Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Of course, the play was all just an excuse for playing with the props and costumes. Parents, sitting in the audience, seem to think that their kids sit quietly with their hands in their laps until it’s their cue.

Clearly, they don’t remember what it’s like to be a sixth-grader.

While we kids with bit parts were waiting around, whether it was rehearsal or opening night, we’d break open the backstage stash and engage in a little impromptu roleplaying. The girls liked to giggle and try on various hideous dresses left over from period pieces or long-ago contemporary productions, while the boys were all about the prop guns.

Our school had the great fortune to have put on a lavish version of Guys and Dolls circa 1985, which meant gangster costumes and prop guns galore. Enough fedoras, zoot suits, Tommy guns, and pistols to go around (except for Jimmy, who had to make due with the crossbow from “Wild Geese: The Musical”). Things broke down very much along class lines, with the most popular kids (and therefore the ones with the best roles) doling out goodies as they saw fit.

Lewis jerked back like a puppet on a string. “No! Please! I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“Start singing. What do you know about the book?” I’d known from the first that he had a little bit of a songbird in him, but hadn’t been expecting Handel’s Messiah.

“He came by here the other day, looking to pawn it. Said it’d be worth a lot of scratch to the right buyer.” Lewis stared straight ahead as he talked, like a deer in the headlights of a ’32 Cadillac. The truth always was a little blinding for his type, though the fact that he was staring down the headlight of my .32 Winchester probably helped.

“And what’d you say?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. A rube like him was happy enough to buy a heater fresh from intensive recruitment for the local undertaking parlors, but didn’t have any use for a book aside from a doorstop. Lewis would’ve torn up a Gutenberg Bible to pack the pages around a 4-cylinder that leaked more than his roof.

“I told him to hit the bricks,” Lewis said. “No money in books.” Clearly, he’d never seen the hollowed-out Tolstoy in my office full of liquor futures.

“Where was he going after you told him to get on the trolley?”

“No idea.” Lewis glanced nervously at the shooting iron in my mitt like it was going to jump on the counter and do a dance. “A…are you a detective?”

I put my hat back on and pulled my collar up. “I’m a librarian,” I said. “And Mr. Salvatori’s book is very overdue.”

“I’m not quite clear on exactly how evil an inanimate object like that can be,” I said. “Atomic bombs don’t kill people. People kill people.”

“The raw uranium was mined from the depths of the Belgian Congo by forced laborers,” said Tex.

“I don’t know where that is.” Geography was never my strong suit.

“Central Africa. The colonial regime there worked millions of people to death.”

“Fun,” I said. “I still don’t follow, though.”

“There’s more,”” said Tex. “The Nazis purchased the raw ore and refined it into uranium oxide. It was on its way to Japan by submarine to build a dirty bomb when the war ended.”

“I’m guessing they didn’t just throw it overboard.”

“The US captured the sub and turned the fissile materials over to the Manhattan Project, which used it in a breeder reactor to create plutonium for a bomb core. Two separate physicists were killed in radiation accidents by that core.”

“Ouch. That’s certainly dangerous, if not necessarily evil,” I said. “What then?”

“It was detonated over Bikini Atoll as part of a nuclear weapons test.”

I kept walking. Somehow, being lost among short grasses bending in the afternoon sun and trees undulating in a light breeze was less stressful than it ought to have been. Though wild, the foliage nevertheless had a faint air of maintenance about it, almost like the median strip on a highway.

After twenty minutes, I saw the girl again, sitting on another rock. Given her disinclination to move before, I was surprised to see that she’d somehow gotten ahead of me.

“How did you get here before me?” I demanded.

Still keeping that absurd, almost meditative pose, the girl opened one eye and once again regarded me. “I have not moved from this spot,” she said.

“Then how did you get ahead of me?” I demanded. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Things often don’t,” she replied, closing the eye. “But I’m not surprised to see you again.”

“You don’t exactly seem to be anything to see me again,” I said. “Care to be a little less cryptic for those of us not into transcendental meditation on random rocks?”

She sighed. “The glen won’t let you leave.”

The tiny car shuddered, and Lowell could feel the accelerator begin to go limp.

“No!” he cried. Lowell pressed the pedal to the floor, and systematically pumped it., as beads of sweat dripped down his pallid features. If he could only get over the crest of the next hill . . . But gravity wasn’t cooperating, and neither was the car. With a final spasm, the engine fell silent, and the car began to roll backwards. Lowell guided it onto what passed for the shoulder and threw the parking brake.

“What’s the matter?” Deacon asked from the passenger seat. His tiny glasses were fogged from the lack of air conditioning, and perspiration plastered his sandy hair to his head.

His only reply was a stream of inventive invectives, as Lowell hammered at the steering wheel.

Some time later, Lowell looked up. “We’re out of gas.” he said, as if Deacon had just asked.

“What?” Deacon glanced at the dashboard. “It says we’re half full!”

“It always says that.” Lowell muttered, opening his door and stepping out.

“Then look at the odometer!” Deacon cried.

“It doesn’t work either.” was the reply. “I just have to guess.”

Deacon flung his door open and leapt out, just as Lowell popped the trunk.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“I’ve got a gas can in the trunk.” Lowell said.

“Thank God.”

Lowell slammed his hands down on the trunk’s rubber seal and swore. “An empty gas can.”

“Empty?”

“It’s like a game of chicken–either I lose and fill the tank, or the car loses and stops.” Lowell said, holding up the empty can. “I used this the last time I won.”

Deacon gave the car a halfhearted kick. “What now?”

“We walk.”

The creature was human-shaped, but unfinished. It had no face, just a featureless blank, and all the other finer details of the human form were missing. Its body was covered with elaborate raised lines that spiraled crazily over its body without rhyme or reason. It floated a few inches above the ground, in a relaxed, almost boneless, pose.

“There is no Zeitengel, and there never was,” it hissed. The words didn’t seem to issue from any particular point but were audible nonethtless. “That was only a name adopted to seed confusion and spur futile searching. The true author of his works has no name, no form, and cannot be comprehended by an ordered mind.”

“A-an ordered mind?” Susan stammered.

“The world is organized, ordered. There still exist dark places where order has never existed, and here dwell the ancient essences who embody all that order is not. To call them beings is to impose an order on that which has none, but they embody complete and utter chaos. The very structure of time and space was created to deny them access to reality, to keep them isolated in pockets of nothingness. They chafe under this, as is their nature, and desire nothing but to break free of their bonds and invade ordered space that such order might be destroyed.”

“I don’t understand,” Susan said. “And what exactly are you?”

“It matters not who or what I am. Suffice to say, I am not one of them, but merely a servant. I was placed here in the expectation that someone might come, and bidden to say what I have said. Do not think this aid; I have given myself wholly to chaos, and await only its inevitable arrival and the burning away of oppressive order. I am to spread chaos in the most efficient manner by moving you to action. Through struggle or inaction, you bring the destruction of your world order closer. Does it not fill you with a sense of importance, that one as insignificant as yourself may perform such mighty deeds?”

A gout of cold wind from the desolate plain chilled Susan to the quick. “Not really.”

“If you choose to embrace this mission–to embrace what is so regardless of your acceptance–you may become a servant like myself. By giving yourself wholly to chaos and the dark ones, you will be granted continuity rather than destruction. When the end comes, the cage of time and order about you will be stripped away, and you may take your place among the dark. Until their coming you will, like I, serve. Perhaps aiding the Anarchists in some way, perhaps as a font of wisdom like I. We are the vorhang, the blind, but we see more than all others combined. You are lucky in that you are aware of your state, and of your choices. Very few enjoy the same luxury as they wander through time. It is the closest to true freedom you can come while the oppressive order remains.”

Thomas couldn’t help but watch her from across the room, but then again neither could his friend Calvin; there was a magnetism there that wasn’t all that hard to explain in terms of physical attraction.

“Don’t stare,” Calvin said.

“You’re the one who’s staring.”

Everything about her–from her delicately managed winter tan to the confident polish strokes on her nails–bespoke a sharply intelligent woman that didn’t tolerate imperfection in herself or others. Calvin ruefully noted that her type was always looking to “trade up;” swapping a less desirable specimen for a fresh prospect at the earliest opportunity. After all, perfection was an ideal, and there was always someone out there who embodied it more.

Even when Thomas said something funny and she laughed, there was something feral in her scrunched nose and flash of ivory-white teeth–something that said “you may amuse me now, but watch your step or I will devour you.”

“Old Man Withers was a nasty piece of work. During the war he shot soldiers from both sides that set foot on his property, and he was famous for feeding ground-up glass to neighborhood dogs. The only thing that rotten Old Man Withers loved was chestnuts, fire-roasted, from his trees out back. They say he fertilized the trees with the bodies of trespassers.”

Howard emphasized each scene with a shadow puppet from the campfire’s light.

“But there was nobody to help him when Old Man Withers choked on a chestnut. Some people said they could hear him bargaining with the Devil with his final gasping breaths. They buried him in his own backyard. But wouldn’t you know it, one day a chestnut tree sprouted from Old Man Withers’ grave. They say that the tree has all the rotten old coot’s meanness pent up in it; more than that, it started gathering up the meanest souls that shuffled off in Royal County, maybe as part of some deal with Old Scratch himself.”

The assembled scouts drew closer.

“And when it was about as tall as a man, that mean old chestnut tree up and vanished. They say it walks these woods still, in the shape of a man, taking the souls of every man, woman, and child it meets. Any of you wonder how I know this?”

“H-how?”

Howard had turned away from the scouts to cast more shadows; he slipped on the bark mask that had been hidden in the bedroll.

One particular stretch of the walk, a dead-end utility road, was Jackson’s favorite. He liked the way thick foliage on either side cut busy nearby streets and buildings off from view; made him feel, if only for a moment, like he was out in the back country on a casual stroll instead of trying to save precious gas money by walking to the office.

That was only the most visible part of the atmosphere, of course.

The real attraction was the scent that filled the area during the springtime.

Even though the brambly wooded gullies on either side of the road revealed nary a visible blossom, the path always smelled strongly of wildflowers. Nevertheless, their presence was felt as soon as Jackson walked by; unlike many strong floral scents, he didn’t cease to percive it after a few moments.

It was almost as if he were walking somewhere breathtaking, like a flower show or a wide-open field scattered with blossoms rather than a dreary windowless office.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Sean. “I had to stop by Fabrics Plus. Abby wants new curtains.”

Adam and Job snickered from behind the games counter, the half-processed inventory of Streets of Fury 3 all but forgotten.

“What’s so funny about that?” Sean asked. “Also, the first person who makes a lewd pun about drapes is fired. That’s my wife we’re talking about.”

No, no,” said Job. “It’s just…can you imagine what would happen if they ran Fabrics Plus like a GamerStore?”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot that Yarn 2.0 drops today,” said Adam. “I’m glad; Yarn 1.0 was too easy to snarl.”

“I bet you had that plus last week’s Threadbane III on pre-order” Job retorted. “I sewed in the beta and got to keep a square yard as long as I didn’t show it before the release date.”

“Do you have any used paisley cloth? I want to trade in three square yards of berber for paisley,” Adam said in falsetto.

“I’m sorry, we only have enough paisley for our pre-order customers,” Job replied, putting on a stoner voice. “We’ll be getting another shipment in a week.”

“You two are idiots.” Sean sighed and walked toward the back of the store. “No wonder we’re behind in sales this month.”