Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

After the great victory before the city gates during  the Second Siege of Vienna, King John III Sobieski of Poland, whose hussars had helped to carry the day, captured the Ottoman baggage train. He wrote effusive letters home about wagons heaped high with the wealth of the Orient that had attended Kara Mustafa Pasha and his troops.

One of his letters never made it to the Polish court at Warsaw; its courier was waylaid and robbed, either by Ottoman stragglers or the troops of Imre Thököly of Hungary, who had tried to profit while Poland was virtually bereft of troops. The letter made its way to Budapest, where it was lost in the former royal archives until a researcher uncovered it in 1916.

The king’s letter described the contents of Kara Mustafa Pasha’s personal saddlebag, with particular attention paid to a small object described as a “spiral of black obsidian or other polished black mineral.” None of the prisoners could identify the bauble or recalled seeing it before, but its place so near the Pasha, intermingled with mementos of home and family and precious jewels, intrigued the king. He declared his intention to take it with him to Warsaw.

That same researcher, granted access to the Polish archives after the fall of Warsaw the previous year, was able to trace the obsidian talisman’s path. It had followed Stanislaw II August into Russian captivity, been held at the Tsar’s court, and then captured by a German unit.

The object, whatever it was, seemed to presage the decline and eventual doom of whichever realm held it.

Of course, Sebastian wasn’t going to let a little thing like the apocalypse get him down. Far from it: he saw it as an opportunity to play with a vastly increased store of components which he was free to scavenge. His slight frame and sixth sense for things that were large and angry–honed by many years on the playground–served him well in picking through the debris of a collapsed society. Things he never could have afforded for his experiments and gadgets were suddenly free for the taking.

Even with his avoidance skills, the question of what to do when confronted with another angry scavenger–or, worse, Slow Walkers or Fast Walkers–did occupy a fair bit of Sebastian’s time. Many of the other survivors relied on guns, but Sebastian saw a plethora of weaknesses inherent in firearms, not the least of which was that most gun stores had been thoroughly looted and ammunition was scarce. One thing there were plenty of, though, were batteries–every size from AAA to D, and kept in every corner grocery. For a long-ago merit badge, Sebastian has experimented with getting a battery to release its entire charge as a directed zap of energy. It was a simple matter to expand the concept and combine the necessary parts with a few springs, coils, and triggers from real guns.

The first scavenger had laughed when he saw Sebastian loading what looked like a shotgun with D cells instead of shells. He was still laughing when the expended charge stopped his heart and Sebastian ejected the smoking and spent batteries onto the cracked pavement.

“You do understand that my German is rusty, right?” Benoir said.

“At least you have German at all. I studied Spanish in college.”

Pages ruffled in the log book. “25 November 1917. Still no visual contact with L.59, and no further signals from base or Tanganyika. Position is unknown due to heavy cloud cover both above and below.”

“Sounds like they were having some trouble,” said Benoir.

“26 November 1917. The order to abort was given at 8.23 this morning, but we cannot be sure that the airship is moving in the correct direction. Everything is strange.”

“It’s true, it’s true!” Zigman said, arms flailing. “We’re just here to take pictures. This is a camera!”

“Put the weapon on the ground, now!” the uniform barked. “Hands on your head!”

“Let’s just…calm down,” I said. I slowly and deliberately unslung my camera and laid it on the deck, and then placed my hands on my head. “We came here to photograph the mothballed ships. We’ve been camping out in the battleship.”

“Don’t encourage them,” Zigman spat. “And you, G.I. Joe! Stop pointing that gun at me.”

“I don’t care why you’re here or who you’re selling those illegal photographs to,” the uniform said. “Tell your friend to place whatever the hell it is in his hands on the ground or the rifle that I’m pointing at him will be the least of his worries.”

“Zig, do what he says,” I hissed through gritted teeth. I could already see Wozinski and DeBeers following my example, putting their equipment down.

“Don’t call me that, and don’t tell me what to do! We’re here to document these relics of American aggression before they’re covered up. You’ve no right to stop us!”

“Susan’s Cape is a restricted area. You’re already going to be up on trespassing charges. Do you want to be up on being shot charges too, huh? They’ll make your next of kin pay the full cost of the bullet, and it ain’t cheap.”

I heard that scuttling noise again, this time behind the trio of uniforms in the mess door. This time, though, something was definitely moving in the shadows.

One of the uniforms, the one closest to the port side, yelped as something brushed across his shoulder. A minute later, the darkness swallowed him whole, with just echoes from spastic rifle burst to show he’d ever been there.

“I think we got more than we bargained for.”

The language was difficult for our interpreter to understand, but it seemed that there was a problem with the  saplings taken by Van Der Hewe, which were the source for the mokeyfruit plants in the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew and the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam. The monkeyfruit trees were apparently sacred to the people of the isle, and in the act of taking his samples Van Der Hewe had attacked them and killed over a dozen for a population of two hundred fifty or less.

As a result, the islanders’ culture had become radically xenophobic in the ensuing fifty-odd years. The entrance to their lagoon was rocky and narrow, with only the Sturgeon‘s longboat small enough to make the trip; that, combined with the high cliffs around the island’s perimeter, served to create a natural fortress. The islanders were willing to parley from shouting distance, and we could observe their comings and goings on the lagoon by spyglass, but any closer risked a hail of arrows and rock.

We endeavoured to earn their trust by leaving small gifts that the ship maintained for trade with savages. Colored cloth, glass beads, and other trinkets were put ashore on a sandbar, and we observed from afar as they were examined. Blue items appeared to deeply excite them, while red was spurned. The second lieutenant tried putting ashore a salted pork carcass obtained from the Sandwich Islands, but the islanders reacted to this with horror and could later be observed burying the meat with pomp and ritual some distance inland.

Had I known of the coming vulcanism, I would have had the men’s very uniforms cut up to furnish blue for the islanders. But sadly, I instead ordered the ship to make sail, to return to a friendly port to collect more goods for trade.

The camp was completely abandoned, littered with the detritus that one might expect an army to leave behind: empty gasoline cans, bits of shredded paper, and discarded ration wrappers.

“What happened here?” said Davis.

“Do you really want to stop and find out?” Caroline snapped.

“I’m paying you, aren’t I?” Davis said. “And I want to see.”

“All right then,” Caroline growled. “But when you tell me you wish we’d just kept walking, remember that I told you so.”

More abandoned junk and deep tire tracks in the mud waited further ahead, but no sign of the massive army it would have taken to generate so much debris. In time, Davis came upon what looked like a reviewing stand with podium. A note was pinned to the lectern with a combat knife.

“We have set off to take that which is ours,” Davis read. “We will make a name for ourselves outside the Permeable Lands. History will long remember Coxley’s Division.” He adjusted the glasses on his head. “What’s that mean? I never heard of an army coming out of the Permeable Lands, certainly not one big enough to leave all this litter.”

“I guarantee you they never came out,” said Caroline. “You remember what I said about the rough triangle of Grant, Anhui, and Phesheya? The line’s not razor sharp, but cross it and anything permeable goes away. Every now and then one of these little armies springs up. Someone puts a lot of time and effort into making something that’s useless in the Permeable Lands. Then they convince themselves it’s real, it’s not permeable, and try to leave.”

“A-are you saying all these people died when they tried to leave, and that whoever created them is out there alone now, trying to make a new army?”

“I’m saying that whoever made this army was probably permeable themselves,” retorted Caroline. “They fooled themselves otherwise and fell to pieces with the rest of their permeable men.”

Willis had entertained dreams of being signed to the majors like all kids who ever came back to a dugout with dirt on their knees. He got closer than most, and was in talks with State for a scholarship when a simple fall on a rough old sidewalk led to a devastating rotator cuff injury. He tried playing through the pain, but it was no good; he wound up at State anyway, but as a business/accounting major.

Still, that wasn’t enough to quash the hope–is it ever?–and once he started seeing Lily, Willis became convinced that the next generation was the ticket. He has all the right equipment to train his son to be a great ball player, to create someone with a sharp mind and unerring aim that would lead inexorably from high school to college to the minors to the majors. It was an ironclad plan, and it made the pain of tossing a ball to himself against the back fence almost bearable.

After the wedding came the baby shower, and after the baby shower came Carolyn. Willis held off buying her the baseball pajamas until Lily’s miscarriage made certain there’s be no second crib. Wasn’t this a brave new world, anyway, one with the WNBA and Title IX? Carolyn still had a shot. And she had talent: it was apparent early on that the girl was whip-smart with a dead eye for using a stick to put a ball just where she wanted it.

Softball came and went along with practice in the backyard, but Carolyn chafed under Willis’s regimen. She loved the sport but hated the teamwork, the sitting and waiting, the subterfuge and the dirt. When her father heard about the junior high tennis team, he was distraught at first before reassuring himself that those same skills–his genes–were still in evidence and would still make their mark. Intense practice and a backyard net followed, along with summer tennis programs at State.

But Carolyn  never really hit her growth spurt, and topped out at five foot two in heels in the seventh grade. Good enough for high school, maybe, but it was apparent that against the willowy blondes she met at State, Carolyn was at a terrible disadvantage. The day she left for State on a clarinet scholarship found Willis seated in his garage, disconsolate, spinning an old racket in his good hand and clutching a worn-out old softball in his bad.

With 115 seventh-grade kids split between the five class periods that made up an average day at Deerton Middle School, a project based on the 116 elements then known to exist (according to the out-of-date table that had come with the chemistry classroom). But there was reason to suspect that old Mr. Lancaster had influenced the element assignment process among wags.

Exhibit A was Boyd Carruthers, who had been assigned no. 82, lead. Anyone who had witnessed Boyd in class or in the cafeteria had no doubt that in all things he was heavy, malleable, and slow. And flighty little Tina Hedstrom in third period being slapped with no. 2, helium, seemed entirely too pat–to say nothing of bony Theresa DiSanto, on the wrong end of a growth spurt, earning no. 20, calcium.

But the plan (if there was a plan) had its more esoteric aspects as well. Caleb Schmidt was granted no. 43, technetium. There didn’t seem to be any connection b’tween that unstable and roguish element and the normally quiet and staid Caleb, until one took into account his recent behavior. Socializing, speaking up in class, trying out for the track team, even unsuccessfully courting Emily Dinklage for snowcoming…like Technetium he was arriving late to the game but making a splash. Quiet, meek, average students like Cara Joyce, who sat in the back and never spoke or made waves or did anything other than make steady unyielding eye contact, tended to get slapped with transuranic elements in Lancaster’s plan (if it was a plan). Cara got Unununium, an element no one without a degree in particle physics could say much about and one that nobody but perhaps the head of IUPAC could pronounce correctly.

Lancaster thus got Cara Joyce up for a brief presenation with a word that would take as long to spit out as anything she’d be saying afterwards.

Turning, Nick walked out the door he’d come in and down the hall toward the stairs. He wanted to see where the other voice had come from.

His room.

The stairs weren’t long, and their soft, blue carpeting cushioned Nick’s footsteps. Upstairs, the hall was L-shaped, turning left at the room that had once been the guest bedroom before it became his father’s study, continuing past his sister Jessica’s room and the master bedroom. At the end…

His room.

The door swung open, and there he was. Nick saw himself at seven, with that dopey little haircut and the shirt with a cartoon character on it. He was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by a pile of toys, playing.

Nick looked around the room. The walls were still covered with brightly colored balloon wallpaper, the stuff that hadn’t come down until eighth grade when Nick became painfully aware of how childish it looked. His little bed, not to be replaced for years, still rested in the center of the room, covered by young Nick’s favorite Star Wars bedsheets.

Little Nick looked up “Who’re you?”

Nick blinked. The room was empty; its white walls were decorated only by a pattern of sunlight filtering through the windows. Dazed, Nick stumbled down the rickety wooden stairs, through the other barren rooms, and into the sunshine of the yard.

Furniture burned surprisingly well; the dining room chairs were enough for Elliot to keep the feeling in his fingers, but the snap of the blaze and the stink of burning varnish wasn’t enough to keep gloomy thoughts at bay.

“Village’s 20 miles away,” Elliot said. “Never make it in the snow. Dammit, it’s their fault for pushing me out here. How’s anyone supposed to get anything written with committees and classes and all that college everywhere?”

The fire crackled in response; Elliot took this as agreement. “It’s bad enough that the place is full of professional vultures,” he said. “Grading papers five days a week and writing criticism the other two. If someone thinks they can tell Baudrillard he isn’t Marxist enough, they won’t show any mercy to me. No, it’s just more paper to shred, more writing to pick into its component pieces like a fetal pig on a dissection table.”

Ashes glowed and cinders churned; sparks worked their way up the chimney. “They’re afraid,” Elliot said. “they can’t produce anymore; they gave it up. Who wants to write when you can’t help but see all the petty biases and assumption that color it all? As if the endless stuffy papers they churn out are any better. They’ve forgotten how to produce, and they’re scared of anyone who still can.”

He pounded his fist on the cold wooden floor. “I’ll show them. They think they can doom me to obscurity, driving me out into the snow to die. I’ll show those dusty old fossils in the department what a real writer can do.”

More chairs went onto the fire in the following hours, and then the table, broken into pieces with a hammer. The bedframe was next, then the bookshelves and cupboard doors. All the while, Elliot scribbled furiously on his pad, stopping only to tear sheets out.

Finally, Dr. Harline’s books went into the blaze. “Screw the feminist reading of Crime and Punishment,” Elliot said, hefting the volume onto the ashes. “Let’s hear the arsonist reading. The Nazi reading. The this-is-why-they-don’t-allow-smoking-in-the-building reading.” The paper burned bright and fast, but before long, the embers were dying.

Things became fuzzy after that. Elliot had a vague recollection of more items offered up to Vulcan for heat, endless spirals of cursive writing snaking across notebook pages, and hoarse shouting and recriminations. The very existence of the Osborn University English department, the publishing industry, and readers at large were questioned in front of a rapt audience of dying coals. Everyone who had kept Elliot’s brilliant prose from attracting the praise it deserved was tried in the cinder court, convicted of obstructionism, and sentenced to hang in the air as frozen breaths.