Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“They’re coming!” Jan shouted, panicked. “Hurry!” She’d gotten the storm shutters down over most of the windows.

“I can’t!” Chrissy cried from the front. The first undead was at the edge of the parking lot, with hundreds behind.

“Why not?”

Chrissy turned around, her eyes bloodshot from terror and tears. “It’s a Danny’s restaurant! Open 24/7! They didn’t put any locks on the doors!”

Jan armed herself with a fillet knife from the grill. “Sweet mother of mercy.”

In theory, the Pskov-Lindberg drive was elegant and simple. Every star and galaxy in the universe was in motion, and by adjusting the vessel’s position in time, but not space, vast distances could be covered in a fraction of the time needed for normal space travel.

The calculations were exceedingly complex, but the popular press rendered the Pskov-Lindberg “geting there before you left.” A normal spacecraft would struggle to pass 20 km/s even with a gravitational assist, while the universe is expanding at nearly 80 km/s. At 80 km/s, it would take 16 years to reach Proxima Centauri. But by shifting 16 years backward in time along the correct trajectory, a Pskov-Lindberg drive could make the trip instantly and arrive well before it left.

Tests with unmanned drone ships and laboratory animals were promising, but the world government was under immense political pressure and cut corners. The first hundred Arks–Pskov-Lindberg equipped starships with volunteer colonists–were constructed and launched before a single human test had been performed. The science community fretted over the lack of radio traffic from the worlds selected for colonization–which should have arrived years before the Arks departed–but could not prevent the launch.

What happened next took centuries to reconstruct. Through a combination of factors, the Arks arrived at their destinations not 20-30 years before their departure, but 20000-30000. The Arks were in fact assumed destroyed until the advent of the Higgs drive in the next century, when astonished surveyors reported contact with humans speaking an unknown language. The Arks had survived, with their descendents were now spread across the most desirable colony worlds with thousands of years of independent biological and cultural evolution.

Inevitably, conflicts broke out between the settlers arriving on fast, safe Higgs spacecraft and the people they came to call Arkers.

In a land that appears on no map
Is a tower with no doors or windows
In the tower with no doors or windows
Is a room with no entrances or exits
In the room with no entrances or exits
Is a box with no keyhole or lid
In the box with no keyhole or lid
Is a treasure without value or worth
In the treasure without value or worth
Is the rule of the breadth of the land
In the hands of a worthy man

It was a silly saying, Masaka mused, one that had been passed down from tongue to tongue so that it no longer rhymed in any language. But even today, in a world of automobiles and cellular telephones, many of his countrymen believed the old riddle that predated even the arrival of Islam. Many a village sage had laid the failure of government after government and the succession of coup after coup on the lack of that paradoxically worthless treasure.

Masaka didn’t believe the legend, but he believed in propaganda. That is why he had brought in archaeologists and surveyors to scour the records, aerial photographs and–if need be–the dunes themselves to locate a structure that matched the description of the legend well enough to pass. He’d taken time out from the tiring routine of personally interrogating and executing political enemies to review potential sites before selecting a site in the al-Qabs dune sea.

The tower was a relic of an abandoned trade route, and any entrances or exits it once had were obscured by sand. Masaka had his men dig an entrance from beneath. There was indeed a room, partially formed by rubble, with no ingress or egress. Masaka had his men tunnel through decorative limestone–ignoring the protests of the Western archaeologists. And in that room there was a stone object choked with rubble that could be charitably described as a box. Masaka removed the rubble personally; a bit of period papyrus subtly altered by his hirelings was tucked in his sleeve just in case.

What he hadn’t considered–what even the riddle was silent about–was what would happen should an unworthy man open that container with neither hinges nor keyhole.

He found out soon enough.

“Well, putrefaction had pretty well set in by the time we were able to run our tests,” Schoenberg said, “but we were able to identify the substance found on the victim’s hands and under her fingernails.”

“Excellent,” said Maier, putting aside her paperwork. “Let’s hear it.”

“It’s chrysophanic acid, also known as rumicen and a host of other lay names,” Schoenberg said, laying a folder with the results on Maier’s desk. “It’s a yellow crystalline substance extracted from rhubarb, yellow dock, sienna, and other related plants.”

“So we cross-check our victim with known rhubarb farmers?” Maier said. “Somehow I doubt that’s going to get us anywhere.”

“It’s used in the treatment of skin diseases, mostly by herbal nuts. You tend to see it used to treat psoriasis, eczema, and the like by people who are allergic to the standard treatments or–more often–granola-shitting hippies.”

“That’s awfully square of you, Detective,” Maier laughed. “Weren’t you born during the Summer of Love?”

“Yeah, to a military family. My family never wondered why the national guard opened up on the flower power set; we wondered why they stopped.”

“I don’t think you quite understand,” Thomson said.

“I should say I don’t,” replied Manderley. “You’re waving a piece of ancient paper with mucky-muck scribbles on it and somehow expecting this layman to intuit what it is that’s got you hot and bothered”

Thomson sighed. “This is hieroglyphic script, roughly contemporaneous with the Narmer Palette.” Seeing the blank look on Manderley’s face, he quickly added “The oldest hieroglyphics we know of.”

“Sound like it might be valuable,” Manderley conceded. “Sell it and see that I get my cut as financier.”

“No, no!” Thomson cried. “Narmer was the first pharaoh, who united upper and lower Egypt and transformed a loose confederation of tribes into a nation-state. Most of his cities remain lost to us, including the military outpost at Ut and Narmer’s capitol at Thinis.”

“I’m still leaning toward selling it,” said Manderley. “I think I could sniff out a buyer that could keep us fully funded for a year–more if it’s private and not a museum.”

“Then you’d be about as savvy as the people in Twain’s story that burned mummies for locomotive fuel. This papyrus was located in a dig that appears to be the ruins of the Ut outpost. It contains an exact map to the location of Thinis.”

From a series of clay tablets found in the ruins of a sacked and burned Roman settlement in northern Dacia.

As the local prefect, it was my civic duty to preserve the veneration of the gods and the deified Imperial luminaries. Ordinarily, the emergence of a local cult would have been of no concern, but devotees of this “Iotherne” claimed that their goddess had subsumed our deified ancestors to gain their knowledge and prowess, and that she would soon arrive to purge Rome from the borders of the land.

This led her followers to begin stockpiling weapons and desecrating temples, in addition to making them a direct threat to the hegemony of the empire. I’ve made preparations to have my men enter the nearby settlements and detain or execute anyone who venerates an idol of Iotherne that we have captured. I expect the operation to proceed smoothly, and

Text ends here abruptly

The revels at court went on long into the night. When his guards attempted to wake him, however, they found King Francis III unresponsive. Over the course of the evening he had been stabbed through the heart with a miniature stiletto which had blended in with his festive clothing, worn thick against the October chill.

The event caused an uproar, with courtiers scrambling over one another–many still bleary from the night before–to implicate enemies and exonerate themselves. Matters were made worse by the uncertainty of succession; Francis III was only betrothed, not yet married, and had no brothers or uncles, and had in fact been a compromise between two other claimants. It fell to the captain of the guard, a man not a generation removed from low birth, to decide the next step.

His solution was to execute every courtier, noble, guard, and page in the room with Francis III when he died.

“The first was Mr. Tesuipp, in 1880. He emerged from the desert near Alice Springs, laden with gold dust and claimed that he’d found a rich vein. He was delirious, though, and the notes and maps found on his body were rambling and indecipherable. The authorities were able to confirm that he’d headed north from Melbourne intent on mining alluvial gold in the Arltunga, but little else.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that bloody story before.”

“And what about Roy Blakeslee, who was prospecting the same general area two decades later and wandered into a telegraph station, delirious and dying, with nearly twenty kilos of gold-laced quartz on his body? Or Sarah Chalmsford-Ennis, who disappeared on a hiking trip in ’87 and somehow came out of the desert with a hunk of lapis lazuli? They couldn’t get an intelligible word out of her before she slipped into a coma and they pulled the plug. There are half a dozen more stories we could link to it.”

“You’re saying they all found the same motherlode?”

“I’m saying it’s possible.”

“And I’m saying it killed them to a one. Maybe that ought to be taken as a sign.”

This post is part of the October 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is to compose a dark story with Lovecraftian words..

The entire landing party, at least half of Captain Kobeyashi’s crew, had slaughtered each other in the grotto. They lay in a tangled mess, spreading fresh blood into the sand from gaping pistol, rifle, and sword wounds. The furthest corpse was at the very foot of a coral altar heaped with gold.

Kobeyashi himself was near the entrance, seated on his knees. His starched white dress uniform was unrecognizable, spattered with gore and unidentifiable chunks of human flesh.

“Easy now,” said Harrison, leveling his gun. He motioned Joy forward with his free hand.

“What…what in God’s name did you do?” Joy cried. She found herself numbly trying to count the bodies.

“Did you ever wonder what happened to the two thousand people who lived here in 1914?” Kobeyashi said evenly, without meeting his foes’ gaze. “They did not abandon the island. The Saudeleur didn’t sign away the islanders’ lands to Bernhard…he signed away their souls.”

“Like you, giving up everything to run after some treasure?”

“Don’t you see? This isn’t a treasure trove, and that isn’t gold it contains. It’s the sepulcher of a dead god, piled high with its manifest essence.” Kobeyashi produced a pistol from the depths of his blood-spattered uniform. As if preparing for a dress inspection, he slowly and deliberately loaded it.

“Watch it,” Harrison barked. His voice quivered on the edge of breaking.

Kobeyashi gave no sign that he’d heard. He raised the pistol to his right temple. “Incorporeal for longer than humankind has existed, now enshrined once more in flesh. A pity I won’t be able to see it.”

He fired, and slumped to the ground.

“Ninety-nine…” Joy said. She seized Harrison’s shoulders. “Ninety-nine sacrifices! We have to get out of here!”

Harrison stared blankly at her for a moment, before Ishi’s warning flooded his memory and his eyes widened.

Before either could make it to the coral staircase, the grotto was gripped by a series of violent tremors. The spilled blood began to boil, to vaporize, as skin and viscera sloughed off the corpses. Rivers of meat and bone churned toward the center of the cavern, where they were joined and twisted into terrible amorphous non-Euclidean shapes. An inhuman roar flooded the grotto – the birthing cry of something altogether too terrible to comprehend.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
Cath
Diana Rajchel
Alynza
lufftocraft
robeiae
pyrosama
dolores haze
leahzero
AbielleRose
pezie
MysteryRiter
JSSchley
Inkstrokes
Alpha Echo
Proach
AuburnAssassin
spacejock2
Madelein.Eirwen
AlishaS

Stjepan Pečenić, originally from the city of Split in Dalmatia, came to Southern Michigan University in 1981 to teach mathematics. Dr. Pečenić claimed that the Yugoslav government had been persecuting him for his political beliefs; that argument got him asylum, but word had it that was just a glossy cover story. Dr. Cvijić in Engineering was particularly outspoken in her claim (inherited from her father) that Pečenić had been forced to flee after the death of his patron, Tito, and that he’s been a loyal party man until power struggles had forced him out.

In the mathematics department and among his students, Pečenić was known as the “Ragin’ Croatian” for his heavily accented outbursts in which he would rail semi-intelligibly against everything from the laziness of his students to the lack of creativity in his peers to the administration’s short-sighted reluctance to raise his salary. Most students hoped they didn’t get him, and Pečenić was happy to oblige, preferring research to teaching.

That said, nobody was quite expecting to find him face-down on his desk one Monday morning with a particularly difficult set of linear equations soaking up his lifeblood. He’d been shot in the temple at close range.