Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Ekaterina. Ekaterina Miloslovna Shuster Daniels Gilman. I’m pretty sure you can figure out which of those is the maiden name.”

Rourke sniffed and sipped his coffee. “If that’s supposed to mean more to me than ‘Jane Doe’ I suggest you try a little harder, Sonny. A stiff’s a stiff.”

“She was a famous surfer and actress in the 60’s,” Sonny said. “Her mother wrote the Tinker novels, inspired by her kid’s antics and surfer nickname, and then got that selfsame kid the starring role in the six or seven beach-blanket movies they made from them.”

“Holy hell.” Rourke cast a fresh eye over the body in the bathtub. “That’s Tinker? My god, I used to keep a 8×10 glossy of her next to a box of tissues when I was in junior high. What happened? She’s not even sixty and she looks like my grandmother…”

“You know how it is with people when the spotlight starts shining,” said Sonny. “She married her producer at 17, got hooked on seven different kind of sauce. Before the divorce he beat her so bad after a hit of coke that she had a miscarriage, and the state took her other kid away for neglect. Surfer movies hit the skids, nobody would insure her…probably a lot of those last names were taken on for the money attached to them.”

“Well, at least she’s remembered by the younger generation,” said Rourke. He looked very old, very tired, as he spoke. “Your mom was probably in diapers when they made ‘Tinker in Barbados’ and you still know the whole goddamn story, unlike a generation of kids like me who forgot about her as soon as we were old enough to feel a little local boob.”

“No, I just looked her up on my phone,” Sonny said. “Don’t know her from Eve, but the Omnipedia article on her’s pretty thorough. Well, except for the ‘living celebrities’ category.”

“Thanks, Sonny. That’s exactly what I needed to hear.” Rourke looked at the body for a moment, silently counting the needle marks on the arm that protruded from the bathtub. Then he drew the curtain and walked into the living room.

“Forensics is gonna give you hell for touching the scene before they get here!” Sonny cried behind him.

“Screw ’em. I don’t want to see her like this.”

Route C was big enough that there was a steady rotation of drivers. That was good, because if Evin had drawn Cecelia every time, he would have rather walked the 8 miles to campus and back every day.

Cecelia delighted in pulling away just as Evin reached the bus stop, even if he was only seconds behind the old Blue Bird. She was also fond of leaving before the he could get off at his stop, knowing that the next one was nearly a mile down the road and that the sidewalk in between was patchy.

Then there were the rare but especially unfortunate times when Evin left his bag on the bus. Cecelia would leaving before he could get back on to collect it, no matter how hard he shouted or pounded. That bag had ended up in the lost and found at the city central bus terminal, discreetly relieved of sunglasses and emergency cash. When she was in a good mood, Cecelia would only charge Evin full bus fare to collect his bag (though still often driving away before he can get off the bus).

And that was without factoring in all the times she’d closed the door on a loose fold of Evin’s clothes, a trailing hand, a wayward foot, or the long ponytail Evin had worn for a time.

Needless to say, Evin hadn’t taken the abuse lying down, but his options were limited. Rents along Routes A and B were double or triple those on C. Cecelia was connected; her uncle was apparently a manager for city transit. Comparing notes with other passengers led Evin to believe that her wrath was only focused on a select few.

And all because he’d dumped Cecelia’s baby sister over the phone.

Tom Shandler was frustrated. Not just in business, but in life as well.

It had become more and more apparent that he was trapped in a rut at the Porthaven Metromert. The managers that he originally trained with at his home store in Newport News had long since outranked him; he’d read about their promotions in the company newsletter that appeared every Friday at his apartment like clockwork. At first, he’d hung them on a nail in the kitchen, the way a writer might hang rejections slips. Now, though, they went straight in the trash after a brief perusal.

To be left forever in a dead-end middle management position as no kind of fate for a man like Shandler, no kind of fate for the man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps from a lowly sales position at that first store. He was destined for great things, and every snag along the way—every former friend promoted over him, every smartass worker beneath him, was carefully noted in a mental register, for retribution when the time came. He had the letter he’d send them all written in his head for years.

Still, despite pushing his workers hard and increasing sales in his division by five percent, there was no sign of that kick upstairs. Marcus, in produce, was being considered to manage his own store—or so Gus, the manager, had said over lunch the other day. This made Shandler resent him all the more; Marcus was popular with his workers, and handsome.

Something had to be done, and time was running out to do it. A grand gesture of loyalty to the company was what he needed—some extraordinary act that would throw him into the limelight and show that he, Thomas Darren Shandler, was the man for the next big opening. Since nothing ever seemed to happen in Porthaven, he was ever on the lookout for a break, the one chance that would see him covered in glory or resigned forever to his niche, even fired. There was a plan for that too, in the desk drawer, freshly oiled and loaded.

“We contacted aliens year ago. They didn’t have anything useful to say, so we all kind of forgot about it.”

“What? How could you do that? What were they like?”

“Near as we could tell they were kind of like a fungus with some kind of fluid-based decentralized nervous system. R-selectors, no sexes, reproduction by what can only be described as billions of spores. What social bonds they had were formed based on size, not relatedness. They were their own starships, with the little young ones as the crew and the big old ones as the ship itself.”

“You must have tried to talk with them.”

“We had nothing to say to them. It took twenty years for our top men to figure out the system of pheromones, chromoatophores, temperature changes, and sterile airborne spores they used to communicate. And what did we find they were saying?”

“What?”

“They were obsessed with temperature variations on their planets. They talked about the weather, all the time, obsessively. When it wasn’t that it was grading various sources of the nutrient sludge they consume. It was mind-numbing.”

“Did you ask them any questions? Maybe that was just a fluke. Would they really find our conversations all that interesting?”

“We asked about their intentions, and they said they wanted to know what the weather would be like on their homeworld tomorrow. We asked about their technology, and they told us that their nutrient sludge was a little off today. The only thing they wanted to know from us was whether we had any sludge to share. It was just like tolking to a goddamn mushroom.”

It’s the hot new thing this year, direct from Europe or so they say. Genetically engineered microbes, smuggled over as nigh-undetectable spores. Activate them with nutrient agar, and strap in.

Nobody’s sure how they work. Hell, it’s not like they’re chemistry majors out there. Some say the bugs make hallucinogens as by-products like botulism makes Botox. Others say the bugs infect the part of your brain that keeps your consciousness grounded and unaltered (a pretty small par in some people, admittedly). One crackpot in Boston has even been heard saying that the critters rot out and replace a small but key part of the brain like a tongue-eating louse replacing a snapper’s tongue.

But regardless of how it works, everyone’s pretty sure it does work. The period of time you go under varies–a few minutes, a few hours–but in that time you’re enraptured in the most realistic psychedelic paradise dream this side of the Matrix. If it weren’t for inconveniences like needing to eat and drink, having to post trustworthy guards (or junkies taking their turn) over the sleepers, or the delay of 2-12 hours before the stuff kicks in after you dose it, most people would probably never willingly snap out of it.

The thing about speaking with trees is that most people expect it to be like speaking with people. In fact, it’s almost totally alien in every way–about what you’d expect from beings that have less in common with humans than many species of bacteria.

Tolkien did get one thing right, though: trees move slowly. Except as saplings, it may take them years to process information or to pass that information on. Even then, they tend to notice things like unusual winds, heavy rains, changes in soil consistency, and the number of creatures touching them or moving over their roots.

Even those that have the gifts necessary to speak with trees must gird themselves for a lengthy process: getting even a single data point may take days, and converting a statement about the wind and water and roots and leaves into information useful to humans can take even longer. It’s an undertaking.

But when all’s said and done, nobody knows the forests better. If something happens, be it ten, a hundred, or a thousand years ago, the trees will notice.

This post is part of the March 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “rainy days.”

Mikey sighed. Maybe the science channel and the encyclopedia had let him down; maybe there wasn’t something unusual and mysterious under every rock. But, darn it, he’d come close and it hurt bitterly to have to go back home, back to Dave, empty handed. There’d been a whisper of truth in all of Elliot and Natalie’s leads–the giant worm hole that was really a drainpipe, the mystery whirlpool caused by the school sprinkler system, the tree shadows that looked like a man–but none of them were even close to the unexplainable phenomenon he’d promised to bring back to his know-it-all brother.

“You don’t think that, maybe we might be able to find some more leads, do you?” he said.

Elliot rubbed his neck. “Maybe later, Mikey. It’s getting kinda late, you know, almost dinnertime.”

“Yeah, maybe later,” Natalie said. “Come on, Mikey, we’ll ride you home.”

The quickest way to Mikey’s house led through downtown—or, more accurately, behind downtown. In small, rural places like that, downtowns were often only a single street, fading into the surrounding residential neighborhoods. There was a wide, muddy alleyway behind the shops, many of which had closed and been boarded up, that neighborhood kids would sometimes use as a shortcut; on an impulse, Mikey darted his bike in, followed closely by his friends.

There hadn’t been so much as a cloudburst for weeks, so the alley was dry and hard packed, save for a damp spot behind the old hardware store. As Mikey sped through, he felt a light dusting of raindrops on his face. Letting his pace slack a bit, he looked up; the sky was as warm and bright and clear as it had been when they left the school.

“Hold on a sec!” he cried, bringing his bike to an abrupt stop.

Elliot and Natalie pulled up behind him. “What’s the matter?” he heard one of them say.

“It’s raining here,” Mikey said. “Feel the drops? Like just before it starts to pour, when it’s all gray out?”

Natalie stepped forward, arms outstretched; her hands came away slightly damp. “Yeah, I can feel it!”

“Me too,” Elliot said, looking up. “And not a cloud in the sky! Where d’you think it’s coming from, Mikey?” he said. “Mikey?”

But Mikey was already running toward the old fire escape, on the back of the hardware store. He charged up, heedless of his friends’ calls. The roof was paved with gravel, and a few rusty chimneys stuck up here and there, but the whole was bone dry. Looking out over the rest of the block, he couldn’t see any clouds, any standing water, any leaking pipes. There didn’t seem to be anywhere that the water could be coming from.

“It’s rain from nowhere,” he said, climbing down. “That’s what it is. We were running all over town looking for it, and here it is right under our noses: water from nowhere.”

“You mean…” Natalie said.

“Look for yourself!” Mikey cried. “It’s not coming from anywhere!” He did a little dance among the light, misty drops. “This is it! We’ve found our unexplainable mystery!”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Bogna
Ralph Pines
Nissie
Lyra Jean
Domoviye
magicmint
areteus
julzperri
hillaryjacques
Turndog-Millionaire
AFord
pyrosama
Tomspy77
J. W. Alden

The Romanians had taken 75 days and lost nearly 100,000 men in taking Odessa in 1941; despite the overwhelming superiority of the Soviet troops who invested the city in 1944, the Romanian garrison was ordered to resist to the last.

The overall commander, though, realized that the situation was hopeless and detached a portion of his troops under Ion Cepurscu for “special purpose work.” No written orders were given, and Cepurscu was left to his own devices as far as implementation, but the overall goal was clear: the “special purpose” was to remove everything of value from the city and cover up any evidence that might reflect poorly on the occupiers once the Soviets returned.

Cepurscu apparently decided that the most expedient way to do this would be to brazenly loot what precious metals and art he could find and load them onto a freighter bound for Constanta. That much at least is clear; the freighter was found in port when the Soviets arrived in late August 1944. But other than that, virtually nothing is known of the “special purpose group” and its actions before Odessa fell on August 19. Cepurscu’s troops were not among the evacuees and are believed to have perished during the battle for the city.

And that would be that if not for the discovery, ten year later, of a mass grave in the Odessa sewers during routine maintenance. Nearly a thousand identifiable sets of remains were recovered, with only one thing in common: skulls pierced by 8×50mmR Mannlicher rounds, the same ammunition used by the aging second-line rifles issued to Cepurscu and his men.

Müsstler was one of the few, even in those days, who knew the secret of infusing the steel of a weapon with a living soul. They were called speaking swords, though their speech was audible only to those holding them at a telepathic level. Shortly after his retirement, Müsstler was kidnapped from his home by a local cell of daemon worshippers. They knew that he had made powerful speaking swords for crusaders and the church, and desired him to craft a weapon of supreme and malign evil–a latter-day version of the speaking scimitar Aldebaran which had corrupted men and built up empires until it was lost to the deep after a naval battle.

The swordsmith complied, fashioning a horrific weapon. Its serrated blade was a deep and sinister gold engraved with skeletons and mounted on a hilt shaped like a human bone. The Bone Blade was then ritually infused with a soul drawn from the beyond; at the height of the ceremony, Müstler himself was used as the necessary human sacrifice.

But the wily old man had foreseen his fate, and played a final trick on his captors. He infused the Bone Blade with a timid and kindly soul that was nevertheless boastful and supplicant. The weapon therefore appeared to go along with the will of its evil daemonic masters but would fail to follow through on its promises or use its powers on innocents or the good–its full potential was only unleashed when the cultists fell to fighting among themselves, for speaking swords used against their will are no more effective than a heavy blunt club but can cleave hillsides otherwise.

So it was that the Bone Blade passed from daemonic cult to daemonic cult across the world, sowing the seeds of destruction among them. Just as Müsstler wished, its dread legend grew so much that the cultists fought over possession of the weapon that would eventually be their own undoing.

Can you hear their cries?
Those of men, those of babies, those of boys?
Do they scream, or simply internalize?
Does anyone notice their long, silent sighs?
The world turns on them a blind pair of eyes.