Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Southern Michigan University was different from a lot of the other universities in the state–like Michigan State or U of M–in that it was closer to a 50-50 mix of ideologies in students rather than the 85-15 or 90-10 in favor of the left that you tended to see elsewhere. I’ve heard plenty of theories about why that is, but honestly I think that since the place is cheaper it tends to attract a lot of farmer’s kids and such.

At times the roiling conflict between the two groups breaks out into open antagonism. The best example I can think of was in the mid-2000s, around the time of the 2004 election, when acrimonious feelings were felt on both sides with no outlet because the lefties and the righties ran with different social groups that were active at different times of the day. As a result their antagonism took the only rout available to it: chalk.

Student groups had long used chalk to scribble advertisements for events and such, but when the discussion turned to politics it became bitter. At first the chalkings only supported candidates of choice, but it was a short road from there to insulting candidates of differing persuasions, insulting candidates of differing persuasions with bad swears, insulting candidates of differing persuasionswith claims of simian ancestry, and insulting candidates of differing persuasions with crude sexual references. Vandalism was the next logical step.

SMU sutdents formed anti-chalking brigates to seek out and alter, chalk over, or wash away rival messages. In the resulting melee, local stores ran out of the preferred pink and blue colors, reducing the rivals to using nigh-invisible yellow and green chalk or pinching flimsy white chalk from classrooms. I remember sitting idly looking out the window in a particularly boring class and seeing, in the space of ten minutes, a chalking deployed, vandalized, washed away, and replaced.

In the end, the Chalk-A-Lot War was decided in favor of nobody: the administration began enforcing a long-ignored prohibition on chalkings and had maintenence wash them away as soon as they were chalked.

When Odessa Mullen rounded a corner downtown and came face to face with a pack of the ravenous undead, the first thing she felt wasn’t fear–it was exhilaration.

Dessie Mullen had been preparing her entire life for this.

Granted, she began to feel a little frightened as she turned and ran with abominations in hot pursuit. But her room back home was lined with George Romero films, splatterpunk zom-coms, and a complete signed first edition run of the rare Zomcomix graphic novel. If anyone knew how to handle those horrors, it was her.

It was almost too easy, really. Dessie ran a serpentine pattern before ducking into an alleyway she knew well and doubling back, causing the zombies to lose sight and scent of her. Then she scaled the old fire escape to the low roof of Hannigan’s Hardware to survey the situation.

“Wow, those guys at the CDC weren’t kidding,” she said, whistling. “Zombies really will lead to the collapse of civilization pretty damn quick.”

Everything had been normal that morning, but now looking out over town Dessie saw that the place was destroyed–burnt-out buildings, wrecked cars, and roving packs of the undead visible here or there.

She cocked her head. Something wasn’t right. There were no fires burning, nobody fighting back or trying to escape. If the zompocalypse that she’d long awaited had actually happened, it couldn’t have gotten so far in two hours.

Her thought process was interrupted by a shout from the street. “Hey! What are you doing up there?” It was Kim Woodard, one of Dessie’s friends who worked at a downtown deli. “The cops will give you a ticket if they see you up there! Remember Halloween ’89?”

“Kim!” Dessie cried. “Come up here, quick! It’s the zombie apocalypse, but I’ve got a plan.”

“Very funny,” Kim said. “Now get down from there. I’m not bailing you out again and my smoke break is almost over.”

“Does this look like a joke?” said Dessie. She had intended to encompass the curiously advanced devastation with e a sweep of her arm…but there was no devastation to encompass.

The town was its normal un-apocalypsed self. Pedestrians, cars, intact storefronts, and roving groups of teenagers rather than zombies.

Dessie could only move her mouth, speechlessly, half relieved and half aghast, as Kim continued to give her a withering stare.

That was Dessie’s first slip into the zombieworld. And it wouldn’t be her last.

“So,” said Ulgathk the Ever-Living, tenting his skeletal fingers on the desktop, “what makes you qualified to lead the charge in the reputational rehabilitation of liches, wights, and ghouls?”

Alistair grinned his most confident smile. “Well, I have ten years as a ghostwriter with Giraudoux & Strauss. In that capacity, I wrote autobiographies, stories, and screenplays. Ever hear of the ‘novel’ that Paris Ritchie wrote? That was me.”

“You did that?” croaked Gothmir the Depraved. “I remember that one. Pulpy but convincing. I was surprised she could even read, much less write.”

“Indeed, that is impressive,” said Ulgathk, the searing lights in his empty eye sockets dancing. “But we need more than impressive ghostwriting. We need a narrative for you, a come-from nowhere story.”

“I assure you, sir, my writing speaks for itself,” Alistair retorted. A bead of sweat made its way visibly down one cheek. “I brought samples if you doubt me.”

“That’s not the point,” hissed the third member of the panel, Nthaeit, Archduke of Wights. “We are attempting to counter a very concerted propaganda effort by our mortal enemies in undeath, who in the space of a mere decade have been able to reinvent themselves from horrors to be shunned to sex idols to be worshiped. A large part of that is the author’s story–they need to come from nowhere, they shouldn’t be slick, they should appear genuine.”

Gothmir the Depraved bobbed his grotesquely distended head, splattering unspeakable juices on his three-piece suit. “The authors enthralled by our enemies in undeath are hack screenwriters, sexually repressed housewives, and emo lolichan girls in black lipstick. We have to know that you can compete with that.”

Ulgathk the Ever-Living tapped where his nose should have been in assent. “So what’s your story, Alistair Chamberlain? Where are you now, where have you come from, and where are you going?”

Alistair never dropped his smile. “Well, I went to Berkley and majored in 18th-century French Romantic poetry, and then worked a stint at a coffee house in Chelsea. I-”

The Elder Lich raised a hand. “I’m going to stop you right there,” Ulgathk said. “That’s not really what we’re looking for.”

“Lacks the common touch,” agreed the Archduke of Wights.

“Too ivory tower, too hipster,” said Gothmir. “People don’t take to that narrative no matter how good the writing is.”

“But-” Alistair began.

“Sorry,” said Ulgathk. His upraised hand glowed as it sucked the lifeforce from Alastair’s body. “But thanks for your time.”

Nthaeit took up his broadsword Hatscarnot, Slayer of Kings, and poked the interviewee’s dessicated remains, crumbling them to dust. “Next!”

3″x5″ note cards, but in half, with a simple word or phrase printed on one side. They were called possibility cards, and she took care to disperse them as widely and subtly as she could.

One might be under a napkin in the campus coffee shop; another might be pinned to a little-used corkboard in Old Engineering. The tawdry gossip rags in the library were a good place for them, as was the waiting area in the student health center.

The cards themselves? she liked to mix it up. Some were upbeat, some down. Some were profound, others were banal. A few might even be characterized as cold.

Here’s a sample of the possibility cards she distributed in one evening:

“Don’t worry.”
“It’s all the same to me.”
“Great!”
“Wonderful!”
“What if…?”
“Fantastic!”
“Listen!”
“It’s a perfect day for…”

People have said that if you know where to look and who to ask–and if you can pay for it–you can find anything in the city.

That’s how Courtniee came into a wish in a box.

An old cigar box, to be exact–worn out, faded, flaking, bound up tightly with twine. The kind of cigar box you found in people’s garages once upon a time, filled with odd screws or sparkplugs. Nowadays you mostly see them in estate sales, still bearing that rusty cargo.

Maybe that’s how the wish box came into circulation. It’d been bought in an alley from a creaky old woman, who traded it for a handkerchief that had five years of Courtniee’s live wrapped up in it and a wheat penny once touched by both Teddy Roosevelt and John Schrank. There was, of course, no way of knowing that the wish was genuine without opening the box; the old lady strongly cautioned against this. Untying the twine and opening the box would leave only seconds to whisper the wish before the opportunity was lost forever.

Courtniee did have the presence of mind to ask why the old woman had never used the wish for herself. “There were two boxes once,” was the reply, and that was enough.

Louisa, even as one of the town’s most vibrant and beautiful woman, had more than a little of the Anderton eccentricity in her. She often spoke of beings of light and darkness that flitted in and out of the shadows between the lives of men, and the strong red cords, invisible to all but the most strong-willed, that bound together those with a common fate. She also had a preoccupation–one might say an obsession–with Prussian blue. She insisted, upon inheriting control of her parents’ estate, that every window and doorjamb in their house be painted that exact shade of blue, which Louisa saw as a ward against phantasms of darkness and errant strands of fate.

Despite, or perhaps because of, her strange ways she was married to a local merchant a few years after her parents died. Perhaps her husband had hoped to manipulate the family fortune through her, or perhaps it was a genuine love match. They did clash over her strange beliefs, and most frequently over the Prussian blue–a color he found ugly and militaristic. When their first child was born, and Louisa was convalescing, her husband resolved to rid himself of the paint forever. He hired a house painter in secret.

Louisa’s husband–and the neighbors–were awakened the next morning by her screaming. Her husband found her standing by an empty crib; the inquest later decided that the infant had died of natural causes and Louisa had hidden the body; kidnapping was ruled out as there was no sign of forced entry. Louisa Anderton’s marriage collapsed soon after, and she spent her remaining years in a sanatorium while he ex-husband left the property to lie fallow.

As for the painter, he pocketed his full fee, despite having painted over only one of the Prussian blue window frames–that of the baby’s room.

As near as the investigation could reconstruct, Annemarie Schiff had never gotten over her miscarriage which had also left her unable to bear children. Adoption proceedings would always run up against her bipolar disorder and a few youthful possession convictions. So Annemarie was left with training in early childcare and no possibility of ever becoming a mother herself.

It appears that she stopped taking her medication around that time, and started a new job at a very exclusive daycare. Interviews with former coworkers confirmed that Annemarie spoke often of how many families did not pay proper attention to their children, especially one wealthy clan dubbed “the Andersons” during the investigation for reasons of privacy. No one thought to make a connection between Annemarie’s quiet fuming–an opinion many of her co-workers shared–and the later kidnapping of “the Andersons'” child. He was returned unharmed after about a week, after which Annemarie resigned her position claiming she couldn’t handle the stress.

Faced with families who did not appreciate their children, investigators believe, childless Annemarie took it upon herself to see that they changed their ways though a little harmless kidnapping. She apparently fell into a pattern of moving to a new area, securing employment at a childcare center, and then finishing her tenure with a kidnap and return. The full extent may never be known, as several victims were from poor families who never reported the disappearance and reappearance, but authorities believe Annemarie may have repeated the process as many as 20 times.

She might have gotten away with it indefinitely, in fact, had she not decided to keep the last victim.

“Oh, there’s nothing that special about the pendant itself,” Whelk sniffed, glaring at it through his jeweler’s eyepiece. “Your standard dull clay manufacture without a hint of the artifice and passion of fair or the elegant utility of fey construction.”

“You sound just like my great aunt Agnes,” Jennie sniffed. “I half-expect you to ask me to mow your lawn next, with getting yelled at for doing it wrong as the only reward. If it’s such a piece of trash, why did the wax model of Éamon de Valera come to life for the sole purpose of snatching it from me?”

Whelk’s red eyes flashed. “I said the pendant itself was worthless trash, clay,” he hissed. “What it contains is priceless. As I’m sure you don’t know, clay, items of a certain consistency–in this case silver–absorb a bit of their owner’s spark over time. Ordinarily it’s too small to bother with and quickly dissipates on shuffling off or sale, as you vile clay are wont to do.”

“But?”

“But if the object is passed to a close blood relative, the spark will grow. Exponentially. By itself, it can do nothing, but in the hands of one with the power to release that stored spark…it’s a necessary component of the oldest and most powerful magicks.” Whelk tapped the pendant with a twisted claw. “This has been in what passes for a family among you clay for many years?”

“Generations,” said Jennie. “I know my great-great grandmother had it, but it could be even older than that.”

“As I thought. The power in this item–especially if combined with the spark in other, similar items–is extremely rare, extremely valuable.”

“What happens if they release that ‘spark’?” Jennie asked. “What kind of engine does it start?”

“Any number of spells require its presence, and they are always the darkest of rituals–or so say meddlesome twits who make such distinctions,” Whelk said. “Part of the spark’s power is its link to the souls of past owners.” He eyed Jennie. “You are young enough that I expect the release would only devour ten to fifteen years of your candle-brief clay life. The others, though…their souls would be called forth from the Gentle Embrace and consumed.”

“We’re getting out of here,” Jennie cried to the Fáidh, who was examining a rack of shillelaghs. “How much for my pendant back?”

“I’m afraid it’s not for sale,” Whelk cackled. “You only bought an appraisal.”

Ami came back to her townhouse only to drop the keys in shock at the vase and roses on her kitchen island. A few scenes from horror movies flashed in the periphery of her vision, but a moment’s though dispelled them. The small notice from the landlord tucked neatly beneath the vase quickly made it clear that silly romantic old Bethanie had been persuaded to deposit the flowers in her tenant’s kitchen.

There was a card on a plastic stalk jutting out among the fiery red-orange roses; Ami plucked it out.

Forgive me. K.

Two words and one letter struck Ami like a blow. After all he’d done, after all she’d caught him doing, he wanted forgiveness? He thought he could buy it with a dozen roses, a cheap vase, and a romantic spinster confederate?

No.

Ami seized the roses, ignoring the sharp thorns digging at her palm, and marched up to the second floor. She wrenched open the bedroom window and hurled the flowers onto the yard below. A moment later, the vase went into the clear glass recycling bin with a crash.

“Hmph,” Ami murmured, staring at the small spots of blood blossoming on her hands. “Even when he’s not here, he can still hurt me.”

In the cul-de-sac below, a neighbor was walking his dog and came across the fallen roses. “What a waste,” he said. “What kind of person is so rich and shallow that they can afford to dump perfectly good roses on the lawn?”

Vicki had been hired as a secretary, back when that was still a job title that people used openly instead of under their breath. Ambition and sheer force of will had metamorphosed that post into a vague supervisory role over the interns and new hires. A look at the company payroll, though, confirmed that she was still officially an “executive assistant,” albeit one with pay and benefits akin to a middle manager. Only her lack of an MBA kept her from ascending higher.

Being in the business as long as she had–nearly 30 years–Vicki was a bottomless font of knowledge, loopholes, and shortcuts. Rumor had it that more than one rival insurer had been bankrupted by careful application of her knowhow, and she did nothing to dispel it. An intern or new hire hungry for an edge could do a lot worse than to consult the Vickipedia.

In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, Vicki was a terrible enemy when enraged. Failure to show her proper obeisance or any real or imagined insult was enough to permanently set her against a person, which more often than not was a professional death sentence. If the Vickipedia didn’t have an article on how to undermine a career, constant low-key intimidation and harassment would suffice instead.