Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

This post is part of the June 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “weird worlds”.

“You’re sure this is the entryway to the High King’s Causeway?” Jennie said. “It looks more like a graffiti-covered outhouse that was so far beyond human control it was simply abandoned.”

The Fáidh took a fresh puff of pipeweed and coughed. “Who’s to say it can’t be both? As anyone who was at Woodstock will agree, an outhouse’s worth lies not without but within. Though some nose-plugging may be advised; remind me to tell you the harrowing tale of Outhouse Row at Woodstock ’94 someday.”

Jennie stuck out her tongue. “Ew. Remind me not to listen.”

“I’ll need absolute concentration to coax the link back from the the Gentle Embrace, unless you fancy using the next terminus over which is a sewer runoff pipe. Keep the others quiet.” The Fáidh breathed deeply from his pipe once more, swayed gently, and began the ritual.

To Jennie it looked like he was pressing his hands to that unspeakable surface and singing the Rolling Stones in a loud, out-of-tune voice. “I’m just mortal clay, what do I know?” she sighed. In the meantime, it occurred to her that the Fáidh’s request might be a tad difficult.

Syke the androdryad paced sullenly near the wall, looking uncomfortable in the track suit Jennie had thrown on him and glaring at any of the tourists and other passersby who stared at the fig sapling poking out of his knapsack. “Oy, clay!” he cried at one particularly pernicious starer. “What are you glaring at? The son of Oxylus and Hamadryas isn’t a spectacle for rubbernecking clay like yourself!”

Jennie rushed over to calm him down. Considering that the fig tree was his actual substance, and the young man only its metaphysical spirit given form, she tried not to be too rough (or, heaven forbid, knock any leaves off the sapling). When Syke grabbed the offending tourist by his Arsenal FC jersey, though, Jennie all but tackled him as she pushed them apart.

Behind her, Jennie could make out Cary the motile caryatid column accosting another passerby. As a 3000-year-old stone statue, Cary’s disguise was already flimsy: thrift store clothes, foundation makeup, a hat and sunglasses. Cary’d reminded Jennie of a sorority girl earlier, gushing over the fabrics and weaves of people who had visited the Orb of Prophecy the column had been sworn to guard (until it was stolen out from under her). Now Cary was acting like one, trying to persuade a tourist to swap a designer top for a bulk thrift store sweater.

“Oh, that’s such a cute top! Is it sea silk or maybe saffron or gold thread? I just love fabrics, all kinds, every kind, always, forever! Do you think I could try it on? You can have my ratty old secondhand dump sweater for collateral; it’d look so cute on you! But not as cute at that top would look on me…”

Jennie had barely set the Arsenal FC fan on his way before she had to sprint over and keep Cary from bodily snatching the poor tourist’s clothes—easier said than done when the statue weighed somewhere north of a thousand pounds. But she was able to interject herself in such a way that the harried pedestrian could make her escape.

“At least tell me where you got it!” Cary cried forlornly to no reply.

Jennie corralled the two mythological malefactors back to the Fáidh just as the older man completed his incantation. Muttering something about he and Jennie having very different definitions of “quiet,” he flung the outhouse door open, revealing not an unspeakable loo but a long stone corridor paved with hexagons and lit by the lazily drifting blue fireflies. The Fáidh entered, as did Syke and Cary.

Jennie hesitated on the threshold. “I’m about to follow a stoner wizard, an angry young fig tree, and a sorority girl made from solid marble through an outhouse door into a mythical realm to follow a wax model of Éamon de Valera that stole from me in the National Irish Wax Museum. Somewhere, somehow, my decision-making paradigm took a real turn for the weird.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
dclary (comic)
Proach
MelodySRV
pyrosama
areteus
Diana_Rajchel
writingismypassion
randi.lee
magicmint
Sweetwheat
AFord
dclary (blog)

I could see his silhouette in the frosted glass of the front door, and opened it before he could knock.

“No, no,” he said, pulling it closed. “You’re doing it all wrong, sis. It’s got to be a big production, a surprise.” I’d caught a snatch of khaki and crease before the latch clicked, though, so I had some idea what I was in for.

A moment passed, and Caleb knocked. I opened the door and took him in, wearing a khaki uniform and a fresh buzz cut. I’d never seen him look anywhere near as polished.

“Well?” he said. “What do you think, sis?”

I know you’re supposed to be supportive, and respect the thin red line and all, but I have kind of a bad habit of shooting from the hip in situations like that. “Is this a joke? What were you thinking? What will Mom and Dad say? What about your music?”

The last question seemed to sting the most–Caleb had, after all, long held ideas of making a career as a singer or performer, with many a lazy summer day spent strumming a guitar in the park.

“This doesn’t mean I’m giving up any of that,” Caleb said. “But I want to try something with a little structure, to be part of something bigger than me, get a little money for myself and college.” He set his peaked cap on an end table. “Is that so wrong?”

I didn’t answer; instead, I just looked at that cap. It would return to the end table many times over the following years, each time with a little bit more gold.

You are brought into a large and gothic library with a high ceiling and a long bench along one wall. An older man begins going down the row, speaking with and examining each of the large number of people seated along with me in turn. You have a sense that you’re not supposed to be there, one that is exacerbated by your realization that the people on either side of you have six fingers on at least one of their visible hands. Fearing that is some kind of required sign, you hide your hands in your robe before the older examiner can get to you.

When he approaches, he smiles warmly and hands you a golden box. You know instantly that he has seen through you, and knows that you are not supposed to be there, but that hardly seems to matter as you and the other “rejects” begin to float skyward: the old man seems to have abolished gravity for all of you. The others begin to converse while you and the “rejects” cavort in the air above them, unable to hear what they are saying no matter how close you get.

For a while you are content to float about joyously, kicking off of the ornate fixtures near the ceiling in a glorious ballet of weightlessness, but soon you become curious about the meeting below and what it entails. You decide to take some small books from a shelf immediately above where the older man is now seated. You have a vague notion of reading them to discover their secrets, or perhaps trading them (and others) for answers.

You remove the books and attempt to show them to the others that were rejected from the gathering and float nearby. You’re interrupted from a cry down below; the old man mournfully, vengefully declares that the meeting and all its business must cease because of the injury inflicted on the library. You look back at the sconce from which the books were taken, and see that there is ink on the shelf, red ink, like blood from a fresh wound. It’s as if the library is a living organism and you have cut off a finger.

A sudden, overwhelming feeling of guilt strikes you, washing away the former desire to know the secrets of the meeting. You convince the other floaters to help you in cleaning the library and restoring the books to their rightful place, but the old man’s sullen expression indicates that it’s not enough.

Max was on a town street that is lined with expansive bookstores with a student group. He enters one of the larger stores, which is very airy and open, only to find that the place is packed with customers and employees who are equally rude. He climbs up to a second level into a reading area that has bright windows overlooking the street below on two sides, and sees a rather famous actor there giving a lecture. The actor is in an altercation (not quite an argument) with a younger woman who appears to have written a book about him. This is clearly the reverse of what he expected.

The woman begins to read the book, and Max can see the images vividly as she describes them. She speaks of the actor’s difficult childhood as a Yiddish speaker in New York City, which is true enough from what Max has heard about the actor’s life, but the woman has inserted herself into the narrative at odd spots. She is the actor’s nurse, a street vendor, a character and meta-narrator. It’s a fascinating blend of biography and literature, but a little creepy.

The actor snatches the book from the woman and gives it to the nearest bystander, Max. Max notes that some of the pages are printed on what look like foreign banknotes in all their Monopoly money glory, shiny and with security strips. The actor nods as if satisfied by his confirmation of this.

It was really exciting. After all those years of chasing bizarre and obscure radio stations with his transmitter and receiver, John was ready to see what they were saying.

Amateur radio had been like a gateway drug, and once he could receive broadcasts from far enough away John had discovered numbers stations. They were mysterious, high-frequency transmissions that repeated buzzes electronic tones, numbers, or letters, and the other amateurs John consulted with agreed that they were probably used for espionage. If a spy in the field had a special sheet called a “one-time pad” with the decryption key, which was truly random, as big or bigger than the message, used only once (and destroyed after use), and kept totally secret.

The code was literally impossible to break without knowing the key on a one-time pad.

And the envelope that John had just received in the mail had a warped and bubbled one-time pad that had been supposedly recovered from a sewer pipe.

John turned the transmitter on at the appointed time, which he had carefully researched beforehand. A metallic, artificial woman’s voice began reading phonetic letters after a brief musical tone: “Bravo, Echo, Hotel, Juliett, Kilo, Mike, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Whiskey, Zulu.”

For each letter, John used the appropriate space on the one-time pad, and gradually a message began to emerge:

JOHN T GUNDERSON WE KNOW YOU ARE LISTENING

I’d had my share of tough video game bosses before. Oozerip the Resurrected from Genesis Dragon, who could only be beaten using a sword that took nearly 100 hours to craft in-game. Cindersoul from Revelation Song, who could only be made vulnerable to damage by completing an epic series of 99 sidequests. Larakoxe from Velocity Skipper, who could only be damaged one out of every 100 rounds. I’d beaten them all.

Even Cycoss, the legendarily tough optional boss from Oblivion Power who had one billion hit points (in a game where the maximum damage was 9999) had fallen to me.

But the Shadow Lady, the hidden final boss of Past Beta VIII, was tougher than them all. Apparently invulnerable to all damage, her first attack struck for more hit points than the player could possibly accumulate.

In fact, as far as I could see, she had never been beaten without the aid of a cheat, which in my mind robbed the endeavor of all its noble qualities. I resolved to beat the Shadow Lady the old-fashioned way.

As I sit here on the rubble which used to be my parents’ house, I wish I hadn’t.

“Look at these people. Would you deny them their bright neon future of peace and social justice based on a few errant bits of data?”

“It’s not one piece of data, nor a single simulation or sample. Do you think I’d be so hasty or stupid as not to check my work? The System will lead to economic and social collapse and either anarchy or autocracy.”

“The idea that a theoretical model knows better than our politicians, our political scientists, our think tanks…it smacks of technological heresy.”

“Theorists are human. They’re invested in a way that a data model never can be. The System is inherently flawed, and would be disastrous to implement.

“Don’t you see? The System is immortality.”

“Where am I?”

“A place for the refuse of the refuse, the junk of the junk.”

“So…a junkyard?”

“No, no. Below that. Strata below. We’re so worthless that even trash throws us away, and there’s no going back. Welcome to the Underjunkyard.”

I cut through that alley a lot on the way to work. It was in the arty part of town, near the college, so there wasn’t much danger of being jumped by toughs. The biggest annoyance was the occasional graffiti, either by some “let’s all group hug the world” hippies or wannabe gangsters trying to throw up old school to disguise their middle-class origins.

For as long as I could remember, there had been a splotch of red paint on one of the brick walls, left over from when one of the dumpsters had been recolored. One day, some wisenheimer had chalked a body outline around the paint, making it appear that the red was spattered brains from a murder (ignorant of the fact that real cops haven’t used chalk outlines since the 60s).

I didn’t think anything of it—well, I guess I did chuckle a bit in a moment of weakness—until a few days later. On my way through the alley I saw that the chalk was still there despite a recent rainstorm, and someone had added a message in red paint of the same shade as the “brains:”

THE CHALK OUTLINES ARE SPREADING.

It did look a little spooky, like a framegrab for a bad, low budget horror flick. But I quickly dismissed it as some anti-war granola-shitting peacenik trying to be edgy with the color that best reflected their political leanings.

The next day I saw another chalk outline, complete with a dab of red paint on its “head,” on the sidewalk near my house. Later in the week I noticed another one near my shop. When I cut through campus on the way to the pharmacy on the first of the month, there were dozens, each contorted into a unique position.

I read in the paper that the cops were trying to catch whatever macabre graffiti artists were behind the outlines, but the thing that began to unnerve me was that they persisted despite frequent rains and the occasional effort to wash them away. The outlines were chalky to the touch and my fingertips came away white, but they resisted removal.

By the time I couldn’t take a step on the sidewalk without standing on a chalk outline with red paintdaub, I was officially freaked out.

The Domepi sisters had always been close. Identical triplets, their birth had rocked their tiny Maine hometown. From a young age, they were trotted out at everything from banquets to bank openings, much to the distaste of their extended (and patrician) family but much to the delight of their parents.

When “triplet fever” eventually cooled around the time the sisters graduated from Noahton High, the three sisters–Diane (Di), Sarah (Sally), and Augusta (Gussie)–turned down their grandfather’s offer of legacy admission to the University of Maine in Orono. The Humecroft side of the family had never approved of the triplets’ father Giuseppe Domepi, but when he abandoned the family shortly after the girls’ 16th birthdays they were brought back into the fold and were the beneficiaries of multiple legacies from older family members.

With a comfortable standard of living assured, and no desire to be separated, the triplets soon became reclusive, associating only with family members and servants. The few visitors they entertained were reportedly unsettled by the sisters’ apparent ability to communicate wordlessly and their propensity to talk rapidly among one another using a personal language of gutteral sounds and sighs.

By 1985, the 70-year-old triplets had run through their trust money and dismissed their servants. Still living in the ancestral Humecroft manor that their grandfather had willed them, they were reduced to drawing water from the town well, growing vegetables in a small plot, and subsisting on donations from the few aged family members and family friends they had left.