Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Oy! You there! Hands off them morsels.” Figures emerged from the valley mist; Gertrude thought they might be rescuers until she could make out their features with clarity: pale, bruised, and rotten.

The living dead of another sort.

“Look, I understand that you need them, but we do too,” the lead bloodsucker said, diplomatic if only because he and his buddies were outnumbered. “Not a lot of blood left after you’ve dismembered one of the poor sods.”

“And there’s not any bleeding flavor left in them morsels after you berks suck it dry,” the living dead leader croaked, maggots writhing in his gums. “Or worse, make it one of you. D’you know what happens when we try to eat one of you wankers?”

Gertrude had heard that the living dead would swell up and explode like liver sausages if they tried to snack on a bloodsucker, but she’d never seen it.

“Oh, you’re one to talk about spreading the love,” the bloodsucker retorted. “How many of your bosom buddies over there started off as a meal?”

“You’d best use your loaf, berk,” the living dead leader said. “You’ve bloody near run out the lot of morsels in the valley, and unless there’s an understanding betwixt us we’ll be having a butcher at bleedin’ starvation.”

As the creatures argued, Gertrude struggled to loosen her bonds.

“So we’re to just give up our meal to you, which we ourselves caught after a fortnight of sucking on field mice? If anyone’s got to go on a blinking diet for the cause of undead harmony, by rights it ought to be you!”

The partisan leader Artyom Ramanchuk was, to put it mildly, a legend. A printer’s assistant before the Great Patriotic War, he had taken up arms after a Nazi Einsatzgruppe had slashed through his village, executing his boss (a Jew) and his father-in-law (a commissar).

From late 1941, he’d forged a disparate group of Belorussians into a potent fighting force. They blew up railway lines, sabotaged Nazi supply convoys, and established broad “liberated” fiefs far behind the front lines, places where the invaders would only travel in great numbers and in direst need. Ramanchuk even founded a number of partisan collective farms in forest clearings and other unoccupied lands to provide food and meat for his growing force.

Always a dedicated student of Lenin and the Revolution, Ramanchuk used what spare time he had studying Marxist theory. Using his experience as a printer, he made and distributed several underground books in which he detailed a new form of collective farming based on the Jewish kibbutz and ways in which the Soviet government could adapt its large and unwieldy structure to become more responsive to the needs of its people.

Those books proved to be his undoing. When his area of operations in the Byelorussian SSR was overrun by Red Army troops in 1944, Ramanchuk expected his force of nearly 10,000 partisans to join them. After all, they had aided Operation Bagration considerably through behind-enemy-lines actions. Instead, the NKVD rounded Ramanchuk and his officers into a Minsk stockyard under the pretense of taking a snapshot.

The ranking commissar read a note declaring the men anti-Soviet reactionaries, and they were gunned down to a man by a heavy machine gun nest concealed, appropriately, in a nearby slaughterhouse. The remaining partisans and their families, including Ramanchuk’s common law wife Darja Maysenia and his daughter Tatsiana, were shipped to Siberia.

S’Mad had been a fixture of the independent and underground music scene in town for years. The proprietor for many years, Nathan Rostop, simply maintained that after setting the little marquee for the joint’s first act (The Bynched Sea, a jazz trio led by SMU professor Sam Bynch), the S, M, A, D and apostrophe had been the only characters left. The fact that the odd name seemed to draw people in was, according to Rostop, a bonus.

Still, from its humble 1978 beginnings as a drain on Nathan Rostop’s UAW pension and disability fund, S’Mad eventually expanded to include a full cash bar (in 1983) a complete kitchen (in 1986) and eventually its own microbrewery (in 1998). Regional and local acts of every genre and stripe kept the house at least moderately in the green, from The Bynched Sea jazz trio to The Rescinded League folk metal to the Antique Threshers ska group.

When Nathan Rostop died in 2002, reportedly during a performance of The Highest Constable electro-pop group, the books were opened on S’Mad and it was found to be drowning in red ink, with operating costs and gig fees largely paid directly out of the cover fees in cash.

“What’s that you’ve got there, Dr. Näher?” a student asked.

Näher looked at the circuit board, dotted with lights and switches, under his arm. “Oh, just a piece of a little science project I am tinkering with in my spare time.”

The student smiled. “Like the Tesla coil you showed us in class?”

“Something like that, yes,” Näher said, tapping his nose.

Inside the campus superconductor center, Stanley the security guard called out a friendly greeting. “Dr. Näher! More bits and bobs for your hobby project?”

“Yes indeed, Stanley,” said Näher. He flipped the guard a candy bar from the vending machine downstairs. “No need to tell Dr. Kuntz about my hobby work, as usual.”

“If you say so, Doc. Ask me, worst he’d do is tell you to take it home.”

Outside Näher’s lab, one of the custodians was buffing the floor. “Any chance of getting in there to clean, Dr. Näher?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not, Emily. The danger of static contamination, you see. I’m sure you understand.”

“All right, but you know I’m going to keep asking until you at least let me go over it with a lint brush.”

Näher shifted his circuit board to his other hand as he fished for his keys. “I have no doubt, Emily,” he said with a smile. “I have no doubt.”

Once inside, he strode deep into the bowels of the device that had consumed nearly every waking moment of the last ten years. The circuit board slid easily into the last open space in the master control panel; the lights and switches glowed to life as power coursed through them.

“And now, at last,” Näher laughed. “To unleash it.”

He flipped open the clear cover on the master button. It was bright red, glowing, and had a simple label: DOOM!

Oh sure, there had been some oddities. The fact that the higher-ups never appeared, communicating only by email, intercom, and sticky note. The fact that there were always free parking spaces in the company lot, parking spaces being about as common on Manhattan as Republicans. The fact that all of the other cube-jockeys always seemed to be there before Jaz arrived and stayed after she left.

But hey, she had talked herself out of any suspicions along those lines. Jaz was, after all, working at one of the most prestigious law firms in New York and by extension the civilized world. It didn’t matter that she was an intern acting as a glorified secretary; she was getting face time and experience and even a modest stipend (unlike most internships which treated people like chattel laborers). In a few months’ time it would all be worth it: the long hours of studying, the stupefying student dept, the lack of a social or romantic life after eighth grade or so, all of it.

Then one morning Jaz found a sticky-note directive from above in the usual place on her monitor: “Please report to the 23rd floor conference room for an urgent meeting.”

Sighing, Jaz had resolved to check her messages before she went. She’d accidentally been included in a company-wide blast email, which usually excluded her, and popped it open:

“Directive: Secure all entrances and exits and report to the 23rd floor conference room for our yearly success and team-building meeting. Bring the virgin/maiden sacrifice if you see her. Convocation and dinner to follow.”

Cecelia Dugaine, born 1727, woke up in a fancy hotel suite on Times Square with a splitting headache.

Where had Gaelan gotten to? He had been such an obvious, easy mark at the party. Nervous, gullible, unattractive, and giving off waves of type AB positive scent–the good stuff, rare and vintage. It had been easy as breathing to give him a whirlwind seduction, a quick whiff of persuasive pheromones, and then retire to a small room upstairs to feed. Cecelia remembered the expression on his face as she’d sunk her dripping fangs into his jugular, the last clear thing she could recall: not so much scared or pained as thrilled.

As she staggered upright and lurched toward the bathroom, Cecelia wondered at her puzzling lack of the Hunger, which should have returned after a day’s rest. Her movements lacked their usual fluid, deadly grace; upon entering the bathroom, she very nearly lost her balance and fell, something that hadn’t happened since she’d been turned in 1755 by the Comte de Vézelay.

Two things were visible in the mirror that shouldn’t have been there. The first was her reflection, which Cecelia hadn’t seen in centuries.

The second was a message scrawled in blood: WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF MORTALITY!

A card was propped on the countertop below; with trembling hands–her hands hadn’t trembled since the Hunger had almost consumed her in 1859!–Cecelia opened it and read.

Dear bloodsucking fiend,

-G

Panicked, Cecelia threw the card down. She dashed to the balcony, throwing open the door and casting aside the curtains. The early morning sun shone gaily down upon her exposed skin, without so much as a tendril of smoke or a whisper of pain.

“No!” she cried, sinking to her knees in important rage.

“Hey nature child!” someone cried from the next balcony over. “Put on a shirt and get the hell over it!”

Let us now consider the nature of truth. Relativists claim that truth is highly subjective; each man may have his own truth which is completely separate (and even in opposition to) the truths of others. Essentially, they argue that anything a human being sees, feels, or believes, has an element of this personalized, relativistic “truth” to it.

However, we must concede that there are thing that human beings cannot see, hear, experience, or grasp. A human may never see infrared or ultraviolet light, for example, or touch an atom. And there are things that we cannot grasp, if only because of the sheer limitations of biology. Just as a cockroach will never be able to grasp the concept of a pneumatic drill, there are—must be—things beyond the pale of human experience. We may even be aware of them—just as a cockroach would notice and avoid the noisy, spinning pneumatic drill—but their governing mechanics are beyond our grasp.

Thus, there must be things that cannot be assigned a relativistic truth, because they cannot be experienced or grasped by a human being. We can therefore divide all things into two groups: those which may attain a measure of relativistic “truth” through human experience, and those that cannot. The former group is as true as relativism allows anything to be, and the latter is as false. To wit: if a thing cannot be experienced, and cannot be grasped, it is outside the pale of human experience and may as well not exist.

We can therefore say, even allowing for the most liberal relativism, that some things are true and others are false. That we cannot name the falsehoods is irrelevant–were they things man could name, they would be things within his pale, and therefore “true.” Working inward from this, let us now consider the category of “true” things established above. Suppose something can be experienced and understood to be true by a human being, yet it never is. Suppose, out there in the cosmos somewhere, that there is a sensation waiting to be had by the human race. There is a creature in the deepest ocean that will never be seen by human eyes or touched by human hands. We can conceptualize its existence in the abstract, perhaps, but it is not “true,” since it has never been subjected to the lens of human interpretation.

The drill instructor was a younger man, well-muscled, wearing a pair of thick black eyeglasses beneath his campaign hat. His dark skin glistened in the 100-degree sunshine, and there was a Decepticon badge on his lapel.

“It doesn’t matter what my name is; you crotchjockeys don’t have the brain cells to say it without making my ancestors howl worse than your parents when they saw your SAT scores,” he barked. “Just call me Sergeant Poindexter. I joined up because I wanted to boss around the jockstrap sniffers that used to snap decent people with towels. So saddle up, my precious unorganized grabastic amphibians, because I am the Kwisatz Haderach and my name is a killing word!”

Some of the recruits exchanged nervous glances. One seemed about to ask a question; the sergeant quickly stepped in front of him, nose to nose. “From now on you speak only when spoken to. You talk out of turn and I will pluck a strand of your hair and give it to the voodoo chaplain to curse you with crotch sores, yea unto the seventh generation! You got that, padawan?”

“Y-yes sir!” the unfortunate recruit stammered.

“I am not ‘sir,'” howled the sergeant, “‘sir’ is your deputy basketball coach or whoever else in your life regularly handled your balls. You will call me ‘Sergeant’ or so help me I will mow you redneck zombies down like George Romero and keep your heads in my icebox next to Zuul! That clear, you piss-poor pack of level one fighters?”

“Yes sergeant!”

“Come on, now, sound off like you got a pair! How’s Cobra Commander going to know you’re coming if you can’t even squeeze out a decent ‘yo Joe?’ All of you, in unison!”

“Yes sergeant!” the men cried at what could hardly be described as the same time.

“My job is to weed out all you letter-jackets who are too dumb for even the United States armed forces,” the sergeant continued. “I asked for a bunch of Imperial Stormtroopers, and I got you! I don’t need to see your identification, I know you’re not the recruits we’re looking for. You’re clueless as a bunch of Microsoft dancing paperclips and twice as annoying; but you popped up and by God I’m going to bend you into shape even if I have to rewrite the source code. You grok me?”

“Yes sergeant!” the men answered once more, a bit more in unison.

“From now on, you maggots are my own personal Pokémon: I throw down, and you do what I say without question. You don’t need to know how to do anything but follow orders, say your own name, and learn to like getting repeatedly shoved in the balls. You are the lowest form of life on Earth, all equally worthless. A flu virus in a Chinese hooker contributes more to society. Are your feelings on this matter clear? Let me hear it again, Recruitmons!”

“Yes, sergeant!”

With apologies to Stanley Kubrick and Skippy.

Jameson huffed on his cheap, mean cigarette. “It was a mystery for a long time, but now it’s pretty much an open secret: the royal family has a genetic predisposition to acute bufomorphic osculitis.”

“Acute…what?” The strong local Cinnibarian liquor was making Cartyr’s ears buzz, but he was still reasonably sure that the last thing Jameson said would have come out as gibberish to the stone-cold sober.

“Did they just throw you into this assignment out of grammar school, or what?” the elder journalist groused. “Acute bufomorphic osculitis is when someone with massive inborn magical potential–specifically, for alteration or mutaremagicae–and can’t control it. Different families have different strains of osculitis, probably dating from whatever forebear had the mutation in the first place.”

Cartyr sipped his local firewater. “That doesn’t explain why the princesses can never marry.”

“It’s sex-linked, so only the ladies can get it. Men are just carriers.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s something in the big book of reporting about getting to the damn point,” Cartyr cried, thrusting his pencil at his blank reporter’s notebook. “You still haven’t told me what buffomoronic occultis is!”

“Guess you never had any Latin in grammar school either.” Jameson ground out his coarse smoke and lit a new one from the ashes. “It means that anyone the Cinnibarian princesses kiss turns into a toad, and that any toad the princesses kiss turns into a man. Or, I suppose, woman.”

The messages arrive every month, but never at the same time. One could be a letter, second class, with no return address. Another might be a telephone call, delivered in a different voice–sepulchral or bright, male or female–each time. There have been notes slipped under doors and emails from unknown senders, papers tacked to your corkboards and faxes sliding drily out of your machine.

They have borne everything from a flowing hand to crude backwards letters to magazine cutouts to morse code. some can be read in a minute, while others would take hours to decode, if that was necessary.

It’s not.

The form may vary, but the content is always the same.

A single phrase: “She is alive.”