Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Wilma loped after the intruder, baying, while Fred scaled to his favorite perch with a yowl and watched the ensuing chase with eyes shining in the semi-darkness. I had quick thoughts of trying to nudge Wilma back behind the kiddie gate, lest the intruder be carrying rabies or some other nasty cocktail of diseases, but she put the lie to her 16 years on earth with a surprisingly energetic pursuit. It was all I could do to follow armed with a broom.

The strange dog, for its part, seemed equal parts terrified and purposeful. While zigzagging across my living room, upsetting furniture and bunching up rugs, it nevertheless made straight for the kitchen. I lost sight of it for a moment, but when the dog reemerged, still tailed stubbornly by Wilma, I saw that it had a boneless chicken breast–one I’d set out to thaw for dinner–in its mouth.

It was only when the intruder made its escape, through Wilma’s doggie door, that I understood how it had gotten inside in the first place. I was able to slide the lock into place before my geriatridog chased the interloping hound outside, but, seized by intense indignation at having my house invaded and my pets threatened, I went through the large door, still clutching my broom, seconds later. It was a bright night out and the streetlights were on; I expected to see the dog running for the treeline across the street and 500 yards away.

Instead I caught a glimpse of a small, pale child in a pool of streetlamp light.

It glanced over its shoulder, and I could see my chicken breast defiantly clamped between rows of square white teeth. Eyes shone vividly in the twilight, and a moment later the figure vanished behind my garbage cans.

The Silent Fortress rests in the center of the realm, its battlements higher than any other structure and the dry moat surrounding it so vast that only the sounds of wind and rain may carry. It is, in essence as well as in fact, the very heart of its world.

Every battlement is manned by troops of the elite Laconic Guard, who are all sworn to eternal silence, even in combat. Their armor is muffled by layers of quilting, and decades of training is required to even be considered for admission to the journeyman camp–for the Laconic Guards must fight and die in total silence.

Within the Silent Fortress, the only communication is through hand signals. Not even writing is permitted due to the scratching. Impossibly luxurious tapestries over a foot thick cover the walls to muffle any sound that might penetrate the halls.

There is on exception, though: in the centermost room of the keep is a massive dome in which a singer whispers a quiet and tender lullaby at all hours, day or night. The singers work in shifts, briefly becoming duets, so that the music need never cease.

Why?

Because, laying in a small bed under the apex of the dome lies the Eternal Child, who dreams the world into being.

To wake them is to cause the unraveling of the world.

In addition to his qualifications as an engineer and a theorist, Ryov Nechayev was also an amateur historian. As such, he especially delighted in old, obsolete, or obscure units of measurement and often used them in his research. Graduate students and international collaborators quickly began passing around informal sheets of “rnmetric units” that were essential in any dealings with Dr. Nechayev:

Horse: 2.4 meters (for measuring distances to be covered)
Bus: 8.4 meters (for measuring things that were large enough to display advertising)
Smoot: 1.7 meters (for measuring things in Boston)
Barn: 10^−28 square meters (for sub-atomic use)
Grave: 1 kilogram (for important measurements)
Dog year: 52 days (for medium scale timeframes)
Tael: 31.25 grams (for meauring thing precious or Chinese)

Kordo（偽の翻訳）was first a manga drawn by Sei Iwashi and lettered by Joanna Suzuki. Published by Kyoto Processed Ricepaper Concerns Press beginning in 1991, the comic was successful enough to interest TV Tokyo, which commissioned an anime series in 1993. Kordo the Series ran 197 episodes with 5 original video animations (OVAs) and remains in syndication with major Japanese satellite providers.

The series was popular enough with foreign audiences that fansubs were soon circulated with English subtitles. Exchanged at anime conventions, the bootleg tapes quickly became prized collector’s items, with even third-generation copies fetching $50-$100 par cassette. A petition to bring the series to English-speaking audiences in an official capacity garnered over 100,000 signatures–just enough for TV Tokyo to confirm that they had no plans for localization.

Occasionally, veteran fans of anime have wondered why Kordo has attracted so many fervent admirers. Its plot and storylines are typical of many “magical schoolgirl” tropes present in Japanese media, and the animation, while lush by anime standards, pales in comparison to deluxe OVAs with much more highly-regarded stories. Iwashi and Suzuki, who maintain strict control over their intellectual property and hand-drew many cels for the animation, have been silent on the matter.

Some have been so bold to suggest that Kordo owes its success to subliminal messages inserted into both the manga and anime. It’s certainly true that the animation has reportedly provoked occasional seizures and psychotic episodes, but that’s hardly unheard-of; the 1997 Pokémon episode “Dennō Senshi Porygon” (でんのうせんしポリゴン) famously caused over 600 such seizures. Skeptics point out that scarcity is a far more likely reason for the program’s success (at least overseas).

But when Iwashi and Suzuki announced a sixth OVA to debut for the series’ 25th anniversary, few could have known that the secret of the program was about to be finally, violently, revealed.

An unfamiliar

Sensation

Drifting through the eddies of life

An air of

Introspection

Watching lifetime worlds spin by

A feel of

Desolation

Sensing time like water slipping

A search for

Resolution

Looking forward, backward, on.

Every hardened spacer knows the ixar, the space-rats: small skittering creatures with seven legs and a hide that’s hairy between plates of chitin. Incredibly adaptable and able to withstand environments from a vacuum to a hothouse, they are regarded as pests aboard ships and ruthlessly eradicated. Populations of ixar have become established near most spaceports, though their original world of origin is unknown.

Far fewer know of the nuuixar, and even those tend to be tall tales passed around spacer bars after a few rounds of drinks.

For all intents and purposes, the nuuixar resemble the ixar and are easily mistaken for them. Whether this is a natural mimicry adaptation, an evolutionary relationship, or some form of shapeshifting has never been established. But unlike the ixar, the nuuixar are deeply intelligent and are capable of sophisticated tool use and communication on psionic wavelengths.

Hence there are dark tales of nuuixar posing as simple ixar in order to steal secrets, selling tradeship routes to pirates or sabotaging key components of stardrives. There are no confirmed cases–what pirate would admit to purchasing information from a space-rat?–but many a spacer adrift in a lifepod has blamed a nuuixar, real or imagined, for their plight.

As creatures of psionic capability, nuuixar reportedly are able to form a gestalt intelligence, exponentially increasing their powers when in close proximity. Some say they use this power to overtake unwary ships and pilot them deep into the galactic core, where they are preparing a massive fleet to make their presence one day known.

Something to consider the next time you set a trap loaded with Ixar-B-Gon.

Nobody had ever seen or spoken to the Elohim, but there was ample enough evidence for its presence. The settlement of Arden had very strict codes to be obeyed in placing buildings, growing vegetables, and just about any other activity that altered the tenor of town life. When someone violated those codes, the Elohim would act.

There was Mackay, for instance, the architect who built a magnificent building that clashed with the Arden codes on north-south orientation, maximum height, and colors to be avoided (his “temple” was bedecked in clashing neon orange and lime green). The morning after its completion, the Elohim had somehow moved the entire edifice into line with the rest of Arden, all 2000 tons of it. The exterior was freshly coated with white, and the towers were each cut off clean and razor-sharp–including the room where Mackay had been sleeping.

Thugs that operated brazenly within city limits, derelicts who slept on city streets, and preachers or evangelists of any kind all risked the Elohim’s wrath. They tended to disappear, leaving behind all their worldly possessions in a small heap. For some reason, the Elohim wouldn’t suffer vagrancy, crime, or the worship of any deity (including itself) within Arden.

Naturally there was rampant speculation about the nature and form of the Elohim, speculation which it seemed to tolerate. The only thing that people in Arden have been able to puzzle out–other than the Elohim’s obvious caprice and its love of certain rules that had been worked out by centuries of Ardenites–was that it sometimes changed its mind. The city had changed axes once, with all new construction being changed from east-west to north-south in the course of one night. Disappeared people occasionally reappeared, hideously scarred but with no memory of where they’d been.

But that was all before the Descent.

The first turn brought then from paved blacktop to gravel.

“What the hell?” groused Sunny. “How far out in the goddamn boondocks is this thing?”

“John knows the way,” said Elain from the passenger seat, indicating the taillights of the Celica ahead of them. “Just keep following him.”

The next turn tore away the gravel and left them on a hardpacked dirt road, a little squishy from the recent rain.

“Are you kidding? I just washed this thing.” Sunny glared at the moist earth ahead of them. “It’s going to look like we went out ‘muddin” like a bunch of hillbillies.”

Elain sighed. “More following John, less comment from the peanut gallery.”

A moment later, John’s Celica turned onto an even narrower dirt road, wide enough only for a single car and decidedly squashier than the last. Sunny tightened her hands around the wheel until her knuckles whitened.

“John knows where he’s going. He’ll get us there, you’ll see.” Elain kept her eyes riveted on the distant taillights.

The narrow road abruptly widened into a field that was laced with deep, furrowed tire tracks and pools of stagnant water. A squirrel lapping at one of the tiretrack ponds narrowly escapes a good waffling at the hands of Sunny’s left front tire, and Sunny herself squealed as streams of mud began to shoot up out of the wheel wells and splatter against the side of her car. It fishtaled slightly as it waddled across the field-they really were muddin’ now.

“My car-” Sunny shrieked.

“Just follow John.” Elain said through clenched teeth.

“My paint-”

“Just follow John.”

“My tires-”

“Just follow John!” Elain screamed it this time.

The muddy field abruptly ended at a lakeshore–probably the Sidras Reservoir. John’s Celica didn’t even slow down as it moved through the mire, leaving a deep and furrowed trail that rapidly pooled with cocoa-brown water.

It drove straight to the shore, into the water, and out of sight.

Sunny slammed on the brakes and her car oozed to a stop on the shore, just as a single bubble rose to the surface and popped where John’s Celica had gone in.

“Want me to keep following him?” she asked Elain.

This post is part of the May 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “zompocalypse now”.

“I’m not crazy.” There was nothing, not even high-pitched screaming street corner gibberish, that sounded crazier than that statement, Dessie decided the moment she heard it.

“We don’t like to assign terms to things here,” the psychologist said. “Just tell me about these ‘reality shifts’ you’ve been seeing.”

“Well, everybody knows that I’m into macabre stuff like zombies in a big way,” said Dessie, excitedly. “I mean, my last birthday cake was green and it had little plastic body parts sticking out of it. I’ve got a full set of George Romero films, and a complete (signed!) first edition run of Zomcomix. That goes for like a hundred bucks on eBay, unsigned!”

“Uh-huh.” The psychologist’s old-fashioned fountain pen made an unpleasant scratching sound as it worked over his notebook. “Go on.”

“The other day I started seeing some zombies for real. I knew they were real because if anyone would know them by sight it would be me and because the Zombie Walk isn’t until next month. I’ve already got my costume, it squirts real fake blood and everything.” Dessie took a deep breath. “They chase me just like the do in the movies and I see a few people that I recognize only they’ve been zombified and now they’re trying to get me too.”

It sounded even crazier when she put it that way; Dessie was sure the psychologist was scratching something about hallucinations and paranoid delusions. “So you’re seeing them in your everyday life, then?” the psychologist said, sounding bored.

“No, not like they’re popping up in the normal world, no. It’s like the whole world goes 100% Dawn of the Dead 28 Days Later with the burnt-out buildings and the wrecked cars and even a few survivors with big guns on rooftops. It’s like I’m, I dunno, in a world where the long prophesied (and some people say, for me, long awaited but I don’t really think like that and want everybody to die or anything) zombie apocalypse happened a month or two ago. A total shift in my reality.”

“And this reality shifting happens…often?” The painful scratching of pen on expensive paper continued.

“At first there was a good long gap between them, so much so that I thought the first one might just have been a hallucination or an episode maybe caused by stress or overwork (it’s finals time) but then it happened again and I think but I’m not sure that the time between them is getting shorter.” Dessie took another deep breath. “So I’m not crazy, I’m just slipping into a zombie world and spending more and more time there.”

More pen scratching, but no further word from the psychologist.

“Well, what do you think? You’re writing that I’m crazy on that thing, aren’t you? Aren’t you? I just told you in plain English that I’m not crazy (even though I know how crazy that sounds) and I set out what’s been happening very plainly (even though I know that sounds even crazier than me saying I’m not crazy), so the least you could do is say something reassuring along the lines of ‘I’m not crazy.'”

The scratchings were particularly violent now, as if the psychologist were jamming his pen into the paper in a frenzy of analysis.

“Well?” Dessie said. She sat up on the diagnosis couch and looked over at the psychologist. “It’s very rude of you to sit there and write while there’s an ever-present chance I might-”

Looking up, the psychologist revealed a dead and chalk-grey face, scratching and chewing at what appeared to be his secretary’s arm, still clutching a little bit of pink memo. The office was a wreck, with peeling wallpaper and a hole in the ceiling, while the diagnosis couch was red not from velvet but from blood.

“-slip into the zombieworld again.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
dclary
randi.lee
Ralph Pines
kimberlycreates
writingismypassion
dclary (again)
Penelope
SinisterCola
PragmaticPimp
magicmint
Diana_Rajchel
SuzanneSeese
AFord
J.W.Alden
Nissie
MonkeyQueen
areteus
pyrosama

The corner shop was a custom cake decorating place called A Masterpiece of Cake. “You know you’re in a certified megamall when they have a place like that,” laughed Merie.

“Ugh, look at all that buttercream icing,” groaned Saini, pointing at a cake that had a blue sports car sculpted on top by waves of flowery sugar. “So mercilessly sweet…makes my tongue burn just to look at it.”

“How about that one?” Merie said. She pointed to a nearby cake that, through prodigious amounts of food coloring and fondant icing, looked like a giant hamburger.

“Fondant? It tastes like modeling clay because that’s basically what it is. It sacrifices any kind of flavor at all for being moldable. It’s like eating cement straight from the mixing truck.” Saini paused. “And with about the same effect on your overall BMI.”

“There’s one in there that has that nice whipped frosting, probably,” said Merie. “It’s not a salad, but it’s better for you than sugar-cement or buttercrack.”

Saini rolled her dark eyes. “Whipped stuff can barely hold the shape of cake frosting lying flat on a cake, much less anything else.”

“So you’re saying that none of these professionally-made cakes matches up to your exacting personal standards, is that it?”

“I’m saying it’s my dream to create an ultimate cake frosting that combines the light sweetness of whipped frosting with the moldability of fondant,” Saini said with a faraway look in her eyes. “It’s the cake version of the moon landing, but it can be done if we pour enough resources into it.”