Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Werner Voss found Manfred von Richthofen standing next to his Fokker triplane, watching Australian soldiers remove his still-warm body from the cockpit.

“I thought they might send you for me,” Richthofen said, barely glancing in the direction of his friend and rival who had been dead for over a year. “Hell of a thing. I was about to down a clumsy little Canadian when one of his buddies forced me to dive right into some ground fire.”

“I see you were able to land safely,” observed Voss politely.

“And a lot of good it did me. They’re already picking the Fokker apart for souvenirs.” Richthofen sighed. “I bet they give that Canuck wichser credit for the kill too.”

“Would you rather credit went to some Aussie digger?” asked Voss. “In any case, it’s time to go. Unless you’d prefer to spend your eternity haunting what’s left of your plane.”

They turned away from the wreckage and Voss led Richthofen to a spot of blinding light that beggared description. “What’s it like?” the Baron asked.

“Oh, it’s quite nice, actually,” said Voss “You become one with the cosmos and the font of all things and gain total knowledge of the past, present, and future. Even if you were reduced to mincemeat like I was.”

“Total knowledge?” Richthofen cast a sidelong glance at his plane. “So tell me, Werner, what do the people of the future think of me, if they even remember?”

“Oh, they certainly remember,” Voss said, clapping a hand on the Baron’s back. “You’re the best-known fighter pilot from any country for the next thousand years or so! Even the smallest children will know your name.”

“Because of my exploits in securing ultimate victory for the Empire?”

“Ah…no,” Voss said hesitantly. “They’ll remember you from that cartoon, and from the lid of an American pizza box.”

“A cartoon? What’s that got to do with anything, Werner?” Richthofen fussed.

“Yes, there’s an American cartoon dog that pretends to dogfight you. On top of his doghouse. You always win, if it’s any consolation.”

“And the Italian food?”

Voss shrugged. “I think it’s a metaphor for the red of the sausage and sauce and how ruthlessly inexpensive it is? Anyhow, the picture on the lid is very unrealistic. It has a mustache.”

The Baron hesitated at the edge of the light.

“Oh, don’t be like that. Go on in and see for yourself.”

Nex was able to jimmy the door open with her reprogrammable card–the place was so old that it didn’t have networked biometrics installed. It opened quietly, even as she had to struggle with the last few inches, and closed with a nearly inaudible click. Peeking through the peephole, Nex was able to see the Redmen continue down the corridor without so much as glancing at the row of “bedsit brick” doors.

With the pursuit shaken, at least for now, Nex crept into the tiny one-room apartment looking for the occupant. There was the taser in her left sleeve if they were asleep and the knife in her right if they were awake. But the pile of unopened and moldering mail by the door–which had made it so hard to open– and the burned-in channel guide on the cheap TV quickly made the situation clear. A cursory search revealed the dessicated remains of the tenant on the futon facing the screen, remote still in hand.

“Karoshi,” Nex muttered.

There had been a time, years ago, when the idea of someone dying by themselves with no one noticing was a big enough social trauma to merit an extensive search for answers and documentary filmmaking. Nex had, during a morbid phase in her teens, seen one such film about a pretty young Londoner who died wrapping Xmas presents and lain undiscovered for three years. Nowadays, with automatic rent debiting and the proliferation of tiny, cheap “bedsit brick” one-room apartments (with little more than a couch-bed, toilet, and high-speed network connection)…”karoshis” were common. The word meant “death by work” according to the cold Japanese instruction vids that Nex used to watch. In the modern sense it was more likely death by heart attack or stroke, but sitting on a couch was probably the closest thing to work the late people ever did.

Nex gave the remains an abbreviated reading of the last rites and flicked a coin onto their chest for the boatman, as was her custom.

In October 1979, a group of seniors from the University of Colorado Boulder Alpine Club resolved to use their week of “winter break” to go hiking and climbing in the remote Branson Pass area in Montana. Eight set out, all of whom were experienced hikers and climbers; two of the students had climbed all of Colorado’s peaks above 14,000ft. in elevation. They left a copy of their itinerary and explicitly requested a search if they had not reported in by November 4.

The small town of Alexander served as their base camp, and local residents later recalled being mildly annoyed by the group’s antics as they purchased supplies and film for their three 35mm and one Super 8 cameras. Just before the ascent, which had Mt. Bronson (14,987ft.) as its goal, two of the club members fell ill with food poisoning. The party was reduced to six and begun its ascent on October 27.

None were ever seen alive again. A storm blew up on the 31st, and on November 4 the Iran Hostage Crisis exploded, greatly hindering the two ill climbers from beginning a search. It wasn’t until November 8 that one was mounted; searchers found the bodies of the climbers, each over a mile from their campsite. Their tent had been torn to pieces, apparently from the inside, and the climbers appeared to have fled into the storm wearing only their underwear or scraps of clothing.

Despite that, they hadn’t all died of exposure. Each had a number of cuts and broken bones, and one of the climbers had a jaw fractured with such violence that her tongue had apparently been bitten off; searchers were unable to locate it. Despite the winter season, searchers reported that the bodies were all quite tan, and then a Geiger counter in a survival kit was accidentally turned on it registered significant radiation from the bodies. No cause for the hikers’ sudden and panicked flight, or their injuries, were ever ascertained.

Once the furor over the hostage crisis died down, the mystery became popular among conspiracy theorists. Most notably, the film that was left in the tent was subsequently developed, and some have claimed to see a tall shadow in the background of several shots in Alexander and at the campsite. The Montana government holds that this so-called “Thin Man” is simply a processing artifact. The final shot in one of the cameras also, according to some, shows lights in the sky or a mysterious form visible behind tearing fabric; skeptics argue that the shot is a simple artifact.

The few that had gone and returned left tales, naturally, and those tales spread far and wide on the lips of tellers who never had and never would see the place with their own eyes. They said that what you found down there reflected who you were as a person much more than any external, metaphysical reality.

Ellis wasn’t sure what a vast wasteland of frozen mountains and snow said about him. Maybe he didn’t want to know.

In the world above–say, in Antarctica–trekking through such a wasteland would have required more supplies than Ellis could possibly have carried, and far more survival training than he possessed. But that wasn’t the way down below. He got hungry but never had to eat; got thirsty but never had to drink; got cold but never had to build a fire. One might have thought that the removal of those things would have made the journey an easy one.

Instead, Ellis found his pain and suffering focused to a thin, white-hot edge. If there was no death at the end, no unconsciousness, then the pain simply brooded and grew far beyond what was possible–or even conceivable–above. Forget the stories of torments unnumbered, or even other people. The suffering of an unforgiving environment with no company but memories was infinitely worse.

There was no night and day, only a constant gray haze. As Ellis struggled through waist-deep snow and up naked rockfaces savaged by high winds, he occasionally tried to take shelter in a crevasse or eat a little snow to dull the pain. It didn’t work; the snow quenched no thirst, the deepest caves and crevasses were canvassed by the same howling polar winds, and the memories were omnipresent above them all.

Those same dilettantes, seated by cozy fires above, said that the pain down there wore away at a soul until it obliterated every trace of memory and left them to wander infinitely in their own personal “down below.” Ellis wouldn’t let that happen. He’d had no inkling of what was ahead when he had performed the ritual of key and coin to venture down below, even after all the interviews and research and preparations.

But even as the pain threatened to devour him, even as the snow and solitude made him question whether he had ever really seen another living being, Ellis pressed on.

Annemarie and Cassandra were out there, somewhere.

And he had to bring them back.

There were plenty of names for it. The Tattooed Man, the Vandalized One, the Defaced. Most were male, which was in and of itself a misnomer; it always appeared as the same sex and roughly the same age to the person that beheld it.

As for the markings, they varied by the watcher too.

Kids would see someone with few or any markings, a fellow innocent with youth-flushed cheeks. But to older people…at first, the figure would seem to bear a number of strange tattoos or markings. But closer inspection would reveal that each was actually an etching of something that the observer had done in their life–always a misdeed. The Vandalized One displayed the sins of a lifetime carved into its very flesh.

As to what happened when you met it…well, that varied too. Those with few misdeeds, or children, would receive a curt salutation, a welcome mixed with a warning. Someone with more would be met with a simple question: “Do you regret it?” In their response, the person would have their fate in their hands. Enough people had escaped the encounter in that way to spread wildly contrary tales about it.

And a soul whose misdeeds were so voluminous that the skin of the Defaced was completely covered by an overlapping cyclorama of wretched inks? Suffice it to say that they do not return from the encounter.

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.