Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

While she was out of work and in between applications, Emmalee found herself with a lot of time to kill. She gradually became obsessed with the pumpkin pie contest held at the Tri-County Fair every fall and the ticket to recipe publication (and residuals) with Bibliophile Digest it represented.

So the hunt was on for the perfect pie recipe, and Emmalee’s kitchen became her laboratory. She had plenty of ingredients saved up in the pantry after the last big hurricane scare, and was soon making two or more pies a day. Though she didn’t like to flaunt the fact–conflicting with some peoples’ notion of the Modern Independent Woman as it did–Emmalee was an excellent cook and even he rejects were eagerly snapped up.

At first, anyway.

As the job hunt wound into the summer and Emmalee remained in the kitchen, her friends and relatives began to tire of her constant barrage of pumpkin pies. They weren’t doing any of her sewing circle friends any favors during swimsuit season, and at least one of her diabetic friends nearly landed himself in the hospital after a particularly delectable (and sugary) pie had found its way across his desk.

Committed as they were to sparing Emmalee’s feelings and supporting her in a time of need, her friends did the only thing they could: they broke into her house and hid the pumpkin pie ingredients, one at a time (inasmuch as using Uncle Harold’s key counted as breaking in, anyway). At first, Emmalee simply tried to make do without, leading to an unfortunate succession of pies with no sugar or crusts made from whole wheat bread crumbs. Eventually, though, even the basic ingredients vanished (along with the contents of her pumpkin patch).

It’s anyone’s guess whether what came next was revenge or simply resourcefulness on the part of someone who couldn’t afford to buy more raw pie fixings. But no one who tasted the spaghetti squash and bell pepper pie sweetened with cinnamon and carrot cake mix on a take n’ bake pizza crust that came next ever forgot it.

Emmalee found her missing ingredients on the porch one day later.

The idea came to Dan after seeing the same quarter with a scratch on Washington’s cheek three times in town. Every coin, he speculated, must be endlessly circulated and recirculated, especially since it was such a small community and all the cash went through a single farmer’s bank. But since most coins were mostly alike, there was no way to be sure.

Dan was going to see for himself.

His girlfriend, an artist, had access to a wide variety of indelible toxic paints and engraving tools. Dan used them to engrave his initials into the face of a quarter and paint them the most durable, indelible, poisonous-if-inhaled black he could find.

Daniel Arthur MacDonnagh. D-A-M.

His parents had kicked themselves for giving him those initials, but Grandpa Art wasn’t about to let them be changed (and neither, for that matter, was Grandpa Dan). They’d been, at various times, a point of pride and a badge of shame.

Now they were an indelible marker cast out into the wilds of a small-town economy.

When the blindfold came off, Gerald found himself in a run-down homesteader’s cabin, lit only by dusty shafts of light that peeked through the logs. He was bound hand and food to a rude wooden stool, and a big man in a duster and banana sat on a stool of his own nearby.

“Wh-who are you?” Gerald stammered. “What do you want?”

The man drew a piece of paper from his pocket and tossed it at Gerald. It wafted down onto his lap, and he could just make out in the dim light that it was one of the sketches he’d done for the Marshall’s office in Dunn’s Crossing. It was Bradley King Freeman’s face, wanted for rustling and robbery; carved into a printing block by the local engraver, it had furnished hundreds of copies dotted about the territories.

“You draw that?”

Gerald spat out his answer before he could think better of it. “Y-yeah,” he said.

The man pulled down his bandanna, and Gerald felt panic sweat prickle along his back. It was Bradley King Freeman, the spitting image of his composite sketch. “That was a mighty pretty picture you drew,” the bandit growled. “Mighty pretty.”

“I…I just did it for the money,” Gerald stammered, his voice rising to a squeak. “I listened to the witnesses and I drew it and they gave me ten dollars. I swear, I don’t have anything against you!”

“Just in it for the money, huh?” Freeman reached into his coat. “In that case I’ve got just the thing for you.”

Gerald winced. That was it–shot in the head while trussed up like a chicken. And all for ten dollars’ worth of art.

Freeman produced a stack of silver certificates tied up with twine and dumped it on Gerald’s lap. “How about you take ten times as much to do a nice portrait with color and a frame,” he said. “Get my good side and send it back upriver to my folks so they’ll have something to remember me by when I’m dangling from a noose.”

Even though crime was way down in the inner city and muggings rare even in the twistiest of subway tunnels, Weirdo Watching still had its dangers. The weirdos in question could be armed, or mentally ill, or both; they could be pedophiles or convicted rapists or former city politicians. That element of danger, however remote, was behind Weirdo Watching’s recent popularity as an extreme sport amongst the spoiled and indolent, the bored and the teenaged.

“Where’s he headed?” Shaney asked, observing the transient that had drawn his attention by waving what appeared to be a stick of ladies’ roll-on deodorant like a symphony baton. He and Ash had followed their quarry down into the subway, surreptitiously snapping the most outrageous shots they could get on their phones for uploading to weirdowatching.ny.com.

“The dead end, he’s headed for the dead end,” Ash said. It wasn’t so much a dead end as a three-way junction where one of the branches had been closed off by a steel gate as long as Ash and Shaney had been alive.

“Keep your distance, then. We don’t want to back him into a place where he could get scared and stabby.”

Following at a car’s length, cell phones still merrily snapping, they saw the weirdo stop at a smooth tile wall just before the dead end. He paused a moment then rapidly smeared the deodorant baton over the wall in a frenzy. It rolled on clear, leaving no residue. Shaney could have sworn the man was casting a glance every so often at his pursuers, but before the idea could fully form the weirdo dashed off at high speed, vaulting over a turnstile before his pursuers could even snap another shot.

“Well, we’ve lost him. But I think we have enough shots of him deodorizing a random subway wall to make a good post. You want to go back up and try again?”

No reply. “Ash?”

Shaney returned to the dead end wall; Ash stood there, staring at the blank surface, agape. “Hey, you all right?”

To Shaney’s eyes it was a blank wall, but to Ash’s there was a message scrawled there, in bright neon green.

ONLY .00001 PERCENT OF PEOPLE CAN READ THIS MESSAGE IT IS THE FIRST SIGN OF MANY

The Vicomte de Foix was enraged by the articles, which painted him as a callous, murderous aristocrat in the worst caricature of the tottering ancien régime. While the “Lyon Theses” were written under a pseudonym, it was an open secret that the liberal Vicomte de Lara was the author. The Vicomte de Lara had all but abandoned his noble titles to live a life of anti-government agitation (and libertine personal habits) in Paris. But in the absence of an official abdication, he remained a member of the Second Estate.

Thus, the Vicomte de Foix challenged the Vicomte de Lara to a duel which the latter rashly accepted despite the fact that he had no combat experience and would be facing down an experienced soldier and veteran of the American Revolution. In recognition of that fact, the Vicomte de Lara found it impossible to secure a second, as none of his friends wished to chance an encounter with the Vicomte de Foix’s pistol (or to watch his opponent die). When the duel took place, on a sandbar in the icy Seine in December 1788, the Vicomte de Lara arrived alone.

Before the duel could begin, though, a figure approached and took its place as the Vicomte de Lara’s second. The challenger was cold and anxious to be done with the duel, and did not challenge the newcomer. Upon seeing the matched and embossed set of dueling pistols and trying, unsuccessfully, to load one, the Vicomte de Lara broke down in hysterics and refused to participate further, instead lying prostrate on the ground.

His opponent, disgusted, declared his intention to gun down the Vicomte de Lara where he lay and began loading his pistol. He was stopped by the late-arriving second, who finished the Vicomte de Lara’s clumsy loading of his pistol and opened fire as permitted by the dueling rules of the time which allowed seconds to take the place of either duelist.

Their aim was true; the Vicomte de Foix never lived to see the second cast off their cloak to reveal his opponent’s young mistress.

“Ekaterina. Ekaterina Miloslovna Shuster Daniels Gilman. I’m pretty sure you can figure out which of those is the maiden name.”

Rourke sniffed and sipped his coffee. “If that’s supposed to mean more to me than ‘Jane Doe’ I suggest you try a little harder, Sonny. A stiff’s a stiff.”

“She was a famous surfer and actress in the 60’s,” Sonny said. “Her mother wrote the Tinker novels, inspired by her kid’s antics and surfer nickname, and then got that selfsame kid the starring role in the six or seven beach-blanket movies they made from them.”

“Holy hell.” Rourke cast a fresh eye over the body in the bathtub. “That’s Tinker? My god, I used to keep a 8×10 glossy of her next to a box of tissues when I was in junior high. What happened? She’s not even sixty and she looks like my grandmother…”

“You know how it is with people when the spotlight starts shining,” said Sonny. “She married her producer at 17, got hooked on seven different kind of sauce. Before the divorce he beat her so bad after a hit of coke that she had a miscarriage, and the state took her other kid away for neglect. Surfer movies hit the skids, nobody would insure her…probably a lot of those last names were taken on for the money attached to them.”

“Well, at least she’s remembered by the younger generation,” said Rourke. He looked very old, very tired, as he spoke. “Your mom was probably in diapers when they made ‘Tinker in Barbados’ and you still know the whole goddamn story, unlike a generation of kids like me who forgot about her as soon as we were old enough to feel a little local boob.”

“No, I just looked her up on my phone,” Sonny said. “Don’t know her from Eve, but the Omnipedia article on her’s pretty thorough. Well, except for the ‘living celebrities’ category.”

“Thanks, Sonny. That’s exactly what I needed to hear.” Rourke looked at the body for a moment, silently counting the needle marks on the arm that protruded from the bathtub. Then he drew the curtain and walked into the living room.

“Forensics is gonna give you hell for touching the scene before they get here!” Sonny cried behind him.

“Screw ’em. I don’t want to see her like this.”

Route C was big enough that there was a steady rotation of drivers. That was good, because if Evin had drawn Cecelia every time, he would have rather walked the 8 miles to campus and back every day.

Cecelia delighted in pulling away just as Evin reached the bus stop, even if he was only seconds behind the old Blue Bird. She was also fond of leaving before the he could get off at his stop, knowing that the next one was nearly a mile down the road and that the sidewalk in between was patchy.

Then there were the rare but especially unfortunate times when Evin left his bag on the bus. Cecelia would leaving before he could get back on to collect it, no matter how hard he shouted or pounded. That bag had ended up in the lost and found at the city central bus terminal, discreetly relieved of sunglasses and emergency cash. When she was in a good mood, Cecelia would only charge Evin full bus fare to collect his bag (though still often driving away before he can get off the bus).

And that was without factoring in all the times she’d closed the door on a loose fold of Evin’s clothes, a trailing hand, a wayward foot, or the long ponytail Evin had worn for a time.

Needless to say, Evin hadn’t taken the abuse lying down, but his options were limited. Rents along Routes A and B were double or triple those on C. Cecelia was connected; her uncle was apparently a manager for city transit. Comparing notes with other passengers led Evin to believe that her wrath was only focused on a select few.

And all because he’d dumped Cecelia’s baby sister over the phone.

Tom Shandler was frustrated. Not just in business, but in life as well.

It had become more and more apparent that he was trapped in a rut at the Porthaven Metromert. The managers that he originally trained with at his home store in Newport News had long since outranked him; he’d read about their promotions in the company newsletter that appeared every Friday at his apartment like clockwork. At first, he’d hung them on a nail in the kitchen, the way a writer might hang rejections slips. Now, though, they went straight in the trash after a brief perusal.

To be left forever in a dead-end middle management position as no kind of fate for a man like Shandler, no kind of fate for the man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps from a lowly sales position at that first store. He was destined for great things, and every snag along the way—every former friend promoted over him, every smartass worker beneath him, was carefully noted in a mental register, for retribution when the time came. He had the letter he’d send them all written in his head for years.

Still, despite pushing his workers hard and increasing sales in his division by five percent, there was no sign of that kick upstairs. Marcus, in produce, was being considered to manage his own store—or so Gus, the manager, had said over lunch the other day. This made Shandler resent him all the more; Marcus was popular with his workers, and handsome.

Something had to be done, and time was running out to do it. A grand gesture of loyalty to the company was what he needed—some extraordinary act that would throw him into the limelight and show that he, Thomas Darren Shandler, was the man for the next big opening. Since nothing ever seemed to happen in Porthaven, he was ever on the lookout for a break, the one chance that would see him covered in glory or resigned forever to his niche, even fired. There was a plan for that too, in the desk drawer, freshly oiled and loaded.

“We contacted aliens year ago. They didn’t have anything useful to say, so we all kind of forgot about it.”

“What? How could you do that? What were they like?”

“Near as we could tell they were kind of like a fungus with some kind of fluid-based decentralized nervous system. R-selectors, no sexes, reproduction by what can only be described as billions of spores. What social bonds they had were formed based on size, not relatedness. They were their own starships, with the little young ones as the crew and the big old ones as the ship itself.”

“You must have tried to talk with them.”

“We had nothing to say to them. It took twenty years for our top men to figure out the system of pheromones, chromoatophores, temperature changes, and sterile airborne spores they used to communicate. And what did we find they were saying?”

“What?”

“They were obsessed with temperature variations on their planets. They talked about the weather, all the time, obsessively. When it wasn’t that it was grading various sources of the nutrient sludge they consume. It was mind-numbing.”

“Did you ask them any questions? Maybe that was just a fluke. Would they really find our conversations all that interesting?”

“We asked about their intentions, and they said they wanted to know what the weather would be like on their homeworld tomorrow. We asked about their technology, and they told us that their nutrient sludge was a little off today. The only thing they wanted to know from us was whether we had any sludge to share. It was just like tolking to a goddamn mushroom.”

It’s the hot new thing this year, direct from Europe or so they say. Genetically engineered microbes, smuggled over as nigh-undetectable spores. Activate them with nutrient agar, and strap in.

Nobody’s sure how they work. Hell, it’s not like they’re chemistry majors out there. Some say the bugs make hallucinogens as by-products like botulism makes Botox. Others say the bugs infect the part of your brain that keeps your consciousness grounded and unaltered (a pretty small par in some people, admittedly). One crackpot in Boston has even been heard saying that the critters rot out and replace a small but key part of the brain like a tongue-eating louse replacing a snapper’s tongue.

But regardless of how it works, everyone’s pretty sure it does work. The period of time you go under varies–a few minutes, a few hours–but in that time you’re enraptured in the most realistic psychedelic paradise dream this side of the Matrix. If it weren’t for inconveniences like needing to eat and drink, having to post trustworthy guards (or junkies taking their turn) over the sleepers, or the delay of 2-12 hours before the stuff kicks in after you dose it, most people would probably never willingly snap out of it.