Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The thing about speaking with trees is that most people expect it to be like speaking with people. In fact, it’s almost totally alien in every way–about what you’d expect from beings that have less in common with humans than many species of bacteria.

Tolkien did get one thing right, though: trees move slowly. Except as saplings, it may take them years to process information or to pass that information on. Even then, they tend to notice things like unusual winds, heavy rains, changes in soil consistency, and the number of creatures touching them or moving over their roots.

Even those that have the gifts necessary to speak with trees must gird themselves for a lengthy process: getting even a single data point may take days, and converting a statement about the wind and water and roots and leaves into information useful to humans can take even longer. It’s an undertaking.

But when all’s said and done, nobody knows the forests better. If something happens, be it ten, a hundred, or a thousand years ago, the trees will notice.

This post is part of the March 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “rainy days.”

Mikey sighed. Maybe the science channel and the encyclopedia had let him down; maybe there wasn’t something unusual and mysterious under every rock. But, darn it, he’d come close and it hurt bitterly to have to go back home, back to Dave, empty handed. There’d been a whisper of truth in all of Elliot and Natalie’s leads–the giant worm hole that was really a drainpipe, the mystery whirlpool caused by the school sprinkler system, the tree shadows that looked like a man–but none of them were even close to the unexplainable phenomenon he’d promised to bring back to his know-it-all brother.

“You don’t think that, maybe we might be able to find some more leads, do you?” he said.

Elliot rubbed his neck. “Maybe later, Mikey. It’s getting kinda late, you know, almost dinnertime.”

“Yeah, maybe later,” Natalie said. “Come on, Mikey, we’ll ride you home.”

The quickest way to Mikey’s house led through downtown—or, more accurately, behind downtown. In small, rural places like that, downtowns were often only a single street, fading into the surrounding residential neighborhoods. There was a wide, muddy alleyway behind the shops, many of which had closed and been boarded up, that neighborhood kids would sometimes use as a shortcut; on an impulse, Mikey darted his bike in, followed closely by his friends.

There hadn’t been so much as a cloudburst for weeks, so the alley was dry and hard packed, save for a damp spot behind the old hardware store. As Mikey sped through, he felt a light dusting of raindrops on his face. Letting his pace slack a bit, he looked up; the sky was as warm and bright and clear as it had been when they left the school.

“Hold on a sec!” he cried, bringing his bike to an abrupt stop.

Elliot and Natalie pulled up behind him. “What’s the matter?” he heard one of them say.

“It’s raining here,” Mikey said. “Feel the drops? Like just before it starts to pour, when it’s all gray out?”

Natalie stepped forward, arms outstretched; her hands came away slightly damp. “Yeah, I can feel it!”

“Me too,” Elliot said, looking up. “And not a cloud in the sky! Where d’you think it’s coming from, Mikey?” he said. “Mikey?”

But Mikey was already running toward the old fire escape, on the back of the hardware store. He charged up, heedless of his friends’ calls. The roof was paved with gravel, and a few rusty chimneys stuck up here and there, but the whole was bone dry. Looking out over the rest of the block, he couldn’t see any clouds, any standing water, any leaking pipes. There didn’t seem to be anywhere that the water could be coming from.

“It’s rain from nowhere,” he said, climbing down. “That’s what it is. We were running all over town looking for it, and here it is right under our noses: water from nowhere.”

“You mean…” Natalie said.

“Look for yourself!” Mikey cried. “It’s not coming from anywhere!” He did a little dance among the light, misty drops. “This is it! We’ve found our unexplainable mystery!”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Bogna
Ralph Pines
Nissie
Lyra Jean
Domoviye
magicmint
areteus
julzperri
hillaryjacques
Turndog-Millionaire
AFord
pyrosama
Tomspy77
J. W. Alden

The Romanians had taken 75 days and lost nearly 100,000 men in taking Odessa in 1941; despite the overwhelming superiority of the Soviet troops who invested the city in 1944, the Romanian garrison was ordered to resist to the last.

The overall commander, though, realized that the situation was hopeless and detached a portion of his troops under Ion Cepurscu for “special purpose work.” No written orders were given, and Cepurscu was left to his own devices as far as implementation, but the overall goal was clear: the “special purpose” was to remove everything of value from the city and cover up any evidence that might reflect poorly on the occupiers once the Soviets returned.

Cepurscu apparently decided that the most expedient way to do this would be to brazenly loot what precious metals and art he could find and load them onto a freighter bound for Constanta. That much at least is clear; the freighter was found in port when the Soviets arrived in late August 1944. But other than that, virtually nothing is known of the “special purpose group” and its actions before Odessa fell on August 19. Cepurscu’s troops were not among the evacuees and are believed to have perished during the battle for the city.

And that would be that if not for the discovery, ten year later, of a mass grave in the Odessa sewers during routine maintenance. Nearly a thousand identifiable sets of remains were recovered, with only one thing in common: skulls pierced by 8×50mmR Mannlicher rounds, the same ammunition used by the aging second-line rifles issued to Cepurscu and his men.

Müsstler was one of the few, even in those days, who knew the secret of infusing the steel of a weapon with a living soul. They were called speaking swords, though their speech was audible only to those holding them at a telepathic level. Shortly after his retirement, Müsstler was kidnapped from his home by a local cell of daemon worshippers. They knew that he had made powerful speaking swords for crusaders and the church, and desired him to craft a weapon of supreme and malign evil–a latter-day version of the speaking scimitar Aldebaran which had corrupted men and built up empires until it was lost to the deep after a naval battle.

The swordsmith complied, fashioning a horrific weapon. Its serrated blade was a deep and sinister gold engraved with skeletons and mounted on a hilt shaped like a human bone. The Bone Blade was then ritually infused with a soul drawn from the beyond; at the height of the ceremony, Müstler himself was used as the necessary human sacrifice.

But the wily old man had foreseen his fate, and played a final trick on his captors. He infused the Bone Blade with a timid and kindly soul that was nevertheless boastful and supplicant. The weapon therefore appeared to go along with the will of its evil daemonic masters but would fail to follow through on its promises or use its powers on innocents or the good–its full potential was only unleashed when the cultists fell to fighting among themselves, for speaking swords used against their will are no more effective than a heavy blunt club but can cleave hillsides otherwise.

So it was that the Bone Blade passed from daemonic cult to daemonic cult across the world, sowing the seeds of destruction among them. Just as Müsstler wished, its dread legend grew so much that the cultists fought over possession of the weapon that would eventually be their own undoing.

Can you hear their cries?
Those of men, those of babies, those of boys?
Do they scream, or simply internalize?
Does anyone notice their long, silent sighs?
The world turns on them a blind pair of eyes.

“Those funny little birds…why do they keep telling me to whip poor Will?” asked young Petunia. “Do they mean Will Camden next door? What’ve they got against poor Will?”

“It’s just what the birds’ call sounds like, dear,” said Auntie May. “They don’t actually want you to whip poor Will.”

I wanted her to whip poor Will, one of the birds thought glumly. He throws rocks at us sometimes.

The terminal housed busses and the occasional passenger train that still chugged along the line. It was hard to escape the fact that it was a relic of the days when our withered burg had been a transportation hub of the mid-South before the highway had been cut fifteen minutes east.

In the men’s room before my bus arrived, I noticed that someone had scrawled a racial epithet. That sort of thing always irks me, not least because such things reinforce the Hollywood stereotype of the South as a land of relentless bigots. It made me feel a bit better, though, that other people had apparently been as disturbed as I and scribbled their own ripostes.

My personal favorite: “One day, we will all be asked to account for our actions on this earth. Do you really want to explain your men’s room graffiti to your lord and savior?”

He never wanted for business, and the kids’ parents tended to pay well–very well. Helicopter parenting did wonders for his bank account as investment bankers fretted that their children might acquire criminal records for youthful hijinks before they could take over the family business.

Sometimes, though…

Stevens looked through the police report. His latest client had gotten into an altercation at a house party in the student ghetto (over a boy) and she’d been caught trying to cut her romantic rival’s brake lines with a pair of scissors. Red-handed, she had stabbed her discoverer in the leg with the aforementioned shears and fled in her car–in the presence of 8-10 witnesses, no less!–causing minor scrapes and damage to other vehicles in her wake. One of the witnesses had actually been a reporter for the student newspaper, allowing the incident to be blown up and lurid on the next day’s front page (“SOUTHERN MICHIGAN STUDENT STABBED IN ATTEMPTED MURDER”) with exclusive pictures.

The girl in question had blown a .10 when she’d been taken into custody–12 hours after the incident!–and been found carrying an aspirin bottle filled with Ecstacy and methamphetamines. So there were no less than 13 indictments or other charges facing the girl, and her father had literally faxed a blank check from his tri-state plumbing supply business that morning.

Stevens sighed, and began composing a short press release for the SMU student paper.

“Look, I was told that I could find the person I’m looking for here,” said Davis. “This just looks like another saloon in a town full of them.” The various customers didn’t react to his outburst, save a little girl seated near the back who regarded Davis with intelligent eyes.

“You come in here whining about how you want a molder to make you a person, on the strength of a rumor you heard over a glass of whiskey, and you complain to me about it?” The bartender laughed. “You’ve got to realize, son that the Permeable Lands are just like the world outside. You’ve got to give something to get something. What have you got that anyone who could mold that well would ever want?”

Davis produced a handful of crystals and dumped them on the bar. “I think you know what these are.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Another thing you’ve got to realize, son, is that the Permeable Lands aren’t like the world outside at all. What do you suppose I mean by that?”

Davis stared quizzically at the man for a moment before comprehension dawned on his face. “All the bottles behind your bar are empty,” he said. “The people in here–all of them–haven’t made so much as a sound. Saloons aren’t like that even on a quiet day. And that little girl staring at me…no one would let a kid like that into a place like this and put her at a table with four full-grown men playing poker.

“Now, that’s more like it,” said the bartender. “You’ve passed the first test.” As he spoke, the figure before Davis melted away into sand.

As did the bar, the walls, the other patrons.

Davis was left standing in an alley, covered with alkaline dust and gripping his payment in the palms of his hands. The girl was the only thing that hadn’t vanished on the wind.

“Name’s Caroline,” she said. “I’m the molder you were looking for, and you’ve interested me enough to hear you out.”

F. Randall Dortmund’s parents had worked in publishing–specifically, in remainders–so he grew up surrounded by books that no one wanted to read. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, that worked out to writers of high Victorian prose and Gothic melancholy romances. Surrounded by reams of the stuff, Dortmund imbibed it all deeply and came to feel that those old authors were being wrongly overlooked in a cynical and overly practical age.

So it’s scarcely surprising that, when he came of age, Dortmund would write the sort of book he wanted to read. Toiling away in business school with a vague notion of taking over the family business, he wrote novel after novel of his own curious blend of chaste Victoriana and towering Gothic melodrama. His family connections were enough to get the first few published, but in 1947 that wasn’t what most people wanted to read.

The later postwar era, though, saw an explosion of interest in Dortmund’s work, enough that he was able to support himself as a full-time writer. His books shed some of the most irksome features of the 19th-century works they emulated–and all the more palatable to modern readers as a result–but were utterly chaste, with mainly psychological, internal, and melancholy conflicts with precious little blood. They were regarded as suitable reading for all ages.

One would have thought that the counterculture movement that followed would have spelled the end of Dortmund’s popularity, but his books soon became newly popular in an ironic sense, with many readers delighting in the innuendo that could be found in his naive prose. This led the author to accentuate those features to an extent bordering on parody, alienating many earlier readers but gaining new ones.

There is much speculation on how Dortmund’s private life and sexuality influenced his later writings, but he was notoriously aloof and private even as he made himself available for regular public consultations with fans (the “Dortmund circle”).

When he died from a combination of pneumocystis pneumoni and Kaposi’s sarcoma in 1984, Dortmund’s executors found one last novel in his private safe (with instructions that it be published immidiately), along with a signed press release to be issued on the author’s death.

The press release ready, simply: “Be kind to animals, love one another honestly, and dream gothic dreams.”