Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Tellytaxt Gallery, 115 E. Main, 11:47am.

“Tellytaxt? What’s that mean–name of the founder?”

“Oh no, heavens no. The gallery was founded by Emile Delecroix and Pierre Richat in 1948. They came up with the name as a nonce word that was free of overt philological baggage.”

“Doesn’t sound baggage-free to me. What would you say, Smitty? A tax on limey televisions?”

“A text on Telly Savalas.”

“Maybe a jelly used in taxidermy.”

“That’s quite enough, officers. Do you want to see the break-in, or are you content to play your childish games with concepts you don’t fully grasp?”

The world, all its creatures and aspects, began in a deep sleep.

Some say that the world had been brought forth by a powerful Shaper. Saddened by the actions of its creations, the Shaper had put them to sleep and withdrawn from the spheres of mortal ken.

Others maintain that the world has always been, and that it periodically falls into cycles of sleep and wakefulness. The sleep at the dawn of memory was therefore only the latest in a neverending cycle.

Still others claim that the sleep was an illusion, and that rather than waking the world was created. That doesn’t fully explain the actions of the Wakeful One, of course, but each of the theories has their own weaknesses.

What is clear–part of the collective memory of every living and unliving thing in the world–is that the Wakeful One was the first to rise, and that through toil and hardship on its part the rest of the world was awakened and made lively once more. It was with great sorrow that, at the end of its adventures, the Wakeful One revealed that eventually there would be another sleep. As a counterbalance to the wakefulness it had brought into the world, the Wakeful One would return to set the sleep in motion once more.

“Here,” the Klrkrr guard clicked, “swallow this.” The medallion around its neck translated its chittering into words that mammals like Jo could understand, but did little to explain the small white wriggling worm being thrust at her.

“I’m…sorry?” Jo said. “You want me to eat this?”

“Not eat!” The guard’s agitated clicking was translated into mammalian yelling. “Swallow! Chew on it and you will answer to me!”

Jo picked up the worm and looked helplessly at Mar.

“It’s a larva toll,” Mar said. “Klrkrr larvae need to gestate in a living host after hatching. Don’t worry; it’ll settle in your stomach or bowels and eat some of your food and suck a little of your blood. Nothing serious.”

“And then burst out of me when it’s ready to pupate!” Jo gagged.

“Oh no. They’ll remove it when you leave their lands and transfer it to some livestock. Serves to get the little ones off to a good start and simultaneously limit the amount of time you spend in Klrkrrdrwn.”

“He wasn’t superstitious, so in the battle for the fairgrounds his unit sent him in to flush snipers out of a house of mirrors. Did it with an antitank mine and shattered every pane of glass for a thousand yards in every direction. 3,381 years of bad luck in one go. Place got bombed to hell not long afterward, so there’s no chance of going back to grind the mirrors up to reverse the curse.”

“That seems a little harsh, don’t you think? It’s like when someone is sentenced to 500 years in prison–why not just say ‘for the rest of their life?'”

“Well, for one thing, the Major believes in reincarnation. Unless he comes back as a redwood or a Galapagos tortoise, there’s an awful lot of lifetimes between himself and the end of his bad luck run.”

Business was lousy, especially at night. College towns tended to be overloaded with tanning salons, and most of the students tended to use ones that were within staggering distance of campus rather.

With no customers, and no supervisor, Maggie and Rae took their smoke breaks frequently and just outside the salon under the protective awning of the mini-mall and the harsh glow of neon signs.

A lone pedestrian cut through the parking lot, probably walking from the nearby apartments to the Chinese buffet just down the road.

“Hey!” Maggie called. “You need to tan?”

“Does this look like it tans?” the pedestrian said, flashing a dead-fish white forearm. “The sun never shines in Ireland, so we never evolved that ability!”

The Velasco family had ruled the island of San Cristóbal since the 1920s; Ramon Velasco had made his bones as a fiery opposition spokesman in street protests against the previous regime. The first free and fair elections since independence from Spain had catapulted him to the presidency, and once ensconced he found it suited him. Through a combination of electoral fraud and intimidation, he remained president until his death in 1952, favoring a crash program of industrialization and expansion of the lumber industry and tax base at the expense of the island’s environment and poorest citizens.

Marco Velasco, his son, had followed in his footsteps. But his “presidency” was cut short by cancer, and he died in an American hospital in 1960. His 19-year-old son, Alberto Velasco, was duly installed as president but had not been groomed for the role as his father had. The influential San Cristóbal Army refused to rally behind him, and he was ousted in a coup by General Jorge Garitano. Garitano had been a long-time supporter of the Velasco regime, but once rid of the family he enacted an entirely different type of rule.

A mestizo rather than of pure Spanish ancestry like the Velascos, Garitano had grown up in poverty on the outskirts of Bilbao de San Cristóbal. e was a firm believer in developing the island for tourism, reducing urban sprawl, and preserving what remained of the verdant foliage that had once covered the land. His time in power, 1961-1983, was marked by massive slum clearing, public housing initiatives, and explosive growth of the national parks. Lest anyone accuse him of being a benevolent dictator, Garitano enacted his measures harshly, imprisoning and executing dissidents and often deploying the army to rout slum dwellers before their homes were razed.

“When you take enough middle-of-the-road, wishy-washy, and hard-to-pin-down positions–not just on the important stuff but in your day-to-day life–you risk creating an ambiguus.”

“I…I don’t understand.”

“What’s not to understand? You’ve made things so easy, so autopilot, that a being which has little self-awareness other than a need for self-preservation and desire to feed on raw banality can take your place and no one will notice.”

“I bet you’re wondering where your apartment building went, Ms. Barrow,” the man said. “And why the street has a different name.”

Annie sniffed. “How do you know my name?”

“Let me introduce myself,” the man said. He held out a business card in an odd, asymmetrical shape. “I’m here to get you home.”

“I thought this was home,” Annie said gesturing at the burnt-out shell behind her.

“Oh no. Not even close, my friend. You see, you’ve slipped through a crack and come out somewhere entirely different. Don’t let the superficial similarities fool you; you’re lost in a wider world than you can ever know, and I’m here to get you back home. That’s what we’re about at the Caidesin Foundation.”

“What’s so hard to believe about a wax artist’s model taking on a life of its own?” asked the Fáidh.

“You’re not really asking me that, are you?” said Jennie. “This may be one of the more mystical places on the planet, but still have an ATM card and a cell phone in my pocket. I refuse to believe in a world that allows those and magical wax at the same time.”

“You’d do well not to think that way. I once met a being, for example, made entirely out of copper pennies tossed by well-meaning children into wishing wells,” the Fáidh said. “It walked the countryside attempting to make whatever small wishes it could come true and sustaining itself on that positive energy.”

“Let me guess: that was in the 1960s, after a party.”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?” said the Fáidh. “Is the fact that I met an ur-dove that could gather leaves about it to form a body any less wonderful because I saw it after hearing Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival?”

“Instruc?”

“Not Instruc. INSTRUC. You need to say it with all capital letters. But yes, they’re watching us. Watching you, watching me, watching everyone.”

“Who is Instruc, and how do you know they’re watching?”

“INSTRUC! It’s INSTRUC! How many times do I have to tell you? They’re smart. They’ve got a copy of every camera feed in the world, spy satellites disguised as weather balloons, and they give everyone subdermal RFID tags disguised as flu shots to shoot passive tracking rays at us!”

“Uh-huh. And why would they do that?”

“They want to make us like them, don’t you see? It’s right there in their title. INSTRUC. They want to watch us so they can INSTRUCt us, make us more and more like their alien overlords until the invasion force is ready to strike.”

“Now don’t take this the wrong way, or think that it’s in any shape or form related to what you’ve just been telling me, but I think we should get you to a psychologist.”