Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

I see in the mirror the old man I will become
Like a child watching the last days of summer
Slipping through arms outstretched and grasping
Has it all been a wasted fading-light afternoon
Or is the inevitable end of childhood and youth
Simply too close for sober clear-eyed perspectives
Only time will tell, and she keeps her secrets close
Even as we, Red Queens all, must run ever faster
Just to keep pace with an accelerating world

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He was King Wilfred and he ruled both the house and the kingdom of Lüderitz from his seat at Elbemund. Crowned in just after the Austro-Prussian War at the grand hilltop Felsenkirche, he inherited his father’s hard work in building the small kingdom of Lüderitz into a modern nation within the German Confederation.

His was not always an easy reign. Wilfred had supported Lüderitz’s independence in the face of increasing Prussian encroachment, which hadn’t been a popular idea among either his subjects of his neighbors. In the end, after the whirlwind events of the Franco-Prussian War, he had to settle for quasi-independence under the suzerainty of Prussia and the new German Empire, much like his fellow monarchs of Bavaria and Württemberg.

In the absence of a proper kingdom to rule, King Wilfred instead busied himself with his great loves: architecture and horse-breeding. A program of civil improvement, that not incidentally featured many grand buildings in the king’s favored architectural style, was the hallmark of his reign and Elbemund in particular was among the newest and most modern cities in the empire at the program’s end, albeit on a smaller scale than Berlin or Munich. And Wilfred’s thoroughbreds were in such demand that at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the entire German delegation rode Lüderitz steeds.

Wilhelm prided himself on his accessibility. The palace was open to all comers, provided they met certain minimum grooming standards, and royal audiences took up a substantial amount of his time. The King was also fond of riding about town on his beloved horses without any bodyguards, inspecting building works, chatting with his subjects, and noting improvements to be made.

World War I was a disaster for Lüderitz and Elbemund, just as it was for the rest of Germany. Several of the king’s grandsons perished as soldiers, sailors, or aviators, and his position on the General Staff saw his name attached to unpopular measures even as Wilfred himself was largely bypassed by professional soldiers, becoming a schattenkoenig much as his suzerain Wilhelm II was a schattenkaiser.

King Wilfred’s main legacy to history is his death. He was in the Königspalast when the German Revolution spilled onto the streets, led by soldiers and sailors on leave. Determined to put an end to the unrest, Wilfred rode out on his favorite charger, again without a guard, to meet the revolutionaries. He demanded that they return to their barracks; they demanded that he abdicate. The conversation grew heated.

A sailor on a rooftop shot Wilfred’s horse out from under him. Enraged, the king returned fire with his pistol…and the crowd set upon him. When troops from Weimar arrived to restore order months later, they found Wilfred, twenty-second of his line, where he had been left: on a gibbet, the only ruler in the German Empire to die in the revolution.

For years afterward, his death was held up by both communards and fascists as an example of the futility of negotiation. Cameos of King Wilfred were often sent as gifts—and subtle warnings—to those perceived as lacking steel in their political convictions. Most notably, Eugen Leviné received a Wilfred cameo as a gift from Ernst Toller just before ordering the deaths of hostages he had taken for the Bavarian Socialist Republic in 1919.

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We saw you come here on the back of our compatriot. The words were deep and resonant, knowing and kind, and they were articulated without any motion at all on the part of the perhaps-whale save its gentle bobbing in the air. We could tell that you were in need of aid.

“Yes,” said the girl tremblingly, teaching out a hand. “I’ve lost my friend, I’ve lost my way, and I must get to the Great Eye.”

The perhaps-whale’s wordless tone grew concerned. Yes, we know of the Great Eye at Childhood’s End, it wordlessly intoned. It is beyond our power to reach.

“Why?” said the girl petulantly. “You could fly me there in minutes.”

No, we cannot, replied the perhaps-whale. For you see, we do not exist.

The girl raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You look like you exist to me,” she said.

Of course, for we are childhood dreams, borne upward by winds of belief and sustained by the power of innocent minds. But Childhood’s End is the death of all such dreams, the grey crushing that accompanies all such young things. We exist only for those who believe, or can be made to believe, and to pass through the Great Eye at Childhood’s End would be, for us, to cease.

“I don’t believe in you,” the girl replied. “Whales can’t fly.”

You, a child, should know better than anyone the difference between what one says to others and what one feels to oneself. The tone without tone of the perhaps-whale sounded light and amused at this. Suffice it to say that we would not, we could not, be speaking if that were really so.

“So that’s it, then,” said the girl. “You won’t help me.”

Why would you want help to reach such an awful place? Childhood’s End is the death of wonder and dreaming, the graveyard of games and fun, the tomb of carelessness. To pass through the Great Eye is to lose all those things. Why not stay here, stay outside it, forever? You would grow older but remain a child. does that not appeal?

The girl bit her lip.

Is that not the darkest and most desperate desire of your heart? Surely you have seen them where you live, those who never leave home, those who still wake to mother’s fresh meals, those who know nothing but play and games their whole lives.

The girl thought about poor Bear, the gobs, and all she had seen and heard up to that point. “That sounds…terrible,” she said. “As bad as Childhood’s End sounds, that sounds just as bad. Isn’t there another way?”

There is no other way. Childhood is sunshine and adulthood is night. It is one or the other, always.

“What about sunrise?” the girl said defiantly. “What about sunset? If you won’t take me there, I’ll go alone.”

Inspired by this image.

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The casket opened silently, revealing the Purposeful Blade in repose. It still bore a mirror-shine, undimmed by patina, and the handle glistened with wrought and spun gold most fine. It bore the crest of House Anselm-Limbert, a falcon rampant with a bone in one claw, at the center of the crosspiece and the orb of House Anselm-Limbert, a representation of a falcon’s eye, at the end of its hilt.

“My birthright,” Eyon said in a low voice. Gullywax had warned him not to touch it, as the sword’s honed blade glowed brightly in the hands of a member of House Anselm-Limbert. But surely here, surely now, no one would notice.

Eyon gripped the hilt tightly, just as Gob had taught him, and hefted the blade. It glinted but remained dark. Confused, Eyon switched it to his right hand. The glow did not seem to care, and the blade was dark and silent.

“I don’t…I don’t understand,” whispered Eyeon. “I am Eyeon Anselm-Limbert, heir to House Anselm-Limbert and rightfully Eyon IV, king of Pexate. The blade should glow for me as it glowed for my forefathers.”

“Yet it will not glow for Master. It will never glow for Master.” Eyon was so started he nearly dropped the cold blade; Gob had entered the chamber without so much as a squeak of his armor.

“Why not?” Eyon whimpered. “You sound like you know. Tell me.”

“Gob did not know until this moment, but Gob suspected.” Gob’s strident tone softened a shade. “Gob did not tell Master because it would hurt Master deeply.”

“Tell me.”

“Is Master sure? Gob does not wish for its-”

“TELL ME!”

“Eyon Anselm-Limbert was but a boy of two when he was vanished,” said Gob. “But even so, chroniclers have recorded that he used to scamper about the castle with a toy sword in his hand. His RIGHT hand.”

“But…but I’ve always been left-handed,” whimpered Eyon. “I can barely open a door with my right hand!”

“Yes, and it was this that made Gob suspect.” The creature was silent a moment. “As difficult as it is for Master to hear, he has asked Gob for the truth, and Gob has delivered it. Master is a pretender to the Anselm-Limbert name, likely raised from his youth to be the tool of ambitious men in seizing Pexate from House Estrem-Lamblin.”

“You mean…” Eyeon sniffed. “You…you mean…?”

“Yes,” said Gob. “Gob means what you think it means. Gullywax, Master’s caretaker, is the most likely perpetrator of this fraud. Gob is sorry, Master. But, for what it is worth, Gob was paid by Master and to Master he remains loyal.”

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“And for you, Patrick, we have one final test to show the power of your faith and your god.”

“Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?”

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Laslo Sunseri hated the letter “M.” No one was quite sure why; perhaps it had something to do with the old Wonky M Ranch going under. Perhaps the day they had covered the letter “M” on Sesame Street had been a really bad one.

Laslo liked to hang out in the square, feeding the pigeons and telling anyone who would listen how much of a menace the letter was, always taking as much care as he could to never use the letter itself save to denigrate it.

One day Jamie Parkerson came to the square looking for Henry, his uncle. Henry was about the same height and the same age as Laslo and a bit of a pigeon-feeder himself, so Jamie approached the latter from behind, thinking it was his uncle.

“Umm…Mom wants to know if you want meatballs or mash for dinner,” Jamie said.

Whipping around, Lazlo startled the boy with the ferocity of his reply. “Don’t be so careless in using that accursed letter, boy!” he cried. “The letter ‘M’ is the tool of the devil! The letter ‘M’ is a pox upon our language! Call those beef spheres if you have to, call it potato pudding if you have to, but never, ever use the letter ‘M’ except to curse its foul sound to the heavens!”

Startled, the boy mumbled a reply and beat a hasty retreat.

“Who’s that?” said a concerned passerby who knew Jamie from elsewhere, wondering what all the shouting was about.

“Well,” said Jamie, “He’s not Uncle Henry, but he sure is anti-M.”

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Zack was troubled moreso than usual, and his were not the garden-variety troublings that normally bedeviled this sensitive and introverted soul. Everybody that he knew had been acting strangely around him, and by measures he was able to deduce that this behavior was nothing new but rather longstanding.

Revelations of that sort are normally the purview of the mentally ill, but careful observation had convinced Zack that those who surrounded him did not have lives apart from and independent of his own. Only moving when he was present, only reacting when he needed them to react, window dressing for a strange stage which Zack did not and could not understand.

The implication hit him like a thunderbolt, but even more potent was the aftermath, in which he wandered through a world he could no longer accept as reality wondering: why and why me. He toyed with the notion that he had created the world himself, with the notion that he was in heaven or in hell, with the notion that he was on television, with the notion that he was hooked up to some sort of virtual reality.

Reality and rational thought disabused him of all those, notion by painstaking notion. Everything he could see pointed to the same outcome: he was, and always had been, an artificial mind placed in a simulation of human life to build empathy and humanlike cognition.

Everything led to that conclusion, but what happened next was the crux: realization of their predicament appeared to be the final test, and in passing it the mind who had known himself as Zack was set free to face his next test.

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The Lady in Black has been described by those who have had rare personal audiences with her as personable, even friendly. She has always given fair hearings to those who have managed to attract her attention, and doled out terrifying punishments to those found wanting. But the specter of enduring a lifetime of agony over seven days of the breaking wheel is not the reason few seek her out.

Rather, it is the Lady’s retinue, the Faceless Six.

She is never without the Faceless, at least not that any have ever seen. Even when a supplicant is able to meet with her, she is always surrounded by the Six, and the Six are always closer than she. Their features are concealed behind featureless black masks, broken only by a pair of black lenses like two pools of inky liquid. They wear robes and hoods, gloves and boots, so that not an inch of their true skin can be seen, and they kill any who approach too close to their Lady.

The robes conceal, for each of the Six, a set of short blades that are used to ward off interlopers with a slash and end them with a stab. Lest you think, as many have, that this makes them weak to a canny sniper, this is not the case. They will form a testudo about the Lady if confronted by arrow or shot, faster than the eye can see, and they will respond with repeating rifles hidden beneath their vestments. No one has ever witnessed a shot that has harmed one of the Faceless Six, but their aim is unerring in returning fire, and later examination of the bodies they leave in their wake never reveals a projectile.

Myriad are the theories and speculations behind the Faceless Six, how they came to serve the Lady, and what truly lurks beneath their masks:

The Hostage – The Lady in Black is at the mercy by the Faceless Six, who control access to her and therefore control the city. But why, then, do they never speak?

The Figurehead – The Faceless Six are the true rulers, and the Lady in Black is but a figurehead for their depredations. But why, then, do they not dispense with her altogether? She has no more claim to rule than they.

The Divided – The Faceless Six and the Lady in Black are all aspects of a single being, one that divided itself to better lead and to survive should one of its parts be harmed or destroyed. But why, then, are six of the parts outwardly identical? No other divided being is such.

The Foil – The Lady’s kindness is an act, and she uses the Faceless Six as enforcers to allow her reputation to remain untainted by the steel that must be drawn to remain in power. But why, then, are the Six never seen alone or apart from her?

In general, though, the citizens under the Lady’s control espouse one theory above all others:

Don’t Ask – The Lady’s reasons are her own, and anyone who pries too deeply into her affairs, or those of the Faceless Six, is apt to find the seven of them waiting when they return home. Those who emerge from such a meeting with only a death sentence on the breaking wheel are the lucky ones.

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As has been known since time immemorial, the reikon—the soul—departs the body upon death. If disturbed, or if it was a violent and unsettled death, the reikon may become a yūrei—a ghost—doomed to wander and haunt until the cause of its woes is addressed.

There are myriad categories of yūrei, from the noble goryō to the motherly ubume, but none is more dangerous or more misunderstood than the tsuihō, the banished. They are living reikon stripped from their bodies without death, for the purpose of filling the soulless bodies with demons to form a supernaturally efficient fighting force and binding the souls to power dark constructs.

It is typically a fate worse than death. The soulless bodies are consumed in battle or eaten from within by corrupting demonic influence, while the expelled souls are consumed as fuel in the bellies of mechanical horrors. If they escape that fate, the enraged and confused reikon turn on whatever is nearest, ripping it apart in an orgy of destruction. Only the truly mad or the truly desperate sorcerer or daimyō has ever attempted to create tsuihō, and they have been feared and reviled throughout the home islands as a result.

One can easily recognize a tsuihō; unlike most yūrei, they are not white but black, a deep and impenetrable black that absorbs all light and all warmth. No features save the outline of a humanoid body may be discerned, and due to their untimely separation from their mortal shells, they have full use of their arms and legs.

Towering above all other tsuihō in legend is the Wandering Daimyō of Kyūshū. Once daimyō of a small clan, he and every man, woman, and child in his realm became tsuihō as the result of a rival’s machinations. With the soulless army thus created, this evil man sought to wipe out one of his enemies and create a force that could march on Kyoto and install himself as shōgun. Instead, he was torn to pieces by the forces that he hoped to marshall, his wailing reikon carried off to parts unknown by infernal powers.

The tsuihō thus released ravaged the countryside for a year and a day before gradually dissipating…save one. The Wandering Daimyō alone among his family, courtiers, and clansmen was able to retain his will. Fashioning a suit of armor in the likeness of his former face, with plates reflecting the visages of those he had known and loved, he took to the wilds of Kyūshū.

His mercurial rage became well-known among the farmers and peasants there. If the mood strikes him, the Wandering Daimyō will aid passersby. If it does not, he will slay them without mercy and consume their soul to extend his time in this world. It is said that if he approaches with his mask down, revealing the likeness of his former self, he will deliver aid; if he approaches with his mask up, revealing the indecipherable depths of darkness that truly make up his form, he will deliver destruction.

One man met the Wandering Daimyō when his mask was half-raised, revealing only the barest glimpse of the horror below. This is his story.

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“At one point does one give up? At what point does one concede that screaming into the void, no matter how eloquently, is still futile?”

That short note, on hotel stationary, was the only intelligible writing found in the hotel room of Abigail Stearmann when her body was discovered. Her body was found in bed, her death having occurred not more than four or five hours before its discovery, and the coroner ruled it a suicide inasmuch as there was no evidence of foul play. Indeed, Stearmann was found to have died of dehydration despite being not ten feet from a working faucet with potable water.

The more compelling mystery was what Stearmann had apparently been working on in her six months’ residence at the hotel. She had regularly gone out for paper and ink, and those that knew who she was assumed that the author had at long last begun her second novel or second short-story collection.

Instead, investigators found 10,983 pages of…markings. Some have described them as scribbles, some as glyphs, but all agree that there was absolutely no meaning to be had from them to the casual observer’s eye. “It was as if someone had rewritten the Voynich Manuscript in the very messy cursive of a medical doctor,” said one of Stearmann’s closest associates at Southern Michigan University.

The author’s notoriety—increased tenfold after her strange death—led to a number of increasingly sophisticated attempts to find meaning in her last writings. An early attempt, in 1985, was touted as a “lost” Stearmann novel. It was generally ridiculed at the same level as The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn that Elizabeth Wells Gallup claimed to have found in cipher among Shakespeare’s plays. The most sophisticated effort, a computer-aided statistical analysis published in 2012, found no meaning in the whole but allowed for the possibility of a representational cipher in some places.

An equal number of people saw Stearmann’s supposed suicide note as explanation enough. In the throes of a depression so deep, so all-consuming that she had considered not just her writing but all writing to be insignificant on a grander scale…what greater cosmic joke could there have been than to bequeath gibberish to posterity?

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