Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The assembled Fonts of Wisdom reflected gravely on the news.

“Times New Roman was the greatest of our number, our leader in times of heartache,” said Courier New.

“He was our rock against all that would move us,” added Garamond. “If he can fade and fall, what lies in store for the rest of us?”

“The dark forces of Sans are spreading,” intoned Bodoni. “Where once we greeted Arial and her brothers as equals, they have become darker of late, dedicated to our overthrow.”

“Indeed,” sighed Courier New. “Times New Roman has been quietly fading from us, withdrawing from the world. His overthrow by Calibri was perhaps the last straw, and I fear that he may now be lost to us forever.”

A moment of silence followed.

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All the effort in the world would have gone to waste
Soldiers, shining bright in their armor, cut down
For impenetrable walls and iron will in the end
Are no match for a secret door and a heavy bribe

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I know nobody will read this post but sometimes, when I’m bored, I get wrapped up in my tutu and put a giant horn on my head and lather sparkles all over myself and slide around the kitchen floor pretending I’m a magical unicorn!

Cut out, fold, and prance! Courtesy Library of Congress.

You just read that, didn’t you? I’m sure you thought it amusing, perhaps even slightly bewildering. Perhaps you even said to yourself “at last, I know I am not the only one!”

Alas dear fellow unicorn, I am sorry. I have unwittingly played this game and now so have you! You read my post and thus you must now post the following message to continue the game (unless you have lost your sense of humor).

The person who passed the sparkles on to me did so to raise breast cancer awareness. Be aware, and pass on an awareness of your own in your post. Be a good sport and keep the sparkles going! Enjoy!

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White Star shells, they called them, equal volume of chlorine and phosgene to neutralize the disadvantages of both. They fired the shells hours before the men were to surmount the parapets. But often as not, the prevailing winds were from the east, carrying the men forward into a haze of their own chemical stew. Anyone whose mask didn’t have a tight seal was explosed.

It started with the intense scent of musty hay and green corn borne on the wind. A burning sensation like strong whiskey going down, eyes watering. They could still stumble forward, even fire, but within a day they’d be writhing on a stretcher, unable to breathe. Pink foam on the lips and water on the lungs.

Oxygen starvation does strange things to the mind. You see things that aren’t there, bright lights, phantoms. All too often, the man hasn’t the breath to tell you what specral horrors are coming to bear him away with them. He hasn’t even the breath to scream.

One who had survived his own phosgene dreams described it thus: “There was a crimson light falling like rain, like a rain of blood and light. I saw men stumbling in and out of it, dead men, men I’d seen blown apart. They were together with the other side in a rictus embrace, and they were dancing slowly to music I couldn’t hear. They reached out a finger to beckon me to join them in that angry, dead dance.”

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No one is quite sure how it came about, but the Wickham House at the edge of town came to posess a remarkable power. From the inside, each of its 97 windows showed a what-if visible only to the viewer.

We all have our what-ifs, after all, those decisions we made but also lingered over long after they had faded. 97 of them waited behind the cloudy panes of Wickham House, snippets of what might have been.

They are like echoes, like dreams. You can see as if through a clouded mirror, hear as if through a thin wall. Always something interesting, always seen as if peering through some other window nearby. 97 alternate forks in the road, just visible enough for you to know of them.

People have tried to open the windows and climb through; they invariably find themselves in our own world, on the other side. People have tried to shatter the panes in hopes of I know not what; that is why only 97 remain. Some old-timers swear that at one time there were only 86 windows intact, and that the others have quietly grown back.

The county sheriff has sealed the property off for years. It’s dangerous, they say, a property on the verge of collapse and infested with black mold.

and yet still people come, sometimes from miles away.

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They called that particular wing of the hospice “the gang” because all of the people there, slowly wasting away from ailment of the body rather than ailments of the mind. They had known each other, it seems, since childhood. And now, lifetimes lived hard and mean had led them to have every similar expiration dates.

And they were angry.

Nurses reported constant verbal and even physical harrassment. Bedpans were thrown, sheets were soiled, and every insut imaginable was bandied about in severl languages. The checks kept coming, and kept clearing, but the abuse continued to escalate until management had to serve the patience notice: “the gang” would be evicted in one week for creating a hostile environment.

The first death happened one day later.

Two more followed the following morning, and another that night. Code blues were ringing around the clock, and the nurses were as harried as they’d ever been. By the day of the hospice managements’ ultimatum, all 13 members of “the gang” were dead and their husks were parceled out to various and sundry funeral homes or potters’ fields.

A collective sigh of relief went up from the staff, thinking that they had survived one last spiteful terror from those elderly delinquents.

And then the noises began, the toppling and moving of objects in the still of the night. And the staff came to realize that their ordeal had not yet truly begun.

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“We have a rather…existential target for you, Voelker,” said Grinds. “Not so much a who, or a what, but a why.

“You’ll forgive me, Grimes, if I ask for a little more than that.”

“That’s just it,” said the station chief. “We don’t have it. Every time we have encountered this person of interest, they have looked different.”

“So a disguise fanatic,” Voelker said. “Like Kaminsky. Hardly what I would call existential.”

“No,” said Grimes. “The differences in height, frame…too great to be a single individual disguised. Other than the fact that we’ve has a similar range of eye colors reported, and never a sighting that was not a female, there are no similarities.”

“Then how do you know it’s a single…thing?” Voelker snapped. “Jumping to strange conclusions in a world that’s strange enough and all that.”

“We thought of that too, that it might be a network, directed individuals. Yet the behavior we’ve seen, the modus operandi…the similarities in the way our operatives have been interfered with is too striking. It has to be some sort of individual, maybe even a gestalt.”

Voelker sighed. “You’re not giving me a lot to go on here, Grimes,” he said. “If they always look different and we can never tell it’s them before they interfere, how will I know?”

“The bird,” Grimes said. “The bird is always with her. Not always the same bird, but always white.”

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“The Great Catastrophe…it has many names, and none do it justice. A great black sun moved through both our skies, laying waste to all its tainted light touched.”

Aquamarine lights danced about the chamber, pulsing in tune with the rhythm of the speech.

The Feyqueene spread her spindly fingers wide. “Our people had long known of each other, but the Great Catastrophe forced us to unify against a common threat. We agreed to merge our two spheres, repairing the damage wrought to two by suturing them into one. Perhaps you can guess what problem there was with this arrangement?”

“There wasn’t enough room,” said Quinn. “Not enough room for both you and us.”

“Very good. So we made a bargain in blood, a pact of steel: every thousand years we would swap places. The dominant kind would live as they had, whilst the other would live on only as myth and legend, eking out the most miserable of existences.”

“I don’t understand how that could work,” Quinn said.

“Do you understand how a nuclear reactor works?” snapped the Feyqueene. “And yet you accept that it is so, and that larger minds than yours are required to grasp the finer details.”

“Fair enough…but what happened?”

“The first to rule was determined by a game of chance. For the first cycles, all was well. Every thousand years, one of us would be sent to wrack and ruin as the other reemerged, leaving the others as the barest phantoms, in agony.”

“But we reneged on the deal, didn’t we?” said Quinn sadly.

“Of course you did! Duplicitous, shallow beings that you are!” spat the Feyqueene. “One of your kind–I have forgotten his name–found a way to avoid the neccessary ritual. And so now it has been six thousand years since we last switched, and our combined world groans at the strain that this has put on it.”

“So you mean to switch back.”

“We mean to put you through what we have suffered. We will make the switch at first light on Midsummer’s Eve, as the contract specified. Then we shall destroy it and make this world ours forever in revenge.”

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The singularity of a black hole is a point of infinite mass, inasmuch as a layman is capable of understanding it. But what many fail to recognize is that infinite mass is also, essentially, infinite information. For what is information but mass, the arrangement of elementary particles in a certain way?

In this way, as a black hole grows, as it devours and compresses, it also is accumulating more information. Distorted, perhaps, by its consumption and compression below the event horizon, but information nonetheless.

One imagines that from such a cauldron of raw and seething matter and information, some sort of gestalt may–perhaps must–arise. One imagines a cold and calculated intellect arising, one nevertheless driven and bound by a primal need to consume more matter, more information. Not for any imperitive, not for any reason, but for its own sake, because that is how it must be.

Thinkers had toyed with this notion for a generation before it was put to the test. The surprising thing was not that they were right. Rather, the surprise lay in just how approachable and yet unfathomable the intelligence turned out to be.

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“Hello, old friend.”

I sat heavily on the park bench. It was mossier than the last time I’d seen it, with more scars and more initials carved into the back.

“It’s good to see you again…good to be with you again.”

The trees rustled softly in the light summer wind. Many of those same trees had been there thirty years ago, when as a child I’d spent many a long summer afternoon there. A few had fallen or been chopped down, but the rest…they were just as they had been at the very beginning, in my earliest memories.

“Almost like time has stood still,” I sighed. If I lost myself in the sights, I could almost pretend that I was a 5-year-old again, forever young, unwearied by the passage of time. I could almost look forward on a life yet to be lived rather than look back on one that had already mostly unwound.

A silly sort of thing, I know. But even as the years pass more quickly, their absence is felt that much more keenly. Is it the act of a foolish old man, I wondered, to sit and quietly weep on a park bench at the memories of those days that seemed to last forever?

Whether it was or not, I was glad that the park was empty. I sat there, tears streaming down my cheeks, as I watched myself run off, hand in hand with friends, into the park that had been, that was, and always would be.

If only in memory.

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