Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Fountain of Turtles.

The Incas of Vilcabamba had believed that the Fountain of Turtles would give those who bathed in its waters the strength of carapace and plastron that was needed to protect their warriors from the guns of the Spanish conquistadors. But with the destruction of Vilcabamba in 1572 and the death of the last Sapa Inca, Thupaq Amaru, the last living being who knew the location of the fountain perished.

Val Dempsey aimed to prove otherwise.

Reading stories of Inca warriors mysteriously invulnerable to musketry and cannonades in the Bibliotheca National de Peru, the former surveyor had begun to believe that there might be a grain of truth to the legend after all. Months of achival research gave way to nearly a year of interviewing toothless old men along the Peru-Brazil border. Val was not only convinced that the Fountain of Turtles was real, but that he knew its location.

The only thing that kept him from uncovering it, from landing the greatest archaeological find of the young century? Just a silly little thing like a rebel insurrection.

With the rise of a group of radical narcotics-funded insurgents in the wild areas near the border, roads were cut off and airports were shuttered. The Fountain of Turtles, if Val’s hunch was right, lay in the track of desperate wilderness now contested between the Peruvian government and well-funded, well-armed, well-pissed-off rebels.

There was only one thing to do.

“We’re over the drop zone,” said the pilot, a civillian skydiving instructor lured from the Himalayas by the promise of action and most especially an action-filled paycheck. “Such as it is.”

Circling the tract of jungle that Val was certain contained the Fountain of Turtles, they had found a clearing and dropped a series of colored smoke markers for the jump before climbing to altitude. Unfortunately, colored smoke signals do not discriminate, and the rebels were rapidly converging on the position. Ground fire began to rise lazily up toward the rented Cessna as Val checked his straps and his reserve chute.

“You know, once you jump, I’m going to have to bug out,” the pilot added. “No rescue’s coming, either. Best case scenario, you wind up holding today’s newspaper in a hostage snapshot for the rebels.”

“No,” said Val. “Best-case scenario, I find the Fountain of Turtles and walk out of there without so much as a scratch.”

“You’re crazy, man,” the pilot replied. “But your check cleared, so you’re good to jump.”

The drop wasn’t so bad, really. The rebels were terrible shots more focused on the plane, and the clearing was just wide enough to make it a viable landing spot, albeit one filled with thick purple smoke. No, the real problem was waiting for Val further up the mountain slopes, after he spent hours evading rebel patrols and losing his pursuers.

The Fountain of Turtles was, in fact, filled with turtles. There was no water. There was only the turtles, even crawling through the mouth of a great stone terrapin to “drip” back into the “pool.”

And the turtles in the fountain? They were anything and everyone that had fallen in.

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Ralph was a simple guy. All he wanted was a life without stress, which is why he left a lucrative teaching position in the pressure cooker that was Stanford University to become a baker in his home town. Not even a master baker; no, Ralph punched his card as a simple apprentice breadmaker. He found the simplicity and order deeply satisfying.

But it wasn’t to last. One day, while hauling stale bread to the dumpsters in the staff parking lot behind his bakery, Ralph witnessed a violent murder. A long, low, black car drove up to an older pedestrian, dropped its windows, and blasted the latter with automatic gunfire.

Instinctively, Ralph ran in the other direction. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the man, and the assailant hadn’t been visible, but it was clear as Ralph’s car turned over that he had been spotted. Flooring the gas and scrambling to remember where the police station was, Ralph’s car fishtailed out of the baker’s back lot with the dark car in hot pursuit. It was faster, the driver was less panicked, and in short order Ralph found himself sideswiped into a sign, a mailbox, and a parked car. Worse, he’d tried to cut across a back alley; no one was watching.

The airbags deployed. Dazed, Ralph bumbled with his seatbelt and crawled from the wreckage of his car. Something hot was oozing from his thinning hairline; he figured it was blood. The other car was still running but the doors were open and it was empty. He limped toward it, hoping to escape through the alley on the other side.

There was a click behind him, the unmistakable sound of the hammer being drawn back on a firearm. Ralph’s shoulders sagged.

“You’re going to shoot me, aren’t you?”

“Well, wouldn’t you?” a very reasonable voice–a boy’s voice–replied. It was soft but strangely familiar. “Witnesses, especially witnesses that get into wrecks like that, are never a good thing.”

“I suppose, but…” Ralph’s thoughts flashed to the comfortable stress-free existence of the last few months. “Nevermind. Get it over with.”

“Dying men get last requests sometimes. What were you going to say?”

“Well, it’s just that…I’ve been living and working as a baker. It’s a life I’ve grown to love…I’d hate to lose it.”

“Oh, that’s awfully boring,” said the voice. “Pleading for your miserable life. You aren’t always that uninteresting, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“…thanks?” Ralph struggled to place the voice. Clearly it was someone he knew, or who knew him, but it just wasn’t clicking. “I could think of a more interesting last request if I knew who you were,” he said.

“You already know. You’ve always known. But you won’t be sure until your last breath is rattling in your throat.”

“Just get it over with.” Ralph’s throat was dry, but really, was this any different than the heart attack that would have felled him back at Stanford? So much for his dreams of working in a bakery. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the end.

Instead, he heard the whistle of a gun butt in the air, the crack of metal against bone, and knew nothing but darkness for some time.

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Violet went for a hike only to get caught in a downpour. And as if her day wasn’t bad enough already, she lost her phone after it slipped from her grip and skittered down a seaside cliff.

This was more than just an inconvenience: that phone contained the face of her target and his updated coordinates from satellite surveillance. She could remember the first, but without the latter her GPS was useless. She shifted the suppressed Beretta 93R in her hand, trying to keep it dry. and yet still ready for action.

It had been ages since she had handled a firearm. She cast her memory back twenty…thirty…yes, thirty-seven years since she had last felt the burning-cold touch of a trigger beneath her finger. But she was–had been–the best, and everybody knew it, even at seventy-three; her last operation, in 1978, was still required reading at the Academy after all.

The Sailor was a shifty bastard, she owed the Agency a favor, and so it was that Violet and her creaky joints were standing out in the rain. “Nothing quite like hunting down a notorious crime boss without any functioning technology,” Violet sighed to herself. “It’s like fishing without a hook. Underwater.”

They called him the Sailor because he had a habit of drowning people he didn’t like, and because his fleet of drug boats was the seventh-largest in the world by gross tonnage. He enjoyed the unofficial protection of the Republic of Valverde, and his base in the Todos los Santos cove was well-fortified. That was why Violet was approaching it on foot, from the north, as wet as the Sailor’s most reviled victims.

Watching the bright lights of the harbor between the trees as she approached, Violet knew from her briefing that the Sailor would be meeting with one of his largest buyers in one of the harbor warehouses. But without the proper coordinates to feed into her GPS, she would have to do the necessary reconnaissance herself.

Moving stealthily past one of the outbuildings after cutting her way through the perimeter fence, Violet heard a loud crack. She registered the sound before she registered the intense pain in her shoulder–not arthritis this time, but a gunshot. The Sailor had posted snipers on the rooftops, most likely with night-vision equipment.

More shots rang out as Violet scrambled into cover in an alleyway.

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Hades, the Lord of the Dead, was exceptionally put out. This was in both a literal and figurative sense; he had been booted out of his home by his wife Persephone and was currently hunched under a metal bus shelter in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas.

He’d been forced to sleep on the couch before, but this was a whole new level of humiliation. “One time,” he told himself. “You get a little too handsy with a naiad one time and out you go.” Hades sighed and looked around morosely. Time was, he’d had to beg Persephone to stick around, had to kidnap her for a little attention. How times had changed now that she was sitting alone on the bone throne and he was flat on his face.

The Lord of the Dead wasn’t exactly sure why Persephone’s portal had spit him out in Kansas. The Underworld was, of course, connected to everything, but…

“Why not Las Vegas?” Hades asked the portal 30 feet above him. “Vegas I could work with!” The aperture blinked shut in response; he wasn’t getting out of this anytime soon.

“Hey, dude, Topeka Nerdicon was last month!” shouted a local embarrassment from his Tahoe, idling at a light. Hades, in response, cast back his hood and let loose the full power of his baleful gaze. Skeletonized, the driver careened of the road as the Lord of the Dead enjoyed a dry chuckle.

“I just need to crash with someone until Persephone comes around,” Hades muttered. He wandered for a bit, skeletonizing all who crossed him as a bit of a pick-me-up. “But who do I know in Kansas?”

Eventually, it hit him: General Juan “Mad Dog” Contigo, former dictator of the Republic of Valverde, was living in Topeka under an assumed name. He owed Hades a favor, too. A few hours later, the god of the underworld stepped out of a grimy cab on the outskirts of town, rewarding the cabbie for his service by releasing him from his mortal coil. Contigo’s pad was a gaudy stuccoed villa surrounded by a tall wrought iron fence draped in festive Christmas tinsel even though it was April.

“You call this living incognito, Juan?” Hades groused. “This is why Comrade Conmigo overthrew you.”

As Hades swung open the door–which, to his surprise, he found unlocked–he was surprised to see a gigantic metal crucifix in the entryway. General Contigo had never been the religious type, not after the Nun Massacre of 1987. But even more surprising was the figure beneath the hanging crucifix: Posidon, god of the sea.

“Brother?” Hades gasped. “What are you doing here? what have you done with Juan Contigo?”

“Did you really think I wouldn’t find out, Hades?” Poseidon snapped. “All water flows to the sea, and that naiad was my granddaughter!”

“We’re all related to everybody else,” Hades said. “Look at Zeus! He’s regularly cheating on the people he cheats on Hera with-”

“Silence!” Poseidon thundered. “I cast your sleazy friend into the depths for a spell in my mines, and I will see my granddaughter avenged. You will serve every minute of the punishment we have devised for you.”

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Gaero walked past the gates with her heady words echoing in his mind: “Never again.” He had finally managed what he had been working toward for twelve years and finally, finally he was free. He had finally pissed off Mother Theresa so badly that she had told him to get out and never come back.

“I am the greatest sinner ever to live!” he said very softly, gleeful grin at odds with how low he kept his voice. He knew his mutterings had often discomfited the wondrous Mother, even if she had never expressed that distaste until now, but he was no angel–why sing if he could murmur mysteriously instead?

With that, his ejection from the Vatican by order of Pope John Paul II, the fatwa against him pronounced by Ekrima Said Sabri the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and the scar where the Dalai Lama had bitch-slapped him, Gaero’s quest was complete. But where was his promised reward? where was the chorus of demons to shower him with gold and gift cards?

“Never again,” Gaero repeated. He began to wonder, as he wandered the streets of Calcutta, whether Mephistopheles had lied to him. Even demons couldn’t break contracts, right? So where had he gone wrong? He doubted that he’d been forgiven by any of the four figures he’d been told to piss off, and he was sure he hadn’t missed one. So he began aimlessly searching for the prize he had been promised, ignoring the Indians staring at the strange Italian in their midst.

“I thought my reward was supposed to be instant,” he said to himself. Instead, there was just urban nothingness, and Gaero began to tear up in fury. He would never trust anyone or anything again; he was done making any kind of deals with anyone. He’d steal the money for a plane ticket and fly to Jamaica, where he could sit on a beach, ripping off tourists for margarita money, with no other problems in sight.

Gaero’s plan worked quite well; after all, one doesn’t get to Rome, Jerusalem, Calcutta, and Lhasa inside of six weeks without some skills in that area. He had been in Jamaica a week, in a hotel room reserved in the name of a man whose wallet he’d pinched in the Kingston airport, when there was a knock on his door.

“Room service, sir!” said the voice beyond the door.

“About bloody time,” Gaeno said, opening the door. He’d put that feast on the stolen credit card ages ago.

The busboy was not a busboy. The busboy was, in point of fact, a horrifying humanoid blob of jelly with tentacles. Bits of gold and plastic gift cards, the leavings of previous victims, were suspended in the colloid structure of the…thing.

“Here’s your promised reward,” it burbled. “Gold and gift cards. Enjoy!” Gaeno was seized before he could lift a finger, and devoured whole.

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The visionary shapeshifter named Briar blinked her (currently) blue eyes and leapt from the window, long cat’s tail whipping out behind her. A moment later her stepmother stormed out from the cottage door, voice like a thunderclap:

“Briar! You get back here this instant!”

Shapeshifters were bound by tradition and law to keep their “malady” a secret. Stay passably human, they were told from a young age, and don’t make waves. And try not to grow a tail at an inconvenient time, lest you be fined, arrested, or worse.

Briar was neither traditional nor lawful, and as she wriggled out the window her form was fluid, the claws and tail needed for climbing and balance appearing almost instinctively. “Stop before someone sees you!” Mrs. Rink added in a desperate tone, her stepdaughter still ignoring her.

It was already too late. The village newspaper boy, making his rounds outside with the evening edition, saw Briar’s leap…and one look at the increasingly feline girl was enough to put him back on his bike and pedaling madly off. It was no surprise when, an hour later, there was a knock on the door.

“Mrs. Rink, a word?” The officer cut an imposing figure thanks in equal part to the dueling scar across his face and his pursed-lip grimace.

“Of course, officer, what can I do for you?” Briar’s stepmother did her best to put on an innocent, guileless facade.

“We’ve had a report of someone in this house taking on an unnatural form.” The officer was about to proceed when he paused and let loose with a racking sneeze. “My apologies,” he said, fishing out a handkerchief. “I saw a cat in your rubbish, and I’m deathly allergic.”

“Well, do come in, Officer,” Mrs. Rink said. “Allow me to put my housecat out for the night so I don’t worsen your allergies before we speak.”

The officer hadn’t a chance to respond before Mrs. Rink dashed up to her stepdaughter’s room. Briar was there, across her bed, about 50% cat by volume and still panting from the evening’s exertions.

“You’re in for it now, child,” hissed Mrs. Rink. “Someone saw you and called the police! Surely you heard him sneezing downstairs. Now change yourself into something presentable so I can take you down and show Officer Scarface there’s nothing to worry about!”

“I heard more than that,” said Briar. “I know a much better way out.”

“Not the window again, please,” her stepmother said desperately. “My heart can’t take it.”

“Of course not.” Briar rolled upright as she did so fluidly dropping everything humanlike about her in favor of a large alley cat form. “I’m going to go down there and give poor allergic Officer Scarface an asthma attack.”

“No, no!” Mrs. Rink said. “I forbid it.”

“You never let me have any fun,” Briar said flippantly, ignoring her stepmother and slinking down the stairs.

“Some days,” Mrs. Rink sighed, “I think owning a Chihuahua might do me some good.”

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On a soggy Wednesday evening, the doors of the weekly Valleyview Self-Help Club (hosted in the Presbyterian Church annexe) burst open. Five pairs of startled eyes in five startled skulls watched as police in black tactical kevlar vests poured into the room. They rounded up the bewildered club members, reading off their rights. Maude, the mousiest but most devoted attendee of the club, was the first to be loaded and by far the most fearful.

They were shuffled wquickly into a large windowless RCMP van and spirited off into the night. The self-helpers, suddenly self-helpless, sat quietly on the hard metal benches trying to communicate their fear to each other using only eyes and body language. The RCMP told them not to worry, in tones that were not very reassuring. They assured the self-helpers that everything would be all right even as the ride stretched to two hours and beyond, made all the more unsettling by the fact that no one knew the destination. The self-helpers had many among their number like Maude who suffered from claustrophobia, making the experience even more tense.

The van stopped and the doors opened, spilling the Valleyview Self-Help Club out into a farmer’s front yard, within sight of both a decrepit farmhouse and acres upon acres of cow fields that hadn’t seen a cow in ages. The RCMP marched the five to the door and inside; the dank wooden beams creaked overhead as the Valleyview Self-Help Club was shuffled across the hay-strewn floor.

“Halt!” the RCMP sergeant cried.

The Valleyview Self-Help Club obeyed. Maude started to break into a sweat. Things were moving so fast…were they being framed for murdering the Prime Minister? It wasn’t her fault that he had come to their dysfunctional self-help group, nor that he had wound up dead of a severe papercut combined with a gunshot…

Suddenly the lights came on. Those same rafters were suddenly alight with streamers and confetti flowing down from above. “Surprise!” The RCMP officers pulled off their riot gear, revealing smiling faces and a decided lack of malice.

This last turn of events was too much for poor Maude; losing that remained of her calm, she sank down onto the floor, buried her face in her immaculately-manicured hands, and began to sob loudly. “I…I don’t want a surprise…” she wailed. “I…I…just want…”

Maude didn’t know what she wanted. There was too much going on, too much for her already fragile mind to process. She retreated into herself thinking back to things that had once made her feel warm and safe.

“I just want to go…to Showbiz Pizza…with Mom again…” she snorted, remembering her eighth birthday party–the warmest and safest part of her life so far.

The rest of the Valleyview Self-Help Club nodded in agreement, much to Maude’s bewilderment. “Yes! Oh yes, please!”

“One of you killed the Prime Minister,” the lead RCMP officer said. “Killing a corrupt man like that is quite a feat, after all, even more so for a self-help group. Certainly worthy of all the pizza in the world.”

Maude stood there as the officers and the rest of the Valleyview Self-Help Club circled around her, smiling and singing amid the confetti and the flashing police lights. Maude, unsure of whether to perk up or continue her wailing, was motionless at their center.

“What’s wrong with this one?” on orderly said, jabbing his thumb in Maude’s direction. Her expression, betwixt agony and ecstasy, was certainly unusual even for the Valleyview Assisted Living Facility.

“That’s just poor Maude,” said another orderly. “Committed in ’07. She shot up her self-help club thinking that they were trying to frame her for killing Stephen Harper. We leave her alone most days, off in her own little world.”

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Neil Grabty’s DNA was utterly unremarkable, as DNA went, but that wasn’t going to stop it from living on forever. When he donated his body to science, Grabty had visions of his transplanted organs saving lives or his cold form enlightening surgical classes in an operating theater.

Instead, he’d reported to the teaching hospital for one minor operation and told to return for a checkup in ten years. Incredulous, he’d forgotten about the whole thing until, nearly twenty years afterward, he met his untimely demise in a head-on collision. His head collided with someone else’s car, specifically, after a commuter ran a red light. That put an end to Neil Grabty’s personal stakes in what happened to his DNA, at least.

His body was rushed to a nearby hospital, but despite the best efforts of the surgeons there and the paramedics en route, Mr. Grabty was dead on arrival. His body was wheeled into the morgue waiting for someone to claim it, but nobody did–Neil was the only child of only children and seventy years old to boot. That was why he’d tried to leave his body to science, after all, but his donor card–and every other piece of identification he had–had been turned out of his pockets during the crash and lost in the ensuing fire.

Slated for cremation, Neil’s mortal shell lay under a sheet until the routine post-mortem that was performed on all unclaimed bodies slated for cremation and the potter’s field. Dr. Melville performed these, as they were the only work he could get after the accusations, the trial, and the acquittal on a technicality.

Certain strange growths on the inside of Mr. Grabty’s abdomen intrigued Dr. Melville; they were something he had never seen before, and he had seen a lot in his long and arguably unscrupulous career. They weren’t tumors and they weren’t cysts…what on earth were these strange structures in a dead man’s body?

Risking further damage to his reputation, Dr. Melville decided to ignore the order to cremate Mr. Grabty and resolved to perform a torough study–far more thorough than his post-mortem–on the cadaver’s abdominal cavity and the bizarre structures within it. Under the pretext of moving some supplies, he was able to transport it to the private lab he’d secretly built out of a disused mechanical space in the hospital basement. A container of dust and wood ash went to the potter’s field instead.

In his lab, during the quietest part of the overnight shift, Dr. Melville proceeded with a more thorough dissection. The smells of rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde commingled in his nose; the nauseating odor of science, as Dr. Melville was oft heard to proclaim. He positioned a camcorder to get a good view of the procedure and began making his first incisions in they mysterious structures below the cadaver’s sternum.

The body split oven violently at the virst cut, splattering Dr. Melville with all manner of unpleasant and unspeakable fluids. He jumped back, swearing and spitting, pulling his glasses hastily off his face for an emergency cleaning. The first thing he saw after shoving them back on was a massive…thing…rising out of what had been Mr. Grabty’s body.

Horrified, screeching, Dr. Melville ran for the door. The creature, emerging like a barnacled rope of twisted flesh, was behind him and gaining.

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Mattheson looked at the shambling zombie walking gaily down main street, protected by a police cordon from curious onlookers. The corpse had been carefully dressed in someone’s Sunday finest and given a complete makeover with wig, silicone prostheses, and foundation–enough that it could almost pass for alive.

“Interpol says that it’s the body of one Tobias Kurz, born 1937 in Munich and died 2013 here in town,” said Wilson, flipping through his files. “It looks like he’s trying to go to his favorite breakfast spot.”

“Too bad it closed last year,” said Mattheson. “How many is this now, Wilson?”

“Three,” Wilson said. “One every two weeks or so. Same modus: tarting them up like they’re still alive.”

Nodding, Mattheson kept his eye on Mr. Kurz’s shambling zombie as it attempted to politely lift its had to someone cowering inside a storefront. “Three or more victims…likely done for psychological gratification…totaling more than a month’s time…including a significant “cooling off period” between each of them…”

“Yeah,” said Wilson. “It fits the classical definition. We’ve got a serial lifer out there, compulsively bringing people back from the dead, and we have no idea where they might strike next.”

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With delighted quibbles, the bird alights. A cuckoo enters the nest, level and light, balancing a bit to clutch twigs for a smaller bird. A nearby sparrow shouts a warning as the interloper lays a fake.

A sparrow weathers the events beside his hen, an apology unspoken between them. The hen runs claws against her clutch, against the interloper. Nearby, in the leaves, the cuckoo waits: ready to wreck nest and meat within should things go ill.

The sparrows have decided. They will keep the child and love it with offerings of chitin as if it were their very own. Perhaps their love will be enough, and their child will no longer savage the nests of others but build its own.

Theirs is the hope of a doomed generation.

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