Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“I attempt to teach you, John, through the use of a mathematical equation,” said Ms. Deidre. A d20 rattled in her hand.

“Saving throw!” said John. “Saving throw! I save verses knowledge.”

“That’ll be a wisdom check,” said the classmaster. “Add or subtract your wisdom bonus from the roll.”

John rolled, confident that his low wisdom score would be his salvation. His d20 clattered down. “Natural 1. Damn!”

Ms. Deidre grinned. “Natural 20,” she said, grinning over her dice. “Critical success.”

“No!” cried John. “What about my knowledge resistance?”

“You rolled a 1, John, and she has a nat 20. I’m sorry, but you’re learning something.”

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“Look, Luciano, I’ve done all I can,” said Gotti, shrugging helplessly. “If you want to stay here in town, and you want a government job with a nice pension and good hours, this is all I have for you right now.”

“Come on, Giovanni,” cried Luciano. His powerful voice, the pride of the local opera, virtually blasted his old friend back in his seat. “You know I have too much tied up in my house here to move! Especially after Roberta got everything else in the divorce.”

“Well, this is as good as I can be to you as your patron,” said Gotti. “I’m sorry, I really am. I’ll look for better, I promise you, since this doesn’t even begin to pay you back for all those free tickets for me and Esmerelda.”

Luciano looked at the paperwork. “I like the money and I like the hours, but…”

“If you want something right now, it’s this or selling hot dogs to fat American tourists,” said Gotti. “Or you could keep singing.”

“No,” said Luciano. “Not after what happened. I can’t, I just can’t. You know this.”

“Well then, you start Monday,” said Gotti. “One week’s training with the current guy before he retires off to a villa in Tuscany with his grandkids.”

“Still, I don’t know,” said Luciano. “I’m just not sure what an opera singer does the only available job is in the quietest library in town.”

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“Lord Eyon said that there was another way, that we gobs did not have to be as we have always been,” said Lodii. “And he was right. But there was something that Lord Eyon left unsaid, something very important.”

“Yeah, he’s like that sometimes,” said Myn.

“Indeed. And what he left unsaid was this: the gobs must become what he wants us to be. The gobs must become like him. In that way, he’s no different than the thousand other conqerors that have tried to remake us in their own image.”

“All I’ve seen are you betraying everyone that’s ever put an ounce of trust in you,” replied Myn. “What’s that say about you?”

“We believe in gobs for gobs. The old ways are failing us, and have failed us for many years. Everyone has an idea of what’s best for us. The humans want us to be humans, the orcs want us to be orcs. But we have to find out own way.”

“Yeah? And where does that way leave a mule like me?” said Myn.

“It’s simple,” replied Lodii. “Like all mules, you must choose. So far you have chosen to favor your human half, to be the exploiter rather than the exploited. But all that will be over soon, and those who have thrown in their lot against the oppressed gobs will find that the tables have turned. That’s the choice, Myn. Join us as a gob in pursuit of a bright future for all our people, or accept as a human your just reward for the lowly state of our kin.”

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“Cccooommmeee, mmmyyy llliiittttttllleee fffrrriiieeennndddsss.”

A pika nibbled softly at the most base moss before scampering away.

A caribou approached, but only after a lengthy period of stillness, to nibble at a carefully tended patch of reindeer moss.

Birds, too, occasionally alighted to nibble, though they were interested as much in the tiny stowaways in the moss than the moss itself.

“Cccooommmeee aaannnddd eeeaaattt.”

The golem, long since forsaken by the dead hands of the society that built him, wandered about the Arctic Circle. He grew a garden of moss on his skin, maintained and tended with the air of a bonsai master, to attract his friends to come and share in his solitude.

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One day, an easer said to a pencil: “Maybe I should do the writing.”

“Sorry, friend,” replied the pencil. “You’re just too dull.”

The eraser considered this. “Well, I guess you have a point there.”

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“Excuse me,” said Mr. Hezurdura. “I was wondering if you have anything smaller than a 28 waist with a men’s inseam of 36 or 38. I just can’t seem to find anything that’ll fit this bony waist.”

“Aaah!” shrieked Miranda the sales lady. “A skeleton!”

“Of course, madam,” said Hezurdura. “Didn’t I just say it was a bony waist?”

Miranda the sales girl, and her entire floor staff, fled before he could finish.

“Honestly, what’s a skeleton got to do to find a good pair of trousers in this town?” he said. Tossing away the size 28s that he was carrying, he added: “What a bony waste.”

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The last time I saw him, he was working on a wood burning project, an art thing. I’d never known him to do anything creative, and it looked really good. I couldn’t see enough of the finished thing to know what it was, I just know that it looked good.

I wanted to tell him that we should hang out soon, that we should go bowling on Saturday or maybe to the zoo. I wanted to tell him that I’d missed his company and that it wasn’t doing him any good to shut people out of his life.

But I didn’t. I just said hey and left. I don’t even know if he knew I was gone.

It was the last time I ever saw him alive, though he lived another 20 years.

I wonder if he ever finished the burning, what it was, and how it came out.

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I was ready for the blood. It’s the first thing that you numb over like a scabbed wound. By the third or fourth time, the blood had no more horrors for me, though I’ll admit the first time left me gagging in a bathroom.

It’s not the uncertainty either. That’s what does it for a lot of the guys on my crew, since half the hazards we face are invisible and undetectable. You might as well stress over being hit by a meteor or clobbered by a city bus in your blind spot, the way I see it.

It’s the silence.

Whether it’s ectoplasm left over from a haunting, the rind left from an alien ectoparasite pupating, or even the crispy bits left over from exposing something cthonic to daylight, it’s wreathed in silence. Things that make sound, hell, even the sounds themselves, they stay away for days. Weeks sometimes.

Often as not, that’s how long cleanup takes. It’s a long time for the only sound to be in your headphones.

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“So what exactly does Campus Crusade for Cthulhu do?”

“It seeks to bring about the early return of our lord and destructor, that the truly faithful might be eaten first and spared the horrors to come.”

“The Campus Whig Party, huh? What’s that all about?”

“We are for the Union, the Constitution, and the enforcement of laws. The slavery issue is to be decided by the states.”

“Do you really play rollerball in the Campus Rollerball Derby?”

“Of course! It’s the most popular blood sport of 2018.”

“So is the Most Dangerous Gamers like for video games?”

“No, no! We select one member by lots every month, and then the rest of us hunt them down for sport.”

“If you’re the Fencing Club, why aren’t there any foils?”

“Oh, we don’t do that kind of fencing. We teach students how to sell stolen goods at a profit.”

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The bargain they reached was thus:

The Dreamer had committed sins of untold ugliness and depravity, sins that could not be atoned for because the Dreamer could not regret them. Infernus was the only possibility should the Dreamer die.

It was offered this escape: an eternal dream of light and beauty, populated by beings that were the echoes of the souls the Dreamer had destroyed in one way or another and were thus bound to it. In this place, the Dreamer would be all of them and none of them, with none of its sins and none of its vices. Its body, wasted and twisted but immortal, would be but a vessel.

Naturally, there was another side to the bargain, as there often is. In exchange for this private heaven apart from the blistering embrace of Infernus, the Dreamer agreed that if ever its physica body were destroyed, or if ever it were awakened from within the dream, it would immediately die and go to its just reward. The deal was sealed, and the Dreamer secreted itself in a well-guarded, obscure place of hiding.

And the dream-specters inhabiting its visions? Why, that is us. All of us.

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