Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“This has got to stop,” Saunders said. “The janitor found your shoe on top of the incubator last night. I don’t need to tell you what a serious violation of our safety policies that is.”

Meredith looked on defiantly. “Then Noreen and I won’t fool around at work anymore,” she said. “Happy?”

“No, I’m not,” said Saunders. “I’m not sure what I need to do, Meredith, to persuade you of the seriousness of the situation. You are our senior microbiologist on this project, and you are letting your personal feelings intrude upon your work.”

“On the contrary,” Meredith said. “Since Noreen joined the team, you’ll find I’ve never been more productive.”

“Look, I know what you’re going through,” Sanders said. “I met my ex-wife in the lab. But I’m not just a bystander here! This project is international in scope and this vaccine could save millions and be worth billions if we get it to trial. It could take this company to new heights! You just need to keep the bedroom in the bedroom and the lab in the lab Please?”

Meredith made a noncommittal noise before walking out, the click of her heels audible long after she had faded from view. Saunders picked up his desk telephone–landlines were easier to tap, but less prone to fail. He had the number memorized.

“It’s Saunders,” he said. “Yes. Meredith has no idea what a trench she’d dug herself down into. Did you get anything on Noreen? Anything she might have preferred to stay hidden?”

A pause. “Oh my God,” said Saunders. “No, no, that’s all right. I’ll try to handle it from here. But if it’s an inside job, if those payments have been coming from where they seem to be…”

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It wasn’t until Emmaline collapsed one Sunday while running the Roanoke Island Marathon that we found out the answer: leukemia. Em needed a bone marrow transplant, but there was every reason to be optimistic: the family was huge and surely there’d be a donor.

Nobody matched. In fact, the lack of matches was so suspicious that Mom insisted they do a DNA test just as Emmaline was going into chemo. She was looking for a mistake, hoping to trip the doctors up at their own game. When the results came back, she locked herself in her room for three days

Emmaline wasn’t related to any of us.

I went with Mom to see her sister, still holed up in Tanglewood where she’d been since the meds had stopped working. Mom confronted Aggie directly with a demand about Emmaline’s parentage. Aggie didn’t respond at first, just sitting there and taking it. It was only when we were set to leave that she whispered something about a notebook pasted behind the wallpaper of her old room.

We hadn’t lived in that house, any of us, for decades. But Mom, somehow, talked her way inside. Aggie had repapered the room shortly after Emmaline had been born, our own little scandal. Mom had been working on me at the time, and Dad had already gotten himself killed. It had been just her with three daughters and a niece.

A secret compartment was behind the paper, secreted between two of the framing timbers. It was as old as the house, but Aggie had filled it with little mementos through a hole in the old paper, one that was still visible when we peeled back the new. The notebook was there, swollen with age but still readable if a little musty.

It was filled with notes about a friend, Edna Parker, who I had never heard of. Mom muttered something about her disappearing when she was young, but the last lines in the notebook were there plain for anyone to read.

I’ve never been more jealous then when I see Edna quietly starting to swell up with Roger’s baby. Out of curiosity, I wonder what it would be like if our lives were to swap…me, bringing up Roger’s delightful little baby, the only little piece of him I’ll ever get…she, a dead-end crazy girl with nothing but soft padded walls and straitjackets ahead once the voices don’t stop anymore.

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There are three days when I don’t like working the piano bar: Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s.

Halloween has that carnival atmosphere where everybody has a request but nobody tips because they think their dime-store mask will protect them from the bad karma. I remember a Halloween, two years ago, when the only thing that showed up in my tip jar was a bobbing apple with a sloppy bite, oxidation already browning it.

People at Christmas are generous with their food but not with their tips. I get plenty of cookies that night, but everyone seems to be quietly guilty that they’re at O’Sullivan’s rather than in the warm embrace of kith and kin. It’s just a sad twirl on the dance floor, awkward passes made at anything that stirs their loins, and longing looks at mistletoe. Oh, and Christmas carol requests. Nothing but. My professors at Julliard would be spinning in their graves if they were dead.

But New Year’s is the worst.

This past New Year’s, I was sitting at my piano playing Auld Lang Syne for the millionth time, nursing a sprained ankle under my dress pants and with a glass of sassafrass beading sweat and leaving a ring on the piano. People will offer you a drink if you don’t have something amber going to waste on your piano, I’ve learned, and they don’t take kindly to being turned down. Better to have something, anything, up there rather than causing controversy with the people who should–emphasis on should–be tipping you.

A drunk lady approached me, with just the right attitude that I thought I was in for some juvenile flirting. Not that I’d mind under ordinary circumstances–people hitting on you do tend to tip until they realize you’re not going for it because you like your job–but people are possessive around the holidays. I remember when the other pianist I alternate with, Zack, got his lights punched out because he flirted with a punchy patron’s hubby.

“I’ve got a strange request for you,” she slurred. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but there’s a tip in it for you.” She stuffed a hundred-dollar bill–a real live Benjamin–in my tip jar before I could respond. “Okay then,” she continued, as if I’d actually agreed sight unseen. “Here’s what I want you to do.”

She reached into a voluminous designer purse and pulled out a piece of sheet music. Ancient stuff, yellowed and fragile-looking, though it didn’t crumble in my hands. “Play this song,” she said. “See that person over there? It’s the song of their soul, and every note you play will make them totally in the power of anybody who commands them.”

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A slick grin slopped across Muntz’s face. “I can’t write,” he said. “Can’t read, either. I’m just a natural.”

“Make your mark with an X, then, same as everybody else,” said Missy. “Right there on the line.”

Muntz shrugged. “Supposing I don’t?” he said airily. “Supposing I decide to make whatever cantrips I want wherever I please?”

“Then you’ll do them whenever you want and wherever you please,” said Missy. “Excepting Smokewood and its environs. Nobody comes into town without surrendering their tools of mayhem.”

“I am a tool of mayhem,” said Muntz. “Am I to surrender myself to you, little girl? I doubt you could handle it.”

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Silas Moore has been dead for about 10 years, but it hadn’t interfered with his running of a funeral parlor with his equally dead brother Elijah. Whenever someone came to buy a coffin in advance, Silas would always tent his gaunt, colorless fingers in delight. “Wonderful! Perhaps they’d be interested in joining the ranks of Smokewood’s living dead? It is a community badly n need of new blood.”

Silas wasn’t lying; in addition to himself and Elijah, only a handful of undead graced the area with their presence. There was Smathers the zombie, passed out drunk on cerebrospinal fluid on any given day. A couple of secretive ghouls lived in the hills, and a vampire rancher who would come into town only every fortnight.

When the client declined, as they inevitably did, Silas would smile wanly. “It is, as they say, up to you. But should you wish to join me in the divine hereafter of living death, the table is set.”

Elijah, for his part, refused to acknowledge that he was dead and would only allow that he was “getting on in years.”

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“Jed?” One of the boys said. “What if they won’t go? What if they’s stubborn?”

Jed’s eyes glowed red under the floppy brim of his hat. “Let them burn, then,” he said. With a flick of his wrist, he scattered magical sparks onto the dry grass before him.

The dry teeth around his neck rattles as he turned his back to the fresh gouts of flame and walked away.

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A beast writes near the timer. The shell camps opposite, desperate for a lesson. The beast scribbles dashes outside the lines, in contempt. Knowledge impairs the contributor to the recovered magazine. Their living handicaps float across the spectrum with the harsh rain their only companion.

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Every town, even out east, has one of Them. The slacker, the drunkard, the ne’er-do-well that sins through inaction. For the burg of Smokewood, such as it is, that’s Feris. Yeah, just Feris. Every time she introduces herself, she gives a different last name, one that’s usually a pun or a crude joke. A partial list follows:

-Shufflebottom
-Dungworth
-Wheel
-Clutterbucker
-Bracegirdle
-Hiscock
-France
-Rattlebag
-Cornfoot
-Bungay
-Fair
-Swindell
-Nutters

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“You can see here the speakers and subwoofers. Armored, of course, and fine-tuned by a company out of London to produce 11 hz white noise. It’s inaudible most of the time but makes people violently ill at ease and, often, violently ill.” The manager of Special Branch pointed to fixtures set all around the ceiling in recessed enclosures. “These are strobes that flash at 11 hz in sync with the speakers.”

“What’s that do?” I said.

“It really ratchets up the sensation,” said the Special Branch man. “Hallucinations, altered states of consciousness…most people can only bear to be exposed to the ‘fun room’ for only a few moments before they lose their minds.”

“I’m…almost morbidly curious to know what it feels like,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said the man from Special Branch. “You’ve been strapped into the ‘fun room’ for 24 hours already.”

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Behold Chittersnit, resplendent lord of all squirrels.

Rather than fur, Chittersnit has a perfect mirror shine, like unto the surface of a lake. Chittersnit never worries after fleas or ticks or other parasites of the flesh, for Chittersnit is resplendent.

Chittersnit’s claws are sharp eternal and there is nothing Chittersnit cannot climb. Branch, and leaf, metal and cement, glass and tile, all yield themselves to be climbed by Chittersnit. Perfect balance, impeccable jumping, and rapid ascent are all the hallmarks of Chittersnit resplendent.

Predators to not faze Chittersnit. Their claws are useless against Its hide, should Chittersnit suffer Itself to be caught. Their teeth shatter upon Its resplendence. When Chittersnit is no longer amused by the efforts of predators, It is faster than them all. And though Chittersnit has no need of trees, It nevertheless climbs them to elude predators merely as a show of their foolishness.

All squirrels aspire to be more than they are, and it is Chittersnit that embodies that aspiration. They look to It, and Its shining example, and dream of a day when they too will have nothing to fear.

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