Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Roberta Dawson married Albert “Al” Atkins in 1972, when she was a schoolteacher and he was working as an adjunct professor at the local university. They’d met through a local singles group, and friends remarked upon how much Al seemed to delight in utterly dominating Roberta when they were together. The scion of a wealthy family with an education to match, he fancied himself a professor even though, as an adjunct, he was teaching lower-level classes at a far lower salary. He offered financial security, though, thanks to his family, and Roberta was all too happy to take it after the death of each of her parents within 6 months had completely drained her own funds as well as her parents’ estate.

Their first child, a stillborn girl, arrived in 1973; a second, another daughter, was born in 1974. The Atkins’ second daughter died at the age of five in 1979, having reportedly drowned during a pool party. By then, Al’s parents had died and left the money to his children with him as executor; with their daughter dead, Al and Roberta inherited the entire estate, though neither of them stopped working, reportedly due to the distaste they had for one another. There were even rumors that Al had only entered into the marriage for that selfsame inheritance, as his parents’ will shows that they had a rather low opinion of his ability to handle money.

After Roberta’s children’s books began selling, however, Al seems to have undergone a remarkable reversal. Family friends say that they saw him less and less, but that when they did see him he appeared to have lost weight and to be very attentive, even submissive, to Roberta. They thought that his wife’s success had finally cowed him.

Al Atkins was seen less and less as his wife became better-known, and by the time of the 60 Minutes interview in 1985 he was refusing to be photographed or interviewed. He died in 1990 and was cremated and scattered without fanfare; the plot that held his two children with space for their parents was never used.

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I’m Sarah Delahaye, and you’re listening to SpookyCode on the Infinite Joy podcast network.

In today’s show, I’m going to take a deep dive into the code of a game I doubt many of you have heard of, and since this is part of the 100 Hours of Giving marathon, I’ll be doing it live on my Swat.ch stream and responding to comments as I go. So please excuse any stream-of-consciousness incoherence as I veer wildly off-script and into the Land of Um and the Kingdom of Long Awkward Silences with a pit stop in the Grand Duchy of Pregnant pauses.

And with that disclaimer out of the way, I give you: the strange, mad story of the Golden Duck and the computer game it spawned in 1987, Feather of Doubt.

How strange and mad can a dusty old computer game be, you may ask. Well, our tale includes a mad genius, a hidden treasure, dastardly subterfuge, and even a possible cold-blooded murder. One of the key players in this tale is in an asylum to this day, or at least I haven’t been able to find an obituary.

So let me start with the tale of Roberta Atkins, the best-selling children’s book author from the 1908s that you’ve never heard of.

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Once again, our friends at Oscoda Smoked Meats will be manning their barbecue station from 12am until they run out of meat! Today’s selections are:

-Roast dry-rub flank of Celephaïs ghoul, $5/lb.
-Elder Thing wings with shoggoth braze, $20/doz.
-Deep One caviar side dish, $10/bucket.

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen demand, pulled night-gaunt sandwiches and scrambled shoggoth and eggs are not available.

Halloween is just around the corner and our artisan pumpkins will help you celebrate! Whether you are decorating, piemaking or simply displaying with these pumpkins, you’ll find that their non-Euclidean forms and colors that exist outside the spectrum of sanity are the perfect taste of the gibbering madness beyond the veil that your Halloween party needs! They are sustainably grown and harvested cruelty-free by the Mi-Go, the fungi from Yuggoth whom no mortal camera can capture.

Fall is upon us, and with it the last batch of artisanal local honey! Gardner Farms Honey is on sale this week, and devotees agree that, although seemingly grey and inedible, it actually helps dull the pain and horror of the unknowable alien beyond even as it corrupts mortal flesh! Try it on toast.

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RANGE SAFETY OFFICER: We call this scenario ‘Invasion of the Coffee Snatchers.’ You are returning from your favorite coffee watering hole when a ship full of Arcturian males in rut lands nearby, mistaking the odor of your fresh java for female pheromones.

[The RSO gestures DOWNRANGE, where several CARBONITE CUT-OUT SILHOUETTE targets have been erected on either side of an ADAMANTIUM RAY-SHIELDED BARRIER.]

RSO: You will hold your death ray, loaded to division electron discharge capacity, in your dominant hand while holding a cup of coffee in your left hand. You will then engage the targets on the left in order of priority. After that, you may discard the coffee cup to engage the targets on the right. You will receive a one-second penalty to your overall time for hitting the carbonite outside the target area or the magnetically sealed berm. Any questions?

DEATH RAY SHOOTER #1: May I overcharge my death ray?

RSO: This is a no-overcharge course for today’s competition. Overcharging, resonance cascade, CP violation, and positron bolts are not allowed. They will result in immediate disqualification.

DEATH RAY SHOOTER #2: Will there be coffee in the cup?

RSO: The cup is empty, donated to us by our friends at Arcturus Coffee.

DEATH RAY SHOOTER #3: Do I need to draw my death ray from concealment?

RSO: Concealment is optional unless you are shooting in the Pocket Death Ray category.

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The machine lets me go deeper, more lucid than I have ever been even in waking life. I am aware of every blade of grass waving in a breeze that exists only in my subconscious mind, every pebble in the worn concrete beneath my feet that was lovingly imported from the darkest of my elementary school days.

Everything seems strange because I am at a child’s height, yet seeing with adult eyes. When it was long ago, there were no thick blades of grass hungrily pushing between asphalt cracks; the city was not yet so decrepit. We had aged together.

An eternal twilight burns overhead, and I feel giddy. It is what I once felt at that height, the joy of a world bursting at its seams with possibilities, stories under every stone. Yet it is also a mix of adult giddiness, of the feeling of time slipping through outstretching fingers like hourglass sand, the looking back at what may never have been through the rosy lens of what might have, if only.

And in, among all that, the machine shows me what I long suspected: a dark hollow, always hovering at the edge of even my dream-tinged perceptions. That darkness has a depth I scarce suspected, and waiting at its bottom…things my lucid mind saw fit to banish to realms of abstraction. A confrontation with the negative essence of myself: that which made my by being rejected, minimized, despised.

The door was open, the machine held it wide, and every halcyon dream-path had as its corollary a path down that ill-winded road, should I choose to take it.

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“I’m telling you, I didn’t order a package,” said the owner of #5298 Richard Rd. “What would I even get that was that small?”

“Jewelry, maybe? A USB cable?” I held up the tiny package, which barely filled my palm. “Look, it says this address and requires signature confirmation, okay? If I don’t get it delivered and signed for, I might be fired.”

“And I’m not signing for some mysterious tiny little package I didn’t order!” countered Mr. 5298. “If CPS is gonna fire its drivers for that, well, that’s their problem, not mine!”

The door slammed in my face, and I trudged back to the waiting truck. Before I got there, I heard a small voice call to me from below.

“Aye, is that me package you got there, lad?”

I looked down, started, and saw an extremely tiny person standing at a little door in the hillside. No more than a few inches tall, he waved me down.

“Did you order a…signature confirmation CPS delivery?” I set the package on his “doorstep.”

“That I did lad! Dinnae ken why they got the address wrong, but it inna first time it’s happened an it wilna be the last.” He signed on the dotted line in comically tiny script with a quill pen.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what did you order?” I said.

“Ach, tis just a micro HDMI cable so I can watch the Netflix in better resolution,” the tiny man said. “The normal ones willna fit in me house, ye ken? Hard enough finding a smallscreen plasma that’d fit, but I dinnae think the cable would bollocks it up! Many thanks to ye.”

He tottered inside with the package in his arms and returned with a pair of quarters under his arm, dinner plates to him. “Here,” he added. “Something for your troubles, lad.”

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Our first warning should have been when the squirrels started screaming.

You’ve heard their chittering howls before if you live in a place with trees, and they usually only go at it when they are having disputes with each other over affairs only rodents understand. But that month, they began making the noises almost nonstop, pausing only to sleep. It was terribly maladaptive on their part, broadcasting themselves like that. The local cast of predators, from cats to birds of prey, soon took to eating the things in mid-scream.

About two weeks later, the noise stopped. There were no more squirrels about; they had all fled or been eaten, with a few found limp after apparently having yowled themselves to death. If we’d had any sense, we would have followed, screaming after our own fashion.

But we didn’t. And, soon enough, we found what they had been howling about.

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So a baker bought a big Tupperware to transport sweet treats without crushing them. Their assistant saw this and said “I’ve seen some strange thing in my day, but that takes the cake.”

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It is a principle well-understood on the plains of Laïs that light is deadly. Early mornings are safe, as are twilights, and the best days of all are cloudy. But the piercing light that illuminates the prairies there, which emanates from the great and cruel star of Køs which was set there when its reality was carved from the dream by the Nameless Ones…

Sometimes, the light simply illuminates. Sometimes, it burns. Often, it kills. The effect of stepping into any given shaft of light can be as unpredictable as any sea.

So thence the Black City of Korton. The folk there signed a compact with the Nameless Ones when the great and cruel Køs was hung above them, trading immunity to its rays for total darkness. Thus, every light in the city is extinguished upon entering, and every facet of life is lived in total blackness. One can cast one’s eyes up to the sky to see the great towers of Korton silhouetted, or down to the banks of the River Kort to see them reflected as onyx. Many newcomers do.

The people of Korton, its long-term residents, have developed ways to go without sight. It is therefore a dangerous place for the sighted, who are easily set upon by gangs of toughs that operate by touch and sound rather than sight.

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Various folk helped the Dark on its way. While this might seem insane on its face, they each did so for their own short-sighted reasons. Some saw the Dark as a weapon to use against their enemies. Some saw it as a way to make money. Many, of course, lied to themselves about what they were doing, if in fact they knew that the Dark had any hand in their actions at all.

But the end result was the same. The Dark only cared for one thing, the thing that it had obsessed over since the first guttering sparks had arisen: extinguishing every last light. Those folk, themselves creatures of light, failed to see that in aiding the Dark they were simply buying themselves the privilege of being extinguished last.

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