Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“And, the next option is to file jointly with your spouse,” said the accountant softly, prodding the relevant section of the paper. “It won’t let you write off business expenses like an LLC will, but-”

“I don’t have time for this,” said Burkette. “Just tell me about the cheapest option.”

The accountant paused, lip quivering. “You interrupted me.”

“Yes, yes I did, because I don’t like having my time was-”

“If you interrupt me again,” the accountant said, still very soft and flat, “I will carve your heart out of your living chest and show it to you before I eat it while you bleed out on the floor.”

Burkette’s jaw came abruptly unhinged. “What?”

The accountant, whose expression and tone of voice had not changed, looked back uncomprehendingly. “What?”

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The ship was made almost in mockery of what the humans sailed, appearing at a distance as a square-rigged three-masted ship of the line. But it revealed itself on closer inspection to be a haphazard conglomeration of trees uprooted and coaxed into strange shapes, dead leaves and dry twigs held in place by old magic, and gunwales bristling not with cannons but with catapults laden with explosive dynamite tree fruit.

But the skull-and-crossbones the fae crew carried was clear enough, as was the shot across the bow that left the Scarper‘s foredeck littered with caustic fruit pulp. Her master ordered the white flag aloft, and as the fae pirates pulled alongside, boarding hooks at the ready, he stood at the helm to receive them. Looking over the diverse shapes opposite him–elves, pixies, pookas, and far stranger things on gossamer wings–he turned to his quartermaster.

“What sort of thing,” he asked, “would a fairy plunder from a mortal ship?”

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The farmer toiled every day in his fields, sweating and laboring to bring forth his master’s crops from the rich muck of the Nile floodplain. But from where he toiled, the great Pharaoh’s compound was visible across the river. At dawn and at dusk, glittering across the river, the farmer could see the lights. When the winds were right, he could hear the singing of the priests and the shouted ablutions offered up to Osiris and Ra.

Local priests kept the farmer and his fellows well informed as to what the Pharaoh meant, a living link to the gods. But the farmer came to think, in time, that he knew the gods as well as anyone did. Perhaps they would deign to accept a substitute to speak to, and incidentally to offer a life of leisure with honeyed wines.

So one night, when the moon was full, the farmer swam the Nile to reach the palace. With him, on his back, he carried a feral cat from the fields, a fine mouser who had earned the respect of those whose grain she saved. With the cat as his sacred guide, the farmer sought to enter the palace and speak to the gods, begging them to at least let him attempt the role of a pharaoh himself. Other than the clothes on his back, he carried nothing else but a small knife for emergencies.

The compound was not strongly held, with the few guards easily avoided by one who had years to practice hiding in darkened fields. Perhaps, the farmer thought, the Pharaoh relied entirely too much on his people’s worship to keep him safe. In the vast pools of darkness between the few lit oil lamps inside, the farmer was able to find his way to what he reckoned to be the royal chamber. There, he began to make his ablutions and obeisances, imploring any god who would listen. Ra, Osiris, even forgotten Aten were all beseeched in turn, but their answers were only insect song and frogs along the river.

When a shape approached in the dark, roused perhaps by the farmer’s devotions, instinct took over. The knife glinted in reflected moonlight, and the shape fell to the floor, gurgling its last. When the guards came, drawn by a startled cry, they found the farmer standing over the Pharaoh with a dripping knife and a cat slung over his back.

Naturally, he was struck down at once. But the high priest, noting the presence of an auspicious cat with the assassin, decreed that both the farmer and his feline companion be mummified, to be buried with the Pharaoh and to serve him eternally in the hereafter as penance. The new Pharaoh, desiring an auspicious start and no questions about the light guard his father had been assigned, went along with the plan. The farmer was duly embalmed, as was his field cat, and placed in the Pharaoh’s burial chamber.

Not long after, grave robbers who had helped to build the tomb arrived and dug it up, plundering the riches that had been laid to rest with their dead king. Unable to separate the Pharaoh’s mummy from his jewels, they simply took the body with them to be dismembered and burned at their leisure. They left the crypt in disarray, leaving the farmer’s body contemptuously untouched, for it had no jewels or adornments.

And that is how, centuries later, the body of the humble farmer came to be displayed in a great and famous museum under the name of the pharaoh he had accidentally slain. His prayers to Osiris, Ra, and Aten had not gone unheard, it seemed. Rather, they had been answered with the patience and subtlety only very old gods can muster.

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After almost drowning in a freak accident in Tribeca, Daniel Feldman had a vision of holy light and oneness with celestial beings. He was able to recapture it through a series of meditations involving breath-holding and free-association writing about the heavenly visions that followed. Dubbing himself “David the Teacher,” he quickly acctracted acolytes, or “pupils,” who joined him in a small but growing Bronx commune, which raised the ire of local authorities who saw it as a Communist plot. Yet Davis was frustrated that the most persistent of the heavenly beings in his visions refuses to reveal its name, driving him to ever-more-stringent meditations and ever-more-dangerous levels of oxygen starvation.

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“If you’re gonna tell the story, best get it right.”

Emerging from the oil-lamp shadows and parting the hushed crowd, Baha limped over to the table and sat down heavily. Without asking, she took the bottle of hooch from Dickenson and poured herself a double shot in Mariah’s glass, downing it before proceeding.

“I was a young woman,” she said. Then, stabbing a finger in Mariah’s direction: “Scarcely older than this tot.”

“I beg your-” Mariah began.

“My lover was a whaling captain, tall and proud. And even though the men thought a lady terrible bad luck on a ship, my man smuggled me aboard, such was our love for one another.”

Dickenson looked at Baha’s scarred visage and embroidered eyepatch, as well as the silvery barbed claw that took the place of her left hand. “Can’t imagine what that must have been like,” he muttered.

“Believe it,” snapped Baha. “Once upon a time this face lured men like him to their doom. But it was not to be, for this time it was true love torn asunder too soon.”

She slammed her good hand on the table, rattling the others’ drinks. “The whalers attacked an eldritch horror from beyond the stars thinking it was a whale, realizing their mistake only when the unearthly tentacles arose, black and billious, from the waves, driving some mad by the mere sight of them.”

Baha took another drink, this time bypassing Mariah’s glass altogether and simply drinking rum from the bottle. “I took command after my lover was killed,” she said, “as I was the only one with the werewithal to fight back after he was enveloped and consumed by that maw. But it still took every man jack of the crew to the bottom.”

“So you’ve come to kill it, then?” Mariah said. “The lurker at the threshold, the thing on the doorstep, that we’re all here to see put down for good and all?”

“Aye. I call it the ‘weird whale’ and ever since I was hauled aboard a Nantucket square-rig from a whaleboat, I have sailed the seven seas with a new crew in search of the ‘weird whale.’ I mean to avenge myself upon it.”

“Kill that which scarred you physically and emotionally, is that it?” said Dickenson.

“Aye. Finding an equally weird being here…what can it be but the “weird whale” arisen anew, somehow?”

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Nigel Biddlecomb, senior partner at the London law firm of Slater, Bullock, and Biddlecomb, is lead counsel on the case. “My client is totally innocent of the charges being brought against him,” Biddlecomb says in a statement. “The fact is, these are clearly prejudicial accusations, and we believe the record will show that.”

When asked about the accusations, which include Biddelcomb’s client being caught on camera using the blood of a ram to summon a demon, he adds “This is a witch hunt, pure and simple.”

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They found Skyrider’s chopper years later, in ’73, while cutting through the jungle to build a road. The Cloudburst was shot up pretty bad, but it had also been claimed by the jungle, with its entire chassis and blades covered with strangler figs, entombing it in overgrowth. The crew cut into the chopper to get to Skyrider’s body, and there he was, sitting in the cockpit as if not a day had gone by. He’d been completely overtaken by the fig as well, leaving a vaguely human shape made out of hollow wood, still with a flight helmet on. The fig had gotten in through a 7.62mm bullet hole in the crown, probably the reason the chopper had last been seen speeding away at such an odd angle.

Nobody ever figured out how it touched down safely. Me, I think that there was just enough fight left in Skyrider that he was able to do it before he bled he brains out into his helmet. And, while I’m at it, I can’t think of a better tomb for him. That fig’ll still be there in a thousand years, when everything we were fighting for is dead and gone.

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But this didn’t make any difference. As the amps exploded around him and sparks rained down, Phargo kept right on shredding with his guitar. The electrical shorts and crackling discharge arcs caused by the sabotage and the lightning strike only seemed to empower him, and he didn’t seem to notice the massive amount of voltage coursing through is body and his axe.

Due to some kind of feedback loop, the last note held on for an unnaturally long time as the guitar’s whammy bar melted and the lights died. Eventually, the roadies were able to get the fires under control and the backup generators working. But when they went onstage to tend to Phargo, all they found was ash. His last performance had literally reduced him to cinders.

There wasn’t a bit of plastic or metal in Phargo’s earthly remains, though. No one ever found Atma, his legendary axe.

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When they pass, each sage becomes part of a final ritual in which their combined knowledge is crystallized at the moment of their death. These crystals, explosive and extraordinarily unstable, are then cast into the Well of Knowledge in the canter of the deepest inner sanctum of the Sages’ Atelier.

There, the collected information gathered by the most learned sages lies as a concentrated and lambent fluid. It is well-known that the sages do this, and the Well of Knowledge has a potent, almost mystical, reputation. Indeed, those sages who have passed are often simply said to have “gone to the Well.” Requests to draw upon this knowledge have always been denied in living memory, with the reasoning that each age needs its own knowledge and solutions rather than drawing needlessly on the past.

But there is a darker secret, one known only to a select few of the most senior living sages and the caretakers who assist them. No one knows how to extract or access the knowledge contained in the Well.

At the time of its construction, millennia ago, the sages perfected the ritual for crystallizing knowledge and casting it into the Well. But in all the years hence, they have been unable to make use of it. The feeling at the time was that the knowledge would keep until it was accessible, and that certainly seems to be the case; random whispers issue forth from it at times, and those that fall into the Well scream in a cacophony of voices not their own until their hearts give out.

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I see them there, 3000 tiny flags on the lawn
Inside a man makes a bitter remark about refugees
They have stood, 3 letters long, for a century
Without a single member any darker than I am
Perhaps those 3000 flags are seeds sown deep
Waiting for patriots to someday grow forth
Not realizing the salted soil beneath them

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