Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“You must choose: the maiden or the moth. For the silken cocoon will stop for no man, yet it is absolutely essential for the next phase. You may try to keep her a gorged and oblivious worm, but it will be a hollow life made all the worse by the knowledge of what she could have been. That is the great mystery of the silk threads, the great gamble of the swaddled chrysalis: one never knows what will emerge therefrom. But to choose the maiden over the moth is to cling to the past over the present, over the future, and to be looking ever backward. It is to let fear of what may be poison what is. You must make the choice, and you must make it now. But choose wisely.”

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If you must know why I feel so sad, you must know I feel I’m going mad.
“Ridiculous,” said the picture hung. “You’re as sane as anyone.”
When to his speech I raised protest, I was cut off at my mirror’s behest.
“I see things as they are, not as they should be, and sane you are, as sane as me.”
A mirror, I said, should never talk, nor should my portrait take a walk.
That I had seen both happen that day, seemed proof that madness indeed held sway.
My end table croaked, upon this remark, “You must be sunny though things seem dark.”
“Madness in the beholder’s eye doth live, to yourself some latitude give.”
The chair beneath me agreed with a laugh “If you be mad, so am I by half!”
Surrounded thus by such happy things, I felt my heard begin to sing.
That mad am I there can be no doubt, but the company’s good while I ride it out.

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I shook his great paw with gusto, and he returned the gesture to me. I asked him what he was doing there, and he returned the question to me. I told the bear I was traveling, a wanderer finding his way. He told me that he was similar, his arrangements changing by the day. With a bit of bashfulness I followed it up with a question abut what he ate; the bear reassured me quite sweetly that I wouldn’t end up on his plate. Humans, it seems, are not tasty, when one can have honey and wine; a bear is not likely to eat us but they fear that we covet what they dine. I told my new friend with assurance that he could expect better from me; the bear seemed to believe it, but said that we’d have to see. I could tell he was a bit frightened, and badly wanted to run; when I asked him what was the matter, he asked if I owned a gun. When I told him I didn’t, I could see he was relieved, but the bear reminded me warily that his worry was scarcely eased. For a lifetime in the forests had taught him one thing well: close by any unarmed human was a gun-toting one as well.

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“Extry! Extry! Read all about it!” Harry knew that ‘extra’ wasn’t said that way, but he found he sold more papers if he did. People just seemed to prefer it.

A woman stopped by—very high-society from the look of her fur hat and her furred dog, who yapped excitedly from the end of a silk lead. “What’s the headline for today, boy?” she said.

Harry held up a paper for her to see. The Weekly World News for January 18, 1920 had, as its banner headline, MARTIAN OVERLORD ENDORSES HARDING FOR PRESIDENT.

“That’s ridiculous,” the woman scoffed. “Everyone knows the Martians favor Mr. Cox.”

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As I went to the station with my lovely, to catch the nine-fifteen
I saw the stationmaster there, with the biggest frown I’d seen
He looked so shocked to see me there, I asked him what was wrong
And when he answered back at me, his face was surely drawn
With shaking hands and ashen brow he pointed at my suit
His pale lips tried to form the words but he found himself quite mute
When he finally got a word out, it was more pained than glad
“Wherever did you get that shade of most unbecoming plaid?”

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Follow the rules, they say
When they make the rules
Your best interests at heart
Just happen to coincide with
Their warmth and comfort
The only decisions made in haste
The ones that line worthy pockets
Your problems, well, no hurry
Hasty decisions are for the rich

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There was nothing. Nothing but Anita’s notes for me to comb through, searching for something that could help me find her. I opened the notebook:

ANITA’S GUIDE TO EXPLORING THE ABANDONED ZONE
Part 1: Supplies to take
-Food and water (do NOT eat or drink anything near Tamarack!)
-Change of clothes
-Hat and rain poncho (don’t let rain touch skin if possible)
-First aid kit
-Gloves (no touchie!)
-Film camera (35mm should work)
-Knife
-A sacrifice (must be valuable)

Part 2: Supplies NOT to take
-Cell phone (won’t work)
-Digital camera (will just make them angry)
-Gun
-Candy
-Sleeping bag (do not sleep anywhere near Tamarack!)

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“Right there, in the unmarked grave next to Spiffy in the pet cemetery.”

Toucan looked up at Blanket. “You’re sure he said that’s where the food was buried?” he said, fluttering his wings.

“That’s right,” Blanket said. “Remember what I said earlier, about there being two kinds of pets in this world? The ones who fly and the ones who dig?”

Scratching at the ground weakly, Toucan looked up at Blanket. “You can’t expect me to dig it up all by myself, can you?”

“I reckon I could give you a hand,” the dog said. “In exchange for a cut of the food.”

“Not so fast, boys.” It was Angel, looking very much worse for wear after her escape from the vet. “That food? It belongs to me.” She hissed and arched her back, claws ready.

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Anita had spent over a year preparing the list, and she had frequently disappeared on research trips. When she did come home, she was always extremely talkative, if disorganized. I’d begun to worry, and had even been in contact with psychologists about the possibility of something like schizophrenia. But Anita had always seemed her same cheerful self–just obsessed with a postage stamp of the rural countryside hours north that was uninhabited and unloved.

“Did you know,” she told me one day, brushing in the door with an armful of papers xeroxed at a library a hundred miles away, “that the state government has systematically cut off all roads to the Tamarack since 1965? The only way to get there now is by hiking or canoeing down the Ontonagon.”

“Anita,” I said. “It’s just a patch of land that nobody cares about. Really.”

“It is so much more than that,” she said. Slapping her new files down on the old oak table in the dining room, she pulled out a copy of an old newspaper clipping: COPPER BOULDER REMOVED: SECOND LARGEST AFTER THE ONTONAGON BOULDER. Then, after that, another: TAMARACK FARMERS BLAME LOCAL YOUTHS FOR “DEVIL’S NIGHT:” THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN DAMAGE.

“What am I supposed to be seeing?” I said.

“That was the start,” Anita replied proudly. “That first article and that second article? They were from the paper in Ironwood, the Daily Globe, so the articles are a few days late. This disturbance, Devil’s Night? It happened the day after they removed that copper boulder.”

“Good for them?” I said.

“You’re not listening!” Anita cried. “I am serving you proof positive of paranormal activity near Grandma and Grandpa’s old farm, and you’re just sitting there like it’s no big deal.”

“Is it?”

“Mark my words, there is something there,” Anita said, flashing her report. “And I’m going to find out how to document it safely.”

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“Skylar was a mean-spirited son-of-a-bitch, but he’s also a legend,” said Renny. “If you’ve awakened anyone or anything, I’m not sure he’d be my first choice.”

“How exactly do you get to be both a mean-spirited son-of-a-bitch and a legend?”

“Well, he ran a big ranch that he carved out of Arapho lands even before they were officially opened up to settlement. He ran that place like a Swiss watch, and people made good money, but he was brutal to anybody that crossed him, whether it was an Indian trying to hunt on their own lands or a farmhand showing up to work drunk. Wasn’t afraid to dirty his own hands in running the ranch, too, which I think a bunch of folks respected even if they couldn’t stand him. Skylar ran into an Arapho warband during the big war with the Sioux, in ’76. He said they were on his land, they said they were just passing through. Band found itself slaughtered by Skylar and his boys, but he made a mistake: one of the Arapho boys survived a bullet in the back.”

“What happened next?”

“Well, ’76 was not the time to be pissing off the Arapho. This was around the time Custer was making the same mistake with the Sioux, you see. They decided they’d had just about enough of this mean old white boy on their land, so they sent about two hundred braves to kill him. Skylar’s boys abandoned him, so he fought them single-handedly from his ranch house. They got him, of course; no man stands up to two hundred, especially when they have repeaters. But he took damn near fifty of the Arapho with him, and they actually buried him and considered his scalp to be a high token. Skylar was a bastard, but he owned it and wasn’t afraid to put himself on the line for his bad decisions.”

“And that’s the spirit you think we’ve been seeing?”

“Like I said,” Renny shrugged. “I hope not. For your sake.”

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