Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The second floor is reached through a wide set of interlocked staircases and escalators. There is no elevator; perhaps this is for the best, as there would be no escape for anyone who did not have the full use of their limbs.

Lights are dimmer here, and everything is dingier in comparison to the spotless floor above. Items are unpackaged, and laid out on shelves and in troughs, many with signs of use from unknown, previous owners.

What there is may be dirty or broken, but it is often far more useful that what lies above. Small appliances are common, home and consumer electronics, even the occasional computer. But they are also from, perhaps, further afield. Much further.

Very few items have any intelligible language on them, and the few that do are riddled with spelling errors. Even seeing a familiar alphabet is rare, as the warning labels and instructions are all in scripts wholly unknown. The corpus is always too small for any decipherment, of course, but many a linguist has puzzled over them in idle hours.

The appliances often need to be rewired to work, and indeed there are some small nearby shops in the industrial park which do just that. Few have plugs that will fit any outlet, and those that do tend to have the prongs dangerously misshapen or expect live current from the ground.

Toasters are especially common, and perhaps half of them have slots that are designed for some fantastic shape. Curved slots are common; it is easy enough to bow the bread and use them after a $5 rewire. But the toaster with four round slots is curiouser (they have been used for hot dogs, but leakage of grease suggests this was not their original function), as is that with wavy openings. Many have no openings at all, despite possessing heating elements inside. A few seem to be pre-assembled with bread inside, almost always spotted with dazzling mold which withers away into ash when exposed to air or light.

There is also media–music, movies, and more–laid out and roughly sorted. The discs and tapes will sometimes work, but virtually none of the moving images have been deciphered or decoded. Almost every album that has been successfully played is an instrumental.

The second floor is as low as people often go, even the most regular visitors. It is generally safe, but the Butcher will follow the unwary up from the darkness, and it will not hesitate to kill a new target should its quarry escape.

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The first floor is brightly lit, with windows looking out onto the surrounding area (an industrial park) as well as the foyer, with fearful cashiers charging a pittance for items.

This is the floor of the new, but also of the mundane.

Items here are sealed in their packages, laid out in cardboard displays, latched onto shelf hooks. They proclaim their brands with bold colors and graphics. Many are toys, plastic and clam-shelled.

Most have just one or two things that set them apart from what one might find in a normal store. Misspellings abound, with vowels especially being swapped about willy-nilly. A few packages are in languages that are totally unknown; linguists have been known to purchase toys here, give the figures to their children, and then spend years puzzling over the packaging.

Barring a few outliers, though, the products generally work. The toys are toys, the cookware cookware. Many of the appliances also function, though the occasional plug must be rewired as it fits no plugs on this world. Perhaps this is also why the products tend to be useless entertainment, books and toys and games, with a smattering of novelties and unitaskers for kitchens.

To find something really useful, one must descend down to the second floor, and to danger.

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They close it every night not because they must, but because the objects inside will only come into being if the store is empty of all people, of all cameras, of all beings larger than an insect. A stray dog staying over one night caused the store to be empty, once. But a fly did not. No one knows why, and none have dared find out.

Inside, every morning, the department store’s three levels are filled with products, many of them artfully packaged and attractively displayed. Since they appear overnight, the cashiers charge only a pittance for them, and the money goes only to pay those same cashiers and to light the small foyer in which they work.

Inside is every consumer product known to exist, perhaps. Perhaps it is only a subset, reaped from universes parallel or skeins of time alongside. People who visit and buy report that they are real, useful items often enough. But just as often, they are dangerous, unusable, or fatal.

Let us step inside, past the cashiers (who never go inside themselves, out of fear) to see what we may.

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The lawyer handed over the disc. “Here,” she said, expressionlessly. “All you need to know is on here.”

I opened it, letting the light play over the professionally engraved surface. Anthony “Prince” Guerino, last will and testament. “Do you have a place I can play this?” I said. “I don’t have a DVD player at home.”

“Of course,” the lawyer said, sounding about as pleased as if I’d asked for for bus fare. “Right this way.”

She ushered me into a small closet with a combination television and disc player, and I put the platter in. It played automatically, with no animated menus or any of the usual pleasantries.

A man in an oxygen mask appeared, propped up by velvet pillows on a bed that looked like it cost more than I made in a year. “Well, well, well. Look who it is,” he said in a heavy Chicago accent. “My last living relative that I don’t hate.”

I opened my mouth to say something in reply, and then closed it. Even alone, I would have felt like an idiot.

“So here’s the deal,” Prince Guerino said. “There ain’t a lot of us left, just two great-uncles, a cousin, and my kid sister’s kid. That’s you. Seeing as our cousin tried to kill me, Grunkle Paul is doing thirty to life, and Grunkle Mike also tried to kill me, you’re all I got left.”

A coughing fit ensued, a violent one, and it was a moment before he could continue.

“So I’m leaving it all to you. Everything. One hundred million bucks in cash, securities, bonds, and real estate.”

I choked, almost toppling off my chair.

“But there’s a catch.” Prince Guerino said, smiling. “Of course there is. There always is. I’m only leaving you one million bucks until you do me a little favor. Last page of my will is a list of guys who I want dead. And you’re gonna do it for me.”

“I’ll do no such thing!” I cried, before sheepishly realizing I was talking to a dead man.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking. Hell no. But here’s the thing: a lot of that money ain’t exactly legit. And you’ve been seen coming in here. I made sure of that with my lawyer friends. So if you’re too much of a wuss to do what I say, fine. But I think you’ll find my friends here have enough evidence to send you to the slammer for longer than Grunkle Paul if you don’t wanna play ball.”

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Snatched up by France during the Scramble for Africa, the area now known as Agawej was inhabited by a number of largely nomadic tribes in the north and mercantile states in the south. All told, over a dozen ethnic and tribal identities were encompassed by the area when the Third Republic conquered it in a series of colonial campaigns and established a centralized administration.

Other than the exploitation of natural resources and the construction of a naval base at N’wadibu, the French invested very little in infrastructure. When they belatedly granted the territory independence in 1960, there were only ten doctors in the territory and no paved airstrips.

The first president after independence, Dr. Emile Ksar, invested heavily in building up N’wadibu and selling concessions to foreign mining companies to extract iron ore, uranium, and bauxite. His overthrow in 1962 changed little other than the chair in the presidential palace; Agawej continued to be dominated by foreign investment and chronic poverty through the course of the 27 presidents it had between 1963 and 2001.

President Youssouf Bodélé, the current leader, has clung to power for nearly twenty years. This is not due to any personal popularity but rather a combination of French paratroopers and an external focus for his military, namely the struggle with Imeyrib over Zemmour.

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Once part (albeit a backwater part) of the Ottoman Empire, Imeyrib was taken under Spanish “protection” beginning in the 15th century, largely to curb pirates operating from its coast that were preying on fleets plying the New World trade routes. The then-governor did not resist the occupation and in fact quickly aligned himself with the Spanish, who allowed him to keep his title and lands.

By the 1960s, however, discontent with the Spanish protectorates and begun to grow, especially given Francoist Spain’s intransigence on a number of religious issues, which culminated in the bombing of an under-construction cathedral in the territory in 1969. The crown prince of Imeyrib, Mahmoud VII, took the opportunity to depose his father and declared himself Sultan of the territory.

Following a series of short, sharp engagements with Spanish troops, the protectorate ended in 1975 following the death of Franco and the general disengagement of Spain from colonial affairs. Mahmoud VII has ruled as Sultan since then, with his absolute authority enshrined in the constitution. Many Imeyribis, however, see him as a puppet of the West and there has been increasing, if suppressed, interest in a more democratic Islamic republic to replace his rule if and when he dies, as Mahmoud has no heirs.

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“So the Zemmour is desolate?”

“Yep. A few tiny villages on the coast, where enough for rolls in that the locals can drink the dew, but the biggest of them is maybe five hundred people on market day. Maybe.”

Li stroked his chin. “Then why all the fuss?”

Guitarrez snorted. “Imeyrib and Agawej, that’s why. The Sultan of Imeyrib is hoping for oil in the Zemmour sands so he can join the club that his fellows in the Gulf are in, the one where you live in a mansion made of Bugattis.”

“And the President of Agawej?”

“Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t turn down the oil. But mostly he doesn’t want Imeyrib to have it, and he wants to keep his military brass happy lest they overthrow him, which happened to eleven of his twelve predecessors.”

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“It is surely a most wondrous sight, is it not?”

The officer looked at his adjutant, and receiving no reply, continued: “The patterns of frost upon every surface, the delicate fibrillations of ice that grow as if by magic in the cool of the winter’s night…it is enough to make even the most hardened and godless man smile at the thought that his Maker is real and good and near.”

Smiling, the officer continued to look out over the shell-pocked battlefield, where frost clung to the bodies of his own men, and their enemies, locked together in a frozen hellscape of mud.

“We’ve done a good thing today, here, you and I,” the officer said, tapping his adjutant on the shoulder. “All these victorious dead, and enemies that shall not take up arms against us ever again.”

His adjutant again did not answer, for the young man had been dead for some time, carried away by a machine-gun bullet that had cleaved clear through his helmet. In fact, the officer that had led the charge was now its sole survivor, beaming at his handiwork stretching away through no-man’s-land, as the day began.

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King tapped his fingers. “I’m in the market for a nuclear weapon. Hans, what have you got for me.”

“Oh, is that all?” Dr. Ottomeyer said. “Would you perhaps like a space station as well?”

“If you have one,” King said, smiling. “But I am serious about the nuclear weapon.”

Hans sighed. “There are approximately 45 nuclear weapons unaccounted for since 1945. I suppose I could recover one for you, given my usual–astronomical–fee. But it might be easier to just build your own.”

“No, not since Kim’s last check bounced,” King said. “What have you got for me?”

“Well,” Dr. Ottomeyer said. “There is a Mark XV thermonuclear bomb off the coast of Georgia. Probably buried in 50 feet of bituminous ooze, but theoretically recoverable.”

“Bomb?” King said. “Like a gravity bomb? That sounds old.”

“1958,” Hans confirmed. “And you’ll need a strategic bomber or a very large hand cart to deliver it.”

“Pass. What else you got?”

Hans rubbed his nose. “If 1970 isn’t too disco for you, the Soviet submarine K-8 sunk with four nuclear torpedoes.”

“Listen to yourself,” King cried. “Nuclear torpedoes? What a laughingstock I’d be. That is all wet, literally.”

“Hmph. How about an R-21 thermonuclear ballistic missile?” Dr. Ottomeyer said. “34 of them are missing, stolen from the wreck of K-219.”

“I thought the American government salvaged it,” King said.

“You’re thinking of K-129,” said Hans. “Stay out of any ex-Soviet sub with a 9 in its hull number. I can scientifically prove that it’s doomed.”

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They call it the piloted woodpecker
Because it is in fact just a biomech
Piloted by a tiny being, relentless
Used to hollow out trees for insects
Not because it’s practical, oh no
But because it’s awfully impractical
That is why it can only be true

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