Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Nobody had ever seen or spoken to the Elohim, but there was ample enough evidence for its presence. The settlement of Arden had very strict codes to be obeyed in placing buildings, growing vegetables, and just about any other activity that altered the tenor of town life. When someone violated those codes, the Elohim would act.

There was Mackay, for instance, the architect who built a magnificent building that clashed with the Arden codes on north-south orientation, maximum height, and colors to be avoided (his “temple” was bedecked in clashing neon orange and lime green). The morning after its completion, the Elohim had somehow moved the entire edifice into line with the rest of Arden, all 2000 tons of it. The exterior was freshly coated with white, and the towers were each cut off clean and razor-sharp–including the room where Mackay had been sleeping.

Thugs that operated brazenly within city limits, derelicts who slept on city streets, and preachers or evangelists of any kind all risked the Elohim’s wrath. They tended to disappear, leaving behind all their worldly possessions in a small heap. For some reason, the Elohim wouldn’t suffer vagrancy, crime, or the worship of any deity (including itself) within Arden.

Naturally there was rampant speculation about the nature and form of the Elohim, speculation which it seemed to tolerate. The only thing that people in Arden have been able to puzzle out–other than the Elohim’s obvious caprice and its love of certain rules that had been worked out by centuries of Ardenites–was that it sometimes changed its mind. The city had changed axes once, with all new construction being changed from east-west to north-south in the course of one night. Disappeared people occasionally reappeared, hideously scarred but with no memory of where they’d been.

But that was all before the Descent.

When the stormfront of the Popular Revolution broke over the Ionnes regime, the rabble of citizens and defected soldiers who stormed the presidential palace were puzzled to find that Dr. Ionnes himself was not among the family members they captured. The newly installed Directorate, mostly made up of newly “reformed” Ionnes men, promised answers. Many rumors had the dictator escaping through a subterranean railway while abandoning his family to their fate.

As they so often say, the truth is stranger than fiction.

Under “enhanced interrogation” by the Directorate, Ionnes’ son Basil made a puzzling reference to a secret buried in the turn-of-the-century catacombs beneath the palace. An excavation team recovered a badly-decomposed set of remains from a shallow grave…one which bore Dr. Ionnes’ distinctive withered arm and silver left incisor. Forensics experts hastily flown in from overseas confirmed that the body had been in place for a considerable amount of time.

Dr. Ionnes, it seems, had been dead for the last decade of his “rule.”

Eventually the Directorate pieced the situation together, leaking information at a steady rate to keep the restive populace from noticing the repeatedly slipping date for the promised free elections. Dr. Ionnes had suffered a heart attack or stroke after a heavy dinner, and his wife, sons, and bodyguard had sought to perpetuate the illusion that he was alive through a combination of old recordings, impersonation (Basil Ionnes was a good double for his father from a distance), and carefully cultivated rumors of paranoia. They’d gone on that way for so long that some of the worst offenses of the Ionnes regime, including the May Day army shootings that sparked the Popular Revolution, had happened when the old doctor was mouldering underground.

Mrs. Ionnes was asked about this over a hot glass of boiling oil and tongs–why she or one of her loathsome sons hadn’t simply taken over the family business Duvalier-style. “We hoped to blame him and scatter if there was ever a revolution,” she reportedly said; “obviously that didn’t work out too well.”