Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

There were plenty of names for it. The Tattooed Man, the Vandalized One, the Defaced. Most were male, which was in and of itself a misnomer; it always appeared as the same sex and roughly the same age to the person that beheld it.

As for the markings, they varied by the watcher too.

Kids would see someone with few or any markings, a fellow innocent with youth-flushed cheeks. But to older people…at first, the figure would seem to bear a number of strange tattoos or markings. But closer inspection would reveal that each was actually an etching of something that the observer had done in their life–always a misdeed. The Vandalized One displayed the sins of a lifetime carved into its very flesh.

As to what happened when you met it…well, that varied too. Those with few misdeeds, or children, would receive a curt salutation, a welcome mixed with a warning. Someone with more would be met with a simple question: “Do you regret it?” In their response, the person would have their fate in their hands. Enough people had escaped the encounter in that way to spread wildly contrary tales about it.

And a soul whose misdeeds were so voluminous that the skin of the Defaced was completely covered by an overlapping cyclorama of wretched inks? Suffice it to say that they do not return from the encounter.

3″x5″ note cards, but in half, with a simple word or phrase printed on one side. They were called possibility cards, and she took care to disperse them as widely and subtly as she could.

One might be under a napkin in the campus coffee shop; another might be pinned to a little-used corkboard in Old Engineering. The tawdry gossip rags in the library were a good place for them, as was the waiting area in the student health center.

The cards themselves? she liked to mix it up. Some were upbeat, some down. Some were profound, others were banal. A few might even be characterized as cold.

Here’s a sample of the possibility cards she distributed in one evening:

“Don’t worry.”
“It’s all the same to me.”
“Great!”
“Wonderful!”
“What if…?”
“Fantastic!”
“Listen!”
“It’s a perfect day for…”

Louisa, even as one of the town’s most vibrant and beautiful woman, had more than a little of the Anderton eccentricity in her. She often spoke of beings of light and darkness that flitted in and out of the shadows between the lives of men, and the strong red cords, invisible to all but the most strong-willed, that bound together those with a common fate. She also had a preoccupation–one might say an obsession–with Prussian blue. She insisted, upon inheriting control of her parents’ estate, that every window and doorjamb in their house be painted that exact shade of blue, which Louisa saw as a ward against phantasms of darkness and errant strands of fate.

Despite, or perhaps because of, her strange ways she was married to a local merchant a few years after her parents died. Perhaps her husband had hoped to manipulate the family fortune through her, or perhaps it was a genuine love match. They did clash over her strange beliefs, and most frequently over the Prussian blue–a color he found ugly and militaristic. When their first child was born, and Louisa was convalescing, her husband resolved to rid himself of the paint forever. He hired a house painter in secret.

Louisa’s husband–and the neighbors–were awakened the next morning by her screaming. Her husband found her standing by an empty crib; the inquest later decided that the infant had died of natural causes and Louisa had hidden the body; kidnapping was ruled out as there was no sign of forced entry. Louisa Anderton’s marriage collapsed soon after, and she spent her remaining years in a sanatorium while he ex-husband left the property to lie fallow.

As for the painter, he pocketed his full fee, despite having painted over only one of the Prussian blue window frames–that of the baby’s room.