Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

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.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

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.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

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

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

After murdering the abusive, drunken fiancee that had been forced upon her, Cera refused to acquiesce to either the burgermeister or the bishop that offered her protection in exchange for her hand. Instead, she was last seen entering the mires with all her worldly possessions.

They spoke in whispers of how Cera had chosen to forsake her beauty and all of her suitors to enter into the swamp and to live in sorcery therein as the legendary swamp witch. For surely, they thought, no woman of sane mind would flee into such dreadful environs, and only black magic could explain the powerful hold she’d seemed to wield over local men with her intense beauty.

Naturally, in those stories–as is often the case–Cera the swamp witch had to trade her beauty for power, for none can be suffered to have both. They say that her hair grew thick with moss, that mushrooms and other fungi erupted from her fair skin, and that none could see her if she failed to move in her new and native home, so complete was the disguise.

Folks for miles around claimed to have seen her riding at night, seen her lights dancing over the swamps and bogs, and seen a dark and twisted shape casting spells in their dreams. Cera is cited as both a cautionary tale to young brides who would go astray, and as a sign of the strength that a woman can grasp if she has but the hands to hold it.

Cera herself, long dead and mummified in the peat bog where she had lay since the day she had sunk into the muck whilst making her escape, would have been proud of such a legacy.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Anita cleans homes for a living. She doesn’t take much joy in her job, but she does have pride in her hard work, and how even her increasingly desperate situation has not been able to get her down. In a moment, she will begin cleaning out an old wardrobe, one that has not been touched since the stately home changed hands.

Near the back of the many old and dusty furs, she will find a hidden latch, mistaking it for a splinter to be pulled and reglued. Woodworking and joinery isn’t in her job description, but since the new owners are both asking and paying, there’s a bottle of wood glue in her back pocket.

The back will slide open on hinges still well-oiled, revealing a passage down into darkness. It’s filthy, so does it need to be cleaned too? That will be foremost on Anita’s mind as she enters, cell phone flashlight ablaze.

She has never heard of the Findlay Vault, the legendary trove that Sir Thomas Findlay III supposedly hid on the grounds. Anita has no idea that the room she is cleaning and airing out was the young Master Thomas IV’s room, untouched by his grieving mother who was one Sir Thomas’s young bride, until she died. No one had been in that room, in that wardrobe, in the nearly 70 years since Master Thomas IV had perished and his father had disappeared.

Anita will follow the long, cool stone tunnel, perhaps once used to smuggle Roman Catholic priests. She will follow it to the Findlay Trove, long undisturbed. And the light of her flashlight will play over the mummified remains of Sir Thomas, surrounded by the riches he hoped to take with him into the next world.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Ellis was eventually caught, of course–even the scion of a rich clan cannot forever kidnap horses from the stables of fellow Social Register families. What was less clear was what he had done with the animals, thoroughbreds all, which could not be found in either the Grissom family stables or anywhere on the black market.

Eventually, the police found a false wall in Ellis Grissom’s private stables, and behind it a hidden room with all the makings of a tannery, with the equipment to skin, tan, and condition leather. In one corner was Ellis’s old wooden rocking horse, his most prized childhood toy and, it was later found, the subject of nearly all of Ellis’s 13,000 journal entries.

The rocking horse was nearly completely covered by leather made from the tanned hides of thoroughbred racers, with only a small patch near the muzzle incomplete.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Twenty-four wrecks in twenty-four hours
And those are just the ones reported
Strange how close the students’ joy
Always seems to mirror the oblate ball
They pretend to watch, corner of one eye
While drifting off on gin-scented wings

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Hey there sports fans! We here at the University love tailgating and football as much as you do, so we have put together this list of handy safety tips for your first big game weekend. Go team!

1. Arrive to the game early. It can take up to 3 hours to move through heavy traffic on a major game day!

2. Only alcohol purchased onsite is allowed in the stadium. The booze will know if it is in the wrong place, and may cry out in pain.

3. Tailgating starts no earlier than 6pm the Friday before the game. Violators must give the University a Friday of its choosing in the future.

4. Masks are forbidden at all games. Though you hide your face, we know your soul better than you yourself.

5. No weapons may be carried on campus. The human body is a weapon, the most dangerous one of all.

6. All University buildings will be closed on game day. The secret whispers to unlock them are known solely to the cleaning staff and may not be overheard by sane ears.

7. Be aware that there may be cellular and data outages due to high demand. Human emotions, rising skyward like death rattles, envy the shining silver threads of cellular signals and seek only to end them.

8. Do not run. It will not help you, should the beast awaken.

9. Somewhere on campus, there is a patch of dead grass with a radius of 11.11 inches. No one must ever enter it.

10. If you suddenly feel the air temperature drop by 39.1 degrees centigrade, run. Do not look back, for what is coming cannot be seen with sane eyes.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

“And that’s what planned giving means for you,” finished Mr. White. “Planning for a bequest in advance makes it easy and painless.”

He could have been named for his perfectly bleached smile, his shimmering skin, or even the waves of whitecaps cresting atop his perfectly coiffed head. But Miriam saw right through all of it, and through his seersucker suit besides, to the mosquito within. The university called him a development officer, but in Miriam’s eyes he was a looter, there to take her for everything she was worth under the banner of a university she detested.

“Thank you for coming all this way,” she said, sweetly. “You know, I met my husband at the university, God rest his weary soul.”

“I saw that, I’m sorry for your loss,” Mr. White said, smile still gleaming.

“It was in ‘92, so you’re a bit late for that,” Miriam said with a hint of battery acid. “You know, all the time we were dating, people had the most terrible things to say to us. They called him a race traitor, said he had the jungle fever, called me a gold-digger n-…well, you can fill in the rest of that for yourself.”

“It was rough in the pre-integration days, wasn’t it?”

Miriam glared at Mr. White. “I graduated in 1976, son. Integration was 15 years before that, and a good 10 years after most other places, I might add.”

“All the more reason to make the campus better with your generous gift.” Like a tried and true salesman whose commission depended on it, nothing she snarked had any effect on him.

“Let me think it over,” she said. “In the meantime, though, I do have a bit of planned giving you can take back with you, so you won’t have driven all the way out here empty-handed.”

“Oh?” said the development officer. He had a donor form out and a pen clicked before Miriam could even continue.

“Up there on the shelf,” said Miriam, gesturing to a rack of dusty curios. “You see the stone head? The Olmecs called it Tiquetzalitza, the Bringer of Rewards. It was given to my husband as a gift after we did an excavation in Tuxtla and donated the artifacts to a local museum instead of looting them.”

Mr. White eagerly filled out the form, asking a few additional questions and snapping a few photos. “This will have a place of honor in our university museum,” he said. “Thank you. And you’ll consider a monetary bequest as well?”

“Call on me in a year and we’ll have a cup of tea over it,” said Miriam, smiling.

In a year she would be dead; the cancer would see to that. And without whispering the name of a new owner into its stony ears, the Olmec Idol of Tiquetzalitza would regard its new owners as thieves. It was made to curse conquistadors with ill luck and poverty, something that had worked so well that they had given it back to its rightful owners three hundred years ago.

With the entire university as the guilty party, that was planned giving indeed.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!