Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Every planet plays a distinct kind of song,” Aimee read. “Jupiter a ballet, Neptune a waltz. Earth is all discordant and chaos, of course, but some would argue that’s the most beautiful music of all. By listening skyward, I am privy to the secrets of the most ancient in a language that needs no translation, no interpretation.”

Aimee paused, and bit her lip. Calvin’s writings sounded more like nascant schizophrenia than anything.

She continued: “Some music is harder to hear than others. Mercury is very faint, of course, and I long knew that Pluto was one of a larger family because I heard it as a chorus. But there has always been one thing that in turns puzzled and disturbed me.”

“Certainly not the fact that you were hearing music through a billion miles of vacuum,” muttered Aimee.

Calvin went on at length: “It’s a long and low tone, sustained but definitely mutable, distant, sonorous, strong. I thought for a time that it was the background, the great song of the universe. But it was moving, drawing nearer slowly but perceptibly. I fear a time will come, not long hence, when this song will fill the night sky. Our discordant musique concrete will first be subsumed, then annihilated.”

“The name on the check is Lena Lehmann, but everyone around here knows her as Lorraine Lothringen. Well, to her back at least.”

Lorraine Lothringen? The name sounded familiar. “Didn’t she do some pin-ups in the 40’s and 50’s?”

“Yup,” the electrician said. “My dad had a stack of ’em from the war. He had me bring one by to sign the first time I got called out here. She wouldn’t, though. Locked herself in the bathroom and screamed about how it wasn’t anybody’s right to remember all that stuff from all those years ago.”

“Pretty sure me and my dad have a right to remember whatever we damn well please,” Hansen said. “Why’d you come back?”

“Because the money’s good. Ms. Lothringen pays well and tips better. I heard she socked away all the money from her modeling years and is living on the interest. You play your cards right, she’ll put you on the list and give you a call anytime her drains clog.”

Hansen raised an eyebrow.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” the electrician laughed. “For one thing, she’s about 85. And for another, she quit modeling to marry a rabbi.”

The first child onstage, dressed in faux buckskin with a raccoon cap, looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. “D-Dis-Disgusted by the Missouri Com-pro-mise in 1820, Charles Dalton led a group of 100 families west to the Oregon Country. They wanted to found a city that was true to their idea of the Yew Ess Con-sti-tooshun.”

“Sounds like somebody learned his lines by rote,” Vincent whispered.

“Hush,” hissed Charlotte.

The next kid, also in buckskin, made a better show of it. “When they reached the valley of the Ide, Dalton and his followers came across a waterfall and build a mill. That is when the lost town of Prosperity Falls was founded. The town fathers established four rules for the people to live by.”

“There’s Vickie,” Vincent said, gesturing to the second of four children in cowboy outfits entering the stage. “Hi honey!”

The young pageanters called out the founding principles of the lost town one at a time:

“Everyone’s equal: ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t matter!”

“Disputes get solved peacefully: no war, no violence!”

“Respect for the natives: settlers and Ide tribes trade and get along!”

“Self-sufficiency: Prosperity Falls makes everything it needs!”

The monestary at Los Acantilados had stood for centuries, built by conquistadors from the rubble of a destroyed settlement as the fulfillment of a promise to a Franciscan who had died in a native attack. Water had to be carried nearly two miles every morning thanks to the strategic masterstroke that had saved those men, beset on all sides by those whom they hoped to conquer: collapsing the nearby well with their stores of gunpowder. The area had been frequented by earthquakes ever since, but the Franciscans always repaired and rebuilt.

Father Domingo had been surveying the damage from the latest quake, which had roused many of the friars from their slumber, when he fell through the rectory floor. his companions mistook his cries for agonized moans, and hurried to fetch ladders. It was only when they reached the bottom that they found he had been shouting not from pain but astonishment.

The cavern was filled with golden artifacts of totally unknown provenance and manufacture–the very treasure the founding friar of Los Acantilados had perished attempting to find.

Sunrise was the time for getting things done upstairs.

Hall stood ramrod-straight on the edge, drinking in the light streaming in from the horizon. It was like a cold shower: focusing, piercing, pure, with that same bite of chilled air rattling about with each breath. Every distraction littering the mind was swept away like so much refuse, a hundred little problems put to bed so the larger ones could be tackled.

“He’ll know I’m coming,” Hall said, closing his eyes. “He’ll know I’m coming, but he won’t be ready.”

He rose off the rooftop as he spoke, levitating skyward–gently at first, but then with gathering speed and purpose.

“No one will.”