Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“He is imprisoned, you see, in a temple of nightmares. Every brick is a night terror, a primal fear pored over in the wee hours and given shape by subconscious dread. For some, the prison is a small one. A single room. Others, those who have known true pain, true fear, true darkness…they can make labyrinths, you see. Walls of living pain.”

I must have looked very old, then, and very tired in the harsh light of the monitors. “You’re saying he’s lost, then.”

“Lost? No. We know where he is. Getting there is possible, if difficult. Finding him is tricky, not impossible. But…”

“But?”

“But it is convincing him to leave that will be the hardest part.” Alyce also looked rather poorly by the artificial light as she looked through the glass at his body. “A temple of nightmares can become rather homely if you spend every day there. If you built it.”

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Once upon a time, two twins lived in Trondheim in Viking Norway. They were known as Byog and Byob Halvorsen, and while they made their livings as hunters, their primary notoriety about the Trondheimsfjorden was their great love of, and incredible appetite for, alcohol. Byog Halvorsen preferred beer, Byob Halvorsen preferred mead, and together they could be found drinking, singing, and carousing whenever they were not out hunting.

One day, a dispute abut which beverage–mead or beer–was superior caused the brothers to break into angry fisticuffs. The fight, which lasted a whole day, wound up with both Halvorsens locked away for disturbing the peace. Speaking through the bars of their cells, the two brothers made a wager: whomever could return a year hence with the best written endorsement of their chosen drink would win, and the other brother would have to pay a year’s supply.

Time passed, and most townsfolk forgot about the whole incident. But the brothers did not, and their increasingly bold boasts in the weeks leading up to their contest resulted in a fair number of spectators. Byob went first, proudly producing a note from the Bishop of Nidaros in favor of mead. But Byog, grinning, then flashed a missive from the King endorsing beer. Byob protested that the King was a foreigner, a German prince ruling from Denmark and therefore biased, but the crowd declared him the winner.

Angry but true to his word, Byob Halvorsen promised to secure a year’s supply of beer for his brother. Byog, for his part, paid to have invitations posted around town for a grand celebration that would use up the supply in a single day. When the day came, though, no beer was forthcoming–instead, all the partygoers brought their own, providing the year’s supply and sharing generously with one another. Byob had cleverly convinced them all, through word of mouth, that they should bring their own drinks because he had been unable to acquire beer of a high quality. He therefore was able to pay off his debt to Byog and please the partygoers without paying a cent.

In recognition of his achievement, any party where guests bring their own spirits was, forever after, known as BYOB.

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The stockings, the tinsel, and more
Went down through the basement door
In those boxes they’ll sleep
A silent vigil they’ll keep
‘Til Xmas bells ring once more

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In my dream, I was walking through a frozen forest. Fresh-fallen snow, pristine icicles on the trees, and a white glow that swallowed up every bit of sunshine into a comforting haze.

I should have been cold, but I was not. The snow was undisturbed by my passage, and I left neither track nor trail. Warm and dry was not how I expected to feel, but I kept on.

There was a figure in front of me, moving into the distance. I could not see them clearly, nor make out any identifying detail, but I felt that I had to find them, stop them, speak to them. Yet the harder I pushed myself, the farther away they drew from me.

I began to see troubling signs, too. Snapped branches, not broken through passage but out of malice. Small animals, broken and bloodied on the driven snow. And, carried on the air, the echoes of dire mutterings. Mean-spirited attacks on the different, the less fortunate. It reminded me of someone even as it repulsed me, even as it drew me still onward to find out who I was following.

Perhaps, I was just afraid that I was following a shade of my future self, seeing in the dream-quarry the shadows of something I had once been, and did not desire to ever be again.

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Deeper, and deeper still. This part of the house is old and dark and ancient. No one lives here, not in this part, and the staff cleans it perfunctorily, by rote, and only once in a great while. They work in pairs on the brightest days, for the shadows are long and limber here, and there is only strong light to keep that dark shape flitting across the periphery of your vision from emerging.

They won’t talk about it, the staff, not because of any threats or recrimination but because they feel that giving the shadows names, giving them currency, gives them power as well. But none of them have escaped the feeling of being watched, none of them have seen only static shadows, and none of them has been spared the sense of helpless fear as beings, formless but for eyes of burning coal, creep out of the darkness.

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“The liquor is in the back, in boxes,” drawled Harrison. “Boxes’re labeled. Shelves’re labeled. Just keep everything topped off and that’ll be that.”

Colin looked at the gas station’s dizzying array of intoxicants, which ranged from cheap to cheap but pretentious. “You need a whole temp just for that?” he said.

Harrison squirted his cheekful of dip from one side of his mouth to the other with a sound, and a vision to go with it, that made Colin thoroughly queasy. “You got a family?” he said.

“Of a sort,” Colin said.

“You seeing them this month?”

“Most likely,” Colin said. “Free meal, after all, when you’re living on a temp’s paycheck.”

“Well, it may surprise you, Mr. Evans Jr., but I also got me a family. A big ‘un. And there is nothing on God’s green earth worse than them. Probably even worse for you, seeing as your people have to cook for folks who think gratitude is a kinda flower,” Harrison said. “You know who gets me through it?”

“Your wife?” Colin ventured.

Harrison turned to the shelves, peeling three bottles off and shoving them into Colin’s arms. “Mister Jack Daniels, the Reverend Jim Beam, and His Goddamn Majesty the Crown Royal.”

Colin shifted the bottles uneasily in his arms. “Ah,” he said. “I think I get it.”

“You learn the shapes of those bottles by feel, Mr. Evans Jr., because you’re gonna need it.” Harrison turned away. “Get ready. I’m opening now.”

At the click of the latch, Colin had barely gotten the bottles back on the shelf when the liquor aisle was flooded with people. None of them acknowledged him, not the three mothers, two grandmothers, or the uncle with a shopping basket over each arm. They just shambled over, filled their hands and all other receptacles with wine and whiskey, and shuffled off. Within five minutes, the box wine was already out, to say nothing of the Jack and Jim.

Colin took ten minutes wrestling fresh bottles and boxes out of the back room, and had just begun opening the when a fresh wave hit. The people didn’t even wait for the boxes to open, simply scooping them up and taking them to the register. And there were more behind them.

“I quit,” he whispered, miserably.

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The statue was monumental, seated. A king, on his throne. And, indisputably, a human being. There was no sign of the traits the legends had spoken of–no pointed ears, no spindly limbs, no inhuman eyes. The symbol that the Empire had turned up again and again in its excavations of old elven sites was carved into the stone as well, a broach about the cloak of the king, so there was no mistaking that this monumental effigy was one of them.

“It’s a man,” Scimoc whispered. “Just a man.”

Agneja laughed, ruefully. “It’s easier to kill someone when they’re not like you,” she said, as her laughter dissolved into a racking cough.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Scimoc replied, weakly. “I suppose every empire must fall, every life must end. There’s no escaping from it.”

“What will you do now?” said Agneja, hoarse. “Go tell your emperor that the thing you pinned all your hopes on was just a phantom?”

“I may at that,” Scimoc said. He sat down heavily, leaned against the cold stone of the wall, and exhaled deeply. His breath spun away into vapor. “I just need a rest first, for a little while. You won’t begrudge me that, will you? An old man who has come a long way only to find bitter disappointment?”

Agneja nodded. “Take as long as you like,” she said, settling against the frigid blocks herself. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

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“We’ve all heard fairy stories,” Agneja said. “But you don’t seem like the sort to believe in that. Why, then? Why look for elves in the godforsaken wilderness?”

Scimoc smacked his hand on one of the stones. “Is this a fairy tale to you?” he said.

“No, but what do we gain from a dead city, soon to have still more dead within it?” Agneja pressed.

“We have it from legends and old histories that the elves were long-lived, that they were not troubled by the petty squabbles that have held our kind back and turned many of our lands to ash,” Scimoc replied. “The population of the Empire is barely half of what it was before the plagues and the Brothers’ War, and there are some in the court that say we’re eventually doomed to exhaust our farmlands, to grow beyond our ability to support ourselves, and dig our own short-sighted graves.”

“The elves can’t help us with any of that,” Agneja said. “They’re gone. Long gone.”

“I’m not looking for their help.” He slapped at the stones again, more weakly this time. “I’m just looking for some evidence that somebody like us could thrive. If they built this place, lived immortal lives, and only disappeared because we killed them all, well…then maybe there’s hope for us. Somebody managed it. Maybe we can too.”

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