Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Korton on the River Kor, safe in darkness beneath the gaze of Køs, the star whose rays bring light and death in equal measure. It was not always so.

Once, the plains of Laïs were safe for all dreamers, and Korton was as their beacon, a shining city with a culture to rival any other. The Nameless Ones watched, as they watch everything, with their own inscrutable machinations.

The great Library of Korton has long since been closed and dispersed, its books traded away to sighted lands and replaced by those written in the pebblescript that all in Korton now use. But once, it had a million, ten times a million, books, and among them was a tome that the Nameless Ones did not desire mortals to look upon.

Some call it the Book of Angels or the Winged Tome. It is also often called The Wager, for it is believed to carry in its pages a copy of the compact that Light and Dark, Life and Death, signed to wager for the souls of the dreamlands.

The Nameless Ones knew immediately when it had been opened and read by a curious scribe.

Terrible Køs appeared in the sky the next morning, a day star visible both in light and in darkness from the length of Laïs. To bathe in any noonday light contaminated by Køs, whose name means simply Destruction in the old dreamtongue, was almost certainly to die.

No one knows how the Nameless Ones made their compact with Korton, trading life for light. It is said that the Dark itself appeared as an intermediary, visible over the distant hills, to negotiate in a voice that drove all who heard it to the brink of madness and bearing a visage to terrible to describe.

By the time Korton’s salvation had been secured, half of its people were dead or insane.

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

O’er the City of Bronze
The beaming sun breaks
Light reflected infinitely
A warden against the darkness
When the dunes close in
As they ultimately will
She will be watching still
Smiling

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

As throngs strode by
The sultan, sweating
Beneath bronzed armor
The sun, beaming
Secure in its wager
Even a heatstroke death
Is a victory

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

Roberta was a teacher, but left that gig when her kid’s books started selling. I guess you could say that she was sort of like the M.C. Escher of children’s literature; she loved her some surreal landscapes, impossible angles, and of course, mice. Mice were in every book she wrote, peeking out here and there from the mazes, lurking in the background of every story, and just generally making you wonder if there was an exterminator in the house and whether Ms. Atkins might not want to bow to the inevitable and just get a cat. The thing is, the mice were never the stars of the books. The stories were all about children, at least until they stopped being stories and started just being surreal picture books by the end of her career, but the mice were there nevertheless.

Another thing that Roberta could do was make jewelry. She’d done it as a teacher to make the ends of her meager salary meet–all you teachers out there listening know how that is, having to get your side hustle on just so you can keep being taken for granted by little brats and yelled at by their parents for including books on the reading list that feature anything resembling real people. Ms. Atkins was a pretty dab hand at making jewelry, to the extent that she handmade the covers to all of her books–they weren’t so much drawings as photographs, you see, if you’ve never had the opportunity to read one. Go check out your local library, I guarantee they’ll have at least one of them if they have any kids’ books at all, and you’ll see what I mean.

So Roberta Atkins eventually decided that she was sick of doing books, and decided to do a computer game instead. So in the early 90s she founded a company called Musoft, which is a really delightful pun if you speak more Latin than I do. Mus, mouse, plus soft, software. She was a clever one. Anyway, Musoft published its one and only computer game in 1993, called A Golden Tail. And here’s the thing that makes it really interesting. The cover of the box was a mouse necklace made out of 25-karat gold. And calling it a necklace really does a disservice to the thing; it’s almost more of a collar. Ruth Bader Ginsberg would be happy to wear this mouse when writing a minority opinion. And the game, it’s said, contains secret clues on where to find the actual golden mouse itself!

Yeah! During the press tour to promote the book, Roberta Atkins said that she buried the original necklace–the one from the cover of the game–and if you figured out the clues in the game, you could uncover its location, dig it up, and have a prize that she claimed was work about thirty thousand dollars in 1993 dollaroos, which would be even more today after a recession and two Republican presidents. The solution to the puzzle was entirely different, it was said, from the solution needed to complete the game, and “anyone with a head for puzzles and a fondness for mice” –her back-of-the-box quote, not mine–could find it.

And here’s the thing: nobody ever did.

The game sold really poorly because it happened to come out on September 24, 1993–the same day as a little game you may have heard of called Myst, which was also a puzzle game. But A Golden Tail had far higher system requirements, more than most machines at the time could muster, and Roberta Atkins hadn’t published a children’s book in years while she was developing the game, so her brand was kind of out of gas at the time. Only about 10,000 copies were sold, Musoft closed its doors, and Roberta Atkins never published another thing in her life. She’s the one in the asylum, by the way, and I say that because it’s the last I could find of her in the news: a 1998 headline, “CHILDREN’S AUTHOR COMMITS SELF.”

As far as anybody knows, Ms. Atkins is still there. And as far as anybody knows, her golden rat is still buried somewhere, with the secret to its location known only to the author and anyone who can unravel the puzzle in an obscure and poorly-selling 1993 computer game. Now can you see why I’m so interested in this for tonight’s podcast?

It took me a while, but I found a sealed copy of A Golden Tail on eBay. We’re going to unbox it on this podcast, and then I’m going to play it live and see if I can’t find me a golden rat for my retirement years.

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

Two deities met
In the midst of a dream
One made of laughter
The other of screams

“I wear the sun on my brow”
The lighter one said
“A worm’s all I need”
Said the god of the dead

“Let’s make a bet,”
Said the god of the light
“To see which is better,
the dark or the light”

“I agree to your terms,”
The darker god said
“And add but one more,
with a feeling of dread.”

“The contest you make
is rigged in your favor;
I want to even the odds,
make it something to savor”

He turned to his brother,
the god of the sun,
nodded agreement and said
“Add but one.”

“This is my change,”
the deathly god cried
“Let humans be judges,
by choosing a side”

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

And yet…

And yet.

Le Aaiun recuperated in the City of Bronze for nearly a year, working on her book in every waking moment. In this work she was assisted by the scribe and storyteller Ad Dakhla, whose work makes up the final two chapters of Le’s book.

Dakhla, who had fallen in love with Le, speaks of how he entered her chambers with salves and fresh dressings for the traveler’s many injuries one evening as he had done many times before. He found Le in shock, and had great difficulty in coaxing what she had seen out of her.

“It was as if I, myself, were in these chambers, radiant and beautiful in a way that I never could be and have never wanted to be,” said Le, according to Ad Dakhla. “I was dressed in flowing robes and seemed at peace.”

“Surely it cannot have been thus,” Dakhla records himself as saying. “Did you ask this intruder who they were, and what they wanted?”

“I did, and she did not answer the question. Instead, she told me a tale with all the appearances of a fable, about how for every person who ascends the infinite slope, there is one who turns back and one who continues – two halves of a whole.”

“That does not make sense,” said Dakhla. “It was your companion who continued, not you.”

“I never had a companion,” said Le. “All had died. Perhaps I was lying to myself. Perhaps I really was carved in twain by the terrible power of that place.”

Dakhla, worried, went to summon the doctor. When he returned, the room was empty. None of the guards had seen anything other than an exceptionally bright full Dreaming Moon.

Le Aaiun was never seen again.

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

The Holzoff Range is impenetrable for nearly all of its massive length, with sheer cliff faces, bitter winds, and vicious wildlife along nearly its entire length. Le Aaiun, writing in her travelogue, told of one place where ascent was possible – above the dead city at the head of a dead river.

While the usual perils of the Range were present on all sides, the path leading upward was merely a gentle walk. In fact, the walk was so gentle that Le, along with the last surviving member of her expedition, did not realize that they had begun following a path that was divorced from the ground itself, an infinite upward incline stretching toward the great welcoming face of the Dreaming Moon.

Now, anyone who has ever ventured into the dreamlands knows the legend of the Dreaming Moon, upon which sits fabled Vloles. When once quarreled the shining light and insidious darkness over its beauty and immortal gifts, they could only agree that it should be forever set beyond the ken of mortal dreamers. The ancients of that dead city had, it seemed, found a way to override this—and in doing so may have sealed their own doom.

Le and her companion had gathered all their remaining supplies to try the ascent, but they soon found everything giving out. The time came to choose: continue on toward the prize, or turn back. Le’s companion chose to continue, while Le herself turned back on bitter terms.

She was the only survivor to return, half-mad and half-dead, to the ken of mortals.

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

The massive City of Aaiun has but one surviving bridge linking its two halves over the salty and corrosive river that divides them. It is located west of the point where even the hardiest metal boats will rapidly deteriorate, and was therefore used by Le Aaiun herself to travel between the two shores. On the bridge, roughly a quarter of the way across, she found what appeared to be a steam locomotive, stopped forever.

While such machines are not unheard of in the dreamlands, their uses are rare and certainly none was so ancient as the City of Aaiun appears to be. Stranger still, there were no tracks to be found on the hard, onyxian stone from which the bridge was made, not even under the vehicle’s wheels. Le asserted that, either the machine had its tracks torn from beneath it, or been deposited there by some unknown force. “I do not know which possibility disturbs me more,” she wrote.

The river moves underground not far beyond this bridge, while the precipitous cliffs of the Holzoff Range loom to the west. The city was built before, and straddles, the only known pass through the rocky maze.

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

One of the first to return unharmed from the great dead city at the head of the great dead river was a woman named Le Aaiun, and as a result of her account, many have taken to calling the city ‘Aaiun’s City’ or even simply ‘Aaiun.’

This is as fitting an appellation as any, as none who now live know–or are willing to speak–the name of this place.

At its most extreme end, the dead river occupies the bottom of a large canyon carved over millennia, with major parts of the city separated by a yawning chasm. Le, in her account, describes the difficulty in traversing this barrier, with a very short and abortive journey to the far side requiring two days’ march and consuming many of her valuable untainted provisions. She did note that the two shores were connected by ‘spiderwebs’ of rope so ancient and fragile that they crumbled at a touch.

Whatever the method used to bind the two sides of Aaiun’s City together once, it is clear that the north shore was quite different from the south. The south shore was residences, apartment blocks seemingly grown rather than built out of dream substrate. The north shore consisted of what Le described as ‘laboratories,’ with many seeming to be used for various sorts of research that the explorer herself was too traumatized to relay.

Le herself only writes: “What I saw in that blasted and cursed place convinced me not only that the knowledge gleaned there had been terrible and unforgivably vile but that it was now lost and should remain so. I have no proof, but I suspect that the great sandstorm that birthed the Dreamsand Sea and the poisonous and fuming condition of the Dead River can both be traced here.”

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

The southernmost border of the Dreamsand Sea is marked by the Dead River, so called because the same cataclysm that turned the verdant plains to sand also caused its mighty waters to run salty. The water is far saltier than any other body known to the dreaming or waking world, and thus its name. No creatures live in it, and parched travelers from across the sands who succumb to the urge to drink are typically dead within a day.

At its far end, the Dead River drains into the Silver Sea by means of a great, parched delta full of treacherous quagmires and gigantic crystals of pure salt. Most travelers cross the river either at the great bridge just before the delta or wade through it at the Crystal Fords. Few venture further upriver than the Fords.

Westward, the river gradually heats up until it is visibly smoking—a caustic, smoldering brew that is high not only in salt but in sulfur and acids. The water never reaches a boil though, for all its fuming.

Follow the river even further, near its headwaters, and one will find a vast and abandoned city occupying both banks. This place, which has no name that any now living remember, is larger than the City of Bronze, Korton, and any other city one would care to name combined.

It is also incredibly dangerous. The water near the city is corrosive enough to eat through the hull of nearly any vessel, and causes horrific chemical burns to any who touch it. There is no water and no food to be had for many leagues in any direction, as the city is buried in sand on its north shore and overgrown with poisonous plant life on its south. Worse still are the angry shades of the place’s former residents, always keen to expand their numbers.

Nevertheless, many have sought this nameless and dead city on a nameless and dead river. Its mysteries are compelling, as are the persistent rumors of treasures to be found there, and it has claimed twice as many souls as have ever returned from it.

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