Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Kru spread out, whispering softly to each other in tongues that sounded gutteral to outsiders. Each left their assault rifle slung, brandishing instead what Sli had assumed to be walking sticks.

“Muskets,” Sli said. “Those are muskets!”

“Bullets are hard to find,” said the lead Kru, Nils. “Expensive. Hard to make. Musket balls, black powder…those are easy. So we use them first.”

“You’re not making me very confident,” said Sli. “Single-shot ramrod-pushers?”

“For most things, it is enough,” grunted Kru.

“Not for this!”

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“I never was good at carvin’ nothin’ but flowers. So that’s what I carve, and if any man says I ain’t fit to do it, well, I’ll carve him too.”

That’s what “Flower” Johnson used to say. A notorious knife fighter, he made ends meet with odd jobs on ranches or posses, but in his ideal moments he was known to carve beautifully detailed blossoms.

Some of them went as gifts to ladies he fancied, or as payment in lieu of cash–if Flower Johnson handed you a walnut rose and said you were paid, you were paid. A few even found their way into the hands of local children, with the rumor being that Johnson had a secret soft spot for them.

But the finest flower he ever carved was on the handle of his trusty Bowie knife, which he called Rose. Each time he got a little better at whittling, he had changed out the handle for one with a better rose, and by the time of his death Rose was a sight to behold.

In the end, though, it was Rose that killed Flower Johnson. At least in a manner of speaking.

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“Stay back!” said Chris, brandishing a gilded copy of Strunk & White. “Begone, grammarpire!”

“Bah,” said the creature, brushing the book aside. “I’m not a grammarpire, ya idjit. I’m a grampire, and I’m here to suck your grandmother’s elderly blood.’

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Kevsera would often return to the park and linger for a while amid the shadows of late afternoon leaves. She hadn’t been there as a child, but it reminded her of the idyllic green space a few blocks from her parents’ house. All her many hours running around when people were less concerned about that sort of thing came flooding back as she sat with one arm over the back of the rough wood, slouched deeply but not nonchalantly.

It certainly helped that the anonymous city park, not important enough even for its own name, was the last place on earth where Kevsera could visit.

When she had chosen to leave, there was a clear warning, a clear delineation: it was an opportunity to see places and things and times her dead-end life never could have revealed, but there was no going back. Crossing over the threshold was to leave the past, and the world that contained it, behind. The park was the only loophole, and Kevsera wasn’t even sure how it was possible.

Nevertheless, she returned often, typically not even bothering to change what she had been wearing…elsewhere. Few people came by, after all, and those that did tended to be cyclists who kept their heads down. Certainly not observant enough to notice a woman with an odd affect and on clothes slouched over a splintery bench.

Dog walkers were her favorite, rare as they were, because they were almost always willing to spare a few moments of conversation and to suffer their animals to be pet. Talking to another human, possibly the first human she’d seen in months from her perspective, and running her hands through the thick fur of a friendly animal… It was a remarkable bit of nostalgia, of normalcy, in a life that had become dominated by the fantastic.

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The bus took us through the worst of the unrest, rocking with the impact of stones and bullets, with the heavy armored sides and thick multiplex keeping the missiles at bay. An older car, ablaze, slid by as people emerged from the thick smoke wearing bandanas to press their assault.

“Do they know?” whispered one of my fellow passengers.

“How can they not?” I said. “Even if they can’t admit it to themselves.”

The port was heavily defended, but even then I could see that the lines were breaking. Tracers arced out from hastily erected fortifications, but I saw just as many soldiers desperately charging in the same direction we were, some peeling off their uniforms as the they away their weapons.

An explosion rocked the bus, knocking it back on two wheels. The driver, whose pay was a spot for him and his wife, heeled it back over like a veteran. But I could see a line of bruise and blood across his forehead where the impact had cracked his head against something or other. Our armed escort, sitting up front–and similarly paid with a berth–clutched her rifle like a life preserver, knuckles monochrome.

I caught a glimpse of the bay as we rattled toward it. The ships were already pulling out, everything that could be commandeered or put into service. They were beset by smaller launches on every side, either people desperate to board or people desperate to destroy. A bright crimson flower blossomed against the hull of one of them–an old cruise ship–and it heeled over.

“Suicide,” I said. “I’m not sure I blame them.”

A few moments more, cutting through the throngs of people who were able to make it through the armed cordon, we arrived at our dock, another old cruise ship pressed into service.

“Thank goodness,” said my chatty fellow passenger. “We made it. We’re safe.”

“Safe?” I said. “Far from it. We’re just buying ourselves the right to die last.”

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Now, it’s no tricky thing to run out on a bill, and Maya knew this. No, the real trick was to avoid paying a bill at your favorite restaurant while still managing to be able to return for later dining.

Casa de Almuerzo was Maya’s favorite spot, and she wasn’t going to let her lack of funds keep her from eating there.

First, she arrived just before their busiest crunch time–Friday night, when there was live music an a surfeit of kids from the local college looking to get a vaguely exotic drink on from overpriced Mexican beer. Next, Maya sat at the bar. Soon, she was surrounded by a maelstrom of revelers, and it was time for the second phase of her plan.

Reaching into her jacket, Maya produced a handful of ketchup packets she had snagged from the McDonald’s across the street.

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“An’ be ye warned, lad,” Guss croaked. “She’ll appear before ye in comely form, a woman o’ th’ wood as it were. An’ she’ll drip promises out o’ her lips, lad, like syrup. Spout a lot o’ nonsense about th’ power she has o’er the wood, a lot o’ nonsense about bein’ a goddess. But dun ye believe it.”

“Let’s say I did believe it,” said Jin, uncertainly. “Believed what she said, was captivated by her beauty, and gave her a knackstone. What then?”

Guss looked Jin dead in the eye. “Then you’d best hope we’re jus’ talkin’ maybes,” he growled.

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The curious thing about Vandenberg’s Arch isn’t the technique used in its construction. It’s fairly mundane masonry, built by a civilization with a firm understanding of the arch. Nor is its location particularly puzzling, as it’s within a glacial valley that’s been inhabited for millennia, with easy access to quarries.

No, the curious thing about Vandenberg’s Arch is its angle.

The arch is set into a sheer cliff side that falls down to the river below. However it goes up, and it goes up at a nearly 45° angle. If it were meant to bridge the river, there is no cliff of similar height on the other side, simply long low set of rolling hills. If it were meant to provide a way down to the valley floor, it’s most assuredly pointed in the wrong direction.

the edge of the arch is crumbled, and material has clearly fallen away at some point. But the no debris on the valley floor, nor is there any nearby, and no indication of what the construction’s original size or purpose may have been. Vandenberg himself, describing the arch in the travelogue that wound up indelibly attaching his name to it, said “it’s as if someone got it in their head to build an arch to the stars.”

There are some crackpot theories which would see him proved right.

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