At long last, Tales of the Unreal, Volume 3 from
is here! A thrilling new anthology from our favorite pulp revivalists, this time with a golden age sci-fi twist. What follows is our own David Herod’s submission to Tales of the Unreal, Volume 1. Pick up the latest anthology to see his newest pulp tale: “Star Sheriff Adventures”.Read Tales of the Unreal, Volume 3 for FREE
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Reader Unbound
Pity me, the poor reader, left to wander and wonder lost in a dream without end — for the waking dream may only be put to an end in one way — and in this dream I read a book without end, so how could it end? It dwells in me still, that mess of yellowed pages unbound from a glue which lingers like warm ice down the gutter of its inner spine. Folded corners, a cold draft flutters its loose sheets to the floor, yet its shadow looms as a headman's sword over me.
I found this book, this book which owns my mind, in the unlikeliest of places. Not in a bookstore, antique shop, or the dusted storage of some obscure collector — for such places have wardens to mind their gates. The book of which I speak came upon me quite by accident at an estate sale. That day we had shuffled, myself and many strangers, through a dead man’s home (a recluse and hoarder by all appearances) and assessed each of his dear trinkets for their fair market value. Choking dust for air, the dim glow of a window pane taped over with newspapers darkened by years of filth and sun stain. I blinked at what would become my singular obsession; it sat atop a guéridon table within arm’s reach of a mold creased recliner. The gilded script on its face simply read: A Treatise on Jean Bouchard.
The contents of the book are irrelevant, an academic distinction for your purposes, but suffice to say it was autobiographical in nature and handwritten by the titular Jean Bouchard, an apparatchik of the colonial authority of Niger in his era who, in a self inflicted exile of sorts, resorted first to living amongst the natives in their urban warrens until he was forced to flee on account of a warrant from his former employer for the bribes he had been accepting to maintain his reputation as a high-stakes parlor cards player. He fled deep into the African bush and pledged himself to a blood cult of self professed shape-shifters, an affiliation of outcasts and half-wild men; the cult is known by modern records as ‘The Human Baboon Society’, but never did those words pass M. Bouchard’s pen. His writings were one of a kind, exceedingly old, out of date — or so some would say. But some ideas are called that, out of date, without becoming incorrect if you understand my meaning.
An amateur historian myself, I was scarcely able to still my quivering fingers long enough to press a knot of small bills into the consignment official’s hands. That night I withdrew to my divan, an island of incandescent light amid stale darkness, and read page after page of the treatise. My palms sweat through age soured paper as the story grew in its derangement and I experienced in livid detail the author’s fall to alcoholism, depression, and unspeakable depravities of flesh and soul — sanity slipping as he violated sexual and cannibalistic mores in pages of flourishing prose, crooked personal notes made in margins overgrown to dominate entire pages, and hastily drawn diagrams of what appeared to be interlocking lunar, human, and baboon-man life cycles.
But then, with dry lips, I turned the page to my death. First I felt only curiosity as mid-narrative the turned page showed itself to be blank, and then the pages continued on unmarked for the remaining twenty pages — each one bare vellum yellow. I rolled them over, again and again, in a slow dawning realization. I read the book again from the start — feverish, for surely the sun must have risen by then although I have no memory of it — but again the book ended in nothing.
No, I realized the truth. The pages were not just blank, they were unwritten, unplanned, incomplete, and forgotten by an uncaring author who thought nothing for all the poor fools who would read the damned thing. A fool like me, like you perhaps. I must have screamed, for my mind swam so furiously that my vision blurred, and I truly remember nothing until I woke on the floor the following evening.
A stronger man would have thrown the hateful book into a fire that very moment. And yet M. Bouchard’s world lived in me. I had bitten deep enough to cut my lips on the barbs of a stolen June plum’s seed, seen bodies drawn burning in sunlight over the bloodletting stone, and tasted manflesh raw and wet down the sides of my lips before my brothers and I threw our knees high at wild midnight fire dances.
All this and more I had lived, and I languished in it all — in his cruelty towards me. Unfinished, unresolved, unkind to an audience who indulged his selfish whims, acted as willing pupils to his every word until at the promise of finality we were abandoned! I will not lead another living soul astray to this haunting absence of finality.
And so I beg you, forgive me for burdening you with this book’s existence, and when the end does take me do not steal the treatise off my threadbare divan. Instead take my nail raked walls as a warning and let the book moulder with my remains in obscurity. For I cannot stop reading it — it occupies my unsatiated mind even now; my only solace is in returning to that dark journey each night to put the inevitable hollow conclusion from my mind for a time.
If you do read it I am no longer accountable, for you know you risk becoming lost in the dream as I have, a man wasting away as if chained in the depths of some medieval dungeon, worn ragged by his own company without relief. Let those who love life avoid my miserable company, my fate, and read only that which is complete in its entirety.
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Nice work, reminds me of Borges.