"The Emperor of Nothing"

“It has been a long time,” said Llorena. “At least six months. We decided to have a child in that time-- about… I don’t know, almost that long ago.”

No one dared say anything about my story, as the officers both scooted into booth besides us. I noticed that Lily was carrying a book. It had a strangely drawn picture on it, something truly grotesque, like an old man with a nose so wrinkled it looked like it was made entirely out of wood. I inquired about the book.

“Oh, I’d just dug it out when you called. I was looking through my old stuff for things for our son. This was my favorite, growing up.” She showed me the cover, in full. There it was, on the cover, a depiction of a gnome: the nose, and indeed the whole body was so wrinkly and old it looked like he had indeed been carved out of the wood. There were many more gnomes, besides, on that cover, all behind him, like a little gang. But there was also a large shadow that stood looming over them. It looked large, almost like a football-player in stature, and yet it was amorphous, something like a Rorschach test: you could see whatever you wanted in that blob of black ink, which contained everything and nothing. “It’s such a good read, really good morals.”

I took at look at the title, then, and found that it was none other than The Emperor of Nothing. I showed the others. Miss GIlda stood up, excused herself to the restroom, and disappeared. We could hear her screaming at first, then nothing.

“Someone better check on her,” said Robert, getting up. But my wife pushed him back down in his seat and followed her.

“What’s wrong?” asked Lily.

“I don’t think she liked the book,” Roman said.

“I always loved it--”

“Well, tell us about it,” I said.

“Why don’t I just read it?” asked Lily, as she opened the book and began. “It’s good practice for when I have my son. Shed cleared her throat. “The Emperor of Nothing, by Doria Negray.

“Once upon a time, in a land far away, an even older country than the old country from which we came, there were very many magical creatures. These creatures included some that were even older than all existence, who remembered when the world itself came into being and they began to make their home on it.

“There is always a price, a balance for action. When the beings decided to leave where they were, the land before all lands, they traded away something for the privilege of living on Earth. Most of these beings traded away their morality. So it was that almost all beings on Earth began to be born only to die. But the gnomes were different. The gnomes would not give up their immortality, they would not give up the vast riches they had already mined from the world before all worlds. They gave up their age, so they were always old-- though they knew the secret of glamour, so they could appear as any age they wanted-- and when they were instructed to give up something else, they gave up their freedom, believing that through their trickery and cunning they could one day win back their lives from slavery.”

Lily stopped and showed us the first picture in the book, an intricately wrought depiction of the mythology related in the story. If it was not clearly signed at the bottom corner by Doria Negray I would have believed it to be the best Gustav Doré every drawn. Each page that we viewed was, in this way, a revelation. I do not know if I really believe those pictures were not Gustav Doré’s to this day. And I do not even know, truly, if that book was real. But it seemed so at the time. I have not, I must admit, been able to obtain a copy since, and all but one or two bookstores claim it as a nonexistent, imaginary book, like the Necronomicon or Max Beerbohm’s story about “Enoch Soames”. There have been several forgeries, sure, but none has ever been verified as authentic.

The picture showed a world carved like a puzzle, with a sort of dragon-snake eating it’s own tail along the outside. Various gnomes were shown outside of the world, stuffing riches into sacks, glancing into mirrors to see younger versions of themselves, and other such actions. In the middle of the puzzle-earth, there were many strange and magical creatures depicted, from unicorns to cyclops to even early giant humans. In the center, however, were the Gnomes, who were depicted as bound in chains.

Lily continued her story:”Gnomic slavery was established underneath dark rulers. The first vampires, for example, existed well before Cain and the other legends, though at that time they could take various different forms. The first vampire on Earth, it is said, was actually the snake that seduced Eve in the Garden of Eden.” Here, she showed us an intricately depicted version of the snake coiling up to Eve. I was sure this was a Doré, but I held my peace and let her continue the story, flipping as she did to the next page. “The vampires used the Gnomes for menial labor, keeping them chained up and making sure they did not go far off task. But Gnomes had a plan, for they played a very long game, and had held a council before they gave up their freedom. It occurred that under a vampire called Chaldea there was a very old Gnome indeed, who had been one of the first chiefs of that race but long retired from that position. His name was Protean and he seemed carved out of the very tree that connected this world to the worlds before this one.”

Again Lily showed us a picture. And again it was a perfect match for that romantic artist’s style. Here, it showed the gnome named Protean as if he were cut from the world tree itself. Indeed, it showed him stepping out of that tree that in a Nordic myth would surely be termed Yggdrasil. She turned the page and resumed her narrative.

“Chaldea was not the smartest of vampires, though he sired a very long line, including all the Merovingians and even Carmilla herself. Unlike the other vampires, who he eyed ever with suspicion that they would attempt to take his fortune and great castles away from him, he gave PRotean more or less leave to wander the lands. He barely scryed or kept an eye on his ****. And he often took naps that lasted for centuries, preferring to conserve his power for the duration. He even said, more than once, that he wished to be the only of the original vampires on earth. And with this knowledge, Protean knew he had a chance to free his people.” Another page, another line-art depiction.

“He sidled up to his master and convinced him that he could indeed rid the world of the other vampires, but he needed an army with which to do it. An army that could shapeshift, and army that could indeed play all the tricks that needed to be played on the vampires that took themselves so seriously. That seriousness, he told his master, would be the downfall of the other vampires. Their pride would cause their very fall, because they would refuse to believe such tricks were played on them. He only needed one thing, one magic word from the vampire-- because the vampire’s words, then, were considered sacred. Whatever one declared for the Gnomes would become true. No vampire had ever declared a Gnome free, but if the vampire would do so, the Gnomes would then be able to play tricks on their former masters. They would owe allegiance-- all of them-- to Chaldea. And it a very good thing indeed, Protean reminded his master, to have a large army of magical creatures.

“So Chaldea gave his word, and with that word all the Gnomes were free. And, because Gnomes must abide by their word-- just as any magical creature-- they could not harm Chaldea. But Chaldea had only promised the Gnomes freedom. He had not promised them he would treat them with the respect that he commanded of them. So, while he allowed them to run free in the world, especially while they clambered all over and tore apart all of his vampiric enemies, he also began slowly to round up the gnomes and attempt to kill them. He had forgotten, apparently, over the centuries, that the Gnomes had never given up any of their immortality. They would go on forever, as they always had, playing tricks on all the others. And so it was for centuries that Chaldea would attempt to burn Gnomes, who would return only for him to burn again. They could do nothing to him because of their oath, and they had to respect his wishes: so the Gnomes would indeed burn themselves, when caught by that vampire.

“But vampires are not gnomes, and they did give up their immortality when they entered our world. And Chaldea, the last of the Original Vampires, fell well within that description. So an ambitious man, whose name has been lost to history, one day chanced upon him and slew him, throwing him into the very fire in which he had been burning Gnomes, after driving a crucifix through his heart. But whoever killed a vampire, in the country even before the old country, gained all the powers of that vampire. They did not become a vampire, too, but that power always grew corrupt within them and it was often hard to tell the difference.

“The Gnomes at first greeted the new man as a liberator, as their hero. But they were not bound to him as they were to Chaldea. So they were truly free. But the man, who began to use the power he had gained to conquer the world, soon started to mimic many of the evil ways of Chaldea. He even began to start to burn the Gnomes. But the Gnomes, immortal as always, knew that they could now resist. And so, after removing deep into the mountains to plan, the Gnomes came together in **** and made their way through the many defences, like many headed dogs, various snake-creatures, and beautiful, deadly she-beasts to tear the shadowy presence apart. Their **** took many years. So many that they forget the name of their target and knew him only as The Emperor of Nothing, because no Gnome would swear allegiance to him and no Gnome would admit that he ruled over anything. His whole domain was nothing, according to the Gnomes, because he did not act with honesty, with kindness, and with decency. Instead, he acted greedily, and that greed, that lust for power and control over the world allowed them to tear him apart in the usual Gnome manner: through magically tumbling over him over and over and then leaping away, pulling bits of this body with them.

“Originally they tore the Emperor of Nothing into forty-two pieces. But those pieces began to rebuild and merge back with each other. So the Gnomes took many years, almost an infinite number of time to tear the Emperor of Nothing into an almost infinite amount of pieces. And when they were done, it is said, the Gnomes opened a portal to the old country, from where they kept a vigil to make sure the Emperor would never creep through the cracks. For though the portal was sealed, every once in a while another portal from the older than the old country opens. Sometimes a piece of the Emperor, enough to allow him to return, break through. But the gnomes maintain their vigil, they maintain their war against the Emperor, for they have sworn a binding oath that they will never again allow the lust for power, the greed to destroy overwhelm the Earth.”

It was the last picture that really spoke to me. It was that picture that at once solved my problem of inspiration and gave me some idea of what we might do when we returned to Nevermore to confront the problems that had chased us away from what was supposed to be our home.The picture presented the world, now looking much more like our own world, through still zigzagged like a puzzle, and showed within it various pictures of evil actions from the past centuries. HItler was depicted, for example, with Gnomes tearing him apart, showing him the very evil of his actions, forcing him to mentally burn as the Gnomes had, and as the Jews had. It showed other dictators and politicians, all with Gnomes on their backs, all cascading and tumbling after them, just as previous pictures within the book had showed the gnomes tumbling away every infinitesimally small piece of the Emperor of Nothing’s body. Around the whole puzzle-world was ring upon ring of gnomes. They did not look as old as wooden as they had throughout the picture book. I suppose their glamours must have kicked in. But each gnome looked very young indeed, and joyful to be ringing around the whole world, hand in hand.

“Eureka!” I shouted.

“What?” asked Robert.

“It means ‘I have found it,” I explained.

“I know that, but what did you figure out?”

“I know how we can bring a new toy to the market. I know what we should make. What’s the publisher of that book?”

Lily looked at the frontispiece for a moment: “Harcourt, Brace & Howe”.

“Perfect, Robert, call up HMH, we’ve worked with them before. Let’s get a new edition of the book out. We’ve got a toy to sell!”