Excerpted from "The Darksider Chronicles Book One: The World on a String." Material is Copyrighted and may not be used without permission of the author.  

Introduction

The following narrative literally fell out of the sky.  Last spring while I was rounding up strays in a remote coulee on the family ranch, my horse stumbled onto a split-open, partially-buried strongbox. By the look of things, the chest plummeted from a great height before cratering into the ravine.  The force of the fall and subsequent weather wrecked some of the contents, but most of the scattered papers and tape cassettes nested safely in the sage and bunch grass.  Chokecherry branches caged a few fluttering pages.

The second I laid eyes on that busted strongbox, my curiosity jumped clean off the charts.  Where did it come from?  Who lost it?  When?  Was somebody hunting it?  What was on all those tapes?  I jammed my coat pockets to bursting with cassettes, then picked up as much of the rest of the outfit as I could locate and cached it under a rock outcropping.  I pitched my mare a loose rein and we covered that last mile to the home place in Kentucky Derby time.  As soon as she skidded to a stop in the corral, I yanked off the saddle and bridle, sprinted to the ranch house, and plopped a cassette into my tape deck. 

I flat out could not believe my ears!  Plumb mesmerized, I listened for hours to the eerie voices as each cassette played three times from start to finish.  By then, I knew only one thing: every person in America–hell, the whole world–HAD to hear what was on those tapes.  A zillion thoughts ricocheted too wildly around my brain for sleep, so I hatched a plan to publicize my discovery.  At first light, I steered the Jeep up as close as I could get to the coulee and then spent the day combing through the brush for every last scrap.

Revealing what I’d heard on the tapes meant somehow transferring those voices to the written page.  That job proved tougher than I ever imagined.  I converted the bunkhouse into a kind of lab and hired a posse of professors, linguists, technicians, and the like to help me restore, catalog, and transcribe the tapes.
 
-Sagebrusher, 2006

 

What's next?
Read excerpts from:
Screwover, the Master of Ceremonies, on the purpose of the Darksiders and their Award Ceremony.
Gotrot, the Head Archivist of the Dark Agenda Bureau (DAB), about privatization and why Darksiders love the American version.