Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026
Gary Wittkow, a teenager with a petty criminal record, wakes up in a sheriff’s holding cell babbling in what turns out to be Old English, apparently the victim of some mind-altering substance. Rattled enough to break his street code, he gives up the details of what happened the night before: a gathering of high school kids beneath the bleachers at Harding High, convened under the authority of Craig Collier, a former varsity quarterback who recently quit the team citing “irreconcilable philosophical differences.” The kids have assembled an eclectic pile of books, which Craig sorts through with the authority of a connoisseur, rejecting phonebooks, Bibles, skin magazines, and textbooks as unworthy.
Presiding over this gathering is a strange little man who goes by “the Professor,” operating out of a converted school bus called the Flying Parnassus, its sides unfurled into shelves of old and antique books. He dismisses the copy of A Separate Peace that Gary offers and substitutes something finer before placing it under a glass isolation dome fitted with hoses and a gas mask — a homemade vaporizer. Gary hits the contraption expecting nothing and wakes up hours later in a cell. The kids have been getting high on literature, inhaling the vaporized essence of books through the Professor’s machine.
Sheriff Fetterman sends deputies to round up the other teenagers and leads the rest of his force to the Murchison farm, where they raid the Flying Parnassus, seize its 3,289 volumes, and arrest the Professor — real name John Gooseflesh, per an expired Oregon driver’s license. No drugs are found, only books and the suspicious device. A routine search triggers a call from the FBI, and a nondescript agent arrives to interrogate him. She is methodical and unimpressed, but clearly knows more than a standard federal case would warrant.
Their interrogation unfolds as a philosophical duel. The Professor argues that books are the original drug — explosives that blow up small minds — and that his device delivers whole lives and entire worlds to readers who have had their time and attention colonized by commercial entertainment. The agent counters that his machine has side effects and that his collection contains stolen rarities: a Bay Psalm Book, incunabula from the Thomas Prince Library, a Shakespeare folio with unattributed plays, and a copy of Bacon’s Essayes that should have gone down with the Titanic. She hints at a prior incident in which a client vaporized an entire used bookshop and vanished, leaving every page blank.
When the Professor agrees to demonstrate his device, the agent straps on the gas mask herself. The vapors hit her hard — a bucking seizure that takes two deputies to interrupt. When she recovers, she kisses the Professor on the lips, declares the device a harmless fraud, and drops all charges. She wheels the machine out herself. Outside, the Flying Parnassus is already burning, torched by “concerned citizens” while firefighters watch their phones. The Professor’s bus is gone; so is the agent, who the FBI later confirms was never one of theirs. Both she and the vaporizer remain at large — and the Professor is left at the Greyhound stop, his library in ashes, his machine stolen, and the toadskin edition of The Parnassus on Wheels somehow a little lighter than before.
Cody Goodfellow has written eight novels. His first two collections, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action, each received the Wonderland Book Award. He wrote, co-produced and scored the short Lovecraftian films “Stay At Home Dad” and “Baby Got Bass.” As an actor, he has appeared in numerous short films, TV shows, music videos and commercials. He is a co-founder of Perilous Press, and lives in San Diego, California.