In the Court of the Yellow King (14 page)

“Just... don’t leave me down here, okay?” Penny added. “Wait for me to come back.”

They nodded and gave her a flashlight and a crowbar. She walked up the steps, took a deep breath, and pulled open the heavy metal door. Her flashlight illuminated nothing but unadorned black walls inside the temple, but then something gold shone bright in the beam: another of the strange symbols, this one on the far wall.

Penny stepped inside, gripping the crowbar in case something came flying out at her from the darkness.

The floor beneath her gave way. She shrieked as she tumbled down a stone chute, first in darkness, and then in a blue, indistinct twilight –

– she fell onto her hands and knees on a hillside. Instead of grass, she’d landed on a thick mat of gray lichens.

“Clumsy!” her mother exclaimed.

Penny looked up into the strange woman’s face and felt herself smile in recognition. “Sorry, Mama!”

Her mother helped her to her feet and they dusted the gray flecks of lichen off her clothes. These hands were not hers, nor the body. Inside this strange new self, Penny reeled. Everything was weird; the air had an unhealthy fungous taint to it, and in the sky – the sky! – there hung a trio of strange, misshapen moons, and opposite the setting sun three black stars rose, their bright coronas gleaming through the streaked clouds.

“Come, Cupra, we better hurry,” her mother said. “Your father will be home soon.”

The girl took the strange mother’s hand and stepped back onto the rocky path toward home. Her old life as Penny and the horrors of Fensmere were rapidly fading away in her mind as if it had all been naught but a daydream;
this
is where she belonged, here in Carcosa with her loving mother and father. She remembered her childhood upon the moors and playing along the shore of the cloudy sea, of going out with her mother to pick herbs and fungus for food and dyeing cloth. Their baskets were full of the most precious mushrooms that produced the royal yellow dye, the colors of the mysterious King and his court, and woe would befall them should any of the nobles be displeased with their craft.

Cupra had heard tales of the King; the whole of Carcosa feared him. She’d seen his minions at the market in town and they were gaunt men and women with faraway stares, quick to anger and quicker to kill. Her parents told her that they were gentle as the spring wind compared to the King himself, and none could so much as look upon the King and maintain their sanity. Cupra had nightmares of the King sometimes, but when she was awake, a tiny part of her thought it must be very exciting to be one of the few who had seen him and lived to tell the tale.

It was nearly dark when she and her mother reached their hut upon the moors. Cupra got to work sorting the lichens and mushrooms onto their drying tables behind the fireplace, and her mother started chopping root vegetables for a stew.

The door banged open. “Ho! Where’s my girl?”

“Papa!” Cupra sprang up from her workbench and ran to embrace her father. He caught her in a mighty bear hug, lifted her off her feet and swung her around as if she were a small child. His great red beard tickled her forehead.

The tiny part of her that was still Penny basked in the love like a seedling feeling sunlight for the first time. There in the cozy hut with the lovely smells of her mother’s cooking, wrapped in the strong warmth of her father’s arms, she was the happiest she had ever been in her life. In that perfect moment, it was as if a door inside her soul had been opened, a door that led to the best possible person she could be. She felt a joy as pure as gold and heady as whiskey.

But then she felt a chill, and there came a slow, thunderous knock at the door.

Her father set her down and quietly shooed her over to her mother’s side.

“Who’s there?” he called, gripping his hatchet.

The door blew open on a gust of icy air, and there stood the King in his scalloped tatters. A pallid mask obscured his features.

“It is I,” the dread King replied in a voice that made Cupra want to tear her ears from her skull. “I have come for new fabric.”

“It... it’s not ready yet, my liege,” her mother said, her voice trembling.

“That is... unfortunate.” The King made the barest motion of his hand, and her mother’s and father’s heads split right down their middles as if they’d been cleaved with invisible mattocks. They fell where they stood, their dark blood spilling across the tidy floorboards.

Cupra wanted to scream, wanted to run, but she found herself rooted to the spot, unable to utter anything but a faint strangled noise.

The King moved toward her, so smoothly it seemed he floated like a ghost. “It’s a dangerous thing to fall into the path of a living god, but then you’d know that, wouldn’t you, little changeling? Little dimension-hopper. Little murderess.”

“Why?” she managed to gasp, staring down at the bodies of her parents.

“Your Lord works in mysterious ways.” He took off the pallid mask, and she recoiled from the monstrosity she saw beneath it. But the worst was his eyes: they were the same terrifying black as the dark stars she’d seen upon the horizon.

He leaned down and gave her a kiss, and suddenly that dreadful darkness was flowing into her mouth, down her throat, filling her very core, and she knew this was a living curse.

She stumbled back, retched, but the darkness would not leave her, and when she looked up again, the King was gone, and she was alone with her slaughtered parents.

Her world destroyed, Cupra fled. Where could she go? Her mother’s sister lived in Carcosa City. Perhaps she would take mercy on her. The girl ran two miles to the city of tall towers, but the guards at the wall barred her entrance.

“You bear the curse of the King, and you may not enter,” the first guard told her, solid and immoveable as a stone in his gray uniform.

“But he killed my parents; where can I go?” she pleaded.

“Go find someone who could love the likes of you,” the second guard said. “But that is surely not here.”

Despondent, Cupra turned away from the city gate, but a beggar in grimy rags called out, “Hoy, girl!”

Cupra approached the beggar. “Yes?”

“Lost your parents, did you?” His tone was sympathetic.

Cupra nodded, heartbroken.

“Go to the kingdom of the South. The King and Queen there are known to love all who enter their realm.”

And so Cupra walked for days and weeks, living off what edible lichens she could find, drinking what dew she could collect in leaf-funnels overnight. The darkness inside her was as heavy as a mountain; she felt she was always a moment away from tears, but as time wore on it became harder and harder to cry. Sometimes, she’d come to a town and try to find a doorway to sleep in or a scrap of discarded bread, but a guard would always find her and chase her outside the city limits.

She was but skin and bones when she reached the border of the Southern kingdom. As she crested the hill outside the kingdom’s gates, her eyes widened as she beheld the line of ragged people on the red carpet that stretched across the barren valley below her, all waiting to be admitted to the green meadows and fruit-heavy orchards beyond the gates.

Cupra climbed down the hill and took a spot at the back of the line, half expecting the people around her to start pointing at her and shout her away back into the wilderness, but nobody did. The others were just as thin and ragged as she, just as travel-weary, just as desperate. They couldn’t see past their own miseries long enough to realize that she’d been cursed.

The line moved forward, but it soon seemed people were just pressing up against the front gates rather than moving through. The crush of bodies made her nervous, made her think about abandoning the line entirely, but she heard beastly howling and realized that someone had released huge dire wolves that were pacing just beyond the red carpet, eyeing the people hungrily. Each monstrous canid wore a red, brass-spiked collar decorated with the royal crest of the Southern kingdom.

“Prospective citizens!” called a woman, her voice floating like music over the crowd.

Cupra looked up, and her breath caught in her throat. Atop the kingdom gates stood a man and a woman dressed in silver and silken sky blue robes, and they were both the most beautiful people she had ever seen. In that moment, Cupra had hope that if she could just be in the same room as the King and Queen of the South, she might find her happiness again, and the curse of the King in Yellow might be lifted.

“We are honored that so many of you wish to join our kingdom,” the handsome king said.

“We are a kingdom of love, and once you step through our gates, you shall need nothing else!” the beautiful queen declared. “You will never be hungry or thirsty again, because you shall not need food in our land, only our love.”

“Therefore, to prepare yourself, we ask only that you remove that which you shall not need.”

Two soldiers carrying large leather sacks began traveling down the line handing something out to each person in the line. Cupra wondered what it could be until a soldier pressed the handle of a very sharp knife into her hand. She stared down at the shining blade, wondering dumbly what she was supposed to do with it.

“Do you love us?” asked the queen.

“We love you!” cried the crowd.

“Do you want our love?” asked the king.

“Yes!” the starving people moaned.

“Then hollow yourselves,” the queen ordered. “Be rid of your distasteful entrails. Hollow yourselves, and we shall fill you with our love.”

A man near the front of the line screamed.

Another cried out, “Ah, it hurts, my queen!”

“If your love for us is true, you will be strong, and you will survive! Only those whose love is false and weak shall fall and be fed to the wolves.”

Shrieks and wails rose all around Cupra as the desperate people began to hollow themselves in hopes of gaining the love of the beautiful king and queen. The darkness inside her ached like molten lead as she stared down at the knife blade. All around her, people fell to the rocky ground outside the red carpet – now, finally, she knew why it was red – and she could hear the snarling and rending of bone and flesh as the dire wolves put those who hadn’t quite managed to hollow themselves out of their misery.

“Girl.”

She looked up, and a blue uniformed soldier upon a dappled gray warhorse loomed above her. He pointed his crossbow at her. “Don’t you feel the love?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I do feel it.”

Cupra plunged the blade into her belly, and the darkness spewed forth from her wound, the darkness of a million poisoned stars, and it flooded the whole landscape, sweeping away the soldiers and wolves and miserable people. The gorgeous king and queen screamed and tried for higher ground but there was none to be found, and they, too, were swept away in the black ocean.

Finally, the darkness receded, and Cupra stood alone in the wasteland, mutely clutching her wound.

Alone but for the King in Yellow at her side.

“Well done, my child,” he said. “Carcosa has but one King, and I shall stand for no others.”

He paused. “Tell me, child. You came here as your last hope, and you found nothing but death. Is your spirit broken? Have you lost all faith?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good,” he replied. “Then I have one last task for you. I’ve been to that planet of yours, and I think I’d like it best if the only sounds were the wind in the dead trees and the waves crashing upon empty shores.”

He gave her a shove. The ground opened beneath her and she tumbled into a great dark chasm –

– Penny landed hard on her back inside the temple, trying to pull the crablike creature off her face.

Just relax and
open your mouth
, it whispered inside her mind.
Be
a good girl and it’l
l all be over soon.

Keeping her mouth clamped shut, Penny struggled to the bronze door and kicked it open.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” she heard Jay exclaim.

“Don’t just stand there; help her!” Georgia shot back.

The others finally pried the creature off her, and they beat it to death on the concrete with crowbars and baseball bats while Penny coughed and gasped for breath.

“Miss Penny, are you all right?” Georgia asked after it was clear the creature was dead.

She nodded, rubbing her throat.

“What do you reckon you want to do now?” Bessie asked.

“We can’t ever let anyone go in there ever again.” Penny nodded toward the basalt temple.

“Should we get some bars to put across the door?” Georgia asked.

“We should burn it,” Penny told the women who had labored in the mansion for years in near slavery. “Burn down the whole place to the ground and if it leaves a hole we fill it with concrete.”

“Why, bless your heart. I believe that’d be my pleasure to do that very thing.”

Camilla: Oh please, please don’t unwrap it! I can’t bear it!

Cassilda: (Setting the wriggling bundle before them.) We must. He wants us to see.

Camilla: I won’t look. I refuse.

Cassilda: It squirms like an infant, but how soft it is— like a worm.

Camilla: Its lips move... but it makes no sound. Why doesn’t it make a sound?

Cassilda: (Giggling now.) It cannot. Its mouth is filled with flies.

The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 4.

n chaos, I found purpose. In bedlam, there was purity of vision. That is the skin of my story. And the blood and meat of my little tale is that you can only hide from insanity
w
ithin
the cloak of insanity. This will make precious little sense to those of you who’ve never opened the book—blessed are the meek and ignorant—but to those of you who have (and you are many, aren’t you?) it will make all the sense in this world... and out of it.

Now let me confess, let me expose the yellowed bones of my tale. Once the idea occurred to me, I had no choice but to see it through and do those things that were demanded of me. Let’s call it a cold, blind compulsion. That will sit easier with most. A mental derangement, an insanity, a stark mania. With that in mind, listen: on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning, I gave baby Marcus a bath. I sudsed him up and rinsed him thoroughly because a clean baby, so soft and pink and fine-smelling, was a happy baby. As he gooed and gurgled, the madness pierced me like hot needles. I tried to shake it from my head and I tried to shiver it from my body. But I couldn’t get rid of it anymore than I could shed my own skin. So, I leaned there against the tub, a sweat that was foul-smelling and cool running from my pores.

It was communion. Something—I dare not say what—had made me part of it. I had been named, chosen. And in my head, a voice, a very soft and smooth voice said to me,
The King comes
now. He comes for wh
at is his and you ar
e made ready.

In my head, a fathomless darkness sucked my mind into nether regions and I saw black stars hanging over a gutted landscape. My hands were no longer my own but instruments of something malevolent that crowded the thoughts from my brain. They—the hands, looking jaundiced and almost
scaly
in the weak bathroom fluorescents—seized Marcus by the throat and held him beneath the sudsy water until he stopped moving, until his cherubic face was erased and replaced with that of a bluing corpse-child, lips blackening and pink skin mottled, eyes like staring black holes looking straight into the vortex of my soul.

Once the act was complete, I sat there, tears running down my face.

Sobbing and whimpering, I studied the hands that had just murdered my darling little boy. I studied them in detail, knowing they were not my hands but those of another, one that did not belong but crept in silent, silken moonlight. Baby Marcus sank like a rock. That is crude, but perfectly descriptive. He would resurface, I knew, when the time was right. And in my horror, I could almost envision that moment: his puckered face breaking the tepid, bubbly water like lips parting, his voice cutting deep into my brain like a scalpel.

The hot needles burning deeper, fed by the kindling of unspeakable guilt, I opened my wrists with a razor, staring at the corpse of my baby drifting like a swollen dead cod at the bottom of the tub. As blood bubbled from my gashed arteries in scarlet rivulets and freshets, I dipped a skeletal white digit into the ragged, spurting inkwell of my left wrist until it was dyed a brilliant red. The vibrancy of my glistening fingertip fascinated me. Without further ado, while the ink of life was still wet and running, I sketched out the form of a simple stick man on the white tile wall of the bathroom in slashes of crimson. It wasn’t until I had drawn in the ruby blobs of its eyes and the tattered mantle blowing out from it that I began to scream. For it was then that my stick figure became something much more and I saw it move as it has moved in my nightmares ever since.

As I slowly came out of it, there was panic. Night-winged panic that filled my brain like mulling bats. It filled my mind until it seemed I had no mind. Grimly, with great burning intensity, I held onto my sanity as reality flew apart inside my head and out of it. I screamed again. I must have screamed for I heard a voice echoing amongst the black and uneasy stars that pressed in from all sides. The walls of the room were gone. And when I looked up, there was no ceiling, there was no roof above, only the inverted sickle of a scarlet moon dripping its black blood onto my face.

Later, after my neighbor called 911, I was stitched-up—much against my feeble will. My neurotic soul sought death and death was denied it. So be it. I was held in the psych ward where I regularly had to be heavily sedated and restrained because I saw the haunted onyx eyes of the cold dead thing in the tub and they created a grim alchemy in my brain. I told the staff feverishly about
The King in Yellow
, how Act II had thrown open the doors of nightmare perception and plunged me screaming into a phobic void. But they would not listen. And the more they would not hear my words, the more certain I was that they already knew them.

I was incarcerated, of course. While the courts decided what to do with me, I underwent some two months of recuperation and intensive therapy. At the close of which, I was brought before the police psychiatrist for yet another interview.

“Why?” he asked me. “Why did you do it?”

“If you have to ask that, then it’s beyond your understanding.”

He smiled gently as if I was something to be pitied. “Enlighten me.”

“Enlightenment is dangerous.”

He had no idea how close he was to the abyss and I would not be the one to give him the final push. I studied the scars on my wrists. They had healed into pink whorls, spiraling pink whorls that captured the eye and drew it deeper into Archimedean complexity. It was there that I saw that which no man or woman should ever see: the Sign. It was sketched on each wrist in an intricate weal of healed flesh. Once my eyes had discovered it, I could not look away. It owned me and I knew that my service to the King had only just begun.

The police psychiatrist pegged me with questions, of course. He was intrigued that Marcus’s father—dear, lost David—had committed suicide and that I had no family and no friends. He was only doing his job and I tried to be helpful. I did not want to involve him in the greater cosmic horror of the things I knew to be true, the things that had forced David to put a noose around his throat. Keeping with that, I kept my wrists out of view and when he asked questions whose answers might be dangerous to him, I remained mum. But he was insistent. As he jabbed, I parried. It was exhausting subterfuge, but in the end I would not confess the secret of the Hyades.

My next stop, of course, was prison. I was sentenced to ten to fifteen years. I was not alone there; many of the women had killed their own children and some had killed the children of others. At night, they would rage and cry and beg God for deliverance but there was never any deliverance. There was only the cool concrete silence winding out interminably.

One night, as I lay there beaded in the sweat of fear that the darkness always brought, a drug trafficker named Mother McGibb started calling out to God for forgiveness. Not just for herself, but for all the animals in all the cages squatting in the dirty straw of their lives. And maybe He heard her because a violent storm gripped the prison in its teeth. The more Mother cried out for divine intervention, the more the torrential fury outside built. The wind screamed and sheets of lightning flashed in the sky as rain lashed those high gray walls.

“SISTERS!” cried Mother above the cacophony of the storm. “SISTERS! HEAR WHAT I SAY! THE LORD IS VENTING HIS WRATH FOR WHAT WE HAVE DONE AND THE SIN IN OUR HEARTS! BOW YOUR HEADS AND MAKE PEACE WITH HIM SO THAT HE MAY COME UNTO YOU IN THE FINAL HOUR!”

Some of the women cried out for her to shut up and others rattled tin cups and hair brushes against the bars of their cells. It was quite melodramatic. Soon, it seemed, everyone was awake and frantic, crying out in anger and remorse as the thunder boomed and the prison shook like a wet dog. The wind was howling and I was certain it was calling out the names of the incarcerated. The scars at my wrists burned interminably.

“HE HAS A PLAN FOR THIS WORLD!” Mother shouted. “AND HE WATCHES ALL FROM HIS LOFTY THRONE IN THE HYADES! HE WILL ALIGN THIS WORLD WITH ALDEBARAN, FOLLOWER OF THE SEVEN SISTERS! MAKE HIM WELCOME! TREMBLE BEFORE HIM! ACCEPT THE LIVING GOD SO THAT HE MAY LAY HIS HANDS UPON YOU!”

The lightning was flashing interminably by this point and rolling thunder echoed down the sullen corridors of the prison, punctuating the fearful voices of the incarcerated. I was shaking, mouthing the words of Mother McGibb even though they tasted like poison on my tongue. It was then that my cellmate, Gretta Leese—doing twenty-to-life for multiple homicide—took hold of me, wrapping her arms around me as if I were a child frightened of the dark and what lurked in it (which was very true).

“Don’t listen!” Gretta said into my ear. “She’s a false prophet and her words are iniquity! The god she calls out to is not the god of anyone sane or righteous! Don’t listen! Do you hear me?
Don’t listen!”

But even though Gretta clamped her hands over my ears, I could hear the words of Mother McGibb just fine, as if they were spoken in the hollows of my skull.

“WE SHALL LOOK FOR THE SIGN, SISTERS! HIS SIGN! THEN WE SHALL KNOW THAT WE ARE AT ONE WITH HIM! THAT THE SON OF HASTUR WALKS THESE LANDS AND THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF MAN SHALL BOW THEIR HEADS AS HE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR! WE SHALL BE BROUGHT FORTH INTO THE BODY OF THE PALLID MASK AND WE SHALL MAKE OFFERINGS ONTO HIM AND GIVE PRAISE TO THE KING IN HIS TATTERED MANTLE!”

By that point, the guards had had more than enough of it. Mother McGill was told to quiet down and when she didn’t, they hauled her down to solitary where, I heard, she continued to rant and rave. But I didn’t need to be told that—the stigmata of my wrists burned throughout the night.

Month after month, the prison psychiatrist picked and pecked at me in search of some tasty red meat, trying in vain to understand my inner workings, the motivation for my crime and (what she called) a deep-set delusional disorder. She was convinced the wellspring of it all was David’s suicide. Although I advised against it again and again, she insisted on hypnotherapy. Our first few sessions were a complete bust. Then, on the third or fourth try, I came out of it and she began asking questions that I dared not answer. She had jotted down things I said while under—“the Pallid Mask” and “darkest Carcosa” and “Cor Tauri, the Festival of the Bloody Heart”—but I refused to comment on any of it. In fact, to my credit, I acted as if I had never heard of such rot and practically accused
her
of multiple delusions.

But I was not completely stubborn. I tried to be cooperative when and where possible. The psych badly wanted to understand me and my psychosis. The way she spoke of the latter, you would have thought it was a living, breathing thing like some immense, fear-swollen parasite or an evil conjoined twin. She found it perplexing that I, an apparently loving and kind single mother, well-educated, well-bred, and quite successful, could commit such a crime, as if status precludes one from darkest folly. I parried with her a bit, telling her that when things were so right they had a way of going so wrong. But she was no fool. She wanted answers and she planned on having them, even if that meant slicing my brain wafer-thin and putting it under a microscope. She had a great deal of passion for my dilemma and I was pretty certain that she had some scientific paper in mind that would win her accolades amongst her peers. I understood ambition. She wanted to know the root cause and I explained it to her (in the most general and antiseptic way). It was the book,
The King in Yellow.
I had discovered it in the historical collection of St. Aubin’s College. As a full professor of Medieval History, I had access to those things which were denied others. I read the book, knowing quite well its fearsome reputation, and suffered the consequences. She claimed that the book did not exist and its namesake, the King himself, was a fantasy. I explained that for those who were chosen (
cursed,
might be a better word), he was occasionally visible in the distorted glass of certain antique mirrors or in pools of October rain. I had once glimpsed his numinous shadow at sundown, an immense and ragged form hovering over the city. I could tell her no more. Already, I knew, the ether of this world was beginning to fracture.

That the King was close, I did not doubt. That he was reaching out for me was a given. That became very apparent to me one summer day as we trimmed weeds amongst the graves at the prison’s potter’s field. Here were acres of withered crosses and crumbling sandstone markers invaded and sometimes engulfed by infestations of devil’s gut, hairweed, and woodbine. We spent the better part of a week cleaning it all up. Creepers had even grown up the wall of the little stone mausoleum. I was one of those who peeled the knotty growths free and when I did, revelation of the worst sort awaited me. For there, etched into the wall, was the very image I had drawn on the bathroom wall in my own blood that terrible night: the King. He was a stick figure and nothing more, but as I stared upon him, he became three-dimensional, fleshing out like a flower blooming until I could see the juicy running orbs of his eyes that bled like crushed berries and the vibrant colors of his tattered mantle drew me in closer and closer until I heard my own voice say,
“Oh, please, King, not aga
in, not so soon.”