In the Court of the Yellow King (21 page)

“‘
So
ngs that the Hyades
shall sing,
’

“‘
Where fl
ap the tatters of th
e King,
’

“‘
Must die unh
eard in dim Carcosa.
’

“The corridor behind the sigil melted and swam and I was given another glimpse of the forested landscape beyond. The robed figure still stood on the battlements of the high castle.

“And once again
The King in Yellow
turned his masked gaze upon me.

“Despite the protection provided by the pentacle, I felt cold creep into my very spine. Jephson’s whispering seemed to come from somewhere inside my own head, burrowing its way into the dark recesses of my mind.

“‘
Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
’

“‘
Di
e thou, unsung, as tea
rs unshed,
’

“‘
Shall dry
and die in lost Car
cosa.
’

“The yellow sign drifted forward again to touch the edge of my defenses. As if I had suddenly focused a telescope, the robed king seemed to fly forward towards me until he stood there in the corridor, grim and tall in tattered robes, just beyond the sigil. His clothes flapped and fluttered in time with Jephson’s voice. The blue valve flared and pulsed, attempting to combat the yellow, trying to force it away into the darkness.

“The robed figure stepped forward and put his hand on the sigil, pushing it ahead of him, forcing it to clash with the pentacle’s defenses. The corridor lit up like a lightning storm in flashes of blue and yellow. Electricity crackled all around me.

“Jephson’s voice rose to a shout.

“‘Unmask!’

“The figure reached up to the wrinkled cloth over his face, at the same instant pushing the sigil, hard, towards me with his other hand.

“The blue valve blazed, flashed and exploded in a bolt of azure lightning. The yellow sign fell apart in a myriad of fragments that glittered and danced, vanishing before they hit the floor. The robed figure reached for me, the yellow mask the last thing to disappear as it faded into wispy smoke. Then it too was gone.

“Jephson screamed, one long despairing cry of agony that cut off sharply.

“My battery hummed slightly louder, then died, the pentacle falling dark.

“Silence fell in Bedlam.”

“I checked on Jephson once I was completely sure all the excitement was over. He lay on his back in the center of his room, gaze still fixed on the same spot in the corner of the ceiling, but he was quite, quite dead.

“The nurses took over as I cleared away the pentacle, and by the time I had the box ready to transport they were already moving the other patients away from the top floor.

“Most of them seemed to be in some kind of catatonic state, but one chap appeared to take an interest in me. He looked me in the eye in passing, and once again I felt a chill pass through me as he spoke.

“
‘The shadows l
engthen in Carcosa
.’”

Carnacki sat back in his chair, his tale obviously done.

“Dash it, man, “Arkwright said. “What the blazes was that all about?”

Carnacki smiled.

“I cannot rightly say. But I believe I have had a damned close shave, for if I had caught even a glimpse of what was beneath that yellow mask, I might well be replacing Jephson in the vacant room. Just be thankful the peril seems to have passed gentlemen. And if you ever come across that blasted play—do not read it.”

He ushered us to the door without further explanation.

“Now—out you go.”

illie, just keep talking to me,” Frank said into his headset as he cracked open another Mountain Dew while watching the Lakers game on the muted television to his left. “Come on, you called because you wanted to talk, right?”

Billie was one of the regulars at the suicide prevention hotline Frank volunteered at. He usually ended up talking to the perpetually depressed seventeen-year-old girl two or three times a month. She never seemed sincere about taking her life, just very sad. Still, it was hotline policy to never, ever ask anyone who called if they were serious about suicide. Everyone had to be treated like they were literally out on the ledge at the moment of the call, even if most of them, like Billie, were just lonely and desperate to have someone listen to them, if just for a little while. Still, it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

Frank knew all about sorry.

He shot a quick glance at the black rubber bracelets on his wrist as he pulled the can of Dew from his lips. He felt too old to still wear such gaudy things, but they did a decent job of covering up the scars.

A soft, wet sob came through Frank’s headset and that caused him to stop drinking the sugary go-juice mid-swallow. While Billie always sounded sad, she had never cried before.

Better safe than...

“Billie? Talk to me, girl, what’s got you so upset?”

Low sobs was all he heard.

“Come on, no matter what it is, if you talk to someone about it, you’ll –”

“Bullshit.” It was a thick, phlegmy word.

“What’s bullshit, Billie?”

“All of it. Everything. Life,” Billie said and then snuffled.

“No, life is not bullshit, Billie,” Frank said, the hairs on the back of his neck starting to rise.
Is she for real this time
?
he asked himself, while he continued, “life is all we’ve got and it’s a beautiful thing. So whatever—”

“Oh bullshit! You don’t know. You don’t know where I’ve been, what I’ve seen.”

“No, no of course I don’t,” Frank said on autopilot as his mind raced behind the scenes.
She sounds really
bad. Do I hit the pa
nic button and let t
he cops handle this?

All calls to the suicide hotline were routed to the volunteers at their homes from a central hub downtown. There was no office where people went and took calls at a switchboard. Not in this modern, wireless, and always connected age. Everyone who helped out on the hotline had a laptop provided to them, and the calls were sent through it. At a press of a button, Frank could send the caller’s phone number directly to the police where they could hopefully trace it back to an address, or use the cell phone’s GPS, if they had one. Frank was only supposed to hit this “panic button” if he felt the caller was beyond being talked down from the metaphorical ledge. Since he had started volunteering on the hotline over a year ago, he had never had to press the button.

Shit, what do I do?

“See, you’re not even listening to me,” Billie whispered.

“No, no, I am, I swear it. It’s just... look, I know what you’re going through. Really, I do. I’ve been there myself and well, I made a bad decision once. A real bad decision, one I hope you don’t ever make. That’s why I do this now. I want to help others so they don’t do what I did, because I got lucky, but many don’t get a second chance like I did.”

Frank stopped to let Billie respond, but for a long, cold moment, all he heard was the girl’s breathing. Then, “So how did you do it? And how did you fuck it up?”

“That’s not important, I just wanted you to know that I do know what you’re—”

“Tell me!” Billie shouted. Then, in a whisper, she added, “Please.”

“I slit my wrists.” Thinking about it always made Frank’s scars itch. He was sure it was some weird psychosomatic crap, but knowing that didn’t do a thing to stop the itch. “I got lucky, because the woman who was leaving me at the time happened to come by to pick up some things she had forgotten when she moved out, and she found me.”

“You tried to kill yourself over a woman?” Billie said with a hint of a grin in her voice. “That’s pathetic.”

Good, keep her talkin
g, joking, anything.
Frank thought. “Yeah, I know that now, but at the time I was in a very dark place. Who knows, it might have been a cry for help, attention, I don’t know. My shrink thinks I was trying to guilt my ex into staying with me, and if so, I can say now that was pretty lame on my—”

“So...” Billie interrupted and then stayed quiet for a long time. “When you did it... when you were dying, did you see anything? Like a light or something?”

Frank’s stomach became a cold, hollow pit as unwanted memories came flooding back to him. “What?”

“A light? A color? Anything?” Then in a monotone devoid of any humanity, Billie added, “I would give anything to see some color. Everything is so damn gray now...”

Frank heard a clunk and recognized it as the phone being put down on a table or counter. He called out to Billie, but got no answer. He heard metal scraping on metal and the sounds of whipping wind. Another memory rose to the surface of Frank’s mind, something Billie had offered on one of her first calls into the hotline: she lived on the ninth floor of an apartment building. “Billie!” Frank shouted into his headset as his finger jammed the panic button. Then a scream came over the phone. It was high-pitched, full of fear and tinged with anguish. As Frank listened to it, yelling the girl’s name into his headset, he heard it fall away and then suddenly stop.

Afterwards it was about how Frank always guessed it would be, should something like that happen. First the police had come and asked a bunch of questions. Chief among them: they wanted to know if he recorded the call. When he told them no, they wanted to know why not. Having to explain the law to cops was always weird, and they never liked it, but Frank had to tell them that if they recorded the call, they would have to let the caller know that they were right at the start. When other suicide hotlines had done that in the past, most of the callers hung up. So no, it hadn’t been recorded.

Next came those that ran the hotline. Two together in person, lanky, always smiling Matthew Carpenter and pretty, red-headed Lacy Dwyer, who together had co-founded the hotline, and two others, Jamie and Amber, individually on the phone. None of them blamed Frank for what happened, or if they did, they didn’t say it to him. They were sure he had tried his best and had done everything by the book. They asked if he wanted to talk to a counselor about “the incident,” as they all called it. That was such a nice, neutral phrase they were no doubt instructed to use whenever this happened. The hotline even offered to pay for the therapy. Since Frank was already seeing a shrink every other week, he politely declined. That didn’t stop them from pressing the issue. Someone even told him that “an incident” like this happened to another hotline volunteer just last week, and she found the counseling very comforting. Still, Frank said no.

That night, after everyone had gone and he was alone again, the bad dreams started. He was expecting them. After all, he had just heard a young girl kill herself, and despite what the hotline people told him about not feeling responsible, he did. How could he not? He supposed that was a good thing. A very emotional, human way to feel, but that didn’t make it suck any less.

Thankfully he didn’t remember the dreams. He just kept waking up all through the night feeling uneasy and sick. He would then toss and turn in his bed for an hour or more before drifting back off to sleep, only to wake up after a few more fitful minutes to start the cycle all over again. The one thing he did recall from his failed attempts to sleep was something Billie had said: “When you were dying, did you see anything? Like a light or something?” That was the thought he woke up to every time, because yes, he had seen something back when he slit his wrists. However, he had spent more than a year convincing himself that what he saw that night was nonsense. Just synapses misfiring in a dying brain, isn’t that what the doctors and scientists said about all near-death experiences? Still, the memory was there, itching in the back of his mind.

Three days after “the incident” and the weather outside had changed to match his mood. Gone were the famous blue skies of L.A. In their place was a dull, dripping, gray more suited to Seattle.

Frank sat at his desk, a cold can of beans with a spoon sticking out of its open top to his left, a piss-warm can of Mountain Dew to his right, with plenty of the soda’s empty brothers lying scattered around his feet. A new addition to his desk was an ashtray already filled to overflowing with crushed-out butts. He had quit that nasty habit three years back when his apartment building had done the very Californian thing and gone totally smoke free. It was now easier for him to buy and smoke marijuana in this city than tobacco, and that was a thought that would have caused him to laugh just a week ago.

Tonight was Frank’s return to the hotline. The people who ran it had originally told him to take some time off after “the incident,” a couple of weeks at least, but today Matthew from the hotline had called. After a few awkward moments of “How you doing?” he sheepishly asked if Frank could cover a shift tonight. One of their volunteers had taken some unscheduled personal time yesterday and another simply didn’t report in for her shift tonight. That left the hotline in a lurch, and so if Frank was feeling up to it...

More to prove something to himself than out of any loyalty, Frank now had his headset on and was staring at the open laptop. Dread slithered around in his guts like an eel, and his recent diet of whatever he could find in a can sure wasn’t helping matters. Then the first call came in. It was Martha, a retiree and prisoner – to hear her tell it – at an old folks’ home. She was much like Billie had been: a lonely soul looking for some kind of companionship, no matter how brief and impersonal it was. Thankfully, that’s where the similarities between Martha and Billie ended. The call lasted twenty-two minutes and ended without incident.

T
hank God
, Frank thought as he leaned back in his chair with an almost forgotten expression on his face: a smile.

Eleven minutes later he got a second call.

The man called himself Tyler and he sounded young, maybe still in his teens, and right from the start, Frank had a bad feeling about it.

“They took it all away,” Tyler mumbled into the phone after Frank got his name and asked how he was doing.

“Took what, Tyler? And who?”

“The colors, man. Everything bright is just... gone. It’s all gray now. Everything and everyone is gray. Even the textures. Whatever I touch is cold, lifeless, and filthy. Whatever I eat or drink is flavorless. I’m stuck in a fucking world of gray.”

“Okay, Tyler, I’m going to ask you something, don’t take offense, but I have to ask: are you on anything right now?”

“None of that shit works anymore,” Tyler wailed in despair. “Man, I’ve taken every sort of upper I could get my hands on and nothing changes. I still feel like I’m all used up inside and I’m just too stupid to lay down and die. And everyone I see around me is just like me: a hollow, rotting shell. Ashes, man, ashes and dust everywhere. Because everyone’s already dead—you, me, everyone, but nobody gets that.”