In the Court of the Yellow King (32 page)

It was the actions of Cordelia which most disturbed me. She paced nervously, gnashed her teeth, and clenched her fists as she did so. That she wanted to tell me something was obvious, for she started toward me on more than one occasion, but then seemed to think better of it and turned away. The Phantom of Truth, a gauzy thing with only the hint of a face, haunted her. It had eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear, but no mouth with which to speak.

If the phantom haunted Cordelia, then The Stranger stalked her, or perhaps he stalked the whole family. He lurked in the background, moving amongst the shadowed curtains. He had the run of the stage, and would disappear from one spot and then suddenly appear in another. These actions were most disconcerting to Cordelia and Uoht, but for the twins Camilla and Cassilda it seemed more of a kind of game. The two girls screamed, but then as they ran their screams turned to giggles which caused Thale to frown.

Eventually, in a sudden rush, Cordelia overcame her hesitancy and ran to my side. It was only then I realized that I was wearing the Pallid Mask. She looked into my eyes, grabbed me by the shoulders and brought her face up next to mine. I could smell the rosewater that she used as a perfume, and the sequins on her own mask nearly blinded me with their scintillating reflections.

Her breath was hot in my ear and her voice was panicked as she whispered softly and desperately the same words Evelyn had said to me before she killed herself. “Have you seen the sepia prints?”

I woke in a cold sweat, my heart pounding in my chest.

The next day I made my way through the crowds to the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra which was on the western side of the theater. I carried with me the folio, secured inside a leather pouch. From the outside the library was impressive, a kind of pavilion that was attached to and mirrored the design of the main structure. However, as impressive was the exterior, the interior was just as ghastly, for it was not only poorly lit, in a manner that only libraries seem to manage and the French have taken to an art form, but also unwelcoming. It was cramped: great shelves and cases lined the walls and extended up beyond the lamps into the darkness. There seemed to be a plethora of spaces at which one could work, but these were covered in manuscripts, papers and dust. As far as I could tell there were no other patrons. The library was empty save for me and the man behind the great reception desk.

He was old, perhaps an octogenarian, bent with age, smartly dressed, and by all evidence a well-educated man. He asked me if I needed assistance. His request was odd in that it came in English, and he laughed at my obvious surprise. “You Americans think that you look like us, or at least the British. You don’t. Your clothes are cut differently. You’re overfed. You walk oddly. You stand differently. You may look like us, but you aren’t us, and we can see that.”

I smiled at his candor and recalled how I talked the same way about European women. “I was hoping you could tell me about this?” I opened up my satchel, took out the folio and handed it to him.

“Young man I am Moncharmin, I am the curator here. If I cannot help you, no one can.” He flipped through it, and though he did his best to conceal it, I could see that he was genuinely thrilled to be handling the object. He paused at the title page and made a hissing noise presumably at the stamp that identified it as property of the library. This was followed by a disappointing “Tsk,” when he almost immediately saw the missing pages. With a flourish he closed the book and raised his eyes to mine. “Where did you get this?”

“A girl I knew had it,” I said. “A girl named Evelyn. She killed herself yesterday. The book, the photographs, seemed important to her.”

The old librarian nodded. “I knew Evelyn, a girl of some talent vocally. She came here often to read, and study the archives. I am sorry to hear that she is dead. Though given what she had been studying, her death is not surprising.”

“Why do you say that?”

He closed his eyes and pursed his lips, obviously mulling over how much he was willing to tell me, if anything. “Please. You will follow me.”

He stood up and pushed his way past me. I don’t know why I followed him, but as he moved through the door and down the hall I seemed to have no choice. The old man had mesmerized me. Through the stacks we went, winding through the shelves and cabinets of books and papers. There was a door, a thick wooden thing with clasps of black iron. He unlocked it with a thick brass key that he pulled from his vest pocket. Beyond in the flickering light there were stairs leading down into the depths of the basement of the opera house. Great stones formed the walls and the steps, and the only signs that anybody had been down here in decades were the electric lines and lights that had been strung up using hooks pounded into the masonry gaps. As we descended he spoke, and I listened.

“Those were dark days. 1898 was a bad year for the Opera, for all of Paris, but for the Opera in particular. The excesses and scandals of the Third Republic had culminated in the Dreyfus Affair and public sentiment had slowly turned away from supporting the arts and literature. The Opera and its managers did things, and allowed things to happen that were not made public. The Opera was used for unsavory productions.”

“Like this play, The King in Yellow?”

He nodded slowly. “You must remember that this was just three years after Jarry’s Ubo Roi, an exercise in what he would later call pataphysics, the study of the laws of exceptions and the universe supplementary to our own. It was nonsense, of course, a first step into the absurdism and surrealism. The crowd on that first night, they rioted. There was a man, a poet of some renown in the crowd who wrote, ‘After this what more is possible? After this, do we bow to the Savage God?’ The authorities banned the play and Jarry had to flee Paris.”

We were descending deeper. “The King in Yellow made Ubo Roi look tame. The authorities, the censors of the Third Republic, banned it before it was ever performed. They ordered all copies of the text destroyed.”

“Then these photos were of a production that never happened.”

“I wish it were so.” There was shame in his voice. “It was a private production, rehearsed and staged in secret. None of our regular performers would participate. We recruited players of ambiguous morals. They were easy to find. Zidler was dead, and his successors at the Moulin Rouge had no use for freaks and deviants. Once Toulouse-Lautrec would have been their voice, but he had gone mad and been confined to a sanitarium, and with him had gone any hope of reason or human compassion. Do you think it odd that I consider that little syphilitic dwarf as the voice of reason, as the voice of morality?”

“There have been stranger sources of laws.” I had not missed that he had inserted himself into the story.

“As you say. We were decadents, willing to do whatever in the name of pleasure, in the name of art. It was not the first time such ideas had played out in this theatre. We all knew the stories, the legends; concerning the chandelier, and the Phantom. We wanted to bring some of that madness, some of that grand theater, that gothic majesty back to life; to challenge the Parisian authorities with a morbid spectacle; to show them all what they should truly be fearful of.”

“Which was?”

“The Phantom of Truth. The Pallid Mask. The Stranger.”

“Death?” I offered.

He laughed. “Bah! Death is just the end of flesh. Men have so many other things to be fearful of. We are cattle being led blindly to slaughter, but that slaughter is not our death. The King and his tattered robe dull our senses, and for that we are eternally grateful.”

“I thought The King in Yellow was just a play.”

“A sonnet, a play, an opera, these are just manifestations of his divine symphony, vehicles for his infectious melodies. We are his chorus and must learn his book, one way or the other.”

“You are mad!” I whispered. I thought perhaps of turning back, of fetching the authorities, but I was driven by some strange force to follow him deeper into that chthonic pit.

“Is it madness to speak the truth? Is it madness that the song remains the same? Our President Felix Faure thought so. He saw our performance, and died that same night. Come with me and I shall show you the truth, and then we shall see who is mad.”

Down we went, further and further, and as we did Moncharmin continued to speak, but whether it was to me, or just to hear his voice, I was not sure. “The architect Garnier planned four basements, but the builder did more, many more. There are vast chambers that most never know of. They are used for storage, scene changes, and the like. One entire level houses the machinery that helps move the stage. Most people think there is only the one stage, but beneath that there are innumerable others. An entire separate production could take place in the under theatre, and those above would never know it.” His voice had become odd, almost theatrical. “There are so many stages; some of them have been completely forgotten.”

We were deep when he finally stopped descending and instead led me down a hall and threw open yet another door. “Behold,” he proclaimed, “the 1899 production of The King in Yellow!”

Beyond that door I saw things, things that should not have been possible, not in the Twentieth Century. I stood there entranced as the old man donned that aged costume, as he placed that crown of antlers upon his brow, as he rose into the air, into that darkened space amongst the rafters. He danced there and I recognized him as the character that had been excised from the photographs, and I knew that the actor that had played him had been Moncharmin himself!

Even now, all these years later, I can still hear him reciting his lines with poise and bravado. “The Yellow King is dead,” he shouted, “and who shall take his place? Shall it be the White Queen, the Crimson Cardinal, the Black Man, or perhaps the Green? The White Knight still guards the gate, but the scion is already within the walls. The exile returns and he seeks his rightful throne!” He floated down and took his place amongst that horrific tableau. He was a maestro, a master puppeteer; he was the spring amidst clockwork bones and flesh. “Kneel before me,” he commanded. “Kneel before the Sepia Prince!”

They say I went mad, that these things did not exist. The Parisian authorities deny all of it. There are no reports concerning what was down there, and the officers I knew to have been involved are now scattered across the country. They claim the fire, the one that three days later consumed that old rehearsal hall, was an accident, bad wiring, but I know better. What they couldn’t understand, what they couldn’t comprehend, they burned away.

But I know what I saw, and I know what I did

Here is the truth. The old librarian floated there surrounded by his machine, a demonic construct of ropes and wire, of pulleys and desiccated corpses that danced to the sounds of an infernal barrel organ. He floated there, bearing the mantle of the upstart, the exile, the Sepia Prince. He was a terrible thing, the counter to the madness of the Yellow King, but just as mad. He floated there and demanded my allegiance, demanded that I take my place amongst those decayed and corrupted mannequins, demanded that I willingly accept him, and by doing so be corrupted by his dark influence.

I did what I thought was right, what any true man would have done.

I took my pistol from my jacket and I shot him. I shot him once, through his left eye. One shot was all that was needed.

His death is well documented. They could not erase the truth of that. I have seen the report. My name is on it, they acknowledge that I shot the man.

They say that none of this happened, but if that was true tell me why was I not charged?

If I shot that man, and he was just that, a man, and not the Sepia Prince, why was I not charged? If I was mad why was I not hauled away to the asylum?

Sometimes I wish they had taken me to the madhouse. Then, at least, I could have had the illusion that I was mad. I could have let the tattered veil of the King in Yellow fall back across my eyes and be blind once more. Instead I see what others will not.

The worst part is my dreams. Moncharmin lies on the floor dead. The others are there as well, dancing; their arms outstretched begging me to join them, to take Moncharmin’s place.

“Have you seen the Sepia Prince?” They cry out.

“Yes,” I tell them. “Yes, I have!”

Then I reach out for that pale brown coat, and the crown of horns. I reach for them with intent.

And then I wake screaming.

It is not the screaming which terrifies me. That I still scream at the offer gives me comfort, it tells me I am still a man. The night I no longer scream, when I no longer fear accepting the mantle of the Sepia Prince, that is what I fear the most.

Not my screaming, but when my screaming stops.

ew cult deprogrammers these days would even try to take someone from Ex Libris. Hardly any even call themselves deprogrammers, anymore. “Exit counselor” is the preferred title, in keeping with the warmer, fuzzier new psychology. A human brain must be more than just Descartes’ materialist cognitive model, or its feelings wouldn’t get so hurt by the truth.

My methods were not popular, but they worked. Most of my business was by referral. The clients who came to me had exhausted every other hope of recovering their loved ones. When I could not myself convince them to accept that perhaps they were healthier, more enlightened, perhaps even happy, with their new lifestyle, then I had them sign my waiver and went to work.

Ex Libris was a hard target. They didn’t greet at airports or convention centers or lurk outside euthanasia booths. They didn’t panhandle or turn tricks. Mostly, they meditated to the Master’s audiobooks while toiling in digital sweatshops up and down the coast.

Their leader was a creative writing professor. Dr. Preston Marble used the classics—“guided” meditation, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, protein starvation, mild hallucinogens and traumatic writing assignments. Ex Libris grew out of Marble’s writing seminars and his “Awakened Editions” series of classic books annotated for neurotics desperately yearning to become psychopaths, harvesting the most hopeless wanna-bes, fans and impressionable victims into a militant bibliomancy cult.

Marble’s guide to story structure translated more easily into a practical bible than the Bible, complete with interactive commandments. Every devotee had to compose an “antibiography” of everything they were not and never would be. On average, they ran to five hundred thousand words composed on no sleep and amphetamine-laced oatmeal. When your Editor finally approved your antibiography, you had to burn it and throw the ashes in the ocean or eat it.

If they used Allah, Buddha or Jesus, they’d be on FBI watch-lists, but to the outside world, they’re just a fucking book club.

Sometimes, I can dress up as a senior cult official and pull them out with no headaches. This outfit had no slack, so I cut their DSL line, then knocked on their door. Four surfers in each one-bedroom unit at all times. A van came every other day to rotate them out. Eight more places like this, just in this part of town.

Cable guy uniform. Toolbelt. Wig and mustache, cotton plugs in my cheeks, lifts in my shoes. I chloroformed the geek who answered the door, caught him, threw the deadbolt and dragged him into the living room.

No furniture except for four workstations and a couple futons in the corner. Lysol, incense and macrobiotic farts. Two were awake and pecking at their boards. Another lay on a futon with headphones on. The one I wanted.

She wore a biofeedback harness and a Cranio-Electrical Stimulation cap. They listen to his heartbeat and EEG mixed with his audiobook lectures while they work. The more her brain activity conforms to Marble’s template, the more mildly pleasurable zaps she gets from the cap.

And all while copy-editing or revising the mass media equivalent of lead-painted, asbestos infant’s teething rings. If you’ve ever watched a slab of direct-to-video dreck or mind-numbing scripted reality show patter and wondered how sane human beings can create such empty noise, well... sane people don’t.

The system also tracks bodily functions and location for the home office. Anyone unplugging their unit or wandering out of range triggers an alarm and the Editors come running.

I unplugged her and took off her headphones—Marble’s sleepy bullroarer voice reading something about an anarchist exploding himself at Greenwich Observatory. She was semi-catatonic, dead on her feet. I didn’t even need the chloroform. I stood her up and escorted her to the balcony.

Someone knocked on the front door, then tried the knob.

Out on the balcony overlooking the alley. My assistant waited on the roof of our parked van, ready to catch the product. I bagged her and lowered her over the railing.

Carl caught the bag and gave me a hand down onto the van, then jumped down and caught the product, dropping her in the back. In and out in less than two minutes.

We took her out to Imperial County, to the Olde Desert Inn. It was abandoned long before I set up shop, and no one ever happened by. Two miles off the Interstate, at a dead place that never quite became a town. You can see anyone coming from five minutes away, watch satellites pass overhead at night.

As soon as we got the product strapped down in the honeymoon suite, Carl went home to his family and I got busy. My client had paid a big premium for a rush job. He wanted his wife back. I had to open up the product and find her.

She had the kind of bright, nervous beauty that you feel sparking at you just before you look her way. Smart, fine features; good bones showing too starkly through her pale, jaundiced skin. Avid, hungry eyes.

Real deprogrammers, the old school guys, kept their techniques under wraps like stage magicians, but it’s almost always some variation on the old interrogation, aversion therapy model. I didn’t have any tricks, training, dirty little secrets.

I didn’t interrogate them or break them down the way the burnout FBI agents and MK-ULTRA stooges who started our game did it. I didn’t have to. I was more of an assassin. I captured and killed the target with my magic bullet. The product died and the person was reborn, saved by the Elixir.

I liked to measure out dosages not just to body size, age and health, but to degree of indoctrination. I usually interviewed the client before, but this one was unresponsive. Semi-catatonic. She’d get up and go where you pushed her, but there was nobody home.

A quick physical turned up scalp scabs from constant electrical shocks and bruised track marks from recent and intensive IV abuse. Her pupils were responsive and pulse fine, but someone had already worked her.

I wanted to wait, but I gave her the shot. Her pulse spiked, then flattened out. I checked her restraints. If she didn’t come around in an hour, I’d give her the second dose I’d prepped.

It wasn’t therapy. I studied psychology, but I’m no doctor. Nobody can teach you how to raise the dead. To join any cult, from the Masons to Aum Shinrikyo, you have to die. The old you dies and is buried inside you to fertilize the budding of the new you. To resurrect them, I just had to go digging. The Elixir was a bullet, but it was also my shovel. It’s just easy enough, the results miraculous enough, that you’d kid yourself you know what you’re doing.

Under the Elixir, you are outwardly conscious. You speak when spoken to. You obey. You don’t ask questions. You know nothing but what you are told. You are utterly suggestible. I could make you blow me, hijack a bus and drive it into a nuclear power plant. It’s not like hypnosis, where the idiot on stage
wants
to act like a chicken. What the product wanted, who they were, what they would or wouldn’t do... all of it dies and goes away. In its place... whatever I put into them.

But she was doing it wrong.

She took me so completely by surprise that I almost didn’t see that I’d found what I’d always been looking for. Someone who could show me what it was like to be nothing.

She babbled in French, faster than I could understand. Then, “
The stars beneath the s
ea
... Do you remember before you were born? You remember what it was like?... I’d give anything if you could send me back....”

Usually, the product has to be coaxed out of the clouds. Sometimes it helps to guide them out with imagery; childhood snapshots as stepping stones, recreating the life history with a big red editorial pen.

But this product didn’t need me to set the scene. The walls of the motel room turned to stained canvas flats in the wings of a musty black cathedral.

The ceiling vanished in a jumble of scenery dangling from cables. Some I recognized–-the apartment, the Ex Libris Chapterhouse, the beach at night, a Hillcrest townhouse—but there were hundreds of others, an armory of scenes. Flakes of corroded varnish fluttered down to settle on her hair like golden snow.

“Before your script was written? Before the Plot had sharpened and bent and broken you to its ends.” She winced, trying to smile. “If you’re here, you must be an actor....”

“Then you’re an actress?”

Her laughter shivered flurries of paintflakes from above. “If you’re alive, you must act. Are you so sure you’re alive?” She tossed her head and fussed with the ash-roses embroidered in the sleeves of her gray gown. The fabric was dull yet subtly iridescent, like a shed snakeskin. “I like this one ever so much more than the last play....”

“What play was that? What was your role?”

“I was a mirror for a man to admire his own mask. So few real roles for women, now as ever... I loved my Lord the King more than my husband. I had forsaken all others to become a thought in my Lord’s mind. But then he revealed to me my particular purpose...”

“And what purpose is that?”

She knelt before the pool that had been only a square chalk outline on the floor of the stage. “To murder him,” she said. The buckled, warped boards were now pitted umber flagstones, the corsages of stained paper extravagantly sexual lilies on still, emerald water.

“Do you want to be free of him? Of... all this?”

“Oh, he’s no burden. His sinister hand stopped my dagger as if it were a feather. By his fear and by his blood, I knew he was but a pretender. No, the one I want to be free of, no one can escape.”

“Who’s that?”

She leaned in close and whispered, “The Plot.”

Looking up into the gallery, she hunched closer to me. I could feel my warmth leeching away into her. “I like this one ever so much better. So many places to hide... Do you not know the French Play?”

I shuddered and told her no.

“No matter, the lines read
you
, as it were. But we must enter! The call! Here, you must don your mask!”

The theater throbbed with the tolling of a vast, leaden bell. She shoved the cold, dry thing into my hands. Before I could look at it, I had pressed it to my face. Shadowy hands came out of the dark to guide us up twisting stairs and through a velvet miasma of rotting curtains into a cold white light....

We lay side by side upon the bed. Her pulse was steady. Her eyes were empty.

I thought better of giving her the second shot, decided instead on a serious sedative. But when I turned around, the syringe was gone.

It was in her hand. Then it was in my neck.

Before 9/11, the airport was much more than a place to wait in line and get searched. It was also really easy to steal people’s luggage.

I did it to pick up quick cash after I dropped out of college. It beat waiting to be expelled once my misuse of the clinical psychology department’s resources was uncovered, or once the new law requiring piss tests for financial aid went into effect.

At LAX, the passengers would crowd up to the belt even if their luggage was nowhere in sight, so if something went round the loop more than twice, it was probably unclaimed. Missed passenger connection, misrouted baggage, or maybe just a protracted restroom visit. Regardless, within ten seconds of spotting my quarry, I could have it out the turnstile door and into my friend’s waiting car.

My friend. Naomi was philosophy on a pre-law track and still doing swimmingly. We had little in common except she enjoyed drugs even more than me, which pretty much guaranteed her at least some sort of regional title. Strikingly homely, smarter than me, and a fry-guide
non pareil
. Any time you wanted to drop acid and go walkabout up the coast, she was down, if she didn’t have a paper due. I told myself she hung out with me because she was writing a paper about me.

So this one time, I cased the claim corrals in the international terminal, which was always sketchy and seldom worth it. Flights from Hong Kong, South America or the Middle East, where customs or immigration might hold them up for me, were also searched the most often. Even back then, they had cameras everywhere, and sometimes someone was watching them. I did a paper on recognition cues that guide our treatment of people we see as young/old, rich/poor, ugly/pretty, hostile/friendly, threatening/helpless, etc. The grabs started as part of those experiments. Everyone is a bigot, but a memorable prop or stereotypical mannerisms were cues that one noticed even above gender or race. I got a C+ and a journeyman’s degree in spycraft.