In the Court of the Yellow King (7 page)

he should have made her way to Hollywood five years ago, back when she had enough money to travel farther than between Upper and Midtown Manhattan. She would wager that, by now, she could have at least snagged a part in some sitcom or second-rate motion picture — something that would have gotten her name out farther than the next block off Broadway. Finances were tighter than ever, and though she had no problem lining up auditions, landing a role that paid for something more than a few drinks was tougher now than the day she had spoken her first line on the stage at the Fugazi Playhouse, now closed. She sure as hell couldn’t afford to move to a new place, even in a worse neighborhood. By any standard, her cozy apartment in Manhattan Valley was a bargain, though uncomfortably far from the law office where she temped as receptionist, not to mention the theater district.

Tonight, as usual, the bus was jammed with bodies, but she had managed to grab a seat near the back. To get it, she’d had to physically remove a large shopping bag owned by an older Hispanic woman who had strategically placed it to discourage potential seatmates. On a crowded bus, Kathryn Stefano refused to tolerate such discourtesy, and now the woman, her bag tucked under her seat, sat peering out the window radiating hot, silent hatred.

Kathryn had felt so good about the last audition. They seemed to love her, but her phone had been silent for two weeks, and they had promised an answer within a few days. Bryon Florey, her ersatz agent, had pestered the director enough, perhaps beyond his tolerance level, clearly to no avail. The damned thing would have paid well, too.

She was 28, and her time for grabbing choice roles
was rapidly slip-slipping away.

She had never heard of the play before.
The Kin
g in Yellow
, a two-act exercise in surrealism, produced by an unfamiliar company — Mythosphere, it was called — though she knew of the director, one Vernard Broach, who had gained notoriety two decades earlier by helming a production of
Jesus Christ, Superstar
that took a page from the Gospel of Phillip, in which Jesus and Mary Magdalene were engaged in an amorous relationship, portrayed quite graphically on the stage. For
The King in Yellow
, Kathryn had read for the part of Cassilda, the queen of a mythical city called Hastur, somewhere on or off the earth, she had no idea. She had not read the entire play, but it supposedly ended on a tragic note, and she’d always had an affinity for tragedies.

At 109th, she disembarked, her seatmate bidding her rude farewell by way of a low “
Reina
puta,
” and had walked most of the block to her building when she felt her jacket pocket vibrating. It was Bryon on the phone.

“You got Cassilda,” came his excited voice. “She’s all yours.”

“Well, thank
you
!”

“Rehearsals start this Friday night.”

“Seriously?”

“The schedule’s going to be intense. Hope you’re up for it. Can you get to their office tomorrow afternoon and get the paperwork done?”

“I guess I can take a long lunch.”

“Do it. I have a good feeling about this one.”

“So do I. I think.”

“You impress Broach, things are going to start falling into place. See if they don’t.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“You’d better.”

She signed off just as she reached the front door of her building, an ancient, nine-story monstrosity that took up half the block between Amsterdam and Broadway. Her apartment was on the top floor, a single-bedroom cubbyhole she shared with her roommate, Yumiko, whom she actually saw about twice a month. She found herself hoping Yumiko would be there now. At first she thought it was because she was excited about sharing her good news, but as the elevator took her up to the dim, deathly silent hallway, she realized she was not excited but nervous. More than that — unsettled, apprehensive. Not the little butterflies that came before stepping on stage but the cold anxiety she might feel if a stranger were to fall in behind her and rapidly close the distance.

Unfortunately, she discovered as she opened the door and entered darkness, the place was deserted, except for Koki, Yumiko’s cat, who occupied his traditional spot on the windowsill. The gray and white tabby gave her a brief, unconcerned glance and returned to peering at the alley outside. For a moment, the view out the window seemed somehow
off
, and she realized there was an odd reflection in the glass: some kind of swirly pattern in bright, yellow-gold, as if cast by an illuminated sign at the entrance to the alley, though she knew no such sign existed. The reflection lasted only a few seconds and then vanished, as if whatever was producing it had dissolved.

That
was strange, she thought, but hardly worth dwelling on. Koki was displaying no interest in anything, indoors or out, and if the Feline Early Warning System didn’t go off, all was right with the world. More or less.

Damned peculiar: the script the office manager had given her was incomplete. A number of random pages had been excised, including the final scene. Still, from it, she pieced together as much of the story as possible.

The play opened with Queen Cassilda — many thousands, perhaps millions of years old — gazing on the vast Lake of Hali from her palace in the far-off city of Hastur. For eons, Hastur had been at war with its sister city, Alar, and the endless siege had made Cassilda into an embittered, apathetic, largely impotent monarch. She occasionally entertained the idea of passing her rule to one of her two sons, Uoht or Thale, she cared not which. Both princes desired to marry their sister, Camilla, and Cassilda finally decided that whichever son won her daughter’s hand would ascend to the throne and take the name “Aldones” — the name of every king that had ever ruled in Hastur. Then Cassilda would give to Camilla the royal diadem, which had been worn by Hastur’s queen since the beginning of time. Camilla, however, dreaded such a transfer, for legend told that the recipient of the diadem might also receive the Yellow Sign — a harbinger of death, or worse — from the mysterious King in Yellow: a nightmarish, inhuman being that resided in the fabled, spectral city of Carcosa, which existed somewhere beyond the Lake of Hali.

One day, a stranger wearing a pallid mask appeared in Hastur. To Cassilda’s horror, he also bore on his garment a representation of the Yellow Sign, a bizarre pattern rendered “in no human script.” The queen’s high priest, Naotalba, declared the stranger the embodiment of the Phantom of Truth, an agent of the King in Yellow. The stranger, however, explained that he was an ally of Hastur, who could wear the Yellow Sign with impunity because the pallid mask concealed his identity even from the all-powerful King. His purpose, he claimed, was to end the stalemate with Alar, for any kingdom that could bear the Yellow Sign as its standard would be invincible. To make this possible, he suggested Cassilda put on a “masque,” wherein the attendees themselves would wear pallid masks in the presence of the Yellow Sign. At the appointed hour, they would unmask and find that the Yellow Sign no longer held power over them.

Despite suspecting treachery, Cassilda believed the gamble worthwhile, for no matter its outcome, the conflict with Alar would end. Act 2 opened with the masked ball in progress, with Cassilda and all members of her court wearing pallid masks. At the sound of a gong, all removed their masks — all except the stranger, who then revealed that he wore no mask at all. He had deceived them so that Alar, not Hastur, might emerge victorious from the endless war.

Suddenly, with a cry of “Yhtill!” — a word meaning “stranger” — the King in Yellow appeared. Taller than two men, garbed in flowing, tattered, golden robes, the King struck down the faceless stranger, proclaiming himself a living god who was not to be mocked. He told Cassilda that Hastur
would
prevail over Alar, but with a heavy price: from that moment on, every inhabitant of Hastur, including Cassilda, would wear a pallid mask.

Cassilda, regaining her regal manner for the first time in eons, approached the King and boldly refused to accept his terms.

And there the script ended.

There was clearly more to the final scene. Whoever had collated this copy, Kathryn decided, was anything but thorough at his or her job.

Something in the script had seized Kathryn’s attention and, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, sent her mind reeling, as if gripped by vertigo. She flipped back through the pages until she found the passage.

“The city of Carcosa had four singularities. The first was that it appeared overnight. The second was that it was impossible to distinguish whether the city sat upon the waters of the Lake of Hali or on the invisible shore beyond. The third was that when the moon rose, the city’s spires appeared
behind
rather than in front of it. And the fourth was that as soon as one looked upon the city, one knew its name was Carcosa.”

Something about that name,
Carcosa
. She felt a strange, tingling excitement, as if she had discovered something indecent or forbidden — the way she had felt when she bought her first vibrator all those years ago. She had taken it home feeling dirty, giddy, almost breathless with anticipation.
How
could she possibly
feel this way now?

That night, she dreamed of a soft, reed-thin voice saying, “The truth
i
s
but a phantom — a ghost that can be used or murdered at whim. Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

The first read-through with the full cast in the rehearsal room of the Frontiere Theatre:

Upon her request for a complete copy of the script, the production manager, Earl Blohm — a bearded, long-haired young man who dressed as if he had fallen out of the early 1970s — told her it was all she would get. “You’ll find out the ending when everyone else does,” he said. “It never ends the same way twice.”

“I didn’t think this play had been produced before.”

“Oh, it’s very old. It’s just that no one alive has ever seen it.”

Strange,
strange
man, Kathryn thought. In fact, the whole ensemble struck her as peculiar. Usually, when cast members gathered for the first time, a certain excitement ran through them like a humming electric current, but here, a somber, almost funereal atmosphere pervaded the chamber. Director Vernard Broach, a portly, swarthy man with dyed black, slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin mustache, spoke so softly she could barely make out his instructions.

“The audience is
there
,” he said, pointing to the farthest wall of the long, deeply shadowed rehearsal room. “We do not concern ourselves with them. You are in the city of Hastur on the Lake of Hali.” He gave the group his most theatrical scowl, pointed to the opposite corner of the room, and said, “The King in Yellow lives
ther
e
. We do not look there, we do not speak of there, we do not go there. Now, look at your scripts, look at them. We have Queen Cassilda and her daughter, Camilla. Who is Camilla, where are you?”

“Here.” An attractive young black woman raised her hand and then pointed to herself. “Jayda Rivera.”