A Season In Carcosa Read online

  A SEASON in CARCOSA

  edited by

  Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  New York • Florida

  2012

  Also from Miskatonic River Press:

  Dead But Dreaming

  edited by Kevin Ross & Keith Herber

  Dead But Dreaming 2

  edited by Kevin Ross

  Dissecting Cthulhu

  edited by S. T. Joshi

  Horror for the Holidays

  edited by Scott David Aniolowski

  The Strange Dark One (coming soon)

  by W. H. Pugmire

  The Grimscribe’s Puppets (coming soon)

  edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  www.miskatonicriverpress.com

  A SEASON IN CARCOSA edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Copyright © 2012 by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Authors retain copyright to their stories, and unless noted otherwise, stories are © 2012 per author. “Salvation in Yellow” by Robin Spriggs is © 2012 solely in the name of the author, Robin Spriggs

  All Rights Reserved.

  For information contact Miskatonic River Press

  Published in the United States by:

  Miskatonic River Press, LLC

  944 Reynolds Road, Suite 188

  Lakeland, Florida 33801

  www.miskatonicriverpress.com

  Contents

  "This Yellow Madness"

  My Voice is Dead

  Beyond the Banks of the River Seine

  Movie Night at Phil's

  MS Found in a Chicago Hotel Room

  it sees me when I'm not looking

  Finale, Act Two

  Yellow Bird Strings

  The Theatre and its Double

  The Hymn of the Hyades

  Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars

  Not Enough Hope

  Whose Hearts are Pure Gold

  April Dawn

  King Wolf

  The White-Face at Dawn

  Wishing Well

  Sweetums

  The King is Yellow

  D T

  Salvation in Yellow

  The Beat Hotel

  "This Yellow Madness"

  Robert William Chambers (May 26, 1865 - December 16, 1933).

  The King in Yellow. The Yellow Sign. Dim Carcosa. Suicide Chambers. Cassilda and the other beguiling characters in The Play . . . Haunting seeds of weird fiction that inspired Lovecraft, Derleth, Karl Edward Wagner, and still infects writers today.

  Influenced, in part, by Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, and it can be argued, the French “Decadents”, Chambers created a small body of stories, some even term it a mythos, linked by a king in pallid, tattered robes, the madness-inducing “The King In Yellow” play, and the Yellow Sign, and collected them into a volume published in 1895, called The King in Yellow. Chamers’ are tales lightly-salted with Nihil and ennui, and ripe with madness, haunting beauty, and eerie torments, you’ll recall I mentioned Bierce, Poe, and the “Decadents”.

  Robert M. Price, in his excellent The Hastur Cycle (Chaosium 1997), traces some of the core elements of Chambers creations from the first mentions of Carcosa, Hali, and Hastur, in Bierce to Blish and Wagner (KEW’s “The River of Night’s Dreaming” is KIY canon and one of the finest weird tales ever written! And I’m not alone on this, Peter Straub in his intro to KEW’s brilliant collection, In A Lonely Place [Warner Books 1983] said so as well! !!). Two years after The Hastur Cycle was published I asked Bob to co-edit a collection I wanted to call, The Pallid Mask. He agreed and we began to assemble works to include and Bob penned an intro, but we lost our publisher. A decade later at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, OR I pitched this book to S. T. (Joshi), who was very interested in editing it, but he got buried and it came back to me. S.T. said, “You should do it yourself. Who would be better?” In my fantasies, Datlow! !! But I didn’t have the courage to ask her. The thought of me editing this tome sent me over the edge into true madness. Yet here it is. Having seen the Yellow Sign long ago (I sat by a body of water in upstate, NY, reading the “The Yellow Sign” by full moonlight, not far from Chambers’ home not knowing about it or him; I was sixteen at the time) and having become a fanatical member of the Society of the Yellow Sign (some even say, it’s leader), I needed to see this book happen.

  Many of the tales that were to be included in The Pallid Mask found their way into Peter Worthy’s fine Rehearsals For Oblivion Act 1 (Dimensions Books 2006). Yet, I still wasn’t happy. I wanted more KIY tales. New ones. I had lists of writers and my what if ______ ___ did this, or what if ___ _____ did something like that?

  My need fed on me and I was finally called to the court.

  Bob had said it was a good idea. S.T. was all for it. I sat looking at my Chambers artifacts and holding my copy of The King in Yellow (no, it’s not a 1st edition! !!) and the King’s madness commanded me, Do it!

  So I scratched out my notes, looked at my list of writers, many who had been on my list for a long time, and went begging.

  Here’s what I wished, begged for:

  No reprints. No HPL anything. The Lovecraftian mythos is not part of the KIY oeuvre... Exception, ghouls, MU could have copy of KIY play. I do not want to someone to write the play. I am interested in tales based on the canon, or that tip their hat to it, or riff off it. This is a book about madness, altered realities, splintered minds, and what is behind the mask.

  The canon as I see it: RWC “The Repairer of Reputations”, “The Mask”, “In the Court of the Dragon”, “The Yellow Sign”, “The Demoiselle D’Ys”, “The Street of Four Winds”, “The Prophet’s Paradise”, “The Street of the First Shell”; Karl Edward Wagner “The River of Night’s Dreaming”; Michael Cisco “He Will be There”; James Blish “More Light”; Vincent Starrett “Cassilda’s Song”; Ann K. Schwader “Tattered Souls”, “Postscript: the King In Yellow”, “A Phantom Walks”.

  Style is wide open. Noir. Bruno Schultz, Burroughs, Ligotti, Sci-Fi, New Weird, dark fantasy, David Lynch, the Quays, POETICS!, surrealism, Ellroy, Vachss...

  Setting and place, any—almost, R’lyeh is out. Urban, desert, cabin, NYC, Paris, Texas in 1885...

  Tales could/should touch on - Suicide chambers, the Dynasty, the play, the characters from the play, madness, the Yellow Sign. Paris. Painting/the arts in general [musical adaptations—what would Julie Taymor’s KIY be like?; Robert Wilson stages play; modern poets/musicians looking at the play]. Carcosa, masks, the war w/ Alar . . .

  On the following pages you’ll see what forms of madness the talented contributors have staged for you. Please dress warmly as you embark for the shores of madness. Upon arrival you’ll note there is, in the vales of the Winter Lantern, a clinging chill in the air.

  (a certain) bEast

  Berlin, Germany

  FEB 2012

  My Voice is Dead

  By Joel Lane

  We are the sacred body of Christ, not some bunch of secular do-gooders.

  – anonymous Internet posting

  The name rang a bell, but Stephen wasn’t sure where he’d seen it. Maybe in his student days, when insomnia and random second-hand books had taken him down some strange roads. But he’d been curious, not gullible, and this looked suspiciously like a cult. A mythical realm with dark towers, a ghostly lake, and a king in tattered clothes like some iconic hobo? Surely even in his mixed-up youth, he couldn’t have confused faith with a bad dream like that? But something about the feverish words drew him in, made him keep opening the page. Perhaps its sheer morbidity appealed to him now that he was, objectively speaking, close to death.

  The anonymous creator of the Yellow Sign website used some dense, archaic font that resembled medieval sc
ript. His long paragraphs were interspersed with amateurish sketches and blurred photos meant to illustrate the text, for all the world as if he were a travel writer rather than a delusional fantasist. A black and white photo of a derelict industrial landscape, with two crumbling brick towers, was captioned The ruined city of Carcosa. Another photo appeared to show the edge of a lake whose water looked almost black, and was completely still though the clouds overhead were in turmoil. That was captioned The lake of Hali in permanent twilight. Of course, Stephen reflected, that probably wasn’t meant to be taken littorally.

  Then there were a few crude drawings, possibly made with charcoal and scanned into the page, of crippled birds and misshapen human figures that lurked around the lake and the ruined buildings. And the Yellow Sign itself, an asymmetrical logo incorporated into every photo and sketch as if hanging in the air wherever you might look. When Stephen closed his eyes it shimmered there, an unhealthy shade of yellow he’d never seen in real life.

  At the end, there was an e-mail address for anyone who wanted to know more. Stephen clicked on it and typed a short message: I don’t know where Carcosa is, but it’s got to be a better place than where I am. Will you go waltzing Cassilda with me? A realm of eternal twilight would beat this world where they switch on stage lights and call it day. Tell me where to find Carcosa. I don’t have long. Hastur la vista, baby.

  After sending the message, he turned off his computer and tried to pray. But the words wouldn’t come. Was God shutting him out for dabbling in a bit of arty folk-religion? I didn’t mean it, he thought, crossing himself. Then he took the rosary from his bedside cabinet and counted the beads steadily until his panic subsided. After the surgery and chemotherapy, he’d been declared free of tumours and told to go back for routine monthly checks. The last of which had revealed a sudden rise in tumour marker levels, calling for an MRI scan. In three days’ time he’d know the results. Surely he could be forgiven for clutching at a few straws.

  Of course, all this Ryan Report business wasn’t helping. He’d read the coverage in the Irish Times with a mixture of rage and shame. Rage at the feeding frenzy that was taking place in the Protestant media, but also at the sheer foolishness of the Church authorities who’d tried to cover up what they should have stamped out. If co-operating with the police was too dangerous, they should have made sure a few of the offenders met with nasty accidents. After all, whatever the papers said, there weren’t many of them.

  And shame at what might have taken place if the accusations were true, if it wasn’t just a bunch of lowlifes blaming their carers and educators for the fact that their lives had come to nothing. Whenever he thought about the alleged crimes, other thoughts got in the way: the fact that those brats would have starved or turned to crime without the care and support the Church offered. He literally couldn’t imagine what they said had happened. But not having words for the shame – being slightly ashamed of it, even – didn’t make it go away.

  His hands were trembling as he returned the rosary to its drawer. It was nearly midday and he’d got nothing done. In the past, he’d have filled a day off with activity: gone somewhere outside Birmingham, or done some reading at the library, or assembled a new bookcase. But now he didn’t have the energy, and it was hard to see the point. When his usual routine lapsed, there was nothing there. Stephen wondered if the pain in his back was anything more than the effect of sitting still too long. Suddenly angry, he marched into the kitchen and started wiping the surfaces, washing up a few mugs, then reaching up to wipe a cobweb from the window. How long had it been there? He strode through the house with a duster, rubbing at shelves and pictures. The computer screen was dusty too but he didn’t want to touch it, the machine didn’t deserve his attention. He reached to switch it back on, then turned away and went back to the kitchen. Where he sat at the table, clasped his hands and pressed them to his forehead, weeping. It wasn’t much of a prayer, but it was something.

  The bright February light skittered off windows and pools of rainwater. Stephen locked the front door and walked through into his front room, the room he always kept tidy and clean, the room for entertaining visitors (what with, his puns?). Its order and familiarity always calmed him, but not now. He waited to feel at home. Inoperable. Behind that word lay more closure than Woolworth’s. Oddly, he didn’t really feel ill. Just tired.

  The computer called him and he resisted just long enough to pour himself a glass of Jameson’s. There were only two new e-mails, both with the title ‘The exile returns’. Which was a sure sign of spam. But one of them was from his sister Claire. The other was from ‘Death in Jaune’.

  Claire’s e-mail said she hoped he was OK. Then there was a link to the local paper’s website, with the comment: This man married me and Ian. I feel betrayed.

  Breathing deeply, aware of a faint stiffness in his lungs, Stephen clicked on the link. A face he recognised from somewhere. Richard Robinson, aged 73, had been jailed for 21 years by Birmingham Crown Court for multiple rapes of children. A former local priest, known for his motorcycle and friendly manner, he’d quit the country in 1983 to escape prosecution. It had taken the police a quarter of a century to extradite him. All along, the article said, the Church had kept his whereabouts a secret. Up to 2001, they had continued to pay him a regular salary.

  Sentencing Robinson to spend the rest of his life in prison, the judge had called for an enquiry into the Church’s actions. Stephen noticed his glass was empty but he didn’t remember drinking, couldn’t taste the whiskey or feel it in his chest.

  He felt more helpless now than he had at the hospital. Father Robinson. He remembered that smiling face at Claire’s wedding and other times. Remembered, now, them saying he’d left the priesthood. Scrolling down the long list of comments, he saw nothing but the cheapness of Protestant minds. As if the Church had no higher purpose than trawling through the mire of dubious accusations and worthless lives. One earnest local had declared: For any priest to go on spouting Latin before the faithful when his church is guilty of such crimes is a vile hypocrisy.

  That was enough. His fingers trembled as he clicked into the empty comment box and typed: We are the sacred body of Christ, not some bunch of secular do-gooders. Then he unplugged the computer and stood at his study window. Tiny flakes of sleet were blowing against the glass like dead skin. He ought to phone Claire, she’d sounded upset. No, he’d reply to her e-mail. That way, he wouldn’t have to burden her with his own bad news.

  The faint hum of the computer was soothing, like the gentle undertow of painkillers. Stephen opened the other ‘The exile returns’ message. It was in the same archaic font as the Yellow Sign website:

  O pilgrim of Carcosa grim

  Our voices share a common hymn

  The Lake of Hali holds the word

  Forgotten by the mindless herd

  The King exists! He has returned

  To where the black stars ever burned

  And in his sacred yellow cloak

  He proves that God is not a joke

  Cassilda dances like a rune

  Beneath a different kind of moon

  If for true vision you would ask

  Then gaze upon her pallid mask

  This is long over, and to come

  The stones cry out, the mouth is dumb

  The King in Yellow – read the text

  And then remember what comes next

  Underneath the verses was another blurred Polaroid photograph: the statue of a woman lying in a white casket, her thin arms crossed over her chest. Her face was a flawless marble cast. The eyes, lips and nostrils were sealed. It reminded Stephen of a carving on the tomb of a saint. The pure spirituality of it took his breath away. Behind the figure, cinders from a hidden fire were rising through bare trees.

  That weekend, he found a copy of The King in Yellow in Reader’s World, the only second-hand bookshop remaining in the city. The paperback had no date. Inside, there was a reproduction of the original cover from 1895: a cloaked m
an standing before a runic sign, with a cyclone twisted around him. Pain struck him on the bus, left him almost helpless, but just managing not to vomit. He got off near his home and collapsed onto a bench, curled up like a foetus. Nobody offered to help him. Finally he managed to stumble back to his flat, the book in his coat pocket. The evening was so bad he nearly called an ambulance. But around two in the morning, the pain and nausea subsided. The peace was too valuable to waste on sleep, so he reached for the book and started reading.

  It was a book about a book that didn’t exist: a play that had been published but never performed. The narrator of the first story was a bigoted Catholic who hated Jews and clearly disliked women. He turned out to be a violent psychopath driven mad by the play. What was the point of that? The second story was a weird nightmare about people turning to stone and then coming back to life. Much better. The third story plunged back into the twisted world of the play, which seemed to offer a morbid spiritual realm of its own. And then the fourth story, ‘The Yellow Sign’. He’d never read anything so disturbing. A more sympathetic Catholic narrator – whose only crime was wasting the chance to make love to his girlfriend. She gave him a carved symbol and then was killed by a rotting man who had come to take it back. The narrator ended up dying, alone, in terror and confusion.

  If he’d read the stories before, however long ago, surely he’d remember. They would have troubled him at the time. If not, why did they seem so familiar? What did they remind him of?

  Stephen didn’t sleep that night. By now he was signed off work, living very much one day at a time. Soon it would be the hospital, and then maybe a hospice. He might have six months, but what kind of months would they be? How long would he be waiting for a Yellow Sign to release him into the dark? And for which sins was he now being punished? He rather wished he’d tried a few more interesting ones. It was too late now. Flesh and pleasure didn’t mix any more.

  A week after reading the book, he e-mailed his nameless correspondent: If Carcosa is real, tell me where it is. I don’t have much time. A few more weeks or months of walking and thinking. Then however long doing nothing but die. If the King can give me hope, I’ll do anything. Before he pressed ‘send’, he wrenched the silver cross from its chain around his neck and dropped it on the carpet.