In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  The monastery’s belfry, a square structure of tarred timber and hewn logs, was silent. Its bell had not tolled for vespers. No robed and tonsured figures moved about within St. Neot’s walls.

  The tall man who stood upon the rise, the tall man in his tattered cloak of yellow and helm with horse-tail plume, nodded with grim satisfaction. He raised one pale, thin-fingered hand and gestured his warriors to follow.

  They moved wraithlike through the town. Only frightened, snarling dogs opposed them, readily dispatched with a spear-thrust or swung axe-blade. The smith’s forge held just a bed of ashes. The bread-ovens were dark and cold. Rats capered in the granaries.

  Here and there were indications of looting and swift departure. Several of the buildings sat abandoned, empty and forlorn. Those that still seemed to harbor life did so with a furtive doom and resignation, as if the people within huddled behind barricaded doors, gripping useless weapons while they waited for the end.

  Once, a haggard, naked crone spat curses from a doorway, then plunged a knife into her scrawny belly and ripped it sideways so that her entrails bulged out, glistening. They passed her by, and left her where she fell.

  The gates of St. Neot’s were open.

  Crow-picked corpses littered the outer yard.

  Fly-crawling corpses littered the inner halls and chambers.

  Some, like Brother Rubert, had hanged themselves. Some had taken their own lives in other ways – veins cut so that the blood pooled thick, or with cups from which poison had been drunk still clutched in death-rigid hands.

  Others had turned their violence outward. In the dormitories, several monks lay suffocated in their beds. One had been stuffed headfirst into the kitchen hearth, held there as he roasted. Another had been crucified and emasculated. There were bludgeonings and stabbings, drownings and strangulations.

  A few yet lived, if such could be said to be living. They crawled, mad and cackling, mutilated. They rocked back and forth, slamming their heads into stone walls. They wept. They laughed. They wallowed in their filth, eating of it.

  “Finish them,” said the man in the tattered yellow cloak.

  His warriors obliged.

  It was no battle, merely butchery.

  As they saw to their deadly business, he saw to his own.

  He went from one room to the next until he came to the library with its long lines of desks. Ink pots had been spilled. Books were scattered. Most of the candles had burned down or gone out; one had tipped and it was a wonder that a fire hadn’t started.

  A sole dead monk sprawled on his back, eyes and mouth agape in final shocked surprise. An aestel, meant for following a reader’s place, had been put to different purpose... the slender wooden rod of its pointer had been driven into the monk’s throat, the enamel and crystal handle jutting like a strange ornament.

  And here... here were sheets of vellum, manuscript pages, copies and translations half-finished. He collected them, studying each, tossing aside those of no interest to him and keeping the rest.

  He noted the beautiful work, the lavish illuminations of rich and brilliant color. He noted the cunning illustrations done along the margins – a crown of diamonds and gold, a corpse-cart pulled by dark horses, a pure white lily with a beam as of sunlight shining from its heart, black stars blazing in a dome of sky, a disheveled cat with a slim pink ribbon serving as collar, the towers of a city rising behind tormented moons.

  Gathering them into a pile, he rolled the pages together, tying them with a length of yellow cord. This thick scroll, he tucked through his belt, and drew his cloak to conceal it.

  Next he searched among the scattered books, indifferent to bibles and scriptures, gospels and homilies, the writings of the saints and disciples. At last, partly hidden by the dead monk’s outflung arm, he found a slim volume bound in leather more ancient and tattered than that of his cloak.

  His long, pale, thin fingers folded around it. He picked it up, turned it over. There on the front, stamped in gold, faded and worn, was a familiar sign... the same sign his men bore on their shields. He traced it with the pad of his thumb, dry skin hissing against skin even drier.

  Summoned, his warriors returned, weapons dripping. They brought no other plunder, had not looted the monastery of its silver, just as they had not ransacked the village or town.

  He thought briefly of the women, the two sisters, the nuns. So brave... strong and willful... the elder of the pair most of all. Perhaps he should not have spared them and left them to their abbey. Perhaps he should have brought them along.

  They might have made fine queens.

  But, no.

  He had what he’d come for.

  Soon the shields hung again along the ship’s sides. Soon the oarsmen took up their oars and the striped sail belled in the wind. The carved beast’s head at the prow faced away from the land, the one at the stern watching the shore recede.

  A gradual, sighing mist engulfed them as they lost sight of the rocky coast, as the ship leaped and crashed in the waves over the cold grey sea.

  Then the mist changed, changed and warmed, became steam. The water flattened, smooth as glass, burnished as a mirror.

  Overhead, blazing black, shone the stars. The hot, fuming lake stretched out vast on all sides. Fish flickered in the depths, the barb-finned and hair-mouthed fish of Hali.

  And the longship sailed on, toward the far horizon, where the towers and spires of a great city rose behind tormented moons.

  aturday night again. Hello, everybody. How y’all? Good old Erin Brew, formula ten-oh-two, northern Ohio’s largest-selling beer, makes it possible for us to be with you a whole extra half hour on Saturday nights. Pop the cap as we stumble together down our musical Memory Lane. ‘The Big Beat in American Music’ was here a hundred years ago – it will be here a thousand years after we are all gone. So! Let’s rock and roll! All ready to rock? Atta boy. We’re gonna have a ball.

  This is Alan Freed with you tonight, the Moondog, the King of the Rock & Rollers, with a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends in northern Ohio, Ontario, Canada, western New York, western Pennsylvania, aaaand West Virgin-eye-ay. Along about eleven-thirty, we’ll be joining the Moondog Network.

  Enjoy Erin brew, ten-oh-two, and the Moondog Show. And don’t sneer at crazy people. Their madness lasts longer than ours. That’s the only difference. There is only Christ to cry to now, and none to repair my reputation. Please arrange your dials of Judgment in a fulminating order to receive the Yellow Sign....

  (I couldn’t be dreaming. I’ve never slept this deeply behind these damn drugs. Sometimes, I do sleep, though. Just not now....)

  Tonight we are actually broadcasting live on whatever decimal fraction of the FM dial. I just learned yesterday that this control booth was here. That there was a baby transmitter. Here. That there was even a Here here, back back back in the back of the first floor of the hospital where they sent me to dry out from that yellow river where I almost drowned.

  I don’t know if I’m drying out. I sleep all the time, and no matter how much they dope me I can’t relax. There are dreams. Dreams. And sleepwalks. Like the one where I woke up here. Playing with switches and trying to get a level.

  I don’t know why this transmitter is in this room of this hospital, or what the breakers in this section were doing all the way on. Some of the desks and keyplates and such are stamped Civil Defense, with one puzzling lead plate on the panel hiding this very microphone, Imperial Dynasty of America.

  It’s quiet here. They don’t know I jimmied the other entrance, the one through the broom-closet in the hall. This room is soundproof, and the Moondog can yell as loud as he wants. When I can get out of bed. Sometimes, I just scream.

  Ah, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you all about this place. About what a beast that big nurse, the redhead with the bullet-bras, can be to the long-timers. She’s not on my f
loor, but she kind of thinks she’s security chief for the whole building. No matter how long it’s been since I even thought about a woman, I’d hate for her to catch me in a half-nelson during this broadcast. All you cats and kittens can understand, that is just too much dead air for the Moondog. Too much.

  They’re not all like her. Most of the nurses on my floor are good people who know how to pity a man who can bear no more. Cathy, the RN who works the graveyard shift up on my floor most nights, she always tells me that the human soul never really has anything to fear. That I always exist and nothing can harm me and anything else is just driving myself nuts. When she’s there, I listen. Graveyard gets long.

  So do the days. What gets me through my days, or most of them... Well, it’s the fans who kept me rockin’ and boppin’ and not stoppin’, back then, for them, until the gods all went home and the clocks melted down. The memories of playing myself in three movies about what all we were doing. The crowds in New York, and everywhere. The roaring seas of people I conducted like an orchestra, the conductor himself turning back and forth between performer and audience and down left right up and a one and a two and a....

  In Johnstown, I learned elocution on the street corner trying to talk faster than any girl in my class I could chat up. At WJAC-Johnstown-Altoona, then on my Ohio Tour ending in Cleveland, I raised the pennon of my own gold star under the goldhorn shadow of Jazz, until to the streets of Manhattan I wandered away, to my tattered cloak and beer-can crown as the King of the Rock & Rollers. Thousands of my subjects conscripted new listeners to WJW and then WINS-New York, and taped the shows themselves. At home. Nobody ever taped my shows but the occasional station-manager.

  My shows. Because it was me.

  Never in word or deed or thought had I betrayed my sorrow, even to myself. The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord.

  What tied my days together was obligation. My obligation, as Hank Williams put it to me years before, to post and blaze the trail. Sometimes, I was obliged to protect the music, sometimes support it, and toward the end it was through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul.

  Not even now.

  Not even now. I’m tired. I’ve broken again. I’ve broken and done this thing. They’ll just look at me funny. No one punishes my sort much here, not the way they punish the real nuts. But my sort aren’t usually up causing this much trouble.

  Except I cry, you dig? I cry so hard in the night with no voice. The bitter wretchedness of the whole elaborate construction of tinsel and mud that’s all any man’s misspent life ever is, that all comes back with an icepick headache of shame and disgrace.

  They will be very curious to know the tragedy – they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers. They may send their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must halt before the confessional.

  But the shame calls forth the memory of honor, and the tears likewise of sacrifice, and my tachycardiac old ticker still telegraphs the story for all the cats and kittens not yet even born. For Rock & ROLL.

  For a minute or two now, until they pinion me and whack me up with something subcutaneously, I have a voice and it’s alive. I cast my lot with the wild Indian who swallows the sun in the sacred mushroom and rises in the dark morning of the eighth day with a song. A big beat and a song. I can feel my voice going out on the air now. On the ether. I can.

  I can. Someone is listening. Story time with Uncle Moondog, tonight. Gonna tell you how one day a King was born in Tupelo, a King I sat before and heard him sing something few others would hear. And some of the rest. The parts I have the strength to croak.

  The Moondog wants to tell you what the King In Yellow sang. About Carcosa Radio and the Big Beat. Have a seat. Turn your radio up. Is there still radio? Are there still all the hits all the time?

  Time. There is this microphone. Whatever those pills are is some heavy shit, and not in that Times Square kind of way. The microphone’s the thing, whereon I’ll tell my audience with the King.

  The parts of the King Of Rock & Roll that came from somewhere else. The parts that didn’t fit the rest of him. The larva inside him, the spy that took control of the flesh. The real King, killed and cut up and reborn like ten, like a tapeworm that squishes in your hand, and all the parts not left to regrow are eaten and shit out and eaten again, forever.

  Before Elvis Aron Presley, there was nobody white like that, no one the networks would let me run on prime time, anyway. Bill Haley was the rock-and-roll Frankie Sinatra, a dinosaur with feathers, like my old band in Johnstown that we called the Sultans. Heh. The Sultans of Swing.

  What an antique time. I suppose I helped kill it, me and guys like Carl Perkins and Buck Owens and Jerry Lee Lewis.... Oh, brother. What Prometheus did we let loose, kids? The Beast touched down in Tupelo.

  I don’t like talking about the first time I met him. The second time, that was just for the press. Or they thought it was. Public Relations, you understand. No, I did my own research, when I thought I was on top of things. Hell, I went to Jamaica, to hear this new kind of music the Calypso orchestras were playing when the tourists weren’t around, this Ska stuff that a half-Chinese bandleader named Byron Lee was trying to figure out a way to bring to the mainland. There was so much I didn’t get to do. Is. So much.

  So much. I’m transfixed with rage and despair, seeing a man’s life and every hope and ambition prostrate, bleeding and infuriated. The thing which is to come has escaped His primary vessel, or will, and already seized throne and empire. Woe to any who try to countenance the King when He opens his tattered mantle!

  The first time we met, it was at his old home place. I was supposed to write it down, or keep notes. The memories are a vast black gully-buster stormfront rolling yonder, a mighty river of clouds that, when beheld in approach are actually a lake. A hole in the sky.

  The lake of Halì, which hides the city of Carcosa. Far out in the lake, distant thunder rumbles like the belly of the Beast that cometh down between worlds, down in the Big Blow, the big Delta Hurricane of 1936, to a shotgun shack with a leaky tin roof and no crib for a bed, slouching toward Carcosa to be bound, where hens don’t lay nor roosters crow, where owls hoot at noon and children write HELP backwards in the frost on windows no one ever sees. Listen to the beating of your blood. Daub it over your own transom. Listen to the rain of maggots. Frogs. The King walks upon Nashville and New York....

  Came I then to Tupelo, and the kaleidoscope sun. And the heat. And the chiggers beneath the skin. The hot rocks of the road barefoot coals. Came I then to Tupelo to eat with a fiend, and watch the Book of Revelation born in a borrowed bed.

  Came I then to Tupelo. I had a whole new cross to bear later, but I had to visit the birthplace first. No more than an hour’s drive from Memphis, that two-room shack where his twin was born dead, where his Mama brought him that hardware-store guitar. I had to look. I had to see.

  I got good and loaded on the way there, at some juke-joint in their little strip of a downtown where a spade cat poured me “good whiskey” when I asked for it by name and tip, and two other spade cats (one with a hollow-body guitar, and one walking an upright bass) were there on the little stage playing dirty blues and owning the whole block with lost chords, with howls and moans and waking sagas. Singing for their supper.

  I left the rental car downtown. I knew better. And no glen-plaid Brooks Brothers suit for the Moondog, either. The clothes I wore that day came from L.L. Bean, and the sneakers P.F. Flyers that looked so age-inappropriate on me when I got them on that I made a note to go pick up four more p
airs when I got back to the Big Apple.

  I got down and walked as far as I could. After a while, I stripped to an undershirt and only smoked where there was shade. After a while, I realized there were no more cotton plants in the fields around, nor sorghum nor anything but rocks, rocks, rocks and bones for a half a mile. The dirt was powdery gray, and not a flower or blade of grass to the sky.

  I had to see the shack, and couldn’t have held back if my own life had been the prize. The little flat-roofed white crackerbox. The sharecropper’s shed, only Vernon didn’t even have his shit together enough to sharecrop.

  Even from the sandhill two miles out, I could feel someone watching me from the yard like they knew who I was, what I brought, the other thing I’d come to see. Someone who maybe didn’t want to be rude to Yet Another Feller From The City.

  She was barefoot. Her feet were caked with gray mud and red clay, but even that was fetching, where the pale shell-pink creatures (callused into hooves by going barefoot half the year) swung from way up the trunk of the big mimosa tree in the front yard and out onto the thickest branch, looking off into the distance. At me. Or so it seemed.

  Her lovely head of black, wavy hair was crowned with a headdress that looked like it came from some fabulous other race out of Weird Tales. She wore a homespun dress edged with silver. From that far away, I could hear her singing some bloodthirsty old Scotch-Irish ballad like ‘Down In The Willow Garden,” you could tell by key and meter, but that wasn’t quite it.

  Not quite it at all. When I passed her on the road, the girl in the tree shouted something in a language I didn’t understand.

  I stopped, shading my eyes and trying to make out her face. A gold chain with a cross on it hung between her pale, freckled breasts. Every yellow ray of sun seemed to follow her hand, tipping her azure-veined white arms with gold wings and tingeing her hair with rose, as if from some faint warm light within her skull.