In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  By that point, the guards had had more than enough of it. Mother McGill was told to quiet down and when she didn’t, they hauled her down to solitary where, I heard, she continued to rant and rave. But I didn’t need to be told that—the stigmata of my wrists burned throughout the night.

  Month after month, the prison psychiatrist picked and pecked at me in search of some tasty red meat, trying in vain to understand my inner workings, the motivation for my crime and (what she called) a deep-set delusional disorder. She was convinced the wellspring of it all was David’s suicide. Although I advised against it again and again, she insisted on hypnotherapy. Our first few sessions were a complete bust. Then, on the third or fourth try, I came out of it and she began asking questions that I dared not answer. She had jotted down things I said while under—“the Pallid Mask” and “darkest Carcosa” and “Cor Tauri, the Festival of the Bloody Heart”—but I refused to comment on any of it. In fact, to my credit, I acted as if I had never heard of such rot and practically accused her of multiple delusions.

  But I was not completely stubborn. I tried to be cooperative when and where possible. The psych badly wanted to understand me and my psychosis. The way she spoke of the latter, you would have thought it was a living, breathing thing like some immense, fear-swollen parasite or an evil conjoined twin. She found it perplexing that I, an apparently loving and kind single mother, well-educated, well-bred, and quite successful, could commit such a crime, as if status precludes one from darkest folly. I parried with her a bit, telling her that when things were so right they had a way of going so wrong. But she was no fool. She wanted answers and she planned on having them, even if that meant slicing my brain wafer-thin and putting it under a microscope. She had a great deal of passion for my dilemma and I was pretty certain that she had some scientific paper in mind that would win her accolades amongst her peers. I understood ambition. She wanted to know the root cause and I explained it to her (in the most general and antiseptic way). It was the book, The King in Yellow. I had discovered it in the historical collection of St. Aubin’s College. As a full professor of Medieval History, I had access to those things which were denied others. I read the book, knowing quite well its fearsome reputation, and suffered the consequences. She claimed that the book did not exist and its namesake, the King himself, was a fantasy. I explained that for those who were chosen (cursed, might be a better word), he was occasionally visible in the distorted glass of certain antique mirrors or in pools of October rain. I had once glimpsed his numinous shadow at sundown, an immense and ragged form hovering over the city. I could tell her no more. Already, I knew, the ether of this world was beginning to fracture.

  That the King was close, I did not doubt. That he was reaching out for me was a given. That became very apparent to me one summer day as we trimmed weeds amongst the graves at the prison’s potter’s field. Here were acres of withered crosses and crumbling sandstone markers invaded and sometimes engulfed by infestations of devil’s gut, hairweed, and woodbine. We spent the better part of a week cleaning it all up. Creepers had even grown up the wall of the little stone mausoleum. I was one of those who peeled the knotty growths free and when I did, revelation of the worst sort awaited me. For there, etched into the wall, was the very image I had drawn on the bathroom wall in my own blood that terrible night: the King. He was a stick figure and nothing more, but as I stared upon him, he became three-dimensional, fleshing out like a flower blooming until I could see the juicy running orbs of his eyes that bled like crushed berries and the vibrant colors of his tattered mantle drew me in closer and closer until I heard my own voice say, “Oh, please, King, not again, not so soon.”

  I have no idea how long I stood there, transfixed, but soon enough a guard came. “What do you think you’re doing? Get back to work.”

  I pointed one trembling hand at the wall. “But... but he won’t allow it.”

  “There’s nothing there, can’t you see that? Get back to work.”

  Oh, the rapture of ignorance. The guard did not see what I saw and how I envied the sheer simplicity of his mental processes. Simplicity, I began to believe, was close to divinity. I dreamed of it and wished for it, but once you have opened the book and seen the dark star and the hollow moon there is no going back. No one can ever close that staring third eye that shows you hidden things in this world and beyond.

  I could go into great, prolix detail about other such occurrences, but I present only the latter to illustrate my point. The penumbra of the king was creeping closer and it would compel me to do the most awful things.

  All of which brings us to my last night in prison. After some six years, I was paroled. And the only reason I was paroled was because I was clever. I kept my nose clean, yes, but there was more to it than that. After a time, but not too soon as to appear suspicious, I accepted what the prison psychiatrist told me and volunteered for therapy sessions. That made her happy. I accepted all that she told me, sometimes repeating verbatim what she said, and that made her even happier. There was no book and no King. It was all delusion and fantasy. And that was how I won my early release from the cesspool of the prison.

  But let us consider my last night there for a moment.

  Sometime, in the dead of night, I opened my eyes. There was something in the cell with me and it was not Gretta. This was something born from the womb of dark and secret night. I could hear it breathing like wind in a chimney flue. It was standing near to me. Its body was a grotesque, heaving sack, its face white and soft, glistening like a mushroom damp with dew. I could see little of it and I was grateful for that. When it spoke, its voice was mucid, almost gelatinous: “You have found the Yellow Sign?”

  “No,” I muttered. “No.”

  Then a single pulpous hand like a flaccid starfish touched my wrist and the scars there burned like phosphorus. “It has been sent and you have found it.”

  I was released with very little fanfare. My parole officer was a man named Meecham who I instinctively did not trust. He was a smallish man, thin as a swamp reed, with a chin so sharp you could’ve sliced cheese with it. His right eye was blue, blinking all the time, but the left just stared. It was oddly large and green, but not a good sort of green, but the green of stagnant ponds and mildew. Frogspawn. It was gummy and jellied-looking.

  “What I want you to keep in mind,” he told me, “is that what happened is over with and you have a new life now. A new purpose. I will help you fulfill that purpose. Do you understand?”

  I told him that I did. At which point, he pulled out a large envelope and out of it he took the book.

  “Do you know what I have here?” he said.

  I was trembling. “I don’t want to see it.”

  “But you must, you must. You see? It’s no book at all.”

  What I was looking at was not The King in Yellow, but only a sheaf of papers that I recognized instantly. These were the doodlings I had done after finishing Act II. The work of a madwoman, certainly. Drawings of stars and distorted planetary bodies, surreal landscapes and cities with misty towers etched against the face of a rising moon. All of it was dominated by mindless scribbling that looked like the work of a child and numerous spiraling forms that seemed to connect it all together.

  “There is no book. There never was a book. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes,” I managed, turning away from those awful spirals that made my wrists burn. “Yes.”

  He slid the papers back in the envelope. “Excellent. Then we can begin to craft the new you. And you do want that, don’t you?”

  I told him I did. I was afraid not to. He was playing a merry obscene game and I knew it. For even as he spoke, I noticed that the edges of his mask were beginning to fray.

  Over the next few weeks as I settled into my role as ex-convict and former child murderess, there were things that did not sit right with me. I had the most disquieting sense that the world was no longer spinning safel
y and smoothly on its axis. Something had changed. I told myself it was only my perception of the same, but I was not convinced. Whomever or whatever had been in control of the universe before was in control no longer. Guardianship had changed hands. Maybe others were unaware of it, but I saw the signs immediately. They were subtle, but apparent—the arcing of sunlight at the horizon near dusk, the misaligned curvature of certain angles, the gathering of immense pale moths outside my window, and (the most telling) the frightening progress of a certain shadow that was getting closer by the day.

  Meecham settled me into a halfway house with the other ex-cons. It was a unisex place, the men’s quarters up the staircase to the left and the women’s up the right. Regardless of gender, they shared one thing in common: the stare, that awful almost cataleptic sort of stare as if they were looking at something far in the distance no one else could ever see. The majority of them stayed in their rooms, pacing back and forth as if they were still in their cells, uncomfortable with the outside world. I suppose the higher physics of unlimited space was beyond their comprehension after being caged so long. One of the women, an old lady everyone called Marge, hanged herself my first week there. She left a suicide note that said simply, ONLY THE LEFT EYE MAY SEE. But before she slipped the noose around her throat, she took an apple corer and took out the offending orb. She set the bloody glob in a teacup and then killed herself. And so very quietly that the woman in the next room didn’t even hear her.

  The woman next to me cried a lot at night. She had dead eyes that reminded me of pools of gray rainwater. It was said that she had murdered her own child. I understood her pain. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would wake up thinking Marcus was crying and I had to feed him. My breasts would ache incessantly, but then I’d remember that Marcus was dead and that I was alone. Oh, David, you do understand, don’t you? Often, I’d stare out the window, certain I could hear a baby crying somewhere in the night, lost and alone. But it was all in my head. More than once, I was certain I had spied Marcus in a baby carriage. But that was impossible... unless the time had come.

  Next door, night after night, I could hear the crazy woman rocking back and forth in her chair, squeak, squeak, squeak. Sometimes it went on until dawn. She often sang lullabies in a shrill, scratching voice that made my skin crawl. I wasn’t truly terrified until I heard a baby crying over there. It wasn’t possible. I knew it wasn’t possible. Yet I heard it and there was no mistaking it or the moist sucking sound of an infant feeding.

  Finally, after too many haunted and sleepless nights, I inquired about my neighbor. “She can’t have a baby in there,” I said to Kim, one of the other girls. “She killed her baby.”

  “Hell are you talking about? You’re the one that murdered your baby. Only you.”

  That was only one of many items that convinced me the world was lopsided and stretching itself inside out. Let me tell you of another. I woke one night quite late certain that I was not alone in my room. A search proved otherwise. I went to the window, staring at my reflection in the glass. And it was then that I saw not my room reflected behind me but some deranged seesaw landscape with an immense lake over which dangled black, guttering stars. On the shore of the lake I caught sight of some tall, crooked figure in scalloped tatters that blew about it like a shroud. I knew who it was. It could only be the King in Yellow and he was striding in my direction.

  That was enough in of itself, but it was not all. You see, the spiraling scars on my wrists that revealed the Yellow Sign were spreading. It was not possible and I knew it, but the evidence was all-too apparent: the intricate pink whorls had spread up my arms and down onto my chest. I traced them with my fingers and they were upraised like burns and unbelievably intricate. Their geometry was not only Archimedean in nature, but hyperbolic or inverse. If the eye followed their vortexual progression, the Yellow Sign was always revealed. And when it was seen, you could look beyond it and see the skeletal towers of Carcosa rising into a red-hazed sky through which Aldebaran and the Hyades peered through sickly yellow cloudbanks like swollen, diseased eyelids.

  After that, I must admit my memories are not as lucid as I would like. It seemed that everything started to get obscured. My world was leaning a little too far this way or that and where the angles met, I was afraid of what I might see. It was like looking through cellophane, everything became oblique, obscured, inverted. The King was turning my world upside down as he crept closer, ever closer to claim me as his own.

  Now to the next few items on my list.

  I awoke another night and I could hear whispering voices next door that disturbed me greatly. After a time, I pressed my ear against the thin wall and listened. This is what I heard: “You won’t be the one, you know. It is I who’ll wear the crown... not you! I have been made ready by His hand and the crown was promised to me in a dream of withered roses! I alone have plumbed the black depths of Lake Hali and I alone have climbed the towers and cried out the sacred names above the hill of dreams! All will soon bow down before me, the child of Hastur!”

  Whether it was the crazy woman speaking or the child itself, there was no way of knowing. I wanted to go over there and make them stop, but I did not dare. I knew if I opened that door, I would see a fleshy spiraling that would suck my mind from my skull.

  One afternoon after stepping off the bus, I stood on the sidewalk before the halfway house, trembling with fear. It was changing like everything else. It was no longer some simple, shabby three-story house but a cyclopean, rising black monolith that wavered and shuddered as if it could no longer hold its shape. I watched as it rose before me, filling the sky, its icy shadow enveloping me in the icy cerements of the King himself.

  But it did not end there, oh no. When the house became nothing but a house again, I went to my room. After lying on my bed for an hour or so, I went to the window and I saw not my world but the scarlet-litten city of Carcosa with its forest of twisted, rising towers overlooking a warped anti-world of clustering black ruins. I could see the Lake of Hali, its dark flat waters reflecting an immense moon of blood. On the shore stood the King in Yellow beckoning to me amongst the crushed shells of a thousand disciples.

  I pulled the shades so I did not have to see the twisted nightmare vistas of that anti-world and particularly its king. For three interminable days and three torturous nights I hid there in my boxlike room, waiting for a tread on the stair or, worse, for the gossamer material of this world to wear thin from its constant friction against that intrusive other which threatened to intersect all that we know. The penumbra of the King’s shadow grew closer and closer by the hour. My second day of self-imposed isolation, I dared peek around the drawn shade and what I saw was the shadow edging closer to the house. Of course, others would say it was only the shadow thrown by the looming building across the street, but I knew better. For each evening at dusk I watched its grim approach, I clearly saw that diabolic penumbra creeping ever forward on a thousand tiny legs.

  By the night of the third day, I knew that I was trapped. I should have escaped while there was time and maneuvering room. The reality I had known my entire life was fragmenting, giving way to the tidal thrust of a limitless blackness without form. Each time it began to come apart I heard something like a crackling or sizzling and awful pains swept over me... following, yes, following the exact patterns of the spiraling cicatrisation that covered my entire body now much as electricity will follow the path of a copper wire. When the pain ceased, I would see—if only momentarily—my room turned topsy-turvy and inside out, remade by the hand of another into some poor, crude replica whose walls oozed a mephitic pink slime and whose ceiling was loose and spongy. Dear God, even the floor was like some nasty jelly as if I were not squatting on tiles but on the accumulated soft putrescence of dozens of over-ripened corpses.

  Then it would pass.

  But I knew, given time, it would engulf my world and there would be no going back. For three nights I watched the
moon hanging above the city like an immense peeled eyeball studying the nocturnal scrambling of those creatures who would soon tremble before a new and malefic god. It throbbed like a heart, pulsing with each abnormal beat, filling itself with blood, getting stronger and larger, fleshing itself out for the final act.

  There were things that needed doing and only I could do them. I plotted carefully and waited. When I heard that poor demented woman slip downstairs, I went over there and found the door ajar. It smelled strange in there, hot and briny like tidal flats on a scorching summer day.

  Passing by the bed, I went to the bassinet under the window, pushing aside the flowing lace. The baby stared at me with curiosity and innocence.

  “Again, oh King, must I do it yet again?”

  The moon was peering through the window and looking at its face I saw voids, glistening depths, and some demented stygian dead-end space where black stars shiver in a nightmare cosmos. Soon, I would travel there.

  As I hesitated in my sacred task, the penumbra of the King in Yellow crept ever closer. I heard the crackling-sizzling sound and the stigmata of my elaborately scarred body went electric with pain. Right away, the room began to alter. It mutated, morphed, going liquid like hot corpse fat and cooling into something perverse and insane. It was a room as envisioned by a lunatic, a surreal, anti-real, expressionistic tangle, a black and red framework of pitted bones and jagged shards of glass, warped doorways that led into black pathless wastes and windows that looked into the pulsating face of the grinning, sardonic moon.

  But I completed my task and when they charged into the room, I held up the blood-dripping, mangled offering to the King. I saw then that there were no secrets between us. They knew that I had tied the noose that David hanged himself with—dear God, he had begged me to after glimpsing the book—and they knew I brought Marcus to term only to offer him to the mighty King at summer solstice. “I have won and now I ascend to the throne! It is my right as concubine of Hastur! It is I who shall wear the crown and I who shall rule over darkest Carcosa!” As they approached me, I tossed the offering at them so the King would know that I was righteous and pure. Then carefully, calmly, and with exacting precision I showed them the knife I carried. How the face of the moon glimmered along its blade. Then, with the finesse of a surgeon, I slit along the outer edges of my mask and began to peel it free so they could see what I hid beneath, the face the world would soon worship and tremble before.