In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  Now that he was here, James began to doubt his actions and feel exposed. He glanced along the street, but nobody seemed to be paying him any attention. Not the elderly woman carrying her shopping bags, nor the middle-aged jogger moving in the opposite direction. He looked again at the door, unsure of what to do next.

  There was a café across the street – a low-key place that provided a good vantage point from which he might watch the house. He crossed the street and went inside, sat at a table by the window but not in the window: he wanted to watch without being seen. The waitress spoke good English, and recognised him as a tourist, so he ordered a pot of coffee and waited.

  He did not have to wait long.

  After thirty or forty minutes, a small white Fiat pulled up at the kerb outside the townhouse. There was a short pause, and then the driver’s door opened. The man who stepped out onto the kerb was small and broad. He was wearing a knee-length overcoat and a crumpled fedora hat, but still James recognised him from the photograph on the website. This was a man who had allegedly appeared in the footage shot that weekend in Sarajevo; it was also the man who made a film featuring a character called Phantomas Ulmer, which was also the alleged name of the man who had filmed the adaptation of The King in Yellow.

  A thrill of something that might have been excitement, or possibly terror, made its way through James’s body. He put down his coffee cup but gripped it tightly, trying to cease the shaking of his hands.

  The small man opened the door to the townhouse and went inside.

  James stared at the door, wondering what he was going to do next, and why the hell he had come here. Beyond the initial mystery of the footage shot in a Sarajevo asylum, there was a deeper puzzle to solve. He had only just glimpsed its edges, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to dig any deeper. He had no doubt now that the film existed – it was not a myth. There was no evidence to support his belief, only the certainty that he felt inside. He had not been so certain about anything for a long time. If he was honest with himself, he’d be forced to admit that for the first time in years he actually felt alive.

  There was something going on here. Something that might lead to the creation of a project that people would talk about for years to come. And wasn’t that the whole point of all this: to make his mark and force people to notice him?

  He left some money on the table and left the café, crossing the street to the townhouse. He climbed the steps and knocked rapidly on the door. Only then did he regret being so impulsive. He had no idea what to say, what to do, when the door opened.

  Just as he was about to flee, the door did open. The small man stood there smiling. Without the fedora hat, he looked even more like the image in the photograph. In fact, he had barely aged at all.

  “Hello,” said James, feeling heat in his cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, James,” said the man in a cultured European accent. “I have been waiting for you.” He pulled the door wider, brushing back shadows, stepped aside, and motioned for James to enter.

  “Do you not think I monitor that website, the one with the article?” Lenz moved quickly and lightly across the cluttered room. His economical gait suggested that he floated rather than walked. He’d taken off his jacket to reveal a sturdy torso wrapped in a white long-sleeved shirt. His arms were wide, as if he worked out regularly with heavy weights.

  “But how did you know my name?” James was sitting in a large armchair with a glass of whisky in his hand. He watched Lenz as he fussed with a pile of books on a low table, arranging them into a neat stack.

  “Nobody has sent anything to that email address in years so it was flagged immediately. I simply did a little research and discovered that you were indeed a fellow filmmaker.” He smiled. His teeth were short, stunted. They weren’t very clean.

  “So...” James put down his glass on the floor at his feet. “You’re all of them. Tommy Urine, Werner Lenz, Phantomas Ulner. They’re all you.”

  “Yes, that is correct.” His clipped accent gave him a sinister air, but James wasn’t afraid. Not of this tiny man.

  “I’m not sure I understand any of this. Why the different identities? Who are you hiding from?”

  Lenz sat down on a small dining chair against the wall – one that was probably meant for a child. He crossed his legs and smoothed his trousers with a small, dainty hand. “I’m sorry for the... secrecy. The obfuscation. Sarajevo was a strange time. A dark time. There were many evils abroad. When I made my... my little film... I was a different man, under the influence of all that evil. I’ve tried to keep the darkness at bay ever since.”

  “What happened back then?” James moved forward in his chair. “Don’t lie to me. I know you filmed something... something that you shouldn’t have?”

  Lenz stared into James’ eyes. His face was stiff, like that of a doll. “What I filmed was... in all honestly, I still do not know what I filmed. We only got a short piece of footage, a few minutes, before trouble outside the institution disturbed our shoot. What I saw through the camera’s lens in that time was confusing: a soft billowing of something yellow, a thin, bony hand, someone very thin running towards the camera. Then darkness.”

  James glanced around the room. He had the feeling that it contained more than the little man’s possessions. Somewhere in here, there hid memories and he wanted to access them, to dust them off and bring them out into the light. “Come on, man. This sounds like something from the Twilight Zone.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Lenz. “That was one of my favourites. I did enjoy those American shows.”

  James felt tired. The travelling was catching up with him. He rubbed at his eyes with his hands; they felt dry and itchy. He yawned. “I’m sorry... I didn’t realise how exhausted I was.”

  Lenz was smiling. His grubby teeth looked ugly, but his eyes were kind. “I know. And I’m sorry.” He stood, took off his shirt, and pushed out his chest to show the tattoo: The Pallid Mask. Now that he saw it in the flesh, James could make out the colour. It was yellow.

  “What is this?” He tried to get to his feet, stumbled, went down on his knees.

  “The oldest trick in the book, my friend.” The tattoo seemed to be speaking, not the little man upon whose chest it had been inked. “I lured you here, drugged you, and now I am preparing to use you for my own means.”

  James felt like screaming but his mouth was sealed shut. He couldn’t believe he had been so stupid.

  When he awoke he was strapped into an upright framework of steel tubes, like scaffolding built for a hanging. He was naked. He tried to blink but nothing happened. Then, taking in his surroundings, he realised that there was a long mirror on the basement wall opposite his position.

  His body had been shaved clean of hair and strange symbols and shapes were daubed on his flesh. The bald, bloody, shivering man hanging by his wrists from an inverted cruciform structure was himself. He was unable to blink because his eyelids had been sliced off. There was no pain. He was too drugged-up to feel anything at all.

  Puzzled, he stared at his own haggard face and tried to see some kind of light in the panicked eyes.

  “I really am sorry.” Lenz stepped into view. He was naked and sporting an erection that was disproportionate to his body size. He, too, was bloodied, and James knew exactly whose blood it was, where it had come from; his veins longed for its return. “But I cannot have anyone trying to get their hands on the film.”

  Lenz smiled: yellow baby-teeth in a tiny skull. “I went back there after the asylum was bombed, you know. The camera was still intact. Do you want to know what was inside when I opened it up?”

  James could only shake his head. No. No, no, no....

  “No film... not that. It was gone. Instead, there was a roll of faded yellow material, like a ribbon, and written upon it in delicate black lines was a set of instructions. A map, if you will: a map to Carcosa, the land that only ex
ists within the imagination of a long-dead writer of weird fictions. I’ve spent years trying to translate what was etched onto that strip of cloth, copied it onto the flesh of so many sacrifices in an attempt to access the roads and territories on the map so that I might journey there and meet the Yellow King. I have risked so much, but nothing has worked. So I continue to try, but only when an opportunity presents itself. I grow too weary to seek out fools like you. These days I wait for them to come to me instead.”

  James shook his head again. He wept red tears into a gaping yellow abyss.

  “An opportunity just like this one, dear friend...” Lenz raised his hand, showing James the knife. The odd double-handle was made of what looked like bone – a small human arm, to be exact: the radius and ulna still attached together, or perhaps fused in the intense heat of something like a bomb blast. The long, thin blade was a dull yellow.

  “Perhaps this time,” said Lenz, advancing. “Perhaps this time, it will work.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  The little man stopped in front of James, cocking his head to one side. He seemed to drift, his mind going elsewhere for a moment. “The atrocities I’ve committed, the lives I have wasted... so much blood I have spilled, in fact, that sacrificing you will barely even register on my conscience. Like a fart in a wind tunnel. I wish that I could grant your end more of a sense of occasion and make it signify something better than a banal rite in an underground room. I really do. But I cannot. It means nothing to me... unless this time something happens, of course... something numinous.”

  Lenz snapped back into the moment, focusing on James.

  “Truth be told, I very much doubt that it will. I commit these acts now more out of habit than the hope of something happening.” He blinked, as if caught in a moment of self-realisation. “Habit... and it is such a tough one to break.”

  Lenz’s shadow elongated, mocking the dimensions of his body. It crawled along the walls, old and sleek and monstrous.

  James stared at his own face in the mirror. He barely recognised himself. Then, as his diminutive murderer moved in swiftly with the blade, he stopped seeing himself altogether and focused only on the slight billow of yellow he saw momentarily reflected in the grubby glass.

  Berlin, 2004

  The city is too dangerous. He can no longer stay here. He packs up his suitcase and waits for the taxi to come and take him to the airport.

  The Yellow Film is locked away somewhere safe.

  The map to Carcosa, those teasing instructions whose meaning remains tantalisingly out of reach, is held in a safe deposit box in a bank in Zurich. But he does not need to go there. The strange words and symbols are engraved upon his soul. He sees them whenever he closes his eyes; he dreams about them on the few occasions he is able to sleep. He has written them out time and time again on the shaved and purified skin of his victims.

  He walks outside and sits down on the sidewalk. The taxi will not be long, and then he can leave this place. He listens intently but cannot hear anyone talking in the dark. The basement cell will never be found. The bodies shall not be uncovered. With that last one, he could have sworn that he saw something: a billowing movement, a flash of yellow, like something caught in his retina, as he dug into the wet cavities and exposed their internal secrets.

  Perhaps he did.

  Or perhaps not.

  Maybe next time things will become clearer and he will finally be given access to the place where he belongs, the city that he no longer believes exists outside of an old book of stories that he once tried to put onto film.

  But even this realisation isn’t enough to break the habit of a lifetime.

  The taxi pulls up at the kerb. Without even a backward glance, the small man with many names climbs inside and waits to be taken somewhere else.

  ulia’s reflection raised its arms. It rippled in the yellowed, uneven glass of the mirror. It turned slightly at the waist and gestured at something unseen to its right. It took a half-step, awkward and hobbled, a bird with an injured wing, and then Julia’s foot twisted under her. She flailed into the heavy wooden frame of the standing mirror and knocked it over, landing flat-out across the glass. She looked down at her reflection; for an absurd instant she worried that it might be hurt. A dull bead of blood dripped from the point of her chin and splashed the mirror.

  Someone shoved the heavy back curtain aside and the other actors of the company crowded into the space. Nicole, the tallest woman in the group, did not so much shove them aside as move them by the aura of her angry presence. She looked down at Julia. “What happened?”

  Julia awkwardly rolled over and sat up. “I was doing warm-ups in front of the mirror —”

  “You’re not supposed to be practicing your dance,” Nicole said, practically hissing the last word. “You should be practicing your lines and practicing them sitting down until your ankle heals. We are putting on this play with a skeleton crew and nobody has time to be your understudy. Is that clear?”

  Nicole spun and stalked away without waiting for an answer. The other actors milled around, avoiding her eyes. Only Kai stepped forward, regal, beautiful Kai, helping Julia to her feet.

  “Sorry about that,” Kai said. She smiled an apology. “Jarré hasn’t sent any new pages of script in days and Nicole’s very upset.”

  You don’t have to apologize for her just because you’re sleeping with her, Julia thought, but did not say. She mimicked a smile back, and nodded, and said nothing at all. She resisted the urge to go back and check on the mirror before she left the theater.

  Julia spent the next two days sitting down. She didn’t bother to practice her lines, because there were only two. She passed the time re-reading Abelard Jarré’s other plays, the ones she had hunted down in the basements of used book stores and read to tatters when she was a drama student: Memorial Sand, Anticlast, Hour of the Oxen, even Indolence, his first and least-regarded play that was nonetheless her favorite. In the thirty-five years since releasing Manifenêtre, Jarré had written nothing. He gave no interviews and appeared in public rarely; many speculated that he was dead. Through some chain of friendships or remote relation that seemed hazy to Julia, Nicole had gained his rare favor, and Jarré picked her tiny, all-woman theater company to stage his new play Carcosa. Julia would have believed it a hoax or publicity stunt if she hadn’t seen the first pages of the partial script herself, read scenes described through Jarré’s searing vision, impossible to imitate. She still had trouble truly believing that she had a role, even a small one, in his play. It was a gift that even Nicole’s hostility and arrogance could not tarnish.

  Julia had read to the point that she feared any more would make her bored and tired even of Jarré’s writing. She went to the theater and slipped in to the back, picking a seat far back in the shadows where she could watch the rehearsals unnoticed. Even the choice of theater was odd, if not surprising for Jarré: a jewel box of a building from the turn of the century that seated perhaps a hundred patrons. It fell into disrepair after World War Two, but in a spurt of local philanthropy, had been renovated to a state that echoed its old glory. Julia privately hoped those renovations had included meeting modern fire codes. Whoever had dictated the renovations failed to match their nostalgia for a historic theater with modern practice; the seats rose in steep tiers, but the stage was raked, tilted forward toward the audience, a trick from the early days of theater to make actors upstage visible to the groundlings. Julia had twisted her ankle because of the unfamiliar angles of that tilted stage.

  Onstage, Kai and Catherine were practicing Scene Four, the lovers’ spat that turned from sensual flirtation into a violent, erotic brawl. Nicole rose from the front row of the audience. The actors scrambled apart. They spoke, their voices too low for Julia to make out the words, but their tone of voice clear: Nicole furious, Kai and Catherine abashed. Julia wondered whether they had botched something in the script – a forgotten line, or
an intonation departing from Nicole’s rigid interpretation of Jarré’s artistic vision – or whether Nicole was jealous, suspicious that the passion between her lover and Catherine heralded something other than the demands of the play.

  Nicole sat back down, vanishing behind the tall back of her chair, and the women onstage began the scene from the beginning. Julia lost interest in watching the drama, either within the play or outside of it. She slipped out of the back row and along the shadowed aisle that led to the stairs going up. She decided to explore the old box seats first, and then, when the others took a break from the rehearsal, to look around backstage. Something about the old theater intrigued her: the oddity of its architecture, its strange partial renovation, the odds and ends of props and costumes left behind by other troupes years ago.

  There was little backstage proper that she hadn’t already seen. The tall mirror had been shoved into a far corner, next to rolls of canvas crusted with ancient paintdrops. Thick layers of dust rose and made her sneeze. She wandered through the near-maze of pallets and backdrops and cheap furniture sets, her interest in exploring the theater waning. In turning to find her way back out she stepped on a knob of metal sticking up from the floor. She crouched down and gave it an experimental tug. It came up, attached to a thick cord that might once have been white, before it abruptly stopped. Julia pulled harder. A section of the floor swung up and over, like a utility door in an attic. Beneath it a set of haphazard wooden stairs led down. The air rising from the hole smelled stale.

  Julia tapped the flashlight icon on her phone and shone the beam down the stairs ahead of her. Splinters dragged at the fabric of her shoes. She picked her way down a wooden staircase that was little more than a wide ladder. Even with her careful balance, the absence of handrails felt dangerous, as if putting a foot wrong in the slightest would send her flailing over the side. The weak, dusty sunlight barely filtered down to the room below, and she shined the flashlight ahead. It was hard to guess exactly where the room was relative the rest of the theater; perhaps under the stage, but wouldn’t that all have been cleaned up during the restoration? Cold leached through her thin shoes. The floor felt hard, uneven, like packed dirt.