by Tim Curran
“And he was dead,” Julia said quietly. She didn’t believe the words as she said them, waiting for Nicole to snap at her for jumping to conclusions.
“I knew when I opened the front door. The smell of the place, you can’t imagine. I found him in his study, behind his desk. I don’t know what killed him. Probably a heart attack, or his liver finally giving up. There were some papers stacked on his desk that looked like they were part of Carcosa, so I grabbed them and got out of there.”
“What did you do with him? Did you call the police?”
“So that everyone would know he was dead? What do you think would have happened to the play? To us? Do you think anyone would come to watch a bunch of struggling nobodies put on half a play, and that half not even finished?” Nicole’s gaze shifted. “I thought I could use his notes to finish Carcosa. I’ve known Jarré since I was a teenager, I thought I could... imitate his style, fill in the gaps. But his notes were garbage. I couldn’t even read most of it, he was probably full of tequila when he wrote them.”
Julia took the wrinkled papers from Nicole’s outstretched hand and smoothed them out. Spiky handwriting slashed across the pages at a steep angle. Nicole craned her neck and tried to point out a few legible words. “This is all I could make out—something about the Masque. That’s why I added some more lines for you, I thought that’s what he wanted. The rest of it... let me show you.”
Julia leafed through the pages. She understood now why Jarré had bragged in interviews about using his father’s manual typewriter; the man’s handwriting was all but illegible, ordinary poor penmanship dragged into ruin by his advancing age and years of heavy drinking. She frowned. Here and there she could make out a few letters, almost a word—
Demhe
Ptahyl
Carcosa
Nicole stared at her with frank desperation. “Look, I know I’ve been harsh, but... I’ve watched you dance on days when we cancelled rehearsal. Whatever you’re doing, it’s like you understood something Jarré tried to write in his play, or... I can’t fake this anymore, Julia. If you can help at all...”
Julia set the pages to one side. She hardly saw Nicole. In her imagination the skittering text between the stanzas unfolded itself, like a flower opening through too many angles to be properly seen. All she had to do was sort them into the correct order; she marveled at herself that she could have missed it before.
“Let’s head back to the hotel,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Julia was no playwright. Reading the words on the manuscript was one thing; making them into coherent speech, and crafting them into dialogue or plot was beyond her. For that, she used Nicole. The two of them sat on the stained, worn carpet of Julia’s hotel room, surrounded by pages that Julia had carefully removed from the walls. She didn’t need to number them or mark their pages; the correct order was plain to her now. She pointed out words to Nicole that she thought were important. When Nicole admitted she couldn’t make sense of them, Julia read them out loud, or cleared the papers away to perform a few steps of the dance, to show Nicole the essence of the words. Nicole wrote everything down in a small notebook, her pen skittering across the page, her handwriting, from Julia’s upside-down perspective, growing as tangled and unreadable as Jarré’s had been. As the manuscript had been, before Julia finally understood.
This time it was Nicole who arrived late, while the troupe milled around sullenly and wondered whether she’d quit. She handed each of them a thick stack of pages, still warm from the printer: the script, all but the first scene completely rewritten.
“You must have been up all night working on this,” said Kai. Her gaze was fixed on Julia.
Nicole ignored her. “We need to step up our efforts. We’re short on time. I suggest we start with readings to familiarize ourselves with the dialogue. Start from the beginning, we’ll work our way up to just before the mask.” Her eyes were bright with excitement and fatigue.
Julia listened to the rehearsal with half an ear as she read through the script. The dialogue was still banal, the scenes still disjointed, but the phrasing was more like Jarré’s; something hidden under the bland surface of the words, a predatory shadow, barely glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The tension rose throughout the first act. There was no Act Two, not yet. Julia thought there must have been something, an outline, or at least rudimentary notes, among the papers Nicole salvaged from Jarré’s desk.
She wondered if Jarré were really dead, if Nicole had told the truth that he was unmistakably a corpse. He could have been blacked out, unconscious drunk, or simply sleeping on the floor, exhausted from his driven schedule. Or, she thought, perhaps Nicole had killed him? She imagined Jarré dismissing Nicole and her little company on a whim, bestowing the honor of acting out his glorious return to the theater on some other, newer favorite—
Maybe he refused to finish the play. Julia pictured it as clearly as if it were real: Jarré an old man with the mind of a petulant, spoiled little boy, his desk cluttered with the half-formed remains of plays that he had begun and discarded when he tired of them, dismissing Nicole’s stuttered protests with a sneer, turning away from her in disdain, and the heavy liquor bottle on his desk right at hand....
The theater was quiet. Julia closed the script and stood up, stretching. She had been so absorbed in her silly fantasy of Nicole as a murderer that she hadn’t even noticed that everyone else had left.
The play would be finished, she knew. It only waited for the right time to reveal itself.
When Julia returned to her hotel room, Kai was waiting. Julia nodded and slid her key card into the door. Before she could shut it behind her, Kai had pushed her way in.
“What are you doing to her?”
Julia looked at her, puzzled. “Nothing. Are you jealous? We’re not lovers, Kai. If you two are having problems it’s nothing to do with me.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Kai shoved the door closed. “Nicole’s not herself. She acts like she has a fever, she isn’t eating, she has bags under her eyes, she looks like you.”
“Like me?” Julia turned to her mirror. She had gotten out of the habit, since for several days it had been obscured by the slowly accumulating pages of the manuscript. Her reflection startled her. Dark rings smudged her eyes and shadowed her orbital bone. The planes of her jaw and cheekbones stood out in sharp angles. There was a slight tremor in her lip that she’d never seen before. Fear rose in her throat and threatened to choke her.
“When did you last eat, Julia?” Kai said. The anger in her tone softened. “You’re obsessed with this stupid play. I don’t understand, I know this Jarré guy is an indie favorite, but the play isn’t all that good. It’s not worth what you’re doing to yourself. I won’t let you pull Nicole in.”
“Demhe,” Julia said. “Hali.” The words calmed her and she turned away from the mirror. “No one will see my face under the mask, anyway.”
“What mask?” Kai looked at her in bewilderment. “And what are you saying? Are those more of his stupid plays?”
Julia bent over to pick up some pages and taped them back over her mirror. She looked at the one in her hand; it was the page where the second dancer first appeared, insinuating itself next to the first.
She straightened up and put the manuscript aside. “You know what, Kai? I think it would be easier if I just showed you.”
“Where the ever-loving hell have you been all day?” Taylor said. “And where’s Kai?” Everyone but Nicole was arrayed on the stage, scripts in hand: the scene that opened the beginning of the Masque.
“I have no idea where Kai is,” Julia said, and in a way it was the truth.
The women looked furtively at one another and would not meet Julia’s gaze. She ignored them. She was ready to rehearse her dance, her lines, in full for the first time. She made a beeline for the cabinet backstage where the smaller prop
s were stored; the Queen’s crown, the musicians’ chimes, an ermine robe daubed with fake blood, a pair of torn slippers. Julia shoved them out of her way and dug through the cabinet until her fingers closed on the smooth porcelain oval of her mask.
It fit her perfectly.
She beckoned to Nicole. With Kai gone, someone had to take the role of the Queen, and who else knew everyone’s lines so well? Nicole set her glasses and her notebook on the edge of the stage and hauled herself up over the edge, moving instinctively to the center, where the Queen stood when the Masque began.
Julia danced. A part of her wondered how she could possibly have tripped and hurt herself that first day of rehearsal; the raked stage was perfectly suited to her movements, and the shifting patterns of the other actors as they moved around the Queen, remarking on the fearful movement of the stars above, or feigning merriment to hide their terror of what was to come. Their feet moved in awkward, reluctant time to Julia’s dance, as if they meant to stop themselves from joining her.
Slowly the circle turned and contracted around Nicole. The others scuttled away as the dance brought Julia to stand in front of her, with a low, grave, exaggerated curtsey.
Nicole spoke to her, the words obscure and distorted as if they were underwater. Julia’s part came back to her in a rush and she remembered her cue.
“I wear no mask,” she said, and it was true. The pallid oval was her face, the lips moving as she spoke. She turned her impassive, terrible gaze to the empty audience. A heavy mist rose up around their seats and swallowed them into obscurity. Above them, the stage lights winked into stars.
The subtle dread that had built through all of Act One swelled to the point of bursting. Julia could no longer pretend to wonder what might be written next; they rose in her mind as clearly as if they were lines she had memorized herself. Her body arced without conscious thought into the opening steps of the dance. The awful words of the second act poured from her mouth like the clang of a tocsin.
Julia was distantly aware of the other women around her. She could not remember their names. One lay on the floor, weeping in terror next to a corpse with a twisted neck. Another crawled on her belly, a smile of idiot ecstasy plastered across her face. Yet another had found Nicole’s pen and used it to puncture one eardrum. She carefully twisted it into the other ear and sighed in relief as blood trickled down her neck.
Julia turned her back on them all. The lake stretched out before her. Where the mists parted, the light of an unfamiliar moon reflected from the water. She extended her arms in the final position of the dance and stepped from the edge of the stage, embracing the sly, reflected spires of Carcosa.
Demhe, she chanted; Ptahyl, Uoht, until the waters of Hali filled her throat and carried her under.
hite sky, black stars, a moonless nighttime in negative above a horizon of twisted towers and minarets. The view was surreal; the closer scene, that of a grey, lichen infested, cobbled square flanked by a squat, crumbling, granite wall....
Horrendous.
Crouched on their knees, their hands behind their backs and their heads bowed in supplication, were eight things lined in a row. Tall, bald, gangly humanoids, their naked yellow flesh was covered in scabrous patches. Not all were supplicants however. A female specimen, bald like the males but with pendulous, flaccid breasts, looked in Campbell’s direction with bulging grey eyes, licked her lips with a long, vein-filled black tongue.
A red dot appeared near the centre of her forehead, and the back of her head exploded in a cloud of atomised skull and brain matter. Campbell shuddered as if he’d heard the gunshot, but the video, now as it was at the beginning, was completely silent. Whoever held the camera shook a little, backed off as the dead female slumped forward. A momentary close-up returned. A gore-filled crater replaced the back of her head, a protuberant twist of spine poking up behind it. Her hands, tied with a black plastic cable tie, bore obscenely long, twisted fingers, the jagged nails thick with dirt.
The camera zoomed out. A male form dressed in black combat fatigues, a ski mask and tactical vest, replaced the corpse. He held a Glock 12 in his gloved hand. Kitted out for combat, and murder, he lifted a sheet of cardboard towards the camera.
Black letters read:
Revenge is Sweet
The man stepped away, and following that cold, clinical first kill came a barrage of gunshots that tore the defenceless things asunder, the shuddering bodies ripped to shreds while silently screaming faces blossomed with new orifices and screamed no more. The screen turned blank. Further darkness follows as Campbell closed his eyes, numb with disgust. What the hell is going on here? A rival agency or some foreign power in competition with us? He was sure Analysis would have a field day with the video, but had decided to keep this his secret.
Campbell opened his eyes and stared at the screen. It made no sense. He was accustomed to seeing the things, had been in the Carcosans presence off and on for eighteen months now. But he never thought he would see them die; didn’t think they could die. Do I speak to The King about this? His superior in the Bureau, Mr. King, would be suspicious as to why he’d kept this alien snuff film to himself. Two days earlier, Campbell had found the dirt-smeared, yellow object in his jacket pocket, and, considering its contents, could only assume it had fallen there from the sack of offerings he’d carried from the summoning room after the last Carcosan Event. His instinct told him to remain quiet.
He checked his watch and sighed. It was almost time. He pushed the chair back from his desk, pulled on his jacket, and halfway to the door returned to his desk, removing the memory stick and pocketing it before powering the computer down.
Revenge is sweet. Campbell pictured the slaughter. Yellow corpses, dirty cobbles pooled with black blood—with difficulty, he shook the image away. Standing with Gibson, a short, female, blonde fellow agent, the tall, bald headed King and two armed, buzz-cut blonde guards wearing khaki combat fatigues, a palpable fear filled the elevator’s small confines. Whenever Campbell was in close proximity to the summoning device, he needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else. By the looks on the other men’s faces and the sweat beading Gibson’s brow, he guessed they suffered similar thoughts. He didn’t envy The King’s role in this, the man holding the black cloth-covered device with his arms outstretched as if it were a bomb. The device was an artefact from the Roswell Event, one rumour went. Another said it had been discovered in Egypt, stuffed inside a Mummy. Whatever its origin, the device was bad company.
The elevator continued its descent, to a floor unused by anyone but the score of members belonging to Project Yellow Sign. Officially, The King’s agents belonged to the F.B.I.’s Facilities and Logistics Services Division. That’s what it said on paper.
Campbell grew lost in thought again, his mind drifting back to the blood, the death. The memory stick felt heavy in his jacket’s inside pocket.
An almost unfelt shudder, the elevator touching the basement floor, returned him to the here and now. The doors parted and The King strode forward, flanked by the guards. Campbell followed them down a grey basement corridor lined with rusted pipes. As The King and his retinue walked, ceiling tubes flickered above their heads. The group turned left at an intersection, and contrary to the unkempt state of the remainder of the floor they now faced a relatively new, reinforced steel door flanked by two armed guards. “They’re in there,” the guard on the left said, and tilted his head towards the door. While the rest paused, the petite Gibson stepped forward and with quick movements slid a card key past a reader at door’s midsection. A loud beep followed and the door fell forward a few inches. Gibson backed away, gave Campbell a nervous look as The King moved forward.
He nudged the door open with his shoe and revealed a familiar, frightening room.
Bare, dirt smeared white plaster walls, a cracked concrete floor, fluorescent tubes starkly illuminated the room. The offerings flanked the door. Sedated, strapped to
gurneys, two Death Row criminals awaited a doom far worse than death, and they deserved it. Campbell had read their sheets. One, a man named Devon ‘Dee’ Dewitt, had supposedly been executed two days earlier, for the multiple rape and murders of eight women in North Carolina. The other, Allen Stuart, ‘executed’ by lethal injection but instead retained and sedated by Campbell’s team, had murdered four people during a robbery at a Chuck E. Cheese. The FBI procured them easily. Monsters, scum, Campbell had witnessed what the Carcosans did to their ‘subjects’ for they occasionally dumped their leftovers when collecting fresh offerings. Why? Because they were evil, sadistic bastards.
“Okay, let’s get this started,” The King said, his pockmarked face betraying only a hint of nervousness. “Campbell, close the door. You two push the offerings towards the back wall.” This was directed at the guards. They shouldered their rifles and reluctantly wheeled the squeaking gurneys to the rear of the room.
Campbell pushed the door closed and heard it click as it locked. The way he felt, utterly trapped, was mirrored by Gibson’s strained expression, the woman’s eyes wide with anticipation. Beyond Gibson the guards returned, passing The King who now crouched on the floor with the device uncovered. He shoved the cloth in his jacket pocket, stood and backed away. The device, an amber, roughly triangular blob, released a mellow glow Campbell knew from experience would fill the room when the lights went down.
“Lights,” The King said and Gibson followed his instructions. Campbell placed his hands behind his back and clenched his fists. His throat dry, he swallowed loudly with fear and anticipation.
The device, now a yellow blob of fire, revealed an object embedded in its depths, a bulbous black cylinder surrounded by three twisted spokes. The King’s body became a black silhouette before it. Within the device’s apparently solid matter, the spokes moved with a sinuous life of their own.
