while the black stars burn

by kucy a snyder

  “Changed it?” Penny replied, remembering the medicinal bitterness of the tea.

  Bessie padded up with an old cotton blanket. Penny took it and wrapped it around herself.

  “How did you know to change it?” Penny asked.

  “This ain’t the first time the Haughtons did this. They tried it with your momma back when she was just a few years older than you. A hoodoo woman from New Orleans come up to warn us what they planned to do, and she showed me what herbs to switch in and out. Your momma was able to hold off the star-devils when they put her on the cross, and we reckoned that if we made the tea right and said our prayers, you’d do the same.”

  The old theatre downtown, Penny thought. So that’s how it burned down.

  “Is the Reverend dead?” Georgia asked, looking anxious. “We need to know. If that evil old buzzard survived—”

  “My grandfather is dead. Aunt Morinda, too,” Penny replied. “Come see.”

  She led them over to a blasted corpse that still wore purple silk tatters of a Grand Dragon’s robes. The fractured remains of a black, crablike creature still nested in his hipbones. Just as dead as the Reverend.

  “Oh Jesus, what’s that?” Bessie breathed, and her uncle muttered a prayer under his breath.

  Georgia inhaled sharply but didn’t react in terror like the other two; Penny figured that the older woman had either seen the abomination, or had guessed that it existed.

  “It controlled him like a puppeteer,” Penny said. “But I think he was perfectly willing to be used by it.”

  She turned to Georgia. “You said my mother wouldn’t open a portal to the stars?”

  Georgia shook her head. “She shut ‘em down like you did. Only she just set a fire, and most everyone escaped.”

  “Then where did this thing come from?” Penny asked.

  “I reckon he didn’t have it before he went on that expedition in Arabia and came back with all those relics, like that evil book they left for you to find,” Georgia replied.

  “We better check the house,” Penny replied, staring down at the broken black shell and curled arachnoid legs. “The thing about spiders and cockroaches is that if you see one, there’s almost always another one somewhere.”

  Georgia nodded. “I recollect the movers brought in a lot of big crates, and they took them down to the basement. Morinda forbade me from going down there. I didn’t want a caning so I never disobeyed her, but I know where she hides the key.”

  *

  Early the next morning, Georgia let the four of them into the musty old mansion. Penny wore a clean shift and pair of Mary Janes she’d borrowed from Bessie. Jay carried a burlap sack laden with pry bars, rope, matches, candles, and a couple of flashlights.

  “The Sherriff and his deputies were all Klan,” she said as she shut the heavy oak doors behind them. “So I reckon they died at the church along with everything else. Everybody in Bucktown knows to sit tight. But some of the Fensmere womenfolk got left at home with their kids; sooner or later the state police will come ‘round here asking questions. So we best find what we gonna find before then.”

  Nobody, it seemed, wanted to go to the cellar right away. So they went up to the Reverend’s rooms on the third floor and searched every closet, drawer, and wardrobe. They found nothing out of the ordinary but some strange and oddly cold figurines carved from black stone. Every time Penny touched one, her mind flashed back on some horror she’d glimpsed among the stars.

  “I think we have to go to the basement,” Penny said, trying to work the feeling back into her numbed fingers.

  Once they descended the long, curving staircase, they found themselves in a hidden warehouse beneath the mansion. Old-fashioned gaslights guttered in sconces on the walls. Penny surveyed the boxes and old furniture with dismay; almost any number of creatures could be hiding down here.

  But she realized that the hairs were standing up on the backs of her arms, and she could feel a low humming vibration from somewhere further into the basement. Penny led the others toward the faint sound, and they found an ancient Middle Eastern temple built from blocks and columns of black basalt crouched on the concrete floor. It was maybe fifteen feet tall, the peak of the terraced roof nearly flush with the basement ceiling, and probably twenty feet wide along each side.

  The only thing upon it that was not a flat, oppressive black was a single bronze door at the top of a short flight of steps. Upon the gleaming metal was some strange symbol wrought from shining gold. When she gazed upon it, Penny shivered as she had amongst the dead cultists at the old stone church, and she guessed that whatever language it was written in was not one humans could comprehend.

  “This thing gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Jay said as they carefully circled the temple.

  “They must have brought it in pieces and put it back together down here,” Georgia said. “I don’t see but the one door in or out.”

  “I’ll go in,” Penny said, responding to the others’ unspoken question.

  She might find nothing but darkness and dust inside the temple, but she could also find something that would utterly destroy her. In the back of her mind, she knew she hadn’t yet come to grips with having slaughtered most of the town. They’d surely had it coming, but it was all still a sin on a massive scale, wasn’t it? Even knowing the gods in the universe cared nothing at all for the human race wasn’t enough to take the sting of guilt from what she’d done. Because if there was no gentle afterlife to hope for, then that meant the life here on Earth was the most precious thing of all. If her mind ever fully felt the gravity of the lives she’d snuffed out and the orphans she’d created, she wasn’t sure that she’d care to go on living.

  So, she would leave her fate to the black temple. She’d fight for her life, but if she wasn’t strong enough to fend off whatever lurked inside, she’d take death as her due.

  “Just...don’t leave me down here, okay?” Penny added. “Wait for me to come back.”

  They nodded and gave her a flashlight and a crowbar. She walked up the steps, took a deep breath, and pulled open the heavy metal door. Her flashlight illuminated nothing but unadorned black walls inside the temple, but then something gold shone bright in the beam: another of the strange symbols, this one on the far wall.

  Penny stepped inside, gripping the crowbar in case something came flying out at her from the darkness.

  The floor beneath her gave way. She shrieked as she tumbled down a stone chute, first in darkness, and then in a blue, indistinct twilight—

  —she fell onto her hands and knees on a hillside. Instead of grass, she’d landed on a thick mat of gray lichens.

  “Clumsy!” her mother exclaimed.

  Penny looked up into the strange woman’s face and felt herself smile in recognition. “Sorry, Mama!”

  Her mother helped her to her feet and they dusted the gray flecks of lichen off her clothes. These hands were not hers, nor the body. Inside this strange new self, Penny reeled. Everything was weird; the air had an unhealthy fungous taint to it, and in the sky—the sky!—there hung a trio of strange, misshapen moons, and opposite the setting sun three black stars rose, their bright coronas gleaming through the streaked clouds.

  “Come, Cupra, we better hurry,” her mother said. “Your father will be home soon.”

  The girl took the strange mother’s hand and stepped back onto the rocky path toward home. Her old life as Penny and the horrors of Fensmere were rapidly fading away in her mind as if it had all been naught but a daydream; this is where she belonged, here in Carcosa with her loving mother and father. She remembered her childhood upon the moors and playing along the shore of the cloudy sea, of going out with her mother to pick herbs and fungus for food and dyeing cloth. Their baskets were full of the most precious mushrooms that produced the royal yellow dye, the colors of the mysterious King and his court, and woe would befall them should any of the nobles be displeased with their craft.

  Cupra had heard tales of the King; the whole of Carcosa fe
ared him. She’d seen his minions at the market in town and they were gaunt men and women with faraway stares, quick to anger and quicker to kill. Her parents told her that they were gentle as the spring wind compared to the King himself, and none could so much as look upon the King and maintain their sanity. Cupra had nightmares of the King sometimes, but when she was awake, a tiny part of her thought it must be very exciting to be one of the few who had seen him and lived to tell the tale.

  It was nearly dark when she and her mother reached their hut upon the moors. Cupra got to work sorting the lichens and mushrooms onto their drying tables behind the fireplace, and her mother started chopping root vegetables for a stew.

  The door banged open. “Ho! Where’s my girl?”

  “Papa!” Cupra sprang up from her workbench and ran to embrace her father. He caught her in a mighty bear hug, lifted her off her feet and swung her around as if she were a small child. His great red beard tickled her forehead.

  The tiny part of her that was still Penny basked in the love like a seedling feeling sunlight for the first time. There in the cozy hut with the lovely smells of her mother’s cooking, wrapped in the strong warmth of her father’s arms, she was the happiest she had ever been in her life. In that perfect moment, it was as if a door inside her soul had been opened, a door that led to the best possible person she could be. She felt a joy as pure as gold and heady as whiskey.

  But then she felt a chill, and there came a slow, thunderous knock at the door.

  Her father set her down and quietly shooed her over to her mother’s side.

  “Who’s there?” he called, gripping his hatchet.

  The door blew open on a gust of icy air, and there stood the King in his scalloped tatters. A pallid mask obscured his features.

  “It is I,” the dread King replied in a voice that made Cupra want to tear her ears from her skull. “I have come for new fabric.”

  “It—it’s not ready yet, my liege,” her mother said, her voice trembling.

  “That is...unfortunate.” The King made the barest motion of his hand, and her mother’s and father’s heads split right down their middles as if they’d been cleaved with invisible mattocks. They fell where they stood, their dark blood spilling across the tidy floorboards.

  Cupra wanted to scream, wanted to run, but she found herself rooted to the spot, unable to utter anything but a faint strangled noise.

  The King moved toward her, so smoothly it seemed he floated like a ghost. “It’s a dangerous thing to fall into the path of a living god, but then you’d know that, wouldn’t you, little changeling? Little dimension-hopper. Little murderess.”

  “Why?” she managed to gasp, staring down at the bodies of her parents.

  “Your Lord works in mysterious ways.” He took off the pallid mask, and she recoiled from the monstrosity she saw beneath it. But the worst was his eyes: they were the same terrifying black as the dark stars she’d seen upon the horizon.

  He leaned down and gave her a kiss, and suddenly that dreadful darkness was flowing into her mouth, down her throat, filling her very core, and she knew this was a living curse.

  She stumbled back, retched, but the darkness would not leave her, and when she looked up again, the King was gone, and she was alone with her slaughtered parents.

  Her world destroyed, Cupra fled. Where could she go? Her mother’s sister lived in Carcosa City. Perhaps she would take mercy on her. The girl ran two miles to the city of tall towers, but the guards at the wall barred her entrance.

  “You bear the curse of the King, and you may not enter,” the first guard told her, solid and immoveable as a stone in his gray uniform.

  “But he killed my parents; where can I go?” she pleaded.

  “Go find someone who could love the likes of you,” the second guard said. “But that is surely not here.”

  Despondent, Cupra turned away from the city gate, but a beggar in grimy rags called out, “Hoy, girl!”

  Cupra approached the beggar. “Yes?”

  “Lost your parents, did you?” His tone was sympathetic.

  Cupra nodded, heartbroken.

  “Go to the kingdom of the South. The King and Queen there are known to love all who enter their realm.”

  And so Cupra walked for days and weeks, living off what edible lichens she could find, drinking what dew she could collect in leaf-funnels overnight. The darkness inside her was as heavy as a mountain; she felt she was always a moment away from tears, but as time wore on it became harder and harder to cry. Sometimes, she’d come to a town and try to find a doorway to sleep in or a scrap of discarded bread, but a guard would always find her and chase her outside the city limits.

  She was but skin and bones when she reached the border of the Southern kingdom. As she crested the hill outside the kingdom’s gates, her eyes widened as she beheld the line of ragged people on the red carpet that stretched across the barren valley below her, all waiting to be admitted to the green meadows and fruit-heavy orchards beyond the gates.

  Cupra climbed down the hill and took a spot at the back of the line, half expecting the people around her to start pointing at her and shout her away back into the wilderness, but nobody did. The others were just as thin and ragged as she, just as travel-weary, just as desperate. They couldn’t see past their own miseries long enough to realize that she’d been cursed.

  The line moved forward, but it soon seemed people were just pressing up against the front gates rather than moving through. The crush of bodies made her nervous, made her think about abandoning the line entirely, but she heard beastly howling and realized that someone had released huge dire wolves that were pacing just beyond the red carpet, eyeing the people hungrily. Each monstrous canid wore a red, brass-spiked collar decorated with the royal crest of the Southern kingdom.

  “Prospective citizens!” called a woman, her voice floating like music over the crowd.

  Cupra looked up, and her breath caught in her throat. Atop the kingdom gates stood a man and a woman dressed in silver and silken sky blue robes, and they were both the most beautiful people she had ever seen. In that moment, Cupra had hope that if she could just be in the same room as the King and Queen of the South, she might find her happiness again, and the curse of the King in Yellow might be lifted.

  “We are honored that so many of you wish to join our kingdom,” the handsome king said.

  “We are a kingdom of love, and once you step through our gates, you shall need nothing else!” the beautiful queen declared. “You will never be hungry or thirsty again, because you shall not need food in our land, only our love.”

  “Therefore, to prepare yourself, we ask only that you remove that which you shall not need.”

  Two soldiers carrying large leather sacks began traveling down the line handing something out to each person in the line. Cupra wondered what it could be until a soldier pressed the handle of a very sharp knife into her hand. She stared down at the shining blade, wondering dumbly what she was supposed to do with it.

  “Do you love us?” asked the queen.

  “We love you!” cried the crowd.

  “Do you want our love?” asked the king.

  “Yes!” the starving people moaned.

  “Then hollow yourselves,” the queen ordered. “Be rid of your distasteful entrails. Hollow yourselves, and we shall fill you with our love.”

  A man near the front of the line screamed.

  Another cried out, “Ah, it hurts, my queen!”

  “If your love for us is true, you will be strong, and you will survive! Only those whose love is false and weak shall fall and be fed to the wolves.”

  Shrieks and wails rose all around Cupra as the desperate people began to hollow themselves in hopes of gaining the love of the beautiful king and queen. The darkness inside her ached like molten lead as she stared down at the knife blade. All around her, people fell to the rocky ground outside the red carpet—now, finally, she knew why it was red—and she could hear the snarling and rending
of bone and flesh as the dire wolves put those who hadn’t quite managed to hollow themselves out of their misery.

  “Girl.”

  She looked up, and a blue uniformed soldier upon a dappled gray warhorse loomed above her. He pointed his crossbow at her. “Don’t you feel the love?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I do feel it.”

  Cupra plunged the blade into her belly, and the darkness spewed forth from her wound, the darkness of a million poisoned stars, and it flooded the whole landscape, sweeping away the soldiers and wolves and miserable people. The gorgeous king and queen screamed and tried for higher ground but there was none to be found, and they, too, were swept away in the black ocean.

  Finally, the darkness receded, and Cupra stood alone in the wasteland, mutely clutching her wound.

  Alone but for the King in Yellow at her side.

  “Well done, my child,” he said. “Carcosa has but one King, and I shall stand for no others.”

  He paused. “Tell me, child. You came here as your last hope, and you found nothing but death. Is your spirit broken? Have you lost all faith?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Good,” he replied. “Then I have one last task for you. I’ve been to that planet of yours, and I think I’d like it best if the only sounds were the wind in the dead trees and the waves crashing upon empty shores.”

  He gave her a shove. The ground opened beneath her and she tumbled into a great dark chasm—

  —Penny landed hard on her back inside the temple, trying to pull the crablike creature off her face.

  Just relax and open your mouth, it whispered inside her mind. Be a good girl and it’ll all be over soon.