Cassilda's Song: Tales Inspired by Robert W. Chambers King in Yellow Mythos

by Allyson Bird

  “Did you know that your father was working on a series of violin sonatas when he died?”

  Her skin itched beneath her sweater. She rubbed at the scar again. “No, I did not.”

  “He was writing them for you, for when your playing would be mature enough to handle them. He told me he intended them to be a surprise for your 21st birthday. I think he realized his dalliance with drink might lead to disaster – as indeed it sadly did – so he arranged for his lawyer to send me the sonatas along with a formal request that I complete them in secret.

  “I regret that I am not half the composer he was, but I am proud to say I have done as he asked. Six months late for your 21st, and for that I apologize, but at last his music is ready for you.”

  “I … oh my. I really don’t know what to say. That was very … kind of you.”

  “I regret that kindness had nothing to do with it; as a composer I could not pass up the opportunity to co-author a work with the good Maestro. It was an extraordinary challenge, one that I am most pleased I was able to meet. I had to consult with … certain experts to complete the work, and one is here today, ready to listen to you perform the first sonata. If you do well – and I am sure that you will! – I believe that he is prepared to offer you a musical patronage that will ensure that you’re taken care of for the rest of your life.”

  Caroline felt simultaneously numb with surprise and overwhelmed by dread. Was this truly an opportunity to escape her slide into poverty? Few students in her position ever saw salvation arriving before they’d even graduated. She had to rise to the occasion. But knowing her father was behind it all made her want nothing more than to go back to her cramped, drafty apartment and hide under the covers.

  Her lips moved for a moment before she could get any words out. “That’s amazing, but I couldn’t possibly perform a piece I haven’t even seen –”

  “Nonsense!” His tone left her no room for demurral or negotiation. “You are a fine sight-reader, and after all this music is made for you. You’ll be splendid.”

  Feeling supremely self-conscious about her dowdy thriftstore clothes and the unfashionable knit cap over her unwashed hair, Caroline took a deep breath, got a better grip on her violin case, lifted her chin, and strode out onto the small, brightly-lit recital stage. Her footsteps echoed hollowly off the curved walls. The theatre was small, just thirty seats, and she could sense rather than clearly see someone sitting in the back row on the left side. Normally having just one listener would bolster her confidence, but today, the emptiness of the room seemed eerie. She bowed crisply toward the dark figure, and then took her seat in a spotlighted wooden folding chair. The music stand held a hand-written musical booklet made from old-fashioned parchment. Her eyes scanned the cover sheet:

  Into the Hands of the Living God

  An Etude in G Minor for Violin

  Composed by Dunric Cage-Satin with Dr. Alexander Harroe

  Caroline frowned at the title. Was this some sort of religious music? As far as she knew, her father had been an ardent atheist his entire life. Ah well. There was nothing to do but struggle through as best she could. At worst she’d perform miserably, lose her mysterious patron, and be exactly as penniless as she’d been when she woke up that morning. She opened her violin case, pulled her instrument and bow from the padded blue velvet cutouts, carefully ran her rosin puck across the horsehair, flipped the cover page over to expose the unfamiliar music, and prepared to play.

  The notes bore a cold, complex intelligence, and the tonality reminded her a little of Benjamin Britten. But there was something else here, something she’d neither heard nor played before, but nothing bound in stanzas was beyond the capacity of her instrument or her skills. She gave herself over to craft and educated reflex and the stark black notes transubstantiated into soaring music as nerves drove muscle, keratin mastered steel, and reverberation shook maple and spruce.

  The stage fell away, and she found herself standing upon a high, barren cliff above a huge lake with driving waves. The air had an unhealthy taint to it, and in the sky there hung a trio of strange, misshapen moons, and opposite the setting twin suns three black stars rose, their bright coronas gleaming through the streaked clouds.

  When the dark starlight touched her palm, her scar exploded, a nova made flesh. She fell to her knees on the lichen-covered rocks, unable to even take a breath to scream as the old lines glowed with a transcendent darkness, hot as any stellar cataclysm.

  She heard footsteps and the rustling of robes, and through her tears she saw a regal iron boot beneath an ochre hem embroidered with the tiny white bones of birds and mice.

  “You’ll do,” the figure said in a voice that made her want to drive spikes into her own brain. “Yes, you’ll do.”

  She felt the terrible lord touch her head, and it was like being impaled on a sword, and suddenly she was falling—

  —Caroline gasped and the bow slipped and screeched across her strings. Blinking in fear and confusion, it took her a half second to realize she was still onstage, still performing … or she had been until her mistake.

  “I’m—I’m so, so sorry, I don’t know what happened,” she stammered, looking to her lone audience member in the back of the theatre. But all the seats were empty.

  “It’s quite all right.” Professor Harroe hurried onstage from the wings, beaming. “You did wonderfully, just wonderfully.”

  “I … I did?” She blinked at him in disbelief. “But … I messed up, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, a mere sight-reading error … I’m sure you’ll play straight through to the end next time! And. Your new benefactor has requested that you perform tomorrow evening at the St. Barnabus Church on 5th Street. 6pm sharp; don’t be late!”

  “Oh. Yes. Okay.” She set her violin down on her lap, and the pain in her hand made her look at her palm. Her scar had split open during the performance, and her sleeve was wet with her own blood.

  When Caroline tried to sleep on her narrow bed, she fell almost immediately into a suite of nightmares. She was onstage again, and the notes of her father’s sonata turned to tiny hungry spiders that swarmed over her arms and chewed through her eyes and into her brain. Predatory black stars wheeled around her as she tumbled helplessly through airless, frigid outer space. And then she was back in the strange land with the twin suns, but now she was a tiny mouse pinned to a flat rock, and a masked man in yellow robes told her how he would flay her alive and take her spine.

  She awoke sweating and weeping at 3am, and in a moment of perfect clarity, she realized that she wanted no part of whatever was happening at St. Barnabus in 15 hours. There was not enough money in the world. She quickly dressed in her dowdy secondhand pants and sweater, threw a few belongings into an overnight bag and grabbed her violin case. The Greyhound station was just a mile walk from her apartment building, and there would be a bus going somewhere far away. Maybe she could go to Boston, find her mother’s people and learn to make shoes or whatever it was that they did. Shoes were good. People needed shoes.

  But when she reached the pitchy street and started striding toward the station, she realized that the city was darker than usual. Tall buildings whose penthouses normally glowed with habitation were entirely black. She scanned the sky: no stars or moon, nothing but a seeming void.

  And then, she saw something like a tattered black handkerchief flutter onto a nearby tall streetlamp, blotting it out. She stood very still for a moment, then slowly turned, beholding the uncanny night. Tattered shadows flapped all around. She started running, the violin case banging against her hip. The tatters moved faster, swarming around her on all sides. Soon she was sprinting headlong down the street, across the bridge …

  … And realized the other side of the bridge was lost in the ragged blackness. No trace of light; it was as if that part of the world had ceased to exist, had been devoured by one of the stars from her nightmares.

  She looked behind her. More utter darkness. The city was blotted out.

 
“I won’t do it,” she said, edging toward the bridge railing. She could hear the river rushing below. “I won’t.”

  The jagged darkness rapidly ate the bridge, surging toward her, and so she unslung her violin case and hurled her instrument over the edge into the murky water. The darkness came at her even faster, and she crouched down, covering her head with her arms—

  —And found herself sitting in a metal folding chair in the nave of a strange church. In her hands was her old violin, the one she’d played as a child. Her father’s sonata rested on the music stand before her, the notes black as the predatory stars.

  “I won’t,” she whispered again, but she no longer ruled her own flesh. Her hands lifted her instrument to her shoulder and expertly drew the bow across the strings. The scabbed sign in her palm split open again, ruby blood spilling down her wrist, and she could see the marks starting to shine darkly as they had in the dream. Something planted in her long ago was seeking a way out.

  Caroline found her eyes were still under her control, so she looked away from the music, looked out the window, hoping that blinding herself to the notes would stop the performance. But her hands and arms played on, her body swaying to keep time.

  And there through the window she saw the glow of buildings on fire, and in the sky she saw a burning version of the symbol in her palm, and the air was rending, space and time separating, and as the firmament tore apart at the seams she could see the twin suns and black stars moving in from the world of her nightmares.

  And she wanted to weep, but her body played on.

  And the people in the city cried out in fear and madness, and still it played on.

  And the winds from Carcosa blew the fires of apocalypse across the land, and still it played on.

  OLD TSAH-HOV

  BY ANYA MARTIN

  Lights flash on, a door slams, I jerk awake. Footsteps approach, and through the bars, I see bent bodies, faces staring. She says the word enough that I know it to be his name—Archer. The adam shakes his head, adjusts his glasses. He wears a pricker-prodder white coat and on it a pin the color of the sun with six points like the one she used to wear.

  I jump up and yell, lunge for the bars. I cannot help it. The pin makes me angry because it reminds me of her and how I am trapped in this place with no sun, but blinding white lights that hurt my eyes and how I am not with her, and most of all not in the city where I yearn to be with that longing so deep it aches inside my heart.

  Archer and the woman, who has short red hair and a similar coat but no pin, pull back, stand up. They are not afraid of me which makes me yell louder.

  “Let me out, you fuckers!”

  The other prisoners start shouting now, too. Whenever one of us yells or screams or even whines, we all do. They cannot silence us.

  The couple turns and walks away, out the first door, the one through which I was brought. The prisoners nearest to it talk loudly and happily when they leave and when they return. They think they won’t be here for long, that their families will be coming to pick them up soon. Sometimes they don’t come back and I assume their offenses were less than mine and that they have homes to go to.

  The door at the other end, the one that slammed, is different—thicker, colder. Few pass through it but no one ever returns.

  Once Archer and the woman are gone, we all begin to quiet, one by one. Saliva churns thickly in my mouth, but spitting does not help. I feel myself shaking not with cold but with a simmering rage that I cannot release. I glance at the full dish of food but am too angry to eat. The water, I cannot even look at, for in its reflection I see the King’s eyes slitted and mocking.

  I lay down again on the hard floor, curl into a ball and squeeze my eyes shut. I concentrate with all my might on the memory of her scent and her singing and imagine myself back in the city where the buildings and streets bore the same color as the sun, the city of yellow, the city of Gold.

  I remembered the days when I ran with my brother and sister through the streets like they were just yesterday or a long, long time ago—never anything in-between. No one was faster than us. Our Ima had bade us be careful and avoid strangers. Sooner or later some thug would challenge us for a piece of food or pick a fight just because he did not like the way we smelled. Ima lectured us sternly that we were too young to win in a brawl, and every day she taught us a little more about how to disappear into a crowd of adams or fade into a shadow in a wall. She also warned us that most dangerous were the adams who were tall and could surprise you from behind with big thick sticks and stones. But we were young and like all the young, we believed ourselves indestructible.

  Because I loved Ima and knew no other way, I listened and studied, but then one day I saw a fight between two adults, a rough-and-tumble ball of punches, kicks and bites. I was surprised at the victory of the smaller combatant—whose color was the same as mine, somewhere between the sun and the sand and the city. The only difference was that he had a short stump instead of a curled tail like my own—its absence likely a scar from some previous battle. His bigger foe, dark fur like the night, limped away, flesh torn and bloodied, while the winner feasted on the slab of smoked meat that must have inspired the struggle. My mouth watered at its delicious aroma, and I thought to myself if only I could learn how to punch and where to bite and claw, I would never have to worry about eating well again. That, and fighting looked like pure pleasure.

  I stepped slowly towards the victor. At first, he raised his head and growled, but when I explained I had no interest in his spoils and complimented him on his combat skills, he calmed. He clearly enjoyed my admiration and began to consider my proposition that I would bring him food if he would teach me to fight. He told me his name was King of the Streets, and it suited him. He was the most impressive of my kind I ever met. Most of us just called each other by the way we looked and recognized each other for how we smelled. My brother was Big Eye, because one of his brown eyes was larger than the other. My sister was Straight Tail because her tail didn’t curl like Ima’s, mine and my brother’s. And I was Lop Ear, because my left ear was crooked. But King, he earned his title in battle and the rest would either bow to him or give him a wide berth.

  So my arrangement with King began. Every day while my brother and sister would siesta in an alley, I would sneak away and meet him. He taught me how to pick a fight, and soon I was not just scraping with others my age but some even older. From the beginning I was winning. King told me I had a natural talent. That he thought so made me happy.

  The day that my life changed started like every other. While darkness still cloaked the city, the adams called from the sky in all directions. My sister would try to sing with them when she was younger, but Ima always hushed her—afraid to draw attention. We were just squatters among the big burlap sacks of rice, couscous and fava beans—so much more comfortable to lie among these than the cold hard stones of the alley where we were born. Ima had discovered the broken window on one of her explorations—the opening just wide enough for her to squeeze through. Then one day she never returned. Her scent ended by a wall of trash cans. We imagined an adam found her while foraging for food for us, and for once, she was not able to disappear. We searched all the streets we knew and even streets we had never wandered before, but we found no trace of her.

  Once we heard the call, the three of us moved quickly. We needed to be outside before the adams who lived above the sacks were done spreading soft cloths on the ground and extending their forearms like we did when we wanted to communicate our desire to play.

  We slipped out the window and into the alley. The first rays of the sun accented the yellow hue of the stones beneath our feet, like the first embers of a fire. We sniffed for signs of others who may have come in the night, and as soon as we caught even the faintest whiff, my brother and I lifted our legs and released our spray to declare this place was ours. After eight full moons, we were old enough that we could do that as adult males, not squat like our sister.

  When we reached
the market street, the scent of fresh bread baking tempted our noses. My brother and sister and I danced at the wonder of it, our stomachs yearning for its soft texture. After tasting the bread of the City of the Sun, no other food could ever fully satisfy—even raw meat, much less the bland hard dry pebbles in the bowl of my prison cell.

  Shop doors opened, shutters lifted, canopies unfurled, and carts wheeled out onto the street. Soon adams would be everywhere, for this is how they hunted. They looked, then pointed, then exchanged wispy slips and metal pellets and took away their rewards. We needed to act quickly if we wanted to procure breakfast when eyes were still distracted with preparing for the day. Today, I didn’t even have to snatch a loaf of bread from the cart. The adam let his son carry it out, but the boy’s arms were not big enough to balance his haul and he dropped one. I grabbed it in my teeth before he could yell “Kelev Ra!” Then I ran back to the alley. I let my brother and sister each tear off a piece, but hid my own for King. My stomach ached with emptiness, but I couldn’t arrive without payment and I’d found what he said to be true—one fights harder and better when hungry.

  We wandered the streets, looking for other opportunities to scavenge and scored a few apples. As usual, I became restless for when the heat would become too much and my brother and sister would want to disappear back into the alleys to nap in the shade. My brother stretched himself against the wall, and my sister curled her back against mine. Once she was asleep, I gently eased away--not knowing it would be the last time we would sleep beside each other.

  I found King waiting in the usual place on the edge of the square outside one of the adams’ great houses of gathering. They had many such buildings in the yellow city, some with half-suns nestled egg-like in their roofs. I once tried to creep inside, but an adam quickly shooed me away, and one of the rocks he threw at me came close enough to convince me it wasn’t worth the risk. King told me inside there wasn’t any food—only crowds of adams shuffling for position in front of sparkly bright objects. I was impressed that he was able to get inside—but if there wasn’t any food, what was the point?