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

by Allyson Bird

  At first the new soft place seemed to calm Shmuel’s anger. But then he and Cassilda began to fight as never before—shouting and shouting. I swore to myself if he ever hit her again, I would rip him apart. One day he left and then he would only come sometimes to take the boy away for short periods of time. Those times when I was alone with Cassilda, I would crawl close to her and she would stroke my head. We both closed our eyes and were back in the City, the sun’s rays painting all the buildings the color of my fur.

  I was dreaming not of King but a happy memory of the streets and the scent of baking bread when a heavy knock jolted me awake. Cassilda rose and opened the door. Shmuel quivered with anger and wobbled unsteady on his feet, and even Chanan trembled in fear of his father. Cassilda shouted at him, yanking the boy away. He wiggled out of her grasp and ran towards the stairs, grabbing onto the railing and lingering as if torn between watching his parents and escaping to his bedroom.

  I yelled at Shmuel to stay away from Cassilda, but she was consumed with the rage of an Ima afraid for her child and moved closer instead. His hand came up quickly and swatted her across the face. She fell back as he lunged again towards her, but tripped on one of my bones on the floor. I heard King shouting now loudly in my head, “Coward! Coward!” I pulled myself into position to leap while my foe’s legs were still teetering.

  Just as my paws left the ground, Chanan ran in front of Shmuel, shouting, “No, Tsah-Hov! No!”

  It was too late for me to pull back my teeth which bit down hard now not on Shmuel’s leg but on Chanan’s cheek. The taste of his blood filled my mouth--both similar and different from the blood of my kind. The boy screamed, and something hard and wood descended on my head. I yelped and let go, my instincts cutting. But as I spun around to attack and grabbed the arm of my combatant, I saw it was Cassilda. I yelped again, let go and ran for the window, hurling myself against and out it. As it shattered, sharp blades cut my flesh like a thousand pricker-prodders. I dashed into the black night and to the back corner of the yard, scrambled into a hole under the fence through which I sometimes escaped to explore the neighborhood by myself. I had no place to go without Cassilda, so I crept to the front of the house and waited.

  A giant mif’letzet covered in spinning lights charged into the driveway. It made a screeching noise which hurt my ears. Another smaller one followed with more lights and noise, and then another. Adams emptied out of them into the house, and soon they brought out Cassilda and Chanan. Her head was bowed and she clutched her arm. I called to her even though I knew she would grant no absolution. I had bitten her child. Ima would never have forgiven anyone who did that.

  Cassilda lifted her head and looked at me. I could see tears flowing down her cheeks. Shmuel exited the house behind her. I shouted and raced towards him. At that moment I felt a tight noose lasso around my neck and a rough jerk backwards. Soon I was caged in the back of one of the mif’letzet and then I was here.

  “Tsah-Hov,” says Archer.

  My eyes blink open when I hear my name, angry to hear anyone utter it but Cassilda. I growl and raise my lips to show my teeth.

  Archer signals to another adam--a heavyset one who opens the cage. Then he lassoes the metal noose around my neck again. I lunge to attack but he wields his weapon with a skill I cannot evade and jumps back before I can snap my teeth. Oh, Ima, the adams have their ways to hurt. They have been doing it since the beginning of time.

  The door to the Chamber stands open, and I enter, knowing I will never leave, never see Cassilda again. I wonder if she thinks of me, if she understands that I did what I did for her.

  I no longer struggle, just allow the burly adam to lift me onto the cold smooth table.

  I see Archer, the pricker-prodder, lift his claw and close my eyes. As its juice flows into me, I see the Yellow City. Cassilda stands before the great doors to the gathering home. She sings and opens her arms and I run to her, but when I reach the entrance, King awaits instead. His yellow fur is no longer drenched in blood but glows so bright and luminous I have to avert my eyes to avoid being blinded.

  I turn to flee. But King springs and sinks his teeth into my neck, drags me in through the doors. Inside everything is shiny, just as King told me, with no roof, just open blue sky and not just one sun but two. Cassilda sings but I cannot see her. Adams are everywhere. King hurls me towards them. They yell “Kelev Ra!” in chorus and raise their arms so I can see the many, many rocks.

  THE NEURASTHENIAC

  BY SELENA CHAMBERS

  The following excerpt is republished with permission from

  The Surhistory Dossier, catalogued by The Bas Bleu Sisterhood in 2014.

  Helen Heck (1937-1968) was a poet whose incomplete and fragmentary unpublished notebooks, collectively known as The Neurastheniac, garnered her a small underground following as a result of bootleg circulation, most notably during the Nineties’ golden age of the punk zine. Heck became most notorious during this time when Boilerplate frontman Donald Lee made her last lines famous by quoting them in his suicide note, leading novelist Kathy Acker to write a small appreciation for Vogue magazine called “Lavender Sashed Wrists.”

  While she was a contemporary of William S. Burroughs and Sylvia Plath, and wrote of similar transgressive themes, she is considered a canonical nightmare and has been largely eschewed from any kind of academic or critical discussion for several reasons. First, The Neurastheniac is her only known work, and even then, exists only as a working draft. She never saw a byline during her lifetime, and there is no indication whether she intended the work to ever see publication. As a draft, it is raw and unstructured, and is at times completely in-cohesive and incomprehensible. It is because of this state that many critics dismiss it as an “Artaud-groupie playing in the Sanitarium” and often repudiate her accounting of factual events as pure fiction.

  Even if it could be agreed that Heck was writing fiction, what kind of fiction is also debatable. Her work is highly confessional and lyrical, but her imagery titters over into high surrealism, and when her work falls out of its elevated strain for slang and simple language, it has the same spontaneous feel of a Beat novel.

  While its literary significance remains in debate, her accounts of her Suicide Chambers trespassings are the only primary records known about the now demolished government building, making it a very important and rare historical document of a notoriously undocumented time, if in fact her account is true.

  Staring Into The Suicide Scrye

  Suicide is at the forefront of Heck’s investigation and in the background of her life. The mid-ground was a struggle against the mental condition known then as neurasthenia and better understood today as bi-polar disorder. An only child born on a farm in lower Alabama, she came to New York City on a partial scholarship to Barnard College in 1955, and attempted suicide half way into her second semester citing constant disappointment in her surroundings, whether it was in Manhattan or back home, as too daunting to believe in a future. Having failed at death, she decided that Barnard was the better bet, and took advantage of the new policy allowing women access to Columbia courses. It is believed this is how she met the Van Dorens, who would provide tea and sympathy, encourage her writing, expose her to confessional poets like Robert Lowell, and introduce her to the Bohemian writers who hung around Washington Square Park.

  With her southern accent, well-read wit, and sartorial eccentricities (she donned lavender sashes on both wrists to conceal her scars), Heck charmed the likes of Ginsberg and Burroughs, and while she felt a temporary affinity for their common interests in the occult, religion, mysticism, and mind expansion, a series of flings with other fellow intellectuals left her jaded and cold:

  All the women here make poetry, while I write it like the men.

  The women hate me and the men hate me and I hate myself.

  The men who like me like me because they hate women and they can look at me and see themselves in a form they could fuck.

  And so we all fuck and get fucked up
and write and read and kill ourselves slowly by destroying our youth.

  I can drink and shoot and snort and smoke all of them under the bed not because I want to die first but because I am the last to live.

  It always begins with the ribbons—

  Yank and tug like they’re shedding Clara’s corset in the garden:

  ‘Why ya wearin’ those lavender Chanel cuffs, bowed around your bones?’

  ‘Because suicide isn’t lady-like.’

  To prove me wrong, for they must always be right, they kiss and lick the scars as though their moment of drunken Don Juan charm is better than vitamin E.

  The admiration only opens new wounds.

  When life is an orgy, no one hears your moans. (22)

  An Existential Alchemy

  What satisfaction Heck had came from her studies. At some point during this period, she found a copy of The King in Yellow in Columbia’s library special collection, and began working on a thesis that focused upon the play’s women Cassilda and Camilla. She theorized they were alchemical sisters and through several “danse macabres” knew how to traverse between the three worlds: the material, the after, and the imaginary: “It’s an entire ether of the imagination and the collective conscious. It is there where Fates are made. The author of King in Yellow termed it Carcosa—if I had my way I’d call it Melpomene—and it is this dream-land the pallid Ladies reign, and it is over the entrance and exit to this existential twilight that they control.”

  From this connection, Heck theorized that the Queens in the mysterious occult play were of a secret alchemical sisterhood reigning over a realm that represented a mythical existence in-between the mind and the body. An existence she termed “the second act,” and what we have termed the surconcious.

  Her thesis was rejected as fiction and Heck ultimately flunked out of school and descended back into her depression:

  Call me Helen—Call me

  Fuck-up and Failure—

  Whose wasted vessel

  Cracks ashore those

  Nician barks of yore. (57)

  She burned the original manuscript, and the theories that lied within are extracted from The Neurastheniac and seems to have either provided the foundation or delusion for the visions she would have during her Lethal Chambers experimentation.

  The Winthrop Government Lethal Chambers

  If the gatherings in Washington Square didn’t provide Heck with intellectual stimulation, it did introduce her to the abandoned Lethal Chamber that was part of the controversial Winthrop program of the 1920s. Opened on the south side of Washington Square on April 13, 1920, the Death Chamber, as it would become called, opened its doors to any poor sod who wanted to off himself. It was also the prototype for future federal death chambers that were to be erected in every major city and eventually towns. However, the initiative never went beyond New York City and plans for the Chambers were kept confidential, especially when the Washington Square prototype was privatized in the 30s. Shortly thereafter, the program was considered ill-conceived and closed in 1949.

  “They found that given the choice,” Heck mused in 1958. “More and more people chose to die before they even could live. It was the only choice that did not lead to more hydra-like decision making.” (70).

  Because the ornate marble building was also part of President Winthrop’s Haussmann-like redesign of the city, and was intended to rival the iconic Washington Square Park in its flora, fauna, and fountains, it was condemned to decay and rot, and the name was changed to conceal its original function to the Wether-Fieber Hotel, and the Beats who congregated in the Park referred to it as the Hades Hotel.

  It was from them that Heck learned the facilities’ legends and became fascinated by a place where “you checked in to never check out. How did they fend off the regrets that weakens one’s resolve? People warned me that perhaps the place was booby-trapped. One big ole mine or marble maiden…. To enter into a building as beautiful as that, certainly the promise was to have a death of an exact pulchritude.” (Ibid).

  Heck began trespassing into the Chamber in spring of 1958, after failing from Barnard. Consequently, she began experimenting with opiates and other psychedelics, and would take an alchemical interest in mixing “cocktails” designed to “keep the mind elevated enough to find Melpomene. It’s all fucking chemicals. It’s all fucking alchemy. The mind has always been the philosopher’s stone—the soul the e-o-l.” (350). With each trespassing, interest in perfecting her cocktails increased. She became so enamored and convinced of her visions experienced in the Chamber, that she sought a “chemical change” that would allow her to sustain her residency in the dream-land.

  “It was a challenge to the Fates,” she wrote before her final vision, and it was one that she would lose.

  Having spent a quarter of a century dabbling with self-destruction, Heck finally succeeded at taking her own life at 31 via one of her infamous opiate/psychedelic cocktails and a bullet to her temple. Her last rites, it seems, was to scrawl the now famous yagé-sipping bruja epitaph on every mirror, and shoot them one by one until the only reflection left in the room was her own.

  Helen Heck is important to the Bas Bleu, even in fragments, for what may be her genuine exploration of the “surconcious.” Whether or not the visions she experienced were in Carcosa or Melpomene is irrelevant—what is relevant is the mental map she explores, because it may guide us to the mental map within us all, and bring us that much closer to locating where the soul exists.

  The following excerpts focus on Heck’s exploration of the Chamber and the early visions that follow from her discovery of the execution machine. She never titled any of her fragments, and so all titles are editorial liberties made to convey a sense of time and development.

  The First Trespassing

  …was like a grand hotel, and explains the successful cover-up.

  The Splitz-Carlton?

  The Four Reasons?

  The Callitoff-Hysteria?

  Once you went up the bureaucratic stairs and passed Yvain’s Fates, faces powdered white with bird shit, you entered Mrs. Havisham’s lobby with:

  long mahogany tables full of molded and spoiled food rotting on tarnished silver platters.

  Empty chairs askew with broken legs and yellowed couches leered with broken springs.

  Floor to ceiling marble. Great corinthian columns as wide and tall as red oaks. The aortal lines running through the flesh-colored stone gives the walls a sense of circulation.

  One large bay window—my light source in this land of cut electricity.

  Frescos on the ceiling depicting some kind of afterbirth afterworld with three wet nurses delivering infants from cradle-graves and tossing them into the air like cherubs just learning to fly—narrative ruined by water damage.

  Overlooking the lobby were the rooms. Doors ajar or unhinged.

  There had been a fire at the concierge desk:

  a cash register empty and charred—its gilding shining through the soot.

  Hooks in the wall for keys or hats.

  a leather-bound guest ledger half burned. A few pronoms still legible: Hank Mc——, Elizabeth Har——, Arthur C——, Meredith Jon——. Josephine Ch——. Lendell Beaureg——.

  Behind the desk the drawers had been pulled out and also suffered torching.

  Scattered on the floor are torched pamphlets advertising the special amenities of the establishment like:

  “DIGNITY IN DEATH: Our PALLID MASK keeps one’s countenance in place for a smooth, calm, and collected rendevouz with the Void.”

  On the front, a young woman with a Louise Brooks bob and a lavender tea gown wears a Louise Brooks mask—cool, collected, and glamorous. Her eyes are closed, and the mask’s cupid’s bow lips are painted in a boudoir smile.

  “LET THERE BE NO GRIEF: Full-cremation package spares your loved ones from material disassociation and financial burden. Includes cremation, ash disposal at a location of your choosing, or thousands of urn options for familial deliver
y.”

  And it showed a Valentino looking ghost hugging what seemed to be his living family…

  Up the grand staircase. Extravagant for just one floor. Counted the rooms—grew bored at 50.

  Each room basically the same. It was bigger than any apartment in the city I had known, and definitely better furnished:

  Elegantly furnished and draped in what was once reassuring colors of cream, gold, and mauve with rosewood furniture.

  There was a sleigh bed and a fainting couch upholstered in mauve velvet, now matted and worn. It lounged next to a Victrola.

  Victrola ornate. The horn made of copper, now patinaed, and its cabinet carved in Art Deco geometries.

  Other flourishes of normality: a vanity

  an armoire

  a personal lavatory with shower and bathtub.

  a secretaire with unmarked stationary for any last thoughts.

  a picked over book shelf—only had a copy left of Dickinson and Whitman.

  I pocketed the Dickinson book and am taking notes on the stationary.

  No windows, and in the waning light from the lobby, I tried to find the execution machine. No trap doors in the ceiling. Marble floor solid. I looked under the bed—nothing but monstrous dust bunnies.

  Did the shower head produce gas? Or acid? Did someone come in the middle of the night and smother you with your extra down pillow? Room to room and more of the same—complete normality and not one sign of self-destruction.

  Gave-up and started flipping through Dickinson. Music would be nice. Checked out the Victrola. Blew dust off the vinyl—Bessie Smith—and wiped it with my shirt to clear the grooves. Placed it on the neck and struggled with the crank on the side. Eventually wound the fucker up and I flipped the arm onto the vinyl. Surprised and relieved the needle wasn’t dull. The Victrola’s cabinet was also a lamp and radiated a warm white light into the room. This was alright.