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

by Allyson Bird

  At the other end of the hallway, Joseph was holding a candle and moving at the command of a little woman in archaic village dress. “The left door,” the woman would say, her closed eyelids trembling. Behind her, a younger man who had not bothered changing out of his rubber flip-flops was squeezing her shoulder. Entranced, Michael would move to his left, to a door that was closed. She would scream, “Now open it! Open it quickly!” and Michael would open the door to a dark meeting room, empty save for rattan furniture and dusty bookshelves. This continued for half an hour – Michael emptied china cabinets, shoved aside mahogany tables, dislodged enormous oily panoramas that imperial artists had painted of soft and pliant pre-industrial Concordia – until at last the woman collapsed. After the younger man fanned her back to life, she told Michael: “There is a ghost.”

  “I knew it,” Michael said, grinning at Joseph. That clownish grin, so unbecoming on a head of state. Before that horrible imperial book, Michael had always seemed immune from all the little people’s blistering nonsense about black magic and witch doctors. “I knew the palace was haunted. I always see it in the mirror. All blood and maggots behind the mask. It’s probably that bastard McMurphy. I’m sure it disgusts him, knowing a dirty savage is sleeping in his bed.”

  Joseph had nothing to say. McMurphy had been spirited away to a secure imperial outpost days before they took Concordia—he was probably sipping tea in a chateau and mourning the sorrows of empire. But the little woman said, very seriously, “You inherited it from them. Like you inherited everything else. You take the palace, you take the ghost. You take the country, you take the ghost. You know.”

  “I don’t want it,” Michael said, rather childishly. “It’s foul.”

  “But it wants you,” she replied.

  Michael wanted to know what should be done about the ghost; the psychic, renowned though she was for purging tree spirits and lifting accursed blindness, claimed there was nothing to be done. “But you are an idea man, Professor,” Michael said, breathless and red-eyed. Joseph would have guessed he’d been drinking but he smelled only of moist, upturned earth. “I’ve kept up with your research. We all have. This is what you study. Getting rid of the Empire’s ghosts. So tell me, guide me. I need a policy prescription.”

  Then he burst out laughing, or perhaps crying—it was so distressing to watch Michael, the President, the War-Hero, the top student of his class, blubbering like an asylum escapee that Joseph had to beg his leave.

  On Patriot Street he nearly ran over several hoodlums running across the road. They carried cans of spray-paint, and when they looked at him from the sidewalk wide-eyed and empty as aerosols, he wondered if someone had exposed them to The King in Yellow. Had someone translated it into the mothertongue? Was it read to them? Then they grinned and started to spray the window of his car a sickly rippling yellow, shouting, “Garanga!”

  He couldn’t take the madness home with him. He drove to the university campus instead, where the night guards nodded him through without checking his ID, and circled round toward Building 2 to be with the geckos and the books that had been his guiding light, his reminder that no matter how terrible life became he was but a cog, a very small cog in God’s most fascinating experiment of human civilization. As the library came up on his right he saw something dark run upon its roof, under the moon. The shock pounced into his right leg and forced him to stop, and he crawled over the gear shift to look up, expecting… what?

  What he saw was a person, but he did not know until the person had jumped and died in front of him that it was Adela. He recognized her faux military jacket, though when he turned her over he no longer recognized her face. Just as some final trace of forward-looking hope for their future tumbled out of his heart, something physical tumbled from Adela’s jacket. Something leather-bound and rotten, the corners of its pages curling like shed skin. He saw that she had marked it up violently as he flipped the pages, too quick to pick up words, thinking maybe he should allow himself a word or two or three thousand and join the madding crowd.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe he would finally understand the joke that up till now seemed only to be a tragedy.

  When the president calls, you always have time.

  Joseph did not need to drive through traffic to attend the president’s Independence Day party. The streets were cleared, and Michael had insisted that as a special guest he be provided a car and driver and a Glock-toting bodyguard. At sundown the empty city was filled only with plastic bags and other imported black cars, tut-tut-tutting onto Patriot Street, converging upon the National Palace. An odd white spattering of flakes was falling in their midst—the driver turned on the windshield wipers. Joseph stuck his hand out the window, remembering Dante, thinking about hell—but it was not snow. It was paper. His bodyguard was laughing.

  Anyone who was anyone had come to the party. Doctors, lawyers – even Willem the tortured writer, who was smiling yet looking as though he were about to scream – the old crowd from Colonial Days and Polo Clubs past. They did not seem worried about the black cars or the armed guards. They were all throwing their heads back, covering their eyes. “Oh Joseph, aren’t you tired of worrying?” asked Robert Fileppo, drinking flat champagne from a chipped goblet. Thin, classical, colonist music was crumbling in bits and pieces out of some scratchy, distant record player. And there on the upper landing stood their savior: Michael in Regent McMurphy’s white spirit-eating suit, weighed down with new medals for mythical honors.

  Suddenly feeling faint, Joseph clambered up the stairs. Guards moved to knock him down, but Michael—good Michael, Michael who had read The Rights of Man, Michael who had cried at the parade on the first anniversary of Independence Day because he loved this baby country so—waved him through. “Professor,” Michael said. “I have decided what to do. I think you would approve my plan. You always said we need a strong state, and I am the state, so…”

  Joseph trembled. “You’re reintroducing the Constitution? Letting Parliament return?”

  “I am going to vanquish the ghost.” A stone sank inside Joseph. “Poor Isabella, I think it killed her. It knocks on doors all night, leaves messages on the wall. The Restitution of the Damned. It speaks of you, Professor.” Another stone—a damned concrete boulder. “It thinks it can hide but I will call it forward, and then we will see.”

  “See what?”

  “See who controls the fate of Concordia. Us, or them. The King in Yellow tells us…”

  “Damn that book, that book is an evil! It came from the old world, it probably came from them!” A coldness descended over Michael’s features. Joseph frantically added, “The revolution is over. Michael, you finished it already. We were all there. You came rolling in with those tanks and that microphone and you gave your little speech about victory and liberty at last…” And he had been so proud. He had hugged Flores and said he’s done it, and she said we did it papa. “We won. We are free. We just have to…”

  Stop bleeding.

  “The revolution is never over.” Michael, no older than thirty-five, looked one hundred years old. “As long as there is Empire, they are always at our door.” With his arms raised like a conductor—and oh, God, Joseph never got to see a live symphony performance, not Berlin nor Vienna—Michael swiveled toward the crowd, fingers curved just so. There was one final second, or so Joseph thought, when teacher and student made eye contact—when he last saw the earnest boy who had raised his hand on the first day of Political Theory and asked, “What does the Empire want from us?” He didn’t know the solution to that riddle—whether domination or death, the answer couldn’t be good.

  “Citizens! It is time!” The party chatter died and Concordia’s elites turned to look at the man that most of them had voted for. “Time to secure our eternal victory over slavery and subjugation. Time for us to rid ourselves of the ghost of Empire once and for all.” Vigorous clapping from the esteemed guests, like automatons set to high-speed. No cheers, nothing so gauche. “Please. Please
. You may not be aware, but there are traitors among us. Counter-revolutionaries. Those who would betray the victory of the state and send us back onto our hands and knees.”

  Michael swiveled his head and then pointed at the literature professor, the man who would be Kipling. “Robert Fileppo!” Fileppo—shocked or muted—blinked at him. “Do you love your country? Would you do anything for your fatherland?”

  He gave Fileppo three seconds. Fileppo seemed on the verge of stammering something when Michael shouted: “Counter-revolutionary!”

  The word, combined with the finger, was like a dog whistle. There was movement on the staircase and then a pop-pop-popping into Fileppo’s body. The woman next to him, the wife of a minister, was suddenly speckled in blood. She jerked back, screaming, and then Michael shouted “Counter-revolutionary!” again and she jerked once more, far more violently this time. So Michael went, pointing at random faces in the crowd, and Michael’s will—the state’s will—was iron. In between executions Michael would stop and quiver, his voice warm and warbling like an animal about to be born, whispering: “I can see him! He moves through the crowd!”

  Joseph’s throat began to ache; he was screaming at Michael to stop. And so he was taken away, dragging his heels then losing his shoes, hollering, “Michael, what do you want?”

  He never got that question answered, either. But he did get a cell in the old imperial prison that had once held pro-independence agitators. He could read their scribbles, carved into concrete: Until Concordia is Free. He could look out between the bars to barren flag-speared Revolutionary Field where enemies of the state—imperialist counter-revolutionaries—were taken to meet their maker. Sometimes when it rained, Joseph could see a yellow-robed figure gliding through the untamed trees on the other side of the electrified fence, staking this traumatized land for something that Joseph did not think was the Empire. The Empire was raging and splintering across the sea, eaten by its own light. Something older? Something truer. Something the Empire had dreamt into being. Something that would have its restitution.

  HER BEGINNING IS HER END IS HER BEGINNING

  BY E. CATHERINE TOBLER AND DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS

  The Doorway:

  Weary but not broken, Cassilda opens the door.

  Behind her, Carcosa fades. Crumbling towers of blackened iron fall into grey ash as twin suns are eclipsed by a singular burning orb in a sky so blue it hurts her eyes. Anticipation sits bright on her tongue; unease sharp in her belly.

  The doorknob is ice beneath her steady palm. Did the door exist before she touched her hand to it, before the thought formed in her mind that there should be a door, a way out? (A way in.) Questions in a circle, questions without answers.

  Cassilda opens the door; she is always opening the door.

  The Scholar, Chapter I:

  The used bookstore holds a single copy of the book. Fingers trembling, Cassilda slips it into her pocket. She feels no guilt taking the liar’s truth; this is not a theft.

  Behind the store, in an alley reeking of cat urine and littered with human detritus—a Chinese takeout container crawling with insects, a set of keys complete with car fob, scattered pages of the city’s free newspaper—she begins to tear out the pages. First one by one; then several at a time. With each tear, there is a sensation of starlight dancing across her skin, and she feels the holes in the fabric of her self knitting back together.

  The pages drift and spiral in the air. She stands in the center, arms outstretched. The reek of the alley fades, and in its place, she smells the sweetness of fruit, ripe on the vine and ready for picking, a hint of the sea in dense fog: scents of home.

  A little like magic; a little like peace. This tether to what she knows to be true clears the rubble from her thoughts and the tension in her neck and shoulders.

  The ink melts inward across the pages, running to the spine where it pools into a black hole. The paper breaks apart at the edge of this darkness, falling in, falling away, until there’s nothing left but a ghost image of the Yellow Sign, the sigil, hanging in the air. Then that, too, vanishes.

  The tether holding the true Carcosa fast to her heart breaks apart and she hunches forward, palms resting on her upper thighs, breathing hard, smelling only the stink of the alley. The destruction of the pages is merely a temporary balm, a salve; there are far too many holes for such a small act to fix. An ache inside her swells. Perhaps then, not a balm, but salt in the wound. A small cruelty.

  Words written are not always true; nonetheless, once ink is committed to paper, once the pages are bound, there is power. If Cassilda could find every copy, she would consign the damnable lies to a bonfire the likes of Nero’s fire in Rome. She was there, she has always been there, but the roads, though holding the same shape, bear new footprints as if the false words changed the weight of her steps. And why would they not? A body wrapped in lies is that of a body wrapped in disfigurement: forever altered, forever deformed.

  She is a glass vessel filled with marbles and every turn of the page, every recitation of the story, every hint of belief, adds another sphere. She longs to tell the story, her true story, so as to tip the glass, emptying it of falsehood’s weight.

  I was a queen, she reminds herself, yet the lies strip the words of their meaning, strip the truth from her history. Her mouth twists. History, too, has changed. Carcosa was a city beyond compare, a city of riches. She remembers ancient rulers paying tribute, the healing waters of the lakes, the glimmer of the rising suns on the horizon. She remembers a king uncorrupted. She remembers…

  No, she would not burn the book. She would burn the man and laugh as his flesh blackened and peeled. Her mouth twists into a feral smile, the wrong smile, but by now the feel has become familiar. Hated, but familiar.

  I was a queen. But her fingers curve, the nails yearning to rake down her cheeks, pull her face into a scream.

  “I was Queen,” she says aloud, and the timbre of her voice does what her thoughts alone cannot, and her fingers uncurl.

  She leaves the alley with sure steps. It’s nearly time; the scholar is as ready as she can manage. She’s taken her time—or as much time as she can risk—and she’s chosen well. He’s strong, capable, and he treats her as the queen she truly is, not as a by-blow of a faulty bloodline. This time, it will work.

  First Woman’s Fire:

  Cassilda went back to the beginning, barefoot and brown as she followed a woman into a grass hut; the grasses brushed Cassilda’s bare arms, whispered shaft against skin, and told the woman she was no longer alone. The woman turned and gasped, lifting a hand as if to ward off an ancient evil. Cassilda could not say the impulse was wrong. She paused in the doorway, then crossed the threshold. She would not reconsider. She could not.

  “It must be so,” Cassilda said.

  The women shared no common language, but Cassilda watched the woman’s shoulders slump in a kind of relief. The African night was warm and still around them, Cassilda appreciating the way the warmth never quite left the air, for Carcosa was ever cold.

  The woman made no further protest as Cassilda crouched beside the low-burning fire with her. Smoke curled up through a hole in the shelter’s cylindrical roof. The fire was a good sign, and so too the shelter; this woman was close enough to the beginning of humanity that Cassilda allowed herself to hope. It was a foolish thing, but moved in her chest like a heart should have. Before the season turned, this woman would leave this fertile place; she would cross the continent as those behind her would, and she would carry Cassilda’s story with her.

  For now, she spread out her catch with steady hands. The fish gleamed in the firelight as she began to clean them. Cassilda watched, strangely hesitant to touch the woman, to break the moment, but there was no cause for delay. As the woman gutted another fish, Cassilda covered the woman’s hands with her own. Cassilda didn’t have to speak to tell her; she let the story flow from her hands.

  The woman—named Nuru by her joyous parents seventeen years before—had ne
ver seen a woman such as Cassilda. Cassilda did not let Nuru’s thought distract her from the task at hand. She would not be charmed or swayed by the way Nuru thought she looked in the firelight, otherworldly (true) and like a goddess come from the heavens (patently false). Cassilda focused on the things she knew to be true, let them flow from her hands the way terror normally did, filled Nuru as though she were filling a vessel. Steady and sure, Cassilda worked, reassured by the ease she found in Nuru’s expression; as if she were being fed after a long starvation, as if she had been given a key to understanding all things.

  But here, when the dark of the African night was allowed to eclipse too much of Nuru’s shining eyes, the vessel began to crack. Cassilda looked at their paired hands, smeared with fish guts and scale, Nuru’s skin marked as they would all be marked, with the Yellow Sign so that Cassilda might know them, so she could—

  Nuru’s body refused.

  Cassilda held her firm, refusing this time to give in. She tried to pull the woman back into the story she was sharing, the truths humanity needed to know, but Nuru rejected her. She bucked, sending fish skittering across the hut’s dirt floor. Out into the night tumbled one fish until it came to a stop against a foot, a foot marked with the Yellow Sign. Now it was Cassilda who startled, who felt the eclipse of Carcosa’s twin suns although there were nowhere near. The cold crept closer.

  If one had come, so would another, Cassilda knew.

  She released Nuru as if the woman was now wreathed in flames, but it was too late. The truth contained an inescapable madness and Nuru was pulled down, shredded into tatters as she vanished from this world and into Carcosa eternal. The Yellow Sign was the last to go, refusing its destruction to the end, clawing at the ground as if sentient, as if it meant to climb into Cassilda herself.

  Cassilda fled the hut, from the other who had come, on feet that knew the way. She knew how to run, she knew how to evade, and when that marked body would have claimed her and dragged her back to Carcosa (into that shrieking girl she had been made), she opened another door. With her capable hands, Cassilda cut the air of this world and vanished into another.