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

by Allyson Bird

  “Does it matter whether anyone takes the hero to heart?”

  “Oh,” said one of the women, eyeing the wine glass Pierce held. “I didn’t know they had a liquor license.”

  He wandered away from the women. He drained his glass. He made a mental note to make a written note about the exceptionally good wine and its questionable legality.

  A heavyset woman with chalky gray hair and orthopedic shoes stood next to a curtain separating the lobby from the seating area. She handed Pierce a program. The cover bore the same symbol as the invitation he’d received, a symbol he now recognized as pure fiction, part of the pre-show theatrics, like the two old women in the lobby.

  He walked past the usher. She took the empty glass from his hand.

  “No drinks in the auditorium,” she warned.

  Pierce caught a whiff of jonquil-scented powder, and a hint of urine. “Strike two,” he said to himself as he entered the theatre.

  He noted with dismay only five people occupying seats, scattered as widely as possible in the small space. Including himself and the women in the lobby, they would be an audience of eight, a dismal turnout worth mentioning in his review.

  He fumbled his way to an aisle seat in semi-darkness. The scent of dust, decades of it, confirmed his suspicion that this theatre had been handed down from one acting company to another. Dust, as ubiquitous in theatre as the aroma of popcorn at movies, accrued, layer upon layer, over decades.

  Nestled in a surprisingly cozy seat, Pierce studied what the usher had so arrogantly called an ‘auditorium.’ Forty-nine seats faced a thrust stage without a shred of scenery. In the failing light he opened the program and found it was merely a sheet of paper with the same text he had read on the front door. No cast list. No director was named.

  He tore open the media envelope. No production shots, no press release, just another program and an out-of-focus photo. Pierce squinted but he could only make out a soft outline, a blob of light. He stuffed the programs and photo back into the envelope and took another look around.

  A woman seated two rows ahead of Pierce glanced back over her shoulder. Before she turned away, quickly facing front again, he was struck by the amount of makeup she was wearing. The colors of her lips and eyes were too well defined, as if tattooed in place.

  The feeble house lights blinked off and the room was consumed by darkness. There didn’t appear to be an exit sign, a reckless violation of the fire code. A cold rush of night air swept from the back of the stage through the audience. Pierce chuckled. This neophyte company probably thought a tactile approach was revolutionary. Given the quirks and illegalities of the whole affair, his review would write itself. By opening night the building would be condemned.

  Following this thought he was aware of a bright amber illumination descending from the flies. He marveled at delicate gold chains and pulleys, crisscrossing beams on a grid, a shimmy of rafters, and the ceiling skewing.

  “Marmalade,” he mumbled, tongue thumping the roof of his mouth.

  Orange-yellow petals spilled from above, lazily looping in air, striking his face and blocking his vision. From the wings, offstage, something rumbled.

  “How do you do?” Molly said. “Oh, no! We already met at your office, didn’t we? Stupid me!”

  His hand engulfed hers. Her skin was sticky, warm as candy on a summer sidewalk. Her laugh guttural, trapped in her throat, her left hand opening to reveal a bite-size lozenge.

  “More lemon drops?” Pierce said. “No, thank you.”

  “Marmalade,” she said. “So sweet and so tart! Please, try it.”

  He refused, disgusted by the offer of unwrapped candy from her bare hand. Later he was glad he’d turned it down, after the yellow gore came rushing from her mouth.

  “Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she cried, and jumped from his lap. With one hand pulling her dress down into place, over her thighs, the other hand wiping vomit from her lips.

  Pierce blotted the hardwood floor of his studio with a fistful of toilet paper snatched from the bathroom. Disgusting.

  “It’s this weather,” she said. “So warm, and I’ve been working so many hours, and things have been crazy. Oh, please don’t be mad. It isn’t you!”

  Apologizing to him, with the honey-scented moisture of her pussy still drying on his fingertips. Begging forgiveness for not swooning, for not coming in his hand, for instead vomiting on the floor. Asking him to visit the company, watch a rehearsal, join the actors for supper, get drunk with the A.D. and get to know what they were trying to do. Why were these vapid young people always trying to ‘do’ something? Everything had been done before they were born.

  “Get out,” he told her in the flat tone reserved for ingénues he had fucked. “Go.”

  Prompting the waterworks. Molly Mundy in her rumpled dress and bent wings, blubbering like a child reprimanded on the playground. All sputters and promises.

  He had said yes, of course he would see their ‘radical re-imagining,’ of course, why not? It was his job to review the show. Don’t give it another thought. Really.

  And he had seen it. A typical disaster lightened by the young woman’s bungled portrayal of an elderly housekeeper in powdered wig and clumsy shoes.

  ‘Porcine.’ If every person had one word by which they might be destroyed, ‘porcine’ had been Molly Mundy’s word.

  “Marmalade,” Pierce mumbled and went silent. His eyes rolled. His tongue no longer knew how to function.

  A substance as sticky as resin held him fast, facedown, petals smothering him. He knew saliva quivered on his lower lip but he had no strength to reach up and wipe it away. He groaned in the heat of a hundred lamps. Points of pain, sharp as pins, ran up and down his legs. Hot liquid spilled across his backside.

  “That’s enough honey. Turn him over,” said a voice. “Let him see.”

  Pierce watched the pale yellow light spinning, arcing around him. When the smell registered he realized the arc was his vomit, an involuntary spasm. Hands pinched his pallid flesh, to hold and to cause damage, using his skin to roll him into position on his back. His vision was limited to a full-length mirror directly above, where he floated, bleeding and naked, smeared with honey, flower petals stuck to his hair and scattered down the length of his trembling body.

  In a darkening pocket of his conscious mind he saw his next two thousand words spill across cheap paper, soaking it and disappearing. A blank sheet took its place and filled with a rush of words that sank and faded.

  Fat fingers dug at his meaty shoulders, nails scraping bone, grasping for purchase, gripping, peeling. And somewhere in the wings, beyond this pale yellow light dancing over his naked corpus, Molly Mundy waited in her gossamer gown. Giggling. Patient. Hungry.

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  ALLYSON BIRD. Once of England and now belonging to the Wairarapa, New Zealand, Allyson Bird thinks of herself as a new pioneer raising Dexter cattle, three goats and three chickens, on a farm below a mountain that looms over the valley.

  Occasionally she is drawn to strange places and people and they are occasionally drawn to her. Her favourite playground, as a child and adult, used to be the village graveyard. Once she wondered what would happen if she took one of the green stones from a grave. She has been looking over her shoulder ever since but has never given it back. Now she is more likely to be found roaming the mountains and asking the Maori to tell her their stories.

  She won the British Fantasy Society Award for her collection Bull Running for Girls in 2009 and The Bram Stoker Award for First Novel 2011.

  This by Henrik Ibsen is never far from her mind.

  ‘To live is to war with trolls

  In the holds of the heart and mind;

  To write is to hold

  Judgement Day over the self.’

  NADIA BULKIN writes scary stories about the scary world we live in. “Pro Patria” is inspired by her late father, Farchan Bulkin, an academic suppressed by Indonesia’s Suharto regime. It is her first, but hopefully
not her last, story about the Gordian knot that is post-colonial stress disorder. She lives in Washington DC, where she tends her garden of student debt sown by two political science degrees. For more, visit nadiabulkin@wordpress.com.

  CHESYA BURKE Chesya Burke has written and published nearly a hundred fiction pieces and articles within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, noir and horror. Her story collection, Let’s Play White, is being taught in universities around the country. In addition, Burke wrote several articles for the African American National Biography in 2008, and Burke’s novel, THE STRANGE CRIMES OF LITTLE AFRICA, debuts later this fall. Poet Nikki Giovanni compared her writing to that of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison.

  Burke’s thesis was on the comic book character Storm from the X-MEN, and her comic, Shiv, is scheduled to debut in 2016.

  Burke is currently pursuing her PhD in English at University of Florida. She’s Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Charis Books and More, one of the oldest feminist book stores in the country.

  SELENA “S. J.” CHAMBERS’s fiction and poetry has appeared in a variety of venues including Mungbeing magazine, New Myths, Yankee Pot Roast, and in anthologies such as the World Fantasy nominated Thackery T. Lambshead’s Cabinet Of Curiosities (HarperCollins, 2011), The New Gothic (Stone Skin Press, 2013), Steampunk World (Alliteration Ink, 2014) and The Starry Wisdom Library (PS Publishing, 2014). She blogs irregularly at: www.selenachambers.wordpress.com; posts sparingly at: https://www.facebook.com/Twiggsnet; and hardly tweets at all @BasBleuZombie.

  NICOLE CUSHING is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and the author of the novel Mr. Suicide, the short story collection The Mirrors, and multiple stand-alone novellas. Her work has garnered praise from such diverse sources as Thomas Ligotti, Famous Monsters of Filmland, John Skipp, S.T. Joshi, Jack Ketchum, Poppy Z. Brite, Ray Garton, and Ain’t It Cool News. In addition to her fiction writing, Nicole also writes nonfiction pieces for the U.K.-based horror film magazine Scream. A native of Maryland, she now lives with her husband in Indiana.

  HELEN MARSHALL is a critically acclaimed Canadian author, editor, and medievalist. Her debut collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, was released in September, 2014 and has been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, the Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association and the Shirley Jackson Award for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. She lives in Oxford, England where she spends her time staring at old books. Unwisely. When you look into a book, who knows what might be looking back. She is also an Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

  ANYA MARTIN’s first encounter with The King in Yellow was at about age 10 in a stack of paperbacks with weird-looking covers by authors such as Lovecraft, Peake and Tolkien, favorites of her book-collector father. Raised in a house with so many books it could have been a library, perhaps it was inevitable that she would abandon early ambitions to become a paleontologist or an actress for fiction and journalism. Her published works include: “The Prince of Lyghes” (Cthulhu Fhtagn!), “Sensoria” (Giallo Fantastique), “A Girl and Her Dog” (Xnoybis #2), the play Passage to the Dreamtime (Dunhams Manor Press), “Resonator Superstar!” (Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond), “The Toe” (Feet), “The Courage of the Lion Tamer” (Daybreak, Jetse DeVries’ groundbreaking online sister publication to the Shine anthology of optimistic science fiction), and “Stuffed Bunny in Doll-Land,” a dark comics fable with Spanish artist Mado Peña in Womanthlogy: Heroic.

  In the realm of nonfiction, Anya has written more than 1000 articles about spec-lit, film, music, comics, hauntings, weird poets, travel, health care and jumbo mortgages. She is the founder/bloggeress-in-chief of ATLRetro.com, a guide to Atlanta’s grassroots thriving Retro revival. She has been lucky to have been loved by four dogs.

  MAURA MCHUGH lives in Galway, Ireland and developed a love for myth, folklore, and horror fiction at an early age. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Fantasy, Black Static, Shroud Magazine, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and La Femme, and her two collections—Twisted Fairy Tales and Twisted Myths—were published in the USA. She’s written several award-nominated comic book series, including co-writing Witchfinder for Dark Horse Comics. Her story ‘Bone Mother’ is being adapted into a stop-motion animated short film by the Canadian Film Board. She’s also a screenwriter, playwright, and a critic, and has served on the juries of international literary, comic book, and film awards.

  Her web site is http://splinister.com and she tweets as @splinister.

  S.P. MISKOWSKI’s four-book series, the Skillute Cycle, is published by Omnium Gatherum. Two of the books were finalists for Shirley Jackson Awards. Her stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in the magazines Black Static, Supernatural Tales, Other Voices, and Identity Theory, and in the anthologies October Dreams II, Detritus, Little Visible Delight, The Hyde Hotel, and The Leaves of a Necronomicon. She’s the recipient of a Swarthout Award and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.

  URSULA PFLUG is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Green Music (Edge/Tesseract), The Alphabet Stones (Blue Denim), and the illustrated flash novel Motion Sickness (Inanna). Her story collections include After the Fires (Tightrope) and Harvesting the Moon (PS). Her edited anthologies include the CMHA fundraiser They Have To Take You In (Hidden Brook) and the forthcoming Playground of Lost Toys (Exile), co-edited with Colleen Anderson. She teaches creative writing workshops at Loyalist College, Trent University (with Derek Newman-Stille), The San Miguel Writers’ Conference and elsewhere, and she co-organized the Cat Sass Reading Series. Her work has been produced for film, theatre, dance and installation, in projects funded by The Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts and The Laidlaw Foundation. Her award winning short stories and nonfiction pieces about books and art have been appearing for decades in Canada, the US and the UK, in genre and literary venues including Fantasy, Strange Horizons, PostScripts, Lightspeed, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, NOW Magazine, Leviathan, Album Zutique, Mix Magazine, The Peterborough Examiner, and The New York Review of Science Fiction. Her short stories have also been taught in universities in Canada and India. Visit her at: ursulapflug.ca

  JOSEPH S. PULVER, SR., is the author of the novels, The Orphan Palace and Nightmare’s Disciple, and he has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including “Weird Fiction Review”, “Lovecraft eZine”, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings (I and III), Book of Cthulhu, The Children of Old Leech, Year’s Best Weird Fiction. His highly–acclaimed short story collections, Blood Will Have Its Season, SIN & ashes, Portraits of Ruin, and A House of Hollow Wounds, were published by Hippocampus Press. Lovecraft eZine Press published his collection, The King in Yellow Tales, vol. 1. He edited A Season in Carcosa and the Bram Stoker nominated and Shirley Jackson Award winning The Grimscribe’s Puppets. He has a new collection of weird fiction upcoming, The Protocols of Ugliness, edited by Jeffrey Thomas. Joe is currently editing several new anthologies, including The Leaves of a Necronomicon and Born Under A Bad Sign.

  LYNDA E. RUCKER is an American writer born and raised in the American South and currently living in Dublin, Ireland. She has sold more than two dozen short stories to magazines and anthologies including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, Black Static, F&SF, Shadows and Tall Trees, Postscripts and Nightmare Magazine. She is a regular columnist for Black Static, and her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released in 2013 from Karōshi Books.

  ANN K. SCHWADER’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Black Wings IV (PS Publishing 2015). Searchers After Horror (Fedogan & Bremer 2014), Dark Fusions (PS Publishing 2013), A Season in Carcosa (Miskatonic River Press, 2
012), The Book of Cthulhu and The Book of Cthulhu II (Night Shade Books, 2011 & 2012), and elsewhere. Her most recent poetry collection is Dark Energies (P’rea Press, 2015). She is an active member of both HWA and SFWA, and a 2010 Bram Stoker Award Finalist. Schwader lives and writes in Colorado.

  LUCY A. SNYDER is a four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning writer and the author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess. She also authored the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide and the story collections Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger.

  Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Jamais Vu, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Steampunk World, In the Court of the Yellow King, Shadows Over Main Street, Qualia Nous, The Library of the Dead, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5.

  She lives in Columbus, Ohio and is a mentor in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. She also writes a column for Horror World. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.

  MOLLY TANZER’S writing has been nominated for the British Fantasy (Sydney J. Bounds) and Wonderland Book Award. She is the author of two novels: Vermilion, and the forthcoming The Pleasure Merchant, and two collections: A Pretty Mouth, a mosaic novel about the fictional, evil Calipash family, and Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations, which pairs short stories with cocktails. She is also the editor of the forthcoming anthology Swords v. Cthulhu, and has authored many of her own Lovecraftian short stories. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and a very bad cat. Visit her at: http://mollytanzer.com

  E. CATHERINE TOBLER first encountered The King in Yellow in a soggy library basement, where his tattered cloak spread to shelter them from the downpour of words in rain. They spent long hours together, wandering Carcosa until they had trouble telling one world from the other. When she returned to this world (did she?), she became the senior editor of Shimmer Magazine and a cupcake connoisseur. Her short fiction has been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.