In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  We were deep when he finally stopped descending and instead led me down a hall and threw open yet another door. “Behold,” he proclaimed, “the 1899 production of The King in Yellow!”

  Beyond that door I saw things, things that should not have been possible, not in the Twentieth Century. I stood there entranced as the old man donned that aged costume, as he placed that crown of antlers upon his brow, as he rose into the air, into that darkened space amongst the rafters. He danced there and I recognized him as the character that had been excised from the photographs, and I knew that the actor that had played him had been Moncharmin himself!

  Even now, all these years later, I can still hear him reciting his lines with poise and bravado. “The Yellow King is dead,” he shouted, “and who shall take his place? Shall it be the White Queen, the Crimson Cardinal, the Black Man, or perhaps the Green? The White Knight still guards the gate, but the scion is already within the walls. The exile returns and he seeks his rightful throne!” He floated down and took his place amongst that horrific tableau. He was a maestro, a master puppeteer; he was the spring amidst clockwork bones and flesh. “Kneel before me,” he commanded. “Kneel before the Sepia Prince!”

  They say I went mad, that these things did not exist. The Parisian authorities deny all of it. There are no reports concerning what was down there, and the officers I knew to have been involved are now scattered across the country. They claim the fire, the one that three days later consumed that old rehearsal hall, was an accident, bad wiring, but I know better. What they couldn’t understand, what they couldn’t comprehend, they burned away.

  But I know what I saw, and I know what I did

  Here is the truth. The old librarian floated there surrounded by his machine, a demonic construct of ropes and wire, of pulleys and desiccated corpses that danced to the sounds of an infernal barrel organ. He floated there, bearing the mantle of the upstart, the exile, the Sepia Prince. He was a terrible thing, the counter to the madness of the Yellow King, but just as mad. He floated there and demanded my allegiance, demanded that I take my place amongst those decayed and corrupted mannequins, demanded that I willingly accept him, and by doing so be corrupted by his dark influence.

  I did what I thought was right, what any true man would have done.

  I took my pistol from my jacket and I shot him. I shot him once, through his left eye. One shot was all that was needed.

  His death is well documented. They could not erase the truth of that. I have seen the report. My name is on it, they acknowledge that I shot the man.

  They say that none of this happened, but if that was true tell me why was I not charged?

  If I shot that man, and he was just that, a man, and not the Sepia Prince, why was I not charged? If I was mad why was I not hauled away to the asylum?

  Sometimes I wish they had taken me to the madhouse. Then, at least, I could have had the illusion that I was mad. I could have let the tattered veil of the King in Yellow fall back across my eyes and be blind once more. Instead I see what others will not.

  The worst part is my dreams. Moncharmin lies on the floor dead. The others are there as well, dancing; their arms outstretched begging me to join them, to take Moncharmin’s place.

  “Have you seen the Sepia Prince?” They cry out.

  “Yes,” I tell them. “Yes, I have!”

  Then I reach out for that pale brown coat, and the crown of horns. I reach for them with intent.

  And then I wake screaming.

  It is not the screaming which terrifies me. That I still scream at the offer gives me comfort, it tells me I am still a man. The night I no longer scream, when I no longer fear accepting the mantle of the Sepia Prince, that is what I fear the most.

  Not my screaming, but when my screaming stops.

  ew cult deprogrammers these days would even try to take someone from Ex Libris. Hardly any even call themselves deprogrammers, anymore. “Exit counselor” is the preferred title, in keeping with the warmer, fuzzier new psychology. A human brain must be more than just Descartes’ materialist cognitive model, or its feelings wouldn’t get so hurt by the truth.

  My methods were not popular, but they worked. Most of my business was by referral. The clients who came to me had exhausted every other hope of recovering their loved ones. When I could not myself convince them to accept that perhaps they were healthier, more enlightened, perhaps even happy, with their new lifestyle, then I had them sign my waiver and went to work.

  Ex Libris was a hard target. They didn’t greet at airports or convention centers or lurk outside euthanasia booths. They didn’t panhandle or turn tricks. Mostly, they meditated to the Master’s audiobooks while toiling in digital sweatshops up and down the coast.

  Their leader was a creative writing professor. Dr. Preston Marble used the classics—“guided” meditation, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, protein starvation, mild hallucinogens and traumatic writing assignments. Ex Libris grew out of Marble’s writing seminars and his “Awakened Editions” series of classic books annotated for neurotics desperately yearning to become psychopaths, harvesting the most hopeless wanna-bes, fans and impressionable victims into a militant bibliomancy cult.

  Marble’s guide to story structure translated more easily into a practical bible than the Bible, complete with interactive commandments. Every devotee had to compose an “antibiography” of everything they were not and never would be. On average, they ran to five hundred thousand words composed on no sleep and amphetamine-laced oatmeal. When your Editor finally approved your antibiography, you had to burn it and throw the ashes in the ocean or eat it.

  If they used Allah, Buddha or Jesus, they’d be on FBI watch-lists, but to the outside world, they’re just a fucking book club.

  Sometimes, I can dress up as a senior cult official and pull them out with no headaches. This outfit had no slack, so I cut their DSL line, then knocked on their door. Four surfers in each one-bedroom unit at all times. A van came every other day to rotate them out. Eight more places like this, just in this part of town.

  Cable guy uniform. Toolbelt. Wig and mustache, cotton plugs in my cheeks, lifts in my shoes. I chloroformed the geek who answered the door, caught him, threw the deadbolt and dragged him into the living room.

  No furniture except for four workstations and a couple futons in the corner. Lysol, incense and macrobiotic farts. Two were awake and pecking at their boards. Another lay on a futon with headphones on. The one I wanted.

  She wore a biofeedback harness and a Cranio-Electrical Stimulation cap. They listen to his heartbeat and EEG mixed with his audiobook lectures while they work. The more her brain activity conforms to Marble’s template, the more mildly pleasurable zaps she gets from the cap.

  And all while copy-editing or revising the mass media equivalent of lead-painted, asbestos infant’s teething rings. If you’ve ever watched a slab of direct-to-video dreck or mind-numbing scripted reality show patter and wondered how sane human beings can create such empty noise, well... sane people don’t.

  The system also tracks bodily functions and location for the home office. Anyone unplugging their unit or wandering out of range triggers an alarm and the Editors come running.

  I unplugged her and took off her headphones—Marble’s sleepy bullroarer voice reading something about an anarchist exploding himself at Greenwich Observatory. She was semi-catatonic, dead on her feet. I didn’t even need the chloroform. I stood her up and escorted her to the balcony.

  Someone knocked on the front door, then tried the knob.

  Out on the balcony overlooking the alley. My assistant waited on the roof of our parked van, ready to catch the product. I bagged her and lowered her over the railing.

  Carl caught the bag and gave me a hand down onto the van, then jumped down and caught the product, dropping her in the back. In and out in less than two minutes.

  We took her out to Imperial C
ounty, to the Olde Desert Inn. It was abandoned long before I set up shop, and no one ever happened by. Two miles off the Interstate, at a dead place that never quite became a town. You can see anyone coming from five minutes away, watch satellites pass overhead at night.

  As soon as we got the product strapped down in the honeymoon suite, Carl went home to his family and I got busy. My client had paid a big premium for a rush job. He wanted his wife back. I had to open up the product and find her.

  She had the kind of bright, nervous beauty that you feel sparking at you just before you look her way. Smart, fine features; good bones showing too starkly through her pale, jaundiced skin. Avid, hungry eyes.

  Real deprogrammers, the old school guys, kept their techniques under wraps like stage magicians, but it’s almost always some variation on the old interrogation, aversion therapy model. I didn’t have any tricks, training, dirty little secrets.

  I didn’t interrogate them or break them down the way the burnout FBI agents and MK-ULTRA stooges who started our game did it. I didn’t have to. I was more of an assassin. I captured and killed the target with my magic bullet. The product died and the person was reborn, saved by the Elixir.

  I liked to measure out dosages not just to body size, age and health, but to degree of indoctrination. I usually interviewed the client before, but this one was unresponsive. Semi-catatonic. She’d get up and go where you pushed her, but there was nobody home.

  A quick physical turned up scalp scabs from constant electrical shocks and bruised track marks from recent and intensive IV abuse. Her pupils were responsive and pulse fine, but someone had already worked her.

  I wanted to wait, but I gave her the shot. Her pulse spiked, then flattened out. I checked her restraints. If she didn’t come around in an hour, I’d give her the second dose I’d prepped.

  It wasn’t therapy. I studied psychology, but I’m no doctor. Nobody can teach you how to raise the dead. To join any cult, from the Masons to Aum Shinrikyo, you have to die. The old you dies and is buried inside you to fertilize the budding of the new you. To resurrect them, I just had to go digging. The Elixir was a bullet, but it was also my shovel. It’s just easy enough, the results miraculous enough, that you’d kid yourself you know what you’re doing.

  Under the Elixir, you are outwardly conscious. You speak when spoken to. You obey. You don’t ask questions. You know nothing but what you are told. You are utterly suggestible. I could make you blow me, hijack a bus and drive it into a nuclear power plant. It’s not like hypnosis, where the idiot on stage wants to act like a chicken. What the product wanted, who they were, what they would or wouldn’t do... all of it dies and goes away. In its place... whatever I put into them.

  But she was doing it wrong.

  She took me so completely by surprise that I almost didn’t see that I’d found what I’d always been looking for. Someone who could show me what it was like to be nothing.

  She babbled in French, faster than I could understand. Then, “The stars beneath the sea... Do you remember before you were born? You remember what it was like?... I’d give anything if you could send me back....”

  Usually, the product has to be coaxed out of the clouds. Sometimes it helps to guide them out with imagery; childhood snapshots as stepping stones, recreating the life history with a big red editorial pen.

  But this product didn’t need me to set the scene. The walls of the motel room turned to stained canvas flats in the wings of a musty black cathedral.

  The ceiling vanished in a jumble of scenery dangling from cables. Some I recognized–-the apartment, the Ex Libris Chapterhouse, the beach at night, a Hillcrest townhouse—but there were hundreds of others, an armory of scenes. Flakes of corroded varnish fluttered down to settle on her hair like golden snow.

  “Before your script was written? Before the Plot had sharpened and bent and broken you to its ends.” She winced, trying to smile. “If you’re here, you must be an actor....”

  “Then you’re an actress?”

  Her laughter shivered flurries of paintflakes from above. “If you’re alive, you must act. Are you so sure you’re alive?” She tossed her head and fussed with the ash-roses embroidered in the sleeves of her gray gown. The fabric was dull yet subtly iridescent, like a shed snakeskin. “I like this one ever so much more than the last play....”

  “What play was that? What was your role?”

  “I was a mirror for a man to admire his own mask. So few real roles for women, now as ever... I loved my Lord the King more than my husband. I had forsaken all others to become a thought in my Lord’s mind. But then he revealed to me my particular purpose...”

  “And what purpose is that?”

  She knelt before the pool that had been only a square chalk outline on the floor of the stage. “To murder him,” she said. The buckled, warped boards were now pitted umber flagstones, the corsages of stained paper extravagantly sexual lilies on still, emerald water.

  “Do you want to be free of him? Of... all this?”

  “Oh, he’s no burden. His sinister hand stopped my dagger as if it were a feather. By his fear and by his blood, I knew he was but a pretender. No, the one I want to be free of, no one can escape.”

  “Who’s that?”

  She leaned in close and whispered, “The Plot.”

  Looking up into the gallery, she hunched closer to me. I could feel my warmth leeching away into her. “I like this one ever so much better. So many places to hide... Do you not know the French Play?”

  I shuddered and told her no.

  “No matter, the lines read you, as it were. But we must enter! The call! Here, you must don your mask!”

  The theater throbbed with the tolling of a vast, leaden bell. She shoved the cold, dry thing into my hands. Before I could look at it, I had pressed it to my face. Shadowy hands came out of the dark to guide us up twisting stairs and through a velvet miasma of rotting curtains into a cold white light....

  We lay side by side upon the bed. Her pulse was steady. Her eyes were empty.

  I thought better of giving her the second shot, decided instead on a serious sedative. But when I turned around, the syringe was gone.

  It was in her hand. Then it was in my neck.

  Before 9/11, the airport was much more than a place to wait in line and get searched. It was also really easy to steal people’s luggage.

  I did it to pick up quick cash after I dropped out of college. It beat waiting to be expelled once my misuse of the clinical psychology department’s resources was uncovered, or once the new law requiring piss tests for financial aid went into effect.

  At LAX, the passengers would crowd up to the belt even if their luggage was nowhere in sight, so if something went round the loop more than twice, it was probably unclaimed. Missed passenger connection, misrouted baggage, or maybe just a protracted restroom visit. Regardless, within ten seconds of spotting my quarry, I could have it out the turnstile door and into my friend’s waiting car.

  My friend. Naomi was philosophy on a pre-law track and still doing swimmingly. We had little in common except she enjoyed drugs even more than me, which pretty much guaranteed her at least some sort of regional title. Strikingly homely, smarter than me, and a fry-guide non pareil. Any time you wanted to drop acid and go walkabout up the coast, she was down, if she didn’t have a paper due. I told myself she hung out with me because she was writing a paper about me.

  So this one time, I cased the claim corrals in the international terminal, which was always sketchy and seldom worth it. Flights from Hong Kong, South America or the Middle East, where customs or immigration might hold them up for me, were also searched the most often. Even back then, they had cameras everywhere, and sometimes someone was watching them. I did a paper on recognition cues that guide our treatment of people we see as young/old, rich/poor, ugly/pretty, hostile/friendly, threatening/helpless, etc. The grabs star
ted as part of those experiments. Everyone is a bigot, but a memorable prop or stereotypical mannerisms were cues that one noticed even above gender or race. I got a C+ and a journeyman’s degree in spycraft.

  We kept a suitcase full of Iranian currency—fifteen hundred dollars after exchange—and two pounds of hash. We pursued the experiments elsewhere—shoplifting, dining and dashing, pharmaceutical burglary, etc. Much was learned.

  But this last one... it was everything we hoped for and deserved.

  I saw this really long, odd-shaped, expensive-looking case on a played-out Cathay Pacific from Bangkok and figured it for something fun. Maybe a musical instrument. I wasn’t looking for money, though I was broke and hungry. I wanted secrets.

  I was dressed in a distressed linen suit, perfect for humid tropical climes, and a Panama hat with a snakeskin band. The dissolute young sex tourist, bringing back only viral contraband incubating where no customs agent dare search, or the callow expatriate, returning to liquidate a deceased parent’s estate before returning to kick the gong around with the ladyboys of Patpong.

  Already a scrum of vultures from the next flight were converging on the belt in anticipation of a fresh bag dump, providing plenty of cover from airport security, who had not once asked to see a claim check.

  I was on the far side of the belt with a clear shot for the doors. Naomi waited at the curb in her ketchup-red Sentra with a bungee-cord holding the trunk shut. I passed “security” when I noticed I’d grabbed the wrong bag. This one was beat up, dull matte-black brushed steel with three key locks on it. It was too late to turn back, so I ran with it.

  Three guesses what was inside.

  Naomi and I went to a Shakey’s Pizza in Culver City. Her dad was a retired cop upstate, but she learned how to pick locks to steal her classmate’s Ritalin and weed in middle school. She got it open before our pie arrived and I lost my last ball on the ancient Zardoz pinball machine.