by Tim Curran
On the right, the hills of Cypress Park and Mount Washington leered down at the quivering wretches slogging through the river. On the left, a wooden staircase led out of the cement crevasse. The masked had gathered here, and were ordering the others out of the river with blades and gun barrels, soaked feet squishing up the rough boards of the rickety stairs. Ganz looked up at the sheer hillside. At the very top, what lay on just the other side poured illumination into the dead night sky. The normally bluish white stadium lights were replaced now by a pale yellow glow that pulsed and danced. Writhed. The sky above Los Angeles used to look yellowish at night, with the smog reflecting back the city lights in on itself. A reassuring blanket of human achievement against the dark. Tonight, the sky was black, as all the lights from man were dead.
énouement
Ganz and the others climbed the hill, the interlacing cement tendrils of the 110 and the 5 Freeway growing smaller behind him. The hillside was steep, but Ganz moved steadily, grabbing hunks of stubborn brown weeds, smelling the sharp odor of the dusty soil that for generations had sucked up smog instead of rain while the city grew wild below.
Reaching the crest of the hill, where signal fires burned in six spots around the rim, Ganz stood tall and looked down into the bowl that was once Dodger Stadium. The seats had been ripped out, exposing tight stone steps like those on Mayan pyramids. Temple of Kukulcan. Chichen Itza. The terraced rings were filled to capacity with the masked figures, standing shoulder to shoulder at perfect attention. Sellout crowd. The unmasked citizens milled about on the field, in front of a stage that had been erected over home plate, six feet high and stretching from dugout to dugout on either side. Pale yellow curtains hid the preparations behind. The design of the stagework and draping was ornate to the point of decadence, channeling Louis XIV at his most sodden. The orchestra pit of two-dozen masked musicians wearing flowing robes took up a dissonant tune, heavy on brass and wheedling flute. The prelude.
The push of the crowd moved Ganz through a cut in the perimeter fence and down the stadium steps, loosing him and his companions out onto the grass. He tried to move to the back fence, to put distance between him and the repulsive symphony, but was pushed to the middle of the field, just behind second base, quickly pressed in close on all sides by breathless, moaning bodies that reeked of sweat and shit.
The orchestra swelled with a terrible spike in pitch and volume. Ganz clutched at his ears, gnashed his teeth. He wanted to fall to the ground, to die before his brain popped, but the bodies around him held him up.
A half dozen spotlights shot down from the sky, topped by the whumping sound of heavy helicopter blades. Loudspeakers mounted on the choppers buzzed out words, shouts. Drop weapons... National Guard... By order of the President... Surrounded... The spots raked the crowd of the masked, who hadn’t moved, all focused on the stage. Two beams of light fell onto the front of platform, perfectly illuminating the curtains as they slowly rose.
All around the stadium, those servants of the King removed their masks in one motion. The bellow from the field began at the edge and spread like a wave, wrenching wide every mouth and set of eyes as they saw what lay beneath.
The curtain was now open, exposing the players on stage. The backdrop. The costumes – what at first appeared to be costumes.
To the south, the tops of six downtown skyscrapers exploded with yellow flame, going up like ignited oilrigs. The boom and tremor arrived a second later.
Tongues fell silent. Machines fell from the sky.
The play began.
Glynn Owen Barrass lives in the North East of England and has been writing since late 2006. He has written over a hundred short stories, most of which have been published in the UK, USA, France, and Japan. He also edits anthologies for Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu fiction line, also writing material for their flagship roleplaying game. To date he has edited the collections Eldritch Chrome, Steampunk Cthulhu, and Atomic Age Cthulhu, for Chaosium, and World War Cthulhu for Dark Regions Press.
Tim Curran lives in Michigan and is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, and Skull Moon. Upcoming projects include the novels Resurrection, The Devil Next Door, and Hive 2, as well as The Corpse King, a novella from Cemetery Dance, and Four Rode Out, a collection of four weird-western novellas by Curran, Tim Lebbon, Brian Keene, and Steve Vernon. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh & Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, as well as anthologies such as Flesh Feast, Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and Vile Things. Find him on the web at www.corpseking.com
Cody Goodfellow has written five novels––his latest is Repo Shark (Broken River Books)––and co-written three more with New York Times bestselling author John Skipp. He received the Wonderland Book Award twice for his short fiction collections, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action (both Swallowdown Press). He wrote, co-produced and scored the short Lovecraftian hygiene film Stay At Home Dad, which can be viewed on YouTube. He is also a managing director of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival–Los Angeles and cofounder and editor at Perilous Press, a micropublisher of modern cosmic horror.
T.E. Grau is an author of dark fiction whose work has been featured in over a dozen anthologies, including The Children of Old Leech, Tales of Jack the Ripper, The Best of The Horror Society 2013, Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk, Suction Cup Dreams: An Octopus Anthology, Mark of the Beast, World War Cthulhu, The Dark Rites of Cthulhu, Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities, Dead But Dreaming 2, The Aklonomicon, and Horror for the Holidays, among others; and such magazines, literary journals, and audio platforms as LA Weekly, The Fog Horn, Lore, Tales To Terrify, The Teeming Brain, Eschatology Journal, and Lovecraft eZine. His limited edition novelette The Mission from Dynatox Ministries/Dunhams Manor Press was released in August of 2014, with his second Dynatox chapbook, The Lost Aklo Stories, released in September of 2014. In the editorial realm, he currently serves as Fiction Editor of Strange Aeons magazine. T.E. Grau lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter, and can be found in the ether at The Cosmicomicon (cosmicomicon.blogspot.com).
Laurel Halbany talked an otherwise sensible college into granting her an undergraduate degree in Mythology, a course of study which was not especially marketable but has proven endlessly useful in her writing. Her work has been published in English and in translation in Japanese, and has appeared in publications including Night Land and Five Million Years to Earth. She lives in the urban penumbra of San Francisco with her family.
CJ Henderson created both the Jack Hagee hardboiled PI series and the Teddy London supernatural detective series. He also authored The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, several score novels, hundreds of short stories, and thousands of non-fiction pieces. In the wonderful world of comics he wrote everything from Batman and the Punisher to Archie and Cherry Poptart.
Gary McMahon is the acclaimed author of seven novels and several short story collections. His award-nominated short fiction has been reprinted in “Year’s Best” anthologies. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife, son, and a skittish cat called Moshi, trains in shotokan karate, and likes running in the rain.
William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with twenty novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. He has recent novels and novellas published by the likes of Dark Regions Press, DarkFuse and Dark Renaissance. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing he plays guitar, drinks beer, and dreams of fortune and glory. He can be reached via his website at http://www.williammeikle.com/
Christine Morgan works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility, which plays havoc with her sleep schedule but allows her a lot of writing time. A lifelong reader, she also reviews, beta-reads, occasionally edits and dabbles in self-publishing. Her other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, cheesy disaster movies and training to be a cr
azy cat lady. She can be found online at www.christine-morgan.org
Edward Morris is a 2011 nominee for the Pushcart Prize in Literature, also nominated for the 2009 Rhysling Award and the 2005 British Science Fiction Association Award. He has five collections’ worth of published short fiction, most recently in Perihelion SF, World War Cthulhu, and issues #11 and #12 of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction. Edward lives in Portland, Oregon.
Robert M. Price, a fan of H.P. Lovecraft since the Lancer paperback collections of 1967 appeared, began writing scholarly articles and humorous pieces on HPL and the Cthulhu Mythos in 1981. His celebrated semi-pro zine Crypt of Cthulhu began as a quarterly fanzine for the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association in 1981 and made it to 109 issues. In 1990 he began editing Mythos anthologies for Fedogan & Bremer and Chaosium, Inc. and still does! His fiction has been collected in Blasphemies and Revelations.
W. H. Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since the early 1970s, beginning with stories published in small press journals. His newest book is The Revenant of Rebecca Pascal (in collaboration with David Barker), and he will have stories in That Is Not Dead, Black Wings IV and V, and numerous other professional anthologies. WHP dreams in Seattle.
Stephen Mark Rainey is author of the novels Balak, The Lebo Coven, Dark Shadows: Dreams of the Dark (with Elizabeth Massie), Blue Devil Island, The Nightmare Frontier, and The Monarchs; five short story collections; over 100 published works of short fiction; and several Dark Shadows audio productions, which feature members of the original ABC-TV series cast. For ten years, Mark edited the award-winning Deathrealm magazine and has edited several anthologies, including Deathrealms, Son of Cthulhu, and Evermore. He is an avid geocacher, which frequently takes him to fascinating places – many of them quite creepy. Mark lives in Greensboro, NC. Visit him on the web at www.stephenmarkrainey.com
Pete Rawlik has been collecting Lovecraftian fiction for forty years. In 2011 he decided to take his hobby of writing more seriously. He has since published more than twenty-five Lovecraftian stories and the novel Reanimators, a labor of love about life, death and the undead in Arkham during the early twentieth century. A sequel, The Weird Company was released in the fall of 2014. He lives in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife and three children. Despite the rumors he is not now and never has been a resident of Kingsport.
Brian M. Sammons is an author, editor, critic, and Managing Editor of Dark Regions Press’ Weird Fiction line. His stories have appeared in the books: Horrors Beyond, Dead but Dreaming 2, and Horror for the Holidays and in the magazines: Dark Discoveries, Nightland, and Bare Bone. To date he has edited 10 anthologies including Undead & Unbound, Dark Rites of Cthulhu, Eldritch Chrome, Edge of Sundown, and World War Cthulhu. He has also written extensively for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and has been a reviewer/critic for twenty years. You can follow Brian on Twitter @BrianMSammons
Daniele Serra was born and lives in Italy. He works as an illustrator and comic artist, with work published in Europe, Australia, United States and Japan. He has worked for DC Comics, Image Comics, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales magazine, PS Publishing and other publications. Winner of the British Fantasy Award.
http://www.multigrade.it
Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her latest two books were released earlier this year: Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide from Post Mortem Press, and her story collection Soft Apocalypses from Raw Dog Screaming Press. 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, Dark Faith, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband and occasional co-author Gary A. Braunbeck and is a mentor in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com
Greg Stolze has been paid to give fiction away in a complicated scheme of trust exchange and artistic patronage. Its fruits can be had for free at www.gregstolze.com/fiction_library . Or you can read one of his several horror novels (including Ashes and Angel Wings and Mask of the Other) or play one of his games like REIGN or A Dirty World. He is tall and thin, with grey hair and a melancholy demeanor.
Jeffrey Thomas has written previously of the city of Punktown, in the short story collections Punktown, Voices from Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts of Punktown. His Punktown-based novels are Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, and Red Cells. Thomas’s other collections include Woship the Night, Thirteen Specimens, Nocturnal Emissions, Unholy Dimensions, and Encounters with Enoch Coffin (with W. H. Pugmire). His other novels include Letters from Hades, The Fall of Hades, Boneland, Beyond the Door, Subject 11, and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers. Thomas lives in Massachusetts.
Eric York is an artist who lives in the gloomy forests of northern Arizona where he works as the night manager of an 87 year old haunted hotel. Over the years he’s played bass guitar in bands with names like The American Deathtrip, Shrunken Monkey Paw, Super Colossal Beast, Scar Strangled Banger and Evilsaurus Rex, as well as publishing his own zines, comix, coloring books, tarot cards and related effluvia. He has over 1000 pieces of his artwork up on his website: tillinghast23.deviantart.com.
In the Court of the Yellow King
All stories copyright their respective authors.
This edition copyright © 2014 Celaeno Press. All rights reserved.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be sold or used in any way in any other work or product without explicit advance written permission from Kurodahan Press. Thank you for helping to protect the author’s rights.
ISBN: 978-4-902075-60-1
Celaeno Press
#403 Tenjin 3-9-10, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka 810-0001 JAPAN
www.celaenopress.com