A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003, and has written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by the writer H. P. Lovecraft.
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The Queen’s Speech
by Ann K. Schwader
My daughters gone before me to the dark,
Dynastic sacrifices for a truth
Unbearable without this stranger’s mask
That mocks me with its pallor -- was his Sign
Sent forth for you at last, two maids in yellow
Awaiting the embrace of their dread king?
Carcosa’s husk, a court without a king,
Lies echoing & hollow save for dark
Fumes rising from these guttered tapers. Yellow
No more with wholesome light, they died for truth
Made manifest among us by a sign
Denying life to all who dare unmask.
The voices of the Hyades still mask
My soul’s lost song, unsung for any king
Save he who comes, the sender & the Sign
Combined at last. Ring down this final dark
To round our play of ages in a truth
Bitter past bearing, venomous & yellow!
Our Dynasty has borne a taint of yellow
Since Demhe’s clouded depths lay clear, unmasked
Beneath the raw black stars. This phantom truth
Divides us from all others, save that king
Whose tattered mantle beckons from the dark
To each inheritor of his bleak Sign.
So many aeons passed without a sign
To guide us as Carcosa’s towers yellowed
From leprous marble shining in that dark
Behind the moon, till madness like a mask
Of saffron veiled us from ourselves. O King,
When I am dead, what tongue shall sing this truth?
Perhaps no living eye can know such truth
As Hali’s cloud-waves hid. Perhaps no sign
Is sent, but only shadows of a king
Lengthening like men’s thoughts, strange & yellow
Across this hall where I alone, unmasked,
Retrace my daughters’ footsteps into dark.
These eyes behold one final truth writ yellow:
Carcosa’s doom, a sign all mortal masks
Lie fallen to that King beyond the dark.
Ann K. Schwader’s most recent collection of dark verse is Twisted in Dream (Hippocampus Press 2011). She is a 2010 Bram Stoker Award Finalist. Her cosmic horror tale “Dark Equinox” is forthcoming in Searchers After Horror, ed. by S.T. Joshi ( Fedogan & Bremer, 2014) . Ann lives & writes in suburban Colorado. Her website is http://home.earthlink.net/~schwader/
Story illustration by Dominic Black
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O Skies Above O Earth Below I Love The Best
by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
I live in a dead city in a dead land. Behold: I reach out you with a dead hand!
No hand of flesh or bone, of gristle or gore, it once was these, but now is so much more.
Please good sir, bestir yourself to listen, I beseech you cease this languor and pay attention!
Oh, but turn that page and I wager you will find so much more than all you’ve left behind!
That world? That livid, bristling thing? Oh, sir, wait until you see the pallid land of which I sing!
The pallid land with its Pleiadian ‘pelago and its Yellow King leading us in funereal adagio!
It is the voice of the book, of the play never successfully staged (who could successfully stage a play which causes actors and audiences alike to lose their minds in the second act?), it is the voice of the thing that wrote the play, that put its own spirit, mad, ethereal, ultramundane, into the words.
Send for the author!
The words speak to me. They offer terrible intuitions, baroque revelations; they obscure what I deemed solid fact and illuminate felicitous vistas of evanescent despair. A land that is dead, where we may, dying, live in the fastnesses of the King in Yellow. Where we may gaze on a pallid mask that is not a mask, share in a sacrament of word and fever, worm and fear!
Word and fever, worm and fear!
Send for the author!
Look, I was a sensible man in my own way. I read the newspapers, and then discarded them. I went to a place where they gave me words to rearrange and I rearranged them, set them marching in the approved paths and received coin of the realm in return for my pains. I was aware of the enormity of the deceptions being practiced upon me, so I drank each night and I listened to clangorous music and I sang and I wept and I ranted and I slept. I paid homage to no false gods – and all the gods are false, after all – did not let myself be seduced by dogma, paradigms or pyramid schemes.
A sensible man!
I tried to write short fictions, but it is ever easier to write such than to read them and even harder to sell them, so I contented myself with rearranging other men’s and women’s words and accepting coin of the realm – here I must pause to note that it was never actually coin which I was paid in so much as signals, impulses, sent from their bank’s computers to mine’s – but anyway, legal tender of the realm. I squandered this tender on books of verse, which are even easier to write and even harder to read or sell than short fictions, and on drink, which is easy to make, easy to read and easy to sell. I loved myself but intermittently and others not at all. I dreamed of skies other than these, of earth other than this, and those I loved. I awoke to despair and slept to escape into delight. I was a sensible man in my own way, I curtailed my contacts with the world I loathed, I kept to myself, I pursued oblivion in a measured and harmless manner, for the most part, and I never multiplied entities or claimed revelations or, after my initial essays in the fictional art, added to the rising tide of vapid noise that our species surrounds itself with.
Skies other than these, earth other than this!
Word and fever, worm and fear!
Yes, I was sensible man. You would not have liked me – I did not like myself – but you could have had little more than a mild aesthetic, ethical or doctrinal distaste for me. I kept to my tracks, I never overstepped, I dreamed in the nights of a quiet, silken dead world with a jaundiced sovereign and I was content to know I would return there in my dreams.
But
But my dreams grew, in my dreams too I tried my hands at the literary arts. I composed a verse – it was not enough – it became a poem! That was too hermetic so I made it into a dramatic monologue. This, also, was far too austere for my liking so I added more voices, and monologue became colloquy, became drama. Night after night in dream after dream I slaved over my creation, my offering to this dream realm and its sovereign. I wrote painstakingly detailed stage directions, sketched costumes and backdrops and obsessively refined dialogue and plot.
Is there an author in the house?
All literary adventures must end when the creator is certain he has attained either failure or success, or is certain that he cannot be certain of each; it was with a certain and novel sense of the utter felicitousness of my literary offering that I scrawled the words ‘The End’ at the end of my manuscript. I had poured my spirit into this creation, and had little left for myself when I was done.
I woke up from that last, salutary dream in a state of elation, which soon faded to despair when I realized I had fallen prey to a malaise common to artists who choose to compose while ensconced in dreams: I had forgotten every word of my composition! For days I had woken with complete recall of the contents of my incomplete or imperfect drafts; but now that I had attained perfection, all was lost! I cursed myself for not taking notes, I drank, I wept, I laughed and then I slept, perchance to dream. To my desolation I found that I had lost the way to that realm beyond happiness and sorrow, and my dreams were once more mere re-hashed garbles of diurnal despairs and defeats.
A sadder man, and no wiser, I resolved to close the book on this episode and move on with a life no more devoid of meaning and purpose than it had once been.
But
But in the waking world, I started to hear whispers of a play. A strange play, a dangerous play! Never staged, neither printed nor issued by known publisher, yet everyone soon had a copy, given them by some acquaintance they did not know they had, or bought from a used-book seller who had been unaware of such a thing lurking in his store. Everyone soon had a copy, a faded yellow folio with a woodcut of its author on the cover; an archaic fellow, conventional at a glance but obscurely deformed and, to me at least, obscurely familiar upon closer perusal. A faded yellow folio that sat awkwardly aslant on their shelves or tables, somehow not quite belonging to the same genus as all the other tomes and pamphlets scattered about.
Those who eventually read that volume were utterly transformed. It happened immediately, and was irrevocable. They became filled with mad schemes to revive unheard of dynasties, to avow loyalties to causes unknown, to travel by means impossible to a land non-existent.
A sensible man?
Surely, I thought, some unhappy man had poured his spirit into these words, had given generously of himself, of a peculiar imagination stunted by solitude and nurtured by isolation. Here was something which could restore to me some measure of the dream-plenitude I had lost. So I, too, procured that slim volume, left it lying around in my rooms, pretended to forget or fear it for a fortnight or two. Then, glutted with reality and desolate for the ethereal, I finally picked it up. I read the dialogue, the stage directions, followed the plot. But by the time I had reached the final act, I was contemplating two sets of words – the ones on the page before me and the ones in my mind. Those superimposed voices sang with my own voice, welcomed me back to the skies above and the earth below that I love the best.
Send for the author!
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy lives in Bangalore with his wife, more books than he will be able to read in this lifetime, and an ever-growing horde of cats and dogs. He plays the bass guitar for a doom metal band called Djinn And Miskatonic and that’s about it. His blog is: http://aaahfooey.blogspot.com
Story illustration by Nikos Alteri
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The First Act
by Peter Steven Rawlik
You can stop pretending, I know you’re awake.
You’ve been straining against the ropes for the last three minutes. Don’t try to speak, you’ll just embarrass yourself. I’m sorry about the gag, but like the ropes it’s there for my protection. I apologize if you’re uncomfortable. I promise it will be over soon. To be honest, while I have written this scene, or something like it, a hundred times, I’ve never actually acted on my script before.
I see that look in your eyes (that is not fear).
I had hoped I was wrong, hoped that you would wake up and be completely surprised,
fearful,
confused.
But you’re not, not at all.
And that doesn’t surprise me.
One of us was going to do this, sooner or later.
We’ve both heard the Song of Cassilda, and that of Camilla,
We both came to see the Play, but the First Act is mine.
After all, I have had more practice, not in actually doing, but rather in plotting. Like you, I’m an idea man, constantly thinking, exploring new thoughts, new perspectives, and new concepts. And I will admit some of those ideas, many of those ideas, those thoughts, those things that wander into my head … they are horrible, monstrous, even unforgivable. If people could see the things I think about, glimpse the images that come to me as I talk to them, or walk down the street, or eat lunch; if they saw the things I daydream of, I doubt that I would be a free man, let alone have any friends.
But I don’t need friends.
I have my family.
And my writing.
And of course, the play.
My wife worries about that quite a bit. Writing is, after all, a lonely occupation, a solitary endeavor, and it doesn’t allow for casual acquaintances or idle conversations.
The subject matter doesn’t help, either.
Authors who write about psychopaths, serial killers and the things that fester beyond the veil don’t tend to cultivate friends.
I suppose that’s why my wife introduced us.
It is difficult to find someone who has a comparable level of intelligence and with whom I can carry on a conversation (about what?).
That you meet these criteria, that you remind her so much of me is, I suppose, something of a compliment, and I have to agree with her assessment.
You and I are so much alike,
too much I think;
I read the book, I heard the songs.
I came to see the play.
So did you.
Which is why you are here.
But I came first,
and the First Act is mine.
Don’t get me wrong,
I like you, I really do.
That night on the piazza, and at the symphony, the evening we spent out with the girls: Those were probably some of the best times I have had in recent memory. Good times.
I’m serious.
But, I’ve watched you too. I’ve seen how you pause in mid-conversation, how you look at dogs, at women, at kids. It’s the same look I get sometimes: the distant, unfocused eyes, the slack jaw, and the tiny bit of drool that betrays the fact that you really aren’t here anymore.
My wife wonders where I go when that happens. I tell her something, something I’ve made up.
(A lie.)
I don’t want to tell her the truth. There are things she shouldn’t know: like what I think about her, her friends, the kids.
If I told her a tenth of what comes into my head my marriage would be over, and my time with the girls would be entirely supervised.
Instead, I tell the world about my horrific dreams, dress them up in fancy language and twisted prose, and then write them down.
AND THEY PAY ME FOR IT!
They pay to take a glimpse inside the dark corners of my mind, to hear just a single stanza of the song, a single line of the play. A play you’ve come to see.
But I got here first.
I’ve seen it before.
It’s what I write about. What I have seen, in my dreams.
(When I write about torturing women, killing kids, tying up dogs in barbwire, I’m not trying to tell people what I am afraid of; I’m telling them what I dream about. It’s kind of amusing that no one has figured that out yet.)
If I didn’t write about them, they would find another way to manifest. They would have to. They are too powerful not to.
Writing about the things, the terrifying things I see, keeps me from actually doing them.
Which brings me back to you.
and the fact that we are so much alike.
I agree, and I hoped, I wished, that I was wrong.
But I’m not.
I suspected from the start, but tried to rationalize it away.
You’ve dropped enough hints.
The book.
The song of Cassilda,
and Camilla,
The haunting tune you whisper - The Overture of Ys!
I suppose to anyone else, to people who don’t think like us, all these things wouldn’t mean anything.
But they do.
I know they do,
and that look in your eye isn’t denial.
We think so much alike, dream the same horrific dreams, and plot the same infernal plots. And we both carry them out. The difference is, mine are laid out on paper, released for the entire world to see.
Yours I’m sure are buried somewhere.
(Where have you hidden the bodies?)
I don’t know how often you’ve acted, and I don’t care.
(But you do, don’t you?)
What I do know is that I can’t have someone like you around my
family, in my house, talking to my wife and kids. I can’t risk it. I can’t let you think like I know you do around the people I care about. They aren’t safe. Sooner or later you will act on the things you dream of.
The Play must have its actors.
There’s really no other way, and you know it.
I’m sure you’ve thought of it as well, I just got here first.
I wish I could say I’m sorry but I’m not.
For once, just this once, I’m going to have to do those things I dream about.
I’m going to take the knife and use it
the way I have dreamed of, written about, so many times before.
I’ll do this once, just this once.
Not because I want to, but because I need to.
You’re a dangerous man. Dangerous to me, to my wife, to my children, to the people I pretend to be friends with. I can’t have you interfering with all the lies and masks that I have put in place to pretend to be normal.
The Pallid Mask.
The Mask of Truth (and lies).
I want to tell you that I’ll be merciful, that I’ll be quick, that I’ll make it is as painless as possible.
But I can’t.
To see one of my dreams fulfilled, to be made real before my eyes,
not just on paper!
Of course you understand, you know all about this.
(I just got here first.)
Tonight I wear no mask!
No mask?
The Overture of Ys echoes through the darkness!
The curtain draws back
(There is a Pause, a beat, a drum that throbs in the temples)
. . . and the Play begins
The First Act is Mine.
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. A sequel, the Weird Company will be released in the Fall of 2014. His short story Revenge of the Reanimator was nominated for a Best Short Story New Pulp Award. He lives in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife and three children. He still remembers where all the bodies are buried.
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