No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection)

by Digital Fiction

  “Is this the way to Carcosa?” I can’t say what made me ask it. The name tasted right, but the thought to say it didn’t feel like my own. Something what Cassie said before, about a King who gave them what they desired. I think it provided a way inside, opened a door for other things to enter.

  “One of them,” was all she would say.

  The corridor opened into a circular chamber, illuminated by unnatural lights all along the walls. The floor was curved slightly, making the chamber into a pit. A black pit of stars, but the stars — the lights — weren’t really here. They came from the deepest pit of all, the one inside us all. “The light here is older than humanity,” Cassie said. She tapped the wall and it rang not like stone, but like glass. “This is the hanging court.” She nodded her head up, and I followed the gesture.

  Empty pairs of chains dangled from points along the wall. The windows, I supposed, were evenly spaced apart. After what I’d seen getting here, I could imagine the room’s purpose. Something blocked out a scatter of lights for a moment, just a moment. It drifted slowly across them, following a path around width of the pit. It was on the other side of the glass.

  “Don’t look,” Cassie said as she turned her head so she couldn’t, and I did the same. “What is it?” My throat was dry and something was picking at the edges of my hearing, a sound I couldn’t and didn’t want to identify.

  “It doesn’t have a name, none of them do. They’re older than that. Mostly they sleep, but sometimes they wake up.”

  I wanted to turn, to look at it. I knew if I did, it would take everything from me. I don’t know how I knew, I just did. It was a deeper, more animal kind of fear than most people can understand.

  “What do they do when they wake up?” “They watch.”

  I don’t know how long we stood there waiting for it to pass us by. Cassie shifted her feet and slowly turned her gaze around, and I knew it was safe to move.

  Something was different. The room was unchanged, but the light was altered, somehow other than it was when we entered. I think it left something behind it, perhaps a trace smeared on the glass walls. I didn’t think it had come so close to touch, but then, I wasn’t looking and it’s possible it did.

  My center of gravity shifted in my stomach, pulling me gently to one side.

  I’d left the House behind. I was in Carcosa, nowhere else but Carcosa. Slipped in through the door swinging open in my head, where the thoughts from before found their way in first.

  The only way out was as Cassie said; straight on. The House of Nothing was just what it said it was, nothing, but that was a lie.

  In Carcosa, even nothing has meaning.

  The door Cassie brought me to was the way back. We weren’t alone when we reached it. Linda was there waiting for us, and I wasn’t surprised to see her. It fitted together. She’d brought me to the party, after all. She didn’t say a word when I left with Cassie, and now I understood why.

  At first, I didn’t recognize her; then I saw the same mark, the same spiral I’d seen on the angel in the harness.

  She was breathing hard, panting wetly like an animal. I think she had been waiting for a long time.

  This was the only room I saw in the House that made sense, its proportions fitting to the view from outside.

  Cassie handed me the knife.

  “She wants it, look at her.” She pointed, like how you might for a child. “She’s used up, almost, and we need to bring another delight for us.”

  I saw something else in Linda — I saw acceptance in her eyes. She wanted this, needed it as much as she needed whatever was burning her up. It and the result waiting at the end of the blade were separate things, but somehow connected. Her lips were moving in a silent flurry, so fast I almost couldn’t read them.

  ‘Not dreaming, but in Carcosa. Not dead, but in Carcosa. Not in hell, but in Carcosa.’

  She mouthed it over and over again. There was something crawling under my skin then, I felt it tickle and wriggle along my forearms. My own need started there in that room.

  You can’t stop it. There’s no way to get clean; you can only wash it off for a time, and even the cleanest hands are washed in blood.

  I woke up on the shore of a lake, dressed in a stained yellow robe.

  All We Have

  The night it happened, Eric asked why I was breathing so heavily. I wasn’t. I don’t remember much after that.

  Our photographs were now only my photographs because he wasn’t in them anymore. As though whatever happened had happened in every time.

  None of our friends remembered him except me.

  I kept the room locked after that, afraid to go in. Sometimes I heard things, but I’m not sure if it was just my mind playing tricks on me.

  I cleared what was left of him from the house. Strange that memories and pictures changed, but his stuff was still about. I don’t pretend to understand it. I was numb, so accepted it for what it was.

  Who could I tell? No one remembered him.

  Tucked in behind the papers was a small scrap, torn from what might have been an envelope; one corner was covered with what I took for the sticky part you lick. A sign was drawn on the bottom of one corner in bright yellow ink, though it was a shade I think I’d never seen in life.

  I tossed the rest, but kept the scrap. It was tangible, personal. I felt as long as I had it, then I had a piece of him to anchor my memories. I was terrified of forgetting him like everyone else had. Somehow, keeping this held more importance than anything else of his I still had.

  As far as I know, it’s still in my wallet.

  When you don’t sleep, the sound on life sort of gets turned down. I went to work, I went home, figuring existence was some kind of life, even if it wasn’t.

  I was living in a structure, a support of routine and habit that was otherwise empty. Even the Internet couldn’t help me — how could it? How do you search Google for someone who never was? Except you know they were. You can remember their smell, how they smiled in the morning; all the little things that make up a person. Erased not like they never were, but simply not, except for you.

  Sleeping wasn’t something I really did after that; I only closed my eyes, but never fell into it. It was like part of my brain was switched off.

  After a certain time, all TV becomes a wasteland. Filled with sound that tries to be words, only the light provides any kind of comfort. Laptop perched on my lap, I scrolled through pages without reading. It helped to keep my hands busy, even if it made my eyes burn.

  ‘hey,’ a chat balloon popped up in the bottom corner.

  It wasn’t a name I recognized: Lost1_0. I ignored it, but they weren’t up for that. ‘ur not busy…u don’t have work tomorrow’

  I sat up a little. It might have been a guess, but it was true. ‘who is this?’ I wrote back. ‘Eric’ Plenty of people have that name. Right? ‘how have u been?’

  ‘no’

  ‘no what?’

  I thought about closing the chat, blocking the name, but I didn’t think that would help. My fingers rested on the keys. I was aware I might have finally lost it. I thought I’d maybe fallen asleep finally and drifted into a deep lucid dream, or that this was really happening.

  ‘how?’ I couldn’t think of anything else to write, but I didn’t want to close the chat. I couldn’t.

  ‘ur not making sense’ He was writing like nothing had happened. He could’ve been messaging from work, for all I knew.

  ‘where hav you been? WTF happened?’

  I stared at the screen, watching as ellipses popped up and vanished. He was typing and deleting, looking for the right words or else writing a long block of text.

  ‘it was time to go,’ he wrote. Keeping it simple was sometimes his way. Eric was never good at long explanations; you had to tease it out of him, a bit at a time.

  ‘why?’

  ‘it’s complica8d it was just time’ I could almost hear his voice as I read. ‘miss you:(…where are you?’)

  �
��hard to explain, will try, but need to show u…there’s a lake. the clouds don’t change here, like it’s always twilight.’

  He wasn’t being evasive — Eric was never like that. He was describing exactly what he could in the way he would.

  ‘there are black stars and sometimes I can c 2 moons, I think.’ ‘what is it? where is it?’

  ‘carcosa’

  The name was both familiar and unknown, like maybe I’d heard it somewhere before, but I’d forgotten where and when.

  ‘we’re lost here’

  ‘no one remembers you’

  ‘except u’ ‘why?’

  ‘it was what was supposed to happen’

  I could see where this was going. ‘I’m supposed to go with u?’

  ‘there are doors and keepers waiting behind them. they take ppl who r willing, even if they don’t know it…I hoped maybe you were…’

  I remembered the piece of paper with the yellow sign, the runic shape drawn on it. It came from an envelope — an invitation.

  ‘u never told me’

  ‘I didn’t know how’

  ‘what happened that night?’ I’d wanted to know, but as soon as I hit enter, I realized I really didn’t. I remembered hearing the heavy breathing; sometimes, I still thought I heard it. Wet and animal-like, it wasn’t a sound a person could make.

  ‘I don’t have words 4 it…u have to experience it’ ‘k’

  ‘I need u here, we need u here’

  My hands drifted away from the keys and I don’t know how long I stared at the screen. For the longest time, I’d had to live with this in isolation. Now Eric was talking to me from some other place he’d gone to, hoping I would join him.

  I wanted to ask why he’d left, why he didn’t tell me about any of this. Find out whatever he’d gotten himself into. I thought we’d been together long enough that there was nothing we couldn’t tell each other.

  Maybe you can never really know another person, but he was all I wanted. There was a literal space he’d left behind him, and I was the only one who noticed it — the only one who felt it and didn’t want it to be there anymore.

  ‘what do I have 2 do?’

  Outside our old room, I stood in front of the door and tried not to stop myself from shaking. Twice I reached for the handle, but I couldn’t touch it. It felt like it was expanding and contracting, as if the room itself was breathing in anticipation of being entered. There was something almost sexual about it — a gradual building of anticipation.

  On the third attempt, I grabbed the handle and turned it slowly. It creaked in the same old way, and the door opened a little stiffly from lack of use.

  Inside was unchanged, but the air was stale and cold. It reminded me of the church I went to as a child, and there was the same kind of reverence lying in wait. This was a sacred place, but I know now God wasn’t looking in. I think he never did, or never could. There are things older than he is, and more patient.

  Turning the lights on did nothing to dispel the feeling.

  My breath misted a little as I closed the door. Naked, I climbed into the bed, which was so cold as to feel damp and clammy against my skin. Reaching over, I flicked the switch by the table and killed the lights.

  In darkness, time and sight have no meaning. You lie there with your eyes open, but after a while, you’re not sure if they are anymore. You have to blink to remind yourself.

  Slowly, I started to drift off, but the sensation of falling or standing on the edge of a precipice kept me from going fully under. I heard a sound like heavy breathing and closed my eyes.

  Flashes of memories are all I have. Images without context or concrete definition, but I remember two things more clearly than the others. Falling, or I should say sinking, down into water deeper than the earth. As dark as the room had been, this was darker still.

  Deafened by the volume of water, I could still hear. There was a sound like the beating of huge wings. Sometimes it was far away; other times, it was right behind me.

  After that, there was nothing.

  I woke up on the shore of a lake, dressed in a stained yellow robe. Despite the memory of being in water, I was dry. From where I was, I saw across the lake itself. Mist shrouded most of the far banks, but here and there, I could see fires burning. By their light, the outlines of decaying and ruined buildings were just visible.

  Barely glimpsed figures suggested themselves between the ruins, but they vanished before I could get a good look.

  “Hi,” Eric said as he came up without making a sound.

  I think he was simply there because he needed to be. He was the same as I remembered and wore something like the robe I was dressed in. Without thinking, I hugged him and pressed my nose into his neck. He was warm and alive. Questions fell away, and I stepped back to look at his face.

  The only difference I noticed up close was a slight darkening and sunken look around his eyes.

  “What is this?”

  “Carcosa, I told you.”

  He seemed to think the name would tell me everything. It rattled around in the back of my head, a form with meaning always slipping out of reach.

  “C’mon, they’re waiting,” he said as he turned and started walking along the shore. “They?”

  “The others. You’ll see.”

  One of the buildings, though rotting and spotted with niter, was more or less in one piece. Eric led me to it, pointing out landmarks that meant nothing to me at that time.

  I didn’t think so much of Carcosa. If it was supposed to be a sanctuary or something, it looked to have seen better days. The people too didn’t look to be in such a good way.

  As we walked along the lakeshore, Eric stopped to talk to someone and dropped behind me.

  When I turned, I was confronted by a woman with hatchet features all but cutting her face in half. I could see she’d been attractive once, but all the fat and maybe vitality were gone from her. Except for her eyes, which were bright and showed no signs of hunger.

  “You’re the new arrival,” she said rather than asked. “Nice to meet you.”

  “The King said you would come, and Eric too.” “Do you know Eric?”

  “Only by way of the King, it’s how it is around here. Those who get close to the King have to give him something, or promise to.”

  “What did Eric give him?”

  “He hasn’t given it yet, as far as anyone knows.” “Why are you all here?”

  She half turned her face away and looked out across the lake. I thought maybe I’d lost her to a daydream, but she turned back a moment later.

  “To live.”

  So it is a sanctuary. I couldn’t imagine what they were running from to come here and to be forgotten. “What are you hiding from?”

  “Life. Here, life forgets us, but the King needs things to keep us hidden. Nothing worth having is easily bought.”

  “All of you give something to the King?”

  She nodded. “It’s the law. In return, he gives us all the same boon.”

  It was an old word, and it took me a moment to understand her meaning. “What kind of things do you give?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes big things, sometimes small. They have to be important and come from within. Sometimes the King puts them to use for Carcosa…other times, he discards them after a while.”

  Eric appeared beside me again and the woman nodded. She didn’t say another word, but just walked away. I should’ve asked Eric about her and what she’d said, but being near him again made me forget it.

  All that mattered was that Eric was here — it didn’t matter where here was as long as I was with him.

  The first floor of the building was taken up by lines of mismatched benches arranged like pews. There were maybe thirty or more people there, and they looked at us each in turn as we came in. Nothing unified them — not age or race or sex — but they all had dark rings around their eyes, some more than others.

  An aisle of sorts led between the arranged seats to a rai
sed platform. A figure wearing yellow robes, bigger than but as tattered as everyone else’s, stood waiting there. For all that he looked like a beggar, his clothes suggested something regal.

  I followed Eric towards him, trying to avoid the stares of the others as we passed. Doubt started to tie itself into a knot in my stomach. For the first time, I seriously wondered where I was and why Eric had come here.

  I think I knew he’d promised them something, but couldn’t figure out what exactly. By the time I did, there was nothing I could do.

  The yellow King – for lack of a better name - opened his arms a little and smiled. Only the lower half of his face was visible, the upper part was hidden behind a hook-beaked mask the color of black iron.

  “Eric,” he said and kissed him lightly on both cheeks before turning to me. “Welcome, we’ve been waiting for you.”

  He repeated the gesture on me. I tried not to flinch as his face brushed against mine. It was cold and greasy, almost like a corpse. I caught something salty and spicy coming off him, and I shivered inwardly. It wasn’t a smell I recognized, but it put me in mind of something only half alive.

  Gently he led me forward and pressed down on my shoulder, forcing me, however softly, to kneel. A woman came around from behind me, carrying an object wrapped in cloth. She handed it to the yellow King, who unwrapped it carefully as Eric took a place just behind him.

  It was a mask, but not one made from plaster — rather from some sort of heavy ceramic. He held it up to what light came in through the windows. I could see flecks of what I thought was rust dotted along its edge, near a series of small holes.

  He handed it to Eric. The woman who’d carried it moved around behind me and gripped my shoulders. She gradually applied pressure and pinned me in place. Eric smiled down at me, but it wasn’t out of love. It was lopsided now, almost manic.

  I understood what was coming next and I realized what he’d promised them — what he had to deliver so we could both be together, here in this place, no matter the shape we were both in. Love is a kind of death — the giving of one soul willingly to another. The obliteration of self and the act of creating something other from two wholes, so giving becomes a kind of sacrifice, one to another.