Toa grunted. “This Yellow Raja, Yellow King, King in a yellow ragpicker’s outfit . . . that bugger seems pretty evil to me. And I’m not one to say someone’s bad just because they’re out to kill me. That can be just business, or a difference of opinion, like.”
Deor nodded. “This Power we deal with here . . . this King in Yellow . . . it is more like us, and understands us better. And it is both mad and evil, in our own sense. Perhaps less powerful than that Other who was the Prophet’s patron, but more subtle. This world we see around us—and its future, which we also saw, and the time beyond that—are already full of it, like threads of mold growing through bread.”
Pip listened closely, and the pretzel suddenly tasted like ashes for an instant. She chased it with a gulp of lemonade.
Oh, this is like the Men with Swords and Things with Tentacles, she thought. We’ve been lucky in Oz since the Blackout. Our encounters with this sort of thing have been smaller and more out-of-the-way.
“That bit we saw first—with the Hell Horse—was the far future of this world?” she said.
“It was a time after time, I think. A place . . . or time . . . where all things have collapsed into each other; past and future, good and evil, life and death. A mad God’s endless revenge.”
Oh, bloody marvelous, she thought with a shudder, and continued briskly aloud:
“So if we’re not to grab him and commence with the pointed—and sharp and heavy—questions, what the bloody hell do we do?” she said.
“Follow and observe and think, I would say,” Deor said.
• • •
John caught something out of the corner of his eye. . . .
No, he thought. Castaigne did, and someone else did. . . .
Castaigne had seen four people on the street, moving in a group: two women and two men, one of the latter very large and very dark. Hildred’s attention was focused on that one for an instant, frowning in distaste at something he disliked in the man.
I thought they’d all gone to Suanee? ran through his thoughts.
Then he dismissed it and returned to his own thoughts—which were, as usual, mostly about himself and his endless circle of grievances.
I’m trapped with a madman and it’s so boring, John thought. Then his mind went clear for an instant: That was Pip! How can Pip be here? And Deor and Thora and Toa!
He struggled like a madman himself for a moment . . . and then realized the futility of it. He felt as if he was thrashing about, but nothing changed. Yet there was something there, teasing at the edges of his mind. Something like golden threads, two of them, one a bit stronger than the other, spinning out towards Thora and Pip.
That hint of another personality, the Boisean agreed. John felt more . . .
Present. As if I can feel the boundaries between me and the rest of the world. Without everything blurring into everything else for a moment. It’s like bobbing about in the water and coming to the surface now and then.
He could also feel how little a man saw of the world around him, and how much was filled in by memory, as if it were a series of pictures ruffled through and held up from little clues. What Hildred Castaigne saw was so familiar to him that it hardly registered at all, just flashes—and all of them were exotic beyond words to John. They passed the place called the Lethal Chamber again, and Castaigne paused.
The door had just closed behind someone who sought it out. John felt pity; suicide was mortal sin, and he prayed for the soul that had abandoned itself. Perhaps the man had been mad, not responsible for what he did. . . .
They were close enough as they crossed the park for the sound of machinery whirring and chunking could be heard—heavy machinery, like a metalworking mill in Corvallis he’d visited once, when his father and mother were cutting the ribbon to celebrate its opening. Gears and flywheels whining, but here they were muffled behind heavy concrete and stone, and with it somehow a wet sound that gradually diminished to rrrrrrr like a mill grinding bone for fertilizer.
Castaigne didn’t consciously notice the sound, but something flowed through him, a dark strength that felt like health but that the ones who shared his mind could instantly feel wasn’t. It put an extra spring into the step, though. It felt like power, too, and that was more truthful. Like taking some drug that increased your strength now but undermined it in the long run.
As always when he felt power, Castaigne thought of revenge. This time it was the square face of the doctor, the one who’d tended him after his injury. Flashes of that treatment came back to the surface of his mind; it was impossible to tell bloody fancy from dark reality, though he thought the parts about sobbing all alone in a dark locked box were true, and then screaming and trying to flail against the straight confines of it.
This doctor may have earned some of his hate. On the other hand, he seems to have been genuinely trying to help.
Castaigne turned onto a broad north–south thoroughfare that he thought of as Madison Avenue. It was flanked by brick mansions, with here and there a taller structure under construction or recently built, mostly of marble and columns in what was apparently the current prevailing style in this city.
Hildred’s mind was skipping about as he approached his goal; this experience was showing John how much of the internal monologue you assumed, the mind talking to itself, was an illusion. Or possibly Castaigne was just less coherent than most. Now he was remembering a fall from a horse, the sudden shock of coming loose. That was familiar, but Hildred landed badly, his head striking the stone curb of a pathway in some sort of park. More images after that, of blurred thought and pain in the head and neck and pain, the wretched debilitating misery that came with concussion. John recognized it, and so did the fellow . . .
Passenger, John decided. We’re fellow-passengers.
Time blurred; then Hildred was sitting across from Dr. Archer in a rather heavy, fussy-looking book-lined office that smelled of print and leather covers, and faintly of disinfectant. A faint muffled howling sounded, like a man screaming endlessly and hoarsely, just on the verge of hearing. It was in the present, if that meant anything; at least it was not one of Hildred Castaigne’s memories, and Archer was trying to smile.
“Still determined to settle my hash for me, are you, Mr. Castaigne?” he said, laughing . . . though from where he stood, John could tell that there was no jest involved.
“Oh, implacably,” Castaigne said calmly. “Though it’s really a minor matter, in a sense, yet still I do look forward to seeing your debt paid in full.”
He brought out a checkbook, indistinguishable from those used in the more advanced parts of Montival, and made out a sum.
“I believe this completes my . . . tuition, Dr. Archer?”
“Most satisfactorily, Mr. Castaigne,” the alienist—that was the title on his diploma on the wall—said.
“Indeed, I do owe you a debt of gratitude,” Castaigne said.
“Ah!” Archer said, looking interested. “That constitutes progress! How do you conceive of that debt?”
“Why, Doctor, the fall from my horse . . . and the, ah, tuition here . . . has changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy young man about town, I have become active, energetic, temperate, and above all—oh, above all else—ambitious. Not least because my convalescence broadened my horizons.”
He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a slim volume with a cover of soft leather. “For example, I read this. I heartily recommend it to you, Doctor! It will broaden your mind too!”
Archer idly opened the book, then whipped back his hand as if it were red-hot.
“My God,” he blurted. “The King in Yellow!”
“The very same,” Castaigne said, amusement in his voice. “I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fe
ll open on the hearth in the firelight . . . you see how it is slightly singed? If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page.”
He leaned forward and tapped a finger. “Riveted just here, Doctor. Where the Yellow Sign appears above the words of Cassilda, as Hastur . . .”
Archer’s eyes dropped to the point he indicated as Castaigne’s voice trailed off. Then they became locked, and sweat broke out on his brow. For perhaps thirty seconds he read, and turned the page with a trembling hand, then wrenched his gaze away.
“This book is illegal; it has been banned throughout the civilized world!”
“Easier to ban in theory than to banish in fact,” Castaigne said, with catlike malice. “Though perhaps you should not mention how I have made you a present of this copy.”
Archer nodded, absently, as if he had not heard the words with his conscious mind.
Castaigne went on: “When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. So it has gone throughout the world; the play is barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. Yet it spreads.”
“It spreads like a disease!”
“Oh, come now, Doctor. You are a man of science, of reason. One who seeks to lay bare the secrets of the human mind, not as poetry or superstition, but as cold fact like engineering or the removal of a diseased appendix! If this play affects men’s minds, surely you must study it to find out the mechanism by which a mere form of words can unbalance the psyche!”
“Perhaps,” Archer said. “Yes, perhaps . . . for science . . .”
With a convulsive gesture he swept the slim book off his desk into a drawer, licking his lips as he shut it away with a small key and tucking the key with trembling fingers into a pocket in his waistcoat.
Chuckling to himself, Castaigne left the doctor sitting at his desk, sweat running down into his starched collar, fingering the key in his pocket and staring ahead with a fixed glare that held an awful hunger.
Hildred chuckled again at the thought of the hunger and of its satisfaction, and made his way back to Bleecker Street, followed it to Wooster, skirted the grounds of the Lethal Chamber, and crossing Washington Park went straight to his rooms in the Benedick.
About what a well-to-do townsman who wasn’t married might have, John thought, looking through another man’s eyes. Or the rooms a country knight might keep for visits to Portland . . . not quite enough for a baron, who’d have a bigger entourage.
The electric lights were fascinating—Hildred took them for granted—but otherwise it was like those of many friends among Portland’s artists and musicians. The more successful ones, who weren’t living in boarding-houses or their parent’s quarters, that was. This Castaigne evidently employed a cook and two housemaids, which was again about what you’d expect. The details were different, of course; the outlines of the overstuffed furniture, the number and type of knickknacks, and the rather florid, Renaissance-derived style of the paintings as opposed to the way the Protectorate’s descended from the pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau.
One of the housemaids brought out Castaigne’s lunch; a rather heavy omelet made with oysters and cream, a tasty seafood soup of clams and cod in tomato broth, rolls and fruit and a mediocre and over-sweet white wine. John found that he could taste it all, but for a moment it made him miserably aware that his real body was starving, and then that it was tied in an excruciatingly painful position.
If that is my real body, John thought. But it’s close enough for government work.
While he ate and read newspapers named the Herald and Meteor full of local news that was meaningless if you didn’t know the context, he looked out his window at the Lethal Chamber on the corner of the square opposite. A few curious people still lingered about the gilded iron railing, but inside the grounds the paths were deserted. He watched the fountains ripple and sparkle; the sparrows had already found this new bathing nook, and the basins were covered with the dusty-feathered little things. Two or three white peacocks picked their way across the lawns, and a drab-colored pigeon sat so motionless on the arm of one of the “Fates,” that it seemed to be a part of the sculptured stone.
Then there was a slight commotion in the group of curious loiterers around the gates that captured Castaigne’s eye. A young man had entered, and was walking with quick nervous strides along the gravel to the bronze doors. He paused a moment before the “Fates,” and as he raised his head to those three mysterious faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a moment and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hand to his face, and then with an angry gesture sprang up the marble steps.
The bronze doors swung open to his touch and closed behind him with the ponderous silence of precise balance. The loiterers stared for a few moments, then slouched away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the arms of Fate.
Again there was that surge of power. John found himself praying in silence; not the formal Latin he’d learned later, but the simple words Sister Agatha had taught him as a child.
Holy Mary pierced with sorrows, have mercy on us sinners!
After he finished his fruit and biscuits, Castaigne rose. He utterly ignored the pertly attractive maidservant, who had red hair and an accent a little like a Mackenzie. John didn’t think it was that he didn’t like women, judging by what he’d thought looking at a picture of a pillowy blond nude on the other side of the dining room; it was more as if nobody else was really real to him compared to the imaginings within his own brain.
He rose, put on his hat and went out into the park with nothing in his mind but a walk, which was a relief after most of what he thought about.
John felt as if he was going to sleep, somehow, and that was frightening. He made himself feel more awake, by imagining how his confessor was going to react to all this. What would he say?
That God is giving me His omnipotent view of what a bad man is like, so that I can guard against it? That this is one of the trials He bestows on those who are fortunate in their birth or who He especially loves?
He caught himself just before he thought that if this was proof of God’s love, he didn’t want it. You did not want to think that, even as a joke. He knew in his heart that God did have a sense of humor—his own mental image of the Wedding at Cana was of Jesus with a mug of the (excellent) wine He’d created in one hand, throwing back his head and laughing full-throated at one of the classic bawdy jokes that got thrown around at every wedding since time began. But there were limits.
When he was conscious of what Castaigne was doing again, he’d crossed the central driveway and a group of officers in those fancy uniforms were passing, reminding him of nothing so much as a group of young bucks at Court in Todenangst, senior squires peacocking about with time on their hands as their knights were at work, and nothing on their minds but horses, falcons, tournaments and flirtations.
Or their gambling debts, often enough, he thought with an aching nostalgia.
“Hello, Hildred,” one called out, and came back to shake hands with him.
This is Louis, his cousin, John thought.
John could see the resemblance in build and coloring, but there was nothing but easy good-nature in the man’s expression, and even in the tilt of his neatly trimmed mustache. He looked like a medium-good fighting man at least, with the slightly pigeon-toed swing to his walk that horse-soldiers got, and thick swordsman’s wrists.
He really is like a lot of brainless squires—boring when you talk anything but women and single-minded about even that, full of invincibly ignorant opinions about music, but brave and there’s no harm in them. And Hildred wants him dead—or is starting to.
“Just back from W
estchester,” the cavalryman said. “Been doing the bucolic; milk and curds, you know, dairymaids in sunbonnets, who say ‘haeow’ and ‘I don’t think’ when you tell them they are pretty.”
John felt a flash of sympathy; he’d had the same experience, in his own knight training.
“I’m nearly dead for a square meal at Delmonico’s. What’s the news?”
“There is none,” Hildred replied. “I saw your regiment coming in this morning.”
“Did you? I didn’t see you. Where were you?”
“In Mr. Wilde’s window.”
“Oh, hell!” Louis began impatiently. “That man is stark mad! I don’t understand why you—”
A flash like white fire ran through Hildred Castaigne’s mind, and his cousin actually went a little pale.
“Really, old chap,” he said. “I don’t mean to run down a man you like, but for the life of me I can’t see what the deuce you find in common with Mr. Wilde. He’s not well bred, to put it generously; he is hideously deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know yourself he’s been in an asylum—”
“So have I,” Hildred said.
I’d have stepped back and put my hand to my sword-hilt if someone talked to me that way, John thought. Not the words, at the tone.
Louis did look startled and confused for a moment, but recovered and slapped him heartily on the shoulder. That made John confusingly sympathetic to Hildred, just for a moment; he hated being mauled that way too.
“You were completely cured,” Louis began.
“I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to have been insane.”
“Of course that . . . that’s what I meant,” he laughed.
Hildred knew the laugh was false; John thought only a deaf man wouldn’t notice. Whatever Louis Castaigne was, he was no actor—nor practitioner of any other trade that required getting up in front of an audience. His cousin was torn between contempt and hatred.
The Sea Peoples Page 20