“You will see,” he replied, that flat calm that quivered with unheard tension back again.
Pip rolled her head to the side and peered through the screen of vegetation around the plinth.
Mr. Hawberk did have a rather unexpressive face, but she could catch a glimpse of him blinking rapidly. That was probably his way of running around screaming dangerous lunatic.
“No,” the dangerous lunatic said, apparently able to read the face of his cousin’s prospective father-in-law. “No, I am not mad. Not as the world understands madness.”
Though in his position, I might consider the possibility of a hereditary taint, grab Constance and do a quick bunk for Brazil.
“I am not mentally weak; my mind is as healthy as Mr. Wilde’s.”
Well, the second half of the statement is true, at least.
“I do not care to explain just yet what I have on hand, but it is an investment which will pay more than mere gold, silver and precious stones. It will secure the happiness and prosperity of a continent—yes, a hemisphere!”
“Oh,” said Hawberk.
Meaning, Oh, buggery! Pip thought.
“And eventually,” he continued more quietly, “it will secure the happiness of the whole world.”
And you have the King in Yellow on your side, and it’s his idea of happiness. Does that make you less barking mad, or just a super-powerful madman?
“And incidentally your own happiness and prosperity as well as Mr. Wilde’s?” Hawberk said soothingly.
“Exactly,” Hildred Castaigne said, and smiled or at least showed some teeth.
Hawberk sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment and then said gently:
“Why don’t you give up your books and studies, Mr. Castaigne, and take a tramp among the mountains somewhere or other? You used to be fond of fishing. Take a cast or two at the trout in the Rangelys.”
“I don’t care for fishing anymore,” Castaigne answered, without a shade of annoyance in his voice.
Well, that’s something we have in common, Pip thought.
She’d been shatteringly bored when her father and grandfather tried to interest her in deep-sea sport fishing. Though she did like grilled Marlin steaks with a nice mango-accented salad.
“You used to be fond of everything,” Hawberk continued; “athletics, yachting, shooting, riding—”
“I have never cared to ride since my fall,” he said quietly.
“Ah, yes, your fall,” Hawberk repeated, looking away in an echoing silence.
“But we were speaking of Mr. Wilde,” Hildred said.
“Mr. Wilde,” Hawberk repeated. “Do you know what he did this afternoon? He came downstairs and nailed a sign over the hall door next to mine; it read: Mr. Wilde, Repairer of Reputations. Third Bell.”
“It is his profession,” Hildred said. “For the present.”
“Do you know what a Repairer of Reputations can be?”
“I do,” Hildred replied . . . with a slight hiss to the tone.
“Oh,” Hawberk said again.
Meaning, Oh, buggery!
Louis and Constance came strolling by.
“Do join us!” Constance said. “It is such a lovely day for a walk.”
Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment a puff of smoke shot from the casemates of the fort in the river, and the boom of a gun rolled across the water and was re-echoed from the highlands opposite.
Pip jumped slightly; the sound had a thudding force that thumped you in the chest, not like anything she’d ever heard before.
A cannon! she thought. The first one since the Blackout . . . if I were in the real world.
The flag came running down from the flagpole, bugles sounded on the white decks of the warships with sequences that were eerily familiar, and the first light sparkled out from the Jersey shore with the fascinating hard brilliance of electricity.
Pip rose to follow them, murmuring aside to her companions:
“Apparently Hildred—who’s mad as a sackful of cocaine-crazed ferrets, whatever this Dr. Archer who let him out of the booby hatch thinks—sees Louis as standing between him and a throne.”
“And Hawberk’s daughter as the potential mother of a rival heir,” Deor said thoughtfully. “That’s less strange than most things in this place. Almost normal, if wicked.”
“He’ll be out to scrag ’em,” Toa put in matter-of-factly, and Thora nodded.
Deor did too. “And there’s definitely some link between Hildred Castaigne and John. I think it’s through the . . . monarch in the robes.”
Best not to say King in Yellow aloud, then, Pip noted; the others would have caught it too. It’s a pleasure to work with people who can keep up with you.
Deor went on in a meditative tone: “A God’s mind can contain worlds. What we see here is his dream, and it . . . seeps through, like a leaking cask of poison, wherever he gains a foothold. In a place, in the mind of a man, seeking to twist it to this form.”
“As in Baru Denpasar,” Pip said.
“And someone wants us to put a spoke in it?” Toa said shrewdly.
No flies on him, either! Pip thought fondly.
“Yes . . . or rather, I think that is the only way we can accomplish what we set out to do. If we weaken . . . him . . . here in his dream, we weaken him everywhere—and weaken the prison in which he has put Prince John.”
The streets grew more crowded as the four were walking back into the city, and they could get closer, though Toa trailed behind as guard. Deor and Thora and Pip looked at one another as they caught murmurs from Constance and Louis that included sweetheart and my own Constance. Which would have been unremarkable . . . except for the way Hildred looked at them.
There’s something crucial about this, Pip thought. But bloody hell, I do so wish we could just find John, grab him and go!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW
John had come to welcome the odd dreams where he was Hildred Castaigne; they were relief from pain, and from the sickening sweetness of the cat’s voice, and the bewilderment of the other man, poor bastard. Now . . .
Hildred stood before the steel safe in his bedroom, trying on the jeweled crown.
That has to be one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen, John thought.
The Crown of Montival—gold and silver, and filigree work, all made from things wrought from its own earth—was utter restraint by comparison. The Sword was the true symbol of the High Kingdom, in any case.
The diamonds flashed fire as Hildred turned to the mirror, and the heavy beaten gold burned like a halo about his head.
Camilla’s agonized scream and the awful words echoing through the dim streets of Carcosa. The last lines in the first act . . .
His mind echoed Hildred’s . . . and the Boisean who shared his prison and these dreams. He hadn’t read this play, but both of them had, and dreaded it and longed for it at the same time. Hildred shook with the need and the fear, thinking:
I dare not think of what followed—dare not, even in the spring sunshine, here in my own room, surrounded with familiar objects, reassured by the bustle from the street and the voices of the servants in the hallway outside. For those poisoned words have dropped slowly into my heart, as death-sweat drops upon a bedsheet and is absorbed.
Trembling, Hildred took the diadem from his head and wiped his forehead. The thought of Hastur and of his own ambitions went through him, and the memory of Wilde as he had last left him, his face torn and bloody from the claws of that cat . . .
The devil’s creature, Hildred thought, and John’s mind flashed agreement.
“And what he said—ah, what he said,” Hildred murmured.
The alarm bell in the safe began to whirr harshly, and Hildred knew his time was up. But instead of putting the crown back he replaced it
on his head and turned defiantly to the mirror.
My eyes, Hildred thought. So many expressions! Such depth!
The mirror reflected a face like the one he remembered before the accident, before he read The King in Yellow, but whiter, and so thin that it gave him a startled sense of foreignness.
Words hissed from between his clenched teeth: “The day has come! The day has come!”
While the alarm in the safe whirred and clamored, the diamonds sparkled and flamed above the thin, tormented face. A door opened behind him, but he ignored it. It was only when he saw two faces in the mirror that fear and rage flashed through him.
He wheeled and snatched up a long knife from the dressing table, and his cousin Louis sprang back, his face gone milk-pale.
“Hildred! For God’s sake, man!”
“Louis?” he said uncertainly, letting his hand fall limp beside him.
“It is I, Louis! Don’t you know me?”
He stood silent, a lock he could not have broken for his life’s sake holding his tongue, yielding the knife to his cousin’s shaking fingers.
“What is all this?” Louis inquired, in a carefully gentle voice. “Are you ill?”
“No,” he replied, so softly he probably was unheard. “But it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.”
“Come, come, old fellow,” he cried. “Take off that stupid crown and toddle into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What’s all this theatrical tinsel anyway?”
Hildred cast his eyes down, anger and contempt filling him as Louis failed to recognize the crown for what it was.
Best to humor him. Yet the more proof that I deserve it, not him! he thought.
Hildred let him take it from his hand, and he tossed the splendid diadem in the air, and catching it, turned to his cousin smiling in relief.
“It’s dear at fifty cents,” he said. “Why, it would put the Pope’s tiara to shame if it was real! What’s it for?”
Hildred silently took the circlet from his hands, and placing it in the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its din at once. Louis watched him curiously, but did not seem to notice the sudden silence.
“That’s some biscuit box for a piece of frippery!” he said, as Hildred hunched over the dial to make sure it was hidden as he spun it.
“Come, let’s go into the study,” Hildred said.
“That’s more like it!” Louis replied with a false heartiness.
Louis threw himself on the sofa and flicked at flies with his riding-whip; a flash of anger went through Hildred’s mind at it, and at the whole casual, brainless health of the man. He wore his fatigue uniform with the braided jacket and jaunty cap, and his cousin noticed that his riding boots were all splashed with red mud.
“Where have you been?” Hildred inquired, though he and John and the nameless Boisean all knew that was what happened when you rode hard through wet ground.
“Jumping mud creeks in Jersey,” Louis said. “I haven’t had time to change yet; I was rather in a hurry to see you. Haven’t you got a glass of something? I’m dead tired; been in the saddle twenty-four hours.”
Hildred poured brandy from a bottle, his nose wrinkling at the harsh scent. John’s soul flashed sympathy as Louis drank it and grimaced; that smelled like the worst sort of plonk, the sort of stuff you’d expect in a place in Portland or Hood River catering to riverboat crews and bargemen, an odd choice for a wealthy and wellborn man.
“Damned bad stuff,” Louis observed. “I’ll give you an address where they sell brandy that is brandy.”
“It’s good enough for my needs,” Hildred said indifferently. “I use it to rub my chest with.”
I’m surprised it doesn’t peel off the skin, or at least kill all the hairs there, John thought.
Louis stared and flicked at another fly with his riding crop, snapping it to a smear on the leg of a table.
He’s good, John thought, and . . . somewhere . . . the Boisean agreed. Very good hand-eye coordination. I’ll bet he’s a devil with a saber.
John felt a stab of grief; his father had been able to cut flies in half with a draw-and-strike, and had done it sometimes to entertain his children. The only other person he’d seen do it successfully was Heuradys d’Ath, though she claimed her adoptive mother had been able to do it as well, in her dreadful prime.
Which Da said was true; she was the only person he’d ever seen who was faster than him at his peak. There were more reasons than one that they call her Lady Death.
“See here, old fellow,” Louis began, his voice full of a rather forced heartiness. “I’ve got something to suggest to you. It’s four years now that you’ve shut yourself up here like an owl, never going anywhere, never taking any healthy exercise, never doing a damn thing but poring over those books up there on the mantelpiece.”
He glanced along the row of shelves. “Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon!” he read. “For heaven’s sake, have you nothing but Napoleons there?”
“I wish they were bound in gold,” Hildred said. “But wait. Yes, there is another book. The King in Yellow.”
He looked his cousin straight in the eye. John could feel how unpleasant the expression was, and from his look Louis realized something of it too.
“Have you never read it?” Hildred asked, that sneer still curling his lip.
“I? No, thank God! I don’t want to be driven crazy.”
John saw Louis regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it, but he could hear Hildred’s teeth grinding as well as feel the sensation. There was only one word which Hildred loathed more than he did lunatic and his cousin had just uttered it. A white flash went through his skull, but iron will controlled it.
“Why do you think it dangerous? The King in Yellow is only a book, a play . . . and one that has never been performed, at that.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Louis said, hastily. “I only remember the excitement it created and the denunciations from pulpit and Press. I believe the author shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn’t he?”
“I understand he is still alive,” Hildred answered.
“That’s probably true,” he muttered. “Bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that.”
“It is a book of great truths,” Hildred said.
“Yes,” he replied. “Of truths which send men frantic and blast their lives. I don’t care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme essence of art. It’s a crime to have written it, and I for one shall never open its pages.”
“Is that what you have come to tell me?” Hildred asked.
“No,” he said, “I came to tell you that I am going to be married.”
For a moment John felt a flailing panic that he was going to die, drop down dead as Hildred’s metaphorically rotten and practically unhealthy heart simply stopped functioning and carried his unwilling psychic passengers along with him. Then the haze cleared from his eyes, and the man he was—or whose consciousness he rode—managed to draw another breath. It had looked possible to perish of sheer rage there for a moment, though. Would he have been back in the self that hung in the room of pain? Or on his way to Judgement?
Now I realize why Wrath is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, he thought shakily. And like all of them, it hurts the sinner first.
“Yes,” Louis continued, smiling happily. “Married, and to the sweetest girl on earth.”
“Constance Hawberk,” Hildred said mechanically.
“How did you know?” he cried, astonished. “I didn’t know it myself until that evening last April, when we strolled down to the embankment before dinner.”
“Think me mentally infirm if you will, Louis, I’m not stupid and I’m not blind,” Hildred said, and barred unseen inner teeth as Louis laughed again. “A blind man could have heard it in your voice, or hers. When is it to be?”
“It was to have been next September, but an hour ago a dispatch came ordering our regiment back to the Presidio, San Francisco. We leave at noon to-morrow. To-morrow,” he repeated. “Just think, Hildred, to-morrow I shall be the happiest fellow that ever drew breath in this jolly world, for Constance will go with me.”
Hildred smiled and offered him his hand in congratulation, and he seized and shook it like . . .
Like a good-natured puppy, John thought. He obviously didn’t grow up at a court, even one as well-conducted as the one Father and Mother ran, much less a snake pit like the stories about Todenangst in Grandfather Norman’s day. He doesn’t seem to be long on wits, but hasn’t he ever read Shakespeare? That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain . . .
“I am going to get my squadron as a wedding present,” he rattled on. “Captain and Mrs. Louis Castaigne, eh, Hildred? It’ll be a brief ceremony—just the Colonel and my brother officers from the regiment at the chapel, but you must come and be my best man! Do say you will, old boy.”
“Certainly,” Hildred said quietly.
Inside he felt nausea, and a hatred so deep it made the blood beat in his temples with spikes of pain.
“Then I must go,” Louis said happily, springing up with a jingle of spurs. “Thank you again, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“There’s one thing I want to ask of you,” Hildred said quietly.
“Out with it, it’s promised,” he laughed.
“I want you to meet me for a quarter of an hour’s talk to-night.”
“Of course, if you wish,” he said, somewhat puzzled. “Where?”
“Anywhere, in the park there.”
“What time, Hildred?”
“Midnight.”
“What in the name of—” he began, but checked himself and laughingly assented. “I won’t be sleeping much tonight, in any event!”
Hildred watched him go down the stairs and hurry away, his sabre banging at every stride. He turned into Bleecker Street, and his cousin knew he was going to see Constance.
He waited ten minutes, pacing and muttering—John thought he wasn’t even aware he was literally growling part of that time, and muttering disturbing fragments of The King in Yellow the rest of it—and then followed in his footsteps, taking with him the jeweled crown and the silken robe embroidered with the Yellow Sign.
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