She turns to Cosette . . .
“You little bitch, you’re just like . . . Them—Do you watch him fuck his whores when he brings Them here?”
She shoots Cosette . . . Blood and brains and bones and a bullet exit the back of her head. Rivulets of red run down the wall . . .
The gun barrel is in her mouth, but she can’t pull the trigger. Thoughts of her father stop her. She drops the gun . . .
Blood and brains . . .
Red . . .
Her Shame . . .
Red . . .
“Shut up!”
She gropes for another way. One that does not require her own hand . . . She can’t go that way . . .
Nor by rope . . .
First her father, one shot to his right temple. Then her mentor—teacher, lover, hanging from that rope . . . shirtless, barefoot . . .
The car is running . . . She fans the gas pedal . . . Exhaust fumes fill the garage . . . Her eyes grow heavy . . . She sees her father and her former lover on the street under the Sign of the Dragon . . . They wave.
She stares vacantly. She sees black roses . . . Sees a pleasant country . . . She’s coughing . . . Something heavy, hot, sits on her chest . . . She slips her shoes off . . . Unbuttons the buttons of her blouse . . . She sees her father and her former lover, angels . . . Sees dead babies, angels . . . Hears words that have no sound . . .
Cold tears are drying on her cheeks . . .
~*~
Bitter October. Migrant birds—swept by the sun, far from the river . . . a long time ago dead as the sad stars, but with names in its mouth . . . ashes . . .
Footsteps . . .
White halls with white tiles. White shoes, white pants, white coats. White nurses in white uniforms. Pale nurses with plain features and lifeless expressions . . . Bright white lights shining over head . . .
Susan in a white dressing gown, sedated and restrained in a wheelchair, sitting by the window. Susan, so pale and still, framed by a sun that bleeds to death in the arms of scrub-covered desert hills.
Fredric hands the doctor The Book.
“Two years ago she asked me to provide the funding for this. I showed it to a producer I know. He told me it would bleed money. I told her no. I should have said yes.” Should have said and done a lot of things. God, she looks, so . . . Hollow.
“In these past few months, she’s often read this thing for hours on end.’
“I’ve looked in it a bit since she . . . Her teacher gave it to her. There’s an inscription inside . . .’
“You’ll take extra good care of her then, Doctor. I need not remind you of who I am and what my wife means to me,” Fredric said.
“She is in the best of hands,” Dr. Archer said, adjusting his unsightly horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
Archer knew who he was dealing with, knew how powerful and wealthy this man was. And Dr. Archer knew his discovery of the Carcosa Syndrome could bring him fame. Nothing would happen to this one . . . Now that he had a copy of The Book, the secrets to Carcosa and The King in Yellow play would be revealed to him . . . Awards and dinners and grants must be sure to follow . . .
Archer thinks of his other patient, escaped a year ago.
Perhaps there’s a way to create a dialogue with him through the press and get him back here? Having both subjects here to study would guarantee my success.
“One thing further, Doctor. The ring Susan wears is very expensive and very old. I know I should take it for safe keeping, as it was my mother’s and my mother’s mother’s, and Susan knows how very dear to me my mother was. Please understand I see the ring as a sign. In my heart, I know Susan understands through the ring, how much I need her. Guard it, and my wife, well.”
“Rest assured, I shall watch over them as if it were my dearest treasures,” Dr. Archer said. He recognized the Yellow Sign on the face of the ring and knew it was another piece of his puzzle . . .
Fredric looks at Susan’s bare feet, remembers their last night together. “One thing puzzles me, Doctor. Why don’t the patients here wear slippers or shoes? I’ll not have her taking a chill.”
“Over the years we’ve had several of the facility’s guests try to leave, without permission, of course. Our policy of not providing certain of our patients with footwear discourages any thoughts of long walks. You might think it somewhat odd, but it works.” For the most part.
“In regards to her recovery, where do you plan to start?”
“When the time comes, I’ll begin by exploring the issue of her father’s suicide and the unfortunate circumstances she’s undergone in her failed attempts at bearing children. And I’ve no doubt, her mentor’s suicide is tied in as well.”
Fredric thought of the three cheap abortions she had in college, the damage they caused to her womb. He wanted a drink. Two. He remembered the last three occasions Susan was hospitalized; the two miscarriages, and their stillborn daughter. He wondered if he, at some future date, would have to tell Dr. Archer about their sex life, about how he used other women and The Parties to control her . . .
~*~
Her eyes survey the faces of the travelers as they gladly pass through the slim doors into the softly swirling cloud-waves.
The moon shines whitely and falls, gently, upon the lake . . .
In a room of soft heirlooms she sits in a large, stuffed blue chair. Her bare feet are tucked under her.
On the floor by her chair, black and white drawing of swans, slow as night, sail back to the place of touching.
She whispers from lips—tattered, dry garments, midnight tender, midnight cold. Her words, each a playful thief laughing, each a window, each a vessel of not coming back . . . Her words dance from the closed leaves of The Book to dim Carcosa’s phantom gardenvale.
Spring skies come . . . no more . . .
(for Susan McAdam)
Hello Is A Yellow Kiss
Dearly beloveds (some wounded by fake virgins and blackmailers, some by Daddy—or Mommy, some by farther down the line or God’s will) outta spare dreams, sliding down Dead Street at closing time. That’s the first thing you see . . .
The City—no vacancies, tons of bars and grills . . . Madmen boiling hot and paranoids . . . Laughing coldly, ladies in red—legs up to here—most from Hell. Tough guys and dangerous crossings, dangerously close . . . Incidents that weren’t there . . . Prowlers hiding in hangovers. Hugs broken by a body of lies . . . The face behind the mask D.O.A.. Pretty young boys and once, pretty young girls who rubbed unavoidable night the wrong way and couldn’t buy an ace. Desire . . . The trigger that stops the Hard Way dead in its tracks . . . And a lack of fresh air for those whose clock has punched out . . .
Carl Lee left Noir City with a hard case of the traveling blues . . . New York . . . Tennessee . . . Riverside . . . Rosedale . . . Walking, not riding. No one at his side. He left the last Rene?, or Lynn?, back in a ditch—No moving teeth and tongue. Just curves and layers and blood, and white glistening bone . . . Rambled on . . . No thought to her smooth young face, sideways and lifeless. Sixteen. No thought to her soft brown open eyes, open mouth frozen in a last kiss with nothingness . . . And he didn’t give a fuck what her name had been. She lied . . . They all lied . . .
He never gave a fuck what any their names had been.
Walking. No home to hurry home to, but looking for something . . .
The road. Not a place for long engagements.
He stood on a ridge of rocks. Looked down into the distortion. The bleak sun burned everything . . .
West Texas. Headed for the open desert, birds slashing across the blue sky . . . The open desert, shimmering and painted with cactus and bugs and scorpions and mice and rattlesnakes . . . October in the desert, not much jumpin’, no livin’ easy. The lizards used the sun as armor. He tied one to a cactus. Looked at it like it was a picture over a mantle; the long line of the tail lingering in the open blue, the abstract flight of blood on the altar of green, the mouth sleeping on the faultless page of sun. Even dead its b
lack eyes held heat. Carl Lee looked at the skin, looked at the muscles, remembered a deer when he was seven. A buck knife moved through the hide, the curve of muscle, white glistening bone. Blood.
Dust to dust . . .
Thoughts following a star down the line . . . West . . .
Dawn—a moment from too hot—at his back . . .
His thumb flashed. A two-toned pick up, white and rust, dark and light. A pale, skinny blonde. She smiled. He got in. A shabby little trailer on the outskirts of a forgotten little town kissed too many times by the wind and promises. A bottle of cheap whiskey. Watched her drink. Felt the burn . . . Washed the blood from his knife. Washed his hands. Watched the diluted blood find its way down into darkness. He looked in the bathroom mirror and traced the scorpion-like tattoo on his chest with his finger.
“Cassilda,” he howled silently.
A lost weekend with little sleep. Heartbreak hotel. Shooter’s Saloon—just another cowboy Peyton Place, everybody trying to fuck another one before yesterday or tomorrow gets in the way. Cowboys, leather skin hard as the hardwood floor. A plaintive piano backing Willie’s dream that didn’t come true . . . Coarse-faced sons-of-bitches thinkin’ they were fuckin’ matador-heroes in white hats, livin’ out oil-rich ecstasies in the eyes of the beautiful, good-hearted women swayin’ in their arms. No big bright blue, only the sky opened by bottles of beer for the waltzing fools . . . Out back of the bar. In the back of her car he tried to fuck her. Wound up using his knife after she told him in that blunt drawl, “Cassie isn’t short for Cassilda, Dummy.”
Mama called him dummy—Once . . . Scissors telling Mama the Truth . . .
Dust to dust. . .
Walking. No home to hurry home to, but looking for something . . . Looking for someone . . .
The road. Not a place for long engagements . . .
Rambling on . . . West . . . Where the ghosts and the coyote and the canyons and restless oracles with distant eyes express echoes of the curse of luck still as the broken fences lining the dead roads . . . Where the wind cries in the wires . . .
Walking . . . Dust to dust . . .
~*~
Dr. Archer sat over the pages of the open book adjusting his unsightly horn-rimmed eyeglasses. The TV crew was in the other room waiting. This would be his fifth televised interview on The Carcosa Syndrome. He wondered if Carl Lee ever watched TV. He was certain Carl Lee was headed this way. His last three postcards were from Texas and Oklahoma and he’d been promising for over a year that The Truth will come for you.
Archer had finished his interview. He was on his third scotch. Carl Lee’s postcards were spread across his desk. They all said the same thing.
You wanted to see the Truth, to understand it. Never fear, one day, the Truth will come for you. It will stand before you and reveal itself. Watch for it.
He had a truth for Carl Lee. She was sitting in the sun room. Sedated and strapped in her wheelchair. All he had to do is get his former patient in the room with her . . .
~*~
Her wheelchair was parked between two clay containers, between two large friendship trees. She was looking out the wall of glass. The afternoon’s heat played on the hills. Distortions. In the sand. In the air. Cactus, the scrub trees bent. The dust swirls.
A century in seclusion with the green birds . . . The humors of the lantern as sedatives . . . And she misses having shoes. . .
She wiggles her toes. Almost smiles.
“When will you come?” she whispers.
Her fingers tighten on the arms of the wheelchair.
The diadem on her finger is so heavy . . .
“When will you come,” she whispers from lips—tattered, dry garments, midnight tender, midnight cold.
~*~
Carl Lee had been out in the badlands, came into Gallup because it was there, because he tired of his talks with the goblins that wandered down from the sandy hills and out of the lonely ravines of embedded fossils and petrified trees. For 14 days he lived off snakes and a coyote for meat. He’d slept in a small fissure under a red and grey and tan formation which brought to mind the wrinkled wildfence skyline of Carcosa.
In a truck stop diner on the side of a dusty road he has bacon and eggs and white-bread toast and black coffee. The waitress is called Dolores. She has real short hair. He wonders if she remembers being young. Almost everyone speaks Spanish. There are saints by the cash register. Carl Lee sat in a booth near the counter, near the TV. From time to time he liked hearing the news, National, never Local—all those greedy brick-stupid, fucked up shithole-motherfuckers fuckin’ up the world with this and that and every other stupid got-ta-have-it new thing that flashed down the speedway. Fuck, half of the shit was parked or dumped out in the desert and the other half sat in their yards, or basements. And oil and gas and money and land, they were killin’ each other all over the fuckin’ place to get more. Everyone was in a hurry, even if it was to get their ugly face on TV for a whole 2 minutes. Whole world’s fucked up with their easy come, easy go. Goin’ alright. Goin’ ta Hell. Fuck, they’re already there.
George Strait singing “All My Ex’s Live In Texas” on the jukebox. Carl Lee didn’t have an ex, but had left girls in nearly 30 states. He couldn’t remember if it was 6 or 8 back in Texas. He remembered something about going to San Antone, he thought it was a Sunday and sunny, but he’d be fucked if he could remember any of their names. But he remembered what they looked like underneath the lies, curves and folds, white glistening bone. And blood. George Strait stopped singing and Carl Lee watched a heavily made-up bottle-blonde on CNN talking about some big fire in Atlanta and some congressman who raped some 6 year old girl. She said they’d be back with a report on a startling new psychiatric discovery on shared dementia and showed Dr. Archer’s face. He stood by a fragile blonde woman in a wheelchair.
“Cassilda,” he howled silently.
Face to face with Dr. Archer’s moving teeth and tongue. Carl Lee sat rod straight—riveted. There was his tormenter.
And his dream.
She didn’t move. Didn’t say a word but Carl Lee heard her speak to him. “I’m waiting for you, Carl Lee. Come and free me. Please.”
Cassilda laughed. She had a Raymond Chandler evening laugh, autumnal. It hit Carl Lee right in the heart. He always counted on her coming as a wave of summer sunshine, but the quiet, autumn-light fireworks in her eyes suited her.
That fuck, Archer, had her. Had her tied in a chair, his jazzed-up needles filling her with poison, Carl Lee could tell by the glaze in her eyes. He’d been there. And the nightmare dealer had The Book in his fuckin’ dirty hand. He was a virus full of spells, fuckin’ evil spells—pourin’ out his mouth and his cold ugly eyes and his goddamned needles. Pokin’. Night and day all the skinny-ass nurses in white dresses and white shoes and smellin’ of too hospital clean to be healthy—comin’ in to poke away with Archer’s fuckin’ poison needles. And all that fuckin’ white light. Eatin’ away at ya. Eatin’ right through your skin . . . “He’s a dead fuck.”
“I’m hoping he’ll be recaptured soon. The more we understand about his condition, the sooner I’ll be able to cast a healing light on this poor woman’s unfortunate condition.”
Carl Lee almost threw his coffee cup at the TV. More abasements from his leather cunt-mouth of lies.
Dead! His fucking Light! I’ll give him more light. He’ll burn in the desert of my hands. I’ll cut out his fucking eyes. Let him see Truth’s black flame.
Curves and layers and blood, and white glistening bones . . . He wanted his knife in his hand. Wanted flesh torn from the hands of God and the basket of life, to feed, with both hands, to Death.
Carl Lee’s boots were out the door. Back to his cheap room, grabbed his stuff. On the other side of the door to #9, another dead girl, soft brown eyes wide open, stuffed with nothingness.
Everything out of his mouth is a crime—a lie! Fuck him and his “mask of sanity” shit. Carl Lee had a good idea about what lay behind the doct
or’s mask. Fuckin’ Carcosa Syndrome! Lies. He’s so full of fucked up bullshit-lies. Gonna show that evil fuck the Truth, then take Cassilda out there . . . After I cut out his lyin’ tongue, I’m gonna paint those fuckin’ white walls with his blood.
His plan came quick. There was no time for sleep, no time for anything but to get to Cassilda, to free her from the death dealing hands of the monster. Carl Lee bought a conservative 500 dollar suit, a hair trimming kit and some hair dye. He also bought a briefcase (to conceal his knife) and a pair of clear glasses. He was going to walk right in Archer’s asylum, cut out Archer’s heart and free Cassilda.
And anyone who got in the way was fucked too.
In a public restroom he cropped his hair into a near skullcap and trimmed and dyed his beard and eyebrows. He looked into the mirror, suit and tie—colorful, but not too loud, just something to help divert eyes from his face—tortoise shell glasses, and a dark brown beard. He’d been clean shaven and had long sun-bleached blonde hair when he was a prisoner in the doctor’s hellhole.
Carl Lee sees Archer in the mirror. Cold ugly eyes behind unsightly horn-rimmed eyeglasses, moving teeth and tongue . . .
“I will feed the tongue of Death your last words, Doctor. The worms can have the rest.”
~*~
A century in seclusion with the green birds . . . The humors of the lantern as sedatives . . . And she misses having shoes . . .
She walks the garden. Bare feet gently pushing aside the black, curling leaves of the Winter Tree . . .
“Will he never come?”
I’ve taken off my mask. Come to me and we will stand face to face . . . We will sit in the Room of Yellow Curtains before the fireplace and with the evening painted all around us we will read of the thirst in times past as the wings of black moths whisper their melodies to us . . . And we will play as angels and demons play . . . Come home from your star-chasing in dream-time. I offer you my hand . . .
“I've grown so pale here.”
The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1 Page 4