The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1
Page 9
U leans in, over the edge—all the way, looking.
She sits straight. Not accepting his hand, the bridge he thrusts in the silence.
(struck.)
U sits back. No might on his brow. (all the years to fill in . . . communicate . . . to break the silence . . .)
The slow sky of almost . . . a sky with shapes that remind him of belonging . . . a sky of echoes and things half open, things took from her, things he lost . . .
Rain, no longer under cover of distinct heavy grey, ended. No bridges between. Across the room . . . scarred flowers . . . sprained candles, losing their wax . . . a heap of intentions that almost fooled time as it sailed to moments collected in the mirror . . . the fuse of boredom and the flash of a dark afternoon here again . . .
A muted trumpet makes a fuss. Things close.
An angel’s teeth and no talk of heaven.
A clock too tired to navigate.
Over the railing, a garden of empty seats . . .
He closes the faded, brittle Midnight Parchment. Leaves his room.
He is no stranger to the to and fro of winding shadows, or the voyage of sorrow and fire, or the unheard footfalls of darkness, or the doors between the self and The Other . . .
or the pallor of madness unreconciled . . .
There is no sound in the long corridor . . .
The mirrors here do not forget the past . . .
He stands before a mirror. Adjusts his tie, whispers, “Wait for the harvest?” Smiles . . . He inhales the time scratched in the mirror. Imagines his powers, infinity of starry black his prey will scream under . . .
He steps away . . . And his hand, an iron vessel filled with everything—and nothing, shakes . . .
. . . U thinks he’s seen a ghost, a silhouette of something that was never evergreen. Decides it was a gesture of her hand, or a smile painted on a mask, hiding a lie.
He hears music and wings . . . there is something simmering in the air . . . her eyes are large, jewels scarred with wishes; they trigger a current in the air . . .
He has seen it before (A cloud of wings and black cloaks. And no mouth and no eyes. Braids of grief and death. It bends and shivers and roils . . . Gathers ashes to its dance . . .). Fears he will see it again . . .
The world with its holes and worn hills, clawed by every empty hand that lost, is awash in stained silver windows mourning plundered promises.
His mouth opens. Silently rattles. Closes . . .
His mind races, picking at strands . . .
“Clarissa.” His tongue knowing the name he forced on it was wrong. “Camilla.”
Then remembered fully.
(A room of tables and windows and puddles of light. A room of weakness . . .)
Turned around.
“Now I remember,” Camilla says.
“Last year in . . . Carcosa?”
“Yes, the coast . . . Hollow. So hollow and thin those vast rooms. So dim. So silent.”
“But not empty.”
“No. There were things—lies and treason—in the dust. Cold, angry things.” Her eyes searching, returning to something that haunts this unfinished time, something that was there in the space captured in the mirrors . . .
(The man and woman standing in the garden by the fountain. He is firm, dark. She is dressed in white and set against the stony spine of a huge column . . . The sky above the House of Suffering is grey (again.) . . .)
THE MAN: (Pressing. His hand upon her breast, his hyena breath in her ear.) Please—Please.
THE WOMAN: (Her head turned away, her eyes damp. Her mouth open.) Please—Stop.
(He is cold—firm, a knife spreading her troubled days. She is surrounded, shouldered—thrust in to a labyrinth of difficulties and cold, angry fire.)
(Neither finds pleasure in the eruption . . .)
(. . . He is walking the long, shadow-laden corridors. From his lips, in fever-painted whispers, slip grey words from Midnight’s Parchment . . . He is waiting for his time to come . . . the long staircase . . . a route of blackness and alien distance . . . and the skeletons of storms . . . The black-soil shadows are filled with dead moths . . .)
(He passes a mirror that time and the walls cannot control)
(And another . . .)
(A mirror—raven-night deep, where time does not count . . . where somewhere is impossible . . .)
(And another . . .)
(filled with the blood of the dead)
(and the gnawing chapters of grey married to claustrophobic waiting . . .)
(A mirror where you find yourself alone.)
(The Hall of Doors, lined with mirrors filled with space, their blackness expanding . . . Walking . . . The endless repetition of corridors and stairs and mirrors that hold and stretch time . . . ancient mirrors that un-shape dimensions—that illuminate darkness with an immense silence, that disorient and disturb sensation . . . The long corridor (leading somewhere, to some brink) that ends at her door (again.) . . .)
(Forward noiselessly—a tall dark shape in a lace of intersecting shadows . . . The key talks in the lock, its language a recitation of unspeakable things . . . The shadow of his hand, a wavering stain, on the knob . . . Her room (again.) . . . She turns from her winter travels in the mirror. She is dressed in white, a white nightgown . . . His darkness, built of Then and This Present, and the closing line from the Midnight Parchment—‘It’s the one who starts who wins’, pressing, spilling, overcoming . . .)
THE MAN (Dry as the impossible distance of centuries, the shadow of his hand stains her breast.): Please—Please . . .
THE WOMAN (Exhausted, wounded, burning in his fingers . . . Her head is turned away. Her eyes flutter.): Please—Please—Please, stop.
THE MAN (From his lips a rush of words from the Midnight Parchment.): Black moths cry your name . . . the years and The White Figure damned and torn stand at the coast . . . waiting for midnight He cries your name . . . THE marriage . . . the stars become black moths . . . there is light . . . and darkness . . . Never, swollen with His Mysteries, leaks . . . the flesh expects . . . wishes to . . . walk through the door—
THE WOMAN: You’re raving!
(But she cannot turn away . . .)
(Her eyes and hair and gown in a state of disorder.)
(Ten dead minutes
—the masquerade of hope flickers out . . .
She trembles, groans, grows dark, spends her blood-stained tears of failure . . .
they nail her dreams to the rusted mouth of silence in the mirror . . .
Consequences reached . . .
Goals no closer . . .
Gluttony has conquered all—the tips of her fingers, her mouth of empty names . . . left her heart stale . . . and frayed . . . left her heart a grave-shaded verse of blood and sand . . .
. . . Wantonly gorged deep—confused, alone, she can find no star in the full cry of evil)
(. . . Ten dead minutes, continents dying in the sun . . .)
His hands, in other times rough seas a thousand secrets deep, rest on the table, palms flat on the smooth, cold surface. Over the dying edges of the rose petals he searches the riverbed of her eyes. “They didn’t have to be. There were seeds.” A strange sentiment—A plan for escape?—flashes in his eyes.
“Colored by things that crawl in smothered hearts and paint the horizon with bitterness.”
“If you had only found a way around. It could have been so simple.”
“Around, Day?”
“Another would have followed . . . If you had just waited. A few seconds more—”
“You are wrong.” The bent shadows of her hands tell of power struggles.
Uoht whispers: “Wrong.” He pauses. Lifts his palm in an empty gesture. Looks both surprised and threatened. “Again?”
Eyes slaves of fleeting lore: “Wrong? . . . Then?” His thoughts slip by silhouettes of minutes . . . weeks . . . months . . . years . . . He finds shapes in the loam of memory’s shadowy creases . . .
Negations<
br />
Sides . . . lines . . . labyrinths . . . splintered, seized
Ascendency
the orphaned words of the old regime weeping
Wrong—for each other—joined together, that surge
On the wrong day—the caged breast overwhelmed erupts, screams for To-morrow
With the wrong need
holding the wrong flag
Wrong question
from the unmoving mouth
Blind eyes colliding with a heart of poisoned fire
—Too wrong to be this anxious after all this time? After being excused from Paradise, sagging and torn from grotesque shadows in this gloom . . . confused and molded in misgivings—Where is the sunlight?
Wrong
. . . time (to think there was still time—still a path—to wish Now was not cold and false)
. . . year
. . . and nowhere to run . . .
The claws of truth, the syllables of dust
. . . and—nowhere to run . . .
Wrong
gestures
gamut
intentions manifest in gales, hissing, melting in chaos—
combinations sunk in impotent, painted flesh of never—never—never
flung
solid
too far to climb
too many mandibles spitting . . . the arcane fever
Wrong
when he said, I am yours . . .
. . . To stand there mocked and condemned as the sun falls . . . unable to change, to fully live . . . helpless and alone at the end of the road haunted by repetitions . . . to look back and look back and see . . . surrender . . . and empty mirrors . . .
. . . Did he miss something? some remark or detail . . . some vague corruption of the compass . . .
Some interwoven shadow in the mirror?
Wrong to reach for that face in dark space—Wrong to want to know—Wrong to notice, to name cadaverous night enemy . . . Wrong to try to wake her . . . to carve inspiration from the cold currents of irrevocably gone . . .
Wrong
Productive as ashes,
or old thoughts deceived by their own fear . . .
Wrong
to seek her door—that famished thunder where the light vanishes . . .
The disguises of the King’s puppets peeled away . . . The myth in shards, the Mother (in silken robes and the devil’s mask)—laughing—crumbles, the sister knotted, her balance collapsed . . . the dead-bird bastard brother swirled in war . . . the high tide of grave music dissecting the ancient walls, pushing . . .
Wrong
Hands screaming like lepers split with illness and colors silvered by the cunning of madness
Wrong mother
Wrong kinship
Being the WRONG brother . . .
Wrong bed—side by side mayhem and fancy . . . wrong bedroom
Scalded, dancing, begging—every deafening limb rotating—
its thirst advancing with the wrong desires
—Jealousy pleated and striped with ecstasy
—Taboos—teeth and tongue snapping for the love of the threading spider
At the wrong door
Hunting, the clamoring teeth—wrong
Lost, tongue crumbling with hate and fear
Sick . . .
and
Wrong. Wrong . . . the blur of the devil’s eye . . . WRONG.
Lies . . .
Every . . . sweet . . .
lie . . . dry, methodical . . . (in hallways, up staircases) . . . (the unspeakable silence of the waning moons) . . .
Lie?
Wrong? Almost spoken, but his mouth, each corner dry and leaning toward the consequences of motionless blackness, can find no door in the clutter maze of shadows . . .
In the mirrors filled with the unforgiveable, the dead—drowned in laments of desire, dance with the dead . . .
Dead wrong—
Wrong—
the venus sex lips language of sin and memory sacrificed—Liar! Liar! The last dying breath of delirium—Empty black collision . . . To remake the nightmouth terrible-news boiling in the arteries of her cold body—Vanished, every trace of angels closer—Dust militates the wrist—Hollow dust stains the curtain-leech sky of impossible memory—False!
Liar! There are no revelations quartered in limbo.
Liar!
There . . . a mask—a tattered costume—pretending (twisted spheres scratched by the crowd of cannibal chance and indiscretions)—every finger bone white, whispering about execution and time silently clamped to raw flesh . . . and then she never even existed . . .
Scraped hours . . . The hole with no mercy.
The slow grind of dark. Flesh in the custody of the grave. Decay succeeds.
Disappear . . .
The mirrors . . . the face of the Black Man in the mask she serves . . . entangled—monstrosity—retaliation—talking backward in slow motion . . .
Liar!
Killer!
. . . the shadows corrupt . . . lengthen . . . dark . . .
and more dark and no where to speak . . .
And endless night . . .
—Told me you died
—Told me you died
—Told me . . . You died
—Told me
. . . Empty black tongue churning
Black . . . the crawling cyclone . . .
Black . . . every crack in the heart . . . the tide of shadows . . .
dead . . .
Wrong.
The endless faces of yesterday splashed in that black hole . . . waiting . . .
(A man and a woman seated at a table on a high balcony, overlooking an empty beach. The air is still, the sky is a mire of steel clouds. There is a gun and a pale rose on the table. The rose has shed one petal. He glances at the dark, strange clouds gathering . . .)
THE MAN (Wanting to say, so beautiful you are . . .): These wounds we share . . . They could heal . . . In our morning silk we could find a place where we can hear the flowers bloom—Our garden would never be finished.
(She removes her pale hand from over her heart, where it was placed as if to shelter it from another lie. It slowly moves to the cold black gun lying on her side of the table.)
THE MAN (Eyes desperate.): A year isn’t long—
(The gun is in the inquisitor’s hands. Hands of scarred alabaster, billowing with ancient minutes, filled with Today—hungry and ready to burst. Filled with the ruin of Then. The inquisitor’s yellow eyes, filled with Tomorrow and the exhaled cellar air of the Next World, are suddenly permeated with thunder.)
(U turns from the din of thunder in her eyes, sees a demon (always new again) with sunken eyes shudder in the mirror . . . It smiles . . . and whispers, It all slips away so fast . . . The mirror cracks.)
CAMILLA: There are no second acts in Carcosa.
(She pauses for a few seconds.)
CAMILLA: Only . . . dust . . . (Whispered, grainy. Filled with ice and ruin, and a quivering, grey hunger.) And things that never return. (Is all Camilla says.)
(The gun and its dividing volume offer no farewell.)
(Then—There was a glass and a rose on the table. There was lust . . . and bad blood . . . A red desert in his pale eyes . . . Now—The rose is dead. The glass is empty.)
(Poured out bit by bit (too deaf to seek, to conflicted by madness to cope), he in the vapors of agony, a scarecrow lost in the haze of a silent mirror of mistakes, its little mouth filled with plague, its stony limbs punished by Eternity’s cannibal worm clinging to the spoils of regret, vanishes . . .)
CAMILLA (standing at the railing, alone.): Desire . . . Is the future.
(She turns, looks in the cracked mirror where a dry darkness moves. Pauses . . . As if looking to see if something will appear.)
(Camilla’s thirst, driftwood dry, finds The End. The hollow sounds of her shoes, the color of crow’s wings, dissipates as the Last Queen takes her exit.)
(The black mirrors are empty. Silent. The dust the
y hold grows deep. The strange shadows they devoured have grown long . . . The silent, black mirrors are empty . . . As they were Then . . .)
(The Queen’s mask—a scene stained yellow by lies and regrets, her calling card, mirroring the lifeless color of the pale, desolate moons—lies on the table . . .)
(All the far stars cry)
(. . . the wind carries secret tides of lies . . . no one notices the black moths, jewels for her crown of blood, lured to the lizardbreath shackles of Forever . . .)
CAMILLA (Silken yellow lips dreaming.): But to desire to-morrow. . . (Eyes embroidered with some time ago transform, reflect a lost object . . .) —in this time of blackened branches . . . (She looks down. He lies there unmoving, his eyes and hair in a state of disorder.) is an error.
(after a rainy afternoon viewing of Last Year At Marienbad)
(Fleet Foxes “Mykonos”, Joe Henry “Scar”, and Beth Orton “She Cries Your Name”, looped)
An Engagement of Hearts
Matters of the heart, how they play on the mind.
Cordelia stared at the perfumed correspondence she had unintentionally happened upon, and its flowing penmanship and fragrance too curious to set aside, just finished reading.
My dearest Denis,
I wither without you. Come to me as soon as you may . . .
She read every unbelievable word again.
. . . My darling, you must know my nights are the blackest depths of unease while you are away from me. Be done with her as we planned, and hurry to my arms! I remain forever and always
Yours faithfully,
E——
Yet another dream broken. Her thoughts turned to previous lovers, each in their time dearly beloved, now interred beneath stone and rich loam stitched by the passing of the conqueror worm. Soon to be alone again. Deceived, and then forgotten; perhaps one day, laughed at by the scheming pair. Cast aside—by, Her Denis? Grotesque, and unthinkable! But the truth of it was in her hand.