The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1

by Joseph S. Pulver

  And when they are gone

  to cold Carcosa’s shores,

  she will don her hopeful mask,

  and let

  matters of the heart, once again—brightly,

  play in her mind.

  Saint Nicholas Hall

  for Michael Cisco -

  who once showed me a platform that led to dark, nameless places

  The old life.

  His.

  Old life.

  No 2 cents for an opinion . . . or an answer.

  life

  Ain’t no ballet . . .

  Ain’t holy . . .

  The sun grows weak. In a locked room he takes off his mask, whispers, “prisoner, chances zero”. Dangerous throws failure into the waltz.

  His life.

  Stolen.

  Numb. Scrambled. The torture of no someday soon.

  No place to hide.

  The breath of Aldebaran howls its ashcan autumnal hunger . . . The weeks around him taste wrong. His oracle flunks the test, swallows the sharp poison . . . Knees that can’t escape the killing floor. Mouth punches out “I exist!” Bedlam laughs . . . Winter with no soul. He pleads for fire, or any arsenal of magic words. Looks over his shoulder—pleading, taking every short cut to distance I from the feats of HARM.

  A dry afternoon. Narrow streets. Depravity thrives, drains another expedition dry as it shits out a new nightmare. Fat violence slides, rattles. Smashes things till they’re raw. Decides it’s not him, if it even noticed him in the twisted shade of the dying tree. Rides off, its lance ready for meat . . .

  Pushed by a blaze of rust and crippled autumn words he leaves the sun behind . . . Before he leaves There and its Then to its tired stars, he lays his tears (with the horn and the lie) in winter’s tomb and burns his maps of delusion.

  Shadows accrue, cover him.

  The Sparrow Gates close . . .

  Three weeks with the riders in The Abyss. He watches the frail, torn and drained, fail. Sees the light flushed from sockets. Watches them kneel, nudge, lose their breath in the silence. Watches the numb scavengers pick at them. For watches or shoes or ribbons . . . A small girl with thin arms and thinner, awkward legs dug through the grave pockets looking for coins or shiny objects or jewels. Hoping, he thought, she’d have something of worth when they arrived in the New Place.

  Having made it through decay, all nine layers of distance (and having slept through the Red Cosmos—alone this time), he came off the Death Ship. Most in the hole didn’t, they, struggling with the weight of the temptations, fell victim to the Black Shapes.

  Shadows spread. From the depths of bitterness evil imaginations create the lurid in gloomy rooms . . . Night is a formless ebony border, part genius, part demon, part dead weight, it takes the weak into its sable chamber . . . The docks where filth prowls. No moon. The damp, hard meadow of the refugee, where the exiled, weeping for limbs and brides (or lovers) lost, come in under cover of mist and oft repeated prayers . . . Running, no suggestions or service, just short words—GO, spat hard as any darkness.

  And they do—to hide, or to deal with their mysteries and troubles . . . Running in to the streets of The Maze, all fires and shapes and storms and cold nights dotted in moaning, offering no promises or hope . . . Running (a few—utterly terrorized, wheezing), reeling—dizzy, afraid, the street is a wolf . . . The cruel men with rifles smoking, laughing . . .

  Wide open this aftermath between formerly and new sky. Different walks under these streetlamps where the light vanishes. Newborn to this brambled dark. Alone in his black glasses and shaved head. A great black coat covered him. He’d had a hat. But traded it for bread on the 10th day of the voyage. He’d had a cape and a walking stick. But he traded them for a bottle. He emptied the bottle—drank it dry—then, bound in dimensions of fatigue, he cried.

  He carried mysteries in his pockets (two in each pocket). And a gun.

  And the page torn from a book. One lone page, a yoke with its vague quivering words of shadows and doorways.

  And he had two scars. The outward scar, an old one, the one that had taken an eye, had healed. The one in his heart, the one no one could see, had nearly killed him. More than once these last months.

  He came here to The New City following The Laugh, pursuing the fire it spread. For three years he’d tracked it. There were those who spoke to him, some firmly, saying he did little other than chase his own tail, or called him a madman and all he would find at the end of the maze was himself, alone in the dark.

  Three years of his life chasing it. Pushing other things, the things of friendship and life, aside, he moved further toward the edge.

  Before—THEN . . . There was a morning of bells. In plain brown shoes she stood on the path of their small house in her travel coat with her travel bag . . . She wore a brown hat, held a brown package tied with brown twine. No flower adorned her buttonhole.

  Tears blemished her dark make up.

  He ran to her. Her breath was cool, filled not with its former joys.

  Through tears she said, “Nathaniel, the shadows and stains of your interrogations have found my heart. As I tumbled through the chests and chairs of our abode I found myself barefoot in the adders of your madness, I found myself lost to the purpose of ghostly stars . . . They call . . . And I must go.”

  Victoria cried as she held him, and then she left him—it was winter; it was a divorce, even if they were not married on parchment.

  No time for lies . . .

  No time for For God’s Sake . . .

  “For God’s sake,” his last muttered words she did not hear when the trolley lost present time in the dented, rotting distance . . .

  From Border to Meridian and he still was no closer. No reasoning with the fugitive dagger songs in his palms and the unfaithful utterances of shattered harmonies. And Victoria had left him.

  Gone.

  Carried off.

  Left him no place to escape to . . .

  Left him alone . . .

  The blind busker on the subway platform was playing “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair”. Could he see? Was he a servant of The Laugh?

  His old life. His love. Some whispered, Rest In Peace.

  But there was no peace.

  Just alone. ALONE . . . (excluded) . . . (limited by anxiety) . . . With his mysteries. And the gun. And a picture of Victoria in an old locket, tucked in a threadbare velvet bag. And the scars his memories picked at, unfolded, seized, leaned into, and then folded, never the same way twice.

  He came up the worn and soiled stairs from the transit underworld

  and quickly passed spasm signs pasted over survival codes

  and sentences of diseased rumor

  and the indulges of fragmented stories

  and the solitary solos of motherfucker-crazy shitty little lives

  filling the high, massive tombstone walls of grey.

  Rapidly turning corner and

  corner

  without surveying the discolored and the dust

  until the desolate galleries

  and lanes ornamented with broken oars spilled in dreams of nothingness-wide-open

  gave way . . .

  He stood in the grass and looked for color. Grey this harbor of ruined, sunken buildings. The city before him was iron. The cloud-ripe sky was iron.

  No birds spread their wings in the torn sky. He wondered if they too, were iron and could not raise their narrow wings to brush the sky.

  This was the place. Fabled in every age-worn nook and drying refuge of the Old Country and in the farmhouses and scandalous taverns and inns of The Middle Places through which he had come. The Laugh came from here. Its servants were born here. Trained—rigidly, by a clamor of devote hands, and finished with notation, study, and consent, swore The Oath to it.

  This immense edifice, fortification, undisturbed by the rubble that stained the blocks around it . . .

  This was the place.

  The inflation of the delirious ..
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  Mud and winter ..

  If ..

  Loss ..

  Decree ..

  Frayed bits and tidings ..

  Low, crying from the canvas of memory ..

  Shame, every moonlight stroke of its voice, fading from TRUTH ..

  He gazed at the handwriting on the pale worn page he’d torn from the old book of sad addictions. Having swallowed all the words wounded in restless ghost echo, he let the yellow page and its troublesome address fall from his fingers.

  Yester Park borders Saint Nicholas Hall on three sides. It is not as green as in earlier years, nor as lush as in earlier years. But in this city of rough stone and steel and grey concrete and granite that threatened to ambush the sky, any remedy for the eye was most welcome . . . The morning doves and songbirds are absent, quickly evicted by occurrences that day did not know. Three ravens, sisters who grew bored with frolic and the spectacles of glamour, now own the park. Under the dome of Mother Night they whisper and rattle of blood, of bleak and things stretched and bent and staked, and Ends. A few fading peacocks still find moments to sail o’er the lawns. Wildfowl gesture and look about. Thin grey rabbits rush to graze when the fox bends his shoulder to nap.

  Yester Park. Its hours, spread like the voice of light at the bottom of the sea, are seeds . . .

  A twitch of breath . . .

  poems of wind . . .

  portraits in soil witness the journey . . .

  Day follows wounds in the park. Night comes breaking all the inches of light with dark indifference. Warm raised, or the flood of chill disturbing the hours, few come to study, to paint nature’s hide, or to sit without shouting, letting their breast be filled in a long hour of quiet council. Fewer still move from the green grounds to the yellow and black doors of Saint Nicholas Hall. None—ever—before the toll of 6 bells. Not even the young who climb the wild fastness of their youth, their faces entirely masked in the plain bone covering of the King.

  But he was not young—its punch far from his memories in these days of unreasonable details, and he had never, even in the tugging of loosed dreams, been among the few.

  He steps from shadows of the garden vale to immalleable stone.

  In the black he came. The doors nearer and nearer, as if they and not he, moved forward.

  Straddling the sides of the considerable doors, solid walls of rough-hewn grey stones carried here from places of fallen kings and not a single window to note passing or to gain an interior view.

  No lamps were stationed to illuminate the appearance of visitors or impulse, only the solitary doors broke the rule of the grey stones.

  His boots at the threshold. He raised a closed hand to knock, but his hand stopped short as his eyes took in a small, black onyx plaque inlaid with a strange character. Foreign, he was certain, but not Oriental, nor a rough etching from the cold northern climes.

  “Come within.”

  A strong voice, the tone fully satisfied with itself, invited him inside. But no one stood there as the doors swung opened. Nor could he discern any mechanical device to project the voice, or device to open the black doors.

  “This is the Hall of the Four Winds,” said the lifeless iron voice.

  “Having climbed all the flatness of irritation and the implications of misery, the slender roses are invited here. Shorn of their deficiencies they leave the past and exaggerate no more.”

  He was desperate for words. But his tongue had crumbled.

  “You seek.”

  Head bobs, agreeing.

  “In this ancient house those born into The Wild Glades and exiled in misadventure come. They shed their scraps and sky . . . And sigh.”

  “Who—”

  “There is little time left to the day, humanchild. Behind the door you select lies what you desire.”

  In the still, quiet air he stood. Waiting for another word from the voice.

  One did not come.

  He looked at the hallway.

  It was lined with arched doors, 13 on each side. Bleached, bone-colored and lined with minute fractures along the wall to his left. The right lined, each and all, with doors heavily lacquered with the blackest black.

  And there were

  faces

  and more faces

  outward identities and expressions of nature transformed

  tinted

  blurred

  bruised matted

  alone

  webbed and scarred and shipwrecked

  shorn of disguise and alibis

  jealousy and love and loathing worn from them

  portraits lined the walls between each door, groups of four, set two upper and two lower above another quartet of faces. Each wraith-like image framed in rough, dry wormwood and the taint of a spreading green mold. Though masked, he recognized a few poets, Utti, Coscia the Exile, Bärtsch, and Abbuehl, and the autumn minstrels who hunt the soft places of the heart, Sha, Wiss, and Keusen. He had heard Sha play by candlelight at The Wooden Horse on three occasions. Had read Utti and Coscia to Victoria one afternoon as they picnicked by the round lake in the Then before the troubles were first reported.

  Most of the faces dyed in shadow he knew not. Each was a spirit drained and vague. No eye twinkled. In the cast of faces peering from the paintings, the leviathan, Silence, chewed upon the haunted.

  Hearing a door open and slam shut, he wheeled. But the hall was empty.

  A damp chill caressed him.

  The statement of another door slammed.

  Melville spun.

  No eyes or face waiting. No fact to climb.

  Another door slams . . .

  Another . . .

  Each time he spins to find empty grinning, nothing happened.

  A midnight choir rose up—“La-la . . . La-la . . . La-ah-la-a-da-da.” Light laughter followed and fired the hallway. Laughter drained of the things of the sun. Laughter that filled the air with echoes of twilight and the Ferryman.

  It subsided. And now rose up a voice, a woman’s voice, possessed with the venom of scarlet and fire.

  “Melville. So you have come. You have taken your time in arriving.”

  “My path was as direct as the terrain allowed.”

  “Ah.” Very nearly a laugh.

  “Something of mine has been taken from me.”

  “Every soul loses small pieces of itself on the way to The Rendezvous.”

  A small rage was in his shoulders. In his eyes.

  “A rendezvous with some cruel spider . . . I—I, have not come to repent, or to hear reviews of rivers run.”

  A hand upon his shoulder. Thin long fingers in soiled yellow gloves split and frayed at the tips, grey flesh and ragged nails exposed.

  Melville turned.

  The hand falls. Slowly floats to its side.

  There stood a thing of cold calm, of twilight, of confusion smothered.

  The curved slope of hip and breast lie under stained yellow robes and the face, a sleek, silken yellow mask with no lips, no mouth, and no grin fitting its autumn stillness. Sharp hawk-brow above lidless yellow eyes. Eyes, fire bright and glaring, fires that absorb but do not reflect.

  “Name yourself masked maiden.”

  In a voice of harsh powers she said, “By those who have found The Yellow Sign I am called, Content. I am the Dean of Saint Nicholas Hall.”

  Open mouth, hardened sorrow wild and bent, stuck behind his teeth. (He feels like he’s overrun with coarse weeds and is breathing stones.)

  Closes.

  Content raises a stick-like arm, her outstretched, gnarly finger points to the door.

  No knob or lever or latch. No keyhole.

  Half a thought momentarily played with abracadabra . . .

  He went to the bone-colored door.

  Leaned. And it opened.

  A room stained in dimming twilight. A room lined with long, narrow glass boxes, several feet wide and several high. Row upon row. Each box filled with thick, swirling yellow vapors Melville thought looked like torn cur
tains flapping in fits of biting wind. He leaned his face closer. The fine yellow currents, rushing—small dense rivers without masters, beckoned compellingly. Their wild yellow art shading out what the boxes contained.

  “What—”

  “This is The Chapel of the Banquet.”

  “A feast for whom?”

  She brushed off his question. Her finger directed his gaze to an empty box, its lid open.

  “This is the world without you.”

  “And those?”

  “Other worlds. Without those who came seeking what had passed.”

  “Are they . . .”

  “Done looking at the undersides of leaves for secrets and answers. Done moving from chair to chair. No longer do they rush low and high for they have finished listening to the hollow words of the self-impressed and the fabled.”

  “Gone.”

  “Only from here.”

  “To where?”

  “To The Vale Where the Fog of Mystery Rolls. To The Place Where Evening Falls On Still.”

  “And the struggle?”

  “Over for those who shed careless and curious, and followed, giving their last words to my brother, the King.”

  He placed his hands on a box next to the one with the open lid. Its yellow vapors part. Victoria lay in the box. Her face, a stony mask, was dimmed. Gone, murdered by his dark questions, he was certain. Gone—vanished words and manners, happier moods of mind, all the traces and whirling of schemes, and the heat that smelled of sweet flowers and the pretty vistas of dreams unfolded, he had once surveyed.

  The lightning flash of recognition that belongs to requiem and the deep bitter ache of lamentation.

  Her hands—hands that once strayed on his face—now so pale, were crossed on her breast.

  Silent now the contours that never spoiled a morning.

  Alone . . .

  Turned to cold stone.

  The windows of her eyes forever closed. Her countenance sealed by a condition black.

  His heart screamed, his hands covered his face. A swift, damning knife had been plunged into his memories. A mob of tornadoes shredded—ripped, all hope of forgiveness and reconciliation.

  Gone.