gone . . . never to . . .
Truly gone.
Forever sealed, bolted. Shut fast.
The lifeless image—of her—a fire that conquers, corrupts, crushes, pure acid and ice burning his eyes.
He stands in a habitat blind, alone—ALONE in a mire of agony, distant the golden stream of life. Promise sunk in a fate of skeletons and misery that goes on and on . . .
He had lived with his eyes open. He would not go.
“I cannot . . . Cannot.” He shivers. Looks down at the pond that was her cheek, sees his heartbreak. “When Then is shaken from my memory . . . Can—can . . . will not . . . accept—”
“Signs and stars and dreams, all sink into the darkness.”
As her yellow profile moved away she whispered, “He will be there.”
Tired of Everyday he whispered, “Where is my heart?”
Melville turns from the tomb-cold flames of her eyes. He is flooded with discolored memories: Coherent blue skies . . . a table with wine and cheese . . . her gentle laughter when he stubbed his toe . . . the cats asleep in the sun-filled pasture of the bay window . . . the strains of ecstatic music dancing from tender hands . . . the kitchen table with honey-sweetened tea and the burnt desert and her smile as he laughed at the hard black underside of the yellow sponge cake . . .
“Damaged.” The war prayer, ravens’ dance, the melody of the grave is within him. “Light . . . swaying.”
His hand is conquered by tremors . . .
“Fall . . .”
There is a twitch below his eye, which has forgotten how to shout . . . His tongue is dry. It tastes of flint and briars and tired flowers . . .
“ing.”
His lungs are husks that cannot function in this vertigo of deepening ash.
A wave of crow-like hissing in the air, burning, swelling . . . The shape of a woman with no mouth shifts, offers refuge from the threatening shadows . . .
“My life . . . is . . .” The world of heart within—with its blindness, and jars of small lives, and countless bridges—crumbles. Nests and wheels fade. “grey.”
“Better off—”
The horizon, a yellow orchard of cancer torn and obscured, hangs upside down. He trembles, veneers and questions out of breath, flake off and fall away . . . And he cannot remember how . . .
“Better off . . .”
Exhaustion and devouring pain unfolded, mute hand and eye . . . the bite of steady tears . . . poisoned, summer bled of anger, descends . . .
Images tarred in black spin, speak . . . Silhouettes crossed by whipping shadows . . . Lakes swallowed . . . Goodbyes sleeping in the sand . . . Thorns, socket thresholds full of wasps and malice smiles, come down the ladder from the gloom to find things to keep their feet warm . . .
Driftwood fingers slowly gliding through thunder toward answers.
Melville brought out his gun. Raised it to his temple . . . The echo of the outburst was surrounded and overcome as The King’s cold, brutal laugh moved through the halls . . .
“Ssssh, child,” she whispers, placing Melville’s hands just so on his chest. Her touch soft as a mother’s, she covers his face with a threadbare-thin cloth soiled with dried tears and dust.
“The gates of Carcosa are open.”
There was the rustling of another pair of boots or slippers about to cross the threshold and enter Saint Nicholas Hall. Sister Content turned from Melville’s glass box toward the door.
“Yesterday arrives so soon.”
She sighs, its tone like the retreating breath of a distant banshee, thinking of tides and how all things, the stout, the fragile, those who judge and the blindfolded, those crouched in ill-fitting fear, lean toward the dark . . .
(Judy Henske & Jerry Yester “Farewell Aldebaran”, “St. Nicholas Hall”, and “Three Ravens”)
A Spider In The Distance
They sat there quietly. Their feet in the warm, still water of the pool. The wandering wind did not enter the courtyard.
“What do you wish for?” she asked.
He was slow to turn, slow to move his gaze from the peace of her unmoving feet. “At this moment, nothing. Being here with you is enough.”
There had been another love and terror and the long despair, then he arrived and calmed her. She took his hand in hers. “I do love you.”
His eyes smiled in the soft playful light.
You, and being with you in this garden is treasure, he thought.
She did not want to send him, but it was not a question of wishes. There was only need.
She put her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder. There would be the rest of this day and tonight. The distance would come with the sunrise . . .
~*~
Distant now are the points of friendship. Next to the stones a spider had come down. Far from home and the warm blue hands, in search of prey he came to the midnight pages. The waves bid goodbye to his boot prints.
The wind came to whisper details.
It was only a few miles to the corpse of the poet and The Mask. A few miles of stillness, dark and cold and waiting.
Spider stood in unwelcome midnight-nothing come down from the sky. He did not stand there in the loneliness long. No help would come. Ever hungry for words, wolves and hawks and teeth would come seeking slow ships. Spider hoped she was right about him being ready.
The path was sharp, but he had been to banquets on webs before.
Under the darkening stars Spider took out his compass and his map. He looked over the open field of stones and saw the undertow of the night winds, saw the sails of other seekers turned to rust. Twisted, dry wrecks of trees, bent snakes curled by the smiles and bane of winter’s giant rage littered the stark expanse. The wreckage was filled with the bleak echoes of crows and autumn.
“There is a gate by the mound. Try to get through quickly,” she said.
“I know how to be quiet, and deadly, if need be,” he said.
He moved her ring to the anointed finger and unslipped Razor. The day he met her, came into her peaceful courtyard, he placed the sword on the mantle. For ten months it laid quiet, the dust came and slept on it. It was clean and oiled now. His hand and arm no longer felt the strangeness of parting, the balance was restored. All the meadows Razor had painted thick with red sat on his straight shoulders.
The moon was a hungry goblin, its light ready to rend. Spider moved among the stones and broken trunks, Razor attuned to any inclination of hidden snake or poison. Shadows chilled in endless hours reached for flesh and bone.
The first mile passed and the black mouth of the second now lay behind him like a frozen lawn. He could see the mound in the distance. The stones thinned, short scrub grass and barren patches of sand eased his march to the threshold.
Spider circled the mound very slowly. Stopping only once in the jet shade of a felled trunk to survey the archway.
The silence and stillness was a great weight. Nothing here twitched, nothing of the sun left its letters here. No raven or demon or echo of the games of the abyss, no grim sentinel patrolling, nonetheless the shade of evil hued this—trap. All the accounts written of this place spoke of it in frightened whispers.
In the land of his birth, magic was poison and Spider hated it and hated the violence it had brought to the now devastated city of his birth. Demons and devils and flesh-eating carrion that walked by night, he’d faced each under fading stars and blinding mid-day sunfire and now standing before this gate wondered if his practiced steel could carry him through deviltry and home again.
The hole in the soil was ribbed, as if dug in steps, a foot or two in the hard earth pocked with stones then the next excavation. The hands that had dug here were not swift and the tunnel they burrowed was not straight. But it was large enough for a man to walk upright, most of the time.
Spider was sleepy and he could eat, breakfast was almost half a day back, but the hours that led to the road home were still before him. He would consume them and eat when he reached his
ship. His burning torch fed his steps.
He stopped from time to time to listen and look for footprints or other signs. Only dim echoes of his own footsteps came to his ears. He moved on. The sour flavor of the air made it hard to breathe. He came to a place where the walls gave way to wider dark. He let his torch hunt the floor and the breadth of silence. No sun hurts this ground . . . Nothing, nothing . . . Empty.
Spider followed the wall, the blood in his arm powering his sword as it fathomed the bare air until he came upon another opening.
He entered and tapped his sword upon the wall, listening to the echo. The cavern was enormous. Spider stretched out his arm, extending the feeble light, and walked forward. This chamber of the underworld was empty and malignant. He felt the different hours that formed its emptiness.
This is all too quiet, he thought.
His torch replied with bones. Whole and in pieces, armor and leather beside them. A sword an arm’s length from a ripped leather bag much like his own.
One set of remains became two and there were brothers for the scraps fallen from the basket of life.
And after another dozen paces, fresh bodies, but they were not men. These hyenas were once women and children, but some ill desert magic had turned them. Eaters of the dead, dead themselves, this was the obscene party that had cleaned every contented delight and unrolled quarrel from the dead men who came to this tomb. Arrows, by the tens and tens, feathered the freshly grown carcasses of the ghouls.
Spider bent to examine the corpse of a thing that had once been a woman. Afraid to be corrupted, he did not touch the blood around the wound, but knew it to be fresh . . . The first arrow stung him, biting the middle of his back. The second hateful pronouncement, lower. Seven more, systematically, followed.
He was down. Noise, the sound of warriors came to him from three sides as the arrows fed slowly.
Faces in the light. Soldiers. Drawn swords, hard faces. A few murmurs. A brisk laugh.
“Were you looking for this?” A leather-gloved hand held the unadorned ivory mask. The Mask he was sent to find. It flared with secrets.
With his eyes he spit at the man who cost him his life.
Deep in the swelling cold, the hard cavern floor a black bed . . . She passes through the room, leaving a hint of summer sun with her scent. Her “come follow me” eyes laughing, the heat of her bare footprints an open treasure map . . . A last fragile thought, caught before it can slip across the distance. Then he died.
Two soldiers tested his death with their boots.
The Captain put The Mask in his leather bag and they left the chamber swollen with death.
~*~
Four months and he had not returned to her side.
There had been no word and the ship sent to find him had returned, the captain saying his boat was found burned and wrecked on the coast. They had searched, only briefly, the darkening, ragged weather made their departure from the cold barren shore a swift need.
“You looked for him for less than half a day,” she said, another goodbye breaking over her shoulders. Spider, will these winter rains never cease? She thought of the summers he had painted in her heart. Tonight, in my bed, I will dream of you . . . Of your good-bye kiss.
“There was no trace of him. There was no proof, but he is lost. And with the condition of his vessel I knew he did not survive what, or whoever, attacked him. Fearing a troubled passage, I thought it best to save my men and my ship.”
Camilla frowned and tied her hands in a great fist. She should have sent an armed group with him. She should have told him everything . . .
In ten days the King of Alar would arrive to talk peace, or to wage war. If she did not wear The Mask on the day the King of Alar came to the peace talks, the war would continue for another millennium. To look upon his face unmasked was the highest form of disrespect. And it was said he cured every insult, every dispute, with the bark of his hungry sword.
Even if she sent a hundred swift men this very moment, they could not return The Mask to her in time to forestall the spurs which would walk in Carcosa in ten days.
Ages ago, in an act of defiance, her mother had taken off The Mask and sent it into the West in the hands of a poet. Sent it to be hidden away by a madman.
Midsummer behind her, Camilla faced unknowns. She climbed the stairs and stood on the terrace, looked at the cliffs and the waves below, the sky, the garden. Spider should be here beside her. Mornings filled with good should smile on them. But she was a prisoner in a dark cell and she was frightened. She looked into the lake and feared what looked back. Not for the first time she wanted to be invisible. Since that stiff twilight hour when Camilla placed the diadem on her finger and assumed all authority in the realm, she has sent a hundred men to recover The Mask, thinking one day she might don it and propose an end to this war with Alar. Not one had returned.
Countless times she had visited her mother in her rooms and the conversation had turned to steam as she struggled with the misadventure that would prove their undoing. She would never understand her mother’s inexplicable act. Camilla knew the prophecy and believed it, but if The Mask were in her hands, her enemy the King of Alar, could not discover it and place it over his face.
Had the king’s minions found The Mask? Was he ready to wear it and thrust Carcosa and her people into bitter servitude until the twelfth of Never arrived? Would he set foot in these halls, not to talk peace, but to place what remained of the royal family under the sword?
No dawn overlooking the sea. The sails of Alar were in the harbor. The soldiery of Alar and their hooded king came—returned—to the court.
He wore The Mask.
She burned with fatal emotions, trying to find words to accept the defeat.
Black eyes glazed with violence. Swords flashed. Thunder, unchanged, returns to her halls . . . Her brothers cut down. Beheaded, in the space of a few moments of fire.
The King’s captains laughed over what they had laid down. They spit on the half-naked body of her mother, dragged into the hall, stumbling and bloody for all to see. Wood is brought into the hall. Chairs are broken, a fire started. The heads of her mother and her two brothers are thrown to the flames.
“You have served me well and long. This thing of Carcosa, I give you.” Alar pushes Camilla to his captain.
The King’s captain spits on her, says, “No man of Alar will soil himself with this Carcosan whore.” His sword speaks broadly in her belly.
On a floor that had broken ten thousand calendars she lays like a common abomination. Camilla’s eyes reach across the short distance to Alar’s masked face. A harsh laugh splashes from his smile, closing the argument between them for all time.
Hands that were cold yesterday remove The Mask and cast it to the ground before her. “You thought to buy the soul of a king with this.” An abrasive boot triumphantly shatters it. “Your desire forever lives in the mud.”
Her lips snap open, dribbling with ashes. Her words are too wet with the impossible to hear. Further broken, beaten down. Time and the sane closing . . . She holds out her hand to Spider. “I’ll be back soon, Camilla. I will bring flowers to your room.” . . . The last thing she sees before the winterboatman takes her across the distance to to-morrow is the scorpion-like, scarlet tattoo on Alar’s cheek above his cold smile.
Blacker now, the sky turns dark with rain . . .
Under The Mask Another Mask
The wind comes off the Hudson. No vengeance in it. It doesn’t care about spectators or pathology. An unbroken lethargy of grim heat under the backhand of an August skyline. Keyless journeys of circumstance in this knotted crucible trampled by turbulent decay . . .
Shifting half-truths reconfigure The City’s civic armature. The inconsequential exaggerated within the voyeuristic no-growth . . . All the blind spots of The City filled with chaos metamorphosed into simple struggle for the fragments trying to outrun the tomb, and every minute—day after day after day—losing speed . . .
Across s
treets, playgrounds for savage experiments of agitation and necessity, unfiltered depravity out shopping the landslide, sifting what’s goin’ on, for hard currency, for alcohol or razorlight chemicals, for mindless expressions of fun, or just to kick boredom off the street . . .
No reprieves. If it’s on the serving plate they’re gonna take it . . .
Arianne’s returning from the Blue Cove Bookstore, from a heated experiment of phantom soliloquies delivered by an up-and-coming poet of The Void. Trying to remember the kiss of each phrase, fearing it to be another theater of comfort that rounds an abrupt curve and becomes a lonely coast disintegrating in ashen shadows and dust. Her ears are still full of his gin and embers voice spilling like a last call.
From each death The King’s misery narrows.
He breathes
And phrases of Oblivion
Fall from his spreading wings.
Before his eye days collapse
And the blue stories of evening,
Once loved as spring flowers by the light,
Weep no more.
Her hands clutch the autographed book. She’s late.
. . . A broken heel. The shadows tilt with new edges. The firm lesson of hurried making its point then vanishing without sympathy . . . Walking again, not hurt, inconvenienced. A landscape changed to bumpy ups and downs . . .
Around a corner that lost its daily light, a corner of dismal concrete edges. She is surrounded by shadows of the exhausted dipped in lawless. Lamps pasted in handbills give their weaken light to the restless hours. Newspapers and cardboard cups buoyed by bouts of the wind’s hard hands roam while the hunger of slow private shadows gagged by black’s motionless monologue mutates. It’s a network of hard lines and bitter deeps, a clenched masquerade drifting until it comes upon a heartbeat.
Something grotesque awakened in a doorway Arianne hadn’t noticed. Something now erect. Now three—harsh reputations churning in riot-colored garments—walking. Three brick-solid predators with hostile masks below baseball caps with stylized recipes she can’t read. Biting voices. Hands surface to play the game of dominance—She is thrown into the pot. Pushed. She, another thing cast to the ground. Kicked, without explanation . . .
The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1 Page 12