The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1
Page 13
Rough hands, taking turns and 2 knives for clipping wings. Cannibals hungry for opportunities, stunning weakness in the slaughterhouse.
Skirt off. Dizzy, panicked. Panties off. Dizzy. Panicked. Blouse torn open. She sags under the weight of a choking hysteria. Two beasts hold her legs apart, then come the fast stiff points thrust upon her, as thorns, as weapons, as venom striking deep. Contaminated in the crossfire of an act of violence . . .
Half a dozen slow thunderstrikes of cold, hard applause from the tallest attacker now merely observing. And the ringing:
FUCK THAT BITCH GOOD!
Fuck her up!
Be cool bitch—it’s only a little in-and-out. Bet’chor hot-fat-pussy stored it up for THIS.
GET THAT ASS UP IN IT HOE!
Her eyes slapped by portraits of the raw nighthawks feeding. Dreams gone in the undertow . . . Blow after blow, her face and all the hopes and fears and tender joys behind it, altered, sting by sting, from its former poise. . . Faces of yelling teeth working. Sharp white teeth under wild eyes of resonant laughter. First comes the brutality of the ice-age, then the mountain, and harshest of all, the machine, each destroying. Broad backs climbing, taking . . . A thousand hands carrying out the sentence.
She tries to kick as if her legs could shout STOP, but they’re yanked back into place before they can even mumble. For her effort she’s punched in the eye, winces.
Weakened.
Nausea. The foul taste of genitals in her mouth.
Contaminated. All her summers now windblown, sliced away, changed in a gash of red, in a rite of knife. A mouse frozen in the jaws of searing predators. Staring, with her one unswollen eye, but not seeing. Blindfolded by fear. No daylight. Tears, but no spring to pawn them to.
Congratulatory laughter.
A pack of cigarettes comes out . . . and from an oversize pocket, lighter fluid. Her face is wet. Her hair reeks of accelerant . . . A black hand casts off a match. Fire, the true god of man and Hell. Her face shattered, bent into a million pieces—transformed by the burning hammer. Her voice can’t concentrate beyond the scream.
Arianne claws at her face, scrapes it against the ground until the coarse grey leaves furrows on the field of scorched flesh.
Her sobbing digs no hole she can crawl into.
The cloud of laughter above dismisses the clock. The stench of compulsion and burnt prayers smothering the breath trickling form her . . . A moment of frozen quiet . . . incapable . . . the ground drinking her blood . . . The map of her life ruined. Staring at freedom on the cold shore of a broken bottle, but her fingers are broken. Arianne can’t reach the sharp glass and The End it offers . . .
Wounded by little drops of night the stone face of the moon departs.
She loses consciousness . . .
~*~
Hideousness is what she sees. Ordinary gone in the mirror inlaid with crime. Contaminated. A death face of burned and scars and acid friction, a mask of proportions she has no ability to comprehend. Each scar slings a white-hot flashback of the gruesome battlefield. Arianne can only view This piece, or That bewildering sector. The old whole, calm and graceful, beautiful many said, gone. Gone, the bright, unblemished pearl that used to smile at her from the mirror. Gone—all the days found in soft and tender. All her sweet days gone in this chaos of confusion—in this obliterating black hole—that answers reason with Nothing. Gone. This face before her is a phantom, a false unrelenting lie she can’t step across. She wants to blink and send it away.
She tries, eyes CLOSED/eyes OPEN—no ruby slippers. Tries again. And again. No trip out. He hands are fists . . .
About to gag on the GODDAMN turning into a scream . . .
Eyes drowning in the depths of the mirror, reaching for a theory or a technique to piece this grotesque puzzle back together. Clawing for a new brain and a new biology to fly above or around this final expression of the unwanted circumstance. Getting nowhere in the projected entanglement forced upon her by the now unbandaged face.
Strong drink, by the pint, by the shot, by the bottle. Hiding—Hiding in the living room—Hiding in the bedroom—Hiding from widows and the dilated night and the overwhelming silence she can’t wipe away. Hiding—In the hands of slippery books—In instant questions—Hiding . . . In the bottom of bottles, witnesses to her thirst . . . She sees visions of Hell, a plague of black and fatal in the mirror. Always running to the naked mirror and finding dizzying, frustrating shadows in the corruption it manifests . . . In an empty room dragging each hot liquid finger of whiskey teeming with unexhausted enemies into the ghost drift of lost . . . Hiding in the bottom of bottles and the voice in The Book of the void poet.
Her sleep is troubled by the grey voice of the wind carrying darkness. Then comes the touch of words held out by yellow hands. Like bells from somewhere she has never traveled, a Tomorrow she longs for, ringing with, “Let it go”, quiet—without conflict comes to her. It settles on the canvas. Soft wings glow, murmur. Soothe. “Do not lose You in the harbor of loneliness. Take up the Truth.”
Awake. The Truth. Rushing to the mirror. “Truth.” The Truth? Uncovered . . . Cover this in Truth.
The retreat into a different light . . . untrained in this visibility . . . absent of self . . . of self . . . Self?
In a different light . . .
~*~
Another night of claws tearing deep, another season at a desolate crossroads where no deal with God or the Devil can be brokered—Though she tries . . . Searching the bottle for amnesia that does not come, for former—or sunlight—or a pulse. Searching the mirror—Yes LOST, seeing Summer again LOST. All the heart-shaped little things, spilled—soiled and eaten by the hunters—scarlet and terminal. Patternless scars crossed this way and that on this mask of shame. Searching the mask of guilt for what has departed. Searching for the undetectable in confusion’s tar. Searching that which cannot be explained or washed away in the mask of anger. Leaning over the toilet her guilt and shame blows up . . .
She wants to be cleansed.
She wants to set back time.
She wants to stop screaming at the dirty expressions performing in the mirror.
She wants to have never left the apartment That Night.
She wants REVENGE! Arianne wants to mold the skin of horny cocks with the thickness of a blade, to seer sour eyes with darkness. She wants to melt her anger in their furious deaths.
But what she has is the mirror, its cross-examination—stone after stone, repeating deformity, pressing its interlaced outburst of disgusting, laughing as the firestorm of violence replays before her eyes—Laughing as the nuclear act, again and again, breaks her spell of beauty . . . What she has is the mirror and its critical tongue. The looking glass points, shouts and Arianne glues her eyes to the humiliation it blinds her with. In its web, traumatized pieces that can’t come back from the chunk of night that slammed into her, pieces that now scream loneliness and hate, a slope of coarse rags hobbled by the raw bolts that raped her beauty . . . Everything broken, burned. Pieced together—Never to blush, never to brush away a stray hair. The end of self-discovery. Her old face now a lost limb. And she runs to the yellow words of The Book, hoping they can grow it back . . . But they slip from her fingers and Then comes again and goes on and on.
The scream of a monster brushes her shoulders . . . A fountain of doomed teeth in the mirror screaming.
Scars. Scissors—she picks them up a hundred times. Sleeping pills to close the cracks. The bottom of the unhelpful whiskey bottle smashed into the face in the mirror, now shattered like her face. Minutes in the swarm of the jigsaw. This piece. That. Eddies, black and red, raw and quick, formed in Hell and shit and pox. Unrelated parts look out at her from the mirror. Something different there . . . The mask of some other.
Arianne runs from the room. Trips on the diamondback ripples and haunted labyrinth of the hall carpet. Back to her bed . . . Clutches The Book to her breasts.
Do not lose You in the harbor of loneliness.
&
nbsp; Her eyes are hiding behind a fortress of tears.
~*~
An after-hours appointment in a white room in a white building.
The odor of good-bye in her voice, “I am a victim,” tumbling from the wide slash of once-exquisite canvas now torn apart. “Breathing, but blind to the exit.’
“I’m searching for The Truth.”
“About you, there are many. Or more rightly put, if one stops the masquerade, peels away the fairytale, only the Truth is left,” the repairer said.
“The Truth. The one Truth. I’ve been reading of a place where troubles are over . . . The friend of a friend’s sister, said—”
“To see me. And The Book you mentioned told you to, what?”
“It echoed a dream. Both said to, take up the Truth. They said one must peel away this mask and don the King’s.”
“Yes, I see.”
“And—”
“I can show you the way.”
The back of his white coat to her. Arianne watches the whiteness dance, watches his pale hand open a white door.
On a sliver tray rests a pale, silent mask. Her eyes find comfort in its unblemished smoothness. She wants to caress it, to believe in its wholeness, but hesitates. She knows she must cast off one before taking up the other. Arianne removes the dark veil she has worn day and night since the performance of the wicked removed all musings of calm and bright from the future. She sets the veil on the silver tray. Black and bone white, different routes, side by side.
The oval whiteness in Doctor Peltonen’s hands. Smooth and ready to wear . . . Slowly placed on her face . . . a shade falls upon her face . . . Warmth. Settling, bonding . . . Comfort . . .
Eyes closed. No thoughts of supermarket aisles or the beach or the rescue of library stacks. No thoughts, webs, of dishes, or fault . . . Black and black . . . Opened. And I . . . Another light. And I . . . Different light. And I . . . The landscape transformed. And I . . . New senses flashing. See . . . dim images full of time and water and things that were . . .
His white coat. Threadbare at the sleeves. The square white mask tied over his face. Her hands take off his white coat, his white shirt. Pale white skin at close range, canvas for the fluid ivy of tattooed script etched in ink upon his skin. Arianne’s eyes scanning his arm—
Star of my exile,
echo the heartbeat that breaks,
with each rushing wave,
upon the shore
Of Carcosa
. . . flowing along the curve of his shoulder—
Gestures of mercy?
Under this exiled moon?
Scars and embraces—Myths and mysteries!
Forget sin and rain,
Lighten your burden—
One push will reveal the places of forever . . .
She removes his white slacks, reads—
The raven rests in the winter tree,
yet the bole finds a season to grow . . .
His pale hands remove her clothes, read curve and layer, downhill and between. Closer underway. Pacing, assembling . . . Absorbing.
Rendezvous in sleight-of-hand. She in her mask, he in his. Her soft eyes trembled. Her soft breath breaks upon the waves of script. His lips tremble at her touch. A kiss . . . a low laugh . . . Each wanting more, each taking more . . . Each seeing, absorbing the silver Truth . . .
when the whiteness falls
in cold Carcosa . . .
She is chewing the strange, bringing it closer, learning new directions. Excited, arched, brushing, in a sigh of eyes they read each other, gnaw at the irresistible as if it were a cautious prayer dripping with slow spacious dawn in the cold air of the white room. The slow rush of a snake’s hiss wind breathing, he moans . . . She, reading the curves of something as it bursts from a beyond she reaches to discover . . .
It swallows so many suns . . .
She can’t understand it or speak it yet, but it’s coming . . .
Carcosa,
wide is the white light, the whiteness . . .
She spurs his sleek nearness with thrusts of words translated from his flesh . . .
Good-bye, day.
Her winged fingers brush over the soft arcs of ink-etched words . . .
Night walkers
frolic in the dreams of the changeless spectral flame
of midnight . . .
Absorbing every word . . .
and spread open
over their drained breast shut fast,
marvels of the ancient night never over
entrenched
in the elixir eternal . . .
Each veil peeled . . . stars . . .
Your eyes twinkle with the wormwood emblem in the sky
that speaks my name . . .
lips, hair . . .
the lake awash in cloud voices . . .
out of the storm
and into the harmony of yesterday . . .
roses, chalices . . .
cloud voices in the water
they sing of glamour & finished . . .
lips, so warm, awash in cloud voices . . .
Beneath Demhe,
where frail dreams erode . . .
kisses writing in soft dreamspeed . . .
Star of my exile,
echo the heartbeat that breaks,
with each rushing wave,
upon the shore
Of Carcosa . . .
fashioned from a radiant whiteness, Truth, intense and intertwined, so sweet . . . Arianne is hollow no more.
Orgasm.
She has paid in flesh . . .
They dress. He in white on white. She back to suitable street clothes.
He brings her a mirror. Places it in her supple hands.
Eyes open . . . The mask of Revelation, softly covering the injury—Another face. The True face.
“I see . . . Another world.”
“Carcosa.”
“Beyond the dunes . . . Unique . . .”
“There, Cassilda, you may cast away the loneliness.” There is a knife in his hand.
“This is the King’s hand. It listens to Day. Its borders shape the dull beasts for The Termination. Its radiant light stops Day . . . The children of the sun glow with stains of hopeless damnation. This is the time collector that gathers their sin and sends The King’s jewels to their cool rest.”
Doctor Peltonen puts on a yellow glove. He picks up the black veil and drops it into a container for waste.
The relief the blade grants warms Arianne’s hand. Its correctness feels like a sky.
“It has rubbed the light of discontent with The Law.”
Her breasts swell. Her eyes shine. Arianne’s fingers tighten about the future, absorb its focus.
~*~
Somewhere in the night.
Beyond the dunes, beyond the cloud-waves and the crooked-peaked, bitterblack towers of Carcosa. She is part of the landscape. She walks in a garden of Winter trees, dead moths at her feet.
This is The Night of On and On, the end of errors. It eats light and weaves it into stories of rain.
“So you shall, Child.”
She turns. Sees—
The Yellow King on his throne
Arianne swoons.
“My Servant has given you the spider’s thread I forged in a furnace of moonlight. You will return to the Other World and stitch the light of the children of the sun to my tapestry. With friction you will take their brighter and cure this abominable disease that tatters my form.’
“You are the Maiden of Ink. In skin, you write the melody to soothe the poison that swells within me.”
She kneels. As if an obedient bee on a flower, her soft lips kiss the frayed hem of The King’s yellow robes.
~*~
Arianne comes from shadows, from smoke and clouds . . .
Another grey street paralyzed by means to an end. A smack of predators, loitering. Their poised cravings thick and hard. She crosses their sweaty off limits . . . The results of their surprised situation she l
eaves for the simple appetites of urgent waste collectors coming up from the sewers in their cloaks of scabs and matted fur . . .
Another night, another waltz of scarlet hunting. Another hateful Thing that used evil as a form of amusement damaged and now forever part of the hard, unmoving landscape.
Marching through the places where time grinds. Writing GO! with her knife. Sending bitter to the mound. Each time she laughs . . .
And another dead thing and another, each time leaving her mark of inches in the howls that went in and never came out.
Again
. . . and again, Arianne, dressed in the somber fragrance of the moon, sends each repulsive page of evil to bed with Blackness . . . An endless night of the blade—Her blade drains the river, the handle nourishes . . . She comes as a phantom, rushing to slash tendons and hands and dead crotches . . . The radiation of every cankerous smile she smothers. The “Gon fuck you up.” of each rough nightbeast of grim and disrepair is their handwritten suicide note which she signs with windmill arcs and jagged furrows loud with blood . . .
She leaves dust and nothing for the spider and windows to measure . . .
Each once malevolent carcass she burns (whispers, “Lights out.” with the tongue of an angel as the fingers of fire play), tattoos in flames, as treatment, as proof of life undone, but the revenge for the perversions engraved on the face behind the mask is temporary.
And after . . .
To far cold Carcosa . . . to sit at the healing hem of The King’s robe . . . exciting in His Masterwork . . . licking the wisdom of His Elixir . . . Leave nothing but bones of ivory, he whispers in her heart.
~*~
A street, old age rotting in its belly, of spilled darkness and disappointment too straight to be a labyrinth. Triggers and slamming knuckles and minutes squeezed until they were all out of clemency. No sorrys. No exits from the Last Exit. Deals and blame (hissed between FUCK YOUs) and quicksilver tricks and vultures and the unfading footfalls of the unspeakable pressing at every window.
A death dealer with big arms and devil-mean boredom in his hands stands in the shadows. Arianne sighs, smiles. He tastes the coming game and stretches out . . . She has It trapped, fastened to her gaping blade . . . Cracked and bleeding margin to margin, staggering, her prey falls to the shadows. Judged . . .