The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1

by Joseph S. Pulver

  Lily smiled to herself—she was gonna roll the bones. Re-made/re-modeled, she was ready for tomorrow’s ports of call and all the surprises just waiting to be opened . . . and the Answers! She was going to find a Goth band that needed a singer-poet and on a darkened stage, surrounded by the sinister freeform, in the drama of flesh and soul, that delirious impromptu of ghosts and ecstasies rattling, she would find the glow of heaven.

  As Lily walked/hurried/side-stepped the pandemonium, she dreamed of Cassilda. Cassilda harnessed her pain, and made something of the chaos—you could hear it in the songs of SYS. Lily heard it. Every time she pushed the play button and the bootleg cassette began to flow across the heads of the small black Sony Walkman® she heard Cassilda escape the damnation of this decaying society. That’s what she needed, to be far from the oppressive gray lands.

  In the devil’s club she’d find bandmates—soulmates—and they’d pin buoyant, swirling sounds of brooding brightness under her haunted sarabandes, and she’d sing & she’d mend & find happiness & peace, & even love—not just fucking, but love, real love. She’d find an oasis of sanity in this sinister cartoon of madness, and a cure for her torments. And the Man in the Moon and ALLtheREST could go to Hell!

  All she needed was to find Café Morphine, and guitars flowing over drums, and there in the synth-wash and the lights, the brothers and sisters who were sick of The Housebreaking and being branded “LAZY CUNT” & “WORTHLESS MOTHERFUCKER”.

  “That’s all I need.”

  ~*~

  And she found it. After the 1800 mile bus trek from her parents’ prison, beside a dull-white cafeteria with red plastic seats that called itself a restaurant and a grimy-faced shop with a chain-link veil that sold used books and CDs. As yellow as the sun it stood—

  ~*~

  Café Morphine

  Café Morphine . . . The hand-painted sign with its weathered Eyes of Haroeris . . . And inside, wide & long & 2 short flights down . . . Catacombs. Bricks. Plank flooring. Exposed pipes now painted black like the veins of some unseen beast—

  Once owned by an ex-wrestler named “Sharkey” until the fire in ’61. 57 burned alive one night when Cass and the Muckrakers raised the roof. Formerly the outpost of pimps & hepcats & Finger-Popping Daddies & pill-poppin’ grifters & the Commie sex-maniacs with long-stemmed reflections of Soul Francisco’s

  marijuana-hipsters & those rejoicing sparrows illuminating long-lined mysteries from truth-teared eyes of naked jazz & the cutting points of view of mellow shaman with fanciful fables of Tangier and the art-grottos of Berlin and the grub served in Barstow’s hoosegow and when Ferlinghetti had said Allen said Jack once—

  Café Morphine . . . once Villa Delirium—HOWL all night, cut it up—until the fire . . . But even after being boarded up for over 2decades, its name, and the pursuits of this new unconstrained generation—HOWL all night, let it bleed— hadn’t altered.

  Lily read the pasted-on announcements.

  7th

  Daddy’s little Whores

  Today—tonight

  8th

  The

  embarrassed Personalities

  of

  GOD

  &

  In Some Small Darkness

  and next Thursday—She couldn’t believe it!, but there it was, right there in plain letters.

  14th

  SYS

  “The Society of the Yellow Sign.” Whispered from her lips like a prayer come true.

  Cassilda’s band was playing here. The Internet had it right.

  Now she just needed a place to stay. And a job until she could form her band.

  Lily drifted. Just walking, sometimes at faster speeds. Looking. Trying to take it in and sort it out—measuring it on her bullshit meter. She ate a sandwich, washed it down with a bubbling Coke, and waited for night, when the club would open.

  She hung down the block watching the door to the club. Some few—“Employees?”—entered and the beerlights in the window came on.

  Before the shrine 5 came together. Then 6 became 9. 2 more over there. & 5 off to the left near the maw of the alley. Now 20 or more waiting. The covens had gathered. 10:06 by her watch. “It’s time.” She moved toward the rustling. Nods & looks & mouths pink under black lipstick. Hellishly-thin under black & black & bitchy was the dress code. She turned to look at, to quietly revel in, each self-portrait of freedom—

  Denizens in corpsepaint & gender-benders in black lace. Leather/rubberware S&M demons—everhungry. Vampyros lesbos, lips as dark as wine. Siouxies & androgyny. Hedonism & nihilism—pick a toxin. Borg-weds-Barker black on black stitched to black. Chiffon & crepe. Demonic tattoos etched in scar & ink. Mascara & piercings & crosses & pentagrams & onyx & unvoiced questions & oblique expectations; all tinted by the streetlamp’s ivory gauze, they, like tethered ravens, waited to step across the threshold.

  Mina & The Hanged Man & TheZipperZombie & Locrian & Esmeralda & Ghoul Von Malice & Countess Bathory & Mistress Absynthe & Edvard & Claire Voyeur & Eva Obsession—Lily backed away from one who’d christened himself Necro. She wanted to be far from the creature in the strategically-ripped Reverend Marilyn Manson is the Antichrist Superstar tee. Far from his fully-displayed malice & rot-yellow teeth & rankbreath close enough to induce puking.

  A lovely, shadowy waif, was beside her. Big bright eyes. Black lips smiled and formed a word. “Hi.” Head cocked, curious.

  “Hi.” Tentatively replied.

  “I’m, Tess.” Another gentle smile.

  “Lily.” Hopeful, forgetting to be guarded.

  Tess looked at the knapsack and the suitcase.

  “I haven’t found a place yet.” A small, helpless shrug with the explanation.

  “So I see.” Smiling, remembering her own coming out. Tess felt the fear of the 1st day. “C’mon, I live around the corner. You can crash on my couch.”

  Lily followed the slow breeze waltz of her savior.

  “Eaten?”

  “Yes. A little something.”

  “Good. Put your things there.”

  And they went back to the club.

  Past the bouncer, down the stairs, through the huge black doors with their stars & sigils, into the warm cavern with its stage & tables & candlelight & gaunt rustling shadows milling in black-on-black art-crypt. Swirling, gigantic music—Medusa Cyclone’s “The Smith Can”—danceable, alive & edgy as lightning.

  Backlit with flickering candles, the pair of girls poised in a shaded corner with drinks—iced vodka. Near the safety of a wall, viewing the ropes.

  “See, THEM. That’s Byron—a royal, dangerous ASS—and his ghoul-pack of sick, cold things. Stay away! They’re blood-drinkers . . . And thieves when it suits them. Byron says fuck AIDS. Only Lestat lives forever. The rest die when they die . . . Hey, there’s Boo!” Tess smiled and waved at the Edward Gorey rendering of Count Poe in the tattered cape. “C’mon!—You’ll like him. He knows everybody worth knowing.”

  And she was off, faster than a leaf in the wind. Like a good shadow Lily followed closely.

  Boo swayed softly—head back, eyes closed, arms up like a tree—to beat the of Collection D’Arnell Andrea’s “L’Aulne et la Morte”. The amiable nightshade turned. “Tess!” A gentle hug and a kiss. Smiling soft brown eyes.

  Lily liked him right off. He felt right. And looked good.

  “This is, Lily.”

  Boo’s eyes considered her. “Hi.” Bright. Friendly. Like Tess’.

  “Hi,” Lily said through a nervous smile.

  And so, on smiles and flowing music, the night, and the imaginative expressions of Halloween and tragedy—nearly half of them anyway—and Lily danced.

  ~*~

  Coffee and day-old bagels in a clean kitchen. Oh there were cobwebs high in the corners of the small living room and the sofa was borderline-ratty, but the kitchen held no collection of old fast-food wrappers and waiting for the trashbag clutter. Who cared if the kitchen table was a wobbly-legged card-table, the chair (needing a coat of
paint and missing 2 back spokes) was solid. And Tess looked cozy & normal in her sky-blue nightgown of flannel. Lily sat with her hands cradling the warm mug of coffee, vaporizing her ghosts, and Tess’ calico kitten, Pyewacket, stroking her bare ankles.

  5 days out of prison and in HEAVEN. The dream life. Not some shimmering reflection of some otherwhere, not some visionary impression glimpsed on the ceiling above her bed back in Endless Domination, but here—Hands-on real and rightNOW. Beauty could come from pain. They WEREN’T “socially inept”! They WEREN’T “oblivion seekers”! They WEREN’T lost in some abysmal evening enduring only the reckless soliloquies of the fallen! They weren’t! Brightness found ways through the cracks. Dreams could come true.

  2 days later Lily had a sales job in a Goth boutique run by Tess’ friend and had moved into Tess’ spare bedroom. She’d purchased a boombox with a CD player and 2 used CDs (the 1st 2 volumes of Heavenly Voices, which she’d left behind when she fled her parent’s prison), red pushpins for the rip-repaired-with-tape poster of Black Tape For A Blue Girl she’d come upon, an inexpensive mattress, make-up, and few appropriate clothes, and a ring with an imitation yellow topaz—her birthstone. She felt the ring was fitting, for she had been reborn. Her share of the rent paid and some food in the fridge, $73 & 83 cents left till payday, and in 3 days SYS would be at Café Morphine. Bright, revitalized, Lily was going to see Cassilda & SYS perform.

  “Everything’s so purrrrrfect,” she whispered to Pyewacket. Lily was certain she’d be in a band by next week and in love by the end of the month—perhaps with soft-eyed, Boo. When she closed her brown eyes she could see it all flickering on her lids like a silent movie.

  ~*~

  Tomorrow & tomorrow came and passed and the day drew near. Then it arrived and inched along slowly.

  Twilight—FINALLY! The excited bustle of preparations—“Everything must be right for, Cassilda.” Lily’s expectant thoughts reached out like the tendrils of an overgrown garden. She played her SYS tape; twice, then thrice. And again—Overjoyed, she reveled in it. The primitive simple pulse of the kettledrum, the repeated single note phraseology of the reverb-saturated distortions voiced by the guitars, the harsh, cyclical wavers of electronic fog summoned by the keys, and Cassilda’s apocryphal articulation of sweeping poetry, rich in timbre—painfully bittersweet, nearly silent at times, then soul shattering, the death wail of 1000 vampires wasting in solar fire, SYS’ rigorous declaration was intensely alive, inexhaustible. Disorienting, it was a complex amalgam of pagan delirium and death. Lily sang along in a light, aching voice. Tonight she would whisper along as Cassilda enabled the holy texts. Tonight there would be a royal ball in the court. Lily had her ticket, her black-lacquered nail traced the bold red stamp of the Yellow Sign below the letters SYS. She looked at it while she sang harmony with Cassilda’s, for the moment fragile, soprano.

  “Songs that the faithful shall sing,

  Where flap the tatters of the King . . .

  The coiled thread unravels—”

  Tess, announced by her biting clove tobacco, was in the doorway.

  Lily ran and hugged her. “LIVE! I’m going to see them live!”

  Tess faked a frown and corrected. “We.”

  Lily squeezed harder and kissed Tess’ cheek with full round lips like ripe fruit. “We,” she gladly agreed.

  ~*~

  The dark club, painted in shades of gray and flatblack to resemble the exposed stone bowels of some sorcerer’s castle, was nearly as black as it had ever been. No candles on the tables, no neon lights. No flash or flicker or strobe. On the stage dozens of thick black candles burned in 2 enormous iron candelabras. There sat the uneven wall of black amps and a blood-colored gong with the Yellow Sign emblazoned upon it and a monstrous kettledrum. 2 electric guitars. A five-string bass. 2 electronic keyboards supported by thin black metal legs. A small, straight-outta “The Phantom of the Opera” pipe organ. But no microphones.

  Lily panicked. Muscles tight, goosebumps beneath her apparel. How would she hear Cassilda? Then it struck her—like being told your dog had died—Was Cassilda sick? All this great luck soiled by some bug, or accident—It wasn’t fair! Some other setback she’d handle—willingly accept if she had to, but, Please!—Not this.

  No. She’ll have a wireless mic. That’s it! THANK GOD.

  The DJ played a brooding organ piece by Paul Schütze. The introductory organ invocation faded and a semi-demonic “Call From the Grave” from Aghast rose to fill the void. Lily absorbed Nebel’s witchly utterance. She wasn’t Cassilda but she was good.

  Lily, hand clasped tightly to Tess’, fidgeted. Her sharp, uneven bangs played across her eyes like wind-whipped black branches cutting the shining face of the moon. The wait was agonizing. She could barely breathe.

  Molochai, the DJ, sensed it—he saw it in every thirsty eye. Let them wait. Make them want, NO, need, the salvation of SYS’ funeral mass. And for 9 minutes and 7 seconds he nudged the throng’s desire with Current 93’s impassioned requiem “All The Stars Are Dead Now”. David Tibet’s ecclesiastical delivery rang through the club—“Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!!!”

  With a vulture’s eyes Molochai scanned the assembled faces. “Corpsepaint. How fitting”. They were consecrated. Cassilda would be pleased.

  Lily didn’t want to hear David Tibet sing about the Last Days, she wanted to hear something gentle & bittersweet. Something like This Ascension or Bleeding Like Mine or Love Is Colder Than Death or The Moon 7 Times—How she adored Lynn Canfield’s kindly voice. That was it. She was going to ask the DJ to play “Her House” or better still, “This and That”. She wanted cascading whispers not screams—Something they could dance to.

  Lily wore a long dress of the palest yellow; it was almost a robe. She wanted Cassilda to see her, to think she was beautiful, and worthy.

  Tess, in layers of softly fluttering black lace, brought Lily ice-cold vodka in a glass with a fluted stem. Boo was off to score some grass for the bittersweet after. The girls smiled at each other and giggled quietly. Moonlight Cinderellas dreaming, they were at the ball. This was their night.

  No music played. Molochai wasn’t in the booth. In the radiance of darkness, between impurity & the divine, the crowd with their medicines & powders waited. SYS would be on soon—They knew it! In another minute. Perhaps 2, or even 5, but soon.

  A tall man in an ivory-yellow cassock with the Yellow Sign stitched upon his breast stepped on to the stage. Many marveled at the line of buttons running gaunt-neck to booted-ankle, they appeared to be fragments of realbone. His head & face completely shaved his ghost-colored skin mirrored a bleached skull. If any countenance could be said to be deathly his would most certainly banish the consideration of any other. He did not look at the wanting creatures.

  Rushes of whispered speculation arose. Was this Baron Uoht? Could he be the one called only, Thale? Maybe he was The Stranger, or Yhtill, or the one said to be unnamable? Like the members of the thoroughly secretive avant-parodist band, the Residents, the identities of SYS were mystery-shrouded unknowns.

  There were 6 in the band; 5 men (by their habiliment and seemingly cenobitic demeanor they might have been clones or identically-outfitted quintuplets) & Cassilda. They had names, but offstage NEVER spoke—NO interviews, NO chats with fans after shows. NO photographs. NO proper recordings, only hand-labeled bootleg cassettes which bore no signs of their origin. The band NEVER dallied with groupies or carried an entourage or drank or ate or were seen before or after shows. They simply came and went like an illusionist’s enigmatic apparitions. The lives & times of the Legendary Pink Dots were as precisely documented as the Beatles in comparison.

  Without so much as a nod or a cough or the bat of an eye Cassilda’s bandmate opened a bible black tome. He closed his eyes as if to concentrate or pray before speaking. “She, our radiant sister, full with the wisdom of Our Father—the true and only God—has written the ‘Inevir Decrees’ in the Vèniavd.”

  Another band mem
ber, a doppelganger of the 1st, appeared and struck the gong with a long bone.

  Again the 1st spoke,

  “‘On that perfect and holy day,

  when falls the Night of All Nights,

  when men must whisper,

  Goodbye, Day—

  He, Our Father,

  shall stand in the lush garden with his desires

  and overwhelm.

  His judgment shall be delivered!

  This is the law.’”

  On, his slow, chilling monotone reverberated. Passage after passage underpinned by pressurized silence.

  Was there any member of the conclave unaffected by the truth of his dramatic recitation? Each, blood-drinker and beautiful nightshade alike, stood statuary still, as if weathered monuments in a garden of bereavement. It seemed Tibet’s doomsaying voice —“Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! . . .”— had, like the skeletal finger of the Reaper, marked each as it moved through the shadows.

  THEN, without the aid of stage-tricks, concealing fogs, or dimmed lights, the remaining members of the band were suddenly on the stage, instruments in hand.

  THE ILL DRONE OF WHITENOISE UNDER NAPALM-RIFFERY/joined by/THE TOLLING THUNDER OF THE KETTLEDRUM—A HEARTBEAT. HUGE. AS EVEN AS MACHINERY./then—instantly/THE EXPLODING-MAGNUM-IN-YOUR-FACE OF A JACKBOOT BASSLINE/and/THE RAZOR-BLIGHT OF A BLEAT-OF-PAIN-GUITAR LEAD SLASHING—

  Cassilda stood there in a billowing yellow robe, tattered at the hem and sleeves like rags weathered for 100 years. Cold as any mummy or vampire, the fierce queen, her silver-shod staff of power held in her right hand, surveyed—encompassed—the flamboyant assemblage. Above the dissecting table of aural hate, hard as a raging cock, the demon queen roared.