The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1

by Joseph S. Pulver

  ~*~

  He was half in his cups. What the hell was he doing here? This was a busy laboratorium. The Serbian himself was supervising here night and day, around the clock, pausing only to call all the men together for a big meal where Nobody Talked About Work. He couldn't be here. He had to get bright. He was...

  Oh, he was so sad since Martha. The work was all that kept him up and stargazing, since she was no longer going to come back up the front walk. He was here working. He'd just nodded off down in Control One, below the main room where the radio-men worked. He was still in the flicker-palace.

  Then he remembered what he was doing. What he'd dreamed. And it scared him clear-headed. Meade had dreamed of blood on the moon, but not... blood. Not exactly.

  ~*~

  Professor Meade wondered if any of the Germans, or the Russians, or any of those tiresome new “psycho-analysis” quacks had yet studied the effects of sitting in front of flickering lights for a long time. The wash of raw post-Impressionist light like wet paint, the thunderstorm of static and image from the long, tightly-packed wall of tele-visor screens, control meters, levers, and dials made the sanity ripple and the head begin to hurt. Should they care to chatter about “unconscious material” and “symptom formation”, a few hours staring at Tesla’s flashing wall should inspire a paper or two.

  Glancing at Stewart's weird old cahier again, he wondered if the Gallic prophets had been speaking in metaphor, when they described this “Yellow Stain” that Stewart and Adams swore was the harbinger of the true Anti-Christ. That made his tired, whiskey-fuzzed brain think of the other kind of flicker-palace, and that interesting film by the French where les frères Lumière made Jules Verne into a kind of puppet show, and stuck a rocket in the Moon's eye.

  Meade's brain raced on, webbing thought to thought as he woke all the way. No one had come and shook him. Two of the ten or so young assistants on duty that shift were watching the screens, talking to each other in low tones, doing homework and munching crackers.

  One of them was dipping the crackers in his coffee. The other was smoking a cigarette and remembering to tap his ashes in the ash tray (a rarity, amongst graduate students.) The blond one's name was Owen. Royal Navy ROTC or whatever they called it. Limey exchange-student in dress blues. The other wasn't even a proper assistant, just an observer. That great fat boy, who styled himself a Scientifiction writer. Mr. Fort. Still, he liked to get his hands dirty.

  It wouldn't do to sell Charles Fort short, their Esteemed Steamed Department Chairman would have said. The bellowing Brooklynite had been more than instrumental in addressing the House committee, and President William Jennings Bryan on the necessity of looking beyond the surly bonds of Earth, in an age when most politicians had barely gotten their heads around the wireless telegraph. But in that department, their young writer on his “ride-along” met and exceeded every expectation.

  ~*~

  “Stay, and let Salvation damn you,” Charles Fort addressed Congress, “Or straddle an aural beam and paddle from Rigel to Betelgeuse. We stand at the very entrance to the desert of space exploration, my fellow Americans, and God alone knows what the answer to anything is. But perhaps it is that the stars are very close indeed. Perhaps we will reach these new Promised Lands.”

  ~*~

  In two weeks, the former garage bay of Miskatonic Observatory had become Control, and the Radio Room, the Tracking Studio with its thick asbestos ice-house walls to damp extraneous sound, and every such office and intercollated facility whose plate-glass door-fronts were continually being turpentined and repainted.

  Chaos Without mirrored Within. No one could gag the Free Press. Every Hollow-Earther, Flat-Earther and crackpot of all denominations that New England could cough from every termite-ridden edifice howled as one at the bill for this new venture, but Miskatonic was Providence. The Marsh family fortune could soak three such 'Spacing-Programmes', perhaps one day even with a monkey or a person in the craft if the tests went well.

  They thought, Meade appended sourly. Perhaps pigs would whistle. Perhaps the stars weren't meant to be seen, and whatever up there that wanted to see us could stay the hell away.

  Flickerrrrr... Day in, night out... Like he couldn't blink any more, and he'd go bug-eyed, there in the half-light, and spastic. Merciful Fate, what this room did to a fellow. No wonder Stewart geeked out in here so much, like some old wet-brain at the carney biting the heads off anything that got close in the dark.

  Meade made a scoffing noise in his throat. They weren't so different. He was just a theorist; Stewart was a...Literalist, that was all. Out of classroom reflex, Meade covered his mouth with the back of his hand to squelch the unprofessorial snort.

  Where the hell was Stewart, anyway? He was here. He'd been in hours ago, all aflutter and atwitter about something. Impatiently, Meade flipped pages in the cahier. “This,” SIGNUM CROCUS, the page read in weird, spiky calligraphy that almost looked backward.

  Below it was a pen-and-ink line drawing that almost resembled a block print or a woodcut. The lines and angles kept changing as he squinted. A hawk, piercing a rabbit's skull with one talon. A scorpion poised to strike. A crooked cross, rather like the Sanskrit symbol of the same type but with the points facing the other way... A death's head in a perfect circle.

  A death's head in a perfect circle. That part reminded him of something else. Something so familiar Meade's tired brain kept shooting right past it. He remembered the day Stewart showed it to him...

  ~*~

  Stewart was staring at him with those hungry green eyes that suddenly went dark. “I didn't expect you to understand. They'll peg me for an alarmist, and I don't have tenure yet. Got to keep this to myself, but...”

  A ghost of the twinkle returned to his eyes, but it was a sad and terrifying thing now, a thing that sat and watched in the darkness as trains wrecked and stars fell, and whispered I Told You So. “This new millennium we're sweeping onto the threshing-floor just now may not be all that bright, old friend, but it's sure as H--- going to be colorful...”

  ~*~

  “You know,” Wilfred Owen looked up from Monitor Three, “That Professor Stewart says the heathens believed you shouldn't go messing about wi'the Moon. Said there was a great worm, the Ourobouros, curled up within it, and in the Last Times...”

  Across the room, the great closh and clang and clack of the typer stopped in mid-report. The hammy hands sounded restless, drumming on the desk wanting more to do. “Stewart,” came that gruff Teddy Roosevelt voice, “That g--d---- Diabolist. Screen door on a submersible around here, if you ask me. Teats on a boar hog. Send him back to Greenwich Village with Blavatsky’s followers and the rest of the kookaboos and kadodies, where he belongs...”

  Owen snorted. “That's you, then, Charlie. Just go on and float through life, mate. Oh... look, This Just In.”

  He rolled his chair several workstations over. In its glass bubble, Wireless A was going off. The big one. The transmission would repeat. 'A' was the whole module (as he'd learned from his senior fellows to call the glass rocketship, the Starbird.) 'A' meant the little tin sailors on their Pequod were beginning to stir all the way.

  The little matroshky, the copper-jacketed living ikebana, were beginning to disentangle. The Mind of the Starbird was beginning to separate into the Platonic clay, the component parts, the tiny eyes of a glass god two storeys tall…

  Right on schedule. Wireless Telegraph Operator Wilfred Owen, late of His Majesty's Navy, put the cans on his ears and picked up his pencil again. When he did, his eyes lit like a little boy's at Christmastime, the way everyone's eyes did on the Sherlock Expedition when they thought no one else was looking.

  Those individual sets of eyes sometimes lit with wonder, and sometimes Fear. They were men of Science, and though they didn't talk about it at faculty teas or when the drum was being beaten for a new wing or piece of expensive equipment, most of them but Stewart were staunch Atheists. The pummeling they were taking in the media for messing about
in God's natural order was secondary to their own fear of the unknown, which they all brushed away into provable things, under the rug and gone.

  Out of sight wasn't out of mind, though. In all their dreams, as the Moon landing drew near, Terror and Doubt stirred and walked with no deactivation-codes, like Gog and Magog in the Bible. The New Millennium drew near, and no one truly knew if St. John of Patmos was right or not, if the End of Days was just something folks believed... or something that would prove itself. There was a prophecy in every age, yet humankind endured.

  But not even Miskatonic had prophesied this. Not as a unified body. It bothered him that that warmly-polite and affable Army Captain Castaigne was now more often than not replaced by several snarking Annapolis lieutenants in dress blues who liked to stare at every monitor over everyone's shoulder.

  More and more of that crowd wore side-arms, and quite a few of them talked behind their oddly soft hands about something called “The Imperial Dynasty”. The professor was almost sure they were making fun of Bryan's presidency, but he didn't like it. It sounded foreign. Too foreign, by half...

  ~*~

  Moon Voyage: The Sherlock Expedition. Day 54.

  Deniston, Michael Terrence, Astronomy Chair, Miskatonic University

  We have nearly broken our backs launching Niko's “borrowed minds” to Heaven on a tinny wireless-telegraph string of maths roughly the tensile strength of a single strand of baling-wire. With them travel our deepest hopes and lurking fears; me in full accord with those expressed by Doctor Kostova’s brace of applied sciences and Professor Ulysses Adams’ unholy, yet unquestionable, black philosophies.

  Ishmael. It all goes back to Ishmael-Prime. That d----- dog that refuses to bark now. The one we sent up first.

  D--- Adams' uncompromising drives and their overpowering logic. Logic? Fact—a flux of foreign data in the sky. Fact—invitations to new dimensions. D---ing, d---able fact. All in proportion, all intermixed, and examination and reexamination could not crack his theoretical. Adams and his often overly-dramatic attitudes and arrow to the heart, Truth. D--- him.

  Things are tense. All twenty of my graduate students working this project sleep in dormitories here in the building. When the Starbird threw off her secondary lifter-rockets and continued to ascend, you could have heard the cheering in Kingsport! Anna Moreno, one of my top researchers, is about three months with child, and she wept outright. Truth be told, so did half the men, including me!

  But those moments pale in comparison to the uncertainty ahead. The train of One D----ed Thing After Another has been nearly intolerable for any man of Science. Even the more trustworthy of little mechanical IRA-probes like to go on holiday when they like and spontaneously return to life, and a thousand more issues, this day. But I am made of sterner stuff than they.

  I am. Try to be...

  Until lately. It is the discoloration in my telescope. That which is no discoloration in the lens, but a discoloration of note in the lowest region of Mare Nubium. Once more, this night, it has changed shape. The students have stoked the boiler below stairs, and the radiators now clank and hiss, but there is still a chill I cannot shake.

  The discoloration has changed shape, and it is now changing location as well. In plain fact, it is moving.

  Ishmael-Prime, the rocket-probe that remained but landed too far away, cheeps and charts out its movements in strings of Morse that the tiny tele-visorscreen furthest to my right charts in turn in harsh, bright color out of Space. In the past week, that anomaly has grown twenty-seven percent. I have no idea how to even write of the dark lines moving across Luna's face, within the bounds of the yellowish 'sea'.

  I feel like a Neanderthal-man, watching a comet tumble down the sky, wishing he knew where to point the nameless fear of... Phenomenon, which we all feel, know, to be fraught with both blasphemies and dire revelations, moving left to right, from the blackest deeps of the dark side, and ever downward in my mad imaginings of yet-to-be...

  East! From Mare Imbrium in a southeasterly direction past Mare Insularum to the lunar escarpment, Rupes Altai!! ! Headed toward the Crater Piccolomini...

  ~*~

  The Phenomenon that Professor Ulysses Adams gazes upon, a Titan who bestrides the room like Charles Fort in a better-cut suit, like Santa Claus and Zeus rolled into one bespectacled juggernaut. Hands bristled into fists, Adams cocks his head and loudly holds forth,

  “And the stars of Heaven fell unto the earth, and the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and every bondman, and every freeman, hid themselves in the dens and rocks of the mountains; and said, Fall on us, and hide us from the Wrath which has come.”

  His audience, R. Edward Stewart, looking like a bald-headed Lucifer in a dirty, yellowing white shirt with no cufflinks knows the passage. Stewart is only slightly moved by Adams' oratory. “Just look at this, too. ‘When the configuration-revealed unbinds the seals on the New Day, with the coming whorl of Black Dawn, as it embraces The Imperium That Could Not Be Seen, the stars serving the desires of Taurus, carrying Doom’s sign, will sing! And the face of the Moon will be made over.”

  And the fear is in his eyes, too. The fear that infests their hearts.

  ~*~

  Vice-Chancellor Nathan Maddock Talbot was also titular Assistant Chair of the Sherlock Expedition, and Dr. Marcus' hatchet-man when he couldn't be found (which was about one-third of any given day). He now stood in the doorway, tapping his foot, looking as impatient as only a tenured polymath genius can look when the tributary begins to appear unsanitary and there is no paddle to be found.

  “Well?”

  There came a weary sigh. “A well is a deep subject, Doctor Talbot, and this one has only been plumbed. There's little doubt regarding this, now.”

  Barely glancing up from his journal, Professor Deniston wearily set his pencil-stub down and turned to face his ivy-covered superior, trying to wish he cared anything about the calendar of their thousand petty ideological tempests at the moment. Talbot was Professor of Chemistry, and Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Yet Deniston marveled for the thousandth time that Talbot could dress so much like a hobo at work and get away with it, but said nothing. That, too, barely registered on his own inner dials as anything but a split-second blip. Not tonight. Not now.

  Instead, Professor Deniston handed his immediate boss the sheet of numbers on graph-paper that trembled in his good left hand. The Doctor apparently read very quickly. Glancing down his patrician nose through filthy spectacles, he began nodding in agreement.

  “Little doubt indeed, old friend.” He was starting to look as spooked as Deniston felt, the junior Professor noted with renewed wonderment. “Whatever this phenomenon is, it is spreading. When The Owl--”

  Deniston spared him a withering look. “The Starbird.” Doctor Talbot went on impatiently, restless in his cheap, rumpled suit and brown waistcoat tinged the color of pipe ash, “Though the great glass firecracker more surely resembles an owl the more I look at it, with that beak at the front and the two round windows, the Starbird is going to make land-fall on the Moon in precisely twenty-two days. Then non-stationary Intelligent Robot Automata One through Seven begin the actual surface exploration. As we've been over. Do we...”

  Talbot fidgeted with his wide black tie. “I'm worried. No matter who's in charge, do we know how much danger this voyage is in? Can we run numbers for that?”

  Both men looked at the televisor at the same time. Deniston looked in the direction of the firmament. “There will be water if God wills it,” he replied, in a voice that managed to sound calm.

  Talbot smiled indulgently, sliding his hand into the deep flap pocket of his suit jacket. His lucky charm was still there. He wasn’t sure it held any real occult power, or even where the writing on it came from, but the chunk of platinum with the danci
ng mermaid-critters on it, the one he, as a boy, found near Owls Head Lighthouse in Maine, was indeed good-fortune bearing.

  It felt like it was getting hotter, somehow. He hadn't noticed it until a few days immediately prior. Like his old lucky piece from parts unknown was generating its own specific heat...Warning him of something, in a language he had no gift to read...

  “Meade says it's some kind of a gate. That when the cameras employed certain polarized filters, the way he programmed them to by accident, he could see some sort of monolithic shape that doesn't appear to be stationary. Could, before Ishmael-Prime went dark. Said it gave him odd megrims, and dreams. Not that we haven't all had the dreams.”

  The two professors shared a look. “Gates are, have to be, fixed structures. Aren’t they?” Talbot asked out of nowhere. Deniston startled involuntarily, but spoke into the sudden jump.

  “Everyone says so, but why can’t the whole of it be a portal?”At that, he reached for his own pipe. “Or a base-camp?”

  Talbot sighed again, less heavily this time. “Meade’s theory, if we can even call it that, it seems to me, is based in madness. He’d been drinking and had a vision. Bah. Hardly scientific. We need to gather facts. Our findings demand hard data.”

  Deniston nodded. “I agree, but—”

  Dr. Talbot was utterly adamant in his uncertainty. “Let’s wait until we’re there, and see.”

  ~*~

  “PIP-SEVEN. REPORTING. PIP-SEVEN REPORTING. STOP. ARRIVED ON MOON SURFACE. ARRIVED ON MOON SURFACE. STOP. ALL EQUIPMENT FUNCTIONING PROPERLY.”

  Michael Deniston almost smiled. Their luck, and science, was holding. “Do you have any readings on atmospheric conditions, Pip-7?” he asked, releasing the contact button on the audio-phone just in front of him. “There is no trace of an atmosphere, or any of its elements, here. This phenomenon cannot be the result of atmospheric conditions.”