A Season In Carcosa

by Sr. (Editor) Joseph S. Pulver

  But all was not blissful. In my illness, the edges of my vision began to waver as though reality itself were becoming undone. I tried to speak but my tongue had swollen, immobilized by the mask I was forced to wear. The man in yellow and his masked bride spun and spun, and as they approached Henri the moonlight bathing them grew so bright a hairline crack that ran along the length of Elyse’s porcelain mask was revealed to me. It seemed to stretch further the closer they danced to the triptych of windows, the blinding moonlight reflected from the great lake bathing them in light; light that could have come from no place in all of France but instead from some distant land that only then did I recognize as lost Carcosa.

  The swell of music ended in the fading light of the Paris morning, and there was nothing but utter silence, the entire audience trying to grasp what it had just witnessed. I knew I certainly was. Then, the uproarious applause began. A standing ovation that continued for the better part of ten minutes while Henri sat there, visibly drained and quite possibly unable to stand, nor do anything more without risk of collapse. During this time I did not celebrate, for my eyes went where no others did. To the front of the room, and to the seat there that remained unoccupied during Henri’s greatest triumph.

  I found Henri the next day in the flat he and his sister shared. The morning had been spent listening to the stories of his musical prowess that were sweeping the campus, but I was more concerned with what had vanished than what had suddenly appeared. And yet, when I found Henri, lying in repose and staring at the Seine coursing outside his window, I could not bring myself to accuse him of anything. The flat was in a state of chaos, and I asked when Elyse had last been there.

  “It seems like forever since she’s been gone.”

  “Where is she?” I asked, though I was certain I did not truly care to know. Fortunately, he spared me by changing the subject.

  “What did you think of the concert?”

  I should have lied – under any other circumstance I would have lied – but his face was such a shadow of what it once was, his eyes so worn from all he had been through, that I could no longer hide behind my jealousy of his talent. I admitted it was unforgettable, that I had not ceased thinking about it since I heard it. To this, he dryly laughed.

  “The price to write that was high, so very high. And now that I am here before you I wonder if it was really worth it. The others, do you think they’ll remember what I’ve done?”

  “I think if all of Paris isn’t speaking of it yet, it’s only because the day is still young.”

  “Good, good,” he said, and closed his eyes for a moment. They had sunken so low, two dark orbs in jaundiced flesh. He almost looked as though he were wearing a mask, and I prayed he would not remove it. When those eyes opened again, they looked up at me, but I am not foolish enough to think it was me they were seeing.

  “Please, Valise, I need to rest now. Tomorrow there is much to do. Will you grant me my peace?”

  “Of course,” I said, and quietly let myself out as he stared once again out across the Seine. I did not travel far before my regret over Elyse returned, but at no time did I turn around or stop hurrying away. There are some topics, like places, that are best left unvisited.

  Movie Night at Phil's

  By Don Webb

  About two years after, in fact twenty-three months after the event, Phillip Saxon realized that he owed what was left of his sanity to BetaMax. When this silly thought flicked through his head he laughed for the first time since his stay at the hospital. News was even carried to Dr. Menschel that he might be getting better.

  When Phil had a life, he had been a programmer and technical writer. He had the usual desirable furnishings of a life for a man of his education and intelligence. His wife Jean carried her stunning looks into her forties, even if her red hair relied on Loreal®. His red headed daughter Susan enjoyed her second year at community college, and would have transferred to the University of Texas next year. As far as Phil knew his ginger-haired son Travis made the honor roll and lettered in track. Even his golden retriever Hawn was admired for her Frisbee catching ability. Their two-story brick façade home had a lovely xeriscaped garden, and all three family vehicles were in good shape. Life was good.

  When Phil had gradated Rice University, he had only one regret. There had not been enough film classes to minor in film. Early on Phil worked with the best software for films. If you’ve done any editing on a professional level, you’ve used some of Phil’s products. The guy loved movies. Foreign films, classics, noir, Westerns, Bollywood, grade Z horror – he had a place in his heart for all of it. Only one thing drove Jean crazy. Phil was a little OCD. When he got on a “kick,” watch out. Phil was always on a kick. One month it had been Luis Buñuel. Jean had been horrified by the eyeball-slicing scene in Un Chein Andalou on day one, and dismayed by the confused eroticism of Cet obscure objet du désir on the last day. One month it had been Godzilla films; did anyone really need to know that there were almost thirty? Jean and her children lost Phil as father and husband for two hours or more a night. But he was a kind man, a hard worker, and sometimes the movies could be fun. Phil had friends and they were all movie buffs as well. They admired his home theater. They drank his beer and ate his popcorn, and often thought to bring their own to share. Four or five nights a week, Phil watched movies. Sometimes he watched them by himself, blogging into the night.

  Christmas, Father’s Day, his birthdays were easy. Books on films, posters, or memorabilia. It was all good. Then Jean saw 666 Films to Scare you to Death on Amazon. Although she dreaded that he might obsess on all of the films, she knew he tended to stick with directors or themes. It seemed to be a good peace of mom-engineering. She thought it would save her son.

  Jean was a Texas mom of three generations of Texas moms. Worse still she was a Dallas Metroplex stay-at-home, big hair SUV Mom. This came with rules: Don’t Disturb The Breadwinner. Secret Keeping Is Good. Phil and Travis hadn’t really talked to each other since Travis played football at Sam Houston Middle School. Phil hadn’t been a jock, he hadn’t related to his son in scouts – he just did his best by having Jean buy the boy expensive gifts. God knew he hadn’t any expensive stuff growing up in Doublesign, Texas.

  Phil thought Travis was still in scouts, Travis thought Phil was a dickweed. Travis had been suspended twice this year from Crocket High (Go Coogs!). Once for “suspicion” of smoking pot, once for being in a fight with a Mexican boy that had “mean mugged” him. Posters for Naziesque bands covered his room, but also Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers and the Saw franchise. Jean thought that if her boys started watching scary movies together, the mysterious force of male bonding would take over and Phil would never need to know his boy was not heading to graduation.

  At first it was failure. Phil was always very historical in his watching. “Did you know the first horror film was shot in 1896? It ran for two minutes.” Breakfast conversation with Phil was seldom interesting. Jean hinted that more recent films might be something he would share with the boy. So there was a month of Italian giallos. Phil didn’t gain any points by trying to explain why the word for “yellow” in Italian stood for horror cum sex. But Travis had liked the cruelty and the outrageous sex-and-death scenes, until he figured out the plot keys. “Why is the killer always some that wears black gloves? Why don’t the police just search their houses and arrest anyone with black gloves?” Vampire movies didn’t work. “Vampires are for fags.” But an unexpected sub-sub genre really appealed to Travis – the Roger Corman Poe movies. There were 8 of them: House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The King In Yellow (1966). Let’s compare-and-contrast. All of the movies start Vincent Price, except for Premature Burial, which starred Ray Milland. Most were filmed in the US except the last three, which were shot in the UK. But what most often brings smiles to English teachers is that
two of the films aren’t “really” by Poe at all. The Haunted Palace (despite it’s title from Roderick Usher’s poem) is a good adaptation by the great Charles Beaumont of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and the last of the series Edgar Allen Poe’s The King In Yellow was James Blish’s adaptation of an obscure French play Le roi jaune which may have been written (according to 666) by Lautremont, a generally creepy French writer born in Uruguay.

  Travis loved Price’s portrayals of despairing nihilistic intellectual sadists. Everything he saw he loved. Roderick Usher’s domination of his sister touched some long held fantasies. Travis came on to Susan one night and even tried to capture her in her room. A sisterly knee to the groin took care of his advances. Thank god Phil never heard about it. Jean convinced Susan that dad would not be able to handle it.

  After The Pit and the Pendulum Travis and Cormac Jones, another “Aryan Youth” kid, had held down a black girl and made slow arcing swipes at her face with a Bowie knife. The tip got closer and closer, but never connected. The principal sent him hose for three days. But Jean did see how much Travis loved watch the movies with his dad, and in Phil’s fantasy world Travis and he were bonding over the lush Technicolor sets and the costumes. Jean told her friends at the book club that her boys were finally friends. Actually a stranger thing had occurred each now saw a refection of himself in the other, but as St. Paul would have it “Through a glass darkly.” Phil thought that Travis might be inspired to that the RTF major at the University of Texas. Phil could already see his son’s name scrolling by in end credits. And Travis decided that his Dad was “really into it.” “It” variously being DBSM, Satanism, or something vaguer and more evil fro the lack of a name. This folly was best-represented one night when Travis asked his dad if he owned a riding crop. Phil answered in the affirmative thinking that Travis was getting together a list of props for a short movie, maybe some period piece on YouTube. Travis heard that mom’s butt was made to grow rosy when the bitch stepped out of line.

  Some of Phil’s geeky programmer friends came to the screenings. Mike, Juan and Swen were totally despised by Travis. Juan for obvious reasons, since he had made the bad life choice of being born brown. Swen should be OK, but he seemed to demonstrate that even the best genes did not save you from being an absolute Tool. Travis felt a special disgust for Mike. For one thing he was loosing his thinning brown hair and he had watery brown eyes that looked the color of baby crap. For another Mike was a hoarder. Much attention has come to these nearly three million Americans who can’t throw anything, cluttering their houses with trash and junk and destroying their lives with the overflow of turbo-capitalism Mike actually stank. Mike’s “collection” of electronics equipment had long ago filled his shower and tub. He cleaned himself with baby Wipes. Every gadget of thirty years were piled around Mike’s domicile – floppy disks, laser disk players, hand-held diathermy machines, record polishers, modems, video games. His house was so full that only two chairs were clean – so Mike could only have one guest at time, not that he had any guests at all. Phil thought of Mike as a sort of reflection of himself, where he would be if he lost control of his movie madness. Travis fantasized about stealing from Mike’s house, but realized it would be too hard to shift through the junk.

  Jean had little imagination, so she didn’t see the signs of what she had started. For example after The Haunted Palace, which dealt with revivification, a neighbor’s calico cat had been gutted. Someone had placed Bootsy in a inverse pentagram made of salt and drain cleaner hoping to make it a sort of feline Lazarus. Jean discovered the corpse in their alley after her morning jog. She certainly suspected her son, there had been other animals’ deaths, but the crack-pot alchemy meant nothing to her. Just else something to hide in the garbage. Poor Bootsy!

  Getting the first seven films had been easy. Edgar Allen Poe’s King in Yellow seems to be the only AIP film not made into DVD. So Phil’s film festival lagged a few weeks. Let’s look at that entry in 666 Horror Films to Scare you to Death shall we?

  Edgar Allen Poe’s King in Yellow

  1966. UK dir Rodger Corman, scr James Blish, starring Vincent Price, Azalea Jones, Sophia Macintyre, David Weston

  The last entry in the Poe series was something of a failure. Originally shot at 126 minutes, the released version runs for 93 Minutes. The resulting film is actually so fragmented as to be literally incomprehensible. Blish was rumored to have over-sold himself as the adapter of the French play, and major plot devices were changed to reflect AIP’s desire for another Poe period piece. For example Le roi jaune is set on another world, but Corman had relocated the drama to 12th Century England. The play is an uneven blend of farce and tale-or-terror, like Corman’s masterpiece The Masque of the Red Death the final moments of surprise take place in a masquerade. In a moment of poor casting Corman allowed Price to play three roles – an acting task that a Peter Sellers may be up for, but beyond the bombastic Price. Price plays the elderly King as well as two younger men. One of these is the Stranger; a figure (who like Death in The Masque of the Red Death) seems to obey different rules of causality than the human players. The Stranger appears in the masquerade unmasked , which for some reason horrifies the revelers. The King had chosen to announce the crucial issues of succession during the masquerade. The partygoers assume that the Stranger, because of his eerie similarity to the aged King, is some long-lost heir. The Stranger however is on a Cosmic mission related to a mysterious sigil, the Yellow Sign. The courtiers have their own plots and intrigues, which were meant to be enacted with poison and sedcuction during the masquerade. Into this heady stew Corman placed Price playing a third character the Phantom of Truth, who stands out among the richly colored players by his simple white tunic. The Phantom seems to had a sheaf of parchment to some of the party goers, who become so aware of the monstrous secrets they have always held about themselves rush into small rooms (Suicide Chambers) and kill themselves. The audience never sees what is written on the parchment save that the character is drawn in a yellow, which may be the same sigil the Stranger seeks (or owns) Azalea Jones and Sophie Macintyre play the lesbian twin sisters Camilla and Cassilda. Camilla is actively plotting to place David Weston’s Aldones on the throne. Weston’s is largely reprising his role in The Masque of the Red Death – the voice of the common man that acts as moral compass in most of Corman’s films. Cassilda is a slightly deranged woman, who has read the dreaded parchment but has somehow been strong enough to deal with her own secrets. Corman directed her as sort of Ophelia – alternately lewd and mad, devastated and ecstatic. After seeing the film in its full version, Corman cut 33 minutes of film making this film even less accessible than his badly edited The Terror. Because of the deaths during the filming, legends persist that this is a “cursed” film, but the amazing special effect by which Corman caused three Vincent Prices to be on screen has attracted many cameramen and many theories over the years. The cast had its share of tragedy, during the shooting Sophie Macintyre (Cassillda) did kill herself in one of the Suicide Chambers – with the grim result that the cast thought she was clowning and even applauded as her blood poured out from the chamber door. The location had been plagued by major power outages, with the set going black almost everyday. Price had a minor breakdown after the film and spent six months in reclusion on the Rivera. The resulting mess of a film had a brief cult following at LSD laced Happenings during the Summer of Love. Several stories of suicides induced by the film attached themselves to it, much like the folklore of the Hungarian Suicide song. “Gloomy Sunday.” Opinion is divided if such stories were started by Corman to create interest in the failed project (ala William Castle) or the whole business was just part of the general Sixties Weirdness. The film ended what had been a profitable series for AIP, and marked a decline in Price’s acting abilities. The only cast member to give interviews about the film was Azalea Jones who laid the blame equally on Blish’s bad French and AIP cost-cutting decisions. With a certain poetic weirdness Azalea Jones was
lost in a private plane near Bermuda, making her name better known to fans of the Bermuda Triangle than a Sixties gothic actress.

  It is the age of the Internet. It took a month, but Phil found a copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s The King In Yellow on eBay. It was not hidden in the secret Vatican library, locked away in an Ivy League’s library in a room of rare and forbidden tomes. It was selling for $118.00 plus Shipping and handling. The seller knowing how to work the crowd claimed that he had not watched the film and could not be responsible for people foolish enough to do so. That had to raise the price of the tape fifty bucks. He also said that it was the 126 minute uncut version. Yeah right. That was the rest of the price. Phil knew he was being fooled, but damnit he had to see the movie. He didn’t tell Jean of his expenditure.

  Travis was more excited than his dad. “Man! Truth that makes people hurt! That’s better than anything else. You can get over bruises and cuts but you can’t get over Truth.” Phil saw his son’s enthusiasm as being a sort of philosophical break-through. When Phil had been eighteen he had become interested in Truth. He swore off religion and went thought a month of telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth regardless of how much it hurt. The boy was a chip off the old block.

  Jean was giving up on Travis. He had been removed from regular school and was due to be enrolled in a Juvenile Justice program. This would be too much to hide form Phil. The kid would wear uniforms for Christ’s sake. Jean began to drink instead of going to her book club. Susan may have been assaulted about this time. She had approached her high school councilor with questions about rape and incest on behalf of a “friend.”