The tape arrived.
The mysterious seller Typhonian Entertainment had also failed to mention it was Sony BetaMax. Phil still had a regular VCR, as well as both formats of laser disk players, and every other modern way to watch a film, but the failed format of the mid-seventies was the wrong size and encoding for any of his equipment. Phil had moved on to watching the Felleni oeuvre at this point, and Travis spent a lot of time hanging out with other pale white kids in front a certain convenience store. Phil mentioned his sadness to a slightly tipsy Jean, who reminded him that Mike Stavros had every electronic device know to man in his roach-filled house.
At first Mike was unhappy at the idea of part of his collection leaving his house, but when it became clear that Phil would bring his family over to Mike’s and thus expose his shameful secret, he dug the BetaMax machine out. He delivered on it on his lunch hour.
Jean, Susan and Travis were home. Travis demanded that they watch the movie RIGHT NOW. Jean had argued for waiting for Phil, but Travis punched Mike’s face and everyone saw the merit of his request. Jean sent Phil a text telling him to come home now, but because of the fickle nature of electronic communications he didn’t get the text for two hours. When he got the text he called his house. Jean, Susan and Travis didn’t answer their phones. Phil left work early, something he almost never did.
He saw Mike’s car in the driveway. Maybe they were arraigning a screening for him. He loved his family. When he walked in he heard voices from the movie room, the big den at the back of the house. This was Phil’s territory no one went there without him. He walked back expecting a yell of “Surprise!”
He heard Vincent Price exchanging lines with Vincent Price:
“The masque outlives the man, the masque outlives truth, the masque is in the reflections of the Water before it is made.”
As an older character he answered, “I know these things. I have spent millions of years forgetting them. I can’t forget them again and my daughters are no longer the masques for each other. Blood will stain the water, but it will turn yellow in the last spring and the poets will use it as ink.”
Phil rushed forward at this moment. He plunged into his media room. On the big flat screen Vincent Price was crying, Vincent Price was laughing fiendishly. Vincent Price was lying wounded with his face peeled off , and showing an emotion that Phil does not know and hasn’t been able to express or explain to Dr. Menschel in two years of therapy. One woman was holding her blood-spattered twin while as dawn broke over an expressionist castle. Another man stood by laughing quietly. It was Aldones playing a lyre. Then the power went out.
But he had seen by the light. Blood was pouring out of the closet and he would not see Susan. Travis was dressed in a bed sheet and had tried to peel away his face with a case cutter. He was saying something low and rapidly about truth. The sheet was red with his blood.
Jean was topless and holding a bottle of tequila uttering, “No Mask. No Mask! I have failed my husband.” Mike was simply staring at the screen, a big shiner forming over his right eye. Travis launched himself at Phil and slashed him in the dark, before passing out from blood loss. Phil thinks his last words were, “My father, my king, I love you!”
The power came back on; Mike stood up and looked at Phil. “Because I love you man.” He walked to his BeatMax machine and pulled the tape out and started shredding it. Phil started to stop him, and then realized that calling 911 was the correct response. Mike left the house telling Phil that he could keep the machine -- he wasn’t collecting anymore. A few minutes later he pulled his car in front of a speeding eighteen-wheeler. Susan had killed herself, but not before taking a sheet of computer paper and writing in yellow Sharpie® SUICIDE CHAMBER on it and taping it to the inside of the small closet just off of the home theater.. Travis died of shock later in the week. Jean later recovered in a peculiar way. She can remember everything up to age twenty-three when she met Phil. She had expressed no desire to see him again.
The ambulances and police came and there were investigations and more investigations, and no could prove Phil had done anything wrong. E-bay found out that Typhonian Entertainment had ended shop – apparently having only one transaction. Dr. Menschel contacted Carlton Press and made a case for removing the entry for Edgar Allen Poe’s The King in Yellow from 666 Films to Scare you to Death. An indie Texas film The Outsider’s Club featuring Sarah Postal took its place.
Phil was placed in the State Hospital in Austin Texas, and remains a few steps above catatonic and has only one irregularity as a patient.
He never goes to Movie Night.
(For Kim Newman & James Marrott)
MS Found in a Chicago Hotel Room
By Daniel Mills
A Confession
The establishment had no name. The night clerk made this clear to me.
It may have had once, he explained. Probably it did. But the signboard outside had long since faded, weathered by years of rain and winter. Any lettering had been erased completely, while the remaining paint was cracked and peeling, yellow with age.
A pale, sickly kind of color, he added. Like a wound gone bad.
Wounds were one subject of which the hotel clerk possessed an intimate knowledge. His left arm terminated in a stump at the elbow, the sleeve cut short to reveal a mass of scar tissue. The man was in his fifties, old enough to have fought in the war against the Confederacy.
I was, I admit, skeptical. While my work had taken me to New York on many occasions previously, I had never before heard of this strange establishment, unnamed and outwardly unremarkable save for the color of its signboard.
And you’re sure I’ll find… I trailed off meaningfully.
You trust old Everett, he said, winking. He chuckled, a horrible, scraping sound like wet stones on cobble. Ask for Camilla.
He went on to give directions. I was to leave the hotel and continue down Mulberry toward the old Five Points slum. But don’t go no farther than Canal Street, he warned. Instead, I was to take Canal over to the Bowery.
You’ll find the place a few blocks down, he said. Can’t miss it.
I can find my way, I’m sure.
I never doubted it, he said, grinning so his teeth showed, black gums and rot. And if you find yourself lost, you can always ask about that old yellow sign. Someone’s sure to know what you’re talking about.
I reached into my coat and plucked a dollar from my purse. I placed the coin face up on the counter. Columbia’s face glinted, gray and dull.
The clerk’s hand shot out to cover it.
There’s also the matter of the key. He eyed me expectantly, mouth drooping like a bloodhound’s, the lips vivid and red.
Key?
I’ll need your room key from you. Before you go.
But I may be late. Shouldn’t I take it with me?
Oh, I’ll be here. Don’t worry yourself about that. You just hurry on back.
~*~
It was a miserable night, sweltering, and the damp lay like a pall over that stinking corpse of a city. Within minutes, it had seeped through my shirt and coat, soaking me to my under-things. Sweat stood like fever on the faces of the men who hurried past, attired in brown coats and bowlers, their hands in their pockets.
Women watched from second-floor windows, little more than silhouettes, while children roamed the street below: knobby limbs, tattered garments. They traveled in packs, mostly, keeping to the dark between streetlamps, visible only in moments, like moths glimpsed beyond the circle of firelight.
Several blocks down Mulberry, I entered an unfamiliar quarter. Here refinery furnaces burned through the night, painting the stars into obscurity. The air was fetid: I breathed in smoke and breathed out ash. Darkness whirled in points from my lips, forming clouds, like fragments of the need that lived inside of me, which drove me into the night as surely as the winds that swept down to the East River.
I followed the clerk’s directions to the letter. At Canal Street, I turned east toward the Bowery. Once t
here, I traveled south for several blocks, doubling back when I realized I had gone too far. The yellow sign proved elusive. Can’t miss it, the clerk had said, but I wandered the same stretch of the Bowery for the better part of an hour until at last the heat pressed hard upon me and I had to sit down.
In the distance, I heard the moan of the ferry, the layered din from the music halls. Songs overlapped, merging one with another, while voices issued from the tenement behind me, a babble of conversations carried on in Irish, Spanish, Italian. I closed my eyes and lowered my face into my hands.
Good evening, a voice said. Are you alright?
I lifted my head, surprised to find myself confronted by a young man of twenty or twenty-one. He was handsome, in apparent good health, and his clothes were well-made. Under one arm, he carried a slim valise, three feet by two but little thicker than a cigar case. He smiled broadly, his lips curling to meet his moustache.
Thank you, I said. I’m—quite well.
Rising, I offered my hand, giving a false name as I did so. He introduced himself as Robert and folded his hand around mine. He squeezed, strong but gentle, his skin cool and dry despite the heat of the evening.
And now, my good fellow, you look rather the lost sheep. Might I be of some assistance?
I looked him over again, taking in the fine clothes, the thin case. For a moment, I half-fancied him for the religious sort, one of those well-meaning young men who would carry bibles into the depths of Tartarus itself as long as he could return home to his wife and townhouse with everything in its place. But his ready smile and obvious amiability put me at my ease.
There is a—place—nearby. It has no name, I’m given to understand, but the sign outside is a most peculiar shade of—
Yellow?
His eyes glittered.
Well—yes.
He laughed, a roar of surprise and delight. And here I thought you meant to ask me the way to the nearest music hall.
You know of it?
He nodded. As it happens, I’m going there myself. Perhaps you might care to accompany me?
I fell into step beside him.
It’s good of you, I said. Truly.
Not at all. We’re not far off now. You’ll see.
We continued to the end of the block, where my companion turned sharply to the right. He plunged down a sunken roadway—long abandoned, half-flooded by a cracked water main—and I followed him through puddles that were ankle-deep and warm as bathwater.
Eventually, we reached another street even more decrepit, where the air reeked of piss and spoiled milk. Laundry-lines flapped like sails overhead, festooned with colorful rags. After two blocks, my guide ducked down another side street before completing the circle by turning right once more.
This should have brought us back to the Bowery, but the street we entered bore little resemblance to the noisome squalor we had left behind. The crumbling tenements were gone, replaced by elaborate structures of concrete and steel. There were no street children, no milling crowds. Instead, an orderly procession of impeccably-attired men and women walked arm-in-arm down the sidewalk, talking and laughing, engaged in an animated discussion of an opera or play they had all just attended. In the lane, carriages were pulled up, black and gleaming, drawn by fine specimens of horseflesh. Even the street signs were unfamiliar: Genevieve Street, Castaigne Court.
Is this the Bowery? I asked, confused.
Of course. Don’t you recognize it?
I offered no reply.
We walked on in silence. My companion maintained a brisk, nearly martial pace, swinging his arms with such vigor that I worried he would lose his valise. Clearly, he was no young missionary equipped with bibles and the armor of self-righteousness. And yet I did not think to ask what he carried inside the case.
He halted. Here we are, he said. He pointed up at the splintered sign board, a faceless plank of weather-worn timber caked in faded paint. The color may have once been gray or brown but now appeared yellow in the glow cast by a streetlamp opposite.
The establishment itself occupied a three story building in the Queen Anne style, the walls fashioned from red brick. The windows were numerous and brightly-lit, though masked with damask drapes that hid the rooms beyond.
Come along, Robert said.
He led me inside into an elaborately-furnished sitting room, characterized by paintings in expensive frames and couches upholstered in dark velvet. Most prominent among the room’s many ornaments was a gilded clock, which stood over six feet in height. Its face was divided into several dials of various sizes, the largest of which gave the time as a quarter past two—but surely that couldn’t be right, I reflected, as it wasn’t yet ten-thirty when I left the hotel. Other dials appeared to tell the month and the year, though these, too, were incorrect. A final gauge noted the phase of the moon. Waning.
A woman received us at the counter. She was tall and emaciated, the skin stretched tight over her skull. In color, she was so pale as to be transparent. Her veins showed like scrimshaw under the skin, darkening to violet where they gathered at her temples. She addressed my companion.
Back again, are you? Here to see Cassie, I take it.
Robert grinned. You know me too well! Would the lovely lady be available?
For you, young man, I dare say she’d make herself available. Of course, it probably wouldn’t matter to you, even if she wasn’t. Maybe you’d prefer it that way.
Maybe I would, he said, flashing the same winning smile. Indeed, fair lady, I think you may be right.
Fair lady? she scoffed. Ah, go on, up with you. He won’t be back for another hour at least. I’ll let him know you’re in there.
You have my thanks. He turned and offered me his hand. Do you think you can find your own way from here?
I nodded.
Good man, said he, and clapped me on the shoulder. He transferred the valise from under his arm, and then, carrying it at his side, stepped round the counter and passed through the curtained doorway beyond.
The pale woman turned her attention on me. And you, sir? she said, speaking more formally than before. I believe you’re joining us tonight for the first time?
Yes, that’s right.
One moment.
She stooped beneath the counter, disappearing from view. I heard the click of a key in a lock, the groan of oiled hinges. Then she straightened, holding a ledger in both arms. The binding was good, the pages crisp and new. She placed it on the counter—gently, the way a mother carries a child—and opened to the marked page.
She looked up at me. With one hand, she held a fountain pen. The other rested on the counter, placed with apparent casualness, though the barrel of a Derringer was just visible where it poked between her fingers.
And which name should I use?
I told her, employing the same pseudonym I had used when meeting Robert. She nodded and noted this down. And do you know who you’re here to see?
Camilla.
Camilla? You sure of that?
I am. Is there a problem?
No, sir. None at all.
She continued to write for the better part of a minute, the nib scratching and scratching. A glance into the corner of the room confirmed what I had initially suspected: the clock’s hands had not changed position. In this unnamed establishment, it was always a quarter past two.
The woman pressed the ledger shut and secreted it away beneath the counter. The gun, I noticed, had disappeared as well. I’ll need payment from you upfront, she said. Not many men can afford to see Camilla. She named a price. It was expensive, but not exorbitant, and ultimately less than I had expected, given the general opulence of the establishment.
I paid it gladly.
She motioned to the curtained entrance behind her. Go on up to the third floor. Camilla’s is the fourth door on the right.
The curtains parted, ushering me into a narrow corridor marked at either end by a twisting stair. The hall was lined with closed doors carved with scenes from mythology:
images of Io and Leda, women sprawled under gods. The smell of smoke was especially pronounced, the cloying odor of cigars. From behind one door came a man’s voice, muffled and gravelly, followed by a woman’s laughter.
I proceeded to the end of the hall and climbed to the third floor, emerging in a new corridor identical to the first in all respects save the wallpaper, which was painted with a pastoral scene: rolling hills, castles, olive groves. A mass-produced print, I decided, though an artist had made certain embellishments, adding a courting couple to the riverbank and again to the castle’s battlements.
The woman stood with her back against the tower-wall. She was arrayed in silks and ruffles, a woman of means. Her golden hair streamed with the wind, hiding her face. The man kneeled before her, as though requesting her hand, but his bare back was turned to the audience, and I wondered why he should be naked.
They were not alone. Another figure could be seen at the far end of the battlements, a man watching. His face was lightly sketched, presented in profile, but there was something vaguely familiar about him, a likeness I couldn’t place.
I reached Camilla’s door. I knocked—gently at first but louder when I received no reply. The handle gave way at a touch. The door swung inward, admitting me to a dimly-lit chamber. The hearth was cold, the lone window shaded with purple damask. The only light emanated from a candelabrum on the mantelpiece, casting layered shadows over the elaborate wallpaper, the four-poster hung with scarlet drapes.
Camilla stood by the window, robed in silk. Her hair was black and curly, gathered atop her head in a series of nested spirals, while her gown was in the Chinese style: crimson, clean lines, the back stitched with a sunburst in gold.
Hearing my step, she turned, and I was surprised to discover that she wore a mask. It was made from porcelain: bone-white and perfectly smooth, a cold facsimile of feminine beauty with elliptical holes left for eyes and mouth. She held her robe closed across her chest, alluringly modest, a triangle of pale skin visible at her throat, merging with the shadows where it plunged to hidden curves below.
A Season In Carcosa Page 5