The book in my hand was yellow. On the chewed spine, some Constant Reader had lovingly scrawled: EMPEREUR A VÊTU AVEC SOLEIL VILLÓN.
~*~
Gratefully, I took the chair, and took a quarter-grain tablet of good morphine from my cigarette-case. It would be a long walk home. My spectacles were in my shirt pocket. Best to stave off the headache with every means to hand. Then I opened the play to its first page.
~*~
When I could blink again, when I found I could, young Albert the bookseller (he introduced himself), was rather politely asking me if he could close up shop, and saying he might even give me a sou for the tavern if I had any doubts about leaving. I shook my head, chuckling.
“Child, I am no mendicant mountebank. Je suis auteur! Surréaliste! But you are kind.” It was the clerk who was paid the asking price of THE KING IN YELLOW. For, though I had closed it, I could not at all put it down.
~*~
My face had grown red, I found as I walked back down the hill into Montmartre. The heartbeat in my ears deafened me to everything else. My mind was hot, too, hot with something hotter than mere terror or joy, suffering in every nerve. When I got back home, I crept shaking to my bed, where I read and re-read, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth.
~*~
Tzara’s bastardization of the play was of course banned in France and gobbled in England, then faded into obsolescence and obscurity, as all such things do in the popular culture which the last war produced. The Great War so filled History with despair that some of these processes cannot now be reversed.
The King is coming back, and we are paving His way. He is not happy. I dream that his cousin has been reincarnated in New York, and knows it not. The Prince of a mighty dynasty, who may tell no one of his birthright or be barred up in Bellevue for life! Imagine!
But Je suis Irréaliste, as de Sade trumpeted from the rooftops until Napoleon Bonaparte drummed him into the madhouse. The de Sade original of the play was locked in his mother-in-law’s wardrobe that burned when Bonaparte gave orders to fire on women and children in a public square and the peasants began to riot...
I am that riot, brought to fruit. I am the dead man’s switch for the whole world. I am Artaud, and come hell or high water my company will run this play.The time has come. The people should not know the son of Hastur. The play is my own spell.
To send Him home...
~*~
B-ROLL
ACT 2, SCENE 4
THE PHANTOM OF MENACE
BATTLE COMMENCES in STREET OF THE FOUR WINDS. CROY CASTAIGNE hobbles on his cane to the window, looking out. His paint-brush is still in his hand. CASSILDA, modestly attired, sits perfectly still for her portrait, in black WIDOW’S WEEDS.
CROY CASTAIGNE
Suicide is a mortal sin but it’s a fine and noble thing
to be conscripted off to war... I will take you with me, as you ask.
OUT OF THE MIST AT THE FRONT, MEN COME RUNNING FROM EVERY ROAD, FIELD AND DITCH, STRAIGHT INTO AN AMBUSH. THE CARRIONMEN, ORIGINAL GUARDS OF THE LAST SHARD OF KING HASTUR’S PALLID MASK, TWIST THE AIR AROUND THEM WITH THEIR LIGHTNING. ORDER BREAKS IN THE RANKS OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES. SOME OF THEM DROP THEIR WEAPONS, AND SOME TURN THEM ON EACH OTHER.
CASSILDA
Sink not ye down to Josephus’ foul lair.
His madness lasts forever, but our love
Outlasts it still. Rest your eyes,
Your arms, your hands,
Your sleeping heart,
Home as the hunter, and in your dreams,
I sing the wild stars at night
That weep down dawning dew,
and begin to burn
Again in setting sun,
in skies so vast and close,
Skies which now no longer open
To anywhere else.
I swear fealty to no King.
CANNONS ARE BEING DISCHARGED. CARCOSA BURNS. HALF A SOLDIER, IN THE STREET, JERKS AND DIES, STILL HOLDING A BLUNDERBUSS WITH A FIXED BAYONET. TWO OTHER SOLDIERS HAVE JUST SAWN HIM IN HALF.INFANTRY STUMBLE, SKELETONS OF REGIMENTS STRUGGLE TO MAINTAIN ORDER.
CROY whirls, crosses the room, and yanks the clasp with the Yellow Sign from Cassilda’s collar. CROY throws it through the open studio window. ARTIST AND MODEL EMBRACE IN A CLINCH.
~*~
ACT 2, SCENE 5
A WOOD NEAR CARCOSA
In the crumbling ruin that is the TEMPLE OF THE WORM, Josephus’ beringed hand passes over a black stone, and his view of Cassilda’s family home in the city, of Cassilda and Croy kissing, blows away in a yellow mist.
JOSEPHUS
There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know
not:
The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock;
The way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.
For let Philosopher and Doctor preach
Of what they will and what they will not,
Each is but one link in an eternal chain
That none can slip nor break nor over-reach.
For how to let either sort of Scribe, or Pharisee
Understand the profound derangement they put forth?
JOSEPHUS looks at the ceiling above him, irritated. From far above that come the scream and boom and whistle of shells.
JOSEPHUS’ right hand begins to glow yellow. CIRCLE CHALKED ON THE FLOOR whistles with wind.
JOSEPHUS
The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together
and lay them down in their dens. Dear Cousin Croy
will fling himself on his knees beside Cassilda’s
foul slattern bed, knowing that he dares not
for his life’s sake leave what he thinks is
dead, though she only sleeps in liquid
stone. Her soul is safe.
He will not know...
~*~
A-ROLL
(later)
I am crazy! All devoutness has fled, and now I wish to mock myself. Yet it is with faint heart I write this.
When I came back up here, little Edith was sitting with her big feet up on my desk reading a folio, bound in yellow. I could not tell if she had been affected by reading the original. She merely put it down when I walked in, slowly and decorously, and said nothing. She seemed dazed.
“He is the King which our every Emperor has served, though many know it not,” I whispered. Then for a long while I sat silently beside her, but Edith neither stirred nor spoke.
Finally, her Cupid’s-bow mouth began switching and twisting, and her eyes were narrow with nearsighted squint. “This is... brilliant...” she stammered at me, “But... Mon Oncle, it was said that you were no longer insane. I...” With something like horror, I saw that my shop-girl was concerned.
“You have crossed over to Earth, Camilla,” I whispered, hoping to show her she was safe. “Explain to me how it was done. Explain. The play must be performed. Surely you can understand my reasoning, for you are Carcosan yourself. How did you swim here?”
Edith’s face changed, then. I saw her much, much older, ravaged by the same opiate poisons now coursing through my veins, shining through the young girl’s face like a mask. Like a pallid mask. But she said nothing. She just stood there and listened.
It was after five, by this point. The sunset light grew jaundiced and strange in my dusty office. Edith just stood there and looked at me, eyes wide and dark and grave.
“The King will bring the Imperial Dynasty of America to its knees. I can tell no one. They merely say I am mentally defective, but many on Earth want the door to Carcosa open again. Many in America. Don’t act as if you think I am insane...”
She shrugs eloquently, a gesture as French as the folk-songs she sings.“Not for me to say. Ça commen
ce avec toi,” she whispers sadly in my ear, and closes the Book of Dream upon my head.
When she does, I am free, burned clean. Until I feel the restraints.
~*~
B-ROLL
[...]
Down in the Temple of the Worm, CASSILDA, awakened, now wails over
CROY’S severed arm, which is all that remained solid when the Spell broke.
CASSILDA
Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die though, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and rot within His head,
in Lost Carcosa...
~*~
A-ROLL:
There is a crack across the universe, a yellow scar along the Sun. There is a bigger problem here that can Strike Anywhere, and none will know the hour when the Master comes to call. Even now, the towers of Carcosa rise behind the Moon.
There is a lower voice within, a towering silhouette looming on the glyph-scratched plaster. It likes to lay waste, & all we may hope to do is sing it to sleep for as long as possible. All we can do is bite its hand. Bite its hand, that spoiled the child with the rod, and spilled the seed of shame forever across its spawn it devoured at birth, like a wild sow eating her farrow.
~*~
I wake, and wish immediately that I hadn’t.
The tatters of the King wash over my mind again, wash it back into the hanging-court of Chaos. There is only their robot Christ to cry to now.
I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As for me, I am past human help or hope.
As I sit here, writing, careless even whether or not I die before I finish, I can sense that they will be very curious to know the tragedy – they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers.
They may send their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their newspapers will batten on blood and tears. But the final indignity has come true, word for word, a nightmare boiled in an oracle’s skull.
All I knew all along was smashed on the rocks when it finally mattered, masticated in Night’s cold seeking mouth, scooped out and eaten and shit and eaten again. Above this flat, shackled cot, outside my barred window, the clouds glow gray. White doves roost upon the wires. The wind hoots and cries as the doves do, around the corners of this bleak old madhouse. Outside that window is a town where I never had one reason to be.
So it is written, forgotten…Rewritten? I feel unguarded here, when I wake, exposed, twisting in the wind, unable to distinguish the sickroom shadows from days of decades long since buried, just as then, in some vein. I want to drain this wound, but it is too old and deep. I want to wash away its taste. I want to belt it in the face.
~*~
But even now there is salt spray spuming through the sky outside. I must tighten down the clamps, subdue brute biology, to become safe and distinguish light from shadows, hands that feed from hands that inject a cure worse than any disease.
Yet now and then, my mind grows silent, dripping down madhouse walls. I rest, and breathe, and wait for my medicine. It will come. This time, I behave.
They will never slit open the mattress, or find the folio play. Like the King, I never wear a mask, or claim to be anything else. They simply haven’t looked.
~*~
Not until I don the diadem, and let the beaten gold burn a halo in the footlights, as the Creature that rules His father Hastur’s kingdom directs the play from the audience.
(Journal ends here)
For :
-Joe Pulver and Lucius Shepard, Earth
-Antonin Artaud & Robert W.Chambers, Carcosa
The Hymn of the Hyades
By Richard Gavin
The bad dream did not arrive until daybreak. It bled into Martin’s bedroom as stealthily and organically as shadows at night. It put down roots as best it could, for the child it assailed was in limbo, neither slumbering nor yet awake.
Even at the tender age of ten Martin knew a little something of the gorge between the ordered world and the outgrowths of his fertile imagination. His father had been insistent that he learn these parameters and be ever-mindful of them. Every drawing his parents unearthed, each comic book cache they discovered, led to a scolding of some degree. Martin had begun being more mindful of his surroundings and less meshed in the products of his mind. For as long as he’d been aware of himself Martin had often thought of life as some type of play and he was cast in a role for which he’d not prepared himself. Conversation was difficult for him; he was so afraid of flubbing his lines, of ruining the plot, no matter how incomprehensible that plot was to him.
Thanks to his father’s conditioning, Martin was groggily aware that the awful noise that scared him so could not be in nature and thus had his imagination as its womb. A cold front had been plaguing the town for the better part of a week, and Martin knew that the temperature had to be mild for it to rain. And without the possibility of rain there can be no thunder.
Yet the next peal confirmed Martin’s suspicions of thunder. He forced his eyes open, grateful for the hint of sunlight that illuminated his bedroom just enough to assure him of fixedness. He wondered if the phantom sounds he was experiencing could be accurately called a nightmare, as they were occurring in the light.
He sat up in his bed and poked his fingers into his window blind, flexing them to part the slats. The sky mimicked the drab greyness of empty sidewalks. The flurrying snowflakes forbade the presence of thunderheads. Martin listened as the noise came again, fainter but still noticeable. He studied the pearled lawn and the non-descript fields long-stripped of their crops, hoping for some logical source for the noise. Perhaps he’d left the storm cellar door open again, or maybe it was simply the attic lamenting the assault of frigid gales.
The only way to uncover the truth was to press the issue as bravely and as thoroughly as his father would, had he been in this position.
Martin sacrificed the quilted sanctuary of his bed and, shivering, dressed himself.
His parents’ bedroom was pent-up and silent as he slipped past it. It was likely that his folks would be unbothered by his impulse to go out exploring at this hour of the morning, but Martin still did not want to risk discovery. He crept down to the mudroom at the rear of the farmhouse and bundled himself.
When he opened the back door and met the day, he regretted the fuss he’d made when his mother had suggested he get a skidoo suit this winter. Today he would have welcomed the warmth. He came to realize that shirking outerwear he deemed childish-looking was no more likely to win him friends at school than his frequent attempts to laugh along with the older kids whenever they teased him, or the willing sacrifice of his allowance; a weekly ritual that inevitably made him cry.
‘No point in being a baby now,’ Martin told himself. He transformed his wind-battered trudge into a purposeful march.
The open fields invited the abuse of the winds. Martin tugged his scarf up to his eyes and pushed on. Sourcing out the noise was much trickier than he’d guessed, for in the flat landscape the sound seemed ubiquitous, as likely to have been born from the stiff soil as the trees of the nearby ravine. Without the distortion of his house, Martin noted that the sound was much sharper, like dozens of branches being cracked in succession, like breakers in a glass sea.
His perception of the windblown evergreens as waving him over to the ravine was, Martin knew, simply his wish to escape the unshielded terrain, but he heeded their invitation all the same. The hike seemed impossibly long, but when he reached the treed rim the blasts of ice seemed unable to penetrate through the boughs. Martin sighed with relief. The temperature was not significantly milder, but the respite from the winds was comfort enough.
Snow balanced on the pines and the evergreens like cake frosting, making Martin long for Christmastime. The slope leading down to West River was gradual, but the abundance of ice made it tricky. The further Martin descended, the clearer the sound became. He lowered his hood to be sure that the sound was indeed that
of ice breaking up on the river.
His first sight of West River confirmed this, but also left him bewildered. The film of ice never began to crack up until April, March at the earliest. February had scarcely commenced, and the town was in a deep freeze to boot. Still, the great slab that coffined the river was dividing itself into dozens of tiny floes right before his eyes. It must have been cracking up for some time, for Martin could see the black water beneath as it bore the shards downstream.
A freak breaking of the ice he could accept, but not tadpoles and other fish. Martin knew it was far too cold for them to be squirming along the current.
But they weren’t tadpoles, and although they were silvery, the dancing specks were far too small to be fish. He crouched down, feeling the frigid spray off the river. He shut his eyes to squeeze out any fantasies that might be infecting him and looked at West River anew.
He’d read – in one of his Never-Never tales no doubt – of stars being described as resembling flecks of ice, but never of ice looking so much like stars. And yet Martin couldn’t help but think of a night-time sky as he watched the sparkles gliding past him. The river did its part to aid the simile, using its cold blackness to give the impression of being just as limitless as space, and just as alien.
Magpie-like, Martin fell under the spell of the swimming glints. Of their shining presence he was certain, but of their strange song he was less so. Were they attempting to lull him like the sirens he’d read of in his illustrated Odyssey? The trilling was faint but still somehow managed to cut through the gush and creak of the river and the ice.
Martin almost reached in but noticed that he still had his mitten on. Soaking his clothing would make the walk home even more unbearable, so he tugged the mitten from his hand and reached in to fish out one of the wailing stars.
He allowed himself the luxury of one fantastical image: his hand breaking through not water, but the night sky of a world that existed leagues below him. He envisioned the shocked natives falling down in dread and awe at the sight of his pale hand raking their heaven.
The temperature of the water shocked his bare flesh, but he was grateful for the frigid wetness once the small bead of light began to burn his palm.
A Season In Carcosa Page 11