A Season In Carcosa

by Sr. (Editor) Joseph S. Pulver

  He couldn’t have clutched the star, if star it was, for more than a second or two before it pushed through his fingers and moved downriver. But this was enough to scald his hand. Badly. Martin lifted his arm from the water, not recognizing it at first. His fingers had reddened from the cold and were shiny with water. An angry red puncture was set in the centre of his palm. There was no blood, thank God, but there was something that looked sickeningly similar to a gunshot wound. Squealing, Martin turned his hand over and sighed over the small mercy that the star had not burned clean through.

  The flesh around the circular hole was bleached and there were jagged lines splaying out from the centre. Martin no longer felt any pain. The only thing he felt now was the scuttling of pins and needles numbing his arm.

  Frantically shaking off the water, Martin shoved his hand back into his mitten. He was crying now, from fear rather than discomfort. The noise of the ice breaking was now rarer and quieter, yet the feminine star-song seemed nearer to him now.

  He slipped and slid and scrabbled out of the ravine. The wind in the fields was just as harsh, but was of no concern to him now. Phlegm sealed in his throat and the air scalded his throat and lungs. By now Martin’s tears had soaked through his scarf and he felt a brief concern that someone may spot him in this condition. But it was Sunday morning, and he knew that the boys who often beat him would be sanctimoniously stationed in their pews.

  His house came into view.

  They were awake and in the kitchen when Martin stumbled into the mudroom. He pursed his lips to stifle the blubbering noises he’d been making for several minutes now and began to unlace his boots. Clanging sounds told him that his mother was about to fry up some breakfast. Martin wiped the cold tears from his cheeks and sucked in his breath to steel himself against the dreadful mark he’d see once the mitten was removed.

  He was less concerned over the wound than he was the potential reprimand he might receive for sneaking out, for heading up a fool’s quest to West River, for possibly permanently damaging his writing hand. But once he’d freed himself of his winter garments, he slipped into the kitchen and received only a “Good morning,” from his mother.

  “Morning,” Martin returned. His bad hand was cradled in the other.

  “If you were out checking the storm cellar door this morning you can relax. I locked it for you.” The brassy voice came from the corner. Martin recognized the hands that held the morning paper, but could only assume that the face behind the newsprint shield was his father’s. “I had to go in my pyjamas at ten o’clock last night to set my mind at ease. I had a hunch you’d forgotten to lock it after your mother let you play down there, and I was right. Must have been twenty-below with the wind. I nearly froze to death.”

  “Sorry.”

  The hands turned the page noisily. Martin’s mother announced, “I’m making omelettes.”

  With his fear of reprimand abated, Martin hurried upstairs to face his next crisis.

  Behind the medicine chest’s clouded mirror he found the jar of salve his mother had used to ease his campfire burn last summer. It was greasy and pungent but was the only item Martin thought might balm his wound. The thought of the wound congealing to permanently mar his hand with the strange design made him queasy. How would he explain his stigmata to his mother, to the bullies on the school bus, to his father?

  His palm was already beginning to blister. A trio of curling lines spread from the shallow pit where the star/ice had scorched him. The fact that he felt no pain puzzled rather than relieved him, and he knew enough about such matters to realize that the sickly egg-yoke shade of the blister pattern might signify infection.

  Martin sat atop the toilet and wallowed in the dreadful consequence of his mistake as quietly as he could until his mother shouted him down to breakfast.

  Though he was worried about the scent of the salve being tell tale, Martin quickly remembered that his mother was still suffering a cold, and his father never took notice of any life beyond the ones captured in printer’s ink.

  He had to choke down the omelette and buttered toast on his plate, hoping no one questioned why he was forking his food with this left hand. After breakfast he cloistered himself in his bedroom.

  By noon the fever began to afflict him.

  Instinct guided him to the bathroom just in time to bring up his morning meal. He staggered back to his room, his feet and hands pulsating, his stomach still doing flips. As he stripped and then donned his pyjamas, Martin was overcome with dizziness. It was as if there was a gear inside his head that grown rusty and rigid from ill-use but had now been lubricated by the fever and was now beginning to turn uncontrollably. He swayed to and fro as even the floorboards seemed to be affected by his internal wheel. Martin flopped down on his bed, but his being stationary did nothing to anchor the wild turns.

  “Mom…” he croaked. Lifting his hand, Martin saw what must have been the source of this all-encompassing vertigo: the sallow mark in his palm was turning, turning. Its yellow tendrils flexed and curled and curved like cat’s tongues over milk. The wound in the centre of the sign began to shimmer. The depth of the wound hosted the lustre of a polished volcanic rock, of moonlight floundering in a pool of ink. Jabbing the index finger of his left hand at the hub of the spinner, Martin felt something firm against the soft meat of his fingertip.

  Part of whatever he had fished out of West River was still embedded in his hand.

  Martin spent the remainder of the day exchanging a few moments of hallucinatory waking life for several hours of dreams that were odder still. One moment he saw himself roaming the shore of a sombre grey lake, the next he was watching the thin stripes in his bedroom wallpaper bending and entwining into ornate alphabets. In fevered sleep he heard trilling songs pouring down from the black stars in the sky, in groggy wakefulness he watched in helpless horror as a great mummy-like shape slid noiselessly into his room. Its tattered dressings were the yellow of Martin’s wound.

  When the great gaunt shape examined Martin’s body, the boy could only watch as his marked hand was exposed and then pierced by the intruder’s needle-like claws.

  It was very dark when Martin heard his bedroom door opening once again. Able to lift his head with less difficulty than before, he was relieved to note that the silhouette filling his doorway was a familiar one.

  “You awake?” whispered his mother.

  “Yes,” croaked the boy.

  She stepped into the room, and when Martin spotted the tumbler of ice water in her hand he almost groaned.

  He drank slowly and could feel the cold water pushing out the sickness that had been congealing inside him. It was making him pure.

  “You gave us quite a scare.” Her voice was soft.

  “I’m sorry,” Martin began, “I just wanted to see what the noise was –”

  “You must promise to tell your father and I whenever you hurt yourself.” She either hadn’t heard him or had no interest in his confession. “That burn on your hand was very badly infected. Luckily Dr. Mason was able to drain it. I have penicillin for you, but right now you need to get more rest.”

  “The doctor came in my room?”

  His mother nodded.

  “Okay,” Martin murmured. And it was.

  He slept well into the next day. His mother kept him home from school until Thursday. During his convalescence, Martin did not dream of the sombre shore. Beyond a slight itch, his injury no longer troubled him. His hand was dressed in clean white bandage, and when his mother changed these dressings Martin saw only a sloppy-looking scab in his palm. The wheeling blisters were gone, as was the distorted memory of Dr. Mason’s fever-costume of a great faceless mummer in yellow.

  He was lulled by the comforting presumption that he would never have to see that hideous figure again, which is why his next encounter with it almost levelled him.

  Passing Mr. Nelsh’s farm on his way to the corner where the school bus fetched him, Martin was startled by the sight of a scarecrow the o
ld man had neglected to tear down for the season. The shocks, stripped of their corn, were mostly buried under snow. The more stubborn ones jutted up like whiskers, and it was over these meagre spokes that the scarecrow loomed. Its ragged clothing matched the sallow hue of the desiccated plants. The figure’s attire, which the wind flaunted about in sweeps like a great cape, disguised its wooden perch so well that for an instant Martin believed he saw legs and sandaled feet upon the frozen soil.

  But blowing snow and distance was clearly making mischief. The effigy was thinner than any living man could be, and besides that, it didn’t appear to be appreciably shorter than the row of evergreens that lined Mr. Nelsh’s field.

  Martin told himself that he mustn’t let his imagination run rampant. What would father say? He thought rationally about the whole thing and managed to convince himself that he hadn’t seen the scarecrow stalking silently across the field.

  He hadn’t even heard the bus rumbling alongside him, or the voices of the other children shouting for him to hurry up. Martin clamoured up the bus’s steps, pouncing on this opportunity to distance himself from the skulking thing. Peering through the windows and seeing no sign of the gaudy giant brought no relief. Martin tried to tell himself that his wits had banished this lingering symptom of his fever, but the cold crawl upon his spin told an altogether different tale.

  Concentrating on the day’s lessons was out of the question. Martin spent the entire morning gazing at the coils of snow that swept across the asphalt playground beyond the classroom window like dervishes of pale dust. Even when pretending to write in his exercise book Martin was secretly listening for the voice of ice upon black river water.

  Recess saw him occupied with his usual solitary games. He was hunched by the chain-link fence at the schoolyard’s edge, forging effigies out of snow, feeding them lines from his imaginary drama about distant Kings and lands too fabulous for human representation.

  It was during this game, when he, the foreign King, was confessing his love to an actress that Martin heard the Song.

  Thinking initially that the bird-like trill was coming from his lumpy woman of snow, Martin was almost disappointed when he sourced out the sound and realized it was coming from a young girl in the yard.

  She was standing aloof from the other children. Her red coat was like a dollop of blood against the anaemic desert of snow. The voice that bloomed from her tiny mouth was almost inhumanly beautiful.

  And the song…

  Martin had heard it before, or rather felt it, when it came from the river, came gushing down from the black stars of his fever landscape.

  Had the girl shared his dream? Was she part of his dream?

  He bounded toward her, desperate to learn which.

  The girl seemed unable to answer his questions. Her voice had become distorted; gnarling from celestial hymn to unbridled shrieking.

  It was Mr. Feldman, the principal, who pried Martin off the girl. She kept sobbing, refusing to look at him. Martin tried to explain himself, but the girl kept screaming about the awful face Martin had apparently donned before charging after her.

  He spent the afternoon in Mr. Feldman’s office as punishment but was unable to obey the principal’s demand to hand over whatever ugly mask he’d presumably worn to torment the girl. The secretary had tried several times to reach Martin’s parents to inform them of his misconduct. When she could not reach them, Mr. Feldman typed out a letter that required their signatures.

  The homeward bus ride passed in a wordless haze. As the bus slowed to drop Martin off at the corner, he no longer cared that Mr. Nelsh’s yellow scarecrow was still missing.

  His house was empty when Martin stepped inside. He searched the kitchen for a note, which his mother always left if she had to go out before he got home from school.

  The breakfast dishes were still on the table.

  His father’s newspaper lay halved on the linoleum floor. Martin tried to swallow but could muster no saliva.

  The wind carried with it a faint thudding sound. Martin had caused this sound enough times to recognize it, yet he still went to the kitchen window to see the storm cellar door being lifted and dropped by the gusts.

  Jutting up from the rim of the cellar door was a cluster of vibrant tongues.

  The sight of these flames caused Martin to panic, sent him charging out of the house and toward the gaping door in the earth.

  The tongues that were undulating above the rim of the storm cellar’s entrance, bright as roman candles, were too yellow to be fire. By the time Martin realized that what he was witnessing were in fact tatters of vibrant yellow fabric it was already too late.

  Staked in-place by shock, Martin’s gaze followed the snow-dusted wooden steps that connected the makeshift pit with the lawn where he stood. His thoughts became gluey and all but impossible to apprehend. Martin saw something bundled upon the storm cellar’s dirt floor, something that been pulled all out of shape. Even though Martin distantly knew the real reason why his father was lying face-down upon the cold soil, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was due to shame, disgust over his son’s inability to rein-in his imagination, even now, with the threat so real, so near.

  Martin realized that what he’d seen in Mr. Nelsh’s field was real, but he felt no sense of vindication. It stood mutely, its face mercifully obscured by the cave of its hood, its only voice being the low lament of the wind. Even the tatters of its robes flapped noiselessly. It was like a wraith in a silent film.

  Martin was only dimly aware of the fact that his fingers had begun to pick at the dressing off his palm. He lifted his hand, feebly hoping that the newly spinning mark might somehow aid him.

  His next thought was a suitably boyish one: the figure really was as tall as he’d feared.

  Its arms were equally unnatural in size, for they jutted up and seized Martin with ease. The yellow mask the figure produced from its folds was small by comparison. He now understood why the girl in the schoolyard had shrieked and wished he could as well.

  Martin wondered if it had been wrought just for him, for as he forcibly discovered, the mask fit snugly on his face.

  Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars

  By Gemma Files

  All graves look the same, generally: Sunken or up-thrust, backdirt slightly looser than whatever lies around it, sometimes of a different color, a different composition. Anything that shows something’s been scooped out and reapportioned, piled back in atop what lies beneath.

  You start with trowel and probe, cleaning the surface near what you suspect is the grave’s edge, thrusting the probe in as far as it’ll go, then sniffing it for decomp. If you strike something soft, that’s a find. Satellite photos also help, as do picks, shovels; Ken Kichi sets up nearby to run the electronic mapping station, charting the site’s contours, eventually providing a three-dimensional outline of every body and its position when found, while Judy Moss—your usual dig partner—shares process photography duties with Guillaume Jutras, head of this particular Physicians for Human Rights forensic anthropology team. Their shutters buzz constantly like strange new insects in the oven-door heat, snap-flash, snap-flash, whirrrr.

  And you, meanwhile—you’re crouched down in the stench feeling for bones, finding rotten cloth, salt-stiff flesh.

  The grave is humid, seawater-infused. Sand clings to everything, knitting with bone itself. At the very top, exposed to air and scavengers alike—crabs, birds—the bodies are slimy, broken down for parts, semi-skeletonized. Down further, they’re still fleshed, literally ripe for autopsy; those are the ones Jutras wants in the worst way. While down further still...

  Each stratum is an era, a span of time between massacres. The numbers vary: Twos and threes, five-person groups at most, as opposed to the first and second layers’ twenty-three. Deeper than that is where your particular skills will come most into play, differentiating one body’s bones from another’s, telling male from female, adult from child. You try not to feel bad about wanting to get
down there as fast as possible, to see just how far down it all goes.

  This tower of murder, thrown down, inverted. To you, it’s a mystery, a challenge; to the people whose fragments it’s made from—their relatives, at any rate—it’s an obscenity, a disgrace. But you can’t think about that, because it’ll only slow you down, make you sloppy. Sentiment breeds mistakes.

  Crouching down, feeling with both hands, gently but firmly. And saying silently to yourself, with every breath: Keep working, keep quiet, keep sharp. Miss nothing. Assuring them, at the same time: Lie still, we’re coming, finally. At long last.

  We’re coming to bring you home.

  ~*~

  You reached the island of Carcosa seven days ago, at 6:35 PM by your watch, only to find what looked like two suns staring down, one centered, the other offset—an upturned pupil, cataract-white, with a faint bluish tinge. It’s an optical illusion, Jutras told you, during your conference-Skype briefing; Everyone sees them. There’s other things, too.

  Like what?

  Just...things. It’s not important.

  (The clear implication: You won’t be there long enough for them to matter. An assumption you don’t question, since it suits you fine; you’ll remember it later, though. And laugh.)

  So yes, it’s strange, though not unbearably so—no more so than the incredible heat or the smell accompanying it, rancid and inescapable, though you haven’t even come near the dig site as yet; the black beaches with their smooth-washed half-glass sand, the masses of shrimp-colored flowers and spindly nests of stick-insects creeping up every semi-vertical surface. Actually, all the colors are different here, just ever-so-slightly “off”: the green laid on green of its grasses, fronds and vines isn’t your green, not exactly. More like your green’s occluded memory.

  There’s a wet woodsmoke tang to the air, like they’ve just doused a forest-fire. Breathing it in gives you a languorous, possessive contact high—opium smoke mixed with bone-dust.

  According to Jutras, the island—itself just the merest jutting peak of an underwater mountain-range ringed with black smokers, incredibly volatile—was once centre-set with a volcano that exploded, Thera-style, its caldera becoming what’s now known as “Lake” Hali. The quote-marks are because the lake itself is filled and re-filled with seawater brought in through a broken end-section that forms the island as a whole into a wormy crescent. Carcosa City occupies the crescent’s midsection, its highest peak, while the two peninsulas formed by the crescent’s horns almost overlap. The longer of the two is called Hali-joj’uk, “Hali-door” or “-gate”, in the island’s highly negotiable yet arcanely individual tongue. Wouldn’t think there could be quite so many sub-dialects supported on an island whose entire population has never historically topped four hundred, and yet.