A Season In Carcosa

by Sr. (Editor) Joseph S. Pulver

  Camilla stands, her feet firmly planted and her arms straight. Her eyes follow the sound of the voice, and she realizes that she is very hungry.

  “Burgers, fries, and a soda. Please.”

  The man, skinny with a long head and a leather baseball cap cocked slightly leftish, appears in her line of sight, laughing.

  “That’s cute! Sure honey. We’ve got burgers. And strawberry shakes. You want cheese on that?”

  “Yea.”

  “Ok, you got it. Pickles too.”

  He snaps his fingers in jest.

  “Carlos! A cheeseburger deluxe for the young lady at table number four. Common honey, let’s get you undressed. See what you can do. I’ll feed you when you’re finished. Just come and find me. They call me Phil.”

  Camilla is led through a narrow hallway into a tiny room where there are mirrors and a coat rack piled high with stacks of rabbit fur trimmed nightgowns. She’d seen these kinds of costumes in the final scene of Marlowe, one of the movies from the 60s Kass showed her because he thought it was intellectual. Camilla watched how Delores moved, with her torso arched at a different angle then her legs; her head spinning slowly while her feet remained planted, thighs opening, then closing… quick. For a cheeseburger, she could do this.

  Camilla finds a red dress that wraps in an X across the back; it’s tight at the top, and flows out at the skirt. Classy. Camilla takes off her gross clothes, tosses them on the floor, and for the first time in 20 years, looks at her body in the mirror. She’s all muscle. Suddenly she realizes that the yellow pin is on the floor, and she feels well up inside of her a panic that for a moment almost causes her to flee. But the desire to never again part from the brooch is too powerful. She unpins it from her old shirt and attaches it to the red dress. For a second it seems alive, like a creature grabbing on to its new home. She caresses the mysterious symbol on its back with her finger. It trembles.

  Still naked and bent over the quivering thing, Pan opens the door without knocking. He seems startled.

  “You’re fucking gorgeous.”

  Camilla smiles as she hurriedly gathers herself together and slips into the dress. Another voice inside of her responds: “Yea, I know.”

  He helps her zip the dress; takes a bottle of hairspray and mists her hair; takes her cheeks between his hands and kisses each one, gently.

  “Knock ‘em dead, baby” he says, escorting her out into the hallway and into the light of the stage.

  Camilla stands right in the middle, remembering a ballet class she took when she was two – before Tess decided that ballet was bad because her little girl was having too much fun. She plants her feet at an angle, straightens her knees, and fans her hands like a swan above her head. The music has already started, but she just stands there, holding this position. The boys are laughing. A few men at the bar are shouting “show your tits!” But it’s all quiet in her head. Nothing happening outside of the stillness she feels in her body matters in the slightest. And she knows now that the yellow pin with its mysterious symbol will protect her against everything.

  As if bowing to force that is beyond her, she feels as her hips give way to music. She doesn’t know the song, but it enters her spine like gravity pulling down an apple. She moves because the music is her skin, peeling slowly up and down the length of her. Her hands are like ribbons tied above her head; they slowly wave in the air. She falls, catching herself with one arm; she lays down, spreads her legs and arches her back; slowly she turns on her hands and feet, pulsing her lower back; slowly she stands up again, her hands moving up the length of her legs, lifting her dress to reveal her bare thighs, her stomach; the dress falls back down again as she moves her hands up her torso to her heart. The red dress falls off her shoulders; she puts her arms in the air and swirls around the beat of the music, which has entered her like a flood creeping underneath a door. She quakes; she comes; the music stops and the boys are silent, just for a moment. Naked and crouched, perched on her fingertips, she stares into the dimly illuminated darkness of the room. She holds her position, doesn’t move. A clapper here; a yeller there. Obscene comments, some laughs. Pan comes behind her and the dress around her shoulders. The brooch is now against her skin, sinking in. As it buries its claws into her flesh, she laughs hysterically. It feels like the ocean, finding eternity in her blood.

  Pan, not knowing what is so funny, shakes his head at this bizarre but dynamic girl and leads her off the stage into the dressing room; as she puts the dress back on, he holds her neck and kisses her cheeks.

  “Baby, that was beautiful. Whatever that was. A little weird. You’re a little weird, right?”

  He pulls a wad of cash out of his wallet and gives her $7. There you go kid, go buy yourself a nice cheeseburger. And come back tomorrow at 2pm. Amanda will be here and can teach you a few tricks.

  Camilla tosses her old clothes in the trash. She keeps her tennis shoes, even though they’ve got holes. What a wonderful, magical place with such wonderful, magical feelings, she thinks. Leaving the club she catches the eye of the college boy and he puts his hand to his heart and keeps it there as he watches her leave. She saw this in a movie once: love. Now that she has experienced it, she vowed to seek it out in every person she meets from here on out. And the next afternoon, she will return to dance that feeling of love into every one she stands before, naked her body waving, pulsing, and slowly opening. This was going to be the happiest moment of her life. Finally, she reasoned, it’s 1977 and this is my world.

  But this moment isn’t going to last long. For Camilla, the world is not going to be a garden of chocolate and roses. Because the cycle that has started spinning as the yellow pin (now a part of her, as veins are to her skin) sets out to recreate Carcosa in this place and time has not yet completed turning.

  VII

  It’s definitely dark now. Her instincts tell her to get out from under the tracks and find a street where there are people, and lights, and a Taco Bell. West, she says to herself, and starts walking. A figure leaning against a pole shifts his feet and approaches her. Hello Camilla, Kass says.

  Camilla, absorbed by her new world, did not recognize Kass at first. He has a black bandanna covering his hair and a strip from a t-shirt wrapped around his head, covering his eye.

  “Did you think I’d let you go so easily?”

  A flood of adrenalin hits her with the instinct to run.

  Kass pursues, but lags a bit. He had been following her all day, and doesn’t feel any pressure to catch up with her now – he just wants her to know that he’ll always be around.

  Camilla thinks she’s lost him and turns down a street with no streetlights and lots of row houses. There are boys her age hanging out on the corner, and she figures this street might lead to a better place.

  Suddenly the boys on the corner have circled around her, like bison in attack formation. Kass, lagging behind, sees this happening from a distance, and hides behind a car to watch the scene unfold. This is going to be good.

  Camilla smiles and waves at the boys. She folds her arms into her chest and waits for them to make the next move.

  The boys are laughing at her. One boy is laughing so hard he is buckled over. Another has his hand on his head. Another is pointing at her and jumping around. She doesn’t see anything that’s funny, so she starts walking.

  She stops short as they block her flow across the street. Now they are poking at her with their fingers as if she had just fallen from the stars.

  One of the boys grabs her face. “Hey girlie, you can’t pass through here if you don’t pay the troll. This bridge is haunted!”

  The other boys laugh. One pulls out a kitchen knife and holds it to her cheek. She doesn’t move. Her fearlessness, at first so amusing, has now pissed them off. They move in closer.

  A patrol car turns the corner at just that moment. Seeing young boys circling a young white girl, the car screeches to a halt and two police, a man and a woman, jump out of with guns drawn. Three of the boys take off run
ning in opposite directions; the other three freeze and put their hands behind their heads because the police have drawn their guns.

  “Shoot, we were just playin’ with her officer. We weren’t going to do nothin’ to her.”

  Camilla is smiling at the police, whose foreheads are wrinkled from the stress of having to draw their guns.

  “Back away from the girl,” said the police woman.

  “We didn’t do nothin’ officer. Nothin’ happening, it’s cool.”

  Seeing that the boys have their hands in the air, the police woman puts her gun back in her holster. Her partner is more jittery, and continues to point his gun. The patrol lights whirl red and white through the air. Camilla is mesmerized by the sudden change of light.

  “Common officer, we’re cool. Tell her she’s stupid to be walking alone at night down here. She’s crazy officer. You can tell. Just look at her.”

  But the police aren’t listening to them. They slam them up against the car, cuffing them.

  “Let’s go downtown and you can tell it all to the judge.”

  The woman officer starts to radio for backup.

  Camilla, who was not at all afraid of these boys, makes a quick decision to protect them. She kicks the radio out of the woman officer’s hands; the other policeman approaches. Camilla waits until he’s at arm’s length, and then she karate kicks the gun out of his hand, summersaults to the ground, picks it up. Seeing the police woman grabbing her gun, she opens fire and shoots her in the arm. The force knocks the woman down, and she drops her gun. The male officer sidesteps and quickly picks up his partner’s gun; the handcuffed boys, seeing Camilla’s completely relaxed face as she shoots the policeman, back away from the scene and run as fast as they can. The policewoman is confused as to what is happening; she yells at the boys to stop, but it’s too late; they hop over fences and into alleys quick as antelopes.

  Camilla remembers Carrie and suddenly feels possessed. She stands with her gun in a victory position, one foot over the fallen policeman. The female officer, terrified, cups her wound with her hand. Camilla shoots her gun straight up into the air because she likes the sound. A crow, sleeping on a nearby roof is startled into flight and catches the bullet. A spray of blood rains down on Camilla. Like a fallen rocket the crow lands at the feet of the felled officer. The lights from the patrol car are turning round and round, and just for a moment Camilla feels the burden of her fate.

  But then she hears sirens coming from all directions, and knows that it is time to run. She turns a corner, and hides behind a bush to make sure she wasn’t followed. She walks into the backyard of the closest house. All the lights are off, and there is no car in the driveway. She breaks a window into the basement and slips in. No one is home. Tired, she goes upstairs, finds a bed, and falls asleep.

  Kass, having witnessed this whole scenario, has followed Camilla into the house where she is sound asleep on the bed upstairs, completely relaxed, as if nothing had happened. She is holding the gun like a dead person holds a bouquet of flowers. He closes the blinds. The police are all over the street. Kass kneels by her bedside, and gently takes the gun from her folded hands. Like a machine she bolts upright, knocks Kass to the ground and grabs the gun. To twist things up a bit, she picks up the alarm clock and throws it out the window. She follows that with the night table, and a chair.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?” says Kass.

  The police are approaching the house to investigate the sounds of breaking glass.

  Camilla grabs the sheet off the bed and throws it over the unsuspecting Kass, wrestling him to the ground. Holding the ends like a sack, she ties the ends of the sheet into a knot. She then proceeds to throw all of the furniture in the room on top of him – bookcase, desk, chair. She finds clothes in the closet and throws them on the pile as well. Kass is yelling for help, but Camilla hardly notices. The police are now in the house, making their way upstairs. Camilla spots a stick of matches that has fallen out of the door of the desk. She lights the sheet wrapped around Kass on fire. The police enter the room, guns drawn. But all they see are flames – Camilla has jumped out of the window, landing in the shrubs.

  Brushing herself off, she walks straight through the crowd of people gathered at the scene. The fire trucks and ambulance are racing to meet the blaze. Behind her, the flames shoot out of the room where she had just been sleeping.

  Camilla walks for a block and spots a construction site where a scoop truck is parked in a vacant lot; it beckons her like a maternal creature, and she climbs into its claws. The metal is cold against her body, but soon it warms up. She stares up at the stars. The moon is making light where before the sky looked drab. She sighs and allows the scoop to enclose her: mama, she whispers, and the scoop truck seems to let out a slight whirr, but not really. She sleeps soundly thorough the night, until she hears the rumbling of men and cars and realizes that it is morning. She jumps out of the scoop and runs past the gawking men, alarmed to see a young girl emerge from the scoop with the grace of Venus rising up out of the clam shell.

  She walks down the middle of the road for a few blocks. A driver picks her up. After realizing that his attempts to fondle her are not scaring her, he decides there is no thrill in it for him, and so offers to take her home. She isn’t exactly sure where home is, but she describes the landscape: cul-de-sac, enclosure, tight space surrounded by trees and houses. Not far from Hugh M. Woods on Sheridan Boulevard. The driver drops her off somewhere in the middle of these hazy coordinates, and Camilla, with a heightened sense of navigation, follows the pulse of the yellow pin and manages to find her way home.

  VIII

  She has only been gone for twelve days but because Camilla and her yellow brooch ripped a hole out of her time it seems like she has been gone for years.

  Camilla knows that a course of events had been set into motion. She doesn’t know what it is, but is desperate to find out. The yellow pin has steered her into a previously unimaginable freedom, but there is something else she needs to find. She kicks in the door and walks by instinct to the kitchen counter where her mother always leaves her notes. She still wasn’t back. Like lightening she returns to the bookshelf where she originally found the brooch. She turns it over until she sees what she is looking for: a book bound in serpent skin. Camilla hears sirens in the distance, clutches the book, and goes out into the backyard. There are fallen, rotten apples everywhere. And the apple tree, unpruned, is thick with foliage.

  Camilla quickly empties the contents of the shed onto the lawn – trimming equipment, bikes, broken toys, sea shells, sleds, planting pots and power tools. By the time the police arrive to search the house, she is high up in the tree, hidden behind a thick green canopy of leaves. The backyard is such a mess that they never look up.

  After they leave, Camilla pulls off a few boards from the siding of the house to build herself a platform, high up in the apple tree. She rests on a clump of tar which she ripped off the roof. The next morning she builds a teepee of branches, tied together with twine. She sleeps soundly. The swirling of leaves in a wind vacuum rouses her from her sleep – she gets down, collects them, and pushes them into the corner to keep out the draft. She is overcome by the instinct to protect herself and to protect the book.

  Finally it is quiet, and she has time to read the horrific book: The King in Yellow. It’s even more frightening than the movies she watched with Kass, but she reads it straight through with an understanding that this story and her own are one. She is Camilla, third daughter of the King of Carcosa who speaks through her his story of violent self-destruction. She is possessed by his narrative; it has given her form and purpose.

  Now filled with the urgency and conviction of a murderer intent on acting out the script of her madness, Camilla pulls apart all the metal from her mother’s power tools and arranges them neatly in a pile. In the middle of the night, she grabs as much as she can carry from the trash outside people’s houses: wood chairs, appliance boxes, clothes; a lamp, newspaper
s, a plastic toy house. She lugs all the junk into the backyard and begins to catalogue it: metal things, plastic things, paper things, natural things. She rips the clothes into strips and stuffs them between slabs of cardboard for insulation. Every night she raids her mother’s pantry: beans, dried pasta, and Crisco eaten straight from the container. She actually gains a little weight.

  Every day she finds more that she needs to make her temple. After one week the junk around her is so thick that it envelopes her in warmth and protects her from the summer afternoon showers. The metal from the tools lines her house like lethal cake decorations. One night a rabid squirrel stumbles upon the mound of wreckage, and crawls inside: wild-eyed Camilla skins it and makes herself a fur bracelet. She uses the bones to reinforce the joints of her temple, grooving them into an arch that points towards the sky.

  It is morning, and chilly. Around her the world is changing and the effects she has put into motion are reverberating. She will never know what those effects are, because the future is like an angel walking backwards through all the debris and chaos, collecting it as she goes, rebuilding what seems salvageable and setting fire to everything else.

  By the time Tess comes home from her cruise, sees the unbelievable wreck of her house, and calls the police, Camilla has been sitting quietly in her apple tree temple for almost two weeks. Sleeping while sitting, she spends her days enmeshed in wild fantasies about the yellow king of Carcosa and how delirious it will be when he comes for her and restores her rightful place by his throne.

  It takes three fire-trucks and twelve firemen to get to her. As she is led down the ladder, past her sobbing mother, and out the door, she has one moment of complete clarity before descending into speechlessness: the rose bush in the yard is starting to bloom simply because she has not trampled it down. And as the stars drip with spray, the towers of Carcosa rise behind the moon.

  April Dawn

  By Richard A. Lupoff

  There are no theaters in Kilkee. There are a couple of reasons for that. For one thing, Kilkee is a wee small town, hardly a hundred souls live there, and no businessman would think to build such an establishment, nor would there be customers enough to support it if someone got so foolish as to think of making the attempt.