A Season In Carcosa

by Sr. (Editor) Joseph S. Pulver

  I turn back to the parchment, my new life, sip my thick coffee and begin, but after a few attempts I stutter. The words will not come. The muse is elusive. I press on, but all I scratch into the parchment seems an illogical and convoluted mess. After a time I admit defeat and retreat to the balcony. Perhaps the beckoning suns will light something inside of me.

  I think of the white-face. The balconies across the way are still shrouded in darkness. I gaze intently at the shadows. I see faint glimmers of pale lamplight leaking from some of the apartments. And movement. The occupants, I think, stirring behind shuttered windows and closed blinds. I try to recall from which balcony the white-face loomed. I blink. Was it directly across from me? Below? To the right? My memory fails. It could have been anywhere. Suddenly I have a vision of the white-face crawling across the face of the building, over balconies, across windows, her (and I am certain it is a ‘she’) body fast and agile, her head smooth, smiling stone.

  These drear thoughts cloud my mind. I will not be getting any work done soon, so decide upon a walk.

  The square is filled with frenetic movement and loud chatter; orange sunlight and blue shadows. I smell fresh bread and honey. At a rickety stall I buy a croissant from a short, dark man. “Good day,” I say to the stout man, smiling, trying to be upbeat, but he only grunts in return. The croissant is stale, tough, but I decide I will not let anything else adversely affect my mood. Genevieve would have smiled and carried on.

  Men, women, and children swirl past me in a steady blur. I am the one still thing in a world of motion; the centre, the apex, an inhabitant of Carcosa. Without Genevieve, I am alone. I feel faint, dizzy. I stumble to the nearest cafe table and fall into an empty seat. I close my eyes to try to quell the spinning world.

  Eyes closed, I “see” it again — the white-face. Smooth, stoic stone swimming in my vision, floating in the darkness. I start, open my eyes, and gasp.

  At my feet something black scuttles across the dark cobblestones. A spider, thin and long-legged, perhaps sensing my sudden attention, stands still as a statue on the warm brickwork. I stand and quickly bring my boot heel down on the black creature. I imagine a satisfying crunch, but it does not come. When I lift my foot there is no trace of the spider.

  I stumble blindly across the plaza into a small back alley. I lean against the cool, dark alley wall, panting and blinking. Perhaps, like the white-face, I simply imagined the spider. Perhaps I imbibed too much absinthe last night. It would not be the first time. Or the last.

  I try to recall the evening, but it is as elusive as my muse is. I have a faint recollection of a woman, though, which is impossible. There was but one woman for me — Genevieve. There will be no other.

  The alley is dark and narrow. It smells of fish guts and despair. I think I hear something, a noise like the clicking of tiny feet along the damp cement of the alleyway. A scuttling. Then a soft whoosh, like the exhalation of a held breath. Perhaps a stuttering, muffled clomp. I imagine movement at the end of the alley, a stirring. I lean forward, squint. I take one stuttering step forward, then another. “H-Hello?” I say. I cannot be sure, but I think I see a pale shape move out of the shadows, a head, or rather a pallid mask, staring sightlessly. Clutching my head, I turn and race out of the alley, vowing to quit the drink once and for all. It would not be the first time.

  Then I wake on the small divan in my apartment. The bedroom door is closed — the bedroom I had shared with dear Genevieve. I am tired, and my head is clouded in thick fog. My sleep was fitful. There was a strange noise during the night, a clomping sound, as if the occupant of the apartment above me was wearing wooden shoes. My body itched and prickled all night. I am uncertain what day it is. But I did not drink; I am sure of it.

  Rising, I am momentarily startled to discover a figure standing in the corner, silent and still as a winter night. I move forward, hand outstretched, and blink. It is the manikin, naked and immobile, its lower half nothing more than three bare wooden pegs like a saloon stool; its upper half a female torso, its ghastly pink-white skin a patina of cracks and spider-lines, peeling paint. In the dim morning light I discern the face of the manikin. The black eyes stare, unblinking, the mouth open in a grim rictus. I imagine I hear a scream issuing from that unmoving black maw. The head is bald, smooth and glowing like the strange moons above the city.

  I recall the old profession; the tailoring and garment-mending, the fine silks and satins, the buttons, needles and pins, the dressing and undressing. Especially the dressing and undressing. I smile. Before Genevieve, there were many women in need of mending. I had, at that time, quite the reputation; one in need of repair.

  I shuffle forward and reach out to stroke the manikin’s cheek, but I stop. There is a black spot on the ancient manikin’s cheek that is moving, crawling slowly across the cracked and broken skin. Another damnable spider! It perches by the manikin’s mouth, as if it has crawled from that black hole. I strike the creature with my open hand, squishing it. It leaves a dark smear on the peeling paint. For a moment, I think I hear a small scream emanate from the manikin.

  Unnerved, I turn from the still manikin. The apartment is quiet, the windows and drapes closed. I totter toward the bedroom, but the closed door mocks me, stops me in my tracks. I stare at the door. A drear unease settles in me. I back away from the bedroom, grab my waistcoat, and flee the apartment.

  Outside, in the light, I look up into the twin suns. By their placement, I guess it to be the mid-afternoon. But how can that be, I think, surely I haven’t slept through all the morning?

  So it is that I presently find myself outside the Four Winds Pub, squinting up at the wooden sign over the thick black door. I have no recollection of what happened when I departed my apartment, no recollection of how I got here, for now the suns are descending and the afternoon wanes.

  I pull open the heavy door and enter. The air is thick with smoke and conversation. Old Viktor is at the bar, so I make my way over.

  “Hail,” Old Viktor says to me. “My, but you are looking a bit put out. Yours is a faced of worries and sorrows, my old friend.”

  I’m dimly aware that I haven’t eaten, but before I can order a plate of food Old Viktor is placing a double dram in front of me. “On the house,” he says. “You look like you need it.”

  I down the whisky in one gulp and as I place the glass back on the counter I see it, a spider, crawling drunkenly across the moist, dark wood. Furious, I raise my hand to strike at the creature but Old Viktor grabs my arm.

  “No,” he says, “you mustn’t kill the spider. They carry our sorrows. It is considered bad form and will bring you ill luck.”

  I lower my hand and stare at Old Viktor. “My luck could not be any worse,” I say.

  “Perhaps,” Old Viktor says. Then, “Do you know the story of the Sorrow Spiders?”

  I shook my head morosely.

  “Come then,” he says, leaving the counter to Young Viktor and directing me to a far dark table, but not before getting us both a large dram. “Perhaps this will be good fodder for your next book.

  “I heard this tale from Hawberk the Armourer,” Old Viktor says, “who heard it from Severn. But it is as true an account as you’ll hear.

  “A long time ago, well before Carcosa had towers, quays, and bridges, when the black stars dripped misery, there lived a young man, Gaston, the son of the great sculptor Vance. Gaston was in love with an equally young maiden, Camilla.

  Now, Vance was no ordinary sculptor. It was said, in fact, that his art was the product of dark magick. With a touch and an invocation, he could turn animate objects to stone. Gaston was a falconer, but was said to have a menagerie of pets, and was particularly fond of spiders. Spiders, Gaston claimed, were of the living world and the dead. Thus, they could travel between worlds, transporting souls. They could even, on rare occasion, reanimate the dead.”

  Here, Old Viktor paused to take a sip of whisky. I did the same.

  Old Viktor continued. “Vance had forbidden Gasto
n to see Camilla, a commoner. The truth was that Camilla was such a young beauty that Vance secretly desired her to himself. He was a man who was used to getting what he wanted. But the young lovebirds continued their affair, unabated, infuriating Vance.

  “Then, one day, when Camilla went to Lake Hali to meet her lover, she found, instead, a man of stone, smooth and dead, perched beneath a great, weeping willow. Camilla was cleft with grief. She was inconsolable. She wept for hours by the bank of the lake, holding tight to the cold stone. Finally, too overcome to continue, Camilla flung herself into Lake Hali. But, after some time, the lake threw her back onto shore. She wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t quite alive, either.

  “Though Gaston had been turned to solid stone, spiders began to emerge from his mouth. Hundreds of them spilled from him and skittered down to the lakeshore where they crawled atop the unconscious form of Camilla and entered her open mouth. It is said that they were drawn to her grief, her pain. She was trapped in some sort of purgatory, a no-man’s land, and the spiders offered safe passage on her journey, wherever that would take her.”

  I shuffle nervously in my chair and down the rest of my whisky. “And?” I say.

  Old Viktor smiles. “She rose up, of course. This half-dead, half alive woman, dripping wet, shambled across the countryside to the home of Vance, the renowned sculptor. She found him in his studio. When Vance saw her, he stood, expecting angry recriminations. But Camilla only smiled wide and shuffled forward. Black things moved in her mouth. She smiled wider and stuttered toward Vance. Could it be? Vance thought. Did she want me all this time? Camilla opened her arms. ‘Come close,’ she said. ‘I want to give you a kiss.’ And Vance moved to her and put his greedy mouth on hers’, and Camilla, seemingly with the strength of stone and grief, held him tight as the spiders moved from her to him, filling him and filling him to bursting as he struggled against the black surge.”

  My stomach is queasy. “Quaint story,” I say.

  “They found Vance days later,” Old Viktor says, “prone on the studio floor, his face a frozen mask of terror. They blamed it on his heart troubles. A weak heart, they said. The statue of his son, Gaston, was also in the studio, as if it had miraculously ‘come alive’ and walked the countryside, as well. There was a nest of spiders in his black mouth.”

  I cough. “And the girl? Camilla?”

  “They didn’t find her. She was never seen again. Now, though, she is said to visit upon those who mourn lost loved ones. Their sorrows attract her. They feed her, keep her tethered to this world. She is said to take the form of a large spider, with the face of a beautiful young woman. A face, they say, that could only be made of pure white stone.”

  Dizzy, I stand. I think I should eat, but it seems imperative that I should get home without further delay. I wave aside Old Viktor’s ministrations and hurry out of the pub.

  The black stars drip, as if weeping. In the dark, under the strange moons, I find my way home.

  In the apartment, heart-racing, I move to the bedroom door. Oh, Genevieve. My eyes well up with heavy tears. Then, still dizzy and faint from lack of food, I stumble over and fall onto the divan. Then, everything goes black.

  I’m awakened by an odd noise, a muffled clomp, clomp. I sit up on the divan and blink. My eyes go to the closed bedroom door. Clomp. There it is again. Clomp. It is coming from the other side of the room.

  Clomp.

  I stand.

  Clomp . . . clomp.

  I shuffle forward. Then, as my eyes adjust to the dim light, I see it, the manikin, pale and ghostly, limned in moonlight, moving toward me, its wooden legs skidding along the floor in a herky-jerky dance. Something black is moving inside the manikin’s mouth. Then, a sound from the bedroom, a strange scuttling, and I whip my head toward the door. In the gap between the door edge and the floor I see movement, a blacker black, and a wedge of darkness seeping under the door and scurrying towards me, a chitinous rush of black noise. And the manikin dance. Clomp . . . clomp.

  Then, beyond the bedroom, that noise again, a whoosh, like an exhaled breath, and a rustling, as if someone or something is stirring from a deep rest, rising, coming out of the bedroom pale and smiling and whispering ‘Come here and give me a kiss.’

  Wishing Well

  By Cody Goodfellow

  Obviously, nobody ever recognized me on the street as one of the original Golden Class kids. I’m forty-three now, and haven’t aged well. But whenever I get cornered by some trainspotter of ancient local daytime TV or introduced as Tardy Artie by a tactless acquaintance, I have a ready stock of cute stories when I get asked what it was like. “I grew up with that show,” they always say, and “Miss Iris was my other teacher, my real teacher.” Some of them can’t quite contain their nostalgic jealousy.

  “What was it really like?” they ask, and I tell them one of my carefully made-to-order lies. The truth, if I could somehow make them believe it, would crack them in half. I don’t tell them about, for instance, the time I tried to take off my mask on-camera, or the day we poured a whole packet of rat poison into Miss Iris’s tea.

  Words can’t contain what it was like to be in the Golden Class. What it’s still like, if I may make so bold, because every time I close my eyes, I’m back there in the corner behind my mask and dunce cap, and I’m tardy, and in a world of trouble.

  The truth is that I didn’t know what it was like, I didn’t remember anything that I could say for sure actually happened to me from before age seven, until I got the package in the mail.

  My hands shook as I ripped the butcher paper from the box. If my fingers had found a mound of rusty razors buried in the Styrofoam packing peanuts, I would’ve been less unpleasantly surprised than I was, when they touched the jeering contours of my old mask.

  There was no note, only a tape––I had to rummage in my storage closet to find my old VCR. There was no return address, no label on the tape, but a faint logo embossed on the black plastic, which I could only see when I held it to the light. The art deco three-leafed flower symbol of Golden Class Productions.

  The panic attack was already beginning before I plugged it in and watched the tape. It was a first generation transfer from three-quarter inch video, jaundiced but painfully sharp. After thirty-seven years of seeing the copies in syndication, the colors bleeding into each other like a dementia patient’s watercolor, it was a shock like suddenly recovering from a stroke. The curdled blood drains from ruined cerebral tissue, and memory and perception come flooding back.

  The theme song played and the title dissolved to the familiar master shot of the Golden Classroom. As Miss Iris told the class that this was a special day, the last day of school, I realized that this was an episode that had never aired, and that my therapists and the shrinks at Norwalk assured me was only a figment of my imagination.

  They said it never happened, they said I made it all up, and they drugged me until I couldn’t remember anything. But it played on my little TV and it wouldn’t stop. I threw the remote and then my mask to smash the screen. The audio track continued to hiss out of the tiny speaker. “And do you want to know why today is a special day, children? Because today… we’re going to put on a play.”

  ~*~

  I don’t need to bore you with recounting the show’s familiar tropes. Everyone who didn’t see it growing up know what it was like, but I happily defer to its brief, oblique Wikipedia entry:

  [edit]

  Although this daily children’s television program shot in Los Angeles lasted only one season (99 episodes) in 1972, it was widely syndicated and gained lasting notoriety for its rigid yet bizarre rituals; hypnotic organ-and-Theramin score by exotica godfather Korla Pandit (loosely adapted from the jazz standard “Yellow-Belly Stomp” by King Leopardi); and its oppressive post-psychedelic art direction. Accused by some critics of borrowing heavily from rivals Romper Room and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the anonymously produced Golden Class was at once more authoritarian and more surreal than either, and was accused by the
Christian advocacy group Action for Family Television of promoting “druggy imagery” and “occult/witchcraft themes.” Jean Baudrillard observed in an interview with The Psychedelic Review in 1973 that the program was a “crypto-fascist dialectic posited to undermine the counter-cultural paradigm,” and derived unsettling resonances from the notorious French Decadent play The King In Yellow*.

  Under the magisterial presence of Miss Iris Moll, the class of twenty-three five and six-year old children were made to wear bizarre expressionistic masks (to protect the identity of the minors, but also to make them easier to replace) and participate in weird rituals involving meditation and playacting alongside lessons in grammar, geometry, philosophy and etiquette. Dominant themes of the lectures included the value of conformity and the danger of unbridled imagination.

  Class activities were often interrupted by the intrusion of courtiers and royal family from the Golden City of Carcosa––elaborate marionettes and bunraku puppets that came to deliver songs and stories, but also sometimes to “ride” or possess the weaker students, driving them to harmless but bizarre acts of misbehavior. Miss Iris would order the students and viewers at home to look away from the puppet visitors, and created much unintentional humor with her shrill warnings that the Tatterdemalion would carry away any children who misbehaved to the court of the King in Yellow*. One especially well-behaved student at the end of each program was selected to throw a coin and a small preprinted note into the Wishing Well––a decorated trashcan––to make a secret wish.

  Never collected on VHS or DVD and barred from YouTube, Golden Class bootleg compilations are treasured by bizarro television enthusiasts, while images of the masked children were employed as background visuals in a concert video by White Zombie, and a particularly incomprehensible Miss Iris lecture was sampled in the song “Yellow Magic Enema” by the Butthole Surfers.