And as the sunlight failed, I hunkered down in the bushes with my axe and waited for my class reunion.
~*~
I could not watch more than ten minutes of the final episode, because I was quite overcome by hallucinations. Out of the stiff, strange delivery of incomprehensible lines by hypnotized children, I saw what had traumatized me. In between the frames of stultifying order dissolving into cardboard madness, I saw flickering visions of everything that didn’t happen.
Miss Iris at the board, and all the children in a circle with their hands in each others’ laps, moaning in unison––all the children clapping in time with Susie slamming her heavy pine desktop down on Bully Billy’s broken head––the door to Carcosa opens in the wall and a torrent of rats floods the set, scurrying up our legs as we climb onto desks and each other to get away––screaming, laughing like rabid monkeys, all of us set fire to the books and throw them at each other until our masks and clothes burn and the set and the studio and the whole world burns…
This was not an accident of my clashing meds or a symptom of my trauma. This was what every child saw, every time they watched the Golden Class every time they blinked their eyes, in the little theater of their minds. This was the message of the show, and the secret of its enduring appeal.
But it unlocked everything I had made myself forget. There is no one so free as a condemned man.
~*~
Before he dropped me off, my father had tried to confess. He didn’t expect me to understand. I was only six, and more scared of him than anything else.
“I joined this group––they’re powerful people, connected in the industry… but they let me in, and I didn’t ask why, until it was too late. When you don’t have money, people can control you, and when they do for you, there’s always strings attached. They got me to do some… favors for them, and they promised things would change for me.
“But they just wanted me to be part of their group to push them up, you know? Like kids on the playground… Listen, inside, everybody in a group thinks they’re the phony, and they’re afraid of being found out, so they go along with the group. But if the group can put all their weakness into one person, then it dies with them, and they can live and rule without doubt or fear. It’s their world, little man.”
I didn’t say anything, just looked out the window. Dad’s radio only got AM, and some awful song about someone called Mellow Yellow leaked through the waves of static.
“I know Mom runs me down a lot, and she’s right, even if she’s a crazy bitch. But I only want the best for you. I want for you to be somebody, so nobody will ever put their strings on you, so you’ll never have to hide behind a mask.
“That’s why I’m doing… what I’m doing.” He wasn’t looking at me, wasn’t looking at the road. “I won’t jump. I’m going to make them push me.”
I hadn’t seen my father for a month when I got the invitation in the mail to audition for Golden Class. It had hardly entered my mind then that I might never see him again, and it wasn’t until much too late that I realized that the two were connected.
~*~
I did not need to watch more than ten minutes of the last episode because, in the intervening years, I had read The King In Yellow.
My father’s pyramid scheme cult must have used the expurgated text. The Golden Class alumni took no chances. Tommy had died ambiguously, which must have driven them crazy, maybe explained why they waited so long to close the circle. Now Kelsey had taken her own life, perhaps because she knew I was too weak. For I knew that the one who laid down their life for the class would don the Teacher’s black mask and serve in sunlight. One more had to be sacrificed, to make the Hidden Crown manifest itself. This one would be easy. All they had to do was murder me.
~*~
Ten minutes after eleven, a wave of cloying perfume drifted through the thicket, and she came into the grove. Alone. She glided through the clinging overgrowth, but she didn’t trip, for I had cleared the way with the axe I now held up as I leapt into her path.
“I’m not helpless,” she said, holding the gun up before her mask. It fit her now. Our masks were huge and grotesque when we were children, because they were our adult faces. In the play, she was Cassilda.
I looked, but did not see the gun. The scar on her hand caught the iodine glow of the arc sodium lamps, shiny like teeth.
“I looked for you,” she said, under her breath.
“No you didn’t,” I started to say, but she stopped the words with her mouth. She drove me backwards into the freshly tilled dirt, into dismembered roots and recycled sewage and the perfume of graves.
I could never endure the touch of another human being, male or female, but now, something twisted inside me was severed and I reveled in the soft heat of her flesh through layered white damask and silk. Everywhere I touched her with my filthy paws left grievous stains, as if she’d been trampled by hogs.
Stripping off my rags, she rolled over and laid the gun down, ground her pelvis against me a few times, and grunted in mild surprise when I spent against her thigh.
“Don’t sweat it, sweetie,” she said. “It still counts.”
She got up with the gun and backed away. I tried to find the axe, but I couldn’t even find my pants. I was still naked when the others began to come into the clearing.
“His wish has been granted,” Regina called out, wiping her leg as she picked her way over to the group. They surrounded me and filled the clearing, a mob of masked men and women. Three of them, two men in black suits and Regina (Cassilda) in her mud-smeared gown, advanced on me with long ceremonial knives.
“You’re going to fuck it up,” I growled. “All the years of planning, of crushing anything good in my life to try to drive me to suicide, and you’re going to fuck it up.”
The man in Thale’s haughty mask snapped, “The sacrifices have been made and accepted.” I recognized his voice from two of last summer’s top-grossing films. “She’s laid down her life to serve in sunlight, and Tom went down to wait in twilight. Only one remains, to wear the Pallid Mask and serve in shadow.”
“Let’s get this shit over with,” Uoht said––which was strange, Uoht was Tommy’s mask. But the show must go on, the players were, ultimately, disposable. Uoht lunged with his dagger.
I stepped back and let the pepper spray fall out of my sleeve, gave him a blast that flooded his right eye and filled his open mouth. He went down and I stepped over him, but the others were a frozen tableau. “You think Tom was an accident? You based that on what, the coroner’s report? A Variety obit? Jesus, you’re all cracked. If I knew everything I had came to me because I was on some stupid kids’ show, sooner or later, I’d snuff it, too.”
That started them mumbling.
“And Norma wasn’t alone in my apartment. She wouldn’t kill herself, she knew what was at stake. Somebody pushed her.”
The woman, Cassilda, reached up to take off her mask, but Thale stopped her. “I’ve had enough of this.”
“Bullshit,” Thale said. “Nobody pushed her. She was a coward, and she did herself in because she knew to stand in our way would be even worse. Our way, do you hear? This world is ours.” The crown, he didn’t have to say, will be mine. Jesus, that insane sonofabitch could act.
“I did it,” I said. “ I pushed her.”
Most of them laughed. I recognized their voices from film and television, from local and national news. In the ones I didn’t recognize, I heard the sneer of real power, of producers and lawyers and accountants. “You never left your little island, Tardy Artie. We’ve had you boxed in for two days now.”
“I did it over the phone. I told her I knew about her, and… I told her I loved her. She was out of her head, and I pushed her.”
They were laughing too hard to hear anything. “Her wish was granted!”
“She jumped,” Thale said, helping Uoht to his feet. “Tom was weak inside, but maybe it was murder. More than a few of us hated him. No way to be sure, you’re
right. But The Black Mask has been cast. This thing wants to happen. So let’s do it.”
I backed up until I ran into stiff arms that pushed me towards the knives. I twisted away, but through the mob, I saw that the twentieth member of our party wore Miss Iris’s mask.
I wept aloud. I had murdered her with words, but my hands were clean, according the ultimate court, and now she was the Teacher. Now I laughed, because they thought they had me.
The favored kids who wore the special masks made a wish almost every week, but sooner or later, every student in the Golden Class got to make one wish in the Wishing Well. Even the bungled and the botched among us, the slow ones and the cursed, got a rigged question right or did some good deed that allowed us to approach the decorated trashcan in the corner of the classroom beside the door to Carcosa, and throw a golden coin with a tiny slip of paper. I remember how the sound effect of the echoing plop of the deep water drowned out the muted thud of the coin hitting the pillow on the bottom of the trashcan, yet believing that my wish would come true. When Miss Iris escorted me to the Wishing Well––even then, expecting mischief––she squeezed the tightly rolled note into my fist along with the coin. There was no time to balk, so I simply palmed it and threw in the coin with the slip of paper I had written on my own.
“You’ll still come to nothing,” I told them. “My wish has not yet come true. It’ll just be a stupid murder.”
The Teacher barged through the line of glowering masks, dwarfing them, forever little children at her knee. Her bright black mask was the size of an automobile hood. But I recognized her voice. “His wish must be granted. But we could not read it. Shoddy penmanship…” Her massive hands knitted together and popped knuckles like starter pistols. “A guessing game should be most diverting.”
“No!” Uoht said. “Enough of this shit! Tell us your wish, nobody!” His knife went through my shoulder, just above my lung, and emerged from my back, just inside the wing of my right shoulder blade. I gasped as he lifted me to my toes by the wound. I could not speak, but I could point to the concrete plug at my feet. I could not kick at the crack I had made with the crowbar, but I tap-danced on it. Uoht and Cassilda knelt to inspect it.
“It’s just a manhole.”
“No… it’s a wishing well… My father made… a wish… with his life. He… who serves in shadow…”
Uoht drove me down to my knees with the knife. “Am I the only one who wants this over with?”
Several others rushed forward with their knives, but I surrendered. “I wished… for my father to come back… to me.”
The concrete plug flew up like a cap on an oil well, crushing Uoht’s legs and pinning him at my feet.
“Your offerings have amused us,” I said, mouthing the words that came into me down the strings at the back of my soul, “but the Hour has passed. None of you shall wear the Crown. All shall serve in shadow.”
Cassilda staggered back, dropped her knife and tried to run from the golden coin I held out to them. They all tried to run, but it was too late. The scrub brush, the trees turned white and dissolved in clouds of ash.
I took off my mask.
Sweetums
By John Langan
I
Feeney?” Keira said.
The cell phone reception here was terrible; her agent’s voice cracked and snapped. “Yeah,” Ralph was saying, “I know, but it’s the only thing I could come up with. Times are tough in Tinseltown, same as everywhere else. If Feeney hadn’t pissed off everybody and his uncle with his shit, there’s no way I’d be able to get this for you. Fortunately, the guy’s an auteur, which is to say, a fucking asshole. Not to mention, his last three films’ve done shit box office.”
“I heard,” Keira said. “Honestly, I’m amazed any studio would bankroll him.”
“Any studio won’t,” Ralph said. “Guy’s toxic; no one’ll touch him. Apparently, he’s put together a group of private backers.”
“Really?”
“Really. I did a little asking around.”
“Who’s cutting his checks?”
“Buncha guys from eastern Europe. Probably the Russian mob, looking to launder money.”
“Jesus.”
“Nah, I’m just fucking with you. The backers are from Hungary or Romania or some shit. From what I hear, they’re on the up and up. Bastions of culture and all that.”
“Huh,” Keira said. “What’s the film about?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I wouldn’t be surprised if Feeney doesn’t know, himself. You see his last one? The one he made by intuition?”
“How long is the gig for?”
“Three weeks, with an option to extend for another three. Because you’re so busy.”
She wasn’t. The restaurant where she waited tables had cut her to Sunday night, which had become the last stop on its employees’ ways out the door. She said, “Where is it?”
“Feeney’s rented a warehouse on the waterfront. I’ll e-mail you the address. First day of shooting’s Monday. Bright and early: five a.m..”
“Ouch.”
“Again—because you’re so busy.”
“All right, all right.”
“So…?”
“I’ll take it. Of course I’ll take it.”
II
Keira pulled into the warehouse parking lot almost twenty minutes late. She was not as late as she could have been, considering how hung-over she was—how much alcohol was doubtless still coursing through her veins. Last night had brought her firing from the restaurant, after which, her (former) co-workers had insisted on taking her out to the bar across the street—though she had suspected they were as much celebrating their own continued employment as they were commiserating her termination. She had intended to tell them about his gig with Feeney, had felt the news washing closer to the tip of her tongue with each rum-and-Coke, but had been unable to consume enough liquor to release it into speech. It wasn’t embarrassment at working with such a well-known flake—an acting job was an acting job, and though this one didn’t sound like a leading role, even a few minutes on screen put her one step closer to the day when it would be her name over the title. She hadn’t let anyone know her good news, not her father, who kept track of how many weeks had passed since her walk-on part in the shampoo commercial, or her mother, who guaranteed her a position teaching drama at her prep school if she would move back east, or even her roommate, who met her anxieties about losing her job at the restaurant by asking her when she was planning on moving out. She wasn’t especially superstitious—well, no more than any other actor—but she had been seized, possessed by the conviction that, were she to reveal her change in fortune to her companions, her parents, her roommate, she would arrive early Monday morning to a deserted address.
So she had swallowed rum-and-Coke after rum-and-Coke, watching the interior of the bar lose focus, starting at the edges of her vision and moving steadily inwards, until the faces of her friends dissolved like pieces of butter sliding around a hot pan. With every drunk-driving PSA she’d ever heard overlapping in her ears, she’d driven home crouched over the wheel of her GEO Metro, which was also the position she’d maintained during her slightly-more-sober race back down I-710 a few hours later. Ahead, the moon was a doubloon balanced on the horizon. When she looked at the road, the satellite elongated, stretching into a pair of gold circles connected by a narrow bridge, an enormous, cartoon barbell. She did her best to ignore it.
The warehouse at which Feeney was shooting was somewhere on the outskirts of the Port of Los Angeles proper, heading in the direction of Long Beach. Within minutes of leaving the highway, Keira was hopelessly lost, unable to recognize or in some cases read the names on street signs. Then, a right turn, and there it was: a wrought-iron gate wide as the street it ended, the word VERDIGRIS suspended between a pair of parallel arches overhead. The left side was open; taped to the right was a piece of canary paper with “Actors Park In Lot 3” written on it in black marker. The doom that Keira had fel
t pressing her into the steering wheel was pushed up by a wave of euphoria. She sped through the opening. Lot 3 was located to the left side of the warehouse. What were the chances that anything was underway, yet? It was a Monday morning, for Christ’s sake. She locked the car and half-ran towards the warehouse.
The place was enormous. If you had told her they docked the container ships inside it and loaded them there, she could have believed it. Eight, ten storeys high, hundreds of yards long, it seemed less of a building and more of a wall, a great barrier built to keep out something vast. The nearer she drew, the smaller she felt. It was like the wall in King Kong, except the beast this was to restrain was no overgrown ape, but a creature whose slimy bulk would blot out the sun. I guess that makes me Fay Wray.
The entrance to this part of the warehouse was surprisingly modest, a single door above which a bare bulb cast jaundiced light. A piece of legal paper reading “Actors” was thumbtacked to it. Keira was almost at the door when a pair of shapes detached from the surrounding shadows, one to her right, one to her left. Men, they were men. There was time for her to think, Oh my God I’m going to be mugged, for her heart to lurch, her arms to tense, and they were on her. The one to the right circled behind her; the one to the left circled in front. She snapped her head back and forth, the sudden motion making her stomach boil. The men moved with a long, leg-over-leg stride, more like dancers preparing to execute a leap than criminals preparing to beat and rob her. Their hands were up, not in a boxer’s guard, but higher, at their eyes. They were holding something to their eyes—cameras, small, rounded video cameras. She could see the red Record light lit on both. “Wait,” she said. “Wait.” The men continued their circling. “Shit.” She grinned, shaking her head more slowly. “Okay, okay. I get it.” She held up her hands. “I’m Keira Lessingham. I’m part of the cast.” The men continued filming. They appeared to be dressed the same: black, tight-fitting turtlenecks, brown corduroys, and black Doc Martens. She could not see their faces, though one was wearing a black beret. “I’m, uh, I guess I’ll just go in, then.” The men continued circling. Keira walked through them to the door and opened it.
A Season In Carcosa Page 24