III
A narrow corridor receded into the warehouse. Heart still knocking against her ribs, Keira walked up it. The passageway was lit by a series of round, blotchy bulbs hanging in space, a row of poisoned suns leading her into blackness, to a gap in the wall to her right. She stepped through, and found herself on a city street. The set was not the most elaborate she’d been on, but taking into account Feeney’s limited resources, it was not unimpressive. Across a wide, cobblestoned street, the brick façade of a low row of apartments was pierced by an archway large enough for a small car to drive through. Stationed along the sidewalk in front of the apartments, one to a doorway, black lampposts whose crowns curved into question marks cradled frosted glass globes that coated the scene with thick, creamy light. Above the apartments, the spire of what was probably a cathedral occupied the near distance; a fairly convincing night sky filled the background. She might have been in some small, middle-European city, one of the places her parents had dragged her to when she was younger and they were trying to inoculate her with culture, a settlement against whose stone walls the tides of invasion, religion, and nationalism had risen and fallen for millennia.
“Finally.”
Keira turned to her left, and there was Feeney with a pair of camera men—possibly the same two who had swept down on her outside the warehouse: it was difficult to be certain, because this pair also began circling her, and she was trying to focus on the director.
He was not shorter than Keira had expected—wasn’t that the impression most people reported on meeting a celebrity? Keira had never had a sense of Feeney being anything other than average height, even short. His hair stood up in a pompadour that made his forehead seem exposed, his eyes surprised. He was wearing a long wool coat that was either navy blue or black. Around a cigarette that had been smoked almost to the filter, he said, “Great. You can stay where you are. Actually, come forward a couple of steps. Now take half a step to your right. Good.” He looked to the camera men, who had stopped their movement. “One of you over there,” he said, pointing to the archway, “and the other…here.” He gestured to a spot ten feet to Keira’s left. “Right. You—”
Feeney was talking to him. “Uh, Keira Less—”
“Right, Keira. Let’s see if you’re up for this. You start here. You’re on this street in—well, it doesn’t really matter where. Someplace far from home. The natives don’t speak English. You’re in pretty rough shape. Actually, you’re not that bad, but you feel like you are, okay? Put your hands in your pockets.”
Keira jammed her hands into her jeans.
“All right. Roll your shoulders forward—hunch over. Not too much. Good. Okay. When I say, ‘Action,’ you’re looking at that place.” He pointed to the apartment row. “Something is going to happen. Something. I won’t tell you what; I just want you to react to it.”
Keira nodded. “Improvise.”
“React,” Feeney said. “Got it? Good.” He clapped his hands. “Okay! Ready?”
“Yes,” Keira said. The camera men held up their free hands in OK signs.
Feeney retreated a half-dozen steps in the direction Keira had come. “And…action.”
Four doors down from the archway, almost parallel with the spot where Feeney had positioned her, one of the apartment doors swung inward. Guess he can’t afford to waste any time, Keira thought. Light the color of dark honey filled the doorway. Somewhere inside that space, that light, a dark shape moved forward—pushed forward, as if struggling through the light. If it was a man—and how could it be anything else?—he was huge, so broad it was hard to believe he would be able to squeeze out onto the front stoop. The silhouette of his head was round, what was visible of his shoulders rough, as if he were wearing a fur coat, or covered in a heavy pelt, himself. Keira could hear the floorboards the man was crossing shrieking with the burden. Without being aware of it, she had withdrawn her hands from her pockets and raised one to her mouth, the other in front of her. Something about the man’s movement was off, out of kilter in a fundamental way Keira could recognize but not articulate. It was curiously soft, as if the man were nothing but a heaping of flesh, the near end of a monstrous worm. The response it evoked in her was immediate, profound: Keira was more afraid than she could remember ever having been; her arms and legs trembled with it. It was intolerable that she should see any more of the figure in the doorway. She looked back the way she had entered the set, but could not find the opening in the wall, only the façade of another apartment row. Feeney was nowhere to be found. When Keira turned back to the street, she saw the man occluding the doorway. Almost before she knew it, she was running, her feet carrying her across the street and into the archway through the apartment building.
The camera man stationed to the right of the arch tracked her passage smoothly.
IV
For a moment, her footsteps chased one another around the tunnel. Then she was in a large courtyard, the empty center of a square whose sides were further blocks of apartments. In the far right corner of the square, an alley offered the only egress she could see from the space. Keira ran towards it. It seemed to take twice as long to cross the distance as it should have. All the while, she was aware of the archway gaping behind her, the naked space surrounding her.
By the time she reached the mouth of the alley, her chest was heaving, her blouse sodden. Though crowded with metal trashcans, the alley appeared passable. Feet sliding on rotten peels and soggy papers, Keira ran along the alley, narrowly avoiding a collision with an overflowing trashcan whose crash would have directed her pursuer straight to her. Above, on the walls to either side, fire escapes held their ladders just out of reach, taunting her. Ahead, the alley ended in a brick wall. The panic that flared in her was as quickly extinguished by her realization that this alley t-junctioned another. She turned right, saw an opening in the wall now to her left, and ducked through it.
Except for a large, bright rectangle glowing to her left, the long room she had entered was dark. The carbon reek of charcoal threaded the air, as if a fire had scoured the place in the recent past. In between where she was standing and the block of light, dark lines formed rectangles and squares of varying dimensions. As she moved closer to them, she saw that they were the frames of uncompleted walls, their timbers blackened and notched. A motor whirred softly somewhere in front of her. In the center of the bright space, a shape loomed.
Blood surged in Keira’s ears. How had the man found her so quickly? She was already half-turned the way she had come when her brain caught up with what her eyes had seen. The figure in the light was Feeney, his head and shoulders, anyway. The steady whir was the sound of a blocky projector resting on a camp table, casting the director’s image onto a burnt wall. The footage was rough, the timecode running in the lower right corner. Keira approached the projector. Feeney had been shot facing right, in three-quarter profile. He was holding a bulky phone to his left ear, a freshly-lit cigarette between his teeth. With a pop that made her jump, the audio thundered on, catching Feeney mid-sentence.
“—sweetums,” he was saying. “My little turd.” He paused. “It’s the Sign.” Another pause. “No. Not about the Sign, it is the Sign.” Pause. “How can—” Pause, during which he removed the cigarette from his mouth, considered its white length, and returned it to its place. “What does any of that have to do with me?” Pause. “No.” Pause. “No.” Pause. “Don’t be ridiculous, sweetums. Don’t be stupid.” Pause. “Yes you are being stupid. Why are you being so Goddamned stupid?” Pause. “Because it isn’t like anything. It’s not a metaphor, my little turd.” Pause. “You are my little turd. My little piece of shit.” Pause. “Sweetums. How I’m going to enjoy fucking you, you little turd. How I’m going to enjoy fucking the shit out of you, you little piece of shit. Oh yes I am.” Pause. “I am.”
A shoe scraped the floor. Keira spun, and found herself facing one of the camera men, the red Record light shining on his camera. “Jesus.” The man offered no response. Keira�
�s cheeks flushed. Of course all of this was part of the movie. What had she thought it was? No doubt, there had been camera men stationed along the route she’d run. She hoped Feeney would be happy with the mix of relief and shame reddening her face.
Behind the camera man, a doorway led out of the room into another. Keira considered leaving this place in favor of a return to the alley that had brought her to it; however, the prospect of encountering the man (it had to be a man) whose presence had produced such a dramatic response from her was sufficiently unwelcome to send her around the camera man and into the adjoining room.
V
Heavy, mustard-colored curtains blocked her way. Keira pushed them to the left, searching for a part. The fabric was grimy against her fingertips. Dust and mildew rose in clouds around her. She sneezed once, twice. She found the end of the curtain, pulled it up, and passed under it.
She was standing in a small, dimly-lit space whose walls consisted of the mustard curtains. In front of her, a man sat behind a typewriter supported by a card table that quivered as his thick fingers stabbed its keys. The man’s longish hair was more brown than red, unlike the beard that flared from his cheeks, which was practically orange. His broad face was pink, puffy, the blood vessels broken across it mapping a route signposted with empty siblings of the bottle of Jack Daniels stationed at the typewriter’s left. At the same time, there was a certain open, even unguarded quality to his eyes that made him appear oddly innocent. As Keira watched, the man tugged the page on which he’d been working free of the typewriter and held it up for scrutiny. His brow lowered, his lips moving soundlessly. Maybe halfway through his reading of it, he smashed the paper between his hands, crushed it into a ball and dropped it to the wood floor, where it joined a host of similar casualties. The man took a measured pull from the bottle of liquor, then selected a fresh sheet from the stack of paper to the typewriter’s right side and spun it onto the roller. His fingers resumed their assault on the keys.
Was this guy an actor? It was hard to think what else he might be. Keira surveyed the folds of the curtains. Almost immediately, she saw a red Record light shining in one of the recesses to the right. So the guy was part of the movie. Keira wasn’t sure how to proceed. Feeney hadn’t covered what to do when she encountered another cast member. Unless his instruction to “react” had been intended to cover everything that was to follow that initial command of “action.” The man appeared to be talking to himself. Keira approached him.
It was difficult to hear the man above the clattering of the keys. His voice was sanded smooth by a Southern drawl whose precise origins Keira could not place. He was saying, “Not dreaming, but in Carcosa. Not dead, but in Carcosa. Not in Hell, but in Carcosa. Why then I’ll fit you. A true son of Tennessee. Jesus, what an asshole. Come, let us go, and make thy father blind. This was the creature that was once Celia Blassenville. Thus the devil candies all sins over. Excellent hyena! I would have you meet this bartered blood. What creature ever fed worse, than hoping Tantalus? Welcome, dread Fury, to my woeful house. The evil of the stars is not as the evil of earth. ’Tis true, ’tis true; witness my knife’s sharp point. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. And touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass. Rhubarb, O, for rhubarb to purge this choler! There sits Death, keeping his circuit by the slicing edge. Solomon miseris socias habuisse doloris. I’ll find scorpions to string my whips. Vergama leaned forward from his chair, and turned the page. I account this world a tedious theater. And while Grom howled and beat his hairy breast, death came to me in the Valley of the Worm. Nothing but fear and fatal steel, my lord. Continually, we carry about us a rotten and dead body. No mask? This banquet, which I wish may prove more stern and bloody than the Centaurs’ feast. You have seen the King…? Man stands amaz’d to see his deformity in any other creature but himself. Where flap the tatters of the King. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. In dim Carcosa. In lost Carcosa. In dead Carcosa.”
The man reached forward and pulled the page from the typewriter. This time, he sampled the bottle while he was scanning it. As before, he had not completed reading it when he crumpled the page and let it fall to the floor. While he rolled a clean sheet into the typewriter, Keira knelt and picked up the closest ball of paper. On one knee, she eased the mass apart and smoothed it over her other knee.
The paper was blank. Keira looked at the man, who had resumed his typing and was repeating his monologue. “When then I’ll fit you.” Strictly speaking, there was no reason for there to be anything typed on the sheet, but given the ferocity with which the man was punching the keys, she had expected to find something on the page, even random combinations of letters and numbers. “Thus the devil candies all sins over.” She had wondered if the guy might be transcribing his weird monologue, which was what she would have done. “Welcome, dread Fury, to my woeful house.”
A burst of hammering made Keira leap to her feet. From the other side of at least one of the curtains, sounds of rapid construction—hammers pounding nails; saws chewing wood; lumber clattering together—drowned out the typewriter’s chatter. The man did not appear to notice them, nor did the camera man filming him. Was the noise coming from the left? She was reasonably sure it was. There seemed little point in remaining here. She supposed she could attempt to speak to the man, but she was reluctant to break into whatever state the guy was in. React, right? She would react by investigating the source of the building sounds. Keeping near to the curtains, she passed around the man at the typewriter. There was a part in the curtains she could slip through. As she did, a glance back showed the view over the man’s shoulder. Though his fingers drove the typewriter’s keys down in steady rhythm, none of the corresponding typebars rose to imprint the paper with its symbol.
VI
Keira emerged on the right side of a shallow stage facing an empty auditorium. Center stage, half a dozen men were busy with a wooden box whose proportions suggested a coffin stood on one end; albeit, a coffin for a man a good foot and a half taller than Keira. Dressed in the same black turtlenecks, brown corduroys, and black boots as the other camera men she had encountered, these men had traded in their cameras for an assortment of tools. Without the cameras obscuring their faces, Keira could see that the men resembled one another to a degree that was unusual, even artificial. Bald, their protuberant eyes stretching heavy lids, mouths wide, lips thin, their skin rendered sallow by the bank of lights shining overhead, the men might have been brothers from an almost comically large family. Undoubtedly, they had been made up after the same model; although why Feeney should have cared for his camera men’s appearances, Keira couldn’t say. Maybe they had parts in the film, too; maybe she would be required to record some of the day’s performances.
She had drawn near enough to the activity for one of the men to turn to her and say, “Beautiful, innit?” He spoke with an approximation of a lower-class English accent, Dick Van Dyke playing the cockney in Mary Poppins. Keira nodded and said, “What is it?”
The man stared at her as if amazed. “What is it? Did you seriously just ask what this is?”
“I’m sorry. I’m new, here—this is my first day on set, and—”
“This is—come over here,” the man said, waving her closer. “Come on, don’t be shy.”
From the front, Keira saw that the box was at least twice as wide as a coffin. A door that slid to the left disclosed a narrow compartment on the right. She thought of a photo booth, especially when she saw the row of green buttons set in the compartment’s left-hand panel. A pair of slots had been cut in the wood above the buttons, the topmost level with a person’s face, the one below set approximately throat-high. Below the green buttons, a pair of holes had been drilled in the panel, the upper level with a person’s waist, the lower set approximately thigh-high. “This,” the man said, “is the King’s Beneficence.”
“The King’s…?”
The man sighed. “You’re not from around these parts, are you?”
> “No,” Keira said. “I mean, I am now, but I’m from New York. Originally.”
“You don’t say?” the man said. “If you’re a denizen of the Old Imperial, then you should be well-acquainted with the Lethal Chamber.”
“I, uh, no, I’m afraid I’m not.”
“Catlicks, your people?”
Her parents? “Episcopalians,” Keira said. When the man frowned, she said, “Anglicans.”
“Ah,” the man said. “Say no more. This,” he gestured at the box, “is the means by which a man—or a woman—with a mind to might make his—or her—own quietus, to quote old Will-I-Am of Avalon. Only, instead of a bare bodkin, you’ve got your choice of these four buttons.”
Her arm stretched out, Keira leaned toward the compartment, only to have the man catch her other arm and haul her back, shouting, “Are you out of your bleedin mind?” At the expression on Keira’s face, the man said, “Right, right, you don’t know.” Releasing her from his grip, the man bent over and picked up a slender piece of wood the length of a yardstick. “‘Bout time for a test, anyway,” the man said, and tapped the closest button with the wood.
Something bright and metal shot out of the top slot and hung quivering in the air. A broad, flat tongue of steel, its razor edge shone. “The King’s Philosophy,” the man explained, “with which he relieves us of the burden of our thoughts.” He moved the tip of his improvised pointer to the next button and pushed.
From the next slot down, something flashed out and around. Wider than the blade above, this one curved in a crescent inlaid with fine filigree. “The King’s Counsel,” the man continued, “with which he relieves us of the burden of our words.” He shifted the sword to the third button and triggered it.
A Season In Carcosa Page 25