‘Gypsy’ transitioned into ‘Dim Carcosa’, and during Hank’s bass-driven lead up, Johnny held out his hand to the crowd.
“How’re you doin’ tonight, Carcosa?”
The crowd cheered.
“I can’t hear you, Carcosa!”
Their roar intensified.
I was too caught up in the music at the time, but it did occur to me later how those hapless people in the crowd reacted to the word ‘Carcosa’. I’ve often wondered if they secretly knew of that golden city, or if they were caught up in the moment like we were. I suspect their indifference had everything to do with the latter. And who could blame them? We were fucking rocking the place.
The change began toward the end of the fourth song in our set. It may have started sooner than that, but the first time I noticed was during Bobby’s synth solo at the end of ‘Usurper’. Considering they were dressed in masks like the rest of the crowd, I guess they could’ve been there from the beginning. The members of Carcosa’s congregation stared down at us from the balcony, the sleeves of their robes draped over the railing like drawn curtains. I’m not sure if the others noticed them. I spotted the comically large figures purely by chance, flicking my head to brush the hair out of my face.
My mouth went dry, and I wanted to stop what I was doing so I could alert my bandmates, but for some reason, I struck the opening notes of the next song. The air grew stale, warm, my lungs constricting as they withered into husks. I tried to move my legs, but they wouldn’t cooperate, mired to the floor by an unseen bog. When I looked down, I discovered the red outline of Johnny’s geometric design was glowing.
I blinked, held my breath, and then exhaled. The glow was still there, piercing and unnatural as though lit by a black light bulb, which was impossible because I knew our show employed no such thing. Still, my hands played, slaves to another master, and when I looked over at my bandmates, they seemed to be struggling with the same realizations. Only Johnny appeared unaffected, caught up in the majesty of his lyrics as he belted them to the crowd, a crazed bard come from afar to tell the tale of a strange traveler, a dark gypsy, and a usurper to the throne of a faceless king.
The world around us shimmered, flickering like heat on a horizon line, pulling back the curtain of one reality to reveal another. And I swear to you, as I live and breathe, that whole fucking club was transported to that dream-place on the darkened shoreline. When I craned my neck, we were no longer on a stage, but at the gates of Carcosa itself. Those cyclopean towers shot skyward at unnatural angles, looming over us like snaking vines ready to pluck us like the ants we were.
But still, we played. We played better than we’d ever played before. I looked down at my fingers and discovered they were bleeding, the calluses that had formed years ago ripped open and fresh once more. I tried to stop, but my muscles would not obey, and I craned back my neck to scream. Finally, I understood why Johnny wouldn’t let us play more than three songs at a time. Whatever its purpose, this music was the catalyst. We were puppets, standing where we were told, playing the notes we were told. We four Yellow Kings were mere pawns placed precariously across Camilla’s chessboard. And now the final moves were in play.
The crowd no longer bobbed or moved in time to our movement. They stood like lifeless puppets, their expressionless masks staring out toward us, toward the gates of the golden city.
Time transmuted into water, washing over us like the dark, briny tides of Hali. Toward the back of the club, or where the back of the club used to be, I glimpsed the twin moons rising over a horizon of churning waters, crossing a red sky peppered with blackened stars.
‘Leech’ bled into ‘Stars’, and on we played—slaves to our art. I felt my head lighten from the loss of blood, but no matter how hard I tried to tear my fingers away from the strings, they would not obey.
Let it happen, I heard Camilla whisper. You want this.
Her words shifted into Johnny’s lyrics, their voices transposed over one another, and for a time I thought it was Camilla who was singing, or maybe it was Johnny whispering into my ear. Both had become one, two sides of the same damned coin, singing in shrill pitch to the darkening heavens above, swearing their oath to reconcile the kingdoms of Hastur.
I craned my neck to the side to check on Hank and Bobby. Hank stood in a crooked manner, his bass slung low almost to his knees, playing feverishly as he shook his head in time to the notes. At first, I thought he was caught up in the thrash of the song, but when we hit the end of the measurement, I could hear him screaming in agony. A dark stream of blood dripped down the side of his bass.
Bobby’s eyes and nose bled. Every time he struck his snare, blood sprayed outward, caking his cymbals like a dark Pollock painting. He looked too exhausted to scream, had somehow grown older in the fifty minutes or so since the show began.
As ‘Stars’ segued into ‘Masques’, I caught sight of something that I’m still not certain actually happened. You would think that after everything I’ve told you, surely something as simple as this would be equally believable, but you must trust me, Mr. Hargrove—this is hard to swallow, even for me.
Camilla’s statue of the faceless king moved. Slow, the fingers merely twitching, flexing, testing their constitution as bits of marble chipped and fell to the stage. The mask it held in its hand followed soon after and cracked down the center.
I played on, but I dared not take my eyes off that impossible thing. I opened my eyes to scream, but I’d burned out my lungs, my voice nothing more than dry hot air, the sound of sand in a desert gale. The statue closed its free hand into a fist, stretching its marble joints before flattening the thin, pale fingers to its face. With both hands together, Hastur buried his head into his palms and raked his stony fingers down the featureless palate of his face. Shreds of marble fell to the floor in powdery white clumps, accompanied by a deep, guttural scream that bellowed from deep beneath our bones.
Was I hallucinating? Did Bobby or Hank even see this happen? I don’t know, and I never will.
I was so caught up in the horror of what I’d witnessed that I missed Johnny’s introduction to the title track, ‘The Final Reconciliation’.
And finally, Mr. Hargrove, we come to the reason why you’re here. What happened that night in the Hyades club? Everything I’ve told you these past few hours has all built up to this moment, and I find that my old heart is beating in my chest just as it did that night onstage. I can almost taste the blood on my tongue and smell the cinders burning in my nostrils.
And if I close my eyes, I can still hear Johnny singing—
***
“Your resistance to truth is vile / I don’t need your repudiation / You can suffer in torment while / we call for the final reconciliation.”
The song carried the same thrashing tempo of Slayer’s ‘Disciple’ (which was Bobby’s inspiration for the beat, if I recall), but we put our own progressive spin on it. Compared to the other songs on the album, ‘Final Rec’ as we called it was probably one of the tamer tracks as far as vocals go. Johnny sang the lines with the same baritone bravado as he did on the Jesters in Our Court EP.
“Under twin moons I give my life / I will untie the binding lines / I pray this blood will suffice / to honor his Yellow Sign.”
The bridge gave way to the chorus, and Johnny unleashed his death metal growl like a surprise attack on the audience. We’d taken heat from prog metal ‘purists’ in the past who said we were too weak to stand up against the greats. Johnny must’ve taken that to heart because the clawing vitriol he spewed into the microphone for the chorus gave everyone pause.
I tell you this because the chorus was the beginning of the end. It’s when all hell broke loose in the club.
Johnny raised one fist into the air and braced the microphone stand with the other. He squeezed so hard the color drained from his knuckles. Bobby paused for half a beat, Hank plucked three notes on his bass, and Johnny thrust his fist higher into the air.
“Take off your mask!”
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A wave of uncertainty fluttered through the crowd. Another half-beat and up-strum of the bass. I stepped forward and depressed the wah-wah pedal, beginning my solo on the second refrain.
“Take off your mask!”
Johnny took hold of his guitar, moved up the fret, and together the four of us jammed the third refrain, a continuous battery of distortion and sonic murder. Finally, another pause and half-beat. The voice that crawled out of his throat wasn’t his own, and it wasn’t Camilla’s, either. It was the voice of Hastur, the true Yellow King.
“TAKE OFF YOUR MASK!”
One by one, members of the audience tucked their fingers beneath the rims of their masks—and discovered they couldn’t pull them off. Have you ever seen panic manifest itself in a crowd? It moves with erratic fervor, like a time-lapsed video of maggots working within a rotting carcass, one part of the animal twitching nervously, inflating like a balloon. before moving on to the next decayed organ.
One by one, the Yellow King’s congregation pulled and scratched and clawed at their masks.
One by one, they extracted the pallid masks from their faces, revealing charred, blackened holes rimmed with writhing worms.
Everything from my nightmare unfolded before me in real time, and my fingers mercifully ceased their playing just as Hastur’s corrupted voice boomed overhead.
“TAKE OFF YOUR MASK!”
Spent, my limbs drained of all feeling, and lightheaded from the blood loss, I staggered off my marker and into the side of Bobby’s platform. The black candles tumbled off the edge, rolling with flickering flames into the side of the empty golden throne. I don’t know what that antique chair was made of, but it went up in a whoosh of flames like dry kindling, interrupting Bobby’s soft, exhausted piano solo of the final instrumental track.
I heard Hank drunkenly shout, “What the fuck?” But his voice was displaced by shrieks from the crowd. When I peered out from behind the pyre of flames on the stage, I glimpsed a tapestry of agony painted in deep, dark crimson.
My mind shut down for a moment. What I saw forced me into a reboot cycle. The hallucination was gone. The interior of the club had returned. Gone were the twin moons and sky. The towers of Carcosa had vanished. All that remained was our congregation screeching, writhing, rocked with spasms of pain I can only fathom.
They had done as Johnny had bade them. They’d taken off their masks. One by one they had torn into their flesh and pulled off their faces like old, tattered wallpaper. Glistening red faces peered back at each other in wide-eyed panic, each face a look of shock and surprise, their lipless mouths frozen forever in toothy smiles.
I staggered toward Johnny’s place on the stage. He was leaning against the microphone stand, his shoulders rising and falling with deep, labored breaths. I don’t know if he was still caught in the trance of the music. He was still wearing his shades.
“Johnny,” I croaked, “brother, what the fuck did you do? What did we do?”
He mumbled something to himself, something I couldn’t hear over the cries of the wounded in the crowd. Below us, I glimpsed one bloody soul working his way toward the stage, his face pulled down around his collar like a wet piece of cloth. I didn’t recognize him at first—I mean, how could you recognize anyone without a face?—but as he neared us, I could make out his voice.
My heart sank. Reggie. My God, poor Reggie. He reached out to us, beckoning for us to save him, or maybe even to accuse us. These days I lean toward the latter. Why wouldn’t he accuse us? He’d tried to warn me, tried to stop me from going onstage, and wasn’t it just like old Reg to say “I told you so?”
Of course it was. That poor son of a bitch.
I watched him collapse in shock and looked away only when a panicked woman sank her heel into the wet viscera of his new face.
Johnny fell to his knees and yanked the shades from his face. He looked upon the mayhem wrought by his songs in a horrified daze. When I looked back, I saw the flames had spread from the throne to the drapery behind the stage, filling the room with a devilish orange glow.
Hank dropped his bass and had taken two steps toward us when Camilla rushed him. She moved like an animal, leaping onto his back and throwing off his center of balance. He fell to the stage with a tired yelp as Camilla jammed her knees into his spine.
“Unmask,” she screeched, grabbing a fistful of his hair. “Unmask, you filth!”
I met Hank’s gaze in the moment before she tore out his eyes. He had no idea what was happening. I like to think it’s better that he didn’t. When Camilla’s nails sank into his eyelids and the screaming started, I had to look away. I don’t care if that makes me a coward. I just couldn’t watch my friend be eviscerated by that witch.
The flames climbed the drapery behind us with alarming speed, shooting up to the rafters and spilling across the ceiling in roiling waves. By the time I remembered Bobby, I was already too late to do anything to save him. He’d collapsed over his synth. I’ll never know if he was alive or dead when the fire swept over him. Considering how he’d fainted over his drum kit weeks before in the studio, I like to believe his heart just couldn’t take the stress and had simply given out.
I know better, of course, but this lie helps me sleep better. Not by much, but better.
“Oh, Aidan.” Camilla rose to her feet and hovered over the stage. Her eyes burned with gold, illuminating the cracks along her face with a sickening light. Blood and viscera fell from her hands in thick, wet clumps. “Won’t you take off your mask?”
She floated toward me. I braced myself for the end, for the inevitable pain that must come from feeling one’s flesh ripped from bone.
And in the end, it was Johnny who saved me. Johnny Leifthauser, my lonely schoolyard friend. The quiet nerd who scribbled poetry in his notebook. The founder of The Yellow Kings.
As I closed my eyes to meet my fate, Johnny stepped between us. “That’s enough from you, bitch.”
My heart leapt into my throat. Blood dribbled out of Johnny’s eyes, but when he glanced at me and smiled, I saw that it was him in there. The real Johnny. The one who’d fallen under Camilla’s spell months before.
“Aww, Johnny, come on.” Camilla’s face was a glowing ball of gold now, her skin peeling and cracking like old paint, the façade slowly melting away. Short, gray nubs protruded through the openings in her skin, seeking the air, tasting it. “I thought we were in love?”
Johnny gripped the neck of his Fender and swung the guitar, striking Camilla across the face. The blow removed her mask in three large chunks of flesh. Golden light leaked out of the withered hole in her skull, illuminating the mass of worms crawling along the rim.
“Get out of here,” Johnny said.
A low, rumbling hiss erupted from the gaping hole in Camilla’s unmasked face. “It’s your turn, lover. Time to take off your mask and reconcile with the true king in yellow.”
My legs refused to move. I gaped in horror at the impossible creature standing before us.
“Go, goddammit!” Johnny shoved me off the stage. I landed hard on the floor, and the impact drove the air out of me. “Go be someone else’s pain in the ass!”
That’s the last thing Johnny ever said to me. As I struggled to take that next precious gasp of air, the thing that was Camilla Bierce descended upon my friend and tore out his throat.
Panicked, I sought my way along the mass of fallen bodies, sinking my hands into their exposed faces. I stayed as low as possible, as the smoke from the raging inferno had filled the room with a darkening haze. The last memory I have of that night is turning back to glimpse Camilla’s glowing figure kneeling before the statue of her faceless king.
“No mask?” Her scream echoed through the room, overpowering the roar and crackle of flames. “No mask!”
-TRACK 9-
TATTERS OF THE KING
The old rock star smoked his last cigarette down to the filter and slumped back in his seat. To Miles, he looked like an old worn-out doll, his days of br
inging joy to children far behind him. Over the last few hours he’d watched life return to Aidan Cross’s eyes, only to fizzle and fade yet again as the old man recounted his band’s triumphs, failures, and untimely demise. Although he would never admit it to his crew, the story spooked Miles Hargrove to his core. He’d read the official police report from all those years ago, and he’d grown up hearing the rumors of ritual activity on the night of the final show, but to hear a first-hand account by someone who was there was soul-crushing.
“So what happened after that?” Miles asked.
Aidan Cross placed the smoldering cigarette filter into the ashtray with the others. He cleared his throat. “About what you’d expect, I guess. They found me on the curb outside the club, unconscious and nearly dead from smoke inhalation. The Hyades club burned to the ground. Last I heard, they’d built a fucking Starbucks in its place. So much for respect for the dead.”
Miles nodded. “You’re right, they did.” He scribbled something on his notepad. “And after?”
“Ah yes, after. There were police inquiries and lawyers and reporters like yourself. All of them wanted the scoop, to understand what had happened, and more importantly, why. They all wanted to know about what sort of drugs we were doing, what we’d been drinking, who Camilla was. That last point of interest was the most perplexing, you see. The most troubling.”
“How so?”
Aidan smirked. “You even have to ask? No one had ever heard of Camilla Bierce. That fancy loft apartment of hers, with all her occult shit, was registered in someone else’s name. Cassilda-something. Her mother, I think, but I could be wrong about that.”
“My notes do say Cassilda Pulver, but all I have is a name. Records say she was deceased long before the fire at the club.”
“Yeah, something like that. She’d been dead for years. Decades. The only person who could shed any light on who Camilla was, was Camilla herself.” Aidan folded his arms and stared at the table between them. “All of her secrets died with her.”
“And you never played guitar again?”
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