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"Holiday at Lake Hali" - A Cassilda x King in Yellow Romance

Title picture: "Cassilda" by Leilani Bustamante

‘Holiday at Lake Hali’

by Allister Nelson

allisternelson.com

The King in Yellow’s eyes watch all the Worlds.

As dawn breaks, the fiery orbs behind his White Mask gently graze my face like falling stars. His gaze’s comet-spark debris dusts fire on my painted skin like crackling powdered sugar. I lick a flame-wisp on my tongue. It’s iron, pickles, must – the taste of Precambrian Seas.

“You sleep so beautifully.”

“And you taste like a gin and tonic.”

“Touché, my little paintress.”

The King surveys my sleeping form. I doze in our marriage bed carved of elder wood as he dotes upon my dreams, folding me into his gullet-lap. He pets my braided hair. My stomach rumbles: he knows I hunger. The King huffs a laugh, teasing as I roll into the pillows away from him. I pull the moth-eaten, yellowed duvet covers above my brown curly plaits and pale, freckled face. I am more curve than line, Callipygian with a strong peasant frame, thick bosom for the angels to rest on, and a shelf-shaped derriere and soft belly to balance a fine China tea set on like my favorite Victorian curio photos of ladies joking, making funny poses, and having a fine time.

“Neurgh. Fiveh moreh minutehs Hasts… oof.” The morsels of my facial canvas obscure my speech. Pentiment revisions stain my teeth. Lapis and carmine grow on my molars. I spit out the mineral glaze.

“That’s right, Cass darling. ‘Neurgh.’” The King dots my palette mouth with his silk honey-color handkerchief. He kisses my brow with his weeping-void mouth and brushes my eyelids with un-hands. The tendrils feel like water-draped silk. The King hums like a wasp hive from somewhere deep beneath his shadows. He readies for the daybreak’s feast by slipping into his beloved cuttlefish-embroidered, tattered apron that I had sewn him many Yules ago. It has millions of arm holes for his tendrils and endless piebald pockets for fresh Lake Hali ingredients or spices and herbs from our gardens.

Even in such a ridiculous outfit, the King’s dangerous beauty leaves yellow fire in my iris. Carcosa, Carcosa, our home. The King, my King, I, Queen Cassilda, his Bride! My monstrous, darling spouse! How I want to kiss the bone’d shadowy abyss of his tender ocean flesh.

“Take your time with waking, my peerless wife. Breakfast can wait for Carcosa’s Dreaming Queen,” Hastur the Shepherd God, the King’s true name, teases. He floats on inky spindrifts quietly out of our chamber, gently shutting the cherrywood-and-stardust door.

I sigh, content to lounge. But something like a gibbetted seagull wails. Strange. It urges me to wake up. Perhaps it is how the grim cold has crept into our castle, blowing open the window that disturbs me. The mangled gull scrabbles on the porch, bleeding. A tiny Prussian mine is tied to the gull’s bill. I use my magic to unbind the gossamer gull and untie and defuse the weapon, then add it to my shelf of treasures and poisons. Perhaps the Great War on Earth is carrying more dead to our kingdom, and the gull knew I would help.

My lids flutter in the gray-black, ashen air. The gull nuzzles me, begging for pets. I oblige – Lake Hali’s birds are sacred. He flies away. I ache, yawn, stretch: my visual field explodes in starburst sunbeams as I cast my pupils across the old, shattered, clanging windows. Our decaying chartreuse curtains, bunched up at the edge, move like rotting leaves on the pallid gusts of Lake Hali. The lead panes cracked from the storm last night, shards now spun with icy sugars of frost and dead flies. I’ve mended the beautiful decaying curtains hundreds of times – I hate to let go of old antiques. But the glass is beyond repair. It’s cut its shards into my bruisy feet. I bleed gold on slices in my slipper like yellow ichor. Precious blood!

In the enchanted, mildew’d tower I live in, in my marriage bed atop Lake Hali, a slow, stale breeze moves over the shires of the Others’ nurseries. They fan their coral, man-eating flowers in the wretched depths of the icebergs. The charnel ground air of Carcosa poisons the sloe black waters, raining ash on saponified corpses. The dead lay below the abyssal tides of Carcosa, fed on by mystic fish and the Others.

The wind carries smells of salt and rot. I step on some more glass, crush it on my hand, carve my face with pain and trace my split-grin-scream. Bleed for your God King, dear Cassilda! The gold and yellow drip. I count the new bodies (decaying or fresh or in-between) that the swells of Hali have brought on their currents to the snowy, leaf-laden bay at the foot of Carcosa’s cliffs. Food for Dreamers and the Others are down there: enough for several weeks. That’s what the carcasses are. And fat for soaps and candles I and my daughters shall bathe with, do laundry, scent our hair and light the halls. Hastur has a different definition of ‘cleanliness,’ being an Elder God.

I use my old opera spyglasses on the mantle next to my shelf of treasures and poisons, above my aquarium of leeches. They survey what naked vision can’t see: the material riches Hali has claimed. The beach is full of treasures! There are old umbrellas, antique pocket watches, coins of fallen empires. Terracotta Warrior finger chips pierce the sand, mixed with ivory spoons carved by the Maasai. The splendid mess floats in seaweed shaped like siren hair. In the sands of death and silence, caskets of amber wine from the Cays rest on a sea-bound boulder and tilt back-forth, back-forth from fine cooper’s work in the astral winds.

I will boil, salt, and season the corpses and feed them to our honored Dreamers as we perform The Yellow Sign tonight. Hastur will administer the Burning Eucharist at the finale of our play. The dead I survey with my spyglasses are streaked in blood – tangled limbs, gas masks. Praise humans, ever building Babel towers, age of steam to oil. Ford just replaced those horses – it seems like only yesterday. What is happening now on Earth, in this War of Worlds, is a World of Wars and toxic poisons, fought over some dead fellow named Archduke Ferdinand. The outcome? Nyar only knows.

“Cassilda, Cassilda, The Dreamer. Queen of Carcosa. Harvester of Life and Death.” That is me, I sing. It is scratched into the rock walls in blood. I thrust the glass shards in my feet deeper as I shout and dance, paint of alizarin leaking from my gums. I use my bloody toes to draw a gold heart and yellow X. I will shepherd the swells of Lake Hali’s souls this evening to be lightless stars in the sky of our kingdom. The consuming of their transgressions, blood, and rot will occur at our evening masquerade, precisely at moon-dark midnight, when we call mortal Dreamers the worlds over to feast. The humans – and our darling Others – will dance in the Court of the Yellow Jester. Hastur will show them a fine frenzy: an ergot-dancing plague and Roman vomitorium. Bacchae-maenadic frenzy! The Mustard Harlequin is the Cycle of Life’s master. And I walk the mists in-between. Wandering the halls of Carcosa. Mistress of locks and keys.

Slipping out of a royal silk chemise I bought from Empress Sissi’s tailor – silk violet as nightshade flowers – I shimmy into a pomegranate-color and fruit-shaped accented kaftan Lilith made and gifted me centuries ago. I pair it with my clinking chatelaine, pocket-studded brown belt, and leather boots. The boots and belt are tender as fawn fur and handmade by my strange angel Hastur. In Hast’s workshop along the shores of our wretched, beautiful, wailing Lake Hali, Hastur works. And Shub gave me my singing chatelaine. The key and mirror on my waist hum the whispers between worlds, shining like sixpence. They make music at my hip! The tines of my skeleton key turn, twists singing a prayer as they strike my mirror’s wood. Drumming, over and over: Cassilda, Cassilda, Cassilda. A name like music Hastur moans, voice smoky, whenever we make love. I go on Mad Maudlin bloody-cut toes downstairs for Hastur’s breakfast.

He oozes yellow goo as he sings in the kitchen. I sneak in and watch him cook, not letting my eldritch husband know I am admiring him from the entrance, though he has no skin for the oils to exude from. The ooze pools at his feet and is eaten by sea slugs of blue frills that drip from oceanic tendrils under his mustard garb. They always tickle my feet in bed.

Hastur has no fingers – still, he flips the pancakes, coaxes the batter not to burn. They form perfect crescent lunar discs. He cannot hug or caress me with arms or lift spoons of sugar to his coffee with pinky raised. No lips to kiss me. No hands to hold me. But there are other ways. He has tendrils, suckers, shadows. There are secrets of love’s covenant, and we mix and make grace with each other, Hastur and his Cassilda, finding salvation in marital bonds, finding best friends in each other, and we love a game of strip poker, charades, or dice.

I look out the bay window to the gardens, where the dead have piled by the shore –

Everything ends up here in Carcosa: to fragments the Universe returns. All bits of matter and dust form the shore and floor of Lake Hali. On ashen, barren wind are the bones of great beasts of Eld brought through the Mountains of Toom. We hold vigil in this graveyard of a kingdom at our nightly masquerades, and the Dreamers are gone by morning, the taste of blood wine, yellow ooze, and sweet sorrow on their tongues. Back in their beds on Earth, the humans (young and old) awaken with déjà vu. In them, the dreams and hopes of the dead of Hali that they ate, that we ate, that the Others ate, live on. It gives our human guests blessings, protection, and serves as a Golden Eucharist for the everyman, eternal qifor their soul. The Others? They eat the parts undigestible to mortal souls, then crawl back on shambling limbs to form the corals of Hali: anemones and zooxanthellae sleepers witnesses, swishing fans and mollusk eyes. The Others watch below as twin black suns rise over the fetid fields of Carcosa. Saying nothing.

They never speak.

There is beauty here, too, in Carcosa. Midnight polonaises, self-playing balalaikas in the eaves. Automaton swans that fly, rainbow zoetropes that flutter the halls. Strange blooms of spice on the rugs. Music from far-flung fairies that echoes in the brackish rain. Hastur’s book of thousand’s age sits in our alien chapel, inking the lives of dead gods. Our Royal Court is lively with the spirits who choose to stay. Dreamers so enchanted by our play, The Yellow Sign, become immortal actors themselves. We give the Players their own rooms, food, farms and holdings, and free range of the kingdom. Wandering Players just greeted me in the hall this morning as I made my way to the kitchen.

We have daughter-cats three as well, and Hastur is in awe of their spitfire. Generous with piggybacks and ice cream for our girls. But my husband’s bestquality, I always quip, is that he is a good cocktail mixer. Judging souls makes one need a stiff drink.

The smell of pancakes is calling me… maple syrup, mixed with nutmeg?... – and eggs!

It’s October, and this is our busiest month. A breakfast, oh, an indulgence! Fall is when Hali brings in the most dead, for the seasons grow sacred and dark, and the veil thins. Nyarlathotep plays cruel tricks that cause chaos. I wonder if the bullet that killed the Archduke was his. Hastur always cleans up his brother’s mess. We have been busy in the mortal world.

A heavy burden, to be a god/dess.

The pancake batter smells delicious. Hastur sings sea shanties, ‘Spanish Ladies.’ Then, some songs of Paris’ demi-monde of the late 1800s that stewed in Dreamer’s sleep come from his void.

My sweet, dear yellow Hastur: he’s a lover, a dreamer like me. I treasure Hast’s oddities and tics, my husband’s love of justice and tricks duly given. His wry, sardonic wit. I like the poems he writes me. I adore how he treats our children, their shadows tendrilled like him. He is a fair but playful ruler, my Dionysus of the Abyss. And I, Ariadne, dance clockwork around him, red thread tied at the tongue to my daughters’ moons.

How often have I danced in the fungal labyrinth at the heart of our castle? How many Octobers have we had? How does an Elder God know how to make pancakes? I know I was human… once. But isn’t Hastur soil and moonbows? Dark moss, whiskey spilled on graves? Pickles in a cellar, cheese in the Fire of London, a peasant’s wheels of cheddar the only thing carried aback Old Tom o’ the Fairies from the flames?

In truth, I do not remember how I ended up here: where the King in Yellow, my Hastur, plucked me from. Did he fish me from eternity? Was it I who created him? I remember Paris, a bit – we wander the realms so often, now that I am a god. Maybe I’m just thinking of my favorite department stores. But the ruins of abbeys in Europe? They call me. There are carmine and lapis stains on my inner teeth. They shift and change like a monk’s pentiment that ever-sheds, trying to correct mistakes on my too-large, ear-split smiles. My daughters say I’m a beautiful monster. I wet toxic chemicals and paintbrushes on my tongue for my canvases: the minerals in my paint and the lead in my makeup sink into the Mask on my undecayed, rosy-pale flesh. The Schiele dye I wear gives it a verdigris stain when it rains. Jewelry of emerald beetles. Thick layers of paint and cicadas on my face, Celtic woad on my arms, malachite my fingers. Worms fall from my hair. I store leeches in my pocket, waterlogged cleaners of pickings leftover from Hali’s wormwood. I play cymbal to the King in Yellow’s pipe and strings. I, like him, am off-key. We live? Deliciously.

“Mama, you are a beautiful woman. Why the Mask?” our cat-daughters three ask.

“What mask?” Hastur jokes back.

I never was the stage makeup or paint off. Hastur taught me to prettify without plaster or beads. It’s a palette of beauty, the stains. A visage all my own! Peerless Cassilda in Rainbow Colombina. Holding court with souls ready to ascend. We judge their deeds, my scale a feather, Hastur’s a leaden heart. In Hastur’s eyes that do not see, he judges. In his voice of no sound, he comforts: dead children, war victims, old men who have nothing, women who have everything. Trees cut down at the root. Salmon who spawn and die young. A starfish who wanted to be a sun. I cradle them to my velvet breast. Lake Hali draws them here in her alpine, mildew’ed swells. The dead come, one and all, to the King. They feed the Players and Dreamers. They brush the teeth of the Others with their rotting vertebrae. Then, off on an iron skiff padded in eider down, Yog Sototh takes the dead to new lives, birthed into being by Shub. They leave behind their moltings on our starless black sky.

And they never see me past my paint. I’m a living anonymous, now, Artist Incorporeal. The pentiment, shifting paint. Teeth are the only part of my bones that show my age, my pain, my violence and regrets. My scars always heal… unlike the holes in Hastur’s feet and hands, the side wound the yellow ooze pours forth from. From a Legionnaire, long ago…

The one bit of humanity left in me – my bones. My flesh – Cassilda, Cassilda! - remains maiden, my calcium and marrow rotting and ripening with the triple moons of Carcosa. The only other sign I may yet be alive? Gold ichor flows from my womb if my belly is not swollen with Hastur’s stillborn ghosts or dark stains of ink and wine that I birth as the Others. Yearling Elder Gods.

I remember this much from, well, before.Was that it? Is that what to call it? An artist’s easel and palette on which I mixed in girlhood madness olives, taupes, and mustard tones to capture Hastur’s velvet adornments. I used my palette knife to scrape them in rhythmic thunder on a stretched canvas I had primed and nailed on wooden framing. Maybe Hastur had been a jester, and I a lowborn lady. Mayhaps Hastur was a wandering acrobat flying flashy yellow-and-black scraps in ‘Ye Olde Bulgaria,’ and I was the carnival freak that sew together his dressage like Joseph’s coat each morning. He certainly has enough scars, riddling his body of no organs or missing skin that still takes the shape of a man. But hands, no fingers? Feet, feet, hands. Yeshua holes, yellow ooze on watery dessert-wine-breast, eldritch heart murmur of God.

The love poems I wrote Hastur most Valentine’s in café corners in Montmartre below my family’s penthouse, in twilight, when he was just a bit character in my playwriting pen, go like this:

PEERLESS CASSILDA:

“Sheep black as night Hector, my love and muse, my King and Co-Conspirator, you ramble with your panpipes and harmonica. Dance with me, Star Shepherd Hector! Across Carcosa, into Hamlin, summoning rat kings and beggar children. Let us lead them into the Abyss.”

DARLING HASTUR:

“Let us eat the rats and my flesh. I am Hector no more, dear Cassilda. Hector became Hastur, you Pythia, make haste. I Hunger, sister Cassandra. We are more, more than the stars burning brightly. We are the Answer of the Sign.”

CURIOUS CASSILDA:

“But I have no Mask, dear darling husband. Not a Majestic Mask like you. So how may I eat the dead?”

TRIUMPHANT HASTUR:

“And I no mouth to eat with. But it is terribly easy - make do, don’t fear, my sweetling, it’s no struggle to give in. I will fill you up with the dead’s flesh. Feed you my blood and wine. Terpsichore Cassilda, darling, dance me a labyrinth –

O will you, Starry Ariadne? Your beauty is mine to behold. Swallow my minotaur clockwork Sing, Cassilda, our song! Tie red fate thread to my fingers, play me like a pipe organ, a pirouetting marionette. Pantomime!”

THE AUDIENCE OF DREAMERS ALL:

“Sign, Yellow Sign, fine as wine, drink divine! OH HASTUR, WE CANNOT

STOP

SCREAMING.”

It is Time Enough and All Time. I burned the script entire. Kept in my cold, dark room. Pantomiming my play. Shouting it to streets who ignored me. In that frail mind, of Cassilda the asylum cripple, the King in Yellow smelled gin and pickles. He rolled in with the fog, brass plague crown, honey blood.

Cassilda’s Hastur – He and I?

We spin on the Omphalos like the marble beads our cat-daughter Ambriel always drops from her underskirt’s pockets. Where am I, if I could chart Time? Oh, these wicked musings. I push my fountain pen through the next draft, then stab its cold point in my neck, bleeding, out, not Red, but Gold… The Rebis! I have finished my play – look how the gore streaks my page!

Hastur sneaks up behind me, hugging me with his shadows. He presses a dark, rich kiss to my throat. Oh, the pancakes are done! They have some nutmeg, paired with rich hot toddies with yolks of runny delight, scrambled, on the side!

I? I was never human, god forbid!... Right?

“What are you thinking of, Cassilda? Is the food not to your liking? Our hunting masque went well last night. Look at all the memories of the revelers and bottled blood.”

“Oh, our origin, I suppose… Hastur, what do you dream of?”

“Oh, to dream, in Carcosa. Dreams are funny things. I remember ink. Paper of old dead men. Your hand, stroking my wrist, pulling me from a page. The Burning Yellow Sign. I’ll leave you to your musings, and I’ll clean up the eggshell mess. Enjoy the pretty rain and your breakfast a-la-carte by our big bay window. Hali is majestic, isn’t she? Legacy for our daughters. Nursery for our Others. They’ll become gods, in time. I shambled once on bruised feet like them, photosynthesized in the cold, pallid depths. Or maybe, I was a young girl’s guardian, brought to life by a desperate mind.” He massages my neck with onyx pendulums, then wanders off like a whimsical professor.

I fork delightful bits of drizzled pancake and egg into my split mouth. The paint on my face cracks apart with each bite. Maybe Hastur’s Apollo, I his Pythia. Or maybe he’s Python. I never truly know. Fall of Carthage, Fall of Troy, Rome to the Visigoths. Crete to Sea People. Tender wine. Cassilda, Cassilda, Cassilda. It sounds like Cassandra: she of prophecies. A girl who saw the fall of Troy.

Carcosa, with its twin black suns, will never fall.

I hear the Princesses of Carcosa giggling, wandering about on their tender cat’s feet, chasing drunken Others who were too imbibed to shamble home, chasing the Others’ tails.

Triple moons are what my daughters reign over. We made them from my pen’s blood and bits of ink Hastur - The Brood of the Yellow Sign! His seed will ruin us all! – their eyes plucked from his alien tendrils. After we sculpted their bitter matter, I painted our girls alive: we named them, our daughters: Ambriel, Nailah, Camilla. By day, they prefer to be felines and slink and play, - Ambriel a coy calico, Nailah a fine lady, Camilla the wildest, black with white splotches, and all have my smoke green eyes. By night, our daughters are Hastur’s Handmaidens, enchantresses ripe of hip and breast like me.

Our girls giggle above the rafter beams, kissing Azathoth’s feet from his throne in the Netherealm Attic whose portal is atop Carcosa’s tallest tower. Azathoth’s winds wail in the sky. Then, Hastur’s Handmaidens sing posy rings, playing Little-Piggy-God-of-the-Plague under his blinded, fluting throne. Later, they will probably devour the new limited edition Mary Shelley and Marie Corelli novels I got them from an occult bookstore in Ostia instead of doing chores. “Mama, chores are for our Other Brothers. We are ‘pampered princesses!’ Hastur’s Handmaidens! Destined for the Tripe Thrones of the Starless Sky.”

They descend, in maiden form, down the stairs, and eat the rest of Hastur’s Continental Breakfast feast. “Mama, Mama?”

“Yes, Nailah?”

“What’s got two legs but no hands?”

“I do not know, dear,” I say, smiling.

“A Yellow Jester doing a handstand!” my triplets purr in unison, then shift back into cats, growing fur and ears. They pounce on each other, chase mice, go to Hali to scheme. Their dear father taught them to tease the frogs who were once his knights on the Shores of Hali: they offer them flies on their dewy cat-girl fingers.

Hastur’s Handmiadens follow his crooked shepherd staff each night. I trail behind our girls, patient, watching them with a heart full of love, and my sacred mirror and key light their musical feet. My mirror’s mercury flame warms our family, but does not burn.

Our girls dance in bells and bangles. Their jewelry goes jangle-jing. The Princesses of Carcosa carry the nightly masque’s redeemed soul stars, stripped of flesh after the Dreamers have partaken, in their shining silver buckets. Ambriel, Nailah, and Camilla’s birth-gift moons are tied red in ribbons to their pink tongues each evening.

CAMILLA PRONOUNCES, ENTERING LEFT:

The Daughters of Cassilda! The Handmaidens of Mildew’d Hastur! Triple Moons of Aldebaran! The Scions of the Shepherd King! Make haste, catkin girls! You have the Dead to Deliver, Devoured by the Dreamers, now Stars for Carcosa’s Lightless Sky.

Watch the Eldritch Angels Dance. Oh, so beautiful, so playful and dangerous – with Dream Mother Cassilda’s smoke green eyes and Father Hastur’s white hair, so beauteous the Heirs of the Yellow King are! They sing as their Mother and Father move the night sky of the Netherealms, eternally young. We are seeking eternal night, carrying the souls abreast. The girl’s balloon moons bob with their melody mouths, changing the shifting Mountains of Toom clouds with their gravity. With each dance our daughters send fire rain, flame dew, or snow onto Hali, Carcosa, and Eld. They scatter star souls from their pails and skirts, flung afar in strange patterns. Hastur’s sweet dark sheep follow last, hidden in the shadow of his shepherd’s crook – black as sin, black as leather dyed, black as velvet night – the yearlings far afield, and our daughter-cats count sheep.

I did that once. When I was human. Counted sheep ‘til I fell into deathly torpor. Chased dreams ‘til I shot my head. Cassilda, Cassilda, Cassilda. Give into my Call. We cannot meet in the mortal realm. In Death, you shall be alive.

I was the eternal watcher of the dovecote by my door. I summoned worlds on dusty parchment; made paint with crushed spider legs and the feather of an owl I ate out of desperation. Bombs outside, nuclear winter, siren blares. Locked away in an asylum from madness, I am a Maudlin Madge – not some regal broad of Carcosa! Disinherited from Anne Boleyn’s will, there will be no Elizabethan Age. I am the answer! I am the stain of raped women and yoked dog bitches. I am in the haunting terrors that visit me each fortnight’s nepenthe.

CASSILDA COLLAPSES AS HER KING REVEALS HIS TRUE FACE, SINGING:

“Hastur, is real, is real! Come see my play, Hector! Apollo told me Odysseus is inside! I wrote the Yellow Sign! I printed it with my menses!

The red ink, the yellow bile, the white gruel of my prison porridge! Sanity is not insane, and reason and rhyme are allergens of starfruit from the Spice Isles!

The printer’s press has spread it, Hastur’s Lines, the Yellow Embers. I made the seed of a god of life strange, I have summoned from Euripides’ Bacchae a new god of wine!

“This is your Second Dream, Cassilda. My Bride.”

I am Hastur’s Prophetess Queen! Bow to me, I am Cassilda, the Immortally Dreaming Queen!

Do not touch me, Father, no, please, Mother, don’t let Teacher hit me, don’t let the boys look at me that rotten way! Don’t ship me off to the abbey! The pentiment keeps melting my skin!

You cannot erase me! Humanity will remember my name! The Yellow Sign will reign! In blood fire and blooms of autumn, you will remember my name!

Cassilda the Dreaming Dancer, Mad Goddess, I remain! I will avenge you, my King! I am the answer! I am the one who made the frame! Who dreamed up a flock of answers, to all the nursery rhymes Mother Goose riddled! I am the pentiment’s stain!

Oh! The YELLOW SIGN IS BURNING, THE DUST OF A THOUSAND’S AGE? IT WILL COME TO CLAIM. And I, CASSILDA AND MY HASTUR? WE WILL DANCE. OUT. OF. THE. PAGE.

Beware me, Mr. Robby! Chambers Dangers! The Yellow’ed Page! I am in the Yellow Wallpaper! It’s stained with blood and rage! I am the Umber Dancer! My King is a King of Rage!

I am not alone in a cell, no, no! This yellow wallpaper lets me see me, Queen Cassilda! The water stain? That is Hastur’s grin. The three black widow spiders in my mangy window? My daughters they are – cats, birds, flies. See them spin the Van Gogh stars. Am I mad? Perhaps. Or maybe, I’m all that exists.

I stir the eggs, listening to Azathoth-in-the-Attics snoring, his angel’s dead panpiping.

We lead the souls of the dead.

It’s all so boring, these days.

Maybe all there is is Hastur’s Mustard Line, and Cassilda’s Yellow Sign.

Insomnia does not exist in Carcosa.

I am not that girl.

Insomnia does not exist in Carcosa. Neither do dreams. I never count sheep. I never have nightmares. I still can make miracles out of clouds of rhyme. When I paint, it is with the threads of reality, pulling on strings and heartbeats, arranging Earth’s fate with:

A feather from a flamingo, a lock of hair from a horse, sea-spider legs. My ichor, Hastur’s oozings, puss of galactic purple, my daugther’s drool, the Others’ starfish spittle. I forge the most wonderful oddities, and Hastur breathes them to life. He takes his white dead peacocks and pheasants, then spreads their plumage into fulcrum world dust, baptizing my creation in pallid clay and crushed graves. The King in Yellow bleeds his own heart’s soma onto my canvas.

We make and unmake. We are real, real, real, yellow, trapped in the wall like Lovecraft’s rats.

We invite our mortals, the demi-monde, the play-goers and Rajs (for the Orientalism of Chambers, I apologize, dear audience, this book is from 1895, and I am a product of my epoch. Remember, the Yellow Sign is not one to age fine as wine. It drives the reader mad, phrenology, a Hapsburg lip, Hottentot Venus, the sins of colonialism, the stain of how Parisians think they are better, now awash in Harlem hipster, and the B.O. of Greenwich Village and indie Dime Square dozens, Bedstuy rat lovers in studio apartments, drinking boxed Franzia wine!). The Wild West cowboy sharpshooters and tea dancers of Siam have come to our Dionysian balls of blood, partaking of amber wine, and the masquerade revelry at midnight is my dancing dream, and I do not know if I have ever

been awake.

Cassilda, Cassilda, Cassilda – she combs her blackened hair in Hali’s glare. Cassilda Cassilda? Cassilda! She marks the Yellow Sign over her breast in golden fire shooting from her fingertip, tracing her mirror’ed reflection. The metal and mercury filigree of her vanity came from Marie Antoinette’s last birthday, stolen away by Hastur before Versailles was sacked, and he fried barbecue on nobility at Bastille.

Nyar invented the guillotine, and then, the ages sped up, and the dollar fell to the dime. And the King in Yellow? He growed.

“Oh, my Creatrix, my Paintress, I found a new wreckage at Hali we could scour for some paint and supplies. That is a lovely dress, Cass,” Hastur smiles without lips, returned from playing with our daughters. I shoot back to the egg on my tongue. I smile

“My love.”

My husband is handsome as a squid, leaking like an orifice of Typhon. Hastur closes the door, smelling strongly of the musk of old pickles, dead sandy planets, and gin. Olives, salt, brine. Death. Life.

Stars, burning, behind his

Mask.

“Little ocelot, let us descend to our ‘Holiday at Lake Hali,’ on this October eve. Our beautiful Others will molt tonight, become Elder Gods in their own right, and slink off through the multiverse. It shall be a glorious day. The Netherealm News forecasts no rain, but sun and flowers on the Fields of White Bone, with fertile winds from the Mountains of Toom, and star-falls from Aldebaran. Shall we picnic atop the peak? Yog might come with Shubbie to watch our Others ascend. Maybe they’ll bring Yog’s pickled pigs’ feet, my favorite.”

Hastur rubs his gullet that has no hole with his coiling, soppy appendages. His voice is smooth and comes crawling forth from the corners of the walls, whiskey-tinted and mint tobacco-scented. It flows like wine, stirring my loins, and echoes like grave water in a dusty ossuary.

He smiles without teeth, knowing I feel fire in my stomach and belly. I crook my finger, inviting his touch. We smirk with split-mouths and sharp teeth. He gives me dark kisses, marking me without lips, biting and nibbling me with fish hooks, and arches up the legs of my dress to make tender love as I bade him do with my smoke green eyes. My carmine and lapis teeth-lips mix with his bloody face. My muse! I dreamed, I painted, Cassilda Cassilda, Hastur Hastur.

He pierces me without any part known to man, my womanhood his sword’s slit.

It oozes into my heart, His love, His blood, God’s essencei

Tendrils of Hastur’s darkness carry me, star-spangled and spent an hour later, down to picnic at Lake Hali, his home-baked scones and crumpets in ribbon basket in his un-hands. I giggle, drunk off his juices.

We feast, and our three cat-girl-moons purr as we give them cream. That late afternoon, , as the hours tick ‘til the midnight masque, we take a quick trip in Prague and lick at some iced chocolates. Hastur is in human guise, but he slips a tendril off his sock to curl gently ‘round my ankle.

“You rake, wanting to play footsie,” I say, winking.

“Say, darling Cass, who hunted whom first, you or I?”

I pause. “We are from the dregs of stardust, dearest Hast.”

Hastur smiles, vermouth on his face like he’s splashed with intoxicating joy. He had only had an affogato, no matter, his joviality and madness are always there, like Arachne maddeningly teying to out-weave a god. Ooze, puss - alcohols and ethers and cocktails of the world – cover and wander across his flesh like ectoplasm.

It is fun to lick. I get drunk off just his un-kisses. Maddened off his creamy wine. Oh, my darling Hast!

“I agree, dear Cass. There was no hunting, only Transformation and Miracles from The Yellow Sign. We are like twin souls bound to one fate. Who knows where the other begins? Say, let’s play Parcheesi.” My husband pulls the game out from his shadows

“I’ll win, Hast – don’t be disappointed.”

We tie after endless rounds.

And Hastur and I

Kiss without

Lips.

Make love without

Bodies

Drink wine with no

Tongues.

And to Carcosa and back, we roam. Unseeing, as he has no eyes, unwalking – I float, no feet, my dress just ghost-pale blue, now that winter reigns.

Our midnight masque each night, as always, draws blood, orgies, revelry, the eating of dead flesh, and his black sheep’s bone turn into the orchestra, the moons meow.

And I call –

Carcosa, Carcosa.

My home.

And that music and chaos, there, in your mind? That sound you half-remember from dreams? You were at our feast last night, Dear Reader. O

Or maybe it was a year ago, or half a century ago, no matter. For each night, Hastur and I do our part for the crowd. Camilla acts a bit. Ambriel and Nailah direct and do backstage tech work. The Players jest and dance.

That strangeness in your ear? The blush of wine in your yourth?

It’s my play, The Yellow Sign. It’s my gift to you, dear wanderer.

Come ‘Holiday at Lake Hali.’ We have built a little hotel. We’ll show you Dreaming Carcosa. The bleakness of Aldebaran. The richness of the Mountains of Toom. Feed you fine, fetid foods.

You can pet and tease my cat-daughters, as long as you bring them some Regency soap novels. And Hastur will play his music, and I’ll paint your portrait as your dead fingernails scratch my canvas.

… … …

You all end up in Hali, anyway.

It just takes

a little

time.

“And where is your Mask?”

I have no Mask.

“No mask? NO MASK!”

You are my Mask, Cassilda.

You are the next in line.

(The girl drops dead, poisoned by lead oil paint. Her canvas shows The Yellow Sign. Amber rose petals spill from the stage’s rafters. Hastur bows, carrying her pallid body offstage.

(ALL ACTRESSES EXIT RIGHT.)

Carcosa, Carcosa, Carcosa. La-dee-lay-dee-dine.

End of days.

EN FIN?

*

End of time.

***

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