In the Court of the Yellow King (22 page)

Frank’s hand shot up and hit the panic button.
Keep him ta
lking, don’t let this
one slip past you,
he thought. “Alright, I hear you. So tell me how all this started. When did you notice—”

“I just want to see something bright again, it doesn’t have to be beautiful. I just want to feel... something. Shit, even my blood is just cold, gray sludge and there’s no pain... no pain....”

“What?” Frank’s voice croaked out.

“I’ve been looking up how to do it online for days, and everyone says that if you’re going to slit your wrists, do it in a tub of cold water to numb the pain. Fuck that. I wanted the pain. I wanted to feel something, damn it. So I did it right here on the couch. I got my left wrist good, cut it right to the bone, and I did it right: up and down, none of that sideways, sissy-shit for me, man. Hell, I did it so good that I can’t use that hand no more, so I had to put the knife in my teeth to do the right wrist. That one’s not as deep, but it’s still bleeding good. And you know what, I didn’t feel nothing. Not a goddamn thing. So I know for sure that I’m already dead, dead and gone, just like he told me.”

“Jesus Christ,” Frank whispered as both of his wrists started itching again.

“No, not him. I’ve been praying to him for days and the fucker never returns a call,” Tyler mimicked a laugh totally devoid of joy. “No, it’s that other guy, the yellow bastard. Been watching me for days. Whispering to me. Showing up in my dreams. He’s the only bright thing left in this shitty world, so I figured, why not join him? I mean, anywhere has to be better than here, right?”

“Who, Tyler? Who told you that?” Frank said and thought,
could someone have talked
him into doing that
to himself? That’s m
urder or manslaughte
r or something, right
? Got to find out who
, the police will wan
t to know that for s
ure.

“It was the king. The one in yellow. The one...” Tyler’s voice trailed and Frank noticed the sluggish, sleepy sound to it. “...who waits at the end....”

Frank’s finger mashed the police alert button again and again. He knew that like an elevator call button, all he had to do was press it once, but that didn’t stop him. “Tyler!” he shouted into his headset. “Come on, stay with me!”

“Have... have you sss...” The voice on the other end of the line was a slurred whisper.

“What?”

“...seen it? Have you seen the yellow... the yellow... sssss...”

Frank next heard the clunk of the phone hitting the floor, and no matter how loud he screamed, no one answered him.

Repetition followed.

First came the police with the same questions as before. Frank answered them, only with more grunts and nods of the head than words this time. He didn’t bother to tell them about the mysterious “yellow king” Tyler had mentioned. It very well could have been the kid’s dying mind playing tricks on him. Frank knew that much from firsthand experience. Besides, without any real info on the mysterious monarch, it all seemed pointless. So goddamn pointless.

Then came the people from the hotline, but this time they called on him only by phone and there were just three of them, pretty Lacey had quit a few days before. According to Matthew, she took off without saying anything to anyone. No one had heard from her since. Matthew thought it must have been all the stress, and he hinted that things were not going well with the hotline, but he kept the specifics to himself. Also no one bothered with euphemisms this time. The incident was referred to as a suicide.

And of course, there were the nightmares, which were always the same. He was in a dark tunnel with only a feeble glimmer of light at its end. Even Frank’s slumbering mind recognized what that light was supposed to represent, and part of him remembered seeing it before, but it wasn’t the warm, welcoming brightness he associated with heaven. It wasn’t even the fearsome, fiery glow he expected from hell. It was wan and sickly, a creeping, seeping light. It was joyless, lacking any comfort or warmth, the color of an old bruise and jaundiced flesh. As he got closer to the end of that tunnel, he could see something moving in that cold light, a tall figure in a tattered robe with something on its head and a beckoning hand.... That’s when he would wake up, always with a scream, and once with blood on his hands after he had scratched his wrists so much during the night that he had split the scarred flesh.

The days that followed fell one into another and another until each was indistinguishable from the next. Frank would wake, eat something, lay on the couch and watch TV, eat something else, then go back to bed. Since he didn’t go out, bathing seemed pointless, as did cooking. He stayed on his strict all-canned diet, and food became an indiscernible paste he would force himself to swallow only when his stomach growled its loudest.

The phone rang a lot for the first few – days? weeks? – but he figured it was either that special slice of cubical hell he called a job or the hotline, and since he didn’t want to talk to either, he didn’t. The phone was now mercifully silent, as was his constant companion, his television. He had kept it on night and day, but it had been mostly a white-noise generator, a flashing and hissing rectangle in the background; something to keep his mind sedated and away from unpleasant truths. He did recall something from the dull images and monotone drone, the word epidemic. Frank never thought he would see that word linked to suicide, but that’s what all the talking heads on TV were calling it. The same dead-eyed faces spat out different reasons behind it all, but Frank could not bring himself to give much of a damn. He did remember snippets of the various stories, the cold details of a young life cut short here, some parents crying for the cameras there. The only thing that still flickered with any light in Frank’s memory was the video that showed Amanda Dwyer killing herself. The one that YouTube kept trying to take down, but nevertheless kept popping up on the web, as if the fifteen-year-old’s death had taken on a life of its own. In the phone-captured video, the cute, chubby girl was standing in front of a coffee shop, already wet with gasoline. “I always wanted to be famous. Do you think this will do it?” She said through a sad, twitchy smile. She added, “I hope the fire will be bright. That would be nice,” before flicking the lighter and immolating herself. The thing that made Frank remember the video was the fact that he was sure he had seen the girl before. More than that, he knew her from somewhere.

Wait, isn’t Lacy
’s last name Dwyer?
Frank came to a half-formed conclusion, one he had reached several times before but always let slip away. However, this time his mind spiraled in a new direction,
and that wasn’t on T
V, I saw that on the
computer.

With that thought, he looked across his dark apartment, past the empty cans and crusty rags he used for his itching wrists, through the cloud of cigarette smoke and buzzing flies, to his open laptop. The screen was dark, gone was his exotic island wallpaper, but the monitor wasn’t completely dead. Not yet. Not like everything else. In the upper right corner, something amber flashed. It was the icon telling him that he had a call waiting for him on the hotline.

“God damn it, leave me alone,” Frank grumbled, picking up an empty tuna fish can from his lap and tossing it at the computer. He missed by a mile, but the action did make him feel the slightest bit better for the briefest of moments. He looked for something else to throw, but all the other cans were at his feet, and that realization murdered the thought of more missile fire. Leaning back onto his sweat-soaked couch, Frank’s eyes went back to the flashing yellow light on his laptop screen.
Just like
a bug, now I get it,
he thought as he was drawn to the dull flicker. More memories stirred in him, a scream that faded and then suddenly stopped, the
thunk
of a dropped phone, the
woosh
of a sudden eruption of flame, a voice whispering, “Come and see what awaits....”

Frank shook his head to clear his thoughts and found himself sitting at his desk, in front of his hotline-provided laptop. He looked back at his couch, confused and half expecting to see himself still lying on it. Instead all he saw was the dark room and the cold, gray light outside the window on the opposite wall. The ceaseless rain was still coming down, leaving dirty streaks everywhere, and Frank could not bear to look at it anymore. So he turned to the computer and pressed the button to accept the call.

“Yeah?” he croaked out in a voice that had gone days without talking to anyone.

Static hiss was the only sound that answered him, so Frank stretched out a hand to hit the disconnect button, but froze when a lifeless, sexless voice mumbled into his ear, “It’s the alignment, you know....”

“What?” Frank said, and then remembered some of his hotline training, and added, “Who am I talking to and how can I help you?”

“Alignment,” the voice repeated, “the angles, phases, stars and all that shit. Aldebaran is ascendant and things have lined up so that right here, right now, two kingdoms border each other. That event allows the huge falsehood we call reality to be washed away for a little while, so that we can see the truth of things. No, not everyone can see what really lies behind reality, but we can, because we’re sensitive to it. We’re special. We’ve either tasted it before, or longed for it in our deepest dreams. We’re the chosen, lucky few.”

“I’m not following you...,” Frank said, but he knew that somehow, in some way he didn’t understand, he was lying even before the voice called him out on it.

“Bullshit. You know exactly what I mean. You’ve been there, you’ve seen it, I know, you’ve told me as much, so no more bullshit, okay?”

A memory sparked to life inside Frank, “Billie?” he whispered.

There was a brief silence and then the caller continued. The tone of the voice remained the same, but something about it had changed. The cadence? Pitch? “He told me all about it, man, the Monarch of Carcosa, and he’ll tell you too, if you’ll only listen to him.”

“Tell me what?” Frank said, his left thumb starting to rub his right wrist.

“He tried to tell you before, don’t you remember? But you wouldn’t listen to—”

“Shut up,” Frank pleaded.

“This
life
,” that second word came out a mocking hiss, “is a lie. Death is reality. It’s all ’round us, the very air we breathe is loaded with dead things. Everything you eat is dead. Man, everyone you see is slowly dying, decaying right before your eyes. They’re all just hollow, rotting shells, nothing more. That’s not all. The building you live in, the clothes on your back, the computer before you, all of it, everything, is rotting, falling apart, breaking down, becoming heaps of ash and dust in a meaningless world of gray. Even the cosmos, since it first exploded into being, has been dying, aeon by aeon and minute by minute. Entropy is the only universal constant. Deep down, everyone knows that, but only a few have the courage to admit —”

“Stop it.” Frank commanded.

“So the question becomes, why drag it out? Why play the stupid game? It’s all rigged, no matter what you do, you’re going to go bust. The house always wins, man. With that in mind, the only sane thing to do is to play by your own rules. Become master of your own fate. Decide when, where, and how you cash your chips in. Don’t mess around with that sissy-shit, just be a man and —”

“Stop it!” Frank shouted, ripping his headset off and throwing it across the room. As he did, it came unplugged from the computer, so what was said next, came out of the laptop’s speakers, after a long moment of silence.

“There is something you can do, if you’re not ready to face the ultimate truth to everything, if you’re still afraid, or if you’re feeling benevolent.”

The caller continued to talk to Frank for a while, laying out plans that seemed to make all sorts of terrible sense.

“Oh God,” Frank moaned.

“Nope, that’s another lie,” the caller mocked, the voice changing once more in a way so subtle it was nearly indistinguishable. “Come on, you tried touching the truth once before, you just needed more conviction. That’s why I’m here, to help you, to guide you. To save you. And who knows, if you do it right, it could even make you famous.”