In the Court of the Yellow King (35 page)

“D’you know how you can tell you’re trapped in an inferior writer’s universe?” someone said. “Nobody can speak for more than three sentences without sounding exactly like the narrator.”

I woke up in a tiny, dusty tea room. The only window was covered up by a faded French, maybe Belgian, flag. I was a prisoner in one of the Houses of Hospitality.

Two big men with thick glasses blocked the door. A thickset man with doleful eyes and no hair of any kind on his head except for a full white handlebar mustache that hid his mouth, so his deep, overly familiar voice could have been coming from anywhere. His left hand rested on his lap like a dead pet, bandaged and splinted as it would be for a deep wound. Say stopping a knife—

“Do you know why cultures die, Mr. —?” He took a cup of tea from a bodyguard with his right hand. Nobody offered me one. “The Native Americans saw their narrative arc demolished by the more dynamic European colonial dialectic. Their myth, their story-way, was gone, and they soon followed it. They were dead inside before we put them on reservations.

“Same with modern America. All our myths gone to rust and reality TV. Fantasies of quick fame and fortune, of being something that everyone else wants to watch, of swift retribution on the lazy, the stupid, the poor. There’s no mythic resonance to daily life. That’s why everyone dreams of writing a book or a screenplay. Everyone feels one in them, that never gets out. That story they can’t tell is
the
mselves
!”

A bodyguard handed him a napkin to blot the spilled tea. “More powerful than drugs, than God or death or fear itself, are stories. With less instinct than any flatworm, we look for them to tell us what to do, how to behave, how we’re going to end up. There’re plenty of atheists in foxholes, but none without a personal mythology that gives them meaning. When life seems long and meaningless, stories make it short and exciting, make every accident into a test, into enemy action, into a
Plot
.”

My head throbbed from the tranquilizer. I still couldn’t feel my hand. Trying not to stare too fixedly at the teacup, I said, “I’m falling asleep again, you dick. Bullet points, please.”

He smiled. “Exposition is death,” he admitted. He tossed his empty teacup into the cold fireplace.

“Would it kill you to give me something to drink?”

The bodyguards looked at each other. One went to a tea service in the corner and graced me with lukewarm bottled water that wasn’t French. It tasted like a kiss from someone with worse breath than mine.

“People call what I do a cult, and that hurts. I help people tell their stories. I teach them to see the magic, the mythic resonance, in their daily lives. I tell them the rest of the world is full of shit, and I’m right. The disciple pays for wisdom with submission. But this isn’t a cult. Nobody here worships me. I don’t tell anyone what’s going to happen to them when they die.

“Everyone who comes to me, I help them articulate their One Story, their narrative arc, and I don’t just help them create a marketable masterpiece. I help them tell their story compellingly, because
that
is where they will go when they die.”

My sleepy hand wouldn’t cooperate with the clapping. “You should say that up front, more people would join up. What’s this got to do with the Resleys? You know he hired me to deprogram Regina so he could try to get her to kill you.”

He didn’t look shocked. He looked delighted. “Of course. He was only following my outline. Do you know the difference between a fringe cult and a legitimate religion?” He anticipated my obligatory smartass answer. “One dead messiah.”

“I find it hard to believe you’re having a hard time getting someone to kill you.”

“With respect, you’re not a storyteller. Regina was addicted to escapism and had no real story of her own to tell, so she naturally insinuated herself into mine. Easier to be the villain in your own story than trying to be something you can’t imagine. At least you know where the end is.”

Pointing at his mangled hand with mine, I asked, “Why didn’t you let her finish you off when you had the chance?”

“Timing is everything. Our lives are like coal. Shaped for eons in darkness to be used up in an instant. Stories are the fire in which they burn.”

“If we’re lucky. So... your...
arc
comes to a dramatic end, cut down by a traitorous disciple.... I think I’ve seen it before.”

“Then you know how it ends. Preston Marble the Man dies, but Marble’s Word lives on in
every
man. She’ll play her part.”

“She’s playing it now. She killed her husband, less than an hour’s walk from here.”

“Nobody seems to have seen her there.” He held up his phone to tab through a slew of amateur paparazzi snaps of yours truly fleeing the condo with a gray blur like a struggling dove trapped in my hand. “Just you.”

“You don’t know where she is.”

“We thought you had her, but wherever her body’s gone to ground, we’re confident she’ll rise to the occasion when the curtain goes up.”

“Why
The King
—”

Shaking his head vehemently, he hushed me. “Don’t.” He gathered his thoughts, fetishism warring with fear. He told his bodyguards to wait outside. “Few can bear to read it at all, and most quickly give up or are thwarted, and everyone who claims to have read it has described a different ending, with variations large and small, but no two alike... because no one, reader or player, has ever
truly
finished it....”

“But that’s not possible. It’s just a play, for fuck’s sake. How hard can it be to get to the end of a goddamn book?...”

“Every reader must enter the text alone. None emerge unchanged. Some never return at all. Regina is that most
rar
a avis
: a
pure
reader. Only the most extreme spheres of abstraction satisfied her, but once dug in, she was impossible to shake out again.

“To reach her... to break her out of her fugue and quicken her to her purpose, we needed some radical outside element to catalyze the last act. You will continue to serve our plot until your arc is complete.”

“And your arc will end with her killing you... to try to make Ex Libris a mainstream religion?...” He shrugged, all false modesty. A bodyguard watched us through the porthole window in the cottage door. I tossed my water at him.

The door flew open and they were on me before it hit him. My head hit the wall, but I saw how he caught it with his bandaged left hand. It seemed to hurt him a lot less than if someone had just stabbed him there.

“You’re not Marble,” I said, feeling brilliant.

“Well, of course not.... But I’ve played him for many years, and I’ve only ever quoted the Master. Professor Marble retired from public life three years ago, and communicates only through bibliomancy and doubles.”

Quotations selected at random from his own books on writing. “You’re willingly going to die just so he can go to his own funeral?”

It was pure hell finding something that didn’t make him smile. “He will be alive and yet mythologically dead. He will be, in point of semiotic and phenomenological fact, a living god.”

“And did
you
have any say in how this would... will... happen?”

“
The
Secret Agent
, by Joseph Conrad. It’s one of my favorites. Have you ever?...”

I shook my head. I lie a lot. “You’re so tight with the, ah, Master... What’s he really like?”

“Could you ever hope to attain mastery so complete that when you close your eyes, your disciple opens them, not merely believing in, but
being
, you? That’s what he’s like. I pray to him: TEACH ME TO BE YOU. And silently, wisely, he has.”

Outside, the pipe organ was crushing the exultant final movement of Saint-Saëns’ 3rd symphony. A timid knock at the low, rounded door lifted Marble’s double out of his chair. He shuffled through ankle-deep dust, looking over his shoulder at me from the open doorway. “I imagine you’re about to be overwhelmed with remorse when you find out what your last patient has done. You’re going to become very emotional over the undoing of your perverse amateur brainwashing operation, and with the police at your door and so many ruined lives in your wake, you’ll be doing the world a favor. A real one, not like the sick games you played with helpless, vulnerable people’s minds.”

I couldn’t help but nod along. “That does sound like me. Did you write it all out for me?”

Slapping his forehead, he produced his trademark overstuffed spiral-bound journal and shook out a slip of paper from my motel. Someone had surely meditated very deeply upon my choppy block capital handwriting, and nailed it.

“How much do I owe you for this?”

Chuckling, he nodded and walked out into a monsoon of applause. Three bodyguards came into the cottage once he was clear and escorted me to a limousine. The bitter tang of mildewed paper and incense filled the cabin. I got in without making a scene.

The book was gone, but I didn’t need it. A bodyguard got in with me as the limo pulled away from the curb. He crushed me against the passenger seat. I hit and kicked to no effect. Try as I might, I couldn’t even bruise myself against him. I wasn’t there at all by the time he hooded me in a two-ply plastic yard waste bag and wrapped his arm around my neck in a truly professional sleeper hold.

I was back in the gallery. I wore a soldier’s uniform. Regina wore a tattered ochre cloak made from a ruined asbestos fire curtain.

She pulled back a drape hiding an alcove and a tarnished brazen bell cover. She lifted the cover and the room was suffused with verdigris-tinted light that seemed to rot all that it illuminated.

Underneath it, her husband’s severed, faceless head. Upon his brow, cruelly piercing it, the source of the dismal glow—a plain golden circlet transfixed with barbarous, spiky coronal flares.

“A cabal of Spanish conquistadors who sought the seven cities of gold from California to Patagonia made it with all the gold they found. Cursed by Aztec sorcery and burnt by the Church, in their bitter madness, they dedicated the crown to Cibola, a kingdom that never was.

“A crown must be ritually consecrated by blood and soil to bind the land and the people to the ruler’s bloodline. It was drowned in blood, but never has it touched earth. Outside, it’s only a curiosity, but because of its potential here, the play has outrun the Plot. Whoever lays claim to it becomes King of Hastur. They shall don it and declare a state of war and lay siege to Carcosa.... And bring the curtain down upon us all. If he is not stopped... Take it.”

I knew it would burn and mutilate my hand. It hurt to touch it, until I realized
I
was hurting me. My fear of it turned to raw, phantom agony, an almost magnetic repulsion.

“Now, I must play my role.” The slip of paper clutched in her hand bore a strangely unfinished, yet overripe symbol, a kind of three-headed question mark rendered in saffron ink upon ivory foolscap.

I took her hand. I had no idea of how it ended, but I would do anything to stop it.

I pulled her close and kissed her. Her lips trembled and she clung to me, but her passion dissolved into hysterical laughter. “He’s coming! If you don’t let me go and perform the scene, then we’ll all go into the void....”

“No, let’s go.” And we ran.

Somewhere, a pipe organ swung deliriously into Saint-Saëns’
Danse Macabre
, with the slap of whips on flesh for percussion.

I leapt into the nearest canvas flat, but instead of ripping through painted canvas, I pancaked against immovable stone.

The chamber at our backs was crowded with broken statuary, headless kings and armless nymphs, clothed in drifts of crematory dust. The flagstones were gray-veined yellow marble, pitted with tiny marine fossils and worn down with centuries of pacing. Fumbling along the wall in the dark, I clung to her arm. I nearly lost her when a long butcher knife slashed through the
trompe l’oei
l
scenery on brittle canvas.

Cassilda cried out and ripped her hand free, so I followed her.

We raced down a flight of stairs and through a courtyard of leafless trees; a cavernous library of books that disintegrated in a whirlwind of debris at our passage; a feasting hall with a bowed table buried to the rafters with uneaten, rotten meals; and a ballroom where the blindfolded organist attacked the crescendo of the delirious, reeling tune in a spastic frenzy. And behind us, just as we escaped each monumental, empty chamber, the butcher knife pierced the canvas and shredded it and our hooded pursuer staggered into fleeting, panicky view.

Breathless, at last we broke through the tall glass doors of the ballroom to end up on a wide balcony overlooking a lake still as stone under two moons. Almost annihilated by the discordant shower of moonlight, on the far shore of the lake and yet somehow further away than the moons, I could see the spires of a city.

Cassilda threw off her robes and cast the Yellow Sign onto the water with a shiver of bravado. “Can you swim, my darling?”

I looked down, shaking my head. “It’s not even water....”