In the Court of the Yellow King by Tim Curran, Cody Goodfellow, Gary McMahon, C.J. Henderson, William Meikle, T.E. Grau, Laurel Halbany, Christine Morgan, Edward Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

starblind terror, and when He looked up at me through all that light His face squirmed and chewed with only spots for eyes, and barbs for a mouth, sick warm pulsing flesh that glowed, and seized all, and turned it to frozen Midas gold. The air grew dank with black frost, painful in my lungs, wearying and saddening.
    “Along the shore the cloud waves break ,
    The twin suns sink beneath the Lake,
    The shadows lengthen
    In ... Car-cosa....”
    How the King’s face gleamed in the darkness, drawing swiftly nearer! It bore down on me from the fathomless shadows in His eyes. Part of me, the part that was starting to fall apart back then anyway, had recognized Him almost from the first. In the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that human instrument, there was the call of a predator tearing His way back to our world through something thicker and worse than Time.
    “Strange is the night ... where bla ck stars rise,
    And st range moons circle t hrough the skies
    But stranger ... ssstill is ...
    Lllllost ...
    Car-cosa ....”
    Cassilda popped to her bell-ankled little bare feet and hurled a vase at the troubadour, which exploded in midair before it even got close. “YOU HAVE CLAIMED ANOTHER!” she screamed. “THE DEMON THAT WILL EAT YOUR LIFE!!”
    When Cassilda Presley ran from the room, weeping, my first sensation was like that of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before crying out. I had never doubted what He had come to do; and now I knew that while my body sat safe in the cheerful little living-room, the thing inside Elvis Presley had been hunting my soul.
    No bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. His yellow Goya eyes, with the black diamond pupils, like a cat or an owl, or a monster that had learned to cut its own toenails....
    “Songs that the Hyad es shall sing,
    Where flap the tatters of the King,
    Mmmmust die ... unheard ...
    in Dim ...
    Ca r- cosa.... ”
    At some point, Grendel’s Mother had left the room. Behind those black diamonds that held me now as sole captive audience, I saw the chill lake of Halì, thin and blank, with no fish or ripple of wind to break its meniscus that reflected the towers of Carcosa rising behind the triple moons in a chiaroscuro old Hokusai himself couldn’t paint. Gray serpents slithered just beneath those depths, and hawks wheeled down to catch the squiggling meat, forming the same figure as the brooch. Like a crooked cross. Or, for that matter, a hog’s pecker.
    “Song of my soul ... mmmmy voice is dead;
    Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
    Shall d ry ...
    and die
    iiiiin ... L lllost ... Car-cosa....”
    CLAP.
    CLAP.
    CLAP.
    The colorless tarns of the King’s kaleidoscopic eyes sought mine,
    “The fans may turn on you,” I suggested.
    “I don’t think so,” Elvis murmured thoughtfully, “I got the mojo, baby. And when that don’t work, well...” His eyes turned to coffin-worm eyespots in my unblinking, swimming gaze. “Well, I invite them to have a little chat with me. A concert from the King...”

    Time froze, and sped up in part, and the end of things drew frightfully near Showtime. Everything that happened after that is hard to put into perspective, being the vomited human ambergris of this Moby Dick nation whose architecture eats itself continuously and shits out the craving for Decency that sweeps away old horrors in favor of more lasting ones. New vessels to set before the King.
    J. Edgar seized the two hundred seven-inch 45’s of “Cassilda’s Song” I managed to press from the little recording-gadget in my shoeheel that my assistant let me borrow before I even left. It got played on a few Negro blues stations here and there on various continents, in the neon backwaters of Hip in various cities, barred out here, confiscated there... but not denounced by Press and pulpit, or censured, even by the most advanced of