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 B

paranoiacs.
    Because they couldn’t. No definite principles had been violated in the first Elvis Presley bootleg record ever, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged in any court except the United Nation of Art. Yet, they knew. They knew that playing it often enough would make Elvis lose some of his mojo.
    So they buried it, and found some other ways to kill me. But I wonder when they will send their scion to finish me off.
    Every night in this hospital, I hear Him creeping like Cassilda in the hall. I dream the bolts of my door rotting at His touch, and His fingers no longer Presley’s, but someone swollen and bloated and dead. But my end will be worse than that.
    It’s over. He’s spoken one more time, and I already knew. My end was always the same, a bridge which no one passes.
    Even now, I hope someone still has one of those 45’s. I hope it got played enough. Or that some hip kid with a huge record collection still plays one of them, once in a while, late at night when the stars turn black and the sky looks like the sea. I hope she leans in close to the console, and turns that Volume up.
    So we can send Him home again, someday. Or try. Come on. Dance with the Moondog, here.
    Yes, those sounds are drums, and behind them something like a receding surf. Shutters going up. Those are cymbals, and soft Bop brushes. A new broom sweeps clean. In the middle of the horn section will fall the first shell.
    The cops still don’t want you to have a good time, kids. But we’re going to have a party, so we gotta post a guard outside. Come on, everybody. You all know how these questions are settled.
    It’ll be a riot.

    Sacred to the Memory of Alan Freed & Joel Lane



he should have made her way to Hollywood five years ago, back when she had enough money to travel farther than between Upper and Midtown Manhattan. She would wager that, by now, she could have at least snagged a part in some sitcom or second-rate motion picture — something that would have gotten her name out farther than the next block off Broadway. Finances were tighter than ever, and though she had no problem lining up auditions, landing a role that paid for something more than a few drinks was tougher now than the day she had spoken her first line on the stage at the Fugazi Playhouse, now closed. She sure as hell couldn’t afford to move to a new place, even in a worse neighborhood. By any standard, her cozy apartment in Manhattan Valley was a bargain, though uncomfortably far from the law office where she temped as receptionist, not to mention the theater district.
    Tonight, as usual, the bus was jammed with bodies, but she had managed to grab a seat near the back. To get it, she’d had to physically remove a large shopping bag owned by an older Hispanic woman who had strategically placed it to discourage potential seatmates. On a crowded bus, Kathryn Stefano refused to tolerate such discourtesy, and now the woman, her bag tucked under her seat, sat peering out the window radiating hot, silent hatred.
    Kathryn had felt so good about the last audition. They seemed to love her, but her phone had been silent for two weeks, and they had promised an answer within a few days. Bryon Florey, her ersatz agent, had pestered the director enough, perhaps beyond his tolerance level, clearly to no avail. The damned thing would have paid well, too.
    She was 28, and her time for grabbing choice roles was rapidly slip-slipping away.
    She had never heard of the play before. The Kin g in Yellow , a two-act exercise in surrealism, produced by an unfamiliar company — Mythosphere, it was called — though she knew of the director, one Vernard Broach, who had gained notoriety two decades earlier by helming a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar that took a page from the Gospel of Phillip, in which Jesus and Mary Magdalene were engaged in an amorous relationship, portrayed quite graphically on the stage. For The King in Yellow , Kathryn had read