In the Court of the Yellow King (28 page)

“I have no idea where Kai is,” Julia said, and in a way it was the truth.

The women looked furtively at one another and would not meet Julia’s gaze. She ignored them. She was ready to rehearse her dance, her lines, in full for the first time. She made a beeline for the cabinet backstage where the smaller props were stored; the Queen’s crown, the musicians’ chimes, an ermine robe daubed with fake blood, a pair of torn slippers. Julia shoved them out of her way and dug through the cabinet until her fingers closed on the smooth porcelain oval of her mask.

It fit her perfectly.

She beckoned to Nicole. With Kai gone, someone had to take the role of the Queen, and who else knew everyone’s lines so well? Nicole set her glasses and her notebook on the edge of the stage and hauled herself up over the edge, moving instinctively to the center, where the Queen stood when the Masque began.

Julia danced. A part of her wondered how she could possibly have tripped and hurt herself that first day of rehearsal; the raked stage was perfectly suited to her movements, and the shifting patterns of the other actors as they moved around the Queen, remarking on the fearful movement of the stars above, or feigning merriment to hide their terror of what was to come. Their feet moved in awkward, reluctant time to Julia’s dance, as if they meant to stop themselves from joining her.

Slowly the circle turned and contracted around Nicole. The others scuttled away as the dance brought Julia to stand in front of her, with a low, grave, exaggerated curtsey.

Nicole spoke to her, the words obscure and distorted as if they were underwater. Julia’s part came back to her in a rush and she remembered her cue.

“I wear no mask,” she said, and it was true. The pallid oval
was
her face, the lips moving as she spoke. She turned her impassive, terrible gaze to the empty audience. A heavy mist rose up around their seats and swallowed them into obscurity. Above them, the stage lights winked into stars.

The subtle dread that had built through all of Act One swelled to the point of bursting. Julia could no longer pretend to wonder what might be written next; they rose in her mind as clearly as if they were lines she had memorized herself. Her body arced without conscious thought into the opening steps of the dance. The awful words of the second act poured from her mouth like the clang of a tocsin.

Julia was distantly aware of the other women around her. She could not remember their names. One lay on the floor, weeping in terror next to a corpse with a twisted neck. Another crawled on her belly, a smile of idiot ecstasy plastered across her face. Yet another had found Nicole’s pen and used it to puncture one eardrum. She carefully twisted it into the other ear and sighed in relief as blood trickled down her neck.

Julia turned her back on them all. The lake stretched out before her. Where the mists parted, the light of an unfamiliar moon reflected from the water. She extended her arms in the final position of the dance and stepped from the edge of the stage, embracing the sly, reflected spires of Carcosa.

Demhe
, she chanted;
Ptahyl, Uoht,
until the waters of Hali filled her throat and carried her under.

hite sky, black stars, a moonless nighttime in negative above a horizon of twisted towers and minarets. The view was surreal; the closer scene, that of a grey, lichen infested, cobbled square flanked by a squat, crumbling, granite wall....

Horrendous.

Crouched on their knees, their hands behind their backs and their heads bowed in supplication, were eight
things
lined in a row. Tall, bald, gangly humanoids, their naked yellow flesh was covered in scabrous patches. Not all were supplicants however. A female specimen, bald like the males but with pendulous, flaccid breasts, looked in Campbell’s direction with bulging grey eyes, licked her lips with a long, vein-filled black tongue.

A red dot appeared near the centre of her forehead, and the back of her head exploded in a cloud of atomised skull and brain matter. Campbell shuddered as if he’d heard the gunshot, but the video, now as it was at the beginning, was completely silent. Whoever held the camera shook a little, backed off as the dead female slumped forward. A momentary close-up returned. A gore-filled crater replaced the back of her head, a protuberant twist of spine poking up behind it. Her hands, tied with a black plastic cable tie, bore obscenely long, twisted fingers, the jagged nails thick with dirt.

The camera zoomed out. A male form dressed in black combat fatigues, a ski mask and tactical vest, replaced the corpse. He held a Glock 12 in his gloved hand. Kitted out for combat, and murder, he lifted a sheet of cardboard towards the camera.

Black letters read:

Revenge is Sweet

The man stepped away, and following that cold, clinical first kill came a barrage of gunshots that tore the defenceless things asunder, the shuddering bodies ripped to shreds while silently screaming faces blossomed with new orifices and screamed no more. The screen turned blank. Further darkness follows as Campbell closed his eyes, numb with disgust.
What t
he hell is going on
here? A rival agency
or some foreign powe
r in competition wit
h us?
He was sure Analysis would have a field day with the video, but had decided to keep this his secret.

Campbell opened his eyes and stared at the screen. It made no sense. He was accustomed to seeing the things, had been in the Carcosans presence off and on for eighteen months now. But he never thought he would see them die; didn’t think they
could
die.
Do I spe
ak to The King about
this?
His superior in the Bureau, Mr. King, would be suspicious as to why he’d kept this alien snuff film to himself. Two days earlier, Campbell had found the dirt-smeared, yellow object in his jacket pocket, and, considering its contents, could only assume it had fallen there from the sack of offerings he’d carried from the summoning room after the last Carcosan Event. His instinct told him to remain quiet.

He checked his watch and sighed. It was almost time. He pushed the chair back from his desk, pulled on his jacket, and halfway to the door returned to his desk, removing the memory stick and pocketing it before powering the computer down.

Revenge is sw
eet
. Campbell pictured the slaughter. Yellow corpses, dirty cobbles pooled with black blood—with difficulty, he shook the image away. Standing with Gibson, a short, female, blonde fellow agent, the tall, bald headed King and two armed, buzz-cut blonde guards wearing khaki combat fatigues, a palpable fear filled the elevator’s small confines. Whenever Campbell was in close proximity to the summoning device, he needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else. By the looks on the other men’s faces and the sweat beading Gibson’s brow, he guessed they suffered similar thoughts. He didn’t envy The King’s role in this, the man holding the black cloth-covered device with his arms outstretched as if it were a bomb. The device was an artefact from the Roswell Event, one rumour went. Another said it had been discovered in Egypt, stuffed inside a Mummy. Whatever its origin, the device was bad company.

The elevator continued its descent, to a floor unused by anyone but the score of members belonging to Project Yellow Sign. Officially, The King’s agents belonged to the F.B.I.’s Facilities and Logistics Services Division. That’s what it said on paper.

Campbell grew lost in thought again, his mind drifting back to the blood, the death. The memory stick felt heavy in his jacket’s inside pocket.

An almost unfelt shudder, the elevator touching the basement floor, returned him to the here and now. The doors parted and The King strode forward, flanked by the guards. Campbell followed them down a grey basement corridor lined with rusted pipes. As The King and his retinue walked, ceiling tubes flickered above their heads. The group turned left at an intersection, and contrary to the unkempt state of the remainder of the floor they now faced a relatively new, reinforced steel door flanked by two armed guards. “They’re in there,” the guard on the left said, and tilted his head towards the door. While the rest paused, the petite Gibson stepped forward and with quick movements slid a card key past a reader at door’s midsection. A loud beep followed and the door fell forward a few inches. Gibson backed away, gave Campbell a nervous look as The King moved forward.

He nudged the door open with his shoe and revealed a familiar, frightening room.

Bare, dirt smeared white plaster walls, a cracked concrete floor, fluorescent tubes starkly illuminated the room. The offerings flanked the door. Sedated, strapped to gurneys, two Death Row criminals awaited a doom far worse than death, and they deserved it. Campbell had read their sheets. One, a man named Devon ‘Dee’ Dewitt, had supposedly been executed two days earlier, for the multiple rape and murders of eight women in North Carolina. The other, Allen Stuart, ‘executed’ by lethal injection but instead retained and sedated by Campbell’s team, had murdered four people during a robbery at a Chuck E. Cheese. The FBI procured them easily. Monsters, scum, Campbell had witnessed what the Carcosans did to their ‘subjects’ for they occasionally dumped their leftovers when collecting fresh offerings. Why? Because they were evil, sadistic bastards.

“Okay, let’s get this started,” The King said, his pockmarked face betraying only a hint of nervousness. “Campbell, close the door. You two push the offerings towards the back wall.” This was directed at the guards. They shouldered their rifles and reluctantly wheeled the squeaking gurneys to the rear of the room.

Campbell pushed the door closed and heard it click as it locked. The way he felt, utterly trapped, was mirrored by Gibson’s strained expression, the woman’s eyes wide with anticipation. Beyond Gibson the guards returned, passing The King who now crouched on the floor with the device uncovered. He shoved the cloth in his jacket pocket, stood and backed away. The device, an amber, roughly triangular blob, released a mellow glow Campbell knew from experience would fill the room when the lights went down.

“Lights,” The King said and Gibson followed his instructions. Campbell placed his hands behind his back and clenched his fists. His throat dry, he swallowed loudly with fear and anticipation.

The device, now a yellow blob of fire, revealed an object embedded in its depths, a bulbous black cylinder surrounded by three twisted spokes. The King’s body became a black silhouette before it. Within the device’s apparently solid matter, the spokes moved with a sinuous life of their own.

“Here we go,” Gibson whispered, and reality shifted.

Blasts of wind, accompanied by wild, animal roars, appeared as the walls and ceiling disintegrated, revealing a blurred white sky spotted with obsidian stars. A too familiar scene. The chaotic air buffeting Campbell smelled of cinnamon and over-ripe fruit. Everyone but The King ducked at the gusts pounding their bodies. He stood stolid, his arms folded as the gurneys rattled around him. Where the walls had stood, just beyond the concrete floor, a world of sandy desert surrounded the group. Although the air shimmered, the wind only assaulted those within the remains of the basement.

Campbell stood straight, tried composing himself to match The King’s firm countenance. He shuddered when he saw they were no longer alone. As if from thin air they’d appeared, too many figures to count. The things, the Carcosans, were everywhere, spotting the sand dunes into the distance. Campbell shuddered, the guards stood alert, and Gibson turned and said something that was lost in the wind. Campbell was distracted anyway, for a tall, spindly male creature now stood facing The King, its ugly, elongated form matching those surrounding them, matching those things he had seen murdered on video.

Fingers reaching past its knees twitched on multiple joints as the Carcosan bowed before The King. Its face, small and withered within a bulbous head, bore a grin of huge black teeth, its eyes glazed and unfocused. It spoke and Campbell shivered, the ugly voice resembling scratches on a record. It didn’t speak English, yet the words appeared in his brain as such.

“
You bring thin
gs? Good things yes?
”

The Carcosan raised its head and giggled like a child. Its voice filled the air as it looked to the sky, its chest convulsing at it laughed at some private, alien joke. It looked to The King and nodded. “
Good things
.”

Movement in the corner of Campbell’s eye shifted his gaze to the gurney on his right. Another Carcosan had stalked closer, now looming over Dewitt. Unlike the others, this one, a female, wore a diamond-shaped, bone-coloured mask over its face. It stared down from narrow eye slits, teasing its hands across Dewitt’s prone form like a pianist. Then Dewitt awoke. His screams filled the air, louder than the chaotic wind as he rocked in his gurney, twisted against the straps. The female Carcosan pressed a spidery hand against his mouth and muffled his terror. More movement – to his left Campbell saw another masked female interfering with the Stuart man.

“
You return
to your blue world n
ow. Live blue lives
,” the male Carcosan said. The King looked small now, insignificant before the being, and was he shaking? “
G
oodbye day
,” the Carcosan continued, and in an instant Campbell’s world became a void of black silence. Light-headed, his knees crumbled and he was on the floor, his quick reflexes saving him from injuring himself. The sight of his spread hands pressed against concrete replaced the darkness, and the room surrounding him stood whole again. Nearby, he heard one of the guards vomiting. Footsteps to his right followed, tender hands gripping him as Gibson helped him up from his knees. He looked around and found The King bent forward, pawing through a large burlap sack. The Carcosan had deposited this before disappearing—their payment for the offerings.

After he composed himself, Campbell approached The King with slow hesitancy. The gifts from the Carcosans varied in usefulness: boxes of costume jewellery, crumbling maps to unknown continents... once a map had been in French, titled
Carcosa: C
hemins Le Fer
. The name had stuck, for the aliens.

“Anything useful?” Campbell asked.

The King shook his head and snorted. “Uh, pieces of half built technology. I don’t know what but Tech will have a field day. Nothing living, thank god.” These words brought some measure of relief to Campbell. The living things were always the worst, especially when they consisted of the mutilated, mewling remains of past offerings. Sometimes, the Carcosans deposited the corpses of
future
offerings, condemned criminals still alive somewhere in America. At least in those cases, locating and procuring the subjects proved simpler.

It was a relief to everyone it was over, the feeling palpable within the room. Still, leaving it felt even better, the King bearing the device before him with Campbell hauling the burlap sack over his shoulder. It was heavy, but not as heavy as the memory stick.