The King in Yellow

"Indeed?" said the Stranger.

"It's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.

"But I wear no mask."

"No mask? No Mask!" Tessa threw down her Mardi Gras mask so that the audience could appreciate her horrified expression. It was a good performance, but something about it felt off to me. It was her eyes: They looked like Melissa's that night I found her at my door.

Louis pointed an accusing finger at the crowd, and although I knew it was all part of the show it was too much like my dreams. As I turned away, I saw Tessa bring out the sword. I knew what was coming next and I preferred not to watch the scene play out. But when I heard Louis scream I turned back: In the play, of course, the Stranger isn't hurt by Camilla's sword; but I guess this was one vein in which Louis' final performance wasn't quite as authentic as he had hoped.

Early speculation was that Tessa had somehow mistaken a real sword for a prop, but as the police report later revealed, the weapon she killed Louis with WAS a prop. The blunt metal stave went through him with so much force that it broke in half, and broke Tessa's wrist along with it. Even as Louis lay there, bleeding and screaming, and the audience all scattered in a panic, Tessa never stopped reciting her lines. When Louis wasn't there to say his line in response, she just repeated the cue line over and over again until the police took her away. As far as I know she's still institutionalized.

After that the campus was closed until further notice. The students lived in a strange no-man's land. Some left. Others stayed. They wandered between bars and parties, and they talked about what had happened, and increasingly they talked about "The King in Yellow." Was the play real? Had Chambers read it? Had Tessa? Could it really drive a person insane? Where had it come from?

Speculation and gossip gave way to myth. Soon everyone knew someone who knew someone who had read it. It became a fad. Everywhere you went people asked: "Have you read it?" and "Do you know anyone who read it?" and "Where can I read it?"

Where indeed? Where, I wondered, had Tessa and Louis gotten the script for the scene they performed that day? Melissa must have given it to them. I remembered the hundred copies found in Chambers' car. I wondered how many others the police hadn't found because they had been given away first, and who might be reading them now, and what they might do?

Two weeks after Louis' death I attended a frat/sorority mixer billed as a "Carcosan Ball," where the Theta Phi girls dressed in corsets and masks and long gowns like Carcosan courtesans, peeking out from over the top of decorative fans at the guys from Alpha Chi Omega, and every third person quoted "The King in Yellow" in conversation, or pretended to. A friend had invited me on the pretense of cheering me up (had he known why I was depressed he probably wouldn't have bothered), and I hadn't known the theme when I, for the sake of politeness, agreed to attend. Watching the partygoers, I thought of them all as silly, thoughtless children. To them "The King in Yellow" was still fun, and an excuse for a second Halloween or Mardi Gras, but I wondered if any of them were thinking about the three people who had died and the one laying in a hospital.

By midnight I was ready to leave, but then a group of laughing Thetas climbed onto the dining room table and shouted for everyone's attention. My heart jumped when I saw them passing printed pages around. A tall blonde, clearly many drinks for the worse, read in a wavering voice from the sheet in front of her:

"Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa."

She giggled and passed the page to one of her friends, who continued the verse:

"Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa."

The effect that these words had on the crowd was astonishing: They surged forward to hear more, and when each girl finished reading a page she would fling it into the mass of them, where it would sometimes be torn to shreds by too many hands groping for it.

At first the girls had apparently been acting on a lark, their drunken recital full of giggles and winks. As they went on, though, their demeanor sobered, and each of them got a faraway look. When one of them lifted up her voice and shrieked:

"The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever!"

—it elicited such a horrible cry of elation from the audience that I felt I had to leave. I pushed my way through the dumbstruck Alphas who stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway, hurrying upstairs to find my coat and get out of that place before I had to hear anymore of those horrible words.

I only made it as far as the first open door in the hall before I stopped. I stood staring into the dimly lit room, just as dumbfounded as those downstairs who were transfixed by the recitation. Scattered over the floor were the various pieces of girls' costumes and lolling on the bed, half-naked in each other's arms, were two Thetas, busily kissing, groping, and fondling each other.

A girl with dark curls piled up on her head struggled with the laces of her corset, finally loosening them enough to allow her breasts out so that her partner could lick the erect nipples. She lounged against a pile of pillows, fingers stroking the other girl's hair, eyes half-open and tongue set between her teeth, inhaling with little hissing noises and then exhaling with lazy sighs.

The other girl closed her eyes, strawberry lips and cherry-red tongue licking and lapping. She shifted her gaze to me, and I was afraid she might scream, but instead she regarded me with cool indifference, or perhaps a complete lack of acknowledgment that I was there at all. The moment didn't seem real. In fact, I was sure that it wasn't. Because it was not the sight of female bodies entwined that fixed my attention; it was that one of them, the girl with the dark curls, looked exactly as I imagined Camilla, the heroine of "The King in Yellow," to look.

It's a strange thing, a resemblance to the fancied image of a fictional person, but when I first read the play a picture of Camilla's face emerged very prominently in my mind, to the point that I felt I could pick her out of a crowd. And now here she was, or at least, someone who looked so much like her that I could only assume I was once again dreaming, or that the difference between dreams and waking was not as pronounced as it should be.

I might have stood rooted to that spot all night if "Camilla" had not pushed the other girl away, stood, and walked across the hall, stopping to stroke the side of my face and trail her hand over my shoulders. She was naked except for fishnets, long black opera gloves, and costume jewelry, but she walked right up to me, touched me, and then retreated into the darkened doorway of the room on the opposite side. A pair of long white arms with lacquered nails emerged from the shadows of that room and drew "Camilla" in.

The other Theta, a short, petite Vietnamese girl, followed, stopping only to kiss my cheek, touch my wrist, stroke my thigh, and trail her fingers along my arm. Her movements were languid, like a passing mirage. I was still not sure if any of this was real, but her touch felt solid enough. She looked over her shoulder as she disappeared into the impenetrable blackness of the other bedroom and gestured, once, for me to follow.

"Hello?" I said, approaching the open door and peering in. I could see nothing, but the same arms, belonging to the unseen third person in this rendezvous, slipped out of the shadows and, taking me by the wrists, drew me in. The door closed behind us.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I allowed myself to be drawn through the dark, to the bed. My unseen partners made no noise at all, and when I lay down it seemed that the weight of only one caused any depression on the mattress. But then I felt their hands on me, one's touch gentle and reassuring, one's fast and insistent, the last a measured compromise. They never said a word, to me or each other, but they worked in perfect tandem, stripping me, laying me back, and ministering their affections one at a time.

Certain things about that night will always stand out to me: I remember hearing the bedsprings creak, and the sound of fabric rustling, and of zippers and buttons and catches being undone as the last vestiges of costumes were dismissed. I remember hearing long hair sweeping over bare shoulders, and the sound of lips brushing together. I remember sighs, and moans, and little laughs so soft they almost weren't there. And from below I could still hear the awful grind of words from many mouths. The impromptu chorus had reached the masquerade scene, and again I heard Camilla's fateful line:

"You, sir, should unmask."

Those words were a throbbing pulse that ran through the whole house, like a gigantic heartbeat, and we all fell into their rhythm.

I smelled perfume, and chapstick, and clean sheets, and the scent of wildflowers. I smelled musk, hot flesh, and sweat. I smelled lust, want, need, and indulgence. I remember the taste of lips, and tongues, and soft necks, and bare shoulders, and exposed breasts. Each kiss left a sweet taste behind that never quite went away. Later, I tasted the wetness of their bodies, my lips dancing across the smooth plane of each of their thighs and then between them.

"You, sir, should unmask."

And of course, I felt. I felt everything: one set of lips against mine, long hair hanging around her face and tickling my cheek while our tongues met. Another mouth ran down my bare chest, over my ribs, and back up again. Further down, a pair of hands wrapped around my cock, holding me while she sat above me, and then down on me. The kissing girl bit my lip at the same moment I entered, and then she pushed my face to her breasts as her friend began to ride me.

"You, sir, should unmask."

I felt the pain and the grief and the coldness of the last weeks drop away. I felt myself forget everything, down to even who I was.

"You, sir, should unmask."

They still didn't say anything. Each time I came they waited patiently for me to recover, teasing me with light kisses and touches until I was ready again, and then it was time for another round, a sea of hot bodies, thrusting hips, and quivering thighs, all while many hands clutched at me and many voices moaned and sighed.

"But I wear no mask..."

After, I lay in the dark, shivering, somehow feeling alone. The girls said nothing, and when I reached out I found the bed unexpectedly empty. Then I felt my clothes drop onto my chest, and I took the hint. After dressing in a hurry I reached for the light, but someone beat me to it, closing her hand over mine and pushing it away.

The door opened, and with the same gentle force that I had been drawn in I was now expelled. I stumbled to the stairs, allowing myself to look back only once. When I did, I saw the open, lightless doorway, and from inside I heard a voice, and it whispered:

"Have you found the Yellow Sign?"

And then I ran.

I ran down the steps and out of the house. As I passed the living room, I had the impression of some great turmoil there, a riot of shouting and colliding bodies and a horrible noise that may have been a voice still reading "The King in Yellow," although nothing about the voice was recognizably human anymore.

But I ignored all of that, and everyone and everything else I encountered on the way home. It wasn't until I was in my one-room dorm with the door securely locked that I allowed myself to stop running, and then I fell onto my bed and cried, and screamed, and tore at the sheets.

I did all of this because I knew that I had recognized that voice in the dark, and that it had been Melissa.

After that things started to get really bad. The nightmares came every night. When I was awake I thought about Melissa and when I didn't think about Melissa I thought about the play. I talked to no one if I could help it. I rarely left my room.

On the outside, things were happening. The Thetas and Alphas and assorted hangers-on from the Carcosan Ball set to work. The manuscript from the party was reassembled, then copied, and they began to pass the copies around. Demand was high, especially since the party itself had assumed something like legendary status among those who hadn't been there. Hand to hand, person to person, it spread and spread. Copies of the play in book form, printed and bound in someone's basement, were pushed onto stores by mysterious, anonymous salesmen. Desperate for a hot seller, the shops bought up all they could. It flew off the shelves. Soon everyone was reading "The King in Yellow."

It was just a trickle of stories at first: suicides, murders, nervous breakdowns. Nothing unusual in themselves. If they were happening a little more often lately, well, maybe it was something in the air.

When Louis Castaigne's cousin, Henry, threw himself in front of a bus it was chalked up to grief. When an assistant district attorney set fire to himself on the courthouse steps it was blamed on depression and being overworked. A woman drowning her husband at their oldest daughter's swim meet? Postpartum depression.

As the incidents became more frequent and more graphic, authorities and media analysts noticed that many of those involved had read "The King in Yellow." A few publications ran sidebars highlighting the play's sordid past, but no one seriously considered that it had anything to do with the violence. No one worried yet. Then a week went by, then two, and more stories came in:

A cab driver who held his fare at gunpoint and forced them to read the play.

A man who changed the name of his club to "Carcosa" only to have it burnt down by rioters two days later.

A parish priest who gave a sermon about "The King in Yellow" rather than the Bible, and an hour later, when his horrified parishioners couldn't take it anymore and found they had been locked in, eventually tore the priest limb from limb with their bare hands, telling police after that it was the only way to keep him from driving them all mad.

The last straw came when a group of Alphas and Thetas set fire to the local library while chanting "Carcosa now!" and then threw themselves off of a freeway overpass. People became scared, and serious questions about play were asked for the first time: Was it mass hysteria? The power of suggestion? Were already psychologically-fragile people drawn to the text because of its reputation and then acting out on it?

Or could it be that the governments of 19th century Europe hadn't suppressed the play because it offended them, but because they knew what it could do?

No sane person was willingly reading or distributing it at all now, but those who had read it already would not stop trying to spread the gospel. They copied the prologue into the body of emails and sent it to their entire contact list hoping that trusting recipients would open it and read without knowing what it was. They texted individual lines to every person whose phone number they could get their hands on. People downloaded podcasts and found, instead of the content they expected, "The King in Yellow" being read over their earbuds.

Copies with fake covers and titles were smuggled onto store and library shelves, hapless browsers opening them up and finding horror within. In at least half of all cases, we were told, those who had read or heard even a few lines couldn't resist reading the entire thing. Once its hooks were in you, they never came out.

The police tried to step in, even going so far as to close bookstores and libraries for the sake of public safety. But of course, the police had seized Chambers' copies of the play after he died, and the suicide note was written on a copy of the play. At least one of the detectives must have read it during the investigation. And then he would have passed it on to a colleague...

It had been months now and there was no telling how many in the department had read it. So when people noticed that the stores being raided were almost always the ones not actually selling the book, and that a person arrested for distributing had usually never done so but very often started to after being released, well, it was best not to draw attention to oneself by saying anything.

Personal protection guidelines were issued to help us keep ourselves safe. We were encouraged to leave the house as little as possible, to minimize use of all communication devices, and not to read anything that was put in front of us. Be suspicious of anyone you haven't been in constant contact with, we were told. Report anyone exhibiting unusual behavior. Assume that anyone you meet may be a threat. Everyone stopped going to work. Cars were abandoned all over town. People started hiding.

From my window each night I could see the fires burning and the crowd of frenzied madmen running through the streets. During the day normal people left their homes, scavenging what they could before returning to their hiding places. The Tattered Raiment was spread over all of us, and we were afraid.

I stayed in my dorm, leaving only twice a day to use the bathroom down the hall. My door was locked at all other times, and I had covered the windows with duct tape. I never saw anyone else, and no one came looking for me. The more time went by, the less and less I heard from the outside and the fewer unaffected people seemed to be on the streets.

Occasionally I wondered if I was the last man in the world. Other times I was sure of it.

I remember spending all of one night crouched by my door, my eye pressed to the crack, watching the hall outside for any hint of movement. I was not sure if movement would be a good or bad thing, but I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Hours passed and I kept my vigil. It was almost sunrise (I slept during the day; it was safer) when something passed by. Not only did it pass, but it stopped, and, to my surprise, dropped down to my level, and peered through the same crack I was at. I saw a jaundiced eye shot rolling in its socket as a voice that was something between a whisper and a grunt said:

"Little pig, little pig, let me in."

I froze. There was a pause. Then:

"You're supposed to say: 'Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.'"

"Is that from 'The King in Yellow'?" I asked.

"Sometimes," was the answer, and then a laugh. "Do you know it?"

I considered this question for some time, as the answer was surprisingly complicated. But eventually I said:

"Yes. In fact, I was the first. And now I might be the last. And everything that's happened is my fault. But it doesn't matter because there's probably not anyone left to blame me, and no one ever knew anyway, and it was nothing I did on purpose, and as embarrassing as it is to admit now, this is all just because I wanted to impress a girl but didn't know how, and I think that's a hell of a fucking thing to end the world over."

Another long pause on the other side. Then:

"When do I get to say 'I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in?'"

"I don't know," I said, voice trembling because I had started to cry. "The second Act?"

The Big Bad Wolf skittered off down the hall to whisper at another door, and I never saw him again. After that I stayed away from the doors and windows entirely.

I counted the minutes as they passed one by one. I did not read the play. I ran out food before I ran out of water. The power went out and stopped coming back on. I considered leaving to find help or supplies, but the thought of what might be waiting out there stopped me. Starvation didn't seem so bad, in a certain light.

If the tape hadn't worn away from the windows I might be in there still. But through a rip I saw the orange light flickering one night, and curiosity got the better of me. I stripped the tape away, and below, in the center of the campus, I saw the great fire being stoked, and around it I saw a mass of people, hundreds of them. At first I thought it was another group of madmen, but then I looked more closely and saw the grim, determined looks on the mob's faces, the faces of people who had been in hiding for weeks and were now ready to burn the cancer of "The King in Yellow" out of their community forever. It turned out I had been wrong, and I was not the last sane man left in the world.