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 Page B
Authors: Tim Curran, Cody Goodfellow, Gary McMahon, C.J. Henderson, William Meikle, T.E. Grau, Laurel Halbany, Christine Morgan, Edward Morris
Tags: Lovecraft, cthulhu mythos, Mark Rainey, Yellow Sign, Lucy Snyder, William Meikle, Brian Sammons, Tim Curran, Jeffrey Thomas, King in Yellow, Chambers, Robert Price, True Detective
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pseudo life.
He wasn’t alone on the fire escape. Beside him, even more out of place in this neighborhood than himself, the woman in the gold-patterned black silk dress leaned against the railing looking down at a vacant lot directly below. His heart sitting up like an eager dog, Giff moved to the railing alongside her, but a curved wing of her glossy bobbed hair shielded the side of her face from his view.
She pointed below. She said, “The play has already started.”
Though he hated to take his eyes off her, Giff followed her graceful gesture.
It didn’t look like a play to him; more like some kind of ritualistic dance. A dozen mutants cavorted below, in a circle, as if drunk or insane or both. Their afflictions varied wildly. One had eight or more stick-like, crooked limbs hanging out of its torso, thrashing as if to some unheard music. Another’s head looked composed of a bunch of giant, flesh-colored grapes. The blighted beings shared only two things in common. All twelve of them were naked, and all of them bore on their forehead (or what approximated a forehead) an identical glyph, the symbol Giff had seen painted in the alley, glowing yellow against their skin like a holograph. Glowing like a fiery brand.
The woman turned toward Giff directly, at last. As he had imagined it, her face was perfection, her white skin flawless as porcelain, though her eyes were not Asian as he had expected. Rather, they were two empty black apertures such as the eyeholes in a mask, with infinity behind them. Giff was flooded full with devotion. What greater freedom was there than infinity?
“We need one more player,” she said to him.
She placed a fingertip against his forehead, and traced a figure there. Though Giff couldn’t see it, he felt the yellow heat radiating from his skin.
Wearing a hard bright grin, like a knife blade laid across his face, Giff began descending the metal steps of the fire escape, peeling off his clothing as he went.
This is the second adventure for young Penny Farrell. In “The Abomination of Fensmere” (a tale that appears in Hazardous Press’ Shadows Over Main Street ) her dead mother’s relatives lured her down south to serve as a virgin sacrifice in a ritual to summon the Elder Ones. She escaped her brush with Yog-Sothoth with her mind (mostly) intact, but now she must face a whole new horror here in The Court of the Ye llow King....
azed, Penny stumbled through the gray ash and blasted debris. Charred human fat stained the fractured rocks of the old stone church. Blackened bones jumbled with the splintered charcoal of the pine roof beams. Most all the men of Fensmere, Mississippi lay dead around her, and many of its womenfolk, too. She spied a bit of wrought iron candelabra here, a burned scrap of a Klansman’s hood there.
She looked up at the broken wall where the skylight had been, and the Reverend Houghton’s order reverberated in her mind: “Brother s, place her beneath the stars!”
The girl shuddered and hugged herself as she remembered the cold touch of the old gods probing her mind, examining the Earth through her memory and dismissing her world as unripe fruit. But their thronging dark minions had clamored to devour the planet, and Penny had seen through the old gods’ eyes what terrible, craven, worthless creatures humankind was, and the darkest power of the cosmos had flowed into her, and she could have opened the doorway to let the minions in to end it all.
And for a moment, she’d considered it. It’s what the Reverend – her own grandfather – had brought her here to do. Exactly a month after Penny’s mother’s death, the Reverend’s sister brought her to the family mansion for the summer under the guise of a family reunion. Instead, the Haughtons wrenched her mind open with the mad Arab’s book, drugged her and kept her penned like a sacrificial calf until the night that the stars were right.
And she’d almost done it. She’d almost opened the door
He wasn’t alone on the fire escape. Beside him, even more out of place in this neighborhood than himself, the woman in the gold-patterned black silk dress leaned against the railing looking down at a vacant lot directly below. His heart sitting up like an eager dog, Giff moved to the railing alongside her, but a curved wing of her glossy bobbed hair shielded the side of her face from his view.
She pointed below. She said, “The play has already started.”
Though he hated to take his eyes off her, Giff followed her graceful gesture.
It didn’t look like a play to him; more like some kind of ritualistic dance. A dozen mutants cavorted below, in a circle, as if drunk or insane or both. Their afflictions varied wildly. One had eight or more stick-like, crooked limbs hanging out of its torso, thrashing as if to some unheard music. Another’s head looked composed of a bunch of giant, flesh-colored grapes. The blighted beings shared only two things in common. All twelve of them were naked, and all of them bore on their forehead (or what approximated a forehead) an identical glyph, the symbol Giff had seen painted in the alley, glowing yellow against their skin like a holograph. Glowing like a fiery brand.
The woman turned toward Giff directly, at last. As he had imagined it, her face was perfection, her white skin flawless as porcelain, though her eyes were not Asian as he had expected. Rather, they were two empty black apertures such as the eyeholes in a mask, with infinity behind them. Giff was flooded full with devotion. What greater freedom was there than infinity?
“We need one more player,” she said to him.
She placed a fingertip against his forehead, and traced a figure there. Though Giff couldn’t see it, he felt the yellow heat radiating from his skin.
Wearing a hard bright grin, like a knife blade laid across his face, Giff began descending the metal steps of the fire escape, peeling off his clothing as he went.
This is the second adventure for young Penny Farrell. In “The Abomination of Fensmere” (a tale that appears in Hazardous Press’ Shadows Over Main Street ) her dead mother’s relatives lured her down south to serve as a virgin sacrifice in a ritual to summon the Elder Ones. She escaped her brush with Yog-Sothoth with her mind (mostly) intact, but now she must face a whole new horror here in The Court of the Ye llow King....
azed, Penny stumbled through the gray ash and blasted debris. Charred human fat stained the fractured rocks of the old stone church. Blackened bones jumbled with the splintered charcoal of the pine roof beams. Most all the men of Fensmere, Mississippi lay dead around her, and many of its womenfolk, too. She spied a bit of wrought iron candelabra here, a burned scrap of a Klansman’s hood there.
She looked up at the broken wall where the skylight had been, and the Reverend Houghton’s order reverberated in her mind: “Brother s, place her beneath the stars!”
The girl shuddered and hugged herself as she remembered the cold touch of the old gods probing her mind, examining the Earth through her memory and dismissing her world as unripe fruit. But their thronging dark minions had clamored to devour the planet, and Penny had seen through the old gods’ eyes what terrible, craven, worthless creatures humankind was, and the darkest power of the cosmos had flowed into her, and she could have opened the doorway to let the minions in to end it all.
And for a moment, she’d considered it. It’s what the Reverend – her own grandfather – had brought her here to do. Exactly a month after Penny’s mother’s death, the Reverend’s sister brought her to the family mansion for the summer under the guise of a family reunion. Instead, the Haughtons wrenched her mind open with the mad Arab’s book, drugged her and kept her penned like a sacrificial calf until the night that the stars were right.
And she’d almost done it. She’d almost opened the door
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