The King in Yellow is a story about grief. Here is how it goes.
Once upon a time, there were two beautiful princesses named Camilla and Cassilda. Their father, the king, died in the wars protecting their falling empire from forces of rot beyond their borders. They lived in a beautiful palace, in a beautiful city called Carcosa. There was nowhere else like it in all the world. It sat along the shores of a lake of clouds, where black stars danced in the sky day and night. Its riches were beyond the wildest dreams of kings. Its towers and streets were mad with ornament and the tantalizing shadows of adventure from times long gone. In short, it was a city seemingly built for and around its unusual rulers.
To be sure, the princesses ensconced themselves in the fantasy and grandeur of their beautiful city. They spared no expense in the most lavish parties, the most astonishing costumes, the greatest feats of wonder and imagination.
But Camilla and Cassilda were not happy.
Underneath it all, the feasts and the festivities and the plays, there was a longing, a grief so great as to exert its own gravity. For the princesses had no one else who loved them, no one in their whole great city.
The people whispered that the princesses were not fit to rule. They spent their people's tithe on fantastical things to distract and amuse, instead of a strong army or a fine fleet or anything the people of Carcosa would need. But that was no matter. They had more than enough to do, and the ghost of the king their father loomed larger every day as they cavorted in the palace gardens and sought penniless suitors from faraway lands.
And on the darkest night of the year, when the people grew hungry and the shadows grew long and the memory of their father’s long stride and loud laughter grew just too much to bear, Camilla and Cassilda held the greatest party Carcosa had ever known. A masquerade ball, held in honor of the veil growing ever more thin.
Camilla and Cassilda were not fools; they were children, a very important difference. This night was not for mere escape, the prospect of which taunted them more every day. For tradition held that on the darkest night of the year, when the people wear masks and the twin suns set for the longest of hours, the departed might be tempted to return to the mortal world, just a little while. It was this, the princesses' secret dream, which meant the world held its breath on masquerade night as the enemy besieged the city walls.
The clock ticked till midnight, and just as they thought all hope was lost, a stranger darkened the doorstep, in the mask of Death, cold and pallid, and in the royal colors, a bright, impudent yellow.
The stranger looked almost comical, stick-straight and tall, approaching the princesses in the tattered royal garb of their father. It had to be him, they thought. Dared they hope?
Camilla asked the stranger to unmask, for it was the stroke of midnight.
The stranger replied in the voice of the eulogy, the last whispers of the dying, and the princesses knew the truth.
They wait forever with the stranger, lost in the dying city of Carcosa. The clock is always at the stroke of midnight, and they are always watching as the stranger lays aside the pallid mask.
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It doesn't matter when you found the book, really. Which is good, since you can't remember. All you know is that you stayed late, when almost everyone else went home to their partners, or parents, or cats.
Working (well, volunteering) in a library affords you some minor perks, one of which is first stab at the halfhearted collection of dollar-bin books deemed too worn out by the head librarian to be of any real use.
You suspect the head librarian chooses some books for the shelves for her personal collection, given the unusual rate of disappearance of cheap bodice-rippers. Not that you’re too broken up about it.
But this is a digression. You snap from your reverie as you dig through the tacky-to-the-touch hardbacks with crinkly cellophane covers, alphabetizing them as best you can in the tiny bargain bin. Cooking with Gelatin: A Beginner's Guide. 1,001 Barroom Limericks. Watercolor Painting with Mona Gibbs.
One of the books jumps out at you.
You've heard that the human eye is trained to see yellow first above all colors. Something about wavelengths, you suspect, or perhaps primordial fruits having bright yellow skin.
(In hindsight, you theorize it's because yellow things in nature are most often dangerous. Snakes. Jaundice. Rot.)
Anyway, the book is nameless. The cover is blank, except for a letter, or a seal, in the middle. (Arabic?) You try to scan it out of the system, but there’s no barcode to be seen.
There's something about it. Something not quite right.
You open it to the title page. The King in Yellow. No author.
You slide the book into your bag as you leave that night.
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The King in Yellow is a story about lies. Here is how it goes.
In a grand theater on the old side of town was a great director looking to produce a seminal European play. Some might have called it Brechtian, some might have called it avant-garde, but the director had one demand. It must be true.
A difficult ask, for a troupe of actors. For how can an artist be true, when the only thing they know how to do is tell lies?
All the starving artists of the city piled like rats to audition. The audition was different for everyone - and never mundane. The director asked about luck in love and deepest fears. The director asked if you ever wished someone dead. The director asked what masks you thought you wore.
The cast was chosen carefully, although no one quite knew how, for he never requested a monologue. But once the parts were offered, no actor refused their chance of a lifetime.
The director jealously guarded his copy of the script, with actors only receiving their parts in scribbled, abridged versions made by the director himself. Perhaps he feared censorship on the script, some speculated. Maybe he worried over rival companies poaching his dreams for their own purposes. The cast grumbled, but little was thought of it. After all, he was always an eccentric.
Yet the production grew stranger.
First was the contract. All the director's actors spent all their time in the theater - to an extent unusual even for the dramatic arts. Rehearsals spanned days at a time, and the director requested that they address each other by the names of their characters, always. He called it immersive, revolutionary - and the troupe complied. Who could disappoint such a great man?
Next came the scene of the lover's spat, between two haughty monarchs a world away. The director cast a husband and wife in starring roles, and before the rehearsal spread a rumor that the villain had taken her over the boards with the leading man none the wiser. The scene crackled with energy - of course it did. When the truth came out, the ingenue slapped the director and stormed from the theater, vowing to never return.
No one knows what she saw, but the ingenue returned the next day.
After was the masks. The director demanded that the masks of the characters be worn day in and day out, uncanny faces and lack of eyesight notwithstanding. Let it not be said that he himself did not comply - outside of rehearsal, he all but disappeared, stating that his part had yet to be truly played.
After a while, no one ever saw anyone else removing a mask. Some whispered that they had forgotten how to.
Other incidents piled up. Script readings only held at night for select performers. Rehearsals with more masked people than the original cast ever held. But still the director persisted, for he felt the call of making something truly great.
The opening night was fantastic. A city glutted with artists scrambling for pennies packed the house with audience members looking to see the curious creation of the director, all the way from Europe, one night only for the discerning connoisseur of the theater.
The curtain went up, and the audience was transfixed. To this day, anyone there that night cannot bear to watch any other play, for none are as masterful, as bewitching, as the performance the director had held.
The director was very devoted to utter realism, complete truth. The sets glimmered with the splendor of forgotten cities’ ramparts. The scenes transitioned seamlessly, the actors married to the script with the transcendent fervor of the ecstatic and the mad.
The climax arrived. In the play, the ingenue brings her own end on the tip of a dagger, as all ingenues do. For legal purposes, in this city, all props in the theater are cleared for use. Nothing is permitted to be real.
The dagger went in, and she choked.
Investigators were baffled by the actual cause of death. It was marked as a stabbing, with the weapon unknown, for the blood-soaked blade found in her chest was a mere wooden prop. The leading man blamed the director for the death of his wife, to the point of clinical insanity. The director himself was gone, disappeared in the intermission although the handrests of his seat were scored from where he clawed them.
Their only lead was a looming yellow silhouette, in a costume no one recognized, treading the boards as the ingenue choked out her final lines.
________________________________________________
You unlock the door of your barren apartment and collapse inside. Volunteering at the library straight after work today meant you couldn't pick up any groceries for the week, but that's fine - your paycheck just dropped, and you can afford to splurge on a pizza.
You call it in and glance out the window on the street, waiting for your food to arrive. It's 10:02 P.M. The apartment is quiet, and you try not to fall asleep, since honestly, a 10 P.M. bedtime is kind of pathetic, even if you've been on your feet since five this morning.
You haven't called your mother in a good couple weeks. The line steadily drones in your ear without a connection as her recorded voice asks for your name and number. She must have re-recorded it, taped over your father's voice that was there last month.
You don't leave a voicemail.
As you stare out the window, something tugs at your eye. There's a new piece of graffiti on the wall of the neighboring block of apartments, between a balloony middle finger and an illegible gang tag. You've seen it before.
You feel the beginnings of a headache.
Odd. Why would someone tag a building with that same calligraphy? You open the book to check for a copyright - maybe it’s a new release. A viral Internet personality's punchy autobiography? Not like you know about that shit. It's been a while since you were up to date on trends.
There's no copyright date. No publisher, either.
You riffle through the pages without thinking. It's clearly an old book. Maybe someone just really liked it?
You know that isn't true, but it helps to think it is.
The doorbell rings, and you almost jump out of your skin. You snap the book shut and open the door. The driver stands there with a tired look.
'Have you found it?'
The fuck? 'Uh… the money? How much do I owe you?'
The driver scoffs, gesturing at the book in your hands with an incredulous look. 'Don't tell me you haven't found it.'
'...This isn't worth anything.'
The driver laughs. 'He's waiting for you.'
You're too tired for this. You snatch the book away, sliding it onto your counter. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
'Hey, I just asked where the money is. $13.95?'
He seems vaguely disoriented, like when you look up after reading for hours.
'Oh, uh. Sorry. Yeah, sure -'
You make the exchange, abashed, and tip more than you can strictly afford.
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The King in Yellow is a story about loneliness. Here is how it goes.
There was once a professor of great acclaim. She lived with her husband and daughter near an old institution of high academe by the slow, winding river. She was a philosopher. She took great pleasure in debating the lines of ethics with students and colleagues, although she herself rarely made a claim she couldn't turn and refute in two seconds flat. For this, she was well-respected. She kept her own deepest thoughts largely private. The general consensus was that it was out of professionalism, although under the table, everyone knew that any treatise with the bent of religiosity would be laughed from any room, and the philosopher could sometimes be heard whispering what could have been prayers softly through her office door.
She was still working on her masterpiece, however. Only a few of her brightest students or most incisive colleagues knew of its existence, a set of Socratic-style dialogues between a stranger and a publican in a far-off land. No one had ever seen it. No one had ever tried.
That is, until the professor's family left her alone.
It happened one night after a bitter argument, when she stayed at work far later than the buses ran to edit her latest dialogue. When she unlocked the door, the house was empty, with a note sitting innocently on the kitchen counter.
She was a strident workaholic, the letter said. Obsessed with her lectures and conferences and that damn book. No time to spend with her family, so why stay? It was starting to scare their daughter. He tried and he tried to talk sense into her, but nothing worked.
The professor became far more vocal with her views, after that.
She was a pure determinist. Nothing was subject to free will. Free will did not even exist, it was a phantasm of the human brain to avoid the unpleasant reality of utter lack of choice. And the professor began to grow more strange.
She left her house less and less.She began taking a position of at-home research and scholarship with the university, seldom lecturing on her own or presenting her arguments. Her writings were far from the lyrical creations of her younger years, instead being a militant and bleak enforcement of her complete cessation, denial, even, of free will.
They didn't find her body for six days. In hindsight, it made sense. By the end, she didn't leave her house at all, instead choosing to have a neighborhood teenager deliver groceries to her front step, and at that point, nobody wanted to spend a second with the crazy old woman more than they absolutely had to. All the same, though. No one quite knew how to react when the papers leaked photos of her body.
Strung up, by her own hand, on strings. Puppet strings, made of thin piano wire which cut viciously in to her hands and feet. This, however, wasn't the most interesting part. That was found when investigators searched the professor's cramped office.
The climax of the philosopher's dialogue, a triumph of deterministic thought against an imaginary foe, was not a conclusion, but a description - a description of the human race. After pages upon pages of dialogue and logic from the yellow-clad stranger to the befuddled monarch, the philosopher clearly wanted to spend time impressing the hopelessness of the human condition on even the most oblivious reader.
The thesis was simple. People were deaf, blind puppets, jabbering on wooden jaws, unaware that they are controlled by the finest and least perceptible of strings which nevertheless tug relentlessly on the course of human affairs. She wonders if someone put them there. If this is the hellscape of a particular puppet-master as opposed to an insensate output of the overarching universe. Eventually, she realizes, even this is beyond humanity's purview. Can a doll recognize its maker, if it were to have one?
Although her death was ruled as a suicide, forensics analysts couldn't explain the strings hanging from her arms and legs. Nor could they explain the crude symbol, a letter in a language no one knew, freshly tattooed on the nape of her neck seemingly after the time of her death.
________________________________________________
You're staring at that damn book.
Your food is forgotten on the kitchen table. The window is open, graffiti seemingly taunting you from across the street.
You're no fool. There’s something clearly up with it - the odd marking, the seemingly entranced delivery guy. What's so great about it? What's the appeal?
You've tried Googling every variation of 'the king in yellow' you can think of. No real results, other than a lonely forum poster asking about the book and an ancient newspaper review declaring the artistic supremacy of a play by a similar name.
You click on the user who wrote Anyone here heard of the King in Yellow? (Jun 6 ‘03).
You browse through their forum posts, long since deactivated.
Weird symbol: maybe Hebrew? (Jun 5 '03).
Causes of sleep paralysis? (Jun 9 '03).
Repeat hallucinations (Jun 15 '03).
And their last post:
Have you found the Yellow Sign? (Jun 17 '03).
You close out the browser window, nauseous. You pick up the book, wondering if it needs handled with gloves.
You volunteer at the library. You love to read. You studied English in college, for God's sake. What you're about to do isn't something you ever thought you'd contemplate.
You grab a lighter on the way out of your apartment.
You don't give yourself any time to think. That seems suicidal. Maybe you'll get some sleep and wake up tomorrow morning and decide this was all insane. That'd be fine. Great, even.
You walk into the alley outside of your apartment, in front of that damn letter sloppily painted on the wall. It's a good a place as any, and after all, you figure that bright yellow paint is as good a warning sign as any.
You hold the book up, flicking the lighter on.
Its pages begin to smolder.
Something catches your eye.
It's a signature, in the same cramped handwriting you remember from lunchbox notes and birthday cards, in the corner of the very last page.
For my storyteller. Love, Dad.
Your mouth is dry. You flick off the lighter.
It's his. It has to be. Unmistakable.
Opening the book is as natural as breathing. He meant it for you, after all.
You read the first line. You know you will never be able to stop.
The King in Yellow is a story about you. Here is how it goes.