The Sea Peoples(7)

This time he/they looked out from a window over a city, many of the buildings newish and looking much like the Capitol buildings in Boise, all columns and domes and marble. Others reared grotesquely high, dozens of stories, but even the tallest weren’t glass-faced like the ones you still saw sometimes where they hadn’t been taken down for salvage. These were sheathed in more natural stone and brick but looking the odder for that, because he had enough engineering education to know that you couldn’t possibly build load-bearing walls that high.

Castaigne—the man he dreamed of being—was sitting in a soft-padded chair in a book-lined study not altogether unlike the one in the ranch-house back home, reading a book between glances out the window. The slightly stuffy smell of velvet and leather-bound books contrasted with the fresher air through the open panes, but that had a tinge of metallic smokiness too as well as the concentrated town-smell of horses.

The hands that held the book weren’t his own—thinner and paler, not the hands of a man who’d ridden as early as he could walk and handled bow and reins and saber, lariat and branding iron, or pitched in with the ranch-hands at roundups and the endless rounds of chores in the lonely estate on the shores of Lake Hali in the mountains of what had once been Idaho.

These were a city man’s hands, and a scholar’s, he thought. The words on the page were familiar both to the man he was in the dream and to his waking self—it was the play he’d read so often, The King in Yellow. There was an eerie detachment to the scene; he knew the words, and the man he was in the dream knew the words, though he was more frightened of them than Alan. The thin fingers trembled as they traced the lines of text, and Alan could hear the way his mind spoke to itself and what it felt, like a faint echo in his own, a tale told so often that it had become part of him:

I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.

Castaigne slammed the book shut and sat shivering and sweating, tears trickling down his face as he laughed shrilly for a moment. The leather cover bore an embossed figure in gold, the outline of a tall man robed and hooded and masked in yellow with the shadow of ragged crimson wings behind him.

A ghost of pain shot through the man whose shaking hands held the book, focused at the back of the neck; Alan recognized the sort of ache you felt from a bad thump on the head, the sort he’d had occasionally after a horse threw him or a sparring-match with wooden sabers got out of hand and someone bounced the ashwood blade off his helmet too hard.

Then the dream-man rose and walked into a luxurious if fussily-ornamented bedroom, and then to a picture on the wall, an oil-painting of a woman in an elaborate uncomfortable-looking dress that left most of her upper body bare. It swung aside to reveal a safe with a combination lock of curious design. The thin fingers were deft on it, and Alan could feel the ridged metal beneath them.

Dream-man waited for three minutes or so, his mind a golden reverie, an ecstasy of waiting, and in it Alan found his mind more and more one with the man he dreamed. It was hard to resist the feeling of exultation, of power beyond imagining in vistas of rule and glory. The safe clicked and chimed like a musical clock, and he swung back the solid steel doors when the safe opened . . .

. . . and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to increase as the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings, an Emperor among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn by his royal servant.

I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and then tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors.

The pleasure of the crown was infinite, but somehow also repellant; it blazed with life and power, but made him feel as if he’d stumbled into a tomb and found it on the head of a mummified corpse stretched out on a bier over which black beetles scuttled.

Dream-self walked slowly back into the study, and leaned on a window sill that overlooked a great square. The afternoon sun poured into the windows, and a gentle breeze stirred the branches of the elms and maples in the park; from the buds and tender new leaves it was spring, wherever this was. A flock of pigeons circled about the tower of a Christian church, swirls of them alighting on the purple tiled roof or wheeling downward to a bronze fountain cast in the semblance of a lotus blossom in front of a marble triumphal arch. Gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A familiar style of lawn mower drawn by a fat white horse clinked across the dense velvety green, and watering carts poured showers of spray over the roads about.

Children in odd clothing—miniature suits shaped like the uniforms sailors wore, or flared gauzy skirts for the girls—ran and played in the spring sunshine amid the banks of bright flowers, and young women in modest long-skirted costumes that reminded him of what the more conservative Mormon ladies wore back home wheeled elaborate baby carriages. They chose paths that let them exchange flirtatious glances with men lolling on the benches; from their boots and spurs and sabers they were horse-soldiers, though the uniforms of gold-slashed blue jackets and tight scarlet pants and polished tasseled boots were far more colorful than most he knew. Only Associates among the peoples he knew were such peacocks at war, and the cut was different from theirs.