In the Court of the Yellow King Page 4

“Say again, little lady? I don’t speak that lingo. Je suis Americain. I’m a disk jockey with the ABC Radio Network in New Y—”

  “I shall not tell you. It is a secret,” she called back in a honeyed drawl that didn’t sound French any more, and maybe a little older than I guessed. On both cheeks a pink spot was burning, and her eyes were very bright. “Our hunting-falcon arrives. Now we got to starve you. Then you learn to hunt.”

  Those words should have been creepy. Instead, they filled me with a kind of breathless expectancy that began wearing me out almost immediately. Hell, friend, I wasn’t even sure why I ran until I stopped running.

  And when my jets cooled and those crazy kid sneaks quit laying rubber, I looked up and then I had to go to Memphis.

  After that, I’m afraid everything got a little weird.

  The sun hung, a purple globe, above the misty Blue Ridge. Nothing at the bungalow in Memphis looked fully unpacked. It was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestries. An old six-string guitar in good repair stood by the window, looking strangely like an instrument of torture in a medieval gallery.

  I knew that the time had come, with no escape, to sound out the troubadour who could bring blues music all the way to white radio. His eyes burned like black stars, and the shadows of my thoughts melted like twin suns into that accursed lake. I knew that the time had come. The world now trembled before him.

  “Come in, Mister Freed, come in.” The voice had an odd ringing quality to it. The batwinged cherub of juvenile delinquents everywhere (to hear some of those idiots in Congress tell it already behind closed doors) was chunky, but it was merely puppy-fat and shirttail-poor work muscle, with raw bones behind that.

  His face looked like a pallid mask, as pale as his short-sleeved undershirt and hair were black, his eyes the expert drillbits of dexedrine holding something behind them, framing something in place. Something with two layers, Past and Distant Past. Something else behind those. I wondered what ailed him.

  “Welcome. You, uhh, kinda came when we was cleanin’ up,” the joke had been shared on the telephone already, “But... Yeah, yeah, this’ll be good to do. I think we’ll be talking a long time.”

  When the King shook my hand, his grip felt like iron. He showed no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. “I’ve already been gone so long, the wife’s making jokes that I got taken by aliens in a flying saucer,” I joked. “So what the hell?”

  His eyes got strange again. “Oh, those kind weren’t never from Space,” he said out of nowhere. “It’s way more complicated. They come from outside. Between. Anyway. Come on in. Make yourself a drink.”

  My shudder reached a long way back, as though it had been dormant for years and now rose to confront me. I knew that meeting him brought him nearer to the accomplishment of his purpose and my fate. “This is all Fate,” Elvis read my thoughts with startling alacrity, “For a purpose. Because my brother Jesse got taken too soon. I swear to God, no one knows how lonely I get without him. And how empty I really feel. Except in the tunes, baby. Except in song.”

  He led me into the living-room, still talking, and showed me where a bottle of Kentucky bourbon was kept, and a big Ball jar of something called ‘branch-water’ in the cupboard that I took to be springwater. Fine. Ice, too, and I found that in the icebox, like anybody.

  I didn’t notice Elvis taking a drink. But watching this boy-king, this Tutankhamun, pace around from living-room to kitchen with that twinkle in his big brown eyes, I realized that I was seeing the phantom future of Music itself. Women would melt for this. (Some men, too, especially in the Village.)

  But when Elvis looked at me again, I felt sick. “You know your public. Which are also mine. You’re kinda like a...” He snapped his fingers. “Like a lightning-rod for music. Like a prophet, Mr. F-”

  I waved a dismissive hand. “The King calls me Prophet, the King can g’wan call me Alan.”

  His upper lip curled, and the smile touched his eyes. Briefly, I saw the dumb kid with a spark behind all this. The dumb kid that had waved a six-stringed wand and opened a door to a world bigger than he could survive and stay sane. “You got your finger on their wants, Alan. I look beyond their wants and I can see their needs.”

  I smiled back, somewhat indulgently. “Well, I do fear to tread where you rush in.”

  At that, Elvis Presley sang the entire first verse of “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” until we were both snapping our fingers. But this time the shared smile never went above his lips. His eyes stayed the same.

  “Now, I know there’s a lot you probably want to know,” the King told me. “And we’ll kinda start in the middle and work at both ends, but...” Something happened to his eyes. Something I didn’t like.

  “First, I want you to meet my Mama.”

  Welcome to our home, Mr. Freed. Pay no mind to all these danged old cats. Won’t you sit down?

  Baby... I mean Elvis, my dear son, he says this won’t be home much longer. Neither will the old place, the one those newsmen always talk about. The one that still feels like home to me. This one’s much nicer, and to hear my boy talk there’ll be something I can’t even imagine.

  Oh, you were there? At the old place? Just walked on by, you say? That’s nice. You’re the disk jockey, yes. I listen to your programs. You seem all right.

  So you saw the old place. Hope you got a photo. Baby’s having some men come in and bulldoze the old place, then seed the ground with salt, just like back in the Biblical times. We’re Assembly of God here, probably donate the plot to the church right up the road.

  Vernon built that little wooden icebox of a thing the year before the big hurricane hit, the Big Blow. No running water, no indoor plumbing. Elvis says he’s going to build me... us... a new house. I told you that. You seen the Caddy parked out in the shed, I’m sure. Not that we know what to do with it besides a coat of Simonize and taking it to church on Sunday.

  I say ‘we.’ Maybe like Queen Victoria meant it, the royal ‘we.’ I won’t let Vernon drive it. He’d have the paint all scratched-up using it to go on scrap runs or haul lumber wherever to put someone’s new porch on for them for a tenth of what it’s worth so he can go drink that weekend. I’m past caring about any of that, now.

  No, I am. I see the look on your face. Vernon did his part already, so be damned to him. I forget if he’s in jail this month or not. Haven’t seen him around. Even a layabout with broken shoulders can still use his pecker. He did. I wear the pants here.

  Well, there must be a lot you want to know. Baby only recorded his first two songs three years ago. They were for me, Gospel songs for my birthday, and he paid Sam Phillips for the studio time out of the wages he got driving that delivery-truck fulla light bulbs.

  My boy is the Prince. He will be King, one day. My family will reclaim their birthright, as of old. Papa’s line only got Ellis-Islanded to Smith, but that family Bible that baby – Elvis – won’t let no one touch still says Castaigne, from Papa’s granny.

  Oh, I see you glancing at that bookshelf. Yes, yes, most of those histories are incomplete, but that one’s not. It’s two centuries old, and...

  Oh, no, not the one you’re thinking of, the one that art-school student turned his back on in midstream to go pluck the lower-hanging fruit, then went back and tried to... No, he dreamed about Americanizing this version.

  A poet wrote this version in jail, back in the Old Country. A thief named Villòn, in 1456. Not our kin, he just knew us. This is the true KING IN YELLOW. Every emperor who ever lived had no kind of ambition compared to the King, who doesn’t rest until He speaks even to the dreams of the unborn.

  Emperors have served Him, and we serve His mandate between God and Man in this house too. It...

  Oh, are you sure you want to just pick that old folio right
on up and start reading? Well. Then let me fix that drink, Mr. Freed. It looks broken. Ha-ha. You opened right to page one. “When from Carcosa,the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldebaran...”

  Here you are. Oh, something’s fallen out of the folio. Have you found the Yellow Sign?

  (Alan Freed turned the ebon brooch over in his hand, and it was a Port Authority subway-token, stamped with a single word, PAYOLA. When he turned it over again, he gasped.

  See, there, it looks a bit like a scorpion, or a hog’s pecker. Then in the center, the Eye. Have you ever read the Chambers version? Both are books of great truths. Here, I’ll take that brooch from you now. It was Grandmother’s. What... Oh, you’re looking at who’s on the mantel. You’re... curious.

  Well, you know.

  Baby Jesse was stillborn. Now he can always be with us. It... Why, I can hear a good Catholic boy like you thinking it, Mr. Freed. Those eyes were closed before Old Lady Two-Head put Jesse in that there jar. He is not looking at you. Ahem. In my own home, men think these things. No respect for the dead.

  There’s someone up the front walk. That’ll be time for—

  Oh, I see you weren’t introduced. This is my sister’s foundling. Elvis calls her ‘Scylla, from when they were babies, but her proper name’s Cassilda. Cassilda Presley.

  Oh, you have met? Tree-climbing. Mr. Freed. You’re old enough to be her—

  I see. My apologies for doubting a married man’s intentions. I’m sure your gallantry is quite old-fashioned enough for our tastes, when we get to know you. We won’t be cruel.

  Cassilda, you did not never have a dream about Mr. Freed coming here! Now whup on out to that side yard and cut some flowers for the table before we sit down to supper.

  Kids can be so rude. Now, where was I? Oh, sure. Well, Elvis told you just a little while ago that we’re kind of... remolding him. Reworking the way we do things, with... this. Bob Neal, his manager, well, you probably heard. He got Elvis a... like an advisor, or an attaché.

  Bob met this military fella, a reservist from the Louisiana State Militia, used to bark in the gilly, claims to have served a special branch called the Imperial Dynasty of America. Colonel Tom Parker, the Repairer of Reputations. Keeps Elvis whipped into line. The way all boys should be. Under the Dragon’s wing. All boys got the Devil in them. Mine the most of all.

  Most of all. Colonel Parker says that my boy is an investment more valuable than gold, or diamonds, or workers, or any human capital. He says they can make Elvis a household name, a brand name. I don’t quite understand how all that would work, but the money. The money.

  Only the Colonel has a contract with my boy now, and as far as I’m concerned, Tom is family. He got that song “Heartbreak Hotel” all the way to you, sir, and that’s mostly why you’re here, I guess. Elvis has a new one for you very shortly, as soon as my boy gets all the way in... character, and no commercial breaks, either. Won’t ever hear this one on Ed Sullivan, or out there in Hollywood where they’ll want him to be in those filthy pictures, instead of the ones we want to make.

  What? Were we starting one? Oh, that old film can on yon shelf. It’s only fifteen minutes of film. Yes, directed by that Edward D. Wood, Jr. Sacrilege that he even wrote THE KING IN YELLOW on that film can in grease-pencil. We don’t speak that morphadite’s name in this house. That is one movie that I will never allow Elvis to make, no matter what the Colonel or that horrible Peter Lorre person ever tell me on the telephone. But Elvis says we keep that reel, so we keep it. At the new place, I expect it will go in the safe.

  If my boy starts letting the fame corrupt his ability to... well, to channel, to be the voice of the King, the Colonel says a two-year hitch in the Army will clear that right up, like it did for him. (Always want to ask him which army, but it’s none of my affair.) Not only that, it will space out record-releases. There will be time.

  There will be time, for these new things. These subliminal messages the psychoanalysts back on your side of the hills are on about, and the back-masking, the multi-track recording, the stereophonic effects to let millions of people receive the Yellow Sign, as it was in Aegyptos, the school of Greece, and is now at the dawn of... this.

  Do you want to see what the King of Rock and Roll is capable of, when he comes through in my boy as votary? It will secure the happiness of the whole world! Look. He comes. Now you see why I arranged the candles the way I did.

  He comes, the way we perform when we have church at home. Behold, the diadem of the Castaigne upon his fevered brow. Behold, his silken vestments. Yes, that’s the same letter on Grand-mamma’s brooch, Mr. Freed. It means ‘CROCUS REX’.

  What?

  Well, what do you mean, ‘mask?’ Elvis ain’t wearing one. That’s just... you see, the crown, and then... Oh, hush. Cassilda, I hear you creeping. You sit and hush, too, and none of your jill-flirting. The Colonel will put a stop to you two again. It’s not Biblical.

  Now hush, and listen.

  Incredibly, the girl began to hum. “Not upon us, King,” she breathed, in a Marilyn Monroe impersonation that raised both my gorge and the hair on the back of my neck simultaneously. “Oh, not upon us....”

  “This is one they don’t get on the airwaves. ‘Cassilda’s Song’...”

  A gospel organ seemed to break a low G-chord somewhere. A dazzling goldenrod-colored light filled the living-room, shadowing Elvis in my eyes. He played a four-chord run to tune, to test the edge of the first crooning breath that held something I seemed to have heard before, something indefinable, like the theme of an Arthurian lay, or some quaint verse I’d seen in an old manuscript.

  “Be of good cheer, the sullen month will die,

  And a young moon requite us by and by,

  Look how the old one, meagre, bent, and wan,

  With age and Fast, is fainting from the sky....”

  The knot in my own disk-jockey throat sounded like a pine knot booming in a fireplace when I tried to swallow it.

  “Crimson nor yellow roses nor

  The savour of the mounting sea

  Are worth the perfume I adore

  That clings to thee.

  The languid-headed lilies tire,

  The changeless waters weary me....”

  Cassilda was singing harmony, in a breathy whisper that sounded like Sarah Carter. Maiden and Crone faded from their respective loveseats, and even the spackled ceiling fell away. I raised my seared eyes and saw black stars hanging in a soup of hurricane sky, and the wet winds from the lake of Halì dampened down my very breath, every other voice but His, singing to three moons over a lost city called Carcosa.

  “I ache with passion’s ire

  For thine and thee.

  There are but these things in the world–-

  Thy mouth of fire,

  Thy breasts, thy hands, thy hair upcurled

  And my desire.”

  The King’s voice, and Cassilda’s, rose and fell through that starblind terror, and when He looked up at me through all that light His face squirmed and chewed with only spots for eyes, and barbs for a mouth, sick warm pulsing flesh that glowed, and seized all, and turned it to frozen Midas gold. The air grew dank with black frost, painful in my lungs, wearying and saddening.

  “Along the shore the cloud waves break,

  The twin suns sink beneath the Lake,

  The shadows lengthen

  In... Car-cosa....”

  How the King’s face gleamed in the darkness, drawing swiftly nearer! It bore down on me from the fathomless shadows in His eyes. Part of me, the part that was starting to fall apart back then anyway, had recognized Him almost from the first. In the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that human instrument, there was the call of a predator tearing His way back to our world through something thicker and worse than Time.

  “Strange is the night... where black stars rise,

  And st
range moons circle through the skies

  But stranger... ssstill is...

  Lllllost...

  Car-cosa....”

  Cassilda popped to her bell-ankled little bare feet and hurled a vase at the troubadour, which exploded in midair before it even got close. “YOU HAVE CLAIMED ANOTHER!” she screamed. “THE DEMON THAT WILL EAT YOUR LIFE!!”

  When Cassilda Presley ran from the room, weeping, my first sensation was like that of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before crying out. I had never doubted what He had come to do; and now I knew that while my body sat safe in the cheerful little living-room, the thing inside Elvis Presley had been hunting my soul.

  No bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. His yellow Goya eyes, with the black diamond pupils, like a cat or an owl, or a monster that had learned to cut its own toenails....

  “Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

  Where flap the tatters of the King,

  Mmmmust die... unheard...

  in Dim...

  Car-cosa....”

  At some point, Grendel’s Mother had left the room. Behind those black diamonds that held me now as sole captive audience, I saw the chill lake of Halì, thin and blank, with no fish or ripple of wind to break its meniscus that reflected the towers of Carcosa rising behind the triple moons in a chiaroscuro old Hokusai himself couldn’t paint. Gray serpents slithered just beneath those depths, and hawks wheeled down to catch the squiggling meat, forming the same figure as the brooch. Like a crooked cross. Or, for that matter, a hog’s pecker.

  “Song of my soul... mmmmy voice is dead;

  Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

  Shall dry...

  and die

  iiiiin... Llllost... Car-cosa....”

  CLAP.

  CLAP.

  CLAP.

  The colorless tarns of the King’s kaleidoscopic eyes sought mine,

  “The fans may turn on you,” I suggested.