Rehearsals For Oblivion: Act One Read online

  Rehearsals for Oblivion

  Act One

  Edited by

  Peter A. Worthy

  Dimensions Books

  2006

  * * *

  anthology first published by Dimensions Books, An imprint of Elder Signs Press, Inc.

  Rehearsals for Oblivion: Act One

  compilation copyright © 2006 by peter a. worthy

  cover art copyright © 2006 by tim wilson

  design by paw

  all characters within this book are fictitious. any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in, any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior, written permission of the publisher. print edition was set in set in adobe garamond & poseidon

  adobe garamond by adobe systems incorporated www.adobe.com

  poseidon by astigmatic one eye www.astigmatic.com

  all rights reserved.

  FIRST EDITION Published in May 2006

  ISBN:0-9779876-6-3

  Printed in the U. S. A.

  Published by Dimensions Books, an imprint of Elder Signs Press Inc.

  P. O. Box 389

  Lake Orion, Mi 48361-0389

  www.eldersignspress.com

  The Curse of the King

  copyright © 2006 by richard l. tierney for this collection.

  The Dream-Leech

  copyright © 1999 by william laughlin. originally published in a modified form in Midnight Shambler.

  appears here by kind permission of lynne laughlin, agent for the author's estate.

  Ambrose

  copyright © 1996 by john scott tynes. originally published as a limited-edition chapbook by Armitage House.

  appears here by kind permission of the author.

  In Memoriam

  copyright © 2006 by roger johnson & robert m. price for this collection.

  Cordelia's Song from The King in Yellow

  copyright © 1938 by the popular fiction publishing company for Weird Tales, april 1938. unable to trace the author's estate.

  Chartreuse

  copyright © 2005 by michael minis. originally published in Anencephalous and other Poisoned Dreams by Werlag-Barenklau, Germany.

  appears here by kind permission of the author.

  Cat with the Hand of a Child

  copyright © 2006 by mark mclaughlin for this collection.

  Lilloth

  copyright © 2006 by susan mcadam for this collection.

  Reflections in Carcosa

  copyright © 2006 by mark francis for this collection.

  Broadalbin

  copyright © 1995 by john scott tynes. originally published as a limited-edition chapbook by Armitage House. appears here by kind permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Yellow Sign

  copyright © 2006 by g. warlock vance for this collection.

  Tattered Souls

  copyright © 2003 by ann k. schwader. originally published in Strange Stan 6 Alien Shadows by Lindisfarne Press.

  appears here by kind permission of the author.

  What Sad Drum?

  copyright © 2006 by steve lines for this collection.

  The Machine in Yellow

  copyright © 2006 by carlos orsi martinho for this collection.

  kindly translated for the editor by ricardo madeira.

  The Peace That Will Not Come

  copyright © 2006 by peter a. worthy for this collection.

  Yellow is the Color of Tomorrow

  copyright © 2004 by ron shiflet. originally published in Book of Dark Wisdom.

  appears here by kind permission of the author.

  The Purple Emperor

  copyright © 2006 by will murray for this collection.

  A Line of Questions

  copyright © 1999 by joseph s. pulver, sr. originally published in Tabs of Lovecraftian Horror.

  appears here by kind permission of the author.

  every effort has been made to trace the copyright owners for some material reprinted here. the editor would like to hear from anyone who believes they own the copyright for the appropriate authors whose estates have proved impossible to trace. please contact the editor, care of the publisher.

  * * *

  this volume is dedicated

  in loving memory of

  william laughlin

  1961-2004

  rest in peace, my fiend.

  "let the red dawn surmise

  what we shall do,

  when this blue starlight dies

  and all is through."

  -- robert w. chambers

  the yellow sign

  * * *

  contents and dramatis personae

  Title Page

  Contents and Dramatis Personae

  The Curse of the King

  Richard L Tierney

  The Dream-Leech

  Willliam Laughlin

  Ambrose

  John Scott Tynes

  In Memoriam

  Roger Johnson and Robert M. Price

  Cordelia's Song From The King In Yellow

  Vincent Starret

  Chartreuse

  Michael Minnis

  Cat With The Hand Of A Child

  Mark McLaughlin

  Lilloth

  Susan McAdam

  Reflections in Carcosa

  Mark Francis

  Broadalbin

  John Scott Tynes

  The Adventure Of The Yellow Sign

  G. Warlock Vance

  Tattered Souls

  Ann K Schwader

  What Sad Drum

  Steve Lines

  The Machine In Yellow

  Carlos Orsi Martinho

  The Peace That Will Not Come

  Peter A. Worthy

  Yellow Is The Color Of Tomorrow

  Ron Shiflet

  The Purple Emperor

  Will Murray

  A Line Of Questions

  Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  End matter

  * * *

  Richard L. Tierney

  the curse of the king

  From towers by which a Styx-black river runs

  The King in Yellow glares from pits of gloom-

  Dark sockets in his pallid mask of doom

  Aglow with hate-red sparks like dying suns.

  Pale mists of Demhe, cloying shrouds of death-

  Foul exudates from out that darksome Lake

  Of Hali-roil from noisome deeps, to break

  Upon its shores like Hastur's noxious breath.

  Now from dark stars beyond Aldebaran

  A curse from out the Hyades is hurled

  Across the death-black voids unto that world

  Where swarm the foul and fecund hordes of Man.

  The Pale King laughs, for now, from gulfs of hell

  Shall gust his gales of judgement fierce and fell.

  William Laughlin

  the dream-leech

  "Life is an image hollower than the shadow on the wall.

  Yet the mysterious hieroglyph inscribed there as you pass,

  enthralls me"

  -- Paul-Jean Toulet,

  Counter-rhymes

  Author's Note: The following narrative, which I have taken the liberty of calling, "The Dream-Leech," came into my possession as a consequence of a bout of insomnia that I suffered during the winter of last year, Contacting an old friend of mine, Dr. Sarah Archer-Spielmann, a clinical psychiatrist, I resolved this stress-related sleep disorder in the span of a few months.

  However, during that time, my conditi
on brought with it a certain degree of 'Sleep Paranoia' which Dr. Archer-Spielmann explained as a symptom of severe deprivation. I was interested to hear her mention that she'd experienced far more chronic cases. Not long afterwards, perhaps sensing my curiosity, she loaned me, in an unusual breach of confidence, the series of notebooks, tapes and newspaper articles that comprise this account.

  Though Dr. Archer-Spielmann and her husband died in a well- documented car-crash several days later, I kept the file, feeling it was her intent, and ultimately, her patient's wish, that someone seek publication of this journal in whatever form it could be compiled. So, after a lengthy decoding of the author's crabbed handwriting and a difficult transcription of the poorly recorded dictation tape. I have assembled this tale as faithfully as possible to the original, providing the allusive chapter headings and slight embellishments where necessary for sense and clarification.

  -- William Laughlin

  I. POISONED SLEEP

  From the tape archives of Jason Atheling.

  You thought that I had given-up, didn't you, Doctor? That I had lapsed into excuses and purposely ignored your secretary's calls, well, it wasn't that!

  Far from it.

  Pause on tape for two minutes. Sound of lighter and puffing with sudden inhalation followed by a wheezing cough.

  If you still care, I've still been getting the headaches; wired-out cold sweats like a thousand cups of coffee. I don't sleep, just nod off and drowse, I remain your chronic insomniac,

  You couldn't help me, Doctor. Do you want to know why?

  Yes, I'm sure you do want to know why, but I'm going to keep you in suspense right now. Keep listening. Let me find the words.

  Exhalation. Silence on tape for five minutes.

  I've moved again, though I guess you're aware of that by now. Once more, I'm ready to vanish, to be swallowed up by the urban leviathan, become a drop in an ocean of people, create a new self,, a new name. Oh, I've done it before. W.hat is it, six times now? Security, Doctor; security, and obscurity. And protected by mereness, I'll continue my vigil. My hunt. While, of course, it hunts me.

  Sound of cigarette hissing into water?

  Let me explain: I am a book-burner Doctor. Shocking to your egalitarian sensibilities, eh? Well, my self-appointed purpose is to travel to the ends of the earth and search the musty, moldy corners of the world; of bookshops and colleges, in old houses and museums, for a certain work of "literature" and then, set it ablaze! Utterly destroy each copy of it before Wake arrives to infect others with its mind-rotting text!

  Flick of lighter again, clattering of glass, three minute gap in tape, then it cuts off. Recording starts up again slightly warbling. Sounds of traffic in background.

  Still, I want you to have this: my restless journal. Guess I had to tell someone at last, didn't I? The inevitable 'Horror Survivor?' It all seems so goddamned absurd. Even more absurd is the terrifying ease with which it drew me into its scheme, as it did my father, my uncle. We, the unknowing bovine victims; the Family Atheling.

  Dictation stops a moment as glass shatters and the sound of a gun safety being clicked off is heard. Then narration resumes, whispering.

  And, despite the thin veneer of control that both time and distance have provided, I find myself, at intervals, breaking off; pacing around the empty office, casting superstitious glances at the street five stories below these tinted windows, wondering if Wake found me or is it just paranoia at the door, again?

  The desk-clock winks at me, 3:25 a.m. blink take blink another blink drink blink. I choke one down, but it doesn't help my nerves, just makes my head droop with a more tantalizing wakefulness. Yes I am Wake-full here, sorting in the mailroom.

  You know why I picked you? 'When I worked there, I was walking through the building and I saw your Krazy Kat coffee mug. I figured if you like Krazy Kat, you had to be O.K. at some level so once I finally finished it I had to send this to you, Doc. The journal thing was the best idea yet, and, although I can't trust you-or anyone else for that matter, I do like you. I'm certain you're a fine therapist for "normal" madmen, but I've been through this semantic charade so many time before, several lives ago. It's been quite an expensive medicine show, my search for a cure. I've been in dozens of sleep deprivation studies-the most prominent being Karadizic's at Stanford; I've tried hypnosis, progressive relaxation, bio- feedback and a stupefying New Age array of tranquilizers, aromatherapy and deep isolation. I've had oculographic wires glued to me for weeks, encephalographic wires connected to my head and myograms done along with them. When I went to bed, I had so many goddamn electrodes on my skull they had to string them like Medusa's ponytail before I could be plugged into their monitors.

  Then, for nights on end, I watched them watch me.

  Pale white researchers in their bright white lab-coats standing under cadaverous white fluorescent lights, clinically pondering piles of white chart-paper, staring from windows, drinking out of white Styrofoam cups. And what became of it? Nothing! Dry, dumbfounded drivel for future dissertations and a footnote in the July '93 copy of Sleep Research which reads:

  "Subject C totaled no more than an astounding three and a half hours of sleep on any given night, showing diminished RE.M. and N.R.E.M. activity until Stage 2 sleep when the sleep state was continually broken by traumatic nightmares similar to night terrors. Oar diagnostic study group attributed this to an event deeply tooted in the subject's background or perhaps a disorder stemming from an as let undetectable chemical imbalance ... "

  Idiots. All of them. It's a very simple doctor, the reason that I can't sleep, my paper-dolly rambling. Why I am a bibliophobe, all of it, everything! A very basic reason:

  A monster stole my dreams.

  Silence on tape for two minutes then coughing and wheezing laughter.

  Go ahead and laugh! I'm laughing, too, Doctor, but I've seen it! Felt it! It was like we were fuel to it, and we gave it a kind of energy, a kind of fertile creative energy-of this much I'm certain.

  Voice trails off, mumbling inaudibly for three minutes.

  A Dream-Leech. I call him what my father did. Mr. Wake, Dream- Leech, the creature that used my father, my uncle.

  Enough. . .

  Just read from here, then play the other side and I'll tell you more ...

  Pause here is for fifteen minutes, the duration of "A Side. " City traffic, horns, a loud street cleaner passes and afterwards a dog barks.

  II. BEAUTIFUL DREAMER

  To fully explain myself I realize that I have to tell the truth about my life and that means the story of the old man; David Atheling. You've probably never heard of him, unless you are a frighteningly erudite enthusiast of paperback artwork of the late sixties and early seventies-in which case, you evidently have no taste. An illustrator with more imagination than talent and more talent than ambition; my father embarked on a forgettable career of artistic millstones for DAW, ACE and other publishers. Though eventually, it led to a kind of 'respectability,' a tenured position at Mullencroft College, and his long fateful involvement with Carl Szabo's Lakeside Theatre.

  When he first started, just after my birth, David Atheling was a reluctant artist living in Provincetown with my mother -- unmarried -- and was forced into the field by his older brother, Bill, a paperback editor living in New York. My Uncle Bill, being raised and educated in London after the war-Grandfather's first marriage-always browbeat his bohemian step-brother, and during the sixties their relationship showed the strain of their separate generations. Finally, the old man caved in to commercial realism, faced with the prospect of a pregnant girlfriend and a cold winter before him, living with her parents. Sullen art-martyr, he married, cur his hair and got a job. And he was surprisingly successful, if, as ever, unhappy with the world's abiding inability to recognize the presence of 'the Greatest Artist in the Universe.'

  I was six when they divorced. He visited weekly, or should I say 'weakly,' for the first year but then it tapered off until, by the time I was fifteen, I was lucky
if I saw him two or three times annually. And mostly I remember how, in the driveway after every visit, he would bitterly write out each back support check in an elaborate gesture before letting me get out of the car. Like I said, I hated the old man.

  The last time that I spoke to him was fifteen years ago during my high- school graduation. He informed me that he had no intention of financing any part of my education unless I was going to become a doctor or lawyer, a shocking revelation from a man who had only recently earned his bachelor's degree. We argued. He left, driving a beat-up '72 nausea-green Impala with a torn vinyl roof into the early summer afternoon. My mother told me we were better off-she was working as a secretary at a local factory and I put myself through school with loans and working part-time at a local museum, eventually becoming a curator and archivist.

  As you probably have guessed that late June day was the last time that I was to see him. Looking back, I was glad to see him go. Outside of a few questions about vision, hair loss and diabetes, there wasn't a damn thing that I wanted to ask him. Though, occasionally, I had flares of interest about his whereabouts and fate. Especially after my mother died. Then, as I sifted through the boxes in the attic, I unearthed a collection of the air- brushed covers that he did for Warren's Creepy and Eerie magazines, as well as numerous ACE paperbacks (the work dried up after my Uncle's death in a house-fire). After that, the curiosity proved overwhelming, and my girlfriend at the time goaded me to hire a detective to find him.

  The much-anticipated report wasn't particularly interesting. He was living in a western Pennsylvania college town teaching art at a nearby university. Apparently he dwelt in some kind of odd communal arrangement with a local theatre group, doing their set design and lighting as part of his rent. He was, it seemed, as self-absorbed as ever. I decided to forego any reunion and resigned my self to a state of perpetual paternal disappointment in my only living relation.