In the Court of the Yellow King (6 page)

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 a
irwaves. ‘Cassilda’s S
ong’...”

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 chee
r, the sullen month w
ill 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 fr
om 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 n
or yellow roses nor

The savour of the mo
unting sea

Are worth
the perfume I adore

That clings to thee
.

The languid-headed
lilies tire,

The chan
geless 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 passi
on’s ire

For thine a
nd thee.

There are bu
t these things in th
e world–-

Thy mouth of
fire,

Thy breasts, th
y hands, thy hair upc
urled

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 bla
ck stars rise,

And st
range moons circle t
hrough 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 Hyad
es shall sing,

Where
flap the tatters of
the King,

Mmmmust die
...
unheard
...

in Dim
...

Ca
r-
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 d
ry
...

and die

iiiiin
...
L
lllost
...
Car-cosa....”

CLAP.

CLAP.

CLAP.

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

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

“I don’t think so,” Elvis murmured thoughtfully, “I got the mojo, baby. And when that don’t work, well...” His eyes turned to coffin-worm eyespots in my unblinking, swimming gaze. “Well, I invite them to have a little chat with me. A concert from the King...”

Time froze, and sped up in part, and the end of things drew frightfully near Showtime. Everything that happened after that is hard to put into perspective, being the vomited human ambergris of this Moby Dick nation whose architecture eats itself continuously and shits out the craving for Decency that sweeps away old horrors in favor of more lasting ones. New vessels to set before the King.

J. Edgar seized the two hundred seven-inch 45’s of “Cassilda’s Song” I managed to press from the little recording-gadget in my shoeheel that my assistant let me borrow before I even left. It got played on a few Negro blues stations here and there on various continents, in the neon backwaters of Hip in various cities, barred out here, confiscated there... but not denounced by Press and pulpit, or censured, even by the most advanced of paranoiacs.

Because they couldn’t. No definite principles had been violated in the first Elvis Presley bootleg record ever, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged in any court except the United Nation of Art. Yet, they knew. They knew that playing it often enough would make Elvis lose some of his mojo.

So they buried it, and found some other ways to kill me. But I wonder when they will send their scion to finish me off.

Every night in this hospital, I hear Him creeping like Cassilda in the hall. I dream the bolts of my door rotting at His touch, and His fingers no longer Presley’s, but someone swollen and bloated and dead. But my end will be worse than that.

It’s over. He’s spoken one more time, and I already knew. My end was always the same, a bridge which no one passes.

Even now, I hope someone still has one of those 45’s. I hope it got played enough. Or that some hip kid with a huge record collection still plays one of them, once in a while, late at night when the stars turn black and the sky looks like the sea. I hope she leans in close to the console, and turns that Volume up.

So we can send Him home again, someday. Or try. Come on. Dance with the Moondog, here.

Yes, those sounds are drums, and behind them something like a receding surf. Shutters going up. Those are cymbals, and soft Bop brushes. A new broom sweeps clean. In the middle of the horn section will fall the first shell.

The cops still don’t want you to have a good time, kids. But we’re going to have a party, so we gotta post a guard outside. Come on, everybody. You all know how these questions are settled.

It’ll be a riot.

Sacred to the Memory of Alan Freed & Joel Lane