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There is a basilisk in my groin. It sleeps, idle, and I fear to touch it lest I wake it. When it awakens, it opens its single eye and stirs, and turns me to stone. Once I thought this treacherous snake a part of myself, one that gave me pleasure. But since the King in Yellow claimed me, it is my creature no more. It is his, obedient to his terrible will alone.
Why he wanted me, why he took me of all the wretched creatures that opened the cursed volume, whether in English or French or Arabic, that led inexorably to Carcosa, I have learned, though I find it impossible to credit.
"Most of the mortals who read my undying words are artists and intellectuals," he said, on a night when the red moon burned in the sky over Lake Hali. I could not answer, paralyzed by the basilisk as I was, and he had impaled me on one of his spiraling appendages, was allowing it to rotate so that it moved ever deeper into my viscera, my legs locked spread wide but body twisting with the motion imparted into me. It, my body, me; I was unsure even of that basic identification any longer. It, I, elongated to accommodate the spiral, twisted in dimensions I could not see but, oh, I suffered every one of them. There was ecstatic anguish in every fold, twist, and turn this body I inhabited made, at the bidding of its undying, irresistible god.
"But you are neither," the King in Yellow said, continuing the thought as though there had been no interruption of soundless screaming, no deluge of fire from the red moon above that burned my flesh. I could hardly deny it was mine when I felt it burn. "To torment and tease an artist, I turn art into agony and horrific delight. For the intellectual I lead thought and reason into twisted labyrinths of contradiction and epiphany. But for one such as you, at his height of thought a dilettante student of this and that shallow topic, barely capable of discerning rococo from baroque, one whose soul was most invested in the physical comforts—your sort is commonplace on the streets of New York and Paris, yes, but do they read my book? Almost never."
He filled me, stretched me like taffy to fill me more, and I could not move. I could not writhe, my body could not, locked by the basilisk, but how my soul writhed, how my thoughts twisted, tensed, grew closer to a culmination I feared as much as desired. Both physically and spiritually, I would hold more than I had ever thought myself capable.
It came, my release, all my senses subordinate to its intensity, and then, as if from a fever-dream, I woke.
⭕⭕
Blinking my eyes open, feeling the heat cooling between my legs, cold and wet and humiliating, I find myself in the choir loft of St. Barnabé. Fortunately for my predicament, I am dressed from neck to toe in black. The organist finishes a terrible piece, one redolent of Carcosa, stands, and walks out of the church. He is dressed, like me, all in black.
Monsignor C— begins his sermon. That confounded speech full of false cheer about the inviolability of the human soul. The very part of oneself that demons will tear at with their teeth for eternity! Of course one must fear for its safety. I suffocate in this church of a sudden and must take myself out of this place. Standing, feeling the lees of my shame drying cold on my bollocks, I spot the one to whom I owe all my suffering. Hate shows itself on my white face as I glare his way.
Oh yes, I'll pursue him to his fate. He thinks he can escape the Dragon.
I trail him down streets of illusory sunshine. The coat of paint barely hides the dripping blood, only to the same extent that the skins of the passersby hide their innards. Muscle and sinew, organs and gore, lie beneath a thin layer of pretense that they are whole.
No one is whole in Carcosa.
He walks the Paris streets in our dream, and one of us knows it for the nightmare it is. Not that there are two of us in this world, only a seeming of such. I follow where he goes, without needing to keep him in sight or glance his way. I know this route well. We have taken it together so often.
As night reveals itself from behind the disguise of day, he finally tires of the great effort of hiding his fate from himself, and turns toward home. His home, now, in the belly of the iron dragon, roasting over the coals of its internal fire. His home in the arms of the King in Yellow, gagging on the god's long arm down his throat, fisted in his belly, soul held tight in the god's clutch.
He enters the court, and I corner him by the sculpture of the dragon. I arrange us so that his back is against its neck, stepping closer so slowly he seems not to be sure I am moving.
Timed just right, the dragon will open its mouth and swallow his head down at the moment the King in Yellow's voice begins to call Carcosa back to us. To remind him of his captivity. To remind me I am him, he is me, we are one in the hands of the god.
The dragon bites down on my neck as his arm creeps around my chest. I struggle to breathe, locked in the embrace of the living god, and feel his endless squirming phallus unwinding itself as he enters me once more.
I was cold, I was numb, and now I am burning hot. His touch sets my every nerve afire. "I will give you everything you desire," he says.
He will, too. Along with everything I fear. It is never enough for him, though. He has taken the comfort of my home from me, and turned the place I felt safest into the avatar of his power.
⭕⭕
My eyes opened, and I awoke. Next to me on the bed I had only ever been alone in for years was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. The same one who died so many years ago. A tattered yellow coat was all he wore, and his eyes were closed on an angelic sleeping face. "C—," I said, his name carved into my heart that cannot be spoken in Carcosa.
The eyes fluttered open, were jaundiced, were not C—'s eyes at all. His soft lips parted and revealed jagged needles in place of teeth. "Kiss me," he commanded.
My mouth opened, as did my body and my soul, to receive my punishment with the kiss of the King in Yellow.