Losing Carcosa
by Jules
part 1
Where do I start?
I’m not a hero. That was my brother, Richard. I’m not a traveler. That was my parents. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not. At this point I’ve been from Saint Louis longer than I’ve been from Carcosa.
Before you ask me about Carcosa, remember that I was little when we left. I didn’t know how important it all was or that the mainstream would come to regard it as something or as something purely evil, or maddening and mesmerizing, or more lately as a trend of luxuriant decay and shattered sanity. I didn’t know that if you so much as read a play written from someone who lived where I come from, it will consume your life and the lives of everyone around you.
At this point, it is difficult to sort my own memories from stories my family tells. I remember that layers of magic distorted the very atmosphere there, made it so honey-viscous that I could jump up and hover there, a foot above the ground, by force of my tiny will. The media never mentions that.
The media always exaggerates, both ways. Wait long enough and what was reviled is chic. So beware of me, I guess. Beware my white, downturned eyes. Beware the roll of chapstick I once put to my lips. Beware my influence.
I never knew the King in Yellow. My family members were not nobility. Our minor patron goddess fell and with that, her protection. We would have been eaten alive if we hadn’t fled.
I remember the series of sharp curves that made up the shore of Carcosa, like some sea-dwelling creature had taken a bite from it. I remember brassy waves folding in on black sand. All of it, the language and the games and the rhymes, became a bright dark line on the horizon. Then the horizon swallowed it.
To me, in 1986, Carcosa was just the end of the world. It was the place where I did not live anymore. When the ship left a white curling V in its wake, the mainland with its linear time and streets that stayed the same from day to day was the abyssal unknown.
America was jumping at shadows back then. If Midwesterners knew where we’d come from, we all would have paid. Even my mother, who could only sew helpful sigils into cloth. Even my brother, who had no magic at all anymore. We kids spoke English and gave ourselves American nicknames. I became Rowan. My older brother became Richard. Good old Richie.
Richard was better than I was, in Saint Louis. He knew how to get back to our apartment by remembering where everything was and walking there, rather than rippling through a series of dreamscapes the way I’d been able to in Carcosa. As far as I was concerned, the map he carried in his head was wonderful.
Richard rescued animals and said no to drugs and stood up to bigger kids. He was the hero.
Where do I begin?
At the height of the Satanic Panic, a noble family on the losing end of a political upheaval in Carcosa landed in the same city as we did. My family members weren’t nobility or anything close. The Tyne family would never have entertained us in Carcosa but, in Saint Louis, their children, Shebra, Cnull and Silda, needed playmates who understood them. I was younger than all three. Richard was the same age as their oldest, Silda.
To this day I do not know where the Tyne house was in relation to ours. Cnull wanted to ripple us there by force of will, but Richard knew better than to let him try. Richard took us there by public transportation. He knew where to wait, where the bus would go and what stop to use. I was amazed by this. His feet reached the grimy floor of the bus. Mine didn’t, unless I slid down in the seat. I could read the graffiti on the underpass, even when Richard couldn’t make it out. I murmured the names. “Pyrex, Nife Fite, D Cups.”
“Shh,” said Richard.
“What?” I asked, innocent.
“That’s not what it says, Rowan,” said Richard.
“It is,” I insisted.
The argument was cut short by our arrival on a mostly abandoned block. The street was wide and flat. The buildings to either side were built to last, of brick and mortar. They’d lasted past their usefulness\ and had been boarded up or left standing. The trees were eating the houses.
Shebra, Silda and Cnull’s home was a tenement but their parents had changed and... charged it. They got around reality enough to make it into a mansion. At first it looked like the nobles’ houses back in Carcosa, all dark wood and tower rooms and guttering lamps. That wasn’t fashionable in the 1980s, though.
Soon they shaped it into something more alluring. They made their house say wealth and power and possibilities. It was full of white marble columns and turquoise-painted walls and candy-pink light filtering through needle-shadows of potted palms.
My mother’s embroidered sigils fell away from my sleeves when the two of us stepped across the Tynes’ threshold for the first time. Just turned to colored dust. I was devastated but couldn’t show it. Not in front of the big kids.
I tried to forget about the sigils when the Tynes showed us the indoor pool. Richard and I liked that. The Midwest summer was so very hot.
I took for granted that the Tynes could change their house. Carcosa used to reform itself almost constantly. Belief was practically a currency there: how many people wanted to dwell in whatever space the local nobility or gods had created. They all tried to see how far they could suspend others’ disbelief.
How far can I suspend your disbelief? There were crystal bridges over depthless chasms, moons captured by twisted columns of vines, towers like yellow flames, gardens of red and blue roses. There were dirigibles that had pennants flying and promised to take you everywhere, if you only stood there waiting for them long enough. Sometimes, they even arrived.
* * *
Beware of peering into my memories. Richard was the hero, but I’ve always been the charmer. After all, Shebra, Silda and Cnull first let me in on their secret, not Richard.
One summer day they showed me the toy they’d dredged out of their parents’ travel-trunks. It was a relic from Carcosa. A real one.
Here is how they did it. We were swimming in the pool when all the lights went off. My surroundings went from blue-and-pink to dark green. I was underwater and suddenly I thought I’d been trapped in a green marble: soundless, weightless, bubbles all round me, the water gone dark and hazy beyond my pale toes. When I surfaced, the three of them beckoned me over to the tiled lip of the pool. Their six eyes glowed white and blurry, like lamplights on patches of mist.
They needed to get the lights back on, they said. Cnull said he knew how to reset them but needed me and Shebra to come with him to the attic to help. I was young enough that I was pleased to be asked. Silda said she would stay down at the pool with Richard.
Shebra snapped her fingers to make a green light over her thumb, which was enough to see by.
Shebra and Cnull led me up to the attic. It was so hot up there that the mineral-smelling water dried all over me before we’d even crossed the long room. Skylights sent orange sunset beams as hot as stage lights down to the wooden floor. It made Shebra’s hair look like coiled mats of seaweed. Cnull somehow looked as if he were standing still — a statue in an orange spotlight — even when he was in motion.
The toy they’d found looked like a puppet theater with only one puppet. The puppet would have fit on my palm if it could have stood alone. It was a figure with loose-jointed bones of flat metal. Its wooden face was a smooth blank except for empty eye sockets and a hollow for a nose. There was a smell about it like dust and licorice.
The figure itself wasn’t much. Shebra quickly lifted small costumes from the trunk, one after the other. I recognized the cut of the fashions from Carcosa, though I had no vocabulary to name them. They looked small and foreign and faded after coming up here from the world of scrunchies and acid-washed denim.
Shebra dressed up the figure in different costumes: a judge, a ship’s captain, a prizefighter. Cnull stood perfectly still, watching the way he always did. Even the catchlights of his eyes didn’t move.
The puppet still didn’t do anything. I picked at a hangnail, trying not to be bored.
Then Shebra told me to lure a mouse from the floorboards. “Do it or there’ll be no secret to keep.”
I thought a moment, then whistled a tune that came into my head. It was a secret tune, a mouse tune. We could hear its tiny paws on a dusty old bureau.
Cnull moved so quickly he seemed to be standing still: he stood where he’d just been, with the mouse in his hand. Then he pushed the frantic creature into the compartment in back of the puppet theater. Suddenly the puppet jumped to life, flailing and contorting.
Shebra and Cnull were mesmerized. I understand that fascination now, though I didn’t that first time it happened. This was what their parents kept from them, what they and their guests did in a dark room to shape their luxurious mansion. The mouse jumped and twisted against the obsidian rods in the cage, which lit up with strange colors like the shapes that floated on my eyes after looking into a bright light. The puppet figure leaped in grotesque mockery of life. We watched until the mouse died, its eyes wrinkled raisins, with beads of blood on its whiskers.
Cnull stood so close to me that I could hear his breath through his teeth. Shebra held my hand. Or rather, she gripped my sweaty wrist. At the time, I told myself this was holding hands with a girl. I thought I should be happy about it. Who wouldn’t want a girl to hold their hand? Hadn’t Richard stayed downstairs with Silda because she’d smiled at him?
“We can make it do more,” Shebra told me, “if we practice.”
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Jules
