Losing Carcosa

by Jules

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

In later days, Silda joined us. She and the others made up a pretext of hide-and-go-seek or some other game. Then they’d bring me to the attic and put a creature — a mouse, a songbird, whatever I could charm — into the obsidian-pronged box.

Silda pretended to admire me, said I was precocious, so mature for my age. We stood there and watched the creatures struggle while Richard hunted for us. We tried a lizard, but the lazy movements it produced did not please the three Tynes.

Over time, they made the puppet perform less wild, more beautiful motions. It curtseyed, it danced. It imitated Silda’s swaying walk.

They were older than I was and told me that secrets were exciting. Certainly the three of them practically vibrated every time they pulled me up to the attic. They made me uneasy, even as I charmed the small creatures to the windowsill. They made me uneasy the way changing my name did, or the way preachers talked about the evils of magic and spells. I thought unease was normal.

Where do I end this story?

* * *

Their secret lasted until Richard followed us up to the attic and found out what they were doing. He didn’t hesitate. Not even for a second. He broke the back of the puppet and set the sparrow free out the attic window. He saw clearly. He was the best, bravest person I ever knew and probably ever will know. Good old Richie.

The Tynes acted surprised that anyone would think differently than they did, especially about something as small as a bird. “After all, you’re just like that puppet,” they told him. “You’re full of destiny and not much else. Really not much else, since your goddess died.”

That upset me more than the mice and the birds. They shouldn’t say that about Richard. I stamped my foot on the attic floorboards, with a sound that sounded dead in the stifling heat.

“Even if it’s true?” Silda grinned.

Then I charmed their house. I rippled two basement walls in an X through their parents’ altar and broke it at opposite angles. I shouldn’t have been able to do it. The magic of the puppet theater was for adults, not kids. But the three Tynes had shown me so many times, even making the wooden puppet hover and pirouette in the air, that I just did what they’d shown me. I pulled magic up from what their parents had done to the lost, and I convinced the house that it wanted to divide the basement into four wedge-shaped rooms.

The three Tynes felt the house shake a little. Dust fell from the attic ceiling and swirled below the skylights. They looked up, they looked down, they looked at us.

“What did you do?” demanded Shebra.

“I know what you did,” growled Cnull.

“You did not just do that,” hissed Silda. “You little brat. Our parents are going to kill us.” She bared two rows of suddenly-pointed teeth.

The three of them closed in around us, their eyes burning white. Shebra’s hair hung around her shoulders like wet seaweed. Cnull was strong as a statue. Silda’s swaying height made her look like a snake.

I put my arms over my head and cowered from them. I’m not a hero. That was Richard. Richard was a vessel for destiny, and that destiny was a dry well without our goddess. But when Cnull came at him, he was ready. He grabbed Cnull’s stone-hard forearm and twisted from his hips, using Cnull’s own weight to throw him past us into Silda and Shebra. The three of them went over in a tangle of limbs and teenaged curses. Then Richard grabbed me and raced down the crooked attic stairs.

We rushed through their house into sunlight hard and bright off the sidewalk outside. The concrete burned my bare feet. I was abruptly, violently sick with what the Tynes had done to create their home. I knew what happened in that basement to people, not mice. I felt the last stunned, confused moments of runaways who were not much older than Richard.

“C’mon, Rowan,” Richard said, glancing up at the attic window where three sets of eyes burned down at us.

I could see their eyes, and I could see a shifting mass of bright, dark colors where their house was. It towered over us, the shapes moving like moths’ wings. My stomach rolled and lurched. I put my hands on my knees and dry-heaved, trying to collect myself, because he was right. Unless we moved soon, the three Tynes would work themselves up enough to come after us.

Richard saw a bus trundling down the street. He gave me a piggyback to the bus stop at the intersection and dashed aboard. It wasn’t our bus, he said, but we needed an out.

He put me down and sat beside me. “I should have known,” he told me, staring out the window at graffiti that was incomprehensible to him. He said he never should have left me alone with Shebra and Cnull while he made out with Silda.

I leaned my head against the window and told him I wanted my mother’s sigils sewn into my sleeves. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be home, in lost Carcosa. I wanted the smell of incense devoted to our fallen patron goddess.

Richard knew that what I really wanted was someone to protect me from what I had done. He put his arm around my sweaty, shaking shoulders and told me from the authority of our age gap that none of this was my fault. I believed him. After all, he’d shown me the Tynes’ secret for what it was. He’d gotten us out. He was my big brother and my hero.

Where does all this finish?

After several transfers and a stop at a tiny corner store to buy me a pint of chocolate milk, Richard got us home.

We found out later that the altar was like the puppet theater: irreparable. Reality caught up to the Tynes when their house began to fade back into a tenement. They moved to LA, where they could feed into other kinds of dreams.

* * *

As I grew up, Carcosa became a trend. I guess the mainstream needed a counterculture push-back against the Satanic Panic. Wear yellow, the color of kings, a color that makes Carcosans flinch. Eat the dust of ages. Wear false eyelashes like a moth’s wings, ones that are responsibly sourced, of course.

My eyes had turned white with what I’d done, too much and too early. A decade later, I saw models wearing white contact lenses, as though I and people like me had become an unwitting blueprint for their aesthetic. Those beautiful girls did not understand what had gone on below the daytime theater of houses like the Tynes’. Neither did most of their audience.

“I don’t get it,” Richard complained to me over the phone. “Don’t they know what white eyes mean?” He never could understand hidden messages in form or fashion, but he’d made his own destiny in medical school.

Where we came from, wearing someone else’s glamor means losing yourself behind a series of masks until you’re so shattered you don’t know what whole feels like.

Maybe that’s what the Tynes are up to now. Them or someone like them. Maybe when those models ape the tatters and mannerisms of the Yellow Court, they are doing what an ancient play from Carcosa used to do, except they are performing that play for a nationwide audience.

Maybe that is the madness of Carcosa: fascination, dreams, possibilities.