Close call

[mdlbear]

If I start rereading The King in Yellow I'll get nothing whatever done all weekend. And since it promises to be a busy weekend (chaoswolf's Senior Prom, yard work, cleaning, and some long-deferred hacking), that would be a bad idea.

That's right, put it back on the shelf...

Comments

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Mr Wilde's door was open, and I entered crying, "It is done, it is done! Let the nations rise and look upon their King!" but I could not find Mr Wilde, so I went to the cabinet and took the splendid diadem from its case. Then I drew on the white silk robe, embroidered with the Yellow Sign, and placed the crown upon my head. At last I was King, King by my right in Hastur, King because I knew the mystery of the Hyades, and my mind had sounded the depths of Hali. I was King! The first gray pencillings of dawn would raise a tempest which would shake two hemispheres. Then as I stood, my every nerve pitched to the highest tension, faint with they joy and splendor of my thought, without, in the dark passage, a man groaned.

I seized the tallow tip and sprang to the door. The cat passed me like a demon, and the tallow tip went out, but my long knife flew swifted than she, and I heard her screech, and I knew that my knife had found her. For a moment I listened to her tumbling and thumping about in the darkness, and when her frenzy ceased, I lighted a lamp and raised it over my head. Mr Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. At first I thought he was dead, but as I looked, a green sparkle came into his sunken eyes, his mutiliated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his mouth from ear to ear. For a moment my terror and despair gave place to hope, but as I bent over him his eyeballs rolled clean around in his head, and he died. Then while I stood, transfixed with rage and despair, seeing my crown, my empire, every hope and every ambition, my very life, lying prostrate there with the dead master, they came, seized me from behind, and bound me until my veins stood out like cords, and my voice filled with paroxysms of my frenzied screams. But I still raged, bleeding and infuriated among them, and more than one policeman felt my sharp teeth. Then when I could no longer move they came nearer; I saw old Hawberk, and behind him my cousin Louis' ghastly face, and farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

"Ah! I see it now!" I shriekd. "You have seized the throne and the empire. Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!"

-- The Repairer of Reputations by Robert W. Chambers

AAAAARGH!!!

[mdlbear]

must...resist...