The King in Scarlet Read online

  Table of Contents

  DE ORSO MEO AD VENEFICUM

  HEART OF THE RAIL

  HAUNTVINE

  THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

  A CHRISTMAS WISH (REDUX)

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE COURT OF LIES

  PART THREE:

  THE KING IN SCARLET

  Mark Teppo

  FAIRWOOD PRESS

  Bonney Lake, WA

  The King in Scarlet is the final act of Mark Teppo's first collection, The Court of Lies. These five stories leap with utter abandon from the cliff of the real, journey far north the frozen top of the world, rattle along old train tracks, and urge you to ingest suspect psychedelics. These are stories of liars, heartbreakers, and fabulists; the way they see the world is undoubtedly the way it truly is.

  At least one sentence of the previous paragraph is true. There is no escaping The Court of Lies. The horned King beckons you to approach his throne . . .

  THE KING IN SCARLET

  A Fairwood Press e-book

  December 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Mark Teppo

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Fairwood Press

  21528 104th Street Court East

  Bonney Lake, WA 98391

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Cover illustration and design by Neal Von Flue

  First Fairwood Press Edition: December 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-265-5

  Electronic Edition by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  DE ORSO MEO AD VENEFICUM

  When I was younger, I remember bumper stickers professing a belief in the fantastic. “I Believe in Fairies.” “I Brake for Leprechauns.” “The Goddess is Among Us.” The bumper sticker, like the t-shirt, is a symbolic reveal you would never see in a culture that actually believed in magick. It is only here, in the industrialized West, where we believe the arrival of the Enlightenment signified the end of that ignorant darkness personified by the Middle Ages. It is only here, in our brave new world of Technicolor technology, that we believe we climbed out of that old cave in the woods, that we no longer need to rely on fire for light and warmth. We believe we know something about the Universe.

  Still, we hedge our bets. Just in case. We cling to a New Age fantasy, a precious hope, like a tiny crystal trinket found in the back of an old box, that the Goddess is out there. That magic is afoot. That unicorns and dryads still dance in fairies rings in what is left of the old forests. We want to reserve the option to keep an open mind. I wouldn’t call it world-weary cynicism, or blind idealism, but more pragmatically, it is a matter of being flexible.

  Just in case.

  If, tonight, on the way home, a leprechaun scampered across the road in front of your car, what would you do? Would you slam on the brakes? Would you put your foot down and run the little fellow over? What if it wasn’t a leprechaun, but a pixie, or a hobbit, even. Would you know the difference?

  No. Probably not. And, really, you would slam on the brakes if anything ran in front of the car. Because you’ve all seen the pictures of what a deer does to the front end of a sedan. That is something you know is true. That is why you would stop, and not because it might be a fantastic creature that has been washed out of his hidden hole. You won’t see a leprechaun tonight. Or a pixie. Or a hobbit. None of those creatures exist.

  But that doesn’t stop you from hoping they might.

  “Fantasy,”—as a literary and psychological term, and not a term used in reference to indolent daydreaming—found its way into our psyche during the last century. Only after blackening the sky and muddying the water with our industrial exhaust have we needed a refuge. Only after killing the imagination of our children and muzzling the voices of the artists have we needed an escape. Like all simple-minded infants, cyclopean in our vision, we’ve gone too far down one path. One of those roads William Blake warned us about. We have gone far and become frightened by this world we have made.

  Now, this isn’t the world of myth, nor the world lit by religious fire. We buried those realms with our parent’s parents. We aren’t children any more, as much as our actions otherwise indicate. No, we have laid claim to our inheritance; we have reveled in our position in the food chain. We have clawed our way to the top, and damnit, we deserve everything we’ve got.

  We don’t have to concern ourselves with resource management, because there is enough for today, and there is enough for tomorrow, and next week may never come. We don’t care what the wind has to say, nor do we bother with reading the stars or interpreting the tremors that run through the earth. On our maps, there are no longer dark places labeled “Here Be Monsters.” We have swallowed all our monsters, and convinced ourselves that to hide them is synonymous with slaying them.

  But we have forgotten what happened to Kronos, who swallowed his children too. But it doesn’t matter, really. Why? Because we no longer have time for the stories of our ancestors, anyway. We are all grown-up, and we don’t need these trifles of our past. We have a new dream now. Yes, a world where there is still the fantastic possibility of . . . what? This cheap toy, this Cracker Jack prize? This hope for something else?

  I want to let you in on a little secret: this fantasy is a lie. You made it up. You screwed your eyes shut and pleaded—oh, you pleaded so very hard—”Please, God, let there be unicorns.” And when one didn’t magically appear, instead of realizing how foolish your prayer was, you simply amended it. “Please, God, I hope you can hear me.”

  He can’t. Or, if He can, He’s ignoring you.

  There’s a story about a young man who believed in God—you know this one—and after a lifetime of pious subservience to an Idea, he offered himself as a sacrifice. The act was, to those who doubted him, meant to be a live demonstration—a crowd-pleasing magic trick that would prove the existence of the Divine. And yet—nailed to cross, bleeding from a cut in his side—the young man despaired. “Eli Eli,” he asked. “Lema sabachthani?” Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?

  If God didn’t respond to his cry, what chance do you have of being heard?

  But that doesn’t stop you from believing, does it?

  Leprechauns on cereal boxes. Mermaids on our coffee cups. Cars, named as if they were stand-ins for fantastic steeds. T-shirts, bumper stickers, corporate logos, tattoos: we surround ourselves with symbols and ephemera of the magical. You may say you are agnostic, that you are free from the yoke of faith, but it touches you intimately each day. Every advertising campaign is devoted to the fabrication of a personalized mythology, one statistically engineered to match your profile, the one you convince yourself—daily—that doesn’t really exist.

  You go to the closet in the morning. Are there logos on the shirts and pants? How about the socks? They may not be visible to the outsider, but you bought them because they had that logo, because that little swoosh or that little horse and rider or that tiny marking made you feel special.

  Even if you manage to put together an outfit that is logo-free, what of your color choices? Or the style of the clothes themselves? They are a uniform—oh, much more than a protective layer—they are how you advertise your identity. Do you fit in, or are you a rebel? This one is a tarnished angel, seeking like-minded souls for redemptive one-on-one sessions; that one is a darktown punk who has crossed over to this side of the street because, yes, he is that much of a bad-ass.

  And tattoos. Oh, let’s talk abou
t tattoos. Magicians don’t even need to know your name any more to twist your spirit. They read your soul right off your markings. Now, the only reason to ink yourself is to actualize your armor, and all that does is say: “Hey, world, I’m spoiling for a fight.” Why give your opponent that fore-knowledge? What do you gain by forsaking the advantage of surprise?

  Because you believe in their strength. You believe these markings transfer some power of the Other Side, some cryptic magick that makes you special. You believe they are the signs that make you a wolf among the sheep.

  This, too, is a fantasy.

  Here is another story, about another earnest young man. He was, like yourself, an open-minded soul, one of those who held tight his tiny nugget of hope. He believed in the possibilities of the fantastic, though he was not yet an initiate of its secrets. He wanted to join a magickal order, a group of Kabbalistic practitioners who thought they knew something about the hidden mechanisms of the Spheres. They brought this man—and several other eager neophytes—to the forest—up north, where the wind makes the weather—for a secret rite. An initiation ceremony, where he would be given access to the mysteries. Like the Elysieuans, if you remember them, or the Mithraics.

  They showed him the Heavenly Tree, the Ten Sephirotic Spheres that make up the foundation of existence. Yes, I realize the Sephiroth are but one model of many—there are many, many ways to quantify the secrets of the Universe—but, as you will come to realize as you become more free, every model is both sufficient and insufficient to describe reality. You are, after all, a subjective object within a subjective space. Appearances are all relative.

  Anyway, the young man saw the Tree. He saw the round globes of its fruit: Malkuth, Netszach, Yesod, and so on up the trunk. At the top, he saw the Veil that hid the bright light of Binah, Chesed, and Kether. The adepts of the order tried to show him peak of the Tree, where the crown sat, but as he was a new-born, he saw only the vibrations of a nth-dimensional echo. His new teachers gave him the ability to See, but didn’t give him knowledge. They gave him tools, but they didn’t show him how to use them.

  This story, like the other one I mentioned, doesn’t end well. The ceremony was interrupted by Park Rangers, a rather mundane tragedy brought about because, well, they were conducting pagan rites on Forest Services lands. Rites that included fire, in a place where you couldn’t get a permit to burn. Suddenly, the light of the Tree was snuffed out, and the woods became a mass of confusion and terror. Darkness. Like the Middle Ages, all over again.

  Lost in the woods, the young man had to find his way. With his new vision, with his freshly opened eyes—what did he see in the darkness that that came so quickly in the wake of the Tree? You could ask the same question to Jesus as he hung on the cross. What did you see, lost little lamb, that made you cry out so? What void did you see, and did you whimper in terror because it was the same as the hole in your heart?

  In our wasted lands—be they a forest of black trees, or a desert of endless sand, or a hill eternally poisoned by the blood of the dead—we have to confront the limits of our faith. In these places, there are no undead, no vampiric nightwalkers, no infectious lycanthropic victims, no parasitic mind-devourers, no feral spirits of unwanted children, and no ghosts of our dead grandmothers. There is only you, your khabit—your shadow—and the light that gives your shadow depth.

  What do we do with this shadow? We fantasize about it. We paint it up as a secret object of desire. We give it sex appeal, and in the primal sweat of our beds, we dream of this creature: oh, if only I was desirable to it, if only I could feel the nakedness of its power, if only it would make me over in the majesty of its dark, unfathomable, bestiality.

  If only . . . If only . . . If only . . .

  It sounds like a mantra. I know, it’s not something those who think they are free of the yoke of religious narrow-mindedness want to hear. If only. . . Repeat it endlessly enough, with enough passion and willful intensity, and it may come true. Like we are in a revival tent meeting, one of those simple gatherings which have remained unchanged since the frontier was everything west of the Appalachians. Gather together, my flock, and repeat with me. If only! If only! If only. . . These meetings are captured live in digital clarity, broadcast to a million devotees who are there in spirit if not in flesh. You are all wide-eyed with your fervor, losing yourself in the mind-numbing din of this empty repetition. If only. . . Hoping it will mean something, eventually.

  This is how small children learn. Observe them at night, when they don’t think you are listening, and you can hear them repeating—over and over—the new words they heard that day. They will put the same plastic shape in the same bucket a thousand times. Tiny puzzles—twenty-four piece pictures of ponies and frogs and other creatures—are made and unmade again and again and again by their hands. And then, as adults, the same habits and methods hold true: we repeat our rituals over and over; we parrots phrases back and forth to one another, again and again. Why? Well, we are still learning, but now we’re learning how to lie to ourselves.

  This realization may be frightening, I know. This abrupt deconstruction of your hope. I am kicking your psyche in the teeth, being a very rude guest, and I know what you are thinking. You don’t believe me. It is easier to have faith in your false hope because that is what you have been doing all your life. I understand. I know.

  But. . . what if I showed you a magick trick? Would that ease your discomfort? Something innocuous, perhaps, something that will make you laugh. How about a card trick? Do you know the one about the three of clubs? Or shall I transform a white handkerchief into a bunny? Would these parlor illusions satisfy you?

  No, they won’t. I don’t have to read your mind to know that you want something better from me. You want something more real. You’d like me to transform something, to make something appear that wasn’t there before. You want a hint of magick, something that will give you. . . hope.

  Very well, but you should be careful what you ask for.

  Let’s play a game, you and I. You could call it mind reading, but that’s giving it too much power. It might be better to call it auto-suggestion or viral mimetics, but these are tricky words that some use to make simple things seems more complicated than they really are. This game is nothing more than a bit of visualization: I will suggest that I know one of your secrets, and you will tell me whether or not I am correct.

  It’s very simple, really. It starts like this. . .

  Now, while it may seem like I am suggesting that I can read your mind, but I think we can both agree that such a thing is impossible. At least, not in front of a large group like this. To speak convincingly of such a thing, I would have to phrase my suggestion—my “reading” of your thoughts—in such a vague and inconsequential way that you would have to fill in all the blanks yourself. And that’s just social engineering; that’s not magick.

  No, even though I must start with such a vague notion—of something, perhaps, as simple as a door—you and I must agree that I am beginning here—with this door that lives in your head—because it is a idea that needs no embellishment. A door is a simple thing to see.

  Anyway, this door that opens every time you close your eyes. What frightens you is what lies beyond this door. You know there is something there, some sort of empty space, but you are afraid to investigate. It is dark, beyond this door, and there is a sneaking suspicion that the door will close behind you, should you step across the portal. You will not be able to find your way back, nor will you have any way to make light in this room. You will be trapped for a very, very long time.

  Every night, you see that door and you wonder: will I go through that door tonight?

  Some of you will laugh. “I walk with the Lord, Markham. He will protect me.” Or you will tell me that you know the Buddhist No-Mind and comprehend Non-Existence as a necessary aspect of the eternal cycle. Others will say they have seen Death and he no longer frightens them. Very well. To all of you I ask: Are you sure?

  Are you re
ady, then, for me to come to you tonight? Have you told everyone you love that you will miss them, or they shouldn’t miss you as you’ve—really, no, really, I’m ready—gone on to a better place? Are all your financial affairs in order, or is the mess you leave behind someone else’s problem?

  Are you ready? Are you?

  Yeah, neither am I. Neither was the young man on the cross. Neither was any child who clawed his way back from the magickal world. We who have returned from the spirit world can attest to its existence. It is most certainly there, and it is filled with the light that enflames the higher spheres.

  You are not ready to see it; you barely understand what it is to live, and I doubt you are prepared to imagine an existence separate from the flesh. Being is a far stranger experience than you allow yourself to imagine.

  Why do you settle for platitudes like “I brake for leprechauns” or “What would Jesus do?” Why do you allow yourself to be bound in this black iron prison of infantile hope? Hoping that a fantastic creature might run across the road in front of your car or asking Jesus for help is to be reactive. Stop letting the universe dictate to you. It is just energy, and yes, we are beholden to entropic laws that make it easy to be passive elements within the massive flow, but we are also Cartesian points. We have defied insubstantiality and said, “Ego sum.”

  I am.

  Okay, so now what? You are a bright shining light. Congratulations. You’ve just acknowledged the singular gift that is having a soul. What’s next? What’s your next trick, magician?

  It isn’t dreaming of the 19th century’s boogeyman. Mary Shelley invented the modern monster story as a reaction to the Romantic fear of man’s wild hubris. Bram Stoker, recycling the wet sweat of Mary Shelley’s night terrors, transformed this fear into psychosexual confusion. We continue to bind ourselves to this fear, and every generation tightens the screws a little more. We convince ourselves that we are supposed to be afraid, that it is a normal aspect of our psychic identities. We are meant to live in fear, because to be otherwise—to be liberated in our imagination, in our ability to create—would be to look into the darkness and not fear that emptiness.