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The King in Yella

Kaaron Warren

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I’m always returning to Rapptown in my thoughts. Unbidden, unwanted, I’m taken back there. A hint of yellow. The smell of smoke. These things blind me to the present. I haven’t lived there for sixteen years, since I was seven, and mostly what I remember is dreamlike and unreal. That’s what kid memories are like, right? Blurry and odd, not making much sense.

Sometimes I’m transported by these subtle things and other times the method is more concrete. The arrival of the brooch was as concrete as they come. Accompanied by a note from my mother (sorry, was supposed to be for your 21st but forgot! I am a dopey drawers. love mum.), such note stained with what I hoped was red wine and perhaps suntan lotion, envelope postmarked Brisbane.

I remembered this brooch, although no one I knew ever wore it. It sat on my father’s dressing table in a purple velvet box, and every now and then I would sneak in to spy on it, touch it. I thought then it must be worth a million dollars or more, because it was made of a dull, yellow metal that must be gold. My father said the King in Yella gave it to him and I remember the look on his face; of reverence and of fear at the same time. When my father died and we left Rapptown, it must have been packed away; only my mother could answer to that.

The brooch no longer had its velvet box. I hid it in my underwear drawer without showing my flatmates, whom I didn’t trust for a second. Not that they would steal anything, but they’d borrow and lose and all the rest of it. If they weren’t such fun to be around, and if I could afford it I’d live alone, but this is where we are at the moment.

Did it enter my dreams that night, my old brooch? I awoke with a memory of a tall man bent over me, his breath clouding physically over my face, the smell of it like old, wet dirt.

Or old wet dog, because there he was, my dear old Rupert, pressed up against me seeking heat. I pushed him away gently. “Off you get, big fella,” I said. I really should take him to the vet, but I knew what they’d say and I wasn’t ready yet to live without him.

I had work that day, eight hours typing up insurance claims, the tedium of it allowing my mind to drift to places I didn’t want to drift to.

That night, I found an invitation in the letter box, the address forwarded two or three times. My mother had clearly forgotten I’d moved; I’d better call and remind her.

“You are invited,” it said on the front, “to the launch of a book of great truths. All proceeds to benefit our heroes, the firefighters of Australia, and the animals who have lost their homes.”

Inside, it said “Fighting Fires is thirsty work. Please come to the Carcosa Hotel, 998 Pell Street, Shangrila. Art and words by Cassilda Wilde.” Shangrila was Rapptown, my childhood suburb. They changed the name because of the Rapptown Murders, fifteen girls killed and buried here, as if that would make it a different place somehow. It was still Rapptown to me, now and forever.

Tickets were a hundred dollars and the event was that week. I laughed at the idea of my going at that price and sent Mum a text message to remind her I’d changed my address. I said, “I don’t know who Cassilda Wilde is but she wants a hundred dollars a ticket!”

She face-timed me. “Don’t you remember?” she said. “She was a neighbor. She looked after you when I had to go to work. You learnt how to paint from her!” My mother was in Brisbane with her boyfriend, “scuba-diving,” she said, lifting her fingers into air quotes.

“I don’t want to know, Mum.” I told her.

“Don’t go, Olivia. Don’t even think about it. We got out of Rapptown once; you don’t want to be stuck there again. You’ll be captured.”

“What, captured by the King in Yella?”

It was a joke, but she snorted, “Him? That’s just someone your father invented to cover up his awful behavior.”

I knew she was right, but it didn’t help. I saw the King in Yella everywhere, a flash here, a flash there. My father always said, “The King in Yella made me do it,” when he came home blind drunk, late. When he came home with the shit bashed out of him, or with an armful of stolen goods, or with scratches all over him, from who knew what.

There were so many small dangers in life. I chose to ignore most of them.

I really didn’t remember this neighbor. Not even when she came knocking at my door the next day.

“Look at you!” she said, cupping my face with her hands. They were cold and firm and that, perhaps, I remembered. “Little Olivia, all grown up. You look like your father. Handsome man. Handsome man.” My father had been skinny, pale, and pockmarked, not a handsome man at all. She nodded at me. “Mrs. Wilde,” she said. “Cassilda! Your artistic neighbor!”

Cassilda insisted on taking me out for dinner, although I assured her I didn’t need the charity. “It isn’t charity, my dear. I need your help. I need your help with my launch this weekend because I have not one young person onboard to spread the word and help me on the day.”

She had collected ash, she said. From the bushfires and any other place where people had lost their homes and their lives. “I have them from all down the south coast. I don’t know, maybe I have people’s houses in there. Pets. Koalas. Not knowing is part of what makes it art.” Tears came to her eyes. “It’s the tragedy of loss I want to capture, and that we are all one in ashes.” She lowered her head and said, “I am as respectful as possible when I take the ashes.”

I didn’t like the way she smelled. It wasn’t the ash, it was her; like a marshmallow-topped meat casserole left out in the sun (ask me how I know how that smells), but she had received donated funds galore and was happy to buy vodka tonics all night.

She grabbed at my arm. “Can’t you just imagine the piece? Statue of a fireman, smudged gray, hair wild. Yellow high visibility vest.”

“Like a king,” I said, and she looked at me strangely.

“When was the last time you went back to Rapptown?”

We were sitting in a small, dark bar I felt sure housed mice.

“Not since I was a kid. Since they changed the name. No reason to go back, and if I went I’d upset Mum. Not good memories.”

“Oh, come on. We had some lovely times there.”

I had a flashback. This woman tossing back champagne and laughing until she fell over. Mum in the kitchen washing up. I remembered what her front yard had looked like. Full of the debris of other people’s lives. Car crash parts. House fire parts. Building demolition parts. Toys in a dilapidated state. She liked to think she was like an auntie to us even though she was old enough to be our grandmother.

Still, it had been a good neighborhood. Lots of kids, quiet streets. That part of Rapptown I remembered.

I don’t like drinking to blackout stage and rarely do, but as it happened, I came to on the train. I was damp with sweat and my face felt clammy. To my great relief I hadn’t been sick; there were no nasty puddles at my feet. I must have been home because I wore my only good dress, and the brooch was pinned to my breast.

A man opposite me sat nodding and grinning. I drew my knees together and looked out the window, my eyesight blurry.

We passed through Rapptown, the train going so fast I only glimpsed a tumbling pile of suitcases. But the next stop was Rapptown again (a man in a suit squatted beside a bush) and again (beer kegs, tipped over) and again, but this time the train slowed. And of course there was only one stop in Rapptown; I don’t know how we passed through it so many times, or if we did, or if, as my mother would say, I’d been lost in my own head again.

On the platform were men in yellow waiting to unload and someone said, “Your stop.”

I stumbled off.

I had been through Rapptown Station many times on the train and never liked the transit. Traveling through, you heard screams sometimes and we all ignored it. It was only two stops to the city; no one wanted to stop the train. They all wanted to get where they were going.

I had not stood on Rapptown station since I was a schoolgirl. I knew it so well then, many hours spent waiting for trains. So many of them didn’t stop there, from superstition and lack of demand. Even though they changed the name of our suburb to Shangrila, it was still associated with the serial killer who’d lived (and worked) there decades earlier. We used to joke that if we lived in heaven we must all be dead, but the parents hated that one.

Someone had left shopping at the station. Meat. Crawling with maggots. A homeless man squatted and ate. His puffy white face looked like a maggot itself but greenish. That could have been the light on the platform, which rendered everything that same sickly green-yellow. He wore a tattered coat and I thought he was short and fat, but when he stood up he was tall and regal, standing there proudly as if he owned the world. His face was jaundiced, and I wondered if he was close to death. But as I watched he vanished from sight, leaving only the mess of meat, the cloak, and a dark, sharp smell.

Lots of others got off at Rapptown with me. They dispersed, disappearing into the streets. I wondered how many were going to Cassilda’s launch. Graffiti covered many of the walls as I left the station and headed down the street. I thought I shouldn’t read the words, that each one would enter my consciousness. My mother had told me not to read the words, don’t read them, but she wasn’t a fan of reading anything at all, to be fair.

I could smell the Rapptown Rot, as we used to call it. The stench of old rubbish and who knew what in the houses. The grass was dry wherever I looked, and strangely shaped rocks sat on front lawns and blocked the footpath here and there.

The shops, including pub, café, and butcher, were to the right of the station. Curiosity led me to the left, though, where my house once stood.

I would go home first.

It had all changed and of course memory makes some things more important than others. The war memorial, a pyramid made of brass and inscribed with names, loomed in my mind as enormous and covered with hundreds of names. Instead there were only a dozen men listed on a structure that reached as high as my shoulders. Had someone removed the rest? Or was I not in Rapptown after all but some other dying suburb? I looked for familiar landmarks: graffiti, the bus stop hidden in bushes where I was sure assassins used to hide, the strip of footpath where a big dog had walked in wet cement.

The Murder House.

As children, we never missed the opportunity to walk past the Murder House. We all knew which one it was; there were still trenches in the front yard, along the side and (if you looked over the side fence that verged on a walkway) the backyard, where the bodies of those fifteen young women had been buried. Long before my time, of course; those bodies belonged to women who would have been my grandmother’s age if they’d lived.

The front door to the Murder House was closed, as it always was, and it was with a sudden chill I realized why the sign on my brooch was so familiar. There it was, emblazoned on the front door in a dull yellow paint. I touched my brooch instinctively, as if it could perhaps protect me, and walked on.

As kids, we used to say the King in Yella lived in that house.

I remember once, my father came home drunk, kicking over the milk bottles at the front door, pushing his hand through the fly-wire in an attempt to open it, tipping over a kitchen chair when he draped his sodden coat over it.

I heard Mum patter down the stairs, pausing halfway, and I leaped out of bed to stop her. She’d told me don’t let me have a go at him in that state. I’ll get if off my chest, but he won’t remember. Save it for the morning when he’s sick and sorry for himself.

It was too late, though, she was down there shouting at him, and him vomiting in the sink, and then the back door slamming and a terrible silence, and my mother, I didn’t see her for three days after that.

“She’s fucked off with the King in Yella,” Dad said next morning. “Now she knows what it’s like. You can’t say no to the King in Yella.”

I walked toward my street. Houses were burnt along the way, not repaired in the last sixteen years or burnt again, perhaps. There were many hazards to watch for (curved bowls of glass, jagged at the edges; old, rusty nails; bones poking up out of the ground).

I couldn’t tell which was my house.

Up ahead I swear I saw a tall man with a yellow raincoat and it started to rain.

Writhing worms on the lawn and on the footpath made me feel sick. We used to call them dead ducks and go around counting them; one day we got to thirty-eight, a very high number to my seven-year-old brain.

I turned around and headed for the pub. All this way, I didn’t want to miss the launch.

Rapptown had the pub, a butcher’s, and a café called This Blue Starlight. It was closed, and it looked dusty and deserted inside.

The butcher’s had a reddish light making everything look fresh-killed, but the smell escaping under the door told a different story.

The butcher, very large, pink-faced, gave me a cheery smile and a wave. “Come and taste some sausage,” he called out, and I shook my head.

Cassilda Wilde stood on the steps of the pub, near the public bar door. She wore sensible pants and a colourful patchwork top.

“You made it,” she said, her voice cross. “Better late than never, I suppose.” She blocked the entrance. When I approached, though, she smiled. “Nice brooch,” she said. She had told me to wear something that reminded me of my father. She said, “We are remembering those lost in fires.” I guess that’s why my drunken self had chosen the brooch. I didn’t remember pinning it on.

Cassilda tore the brooch off me. “Give us a look,” she said, her voice thick and rough around the edges. She tore my dress, leaving my purple bra exposed and the top of the tiny tattoo of a dove I had on my left breast.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll give you a free book, okay?”

One room of the pub had been set aside for her event. There were upwards of fifty people in there, maybe more. At a hundred dollars a head, I guessed some money was being raised for the firies, because most of them were unpaid volunteers and this was a way to thank them for keeping us safe. Around the walls, on plinths and shelves, was her art; ugly gray pieces that seemed blobbish and certainly not beautiful. In places, she’d repaired cracks in the walls with the same ash.

One man dressed in a yellow firefighter’s coat, with yellow helmet, called for attention.

He said, “Some think this place is a shithole. Others find refuge. You’ll know soon enough which one you are. Some look out on a fire-ravaged forest and see devastation, others see a lushness that can’t be forgotten. When we were out there, keeping you lot safe” (there was a titter of laughter amongst the group, as if he was joking. These people were well-heeled, most of them owning at least two houses. None of them cared if their coast houses burnt, or their bush houses), “we saw something none of you have seen. We all saw it. It was a giant figure, leaving footprints. We knew if we saw him, there was no hope. Where he trod would burn to the ground. Be thankful he isn’t here today, that fella.” He took a large swallow of beer, draining his glass. “It’s thirsty work, as she says,” he said, thumbing at Cassilda. “Thirsty fucken work. So drink up. Buy this shit. Make us some money so we can outrun that tall bastard.”

I wasn’t about to buy any of her crappy artwork, but I did buy myself a drink called a Brunswick Cocktail (whisky, lemon juice, sugar syrup, red wine). It was potent and pretty good. I bought another, and one for the fireman who’d launched the exhibit. He accepted it happily.

“Who was he, this tall guy?” The man was solid, handsome in a red-faced way. He wore a good cologne and I wanted to get closer to him.

“Every step he took he left fire behind. You could see him in the flames, laughing and roaring.”

“The King in Yella,” I said.

He looked at me. “Maybe,” he said. “You could be right there.”

He smiled; slightly broken toothed, slightly crooked, one side of his mouth slacker than the other. I was already thinking of kissing him when a woman grabbed his shoulder. She was neat, blonde, beautiful, perfect looking, and I knew I’d never had a chance.

He did wink at me, though.

Cassilda worked the room, pressing people to buy buy buy. I bought another drink and sought a place to hide from her. I found a small room open upstairs, an unoccupied bedroom. A wall of moth-eaten books, a ceiling painted with black stars, tattered curtains on the windows; it seemed like a storage room more than anything else. I sat and finished my drink, enjoying the quiet, when I noticed one book on the shelves. It was beautiful, different from the others. The cover felt soft yet ridged, like serpent skin and the title . . . well. It was called The King in Yellow. I would have said that’s where my dad got the name, but he never read.

“I wouldn’t,” a voice said. It was the pub owner, a man with a small fat white face but bright clear eyes. His name was Elvis and I’d never seen anyone suit their name less. “They only read that if they’re going to top themselves. This is what they call the suicide chamber. It should be locked. It usually is. Some bastard must have unlocked it.” He gestured me out, locking the door after us. “That much bloody trouble when someone carks it, I’m not interested in another.”

“I’m not interested in that!” I said, my protest loud. I’d never even thought that.

“Come on, love, let’s get you another,” he said. I had the book tucked under my arm, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

Back in the bar, Cassilda was directing and informing and telling people about her art. I wondered if anyone ever stood up to her; I wasn’t about to. She’d barely noticed my existence since she stole my brooch; she was wearing it pinned to her broad bosom.

I drank so many of those damn cocktails.

We drank to my father (the pub owner remembered him, calling him a good drinking man), and how he said his heart was a homing device, that no matter how drunk he was he’d find his way home. He died a sickly yellow, my dad, jaundiced, his liver so bad it wouldn’t function anymore. He told people he got bitten by a mosquito, that he had yellow fever, but no one believed that. When our house burnt half down he was the only one in it. Couldn’t even get himself out. Scavengers got there before we did; they were welcome to it.

I heard the train rumbling in the distance and wondered which one I should catch.

I heard the ding and ting of beer kegs being moved about. Now that was a sound that brought me back to Rapptown. Reminded me of going to get Dad at the early opener, or walking with him there. He’d hear the ding and ting of the beer kegs and know the pub was opening. He’d say, “Music to my ears,” rubbing his hands together, back and forward, heel to toe, heel to toe.

Cassilda snatched the book from me and flipped it open. She began to read aloud, intoning, marching around the room, waving her arms dramatically, acting. I couldn’t stand the sound of her voice so I ordered more cocktails and entered into a conversation with anyone who’d talk to me.

I drank so many of those damned cocktails I fell asleep in the big armchair in the foyer. I was watched over by a man with a big coat. He opened and closed it every few minutes. In my fanciful state I thought a deep glow came from him. A yellow radiance.

Such nonsense.

I missed the last train. I fumbled with my phone to order a taxi but the pub owner told me there was a room upstairs put aside for me. “Your father used to crash there, love.” Plenty of others were staying over as well.

“There might even be a toothbrush left up there by a previous tenant,” he said, in a kindly voice, adding: “And women are always leaving cunt plugs behind if you need one of those.” He had waxy-looking ears that he cupped his hand behind as if he was hard of hearing.

I woke with my mouth so dry I couldn’t breathe. There was a small sink in my room but no glass, so I cupped my hands and drank thirstily. The water was lukewarm and had a rusty flavor, and once I quenched my thirst I went in search of something to take the taste out of my mouth.

The party was still going in the bar. I didn’t know the time, but it felt like about 3 a.m. I took a drink and saw what looked like an altar at the end of the bar, and my brooch pinned to it. I’d forgotten about that, and the fact that my dress was torn and my bra peeking through. No wonder the men in the room took an interest in me. I’d grab it back, later, when none of them were looking.

The whole room seemed filmed with a layer of ash.

In one corner was a mound of ash. Cassilda was tear-streaked, blind drunk. “They’ve smashed it all,” she said.

“She smashed it herself,” Elvis said. “Read that whole bloody book, then destroyed everything.” He shook his head. “She still owes me, if she hasn’t spent it all.”

A greenish light washed over everything. It was like the moss growing on a grave, or like green twigs burning. The smell of young wood, burnt too soon. A life used up too soon.

Someone put a drink in my hand, a deep yellow dessert wine I drank quickly, and then the next.

In the morning the sun woke me, creeping in through a crack in the old blinds. I wondered how I’d slept at all, because the room was uncomfortably warm and the bed lumpy. I stood in a patch of something sticky near the door and cursed. I didn’t want to know what it was. I limped to the shared bathroom (stained lino covered in cigarette burns, a shower with no curtain, one toilet with no seat). I had no towel, and nothing to change into, but at least I could wash my face and get that sticky stuff off my foot.

I had little to gather, just my bag and phone, then I went out by the back stairs. I really didn’t want to run into any of the late-night partygoers; call it day after regret, call it fear of sunlight reality. I didn’t want to see them.

The first train wasn’t for another half hour, so I thought I’d try the old neighborhood again.

Today everything seemed familiar. Almost too familiar, as if I hadn’t left at all. I found my way easily to my childhood home.

It stood, half-burnt. Was it never repaired? Clearly no one lived there; the lawn was grown thigh-high, there were advertising flyers in massive piles by the letterbox, the door was half off its hinges. A painted yellow crown on the door itself, as it had been on other derelict houses, and I thought the council should devise a clearer warning symbol for dangerous buildings.

Still, I pushed my way inside.

It was dark, the dust so thick I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t think anyone had been there since we ran, and my father killed himself in the fire. He’d handcuffed himself to the radiator, they said, because he was a weak man and didn’t want to be able to change his mind.

I heard a voice beside me, intoning, low.

It was Cassilda, reading that book aloud to me. Wearing my brooch, the one my father left to me, proof that he did love me and remember me, that he thought of me as he died.

“Give me my brooch back,” I said, low-voiced. I’d ordered men of industry with that voice, and other so-called tough guys. She put her hand over it, kept reading.

I moved through the house, wanting to see if we’d left anything behind, wanting to get away from her. In the room where my father died (and I could see the dark stain in the lino, the spread of the burn), in the corner where the radiator was, I saw the remnants of his handcuffs.

Cassilda, reading, came into the room. She finished and closed the book.

“There,” she said, “all done.” She smiled at me. “I read to you through the night,” she said. “And beside me the boys took it in turns to watch. They liked you sleeping there. Limbs all loose and friendly.”

I lunged at her, pushing her backwards. For all her sturdiness she was old and weak, and I tore the brooch from her, distended the pin, and thrust it deep into her eye.

I don’t know what possessed me; to this day I don’t understand what made me do it. But the sight of her made me so furious I grasped her throat and pressed, as I’d done, I remembered, to my dear old dog Rupert (or had I? was that me or had I watched it? I could no longer tell my own memories from others), until she finally sputtered and stopped speaking.

Then I let her sink to the ground, and I took back my brooch.

There was a hole in the floor, and by folding and bending I got her down there and covered the space with some wood I found in the backyard.

A neighbor watched me over the fence, a tall man, but it was only a tree with yellow blossoms.

I needed to wash up and there was no running water in this old house, so I ventured back to the pub.

Elvis was at the bar. “Tomato juice and vodka is the answer for you,” he said, pouring it for me.

“I’ll make sure it gets back to your father,” he said, raising his glass to me. He held out his hand, and instinctively I placed the brooch in his broad, soft, white palm.

I felt a burning inside me, so hot and terrible I couldn’t speak, let alone talk.

And yet I could run for the train, and catch it, and sit, gazing through the fogged window at the buildings and graffiti and back yards and car frames flashing by.

Of Rapptown I recall little else.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 880

July 25h 2023

The King in Yella by Kaaron Warren

Narrated by Petra Elliott

Audio Production by Chelsea Davis

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart

 

Hi everyone, welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror podcast. I’m Alasdair your host and this week’s story, audio produced by the amazing Chelsea, is from Kaaron Warren. Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019. She has also been Guest of Honour at Conflux in Canberra and Genrecon in Brisbane. She has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji, drawing inspiration from every place. 2023 has seen publication of two novellas. “The Deathplace Set” from Crystal Lake Publishing, and “Bitters” from Cemetery Dance. Your narrator is Petra Elliott so drink up, because the King’s truth is here.

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Are there facts that haunt you? Informational ghosts that show up when you least expect them. Banquos of trivia, but never trivial. I have a couple, one of them is the Centralia fire.

This is a coal fire beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania that’s been burning since at least May 27, 1962. Its original cause and start date are still a matter of debate. At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years. It has quietly, methodically decimated Centralia and as of 2017 only 56 people were left in town. Centralia was one of the inspirations for Silent Hill.

The ground is on fire. The ground will be on fire for longer than we’ve been alive. No one can do anything. No one will do anything. Just 56 people whose choices are to leave their home or to continue making their way across burning ground that’s slowly collapsing beneath them. There’s a certain resonance to that in 2023. Not just the environmental disasters that mount up every year but that sense of surviving in persistent, relentless trauma even as it picks a little more away at you. That’s how the world’s felt for a lot of folks for a long time. That’s one of the reasons this story is so familiar.

I’ve talked, a lot, about the horrors of small-town life but what Warren does here is use the horror as both a filter and a lens. There is no monster in this story because this story is the monster, our perspective locked into what is either the killer’s, a victim’s or more likely both. Yellow as a symbol of decay and order. Firefighters holding the line against the thing they think they see in the woods and aren’t QUITE worshipping. Drinking heavy yellow wine to persuade themselves that they’re fine and they’re keeping it at bay even as their livers are just the latest sacrifice in a decades long parade of unwilling or unconsci. The ground is always on fire. The world is always collapsing. Have another drink. Welcome home.

This is a GOOD one. Thanks to Kaaron, Petra, Chelsea, and of course, you.

We’re an independent production, and one powered entirely by you. We rely on you to pay our authors, staff and cover our costs. There’s a recession, a pandemic and yet here we are, making art for you. We can only do that if you help us.

We’ve got Paypal and Patreon subscriptions that start at 5 bucks a month.

Both get you access to our audio archive. The Patreon subscription tiers get you all sorts of goodies

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If you can’t help financially, we understand completely please consider talking about us. It helps a lot too. If you liked an episode, please link to it, or blog about it or leave a review on your podcatcher of choice. It all helps and with your help we can keep doing this.

 

PseudoPod returns next week with How to Win a Dance Contest During an Apocalypse (In Nine Easy Steps!) by Gwendolyn, read by Ibba Armancas, hosted by Kat and produced by Chelsea. Then as now PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

We’ll see you then but before we go, PseudoPod wants to remind you In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill… and you are reborn but into the same life that you’ve always been born into.