The King is dead. He lies flat on a coarse stone slab in a shabby room in one of the great towers of the City of the Miserable.
His robes are muddy and torn, his skin is marred by leprosy, and his eyes are nothing more than pus-swollen black pools. His greenish skin is scratched and bruised by brambles and rocks, and there is great pain in his frozen expression. And yet for two reasons he still births great jealousy in all who see him: first of all, he is dead, and thus spared the Miseries of life. And second, he was once a King, and so lived a life without Misery, as all Kings surely do. He does not belong here, they whisper, one who has never known our burden, and never will.
What they do not know is that Misery was the name of his domain.
In a far-off city, which stood on the shores of a nameless lake, the King ruled from behind a Golden Mask. And the Priests and the Jesters and the Women of his court were masked as well; and behind their masks hypocrisy reigned. His pious Priests laughed mockingly, his mirthful Jesters were broken by sorrow, and his luscious Women were faithless and haggish. And he, who was pure in blood and rich in earthly wealth, was in fact a hideous leper, and a master of a dead kingdom. He learned the truth one horrible day, when he was inspired by idle fancy to glimpse his own face for the first time.
In the King’s dreams another King had come before him, wearing a mask of his own, of pallid white. This second King, whose robes and vestments shone gold, was the one who had whispered the suggestion that he should remove his shining mask, and look upon the visage beneath. It was this Hidden King who had brought him to shame and ruin…
When the leper King first took to wandering the wilds of his land, having chosen exile for himself, he wondered sometimes if the Hidden King had driven him off his throne to take it for himself. But that no longer concerned him. His grief and disillusionment were too great. So great were they that he had taken his very eyes from their sockets, and roamed bleeding and blinded in search of oblivion or fate.
Now he is dead, his final mask having fallen away. The illusion that is life has left him.
And yet—two others stand by his side. One is the leper-girl who found him, and brought him into the City of the Miserable; while the other is an Ethiopian, one of the legendary Embalmer Women of the desert who make art out of corpses.
“It does not bring me joy to sell the body of one I loved,” the leper-girl says, shuddering. “And yet, the miseries of the City of the Miserable have proven to be beyond my imagination. I must find some good in this man’s death.”
“He is a strange being. I sense a curious light in him,” the Embalmer Woman murmurs, from her toothless mouth. “I will give you thirty pieces of gold for him.”
“For thirty pieces of gold,” says the leper-girl, with more than a hint of shame, “I may well quit the Miserable City.”
The Embalmer smiles, exposing the pink nubs of her gums. She does not tell the young leper that the wounded King will bring her much more than she’s paying.
The girl likely knows, but she accepts the money anyway. The King’s spirit, lingering nearby, sees the perpetuation of the cycle that drove him from his throne. Love and promises are eroded by gold; no wonder his forefathers made their masks of it, when hiding from the world and its light.
But still he slumbers, only dimly aware of the sale of his remains. The embalming commences. The Woman removes his organs from his cavities with her long, curving fork, and fills his veins with her potions. She grooms his hair and scrubs his skin smooth, or smooth as a leper gets, with the hard edge of a clam-shell. She polishes him in the manner of her people, making even his eyeless face lovely. He feels no pain in this process.
He does feel the faint motion of the Embalmer Woman’s cart below him; but its significance eludes him. He is carried elsewhere, far, far away from the City of the Miserable, to a place called Arras. The Embalmer Woman knows the clientele of Europe, and the trio who await her here will make the best use of his body.
He only begins to dread when he hears their eerie laughter. It is that laughter that provides the first breath—for already they have begun pushing the spark of life back into his carcass. They will make a splendid poppet of him. Beyond their cackles comes the second breath, and all of a sudden feeling and caring are forced back inside him. A third breath comes, and then a fourth.
His mind, now a victim of their sorcery, perceives the whole of time and space. For theirs is a power banished from the primordial long ago—or at least, a fragment of such. Even dimmed, it is great enough to open infinity to his mind. He sees ages of ice, the creeping frozen death of mankind’s early days, through the eyes of a masked primitive called Odjigh. Just as swiftly he is thrust to the creeping frozen death that waits at civilization’s end, when the Terrestrial Fire will sweep down and make mockery of the Sun. Brackets around history: the Ice Age at one end, and the Night Land, Zothique, and the Junpi at the other. Eons of horror and famine under a crimson gaze—or an emerald one.
And in a great rush he sees everything in between…infinite purpose emerges, only to dissolve into meaninglessness, as he witnesses the fall of all ambition, all empires.
When the King in the Golden Mask awakens into life again, he does so babbling, with froth at his lips.
* * *
1881.
“Come, my friend, and drink my wine,” said the man in the white fabric hood. “It is good to be among nobility again. You are a Lord, from Spain, yes?”
Don Luis de Serrano, or the man calling himself such, adjusted his silk cravat. “Er, yes, Your Majesty. Not only do I hold lands in Spain and Mexico, but I am the Lord of thirteen million acres of the American West. I am the wealthiest man in the United States, if not the whole world.”
“Ah! So you are more than a Lord. You are a King, like me.”
Again, Don Luis tugged at his cravat. Then he took some of the hooded man’s wine. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, “in my own way.”
“Don Luis” didn’t dare reveal to his masked host that he was in fact Pierce Talbot, a two-bit gambler. He had been elevated to the status of Spanish Lord by Walt Hazleton, the forger who had rescued him after he nearly drowned in the Rio Grande. A trio of do-gooders known as the Three Mesquiteers—Stony Brooke, Tucson Smith, and Lullaby Joslin were their names—had thrown him off the paddle-boat he’d been riding because they blamed him for a fight that had broken out on the upper deck. It wasn’t his fault that the men he’d been playing cards against called his clever tactics cheating. Those damned Mesquiteers had almost killed him in their efforts to make peace. But Hazleton saved him, and at once the old forger knew the time had come to kick off a scheme he’d been planning for years.
By faking a governmental land deed to the fictitious de Serrano family, and setting Talbot up as their latest descendant, Hazleton had made the gambler the landlord of the American West—his forgery was so good that the U.S. government accepted it as genuine. In his new guise, “Don Luis” at once declared that all tenants of his land now owed him fortunes in rent. He used the first influx of funds to hire a massive army of mercenaries to enforce his demands. Soon he commenced a reign of terror that even President Garfield feared to contend with.
Hazleton was inspired in his scheme by the story of a costumed criminal from the 1820s known as Don del Oro, who had posed as a Yaqui deity in order to disrupt the Mexican gold trade. This Don del Oro was supposedly influenced not only by the Yaqui myths, but also by a figure from European legend, the King in the Golden Mask. Hazleton knew that he couldn’t duplicate the false del Oro’s scheme exactly. Trying to pass his disciple off as a god wouldn’t work—but a false nobleman might do the trick.
The only problem was that “Don Luis”’ rule was threatened by a powerful fighting force—none other than the same Three Mesquiteers who had thrown him off the paddle-boat. He had ordered his men to hunt down and destroy the Mesquiteers, and the trio had seemingly vanished after being chased off as outlaws. Only now, three white-masked “Night Riders” had appeared on the scene, disrupting operations in the exact same manner the Mesquiteers had. The ruse was obvious, but in their Night Rider guises the Mesquiteers had proven slipperier than ever.
As if this business wasn’t weird enough, Hazleton had just recently informed Don Luis that he secretly served a greater power—a man called the Cambric King. The way the forger described the King, right down his white cambric hood, it seemed like he worshipped him as a god. Don Luis repressed his concern over this strange talk, not wanting to jeopardize the fortune this enterprise had given him. Hazleton’s theory was that the Mesquiteers knew the King was backing their scheme, and were wearing variants of his mask as a form of mockery. When Don Luis pointed out it was more likely that they were copying the Ku Klux Klan, Hazleton retorted that their hoods, like the King’s, lacked the Klan’s sharp point. The false nobleman took his word on the matter.
Somehow, Don Luis had the feeling that none of this was worth discussing with the Cambric King himself. So far the masked man seemed to be an utter lunatic.
“Let me tell you a story, my King,” the hooded one said. “My story. It is a secret I keep closely guarded, though my zealousness fades in the proper company. I feel you are a worthy enough man to hear the tale.”
“I am very curious, Your Majesty. You are indeed very mysterious to me.” That was the truth. Last week he hadn’t known this madman had even existed.
There were no holes in the Cambric King’s hood, not even for his eyes, but Don Luis could see from the folds in the fabric that his host was smiling broadly.
“Most stories begin with one’s birth. Mine begins with my rebirth.”
“Your, er, rebirth, sire?”
“Oh, yes. What happened before that point is of little consequence, though I have been a King all my days. I lost my old throne in death, but rebirth gave me one far grander than that which seated me before.” They sat in well-crafted wooden chairs, and the King leaned back in his. “I was restored from my death as the poppet of a trio of witches, in the regions near the city of Arras. They were women of pleasure as well as sorceresses, and they were beautiful and terrible alike. Their names were Blancminette, Vergensen, and Belotte. Belotte was the youngest and the fiercest, and her too-wide smile will remain forever etched into my memory.
“They restored me so that I might serve them, and at first I resisted. I feared them and their dreadful witchcraft, but the passage of years changed things. By the time they brought me to meet the Devil in the dark forests of the Gavre, they had allowed me into their confidence, and I had willingly sworn fealty to their cause. They taught me fragments of their black arts, and they prolonged my life. You see—this was nearly five hundred years ago.”
Now Don Luis knew the King was crazy. Five hundred years old! It couldn’t be—or so he tried to convince himself.
“In the early 1440s I took on an alias, Alain Blanc-Bâton, and I raised an army of servants of the Dark Forces,” the King went on. “They were my Faulx-Visaiges, my False-Faces—they wore masks, as I always have. And we made great mischief in the countryside, skewering women and decapitating men, and drowning little children. We spread terror for terror’s sake, for terror’s glory. Blood and annihilation were our tongue and creed.
“The forces of law and order tried to capture me, and they seemingly succeeded; but I had sent a fool in my place, a fanatic who would die for me and did. He spoke the words I placed in his mouth loyally, spitting out a false confession that allowed me to fade back into the shadows. But some remained skeptical that the deeds of the Faulx-Visaiges had ended, and indeed, some correctly intuited that there were witches behind their work.
“I fought hard to keep the secret of my mistresses, yet in time they were overcome. It was in 1459 that Blancminette and Vergensen met their ends; and I thought for a long time that Belotte had perished as well. But my youngest teacher, with her too-wide smile, came to me in the dead of night and showed me she yet survived. Our work went on. We became masters of destruction. We spread plagues, we summoned diabolical presences, we even probed the secrets of time that are forbidden by the Higher Powers. We drank and dreamt in the Black Tea in thatched huts on the slopes of the Pyrenees, where the green-skinned Viridermae live. It was a magnificent set of centuries.
“In time, however, my mistress moved on to less material realms, and I was left alone. At least, for a little while. I trained my own apprentices: Rinaldo Sabata, and Zéphyrin Céladon, among others.”
Needless to say, Don Luis didn’t know these names.
“I left Europe, eventually, to find adventure in the New World. These days I take my simple pleasures where I can. I like riding these newfangled locomotives. I sometimes kill my fellow passengers at random, with this.” And he produced a glinting object that Don Luis knew was called a Turkestan knife. “As a fellow King, you must surely know the pleasure of killing peasants at will?”
“I certainly do,” said Don Luis. Suddenly he wished very much to escape. He finished his wine and stood from his chair. “It’s been an honor to meet Mr. Hazleton’s sponsor—and mine. I-I hope that our enterprise continues to prove profitable.”
The Cambric King didn’t seem to hear him. “I am fascinated by these Night Riders who trouble us,” he said. “I have already, of course, secured connections between our faction and the Ku Klux Klan—not because I believe in their foolish ideals of white supremacy, or their worship of the Confederacy, mind, but because I believe they will prove a useful distraction at some point in the future. Every King needs his pawns. And some may prove worthy of initiation into the cult.”
“The—the cult?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Talbot,” said the King then, “I may as well call it a cult. There is no shame in the term. It describes a group of worshippers—and my followers and I have never ceased worshipping the Dark…”
“Don Luis” froze—the bastard knew his real name. He had this whole time.
Now he was reaching up to remove that eyeless hood of his…
Talbot didn’t stick around. He ran, and left the mad King behind him in the shadowy parlor.
* * *
1891.
The last ten years had been a decennium horribilis for the Cambric King. The arrogance he’d displayed before the false Don Luis de Serrano had been entirely misplaced. The Three Mesquiteers, or Night Riders as they temporarily called themselves, had dismantled his operation and killed many of his men. Since then, the ostensible monarch had found himself increasingly unwelcome in the West. It was around this time that the powers he served seemed to abandon him—they had departed him in great degrees ever since Belotte left, but now he seemed entirely forsaken. To cope with his struggles he had turned to decadence, and that further blinded him to the eternal. He never knew the name of the gods he obeyed, and time expended on carnal pursuits made them even less distinct to him.
Without the mysteries working through him, he could not train more apprentices. Instead, he was forced to largely keep company with the Klansmen he had written off as a mere lightning rod for his real operations. The Klan he’d brooked an alliance with ten years ago was a severely diluted bunch of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s original organization, which had withered in the face of crackdowns by the U.S. government. A lot of their number had actually belonged to newer race-hatred organizations like the Red Shirts, but they called themselves Klansmen for the clout. The Klan old guard and the Red Shirts didn’t always see eye to eye and so there was often fighting between the men. These tensions only worsened as the ‘80s slowly crept along, and the Klan proper was all but destroyed. His band, being cobbled together from all sorts of groups, was even more disparate and disunified than ever, and intra-group backstabbing became more and more common by the day.
They were a degenerate lot, being made up wholesale of sadists, gutless cowards, wife- and child-beaters, religious fanatics, gullible head-nodders, craven clergymen, wannabe emperors, rejected politicians, grown-up school bullies, sore-loser veterans, and countless other types of sundry fools. They believed in ludicrous conspiracy theories that posited black people and Jews and Catholics as simultaneously hideously weak and oppressively powerful. They thought of themselves as wise and brilliant when they were ignorant and doltish. They were the worst kind of idiots and just for that, the Cambric King thought of them as monstrous, even before factoring in their bloodlust and their tedious racism.
They served no God, despite shrieking about their Protestantism like it actually meant something to them. They could not be converted to his cause, because they had built their entire personalities around their foolish idea of resurrecting the degenerate Confederacy. And so the King manipulated their prejudices to trick them into killing those who he’d marked for sacrifice. But these sacrifices were as meaningless as the murders they would have committed without him, as they did not serve to restore his ailing power.
This all very swiftly grew tiresome, and occasionally the King would massacre his own men out of disgust, or otherwise just to bring himself to feel something again. The only ones he trusted were his two lieutenants, Harris and Dauson. They still had potential to be molded in the right direction.
But besides them, hope was sparse among the outfit. These were not the proud, strutting Faulx-Visaiges of old.
He was supposed to be above this. He was a sorcerer, and a King—he did not butcher helpless families for material purpose. To play boogeyman at voting booths and churches and schoolhouses was below his station. He was not one of them, and they would not drag him down with them. So he kept telling himself.
As his gang was driven further and further east, the King had sent scouts to see if New York might present some places of refuge. But his men, corrupt and moronic as ever, had ended up wasting time and effort (to say nothing of the unneeded publicity) waging a land war against a man named John Sark. Some of the men in the unit craved possession of the plenitude of valuable sweet-fern that grew on Sark’s land. A woman named Rose Ember, who was in love with Sark, helped defeat the cambric-masked White Riders, most of whom subsequently found themselves inmates of the New York state prison system. It was an unrelenting embarrassment.
Things only worsened from there. One of the King’s other close aides besides Dauson and Harris was Dan Rogers. Rogers was trying to rebuild the Night Riders, or White Riders, or whatever name they bore, back out West. But he had recently come in conflict with a lawman named John Brown, who had caught him off-guard by posing as an outlaw, “Bad Jim Blake.” Brown was supposedly a relative of the famous U.S. Marshall Nevada Jack Mackenzie, who was in turn an associate of Lullaby Joslin of the Three Mesquiteers. The King began to fret that the Mesquiteers might come for him again.
To prepare himself, the King spied on the Mesquiteers, and found some very bizarre rumors swirling around them. Sometimes when they showed up they seemed to be much younger or older than they had been before, and it was said that they were in fact a family franchise, consisting of two generations of fathers and sons. Besides that stood the curious fact that the three would occasionally refer to themselves as the Range Busters, only to revert to the Mesquiteers handle upon their next adventure. The Range Busters weren’t a temporary alias, like when they’d called themselves the Night Riders—about half of their published exploits had the trio using that name. It appeared at first that the younger generation of Mesquiteers were the Range Busters, but sometimes the older men used the moniker as well.
There was clearly much more to them than met the eye. And with his patience exhausted, the King was going to find out what it was.
Having already abandoned the idea of building a power base in New York, he rode back out West, to California, where the Mesquiteers had last been spotted. He had to cut them off before they could get a chance to hunt him down. Whether they were calling themselves Mesquiteers, Night Riders, or Range Busters, he’d get even with them. He fantasized about breaking Lullaby Joslin’s ventriloquist dummy, Elmer, over his knee, before torturing the brainless cowboy to death. He dreamed of making Stony Brooke and Tucson Smith fight to death, and strangling the victor.
Thoughts of vengeance carried him across the miles; he lived weeks of hate. It was only when he crossed the Californian border that a strange thought passed through his brain, spurred by the pain of repetition: he hadn’t always been this way.
At first he doubted this, but slowly his doubts melted. It was true, he had once been different. Very much so.
He had been full of remorse, hadn’t he, before his death? He had known terrible loss, and he had met it not with wrath, but with grief. For he had had a soul full of ideals of beauty and truth, and a sort of love for the universe, and losing that brought him to despair, not violence.
Had it been the girl? Had it been the leper-girl selling his remains, at the same time she said she’d loved him? Had that been the final blow that broke open the dike and loosed his hatred?
Or was it his mistresses, and the manner in which they brought him back? Had they resurrected him incorrectly? Was he merely a monster with the memories of the King in the Golden Mask?
His gods and his past had become indistinct to him, and as he rode his very self became misty and blurry in his mind’s eye.
In fact, the farther he rode into California, the less real the world around him seemed to appear. Though he had destroyed his own eyes centuries ago, Belotte had taught him to “see” through the world of spirit. Things didn’t look the same with this type of vision, being woven of light instead of matter—though, men of science said that the eye only saw light anyway, reflected light, and so his eyes weren’t so different from those of seeing folk. But now his gaze was becoming yet more alien, as the dancing lights broke and splintered before him. Though it turned his stomach, this uncanny sight somehow did not concern him, and he did not halt his riding.
The road ahead of him and the sky above blended together; grass became night, and vice versa. The trees were mere smudges of paint at the periphery of his vision. One by one, his hooded henchmen who rode along with him faded away from him, as if they had never been there at all. He rode on alone, into the fuzzy emptiness.
His body felt cold and numb, and all that remained was his mind. His memories became cloying and grating inside him, deepening the numbness. He felt his two lives battle for supremacy—the King in the Golden Mask versus the King in the Cambric Mask. His nausea worsened, till it reached the same potency he’d felt when he’d first realized he was a leper.
Eventually, the rumbling and shaking of his horse underneath him faded away as well. And he slipped away into the darkness.
* * *
She is ringed 'round with corpses who are bloated fat and white
Before her stands a stranger, with a smiling mask of night
He offers her a tempting hand, a furtherance of vengeance
She knows what that hand means: an unholy transcendence
To spend her days among the dead, to forever fight their fight
But maybe
Just maybe
She can squeeze from their Game light
And she can make that vengeance bloom
so radiant and so sure
that even the sun will know envy.
And then,
His hand's in hers
* * *
When he awoke, he found himself on the bank of a stream. He had apparently been thrown from his horse, which was lying dead of a broken neck not ten yards away. His faculties returned to him, and he was left wondering what the hell had just happened.
He still felt as if he was in a dream, but now it was daytime. He had fallen during the night, but how long he’d been out, he had no idea. It felt like weeks.
He made sure his leprous face was still covered by his mask, and then he tried to find his bearings. Logic reasserted itself in his mind. Experience told him that if he followed the stream, he’d eventually find something that could help him.
Damn the horse for dying. Damn him for losing control.
He commenced a walk along the sandy shore, surrounded by the squalls of birds and the rustling of brush in the breeze. It took him back to his early days of exile, when he left his city behind him. He remembered the song of the grass in the high wind, and how at the time it had seemed like a low death-lament. It had risen around him, growing louder and louder, until he felt bloody tears flowing down his cheeks. It seemed to swallow everything, and bar him from the light of the sun, as though great clouds had swallowed the whole world.
After many miles his legs tired, and he yearned to rest. But he had gotten no closer to finding civilization—at least, not in any populated sense. Beyond the thin treeline at the curve in the stream ahead, he could faintly see what might have been a dusty road. He decided to make for that, in hopes that perhaps a rider would come along. He would convince them to stop, and then he would kill them and steal their horse. That was the easiest way to handle things.
But as he made his way onto the road, and followed it as he had the stream, he realized it was just as bereft of people as the stream had been. He continued his resolute march, but eventually he was forced to stop and sit down.
A half-hour or so passed, and the King rubbed his aching soles. He wished very much he had something to eat.
That was when he heard a strange sound over the horizon—a low, smooth rumbling noise. To his ears it almost sounded like one of those automobiles Carl Benz had been showing off in Germany. But it was much cleaner-sounding than that.
Suddenly a flat horseless carriage appeared over the horizon, black as jet. Its shining chassis rolled along on four rubber tires. To the King’s psychic vision, it appeared to be something out of a fairy-tale from his boyhood—a time nearly six centuries past now. This had to be the craft of some mythic psychopomp—had it come to carry him to the land of the dead?
The vessel slowed to a halt, and slowly, the tinted window on the front left rolled down. A man with a hard face and a mustache looked out.
“Hello,” he said, speaking with an English accent. “You are the Cambric King, are you not?”
The King was taken aback.
“Who—who are you?” he demanded.
The man smiled.
“My name is Martin Brenner. I knew you would end up here.”
“What do you mean? Where is here?”
“Less a where than a when. Welcome to 1953, Your Majesty.”
“1953?” That was impossible. “You must be mad—it’s 1891.”
“Yes, that was when you disappeared, Your Majesty. We suspected that because you vanished chasing the Range Busters, you had passed into their chronal tunnel. From there it was just a matter of determining your trajectory…”
Just then, the door behind Brenner’s opened, and a tall, hairy man came out.
“This is my assistant, Mario Baldur. He and I currently have our hands full with some business in England, but we decided to fly out to California when we determined we could intercept you.”
“What are you talking about?” For the first time in his life, the King felt the intrusion of panic. “It’s not 1953! And you’ll never take me alive—!”
But before he could prepare himself, and draw his Turkestan knife, he was yielding to the grip of the man called Baldur, and allowing himself to be taken into the backseat of the car.
As soon as he was inside, Baldur took his knife, and Brenner started driving again. They rolled slowly down the country road. “Allow me to explain a few things, Your Majesty,” Brenner began. “First of all, there is a reason for your chronal displacement. You know something of such matters, don’t you?”
Yes—centuries ago, he and Belotte had tried to attain the secrets of time but they, like many mortals before them, were rebuked by the Higher Powers. He had never seen Belotte reduced to meekness before, but he had then. She had exited the ritual chamber with her hair frayed and her eyes wide, like she had suffered a blow to her sanity. Through the stone door he had heard unusual sounds, none of which hinted at what was happening inside. She never told him what exactly had transpired.
Had he really traveled forward in time?
“I’ll take your silence as a yes,” Brenner went on. “Now, I’m guessing you must’ve been right on the tail of those Range Busters exactly when they galloped into 1953. I’ve read all about your life, and even though you were a broken shadow of yourself by the time of your disappearance, you must have still possessed enough connection to the Dark to sniff them out. Your instincts were still strong. Even if you didn’t catch sight of them, you were close enough to them to get caught in their jump forward.”
“It’s impossible—those three dimwits couldn’t possibly travel in time,” the King argued, choosing then to speak up. “The Higher Powers would never permit it.”
“You don’t get it, do you? They serve the Higher Powers. At least their master does.”
“Their—master?”
“Oh yes. Didn’t you know there was a temporal war in the Wild West? A front of it, at least. You see, in the near future, the Earth will be defended by the mighty space adventurer Captain Video, and his Video Rangers.”
Not only was the King panicked for the first time, but this was his first time being completely baffled as well.
“While protecting Earth against monsters like Dr. Pauli and Ultima Aureans, Captain Video also maintains a legion of ‘Western Agents’ to keep history on track back in the 19th Century. The Three Mesquiteers, or Range Busters, are among them. They are not only two organizations, grandfathers and grandsons, but they are time-travelers as well. They battle against Video’s true nemeses, the time- and universe-traveling Blayden dynasty. The Blayden clan serves the foes of the Higher Powers, as we’ll insist on calling them, and so the Powers have instilled some of their, uh, power into Captain Video and his aides, to fight on their behalf.”
“This is insanity! Far-future world-defenders! Time-hopping cowboys! I’ll grant you that your horseless carriage does appear to be the product of advanced technology—or else, sorcery. But I—”
Brenner turned back and raised a silencing hand. “Fear not, Your Majesty. I am a friend of the Blaydens, and their masters, and so I am an enemy of your enemies. But perhaps I should explain to you why I broke away from my pressing work to intercept you.”
The King huffed impotently, not knowing what to say.
“I told you that Mario and I were busy over in England, and I think you’ll appreciate how we handle things out there. He and I are smugglers, at least on the surface—the money we make from such funds our real endeavors. Brockham Castle in Dorset has proven to be an ideal coastal locale for our work, but it is on public land. We’ve had to find clever ways of keeping people away from it. Because the locals are a superstitious lot, I’ve had Mario disguise himself as ‘the Black Rider’—a ghostly abbot riding a motorcycle—to frighten them off. There were motorcycles in your time, in Germany, but if you don’t know what I mean, think iron horses. And consider our Black Rider a twist on your White Riders. There’s some symbolism in that guise, and I’ll tell you about it.
“The Black Rider is hardly England’s first ghostly abbot. The Hillcrist family of Greenwich, for instance, used to keep their own legend of a ghost called the Black Abbot. In 1934, the legend was exploited by two associates of mine, Brian Heslewood and Phillip Shadwell, in order to kidnap John Hillcrist and extort his family. But both Heslewood and I drew from our plots from the legend of the Black Abbot of Chelfordbury. Back in the 12th Century, Abbot Hubert of Redruth was assassinated by the insane 2nd Earl of Chelford, who believed the old Abbot to have been practicing witchcraft. His ghost was said to haunt the Earls of Chelford forever after, and many of the Earls throughout history died seeking the Abbot’s lost treasure, which according to myth was buried on the family grounds. In 1926 Harry Alford, the 18th Earl, lost his mind and began killing people while dressed as the Black Abbot, in the hopes of driving everyone away so he could get the treasure. His younger brother, Dick, tried to pose as the Abbot himself in order to frighten Harry into staying indoors. While he was unsuccessful, Harry was eventually killed by misadventure, bringing his murder spree to an end.
“A couple of years after the crimes in Chelfordbury, a maniacal gang leader named Leonard O’Shea, alias ‘the Terror,’ copied Harry Alford’s scheme by posing as the ghost of Pangleton Abbey. He was eventually undone by the conflict between his split personalities, as he occasionally became a man named Goodman, who was, true to his name, gentle and kind. So you see, old Hubert of Redruth has inspired much mischief in his wake.”
The King tried to keep a strong face, but his mind was reeling from everything Brenner had just dumped on him.
“So assuming all of this is true...why bother intercepting me?” he asked. “You lead the Black Riders, as I lead the White Riders. You say you are my ally. Do you intend us to attack this Captain Video you mentioned? Are we going to kill the Three Mesquiteers?”
Martin Brenner laughed. “No, of course not. Why would I, an accomplished modern occultist, join with a diseased old man who decayed into being nothing more than the king of a bunch of Klansman thugs? You have always been a toy of the Black Abbots—you’re no good for anything else.”
The King huffed impotently. “You dare insult me? I, who have walked the Earth for centuries, and presided over empires and armies?”
“It’s not incidental that I bring up Hubert of Redruth. It turns out that his killer, the 2nd Earl of Chelford, wasn’t so insane after all. The Black Abbot was the apprentice of Jacques Sorgue, a warlock known as the Black Priest. The Black Priesthood serve the Hidden King, who stripped your throne from you.”
The Cambric King went cold and numb again.
“You were intended to eventually succeed Sorgue as the Black Priest. But you failed, having thrown in with idiots and mad dogs. Instead, another has been appointed Sorgue’s successor—one of his descendants.
“You have been kept alive by the rituals of the witch Belotte. Her charms have been declining over the years; you are aging. But I think it’s time that age caught up with you.”
At that point, Mario Baldur reached over and grabbed the old King’s hood. Though the King tried to stop him he got it off with a firm yank. The King’s scaly, leprosy-scarred face was now exposed, and he tried vainly to hide it with his hands.
“Get away from me!!”
“In truth, Your Majesty, this trip has been for Mario’s sake,” Brenner said then. “He has very diligently served the Viridermae on their mountain—he has promised them the life and soul of his nephew, also called Mario, and in return, they have given him the rest of your years.”
“No! I will not age! I will not die!”
“You have no choice in the matter, my King,” Brenner said, as Mario set his hands on him. “It’s already begun.”
And as the Cambric King passed out of this world, he did so babbling, with froth at his lips.
* * *
The Black Riders soon became the finest servants of the Black Priest in England. Martin Brenner’s old colleague Phillip Shadwell saw to their empowerment over the decades. Now it is 1973, and he has formed their newest iteration, sculpting them out of the chaotic fury of Britain’s wild youth.
While the new Black Riders rampage across England on their motorcycles, broadening the domain of death, the Cambric King is in France, where Brenner had deposited him. He does not know the name of the elder home where he has been left, but he can read the sign over the wing where he lives: Orfila Ward.
Here, amidst the squabble and gossip of his fellow seniors, he passes a quiet life, never speaking, never breathing a solitary word. He stares at the ceiling most of the time, daydreaming; when he eats, his porridge slips through his lips, like he is unaware he put it there. Sometimes a smile comes to his lips, and none of the other boarders know why—he himself does not know why. But pleasure touches him on occasion, unearned pleasure.
They envy and loathe him. Sometimes at night he sobs for hours, and that is when the crones get into him, kicking him and calling him “Old Rot-face.”
But most of the time he dreams blissfully, unaware of the jealousy he has inspired.
The lights inside his mind are winking out, one by one. He drools and thinks of the scrape of stone under him. Why would he seat himself on stone? And why does he remember the kiss of gold against his face?
It will not matter in just a few minutes.
As the darkness comes upon him, he gains a sudden clarity of vision. All at once he sees his old city, where he ruled, which is now dust. He sees a golden shadow over the icy lake, and gold-wrapped arms reaching towards him.
He wonders: will those arms ensnare me? Or will I fly away free, laughing into the sky?
He waits to find out.
And then his arm droops limp by his side.
…
“Nurse!
“Nurse Sweet!
“Nurse Sweet, this man’s stopped breathing!”
A woman walks in.
“I’ll take a look at him.”
His spirit lingers nearby. But it is not like before, in the City of the Miserable. This time, he is aware of what is happening.
The nurse, Sweet, is African-American. What is she doing in France?
She looks him dead in the face. But not the face of his corpse. She can see his spirit.
Something familiar in her face…
“‘Fly away free, laughing into the sky?’” she asks, mockingly. “Really? That’s what you think you deserve?”
What?
She can see me?
No. The Klan was just a lightning rod. Just an unfortunate necessity.
The terror they’d spread was meaningless, it failed to empower him. And it would have happened anyway. Wars between the races broke out endlessly through human history. He was just a cog in the machine.
“Listen to yourself, you’re disgusting,” the nurse says. “Do you remember the Hill family? Back in 1888?”
All those names and faces were the same to him…
“Idiot! Then perhaps you recall the Embalmer Woman, who sold you to your resurrectors?”
Oh. Yes.
Yes, now he knew the face.
There had been a woman in 1888—Dauson had killed her right in front of him. He’d thought at the time she looked like the Embalmer, but he had been so apathetic at the time that he didn’t think it had mattered…
Suddenly the Nurse sets her hand on his temple, and a flash of scorching light sears him. He cries out, but he is dead—he cannot scream.
This woman has been strengthened by some sort of pact with a cosmic spirit—he catches glimpses of her recent campaign of revenge, unleashing the walking dead upon the white supremacists who hurt and killed her loved ones. She is the inheritor of the gods, and there are few witches alive today who can match her power.
“You were Belotte’s poppet once. Now, through the power of Baron Samedi, you are mine.” Nurse Sweet, née Hill, wrestles him back down into his body. She chains him there, and stills his mouth before his scream breaks through.
“Poppets, zombies, there’s little difference at the end of the day,” she says. “Just know that you will never be a King again. You are a pawn now. The lowest of the low on the board of the Great Game…”
He sits up, unable to help himself.
He tries to imagine himself seated on a throne, the scrape of stone beneath him, but he can’t.
And Nurse Hill takes him by the hand, and helps him to his feet.
His battle has just begun. The scions of his Klan will die, one by one, by her will, and his hands.
And when that work is done he shall be cast into the Hell he has bought himself.
THE END
~ ~ ~
Notes
The Cambric King was first mentioned in Awful Agonies: Stories Inspired by How Awful About Allan, a book which was heavily influenced by the stories of Robert W. Chambers. In it I built on concepts from Chambers’ books The King in Yellow (1895), The Mystery of Choice (1897), and The Cambric Mask (1899), among others. The King in Yellow was partially inspired by Marcel Schwob’s short story collection The King in the Golden Mask (1893), and in this story I wanted to marry Schwob’s concepts to Chambers’. In addition to drawing on the titular story from King in the Golden Mask, I referenced other stories from that book’s contents, including “The Embalmer Women,” “The Death of Odjigh,” “The Terrestrial Fire,” “The Sabbat at Mofflaines,” “The Faulx-Visaiges,” and “52 and 53 Orfila.” I also nodded to stories from Schwob’s earlier collection Double Heart (1891), namely “The Clog” and “The Veiled Man.” Schwob called on older sources for some of his stories; for instance, Blancminette, Vergensen, and Belotte initially appear in an ostensibly historical account in Jacques du Clercq’s Mémoires (1467), while Mathieu d’Escouchy’s Chronique (1461) contains a record that inspired “The Faulx-Visaiges.” In his postscript to Double Heart, Schwob creates a parody of writer and occultist Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918) in the form of Zéphyrin Céladon, who is mentioned in my story, alongside Rinaldo Sabata from the horror film The Ghost of Rashmon Hall (1947), as one of the Cambric King’s apprentices.
Besides Chambers and Schwob (and Rashmon Hall), other public domain sources informed the rest of the story. The Night Land appears in the 1912 novel of the same name by William Hope Hodgson. Zothique was created by Clark Ashton Smith. The Junpi will appear soon in a forthcoming PhantomEye story. The idea of a hostile other-time attempting to interfere with the present originates in Night of the Living Dead: Beast Wars, my sequel to Night of the Living Dead (1968).
The Three Mesquiteers originated in a series of Western novels by William Colt MacDonald, starting with Law of the .45s (1933). MacDonald’s books inspired a film series by Republic Pictures, with the first being The Three Mesquiteers in 1936—these movies have fallen out of copyright. In them, Stony Brooke was played variously by Bob Livingston, Tom Tyler, and John Wayne; Tucson Smith was played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan and Bob Steele; and Lullaby Joslin was played by Max Terhune, Rufe Davis, Jimmie Dodd, and Syd Saylor. In the Terhune entries, the trio were joined by Lullaby’s ventriloquist dummy Elmer Sneezeweed, who, by the end of the series, is capable of moving and speaking autonomously. (Either that or Lullaby has telekinesis.) In 1940, Crash Corrigan and Max Terhune (with Elmer) appeared as fictionalized versions of themselves (a common practice in low-budget Westerns) alongside John “Dusty” King, also as himself, in a new Western trio, the Range Busters. Terhune now uses the nickname “Alibi,” and in the first film, one of the group asks why he chose that name over Lullaby, cementing the fact that the fictional Max Terhune is the same person as Lullaby Joslin. Both the Three Mesquiteers and Range Busters series jump all over history—for instance, The Three Mesquiteers establishes the trio as veterans of World War I, but The Night Riders (1939) (which is the source of Walt Hazleton and Don Luis de Serrano) features the 1881 assassination of James A. Garfield as a major plot point. Timeline inconsistencies plague the majority of the long-running B-Western movie series from the ‘30s and ‘40s, which I intend to explain in my fiction, including in this story. Don del Oro is from another unusual Western, the film serial Zorro’s Fighting Legion (1939), derived from the Zorro stories of Johnston McCulley. (Zorro is trademarked, but Don del Oro is not.)
The green-skinned witches, here named Viridermae, originate in my conflation of many fictional green-skinned witches in my book The Bryan Gospels, an expansion of the 2008 horror film Bryan Loves You. (There their order is called the Marita.) The witches being based in the Pyrenees references the movie The Witches’ Mountain (1972). The Black Tea is related to the Black Liquor from Awful Agonies (though don’t ask me how, I don’t know every secret of the occult).
Harris and Dauson are relatives of Lud Harris and Mort Dauson from the anti-KKK movie The Burning Cross (1947). John Sark, Rose Ember, and the White Riders are from Robert Chambers’ The Cambric Mask. In the book the White Riders are not explicitly tied to racist crimes, but when Cambric Mask was adapted into a now-lost film in 1919, contemporary reviewers considered the villains of the movie to be Klansmen or a stand-in for such. In my story the hood the Cambric King wears, and consequently those worn by Chambers’ White Riders, are connected implicitly to the Pallid Mask from Chambers’ King in Yellow. In knitting together Chambers’ works I wanted to acknowledge the fact that the White Riders carried Klan-like connotations, but I wanted to do so in a way that avoided suggesting that a real-life white supremacist terrorist group are the servants of the entirely fictitious King in Yellow. And so while the Klan ends up following the Cambric King, they are driven by their own, much more evil purposes and are blind to all of the fictional occult stuff that’s going on.
Dan Rogers and John Brown (aka “Bad Jim Blake”) are from the B-Western The Night Rider (1932). Nevada Jack Mackenzie was played in a series of Westerns by Johnny Mack Brown, starting with The Ghost Rider (1943). The connection between John Brown and Jack Mackenzie is a joke on Johnny Mack Brown’s surname; notably, Brown played a fictionalized version of himself later in his career, wherein he frequently teamed up with “Alibi” Terhune. Presumably Nevada Jack and the fictional Johnny Mack Brown represent the same character.
Martin Brenner, Mario, Brockham Castle, and the Black Rider are from the movie The Black Rider (1954). Mario’s last name of Baldur is a reference to Mario Baldur from The Witches’ Mountain, who is the nephew mentioned later on as a sacrifice to the Pyrenees witches (thus explaining his fate in his own movie).
Captain Video, the Video Rangers, the Western Agents, Dr. Pauli, and Ultima Aureans are all from the TV series Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949-1955), which spun off a film serial, Captain Video, Master of the Stratosphere (1951). Captain Video was the first American sci-fi TV series, and it ran for 1,537 episodes, all of which besides a small handful are now completely lost. The show had a shockingly small budget, and to pad the runtime, it ran a segment wherein Captain Video showed off surveillance footage of his Western Agents—i.e., clips from B-Westerns that the studio had the rights to. With chronology in Captain Video being as inconsistent as that of the B-Westerns themselves, with some episodes set in the 1950s and others in the 22nd Century, it is clear that Captain Video was fighting some kind of chronal conflict across multiple periods of history. The Blayden dynasty is a reference to Frank Blayden, alias the Rattler, from the Ken Maynard Western serial Mystery Mountain (1934). In 1976, Western fan Richard Patterson cobbled together dozens of public domain B-Westerns into Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch, an epic in which the Rattler faces off against a veritable army of B-Western heroes, including the Three Mesquiteers/Range Busters, Johnny Mack Brown, and countless others. Because The Night Rider’s John Brown was played by top Western star Harry Carey, it can be assumed that he was a member of Captain Video’s army against the Rattler as well. The Blayden dynasty appeared in “The Bulk Who Walked the West,” a backup story in my novelization of The Amazing Bulk (2012), but that story is set in a different universe than this one, hence the reference to the Blaydens traveling universes.
The Hillcrist family and Brian Heslewood are from the film The Black Abbot (1934). Phillip Shadwell is a fusion of the butler Phillips from The Black Abbot and the butler Shadwell from the biker horror movie Psychomania (1973). Hubert of Redruth, the Earls of Chelford, and Harry and Dick Alford are from Edgar Wallace’s The Black Abbot (1926), which may or may not have inspired the 1934 film, whose credits do not mention Wallace despite the shared title and similar plot. Leonard O’Shea/Goodman/The Terror and Pangleton Abbey are from Wallace’s play The Terror (1927), which began life as an adaptation of The Black Abbot. Jacques Sorgue, the Black Priest, is from Robert Chambers’ short stories “The Purple Emperor” and “The Messenger” from The Mystery of Choice; the Black Priest’s modern successor was revealed in Awful Agonies.
Nurse Sweet, aka Nurse Hill, is intended to be a version of the titular protagonist of the movie Sugar Hill (1974).
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