Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.-the King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers
The Woods were only the woods after the lone streetlight went out. By then the city didn’t care, the surrounding area was the wildlands. The borderlands. A place thinned by being forgotten, a place populated with those pushed to the edges of civility, a place everyone in the hood called The Jungle.
It called. It called for years, whispering into the darkness waiting for the right one to hear. It called the baseheads, the crackheads, the junkies but they never answered. Intoxication proved to be the wrong gateway and it searched for something else. It learned. It observed. It watched the men who coveted power, it took them but consumed them quickly. It had no use for such callow, selfish creatures. It needed something new.
The lonely king relegated to his yellows and mutterings and calling from his isolation.
The couple who came one night were of interest only in the way the eternal passes time observing. It only heard as it was too disinterested not to hear. The little creatures bickered, fighting over something and it was going to return to a state of somnolence until it was given blood. The woman, pregnant and enraged stepped back from the body and wiped the blood from her face.
“I told you never again.”
It was moved. It felt moved. It transubstantiated enough to ooze from the deep shadows wearing the semblance of man skin. It spoke with the wet voice of all its sons and all its madness and obsession, “I am the Black Man. Stalker Among the Stars.” She stood tall and straight, blood smeared her answer was the right answer. “I don’t shudder. I will not dream. Be mine, obey or be gone.”
Obey.
Yes.
The man shadow suit knew.
It knew.
The King knew.
The dead man on the ground spoke in blood as the thing in the wood greedily drank his life and offered it right back to its new queen.
“Birth me a daughter and we shall call you mother. The Queen in Yellow who shall set her offspring on the world. Call her dream. Call her nightmare. Call her the Black Pharaoh.”