It’s 1998 and you stayed home from school because you haven’t been feeling good for days now. Which is fine by you because you don’t ever want to go back to school after what happened. You can still hear everyone, the whole class, laughing at you. It eats you up inside remembering how excited you were to share your favorite movie with everyone, and they all hated it. Not once did your teacher think to stop the movie or tell everyone to stop being mean. In fact, she was laughing too.

Your mom is downstairs doing whatever. She hasn’t checked in on you and probably thinks you’re still sleeping. You’ve done enough sleeping so you pull yourself out of bed. There’s nothing good on TV, but none of your videos look interesting right now. You’ve seen them all a hundred times. Sure, you’ve got all the Disney movies like Fantasia and A Goofy Movie. Who doesn’t have Disney movies? When your parents take you shopping at K-Mart and Caldors you’ve found fairy tale movies that weren’t made by Disney. It’s fun comparing them to the Disney ones, and you start liking them better. You don’t like it when your mom and dad call them ‘cheap’ or ‘ripoffs’.

“Mockbusters”, you heard them say once.

There’s some that aren’t just fairy tales Disney’s already done. You’ve found ones you’d never heard of before from companies like Goodtimes, or Faerie Tale Theater, or Dingo Pictures. There’s The New Mother and Black Caroline & White Caroline and The Pink Carnation and Donkeyskin, they were made by Airbag Entertainment.

You think about Blue and Red misbehaving to the tune of ‘Music Box Mischief’ in The New Mother. How many times did you play and rewind the beginning of Black Caroline & White Caroline to hear the song ‘Black and White’? It wasn’t long before some of these tapes became

worn out. You love these movies, but you don’t want to watch them right now. Your favorite movie, the one you haven’t watched since that fateful day at school, is gone. You get scared, and then get angry, remembering your dad throwing the tape on the ground and slamming his foot on it. You told your dad you hated him for that and still haven’t apologized because why should you? It’s gone and they won’t-

Wait, what’s that?

There it is! But you saw it get broken on the living room floor! Did Mom buy you another copy? She always was nicer than dad. Maybe she did this to surprise you because you’ve been so sick.

You pull out a plastic cassette box. You see a familiar symbol you’ve been drawing over and over in your notebooks. When you were bored and not paying attention in class, you used to draw little stars and hearts and hexagrams on your papers, but lately all you’ve drawn is this sign. It’s the King’s sign. Above the sign is the title.

AIRBAG ENTERTAINMENT FAMILY CLASSICS PRESENTS – THE KING IN YELLOW

Even though you still feel sick and tired, just seeing the tape in the case makes you feel better almost immediately. It looks brand new, and you’re certain this is a different copy. Your heart swells with gratitude for your mom, quickly replaced with your delight at watching this movie all over again.

You hear a familiar song begin to play, and soon you’re introduced to the Hyades. They’re the ones who narrate the movie and they appear sporadically throughout it. All of them, wearing dresses in various shades of yellow. You weren’t fond of yellow before. In fact, you hated it.

Whenever your mom made you wear that long sleeved yellow shirt, you thought you looked like a banana. Seeing all the Hyades in dresses, all different shades of yellow, you think the color’s prettier than you did before. Your favorite of the Hyades is Coronis. There’s a lot of them. Eudora, Dione, Ambrosia, to name a few. Last year you wrote to Santa Claus asking for a Coronis doll, like the Disney Princess dolls you used to have (you’re still sad you never got the perfume dolls). “They don’t make Hyades dolls” your parents said. You hoped Santa would bring you one, but he never did, and you were so good. Your mom asked how you’ve managed to tell the Hyades apart but it’s real easy. Coronis has wings like a crow and her dress is this kind of tawny color. People wonder how you know a word like tawny. Listening to them singing about the lost city of Carcosa and Lake Hali, you’re starting to forget all about school and your dad and how sick you’re supposed to be.

It’s amazing, seeing Carcosa and everybody else after so long. You thought you were starting to forget them, but there’s Queen Cassilda and Princess Camilla. They must rescue the Yellow King, Hastur, or Cassilda can’t have her happily ever after. Some parts of the movie are scary, but a good kind of scary, like in The New Mother when she sings ‘Mommy Dearest’ as she chases after Blue and Red, and ‘Pretty in Pink’ during the part in The Pink Carnation where the girl gets turned into a flower. There’s ‘The Statue Song’ sequence too, but the scariest part of all is ‘Masquerade’ when it’s time to meet the Stranger. That’s when Camilla gets chased through the hall by these creepy looking people who it turns out aren’t wearing masks.

You’ve made this movie the center of your world. You started to think about what if the characters from those other movies met The Yellow King and Cassilda and the Hyades. Red and Blue get to escape from the New Mother and are adopted by Cassilda. Black Caroline and White

Caroline become new members of the Hyades and their mother’s not trying to get rid of them. The prince and the girl get to live with his mother, the queen, and dance in a field of yellow carnations. She doesn’t get taken by the angels and the cook doesn’t try to eat them. Poor Donkeyskin doesn’t have to marry the prince or her father and gets a new fairy godmother.

Everyone is happy, the Hyades sing, in dim Carcosa.

By the time the movie is over, you feel better than you’ve felt in ages. You think about wanting to watch the movie again, but your stomach starts to growl. How long has it been since you ate last? Lately you’ve been too queasy to try anything because whenever you do eat it comes right back up. Even water. It’s funny how that feels like it happened so long ago; the fever, the aches, the chill. You don’t know if you’ve ever felt sick with how good you feel now.

That’s why you love The King In Yellow so much over all these other movies. It makes you feel good. Makes you forget. So what if you don’t have friends? So what if your parents yell? So what if the teachers don’t like you? You see what they don’t, and that’s all that matters.

You go downstairs and see your mom sitting in the kitchen. She looks tired and there’s a cigarette in her hand. You can’t stand that she smokes. You always heard smoking’s bad for you and wish your parents wouldn’t do that. You go up to your mom and ask if she could put some waffles in the toaster oven for you. With how hungry you are you feel like you could eat a whole box of them. Your mom takes a long drag of her cigarette before she turns around and looks down at you. And then she starts screaming.

You don’t know what happened when you’re suddenly running back to your bedroom and crying. You can still feel where your mom dug her fingers into your cheeks, starting to pull. Your face hurts and your hands are wet from your tears and something else. You can still hear your mom screaming, screaming at you, screaming at you to take the mask off and when you begged her to stop she grabbed a knife and started chasing after you.

You feel the blade just once against your skin, and now your mother is screaming even louder. Part of you thinks that’s not your mother because your mother wouldn’t do this. Your mother was the only one who never hurt you. What if that’s the New Mother, with her wooden tail hidden out of sight, you think for one delirious moment.

You’re in your bedroom and your mom is banging on the door and you’re scared and hurt and wish it would stop and wish they wouldn’t hate you and wish that everything was okay, when you start running again. You’re running, and running, because even though it hurts you, you have to get away. You thought at least your mom loved you, but she’s just as bad as dad and everybody else. You hate her, and it hurts, and wish she was gone.

You don’t recognize the sound your feet make as they run on the cold stones through deserted streets. You don’t notice yet how bright it is now because there’s two suns instead of one and the sky is yellow and the stars are black. You finally stop when you run into someone’s arms and a familiar, soothing voice tells you it’s okay.

You hear the sound of wings, and find yourself embracing a familiar tawny color. You look up and you see eyes that gaze upon you with a tenderness and warmth no one else has shown you in a very long time. Hands caress your wounds and a gentle kiss here-and-there makes it all better.

They’re all waiting for you, as she lifts you into the sky with her black wings. There’s Lake Hali and a field of carnations, where it’s safe to play later with everyone else. A courtyard of dancing statues and figures that have faces like masks. You hear them; Dione and Eudora and Ambrosia, and Coronis, as she holds you close. You hear the songs the Hyades sing, and now you’re singing too. They’re happy for you, that you’re finally here, because everyone was waiting for you. Red and Blue and Black Caroline and White Caroline and the prince and the queen and the girl and Donkeyskin. All in shades of yellow and gold and black. You get taken to Queen Cassilda who is happy, because now you get your happily-every-after too. Now, you get to meet the King.

And somewhere, somewhere far far away, you aren’t there to see your father come home to discover your mother sobbing in your room holding a knife covered in something black, as she’s screaming over and over again that it wasn’t a mask.

On the TV, the screen is yellow, with black static that sometimes flashes like the constellations in the sky.

That doesn’t matter to you, as you sing the songs the Hyades sing, in lost Carcosa.

COMING SOON FROM AIRBAG FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT – THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

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