Free No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection) by Digital Fiction

up without making a sound.
    I think he
was simply there because he needed to be. He was the same as I remembered and wore
something like the robe I was dressed in. Without thinking, I hugged him and
pressed my nose into his neck. He was warm and alive. Questions fell away, and
I stepped back to look at his face.
    The only
difference I noticed up close was a slight darkening and sunken look around his
eyes.
    “What is
this?”
    “Carcosa,
I told you.”
    He seemed
to think the name would tell me everything. It rattled around in the back of my
head, a form with meaning always slipping out of reach.
    “C’mon,
they’re waiting,” he said as he turned and started walking along the shore.
“They?”
    “The
others. You’ll see.”
     
    One of the
buildings, though rotting and spotted with niter, was more or less in one
piece. Eric led me to it, pointing out landmarks that meant nothing to me at
that time.
    I didn’t
think so much of Carcosa. If it was supposed to be a sanctuary or something, it
looked to have seen better days. The people too didn’t look to be in such a
good way.
    As we
walked along the lakeshore, Eric stopped to talk to someone and dropped behind
me.
    When I
turned, I was confronted by a woman with hatchet features all but cutting her
face in half. I could see she’d been attractive once, but all the fat and maybe
vitality were gone from her. Except for her eyes, which were bright and showed
no signs of hunger.
    “You’re
the new arrival,” she said rather than asked. “Nice to meet you.”
    “The King
said you would come, and Eric too.” “Do you know Eric?”
    “Only by
way of the King, it’s how it is around here. Those who get close to the King
have to give him something, or promise to.”
    “What did
Eric give him?”
    “He hasn’t
given it yet, as far as anyone knows.” “Why are you all here?”
    She half
turned her face away and looked out across the lake. I thought maybe I’d lost
her to a daydream, but she turned back a moment later.
    “To live.”
    So it
is a sanctuary . I couldn’t imagine
what they were running from to come here and to be forgotten. “What are you
hiding from?”
    “Life.
Here, life forgets us, but the King needs things to keep us hidden. Nothing
worth having is easily bought.”
    “All of
you give something to the King?”
    She
nodded. “It’s the law. In return, he gives us all the same boon.”
    It was an
old word, and it took me a moment to understand her meaning. “What kind of
things do you give?”
    She
shrugged. “Sometimes big things, sometimes small. They have to be important and
come from within. Sometimes the King puts them to use for Carcosa…other times,
he discards them after a while.”
    Eric
appeared beside me again and the woman nodded. She didn’t say another word, but
just walked away. I should’ve asked Eric about her and what she’d said, but
being near him again made me forget it.
    All that
mattered was that Eric was here — it didn’t matter where here was as
long as I was with him.
     
    The first
floor of the building was taken up by lines of mismatched benches arranged like
pews. There were maybe thirty or more people there, and they looked at us each
in turn as we came in. Nothing unified them — not age or race or sex — but they
all had dark rings around their eyes, some more than others.
    An aisle
of sorts led between the arranged seats to a raised platform. A figure wearing
yellow robes, bigger than but as tattered as everyone else’s, stood waiting
there. For all that he looked like a beggar, his clothes suggested something
regal.
    I followed
Eric towards him, trying to avoid the stares of the others as we passed. Doubt
started to tie itself into a knot in my stomach. For the first time, I
seriously wondered where I was and why Eric had come here.
    I think I
knew he’d promised them something, but couldn’t figure out what exactly. By the
time I did, there was nothing I could do.
    The yellow
King – for