The Pale Pages

Preface

I closed the book.

My hands, arms, and my whole body were seized by something I couldn’t name. The King in Yellow lay before me, its words still seeming to writhe on the page, leaving afterimages like something once alive. The line of the play echoed in my mind, that curse reverberating through the ruins of Carcosa:

May the long night be dreamless. May the Black Stars rise.

It was three in the morning. The only light in my study came from an old desk lamp, its yellow glow casting strange shadows up the walls. Outside, the fog of a wet season crept across the glass. I could hear my own breathing, ragged and uneven, as though I’d just finished running a race I hadn’t entered.

Why was my heart hammering like this?

Books surrounded me in towers: Gothic novels, horror stories, occult manuscripts. In the dark, they looked like tombstones. Robert Chambers’ book sat at the top of the nearest pile, and on its cover, that vague yellow mark seemed to pulse. I stared at it until my eyes watered, until the mark began to spread at the edges of my vision into a vast pale nothing.

Then the idea came.

No, I have to be honest. It wasn’t an idea. Ideas are rational things, the product of cognition, electrical signals in the cortex. This was something older, something deeper. It rose from the lowest layer of my consciousness the way a body rises from deep water, carrying with it the smell of decay and an attraction I couldn’t resist.

I was going to write. I was going to write like Chambers. Five stories, five completely unconnected stories from different eras, different places, different people, but at the end bound together by a single book. A book I was going to create.

I already knew its name, though I couldn’t remember thinking of it. The Pale Pages. The title resonated in my mind like a voice calling from very far away.

My hand was already reaching for my notebook. I picked up my pen and turned to a blank sheet. The first story should be set in Victorian London…