Carcosa:
You reached the island of Carcosa seven days ago, at 6:35 p.m. by your watch, only to find what look like two suns staring down, one centered, the other offset – an upturned pupil, cataract-white, with a faint bluish tinge, an optical illusion.
Here, there are black beaches with smooth-washed half-glass sand, and masses of shrimp-colored flowers and spindly nests of stick-insects creeping up every semi-vertical surface. All the colors seem different here, just ever-so-slightly “off”: the green laid on green of its grasses, fronds and vines isn’t your green, not exactly. More like your green’s occluded memory.
There is a wet woodsmoke tang to the air, like a doused forest-fire. Breathing it in gives you a languorous, possessive contact high – like opium smoke mixed with bone-dust.
The island – itself just the merest jutting peak of an underwater mountain-range ringed with black smokers, incredibly volatile – was once center-set with a volcano that exploded, Thera-style, its caldera becoming what’s now known as “Lake” Hali.
The lake itself has been filled and re-filled with seawater brought in through a broken end-section that forms the island as a whole into a wormy crescent. Carcosa City occupies the crescent’s mid-section, its highest peak, while the two peninsulas formed by the crescent’s horns almost overlap. The longer of the two is called Hali-joj’uk, “Hali-door” or “-gate”, in the island’s highly negotiable yet arcanely individual tongue.
The whole island takes up approximately eighteen square miles, “lake” included. Nine of those take one from the airstrip to Hali-jo’juk, where the causeway to the dig awaits: Funeral Rock, yet one more island inside an island, a tiny chip barely a mile across split off from the main rim back into Hali itself, a shelf of bare black crag-slopes cradling a black sand beach which separates completely from the peninsula at high tide.
The city is also named Carcosa. It appears lake-center, where the volcano used to be – not always, not every night, but sometimes. Where the first Carcosa City stood once, before it dropped inside: a whole other Carcosa City under this lake? And it appears, sometimes . . .
It happens on two-sun days, mostly, around suns’-set. That’s what they say. One looks across Hali and there it is, all lit up, with the masks, and the beckoning. And then when you look up you see black stars high above, watching you.
The King once ruled in Other Carcosa City, before he was expelled and set adrift. He came from somewhere else entirely, far Away, further than anywhere – came walking through their gates on foot one two-sun day, at suns’-set, and when asked to remove his mask as a gesture of friendship, claimed he didn’t wear one. He looked . . . different, supposedly. Pale, yellow, with horns, all over – no one could think that was really his face. And yet . . . That’s why the volcano blew up, because of the King? Because he wouldn’t leave. So the people in Other Carcosa City made it happen, to make sure he did. This would have would destroyed them as well, but the inhabitants of the other Carcosa were...different.
You look up in the dusk light, out across the lake. The “twin suns” sink towards the horizon in a blurry shimmer. A mirage, an illusion; the same thing that makes the suns look almost bluish-white, rather than red-gold.
Above the center of the lake, where the volcano exploded centuries ago, lights glow in a scattered matrix of green, blue, gold and red, clear and cold. The darkness between them seems to outline shapes – structures, blocks, towers. They’re hard to look at, defying your eyes’ focus almost painfully. Can’t tell if the blur is distance, or atmosphere mirage, or the wake of motion too fast to follow. The bluegreen, poisonous light of the setting suns behind it twists your stomach. You feel the whole thing pulling, physically, like a hook in the gut: some second force of gravity, pressing you towards the lake and the place you know isn’t there, can’t be there—
—not because it isn’t real, but because it’s somewhere else. Some utter, alien elsewhere, so far away its light is older than your species.
It’s that pull, that nausea and that disbelief, which keeps you from hearing the tumult until it’s too late. Distracted by Other Carcosa City’s spectacular appearance, you simply haven’t noticed the boats’ approach, silent and sure – pontooned sea-canoes, anchoring themselves at Funeral Rock’s base so their passengers can shinny up the handhold-pocked cliff and emerge through those cave-entrances you never even knew were there, almost under your feet.
Across Hali, behind Other Carcosa City’s gleaming shoreline, you can just glimpse the “real” capitol going up in flames.
No pain, simply shock, cold and huge enough to sharpen your observational skills to inhuman levels. The not-fungus has finished its work. The creature’s skin is black everywhere but its pallid mask of a face, slick and soft, oily to the touch, almost warm; that’s your blood it’s soaking up, sponge-like, as if every pore is a feeding orifice, swelling with the sacrifice.
And its massive, horned head turns, yellow eyes cracking open. Locking upon yours.
“I am here,” it tells you; look across the lake, where my city rises, and watch us beckon. “You have done me great service, bringing me back into this world.”
“Now: be not afraid, lie still, lie quiet. Your long wait is over.”
Beyond the hovering ’copter, those two suns sink down, white-blue turning red, filling Hali’s caldera with false lava. And when you slump over onto your back, looking up again by sheer default, you see stars: Soft black stars, almost indistinguishable, in a black, black sky.
The King lays one scaly hand on your brow, lightly. Almost affectionately.
“I am coming,” he promises, “to take you home.”