HOW IT ENDS

It was raining in Stockholm.  The landlady was showing Annalisa's apartment to an excited young couple.  She put Annalisa's things in the storage room but she knew the girl would probably never come for them.

"No, no, she was never accused of murdering that photographer and her boyfriend," the landlady interrupted when she heard the couple whispering about the scandal.

"What happened to her?" the young man asked.

"My guess is that a relative is taking care of her.  She fell to pieces.  She talked to me as if she never met me.  Then she started looking for a sister that doesn't exist, a sister of a character in a soap opera she had a small part in.  Someone is taking care of her," the landlady manufactured a happy ending.  No one wants to rent an apartment where things didn't end well.

The young couple took the apartment.  They were rearranging the furniture to suit their taste when the found a script behind a chest of drawers.

"'THE KING IN YELLOW'",  she read the title. "I'll bet this belonged to the model. I bet this was the movie she was in," the wife exclaimed.


"Does it have a character named Camilla?  Let me see," the husband began reading the script and couldn't stop.  He read it instead of sleeping.  He was fired for reading it at work.  Several months later he murdered his wife because she interrupted his reading.

~ The End ~

ESCAPE FROM THE DEN OF THE DAMNED | OPHELIA OBLONGATA |

Richard, Annalisa and Carl checked into the motel at the base of the mountain.

“Enjoyed your spaghetti dinner?” the motel clerk smiled. He soon realized Richard did not remember him from the day before.

“Yes, it was very good,” Carl answered politely.  They walked to the rooms pondering how the clerk knew they’d had spaghetti.   They were too out of it to notice that they still had rather large sauce goatees.  They did not recall leaving spaghetti handprints on the safe.

At a campsite by the Kern River, Bobby and The Fly Eater thanked the campers they just met for an excellent trout dinner.  They settled around the campfire to roast marshmallows and listen to the story about the evil king from the planet of the double sun.

“The Tree of Lost Souls is not of this earth.  The evil king scattered seeds across the universe so that beacon trees would grow on every planet. When the roots of one of these trees finally grew down into the den of the damned, the leaves lit up and began to spin like gold sequins to signal the king to come to earth.

This secret chamber wasn’t always a den of the damned.  It began as a sanctuary where the queen hid her children from certain death.  After eons of isolation in that chamber, the children became demons.  Evil seeps from this tree.  First there were just the two souls of the children trapped there. They could not get out, but they found a way to bring more souls in, with the idea that when king finally found them, they would greatly out number him. 

One day a squirrel happened upon this tree and decided it was so intimidating that it would be a good place to hide his acorns.  Before long every space in the bark had an acorn jammed into it.  Evil traveled up the tree and into those acorns.  As the squirrel ate them one by one, he began to be able to communicate with the children in the den of the damned.  They gave him powers and made him collect souls for them.  Soon he was able to shape shift into the form of a man.  He is often seen on college campuses wearing a mustard colored suit, collecting the best and the brightest for his masters,” The Fly Eater ate a marshmallow.

“What will the king do when he finally finds his children?” One of the campers asked.

 “He’ll eat them.  He is insane with jealousy, afraid his children will surpass him. Here, pass this around.  I made it myself.  It wards off mosquitos and evil spirits.” The Fly Eater produced a famous brand name mosquito repellant.

************************

“She took my bike!” Richard woke to find Annalisa had gone.

Richard and Carl took the van back up the mountain to look for her.

“She said the medicine man told her that there was an extraterrestrial tree on the Rim of the World Highway in Skyforest.  She believes the soul of her sister is in the tree.  Richard, what was in the safe?”  Carl chewed the cuticle of his thumb while he navigated the narrow, foggy mountain road.

“A cursed play. People who read it can never stop reading it.  They go mad.  They do evil things.”  Richard was serious. He didn’t tell Carl that the title was THE KING IN YELLOW because it would give the evil more strength if those words repeated in Carl’s thoughts.

“You think that is the play you were going to do tonight?”

“Yes.  The house we were sitting belongs to the patron.  Carl, that crazy Paiute saved our lives.”

“Look! Your bike!”  Carl pointed to a parking lot nestled in Skyforest .  There were huge candy canes, gingerbread houses and a sign that read, “Santa’s Village”.  It was closed for the season.  The fog was so thick that they could only see a few yards ahead.  A deer calmly walked by them as if they were invisible.

“Annalisa!”  They called for her.  They found her sitting at a picnic table by the Pixie Pantry.

“Why didn’t you answer?”  Carl asked. 

“My sister is in here,” Annalisa held an acorn in the palm of her hand.

“Look at her eyes.  Annalisa, can you hear me?”  Richard got an idea. He ran to get the satchel on his bike.  When he returned he began rubbing the suntan oil on her.

“Here, honey, you have to drink this, it will make you better,” Richard began pouring the suntan oil down her throat.

“What if it kills her?” Carl shrieked. Maybe there are no demons.

~ To Be Continued ~

           

           

                       

OPHELIA O | THE KING IN YELLOW

Bobby and Richard were so late for dinner that their mom had to accept that she'd been stood up again.  She cut a slice of ham for herself then cleared the table and reheated her plate in the oven. 

She turned on the TV and had dinner with Johnny Carson.  "We've got to stop meeting like this," she winked at the TV.  After The Tonight Show she got up to change the channel, searching for an interesting movie to take her mind off her wayward boys.

There was nothing on but THE KING IN YELLOW, a grainy foreign film with subtitles. She adjusted the rabbit ears and was about to turn it off when the actress caught her eye.

"Well, I'll be damned," she took a closer look.  It certainly looked like the girl Bobby and Richard were traipsing around the countryside with.

"Camilla, you can't do this," a man in the film grabbed and held her forcibly by the upper arm.

~ To Be Continued ~

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: OPHELIA OBLONGATA AND THE ANGLE OF THE SUN

OPHELIA OBLONGATA AND THE ANGLE OF THE SUN

 

Dramatis Personae

 

 

Richard, a young actor

Bobby, lead singer in a rock n roll band, Richard's brother

Carl, a photographer, Richard's friend

 Annalisa, beautiful stranger from Sweden searching for her sister Camilla

Richard's Mom in Bakersfield

Seedy Fashion Photographer

Camilla's Boyfriend

Denny's Waitress

Motel Clerk

Liqour Store Clerk

The Cast of Hamlet

The Fly Eater, A Paiute Shaman

Squirrel-Man, a familiar, a demon shape shifting squirrel

Campers by the Kern River

A Mysterious Patron

Annalisa's landlady in Sweden

The Man In The Mustard Suit

The King In Yellow

OPHELIA OBLONGAGA | WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

Carl and Annalisa were already at the cabin in Lake Arrowhead when Richard arrived.  Richard didn’t say any of the beautiful things he imagined he might when he saw her standing in the entry way behind Carl.

“You need to shower!  Get in the shower!  It probably won’t do any good but get in the shower and stay there a couple of hours…” Richard said with authority.

“You look like hell,” Annalisa repaid the insult.

“You haven’t seen each other for weeks and this is how you talk?”  Carl slammed the door in Richard’s face.

“He hasn’t really slept since the last time he saw you. We better go easy on him,” Carl whispered to Annalisa.

“Open the door!”  Richard’s voice was strained.

 “I’m sorry.  Auditions for Edward Albee’s new play are three houses down,” Carl shouted through the door.

“You call that going easy,” Annalisa remarked.

“He’s being rude.  I don’t smell anything,” Carl whispered. They heard a crash on the porch.

Richard was flat on his back surrounded by clay pots of geraniums.  A flower box had broken.

“Put me in the shower.  I’m telling you, Doc put peyote in the suntan oil.  Even if you didn’t use it, the stream was full of it.  Annalisa, we have to wash off as much as we can.  It’s time released.  We could be crazy for days,”

“How do you know if it’s affecting you?”  Annalisa asked.

“I wasn’t sure until now.  I was trying to get the geraniums to shut up.  When Carl said, ‘Edward Albee’, they started singing, ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf….”

“Let’s go to the hot tub!” Carl suggested.

“You too, Carl?”  Richard cried out.

“We swam out to the raft today to cool off.  I let Carl use the oil.  Doc said it would keep evil spirits away,” Annalisa confessed.

“To the hot tub!” Carl cried out.

“And stew in the stuff?  No, Carl, that is a bad idea,” Richard argued.

They showered until there was no more hot water.  Carl made spaghetti.  Richard found the bottle of suntan oil and placed it in his satchel until he could figure a way to dispose of it.  They discussed how the photo and posters had changed.  Richard’s photo of Annalisa had turned into a photo of a squirrel and the HAMLET posters reverted back to the photo of Richard with the skull and Annalisa in the wings with the man standing behind her.  Carl pointed out that these things had happened before they were exposed to the peyote oil.

Annalisa tried to serve the spaghetti.  She dumped the entire contents of the pot onto Richard’s plate.  Carl and Annalisa scooted their chairs up against Richard’s and the three of them silently ate from his plate.

“We should go straight to bed after dinner,” Richard said with spaghetti sauce dribbling down his chin and onto his shirt.  “We’ll sleep through the worst of it and everything will be fine.”

“Before we turn in I suggest we retire to the library to crack the safe I found this afternoon,” Carl suggested.

Richard raised his eyebrows.

Carl squinted. “Not to steal anything.  I just want to see if you can open it with your ears.”

Richard could hear the tumblers clacking like typewriter keys.  He peered inside the safe and looked as if he’d seen the devil himself.

“Get your things.  We’re leaving NOW,” Richard slammed the safe shut and pulled back as if he was about to be launched from a slingshot.

“Richard, what’s in there?”  Carl begged.

“We have to leave now. No amount of magic suntan oil that can protect us from what is in that safe,” Richard pulled Annalisa to the door.  As they stepped onto the porch there was a rumble in the fireplace.  Acorns began to pour out of the fireplace.  They didn’t stay to watch.  The gravel under their feet didn’t sound like it had earlier.  Carl’s headlights revealed the gravel was gone and the driveway was now paved with acorns.

~ To Be Continued ~

OPHELIA OBLONGATA | ALL PATHS ARE PAVED WITH PEYOTE

“What am I listening to?”  Richard asked with his ear pressed on the rock.

“Do you hear thumping?  It gets louder as we approach a certain angle of the sun.  Bobby heard it.  It drove him mad,” The Fly Eater said.

“All I can hear is my own heartbeat. Where is Bobby?  Was there a girl with him?  What do you mean, ‘mad’”, Richard sat up.  He didn’t have the patience for tall tales at the moment.

“He’s running from the wind.  The girl left several hours ago.”

“There is no wind.  Did she say where she was going?

“Lake Arrowhead.  Your bother cast a spell on himself with my adder.  I warned him not to play with my medicine bag.  I can’t fix it until he returns my adder.”

It dawned on Richard that if he had stayed in bed at that morning, he probably would have arrived in Lake Arrowhead at the same time as Annalisa.  Luckily, Carl would be there to answer the phone and let her in.

“Get this wind off of me!”  Bobby’s muffled scream from downstream echoed through the rock formations.

“Is he alright?”

“The white noise wind follows him wherever he goes.  He was complaining that the thumping was tormenting him.  He cannot hear the thumping now but it seems he hates his wind even more.  Some people find it comforting.  I can turn it off when he returns my sacred snake.  He dropped it in the pool and it slipped downstream.”  The Fly Eater explained.

“You’re telling me that my brother has his own private wind circling him?”

“See those trees swaying down there?  That’s Bobby.  Your brother could hear the thumping even better than I can.  I could train him to be a Shaman if he wasn’t so full of mischief.  What a waste.  The world needs his gifts.  You young people sing about the Age of Aquarius as if were a big deal.  There are other things happening. There is something up there changing the way light falls.  The angle of the sun is trying to release demons that have been locked in the earth for eons.”

“Demons?” Richard was hearing that word a lot lately.

“They weren’t always demons.  They were the stolen children of a sky king from a planet with a double sun and hidden in the earth for so long that they went mad”, The Fly Eater explained.

Richard sighed. 

“No one notices the angle of the sun has changed, that it burns the skin worse at sunset than at high noon. The ship of the sky king is up there. You can’t see it but you can feel it burning you skin.” The Fly Eater tossed a bottle of suntan oil to Richard.

“What’s this?”

  “It wards off demons while promoting an even tan. I made it myself.”  The Fly Eater offered Richard a clear brown bottle of suntan oil.

“This is the most famous suntan oil on earth!  You didn’t make this!” Richard protested the obvious lie and tossed the bottle back.

“You can’t get this off the shelf,” The medicine man produced a vial from his bag and poured the contents into the suntan oil and shook it. “Now it’s double strength.”

“What did you put in it?”

“Concentrate of mescal and other natural ingredients.  It’s a secret recipe that is ingested through the skin and makes you one with nature.”

“No thank you.  Tell my brother I’ve gone to Arrowhead to be with my woman,” Richard began the long hike up hill.  Bobby and The Fly Eater were out of their gourds on peyote.  As he turned to wave goodbye, it slowly dawned on him that the rainbows shimmering on the pool he had just gotten out of were caused by a layer of suntan oil.  He slapped his shoulder.  It was oily.  He’d never taken peyote.  He didn’t know what to expect.  Before he let out the big sigh, the medicine man made him gasp again.

“Your woman knows about Squirrel-Man.  He’s following her.  I told her to stay away from the tree of lost souls on the rim of the world, but she’s on autonomic pilot, all medulla oblongata, you can’t argue with that,” the medicine man shouted over the wind which had come up out of nowhere. 

“Squirrel-Man? What the fuck? I don’t have time for this,” Richard kept climbing.

 “Richard!”  Bobby cried out to his brother, waving one arm and holding the Fly Eater’s adder snake in the other.

“I’ll catch you later!  Tell mom I’ll drop in next time.  I have a show!  Bye!” Richard climbed the mountain to the top of the waterfalls as fast as he could.  Every now and then he’d shout out, “Shit!” 

No matter what choices he made, all paths were paved with peyote.

~ To Be Continued ~