The King in Yellow Chapter Seven

DREAMS

Back in Katya’s apartment, they sat by the fire, wrapped in shawls and sipping sweetened tea. Neither had spoken much during the drive back from the countryside and they stared blankly into space until Katya broke the silence.

“We are in danger” she said softly. “We were too close tonight, too involved”.

“I laid a false trail” Dana replied dully.

“That’s not what I meant. We were too close” she repeated “and we have to accept that we’re at risk of being drawn in”.

“I don’t think I want to be killed” Dana protested, bridling, but Katya held up a hand to silence her.

“It is a negation, of course” she said “but there is a powerful attraction – even if we don’t fully understand how it works. I had a colleague named Rosa – a dear friend…”. Her voice trailed away, and then she collected herself and continued. “There is…” she hesitated, setting down her glass and looking Dana in the eyes “there is an experimental technique. Jungian in origin, but the clinical psychologists are very positive about it, they say it desensitises the subject. A kind of deprogramming”.

“I’ve read this, too” Dana said, avoiding her gaze. Katya looked away. “You’re talking about the cognitive-behaviour dream therapy. But I don’t have a suppressed fantasy I can express to – to bring catharsis. My own nightmare is not fantasy at all, not in that way. It terrifies me”.

“Your nightmare?” Katya asked gently “One nightmare? That sounds promising”. She took another of her herbal cigarettes and reached for a lighter as she spoke; Dana started in surprise when a familiar aroma reached her. Katya passed it to her with a thin smile. “Use of a depressant is recommended in the literature” she said, settling back and taking a drink of tea. Dana drew on the reefer several times and leant back, looking up at the ceiling.

“I am in St Cyril’s cemetery, in the moonlight, with a mist coming up from the river around the headstones and mausoleums” Dana began.

She saw movement in the corner of her eye and span around to see shapes moving low down in the mist, around a pile of loose earth. Drawn towards them she made out figures in the moonlight – stooped and crouching figures in mouldering rags. The nearest turned its face to her and she saw the dead eyes and mottled, blue-grey skin stretched over a skeletal frame, saw the shreds of raw human flesh trailing from its drooling mouth when it bared yellow teeth at her in a savage grin. She continued towards the creatures until they all turned to stare at her. Six foul and decaying corpses looked up from feasting on the pale body of a young woman dragged from a fresh grave, gobbets of bloody flesh in their clawed hands and gaping mouths. She stepped between two kneeling horrors and looked boldly around at them all, running her hands sensually over her pert breasts and down her ribs and hips. They watched intently, blood running down their chins as they champed on pale flesh, while Dana unbuttoned her tunic and let it slide down her long legs. She sucked on her index finger as she tugged her lace pants to her knees and stepped out of them.

“I don’t want to be there” she whispered to Katya, inhaling again “but in the dream, I cannot help myself. I have no choice”. Katya nodded encouragingly.

The ghouls sniffed at her and their rotting tongues hung wetly from their mouths like dogs’ as Dana lay down languorously alongside the half-eaten woman, her lithe body spread open shamelessly in the freshly turned soil, amongst bones and teeth and wet coils of human innards. She licked her lips and rubbed at her clit; when the first bony fingers touched her she trembled and let out a deep sigh.

A rotting woman with long, white teeth slithered towards her open thighs and she raised her hips up to meet her, spreading her labia open with her fingers and teasing her long, aching nipples with her other hand, licking her lips. The corpse’s foetid tongue darted to and fro at her gaping cunt while Dana dug her outspread heels into the earth and moaned. The licking stopped and she looked down to see the thing raising its head over her crotch. Arching her back, Dana pressed a fist into her mouth and chewed on her knuckles to suppress a scream as the cruel teeth sank into her pubic mound. Two startlingly red trickles of blood ran over her pubes from the jagged punctures by her clit.