In the Church of St. Barnabé, vespers had ended.
The clergy left the altar, and the little choirboys crossed the chancel and settled into their stalls. A Suisse in a splendid uniform marched down the south aisle, striking his staff against the stone floor every fourth step. Behind him came Monseigneur C——, a respected priest and a powerful preacher.
My chair was close to the chancel rail. I turned toward the west end of the church, and everyone else between the altar and the pulpit turned with me.
There was a soft scraping of chairs and a rustle of clothing as the congregation settled down again.
The preacher climbed the pulpit steps.
The organ voluntary stopped.
I had always enjoyed the organ music at St. Barnabé. It was highly educated and technically complex, perhaps too complex for me to understand fully, but it expressed a sharp, almost cold intelligence. Above all, it had that unmistakable French quality of taste—controlled, dignified, restrained.
But today, from the very first chord, something felt wrong.
During vespers, the smaller organ in the chancel had supported the beautiful voices of the choir. Every so often, however, a heavy hand from the great organ in the west gallery had crashed into the music, destroying the calm of those pure voices.
It was not merely ugly or badly played.
The musician clearly knew exactly what he was doing.
And every time the strange music returned, I found myself thinking about something I had read in books on architecture.
In ancient times, churches were sometimes consecrated as soon as the choir was finished. The nave might not be completed until fifty years later, and sometimes it was never formally blessed at all.
I wondered, rather foolishly, whether that had happened at St. Barnabé.
Could something that had no business being inside a Christian church have slipped into the unfinished nave long ago and taken possession of the west gallery?
I had read stories about such things.
Just not in books about architecture.
Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was barely more than a hundred years old, and I smiled at the ridiculous thought of medieval superstition haunting such a cheerful little eighteenth-century rococo church.
But now vespers were finished.
There should have been a few quiet chords to encourage meditation while we waited for the sermon.
Instead, the terrible music exploded from the west end again as the clergy left the altar, as if the organist had been waiting for them to go.
I have always belonged to an older and simpler generation. I never cared much for finding mysterious psychological meanings in art. I have always believed that music was simply melody and harmony.
Yet there was something in the maze of sounds coming from that organ.
Something was being hunted.
The pedals raced up and down after it.
The manuals thundered above them as if cheering the chase.
Poor devil, whoever he was.
There seemed to be no chance of escape.
My nervous irritation turned into anger.
Who was playing that music?
How dare he play like that during divine service?
I looked around at the congregation.
No one seemed disturbed.
The nuns remained kneeling, their peaceful faces turned toward the altar. Their white head coverings cast pale shadows over their brows, but nothing disturbed their devotion.
The fashionable woman sitting beside me looked expectantly toward Monseigneur C——.
From her expression, the organ might have been playing an Ave Maria.
At last the preacher made the sign of the cross and called for silence.
I turned toward him with relief.
I had not yet found the peace I had come to St. Barnabé seeking.
Three nights of physical suffering and mental anguish had exhausted me. The last night had been the worst.
My body was worn out.
My mind was numb, yet strangely sensitive to everything around me.
I had come to my favorite church hoping it might calm me.
For I had been reading The King in Yellow.
“The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in their dens.”
Monseigneur C—— spoke the words of his text calmly, looking over the congregation.
For some reason, my eyes drifted toward the west end of the church.
The organist was coming out from behind the pipes. He walked along the gallery toward a small door that led to a staircase descending directly to the street.
I watched him disappear through it.
He was a thin man.
His face was as white as his coat was black.
“Good riddance,” I thought.
“With your wicked music! I hope your assistant plays the closing voluntary.”
I turned back toward the gentle face in the pulpit.
At last, I thought, I could relax.
“My children,” the preacher began, “there is one truth that the human soul finds harder than any other to understand.”
He paused.
“It has nothing to fear.”
He looked quietly over the congregation.
“The soul can never accept that nothing can truly harm it.”
“Curious doctrine,” I thought.
“For a Catholic priest, at least. Let us see how he reconciles that with the teachings of the Fathers.”
“Nothing can truly harm the soul,” he continued in his calm, clear voice, “because—”
I never heard what came next.
My eyes left his face and returned to the west gallery.
The same man was coming out from behind the organ.
He was walking along the gallery in exactly the same direction.
But he could not possibly have had enough time to return.
And if he had returned, I would have seen him.
A faint chill passed through me.
My heart sank.
Yet what he did was none of my concern.
I watched him.
I could not look away from that black figure and that white face.
When he came directly opposite me, he turned.
His eyes met mine.
He gave me a look of hatred so intense and deadly that I have never seen anything like it before.
God grant that I never see it again.
Then he disappeared through the same little door.
The very door through which I had watched him leave less than a minute earlier.
I sat there trying to gather my thoughts.
My first sensation was like that of a small child who has been badly hurt and suddenly stops breathing before bursting into tears.
To become the object of such hatred without knowing why was almost unbearable.
And the man was a complete stranger.
Why did he hate me?
Why me, whom he had never seen before?
For a moment, every other feeling disappeared beneath that pain.
Even fear seemed less important.
I did not doubt what I had seen.
But then reason returned.
And reason brought me some comfort.
As I had already said, St. Barnabé was a modern church.
It was small and brightly lit. From almost anywhere, one could see the whole interior.
The organ gallery was flooded with strong white light from a row of tall clerestory windows. There was not even colored glass to distort the view.
The pulpit stood in the middle of the church.
So whenever I was facing it, anything moving at the west end was bound to catch my eye.
It was no wonder I had seen the organist when he passed the first time.
I had simply misunderstood the interval between his appearances.
He must have entered again through the other side door.
And that terrible look?
There had been no such thing.
I was simply a nervous fool.
I looked around the church.
What kind of place was this for supernatural horror?
I looked at the calm, intelligent face of Monseigneur C——.
His composed manner.
His easy, graceful gestures.
Wasn’t all of that enough to make any gruesome mystery seem absurd?
I glanced above his head and nearly laughed.
A strange little woman supported one corner of the pulpit canopy. The canopy itself looked like a fringed damask tablecloth caught in a strong wind.
If a basilisk suddenly appeared in the organ gallery, that ridiculous woman would simply point her golden trumpet at it and blow it out of existence.
I laughed silently at the image.
At the time, I thought it was very funny.
Then I began mocking myself and everything around me.
I even mocked the old woman outside the railing who had charged me ten centimes for my chair before allowing me into the church.
“She looks more like a basilisk,” I told myself, “than that pale-faced organist does.”
From that miserable old creature, my mockery spread to everyone.
Yes.
Even Monseigneur C——.
All sense of devotion had disappeared from me.
I had never behaved like that in my life.
Yet suddenly I felt an almost irresistible desire to laugh at everything.
As for the sermon, I could not hear a word.
A ridiculous little rhyme kept jingling inside my head, keeping time with the most absurd and irreverent thoughts.
There was no point in remaining there.
I needed to get outside.
I needed to shake off this horrible state of mind.
I knew I was being rude.
Still, I stood up and left the church.
Spring sunlight flooded the Rue St. Honoré as I hurried down the steps.
At one corner, a flower seller’s cart was piled high with yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths. A golden cloud of mimosa surrounded them all.
The street was crowded with people enjoying their Sunday.
I swung my cane and laughed along with them.
Then someone overtook me.
He passed without turning.
But I saw his white profile.
The same deadly hatred was written across it.
I watched him for as long as I could.
Even his slender back seemed threatening.
Every step he took away from me looked like a step toward some purpose connected with my destruction.
My feet began to move slowly.
Almost unwillingly.
A strange sense of guilt began to grow inside me.
I started to feel that I was responsible for something I had forgotten long ago.
Perhaps I deserved whatever this man intended to do to me.
Whatever it was, it had happened far in the past.
Very far.
It had remained buried all these years.
But now it was rising again.
Soon it would stand before me.
I had to escape.
I stumbled into the Rue de Rivoli, crossed the Place de la Concorde, and reached the Quai.
I stared at the sunlight with sick eyes.
It glittered through the white spray of the fountain and poured over the backs of the dark bronze river gods.
Far away, the Arc de Triomphe seemed to float inside a haze of purple mist.
Beyond it stretched endless lines of gray tree trunks and bare branches touched with the faintest green.
Then I saw him again.
He was walking down one of the chestnut-lined paths of the Cours la Reine.
I abandoned the riverside.
I crossed blindly toward the Champs-Élysées and turned toward the Arc.
The setting sun poured across the green grass of the Rond-point.
There he was.
He sat on a bench in the full sunlight.
Children played nearby.
Young mothers sat around him.
He looked like nothing more than an ordinary Sunday stroller.
Just another man enjoying the afternoon.
Just like me.
I almost said the words aloud.
But I could still see the hatred in his face.
He wasn’t looking at me.
I crept past him and dragged my heavy feet up the Avenue.
Every time I encountered him, I felt that he was coming closer to fulfilling his purpose.
And I kept trying to save myself.
The last rays of sunlight were shining through the great Arc.
I walked beneath it.
And suddenly he was standing directly in front of me.
Face to face.
I had left him far behind on the Champs-Élysées.
Yet he had somehow joined the stream of people returning from the Bois de Boulogne.
He came so close that his body brushed against mine.
His thin frame felt like iron beneath the loose black coat.
He showed no sign of hurry.
No sign of exhaustion.
No sign of any ordinary human emotion.
Everything about him expressed one thing.
The will to destroy me.
And the power to do it.
I watched in terror as he walked away down the broad, crowded Avenue.
Carriages flashed past.
Horses shook their shining harness.
Members of the Garde Républicaine moved through the crowd in their helmets.
Soon the man disappeared from sight.
Then I turned and ran.
I fled into the Bois and kept going far beyond it.
I do not know where I went.
After what seemed like many hours, darkness had fallen.
I found myself sitting at a table outside a small café.
Somehow, I had wandered back into the Bois.
Hours had passed since I had last seen him.
Physical exhaustion and mental suffering had finally drained me of the ability to think or feel.
I was so tired.
I wanted only to hide somewhere.
I wanted to crawl back into my own little den.
I decided to go home.
But home was a long way away.
I lived in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage running between the Rue de Rennes and the Rue du Dragon.
It was an impasse, a passage meant only for pedestrians.
Above the entrance on the Rue de Rennes was a balcony supported by an iron dragon.
Inside the court stood tall, old buildings on both sides, with more buildings closing off the ends where the passage opened onto the two streets.
During the day, enormous gates stood open inside the deep archways.
After midnight, they were closed.
Anyone arriving late had to enter through small doors in the walls.
The pavement was sunken and collected filthy pools of water.
Steep staircases led down directly to doors opening onto the court.
The ground floors were occupied by secondhand dealers and metalworkers.
All day long, the place echoed with the ringing of hammers and the clang of iron.
Down below, the place was dirty and unpleasant.
But upstairs there was warmth, cheerfulness, and honest hard work.
Five flights up were the studios of architects and painters.
There were also hiding places for middle-aged students like me who wanted to live alone.
When I first came there, I had been young.
And I had not been alone.
I had to walk for some time before I found a carriage.
At last, near the Arc de Triomphe, an empty cab appeared.
I hailed it and climbed inside.
The journey from the Arc to the Rue de Rennes took more than half an hour.
The horse was exhausted from carrying Sunday pleasure-seekers all day.
There had been plenty of time for me to encounter my enemy again before reaching the Dragon.
But I never saw him.
My refuge was almost within reach.
In front of the wide entrance, a crowd of children were playing.
The concierge and his wife were among them with their black poodle, trying to keep order.
A few couples were dancing on the sidewalk.
I returned their greetings and hurried inside.
Everyone who lived in the court had gone out into the street.
The passage itself was almost completely deserted.
Only a few lanterns hung high above, their gas flames burning weakly.
My apartment was at the top of a house halfway down the court.
The staircase began almost directly from the street, with only a narrow strip of passage between the doorway and the steps.
I reached the open door.
The familiar, crumbling staircase rose before me.
Home.
Rest.
Safety.
I placed one foot over the threshold.
Then I looked back over my right shoulder.
He was there.
Ten paces away.
He must have entered the court with me.
He was walking directly toward me.
Neither fast nor slow.
Just straight toward me.
And now he was looking at me.
For the first time since our eyes had met across the church, we looked directly at each other again.
I knew then that the moment had come.
I stepped backward into the court.
I kept my face toward him.
I intended to escape through the entrance on the Rue du Dragon.
But his eyes told me that I would never escape.
It seemed to take ages.
I backed away.
He advanced.
Neither of us spoke.
Neither of us made a sound.
At last I felt the shadow of the archway.
One more step brought me inside it.
I had planned to turn and run into the street.
But this was not the shadow of an archway.
It was the darkness of a vault.
The great gates on the Rue du Dragon were closed.
I knew it from the blackness around me.
And at the same instant, I saw that he knew it too.
His face gleamed in the darkness as he came closer.
The deep vault.
The enormous closed doors.
The cold iron clamps.
Everything seemed to be on his side.
The thing he had threatened had finally arrived.
It seemed to gather itself from the bottomless darkness and come crashing down upon me.
And I knew that it would strike through his infernal eyes.
There was nowhere left to run.
I pressed my back against the barred doors.
And faced him.
There was a scraping of chairs against the stone floor.
The congregation was rising.
I heard the Suisse’s staff striking the floor in the south aisle as he led Monseigneur C—— toward the sacristy.
The kneeling nuns finally came out of their devout silence.
They made their reverence and left.
The fashionable woman beside me stood too.
As she passed, she gave me a brief, disapproving glance.
I felt almost dead.
Yet every tiny detail around me seemed painfully vivid.
I sat among the slowly moving crowd.
Then I rose and walked toward the door.
I had slept through the sermon.
Had I really slept through it?
I looked up.
The organist was walking along the gallery toward his place.
I could see only his side.
His thin, bent arm, covered in black, looked like one of those nameless instruments of torture found in the abandoned chambers of medieval castles.
But I had escaped him.
His eyes had told me I would not.
Had I really escaped?
The thing that gave him power over me had returned from the darkness where I had hoped to keep it buried.
Because now I knew who he was.
Death had changed him.
The terrible place where lost souls go—the place to which my weakness had sent him long ago—had changed his appearance for everyone else.
But not for me.
I had recognized him almost immediately.
I had always known what he had come to do.
And now I understood.
While my body had remained safe inside this cheerful little church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.
I staggered toward the door.
The organ suddenly exploded overhead.
A blinding light filled the church.
The altar disappeared from my sight.
The people vanished.
The arches disappeared.
The vaulted ceiling vanished.
I raised my burned, aching eyes toward the endless glare.
And I saw black stars hanging in the heavens.
Cold, wet winds blew across my face from the lake of Hali.
Far away, across leagues of rolling clouds, I saw the moon dripping with spray.
And beyond it, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the moon.
Death had changed him for every eye but mine.
The terrible kingdom of lost souls had changed him.
But I had known him.
And now I heard his voice.
It rose through the blazing light.
It grew louder.
It swelled into a terrible thunder.
I fell.
The radiance became brighter and brighter, pouring over me like waves of flame.
Then I sank into the depths.
And the King in Yellow whispered to my soul:
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”