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It takes the cops a year to take the yellow crime scene tape down from Carcosa. Rust doesn’t know why they waited so long. The place was a legend before the week was out. The news says they’re starting to find cigarette butts inside, whiskey bottles, condoms. It’s the last part that Marty takes almost personally. “Who the fuck would want to do anything in that place?”
“There’s got to be an appeal of stripping down in a place designed to strip you of all skin and pretensions,” Rust says.
Marty gives him The Look. “No, Rust,” he says. “There doesn’t.”
They argue about it, about whether or not they should take the case. They retreat to separate corners of the house and fume and Rust goes so far as to take his suitcase out from under the bed and stuff a shirt in it before wondering what the fuck he’s doing. He isn’t going to leave. He rubs at the button on the right cuff until it pops off in his hand and then he fights the urge to put it in his mouth and suck at it. He gets strange impulses like that sometimes. Too much time alone, Marty tells him, like him tonguing a shirt-button is the same as the time Marty got drunk and watched an entire season of Project Runway in repeats.
Marty comes in and Rust feels his eyes on him. He knows even from inside himself that from the outside he is all rigid lines and tangles. Marty lays a hand between Rust’s shoulder-blades and Rust relearns how to breathe.
“It’s a stupid idea,” Marty says. “Never mind. We don’t have to do it.” His fingers contract in, blunt nails against Rust’s spine in a scratch, like Rust needs to be soothed, and maybe he does. Or like Marty needs it—Rust isn’t hardly sure half the time. “Don’t do that.”
“I wasn’t,” Rust says, looking at the suitcase. “I stopped.”
“Well, next time don’t start.” Marty gets the button out of Rust’s hand and puts it on the dresser like he’s going to sew it back on later. Rust doubts to hell that’s true. Marty spent the years after Maggie and before Rust eating TV dinners and the occasional burned steak, he doesn’t know how to fucking sew. Rust does: he’ll fix it himself. But he appreciates, sort of, Marty’s delusion, the fact that Marty is all the time coming across things and thinking he can fix them even though he can’t. Half the time it makes him an asshole. The other half it makes him something else.
“We can go,” Rust says.
“Indecisive son-of-a-bitch.”
“Nobody knows the landscape of hell better than us.”
“That’s good,” Marty says. “Say that if we do an interview afterwards.”
Their client is a woman whose seventeen year-old son is missing. The boy is old enough to run off, and in his town, there’s a lot to run from, but then again, they check the details and he’s a straight-A student. Girlfriend, football team. The town’s going nowhere, but he isn’t. But he spent time, on a dare, in Carcosa, and afterwards his eyes got a thousand-yard stare at the dinner table. He might be living in it, she says. That place. Or there might be something there that would tell where he went.
He’s with the Yellow King now, Rust thinks, when they hash all this out with her and finally agree. He breaks his pen in the car and gets a blur of black all over his hands. Marty keeps fast food napkins and hand sanitizer in the car and cleans Rust’s palms off like he’s doctoring him. He says again that they don’t have to do this but now that Rust has seen the woman’s face, it’s different. He doesn’t, honestly, give a shit about the kid—the kid sounds like a fucking idiot, too much like the worst of him and Marty put together—but this woman held onto the strap of her purse like it was a lifeline. And she looked a little like Claire.
They go to Carcosa with flashlights and guns. Like they could make enough light to matter in that darkness or have enough firepower to kill whatever was still there.
But at first it’s fine. Marty grabs him by the wrist once they’re through the second doorway. Rust grabs back.
“Just a sensible precaution,” Marty says.
“I’m with you.” Rust means it every which way.
They move slowly through the maze. It’s pointless to ask if Rust knows the way, but Marty does it anyway, probably mostly to hear himself talk. For the same reason, Rust answers him, even though Marty knows this just as well as he does: “That would only matter if we were trying to get to the center. We’re just trying to find the kid, and the kid could be anywhere.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Marty says.
“Yeah?”
“Just—fuck him.” Marty’s hand is warm and his grip on Rust’s wrist feels like it’s making the bones compress—Rust likes it, squeezes back hard, too. “I mean, fuck you, asshole.”
Rust nods.
They keep moving. Marty spends a minute staring at one of the bramble-and-thistle walls and it takes Rust a moment to realize he’s trying to figure out how they can get through it without letting go of each other. Rust is a little on the side of burning it down. But they shouldn’t, not if they’re in there (and the kid’s in there) with all the smoke, so Rust lets go first—he’s used to it—and steps forward to try to dig his way through. Something bites into his the pads of his fingertips.
“Marty,” he says.
The world turns in on itself like a collapsible telescope and everything that was far away, and black, and lonesome crashes into his head. Marty keeps saying his name. Time turns out to be a flat circle after all.
When Rust wakes up, he’s alone. His mouth tastes like metal and bone and he has Marty’s watch in his hand. Everything shimmers and there are flocks of birds taking flight just outside of his range of vision—he can see the smears of black on the periphery and hear the thunder of their wings. If this is a flashback, it’s worse than any he’s ever had. He thinks it’s something else—that either somehow he’s on a trip or the surface of the world has given through and the already-spurious rules of reality have been called off. He doesn’t really give a fuck which it is. The Yellow King or Errol Childress or both. The green-eared Spaghetti Monster. He has to find Marty. The last time they were here, Marty found him, and turnabout is fair play is fucking partnership, and Rust licks the back of the watch like he’s going to taste Marty’s sweat and it’s going to be some kind of clue. He tells himself that this is the same thing as the shirt button.
He walks. Something starts following him, but it isn’t there when he turns around.
He holds the watch like it’s a promise.
In Carcosa, there are black stars, and if Carcosa is all he has right now, he has to remember his allegiance to the brighter constellations. Sophia, he thinks, Claire, Dad, Maggie, Marty. Marty. He isn’t walking right, must have hurt his leg when he fell. His hand is bleeding. He stumbles on and doesn’t listen to the footfalls behind him because come on, come on, he chants to himself in Marty’s voice, half the things you talk about are unpronounceable.
He is calling for Marty and his voice is an echo that comes back to him like a boomerang.
He goes into a room.
Its walls are painted white and honey-yellow. It’s someone’s home, he thinks, and just like that, there’s Maggie, her hair up except for the delicate tendrils against her neck. “Come on,” she says, and she tugs him forward. The girls are outside. He can hear them. “Everyone’s been waiting for you.”
“I’m looking for Marty,” he says.
“Never mind about Marty.”
She puts her hand against his cheek. He can feel her pulse, lightly, against his jawline and he can no longer believe that this isn’t real, that he isn’t being offered some sort of choice. In Carcosa, everyone unmasks. Rust doesn’t know what face he’s supposed to be wearing. He kisses her and she tastes like apples. The one time they were together, he was too drunk and she was too angry. He could remake that in this place. Take off your mask, Childress said, and Rust can do that, if he only he can be sure that this is his real face. Maggie’s skin feels like silk.
But—“No,” he says. “If she would have wanted this, she wouldn’t have come to me then. And if I’d have wanted it, I would have stayed, after.” He had looked after her with either love or memory for seven years and she had looked on him with either longing or fascination, but in the end, what had been between them has just been friction used to set her life on fire. And she was not who he had come home to.
“I’m looking for Marty,” he says again.
Maggie says, “Well, you know what, Rust? You never would have found him here.”
He keeps walking. Puts the watch on. The time runs backward. The hands melt and curl around their juncture like snakes. Marty will be pissed; the watch was expensive. He only mentioned it about a thousand times.
In another room, there is Sophia, and he doesn’t even look.
He met his daughter again. He felt the vastness of her love. He could not confuse her with this thing that wears her face anymore than he could confuse a raindrop with the ocean.
Like all stories of human endeavor, like all stories of looking to find what is lost, this one has a wolf in it: Rust just blinks and it’s there, looking at him with lemon-colored eyes.
Rust read all these stories to Sophia. He understands the rules. He says, “I’m looking for my partner.”
“Why?”
Rust doesn’t understand the question. It isn’t about why, it’s about necessity.
“Do you even know the man you’re looking for?”
The man he is looking for is the only one he knows, and the only one who knows him.
“His vanities, his faults,” the thing goes on. “What threatens to split him in two.”
Self-righteousness, Rust thinks, and bad temper. More than anything else, entitlement. Conversations he used to overhear between Marty and his family that tasted like salt so strong it burned his tongue. The days Rust couldn’t even talk to him. A long time ago now—age shifting the topsoil of people so the cracks filled in with the loose earth of time, opened up other things. Other faults and fault-lines where the first had gotten eased. It doesn’t matter, or else he doesn’t see how it matters. If Marty is nothing but brittle shell over crumbling earth, Rust himself is nothing but cracks and darkness, too.
“I never said he was good,” Rust says. “I only said he was mine.”
Unmask, unmask.
“No mask,” Rust says. He presses his thumb against the face of watch.
Little priest, Errol Childress had called him, but now he has no message. All he has is persistence—he will tear Carcosa down with his bare hands if it doesn’t give Marty up to him. Even stones should be afraid of him. He is completely unmasked now, yes.
He sees a little boy with the lower half of his face on fire.
“I’m sorry,” Rust says to him. “It already happened.”
Finally, he comes to a room with a pale-faced scarecrow-dummy lashed to the wall. Its face is made of corn-silk and melted candle-wax, a bleary and sallow gold-and-white. Its crown is made of shards of broken glass. It is either the ruler of this place of dark stars or a mannequin made by a man whose mind had been half-destroyed. Rust cannot tell the Yellow King that he is looking for Marty because the Yellow King has no pity—a defining characteristic. The Yellow King in dim Carcosa accepts no plea but sacrifice, and Rust has nothing to give but Marty, and fuck that. He does not bend the knee to this thing.
But he goes behind it and finds the boy, seventeen and scrawny, his face covered in dirt, his hands bleeding.
“Carcosa,” the boy says. “Carcosa. I read the book—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Rust says. “Did anyone else come through here?”
The boy rubs at his eyes. “I don’t know, I can’t tell—I don’t even know if you’re real, man—” He shivers. Says, mechanically, “I serve the Yellow King.”
“Why’re you bleeding,” Rust says flatly.
“The branches—I prick my hands on the branches—”
Rust remembers the rip in his skin, the press of thorns against his fingers. “Hallucinogens. Psychotropic. Something. I did, too.”
“It doesn’t do anything,” the boy says. “It doesn’t make you see anything. It just takes off the curtains. This is always what’s underneath.”
“I really don’t give a shit,” Rust says. He drags the boy up. “Come on.”
The boy puts his fingers in his mouth and talks around them. “Someone did come through. He said he was looking for someone. Was he you? Were you already here?”
Rust doesn’t know for sure, but he thinks not—he thinks either he’s sobering up or the place is loosening its hold on him, having decided he’s not appetizing enough to swallow whole. He thinks it’s Marty the boy means. “Where’d he go?”
The boy points. Rust follows, intent as a bloodhound.
He finds Marty an hour later, in a cross-tunnel that holds nothing but gray dirt. Marty latches onto him and puts his hand on the back of Rust’s neck. His breath is hot in Rust’s ear. It’s like Sophia: like Marty is the ocean and everything else is the raindrop. Marty’s shirt is wet with blood. Rust lets it make prints on him.
“Thank God,” Marty’s saying, “thank God, thank God. I bumped into those branches and I’ve been higher than a fucking kite ever since, and where the fuck were you? You got out of your body and started wandering around and I had to chase after you. I see you found the kid.”
“Yeah, I see you asked him for directions and then left his ass.”
“He had antlers,” Marty said simply. “Thought I’d wait until he didn’t and go back for him.”
Rust ran his hands over his head. “Do I have ‘em?”
“Of course you don’t have them, you asshole,” Marty says. He still hasn’t let go of Rust’s shoulders. “Oh, shit, shit. I kept running into—I kept seeing—” He bends at the waist, his hands dropping down to Rust’s hips, and vomits at their feet. The kid recoils, like he can handle occultism and the masquerades of the Yellow King but not puke, and Rust wonders how much of his trip is self-willed and how much is genuine. He wonders what this boy will be when he becomes a man. There’s no way of knowing, of course, and even men change.
He hushes Marty—“Shh, shh, yeah, I saw it too”—and Marty looks up at him, eyes hot and wet and grateful.
“Do you know the fucking way out of this place?”
“Yeah,” Rust says, meaning as long as you’re with me, and it’s only fifteen minutes before they find their way back into the sunlight, all three of them blinking and blanched and bloodstained. Rust dials 911. Marty keeps saying he doesn’t have a face and Rust says, “I see you, I see you,” over and over again until the ambulance comes and the paramedics inject them all with something as clear as water. Rust floats.
“You gonna need your watch back?” he asks Marty a week later.
But there is one point of that second time in Carcosa that Marty is absolute on. “No,” he says. “I gave it to you.”
So Rust keeps it.