Read In the Court of the Yellow King for Free Online

Weird Tales . She wore a homespun dress edged with silver. From that far away, I could hear her singing some bloodthirsty old Scotch-Irish ballad like ‘Down In The Willow Garden,” you could tell by key and meter, but that wasn’t quite it.
    Not quite it at all. When I passed her on the road, the girl in the tree shouted something in a language I didn’t understand.
    I stopped, shading my eyes and trying to make out her face. A gold chain with a cross on it hung between her pale, freckled breasts. Every yellow ray of sun seemed to follow her hand, tipping her azure-veined white arms with gold wings and tingeing her hair with rose, as if from some faint warm light within her skull.
    “Say again, little lady? I don’t speak that lingo. Je suis Americain. I’m a disk jockey with the ABC Radio Network in New Y— ”
    “I shall not tell you. It is a secret,” she called back in a honeyed drawl that didn’t sound French any more, and maybe a little older than I guessed. On both cheeks a pink spot was burning, and her eyes were very bright. “ Our hunting-falcon arrives. Now we got to starve you. Then you learn to hunt.”
    Those words should have been creepy. Instead, they filled me with a kind of breathless expectancy that began wearing me out almost immediately. Hell, friend, I wasn’t even sure why I ran until I stopped running.
    And when my jets cooled and those crazy kid sneaks quit laying rubber, I looked up and then I had to go to Memphis.
    After that, I’m afraid everything got a little weird.

    The sun hung, a purple globe, above the misty Blue Ridge. Nothing at the bungalow in Memphis looked fully unpacked. It was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestries. An old six-string guitar in good repair stood by the window, looking strangely like an instrument of torture in a medieval gallery.
    I knew that the time had come, with no escape, to sound out the troubadour who could bring blues music all the way to white radio. His eyes burned like black stars, and the shadows of my thoughts melted like twin suns into that accursed lake. I knew that the time had come. The world now trembled before him.
    “Come in, Mister Freed, come in.” The voice had an odd ringing quality to it. The batwinged cherub of juvenile delinquents everywhere (to hear some of those idiots in Congress tell it already behind closed doors) was chunky, but it was merely puppy-fat and shirttail-poor work muscle, with raw bones behind that.
    His face looked like a pallid mask, as pale as his short-sleeved undershirt and hair were black, his eyes the expert drillbits of dexedrine holding something behind them, framing something in place. Something with two layers, Past and Distant Past. Something else behind those. I wondered what ailed him.
    “Welcome. You, uhh, kinda came when we was cleanin’ up,” the joke had been shared on the telephone already, “But... Yeah, yeah, this’ll be good to do. I think we’ll be talking a long time.”
    When the King shook my hand, his grip felt like iron. He showed no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. “I’ve already been gone so long, the wife’s making jokes that I got taken by aliens in a flying saucer,” I joked. “So what the hell?”
    His eyes got strange again. “Oh, those kind weren’t never from Space,” he said out of nowhere. “It’s way more complicated. They come from outside. Between. Anyway. Come on in. Make yourself a drink.”
    My shudder reached a long way back, as though it had been dormant for years and now rose to confront me. I knew that meeting him brought him nearer to the accomplishment of his purpose and my fate. “This is all Fate,” Elvis read my thoughts with startling alacrity, “For a purpose. Because my brother Jesse got taken too soon. I swear to God, no one knows how lonely I get without him. And how empty I really feel. Except in the