Happy Holidays, Hoshi_Ryo!
The Corsair of Carcosa
For: hoshi_ryo
From: vulgarweed
Rating: PG
Characters: Crowley, Aziraphale, Hastur, The Them, Randolph Carter, Dream, Cassilda the Cat
Fandoms: Good Omens/The King in Yellow/The Cthulhu Mythos/Sandman
Summary: Forbidden literature is forbidden because stories can change the world. For good and for ill.
Prompt: “Aziraphale gets his hands on a rare copy of the play The King in Yellow. Reading and its consequences ensue.”
Author's Notes: “The King in Yellow” doesn't really exist - it's a sinister play that's alluded to and plays a role in the events of four Robert W. Chambers short stories: The Repairer of Reputations, The Yellow Sign, The Mask, and In the Court of the Dragon. H.P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Chambers who alluded to these stories in his own, and the KIY cycle has been adopted pretty thoroughly into the Cthulhu Mythos (by August Derleth more than HPL himself). So I incorporated a lot of elements from Lovecraft stories, particularly “The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath,” to the point where it wound up being pretty much a crossover. Sandman, also - all things that take place in the Dreaming come under the rule of Morpheus. (There are also allusions to a couple other Neil Gaiman works, and shoutouts to several other writers as well.) I hope it all holds up as a story despite this patchwork, and I especially hope you enjoy it, hoshi_ryo!
“This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” - Dorothy Parker
London, 1895
It had been fifty years since the angel Aziraphale had finally given up hope of hearing that familiar knock-and-scratch at his bookshop door any time soon. Oh, he knew perfectly well that his demonic counterpart was alive - well, existing - and on Earth, so Crowley just clearly had better things to do than spend time with the only one of his enemies who really understood him. Well then, Aziraphale would just have to keep himself busy.
Which he did. By doing what he'd always done, and what his bookshop was admirably suited to doing - not selling books. It was absorbing business, this not-selling books, because not selling them meant that one had them. And simply having books was extremely time-consuming, because books are demanding. If Aziraphale hadn't been able to pencil in a Choir of Principalities time-management meeting in 200 years, well, so be it - he had duties.
So he couldn't really be blamed if he barely recognized the knock on the door when it came - or the familiar entity behind the knock, messy-haired and puffy-eyed, bringing in with him the damp and the yellow fog that really didn't smell like brimstone at all, no, not one bit. Well, all right, maybe a little. But that wasn't Crowley, it was just London.
Crowley sauntered into the shop and stretched insouciantly, running a hand through 89 years' worth of bedhead and instantly turning it sleek and stylish, because he could do that. Aziraphale rather prided himself on never being sleek, although he (incorrectly) thought himself quite stylish.
“Really, my dear,” he said. Crowley was just so unfairly relaxed. It wasn't decent. “Opium den again?”
“Please,” Crowley said with a little sniff. “The comfort of my own bed, thank you very much.”
“For almost a whole century?”
“I woke up,” Crowley said, almost guiltily but not quite. “Once in a while.”
Aziraphale nodded disapprovingly. “Only for unwholesome reasons, I'm certain.”
“Of course,” Crowley said.
“So you know nothing of the world today?”
“I know some things. We've a Queen now, right?”
“For decades.”
“That's how it is when you get a good queen,” Crowley said knowingly. “They're built to last. The good ones.”
“By human standards anyway,” Aziraphale said.
“Yes, there's that,” Crowley said. “Say, would have happen to have something to drink?”
“Thought you'd never ask.”
Two wine bottles in, Aziraphale had filled Crowley's hands and his lap and his head with literature. They'd oohed and aahed over fifty years' worth of newspapers, which gave Crowley something to compare Aziraphale's clothing with, as he mostly looked at the menswear adverts. No matter how much time elapsed, Aziraphale was always precisely 28.9 years behind the times. It was reassuring in a there-will-always-be-an-England sort of way, even though Aziraphale had been like that since before there was an England.
“Hmmm, this is interesting,” Crowley said, and kept coming back to The Yellow Book although it wasn't quite Aziraphale's style. “Nice illustrations.”
“Beardsley's on the way out,” Aziraphale said, his lips pressed tight. “It's . . . not quite politically . . . safe these days. Due to his. Associations. Um.”
“I meant this one,” Crowley said.
“Oh, Hallward,” Aziraphale said with a little sniff. “Bit of a dilettante, if you ask me. His work looks fresh at first but it gets old really quickly.”
“But isn't that the style?” Crowley asked. “Ephemeral, epicurean, wan and wasted?”
“Well, they are mortal, you know.”
“Don't remind me,” Crowley said, rifling through the books again. “All this yellow. So much yellow - what's with the fixation with it these days?”
“It represents decadence,” Aziraphale said, trying not to gaze at the colour of Crowley's eyes.
“Yeah, I'm starting to pick up on that. You shouldn't have to work this hard at decadence. Decadence just happens.”
“You're confusing it with entropy. Absinthe?”
“Makes the heart grow fonder, sure,” Crowley said as Aziraphale busied himself arranging the glasses and little perforated spoons. “Is it real decadence if it's so bloody forced?”
“Even more so, because it's artificial. They're very big on artifice.”
Absinthe is not like wine. Wine permeates the brain gently until one feels ever-so-pleasantly dissolved. It's a gentle transition.
Absinthe is like an eerie but graceful green fairy that goes up your nose and explodes like a sort of psychotropic suicide bomber. It's not a precision instrument, and its effects are rarely predictable. But they're always dramatic.
“Sober up just a little, can you?”
“Think it's all or nothin' but I'll try.”
“Never mind.”
Crowley dosed off instead, on the ratty old sofa in the back room. When he woke, hours later, Aziraphale was nowhere in sight.
First order of business regarding Aziraphale's bookshelves was to find which ones he used as a hiding place for his good liquor. Finding that was easy enough.
With a nice buzz on, Crowley rooted through the books and magazines, got lost for awhile in ridiculous tales from the American Civil War, had to hide his head under a pillow for a while after some accounts of the awful happenings in Whitechapel, and finally settled on the only thing he knew would always make him feel better, which was scathing and vicious theater reviews.
Critics seemed to be particularly virulent about a play called The King in Yellow, which no one seemed willing to admit to having read.
Did Aziraphale have a copy? Of course he did. Crowley was pulling it slowly out from the shelf when Aziraphale walked in, saw what he was doing, and squealed. “DON'T!” he shouted.
“Why not? What is it?”
“It's . . . forbidden,” Aziraphale said.
“By whom?”
Aziraphale looked around at the walls, down at the floor, up at the sky, anywhere except at Crowley. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. Either you shouldn't have it, or I shouldn't, right? And either way, I'm always supposed to do whatever it is I shouldn't. Because, demon, right? So if you should have it, then that means I shouldn't read it because it's a holy thing, which of course means that I should. Because of breaking rules. But if it's something that you shouldn't have, then it must be unholy, which means I should have it. Right?”
“Right, but that means you shouldn't. Because you should always do what you shouldn't.” Aziraphale said.
“I'm too sober for that to make sense,” Crowley admitted.
“Yes, we are. We need to correct that,” Aziraphale said, reaching for the bottle.
It took half a bottle of brandy for Crowley to get around to asking, “So is it any good, though?”
“It better be, for what it cost me,” Aziraphale said. “I think it's got a . . . pungent bouquet.”
“Not the brandy,” Crowley said, slumping down on the couch. “The play.”
“I don't think it is,” Aziraphale said. He had never meant to read it, after all - there are books that are meant for having, and even bragging about having, but not for reading. This must certainly be one of them.
But it was too late. He had opened it. And Crowley was peering over his shoulder. The first act, reassuring by its very banality. Many readers do not make it past this point, but those who do are likely to have their eyes caught by the second act, and then it is truly too late.
Aziraphale and Crowley read, and they drank, and they read. And they laid back upon the ratty sofa in the backroom of Aziraphale's bookshop, and realized they were discussing The King in Yellow. They spoke of the midnight soundings from the mistry spires in the fog-wrapped city of Carcosa, the cloud waves breaking on the shores of Hali. They spoke of Cassilda, and though they should really have known better, they spoke of Hastur.
“Ssssso does sshe make honey?”
“Who?”
“The queen. Like, whatssits, whatchacallit - ants! Ants have a queen. And make honey.”
“They do not.”
“Do too.”
“You're thinkin' of bees. Beesh have a queen too.”
“Just one? For all of 'em?”
“I dunno. I think there'sh more than one bee queen in the world.”
“But only one for the Britishshshsh Empire,” said Crowley, toasting sloshily. “Go - Sa - Somebody Save Her!”
“Here, got a book on beesh right here,” Aziraphale said. “Don't spill wine on it, it's augo - aupho - signed.”
“Uh-huh. Can't read now. Can't see.”
{If Crowley was anywhere near the same solar system as sobriety, something uncanny and unpleasant might have caught his attention about that sublimely boring tome. Notably, the fact that its publication date was decades in the future. Also, the author - who did indeed autograph it - was and remains to this day, fictional. At least in our world, which is one in which 'The King in Yellow' was never really written. This volume sat beside others of its kin, like the History of a Land Called Uqbar, Tsui Pen's The Garden of Forking Paths, Poe's The Worm of Midnight, the poems of Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, and Marlowe's The Merrie Comedie of the Redemption of Doctor Faustus.)
There had opened a crack in the fiber of reality.
Madness in the world often begins in its bookshelves, and spreads forth with its poisoning, spreading spores - of books that were not mean to exist in this timeline. Aziraphale's misprinted Bible collection now nestled next to the forbidden grimoire of the Mad Arab.
God save the queen
She ain't no human bein'
The world in which Aziraphale and Crowley read The King in Yellow back in 1895 was a very different world in 1920 than the one we know.
Some say it began when Prince Albert died young, and the vampire prince Vlad Tepes wooed and won Her Royal Majesty.
Some say it really began hundreds of years ago when the Great Old Ones rose and took their rightful place as Earth's rulers; modern memory only refers to the war that started when Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia was messily murdered in London by two clever Restorationists, who were never caught.
Regardless, we know it was the world in which Mr. Wilde went stark raving mad in Reading Gaol, and shortly thereafter tried with all his might to die - and found he could not.
***
The madness of angels and demons is not the same as that of mortals - a mad mortal influences mostly their closest sphere only, unless they can persuade an entire nation to share in it (which isn't as uncommon as one might hope). But the influences an angel, fallen or otherwise, exert upon the world are subtle and not immediately obvious - and they are widely diffused, spreading through time and space in deep rings like a body of water receiving the splash of a falling body of something (or someone) else. An angel's madness is like the proverbial boiling water in which the proverbial frog fails to notice that it's being cooked alive.
Some mad angels destroy islands and abuse pronouns; others, perhaps more introverted and reserved in temperament and less ambitious, can cause even more damage for their utter lack of focused, disciplined malice. And even a demon who never really meant much harm can bring wrack and ruin simply by virtue (or vice) of having a will that can alter the fabric of reality without really trying. Perhaps without even noticing, until being confronted with the awful truth far down the line when the damage is all but irreparable.
Which is particularly cruel considering it sometimes is the confrontation of a horrible truth - or the mere suggestion of one - that brought on the madness in the first place.
There's that invisible card dealer again. This time, one can almost hear him giggling.
Mindlessly.
In the cold outer void.
New York, 1920
Crowley was wary. For 25 years he'd been navigating this world-that-was-wrong (was it wrong? Some days it seemed fine. Some days he had memories of a world that was different) and there were times when he was sure he could map out where the right was, and where things were utterly wrong.
The sunlight was filtered through raspy-edged gray veils over Washington Square, and the tall buildings around the little park seemed to have some blurry indistinctness at their edges, as if their solidity was an illusion it was best not to examine too closely.
The autumn light caught orange and yellow in the trees around the edge of the park, and one of the peacocks on the grounds of the Government Lethal Chamber shrieked. Crowley shuddered at the sight of the creature. Its colors were wrong. Didn't peacocks used to be mostly blue instead of that upsetting crimson?
A middle-aged woman leaning on a cane walked slowly up the stairs to the Lethal Chamber, the center for civilized suicide, glancing all around her for just a second before casting her eyes down at her feet again. She pushed the door open and never once looked back, shutting out the world.
Alright then, Crowley thought to himself. That's business for you. If you build it, they will come.
He could all but hear Aziraphale's voice in his head, disapproving, fretting. “It's not business, though, Crowley, it's the government. Says so right there in the name.”
“Does that make it better or worse?”
“I don't know,” Aziraphale said, wringing his hands.
“They'd always find a way to do it anyway, if they want to,” Crowley said. “You know that. They get really creative.”
“Maybe that's what I don't like about it. It's so very . . . mass-produced.”
“You're sounding kind of like a Decadent yourself there,” Crowley said. That was how he knew the Aziraphale he was arguing with was only in his head, not beside him getting drunk like he ought to be.
Wrong. It was all wrong, and Crowley could smell it, even though he was inured to it. Sometimes demons have trouble noticing a pervasive haze of petty evil, in much the same way smokers hardly notice the scent of smoke on others or themselves.
This, however, would be like even a three-unfiltered-pack-a-day steelworker failing to notice an entire tyre factory burning down right around him. The whole city square was pungent with it, and it wasn't even coming from the shiny new Lethal Center, creepy-crawly as that was.
It was coming from the corner and a block down, from the armorer's shop and the squalid apartment above it.
“You are not that Mr. Wilde,” Crowley said, looking at the mad wreck of a man, with his misshapen head and his fingerless hand.
“That Mr. Wilde is dead,” said Mr. Wilde. “But I'm sure your friend will be glad to know that before he died, he had his portrait painted. When he was already ruined and broken. When he had no genius left to declare, and no heart left to break, and no mind left to lose. And when he died, he set that mockery free.”
Crowley swallowed hard, feeling the rise of bile at just how much in this world was so deeply wrong, and how little idea he had of what it would even look like if put right again. “I suppose . . . you repaired his reputation, too? Is that where your mad profession started?”
“Kiss me, Crowley,” rasped the loathsome creature. “Kiss me like Salome kissed the dead lips of Iokanaan. And then, only then will you receive the Yellow Sign, and only then will you know.
“The Yellow Sign?” Crowley said, unimpressed. “I've seen it. That lurky old bastard signs it everywhere, all over his manky little realm. Like a dog, scent-marking. Sign of the Yellow Snow.”
“Silence,” bellowed Wilde, or the creature calling himself that. “You wouldn't be so flippant with me if you understood the first thing about what will happen . . . when the nations rise . . . to meet their true King.”
“Their true King? That crazy little . . . “
“BEHOLD!” Wilde declaimed, as the madman Castaigne ascended the stairs with a knife in his hand. Castaigne looked murderous and lunged at Wilde, betrayed.
Several things happened in that moment.
Wilde's cat launched herself at Castaigne's face.
Castaigne threw the cat to the floor and aimed the knife at her.
Crowley made a complicated gesture and made sure the knife missed.
The cat bounded down the stairs and was gone.
And from the darkened closet behind Wilde, a storm was gathering. A whirlwind of maggots, a maelstrom of pestilential stench, and a hand that reached out and snapped Castaigne's neck with a single delicate twitch. When the cold, bony hand made out of foul-smelling gas took the cheap tiara of brass from where it lay by Castaigne's head, the crown turned real, and the dark mist took form.
Duke Hastur stepped on Wilde's chest - stepped through it, crushed his ribs and his heart with a sickening wet crunch and pop and squelch.
“I'm glad I found you, Crowley,” he said with several unpleasant voices at once, wrapping himself in a tattered yellow robe.
“But . . .” Crowley said, his voice gone very small. “So you really are . . . himself? I mean, in the play, Hastur is a place.”
“I am the avatar of the true King, little snake,” Hastur, said, his claws reaching out to close around Crowley's jaw. “And he'll be pleased I've caught you. Complete his set, as it were.” Hastur removed the eerily-carved diadem with its unwholesome gems from his head and held it up through the line as a warped mist began to form within its circle.
Crowley saw a vast city on a cold desert plain. He saw a temple built to no human or human-like proportions, manned by priests and slaves of unspeakable description.
He saw, chained in a stark room of carved basalt, Aziraphale.
“When we have you both,” Hastur said. “We'll make the sacrifice. And bring him through.”
With a shriek of horror, Crowley backed against the wall as Hastur advanced, a reeking cloud of oily yellow gas with outstretching tentacles and a leering face forming and melding from the mist.
Crowley shuddered, pressed himself into the wall, and dematerialized, pouring himself out of the building through the gas lines and into the aether. Now, in this state of terror, it was hard to access the Dreaming - it's never easy for demons, even in the most relaxed state possible, which Crowley had spent a lot of time mastering. Hastur chased him through the darkened narrow streets of the city, twining through the steel of fire escapes and sweeping low over cobblestoned alleyways before flying into the cold vastness of space, far from any landmarks or anchors that Crowley knew.
Crowley never been a particularly gifted astral traveller, but he was giving himself a desperate crash course now - but Hastur controlled the chase, and he had the choice of destination well in hand.
There was never really any question of winding up anywhere but where Hastur wanted him, that grotesque citadel with its Cyclopean pillars and towers, on the hideous cold high plateau of Leng - and with the long distance between, and the remoteness of the kinder and safer lands of the Dreaming, the ones Crowley had only heard tell of and never seen, he would fall under Hastur's power sooner rather than later. And then he would be no help to Aziraphale at all.
But he had not taken one thing into account. Well, many things. It's easy to miss little details when one is living in a warped alternate timeline that should not be.
There is a timeline where Castaigne's aim did not go astray when he hurled his knife in hatred at Wilde's violent cat. That is the timeline in which Crowley was not there to block his arm.
In this timeline, a large, bad-tempered, sharp-clawed calico survived to bolt down the tenement stairs out onto the streets below, to meet with her kin on the secret paths through the Dreaming that are known to all of feline-kind (and only to them.)
We do not know the name she was called by men (if in fact she had one; only Wilde ever seemed to welcome her, no matter how hard she had tried to remove his vileness from the world), and of course we do not know her secret name among cat-kind. We will call her Cassilda.
Through the streets of Manhattan she ran, where there are many portals, as many as there are doorways and sewer grates and secret basements. In a clowder of her soft-pawed, sleek-backed kin, she ran through starlit realms - desert sands and steaming swamps and high mountain forests, all the places where catkind are found, in all the worlds.
And ever since a sad Siamese mourned the loss of her murdered kittens and cried out to the Dream-King for justice, all the cats of Earth have had a meeting-place and a sanctuary in fair Ulthar, where strange harms come to any creature who dares to cast an evil eye upon a cat.
Cassilda the angry calico made her pitch to the gathered council beneath the moon.
“He may not have meant to,” she said. “But he saved me. The one with eyes like a snake, not so unlike a cat's. I would not see him or anyone like him fall into the clutches of the Yellow King.”
“I know who can help,” said a strong young officer, who had once been a small black kitten. All the cats knew at once that he meant the master dreamer Randolph Carter, who had come to the aid of cats many times. One could even say he had led them into war, if it were possible to lead cats.
“Yes, yes,” said the others in many voices - the curious peep of the kitten, the hungry chirp of the hunter, the yearning yowl of the lover.
“I will allow this,” said the huge shaggy cat made out of night's darkness, who had constellations in his eyes.
Carter could always be found by cats, for he kept a snug little cottage in the dreaming that always had saucers of milk by the door. It was located on the outskirts of the glorious sunset city he had long sought, which was built of nothing more - and nothing less - than the eternal radiance and sea-scent of the New England of his youth.
And Carter would always wake gentle and friendly out of the first lair of dream, to a soft paw on his face and a wet whiskered nose in his ear. He opened his eyes to a room that thrummed with a hundred purrs, and listened raptly to the tale from the Captain and Cressilda. He was attentive, but he seemed flummoxed.
“I want to help. But I don't see how. I have told you all my tale, of the Silver Key and Unknown Kadath, and how long and hard and perilous that journey was. Within the Dreaming, it took me many years - the black galleys and the tunnels, the gossip in the seaports. I could never have done it without the help of the ghouls and the night-gaunts. I just cannot see a way I could ever reach that evil place in time.”
There was the huge shaggy black cat again, who spoke with such a strong but distant voice. Carter knew him, and knew that all that had transpired on his quest had been by his sufferance. The stars in his eyes were cold and remote. But not always unkindly. “You still have too much of the waking world about you. You've already made that journey in distance, you need not do it again. You can give aid if you travel in time.”
“Backwards?”
“Go backwards by going forward. My librarian is angry of the loss of several volumes that have been misplaced into this world. They should not be here, and they have changed everything.”
“And how do I do that?”
“Stories, Randolph Carter. Stories.”
Of course. Of course. His quest had become a story, and it was a story that could be read, and as long as it was read, he could travel those roads again. And to set right the world again, perhaps he would not have to. He would just have to see that his story was read by the right person at the right time...
Only sharp feline hearing, and feline eyes in the dark, could have seen that the large black King now had a companion, a female brown tabby. Only certain eyes inured to madness would have seen that half her face was sweet and the other half gruesome, her skin and fur torn away and her muscles and bone exposed to sight. “A story for your son, Mazikeen,” said the Dream King of Cats almost gently. “Only his dreams will reach far enough.” The half-faced tabby lady nodded and purred her agreement, an eerie bubbling sound.
***
Lower Tadfield, England, 1990
“I liked the one about the bloke who goes looking for the dream city,” Adam said. “I liked the part about the cats. I liked the way the ghouls turned out to be good guys.”
There was a black cat watching from a tree near the old quarry. Uncharacteristically, Dog showed no interest in chasing it.
“But I didn't like the horror stuff so much. I thought these stories were 'sposed to be scary,” said Adam Young, disgruntled.
“They are,” said Wensleydale. “He's a founding father of the horror genre.”
“But it's just a bunch of stories about people seein' unspeakable stuff and then goin' mad, and that's the end! I wanna see the monsters!”
“No you don't,” said Wensleydale firmly. “That's the whole point. Things mankind was never meant to know.”
“Well, I don't see the point of it if we en't ever s'posed to know it,” Adam said, crossing his arms. “Is it like that stupid play that we're not supposed to read?”
“I think so,” Pepper said. “I don't like it anyway. All the girls in it do is scream.”
“Well, if we act it out, you don't have to be a girl.”
“Can I be the King in Yellow?”
“He doesn't do anything either, he just wears that stupid mask and then everybody gets all scared because it isn't a mask.”
“It's stupid,” Brian agreed.
“It's a classic,” Wensleydale said.
“That's what they say about a lot of things that are old and stupid,” Adam said. “You know what, let's not do that play. It's so stupid it should never have been written. I won't have it, do you understand? Write it out. It's gone.”
Adam's three friends backed away, a little bit unnerved, and Adam always felt guilty when they acted like that, so he said. “I'm gonna write a better one, and we can play that.”
And he did. It was a terrific play, “The Corsair of Carcosa.” It was about a pirate who was a famous detective, and his adventures with his crew sailing the seas of dream to far off lovely cities. There was a lot of swashbuckling and crime-solving, but no screaming girls or masked kings. It brought with it no madness.
And because it was a story, Randolph Carter sailed it through the Dreaming, back in time, and restored all the bookshelves of the world.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
***
“NO,” Crowley screamed from his prison in the unhallowed city, ringed by the unspeakable priesthood with their torches, trying in vain to shield Aziraphale with his not-very-corporeal body, cringing away helplessly from the horrible priest-king in his Pallid Mask, his scallopped yellow tatters. “Not upon us, O King!” Every fiber of his being shrank from that mask that hid the void - Hastur's Lord, the emissary of the Gods Beyond; Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos . . .
And then the light changed.
And the sky changed.
And then none of this had happened.
***
London, 1895
“Sober up just a little, can you?”
“Think it's all or nothin' but I'll try.”
“Never mind.”
Crowley dosed off instead, on the ratty old sofa in the back room. When he woke, hours later, Aziraphale was nowhere in sight.
First order of business regarding Aziraphale's bookshelves was to find which ones he used as a hiding place for his good liquor. Finding that was easy enough.
With a nice buzz on, Crowley rooted through the books and magazines, got lost for awhile in ridiculous tales from the American Civil War, had to hide his head under a pillow for a while after some accounts of the awful happenings in Whitechapel, and finally settled on the only thing he knew would always make him feel better, which was scathing and vicious theater reviews.
George Bernard Shaw seemed to be particularly gifted in this realm, so Crowley scanned Aziraphale's shelves for more, and zeroed in on Mrs. Warren's Profession.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said scoldingly. “That's rather . . . bawdy.”
“I should hope so,” Crowley said. “I hear he's a socialist too.” He gave that a slightly drunken leer as though it was sexually suggestive.
“If I'm going to risk displeasure, I prefer Mr. Wilde,” Aziraphale said suddenly.
“Yes . . . you would, wouldn't you?” Crowley said, as dim light dawned through the London fog. “Have anything more to drink?”
“You're a bottomless pit,” Aziraphale said fondly.
“Got a century to catch up. Is this play any good?”
“So I've heard. Be careful with that, it's auto-, ago - signed.”
And not in yellow.
"We should go out and see one in the theatre sometime. How about that thing with the pirates?"
"The Gilbert and Sullivan?"
"No, the one about the magic city and the murder mysteries. The Concierge of Coca-Cola or something like that."
Aziraphale gave him an odd look. "It's the hit of the season, dear boy. Tickets are hard to come by."
"I have my ways," said Crowley.
~end
Happy Holidays, hoshi_ryo, from your Secret Writer!
For: hoshi_ryo
From: vulgarweed
Rating: PG
Characters: Crowley, Aziraphale, Hastur, The Them, Randolph Carter, Dream, Cassilda the Cat
Fandoms: Good Omens/The King in Yellow/The Cthulhu Mythos/Sandman
Summary: Forbidden literature is forbidden because stories can change the world. For good and for ill.
Prompt: “Aziraphale gets his hands on a rare copy of the play The King in Yellow. Reading and its consequences ensue.”
Author's Notes: “The King in Yellow” doesn't really exist - it's a sinister play that's alluded to and plays a role in the events of four Robert W. Chambers short stories: The Repairer of Reputations, The Yellow Sign, The Mask, and In the Court of the Dragon. H.P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Chambers who alluded to these stories in his own, and the KIY cycle has been adopted pretty thoroughly into the Cthulhu Mythos (by August Derleth more than HPL himself). So I incorporated a lot of elements from Lovecraft stories, particularly “The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath,” to the point where it wound up being pretty much a crossover. Sandman, also - all things that take place in the Dreaming come under the rule of Morpheus. (There are also allusions to a couple other Neil Gaiman works, and shoutouts to several other writers as well.) I hope it all holds up as a story despite this patchwork, and I especially hope you enjoy it, hoshi_ryo!
“This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” - Dorothy Parker
London, 1895
It had been fifty years since the angel Aziraphale had finally given up hope of hearing that familiar knock-and-scratch at his bookshop door any time soon. Oh, he knew perfectly well that his demonic counterpart was alive - well, existing - and on Earth, so Crowley just clearly had better things to do than spend time with the only one of his enemies who really understood him. Well then, Aziraphale would just have to keep himself busy.
Which he did. By doing what he'd always done, and what his bookshop was admirably suited to doing - not selling books. It was absorbing business, this not-selling books, because not selling them meant that one had them. And simply having books was extremely time-consuming, because books are demanding. If Aziraphale hadn't been able to pencil in a Choir of Principalities time-management meeting in 200 years, well, so be it - he had duties.
So he couldn't really be blamed if he barely recognized the knock on the door when it came - or the familiar entity behind the knock, messy-haired and puffy-eyed, bringing in with him the damp and the yellow fog that really didn't smell like brimstone at all, no, not one bit. Well, all right, maybe a little. But that wasn't Crowley, it was just London.
Crowley sauntered into the shop and stretched insouciantly, running a hand through 89 years' worth of bedhead and instantly turning it sleek and stylish, because he could do that. Aziraphale rather prided himself on never being sleek, although he (incorrectly) thought himself quite stylish.
“Really, my dear,” he said. Crowley was just so unfairly relaxed. It wasn't decent. “Opium den again?”
“Please,” Crowley said with a little sniff. “The comfort of my own bed, thank you very much.”
“For almost a whole century?”
“I woke up,” Crowley said, almost guiltily but not quite. “Once in a while.”
Aziraphale nodded disapprovingly. “Only for unwholesome reasons, I'm certain.”
“Of course,” Crowley said.
“So you know nothing of the world today?”
“I know some things. We've a Queen now, right?”
“For decades.”
“That's how it is when you get a good queen,” Crowley said knowingly. “They're built to last. The good ones.”
“By human standards anyway,” Aziraphale said.
“Yes, there's that,” Crowley said. “Say, would have happen to have something to drink?”
“Thought you'd never ask.”
Two wine bottles in, Aziraphale had filled Crowley's hands and his lap and his head with literature. They'd oohed and aahed over fifty years' worth of newspapers, which gave Crowley something to compare Aziraphale's clothing with, as he mostly looked at the menswear adverts. No matter how much time elapsed, Aziraphale was always precisely 28.9 years behind the times. It was reassuring in a there-will-always-be-an-England sort of way, even though Aziraphale had been like that since before there was an England.
“Hmmm, this is interesting,” Crowley said, and kept coming back to The Yellow Book although it wasn't quite Aziraphale's style. “Nice illustrations.”
“Beardsley's on the way out,” Aziraphale said, his lips pressed tight. “It's . . . not quite politically . . . safe these days. Due to his. Associations. Um.”
“I meant this one,” Crowley said.
“Oh, Hallward,” Aziraphale said with a little sniff. “Bit of a dilettante, if you ask me. His work looks fresh at first but it gets old really quickly.”
“But isn't that the style?” Crowley asked. “Ephemeral, epicurean, wan and wasted?”
“Well, they are mortal, you know.”
“Don't remind me,” Crowley said, rifling through the books again. “All this yellow. So much yellow - what's with the fixation with it these days?”
“It represents decadence,” Aziraphale said, trying not to gaze at the colour of Crowley's eyes.
“Yeah, I'm starting to pick up on that. You shouldn't have to work this hard at decadence. Decadence just happens.”
“You're confusing it with entropy. Absinthe?”
“Makes the heart grow fonder, sure,” Crowley said as Aziraphale busied himself arranging the glasses and little perforated spoons. “Is it real decadence if it's so bloody forced?”
“Even more so, because it's artificial. They're very big on artifice.”
Absinthe is not like wine. Wine permeates the brain gently until one feels ever-so-pleasantly dissolved. It's a gentle transition.
Absinthe is like an eerie but graceful green fairy that goes up your nose and explodes like a sort of psychotropic suicide bomber. It's not a precision instrument, and its effects are rarely predictable. But they're always dramatic.
“Sober up just a little, can you?”
“Think it's all or nothin' but I'll try.”
“Never mind.”
Crowley dosed off instead, on the ratty old sofa in the back room. When he woke, hours later, Aziraphale was nowhere in sight.
First order of business regarding Aziraphale's bookshelves was to find which ones he used as a hiding place for his good liquor. Finding that was easy enough.
With a nice buzz on, Crowley rooted through the books and magazines, got lost for awhile in ridiculous tales from the American Civil War, had to hide his head under a pillow for a while after some accounts of the awful happenings in Whitechapel, and finally settled on the only thing he knew would always make him feel better, which was scathing and vicious theater reviews.
Critics seemed to be particularly virulent about a play called The King in Yellow, which no one seemed willing to admit to having read.
Did Aziraphale have a copy? Of course he did. Crowley was pulling it slowly out from the shelf when Aziraphale walked in, saw what he was doing, and squealed. “DON'T!” he shouted.
“Why not? What is it?”
“It's . . . forbidden,” Aziraphale said.
“By whom?”
Aziraphale looked around at the walls, down at the floor, up at the sky, anywhere except at Crowley. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. Either you shouldn't have it, or I shouldn't, right? And either way, I'm always supposed to do whatever it is I shouldn't. Because, demon, right? So if you should have it, then that means I shouldn't read it because it's a holy thing, which of course means that I should. Because of breaking rules. But if it's something that you shouldn't have, then it must be unholy, which means I should have it. Right?”
“Right, but that means you shouldn't. Because you should always do what you shouldn't.” Aziraphale said.
“I'm too sober for that to make sense,” Crowley admitted.
“Yes, we are. We need to correct that,” Aziraphale said, reaching for the bottle.
It took half a bottle of brandy for Crowley to get around to asking, “So is it any good, though?”
“It better be, for what it cost me,” Aziraphale said. “I think it's got a . . . pungent bouquet.”
“Not the brandy,” Crowley said, slumping down on the couch. “The play.”
“I don't think it is,” Aziraphale said. He had never meant to read it, after all - there are books that are meant for having, and even bragging about having, but not for reading. This must certainly be one of them.
But it was too late. He had opened it. And Crowley was peering over his shoulder. The first act, reassuring by its very banality. Many readers do not make it past this point, but those who do are likely to have their eyes caught by the second act, and then it is truly too late.
Aziraphale and Crowley read, and they drank, and they read. And they laid back upon the ratty sofa in the backroom of Aziraphale's bookshop, and realized they were discussing The King in Yellow. They spoke of the midnight soundings from the mistry spires in the fog-wrapped city of Carcosa, the cloud waves breaking on the shores of Hali. They spoke of Cassilda, and though they should really have known better, they spoke of Hastur.
“Ssssso does sshe make honey?”
“Who?”
“The queen. Like, whatssits, whatchacallit - ants! Ants have a queen. And make honey.”
“They do not.”
“Do too.”
“You're thinkin' of bees. Beesh have a queen too.”
“Just one? For all of 'em?”
“I dunno. I think there'sh more than one bee queen in the world.”
“But only one for the Britishshshsh Empire,” said Crowley, toasting sloshily. “Go - Sa - Somebody Save Her!”
“Here, got a book on beesh right here,” Aziraphale said. “Don't spill wine on it, it's augo - aupho - signed.”
“Uh-huh. Can't read now. Can't see.”
{If Crowley was anywhere near the same solar system as sobriety, something uncanny and unpleasant might have caught his attention about that sublimely boring tome. Notably, the fact that its publication date was decades in the future. Also, the author - who did indeed autograph it - was and remains to this day, fictional. At least in our world, which is one in which 'The King in Yellow' was never really written. This volume sat beside others of its kin, like the History of a Land Called Uqbar, Tsui Pen's The Garden of Forking Paths, Poe's The Worm of Midnight, the poems of Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, and Marlowe's The Merrie Comedie of the Redemption of Doctor Faustus.)
There had opened a crack in the fiber of reality.
Madness in the world often begins in its bookshelves, and spreads forth with its poisoning, spreading spores - of books that were not mean to exist in this timeline. Aziraphale's misprinted Bible collection now nestled next to the forbidden grimoire of the Mad Arab.
God save the queen
She ain't no human bein'
The world in which Aziraphale and Crowley read The King in Yellow back in 1895 was a very different world in 1920 than the one we know.
Some say it began when Prince Albert died young, and the vampire prince Vlad Tepes wooed and won Her Royal Majesty.
Some say it really began hundreds of years ago when the Great Old Ones rose and took their rightful place as Earth's rulers; modern memory only refers to the war that started when Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia was messily murdered in London by two clever Restorationists, who were never caught.
Regardless, we know it was the world in which Mr. Wilde went stark raving mad in Reading Gaol, and shortly thereafter tried with all his might to die - and found he could not.
***
The madness of angels and demons is not the same as that of mortals - a mad mortal influences mostly their closest sphere only, unless they can persuade an entire nation to share in it (which isn't as uncommon as one might hope). But the influences an angel, fallen or otherwise, exert upon the world are subtle and not immediately obvious - and they are widely diffused, spreading through time and space in deep rings like a body of water receiving the splash of a falling body of something (or someone) else. An angel's madness is like the proverbial boiling water in which the proverbial frog fails to notice that it's being cooked alive.
Some mad angels destroy islands and abuse pronouns; others, perhaps more introverted and reserved in temperament and less ambitious, can cause even more damage for their utter lack of focused, disciplined malice. And even a demon who never really meant much harm can bring wrack and ruin simply by virtue (or vice) of having a will that can alter the fabric of reality without really trying. Perhaps without even noticing, until being confronted with the awful truth far down the line when the damage is all but irreparable.
Which is particularly cruel considering it sometimes is the confrontation of a horrible truth - or the mere suggestion of one - that brought on the madness in the first place.
There's that invisible card dealer again. This time, one can almost hear him giggling.
Mindlessly.
In the cold outer void.
New York, 1920
Crowley was wary. For 25 years he'd been navigating this world-that-was-wrong (was it wrong? Some days it seemed fine. Some days he had memories of a world that was different) and there were times when he was sure he could map out where the right was, and where things were utterly wrong.
The sunlight was filtered through raspy-edged gray veils over Washington Square, and the tall buildings around the little park seemed to have some blurry indistinctness at their edges, as if their solidity was an illusion it was best not to examine too closely.
The autumn light caught orange and yellow in the trees around the edge of the park, and one of the peacocks on the grounds of the Government Lethal Chamber shrieked. Crowley shuddered at the sight of the creature. Its colors were wrong. Didn't peacocks used to be mostly blue instead of that upsetting crimson?
A middle-aged woman leaning on a cane walked slowly up the stairs to the Lethal Chamber, the center for civilized suicide, glancing all around her for just a second before casting her eyes down at her feet again. She pushed the door open and never once looked back, shutting out the world.
Alright then, Crowley thought to himself. That's business for you. If you build it, they will come.
He could all but hear Aziraphale's voice in his head, disapproving, fretting. “It's not business, though, Crowley, it's the government. Says so right there in the name.”
“Does that make it better or worse?”
“I don't know,” Aziraphale said, wringing his hands.
“They'd always find a way to do it anyway, if they want to,” Crowley said. “You know that. They get really creative.”
“Maybe that's what I don't like about it. It's so very . . . mass-produced.”
“You're sounding kind of like a Decadent yourself there,” Crowley said. That was how he knew the Aziraphale he was arguing with was only in his head, not beside him getting drunk like he ought to be.
Wrong. It was all wrong, and Crowley could smell it, even though he was inured to it. Sometimes demons have trouble noticing a pervasive haze of petty evil, in much the same way smokers hardly notice the scent of smoke on others or themselves.
This, however, would be like even a three-unfiltered-pack-a-day steelworker failing to notice an entire tyre factory burning down right around him. The whole city square was pungent with it, and it wasn't even coming from the shiny new Lethal Center, creepy-crawly as that was.
It was coming from the corner and a block down, from the armorer's shop and the squalid apartment above it.
“You are not that Mr. Wilde,” Crowley said, looking at the mad wreck of a man, with his misshapen head and his fingerless hand.
“That Mr. Wilde is dead,” said Mr. Wilde. “But I'm sure your friend will be glad to know that before he died, he had his portrait painted. When he was already ruined and broken. When he had no genius left to declare, and no heart left to break, and no mind left to lose. And when he died, he set that mockery free.”
Crowley swallowed hard, feeling the rise of bile at just how much in this world was so deeply wrong, and how little idea he had of what it would even look like if put right again. “I suppose . . . you repaired his reputation, too? Is that where your mad profession started?”
“Kiss me, Crowley,” rasped the loathsome creature. “Kiss me like Salome kissed the dead lips of Iokanaan. And then, only then will you receive the Yellow Sign, and only then will you know.
“The Yellow Sign?” Crowley said, unimpressed. “I've seen it. That lurky old bastard signs it everywhere, all over his manky little realm. Like a dog, scent-marking. Sign of the Yellow Snow.”
“Silence,” bellowed Wilde, or the creature calling himself that. “You wouldn't be so flippant with me if you understood the first thing about what will happen . . . when the nations rise . . . to meet their true King.”
“Their true King? That crazy little . . . “
“BEHOLD!” Wilde declaimed, as the madman Castaigne ascended the stairs with a knife in his hand. Castaigne looked murderous and lunged at Wilde, betrayed.
Several things happened in that moment.
Wilde's cat launched herself at Castaigne's face.
Castaigne threw the cat to the floor and aimed the knife at her.
Crowley made a complicated gesture and made sure the knife missed.
The cat bounded down the stairs and was gone.
And from the darkened closet behind Wilde, a storm was gathering. A whirlwind of maggots, a maelstrom of pestilential stench, and a hand that reached out and snapped Castaigne's neck with a single delicate twitch. When the cold, bony hand made out of foul-smelling gas took the cheap tiara of brass from where it lay by Castaigne's head, the crown turned real, and the dark mist took form.
Duke Hastur stepped on Wilde's chest - stepped through it, crushed his ribs and his heart with a sickening wet crunch and pop and squelch.
“I'm glad I found you, Crowley,” he said with several unpleasant voices at once, wrapping himself in a tattered yellow robe.
“But . . .” Crowley said, his voice gone very small. “So you really are . . . himself? I mean, in the play, Hastur is a place.”
“I am the avatar of the true King, little snake,” Hastur, said, his claws reaching out to close around Crowley's jaw. “And he'll be pleased I've caught you. Complete his set, as it were.” Hastur removed the eerily-carved diadem with its unwholesome gems from his head and held it up through the line as a warped mist began to form within its circle.
Crowley saw a vast city on a cold desert plain. He saw a temple built to no human or human-like proportions, manned by priests and slaves of unspeakable description.
He saw, chained in a stark room of carved basalt, Aziraphale.
“When we have you both,” Hastur said. “We'll make the sacrifice. And bring him through.”
With a shriek of horror, Crowley backed against the wall as Hastur advanced, a reeking cloud of oily yellow gas with outstretching tentacles and a leering face forming and melding from the mist.
Crowley shuddered, pressed himself into the wall, and dematerialized, pouring himself out of the building through the gas lines and into the aether. Now, in this state of terror, it was hard to access the Dreaming - it's never easy for demons, even in the most relaxed state possible, which Crowley had spent a lot of time mastering. Hastur chased him through the darkened narrow streets of the city, twining through the steel of fire escapes and sweeping low over cobblestoned alleyways before flying into the cold vastness of space, far from any landmarks or anchors that Crowley knew.
Crowley never been a particularly gifted astral traveller, but he was giving himself a desperate crash course now - but Hastur controlled the chase, and he had the choice of destination well in hand.
There was never really any question of winding up anywhere but where Hastur wanted him, that grotesque citadel with its Cyclopean pillars and towers, on the hideous cold high plateau of Leng - and with the long distance between, and the remoteness of the kinder and safer lands of the Dreaming, the ones Crowley had only heard tell of and never seen, he would fall under Hastur's power sooner rather than later. And then he would be no help to Aziraphale at all.
But he had not taken one thing into account. Well, many things. It's easy to miss little details when one is living in a warped alternate timeline that should not be.
There is a timeline where Castaigne's aim did not go astray when he hurled his knife in hatred at Wilde's violent cat. That is the timeline in which Crowley was not there to block his arm.
In this timeline, a large, bad-tempered, sharp-clawed calico survived to bolt down the tenement stairs out onto the streets below, to meet with her kin on the secret paths through the Dreaming that are known to all of feline-kind (and only to them.)
We do not know the name she was called by men (if in fact she had one; only Wilde ever seemed to welcome her, no matter how hard she had tried to remove his vileness from the world), and of course we do not know her secret name among cat-kind. We will call her Cassilda.
Through the streets of Manhattan she ran, where there are many portals, as many as there are doorways and sewer grates and secret basements. In a clowder of her soft-pawed, sleek-backed kin, she ran through starlit realms - desert sands and steaming swamps and high mountain forests, all the places where catkind are found, in all the worlds.
And ever since a sad Siamese mourned the loss of her murdered kittens and cried out to the Dream-King for justice, all the cats of Earth have had a meeting-place and a sanctuary in fair Ulthar, where strange harms come to any creature who dares to cast an evil eye upon a cat.
Cassilda the angry calico made her pitch to the gathered council beneath the moon.
“He may not have meant to,” she said. “But he saved me. The one with eyes like a snake, not so unlike a cat's. I would not see him or anyone like him fall into the clutches of the Yellow King.”
“I know who can help,” said a strong young officer, who had once been a small black kitten. All the cats knew at once that he meant the master dreamer Randolph Carter, who had come to the aid of cats many times. One could even say he had led them into war, if it were possible to lead cats.
“Yes, yes,” said the others in many voices - the curious peep of the kitten, the hungry chirp of the hunter, the yearning yowl of the lover.
“I will allow this,” said the huge shaggy cat made out of night's darkness, who had constellations in his eyes.
Carter could always be found by cats, for he kept a snug little cottage in the dreaming that always had saucers of milk by the door. It was located on the outskirts of the glorious sunset city he had long sought, which was built of nothing more - and nothing less - than the eternal radiance and sea-scent of the New England of his youth.
And Carter would always wake gentle and friendly out of the first lair of dream, to a soft paw on his face and a wet whiskered nose in his ear. He opened his eyes to a room that thrummed with a hundred purrs, and listened raptly to the tale from the Captain and Cressilda. He was attentive, but he seemed flummoxed.
“I want to help. But I don't see how. I have told you all my tale, of the Silver Key and Unknown Kadath, and how long and hard and perilous that journey was. Within the Dreaming, it took me many years - the black galleys and the tunnels, the gossip in the seaports. I could never have done it without the help of the ghouls and the night-gaunts. I just cannot see a way I could ever reach that evil place in time.”
There was the huge shaggy black cat again, who spoke with such a strong but distant voice. Carter knew him, and knew that all that had transpired on his quest had been by his sufferance. The stars in his eyes were cold and remote. But not always unkindly. “You still have too much of the waking world about you. You've already made that journey in distance, you need not do it again. You can give aid if you travel in time.”
“Backwards?”
“Go backwards by going forward. My librarian is angry of the loss of several volumes that have been misplaced into this world. They should not be here, and they have changed everything.”
“And how do I do that?”
“Stories, Randolph Carter. Stories.”
Of course. Of course. His quest had become a story, and it was a story that could be read, and as long as it was read, he could travel those roads again. And to set right the world again, perhaps he would not have to. He would just have to see that his story was read by the right person at the right time...
Only sharp feline hearing, and feline eyes in the dark, could have seen that the large black King now had a companion, a female brown tabby. Only certain eyes inured to madness would have seen that half her face was sweet and the other half gruesome, her skin and fur torn away and her muscles and bone exposed to sight. “A story for your son, Mazikeen,” said the Dream King of Cats almost gently. “Only his dreams will reach far enough.” The half-faced tabby lady nodded and purred her agreement, an eerie bubbling sound.
***
Lower Tadfield, England, 1990
“I liked the one about the bloke who goes looking for the dream city,” Adam said. “I liked the part about the cats. I liked the way the ghouls turned out to be good guys.”
There was a black cat watching from a tree near the old quarry. Uncharacteristically, Dog showed no interest in chasing it.
“But I didn't like the horror stuff so much. I thought these stories were 'sposed to be scary,” said Adam Young, disgruntled.
“They are,” said Wensleydale. “He's a founding father of the horror genre.”
“But it's just a bunch of stories about people seein' unspeakable stuff and then goin' mad, and that's the end! I wanna see the monsters!”
“No you don't,” said Wensleydale firmly. “That's the whole point. Things mankind was never meant to know.”
“Well, I don't see the point of it if we en't ever s'posed to know it,” Adam said, crossing his arms. “Is it like that stupid play that we're not supposed to read?”
“I think so,” Pepper said. “I don't like it anyway. All the girls in it do is scream.”
“Well, if we act it out, you don't have to be a girl.”
“Can I be the King in Yellow?”
“He doesn't do anything either, he just wears that stupid mask and then everybody gets all scared because it isn't a mask.”
“It's stupid,” Brian agreed.
“It's a classic,” Wensleydale said.
“That's what they say about a lot of things that are old and stupid,” Adam said. “You know what, let's not do that play. It's so stupid it should never have been written. I won't have it, do you understand? Write it out. It's gone.”
Adam's three friends backed away, a little bit unnerved, and Adam always felt guilty when they acted like that, so he said. “I'm gonna write a better one, and we can play that.”
And he did. It was a terrific play, “The Corsair of Carcosa.” It was about a pirate who was a famous detective, and his adventures with his crew sailing the seas of dream to far off lovely cities. There was a lot of swashbuckling and crime-solving, but no screaming girls or masked kings. It brought with it no madness.
And because it was a story, Randolph Carter sailed it through the Dreaming, back in time, and restored all the bookshelves of the world.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
***
“NO,” Crowley screamed from his prison in the unhallowed city, ringed by the unspeakable priesthood with their torches, trying in vain to shield Aziraphale with his not-very-corporeal body, cringing away helplessly from the horrible priest-king in his Pallid Mask, his scallopped yellow tatters. “Not upon us, O King!” Every fiber of his being shrank from that mask that hid the void - Hastur's Lord, the emissary of the Gods Beyond; Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos . . .
And then the light changed.
And the sky changed.
And then none of this had happened.
***
London, 1895
“Sober up just a little, can you?”
“Think it's all or nothin' but I'll try.”
“Never mind.”
Crowley dosed off instead, on the ratty old sofa in the back room. When he woke, hours later, Aziraphale was nowhere in sight.
First order of business regarding Aziraphale's bookshelves was to find which ones he used as a hiding place for his good liquor. Finding that was easy enough.
With a nice buzz on, Crowley rooted through the books and magazines, got lost for awhile in ridiculous tales from the American Civil War, had to hide his head under a pillow for a while after some accounts of the awful happenings in Whitechapel, and finally settled on the only thing he knew would always make him feel better, which was scathing and vicious theater reviews.
George Bernard Shaw seemed to be particularly gifted in this realm, so Crowley scanned Aziraphale's shelves for more, and zeroed in on Mrs. Warren's Profession.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said scoldingly. “That's rather . . . bawdy.”
“I should hope so,” Crowley said. “I hear he's a socialist too.” He gave that a slightly drunken leer as though it was sexually suggestive.
“If I'm going to risk displeasure, I prefer Mr. Wilde,” Aziraphale said suddenly.
“Yes . . . you would, wouldn't you?” Crowley said, as dim light dawned through the London fog. “Have anything more to drink?”
“You're a bottomless pit,” Aziraphale said fondly.
“Got a century to catch up. Is this play any good?”
“So I've heard. Be careful with that, it's auto-, ago - signed.”
And not in yellow.
"We should go out and see one in the theatre sometime. How about that thing with the pirates?"
"The Gilbert and Sullivan?"
"No, the one about the magic city and the murder mysteries. The Concierge of Coca-Cola or something like that."
Aziraphale gave him an odd look. "It's the hit of the season, dear boy. Tickets are hard to come by."
"I have my ways," said Crowley.
~end
Happy Holidays, hoshi_ryo, from your Secret Writer!