On the Carcosa Metro

The residents of this vast city drift through the dim, cavernous stations of our underground, lost to each other but not directionless. There are no tickets, no faregates. Nobody jostles; nobody runs. People speak in low voices. They are orderly. Every day you board the train at the Lake Hali terminus. Mists off the nearby lake tinge the air grey. A unique, peculiar scent surrounds the inhabitants of this improbable district wherever we go. It seeps into our clothing, our skin, and our hair. You know us by our smell, almost a base note in an exotic perfume—cedar, amber, oudh. And as for you, your own clothing never changes. Dark suit. White shirt. Leather shoes polished to a high gloss. Your hair, trimmed and tidy, is grey at the temples. I feel I know you. I picture your closet, your routines, the objects on the shelves in your home. What would those objects say if they could speak? They would whisper of times past, times of certainty, times when there was enough. As is your habit, you board the last carriage this morning, the one farthest from the creaking escalators that bring passengers down from the surface. I note your return, watch you take a seat, and return to my book. The doors slide shut. We depart. 

The Yellow Line pierces the center of our lost city but the journey is long. It’s half an hour to the next station, Hastur. The conductor flips a switch a few minutes after the train leaves Lake Hali, and the windows go silver via some arcane electrical alchemy: protection from the boiling lakes the tracks traverse, from the sight of the unfortunates drawn to them for their mythical healing properties. These lost souls flock to Hastur to take the waters. Some, riddled with boils and pestilence, plunge straight in seeking permanent relief. Legend has it the prison compound was built near the lakes as a source of labor. No one would volunteer to fish scalded bodies out of the water. As scarce as honest work has become, the sight of cooked, carbuncled flesh sliding off bones is too much for most. No salary is high enough. Thus, hardened prisoners are bussed in every day. They work at gunpoint. The opaque windows shield us from the sight of the gruesome work below. They do not, however, completely muffle the gunfire. 

Although the carriages are armored against stray bullets and have been since the dark days of the invasion, I’m never at ease until we move away from Hastur, speeding south. At Hastur, guards and other prison staff enter and leave, as they always do. Now and then, but not this morning, I see a professor or two from one of the universities. I haven’t thought of them as colleagues in more years than I can recall; these days, they look almost as young as the students they sometimes bring with them. I’m told they study the arcane properties of the waters. There are obscure elements that exist nowhere else; there are fish and animals and even people with strange mutations. Over the top of my book, I glance at you again. How much have you noticed, these months and years? Has it even been that long? You remain polite, alert, slightly expectant. Your expression doesn’t change from one day to the next. I imagine anxieties lurking below that calm surface like the beasts rumored to live in those boiling waters. Yet I also hope for all our sakes that you are as calm inside as you appear. I suspect that is the case for many of our fellow citizens, though. We all wear masks of one sort or another. 

Yhtill, the next station, is a place of contrasts and mysteries. Like Hastur, Yhtill once stood as a city apart, miles beyond the dark spires and ramparts of Carcosa. But as our lost city grew, it took neighboring cities and towns into itself, devouring them like the old gods beyond the black stars will someday do to us all. Yhtill’s own royal line died off in the remote past but the palace still stands. The King, exiled from the city proper, calls it his summer retreat. Every resident of the district wears a mask in public—real ones over the figurative kind life in Carcosa requires. This tradition has now been codified by royal decree. When His Majesty wishes to walk among the commoners unseen, perhaps in spring, winter, and autumn, he can do that in Yhtill. One could easily get lost among those shadowy old streets and alleys with their ancient names— The Four Winds, Our Lady of the Fields, The First Shell—but there are worse fates than being subsumed into beauty, I suppose. Some days, I think it might be bliss to merge with the stones. 

In the days before the invasion, there would have been twice as many souls—people, as well as other beings—on the metro. Things were different then. Things were better. Although I feel an enduring relief now that the crowds are gone, perhaps for good, I miss the days when we could travel for pleasure. Curiosity once had its rewards. Today, the ships still set sail from the wharves and diplomats still board flights to other lands, but the only thing we have in abundance is scarcity. 

I have never seen you exit the train. Myself, I alight at Aldebaran every time. I could change to the Blue Line there, but I won’t. There is often a pang of regret as I glance back at you, still in your seat and seemingly waiting. On the concourse, I risk a look back as I have so often done. I would know you from the commute—a handsome face in a crowd, a face I’ve come to look forward to seeing. But another thought has begun to nag me. I must know you. Of course, I might also be a ridiculous old widower. We are all so lost to each other now. But I turn my attention back to the path before me: through the tunnels and down to the platform below. The chimes are half audible over quiet footfall. I hear the doors shut. The train departs with a clatter that hints at both its age and the extent of its repairs in the years since the invasion. Are you bound for the Hyades this morning? Riding the Yellow Line from end to end? Is your destination one of the intermediate stations? Or are you here for other reasons altogether?

The much newer Blue Line crosses the city east to west, from Alar to foggy Demhe. The stations are deeper; the trains are quieter and more comfortable. Our new overlords built it and the Grey Line as a token of their largesse. In this new version of prosperity, half of the shops are closed and shelves sit empty in the ones that remain. If the newspapers still told the truth, there might be stories of starvation, of knocks on doors late at night, of a quiet exodus out of Carcosa. But all the stories are about stability. Imminent plenty. How fortunate we all are. Today, just as I did in my younger days, I alight at Aldebaran and will walk the half mile to the university library. There’s a station at the university now, but today of all days, I need the walk.

Black stars cast white shadows, or so the saying goes. Crenellated towers, pointy spires: the buildings of central Carcosa block out the sky to such an extent that midday resembles dusk at street level. The sun is never directly overhead. Around me, pedestrians keep their heads down. Several sailors in identical uniforms stumble past, reeking of the bordello they must have woken up in. A priest in clerical robes follows. Does he revile them or envy them, or both? There are businessmen and women. Their own clothing suggests not prosperity but the remembrance thereof. Trade sustains life here, just, but nothing flourishes. I see them and look away. In our own ways, we all try to avoid being noticed. Eyes watch from those towers and spires. Some of the cameras still work. On the opposite side of those stars, who knows what presences there may be—what hideous intentions? On the opposite end of those cameras, who is watching? 

My route to the university takes me past our dark cathedral, no doubt the priest’s destination. Foreigners bundled head to toe in robes of black and red make religious pilgrimages here. I once knew the names of the countries they came from. All that has fallen away now. They kneel, they pray to the old gods in their knotted dialects, they hide their faces and hands from all eyes. And then, their observances done, they remove their religious vestments and join the queues to enter the nearby station, indistinguishable from the rest of us. It has been decades since I last stepped inside the cathedral myself. The stained glass is seventeen shades of grey and the organ is mostly subsonic. Stretchers are sometimes needed for the frailest among the congregation. I’m told now and then there’s a hearse. It is a place of catacombs and anchorites. Those cursed or blessed enough to drop dead in a service earn the sacred right to have their bones interred with those of a million other faithful. So do those who have chosen—or been chosen—to be walled up in cells under the sanctuary. As long as their benefactors continue making donations to the church, the anchorites are fed. If the donations cease, the openings through which their food is passed and their waste taken away are bricked up. After a decade, masons break down the walls. Nuns take the desiccated bodies away, carve away any flesh that remains, and dismantle the skeletons. I’m told the patterns of bones are elaborate. I hope to never see them. 

Now comes the moment of my greatest peril. All assurances vanished in the invasion. Will my old colleague at the library be at the front desk when I present myself, or will he have been replaced? So many others in important positions were, quietly in the months leading up to the invasion and more openly in the aftermath. Will my request—even with my roundabout wording in a crowded cafe—have been overheard, triggered an alarm, perhaps been forwarded to the secret police? Carcosa is not the place it once was. Day by day it unravels, even as we are told over and over it’s knit whole. 

This library is one of the great triumphs of our city: even on the campus of a university whose buildings resemble a cluster of palaces spreading out from a central square, it is a marvel. It is the antipode to the nearby cathedral, or the antidote. One is a fountain of shadows where life ebbs away, drawing to a sad and dusty close; in the other, life is barely beginning. Vast windows flood the interior with natural light, but a special coating on the glass shields the books from the sun’s destructive ways. Just as they do on the trains, the windows become opaque at the brightest times of day. The rich green carpet underfoot and the orderly rows of wooden bookshelves give the impression of being in a forest. Although most of the woodwork is our native oak, enough cedar and teak were used that a perfume lingers. It commingles with the smell of old books. Unlike so much in lost Carcosa, this place stands firm against time.

My colleague smiles, greets me, invites me to follow. This comes as a short-lived relief. We do not bother with surreptitious glances left and right to see who is watching. Transactions such as this must be carried out in broad daylight, in full view, both expecting surveillance and defying it. My heart will give out, I fear. My legs are weak and my bowels are heavy. I fortify myself as I follow him down one corridor and then another: through a door that he unlocks with a large brass key, into a rattly cage-like elevator that takes us down farther than I would have thought possible. I shiver, not just with fear but with cold. Even in my days as a rector here, the rumors about the deep archives were just that: rumors. There were questions we knew not to ask. Yet just as I had hoped and suspected, the librarians have long been prepared for contingencies. Although the yearbooks I’ve requested are not off-limits, the old newspapers might carry the death sentence. 

If it comes to that, let them shoot me. 

The invasion was subtle at first. For months, rumors spread: the police, the courts, the hospitals, the civil service, even the clergy were… no longer us. Carcosa’s history is one of transience: people come and go, and have always done so. Our streets are paved with intrigue and cobbled with drama; the graffiti on the walls tells a story of fading hope and fresh deception. When troops and tanks and planes roared across our northern border, Carcosa fell within hours. It had essentially already been taken, hollowed out from within. 

Resistance, what there was of it, sprang up because of the derailment. You would have missed that. We tolerated strangers in our offices, soldiers in our streets, even gunmen in our stations. But the day after a bomb knocked a Yellow Line train off the tracks near the boiling lakes, the newspapers published a gallery of the dead. There were hundreds. Outraged, Carcosa rose up and was swiftly put down. All those old newspapers were outlawed, and their offices burned. Now I endanger myself by leafing through these rustling pages, trying to confirm what I struggle against but already know to be true. I am an addled old man, but I am also a former rector at this university, and yes, my suspicion was right: your former professor. Your face didn’t change much over the years. Would that you’d been granted more of them. I lost my own love in a time when such unions still enjoyed legal sanction in Carcosa. You and your own fellow met in my lecture hall, if memory serves. Seeing your faces among the pictures of the dead—first in the university yearbook, then a second time on yellowed newsprint—breaks me in half, into quarters, into eighths. It might be a kindness you are not here to live through this. 

I know why you board that metro train every morning. Tomorrow I’ll summon the courage to sit next to you—at long last. Despite the risk, I will have a copy of this newspaper and the yearbook in my bag. I will introduce myself, ask if you remember me. I assume you can reason and speak. I’ll say I know who you’re looking for. I’ll say you won’t find him. Not here. I’ll show you his picture, tell you to think of his hand warm and solid in yours. I’ll tell you it’s time that you followed him. He wears the pale mask now. You both do. In Carcosa we are all so lost to each other, but I hope after this, you two might not be.

Marshall Moore is an American author, academic, and recovering publisher based in Cornwall, England. He is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is an essay collection titled Sunset House (Rebel Satori Press, 2024). His short fiction and essays have been published in The Southern Review, Eclectica, Pithead Chapel, Trampset, and many other fine places. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University.