He shut his book, shook his head and put it down. The break was over, and it was time to continue classes.

The teacher watched the young stundents prepare for the play. He had ordered his fourth-graders to enact a short play of their own choice, and he had been stupid enough to allow the children to form groups of their own. Of course, the lazy, less talented children, the children with parents that didn’t care, formed one such group. As the first class of the day started, the teacher, a young, idealistic mentorlike figure, checked the presence in the class. John F was there, as was Lisa, Carter and Oumar and Carla. Anton was ill for the day, he was the boy who was supposed to provide the play for the Bad Group, but it seemed that the other boys had yet to read the play. They had borrowed the book from his mother, his father had gone to the hospital with little Anton, the poor kid seemed to be very ill. He had always been very pale and seemed in lack of both nutrition, sunlight and sleep. All the teachers that knew him worried.

The Bad group were the third group to perform. The first group, all girls, had performed a self-written version of Little Red Riding-hood, whilst the second group, with Lisa, the genious of the class, had performed a short scene from Hamlet, with a boy performing as Ofelia, and two others performing as trees. Fat Steve looked like a bizarre tree indeed, sweating, never being able to stand still. Lisa, of course, played the part of Hamlet. It was doubtful if it was Lisa or her feministic single mother that had come up with the idea of changing genders between Hamlet and Ofelia.
The bad group consisted of some eight boys, among them Oumar, the african-american, Carlos, the motherless troublemaker, Kit, the smart but clumsy kid and John S, the bully. They looked as confused and unprepared as ever, holding an old, dusty book in their hands. It had to be the play they had borrowed from Anton. Considering how dusty it was, it was doubtful if Anton had become ill from the reading of the book, it couldn’t have been opened for a great many years.
Unlike the other students, these children weren’t prepared. They opened the first page, seemed to argue a bit about who would play what part in the play, seemingly arguing that Oumar should take a certain part due to the color of his skin or something, which obviously triggered strong emotions in the racially-aware boy. In the end he reluctantly and angrily accepted. John S took the part of a king, a role not fitting a big, strong boy with no charisma or wisdom whatsoever.

They started reading the play, and though they at first read badly, they started to read with a great lot of feeling after but a few lines, as if they had become stuck in the play, mind, heart and soul. The talentless little boys started acting. Kit took over the reading, the other boys acted silently, only at times repeating lines that Kit read that they should have.

The teacher watched in great surprise and awe as the play unfolded itself in his gray little classroom. It was as if suddenly, all the little children had become great actors. Not a giggle, not a shamed gaze in front of the other kids, not a mistake. John S seemed to grow in his part, becoming far mor regal than had he been ever before. Sometime during the play they had taken down one of the yellow curtains and wrapped it around his shoulders; a king needed a cape!

But now the children, the other children, started to be afraid. The themes were very mature, and though they all wanted it to stop, it was as if they too had become stuck with the play. It continued as unquestioned as time itself.

This was when the teacher, stronger of will and perception than any save Lisa, noticed that something was wrong. Though a curtain had been taken down, the room was as dark as if it had been swallowed by shadows. The little light that entered played strange games on the walls, as if it had entered through water. The air seemed humid and damp, and the other children, though shaking in fear, sat as entranced before the play. Only three of the actors stood before them: The king, the black boy and Kit, reading, almost chanting, nay, indeed chanting the play. The remaining boys played the sea, lying down behind the teacher’s desk, waving their arms as if they were the sea. But their arms waved vertically, not horizontally, making them look more like arms of drowning hoards of children in a deep, pitch-black sea.

The teacher noted that the only child still free of the enchantment was Lisa, who sat in a dark corner of the room, a little package of mindless fear and sobbing, half-watching the play, half hiding beneath her fine jacket. She looked at the unbroken wave of shadow that almost reached her little legs, as it emanated all the way through the classroom, all the way from the desk, all the way from the stage, the play itself. It was as if the King and the Black boy had become inhuman, spreading the cold, soulconsuming darkness that entrapped and enslaved the children in the room. The teacher felt a heart-gripping fear, a beginning panic, but he could not move to save her, as the shadows, like dark, inky tentacles, closed in on the squeeling, panicking little girl. As he looked back at the play, sweat running down his forehead, as with all the other little children, he saw that the arms of the little actors were gone, transformed, transmuted into long, slimy, horrid tentacles. The King shone in his yellow robes, stronger and more powerful than anything he had seen before, and the Black One more terrifying than anything he had ever seen before.
And then he remembered, he had heard of this play before, in his childhood! He started to

He closed the book.
"What a bunch of baloney, my good fellow."
The young man with the cheap business-suit looked at the older man in his morning-dress, a red morning-coat. His gray hair well-combed, his slippers of finest silk. The room was, as could be expected of a fine gentleman, full of expensive wooden furniture, crystal-glass objects and the occassional head of some animal or other. The old man looked with an amused smile at his young guest.

"What do you mean, don’t you like it?" asked the dark-haired younger man.

"Like has nothing to do with it. Tell me, where exactly did this unnamed teacher of yours get to read about the "King in Yellow?" Why is he unnamed when children of lesser importance are given a name? And do you think that anyone would keep the Play in such an open view as to allow your child to glance at it by chance and be driven insane?"

"Well, I thought that perhaps Anton’s parents had bought the book without knowing what it was, and..."

"In short, you hadn’t thought at all. I told you, you must think before you write stories, Damien. You know" and here he put a strong hand on the young, defeated writers shoulder and gave him a strong shake "You KNOW that I want to publish your texts. Your stile is flawless, but you must mind your stories better. Logic, reason, clarity. Or the readers will think it illogical, and abondond it. Surely that is not what you want!" he smiled kindly.

The book was shut.

"This is hardly a good story, darling. Four pages and still not a tentacle. You said this was a horror-novel, and all I read is babbling between an author and some guy that must be his publisher. I haven’t heard of a publisher who could afford to live like a 1930’s gentleman in my life, but that part I can swallow. It is called unlogical, by the way, not illogical."

She looked at the sweaty, thin man in his office. Outside shone the city in all its dark splendour. She watched the strange figure on his desk, a figure that looked rather like a bizarre, dancing version of the Statue of Liberty, not too far away from this Manhattan office.

"Look, I know that you want to write, but you need to make stories INTERESTING, right? Or they won’t sell!"

"Interesting?" She said angrily "Interesting? Is this interesting enough for you?"
She bashed his head in with the grimly smiling figurine, over and over and over, while the cold city watched through the window.

She put the book down, and after having rubbed her tired eyes, shut it. What utter junk, she thought. Would a writer kill a whatstheirname, a publisher, just because he told her that her book was boring?

She stood up from her bed, watching out the window of her parents’ house, and out the streets. The night was warm but foreboding, as it always was in this part of town. Her parents had gone to see her little-sister’s school-play, but would surely be back soon. She looked at the time, it was two hours before midnight. Her boyfriend had yet to call her, and she started to worry, as she often did when this occured, that he might have found someone else. Her friends warned her that he had, but she refused to believe it, she knew that he was more honest than that.

The door opened and closed, and she recognised the sound of her parents entering. But they were laughing strangely, walking erratically. She recognised their voices, allright, but not the tone in them. It was as if something was missing in their voices. She exited her girl-room, clad only in her nightgown, and ran down the stairs to see what was wrong.

She saw her parents, dancing around something in the kitchen.
She entered slowly, realising that something was amiss.
Her sister was lying laughing in the sink, disembowed.

She threw up, and as she did, her parents heard her, and laughing, exited the kitchen to greet her. Now she saw their faces, heard their joyfull laughs. Now she could see and hear what they lacked: They lacked restraint, they lacked moral chains, they lacked entrapped lust, joy and bitter responsability. They were free. She could vaguely hear her little-sister, darling, clever little sister, sing God’s praise, and how she soon would meet him, as her parents laughingly asked if she wanted fleshly joys first, or meet God and have the joys later, when her spirit had fled. She turned and screamed, but felt their hands on her gown, dragging her back into the bloody kitchen, and she could hear

"Bloody hell!" He threw the book into the wall. "Bloody hell."
Jane entered, looking with surprise on her boyfriend.

"Wha’, you di’nn lik’eh?"

"Hell no, it was sick, where did you get this shit?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I thought you liked this kind of books. ‘Dinn know you had a weakness in incest and gore."

"Fuck, neither did I, but this was weird, it got a grip on me. Hell, to think that someone had thought all of this up..."

"Maybe someone didn’t." She didn’t smile at all.

"What! Are you trying to scare me? Nock it off!"

She entered, her eyes a bit different from what they should be, obviously high on some lighter addictive.

"Maybe there are little people living in the books, maybe these books are reality to them, and they can’t get out. Why else would they run? If the end of the world is neigh, where would you run? Why even try? If you didn’t think you could run out of the story, back into reality, if there is such a thing..."

"Please, don’t..."

"What if we, you and I, are prisoners inside a book, inside a story, inside a sick fantasy, and that we will die horridly... What if we are not real at all, and there is no heaven for us to go to... What if we will kill each other the next page, or some dark monster, some dark, ancient shadow will enter that window, and we realise that there is no outside world to flee to. What if this is all there is..."

"STOP IT!"

 "What if..."

And the shadows started moving...

And now you close the book, finding it too weird. You look at this last line, remembering that you have a real life, in a real world, and that this is just as short, pointless story, not at all connected to reality.

And as you do, someone will stop reading you.