The Yellow Sign

"The Yellow Sign" is a short story by Robert W. Chambers that appeared in his 1895 collection The King in Yellow. It's one of five stories in the book that are connected through their references to a fictional play called The King in Yellow, which has an inevitably disastrous effect on those who read it.
The story concerns an Greenwich Village artist named Scott and his favorite model, Tessie Reardon. While painting a nude portrait of Tessie, Scott glances out his window on Washington Square and sees the watchman of a nearby church, whose face gives the "impression of a plump white grave-worm"--an image so "intense and nauseating" that it spoils the painting. Tessie confesses that she has seen the "young man with the pasty face" in a dream--driving a hearse that carries Scott in a coffin. Scott later overhears the watchman muttering something that turns out to be "Have you found the Yellow Sign?"
The relationship between Scott and Tessie grows closer, and she gives him "a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold," as a symbol of her love, which she had found coming back from Battery Park. He promises to wear it always.
Scott injures his wrists in an accident in his studio, rendering him temporarily unable to paint. Looking about for something to read to occupy himself, he comes upon "a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase." It is, inexplicably, The King in Yellow, a book he has studiously avoided: "If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages." Tessie playfully grabs the book, and despite Scott's entreaties, hides away and reads it: "I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She had opened The King in Yellow." Scott sits down and reads it too, from beginning to end. "Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words...!"
They now realize that the found onyx clasp is the Yellow Sign; Tessie begs Scott to throw it away, but he refuses, for reasons he doesn't understand. They sit discussing the play:[W]e murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.... I knew that she knew and read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid.They hear wheels outside and see a hearse; they bolt the door but "knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign." The pallid watchman breaks in and retrieves the onyx clasp.
In the aftermath Tessie is dead, Scott knows he is dying, and a corpse that has been "dead for months" is discovered in Scott's room.
Category:Robert W. Chambers works
Category:Lovecraft's Inspirations (works)
Category:Mythos-Adjacent Works