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Today was supposed to be Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. Appreciation Day.

Today was supposed to be Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. Appreciation Day, but for some reason things have gotten a little strange. I hadn’t heard about this before. Was this a new thing? What exactly…you know…was it? Then again, Joseph S. Pulver is not only one of the most amazing writers ever to grace literature but a living treasure, so I decided to do a fun little write-up like several other sites in the Blogosphere have been doing.

I went back to some of his stories – a few derived from that seminal classic of weird fiction, Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow; others completely original masterworks – so I could write this post. But while I was reading them something rather unusual happened. There was a pressure behind my eyes. Dizzying afterimages – yellow, with borders of purple – danced before my eyes. I took a break from reading an removed my glasses. I felt warm.

I walked into the den. My dog was chasing her tail, something she hadn’t done since she was little. After several failed attempts she stopped and her spine elongated, bones cracking, and she bit off her tail, playing with the ragged stub as if it were a toy. Her eyes were yellow.

Now I sit downstairs. I tried to leave the house. I tried. I tried. I looked outside. I cried. I cried.

It’s yellow. It’s all yellow.

I hold my damp face in my hands and scrawl words I don’t understand on it with an old rusty nail I found somewhere.

I see the King stand before me. He removes his mask. Under he is a kind-eyed man with a smirk on his face, a handlebar mustache, and a t-shirt reading “xPulver”.

“Hey,” he says. “Get up. You’ve got front row seats to the show of your lifetime.”

I rise.