I Have Seen

the Yellow Sign

A Secret History of the King in Yellow and Delta Green

By Dennis Detwiller, © 2015

The infection of thought called the King in Yellow predates the Delta Green organiza-
tion. Since it came to the Delta Green’s attention in 1951, it has been a particularly
sore point in the group’s mandate. While forces of the unnatural remain difficult to
contain, most entities are confined or bound to some concept of physics. The King in
Yellow exists and thrives in the mind.

A Note About Access

Many of the facts presented here exist only in the minds of survivors of operations

against the horrors of the King in Yellow. They do not speak lightly about what they
saw. Their survival was predicated on not letting such insanity settle in their minds—on
not letting it use them to transport the “infection”.
Official records on the subject were purged at various times in the group’s histo-
ry, leaving behind only ashes and fragments. Of course there is always the possibility
that a war record, a box of papers, or even an entire file cabinet was overlooked and

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lost in the shuffle of Delta Green leadership; which, once discovered and investigat-
ed, might start the chain of exposure once more.

The First Known Outbreak (1895)

The first documented identification of the concepts associated with the King in Yellow
occurred in France in the summer of 1895. Over two hundred people were mur-
dered, committed suicide, or vanished during this time, including two members of
the government who fell under its influence.
In Paris it rose like a blight in the form of a short, three-act play, The King in Yel-
low, bound in a small black book that was passed from artist to artist. It infected those
who read it with madness and death until the government launched a crackdown.
Copies of the book were collected and burned. In that time the work was given
special scrutiny by the Deuxième Bureau, a French intelligence group which investi-
gated the martial maneuvers of France’s enemies. They discovered the work did not,
as is widely believed, originate in France at all.

Actual Origins
American soldiers found Deuxième Bureau records of the Paris crackdown in July

1944 in a looted villa called the Mansion des Portes. Delta Green confiscated them
from the U.S. general war records in 1951.
The records say the play was “translated” into French, indicating it had come from
somewhere before. There is no mention of the language it was translated from, or the
name of the country or city of origin. A single typewritten copy of the play itself was in
this file.

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 There are no confirmed records of earlier outbreaks or of the actual source of the
play. The author of the book is always referred to as “X” or “the Author” and his or her
country of origin is never indicated. Where the play was before 1895 Paris, no one
knows. But parallels between the play and ancient human legends which were no-
ticed by Delta Green over the following years.

Themes in Anthropology
The Mohegan Indians have tales of a Hobomack, an evil creature which can “replace”
a shaman by tearing off his face and putting it on as a mask to assume his appear-
ance. When the Hobomack arrives, it is to announce the end of the tribe and its lead-
ership in a great story, and to bring about chaos, death and destruction in as subtle a
way as possible by spreading lies and turning one against another. When confronted
or revealed, this entity claims to “wear no mask”. All these elements (the story, the
mask) mimic the King In Yellow legend.
That was only the first. Delta Green found hundreds of such stories from all
around the world that conformed with these elements and seemed to follow the skein
of the play The King in Yellow.
Delta Green is not certain of the relationship between the play and those ancient
legends. Perhaps the play reflects deep-seated human truths which arise no matter
the culture, over and over again, like a cancer of thought. It remains there, forever on
the edge of erupting into the world from many different cultures, times and ideas. It is
never truly gone.
Scattered copies of The King in Yellow still exist, hidden throughout the world.
Each represents a potential outbreak of murder and suicide.

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 Since the 1890s The King in Yellow has appeared in twenty languages in random,
small-print-run limited editions.
In 1952 it appeared in English for the first time in the so-called Red Book, a thin,
red leather book marked with an odd, undulating symbol that was known, despite the
book’s coloring, as the Yellow Sign. The Red Book’s existence was not noticed by the
group until 1953.
These outbreaks led to the STATIC protocol, with which Delta Green attempted
to destroy the work wholesale.
Since that general order, which persisted until the dissolution and decentraliza-
tion of Delta Green in 1970 (and continued in isolated cells of the conspiracy), many
copies of The King in Yellow have been located and destroyed. But it seems the work
is never done.
After all, it is difficult to truly kill a nightmare.

The Secret of The Red Book

It did not go unnoticed that the first known appearance of the Red Book in America
occurred nine months after Delta Green came into possession of the files of the
Deuxième Bureau. A secret internal investigation failed to find an agent responsible,
though a new level of paranoia settled into the group’s leadership. That led directly
to the STATIC protocol.

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STATIC (1955)
In 1955, Delta Green was involved in an incident in New York City called Operation
BRISTOL. It was a disaster with a body count similar to the 1895 Paris outbreak, fo-
cused around a failed off-Broadway play called Her Grey Song. Nearly nothing re-
mains on the record, though some survivors linger.
From the ruins of this operation, Delta Green’s leaders established the STATIC
protocol.
The STATIC protocol says:

1. Works referencing the Yellow Sign, the King in Yellow, Hali, Carcosa, Hastur,
Yhtill, Cassilda, Camilla, the Pallid Mask, etc., are TO BE DESTROYED.
2. Those who produce such works are to be eliminated. Those who seem influ-
enced by the work are to be contained or eliminated at the agent’s discretion.
3. An agent’s exposure must be reported to the group, who will then decide up-
on a response.
4. Agents not exposed to such elements on these ops become the point of con-
tact with the group. They must remain separate from the main investigative
arm, acting in a supporting role.
5. Agents violating any of these protocols are to be assumed active threats and
are to be dealt with appropriately.

The second, more secret portion of the STATIC protocol is the so-called “shadow
team”. Upon activation of the STATIC protocol, a second group of experienced
agents were activated to covertly observe the first Delta Green team. If things got out
of hand, the shadow team was there to remove the threat through any means possi-
ble, destroy all infectious elements, and cover it all up.

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STATIC Today
Ironically, today STATIC only remais as a protocol in a few cells of the illegal conspira-
cy, handed down from cell to cell after Delta Green’s 1970 dissolution. These few
“cowboys” know the basics of STATIC and the destructive nature of the play called
The King in Yellow.
The official, reauthorized DELTA GREEN special-access program (“the Program”)
has no record of the STATIC protocol (it having been purged along with all records of
The King In Yellow in 1970 in a “house cleaning”). Some old agents who are involved
in the Program may recall STATIC, and might have some inkling of the play and its
deleterious effects. But for the most part the Program will look at an outbreak as a
problem to be investigated, rooted out, and “cured” just like any other unnatural
threat.
Due to the infectious nature of The King in Yellow, this will likely prove disastrous.