Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (9 page)

Later on that day, I reflected again on Dr. Roxy’s words about confronting one’s fears, and I began to think back to other things that had frightened me during my childhood, mainly certain illustrations from assorted children’s books that I had read during my youth. I remembered that a month ago, my mother had dropped off at my house a box filled with my old childhood books that she had stumbled across while cleaning out the basement of our old home. I had thanked her for this, then promptly dumped the box in my bedroom closet and piled up clothes atop it. Why I hadn’t at least taken the time to inspect the box’s contents had never crossed my mind at the time, but now that I thought about it, perhaps it was all due to those only dimly remembered memories of the illustrations that had frightened me when I was a child. So I walked into my bedroom, opened the closet, swept off the piles of clothes atop the box, and dragged the box into the light. I opened up the musty-smelling box and began pulling out books, seeking two in particular.

It didn’t take me all that long to find them. The first book was
The How and Why Wonder Book of Insects
, which my parents had purchased for me at a Toys
“Я
” Us for $1.08. Written by Ronald N. Rood and illustrated by Cynthia and Alvin Koehler (and published by Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers, Inc. Los Angeles, 1983), it was basically a 48-page informational book about insects, with illustrations (some of which were in color, others in black-and-white). The sinister drawing appeared on page 28, which struck me as ironic, seeing as I consider 28 to be one of my lucky numbers. At the bottom half of this page there was a black and white illustration of a startled-looking mouse that was surrounded on all sides by five honeybees, which seem to be readying themselves to sting the mouse to death. The text above the illustration said, “A warm beehive sometimes attracts mice and other animals. If a mouse finds the hive, it may eat some of the honey the bees have stored for food. It may build its nest in front of the entrance so that the bees cannot get out in the spring. Often the bees drive the mouse away with their stings. Sometimes they sting it so much that it dies. Then they have to leave the body there. But the bees often cover a dead mouse with their wax, sealing it up so that the air in the hive will stay fresh.” And beneath the illustration was this caption: “The mouse has a sweet tooth, especially for honey, but bees know how to defend their property from enemies.” Staring at this illustration, I was shocked to see that it looked very different from the way that my mind had remembered it for the last 25 or so years. In my memory of it, it was a color illustration, the honeybees were bumblebees, and the mouse had a much more human-looking expression of terror on its face. It would seem then that I had utterly misremembered what the illustration had looked like after all these years.

The second book was a comic book adaptation of Don Bluth’s classic 1982 film
The Secret of NIMH
, which was itself an adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s novel
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
. I recall being quite fond of the movie when I was a child (I had had a crush on the animated version of Mrs. Brisby, who I had thought was kind of hot, for a mouse). This comic book adaptation was published by Golden Press in 1982, and though it was priced at $2.95, my parents, ever economical, had purchased it for $2.46 at Caldor. The illustration in this book that had scared me was on page 29, the portion of the book dealing with the rats and mice trying to escape from the NIMH research labs by fleeing through a ventilator system. At the top of this page in question there was a panel showing some of the rats crawling along a string that stretched like a tightrope at the top of the air shafts. The inside of this air shaft was red, with gaping black holes, making it look more like the interior arteries of the body of some horrific eldritch monster than the inside of an air shaft. At that point in my life, when I had first read this comic book, I had never seen the insides of an actual air shaft, but my gut feeling had been that they didn’t look like
that
. Some of the rats were shown falling to their deaths as they got sucked down the air shafts, horrified expressions on their cartoony faces: at the top of the panel was a caption stating: “But all the mice except Jonathan and Mr. Ages were sucked to their doom down air shafts!” Incidentally, as a child I would sometimes have nightmares in which I’d find myself getting sucked down similar air shafts. But still, once again, I found that the actual illustration was quite different from the way that I had remembered it.

Closing this latter book, I thought to myself,
All these years you’ve been vaguely haunted by dim recollections of these illustrations, and now that you’ve seen them again for the first time in years you realize that not only was your memory wrong about them, but that they’re not even scary to you anymore. Perhaps Dr. Roxy is right. Why not go to this play and check out this giant rainbow? Maybe you could even meet with Father Doyle before the show and ask him about that rainbow homily, ask him where he got that story from, or if it was just something he made up. Odds are you aren’t even remembering the exact details of it right, and maybe once you’ve been given the chance to research deeply into it, it will no longer frighten you.
Feeling inspired, I resolved to go to the play with Dr. Roxy on Saturday.

***

That Saturday…

I ended up leaving for St. Stephen’s Church at 11:45
am
, seeing as it was only about a ten minute drive away from my place, which was located on the outskirts of Thundermist. I had never been to St. Stephen’s Church before, though I had seen pictures of it, both online and in the
Thundermist Times
newspaper, so I was curious to finally see the place in person. I did know a few basic facts about the church: how it had been constructed back in the 1920’s, making it one of the older churches in the area (though not as old as St. Durtal’s Church or Lamb’s Blood Church). While I drove to the church, I was listening to some music on my car’s CD player, Alan Moore’s “The Decline of English Murder” (of all things).

Soon enough I arrived at the church. I parked my car in the parking lot located on the church’s western side. Beyond this parking lot was a large patch of neatly cut grass and, beyond that, the church itself. It was on the large patch of neatly cut grass that the play was being staged, and as I pulled into the parking space I could easily spot the giant glass rainbow. Indeed, how could I not? The thing was enormous, easily 25 feet in height and 50 feet in length, and I wondered how long it had taken the church to even construct the thing, or how much it had cost to build. Beyond the rainbow, I could see a number of folding chairs had been set up, and, beyond that, a make-shift stage, atop of which was a small-scale replica of Noah’s Ark. Children dressed in crude animal costumes were wandering around, killing time before the start of the show. It all seemed like something straight out of a Wes Anderson movie.

Dr. Roxy was standing atop the glass rainbow (as the thing had been constructed in such a way that it was also being used as a sort of bridge that people could travel across the top of), and when she saw me approaching she waved her hand at me and smiled. I smiled and was about to wave back when something above her caught my eye. I noticed some movement within one of the church’s steeple windows. I glanced up and saw, standing within the window, good old Father Doyle, looking much as I remembered him from my youth, albeit with grayer hair. He was certainly
dressed
differently, though. During the years I had known him, he had only ever been dressed up in two outfits, the robes that he would wear when conducting the Mass or the all-black clerical dress shirt and pants outfit he wore when not conducting Mass. That Saturday afternoon, though, he was clad only in a white loincloth, with large feathery wings strapped to his back. In one hand he held a half-empty bottle of booze, in the other an envelope (which investigators would later find contained a suicide note/confession). The word “MURDERER” was written in red capital letters on his forehead.

I shouted Father Doyle’s name, but I’ll never know if he heard me or not. He took one last drain from his bottle of booze, tossed it aside, then launched himself out the window. For a second, he seemed to hang in the air, and resembled a somewhat incongruous yet still oddly graceful-looking swan. Then gravity did its devil’s work and pulled him to the Earth. I shouted out Dr. Roxy’s name, but it was too late: Father Doyle crashed into the top of the glass rainbow’s arch with enough force to cause it to shatter, and Dr. Roxy plummeted to the earth as well, the shards of colorful glass that rained down all around her messily decapitating her in the process. One particularly large shard of glass sliced her head clean off her neck, and I watched as her head rolled down the grassy lawn and came to a stop right at my feet, while the headless body slumped to the ground, blood spurting from the ragged neck stump. All around me was the sound of children screaming, children who would no doubt be scarred for life by this incident.

It could be argued that Dr. Roxy Pomo’s confrontation therapy had failed miserably, as I left St. Stephen’s Church that day with not only my phobia of rainbows intact, but with a new phobia also in place: Hyelophobia, which is a fear of… oh, well, just look it up on your own if you can’t figure it out. I’ve filled your head with enough useless facts by this point.

I

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” So begins “The Picture in the House,” a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft on December 12, 1920. It was a statement that had resonated with Daphne Broadmoor ever since she first came across it many years ago, while flipping through the 1985 corrected sixth printing of Arkham House’s publication of Lovecraft’s
The Dunwich Horrors and Others
, a book that she had stumbled across on her father’s bookcase when she was a child, a book with a green dust jacket featuring a Raymond Bayless illustration of Cthulhu emerging from his sunken tomb at R’lyeh. Throughout her twenty-five years of existence, Daphne had known a fair number of people who were fixated on buildings possessing an eidolic glamour: one friend of hers had been obsessed with an old chemical factory situated in the city of Los Diablos (an obsession which had led him to insanity), while another of her friends, Timothy Childermass, adored a local church known for its beautiful (and supposedly haunted) frescoes. As it was, there was one such place she herself was utterly fascinated with, which, though it was not far from her, was certainly strange: Saddleworth Clinic, a hospital for the mentally insane.

Daphne Broadmoor was born and raised in the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island, and at an early age became obsessed with Saddleworth Clinic, which could be found on the outskirts of Thundermist, not far from Lamb’s Blood Cemetery. Saddleworth Clinic was located atop a flat hill, which in turn towered over a nearby shopping center. The grounds of the Clinic were paved, though weeds grew through cracks in the pavement, and all of the buildings seemed to be in an advanced stage of decay. The Clinic was made up of a number of 4-story cottages that surrounded a circular driveway, along with a few other buildings, such as an infirmary, a chapel, and a small power plant that provided the Clinic with electricity. The cottages, which were where the patients were held, had been built in the 1880’s, and they certainly looked it. They boasted solid rubblestone walls and brownstone quoins, along with arched windows with stick style porches. The outer walls of many of these buildings were covered in vines, and most of the windows were broken. With a few of the cottages, prominent reddish-brown stains could be found on the walls beneath some of the windows, making it look as if the buildings were crying tears of blood.

For as long as she could remember, Daphne had been fascinated by the buildings that made up Saddleworth Clinic. Sometimes her father would go to the shopping center located at the bottom of the hill, in the shadow of the Clinic, and she would often accompany him. On such excursions she would often gaze out the car window longingly at the decrepit old buildings that made up the Clinic, and her father, catching these expressions on her face, would warn her to stay away from those buildings. When she would ask him why, his usual response was that they were haunted by the ghosts of patients who had been treated cruelly by the hospital’s staff. Naturally, this only served to further inflame her interest in the place. Those old buildings, all alone up on that lonely hill, seemed like something out of a different epoch, as if they had been cut & pasted onto the landscape by some omnipotent antiquarian of architecture, and they looked utterly incongruous when compared to the extremely modern-looking shopping center only a short distance away. To stare up at those haunted and ramshackle buildings (especially during the hours of the dying sunlight) filled Daphne with a sense of desolation and melancholy that was almost exquisite. It was as if the buildings that made up the Clinic were astral transmitters, broadcasting the final death rattles of lost worlds and forgotten Aeons. All her life, Daphne had been blessed (or perhaps cursed) with an overactive imagination, and she often amused herself wondering what the interior of the buildings of the Clinic must be like, what sort of inhabitants one could find within its walls.

For many years, Daphne had assumed that Saddleworth Clinic was abandoned, that it had been shut down for some time. This perception was proven false in the summer of 2013. On a warm July day, Daphne was behind the wheel of her car, driving down Main Street through Thundermist’s downtown area. She had her radio on, was listening to a local station named 8-Bit FM, a station that only played music from video and computer games: right now they were playing the song “Sim Will Build,“ taken from the
Sims 2: Apartment Life
PC game. She drove by the Thundermist Museum of Work and Culture, the Ye Olde English Fish & Chips of Yore, City Hall, the YMCA, the post office, the police station, the library (where her friend Timothy worked), and assorted tattoo parlors, Chinese restaurants, bars and taverns, Domino’s Pizza and Burger King, Walgreens and Dunkin’ Donuts. As she drove to her destination, she spotted a number of interesting looking people out on strolls: there was an old man with a dirty beard, clad in New England Patriots athletic gear, pushing along a rusty old shopping cart that was loaded up with small logs; two teenage boys walking along the sidewalk (one of whom was wearing a deadmau5 t-shirt), staring down at the cellphones in their hands, texting away, seemingly oblivious to the world around them; and then there was the odd-looking man standing next to the Masonic Temple over on Britten Street, this man wearing a black penitential robe, his face hidden from view by a strange-looking squid mask. Daphne had seen this person around town quite a bit recently: the word on the street was that he was some kind of performance artist.

Finally she pulled into the parking lot of Duncan’s Drugs, her favorite pharmacy. Daphne exited her car, locked up, then stepped into the drugstore. As she entered the building she nodded to Duncan, a tonsured old gnome with a wrinkled tortoise-like face who sat behind the counter reading that day’s edition of the
Thundermist Times
. Inside the pharmacy it was air-conditioned, and music was playing over the speakers, “Caribou” by the Pixies. The only other customers in the place were two well-dressed middle-aged white women sitting next to the main entrance, one of whom was clutching a purple satin pillow, resting on top of which was a hairless cat. These two women kept giving Daphne strange looks. Maybe it was because Daphne was black, and Thundermist’s African-American population was very small. Or maybe it was just because she was wearing a pair of pointy cat ears on her head. Daphne shrugged and headed to the back of the store, where the comics were kept.

Daphne found the comic she was looking for (the latest issue of Grant Morrison’s
Batman Incorporated
), along with some food for her pet hamster (named Babalon), then made her way to the front counter, where she paid for her items. “Hot as hell outside, isn’t it Daphne?” Duncan asked as he accepted her cash and placed it in the register.

“Sure is, Duncan,” Daphne said. “Anything interesting in the paper today?”

“Just a car accident that happened last night on Route 23,” Duncan said, referring to a road that led one out of Thundermist. “Old Man Gabriel wrecked his car, was nearly killed. He claimed that he didn’t see what hit him… the cops think that a deer must have run out of the woods and he smashed into it, though the cops found no deer nearby, no bloodstains other than those belonging to Old Man Gabriel.”

“That’s weird,” Daphne said as Duncan bagged her items.

“I’ll say. I was just talking to Officer Wilde who was in here a few minutes ago. Said that they took Old Man Gabriel to Landmark Hospital, where he’s still ranting and raving about that damn nonexistent object he hit and other nonsense. You ask me, I think the only thing that Old Man Gabriel’s been hitting is the bottle again,” Duncan confided.

“You’re probably right,” Daphne said as she took the bag from him. “Thanks Duncan, I’ll see you around.”

On the way out of the store she passed by the two older women and heard a little bit of their conversation.

“Althea, is it just me or did Mona look a little out of it at the meeting last night?” one of the women asked.

“Haven’t you heard, Lydia?” asked the woman who was apparently named Althea. “Her son Peter was committed to the Clinic last week.”

“Really?” Lydia asked, going a little pale. “Why, how awful. What’s the matter with him?”

“Mona didn’t tell me much, something to do with uncontrollable tremors,” Althea sighed as she stroked her odd-looking cat. “They had to lock him up in a padded cell. The doctors say they’ve never seen a case like it.”

“Poor Mona,” Lydia said, holding a gloved hand to her mouth.

“That’s a beautiful cat,” Daphne commented to Althea as she passed them by.

“Thanks, her name is Grimalkin. She’s a Sphynx,” Althea said with a hieratic smile.

Wow, I had no idea that the Clinic was still operational,
Daphne thought as she exited the drugstore, stepping back out into the sweltering July heat. As she walked back towards her car, she ran into her therapist, Dr. Roxy, a thin middle-aged woman with short red hair and heterochromatic eyes. As always, Dr. Roxy was wearing some sort of Native American necklace along with Navajo sterling-silver and turquoise dream catcher dangle-earrings. Dr. Roxy’s office was located in an office building right next door to old St. Durtal’s Cathedral, only a minute’s walk away from Duncan’s Drugs.

“Good afternoon, Daphne,” Dr. Roxy said in a pleasant voice.

“Hi Dr. Roxy,” Daphne smiled. “Long time no see.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Roxy said. “I’m kind of curious as to why you cancelled your appointment with me a few weeks ago.”

“To be honest with you, Dr. Roxy, I’ve been feeling fine.”

“I’m so happy to hear that, Daphne,” Dr. Roxy said with a smile. “I take it you’re still taking those pills I put you on?”

“I sure am,” Daphne assured her.

“I only ask because I know you can be forgetful,” Dr. Roxy sighed. “And you’ve been having no visions as of late?”

“It’s been awhile since the last one,” Daphne said. “Though I still don’t understand why so many people instantly equate visions with insanity. My friend Timothy told me that St. Teresa of Avila had visions, and she was eventually declared a saint.”

“Yes, but St. Teresa had a vision in which her heart was pierced by a lance held by an angel of God,” Dr. Roxy pointed out. “What did
your
last vision consist of, Daphne?”

“I was serenaded by an angel that looked exactly like Harry Styles,” Daphne admitted sheepishly.

Dr. Roxy smiled kindly. “I don’t think the Vatican will be canonizing you anytime soon, dear,” she said. “Look, I have some errands to run, so I won’t keep you. Should you ever need anything from me, or if you wish to make another appointment, you have my number.”

“Okay. Nice seeing you again, Dr. Roxy.”

“You too, Daphne.”

Daphne watched Dr. Roxy disappear into Duncan’s Drugs. She then climbed into her own car and cranked on the air conditioning. She decided to go home and have lunch. But then she spotted a building across the street, one she had never really noticed before. It was a small and seedy-looking two-story building, with dusty windows and a sinister character. Above the front door was a sign with the following words on it: KIRKBRIDE’S CURIOS.

Must be some kind of antique store,
Daphne mused to herself. She wondered why she’d never noticed it before. She decided to go into the store and have a look around. So she got out of her car again, crossed the street and opened the door, stepping into the murky gloom of the shop. She looked around the emporium. The small room was very humid and filled with large glass showcases, many of which were covered in dust, the interiors of which housed baubles and relics resting on velvet cushions. On the walls were shelves holding a number of plaster cast objets d’art, antique sculptures and waxen effigies, mainly Oriental images, though there were a few Egyptian specimens also. Daphne peered into a few of the showcases, but their outer surfaces were so filthy she could only make out dim outlines of the objects contained within. So she decided to check the shelves on the walls instead. Daphne walked past row upon row of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, hawk-headed gods and crystal Baphomets and diamond dogs. There were even a few books for sale: Daphne spotted, among other titles, the 9-volume edition of
The Revelations of Gla’aki
that had been edited by Percy Smallbeam and published by the Matterhorn Press in 1865.

Finally, she found a curio that caught her interest. It was a snow globe of medium size, with a small flat wooden base. Daphne carefully picked up the snow globe and inspected it. Within the globe was a miniature wintry landscape, and embedded within this landscape were five enlarged Scrabble tiles, bearing the letters L, H, O, O, and Q. Standing within the shadow cast by these letters were two tiny figurines. The first figurine was that of a young woman, who was wearing a black fedora tilted atop her head and, on her body, a dark green robe that was slit open in the back, revealing her shapely buttocks. The second figurine was that of a centaur with the head of a pigeon, and in one hand it held a long spear. Daphne gave the snow globe a gentle shake and watched the artificial “snow” inside swirl around the Scrabble tiles and the two figurines. Staring inside the globe, she marveled at how intricately detailed the figurines were, despite their small size. It was then that she noticed the words carved into the square wooden base of the snow globe:
In the Shadow of the Calcified Dominion
. Beneath those words were the letters “O.T.” She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something about the snow globe seemed to intrigue her, and she desired to learn more about the mysteriarch who had crafted it. With that goal in mind, she sought out the proprietor of the emporium.