Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking

By James Champagne

Every city casts a shadow, some longer than others. And the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island casts one of the longest shadows of all. With a population of 40,000 people, it might not seem like the most populated place on earth, but every citizen there has a story to tell, some more sinister than others. Look past the city’s pious Catholic façade and you shall see dead children floating face down in its sewers, witches corrupting susceptible minds with blasphemous books, and demons capering on the frescos of its haunted churches. It is a city where even the most innocent of objects—a quilt, a video game, a snow globe, a notebook—can act as a key that unlocks the doors to Doom, Delirium, and Death. The city has long since faded away: all that lingers is its nightmares, in the form of these ten testimonials from the damned, tales of strange and unproductive thinking. Will you open these pages and conduct an autopsy of your own on this dead city? But be warned: the scalpel that dissects the shadows is also the scalpel that cuts both ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebel Satori Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781608641093

James Champagne

James Champagne is the author of Grimoire: A Compendium of Neo-Goth Narratives. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Userlands: New Fiction Writers From the Blogging Underground and Mighty in Sorrow: a Tribute to Current 93 & David Tibet. He was born in 1980 and lives in Rhode Island. This is his second collection.

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Autopsy of an Eldritch City:

Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking

by

James Champagne

Illustrations by O.B. De Alessi

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Rebel Satori Press on Smashwords

Copyright © 2015 by James Champagne

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http://www.rebelsatoripress.com

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Cover Design: Michael Salerno

Acknowledgments

Alongside my parents, brothers, family, pets and friends, I would also like to thank the following individuals: Tosh Berman, Scott Bradley, Rex Cityzen, Michael Clarke, Jeff Coleman, Dennis Cooper, Judi Cosentino, Ilya Davidovich, Bryce Clayton Eiman, David Saä Estornell, John Fisher, Craig Laurance Gidney, Mark Gluth, Chris Herrmann, Dylan Holmes, Jesse Hudson, Kyler James, Kevin Killian, Kyte Lockett, CL Martin, Brendan Michael, Joseph Mills, Thomas Moore, Brian Morrissey, Laura Beth Noble, Alex Pearson, Nicholas Jason Rhoades, Rigby, Ben Robinson, David Rylance, Nicki Smith, Garrison Taylor, Glenn Tilson, Math Tinder/Wht Tgr, Lee Vincent, George Wines, Mieze Zuber and all of the Weaklings. I would also like to thank anyone who purchased a copy of Grimoire.

Special thanks to Benedetta De Alessi for creating the lovely illustrations, and to Michael Salerno for the cover and interior design.

This collection was inspired by the following (in no particular order): Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, the art of Stefan Danielsson, the work of C.G. Jung, M.R. James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (especially his short story The Mezzotint), Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers, St. Ann’s Church and also Precious Blood Cemetery in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, the music of Current 93 and Cut Hands and Coil, the comics of Grant Morrison, Robert Aickman’s short story collections (especially Powers of Darkness and Cold Hand in Mine), the Johnny Dixon Mysteries of John Bellairs (especially The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Adittapariyaya Sutta, The Holy Bible, the Roman Catholic Church (Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus), Kanye West’s Yeezus album, Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch album, Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Edogawa Rampo’s Mojo: The Blind Beast, the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Half-Life, Kenneth Grant’s short novels The Stellar Lode and Against the Light, Thomas Ligotti’s short story The Chymist, the Black Paintings of Goya, J.K. Huysmans’ Durtal tetralogy, Creepypasta, Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena, Arthur Rackham’s illustration of The Gnat and the Flea for Aesop’s Fables, the oeuvre of Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, the Post-Postmodern Passion of David Foster Wallace, Ritual Quest, and, of course, the Old Man of Providence, H.P. Lovecraft (in particular, his short stories Pickman’s Model and The Dreams in the Witch House).

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.

—Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!

—Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden

"No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots,

for it grows not only upwards but downwards as well."

—C.G. Jung, Psychology & Alchemy

"One reaches heaven by the very things

which may lead to hell."

—Kularnava Tantra

What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?

—Nick Land

The Cursed Quilts

If the earth is a sphere, then the abyss below the earth is also its heavens; and the difference between them is no more than time, the time of the earth’s turning. —Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

I’ve always found attending quilt shows to be a somewhat unsettling experience. It’s not because of the Raison d’être of such shows: after all, how scary can a quilt be? And it’s also not related to the people such shows tend to attract; generally speaking, harmless-looking middle-aged to older women, the kind of people who read ‘cozy’ mystery novels about cats who solve crimes or who surround themselves with cats in general (or sometimes both). No, what I find unsettling is the looks I get when I myself attend quilt shows. In my experience, I’ve found that you often won’t find a lot of men at such events, aside from the husbands of those women whose work is on display, or, more pertinently, the sons of those women. Therefore, when I go to such shows I feel as if I stick out like the proverbial sore pollex, and I always get embarrassed when the other women would refer to my brothers and me as Susan’s boys (Susan being the name of our mother). There are even times where I’ve wondered if it would be less embarrassing were I to go to such shows in drag, to try to blend in with the other women, as it were, and thus escape notice. But seeing as my body is fairly hairy, I don’t believe that such a deception would be all that effective.

The reason why I’m so familiar with what goes on at quilt shows is because I’ve been to a fair number of them during my lifetime. My mother just so happens to be a member of the Thread-Lovers of Thundermist, a local quilters club made up of 40 women who meet the second Thursday of every month at a nearby church known as Lamb’s Blood Church. Aside from these monthly meetings, they also hold an annual quilt show, usually in April of each year. At these annual quilt shows, the members of the club display their quilts, and people who attend the show can vote on which quilts they like the best; in addition to this, raffles are also held. Inevitably, my brothers and I, along with our father, would always go to these shows, to lend our mother moral support (and also to vote for her pieces: some may see this as nepotism, but I prefer to call it filial duty).

On April 26-27, 2013, the Thread-Lovers of Thundermist held their 23rd annual quilt show. The first day of the quilt show took place on Friday, from 4 pm to 8 pm, while the second show was taking place earlier on Saturday, from 10 am to 4 pm. My father went to the first show because he had to work Saturday morning, but my brothers and I ended up going to the second show. So that was why I found myself sitting in the back seat of the Chevrolet Impala owned by my younger brother Taliesin, who was behind the wheel, with my older brother Howard seated to his right in the front.

Taliesin, age 28, is a somewhat seedy-looking fellow who can often be seen dressed entirely in black, usually sporting a t-shirt displaying the logo of some no-name punk band: the shirt he had on that day didn’t deviate from this sartorial state of affairs, displaying as it did the logo of some local band known as The Howling Fantods. Although he makes a meagre living writing music and movie reviews for the Thundermist Times newspaper, his true passion in life is his own band: he’s the guitarist for Faculty X, a punk band he formed four years ago with three other ne’er-do-wells (they pilfered their name from the terminology of Colin Wilson, in case you’re curious). They mostly just played gigs at local dives, and to date only produced one recording, a limited-edition EP entitled Season of Ghouls that was so poorly recorded and of such dubious musical quality that they made Crass sound like Dream Theater.

Howard, age 35, is a Professor of Folkloristics at Fludd University over in Massachusetts. Unlike Taliesin, Howard is almost always impeccably dressed, usually sporting a tweed coat with elbow patches, his hair always smartly cut and his face always clean-shaven. Also unlike Taliesin, who has lived in Thundermist all his life, Howard is much more worldly, having traveled to all seven continents in the course of his life. Of the three of us, he’s easily the most intelligent, and also the most loquacious: aside from knowing a great deal about obscure topics (for example, he’s the kind of man who could explain to you how Saint Denis is a good example of what would be considered a cephalophoric saint, the term ‘cephalophore’ being a word used to describe any saint that is depicted as carrying their own head: you would be surprised as to how many saints fall into this category), he also knows a lot of big words and isn’t afraid to deploy them in casual conversation, to the annoyance of many, though I’ve always enjoyed talking with him.

I’m the middle brother, and my name is Daniel Kingfisher. If my name sounds familiar to you, then it’s a good bet that you go to the movies a lot, because my name tends to pop up in the credits of many films: I make a living writing screenplays, mostly for horror films, most of which are put out by Häxan Pictures, an indie film production company I work for. Unlike my two brothers, who live in the New England area, I’ve been living out in Los Angeles for around ten years now. As a result, I don’t see my parents nearly as often as my brothers do. Still, I always make it a point to come home for important occasions, and my mother’s quilt show is one of those occasions I would never miss. And how could I? I guess you could say that of the Kingfisher brothers, I’m known as the ‘good son.’ Whereas Taliesin is a former drug addict, and Howard is a notorious womanizer, I’ve always lived a life of moderation: of the three of us, I’m also the only one who has maintained the Catholic faith of my childhood, unlike Taliesin, who dabbles in weird occultism, or Howard, who is an agnostic at best. It often surprises people when they find out that I’m somewhat devoutly religious, in light of the bloody and often gruesome content of the screenplays I write (to give an example, the last script I wrote had been an extremely violent historical treatment of the so-called Stabber’s Conspiracy that had occurred in Palermo, Sicily between 1862-1863, while the first script I had ever written had been a fictionalized dramatization of the Freckle Slayer killings that had scandalized Thundermist back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, a crime spree involving the murder of young local freckled girls that had never been solved). I use my art as a means to exorcise my demons. In his introduction to the 2012 republication of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World, Martin Amis writes that as a man, …Ballard was naturally on the side of the angels, but as an artist he is unconditionally of the devil’s party. It’s a remark that I can certainly relate to myself, along with another quote, this one taken from Stephan A. Hoeller’s 1982 work The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons of the Dead: We must, as it were, not only fight on the side of the angels, but occasionally we must join the host of the fallen angels also. As always, one needs to balance out one’s own light and dark sides, something which I think I do pretty well. Truth be told, I’m not even all that crazy about horror movies: I much prefer arty European films, works by directors such as Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti, and I’d much rather feast my eyes on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc than watch any of the Saw or Hostel films. But that’s just me.

Anyway, April 27th, 2013 was a beautiful day, the sky a bright blue color with scarcely a cloud in sight. On the ride to the quilt show, my brothers and I engaged in the usual conversation. Taliesin was telling us about this Manic Pixie Dream Girl he had picked up over at the Dark Tower hamburger boutique on Cassandra Avenue (well, where else in Thundermist can you pick up a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?) and explaining to us how she was in a band too, the name of this band being Rape Culture, an all-girl group that made their music using just toy instruments, and how he was thinking of asking her to do guest vocals on a song on Factory X’s next album, and then he switched topics as he was wont to do on a whim and asked if I had heard the news that a boy we had both known in high school, Kevin Ophion, otherwise known as The Lizard King, had died in Egypt back in February, blown to bits after accidentally stepping on a landmine, and this news depressed me, as I had always felt pity for Kevin and thought he was an underrated novelist (The New Yorker had somewhat snidely dismissed him as a Jonathan Franzen with scales). Meanwhile, Howard was telling us about how he recently got back from a trip to Japan, and how he had gotten a lot of material for a future book dealing with modern-day ghost stories and urban legends from that country (Pure Creepypasta stuff, he said, and I had to ask him to describe what the term Creepypasta even meant), then he told us a lewd story about one of his colleagues at Fludd, a Professor of Ophiology named Nathan Nisbet, before asking me what I was up to, and I told him that I was working on a screen adaptation of M.R. James’ classic 1904 short story The Mezzotint for Miramax Films. Taliesin asked me if I was dating Alice, that weird little girl who lived down the street from us, but I told him that we were professional colleagues and nothing more.

Howard then started droning on about a trip he took to Israel last fall, where he had watched a celebration known as the Feast of Trumpets during Rosh Hashanah. As his soliloquy on shofars went on and on, I soon found myself gazing out the window closest to me in the car and I stared at my reflection: to give you a good idea of what I look like, just picture Jason Schwartzman’s Jack Whitman character from Wes Anderson’s 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited: that is, a young man with longish dark brown hair and a bold mustache. Then I looked out at the city of my birth. Incorporated as a city back in 1888, Thundermist was a city of fair size situated in northern Rhode Island, right near the borderline that divides Rhode Island from Massachusetts, and its population is over 41,000 people, making it the sixth largest city in the state. I saw that Thundermist hadn’t changed much since my last visit: it was still a city of old and abandoned mills, mills that lined the Blackstone River that snaked through the center of the city, mills that once had been the city’s major cash cow, before the Great Depression. Though many of those old mills were in the process of being torn down, bland-looking schools and office buildings were being erected in their place: no doubt to fall in line with the city’s official slogan (Thundermist: A City on The Move!). This made me sad, for whatever reason: it was as if the city I remembered from my childhood was slowly being replaced by another city, one seemingly designed in the bowels of some staid architectural firm overseen by some Infernal Bureaucracy. It was like whatever had made Thundermist unique in the first place was being destroyed by modernity. Still, some places remained that reminded me of my childhood, mostly the old churches, one of which was the massive cathedral known as St. Durtal’s Church, a building that looked like something right out of the Middle Ages, as solid and unshakable as the rock that St. Peter had built his church on.

There were a lot of people out on the streets that day, on account of the weather being so nice, and I saw, among other things, a massively overweight man on a motorized wheelchair whose outer surface was covered with Tea Party stickers and other patriotic propaganda, a middle-aged woman with ratty hair and mousy features taking her pet Basset Hound on a walk (said Basset Hound being dressed up like a canine Sherlock Holmes, complete with Inverness Cape and Deerstalker hat, though fortunately for the state of the dog’s lungs it wasn’t smoking a calabash pipe), two younger Hispanic women seated at a bus stop (one of whom was reading The Hunger Games, the other of whom was wearing a Root Doctaz t-shirt, that sinister Chicago-based hip-hop band who were temporarily in vogue during the early-to-mid-1990’s), a wizened old rabbi feeding corn to a murder of crows outside the Temple Beth-El synagogue, a boy spray-painting the words ZUMB ZUMB on one of the outer walls of Duncan’s Drugs, some construction workers taking a break from work on the new Unitol Pharmaceuticals office building… the city was certainly full of life that day.

For the trip up, Taliesin had slipped a Cut Hands CD into his car’s CD player, and right now the song Black Mamba was blasting from the speakers at a very loud volume that forced us to speak loudly in turn to be heard over the music. Something about the music disturbed me: it could have been classified as abrasive and experimental world music of an African vein, what with its ample use of djembes and doundouns and ksing-ksings, among other instrumentation, but world music of a darker world that we couldn’t perceive with our senses yet existed around us at all times, world music of an upside-down earth, and it conjured in my mind’s eye disconcerting images: I saw before me a cavern and an underground lake, and rising forth from the stagnant waters of this subterranean lake was a most abominable creature, its head resembling an enormous human brain, a giant eyeball, a shark’s mouth filled with large teeth, and a number of slimy octopus tentacles, while its body was a warty, lumpy, amorphous mass, and standing on the banks of this lake was a robed woman, situated in the center of a magical circle that had been drawn with red chalk on the ground, and her hands were raised as if she were summoning the monster emerging from the lake. I suppose what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that the music playing on Taliesin’s CD player made me visualize what could only be described as an Evocation of Yog-Sothoth as portrayed by Soror Andahadna (see plate 7 in Kenneth Grant’s Outside the Circles of Time, a book that Taliesin had lent me once as part of some research I was doing for a horror film involving certain occult elements). I wished that Taliesin would have taken the CD out and just flipped through some radio stations: I’ve always been more of a Shirley Collins guy, to be honest, and I yearned to listen to Fountains of Snow, or perhaps the sitar music of George Harrison and Ravi Shankar. Still, he was being kind enough to provide us with transportation there, so it would have been boorish of me to complain about his taste in music.

For their 2013 show, the Thread-Lovers of Thundermist were holding the event at a small church known as the Chantry Street Congregational Church, so-named because it was located on Chantry Street, in one of the nicer areas of Thundermist, a quiet suburban neighborhood where all the streets were lined with elm trees that provided ample shade. I knew that this was one of Rhode Island’s older churches, having been erected sometime in the 1860’s, and even though, architecturally speaking, the church itself hadn’t changed much over the years, certain modern additions had been added to it. Taliesin parked the car on the side of the street facing the church, beneath the shade of a tree, and once he had turned the engine off we all exited the vehicle. I looked up at the church: it was a fairly low-key structure, only one story tall and built atop a small hill that could be accessed by climbing a set of stone stairs, though there was also a ramp at the back of the building for handicapped people. To the west of this church was a taller, somewhat ugly modern-looking building with a flat roof, and it was made of pale gray and white cement blocks, and this building was connected to the church via a narrow vestibule, this vestibule serving as the main entrance to both buildings. The more modern-looking building was the church hall.

My brothers and I braced ourselves, then crossed the street, walked up the stairs and passed through the front doors of the vestibule. We found ourselves in a narrow rectangular room, with two doors, one on the west wall that led to the church hall, and a door on the east wall that led to the church itself. A table had been set up in this vestibule, serving as a makeshift desk, and seated behind it was a middle-aged woman, who, after putting down the copy of 50 Shades of Grey that she had been reading, immediately recognized us as Susan’s boys. Blushing, we each paid the $5 admission cost, and were each in turn handed a voting ballot and a stubby pencil. The voting ballots were simple pieces of white paper with 5 different categories typed on them: bed quilts, large wall hangings, small wall hangings, children’s quilts, and Best in Show. Beneath each category was a blank line where you could write in your pick.

My brothers and I opened the door on the west wall and entered the church hall. It was a large room, with white concrete block walls and a shiny Masonic black and white tiled floor. Long vertical windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling lined the east and west walls of the room, while a stage was located against the north wall. I surmised that the hall was normally used for bingo games, dances, musical recitals, Christmas pageants, and events of that nature, but that day the center of the room was crowded with a large number of wooden quilt racks that formed a labyrinth of stitches and fabric, each rack holding a number of quilts, while along the sides of the room tables had been set that were also displaying quilts and other crafts on their surfaces: according to a sign that had been set up in the vestibule, over 1,000 quilts were on display for the show. Each quilt had an index card clipped to it, identifying the creator of the quilt, its name, what category of quilt it was, and an identification number (when one voted for a quilt they liked, they needed to write down its corresponding number on the voting ballot). All around the place were pieces of paper cut into the shapes of human hands, and written on these paper hands was the following warning: Don’t Touch the Quilts! The stage, in the meanwhile, had been set up so that it displayed a number of antique sewing machines,