Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (3 page)

“Ah yes,” I said. I was more than familiar with the
Anima Sola
, which was a Catholic image depicting a soul in Purgatory. Commonly found on Latin American holy cards, they usually depicted a fair-skinned woman with long dark hair who was in the act of breaking free from chains around her wrist, in a dungeon surrounded by flames, this dungeon being a symbolic representation of Purgatory. “How do you know so much about Vodou anyway?”

“Don’t forget, folklore is my specialty, and in college I did minor in anthropology,” Howard said. “I spent a bit of time in Haiti a few years ago, as research for my thesis, and I got to see some Vodou ceremonies first hand. And I’ve read many books on the topic, such as Maya Deren’s
Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti
and Hougan Coquille du Mer’s
The Haitian Vodou Handbook
and Michael Bertiaux’s
The Voudon Gnostic Workbook
, among others.”

“Why am I not surprised?” I asked. “You say that the purpose of these vevers is to call the lwa down to the world as we know it? So where do these lwa come from, if that’s the case?”

“They come from a place known as Ginen, a paradisiacal island said to be at the bottom of the Earth and surrounded by primordial cosmic waters: the Island Below the Sea,” Howard said, as he popped a Luden’s Sugar Free Wild Cherry Throat Drop into his mouth. “It’s believed that not only the lwa but also the souls of the blessed dead live there. When the first slaves came to Haiti from Africa, they conceived a mythical homeland for their spirits, a sort of idealized version of Africa: an astral or dream version of Africa, if you will. That’s because during the time of the slave trade, one of the most powerful tribes in Africa was the Fon tribe, who created an empire known as Dahomey on the west coast of Africa. Rulers of Dahomey would often sell their own people in slavery to various European powers, and the majority of Haitian slaves were taken from there. For this reason, among others, the Haitian slaves had to create a new Africa, one that hadn’t betrayed them.”

“So you think that Zoyle was into Vodou?” I asked.

“Maybe, and not a nice version of it, either. You know, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps this Zoyle was a bokor, a Vodou priestess who exclusively practices black magic. Or maybe she was a member of the Palo Mayombe, or even a zobop,” Howard mused.

“A zobop?” I asked. This probably won’t make me look all that smart, but the moment I heard him say the word ‘zobop,’ the first thing I thought of was Bebop, the dim-witted warthog mutant who served as a henchman for the Shredder in
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
.

“A zobop is a vodou sorcerer who is associated with Haitian secret societies that practice black magic, among other things,” Howard sighed, as if he were explaining basic math to a mongoloid. “There are a lot of other names for them: bizangos, galipotes, ‘hairless pigs,’ ‘the hairless ones,’ the vlenblendengs and the voltigeurs. Such secret societies practice something known as
angajan
, which are transactions between the Vodouisant and the lwa in which the Vodouisant receives black magic techniques in return for serving the lwa. Needless to say, the cost of such transactions is steep, and failing to live up to one’s end of the bargain can be fatal to the Vodouisant. During my time spent in Haiti, I would often hear whispered stories about the zobop in Port-au-Prince. Some people were afraid to be outdoors at night because that’s when they believed the zobop were out, in their ‘tiger cars,’ or auto-tigres, to use their word for it. They believed that the zobop abducted people at night to eat them, or transform them into animals, or make them into zombies. The bizangos in particular are known for their zombification practices.”

“So what does ‘Nzambi’ mean?” I asked, pointing to the quilt’s name tag.

“Nzambi is the name of the god of the Bacongo people of Angola: a variation on Damballah, the so-called Rainbow Serpent. The Creole word for ‘Zombie’ is derived from it,” Howard said. “I think the odd creature in the foreground of this quilt is meant to be a zombie: observe, if you will, its extinguished eyes, which is one of the signs of a person who has been turned into a zombie. Though it could also be a baka, an evil spirit created by black magic that takes the form of a dwarf or a small monster, or maybe even a lougarou, which is the Vodoun equivalent of the werewolf.”

“Fascinating,” I said. I turned away from Zoyle’s creepy quilt and began walking around again, slipping my iPod’s ear buds back onto my ears, and I switched over to a new song, “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” by the Talking Heads, and this was the music I listened to as I continued my tour of the church hall, though now that I had seen one of Zoyle’s quilts I suddenly started to find her other entries, scattered here and there, the second one once again portraying a house on a hill at the edge of a swamp at night, with the silhouette of two people in one of the windows on the second floor, though for this quilt (entitled
Ouanga
) there was no nzambi present. Instead, an image had been stitched into the interior of the waning moon, that of a sickly-looking black woman lying in a hospital bed, stitching together a quilt while gazing down at the house below her with a scornful expression on her emaciated face: I couldn’t help but notice that this woman resembled a less healthy-looking Zoyle Dalembert. A few minutes later I found another one of her quilts, and once again it was a depiction of the same house at night, with the silhouette of the two people again in the upper window, and this one was called
Trahison
. I quickly deduced that all of these quilts were part of a series, a conclusion that seemed valid when I came across a fourth quilt displaying the same house (this quilt entitled
54 Needles
), but what made this one different from the others was that the window on the second floor now had no silhouettes, the front door of the house was now wide open, and a curious reddish sheen seemed to have been washed over the surface of the quilt, making the image appear to be seen through a veil of blood. More alarmingly, a red beam of light now emanated from the moon and stretched downwards to surround the house, and traveling down this red beam of light as if it were a lunar slide were three sinister-looking creatures that resembled giant scorpions with upright bodies and monstrous, almost human faces, their toothy mouths gaping obscenely open, slavering as they descended to the earth.

After doing a complete circuit of the church hall, I only found two more quilts in this series: one showed the nzambi (or whatever the hell it was) crawling up the serpentine path towards the house’s front door on all fours, a Petrine Cross glowing on his back, his shadowy hand reaching for the door knob, with the two silhouettes again in the window, while in the sixth and final one I saw the nzambi creeping away from the house, his alien face once again leering out at the viewer, and in this one, there were no silhouettes in any of the windows of the second floor, and the red beam once again connected the house with the moon, only now the scorpion monsters were traveling up the beam of light, away from the house, back to the moon. Collectively, the quilts seemed to be trying to put forth a narrative, but because they weren’t dated all that specifically (aside from the fact they were all apparently made in the year 2013), it was hard for me to figure out the sequence of events. And yet there was a little voice in the back of my head, echoing within my skull like a thousand little footsteps, that told me that maybe I didn’t really want to be able to put the whole story together, that it would be far more beneficial to my sanity to avoid doing so.

Time passed, and eventually Howard, Taliesin and I met up near the entrance to the church hall, where we agreed that it was time we departed. By this point our mother was back at the raffle table, and we went to say goodbye to her. Howard and Taliesin then headed for the vestibule (where they dropped off their voting ballots), and I was about to join them, when I stopped and asked my mother, “So, I saw some of Zoyle’s quilts.”

“Oh yes?” our mother asked. “Which ones?”

“That series she did of that house at night,” I said. “Those were all done this year, I take it?”

“Yes, those were actually the final quilts that Zoyle ever made, in her bed at the hospital: we all helped her out by bringing her the fabric she needed, along with other supplies,” our mother said. “You know, that house in those quilts, that’s actually
her
house. She was always very fond of it.”

“Really,” I said. “This Zoyle… was she married?”

“Yes, she had been married for twenty years, to a very nice man named Aaron, who was born in Africa,” our mother said. “Sarah Binks, the president of our group, was a good friend of Zoyle and Aaron. She provided the poor man with a lot of emotional support during the final months of Zoyle’s life. In fact, he’s here today. I imagine he must be very proud, what with his wife’s final works on display. Why, there he is right now, talking to Sarah.” And here our mother pointed to the church hall’s western wall.

I looked in the direction she was pointing in and saw two people talking in front of one of the tall windows that lined the western wall of the church hall. Aaron Dalembert was a handsome middle-aged black man, while Sarah Binks was the French cougar who had spoken to our mother earlier that day. The two gave each other a quick hug that seemed more than a little friendly. Maybe my overactive imagination was playing tricks on me again, but I could have sworn that, in the bright afternoon sunlight streaming forth through the windows, that their silhouettes greatly resembled the ones found in Zoyle’s final quilts.

I shivered, said goodbye to our mother, then left the church hall. I dropped off my voting ballot and pencil stub and left the church, and a few seconds later I was back in the backseat of Taliesin’s Impala. Once I was seated and my seatbelt was in place (despite being into punk rock, Taliesin was obsessed with following the rules of the road to a tee), Taliesin started up the engine and drove off, and as he did so he flicked on the radio and switched to a local alternative rock station, and I almost burst out in nervous laughter when I heard what song came on: Adam Lambert’s “Voodoo.”

I stayed at Thundermist for a few more days, then took a plane back to Los Angeles. As the days went by, I gradually forgot about Zoyle Dalembert and her creepy quilts (with the exception of one night where, unable to sleep, I had switched through TV stations until I had come across a station that was showing
Howard the Duck
, and it was the scene where giant scorpion-like aliens from another dimension were trying to invade Earth, and these scorpion aliens queasily reminded me of the ones that appeared in the quilts of Zoyle Dalembert). But my memory of the quilts was reawakened a week or so later when I called my mother to see how she was doing, something I did 2-3 times a week. I noticed how she sounded glum, so I asked her what was the matter. She sighed and said that the Thread-Lovers of Thundermist were grappling with another death, and even before she said another word I knew that Sarah Binks and Aaron Dalembert had met a no doubt gruesome and preordained end. One lesson I had learnt from this most recent quilt show is that, in the skilled hands of a Vodouisant, dolls are not the only thing in this world that may be cursed.

“Martyrdom does not end something,

it’s only a beginning.”

—Indira Gandhi

I

Like many odd children, Halloween was always my favorite holiday. It was to my great fortune, then, that I grew up in the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island: while this city was of a particularly Christian bent, that didn’t stop its citizens from going all-out and getting in touch with their inner pagan as far as Halloween was concerned (and as G.K. Chesterton once observed in his book
Orthodoxy
, “We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about”). My obsession with Halloween was something that perplexed my parents, but I can’t see why this should have been the case; after all, I was hardly a stereotypical little girl, and while my peers were all playing with Barbie dolls I instead took it upon myself to fashion a miniature eidolon from concrete and rebar, said eidolon resembling, in retrospect, a condensed version of SCP-173. I suppose I was a somewhat precocious child: I was probably the only girl on my block who named her pet cat Dharma. And yes, it was a black cat. My youth was a time of loneliness and isolation, and I didn’t have all that much in the way of friends, aside from a local boy named Frederick (it probably didn’t help matters that I wasn’t the most attractive girl, bearing a strong resemblance to poor Clara, the little tot who’s wasting away in Edward Gorey’s
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
, though I have freckles and she doesn’t). I’ve always wondered if this had to do with my family’s cultural heritage: in a city made up mostly of French-Canadian immigrants, a girl with a name like Alice O’Nan kind of drew notice to herself, as Thundermist has never boasted a large population of Irish-Americans. At times it felt as if the only thing I had in common with all the people around me was my Catholic faith and my love for Halloween.

And boy, did the people of Thundermist love Halloween. Every October, the city held a contest to see who could decorate their lawn in the most inventive and spooky manner. 11 out of 12 months of the year, the lawns of Thundermist were as bland as bland could be, though the more pious would have a Cross here, a shrine devoted to the Virgin Mary or some other saint there. But that all changed in October. Gone were the crosses and the saints, and in their place were ghosts hanging from trees, diseased and rotting arms and hands rising from fake cemetery dirt, foam tombstones and illuminated plastic heads-on-stakes, artificial spider webs and giant plastic spiders, inflatable black cats, sickly scarecrows with lurid expressions,  even mechanical vampires that arose from coffins, all accompanied by fog machines and flashing strobe lights and spooky organ music. And of course, the ubiquitous jack-o’-lanterns, which could be seen guarding the front doors or glowering from the windows of nearly every house in Thundermist. In the month of October, the darkness that descended on the town wasn’t just black, rather it was a black softened by the autumnal colors of red and yellow and orange, the lit-up jack-o’-lanterns resembling the lights of some eldritch erewhon.

Like our neighbors, my family liked to take part in this decorating contest. We even won one year, in 1992. That was the year my father, a metalworker, crafted an enormous bloodshot eyeball that he stationed on a stand near the driveway of our front lawn. This eye was motion-activated, so whenever someone would walk or drive by our house, the veins in the eye would glow a bloody red color and the eye would revolve around to stare at the person passing by and a recorded voice from within the eyeball would say “I see you!” My friend Frederick’s family won the following year: they created a giant crashed UFO from papier-mâché and set it on their front lawn, with a smoke machine inside it to make it look as if the spacecraft was still smoldering. A few feet away they had placed on the lawn a papier-mâché alien, done in the typical design of the Greys, with a large head and huge black eyes and a slit for a mouth. The family would dress up like Men in Black, with black shades and everything, and would pose in front of this UFO: they even placed yellow police DO NOT CROSS tape all around the site of the crash. As I said, Thundermisters took their Halloween decorating seriously.

But it wasn’t just the citizens of the city who got into the spirit of the season, as the local businesses and municipalities got into the act as well. The Magic Lantern Movie Theater over on Main Street would devote the entire month to showings of classic horror films like
The Exorcist
and
The Blob
and
Friday the 13th
. The local Covers bookstore would display, in their central aisle, a special promotional table devoted entirely to classic horror novels, such as Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, and Thomas Harris’
The Silence of the Lambs
. The local churches organized elaborate costume parties and masked balls (my parish, Our Lady of Sorrows, was renowned as having the best costume parties), while the schools would put on horror-themed plays, such as the fifth-grade class at Vernon Park Elementary School performing their annual dramatization of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan.” The Melanoid Art Gallery would display prints of famous macabre works of art, everything from Caspar David Friedrich’s
The Abbey in the Woods
to Theodore Gericault’s
Heads Severed
. Even the city radio station would show their seasonal solidarity by playing a constant stream of Halloween-themed music, from “The Monster Mash” to “Frankenstein” to “Werewolves of London” to the themes from
Ghostbusters
,
Psycho
and
Halloween
, to name just a few. During the month of October, it was as if the heartbeats of all the citizens of Thundermist were beating as one, only instead of the Sacred Heart of Christ it was the Tell-Tale Heart of Poe’s celebrated short story.

And finally, who could forget the annual Halloween parade, which was somewhat poetically referred to as “The Feast of Wasps?” A Thundermist tradition dating back to 1932, every Halloween morning a number of grotesque balloons and morbidly decorated floats would parade down Main Street like some Gothic, stillborn twin of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. One of these balloons resembled a gigantic floating lamb with diseased, decaying skin, and it was this balloon (known as the Lamb of Torment) that was my favorite of all of them.

I’m not sure why it was I loved Halloween so much. Maybe it was because I liked the imagery associated with it (it probably says a lot about me that as a child, my favorite
Where’s Waldo
scene was “The Nasty Nasties” from
Where’s Waldo? The Fantastic Journey
). Or my appreciation of certain scents and smells characteristic of autumn in Thundermist that now remain forever etched in the memory of my nostrils: that of bonfires and wet leaves, of freshly made apple cider and the smell of wax from the hundreds of candles burning away within the innumerous jack-o’-lanterns. Or maybe it was just because I liked dressing up. The first Halloween that really stands out in my memory was the one of 1989, when I was nine years old. That was the year where my parents let my younger brother and I trick-or-treat by ourselves, so long as we remained in our neighborhood. Well, it wasn’t just my brother and I: Frederick went with us too. I still remember the costumes we all wore: my brother, Seamus, was dressed up as Winston Zeddemore from
The Ghostbusters
films: he had seen
The Ghostbusters 2
in theaters earlier that year and had become utterly obsessed with Winston. So there he was that night, dressed in a handmade Ghostbusters jumpsuit, a plastic toy proton pack strapped to his back, crude brown face paint applied to his face to make him look black (my parents had worried as to how politically correct that was: “Why couldn’t he be obsessed with Ray Stanz?” was a phrase I heard my mother wailing a lot that month as she assembled his costume). That year, my friend Frederick went as a gorgon (NOT as Medusa, as he was quick to point out to anyone who called him that: just a generic gorgon): he was wearing a headpiece that had a number of plastic snakes glued to it, along with a black bathrobe and contact lenses that made his eyes look reptilian. I don’t know what he used for fake boobs. I myself was all dolled up as Maleficent, the villainess from the Walt Disney film
Sleeping Beauty
, which involved me wearing a bat-like black-and-purple robe, a horned headdress, and pale green face paint.

Frederick had arrived at my house by seven o’clock that evening, and that was when the three of us set out. There were a lot of kids out and about in our neighborhood that evening, perhaps because we lived in one of the nicer, more posh areas of Thundermist, an area that was well-lit and mostly crime-free. I seem to recall that most of the boys were dressed up either like Batman and the Joker that year (on account of the first Tim Burton
Batman
film), whereas a lot of the girls were dressed like Madonna. We each held a generic plastic jack-o’-lantern pumpkin pail to collect candy in, and I remember that my pumpkin was green in color, while Seamus’ was orange and Frederick’s was… well, his I can’t remember. Before we had left, our parents had given us a few ground rules, and it was obvious that the scar of the Freckle Slayer killings was still fresh in their minds: stay in the neighborhood, stick together, don’t take any offers from strangers, and finally, to stay clear of the Paddock house. We honored our parent’s wishes, with one exception: we did end up going to the Paddock house, a decision that was entirely my own.

Truth was, I was fascinated by Ms. Paddock Paterson. She lived in an old house at the end of Keziah Street, which was a dead-end street located near the border of our neighborhood. It was the only house on that street, in fact, and its address number was 11. Supposedly, Ms. Paddock had been a writer during the 1960’s and 1970’s, specializing in tales of a supernatural and horrific bent, but in the early 1980’s she had stopped publishing and moved to Thundermist, apparently to pursue the life of a recluse. She rarely ever left her house, having groceries and supplies delivered to her front door. My parents were familiar with some of her books and told us that they were not appropriate reading for children of a Christian character. Furthermore, they told us that she was a witch. Naturally, all of this only made me more interested in her rather than less.

Her house was the last house we went to, that Halloween night of 1989. It was a medium-sized house, done in the Dutch Colonial Revival style, with a gambrel roof and curved eaves, and it was somewhat seedy and decrepit in appearance, though one could tell by glancing at it that, once upon a time, it must have been a nice-looking place. For many years, the house had served as a funeral home, before closing down in 1982, and according to the local legends, when Ms. Paddock had purchased the place it had been said that when she first entered its basement she had discovered a box full of coffin handles, a chain-and-pulley casket lift, and a blood drainage pit, along with a shelf holding a few old jars of formaldehyde. The place certainly projected an aura of dread: even the garden gnomes on the front lawn were of a sinister design, looking less like the Travelocity’s Roaming Gnome and more like distant relatives of the primitive dwarf race that haunted the tales of Arthur Machen: lurid expressions were carved on their wooden faces, as if they were being buggered by the ghosts of Bogomil boys.

Surprisingly, given Ms. Paddock’s reputation (and also the reputation of the house she lived in), she barely did any Halloween decorating at all. Aside from a standard glowing jack-o’-lantern in one of the front windows of the first floor of her house, the only other decoration was a piñata hanging from her front yard’s lone tree. This piñata was designed to resemble a humanoid form, with a head and arms and legs and a torso, but it was as white as a ghost and completely featureless; it could have been a representation of anybody, a man or a woman, a child or an elderly person. Evidently, Ms. Paddock expected
someone
to hit it, for a large splintered wooden stick rested against the trunk of the tree. As we walked by this tree, Seamus grabbed the stick and took a few whacks at the dangling piñata, but though it shuddered and twirled from the impact of his blows, it remained intact. Seamus eventually gave up and set the stick back down against the tree’s trunk, and we continued walking to Ms. Paddock’s house.

Eventually, we reached the front door, and Frederick rang the doorbell. From inside the house we could hear the sound of approaching footsteps. A moment later the door slowly opened with a loud, prolonged creaking sound, as if the wood of the door itself were screaming under torture. And then there she stood before us, Ms. Paddock Paterson. To say I was somewhat disappointed was an understatement. No doubt I was expecting some old crone with gnarled features, green skin, and a third eye in her forehead. But Ms. Paddock didn’t look like that at all. She was middle-aged and fairly attractive, with long hair that was dark red in color. Her figure was impressive: she was wearing tight black jeans and a tight t-shirt that had the word ‘Heart’ stretched out over her considerable bosom (the t-shirt was old and faded: evidently from the band’s
Dreamboat Annie
era). Seamus, being only 7 years of age at the time, took no notice of the witch’s physical charms, but Frederick, who was the oldest of us at age 10 and the one who was closest to approaching puberty, had found it hard not to ogle at her breasts. From a room near the front of the house we could hear music playing softly, and though I didn’t recognize the song at the time, years later I would find out that it had been the “Overture” from the soundtrack to Roman Polanski’s
Macbeth
, as composed by the Third Ear Band in 1972, and it conjured curious and morbid images in my mind, images of witches burying a decomposed human hand in the sand of some desolate Scottish beach, of the corpses of traitors dangling from crude makeshift nooses, of a naked little boy in a bath being toweled off by his mother only to be slain moments later by knives that were thirsty for human blood. When Ms. Paddock saw the three of us standing before her on her doorstep she smiled.