Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (4 page)

“Good evening, my dears,” she said, in a voice that seemed… off. It was the voice of an old woman in some ways, and it didn’t match her youthful features. “My, what lovely costumes.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Frederick said. “Uh, trick or treat.”

We held up our pumpkin pails. Ms. Paddock reached into a cardboard box that was located on a side table right near her door. We were expecting her to pull out handfuls of candy, so we were surprised when she instead pulled out some books, mass market paperbacks with lurid covers, to be exact. I watched, eyebrows raised, as she dropped a copy of Alvin Schwartz’s
Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark
into my brother’s pumpkin. He reached in, picked up the book, and stared at it, as if it were an artifact from some alien realm. “What’s
this
?” he asked in barely disguised dismay. He was quite a rotund little boy with something of a sweet tooth.

“It’s a book, my dear,” Ms. Paddock said as she dropped a book into Frederick’s pumpkin. “I’m sure you know what a book is, though the way public schools are run these days, perhaps you don’t.”

“I know what it is,” Seamus said testily. “But… most people give out candy to trick-or-treaters on Halloween.”

“My dear, I’m hardly ‘most people,’” Ms. Paddock said, still smiling. “Candy is no good for a growing young boy such as yourself. All it does is rot your teeth.”

“So instead you’re giving us books to rot our minds?” I asked.

Ms. Paddock turned to me and looked me in the eye and smiled. “In a manner of speaking,” she said in a cryptic tone. “You’re a smart girl, aren’t you?”

“I guess you could say that,” I said, secretly pleased that the witch hadn’t called me a
little
girl.

“Well, if you’re so clever, maybe you’ll appreciate this one,” Ms. Paddock said as she dropped a small paperback book into my pumpkin pail. I looked at the book: on the front cover was an illustration of a raven standing atop a skull, and I saw that it was a collection of Poe’s short stories and poetry. I had heard of Poe, but I had never actually read his work.

“Thank you,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“If you enjoy that book, be sure to come back here next year,” Ms. Paddock said as she began closing the door. “Maybe I’ll have something else that might interest you.”

Then she shut the door all the way, leaving the three of us alone on the front step of her house.

“What book did you get?” I asked Frederick.

“
Dracula
,” he said, a little glumly. He wasn’t really into horror, preferring sci-fi: he was always trying to get me to read H.G. Wells’
The War of the Worlds
back in those days.

“No way am I coming back here again next year,” Seamus grumbled as we began walking away from the house. “Who gives away books instead of candy on Halloween? That’s totally bogus, dude.” Perhaps I should mention here that, aside from being a fan of the Ghostbusters, Seamus was also obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, hence his vernacular.

As we walked back down the street, in the direction of home, we once again passed by the featureless piñata hanging from the tree. I now found the stick resting against the tree’s trunk to be too irresistible to pass up, so I grabbed it and gave it a mighty swing in the direction of the piñata. To my surprise, the piñata broke off its string at this first hit of mine and crashed against the cold earth. It split open, and its contents began pouring out: not candy, but hundreds of spiders, centipedes, worms, and other creepy crawlers. The three of us shrieked and promptly fled the scene as quickly as we could.

It only took Seamus a few days to finish off the candy he had amassed that evening. When he was done with it, he even ate some pages from the book Ms. Paddock had given him, in an act of defiance. No one ever said my brother was the brightest boy, but I had to admire his pigheaded spunk.

I didn’t read the Poe book I had been given immediately. For a couple of weeks after Halloween, it sat unread atop the nightstand near my bed. Then one night that November my neighborhood lost power (I forget the exact circumstances behind this, but I believe it had something to do with a rabid raccoon falling on a power transformer) and our house was plunged into darkness. At the time of this power outage, I had been seated before the computer, playing one of my favorite Commodore 64 games,
Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back
, a game in which you play as a bouncing jack-o’-lantern who’s trapped in a castle owned by an evil witch. Bored, I had taken a flashlight up to my bedroom and, sitting in bed, I took the Poe book off my nightstand and flipped it open to a random story, the name of this story being “The Masque of the Red Death.” And I began reading it. And reading it. And reading it. And when I was done with that one, I picked another Poe story at random, entitled “The Premature Burial.”

To make a long story short, I became a lifelong fan of Poe that evening. Up to that point in my life, I had a reputation as a morbid girl, one who enjoyed dressing in black and hanging out at any one of Thundermist’s many cemeteries (with Lamb’s Blood Cemetery in particular being a favorite). In some ways I was so morbid that my father often joked that I made Wednesday Addams look like Ramona Quimby. I’ve always been drawn to the dark: as a child, I had cried when the shark died at the end of the first
Jaws
film, and still have nightmares from the first time I watched the original 1954 Godzilla film (that awful scene at the end where scientists use the Oxygen Destroyer to slay the monster, and how I had broken down into tears as I watched Godzilla disintegrate before my very eyes, until he was nothing more than a skeleton… how that traumatized me!). Even when I use to play that old computer game
Archon
with Seamus, I would
always
play as the Dark Side. In other words, it would seem as if I were
genetically designed
to appreciate Poe’s work, and certainly his stories and poems, what with their scarlet horrors and blood-bedewed halls, their vulture-eyed old men and beating undead hearts, their premature burials and mansions of gloom, their phantom cats and talking ravens, were like soothing psalms to the shadow at the bottom of my soul. In “The Premature Burial,” the narrator writes of how his fancy grew charnel, how he talked “of worms, of tombs, and epitaphs,” and I knew
exactly
how he felt. It didn’t take me all that long to finish the book, and by the time I had turned over its final yellowing page, one thing was clear to my mind: that next year, on Halloween night, I would be certain to visit Ms. Paddock’s house and see what new treasure she would have for me.

II

And so it was on the Halloween night of 1990 that my brother, Frederick, and I once again went trick-or-treating, and just like the previous Halloween, we stopped at Keziah Street towards the end of our costumed noctambulations. Both Seamus and Frederick had no intention of returning to the witch’s house, as Frederick had hated
Dracula
, and the book that Ms. Paddock had given Seamus had only ended up giving him a bad case of indigestion. So I left them standing by the house’s lone tree as I made my way to the front door of her lonely house. As I traversed the sidewalk, I noticed that once again a featureless piñata built in a vaguely humanoid shape was hanging from one of the crooked branches of the tree, and how once again a stick was resting against the trunk of the tree, but knowing this year of the crawling insects that lurked within the piñata’s confines, I wisely decided to leave it alone. I noticed that the piñata’s outer surface was covered with stitches and seams, almost as if it were the piñata from the previous year, sewn back together so that it could once again carry out its appointed function.

Soon enough I was standing before the front door of Ms. Paddock’s house. I rang the doorbell, and seconds later she opened the door, her body casting a crooked shadow over me. Her physical appearance was largely unchanged from the last time I had seen her, though this year she was wearing a new t-shirt: it was black in color, and on the front of it was the poster artwork of the film
Evil Dead 2
: a grinning human skull. For the record, I myself was dressed up as the Bride of Frankenstein that year.

She smiled when she saw me. “So, you’ve returned,” she said, in that odd elderly voice of hers. “I’m surprised. Not many do. But where are your little friends?”

“They’re not as into books as I am, I guess,” I said, by way of explanation.

“I take it, then, that you appreciated the Poe book I gave you last year?” she asked.

“Indeed I did,” I replied, impressed that she not only remembered me, but also the book that she had given me. Then again, she probably didn’t get too many repeat trick-or-treaters.

“Well, let’s see if I can give you something this year that you’ll enjoy just as much,” she said as she rooted through the cardboard box she kept by the door in her foyer, a box that was once again filled with books. After a few seconds, she found the book she was looking for and handed it to me.

I looked this new book over. It was entitled
The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre
, the one published by Del Rey Books in 1982, with an introduction by Robert Bloch and an evocative cover painting by Michael Whelan, a diptych known as
Lovecraft’s Nightmare
. I flipped the book over to check out the back cover and saw that there was a quote by Lovecraft himself printed on the back: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

“If you loved Poe so much, maybe you’ll appreciate H.P. Lovecraft as well,” Ms. Paddock told me. “If you do enjoy it, be sure to come back next year.”

“Thank you,” I said as I placed the book in my pumpkin pail.

Then she closed the door and I was alone on the front step of her house. I returned to Seamus and Frederick, and we continued on our way.

That year, I didn’t wait as long to read the new book I had been given: I began reading it that very evening, and just as with the Poe book, I quickly became entranced by it. In some regards, I found Lovecraft to be even more to my liking than Poe. Over the next 5 years, I kept returning to Ms. Paddock’s house every Halloween, and every Halloween she had a new book for me to read. One year it was Clive Barker’s
Books of Blood
. Another year it was Thomas Ligotti’s
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
. Yet another year it was August Van Zorn’s
The Abominations of Plunkettsburg and Other Tales
, and the year after that Tony Horla’s
Choronzon Speaks!
And so on and so forth. In the space of time in-between each Halloween, I had begun to haunt Thundermist’s used bookstores, collecting some horror and weird fiction short story collections of my own choosing. By the time I was 15, I had assembled a pretty nice little library of cosmic horror titles. I quickly came to realize that I preferred horror short stories to horror novels, and that I tended to gravitate most towards pessimistic stories, ones that usually ended with the narrator or main character either dying, going insane, taking their own life, or mutating into some sort of abomination. I even eventually got around to purchasing some of Ms. Paddock’s short story collections, such as
Hymns From a Flayed Future
, a development my parents were none too excited about, as the idea of their daughter reading prose that had been penned by a godless pagan didn’t exactly soothe their fears that I was taking my first tentative steps on the long road to Hell.

Like most people exposed to such horror fiction of a Lovecraftian bent, when I was in high school I too entertained notions of writing similar material. Yet despite the fact that I had some ideas for stories that I thought were pretty good, I could never really muster up the energy to actually write them, or even start them, for that matter. I wondered if it had something to do with my Catholic upbringing; Lovecraft may have believed that the
universe is an “automatic, meaningless chaos devoid of ultimate values,” and Ligotti may have argued that life was “malignantly useless,” yet such a frame of mind ran counter to my own Christian worldview which, while not ignoring the fact of suffering, still believed that there had to be some point, some meaning behind it all. Therefore, to have written cosmically pessimistic horror stories and to have put forth a philosophical system of beliefs that I myself didn’t really believe in made me feel like a hypocrite and a fraud, so it was something I decided to not bother pursuing.

It was around this period of my life that I began suffering from bad nightmares, though oddly enough I never put 2 and 2 together and wondered that maybe the nightmares were being triggered by the material I was reading at that time. There was one nightmare in particular that plagued me more than others, one I had to endure 401 times between the years 1990-1995 (I know this because even back then I was keeping a detailed dream diary every day). This nightmare involved me walking across a sort of lunar landscape, one where the sky was a sickly pale yellow, while the ground was the color of emerald that had been flecked with gold. Soon enough I would come to a vast crater at the end of the Backward Path, and standing on the edge of this crater was a large headless woman with a withered body and sagging breasts, and she held two serpents in her left hand and a noose and some flowers in her right. This woman was surrounded by floating flutists with squid-like facial features, all of whom were playing the pipes of Pan. As the flutists played their Pan pipes in a discordant, chaotic fashion, I wandered to the edge of the crater and stared down into it. I saw that the crater was not empty, but was filled with a bubbling miasma of a liquid whose primary colors were black and red. It was a lake of menstrual blood and whore urine, and as I gazed down into this muck of the moon I could see shapes writhing within the bubbles forming on the surface of the Vinum Sabbatum, shapes that were like the vitrified remnants of nightmares struggling to be born, oneiric teratomas emanating forth from some Black Light District of the soul. And as the bubbles containing these monstrosities began to rise towards me, it was then when I would awaken.