Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (6 page)

The Sect put this praxis of torturing the Martyr into practice by training their acolytes at a young age in the art of writing weird fiction. Ms. Paddock had been one of those acolytes, and on her tape she had named a few other horror writers as well, some of them big names in the field, but for fear of being accused of slander, I won’t name names here. For many years, Ms. Paddock had played her part, torturing The Perpetual Martyr innumerous times in her sinister stories. But in the end, her own inner cauldron of creativity had dried up, and she took up a new task: seeking a new acolyte to take her place, to continue the torturing of The Perpetual Martyr and the worship of the Fecundating Cauldron. The tape ended with Ms. Paddock’s revelation that
I
was that new acolyte, that she had been grooming me to take her place for years now. And now that the truth was known to me, I was ready to fulfill my role and join the Sect of the Fecundating Cauldron. With those words being uttered, the tape came to an end, and it evaporated into ashes inside the tape player.

I directed my attention towards the typewriter, saw that a blank sheet of paper was already in place and ready to go, a white field crying out to be irrigated with words. I sat down and ran my fingers over the keys, which felt as cold as frozen bone beneath my touch. I thought back to my earlier failed adolescent attempts at writing pessimistic cosmic horror fiction, my reluctance to usher more nihilism and darkness onto a world that was already so weary of such things, that for countless years had gluttoned itself on gloom. But if there was a divine purpose behind such fiction, if it did in fact serve some holy function, then perhaps, perhaps…

Outside of the house, on the front lawn, the children continued whacking away at the hapless piñata.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a fear of the sky.” I paused, took a sip from the glass of water that Dr. Roxy had been thoughtful enough to leave on the small wooden end table to the side of my chair, and then continued on with my story. “I have this very distinct memory from childhood where I was hanging out at Vernon Park one day and staring up at this domed hill, and on top of this domed hill there was this one lone tree, and because it was late fall all of the leaves had fallen off this tree, leaving its branches bare. From where I stood, at the bottom of the hill, the tree looked completely black, and juxtaposed as it was with the cloudless blue sky behind it, it seemed almost as if the tree were a crack in the sky itself, and for a brief few seconds the tree/crack seemed to begin to grow before my eyes, and I panicked, visualizing in my mind’s eye the sky itself cracking open and shattering to pieces all around me like big shards of blue glass. The sky as a giant blue Easter egg being smashed against the rim of a frying pan, the rim in this case being the Earth’s horizon. What can I say? As a child, I had quite an imagination. But it wasn’t just the sky itself that scared me. It was also
things that came from the sky
. One raindrop could have been the precursor to a Biblical flood that would never end. Then there were tornadoes, which scared me witless, even though I’ve yet to ever see one in my life. I often had nightmares of tornadoes, as a child. In these dreams I would often see storm clouds gathering in the sky like the black ships of the Antichrist’s armies and watch in horror as the bottom tips of maturing tornadoes descended from these storm clouds like enormous cobras unsheathing their fangs. Lightning was an electric crack that seemed to shatter the mirror of the sky, and thunder unsettled me. There was this one bad storm I suffered through when I was a child, I may have been maybe 9 or perhaps even 10 at the time, where I was home alone with my father and we were both in the living room of our house, he on his favorite rocker and me on the family sofa, and I guess to try to take my mind off the storm my father was telling jokes, or just making comments that were supposed to be amusing in general. One of these comments (or perhaps observations would be a better word) was that thunder was nothing more than God farting in Heaven. But that comment had the opposite of its intended effect on me: instead of making me laugh, it shocked and even horrified me. It seemed blasphemous to me that he would say such a thing, even though I knew he wasn’t being serious. I looked at my father with a glum face and asked him, in a nervous voice, ‘Dad, will you go to Hell for saying something like that?’ Many years later, during a period of my life in which I found myself studying the Qabalah, I came across a book by William G. Gray entitled
Qabalistic Concepts: Living The Tree
, that had first been published in 1984. There was this one chapter in the book, chapter 20 I think it was, that was titled ‘Esoteric Excretion,’ in which the author pondered the idea of Man serving as the Microcosm that was made in the likeness of God (and the Macrocosm), and wondered how, if Man has a digestive and excretory system, then does God as well? Or, as the author puts it, ‘does deity produce dung?’ He examined the Qabalistic Tree of Life and came to the conclusion that the Sephira Daath, otherwise known as ‘The Abyss,’ served as a sort of mouth, then conceptualized a second Abyss, in between Yesod and Malkuth at the bottom of the Tree, that served as the anus of God. It’s quite an interesting chapter, really, and reading it one can see how it was a clear influence on Grant Morrison’s
The Filth
comic book. At the start of the chapter, he wrote how, in the old days, there was a reason why hanging was the preferred method of dealing with criminals. It was believed that when the soul left the body at death, it did so via either the mouth or the nostrils. But when one was strangled, the soul would be unable to escape the corpse using those routes, and would instead be forced to escape via the anus, or the ‘dung gate’ as it was called. It’s common knowledge that when one is hanged one often ejaculates, but explosive defecation is also quite common in such situations. By forcing the soul to flee from the body side-by-side with shit, they believed they were condemning it to an ill-starred afterlife. Anyway, reading all this reminded me of my father’s observation about the farts of God years ago, and got me looking into the topic of intestinal exorcism. One day while I was paying a visit to the Thundermist Rescue Mission I happened to bump into a friend of mine, Padre Pendragon. We got to talking, one thing led to another, and he eventually got around to lending me a book called
Glory of the Confessors
by Gregory of Tours. In this book he writes about this bishop from the 5
th
century named Martin of Tours who was known for his ability to exorcise demons from people who had been possessed. At one part of the book Gregory mentions how one of the afflicted men that Martin exorcised ended up expelling the demon from his body in a ‘blast of air from his bowels.’ So I got to researching the topic a bit more and I found out how in the Middle Ages it was believed that flatulence was seen as a way of casting demons out from one’s body. The idea of demons being expelled by flatulence isn’t unique to Western Christianity, however. For example, Ethiopians also believe that when one farts demons escape from the body. And there’s also a certain mysterious voodoo cult in Haiti that worships Ti-Moufette, the lwa of bad smells. The priesthood of this cult conducts rituals in which they try to emit as many bad smells as they possibly can: I’m sure you can imagine what that entails.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Roxy said. The method in which she worked with her patients was that she liked to let them talk a lot first before she gradually began joining in with her questions, and that day’s session was no different. “So could it then be claimed that the stage act of Le Pétomane was a form of public exorcism?”

“Not quite,” I said. “It is often mistakenly believed that the passing of intestinal gas was a part of Pujol’s theatrics, but such was not the case. Rather, it was his extraordinary control of his anal muscles, his ability to inhale air up his rectum and then control the release of said air by a manipulation of his sphincter muscles, which allowed him to achieve the anal auditory effects he was able to recreate onstage. But I digress. We were talking about my fear of the sky. I can’t believe that I neglected to mention my crippling childhood fear of rainbows.”

“What you’re describing is iridophobia,” Dr. Roxy told me. “That means ‘the fear of rainbows.’”

Upon receiving this tidbit of trivia, I had to smile. “My, they really do have phobias for everything, don’t they?” I asked with a laugh.

“More so than most people think. To name just a few of the more exotic ones, there’s anatidaephobia, which is the fear that somewhere in the world, a duck is watching you, and ectophobia, which is the fear of vomit, and masklophobia, the fear of costumes and mascots, and xanthophobia, which is the fear of the color yellow, and who could forget Paraskavedekatriaphobia, which is the fear of Friday the 13th? To use myself as an example: growing up, I had a fear of buttons, especially buttons on clothing,” Dr. Roxy told me with a grin.

“Really?” At that I laughed a little harder. “You were afraid of buttons?”

“The clinical name for such a fear is koumpounophobia,” Dr. Roxy went on. “It’s more common than you would assume. Steve Jobs suffered the same fear, which is one of the reasons why the elevator in Apple’s Tokyo store has no floor buttons. In my case it was so chronic that, when I was growing up, I would refuse to wear any type of clothing that had buttons on them. Just the act of
touching
a button would leave me feeling physically ill. Of course, with some people the phobia is so severe that the sight of a button is enough to induce vomiting.”

The date was September 14th, 2013: a Monday. I was seated in the office of my therapist, Dr. Roxy, who I had been a patient of for around 5-6 months. Her office was situated towards the back of a medium-sized three-story office building in downtown Thundermist known as the Plaza Center. This building was quite modern looking, and on its façade there was a giant angular piece of diamond-like glass that served as the entrance to the building’s atrium: it looked like something that might have fallen off the dress of Lady Gaga if Lady Gaga had been 500 feet tall (incidentally, I think the idea of a 500-foot-tall Lady Gaga is one of the most awesome ideas ever). Dr. Roxy’s office was a small room, which contained a desk and computer and a framed picture of some black girl, a bookshelf where one could find standard titles by Freud and Jung (along with books on hypnotism and post-hypnotic command techniques), a few comfortable chairs with plush cushions and wooden frames, and a file cabinet or two. The walls were decorated with wallpaper that sported a “fluffy white clouds floating through a blue sky” design, and hanging up on these walls were two framed posters, one of which depicted a photograph of the planet Earth as seen from outer space, while the other was an Ansel Adams print, a photograph of Redwood Forest, Founder’s Grove, with the words “FIAT LUX” at the bottom of it. On the wall facing the chairs where the patients sat there were large windows (made of tinted glass) that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. They gave one not only a good view of Broderbund Street, but also the massive structure known as St. Durtal’s Church, which was located next door, behind Plaza Center. Sometimes during my sessions with Dr. Roxy I would find myself getting distracted by the enormous church: a friend of mine, a librarian named Timothy, was obsessed with the world-famous frescoes that could be found within the church’s walls, and he was always bugging me to visit it with him on Sundays, when tours were held there.

Prior to my appointment with Dr. Roxy, I had been seated in the waiting room of her office, deep in the heart of Plaza Center, flipping through a magazine, this really old back issue of
Life & Style Weekly
that had first been published all the way back on January 3, 2011. The cover story dealt with Heidi Montag’s plastic surgery disasters, and it promised world exclusive shocking photos of “Horrific Scars,” “Botched Implants,” “Lumpy Liposuction,” and “Mangled Ears.” Bored, I flipped to the story, which began on page 24 and consisted of 6 pages, mostly photographs analyzing Montag’s plastic surgery flaws in such a detailed, almost fetishistic way that I had to remind myself that it couldn’t have been written by J.G. Ballard, who had died on April 19, 2009. The best page was page 26, which consisted of a full-page photograph of Heidi Montag, clad in only a white Land’s End bikini and top, her hands on her hips. At the top left-hand corner of the page were the words “THE REAL SIDE OF SURGERY” in bold capital letters, and on this page there were a number of lines pointing out where all the plastic surgery flaws could be found on Heidi’s body, including a “horrifying jagged line” behind her ears (“They basically cut off your ears and sew them back on”), the two “caterpillar-size bald spots” along her scalp, a 2-inch-long raised blemish on her chin, a nose that has been operated on twice and was apparently so fragile she was afraid it would break off, lumpy legs, the fluid-filled scar beneath her butt cheek, excessive scar tissue on her nipples, and of course, her breasts, with her right boob being larger than her left: the cumulative effect was that of a travelogue of scars. In the interview portion of the article, Heidi mentions how she has trouble sleeping at night because her breasts are so large, and that she’s forced to massage her boobs for an hour or so a day. “People have fewer scars from car accidents than I have on my body,” Heidi says about her “grizzly operation-room battle wounds.” Her makeup was done by Brett Freedman, her hair was done by Giovanni Giulliano, and her dress was from Free People, while the pink cami she wore in one of the photographs was from Cosabella. For some reason, the mental image of Heidi Montag massaging her freakish boobs gave me a guilty erection, and I wondered if maybe I should make a quick visit to the men’s restroom and rub one out, when Dr. Roxy entered the waiting room and looked at me and smiled and said it was my turn. So I smiled back, put the magazine back down on the coffee table, and followed her to her office, hoping that she didn’t notice that I was walking a little funny (on account of my boner).

“Hello? Earth to Christopher Oz?” Dr. Roxy asked me with a grin as she waved a slender hand a few feet away from my face, causing my attention to snap back into the present. Dr. Roxy Pomo was a thin middle-aged woman with short red hair and heterochromatic eyes, these eyes being framed by a pair of old-fashioned looking glasses that looked almost exactly like the ones worn by Eileen Brennan’s Mrs. Peacock character from the 1985 film
Clue
(in fact, they were the
exact
same pair of glasses, as it just so happened that Dr. Roxy was a distant relation of Eileen Brennan and had received the glasses as a gift many years ago). As always, she was wearing some sort of Native American necklace along with Navajo sterling-silver and turquoise dream catcher dangle-earrings. I couldn’t help but notice that her outfit had no buttons on it: she had on that day faded denim jeans, a black short-sleeved t-shirt (on the front of which was an image of three wolves howling at a moon), and no shoes or socks. I myself was wearing black jeans and a custom made white t-shirt, on the front of which was an illustration of the Doomsday Door that appeared on an episode of
The Real Ghostbusters
cartoon show back in 1987, during its second season (an episode that had given me nightmares when I was a kid: in the show, which was entitled “Knock Knock,” some construction workers digging a subway tunnel encounter an ancient Sumerian gateway built beneath New York City, a door that leads to the “Nether Regions” and which has a demonic face on the front of it that resembled a monstrous black-skinned bull/human hybrid, with two curvy horns, a nose ring, a mouth filled with sharp teeth, and two black tentacles coming from beneath its chin. The demon face on the door can speak, and it warns the workers in a deep, echoed voice to not open the door until doomsday, this warning being followed by a maniacal laugh. One of the workers, seemingly blasé about all of this, chooses to ignore the warning, claiming that they have a subway tunnel to dig and that they weren’t going to stop “just because some nutty door says so.” Naturally, the door flies open, all kinds of ghosts and demons commence causing havoc in NYC, and once again the Ghostbusters are called upon to save the world. Man, that was a great cartoon show).