Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (7 page)

“Sorry… though you know I have a tendency to daydream,” I said, with a lopsided grin of my own on my face. “Uh, what were we talking about again?”

“You were telling me about your fear of rainbows, and I told you about my fear of buttons. Why are you afraid of rainbows, if you don’t mind my asking?” Dr. Roxy asked, her gold Cross pen poised over the surface of her legal pad, ready to jot down notes.

“It all dates back to a sermon I heard once when I was a kid. I was raised as a Roman Catholic, you see… I went to Mass with my family every Sunday,” I said.

“What church did you go to?” Dr. Roxy asked.

“Our Lady of Sorrows,” I answered. “It’s near the border of North Smithfield, right across the street from the Super Stop & Shop, on Park Ave.”

“Okay, I think I know what church you mean,” Dr. Roxy said. She herself lived in Massachusetts.

“I was never that crazy about the place,” I went on. “I always thought that visually it was kind of bland, especially when compared to the pictures of the old European cathedrals from the Middle Ages that I would look at in my history textbooks at school. It had, like, no stained glass windows or anything like that. It almost felt more like a Protestant church, you know?”

“I’ve never really been in many churches,” Dr. Roxy admitted. “I am a Neopagan, you know.”

“Anyway, there was this one priest, Father Severin Doyle. He was the assistant pastor. He wasn’t like most of the other priests at Our Lady of Sorrows. He was like an actual human being, someone who I could relate to. He was a fat, jovial fellow; heck, his cheeks were practically rosy. I don’t think that I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He had his little vices, of course, like all of us: he smoked all the time, and was somewhat obsessed with his golf game, though he freely admitted that he was terrible at it. He was really popular with the rest of the parishioners. At the start of each of his homilies, he would warm the crowd up, so to speak, with a little joke. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of the jokes he told, but here’s one that I still recall, after all these years: a guy goes into his kitchen, opens up the freezer door of his refrigerator, and he sees a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit sleeping in his freezer. When the guy asks the rabbit what he’s doing in the freezer, the rabbit answers, ‘I thought it said Westing House!’ As I said, Father Doyle wasn’t like some of the other priests at Our Lady of Sorrows. The other priests there were, for the most part, grim old fossils with no sense of humor. I remember one summer when one of those pastors was away on a religious retreat for a week, leaving Father Doyle in charge of the parish. That Sunday, when Father Doyle stepped out from behind the lectern to deliver his homily, he simply said, ‘When the cat’s away, the mouse will play. You guys get the week off.’ Or words to that effect. And that was it. It was easily the shortest sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, lasting not even ten seconds. Needless to say, the congregation loved that: they laughed and even applauded. And yet, the irony is, it was one of Father Doyle’s homilies that scared me more than any other homily that I’ve ever heard in my life.”

I suddenly found myself reminiscing about Our Lady of Sorrows Church, the church of my childhood. Our Lady of Sorrows Church had been founded back on September 1953, though the church itself hadn’t been completed until March of the following year. The inside of the church was made from red cedar imported from Oregon (funded almost entirely from small donations), and visually it resembled the interior of an ark. In the 1970’s, the decision was unfortunately made to modernize the place, and the tile floor was replaced by red carpeting. Also, two furnished reconciliation chapels adorned with bronze decorations were created for the sacrament of penance, and a special devotional chapel was erected near the main entrance. This devotional chapel was dedicated to the Virgin Mary (who, after all, was the Lady of Sorrows that the church was named after), and within it was a statue of the Blessed Mother, a statue that was continually spot lit and surrounded by red and blue votive candles. The fourteen Stations of the Cross could be found on the walls to the left and right of the main aisles in the nave. Above the doors leading to the vestibule was a large statue of Christ on the cross, while high up on the wall behind the altar was a statue of Christ resurrected. That was pretty much the extent of the decoration of Our Lady of Sorrows Church.

Even though I hadn’t been baptized at this church (as at the time of my birth, my parents had been members of a different parish), Our Lady of Sorrows Church was pretty much the church I was raised in: my First Communion had taken place there on May 14, 1989, while my Confirmation had been done there in 1996. Around 1998 or 1999, I pretty much stopped going to Mass weekly, partly because I had moved away to be a student at Fludd University in Massachusetts, but also because at that point in my life I had lost interest in Catholicism.

For some reason, though, I’ve always been nostalgic about my First Communion. I had even kept all of the cards I had received from my friends and relatives for my First Communion, though some I preferred more than others. One of my favorites was a white card manufactured by Alfred Mainzer, Inc. and given to me by my grandparents. On the front of this card were the words “God’s Blessing on Your Communion DEAR GRANDSON” in gold gilt lettering, and below that was an oval-shaped image (also surrounded by gold gilt) which depicted a young boy with shaggy Justin Bieberish brown hair, and this boy was dressed in a white robe and his hands were held up before him, clasped in prayer, and floating in front of him was a golden grail, and emerging from this grail was a Communion wafer inscribed with the letters JHS, and this wafer was surrounded by a golden halo. Inside the card there was a generic inspirational message and a quote from the Bible, Proverbs 28:20, “A faithful man shall abound with blessings.” Another card I received that day was a pale blue card, also manufactured by Alfred Mainzer, Inc., though this one was given to me by my parents. On the front of the card were the words “For you, dear Son, on Your Communion,” and below those words there was an illustration of another young boy, this one clad in a white and blue robe, his hair blonde, and he was standing in the middle of some field and in his right hand he was holding up a fistful of palms and in his left hand he was holding a golden grail, yet another Communion wafer emerging forth from it like a tiny white sun. There was a biblical quote inside this one as well, from Isaiah 60:19: “The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light.” I’m not sure why I still remember those cards so fondly: perhaps because they remind me of a paradise that’s been lost, innocence that can never be regained.

Dr. Roxy cleared her throat. “Christopher?” she spoke up. “I think you’re daydreaming again.”

“Sorry,” I apologized. “I realize I’m mentally digressing again. Where was I? Oh yes, I was talking about Father Doyle, and how one of his sermons had frightened me when I was a child.”

“Why don’t you just describe to me what it was about this sermon that frightened you when you were a kid,” Dr. Roxy suggested.

“Okay, let me think back… I forget exactly what year it was, or how old I was… I think I was still in middle school at the time, so I want to say probably 1991, when I was 11 or so. The homily of which I speak consisted of a story Father Doyle told us, no doubt as a means of explaining that week’s Gospel reading. I forget if this story was something he had read in a book, or if it was a dream he had had, or just something he made up: the fact that I’ve never been able to track down the story to its original source is something that has haunted me throughout my life. I forget the exact details, but this is what I remember about the story he told us that day: one day, a rainbow appears in the sky, a rainbow that can be seen at any point on Earth. As people look up at the rainbow in shock, burning letters begin to appear across the rainbow itself. The letters spell out the following message: that all people’s sins will be unveiled, and that the world will end in seven days. And sure enough, everyone’s sins begin to manifest as words on their faces. By that I mean, say you were guilty of the sin of lust: then the word ‘LUST’ would appear on your face. People all over the Earth start to panic. They try to wash and scrub the words off their faces, but the words remain, despite their best efforts. At one point in the story, Father Doyle mentioned a couple, a husband and wife I think, who decide to remain married, even when they can plainly see that they’ve been unfaithful to each other. Then on the seventh day the rainbow reappears and the world ends. That’s the gist of the homily, as best as I can recall it.”

“And that’s the story that caused you to become so afraid of rainbows?”

“Oh yes, for years afterwards, I had a bad fear of rainbows, and all because of that damn sermon. I would get very nervous every time it would rain, and whenever I was outside I tried my best not to look up at the sky, for fear of seeing a rainbow that had words on it announcing the advent of the end of the world… plus, the idea of my sins appearing on my face for all the world to see was also a big part of that worry. I know it sounds silly...”

“Did you ever tell your parents about this rainbow phobia?” Dr. Roxy asked.

“No, mainly because I was afraid that they would try to cure it the same way they tried to cure some of the other things that scared me: through direct and catastrophic confrontation,” I replied.

“What do you mean by that?” Dr. Roxy asked, and I could tell now that she was really interested in what I was saying.

“Let me give you an example: there was this one day at school where all the kids were talking about the Bloody Mary urban myth. The way they were describing it was, if you stood in front of a mirror in a darkened room and said the words ‘Bloody Mary’ ten times while staring into the mirror, then the bloody disembodied head of a dead witch would appear in the mirror and, if you did not escape from the room or turn the light on fast enough, then she would chop your head off, or something along those lines. As I said, many of my classmates were talking about this on that day, and some were even saying that they had tried it out themselves and that it was true, that she had appeared in the mirror,” I said. “Now, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who make up bullshit stories, and the superstitious, easily fooled poor souls who believe such bullshit stories. As you probably have guessed by now, I fall into the latter category. I even asked this one girl who said she had tried it out if she was telling the truth and she looked into my eyes and swore to God that it was true, that she wasn’t lying (I should have known better: this girl really had it out for me that year, for whatever reason: she looked exactly like Anne Frank but she was pure evil, and she took a special delight in tormenting me: once in Home Ec class our assignment was to bake pancakes and after we had baked the pancakes we ate what we had baked and this girl’s hands got all covered in maple syrup and at one point as I walked by her she grabbed my arm and she wiped her hand over my arm, as if it were a napkin, so as a result it got all sticky with maple syrup. It was a very embarrassing situation for me. But years later, I happened to find out that she had gotten knocked up, so, you know, like, karma, but I digress). Long story short, I fell for the urban legend hook, line and sinker, and by the end of that school day I was very shaken up. I suppose I must have been pale and quieter than usual when my parents picked me up from school because they asked me what was wrong with me. So I foolishly told them about how all the kids were talking about Bloody Mary. My parents assured me that it was all a hoax, but I didn’t believe them. To prove it to me, they took me into the bathroom of the first floor of our house. They closed the door and turned off the lights. My dad began chanting ‘Bloody Mary’ at the mirror while I stood at the door, my hand gripped on the knob, beads of sweat popping out on my forehead, and with each utterance of the words ‘Bloody Mary’ my terror seemed to keep rising to a feverish pitch, like a red line of mercury ascending a thermometer of terror. Finally, with the tenth ‘Bloody Mary’ being uttered, I screamed and ran out of the room, and in the hallway outside the bathroom I (somewhat humiliatingly) burst into tears. In the end, Bloody Mary did not appear in the mirror. And yet, I developed a phobia that day, not so much of mirrors, but
mirrors at night
. Even now, to this day, whenever I’m passing by a darkened room at night with a mirror in it, I keep my head down so that I won’t accidentally look into the mirror. I remember in 2011, we had a hurricane hit New England, and we lost power for a day. That night, I had to take a shower in the bathroom, but because we had no lights I had to bring a flashlight in with me, so I could see what I was doing. On the front of the medicine cabinet above the sink was a mirror, the same mirror that my parents had chanted ‘Bloody Mary’ into all those years ago. So I covered it up with a towel!”

“You sound as if you had an interesting childhood,” Dr. Roxy observed. “So this rainbow sermon and the Bloody Mary event: these are the things that scared you the most when you were young?”

“Yeah, but there were some other things,” I said, thinking back. “In the 1980’s, my mother went through a heavily religious phase. She had always been a very devout Catholic, but during the Reagan era, she seemed to become almost fundamentally fanatical about it. She read this really awful Christian horror novel named, let me see, what was it, oh yes,
This Present Darkness
, and after that she became obsessed with spiritual warfare and demons. Like St. Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, and many of the other early apostolic fathers, my mother saw the world as the divine battleground of a cosmic war being fought between the forces of Light and Darkness, Christ and the Devil, Good and Evil. And like Tatian the Assyrian-“