Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking Read Online Free PDF Page A

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