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

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.



Tir-Na-Nog
    “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