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

webs and giant plastic spiders, inflatable black cats, sickly scarecrows with lurid expressions,  even mechanical vampires that arose from coffins, all accompanied by fog machines and flashing strobe lights and spooky organ music. And of course, the ubiquitous jack-o’-lanterns, which could be seen guarding the front doors or glowering from the windows of nearly every house in Thundermist. In the month of October, the darkness that descended on the town wasn’t just black, rather it was a black softened by the autumnal colors of red and yellow and orange, the lit-up jack-o’-lanterns resembling the lights of some eldritch erewhon.
    Like our neighbors, my family liked to take part in this decorating contest. We even won one year, in 1992. That was the year my father, a metalworker, crafted an enormous bloodshot eyeball that he stationed on a stand near the driveway of our front lawn. This eye was motion-activated, so whenever someone would walk or drive by our house, the veins in the eye would glow a bloody red color and the eye would revolve around to stare at the person passing by and a recorded voice from within the eyeball would say “I see you!” My friend Frederick’s family won the following year: they created a giant crashed UFO from papier-mâché and set it on their front lawn, with a smoke machine inside it to make it look as if the spacecraft was still smoldering. A few feet away they had placed on the lawn a papier-mâché alien, done in the typical design of the Greys, with a large head and huge black eyes and a slit for a mouth. The family would dress up like Men in Black, with black shades and everything, and would pose in front of this UFO: they even placed yellow police DO NOT CROSS tape all around the site of the crash. As I said, Thundermisters took their Halloween decorating seriously.
    But it wasn’t just the citizens of the city who got into the spirit of the season, as the local businesses and municipalities got into the act as well. The Magic Lantern Movie Theater over on Main Street would devote the entire month to showings of classic horror films like The Exorcist and The Blob and Friday the 13th . The local Covers bookstore would display, in their central aisle, a special promotional table devoted entirely to classic horror novels, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula , Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , and Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs . The local churches organized elaborate costume parties and masked balls (my parish, Our Lady of Sorrows, was renowned as having the best costume parties), while the schools would put on horror-themed plays, such as the fifth-grade class at Vernon Park Elementary School performing their annual dramatization of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan.” The Melanoid Art Gallery would display prints of famous macabre works of art, everything from Caspar David Friedrich’s The Abbey in the Woods to Theodore Gericault’s Heads Severed . Even the city radio station would show their seasonal solidarity by playing a constant stream of Halloween-themed music, from “The Monster Mash” to “Frankenstein” to “Werewolves of London” to the themes from Ghostbusters , Psycho and Halloween , to name just a few. During the month of October, it was as if the heartbeats of all the citizens of Thundermist were beating as one, only instead of the Sacred Heart of Christ it was the Tell-Tale Heart of Poe’s celebrated short story.
    And finally, who could forget the annual Halloween parade, which was somewhat poetically referred to as “The Feast of Wasps?” A Thundermist tradition dating back to 1932, every Halloween morning a number of grotesque balloons and morbidly decorated floats would parade down Main Street like some Gothic, stillborn twin of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. One of these balloons resembled a gigantic floating lamb with diseased, decaying skin, and it was this balloon (known as the Lamb of Torment) that was my