Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking
Page 18
Let me just tilt your head so you can see the TV on that wall. In a few minutes I’m going to let you observe Mabel Osterman’s portrait session, as I videotape all such sessions. This session which we’re doing right now will be also recorded. Actually, the recording is the portrait. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. Before we can begin I feel the need to further explain my philosophy, which I hope will enlighten you about my working methods. And I apologize for the hoarseness of my voice: I spend so much time in communication with the spirit world, with the invisible Cobwebbed Ones, that it tends to put quite a bit of strain on my vocal cords. I also apologize for my somewhat extensive vocabulary. I adore archaic and antiquated words, and in my more delusional frames of mind I prefer to see myself as not only an artist but also as a necromancer of dead languages. My favorite word of all time is “thanatoskiankomorphic.” I won’t tell you what that means, though. I will only say that its definition reveals all there is to know about me. Or maybe I’m just lying. If some of what I’m about to tell you doesn’t make much sense, bear in mind that the gas you’re inhaling at the moment also causes the occasional audio (and visual) hallucination.
Now, earlier I was telling you about my fascination with things that are hidden, with the occult. As a child, I used to always take things apart, to see what they were like inside. My parents thought it was cute when I disassembled their VCR. They didn’t think it was as cute when I did the same thing to the family parakeet, named Napoleon, of all things. Please don’t misunderstand me, it had nothing to do with mere sadism. It wasn’t as if I was also wetting my bed and setting things on fire, like so many other little budding Bundys. It was simply that I found surface boring. It was at some point during my teenage years that I determined to become an artist. Hence my years at the Rhode Island School of Design. The real reason I was kicked out of the school was because I drugged a model with formaldehyde and tried to turn her vagina inside out. But the dosage was wrong and she ended up awakening halfway through the operation. Her screams alerted the campus police, who thus interrupted my work of art. I tried to explain to the Dean my philosophy, but apparently the college frowned on genital mutilation. The story never made it to the papers as the school didn’t want bad publicity: I was simply expelled. I went through another depressive period, which was followed by a phase in which I studied a large number of religions, spiritual belief systems, Eastern philosophies, you name it. Yet I found every single one of them lacking. During this period of my life, I also began a new career, that of a psychiatrist, and I started seeing patients, many of whom ended up becoming the test subjects of my future experiments.
One evening a couple of years ago, I went through a dark night of the soul, and at one point cursed the God who had created this world, who had hidden the most interesting things behind dull walls and tedious flesh. I was in such a state of despair that I considered taking my own life. As I sat in my bedroom with the razor in my hand I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed... until He came to me: the man with the starfish head. Some would call him a demon, but to me, he was my savior. It was He who made me pick up the razor and slice open a finger on my left hand. I saw the blood begin to seep out, my own blood, and I felt dizzy, as if I were witnessing something unreal. It made me think: why do people sometimes get dizzy or light-headed when they see their own blood? That evening, I had a revelation: it’s not due to a fear of the sight of blood, it’s because we’re seeing something we’re never meant to see, something that has been hidden away from us, like the face of God. I began to think of the inside of the human body, and all the organs that keep us going, how one never gets to truly see one’s own skull when he looks at himself in the mirror. This was the conclusion I came to: that our true selves can only be found within us, literally, that the ultimate occult grimoire cannot be found on any bookshelf but underneath our skin. We need to read ourselves to truly reach enlightenment. The haruspices who tried to divine the future by inspecting the entrails of sacrificed sheep were on the right track, and I foresaw a new brand of theology: the study of the divinity of the human organs.
“In the heart of every human being there exists a haunted house, a dark forest, a pagan temple, a crumbling Gothic castle, and a desecrated church. It is within these ruins that we find our true selves, it is through these dark nights of the soul that Nature is unveiled.” I wrote that, many years ago, when I was a pretentious teenager. Little did I know, back then, how true those words were. So... where was I? Ah, yes, my life following the revelation. First, I began wearing my clothes inside out, as an outward display of the dedication I felt towards my new purpose in life. I then began carefully studying nature, seeking out animals that were capable of turning themselves inside out. Sadly, I was only able to find but a few examples, such as the starfish, which can turn its stomach inside out. Did you know that? And, of course, my beloved Vampire Squids. Once I discovered them, my metamorphosis was complete. I created this mask and gave myself a new name: Professor Noe, you see. I began practicing my art, gradually perfecting my technique. Granted, a few of my early models died, but these were regrettable casualties of art. Eventually, I saved up enough money to move to this fine city of ours, and I proceeded to build this house, a house that reflects my unique philosophy. And then, my career as an artist began in earnest.
Are you familiar, Adrian, with the term “Aphotic Zone?” Ah, forgive me, I had forgotten that you are unable to speak at the present moment: or do anything at all, for that matter. Back to the Aphotic Zone. Now there’s a term you won’t come across on a daily basis. Aphotic is a Greek word meaning “without light.” The Aphotic Zone, then, is the portion of a lake or ocean where there is little to no sunlight. Less than 1% of sunlight penetrates this zone, and as a result, bioluminescence provides the only light source in this area of the ocean. Of course, there are layers even further below the Aphotic Zone, such as the Bathyal Zone, the Abyssal Zone, and the Hadal Zone. But I’ve always found the Aphotic Zone to be most fascinating because it’s the natural habitat of the Vampire Squid. As I formulated my new philosophy, I began to see the innards of the human body as a metaphor for the Aphotic Zone, that is, we carry within us the darkness of the deepest depths of the ocean, and one must never forget that water makes up a significant portion of the human body. Science and technology have given us bathyspheres to explore the lowest depths of the ocean, but have failed to properly equip us with a similar device for plumbing the alien seas beneath our skin and muscles. Ufologists have it backwards: why look to the sky for alien life forms when the ultimate UFO is our own body? The drowning king of alchemy is nothing more than our own unconscious desire to map out these unknown waters, our mare nostrum. As Saint Yoko Ono once said, in her “Seven Little Stories,” “Listen very carefully and you will hear the sea in your body. You know, our blood is seawater and we are all seacarriers.” To shed light on the Aphotic Zone inside the human body: this became the aim of my philosophy, the goal of my art, for there is a darkness within us as tenebrous as a Crater of Eternal Darkness, those areas of the Solar System which are untouched by light (one such example: Lovecraft’s Crater, near the south pole of Mercury, but again, I digress).
Before I begin working on your portrait, let me show you Mabel’s session. Now, let me think, where did I last leave that video? Probably with my collection of previously taped portrait sessions. Let me search the “O” list: Olafson, Ondic, Orton, Orwig, ah! Here we are. Mabel Osterman. Let me just get this started up now. Okay, from the beginning. There’s Mabel Osterman, strapped down to the very same gurney on which you now rest, paralyzed, naked, just like you. And now there I am, hovering to her side, scalpel in hand. Do you see? Accompanied by that old song by R.E.M., “Turn You Inside-Out,” I’m cutting her chest open now, as if I were performing an autopsy on her. I hope you don’t find all of this dull. It picks up once I reach her interior region, her glorious subterranean ocean, her darkly shining world. Ah! There... see how gingerly I handle her insides, how delica
tely I hold them up to the camera, how lovingly I caress them? Oh, how I love to whisper noctivigant nursery rhymes to the organs of my models. Adrian, my boy, if you only knew the scandalous things her liver told me: I will never tire of hearing tales from topographic organs.
Have you ever wondered what your jealous organs daydream? Starved of attention, they fantasize about nothing less than the desecration of our beloved surfaces. The flawless faces of innocent babies and beautiful children covered with foul saprophytic maggots. Supermodels losing their minds as the skin starts to flake off their faces, before their horrified eyes. Our lovely lakes and oceans befouled by enormous anuses shitting torrents of fecal matter into once-pristine water. Trees covered with festering sores and bubbling ulcers. Noble animals melting and mutating into horrific new forms, their outsides suddenly resembling their insides. The young turning into the old, their bodies crushed by time, their skin rotting away: this is pornography for our organs.
A confession: even though I depend on people such as yourself and Madame Osterman to fund my experiments, and even though your very existence is necessary to provide a reason for my art to exist in the first place, it’s a symbiotic relationship I find nauseating, as narcissists like yourself make me sick to death. You’re just like everyone else in the world, concerned with outer appearances only. All you care about is your face, your muscles, the flatness of your gut, perhaps even your genital area. Meaningless! Meaningless! Vanity of vanity, all is vanity. Do you ever stop and think about the organs keeping you alive, the organs that never get to take a break, never get to go on vacation, never even get to rest? Maybe you think of them only in rare moments of morbidity, or at those periods in life where after decades of wear and tear they finally start to break down and rebel. What is cancer but a violent insurrection against a despotic tyrant? What is a heart attack but a noble suicide? Do you know that every organ is like a snowflake, something totally unique and with its own individual personality? Yet no one cares, except I, the man who has given them a voice, the artist who listens to the nightmares of tissues, the agony of the plasma, and the lamentations of the blood. As I turn you inside out, I plan on reading your insides like a novel, and what I’ll discover will be a trillion times more interesting than any words that could come forth from your pretty mouth, for within each of us is an alien landscape as divinely weird as the mystical paintings of Nicholas Roerich.
Sorry about that, sometimes I like to get on my high horse. Ah, here’s the part of the video where I hold a conversation with Mabel’s kidneys. Don’t worry about infection, as you can clearly see in this video, I’m wearing gloves, and I would also like to let you know that I always sterilize my surgical equipment before doing the portrait. In addition, my little dark elves will put you all back together once I’m done far more skillfully than any mere surgeon could do. Listen to me, surgical equipment, as if what I was doing was mere surgery! No, the scalpel is my paintbrush. Oh, this is a good part: it’s very exciting when I cut open the skull and expose the brain to light. How many people can claim to have seen their own brain, I ask you? If only I could find a way to peel off one’s face to reveal the skull beneath, then somehow attach the face back on... but my art technique has not reached that level yet. Perhaps in the future I shall achieve that height. Maybe I’ll even try it out on you.
Still, all good things must come to an end. You might find this final part of the video curious. You might even ask yourself, “Why is Professor Noe pulling what appears to be the shadows of benthopelagic homunculi out of a jar and sticking them in Mabel Osterman’s body?” Well, it’s partly insurance: to make sure that the model doesn’t reveal my secrets to the profane. Those little monsters, the dark elves that I mentioned just a moment ago (which, by the way, were hydroponically harvested on the shadows of demons captured from some festering Fairyland), will snuggle up in your guts and make sure you behave. Don’t worry, after awhile you won’t even know they’re there. If that sounds crude, look at it this way: many artists like to sign their works upon completion. Consider those little monsters to be my signature, written within the walls of your body: a living and demonic autograph.
Mabel’s been stitched up good as new, and our video has come to an end. Now it’s your turn. But wait, what’s this? Are these tears trickling forth from your eyes? Are you crying, poor Adrian? There there... I promise you won’t feel a thing, and it’ll all be over before you know it, though it might take you a few weeks to recover, and it will leave a scar. But I can assure you this: when all is said and done, you’ll get a copy of the session, and you’ll have that rarest of pleasures: the chance to see your very own Aphotic Zone, that Godly shadow that exists within you. I will show you treasures within you whose existence you never even suspected, buried deep within your interior la mer like sunken ships of gold.
And now, for the scalpel...
THE DEMONS IN THE FRESCO
“Where God has his church
the Devil will have his chapel.”
—Spanish proverb
“…he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”
I
St. Peter’s Keys All Bloody
Of the many gifts that Timothy Childermass had received on his sixth birthday, his favorite one had been a kaleidoscope that had been a present from his father. This kaleidoscope, which his father had purchased at a local church bazaar for the grand total of $7.59, was encased in a cardboard tube whose outer surface was decorated with artwork of a Christian nature, mainly depicting scenes of martyrdom. These scenes included reproductions of Guido Reni’s 1616 painting of Saint Sebastian being shot with arrows (this being a work of art that had not only inspired Oscar Wilde but had also led Kochan, the narrator of Yukio Mishima’s 1948 novel Confessions of a Mask, to experience his first sexual ejaculation), Caravaggio’s 1616 painting Crucifixion of St. Peter (which portrayed St. Peter being crucified upside-down on an inverted, or Petrine cross), Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 19th century work The Christian Martyr’s Last Prayer (which displayed an Imperial Rome scene in which a small band of imprisoned Christians huddle together in prayer in the center of the Circus Maximus, with lions and tigers slowly approaching them for the kill), and, finally, Rembrandt’s 1625 painting The Stoning of St. Stephen, which depicted the Protomartyr being stoned to death by a mob of infuriated Jews following his trial before the Sanhedrin (this scene being taken from the New Testament’s “Acts of the Apostles”). It seemed a very odd and somewhat morbid way in which to decorate a child’s toy, but years later Timothy had done some research on the kaleidoscope and found out that it had been manufactured by a Waco, Texas-based company (named Mt. Carmel Curiosities) that specialized in the creation of Christian-themed children’s toys. Apparently, the illustrations on the front were to remind the child about the sacrifices that Christians are often demanded to make, while the beautiful colors within the tube symbolized the beauty of the human soul, something that can’t be seen on our outer forms.
As a child, Timothy could often be found in his bedroom, gazing into this kaleidoscope as he held it up to the light. He loved watching the hypnotic patterns formed by the bits of colored stained glass that had been placed within the tube. He often felt like a tiny astronaut stranded on some alien world, staring up into a prismatic sky of fractalizing colors. Other times, he felt as if his kaleidoscope was no mere toy, but a sort of seraphic lachrymatory, a tear bottle that, in this case, contained tears that had been wept by the choirs of the angels themselves. For if an angel were in fact to weep, then surely their tears would resemble watery stained glass (or so Timothy thought, when he was a child: it should be noted here that he did possess a somewhat overactive imagination).
Although it had been many years since Timothy Childermass had broken away from the Catholic Church, he had never quite been able to exorcise his appreciation for Christian art and literature, the pomp and regalia of the Liturgy, or his love for many of the old churches associated with Christianity. Though quite liberal when it came to social issues, when the topic concerned itself with places of worship he was ultra-conservative, and it was his opinion that many churches built these days looked more like factories or gymnasiums than appropriate temples to pay homage to God. By far his least favorite modern churches were the so-called “megachurches,” which he considered to be less-than-divine eyesores.
Fortunately for him, it just so happened that the city he lived in, Thundermist, was a very old city that was also home to quite a few very old and very beautiful churches, many of which had been built by the hard-working and pious French-Canadian immigrants who had flocked to the city upon its foundation in the late 19th century. In the 1970’s, the city of Thundermist (which was located in Northern Rhode Island) began undergoing a massive renovation, to the extent that the city now bore little trace of its French heritage. But there had once been a time where the city had so many French people living there that it had been informally nicknamed “Little Quebec,” and where more people had spoken French as their first language than English, and the memory of these people lived on in the lovely churches they had erected. Back in the day, these churches had served as their sanctuaries, places that had given meaning and purpose to their tedious and hardscrabble lives (as many of these immigrants had barely made a decent living working in the dirty and dangerous textile mills that lined the banks of the Blackstone River, which cut through the center of the city and divided it into two diagonal halves).