But the symbolism goes even further than all that, Timothy thought. Like many Catholic churches, St. Durtal’s was built in the shape of a giant Roman cross, to symbolize the crucified Christ. Hence the altar was Jesus’ head, the two transepts represented his outstretched arms, the side doors of the transepts were his pierced hands, the nave was his legs, the front doors were his pierced feet, and so on. So what does that make us, the people who enter the church through the wounds of Christ? Are we the vermin and insects that no doubt tormented Christ while he suffered on the Cross? These thoughts paraded through Timothy’s mind as he also recalled that the choir (and the sanctuary) symbolized Heaven, while the apse above the altar stood in for the crown of thorns and the sacristy represented Mary. Timothy also remembered that the left side of the church (which would be to the right of the crucified Christ) was known as the Gospel, or Mary side of the church, while the right side (which was Jesus’ left) was the Epistle (or St. Joseph) side of the church. Which also made sense when one took into account that in religious art, Mary is usually depicted on the right side of Christ in crucifixion scenes. Hence, St. Durtal’s Church was correct in their placement of the side altars dedicated to Mary and St. Joseph.
Timothy closed his eyes and tried to visualize, in his mind, the church as it had once been, back when it had held Masses on a weekly, even daily, basis. He tried to imagine the pews filled with throngs of parishioners, many of whom wouldn’t exactly be dressed in their finest clothes on account of the fact that they were poor mill workers and couldn’t afford such niceties anyway. He evoked, in his nostrils, the smell of burning candles and dripping wax, of perfume and incense (specifically frankincense and myrrh). He heard, in his mind, the voice of the pastor preaching in Latin as it echoed through the insides of the church, heard the hushed prayers as they passed through the lips of the congregation. The New Testament teaches that the Body of Christ is the Church, and how all who acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Lord are part of that Body. A church is only truly alive when it is filled with the faithful, so what did that make St. Durtal’s now? Nothing more than a husk, albeit a beautiful one, its very walls and floors saturated with the prayers once spoken there. The thought made Timothy feel slightly melancholy.
Timothy opened his eyes and looked at the clock placed on the balcony that held the choir loft, saw that he had been wandering around the church for about an hour now. Maybe I should get going, he thought, somewhat reluctantly. Then he stopped himself. Wait, how can I leave before I inspect Prof. Mancini’s masterpiece, The Last Judgment? And here he looked up and craned his neck to gaze at the large central dome built above the crossing. This dome was decorated with the largest fresco in the entire church, and it was known simply as “The Last Judgment.” It illustrated God surrounded in heaven by his choirs of angels, emitting beams of light that formed a sort of ethereal staircase. Stepping down the central aisle of this staircase of light was Christ the King, flanked on both sides by a number of angels, including the six-winged seraphim, their glowing bodies covered with eyes, like the feathers of a peacock. At the bottom of this painting were three demons, cowering in fright. One had his back to the viewer, but Timothy could make out the faces of the other two. The demons in the fresco were clearly masculine and humanoid in appearance, just with curved horns growing out of their heads and large leathery batwings sprouting from their backs. Each held a three-pronged pitchfork in their clawed hands, and their genitals were blocked from sight by a simple white cloth. Because the Gospel message is the pillar that serves as the foundation of the Roman Catholic faith, Prof. Mancini had painted the four Gospel writers (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) in the arches that supported the dome, above the four main church pillars; alongside the numbers 3 and 7, the number 4 also cropped up often in Christianity: aside from the Tetramorph of the Four Evangelists, there were also the four limbs of the Cross, the four winds mentioned in Matthew 24:31, and the 4 rivers of Paradise mentioned in Genesis 2:10 (Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Perat). Truly, this was a most impressive piece of art, and Timothy realized he was very much drawn to the expressions on the faces of the demons in the fresco. Despite their slightly bestial appearance their faces seemed so young, so innocent… so tragic.
Timothy looked back down to earth, his neck feeling strained from staring up at all of the artwork on the ceiling. It was then that he noticed Henri standing next to him, a wry grin on his face. “I know, this place can really do a number on one’s neck,” he said.
“Tell me about it,” Timothy grimaced as he removed his earphones, trying to be polite.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t seem like the kind of person who would take a tour here,” Henri went on. “Most of our patrons are either very old people who were once upon a time parishioners here, or the homeless.”
“Well, I guess I’ve always had an appreciation for ecclesiastical architecture,” Timothy said with a shrug.
“So, what do you think of St. Durtal’s?” asked Henri.
“It’s all very lovely… the artwork is fabulous,” Timothy said.
“Yes, Professor Mancini was indeed a master,” Henri nodded. “And as you can probably guess, there’s a story behind almost all the frescoes.”
“I can imagine,” Timothy replied.
“To provide you with an example, the professor would often use parishioners as models for the Biblical characters and angels that he was painting,” Henri explained. “He would invite them to his estate in town and they would pose for him, getting fifty cents and a peanut butter sandwich in return. Fifty cents was a lot of money, back then. One of his favorite models was Anthony Moreau, who was the church sexton at that time. Moreau served as the model for not only Jonah but also Adam, King David, Abel, Aaron, and numerous angels. And if you’ll direct your attention to the choir loft, you can see a fresco of St. Cecilia playing a pipe organ to entertain the angels: the model for St. Cecilia was none other than Professor Mancini’s wife, a talented musician who would often provide inspiration to Professor Mancini during his modeling sessions by playing Mozart selections on a piano. As for the professor himself, we believe that the portrait of St. Peter over by the north transept is meant to serve as a self-portrait of the artist.”
“Fascinating,” Timothy said. “I imagine that an old church such as this one must have a few ghost stories.”
“Indeed, we believe the building is haunted,” Henri affirmed. “You may have noticed some curious red spots on the seal of St. Peter’s Keys over in the north transept, on the floor near the old confessionals. Those are actually blood stains, Professor Mancini’s blood to be exact. One day, while painting the fall of the rebel angels on the ceiling arch of the north transept, he suffered a nose bleed and some of his blood dripped onto the seal below, staining St. Peter’s Keys. For some reason, they’re impossible to wash off, though countless people have tried to clean the seal. And the choir loft is certainly haunted. On some nights, when one is all alone up there, it’s not uncommon to hear women singing softly. I myself can testify to this. We’ve had professional ghost hunters investigate this building, and they assure me that the spirits who haunt this church are peaceful. They believe that ghosts linger here because they mistake this church for Heaven itself.”
“Hardly a surprise, considering the vast number of angels depicted in all of the artwork,” Timothy pointed out.
“Certainly the angels keep watch over St. Durtal’s,” Henri agreed. “You can see them in the stained glass windows, several of the major frescoes, on the walls, the arches, and the ceiling. All in all, over 400 angels can be found here at St. Durtal’s.”
“So many angels, yet not many devils,” Timothy remarked. “Well, aside from the one that appears in the central stained glass window of the sanctuary, and those in the fresco of the Last Judgment.” And here he nodded his head in the general direction of the dome above.
“Ah, yes, there’s quite an amusing little story concerning those demons, if you want to hear it,” Henr
i said with a twinkle in his eyes as he glanced up at the Last Judgment fresco.
“Sure, I’d love to hear more,” Timothy said.
“The story goes that one day in the mid-1940’s Professor Mancini visited Sister Rita Venkman’s seventh-grade classroom and asked her to show him the two boys who supposedly were the most wicked and mischievous in the class. It was these two boys who allegedly served as the models for the demons whose faces we can see in the ‘Last Judgment’ fresco. Interestingly enough, the names of the two boys remain unknown, and sadly we’ve been unable to locate the notes Professor Mancini kept in regards as to which parishioners served as which models. A few years ago we even placed an ad in the Thundermist Times asking if the boys who served as the models for the demons in the fresco would identify themselves, but no one stepped forward to admit it. Who knows, perhaps they’re still ashamed? It is yet another unsolved mystery of St. Durtal’s Church, perhaps its greatest unsolved mystery.”
“I see,” Timothy said, both amused and intrigued. “Um, I’d love to stay and chat, but I really must be going now. Thanks for telling me a bit about the church.”
“The pleasure was all mine,” Henri smiled. “We hope you return again some day… visitors are always welcome here.”
Timothy made his way out of the church, once again passing by the gift shop. Near the door leading out to the narthex was a small wooden box with a slot in the top, where one could leave donations. Timothy slipped a twenty dollar bill into the box as he left the church, stepping back out into the pale sunlight, feeling oddly disorientated by the modern world all around him; it was as if he had just stepped out of Biblical times into the 21st-century. He walked back to his car, then drove home.
II
Falling Back Through and Through the Years
Over the next few days, as he went about his day-to-day life, Timothy was haunted by the demons in the fresco, and also by the mystery surrounding their genesis. This wasn’t all that shocking, for Timothy had always adored mysteries: as a child he had read the supernatural Johnny Dixon mysteries penned by John Bellairs (he had especially enjoyed The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull and The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost), and when he had been a little bit older had read all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. These days he enjoyed reading everything from erudite thrillers such as Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum to mainstream pap like Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon novels (the last book he had read was Brown’s Inferno). Timothy especially enjoyed mysteries that revolved around secret societies, the occult, religious matters, or sacred architecture. So it was only natural for him to be fascinated by the mysteries of St. Durtal’s Church. He decided he would look further into the matter and see if maybe he could shed a little light on the subject.
Timothy lived in a small house near Vernon Park in south Thundermist, on the other side of the Blackstone River. The walls of his house were decorated with framed religious artwork, prints like Joshua Reynolds’ 1723 work The Infant Samuel, which portrayed Samuel as a very young boy on his knees, hands clasped in prayer, his eyes raised to Heaven, the very picture of childhood innocence. Another print was Carlo Dolci’s St. Rose of Lima, which was, after the aforementioned Infant Samuel and Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, one of his favorite examples of religious artwork. Aside from the Bible, which he had read numerous times, Timothy had never really been able to get into Christian writing: he had tried to read the works of St. Augustine and St. Aquinas, but he had just found them too dry, though he did admire the books of C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, along with St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle and certain chapters from Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend. Still, religious art and architecture greatly fascinated him. Of course, there were secular touches to his house as well, like his Tom Daley wall calendar and a poster of one of Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans.
One weekend found him whiling away the hours curled up in bed on a day off, flipping through his copy of Towers of Family & Faith while Current 93’s “The Great, Bloody and Bruised Veil of the World” played on his stereo system (his favorite song of all time, incidentally, one that always brought tears to his eyes). Towers of Family & Faith was a large yearbook-sized tome devoted to the history of St. Durtal’s Church, and it had been published in 1990, about a decade before the church shut down. As Timothy read this book he jotted down a large amount of notes. Some of the information put forth in the book was old news to him, though he did gather some interesting facts concerning the life of Prof. Fausto Mancini. Prof. Mancini (who bore an almost uncanny physical resemblance to the artist and poet William Blake) had been born in the year 1885 in Prato, Tuscany. At the age of 18, he had moved to Florence, Italy, to study art and the fresco paintings of Michelangelo and Raphael. These studies (which extended over a twelve-year period) culminated in his earning a diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence around 1912. In 1913, he married his girlfriend Anna, and in 1920, they moved to the city of Boston, Massachusetts. He started up an acclaimed stained glass window business, and on the side decorated churches (his work could be seen in over 220 churches across the United States and Canada). Prof. Mancini had relocated to Thundermist in 1940 when he signed a $25,000 contract to paint the interior of St. Durtal’s. A small, hunchbacked man, Prof. Mancini preferred to paint sitting down, though to decorate the church’s vaults and ceilings he had been forced to paint lying down on his back, in much the same manner that his idol Michelangelo had painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Seated in the scaffolding set up around the walls of St. Durtal’s with a paintbrush in one hand and a Bible for reference in the other, it had taken him around eight years to paint the interior of the church and fulfill his contract. The professor had died in 1973, at the age of 87, while his wife Anna had died in the mid-1940’s, under circumstances as mysterious as the YouTube videos of Webdriver Torso, though the book Timothy was reading didn’t elaborate on this.
The book did, however, make a special note that of all the churches that Prof. Mancini had painted throughout his life, his favorite had been St. Durtal’s Church, which he had viewed as his masterpiece. The book also mentioned that St. Durtal had been Prof. Mancini’s favorite saint, one he had felt a close personal kinship with, and that had been the main reason as to why he had agreed to take the job at St. Durtal’s. Maybe now would be an ideal time to investigate what is known about the life of St. Durtal, Timothy thought as he closed his copy of Towers of Family & Faith and walked over to one of his bookcases, scanning the packed shelves until he located his copy of Saint Durtal: Painter of the Pit, part of the Paulist Press’ “Classics of Western Spirituality” series.
According to this book, St. Durtal had been a fairly unknown monk who had lived in a Trappist monastery named Notre-Dame d’Igny in France in the late 16th century. St. Durtal had been a great admirer of the Hell scenes painted by the Flemish masters of the 15th and 16th century, such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts, Hans Memling, Hieronymus Bosch, and Brueghel the Elder. Like those artists, St. Durtal had been obsessed with the imagery and iconography of Hell, and nearly all of the paintings he had created while serving as a monk at d’Igny were depictions of souls suffering torment in Hell. Like many Christians, St. Durtal had no doubt that Hell existed, and part of the reason why he was so obsessed with capturing it in exacting, almost photorealistic detail was to warn the sinners who viewed his art as to what they should expect to endure after death should they not repent and give themselves up to Christ. There was even a legend that, via black magic rituals, St. Durtal had summoned up demons from Hell itself and forced them to pose for him, so he could get them down in perfect detail on his canvases (which made Timothy think of the large stained glass window above the altarpiece at the sanctuary of St. Durtal’s Church). St. Durtal saw himself as a conquistador of the spiritual realm, mapping out the blasphemous contours and geography of Hell, despite the great strain this activity supposedly placed on his already fragile health. St. Durtal
had died at around the age of 58, expiring from cancer of the mouth. On his deathbed, he had whispered to his abbot, “My soul departs from my body, my judgment awaits me. May the Good Lord take me up to Heaven, and not send me down to the Pit I have wallowed in my entire life.” As Timothy closed his book on St. Durtal, he thought of another quote he had once read in Antonia White’s The Hound and the Falcon: “Heaven without Hell—without the possibility of Hell—is meaningless.”
Timothy tried to do further research into the life of Prof. Mancini on the Internet, but he wasn’t able to find all that much information that he didn’t already know, aside from one intriguing essay written by the noted Lovecraftian scholar Peter Iwanicki that explored the connection between Prof. Mancini and the Salem painter Richard Upton Pickman (1884-1926?), who Prof. Mancini had befriended upon moving to Boston in 1920. Pickman was a painter best known for his ghastly realism, his work depicting bestial canine monsters in graveyards and cellars, and some of his works, such as Ghoul Feeding, The Lesson, and Subway Accident, are much admired by aficionados of grotesque art. It was whispered that Pickman had maintained a hidden studio in Boston’s North End where he had executed his most depraved works of art, and the man had no doubt dabbled in the black arts of occultism. How on earth a pious Christian like Prof. Mancini could have ever come to befriend such a profane artist is another of life’s little mysteries, but it would seem that the two men had greatly inspired each other’s art. It was even said that Prof. Mancini had also kept a hidden studio of his own, where he created his own monstrous paintings, similar to the 14 “Black Paintings” created by the elderly Goya in a two-story house in Madrid from 1819 to 1823 (some of these paintings included Saturn Devouring His Son and Witches’ Sabbath: the Great He-Goat). For years, fans of Prof. Mancini’s art had tried to locate this supposed “Black Studio” with no success, but it was rumored that the professor had hinted at its location in the epitaph on his gravestone at Lamb’s Blood Cemetery, which was near the borderline that divided Thundermist, Rhode Island from Blackstone, Massachusetts. Timothy wasn’t able to find any pictures of Prof. Mancini’s headstone online, so he decided to just visit the cemetery himself. Besides, it was only about a ten minutes’ drive away from his house. So the following day he climbed into his car and drove out to the cemetery.
Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking Page 21
