Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking

by James Champagne

  For their 2013 show, the Thread-Lovers of Thundermist were holding the event at a small church known as the Chantry Street Congregational Church, so-named because it was located on Chantry Street, in one of the nicer areas of Thundermist, a quiet suburban neighborhood where all the streets were lined with elm trees that provided ample shade. I knew that this was one of Rhode Island’s older churches, having been erected sometime in the 1860’s, and even though, architecturally speaking, the church itself hadn’t changed much over the years, certain modern additions had been added to it. Taliesin parked the car on the side of the street facing the church, beneath the shade of a tree, and once he had turned the engine off we all exited the vehicle. I looked up at the church: it was a fairly low-key structure, only one story tall and built atop a small hill that could be accessed by climbing a set of stone stairs, though there was also a ramp at the back of the building for handicapped people. To the west of this church was a taller, somewhat ugly modern-looking building with a flat roof, and it was made of pale gray and white cement blocks, and this building was connected to the church via a narrow vestibule, this vestibule serving as the main entrance to both buildings. The more modern-looking building was the church hall.

  My brothers and I braced ourselves, then crossed the street, walked up the stairs and passed through the front doors of the vestibule. We found ourselves in a narrow rectangular room, with two doors, one on the west wall that led to the church hall, and a door on the east wall that led to the church itself. A table had been set up in this vestibule, serving as a makeshift desk, and seated behind it was a middle-aged woman, who, after putting down the copy of 50 Shades of Grey that she had been reading, immediately recognized us as “Susan’s boys.” Blushing, we each paid the $5 admission cost, and were each in turn handed a voting ballot and a stubby pencil. The voting ballots were simple pieces of white paper with 5 different categories typed on them: bed quilts, large wall hangings, small wall hangings, children’s quilts, and Best in Show. Beneath each category was a blank line where you could write in your pick.

  My brothers and I opened the door on the west wall and entered the church hall. It was a large room, with white concrete block walls and a shiny Masonic black and white tiled floor. Long vertical windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling lined the east and west walls of the room, while a stage was located against the north wall. I surmised that the hall was normally used for bingo games, dances, musical recitals, Christmas pageants, and events of that nature, but that day the center of the room was crowded with a large number of wooden quilt racks that formed a labyrinth of stitches and fabric, each rack holding a number of quilts, while along the sides of the room tables had been set that were also displaying quilts and other crafts on their surfaces: according to a sign that had been set up in the vestibule, over 1,000 quilts were on display for the show. Each quilt had an index card clipped to it, identifying the creator of the quilt, its name, what category of quilt it was, and an identification number (when one voted for a quilt they liked, they needed to write down its corresponding number on the voting ballot). All around the place were pieces of paper cut into the shapes of human hands, and written on these paper hands was the following warning: “Don’t Touch the Quilts!” The stage, in the meanwhile, had been set up so that it displayed a number of antique sewing machines, many of which looked very old, though how old I wasn’t quite sure: let’s just say that I’m no expert when it comes to dating antique sewing machines. My ears detected classical music playing softly over the speakers, and I recognized the composition as Thomas Vincent’s “Sonata II in A,” one of his oboe sonatas first published in 1748.

  I briefly looked the crowd over: as expected, it consisted mostly of older to middle-aged women, though a few men were present, and even some younger people: I noticed in particular an attractive black girl wearing a black Xasthur t-shirt and, atop her head, a cat ears headband, and she was walking arm-in-arm with an equally attractive young guy with a somewhat emo haircut, and he was wearing a Cher t-shirt and eye shadow and his fingernails were painted mauve, so I figured he was gay, though who knows, maybe he was just metrosexual or whatever they called it these days: as they walked past me I heard him making a snide remark about how tacky-looking the church was, and how it was nowhere near as nice as St. Durtal’s Church, and I concluded that perhaps he and I had more in common than I realized.

  Set up next to the door leading into the hall on the hall’s south wall was the raffle table, the surface of which was covered with various raffle basket prizes. Our mother was seated at this table, and we each said hello to her. Our mother (who, like most of the other members of her quilt group, was a volunteer for the show) seemed happy but she also looked a little tired: hardly surprising, seeing as she had gone to the church earlier that day to help set up the show before it was opened to the public. She thanked us for coming, then covertly whispered to us which of her quilts she wanted us to vote for. It was then that I noticed that a wooden easel had been set up on the other side of the door, and that resting on this easel was a large cardboard display, the front of which showcased a photograph of an attractive middle-aged black woman with short graying hair and proud features, her eyes a hypnotic greenish hue, her smile as crooked as the nose of a cartoon witch. Off to the side of this photograph were the words “In Memorium: Zoyle Dalembert, 1966-2013.” “Who’s that?” I asked my mother, pointing a finger at the picture of the black woman.

  “Oh, that’s Zoyle Dalembert, she was a long-time member of our group,” our mother said sadly. “She died from cancer about a month ago, poor thing. This year’s show is dedicated in her memory, actually. She was the nicest woman, a quite devout Catholic who went to church every Sunday her entire life, as she liked to say. Her wake lasted around nine days or so, that’s how popular she was. She was born in Haiti, but moved to America with her parents when she was quite young: she spoke better English than some white people I’ve known who’ve lived in this country their whole life!”

  “And she was a quilter, then?” Taliesin asked. No one has ever accused my youngest brother of being the brightest bulb in the box.

  “Of course!” our mother said. “Her work’s really beautiful, very innovative and unusual and… intense. Also a little… odd. We all miss her, though I’m sure she’s here in spirit today.”

  “I’m sure she is,” I assured her. Curious to see her work now, I asked, “So where’s her work located? Has any special spot been set up for her?”

  “We wanted to do something like that, but even on her deathbed in the hospice, she told us she didn’t want any special treatment, though she thanked us for the gesture,” our mother said. “So we decided to honor her final wishes. Her work is scattered all over the show, just like everyone else’s.”

  One of the other members of the quilt group then walked over to the table, a very attractive white middle-aged woman who practically screamed cougar: in a somewhat silky French accent, she asked our mother to man the admission desk in the vestibule while the woman who had been seated there when we came in could take a lunch break. So our mother said bye to us, saying that she’d catch up with us later as she walked out of the hall. Left to our own devices, at that point my brothers and I split up to go start voting. I decided to go check out the church itself first and see what quilts were on display there. So I left the hall, passed through the vestibule, and entered the church proper. It was a very small room, with white walls and a wooden floor that was covered with a grayish-blue rug, with 3 rows of wooden pews (all of which had quilts draped across them), some obligatory stained-glass windows done in the trefoil style, a framed print of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, and so on. I walked amongst the pews, spotted a few of my mother’s quilts, but what I was really looking for was the work of Zoyle Dalembert. I quickly discovered that none of her work was on display in the chapel, so I exited it, walked through the vestibule yet again (nodding my head at our mother as I did so), then stepped back into the church hall.
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  Standing by the hall’s entrance, I scanned the crowd for my brothers, and quickly spotted Taliesin, standing near the foot of the stage in the shadows cast by the antique sewing machines looming above him, and he was chatting up the black girl with the cat ears headband, who seemed mildly amused at what he was telling her. I wasn’t able to spot Howard, though. The piped-in classical music was starting to get on my nerves, so I slipped on the ear buds of my iPod and began listening to “All Things Are Quite Silent” by Shirley Collins. Thus accompanied by such soothing sounds, I began walking around the hall, spotting a few more of our mother’s quilts, and I slowly began to fill in my voting ballot: for the record, for the “Best in Show” prize I voted for a small quilt done by our mother that featured a blocky and abstract depiction of Amber, the family cat.

  Finally, I spotted Howard, who was standing before a large quilt and frowning, a slightly disturbed expression on his saturnine face. I walked closer to him to get a better look at the quilt he was gazing at. The quilt depicted the image of a lone house built atop a hill and surrounded by a nocturnal landscape, a mangrove swamp of some sorts, and the colors of the fabric used for this quilt were primarily somber shades of black and gray. It was a nice house, done in the Queen Anne revival style, two stories tall, its windows brightly illuminated and mirroring the glowing stars and waning moon in the night sky above. A twisting serpent-like path that reminded me of Jacob Bryant’s 1774 illustration Orphic Egg led to the front door of this house, and in the light of one of the windows of the house’s second floor, one could see the silhouettes of two people embracing, one of these silhouettes that of a man and the other that of a woman. But the most startling thing about this quilt was the thing located in the foreground of the image. Near the side of the path at the bottom, a head was leering into the image’s frame, and it resembled a humanoid with black skin. I don’t mean to say that it was a depiction of an African-American, for the skin of this man was literally pure black, like a black hole from outer space that had assumed the general outline of a human being. The “man” was bald and his face was almost utterly featureless, save for two white eyes (that were apparently blind: they had no pupils), and a thin, scar-like slit for a mouth. The black man seemed to be gazing out at the viewer of the quilt with his extinguished eyes. The border of this quilt was made up of a number of multi-colored squares, each one decorated with an odd, almost tribal-looking design. I found the quilt incredibly unsettling to look at, in much the same manner that I find the creepy African-themed artwork of Stefan Danielsson to be disturbing. Pinned to the lower right-hand corner of the quilt was a name tag, and this is what it said:

  Entry #978

  Nzambi

  Zoyle Dalembert

  2013

  “So, this is one of Zoyle’s quilts,” I said with a whistle as I temporarily muted my iPod. “Well, our mother wasn’t kidding when she claimed that her quilts were unusual.”

  “Something about this quilt seems… off,” Howard said, stroking his chin and still frowning. “Our mother said that this Zoyle woman was a devout Roman Catholic, yet this quilt of hers is steeped in Vodou imagery. Granted, the African slaves brought to Haiti were known to disguise their spirits as the saints of the Roman Catholic tradition via syncretism, as a result of the Code Noir passed by King Louis XIV in 1685, which required slave owners to both baptize and instruct their slaves in the Catholic tradition, but still… I can’t think of any Catholic wake that goes on for nine days either. It sounds more like the funerary tradition down in the Caribbean known as Nine-Nights, if you ask my opinion.”

  “Vodou imagery? You mean all those tribal-looking designs running along the border of the quilt?” I asked, pointing to them and being careful not to touch the quilt.

  “Those are vevers, the religious symbols of Haitian Vodou,” Howard explained. “Symbolic designs or glyphs used in Vodou ceremonies as a kind of altar for offerings. The designs are usually made by sprinkling cornmeal or some other type of powder on the floor of the ritual space, and each design is a symbolic representation of the lwa being invoked. They’re supposed to act as a guiding beacon, to get the lwa to descend to our plane of reality and possess, or mount, the Vodouisant. The technical term for someone possessed by the lwa is chwal, which is a variation on cheval, the French word for ‘horse,’ hence the use of the term mounting.”

  “Lwa?” I asked, knowing as I did so that I was just setting Howard up for a lecture.

  “Lwa are the spirits of Vodou, also known as the Mystères or Invisibles. They’re not gods, rather they serve as intermediaries between humanity and Bondye, who is the Good God, the Creator of the universe,” Howard said. “The lwa are kind of like the saints of Catholicism, the big difference being that Catholics pray to the saints, whereas the practitioner of Vodou serves the lwa. Some of these vevers are the designs of the more well-known lwa: I see the vevers of Erzulie, Ghede, Legba, Ogoun Badagris, Ayizan, and so forth. But there are lesser known, more sinister ones on display here as well. Besides the vever of Kalfou, Grand Master of Black Magic, I also see the vever of the scorpion Baron Zaraguin, patriarch of the were-scorpion family of lwa, along with the vever of Marinette-Bois Sèc, otherwise known as Marinette of the Dry Arms. She’s considered to be one of the most violent and chaotic of the lwa, and is thought to be evil incarnate. Her symbol is the screech owl, and she has authority over all werewolves. You should find this interesting, Daniel, seeing as you’re such a choir boy. Remember how I was saying a few moments ago how there is a great degree of syncretisation between Vodou and Roman Catholicism? Well, just as Damballah is associated with Saint Patrick, and Legba is associated with Saint Peter, and so on, the Catholic counterpart of Marinette is the Anima Sola, or Lonely Soul.”

  “Ah yes,” I said. I was more than familiar with the Anima Sola, which was a Catholic image depicting a soul in Purgatory. Commonly found on Latin American holy cards, they usually depicted a fair-skinned woman with long dark hair who was in the act of breaking free from chains around her wrist, in a dungeon surrounded by flames, this dungeon being a symbolic representation of Purgatory. “How do you know so much about Vodou anyway?”

  “Don’t forget, folklore is my specialty, and in college I did minor in anthropology,” Howard said. “I spent a bit of time in Haiti a few years ago, as research for my thesis, and I got to see some Vodou ceremonies first hand. And I’ve read many books on the topic, such as Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti and Hougan Coquille du Mer’s The Haitian Vodou Handbook and Michael Bertiaux’s The Voudon Gnostic Workbook, among others.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” I asked. “You say that the purpose of these vevers is to call the lwa down to the world as we know it? So where do these lwa come from, if that’s the case?”

  “They come from a place known as Ginen, a paradisiacal island said to be at the bottom of the Earth and surrounded by primordial cosmic waters: the Island Below the Sea,” Howard said, as he popped a Luden’s Sugar Free Wild Cherry Throat Drop into his mouth. “It’s believed that not only the lwa but also the souls of the blessed dead live there. When the first slaves came to Haiti from Africa, they conceived a mythical homeland for their spirits, a sort of idealized version of Africa: an astral or dream version of Africa, if you will. That’s because during the time of the slave trade, one of the most powerful tribes in Africa was the Fon tribe, who created an empire known as Dahomey on the west coast of Africa. Rulers of Dahomey would often sell their own people in slavery to various European powers, and the majority of Haitian slaves were taken from there. For this reason, among others, the Haitian slaves had to create a new Africa, one that hadn’t betrayed them.”

  “So you think that Zoyle was into Vodou?” I asked.

  “Maybe, and not a nice version of it, either. You know, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps this Zoyle was a bokor, a Vodou priestess who exclusively practices black magic. Or maybe she was a member of the Palo Mayombe, or even a zobop,” Howard mused.


  “A zobop?” I asked. This probably won’t make me look all that smart, but the moment I heard him say the word ‘zobop,’ the first thing I thought of was Bebop, the dim-witted warthog mutant who served as a henchman for the Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

  “A zobop is a vodou sorcerer who is associated with Haitian secret societies that practice black magic, among other things,” Howard sighed, as if he were explaining basic math to a mongoloid. “There are a lot of other names for them: bizangos, galipotes, ‘hairless pigs,’ ‘the hairless ones,’ the vlenblendengs and the voltigeurs. Such secret societies practice something known as angajan, which are transactions between the Vodouisant and the lwa in which the Vodouisant receives black magic techniques in return for serving the lwa. Needless to say, the cost of such transactions is steep, and failing to live up to one’s end of the bargain can be fatal to the Vodouisant. During my time spent in Haiti, I would often hear whispered stories about the zobop in Port-au-Prince. Some people were afraid to be outdoors at night because that’s when they believed the zobop were out, in their ‘tiger cars,’ or auto-tigres, to use their word for it. They believed that the zobop abducted people at night to eat them, or transform them into animals, or make them into zombies. The bizangos in particular are known for their zombification practices.”

  “So what does ‘Nzambi’ mean?” I asked, pointing to the quilt’s name tag.

  “Nzambi is the name of the god of the Bacongo people of Angola: a variation on Damballah, the so-called Rainbow Serpent. The Creole word for ‘Zombie’ is derived from it,” Howard said. “I think the odd creature in the foreground of this quilt is meant to be a zombie: observe, if you will, its extinguished eyes, which is one of the signs of a person who has been turned into a zombie. Though it could also be a baka, an evil spirit created by black magic that takes the form of a dwarf or a small monster, or maybe even a lougarou, which is the Vodoun equivalent of the werewolf.”