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

by James Champagne

  So she put on her winter coat and exited her house, noticing as she did so that the people walking by on the streets were gazing at her as if she were a crazy person. She climbed into her car, gunned the engine, and started making her way out of town. The longer she drove, the more panicked she became, and soon she was driving pretty fast. Eventually, she was on Route 23 and headed south, as far away from the city as she could. To distract herself she was blaring Coil’s song “Snow” at a very loud volume. Yet no matter how far she drove, all she could see was a never ending vista of snow and ice.

  A minute later Daphne’s car crashed. Daphne was thrown out of the windshield, glass exploding everywhere, and she smacked against something like a fly splattering against a window, before falling back to the street. For a moment, she was unconscious. When she came to, she weakly sat up, the pain wracking her body almost agonizing in its severity. Dazed, she looked at the smashed remains of her car. The entire front portion of it was crumpled. Yet she had no idea what she could have hit. No other cars were on the road. It was as if she had smashed into an invisible barrier.

  Daphne began coughing up blood. Delirious with pain, she dragged herself off of the road, her legs all mangled up and bloody. Once off the road, she collapsed on the frozen earth in a field of eternal ice and gazed up at the dark gray sky. She saw a gigantic eye gazing down at her from above, an eye that was blue and green in color with a few small flecks of gray. Then the whole world began to tremble again, and the falling snow began dancing and swirling all around poor dying Daphne.

  THE YELLOW NOTEBOOK

  “The cancer of time is eating us away.”

  —Henry Miller, The Tropic of Cancer

  “Everything to do with time is hideous.”

  —Robert Aickman, “The Clock Watcher”

  “The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales

  is that this element looms up in my mind as the most

  profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.

  Conflict with time seems to me the most

  potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.”

  —H.P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”

  “What destroyed Atlantean civilization? The sensible assumption is, a series of volcanic eruptions, due to the fact that Atlantis straddled the Atlantic Ridge, the great crack in the earth’s crust from which molten lava still continues to seep. Then what of the persistent legends that it was destroyed by black magic?”

  —Colin Wilson, introduction to The R’lyeh Text

  I

  Hell is other people!” So wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1944 play No Exit. Little could he have known at the time that this anguished ejaculation of existentialism would become the unofficial credo of the modern day retail employee. Like the chorus of some pretentious yet nonetheless catchy Parisian pop song, the phrase “Hell is other people!” had a habit of repeating itself in my head over and over again during my shifts at Covers, which was the name of the bookstore where I worked full time as a bookseller. It was certainly echoing in my head on the date of October 11, 2012, the evening on which I first laid eyes on the Yellow Notebook. Oh! That infernal Yellow Notebook! If only I had called in sick that day, I could have spared myself from the present misery I now find myself enmeshed in. But, alas, I get ahead of myself.

  My name is Frederick Fripp. The October of which I speak marked my five-year anniversary working at the Covers bookstore in question. It was a job I had taken reluctantly upon graduating from Fludd University in 2008, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Theology. Sadly, following my graduation from college and my entrance into the real world, I discovered a most bitter truth: that in today’s dire economic times, theologians aren’t exactly in big demand, and employers aren’t looking for people who have read St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica in its entirety, or who had studied the Catholic Catechism for enjoyment (yes, I’m talking about myself here). Therefore, I had no choice but to roll up my sleeves, as they say, and venture forth into the revolting world of retail.

  In the past, when Christian artists wished to depict scenes of hell-fire and damnation, they would paint grim vistas of dog-like demons and hungry flames, naked bodies and boiling cauldrons. These days, they could simply paint the interior of a Walmart and achieve the same effect. The dark woods that Dante finds himself lost in at the start of his Divine Comedy would, in our modern era, be found not in some wilderness, but smack dab in the center of Target. Big-box stores: our 21st century Inferno. Please do not mistake me for a misanthrope. I don’t loathe the (highly overrated and hideously disgusting) human race by any means, but after a couple of years spent serving the great unwashed masses, one becomes first jaded, then utterly disgusted by their idiotic antics. And seeing as how I was the customer service specialist at the Covers where I worked, and was thus permanently stationed behind the octagonal information desk in the central aisle, it was almost as if I were a lightning rod for stupidity.

  And that night of October 11th was a doozy. One customer told me he was seeking out the books “Fire Hydrant 451” and “One Hundred Years of Salad, Too,” by which he meant Fahrenheit 451 and One Hundred Years of Solitude, respectively. Then there was a customer who asked if we had any Urdu translations of the Twilight series. A Tea Party patriot wearing an Obama Joker t-shirt asked me if I had read Demonic, Ann Coulter’s new book. But worst of all was the lady who called the store over the phone, asking if we had any books written by a particular author. When I asked for the name of the author, she said his first name was Aesop and his last name was Fables. I could barely contain my scornful laughter while dealing with this latter specimen. During every one of these unfortunate customer interactions, I could all the while hear Sartre’s bitter lament ringing inside my skull like the sickening peals of syphilitic church bells, and I went through these Kafkaesque ceremonies in a numb daze, like an insincere supplicant offering false prayers to Termagant.

  But still, time marched on (now there’s a phrase I can never look at the same way again!), and eventually it was 9:30PM. By this point in the evening, the store was all but deserted, and we were only 30 minutes away from locking up for the night, and I was pretty much at the end of my rope: I had just finished off my weekly phone conversation with a particularly annoying crank who had a duel obsession with both the sound of his own voice and the theory that ancient civilizations had technology superior to that of our own (“Frederick, lemme tell you something: did you know that the Ancient Egyptians had cell phones?” was how he began many of our conversations), and as usual he was seeking out a number of hopelessly out-of-print books of dubious scientific value and historical quality. Donovan’s “Atlantis” was playing over the store’s stereo system, and I was just about to abandon the information desk and begin the tedious task of tidying up the store when I heard the front doors open, which could mean only one thing: a customer.

  I looked up, just in time to see a man walking down the store’s central aisle in my direction. He was middle-aged, a tall fellow with an egg-shaped head, blonde moustache and neatly trimmed beard. Glasses framed his inquisitive blue eyes. He was wearing a dark blue jacket (with the Lambda symbol on the back), black jeans, and beat-up sneakers, while perched atop his head was a nondescript baseball cap. He looked like the kind of man who could explain to you the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the archaeopsychic zero (to use a phrase coined by J.G. Ballard), the type of fellow who could tell you that the eagle that dropped the fatal tortoise upon the bald head of the Greek playwright Aeschylus in 455 BC had most likely been a Lammergeier, otherwise known as the bearded vulture. In his left hand he held a tattered yellow notebook, which he set down on the surface of the info desk upon reaching it.

  “Good evening, welcome to Covers, how may I help you?” I asked, reciting the words taught to me by my corporate masters as if they were an incantation from a spell for a ritual of black magic.

  “I know you guys are closing soon, and I figured ma
ybe you could help me find some books I’m seeking, even though I’m pretty sure you won’t have them in stock,” he said in a quiet and reserved voice as he flipped his notebook open. In some ways the notebook was like him, in that its exterior was utterly unremarkable-looking, with a very generic yellow cover: you could find any number of ones just like it at any office supply depot or convenience store. What made this man’s yellow notebook so unique was the content he had filled it with, for he had divided each of its white-lined pages into three columns of equal size, these columns then being further subdivided into boxes. In the interior spaces of this multitude of boxes the man had written a staggering amount of cryptic words and phrases that made little to no sense to me at all. Much of it struck me as a lot of New Age gobbledygook: I saw references to aura photography, crystal energy, holotropic breathwork, the Akashic Records, Star Gate opening, prema rebirthing, King Solomon healing modality, chakra therapy, and 22 Strand DNA Activation (which, now that I think about it, would be a pretty cool name for a noise-pop rock band). Interspersed within these phrases were words such as “metaphysical,” “harmony,” “holistic,” “Universal,” and “Atlantis,” this latter word seeming to appear with a greater frequency than any other. Mixed in with all of this was other seemingly unconnected data, including historical UFO sightings, the weather patterns over the pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge, quotations from the Upanishads of the Hindus and also Ignatius L. Donnelly (the 19th century U.S. Congressman best known for his outré writings on the history of Atlantis and his theories regarding Catastrophism), recipes for spells, and other assorted esoterica. Because the content of each box was so bizarre, they brought to my mind some of the boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell. Indeed, the interior of the man’s yellow notebook struck me in general as resembling the contents of an old curiosity shop of the occult, and as he flipped through it seeking the page he was looking for I tried to subtly glimpse as many of its details as I could. The more I saw of it, the more it fascinated me; it felt like I was journeying through the man’s imagination, being allowed to peek into his own private inner universe, and I quickly came to the conclusion that this man was much more interesting than his outward appearance had initially suggested. Assuming that it was indeed he who had filled up the pages of this notebook with its scintillating lore, that is.

  One page that I briefly saw especially captivated my attention. Like practically every page of the notebook, it was divided into three columns, but while on every other page the boxes within the columns had been neatly filled in with words, on this page that now caught my eye I saw that the man had written down the question “What is the Flaw?” over and over again, in bright red ink, the words being splashed all over the grid in a haphazard fashion with no rhyme or reason. In my mind this only deepened the mystery of the Yellow Notebook.

  Finally, the man came across the page he was looking for, towards the back of the notebook, and on this page was a list of book titles followed by the names of the authors who had written them. Three of these book titles had been circled, and the man asked me if I could search our store’s database to see if we had any copies of them in stock. The three books he was looking for were Ashayana Deane’s Angelic Realities, Dr. Richard Bartlett’s The Physics of Miracles, and The Gur Experiments by Dr. Phineas Otto. Perhaps needless to say, we didn’t have any of these books in stock, which didn’t surprise me in the least, so I offered to order them for him. I proceeded to get his contact information, first his phone number and e-mail address (so we could contact him when his books arrived), followed by his name, which was Bruce Kadmon. Thinking back, it strikes me as being funny that his name seemed to sum him up so well. By this I mean that on one hand you had his first name, Bruce, which is a fairly banal and commonplace first name, just as his very appearance was unexceptional. Yet his last name was Kadmon, which reminded one of Adam Kadmon, the “Primal Man” of the Qabalists, and which seemed to symbolize his inner life, which was represented by his notebook.

  Upon completing his order I printed out an order slip, so he could go pay for the books at the registers at the front of the store. Bruce politely thanked me for my assistance, then walked off to the registers, still clutching his Yellow Notebook, which I was very sad to see go: I wished I had hours to examine its contents at my own leisure. I heard him being cashed out at the front, and a moment later I saw him exit the store.

  By now there were only five minutes left until we locked up for the evening. I decided to head to the front of the store, to the registers, to see if the lone cashier on duty had any books that needed to be returned to their proper places on the shelves. Imagine my surprise when, upon reaching the registers, I noticed the Yellow Notebook resting on the counter next to the cashier’s register.

  Upon noticing my reaction to seeing the Yellow Notebook (I must have made a face of some sorts), the cashier said, “Oh yeah, this last guy I just cashed out forgot his notebook here.”

  “That guy was my uncle,” I told her, pleased at how I had come up with a lie so quickly. “I’ll just take that and give it to him when I see him tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” the cashier said. The expression on her face made me wonder if perhaps she didn’t believe my story, but at the same time she seemed relieved when I picked up the notebook and took it away from her. It was strange, but it was almost as if the notebook frightened her in some way, and I wondered if maybe she had flipped through it a bit.

  After the store was closed and the manager sent us all on our way for the evening, I climbed into my car and drove straight home. Driving through Thundermist at night is always a gloomy endeavor. As I drove past the drab modern buildings that passed themselves off as the city’s residential abodes I could see that many people were still awake, and the windows of their apartments were lit up with the cold blue light cast by their television screens, making the windows resemble observation portholes into the aquariums of Hell. Seen from a distance, the city reminded me of the broken, jagged fragments of some shattered vessel, like a demolished Corbusier lamp. Gothic cathedrals dotted the landscape like sacred blisters, and snaking through the center of the city was the serpentine Blackstone River, its banks lined with a rapidly dwindling number of old, ruined mills and factories, holdovers and relics from some Victorian yesteryear. And then there were the graveyards, so many graveyards, the white marble markers and headstones like the scattered teeth of some edentated Leviathan. Years ago, my friend Alice had lent me a book that made the claim that Thundermist was the most haunted city in all of New England, and driving through the city at night, it wasn’t hard to understand how such an opinion had been formed. Supposedly it wasn’t just supernatural phenomena that one could find in Thundermist, but extraterrestrial as well: photographs exist of a UFO that allegedly flew over the city on June 10, 1967. Basically, the place was an enormous haunted house.

  Twenty minutes later and I was standing in the center of my cluttered yet comfy apartment, which was located on the top floor of a decrepit-looking apartment building in the heart of The Seeds, which is Thundermist’s equivalent of a ghetto: land values had plummeted in this section of Thundermist, thanks to the majority of the Freckle Slayer killings having occurred there back in the day. I wasted no time in scanning each and every page of the Yellow Notebook onto my computer. I had the following day off, and it was my intention to read the entire thing then before I took the next step of calling Bruce and telling him that I had recovered his lost property. Ah, how excited I was that night, when what I really should have done was set the notebook aflame and scatter its accursed ashes to the four winds! I had forgotten Oscar Wilde’s immortal quote: “When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.”

  II

  The following day found me reading Bruce’s Yellow Notebook. It didn’t take me all that long to read the whole thing, but then again, I’ve always been something of a fast reader. And though I initially found its schizophrenic content to be puzzling, the further I read into the notebook the more it
began to make some sort of weird sense to me. Essentially, I realized that what Bruce was trying to map out in the Yellow Notebook was a blueprint for a new religion, one that took a vast multitude of New Age concepts and wedded them to the more positive elements of all the world’s major religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism.

  But no, that’s not entirely accurate. It wasn’t so much that he was creating a new religion as it was that he was seeking to rediscover one, a belief system that he believed was originally both taught and practiced amongst the people of Atlantis, that mythical long-lost kingdom that has fascinated so many people for so many centuries. Bruce obviously believed that Atlantis was an actual place, one that had practiced a supremely ethical religion that he thought was far more advanced than the ones that we’re familiar with today. In a sense, he was then a sort of theological archeologist.

  If Bruce’s more recently dated entries were anything to go by, it was evident that he believed he had nearly succeeded in bringing the particulars of this forgotten religion to full restoration. However, there was something which troubled him, a hole in his theory that he referred to somewhat abstractly as “the Flaw.” The question “What is the Flaw?” appeared numerous times throughout the Yellow Notebook, including the page I previously mentioned in which Bruce had written out the question over and over again, apparently in an infantile burst of frustration. As I concluded my initial reading of the Yellow Notebook, I realized that Bruce had still not answered his own question, that the enigmatic lacuna still haunted the yellowing pages of his research. Or maybe he had, and had just not felt the need to write it down, though this struck me as very unlikely. It would seem that he still did not know what this “Flaw” in his religion was.