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

by James Champagne

  To say that Yoshi was a creature of habit was a massive understatement. Every day he would leave his home at nine o’clock in the morning and head out to Aokigahara. He would then return to the village at five o’clock in the evening. Every evening after getting out of work Yoshi would first visit the local tavern where he would have one glass of sake. Then he would pass under the town’s torii gate and enter the local Shinto shrine, where he would put some yen in the monetary box, ring the bell once, bow twice, clap his hands twice in prayer while making his wish, then ring the bell once more. What exactly it was that Yoshi prayed about and wished for, the people of Shoji had no idea, though they assumed it had something to do with the health and well-being of his sickly twin. They couldn’t have been more wrong in this assumption, however.

  Once his business at the shrine was done, he would head home. The house of the Yotsuba Twins was located at the very edge of Shoji, and was thus the closest to the forest. It was a small house of only one story, quite banal and most unimpressive to look at, architecturally speaking. However, a sickly reddish light was always seeping out from under the crack at the bottom of the front door, which suggested that behind that door lay not a modern-day Japanese home but instead some sort of transdimensional gateway that led one to a galactic slaughterhouse, one that specialized in the slaughter of Suns, or the haruspicy of heavenly bodies. The truth, of course, was much more banal. On the other side of the door was the living room, and it was within this living room that one could find Shitai Yotsuba.

  Shitai Yotsuba looked identical to Yoshi, but this was no surprise, giving that they were, after all, identical twins. Shitai was better dressed, though, clad as he was in a white burial kimono, while his hair was neatly combed. Shitai was in a permanent vegetative state (PVS) and, as a result, was bedridden: his bed was surrounded by a number of machines that kept him alive, and it was these machines that emitted the reddish glow that seeped under the front door of their home. Every day, before setting out for work, Yoshi would go through the tedious task of adjusting Shitai’s various IVs and catheter tubes and nasal hoses, and, once he made sure everything was in its proper place, he would leave the house. Then at night he would return home after visiting the Shinto shrine and, once he was by Shitai’s bedside, would once again go about the ritual that involved adjusting the machinery that had been keeping his twin brother alive now for practically his entire life. But what he did after that was quite different.

  Every night, after Yoshi had completed these necessary rituals, he would then pull up a chair and sit down next to Shitai’s bedside. He would then lean over and place his mouth next to Shitai’s left ear and he would begin to slowly whisper things into his twin’s ear, like a Buddhist monk whispering passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead into the ears of a recently deceased corpse. More often than not, he would simply regale his brother with stories about his day: descriptions of things he had seen in the forest, gossip concerning various citizens of the town, and so on. One thing he would always marvel over was the youth of Shoji’s population: Yoshi could think of almost no other elderly people in the village aside from himself and his twin, and these young people were so healthy and robust…yet they almost all seemed to have harried, almost guilty expressions on their attractive faces, as if they were scared of their own shadows, or were haunted by wraiths that only they could see.

  Other times, when Yoshi was in a nostalgic mood (which was often), he would tell his brother stories from his past. He would talk about his childhood, about growing up on the small island ofŌkunoshima, where he had made money for the family by working on one of the island’s fishing ships (usually cleaning up during the month of November, which was the height of Octopus Season). Then there were his occasional adolescent visits to Tokyo, where he would frequent the pinball parlors and milk bars and sushi stalls. That awful night in 1931 when he had visited the Ryogoku Sports Hall (prior to its conversion to a sumo wrestling venue), where he had witnessed the nightmarish spectacle of the Spider Woman’s dead head (poor Mizuki Ranko, the first victim of the Blind Beast). His days with the Imperial Army during World War II, when he had been drafted into the army and stationed at Unit 731, Japan’s secret biological warfare unit in northeast China, where he had worked under the gimlet eye of Dr. Yoshimura Hisao, the head of the frostbite team: Yoshi could still recall the prisoners (known to the Unit’s staff as maruta, or “logs”) who had been tied up outdoors in temperatures as cold as -20 degrees Fahrenheit, their body parts sprayed with salt water: how the prisoners would then be taken back indoors and doused in hot water, which often caused their skin and muscles to slough right off, a landslide of flesh. This followed by the horrors he had witnessed when he had been stationed in the Philippine Islands: the smoldering remains of that Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the dead pilot’s face inside fused to the controls, or the disembodied hand of his friend Jouichirou on the ground, palm upwards, the fingers twitching obscenely, as if it were trying to grasp some invisible breast, or as if it were spelling out the sign language of the damned, these morbid mental images like the 19th century “Bloody Prints” of Yoshitoshi brought to sickening life, or the terrifying dioramas that made up the Ten Courts of Hell in Singapore’s Tiger Balm Gardens theme park. How he had once re-visitedŌkunoshima, better known as “Rabbit island,” after the War with Miho, who had been his girlfriend at the time (she was from Matsue, the capital city of the Shimane Prefecture, and she had had two vaginas, this interesting mullerian anomaly being known as uterus didelphys, a condition that usually occurred in one out of every 3,000 women), and how they had played with the rabbits on that island one hot summer day, the most lovely day of Yoshi’s long life. Then there was the time he had visited the USA in the 1950’s, back when their mother had still been alive and was able to take care of Shitai. He had toured all of the New England area: a long visit to New York City, where he had purchased a number of opera albums, including the recently released M. Czgowchwz Sings Oltrano (he had even caught one of the diva’s shows, her legendary performance of Tristan Und Isolde). This was followed by a trip to Thundermist, Rhode Island, where he had been rudely jostled by a nautical-looking black man who had reminded him somewhat of the creepy figure seen emerging from the swamp in “Regeneration of the Ethiopian” (plate 8 of Salomon Trismosin’s Splendor Solis).

  Truth be told, Yoshi was unsure as to why he bothered telling his brother such stories every day. It must be remembered that Shitai was practically brain dead, nothing more than a giant vegetable, one who no doubt was unable to comprehend what Yoshi was telling him. Perhaps it had something to do with guilt. Yoshi had lived a very full life (or he had prior to the death of their mother in 1970, the year he had become Shitai’s primary caretaker, and the year he had decided to move to Shoji). Shitai, on the other hand, had remained bedridden his entire life, had never really even experienced life at all. But Yoshi’s guilt was, in a way, multi-tiered, for there was a part of him that loathed his twin brother, and resented his very existence. For many years now, Yoshi had been fascinated by the Phantom Twin Syndrome, had been intrigued by famous people whose twins had died either in the womb or just after they were born, and were thus haunted by that twin for the rest of their lives (‘twinless twins’ was one term for such people). He would read about the birth of Elvis Presley, who had been born on January 8th, 1935, in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo, Mississippi, and how Elvis’ older identical twin brother, Jesse Gordon Presley, had been delivered stillborn just 35 minutes before, and was buried in a shoebox in an unmarked grave (Jesse being immortalized in Scott Walker’s stillborn serenade “Jesse,” off his 2006 album The Drift, an album that Yoshi loved, having been a Scott Walker fan for many years). Then there was Philip K. Dick, whose twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, died just six weeks after being born, on January 26, 1929. Oftentimes Yoshi would feel as if Shitai was one of those phantom twins, one who had died stillborn, only in Shitai’s case he was a phantom twin who had somehow survived, by one of Nature’s cruel
anti-miracles. This was something he thought about every day, usually when going about the tedious process of changing his brother’s tubes, and as he would do this he would also sometimes think that perhaps Shitai should have died in utero, and then have been absorbed by himself, such fetal resorption being known as Vanishing Twin Syndrome, or VTS. Every day, when Yoshi would visit the local Shinto shrine, he would pray for Shitai’s merciful death, and while it would have been quite easy for him to do the deed himself, he just could not go through with such an act. Besides, he was perversely curious as to which of the two would die first.

  Every night, after telling whatever story he chose to tell to his twin, Yoshi would then climb into his own bed (which was located a few feet away from Shitai’s bed, to its left). Then he would close his eyes and quickly fall asleep. And then he would dream, and this dream was the same dream he had been having now for over 40 years, ever since he had become Shitai’s primary caretaker.

  In this dream, Yoshi would find himself lying down in bed, in a room almost identical to the living room of their home, just with some slight variations in decoration and furniture. In this dream, however, it was Yoshi who was the bedridden one, Yoshi who was connected via tubes to a number of machines. All he could do in this dream was lie in bed and watch as his brother walked around the room, going about doing various chores. At some point in this dream, Shitai would eventually go to the front door, open it, and step outside, and for a brief moment Yoshi was granted a glimpse of the world outside the house, and what he saw was somewhat unnerving. For outside the house there stretched a black night sky that brooded over a monochrome landscape: Shitai would begin walking down a gray street, one that cut across a lake of spoiled white milk. Rising out from this lake in the distance was the head of an enormous snake with a rooster-like face, a bejeweled crown atop its scaly head, and sticking out from its beaked mouth was the bloody tip of a tail: an Uroborus taken to its logical and graphic conclusion. Meanwhile, hovering in the sky was a creature that in shape resembled the chalk outline of some ghastly malnourished lamb, its sinister aura bringing to mind the Bloody Touching Monster that haunted the Uboa Trap World in Yume Nikki. Yoshi would see all of this only very briefly, before Shitai would shut the door, blocking the outside world from sight. Hours would go by, and eventually, Shitai would return: then he would change Yoshi’s tubes, sit down next to him, and begin whispering into his ear, in much the same manner that Yoshi whispered stories into his brother’s ear during his waking hours. And the things that he would whisper in Yoshi’s ear were so horrific that, upon waking up in the morning, Yoshi would find himself unable to remember just what it was that he had been told, being left only with the gut feeling that what he had been told had been so awful that his memory had erased it to preserve his sanity.

  Whenever Yoshi would wake up in the morning, he would reflect on his dreams from that night and inevitably feel quite disturbed. One would think that he would be used to them by now, seeing as he had been having variations on this same nightmare for over 40 years, yet still, such a thing had never happened. There were two reasons why they disturbed him, the first being the reversal of their roles: like Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, it made him ponder the possibility that what he knew as the objective world was nothing more than a dream, and that it was the grim nightmare world in which Shitai was the mobile one that was the true objective reality. The other reason why the dream disturbed him was because of the ghastly things that Shitai would whisper in his ear every night. Thinking about those things, Yoshi couldn’t help but compare them to the dark things of the world he was familiar with, and there were times in which he had to wonder which of the two twins lived in the actual nightmare. Yoshi would often read his brother stories from the newspapers, and it never failed to amaze him how awful many of those stories were. Why, just in the last week of May and the first week of June, there had been that man in Hackensack, New Jersey who had repeatedly stabbed himself with a 12-inch knife in front of police, throwing bits of his own skin and intestines at them. Then there had been that 21-year-old Michigan State University student who had murdered his roommate, dismembered him, eaten his heart and brain, then disposed of the remains in a dumpster behind a church. Then the day after that, the story of a former employee of a Swedish medical university who had cut off his wife’s lips, then eaten them, so that they couldn’t be sewn back on: that same day the CDC had denied the existence of a zombie apocalypse, and a woman in Houston had seen a likeness of Jesus in the bathroom mold of her home, and a massacre had taken place in Syria where the victims, mostly women and children, had been killed execution style, their heads cut off. It seemed to Yoshi as if blood and madness were the only true universal language of the world. And was it not the Aztecs who had believed that the spilling of blood was needed to sustain the Universe itself?

  In any event, time went by, the seasons changed, but Yoshi’s life remained as stagnant as pond water in the stifling dog days of summer, as sessile as the gargoyles clinging to Notre-Dame de Paris. Every day he went to the forest to look for corpses that often hung from trees like morbid wind chimes, and every night he returned to his home and told his brother about his day. But then, one night in September of 2012, everything changed.

  In most aspects, the day had begun like any other for Yoshi. Yet as he had left his house shortly before 9 o’clock that morning, something about the day had already seemed to be strangely off to him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but as he had gone about the routine of changing all of Shitai’s tubes, he had begun to receive the odd notion that this would be the final time that he would ever do this for his brother, a notion that that night, he would rid himself of his brother once and for all. These notions, which began as mere stray thoughts, eventually blossomed into deep convictions as the day had gone on. As he had made his rounds in the forest that day, he had come to the conclusion that, while he would never be able to kill his twin in a direct manner, nothing was stopping him from doing it indirectly.

  Soon, night had fallen like the blade of a tenebrous guillotine, and with it, the end of Yoshi’s shift. He stayed at the local tavern a bit longer than usual that evening, and consumed more sake than was his wont as well, much more than he was accustomed to imbibing. Perhaps he had been subconsciously operating under the rationale that he needed to steel his nerves for what he had intended to do that evening. After he left the tavern, he had made his way home, not even bothering to stop at the Shinto shrine as he always did, figuring to do so would be pointless. For all these years now, his prayers had never been granted by the gods, so that night he would take matters into his own hands. He tried to assure himself that what he was doing was only just and humane, but he felt as if he were being watched by sinister authority figures, as if he were walking down not a normal village street but was instead wandering blindly through a hallucinogenic labyrinth whose walls were decorated with giant sculpted eyeballs. He kept shooting nervous glances up at the sky, which also had seemed more sinister than usual that evening: the stars seemed less like infinitely distant celestial bodies and more like white dots on an enormous sky-wide ebony-paged connect-the-dots book which, were they to be connected, would trace out the obscene shape of some repressed dropsical deity (perhaps Cloacina, the Roman Goddess of the Sewers and the Spirit of the Great Drain), and the crescent moon was like one of God’s fingernail clippings, forever embalmed in the black sky.

  Yoshi stepped into their house and looked around. There was Shitai on his bed, bathed in red light, quiet as one of the University of Salford’s anechoic chambers, as sempiternal as day and night. There was his own bed, currently unoccupied and awaiting his presence. There was his bookcase, which held a number of titles, including everything ever written by Yukio Mishima, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, various texts related to Eastern Religion, and their father’s prized possession, a signed copy of W.P. Mayhew’s classic novel Nebuchadnezzar (Pappas & Swain, New York, 1941). Ther
e were also many books by Jung and various spagyrical texts, for the twins’ father had been a psychiatrist of the Jungian school of thought, employed by a powerful Japanese company known as Chipco, who had sadly died in 1984 when the Chipco laboratory he had been stationed at had been mysteriously destroyed, reduced to nothing more than a giant crater shaped like the footprint of some titanic aquatic reptile. There was his record player, placed atop a cabinet, and in the cabinet itself was a shelf housing a number of records, including many of the opera LPs he had purchased during his trip to New York City in the 1950’s, along with many albums featuring Akihiro Miwa, who was Yoshi’s favorite singer. On one wall hung a framed print of Hiroyuki Fukuda’s extremely creepy painting The Goddess of Meontology, which had been in the possession of Yoshi’s family for many years now, and which Yoshi had always found to be somewhat sinister in its composition. Then Yoshi turned his attention to Shitai.

  Yoshi stared down at his twin’s body with a grim look of resolution on his face, in much the same manner that Abraham, clutching a sacrificial knife, had probably stared down at the bound form of his son Isaac on the altar atop Mt. Moriah. But here, in this case, there would be no angel to stop Yoshi from doing that which he was about to do. He quietly went about unhooking his brother’s various tubes. Rather than replacing them, however, he instead gripped his frail brother in his arms and lifted him off the bed, which wasn’t too hard as his brother’s withered body weighed hardly anything at all. He then turned and walked right out of the house, still cradling his brother in his arms. At that hour of the night, the streets of Shoji were all but deserted, so he didn’t need to worry about running into anybody. He walked down his street and stepped into the forest.