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

a story about Adrian Colwin, that cute little rich boy who had been employing a number of artists to create a portrait of himself over this last year (though according to local gossip, none of these artists had succeeded in pleasing him). Eventually I came across the article that Dr. Roxy had mentioned to me towards the end of our session, the one about the children of St. Stephen’s Church performing the story of Noah’s Ark. Sure enough, there was a black and white picture of the artificial rainbow in question, and even though looking at this picture made me feel a little queasy, I still thought that maybe Dr. Roxy was on to something.
    Later on that day, I reflected again on Dr. Roxy’s words about confronting one’s fears, and I began to think back to other things that had frightened me during my childhood, mainly certain illustrations from assorted children’s books that I had read during my youth. I remembered that a month ago, my mother had dropped off at my house a box filled with my old childhood books that she had stumbled across while cleaning out the basement of our old home. I had thanked her for this, then promptly dumped the box in my bedroom closet and piled up clothes atop it. Why I hadn’t at least taken the time to inspect the box’s contents had never crossed my mind at the time, but now that I thought about it, perhaps it was all due to those only dimly remembered memories of the illustrations that had frightened me when I was a child. So I walked into my bedroom, opened the closet, swept off the piles of clothes atop the box, and dragged the box into the light. I opened up the musty-smelling box and began pulling out books, seeking two in particular.
    It didn’t take me all that long to find them. The first book was The How and Why Wonder Book of Insects , which my parents had purchased for me at a Toys “Я ” Us for $1.08. Written by Ronald N. Rood and illustrated by Cynthia and Alvin Koehler (and published by Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers, Inc. Los Angeles, 1983), it was basically a 48-page informational book about insects, with illustrations (some of which were in color, others in black-and-white). The sinister drawing appeared on page 28, which struck me as ironic, seeing as I consider 28 to be one of my lucky numbers. At the bottom half of this page there was a black and white illustration of a startled-looking mouse that was surrounded on all sides by five honeybees, which seem to be readying themselves to sting the mouse to death. The text above the illustration said, “A warm beehive sometimes attracts mice and other animals. If a mouse finds the hive, it may eat some of the honey the bees have stored for food. It may build its nest in front of the entrance so that the bees cannot get out in the spring. Often the bees drive the mouse away with their stings. Sometimes they sting it so much that it dies. Then they have to leave the body there. But the bees often cover a dead mouse with their wax, sealing it up so that the air in the hive will stay fresh.” And beneath the illustration was this caption: “The mouse has a sweet tooth, especially for honey, but bees know how to defend their property from enemies.” Staring at this illustration, I was shocked to see that it looked very different from the way that my mind had remembered it for the last 25 or so years. In my memory of it, it was a color illustration, the honeybees were bumblebees, and the mouse had a much more human-looking expression of terror on its face. It would seem then that I had utterly misremembered what the illustration had looked like after all these years.
    The second book was a comic book adaptation of Don Bluth’s classic 1982 film The Secret of NIMH , which was itself an adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH . I recall being quite fond of the movie when I was a child (I had had a crush on the animated version of Mrs. Brisby, who I had thought was kind of hot, for a