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

mouse). This comic book adaptation was published by Golden Press in 1982, and though it was priced at $2.95, my parents, ever economical, had purchased it for $2.46 at Caldor. The illustration in this book that had scared me was on page 29, the portion of the book dealing with the rats and mice trying to escape from the NIMH research labs by fleeing through a ventilator system. At the top of this page in question there was a panel showing some of the rats crawling along a string that stretched like a tightrope at the top of the air shafts. The inside of this air shaft was red, with gaping black holes, making it look more like the interior arteries of the body of some horrific eldritch monster than the inside of an air shaft. At that point in my life, when I had first read this comic book, I had never seen the insides of an actual air shaft, but my gut feeling had been that they didn’t look like that . Some of the rats were shown falling to their deaths as they got sucked down the air shafts, horrified expressions on their cartoony faces: at the top of the panel was a caption stating: “But all the mice except Jonathan and Mr. Ages were sucked to their doom down air shafts!” Incidentally, as a child I would sometimes have nightmares in which I’d find myself getting sucked down similar air shafts. But still, once again, I found that the actual illustration was quite different from the way that I had remembered it.
    Closing this latter book, I thought to myself, All these years you’ve been vaguely haunted by dim recollections of these illustrations, and now that you’ve seen them again for the first time in years you realize that not only was your memory wrong about them, but that they’re not even scary to you anymore. Perhaps Dr. Roxy is right. Why not go to this play and check out this giant rainbow? Maybe you could even meet with Father Doyle before the show and ask him about that rainbow homily, ask him where he got that story from, or if it was just something he made up. Odds are you aren’t even remembering the exact details of it right, and maybe once you’ve been given the chance to research deeply into it, it will no longer frighten you. Feeling inspired, I resolved to go to the play with Dr. Roxy on Saturday.
    ***
    That Saturday…
    I ended up leaving for St. Stephen’s Church at 11:45 am , seeing as it was only about a ten minute drive away from my place, which was located on the outskirts of Thundermist. I had never been to St. Stephen’s Church before, though I had seen pictures of it, both online and in the Thundermist Times newspaper, so I was curious to finally see the place in person. I did know a few basic facts about the church: how it had been constructed back in the 1920’s, making it one of the older churches in the area (though not as old as St. Durtal’s Church or Lamb’s Blood Church). While I drove to the church, I was listening to some music on my car’s CD player, Alan Moore’s “The Decline of English Murder” (of all things).
    Soon enough I arrived at the church. I parked my car in the parking lot located on the church’s western side. Beyond this parking lot was a large patch of neatly cut grass and, beyond that, the church itself. It was on the large patch of neatly cut grass that the play was being staged, and as I pulled into the parking space I could easily spot the giant glass rainbow. Indeed, how could I not? The thing was enormous, easily 25 feet in height and 50 feet in length, and I wondered how long it had taken the church to even construct the thing, or how much it had cost to build. Beyond the rainbow, I could see a number of folding chairs had been set up, and, beyond that, a make-shift stage, atop of which was a small-scale replica of Noah’s Ark. Children dressed in crude animal costumes were wandering around, killing time before the start of the show. It all seemed like something straight out of a Wes Anderson movie.
    Dr. Roxy was standing atop the glass