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

rainbow (as the thing had been constructed in such a way that it was also being used as a sort of bridge that people could travel across the top of), and when she saw me approaching she waved her hand at me and smiled. I smiled and was about to wave back when something above her caught my eye. I noticed some movement within one of the church’s steeple windows. I glanced up and saw, standing within the window, good old Father Doyle, looking much as I remembered him from my youth, albeit with grayer hair. He was certainly dressed differently, though. During the years I had known him, he had only ever been dressed up in two outfits, the robes that he would wear when conducting the Mass or the all-black clerical dress shirt and pants outfit he wore when not conducting Mass. That Saturday afternoon, though, he was clad only in a white loincloth, with large feathery wings strapped to his back. In one hand he held a half-empty bottle of booze, in the other an envelope (which investigators would later find contained a suicide note/confession). The word “MURDERER” was written in red capital letters on his forehead.
    I shouted Father Doyle’s name, but I’ll never know if he heard me or not. He took one last drain from his bottle of booze, tossed it aside, then launched himself out the window. For a second, he seemed to hang in the air, and resembled a somewhat incongruous yet still oddly graceful-looking swan. Then gravity did its devil’s work and pulled him to the Earth. I shouted out Dr. Roxy’s name, but it was too late: Father Doyle crashed into the top of the glass rainbow’s arch with enough force to cause it to shatter, and Dr. Roxy plummeted to the earth as well, the shards of colorful glass that rained down all around her messily decapitating her in the process. One particularly large shard of glass sliced her head clean off her neck, and I watched as her head rolled down the grassy lawn and came to a stop right at my feet, while the headless body slumped to the ground, blood spurting from the ragged neck stump. All around me was the sound of children screaming, children who would no doubt be scarred for life by this incident.
    It could be argued that Dr. Roxy Pomo’s confrontation therapy had failed miserably, as I left St. Stephen’s Church that day with not only my phobia of rainbows intact, but with a new phobia also in place: Hyelophobia, which is a fear of… oh, well, just look it up on your own if you can’t figure it out. I’ve filled your head with enough useless facts by this point.



The Snow Globes of Patient O.T.
    I
    Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” So begins “The Picture in the House,” a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft on December 12, 1920. It was a statement that had resonated with Daphne Broadmoor ever since she first came across it many years ago, while flipping through the 1985 corrected sixth printing of Arkham House’s publication of Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horrors and Others , a book that she had stumbled across on her father’s bookcase when she was a child, a book with a green dust jacket featuring a Raymond Bayless illustration of Cthulhu emerging from his sunken tomb at R’lyeh. Throughout her twenty-five years of existence, Daphne had known a fair number of people who were fixated on buildings possessing an eidolic glamour: one friend of hers had been obsessed with an old chemical factory situated in the city of Los Diablos (an obsession which had led him to insanity), while another of her friends, Timothy Childermass, adored a local church known for its beautiful (and supposedly haunted) frescoes. As it was, there was one such place she herself was utterly fascinated with, which, though it was not far from her, was certainly strange: Saddleworth Clinic, a hospital for the mentally insane.
    Daphne Broadmoor was born and raised in the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island, and at an early age became obsessed with Saddleworth Clinic, which could be found