Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (27 page)

Hold on a minute here
, Timothy thought, his mind racing in excitement. Capricorn was usually portrayed as a goat with a fish tail on the zodiac: its name in Latin even meant “horned male goat.” Could this be a reference to the goat that Prof. Mancini had mentioned on his epitaph? Timothy was well aware of the diabolical connotations of Capricorn. In the Tarot, the card that Capricorn was associated with was The Devil. Timothy recalled how years ago, while reading Kenneth Grant’s
The Magical Revival
, he had come across a passage explaining how the goat came to be the dominant bestial type assigned to symbolize the Devil: how early civilizations had noted that, during the Winter Solstice, the Sun, when dipping below the horizon and ushering in the darkness of night, could be seen entering the constellation of Capricorn, the Goat. Thus did the goat become a type of God identified with the underworld and, later on, the Egyptian god Set, the Greek god Pan, and, of course, Christianity’s Satan.

Upon arriving at home, Timothy decided to research the matter further. He began studying the theory of Christian constellations online, exploring the idea that one could find examples of messages from the Gospels in the stars (this idea being popularized in the 1800’s by the writings of E.W. Bullinger and J.A. Seiss). He read about Julius Schiller (c. 1580-1627), a German lawyer who, in the year of his death, had published a star atlas known as the
Coelum Stellatum Christianum
, which replaced the pagan constellations with Biblical figures. That is, the twelve major zodiacal constellations were here replaced instead with the Twelve Apostles. Timothy looked up which Biblical figure that Schiller had used to replace Capricorn, and saw that it was... Jacob.

It can’t be a coincidence
, Timothy mused.
Professor Mancini was notorious for hiding little puzzles in his artwork, and had supposedly been a great admirer of the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges
. As far as Timothy was concerned, most of the puzzling aspects of the epitaph had been explained, aside from the part about praising the goat on his knees. Yet he was still no closer to locating the professor’s “Black Studio” (assuming that such a studio even existed), or, for that matter, uncovering the identity of the boys who had served as the models for St. Durtal’s demons, which was what had got him started on this whole wild goose chase to begin with.

There’s only one thing left to do: I need to go and search Prof. Mancini’s estate itself, and see if I can find any clues there
, Timothy thought. He knew a few basic facts about Prof. Mancini’s mansion. Between his stained glass window business and the money he made decorating churches on the side, Prof. Mancini had been quite well off, to the extent that, upon moving from Boston to Thundermist in 1940, he had been able to buy a large estate on the border of the town, next to Baart Pond and not far from Lamb’s Blood Cemetery and the Saddleworth Clinic. Apparently, the professor had been quite fond of Lamb’s Blood Cemetery, and back in the day was often spotted strolling along its winding paths when the weather was mild. “When I’m in Lamb’s Blood Cemetery, I feel as if the dead are very near to me,” Prof. Mancini had once been quoted as saying. Well, that wasn’t shocking: Timothy believed that cemeteries were notorious hang-outs for the Qliphoth, the husks of the dead and denizens of the World of Shells. In any case, the layout of Prof. Mancini’s estate was modeled after that of old Zebulon Windrow’s estate near Haverstraw, New York, the Windrows being a family of black magicians and necromancers, said to be in possession of the Urim and Thummim mentioned in the Biblical Book of Exodus.
So why on earth did a pious Christian like Prof. Mancini have such a fascination with them
? Timothy was confused. Like the professor’s friendship with the diabolic artist Richard Pickton, it just didn’t add up.

Whatever the case was, Timothy’s next step seemed clear. He needed to get into Prof. Mancini’s mansion and poke around a bit. In the period following the professor’s death, the mansion had stood empty for years, slowly falling into ruin. But Timothy had recently read in the
Thundermist Times
that a couple of years ago, the SDACC had purchased the place and was in the process of renovating it, with the intention of turning it into a tourist attraction, just like they had done with St. Durtal’s Church. At night the place was certain to be empty. Timothy decided that he could sneak in then and do some snooping. And with that thought in mind, he went to bed, with the intention of exploring Prof. Mancini’s estate sometime in the near future.

IV

To Feed the Moon

A few nights later, after the sun had set, Timothy had climbed into his car and driven up to the Mancini estate. The streets were all but deserted at that hour, and as Timothy drove he had the radio on, was listening to the song “Demons” by Imagine Dragons. On the car seat next to him was a duffel bag containing a flashlight, matches, a screwdriver, a crowbar, some rope, a first aid kit, and other useful tools. He was dressed mostly in black, wearing his favorite t-shirt, one that had the movie poster art for the Jessica Alba horror film
The Eye
on the front of it. He had the evening all planned out: he would park his car a mile or so down the road from the estate, then hoof it on foot the rest of the way there. As matters stood, there weren’t any other homes or businesses on the street leading to the Mancini estate, so it wasn’t as if he had to worry about being spotted. Once at the estate he’d look around and see if he could find anything. On the off chance that he’d trigger some kind of security alarm, or were he to be arrested, he would claim that his car had broken down and he had gone over to the estate to see if there had been a phone he could use. Timothy was aware that it wasn’t the greatest plan in the world (“Yes, officer, my car broke down. Don’t mind this duffel bag that just happens to be loaded up with just the sort of tools an intruder would use to break into private property”), but what the hell, it was worth a shot.

Timothy reached the intended spot and parked his car. He exited the vehicle and began walking in the direction of the estate, his lonely wandering accompanied by the hooting of owls. He was wearing a heavy winter coat, on account of the fact that it was a very chilly and wintry night out. A few minutes later and he had reached his destination. The estate was surrounded by an especially dirty-looking red sandstone wall. Rising into view from behind this wall were a number of tall oak trees, along with the upper floors of the mansion itself. Timothy walked along the imposing wall until he came to the main gate, which consisted of two tall black granite pillars, a grinning skull atop each of them. In between these two pillars was a large black gate. Beyond the gate was a white flagstone path which eventually split into two forking paths: the left path led to the estate’s backyard while the right path led to the mansion. The mansion itself was surrounded by fog that evening, and in the murky light of the moon it resembled the phantasmagoria of some perverted fairyland, the product of the fevered mind of some anonymous curate whose brain was fried by cocaine: the sinister atmosphere generated by the place made Timothy recall the haunted vibes he had felt upon first laying eyes on Caspar David Friedrcih’s
The Abbey in the Oakwood
. The mansion, a three-story hulking Gothic structure, reminded Timothy of Bartram-Haugh, the malignant mansion that had featured in Sheridan LeFanu’s famous 19th century Victorian mystery thriller
Uncle Silas
.
Could this place possibly look any creepier
? Timothy wondered to himself as he stared at the estate from behind the safety of the gate.
All that’s missing is Bach’s “Tocotta & Fugue in D Minor” being played on a pipe organ as background music
.

The front gate was out of the question, as it was padlocked firmly shut. However, to the left of the gate was a small stone gatehouse set into the wall, a narrow bronze door with a round arch providing an alternate entrance. Timothy tried to open the gatehouse door and to his surprise found that it was unlocked.
Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy,
he thought as he stepped into a tiny room, which contained another nondescript door, which also wasn’t locked. Timothy stepped past it and set foot upon the grounds of the estate.

That was easy... maybe a little
too
easy
, Timothy thought. He began walking down the white flagstone path, passing by numerous cement mixers, wheelbarrows, and scaffolding on the way, reminders that this place was still in the process of being renovated. Even though the fog swirled all around him like the congealed souls of dead maggots, the light of the moon above made it easy for him to see where he was going. As he made his way to the mansion, he kept shooting nervous glances at the clusters of oak trees scattered around the grounds of the estate, expecting at any moment that a figure would step out from their leafy shadows, perhaps a cloaked creature with tentacles for arms and suction cups for a face, like that horrible familiar summoned from Hell in John Bellairs’ book
The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost
. But his trip to the mansion proved to be uneventful and he made it to the front doors unmolested by any nocturnal denizens.

As he got closer to the estate, Timothy saw that atop the building was a big egg-shaped dome made out of green copper, and rising out from the center of this dome was a pole with a flag attached to it, and printed on this flag were two letters, F and M: the initials of Prof. Fausto Mancini. The moon lingered in the sky above, half its face obscured, like the visage of an insane and deformed moonchild peeking maliciously from behind a curtain woven from the void, while the stars seemed oddly unstable, as if they were capable of plunging from their fixed positions at any moment. Timothy tried to not let himself be distracted by all of this as he made his way to the mansion’s main entrance. The front doors of the mansion were tall and made of bronze, and Timothy by this point wasn’t surprised to find them unlocked as well. So he pushed the creaky door open and stepped into the mansion.

To his disappointment he quickly saw that the mansion’s foreboding exterior was much more evocative than its bland interior. Many of the rooms were bare, and what little furniture that was there was covered with white sheets. Even the walls were dull to look at, being mostly unadorned, with the exception of a few fairly commonplace-looking crucifixes. None of the lights in the estate worked, but moonlight filtered through the windows of the house, creating jagged patterns of light on the floor, the shapes reminiscent of the sort of geometric perversions one could find while studying the mathematics of Hell, and this let Timothy see where he was going.

He eventually found a studio, and saw it was nothing to get excited over, containing a few old art supplies and some stacked up, unfinished canvases that Prof. Mancini was working on at the time of his death. The mansion’s most interesting room was the library, its bookcases filled with titles that struck Timothy’s fancy: he spotted various writings of the saints (such as St. John of the Cross’
Dark Night of the Soul
and St. Teresa of Avila’s
The Interior Castle
), the
Scivias
of Hildegard of Bingen, books about angelic hierarchies and demonology, medieval treatises on alchemy, some of the theosophical works penned by Helena Blavatsky, and many editions of the Bible, some looking quite old. This library was testament to the legend that Prof. Mancini was exceedingly well read.

Also in this library was a fireplace, and hanging above it was a painting, one that was obviously the work of Prof. Mancini. This one portrayed a Biblical scene, illustrating Christ’s discourse on the sheep and the goats (also known as the Judgment of Nations) from the New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew, in which the Son of Man, upon returning to this world and being seated on his throne of glory, gathers all the nations before him and separates them, like a shepherd separating sheep and goats, with the sheep going to his right side and the goats going to his left, the goats being symbolic of sin and wickedness, destined for eternal punishment. It wasn’t a great shock that the goats were placed to the left of Christ, as the left has long been considered an unfavorable direction in various religious and mythological belief systems. One had to consider how the Left Hand Path of Magick was related to Hecate, the Greek Goddess of Witchcraft, or, on a related note, the Vama Marg of the Tantric cults, associated with women and the moon, the black twin of the Dakshina Marg, which was itself symbolized by the phallus and the sun. But Timothy realized he was mentally digressing.

Timothy stared at the goats in the painting, noting their slightly demonic appearance. Then he stared down at the fireplace, the interior of which was empty: even the ash had been cleaned away. He realized that if he got down on his knees, he could easily crawl into it. He recalled the final line of Prof. Mancini’s epitaph: “I praised the Goat upon my knees.”
Maybe the fireplace conceals a secret passage, like in the movies. Well, I’ve come all this way, it couldn’t hurt to check
, Timothy thought. So he got down on his knees and stared into the fireplace, but it was so dark he couldn’t see a thing. Reaching into his duffel bag, he pulled out a flashlight, switched it on, and aimed the beam of light into the gap. On the wall towards the back of the fireplace was a soot-stained stone sculpture depicting the twelve major symbols of the zodiac. Timothy trained the beam of light onto this sculpture until he found the symbol representing Capricorn: the goat-fish. Timothy reached out to touch it, felt that it was slightly loose. He gave it a counterclockwise twist, and with a rumble the wall panel slid away, revealing a darkened room beyond it.