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

a Roman Catholic, you see… I went to Mass with my family every Sunday,” I said.
    “What church did you go to?” Dr. Roxy asked.
    “Our Lady of Sorrows,” I answered. “It’s near the border of North Smithfield, right across the street from the Super Stop & Shop, on Park Ave.”
    “Okay, I think I know what church you mean,” Dr. Roxy said. She herself lived in Massachusetts.
    “I was never that crazy about the place,” I went on. “I always thought that visually it was kind of bland, especially when compared to the pictures of the old European cathedrals from the Middle Ages that I would look at in my history textbooks at school. It had, like, no stained glass windows or anything like that. It almost felt more like a Protestant church, you know?”
    “I’ve never really been in many churches,” Dr. Roxy admitted. “I am a Neopagan, you know.”
    “Anyway, there was this one priest, Father Severin Doyle. He was the assistant pastor. He wasn’t like most of the other priests at Our Lady of Sorrows. He was like an actual human being, someone who I could relate to. He was a fat, jovial fellow; heck, his cheeks were practically rosy. I don’t think that I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He had his little vices, of course, like all of us: he smoked all the time, and was somewhat obsessed with his golf game, though he freely admitted that he was terrible at it. He was really popular with the rest of the parishioners. At the start of each of his homilies, he would warm the crowd up, so to speak, with a little joke. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of the jokes he told, but here’s one that I still recall, after all these years: a guy goes into his kitchen, opens up the freezer door of his refrigerator, and he sees a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit sleeping in his freezer. When the guy asks the rabbit what he’s doing in the freezer, the rabbit answers, ‘I thought it said Westing House!’ As I said, Father Doyle wasn’t like some of the other priests at Our Lady of Sorrows. The other priests there were, for the most part, grim old fossils with no sense of humor. I remember one summer when one of those pastors was away on a religious retreat for a week, leaving Father Doyle in charge of the parish. That Sunday, when Father Doyle stepped out from behind the lectern to deliver his homily, he simply said, ‘When the cat’s away, the mouse will play. You guys get the week off.’ Or words to that effect. And that was it. It was easily the shortest sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, lasting not even ten seconds. Needless to say, the congregation loved that: they laughed and even applauded. And yet, the irony is, it was one of Father Doyle’s homilies that scared me more than any other homily that I’ve ever heard in my life.”
    I suddenly found myself reminiscing about Our Lady of Sorrows Church, the church of my childhood. Our Lady of Sorrows Church had been founded back on September 1953, though the church itself hadn’t been completed until March of the following year. The inside of the church was made from red cedar imported from Oregon (funded almost entirely from small donations), and visually it resembled the interior of an ark. In the 1970’s, the decision was unfortunately made to modernize the place, and the tile floor was replaced by red carpeting. Also, two furnished reconciliation chapels adorned with bronze decorations were created for the sacrament of penance, and a special devotional chapel was erected near the main entrance. This devotional chapel was dedicated to the Virgin Mary (who, after all, was the Lady of Sorrows that the church was named after), and within it was a statue of the Blessed Mother, a statue that was continually spot lit and surrounded by red and blue votive candles. The fourteen Stations of the Cross could be found on the walls to the left and right of the main aisles in the nave. Above the doors leading to the vestibule was a large statue of Christ on the cross, while