Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

brought in potential poker players and gamers, at Mania’s Lucky Stop Inn, a Polish bar on the other side of their building.

The first time I went over to Celly’s house, I saw a framed quote, this being long before the cutesy arts- and-crafts-stitched logos. The bromide, in simple block letters, read:

HEALTH AND ILLNESS CAN BE REPRESENTED BY A CONTINUUM.

Celly showed me her mother’s bookshelves, Jan Smut’s Holism and Evolution, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions, there were others. I remember seeing a book on EDTA. Not knowing what it meant, I thumbed through it. The letters stood for ethylene tetra-acetic acid. There were pictures in the book of dwarf-like skeletons and bodies in foetal positions. I read that EDTA chelated the calcium lost in body waste. I started to ask Mrs. Tomei what this meant, as she had walked into the room with cherry Kool-Aid, but she quickly took the book away, putting it up out of reach of Celly and me.

I stayed late that evening, because my mother was putting in overtime at the radium plant. I was supposed to be home before dark, but she wasn’t able to make any calls, and I knew that crazy Anna Banana, the downstairs neighbour who was supposed to check on me, was at the horse track in Cicero.

We watched Walter Cronkite on the black-and-white blond-coloured Philco, talking very seriously about the latest Mercury space flight. And that’s the way it was, July fourteenth, 1967. We changed channels and watched I Dream of Jeannie and Batman. Catwoman shot the Dynamic Duo with sedated darts. Robin said “Holy D’Artagnan,” and they both collapsed. It was Julie Newmar as Catwoman. The television picture wasn’t snowy like our own, the Tomeis had ordered a Channel-Master from New York state (the only place that was marketing them), the first ones in the neighbourhood to have one, I think. You see them all over now; they look like double-sided rakes up next to the chimneys.

That night, after getting a ride home from Mrs. Tomei in their 1956 Olds Holiday, I had my first adult dream. It was of an older, fuller Celandine in the Catwoman outfit. My underwear was wet and it was hard to pee that morning. I felt guilty. I did not remember the dream itself until early that afternoon, then I kind of understood.

I went to see Celly that same day, the afternoon after my dream. Celly suggested that we play doctor. Her mother was out shopping at RB’s, and I wondered if she would run into my father and spend extra time gossiping. We went into the back sitting room, the drapes fluttering every time the Paulina Street elevated thundered by like destiny.

Celly asked me if I was going to be afraid. I said of what, getting caught? She said no, and looked away.

I remember it all so clearly. The Westclox ticking a tattoo across the room, both of us bursting with fear and anticipation. We knew we’d never do anything more that day but look at each other naked. Celly’s mother had left a package of Hit Parade cigarettes lying atop the bureau. I never had seen her smoke, and thought that the cigarettes were for her male visitors.

Celly was barefoot, still wearing the flowered dress. I moved forward to take the shoulder straps in my sweaty hands.

Something kicked me. It wasn’t Celandine, unless she was able to lift up her leg double-jointed and plant one right in my thigh. She backed away quickly.

I was concerned that she had changed her mind. Another train went by and I started thinking about the time. I told her not to worry.

Celandine said that she would take the dress off herself.

“Close your eyes,” she said. When I had them firmly shut, I heard her whisper, “You know I’ve never made fun of your head or eyes.”

I opened my eyes. I thank the lesser gods that my deformity allowed for my eyes to not bug out any more than they already did.

I looked at Celly. She stood away from me, naked, her body hairless. But.

There was a part of a body growing out of her. Like in that book I had been looking at, the one Celly’s mom had moved to a higher place on the bookshelf.

I realized that her rib cage was slightly bell-shaped. To accommodate the head that protruded from below the last of the left ribs. Its eyes were closed, peaceful-like, as if in sleep.

But that wasn’t all.

Celly had a tiny leg growing out from her pelvic bone; that must have been what had kicked me. From the area around her flat stomach, I could see three webbed fingers.

A thumb with no thumbnail protruded from her navel.

I was only seven and a half, but you learn fast when you don’t know what the next guy on the street is going to say or do to you. I told Celly that she looked beautiful, strong not vulnerable. Now I understood the reason for the Bohemian-style dresses. She began crying.

Still dressed, I went forward, carefully kissing her face. She responded in kind. After several minutes, I felt a tugging around my waist. I thought it might have been Celly’s hands, working at my pants.

I looked down from the corner of my bigger eye.

The head below Celandine’s rib cage was sucking on my shirt, pulling it into its mouth. Chewing on it.

I heard a noise and panicked, thinking the front door had opened. Celandine asked me if I was afraid. I said yes I was, that her mother might catch us.

Celly looked down and said that her mother didn’t care that someone might see her this way. In what had to be her own mixed-up way, Mrs. Tomei was evidently proud that Celly was not afraid to show off her body.

When I backed away slightly, the head bobbed up. The eyes stared at me. The mouth did not relinquish my shirt.

* * *

Christ, I’ve looked up so many medical words in the time I came back to Chicago, to Celly. I tried looking up the phrase “maternal eclampsia” and couldn’t locate it anywhere. Finally called the Harold Washington Library, a girl named Colleen told me that it meant that the mother would sometimes bleed to death during childbirth.

* * *

Celandine and I remained good friends throughout the next few years. We played doctor several more times when her mother wasn’t around.

More often than not, we would just walk around Wicker Park, and I would sometimes, in the steel shadows of the elevated, lift up her dress, reach under and caress the twin’s head. In the books about circus freak-shows, they were called “vestigial twins.”

What Celandine’s mother had was a foetal multiple cyst anomaly.

Nowadays, this is detectable by sonography. So Celly is certainly unique, especially that she lived. And the head was not stillborn.

Celly kept the leg, tiny like a chicken’s, strapped around her leg with something along the lines of a Posey gait belt, the kind used to lift patients out of wheelchairs. The fingers were slowly being recalcified into her body, due to the added weight gain of her prepubescent years. Many times, I had read, a vestigial twin never formed because it had actually been recalcified into the stronger twin during the time in the womb.

Ray-Ban invented a pair of wraparound sunglasses about 1970, that fit my eyes perfectly, and Bankers Life Insurance picked up the bill. If I didn’t have a full head of blond hair, I might have looked like one of the most intense punkers still visible in the old north side neighbourhoods. I think of all I know now, that I didn’t know then. All the medical terms that didn’t make a damn bit of difference to me. I loved Celandine Tomei.

You can find Celandine’s anomaly, if you wish to call it something safe, under any book that lists Foetal Monozygous Multiple Pregnancy Dysplacentation Effects. In the Washington Library’s reference book on birth defects, it says: SEE Also Michelin Baby Syndrome. Page 1433, no shit. Makes me think of John Merrick’s disease and how it became known as “elephantitis” because his mother fell in front of an elephant during a parade in the early days of her pregnancy. I wonder if she ever ran into Tom Thumb’s mother and swapped bad juju stories.

The head growing out of Celly was part of a foetal cyst that had skeletal dysplasia. Larger effusions of the cyst’s organs were beneath Celly’s subdermal region around her lower rib cage. Most thalidomide babies born this way had general effusions in the pleural and pericardial regions, that is, the lungs, heart, and spleen, and polyhydramnios may occur. I seem to recall a child at Childermas like this, the disease itself being excess water in