The Hand That Wounds part
1
Extracts from the Personal
Diary of
Tuesday
1st May 2007
The
MI13 pager went off. (I had told Jules I have been given this by my ‘agent’ for
dowsing contracts. The agency is actually one of MI13's front organisations.) I
rushed off to the phone box and got told to wait on the main road; they were
sending a car. I rushed home, quickly packed and told Jules I have a contract
and have to go.
The
car, the local pigs, turned up in next to no time and they seemed to doubt I
can be the person they are supposed to be picking up. They drive me to the
local police helicopter base, where their helicopter is waiting. The pilot
wants to know what is so important about me that he had been ordered back to
transport me. I don't have a clue but I tell him that he doesn't have the
necessary clearance to know that.
The
helicopter took me to a large R.A.F. station, where I found several familiar
faces: Adam, Barbara, Belinda & Eliza. We were escorted into a secure
conference facility, and Forbush gave us a briefing,
appearing on an enormous TV screen.
There
has been a ritual murder at Mayburgh Henge. It is a heavily plundered site (with only one
significant stone remaining) in the lake district. It
terminates a short ley-line; Scafell
is at the other end. Probably originates in the late Neolithic, and in active
use, well into the Bronze Age, but no recent usage that I am aware of. English
Heritage look after the place at the moment, which
accounts for Barbara being here.
We
are given some files and told to go there and find out what is going on. Our
transport to get there was a large and very fast military helicopter, which
flew us straight up to Penrith.
On
arrival we were met by a Penrith pig called Alex
Douglas. We didn't recognise him in his uniform, but he spotted us, and
re-introduces himself; he is the bloke we met in Dylath-Leen
being chased by Moonbeasts!
Alex
takes us directly to the scene of the crime. On the way, we got some details as
well as some very unpleasant photos. The victim was Jeremy Springfield, aged
16. He seems to have had his neck grabbed by someone immensely strong and
broken. The corpse has been mutilated, and laid out in a stream-eagle pose. His
heart was torn out and is missing. His eyes were torn out of their sockets and
placed as though looking out of his groin.
Alex
says he recognises the pose and mutilations. It was depicted in one of the
stained glass windows in the Dylath-Leen temple,
where he hid from the Moonbeasts. On describing the
other windows, I realise what they are depicting. One is the black or horned
man, for some a depiction of the devil. In the window, he is shown standing
behind a standing stone, which Alex thinks looks like the one in the centre of Mayburgh. The third window was a three lobed-eye on an arm,
the Haunter-of-the-Dark.
Both
the black-man and the Haunter-of-the-Dark
are manifestations of Nyarlathotep. This is not
really welcome news, especially as I am under an obligation to him and the
artefacts that he desires to be used more seem to have packed themselves and
come with us.
The
site has been covered by a tent to keep the weather, and especially the press,
out. I noticed a charred fragment of paper on the ground. It is something of a
mystery where it came from, as if it had been there all along then it should
have been in the photographs and it should have been noticed.
On
one side the piece of paper has a quotation…
‘Open unto me the way, Umr
at-Tawil;
Across the angles of time and curvéd space;
Let the passage be free unto the Crawling
Chaos.’
It
almost seems that this particular spell has been deliberately selected to be
preserved. On the back there is part of an illustration, probably part of Vitruvian Man, and a fragment of a library
stamp.
Next
we visited the victim's parents. They seem to blame Giles Hebdon,
who they believe had an undue influence over their son.
Our
next trip was to
The
three accounts that we were given all agree remarkably well. If any of them are
lying they are being very careful not to contradict what the others know. Adam,
who it seems is very sensitive to deception, believes that Giles, and
especially Friday, had told the truth and held back nothing significant. We
suspect them all having been interviewed in front of their parents, that what
little they concealed was probably not relevant to us, but stuff they didn't
want their parents to hear. However we believe that Isabel was holding back
significantly.
We
had discovered between the interviews that the paper fragment was from a page
that had been cut out of a school library book with a sharp blade. It seems
that the school has a collection of arcane tomes donated by the school's
founder, including a number of English translations that were unknown to MI13.
We are reasonably certain that Isabel was lying when she denied knowing who
stole the page of the book.
The
story told by the three survivors is roughly as follows…
The
Beltane Misadventure
Jeremy
and Giles were both sporty rather than academic types. By contrast, it seems
both of the girls were bright and studious. Friday was the more reserved
and claimed plausibly that this was her first offence of sneaking out at night.
Ostensibly, Friday was invited along as Isabel did not want to be alone with
the two boys.
Whereas
no doubt horrifying to their parents, it seems that they had not really got up
to that much before their disastrous dabbling in magic. They wandered up to the
henge. All three survivors claim that it was Jeremy's
idea to cast the spell and that he had brought the sheet from the book with
him.
Around
Jeremy
had read the incantation and struck the stone seven times with a stick. At this
point, it seems that the night got a great deal darker and Friday took fright.
As Friday ran, Jeremy shouted ‘Get her!’. Giles ran after Friday, initially
trying to catch her, and Isabel also ran. Then they all heard a terrible scream
from Jeremy.
The
three survivors scattered, although the girls managed to meet up again. None
dared to return to the henge.
———
What
actually occurred that night seems reasonably clear.
However, we are very little closer to discovering who is really responsible.
Feeling
we were at a dead-end with the witnesses, we went up to the henge
to see if it might be possible to use the past-sight binoculars to view the
events of the previous night. I settled in the best cover I could find to the
south-east of the henge, behind the dyke that
surrounds it, and tried to view as close to the current time as possible. I
realised that we have never managed to view much less than a week ago, so it
was a faint hope.
The
first thing I noticed was it seemed to be misty, not an unclear view, but a
clear view of mist. This was very strange; I was definitely expecting to see
sometime in the past month, and there had been no mist in that time. I could
not possibly be at the wrong end of the scale (and in the ancient past) as the
lights from the M6 were visible.
Then
I saw something in sky to the north flying westwards, something enormous and
serpentine flying with an unnatural undulation. It flew across and down onto
the motorway, apparently causing many vehicles to crash. At this point, I
ceased looking and went to consult Alex. He was adamant that no large accident
had been on that stretch for years.
It
was around then that we were called away to Giles' parents, as Giles had gone
AWOL. We were seconded to help look for him. An immediate sweep of the
area turned up a few kids, and the story that Giles was heading for the henge. So we all returned to the henge
to look for him. We parked the van to the northeast of the site and walked in
towards the centre, well spaced out to cover as much ground as possible.
Mist
was starting to form, it looked very like what I had
seen through the binoculars. It occurred to me that, perhaps, the binoculars
had shown the future, not the past. I knew that the viewer is visible in
the time they were viewing, so I moved so that I would be able to see where I
had been. I could see the binoculars and something strange behind them.
That meant I had seen the future; and as I had only looked for at most quarter
of an hour, it meant that the arrival of the flying horror was imminent!
Previously
I had been able to absent myself from the scene by lowering the binoculars.
However we were now unavoidably in the vicinity of the beast and it was time to
take cover.
Then
we heard a scream from across the henge. We ran
towards it and I saw the snake-like creature again, flying towards the
motorway. I had originally feared that the scream came from another sacrificial
victim at the centre of the henge but, on getting
back to the van, we found it was Belinda who had taken very badly to seeing the
creature directly above her.
We
drove as fast as possible round to the motorway. Alex took charge with
Barbara, who is apparently an ex-pig, (I should have guessed)
as his assistant. Eliza tended to the wounded and co-opted me to provide moral
support for one of the trapped victims. Adam stayed in the van looking after
Belinda.
It
was a mess, a proper pile-up. At the centre of it was a mutilated corpse that
at first sight had been hit by a lorry that was stopped before it. However the
body had been raked and gouged vertically, not
crushed, and there was no damage to or blood on the lorry. It was hard to be
100% certain at the time, but we are now sure, that the fatality was Giles Hebdon.
The
lorry driver was in shock but reasonably coherent. He claimed to have seen
Giles running across the carriageway and then falling from above. There was
also someone screaming about a giant snake, so they had seen it.
In
time the rest of the local pigs turned up, and we were surplus to requirements,
so we went off to bed after phoning in a report to HQ. Not a good first day.
We
are reasonably sure that last night's flying monster was a Hunting Horror.
Giles' injuries and the witness accounts are consistent with Giles being
grabbed by the beast's tail, killed by its teeth and his corpse dropped on the
motorway. It was almost certainly summoned, bound and instructed to hunt down
and kill Giles. It would have taken a pretty powerful magician, or a team of
magicians, to cast the necessary spells.
We
now have a copy of the missing page from the book, faxed from the MI13 library.
It is a ritual to summon Nyarlathotep. Having
been summoned, he must be appeased with a sacrifice, whose body is to be
mutilated and laid out as Jeremy was found. The obverse is an illustration of
how this must be done, in the style of
I
suspect that Friday was the intended sacrifice, hence
Jeremy's shout that she was to be brought back, but Jeremy became the sacrifice
when Friday had the good luck, or good sense, to absent herself.
It
is not clear who initiated the proceedings. It is entirely possible that there
were other participants that the four youngsters were unaware of. However it
seems likely that whoever summoned the Hunting Horror to murder Giles was
really responsible. It also seems likely that this was intended to silence
Giles, which suggests that he knew something we need to know. I assume that the
wizard or wizards involved are unaware that we possess a necromantic artefact
capable of contacting their victims.
Giles
and Friday were almost certainly innocent participants. Jeremy and Isabel both
seem to have known at least something of the intended proceedings. Jeremy took
the central role; Isabel is lying about how much she knows. Isabel was close
enough to Jeremy to have been whispering instructions in his ear. Either could
have been anything from prime instigator to a dupe.
Personally
I am deeply suspicious of Mr Carleton, Isabel's father. Of the people we have
met so far, he seems by far the most likely to be the monster summoning wizard.
To
Do
The
following lines of investigation need to be considered:
•
Use bone mask to interview Jeremy Springfield
•
Use bone mask to interview Giles Hebdon again
•
Interview Mr Sinclair again, this time more aggressively, to find out
everything he knows about the abuse of the school's arcane library.
•
Investigate what Mr Carleton got up to in his youth; are any of his
contemporaries still around? We need to be careful, in case we make our
suspicions too obvious, or we might have a Hunting Horror, or even
something worse, sent after us.
•
Investigate the founder of the school.
• Consider
providing Friday and her family with a Circle of Protection as she may
be the next victim.