The Masks of Nyarlathotep pt2

Extracts from the Personal Diary of St John Cartwright-Fiennes

Wednesday July 23rd

Several friends are visiting all who were part of the 2004 protest where Jules and I met. Jules and her girl-friends wanted a females-only natter, so I was commissioned to take the men off somewhere. Actually that was quite convenient as they are mostly old friends from the archaeology course. I have this scheme to properly survey an area by dowsing so that I can work out precisely where it will be worth digging. I hope to use it to demonstrate the value of such dowsing surveys, and hopefully get some paid commissions. 

Having a few helpers to hold poles and take notes for me, makes the process far, far faster.  We spent the whole day surveying an area in Temple Bottom. We didn't stop until about 7 pm. As we walked up Totterdown on the way back, my MI13 mobile went off. It was a text message from several hours earlier telling me to call Forbush. 

I phoned in and was told to be in the office by 9 a.m. tomorrow. I explained that isn't possible; the first bus wasn't until 7:30.

 

Thursday July 24th

Up early and off to London. Actually everything went smoothly for once and I was at H.Q. at about quarter past nine. It seems that a man has been found murdered in the toilet of a train from Paris. It is Elton Jackson, the author specialising in death cults. I had read most of his earlier more academic works when I was at university. I have also read quite a lot of his more recent stuff in W H Smiths reference library. He managed to go from academic priggery to a commercial sell-out without passing through a real understanding of the subject. Nevertheless the books are of some use as they are reasonably comprehensive and reference all of the relevant sources. 

It seems that he was ritually murdered, hence the MI13 interest.  He was just back from a long trip investigating the disappearance of Roger Carlisle's party in Kenya. Carlisle, a playboy with academic pretensions, had organised an archaeological dig in Egypt. When he bored of it, he aborted it in favour of a safari in Kenya. It seems they wandered across the border into Uganda and were believed to have been slaughtered by the Lord's Resistance Army. Jackson had been investigating the party's demise, and specifically the suspicion that the LRA had nothing to do with it. 

My first task was to go with Eliza to the post-mortem to give an opinion on the mutilation of the corpse. It was gruesome.  There were two parallel vertical cuts on either side of the nose and the strip of skin between them pulled down. Mercifully this had been done after death. I had heard of a reference to this, but I couldn't remember where. 

I went off to the British Museum to research it. It took a few hours. After failing to find it in any of the best sources, it occurred to me to try Jackson's own books. I finally found it in, ironically “Black Power”. It is almost certainly Jackson's worst book. In parts, it is down-right racist, and I strongly suspect that that was deliberately provocative; the book's publicity made a great deal of the number of African countries that had banned it. 

The mutilation is associated with the Cult of the Bloody Tongue. Having Jackson's list of references, I followed them all up which took another couple of hours. It is a North African cult or cults; it is not clear if there is any real connection between the various groups of practitioners. The cult claims ancient ancestry, but there is no evidence of it dating from earlier than the 19th century. To the extent that it is a real cult, it looks disturbingly likely to be a cult of Nyarlathotep. 

Finally returned to H.Q. to learn that there has been an arrest and there is a lead in Paris. Alex and Belinda are flying off to investigate tomorrow.

 

Friday July 25th

While Alex and Belinda were winging their way to Paris, (which at the time made me jealous) the rest of us settled down to further sifting through Jackson's papers and research. 

Jackson's research trip had taken him a bit over three months. The first month he had spent in Kenya and Uganda, finding out all he could about the fateful safari. Then he had headed off to China, where he spent another month; briefly in Hong Kong but spending most of the time in Shanghai. It was here that he developed a fear of flying. He apparently believed that he was at risk of attack by some form of air-spirit. From Shanghai, he travelled to Port Said by surface transport; a journey that took around two to three weeks. The only place he stopped was Odessa and he was only delayed there by difficulties engaging onward transport.  After a few days in Egypt he travelled to Paris and spent a week there. Finally he got on the train to London and was murdered on the way.

In addition to developing a phobia of flying, Jackson also seemed convinced that some or all of the whites in the safari had in fact survived.

The most notable other person on the fateful safari was professor Penhew. Penhew was a rich and respectable Egyptologist. It seems that he was exceptionally opinionated (even by academic standards). He had a particular obsession about the Old Kingdom kings lists, and in particular Nephren-Ka, a.k.a. The Black Pharaoh that he believed was omitted from the generally accepted lists. 

When Penhew inherited the family fortune, he used it to set up his very own Egyptology establishment, the Penhew Institute. He had, of course, been its CEO. Around the time that he teamed up with Carlisle, he had resigned as CEO and handed day-to-day control over to a deputy called Gavigan, so that he could get back to hands-on Egyptology. 

Carlisle had provided all of the finance for the fateful expedition, but it had been done under the auspices of the Penhew Institute. Penhew had extraordinarily good contacts in Egypt; so much so that the Institute was able to export a considerable number of ancient artefacts, which is something that the Egyptians are extremely reluctant to allow. 

The expedition was strange in that they took no Egyptologists apart from Penhew. Of course, Penhew had the contacts, language and local knowledge to recruit everyone necessary locally. Nevertheless it would have been normal to takeout at least a few British archaelogists to supervise, take notes, catalogue the finds and help write up the work later. 

The expedition had started in on the Giza plateau. However after only a few days (they can have barely started), they moved to Saqqara. There doesn't seem to be any record of precisely where; it is four square miles of necropolis so simply saying “Saqqara” isn't very specific. Only a tiny fraction of it has ever been excavated; there is just so much there.

After a couple of weeks, they abandoned this dig too, ostensibly because they were Personae Non-Gratae after Carlisle's bodyguard got in a fight. I don't believe a word of that. It might have been necessary to send the body-guard home, but Penhew's government contacts would have smoothed things out without the slightest of difficulty and at a cost in bribes that would have been trivial to Carlisle. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, they all went off to Kenya for a safari and didn't come back. 

That much we had worked out from Jackson's papers and the questioning of his publisher (which I didn't attend as I was busy in the British Library.). As the next step in the investigation Adam, Belinda, Eliza and I went off to the Penhew Institute.

The Institute is a modern building in Tottenham Court Road. It houses artefact storage and restoration facilities, an open-to-the-public museum complete with a gift-shop and administration offices. I gave the gift-shop a quick look-over, considering if it would be a place that might take any of Jules' jewelry, but there really isn't enough in common between her style and anything ancient Egyptian.

We were seen by the current director, Gavigan. He took over around about the time Penhew teamed up with Carlisle. Penhew decided that he wanted to spend more time on practical Egyptology, and less time pushing paper around. 

Gavigan claimed to have absolutely nothing on Carlisle's expedition. It had only been nominally a Penhew Institute project; really it was Carlisle's private party with Penhew providing a gloss of academic respectability. 

What was more interesting was that Gavigan had given Jackson an interview before he set off on his investigative world tour. It seems that even then Jackson had had the idea that their might have been survivors. This is clearly a very sensitive topic with Gavigan. Penhew's will left everything to the Institute. Penhew has, for some purposes at least, been declared dead, so Gavigan has had access to most of the estate. It seems that most of this money is now committed on various projects. Were Penhew to turn up alive this would give Gavigan serious problems. Gavigan had taken umbrage at some of Jackson's suggestions. Finally Jackson gave us a tour of the premises; I didn't notice at the time but it seems he didn't show us all of the basement.

Meanwhile in Paris…

While we were doing this, Alex and Barbara were having a far more interesting time in Paris. The French police organised a raid on the premises of the other murder suspect. This had to be strictly time limited as there was a very real chance that this was going to trigger a riot. Alex, Barbara and their French liaison went into the cellar of this building and were confronted by the suspect, who turned out to be some form of necromantic wizard and a few zombies he had animated. I don't know (and don't want to know) the details, but it seems Barbara got hospitalised, Alex got injured and the wizard was killed. They recovered a number of artefacts including a copy of “Africa's Dark Sects” which had been stolen from Harvard. 

After this Alex had dinner with a guy called Mercredi, who works at the Louvre and has been examining the artefacts. He could be a very useful contact. It is clear that the French aren't organised the same way we are, but Mercredi seems to have MI13-like responsibilities.

 

Saturday July 26th

Barbara was discharged from hospital in time for a morning flight back. After reviewing progress so far, we decided that we needed to see Gavigan again. We want access to all of Penhew's private papers and to the bit of the basement that he failed to show us. 

We booked an appointment and then turned up early to give me a chance to dowse the basement from the foyer and gift-shop. There is definitely a room there. It isn't a machine space (not enough metal) albeit some. It isn't an archive (not enough paper) albeit some.

Gavigan claims that the space in the basement was Penhew's private area, and that he doesn't have access. There is a hi-tech lock on the door and no-one admits to knowing where the key is. Gavigan said Penhew's papers would be in his home, Penhew Place, and that the key to the basement might be there too. Penhew Place is a pile in the Naze, just north of Walton-on-the-Naze. Apparently Penhew isn't yet legally sufficiently dead for the place to be sold, so it is mothballed. Gavigan offered us the keys to the place, but had a bit of an argument with his PA, June Telson, over this. She clearly didn't want us to have the keys. 

Forbush organised a couple of cars for us, and we all trooped off to Essex. We approached carefully, doing a circuit of the place before entering. Then we started to systematically explore. Adam did some form of meditation, which revealed something in the library. Dowsing from the room above showed that it was in the corner of the room near the ceiling, and vaguely Shoggoth-like but not a Shoggoth. It could be a smallish mass near the ceiling or a column to the floor; dowsing won't distinguish. We decided to check out the rest of the house before proceeding. We found evidence that some one was living in the servant’s wing. Finally having found nothing of any real use anywhere else in the house, we all returned to the library. 

We opened the door to find a corpse on the floor, and looking in the corner we couldn't see the thing. I ran up the backstairs to dowse again. I got the rods out and found that it hadn't moved; it must be invisible.

It was about this point that all Hell let loose. I heard gun-shots from the front, but of course didn't have a clue who was shooting at whom. I tore down the stairs to the corridor past the library. The others had all bolted. 

 

Then I heard the twittering. It was indescribably ghastly; it was right next to me and I was sure I was about to wind up like the corpse we had found. I sprinted after the others. As I approached them I heard a very heavy shattering of glass. A bullet had taken out one of the plate glass windows. We all rushed head-long through the broken window.

As we did so, it was getting dark, like the sun was going out but it was the middle of the day. We could have tried taking the cars but they were locked. Getting in and driving off would have taken too long. We ran and ran and ran. 

I didn't stop until I was well into Walton.