The Masks of Nyarlathotep: Australia pt 3

Extracts from the Personal Diary of James Elliott

Thursday 17^th February 2009 - continued

Actually I would not bank on our knowing the date. We are in the Dreamtime, and it is claimed that there is no time in the Dreamtime. There is only now; there is no passage of time, the past, present and future are all now.

Back in the now, whatever that is, Marshall has a nasty head wound, a grazing bullet wound. He was lucky to survive. I tried to bandage it but didn't make a very good job of it.

We then embarked on recovering the missing members of our party. First we looked for Muldoon, as finding him was likely to be much easier. We had a reasonable idea which way he had gone and we found him quite easily.

When we turned our attention to the problem of where Eliza had gone. Marshall had last seen her being dragged by the conjured wind towards the gunmen. We set off towards the sandbagged area and the parked vehicles. We approached using the large stones as cover, but the last of them was about 50m from the sandbags.

I took up a firing position around the last stone. Marshall threw a smoke grenade, then he and Freddy ran to the sandbags. Once they were there without incident, Muldoon, Belinda and I ran up to join them. Beyond the sandbags, there was a large hole in the ground. Marshall advanced and looked in, and got shot at. Freddy threw in a thunderflash and there was some gun fire in response. Probably three or four gunmen. The entrance was a sloping tunnel high enough to walk into but not much more. It seemed to widen as it descended. It was clear that we were not going to get in this way, and trying was just likely to get us killed.

Staying out of sight of the entrance, we had a look around the rest of the area. There were a couple of diggers and a couple of trucks all under tarpaulins.

Fatima started talking confidently about the Yithian city. It seems she had stayed here during her temporal mind-swap with the Yithian. The memory erasure that they had performed when she was returned seemed be breaking down. She said that the Living Winds were enslaved by the Great Race to provide air-conditioning. It seemed likely that the Living Winds were still living in the city and had another way in. Muldoon reckoned he has seen roughly where the Living Winds had landed, a few miles away. We went back to our vehicles and set off to look for their entrance.

We only had a very vague idea of the location, and the hole wouldn't necessarily be visible unless you were nearly falling into it. We did manage to find it (or one of them; it is possible there are several). Nearby there were some very odd marks in the sand, clusters of marks at intervals of about 20m. We speculated that this was the marks of a Living Wind, taking-off or landing. The hole itself was shaped like the horn of a trumpet, so we could not see all the way in without risking falling in. Marshall went down on a rope and found that at the bottom there was a passageway. In one direction it was clear and in the other block with sand. The unblocked passage was heading approximately towards the location we had encountered the gunmen. We tied a rope to one of the vehicles we descended into the tunnel. I made a complete hash it and wound up falling the last bit. Apart from being rather bruised, I was okay. However this, along with my botched bandaging of Marshall's head, made it clear that I was still badly shaken up from my encounter with the Living Wind.

We set out along the passage way, it was about 5m high at the sides and 15m wide; the ceiling on either side slopes upwards to an angle at the centre. It wasn't dead straight to begin with so we soon lost sight of the light from the entrance. Then it seemed to be completely straight, but as our torches only lit to a very limited range, it is entirely possible that there was a gentle curve we could not detect. There was no sound or light at all apart for that that we were making ourselves.

Then we heard a Living Wind ahead. John tried to drive it off with the amulet. This seemed to merely annoy it. There was a sudden blast of wind that flattened us all and gave all exposed skin significant wind-burn. Then John seemed to succeed. Certainly it departed. I treated everyone's wind-burn with some ointment from the first aid kit. That used up about half of the supply. We set out again.

Then we found a large hole in the middle of the passage's floor. It seemed to be the top of a vertical shaft. Someone spotted that there was something metal in the walls of the shaft at little below the floor, perhaps a door mechanism to shut off the shaft. A little beyond it, we found a switch mechanism high on the wall. After a lot of effort, we managed to operate the switch, and a door using a mechanism like an enormous iris diaphragm, closed off the tunnel except for a small central hole. Given that we believe this is a city that was abandoned 50 million years ago, it is staggering that this mechanism not only still works, but is still powered. I think this is further proof we are in the Dreamtime, so there was no 50 million years; then is now. We hope that that cuts at least some of the Living Winds off from us.

We continued for what seemed ages and then we saw a light ahead. On getting there, we found it was a junction. There are tunnels 60° to the left and 60° to the right. Down these there ran a cable powering modern lights set at intervals. There was also a tunnel between the tunnel to our right and the tunnel we arrived down (opposite the lit tunnel to the left) which was unlit but a distant glow was visible down it. Fatima thought there would be water there.

We walked to the glow and found it was a truly vast plaza, several hundred metres across. Fatima said it was the Yellow Plaza. Fatima knew where to look and quickly found water. It was a bit of a scramble to get it (being a convenient height for the Great Race, not for us). Without any real problem, we drank our fill and refilled all of our water bottles.

We returned to the junction and continued straight on (into the lit tunnel that had been to our left when we first encountered it). Fatima reckoned this was heading towards where we expected Eliza to be.

After a few hundred yards, there was a passage 60° to the right (reverting to our original bearing). We took that partly because it was the right direction and partly to avoid the people who rigged the lights. We explored a bit in some side rooms, and found some artefacts, including a lightning gun. Fatima said they are effective against Living Winds (and nothing else is), so we took it with us.

Continuing on we came to another corridor with rigged lights. Marshall went ahead first to scout and saw someone briefly. Marshall, Fatima and Freddy set off in pursuit and managed to catch him. He was called Dave, and claimed to have escaped from being held prisoner by the cultists. He was half starved and we gave him a bit of food. He told us in general terms about their abominable rituals. Men are sacrificed to a statue. Women are used as breeding stock; they are given to something, just what wasn't clear, which impregnates them. Fatima thinks she knows about the place that they are talking about. It would be about a mile away down the lit corridor. We decide to take a longer route down unlit corridors to reduce the chance of detection.

We arrived at a place where there was damage to the tunnel, a collapsed floor and what seemed to be a makeshift path across it. Then Fatima was hit by an entangling ball of adhesive strands that wrapped around her and incapacitated her. We looked where this had come from and saw a massive spider the size of an elephant charging at us! I fired at it two or three times. I don't think can have missed, certainly not every time as it was just too big, but it didn't seem to notice in the slightest. To shoot at something that size you need a 13mm elephant gun, not a puny 5.56mm pop-gun. I wasn't any use against it, so I legged it! As I was doing so, Marshall finally managed to bring the lightning gun into play. This proved to be a far more effective weapon whereas, though it didn't actually kill the beast, it did drive it off.

We got together again. It took us about half-an-hour to free Fatima from the spider's entanglement. By that time we were reasonably sure that no-one was coming to investigate the noise we had made. We set off again, but decided to take the lit route.

We reached the place Fatima was looking for, which she said was the Purple Plaza. This is another enormous open space. The floor sloped down from the entrance to the centre where there was an enormous (between 100 and 200 metre high) hemispherical dome which was pulsating with purple light. The top of the dome was a bit above us, the base much lower. The plaza was a regular hexagon in shape, with an entrance at each corner.

We set off walking clockwise around the perimeter. We passed the next entrance and were half way down the next wall when we saw some statues down by the dome. We walked down to take a better look.

The largest statue was about 8m tall and was of a bat, so we assumed to be the eponymous Sand-Bat of the cult. This stood with its back to the dome. Before it was a one metre high simple block, probably an altar. In a semi-circle facing the Sand-bat were seven smaller statues. I recognised Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth among them. They were probably all Outer Gods. I would guess it was the cultists' conceit that the Outer Gods worship the Sand-Bat. Most of us stayed at a safe distance but John and Freddy investigated closely. There were stains on the altar, on the Sand-Bat statue (including very high up) and especially on the ground immediately before it that we believe to be blood and suggests victims were sacrificed here by being bled to death.

There was the noise of a running engine so Freddy, Muldoon and I walked round the dome and found a running generator and a considerable supply of fuel for it. We considered some sabotage but decided that maximising surprise was preferable.

We set off again, taking what Fatima thought to be the right direction, down another lit tunnel. We continued to a junction with another lit tunnel and heard the piping sound of an approaching Living Wind. There was an unlit passage off the junction that we hid in, a little distance down it. The Living Wind went past without showing any sign of being aware of us. We waited a few minutes and then set off again.

We continued for about another mile, and then started to hear another generator. We came to another large chamber with all the passages off it lit. In the centre of the room there was a large pit. The smell from it was truly terrible and there were ghastly moans. Muldoon and John went forward to look into the pit, and saw a variety of deformed bat-like creatures. Most likely these are the progeny of the sand-bat and the female captives. I didn't see the need to look at them myself. Following Fatima's advice, we took a corridor to the left, skirting around the perimeter to get to the entrance.

We travelled on and got to a rock fall; the lights were rigged over the top. We had to scramble over this. Fatima took a bit of a tumble on it but just suffered a few bruises. Beyond the rock-fall there was another junction. Fatima reckoned the right direction was down an unlit corridor.

After a while, we saw a lit area ahead. We stopped about 100m short of it, and Marshall went ahead to scout. He got there silently, but on the way back he started tripping over debris. (Clearly it was far harder with the light behind him.) We could hear voices at the far end of the tunnel. It seemed they were aware of Marshall. He started to run.

The cultists at the far end of the tunnel opened fire, one with a pistol and one with a lightning gun. Marshall was moving evasively as he ran. I took aim at the lightning gunner, ready to fire the moment Marshall was out of the line of fire. The pistol wasn't having any noticeable effect. A lightning bolt went right past us with a deafening crack, but thankfully hit no-one. Just as Marshall was approaching us, someone opened fire and then Marshall crashed into John and Muldoon, and they were all on the floor. I didn't actually see as I was looking down the gun-site, but the commotion put me off enough for my first shot to miss.

The second lightning bolt struck the ceiling before it got to us. My second shot hit the lightning gunner, in the head I think, and he went down. The only weapon that they had that was any real danger to us was the lightning gun, so I watched it through the sights so I could shoot anyone trying to use it. Soon another cultist went for it and I fired at him; he went down too. By this time, Marshall was firing our lightning gun.

Another cultist went for the lightning gun and I fired at him. I missed him but hit another one behind him. By the time I was back on aim, there were no targets. The cultists were all out of the line of fire.

After a minute or two of no activity up ahead, we advanced to investigate. We found they had abandoned the position. We think we had killed the acolyte(s), and the lesser cultists had fled.

We were at the bottom of the ramp of the first entrance that we had thought better of trying to storm. There was one fetid room that was being used as a latrine, and another slightly less fetid room being used as a dormitory. Disturbingly, we found Eliza's clothes there, and a notice board with some surreally bureaucratic notices to the acolytes in English. One seemed to be about the failure to recapture our friend Dave, indicating that he had actually been free for only a few weeks, not the year or so he had thought. Being in the Dreamtime, we ought not to read too much into the discrepancy.

We needed intelligence, so we used Command Ghost to interrogate the original lightning gunner. Shoot first, ask questions later. We determined that their total strength is a few dozen (and now a few less than it was), and that the captives are held at their HQ north of the ‘nursery’ (we assumed the pit with the Sand-bat progeny). Clearly we need to go there, but we are too tired to do so without sleeping first.

We headed back into the dark corridors to find a place to hide over-night. We chose a room with an already open door as a recently forced door might be obvious or forcing it might be heard. We set watches but the night passed quietly.

I had a nightmare about the fire-fight with the cultists. When it was over, John was dead with his throat cut. Marshall admitted doing so, claiming John had gone mad and tried to kill him. Muldoon confirmed this and admitted to helping Marshall by holding John down. Even if it was true that John had gone insane, killing him just like that seemed highly precipitous. I was left wondering, who had really gone mad? I was very relieved to wake up and find John is still alive.

Friday 18^th February 2009

In the morning, or at least when we were adequately rested as we cannot be sure about the passage of time, I noticed a large beetle behaving very oddly, like it was trying to attract my attention. Fatima told us that Yithians have an affinity with beetles. When they finally had to abandon the city, they moved their minds into the far future into beetles. There were five beetles behaving weirdly (like forming themselves into a vertical stack), and it seems trying to lead us somewhere. We decided to follow them. At first we thought they were trying to lead us to the HQ. They took us though both lit and unlit corridors. At one point, they became agitated and ran behind us. We were trying to work out what this meant when a cultist patrol passed across the tunnel ahead of us. It seemed that they had been trying to stop us running into them.

Fatima became sure that they were leading us away from the HQ. We decided to follow them anyway.

We came into a corridor with lots of bas reliefs on the walls. A lot seemed to depict Yithians fighting. At the end we came to a hexagonal room with no door. Fatima reckoned the entrance was a high security one, if it had been enabled anyone trying to pass through it would be fried by lightning bolts.

The room seemed to be storage for spare parts. There were two exits off it. One into a lit room (though another disabled security doorway) and the other into an unlit room, the security portal to this one was enabled. After a number of failed attempts, I did manage to disable the security door-way. Inside the room we found a real live member of the Great Race of Yith.

Fatima claims she is able to talk to the Yithian, using its mind speech. Kakatak, the Yithian, has been brought here from the far past by means of a spell cast by Dr Houston. Houston was a member of the Carlyle expedition and had been assumed dead. Kakatak has been controlling the beetles, using them to find and summon us.

Now with his help, which includes a supply of lightning guns, and probably other aid (those beetles are going to be great for reconnaissance) we have to try to storm the cultist HQ and rescue Eliza.