As Leo took in the hoard of items in the room, the magnitude of the collection was what struck him most initially. It might have been easy to dismiss the small gathering at the Juju House in Harlem as a group of fringe lunatics, and the same might even have been said of Gavigan and those that were consorting with him here. The collection of items here, however, defied such notions. Ill formed statues of beings from beyond the limits of his imagination alongside impossibly black idols of Egyptian countenance seemed to litter the room. There were inscriptions on the various statues in various known languages, from all corners of the world.Much of the jewelry bore ankhs, and there were rings and pendants inscribed with other strange symbols, along with a set of scepters similar to the ones that Vincent had recovered from the spice merchant's shop. Throughout the paintings there seemed a similar theme that he started to connect as he surveyed the hoard - that the individual depicted in much of the work could only be the one referred to as the Black Pharaoh. Some items seemed to be tremendously aged, though only an expert might be able to verify them.
However this collection had come together here, the items were sourced globally, and from a body of adherents that could not possibly have been as small as they might have previously believed. If he had not known it before, it was clear then and there that no matter how outlandish the theories that Jackson seemed to hold about the prevalence of these cults, there was no doubt substance to them.
As Harry was about to leave, something caught his eye that drew his interest. Under the desk, quite nearly out of view, there was a ledger, and peeking out of it he could see that a leaf of paper had been wedged within the pages. Leaning down to pick it up, Harry could see that the ledger seemed to be filled with pages - some complete, some incomplete - in which Gavigan apparently recorded his shipments abroad, with addresses of recipients
and notes of what was shipped. Reading the past three years’ entries shows many shipments to Ho Fong in Shanghai, more to Randolph Shipping in Australia, and many more yet to Egypt, and New York, with much less frequent ones made as well to Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Odessa, Calcutta, and and Los Angeles.
The detail that had caught his eye from afar, however, had been another paper that was slipped in between the pages from the ledger, which came out when he opened it. The letter was written in a hand with excellent penmanship, one which Harry can be certain was trained in an upper class school, in black ink on a high quality cream-colored paper. The letter is dated with yesterday's date and is unfinished, looking as if the writer was interrupted while penning it.
Leo made his way from the art to near where the built in shelves were found. In them were jars, tubes, wooden boxes, tins, bags, sacks, and pouches that seemed to be filled wth herbs, roots, pickled organs, strips of what appear to be skin and hide, a powdered red substance, pressed flowers, various colored dusts, powders, sands, and other things. On one shelf ther eare two one-inch long metal vials. Each bears a strange symbol on its seal, and what appear to be a single, tiny, brittle looking larva in each one.
While Leo looked at the art and the strange substances, Harry at the fat ledger on the desk, Rosalie naturally gravitated towards the bookshelf, where she saw at least a hundred of what appeared to be old but very well cared for books in all manner of languages - Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Frisian, and Spanish.