A brief phone call to the Lower East Precinct, under the excuse of wishing to speak with Detective Cameron MacBrady, had revealed that the detective, along with several other police officers, were working at a local cemetery, having answered a “shots fired” call at the location early that morning. Jake’s contact, a helpful secretary, was unable to provide any further details.

A sympathetic teaching assistant had brought a pot of fresh coffee and a tray of blueberry scones from a nearby bakery to Professor Wells’ office, after noting how bleary eyed Wells and his visitors appeared to be. The adjoining corridors remain quiet after the assistant departs, the lull of the summer session providing the men with ample privacy to discuss their recent grim discoveries.

Sully deposits his bundle of ancient books on the Prof's desk. He unties the tablecloth and pulls it back so that the academic, and anyone else who dares, can peruse the volumes. Then he takes a cup of coffee and a couple of scones and sits in a chair.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:26, Fri 09 Dec 2022.

The assistant had been heaped with genuine if awkward thanks for the provisions, leaving Jake to clutch a scone like the world's luckiest rat and nab himself some coffee.

"No update on what the cops found yet," he tells the others. He leans back from Sully hauling the second sack of stolen tomes onto the table from wherever it'd been stashed and starts picking them over to look at the spines.

"Anyone done anything but get some sleep in since we skedaddled? I was hoping that communal diary book might have some signed confessions." The left side of his mouth quirks to a half-smile, acknowledging the liklihood is almost a joke, but then again that slayer's scrapbook had been left out.

Arthur set himself some coffee and scones, and then turned to the bundle and slowly approached it.

Twitching in his face as he picked up the Elizabethan book bound in black leather on boards, Arthur sat at the spot he had established for his work station previously, and with trepidation turned the book open. He looked up at Jake, and simply said, "Well, if you want to know, you can join us for...study."

There was something peculiar and resigned in his bearing, something only Professor Wells could understand just yet.

Wells assembled the various volumes before him, setting the ritual objects he had taken to the side for more study or in case they became relevant.

"I have done little but sleep, and have things set up here," he said, referring to the assembly of books and ritual objects. The books were laid out in sequence, with the ritual objects set to the side.

"I'd be happy to review all of these, but if we split them up and skim their contents we might more quickly get a sense of what is in each volume and how much use it might be before diving deep."

Jake downs some coffee, willing to help but not sure what they're looking for. "Hold up, Professor...what kind of 'use' are we talking about here? Getting in touch with the cannibal tribe - if there is a cannibal tribe, not just some kinda grave-robbing racket - working out where Bishop's hiding if him and his tunnel people didn't walk right into the cops, material for some paper of yours?"

There's enough of a smile to suggest the last bit's a joke, but he's still confused. "Only what I'm concerned with is having something to show Missus Hargrave - preferably that killer's teeth, but we never got so far. Am I...I dunno, I get the impression you'n Arthur know of something more specific going on, like...is this Agatha our Dracula, like she's gonna make another Top Hat and set it all up again, with her grunts killing girls when they get bored, or...?"

Jake waves his mug vaguely, ready to believe most things after getting used to the exanguinated walking dead. Then he actually sips the coffee, since disrupted sleep tends to haul the itch of addiction up near the surface and he wants a drink, badly enough that it'll take clear focus on a project to ignore what his body tries to convince him is a need.

Sully polishes off his scones and washes them down with some coffee. He wipes his fingers with his handkerchief and tucks it back in his breast pocket.

"I'm not very much of a scholar but I'll lend my efforts as I can." He reaches for what Jake calls the "diary" and pulls it over in front of him. Setting a new notebook and pencil beside it, he opens the cover and begins to read quickly along the pages, puzzling out the archaic script and language. He pauses to make a note now and then and tears a piece of paper into strips to bookmark certain pages.

Seeing Sully settle down with the diary and Art having nabbed the Necronomicon, Jake gets up to hand over the last 'special collection' book to the Professor, eyeing the general collection without an excess of academic enthusiasm. "I guess you get Wormy Mysteries, Prof, my Latin doesn't go so far."

"Truth be told, I'm not sure what kind of use these might be, but I'm not certain what to make of what we've found so far. I reason only that studying the items that Bishop prized and kept aside might lend some hint as to what purpose he has his eyes set on."

He picked up the remaining volume, along with a selection of Latin dictionaries to help with the translation effort, and had started the task of trying to understand at least a surface level of what was within them. He focused on anything that had been bookmarked or noted, or areas where the binding seemed there had been a lot of time spent on those pages.

The quiet that pervades the building proves to be ideal for study as each of the men begins to explore the strange texts retrieved from Bishop House. As the hours begin to pass however, the silence takes a forbidding turn, the absence of noise within the office and adjoining hallways assuming an isolating quality, a pressing reminder that each investigator is, in many respects, alone as they delve into secrets best left forgotten.

OOC: Could each of you kindly supply me with a sanity roll?

The silence from Jake Morris takes on a tense, even sinister character as he leafs from book to book amongst the non-special collection. One volume by M. Tarrare seems to hold a particular unholy fascination, until he finds the next...

[[09:43, Today: Jake Morris rolled 100 using 1d100.  SAN check]]

Sully tries to hum a tune but keeps losing the thread of the melody as his mind is drawn into the text before him. He has to consciously just skim the words and refrain from a deeper reading.

Sullivan (Sully) Quinn rolled 40 for Sanity 46.

Arthur had already begun to gain some deeper familiarity with the subject, perhaps insulating him from the shock of parsing this difficult subject matter.

Wells worked feverishly to understand the material, eyes flitting from the dictionary to the text, mouthing things he was reading and working them out, seeming to move with a strange speed, his fingers used to turning pages.

OOC:

Somehow managed it!

21:25, Today: Anthony Wells rolled 9 using 1d100.  SAN (44).

OOC: Somehow managed to forget about appending my roll before! I think Sully also succeeded

"03:25, Yesterday: Arthur G. Flatt rolled 36 using 1d100.  SAN (55)."

The four investigators read in relative silence, the normally welcoming office taking on an isolated, almost oppressive character as each man explores the books before them. Time passes quickly, the afternoon shadows growing long as dusk approaches.





OOC: Jake loses 6 sanity points and gains 4 points in the Cthulhu Mythos skill.

Everyone else takes an immediate loss of 4 sanity points and gains 8 points in the Cthulhu Mythos skill.

"The author of this book was clearly a madman, at least by the time the volume was completed, but the annotations in the margins, those were written by Bishop. Either this one, or some other Bishop. It seems that dabbling with blasphemous tomes like this is something of a family tradition in the Bishop family," he said.

"I think the main interest of the reader as indicated by these notes seems to be contacting supernatural creatures to obtain knowledge or their service. I see comments here about 'star dwellers' and 'winged serpents which dwell in the deep places.' The author of this text also talks a lot about divination - a mirror that can be used for scrying, and a spell that lets them take control of other people's minds."


"Also it seems that he wanted to make contact with an entity that I have heard of previously in similarly obscure texts - Nyarlathotep, supposedly some kind of terrible god that also is an emissary for still more terrible gods. This Nyarlathotep has other names, like Nephren-Ka, the Black Pharaoh...and can give them an audience with another being, Nyogtha - the Haunter of the Red Abyss.

This is interesting because this name came up in our earlier research in relation to beliefs and practices in colonial New York. This entity supposedly lives in the dark depths of the earth and rules over the restless dead and carrion eaters. I'm not sure how it all connects. I mean, that mirror we saw perhaps is something he used in his scrying. I regret that we did not shatter it before departing, though perhaps he could do so with any mirror and that would only have been a minor setback."

It was clear that the Professor was taking these strange spells, abilities, and creatures for fact, when once he would not have uttered these aloud.

Sully pushes back his chair and lights an Old Gold, taking a deep lungful of smoke that he blows toward the ceiling. Then he reaches out his flask and takes a long swallow. Thus fortified, he feels able to describe what he has read.

"I'd say this journal was begun by Agatha Bishop back in the seventeen hundreds, though there are several other writers as well. That Nyogtha gets mentioned a lot and they seem to worship him... it... He shrugs.

"The main matter though is that they want to find a way to create... I dunno... 'artificial humans' I have to say. Seems like they get to the point they can make them but not keep them made. They sort of melt into 'black abominations' though some hold together for twenty years or so. The best one they make is called Nathaniel Bishop, who passes pretty successfully for a real man except for being very pale and sensitive to sunlight. The description of those rituals-- Sully shudders and takes another drink from his flask. "Well, I kinda skipped over those after the first one. Pretty grisly."

"There's spells written in here, too.  Things like summoning ghosts and contacting 'dwellers within the earth', creating undead servants from corpses--seems they got that one down pat. Also, to contact old Mr. Nyogtha. And a way to use the power of Nyogtha to crush the heart of an enemy."

"what've we got ourselves into?" he mutters.

It took Arthur an extended period of time to snap back out of it once he had read so far as that. He took in what the others said passively, words washing over him. In the midst of their whole conversation, he turned away from the book, put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it--then paused for a long time.

Finally, he dabbed the ashes into a tray and saw fit to explain what he had read.

"This book...it's called the Necronomicon, translated from the Arabic. It goes back to...the 700s. It was written by a man, Abdul al-Hazred, a Damascan polymath. The...translator, John Dee, you might know him from school a bit. He says the man died eight years after he wrote it, at the hands of some invisible creature."

He rubbed at his forehead, and realized he was sweating, and started mopping the sweat from his face.

"This book is...I don't know, it's too much. It says there are many gods like this. And it tells you much about how to call on them. I recognized Nyogtha in this...called the Lord of the Pit. There are notes in the margins around this information."

He took a deep breath.

"There's more. Nyogtha is served by...ghouls, subterranean things which live around graveyards. And it tells one how to...how to raise the dead into something terrible, by reducing the body to something of its base components."

He paused, pressing his fingers into his eyes as he leaned forward in his seat.

Strain coming through in his voice, he asked, "What have we come into, fellows?"

OOC: Thanks for bearing with me on the wait here. Coming out of December has been a bit awkward.

[[If the Keeper would like to edit this to better reflect Jake's Temporary Insanity, that's fine.]]

Jake becomes aware of an expectant lapse in conversation and raises a hand to temporise for a moment, his head bent right down between his knees. "...sorry, got a religious crisis and a nosebleed...I-I-I think-" he pushes a hanky that could have done with a wash awhile back harder against the unexpected blood and straightens up enough to address the others. His eyes are entirely too wide, and though there's clearly some pertinent information in his ramblings, once he's started he doesn't seem quite able to stop, like the seal on something under pressure has been cracked.

"'Ghul', that's a kind of Arab demon, isn't it? I never really believed anything before, but these...this Sorrels guy, a miner, in his journal, he talks about watching ghouls here in America...living in some old ruined cemetery way down in the Southwest, and, and I went to church as a little kid. Read the Bible out of the pew in front for the gory bits and the weird stuff, and this is...these are Solomon's night monsters, and I'm not going to Heaven, and 'Necronomicon', that's 'Dead Names', fallen angels, they're all demons...that octopus god, huge demon; octopusses in the sea, they worship the Devil, and the ghouls in the ground, they're, some of them are just cannibals, met the demon kind and turned into...like werewolves. Maybe they bite each other? It doesn't say. I...I'm..they're physical. Demons don't...they're not meant to be physical..."

"Pickman, that painter, he was teaching them to eat live flesh...bastard. Nyogtha must talk to them somehow, if it's physical...is it...is it under here? Right now? Or do they use some kind of radio waves, right into their heads? ought to make ourselves some kind of hat..." Jake trails into muttering, seemingly having wound down at least enough for someone to get a word in.

Silence momentarily fills the Professor’s office in the wake of each investigator’s revelation about their selected reading. It is broken by the arrival of Christine Kelly, one of the summer teaching assistants, who stands hesitantly in the doorway.

”Excuse me, Professor Wells. There’s a phone call at the secretary’s desk for one of your associates, I believe. A Mister Morris?”

Jake raises his free hand and lurches up. "I'm Mister Morris, I'm-" he manages to catch a thick drop of blood on his hanky, just, "-still bleeding. Uh, I mean, I'm coming, sorry."

There's still something far too wild about his gaze and subtly unsteady about his gait, but he heads towards the secretary's office as best he knows how. His thoughts are a chaotic, unparseable mess of infernality, like the writhing contents of several Hieronymous Bosch paintings crammed into the dark space between his ears.

The secretary, a silver haired woman with a kind face, extends the telephone receiver to Morris when he arrives at her desk. She whispers something to Miss Kelly, who nods and disappears through one of the adjoining doors.

”Morris?” Cameron MacBrady familiar voice asks, ”Hope I didn’t interrupt anything, but you did give me this number. You and your friends still looking into those murders in the Lower East?”

Jake gives the secretary a rather apologetic if not entirely focused smile and takes the reciever. He tries to take the cloth away from his nose whilst he speaks, though it's a challenge with blood making its way down his upper lip. "Yeah, the Professor and the crew were helping me look up some-"  he pauses to mop at the stuff before he winds up eating it, "-sorry, some things. You got a lead?" the -that you can't look into officially is unspoken.

”I gotta be honest. I don’t know what to call it right now, but I know the Hargrove girl died in the area, along with several others, so I thought you’d want to know what happened,” MacBrady answers.

”That old graveyard in the area. Stanton Street Cemetery. We got a shots fired call over there late last night. Patrolmen found a body in the residence on the property. Guy was in pretty bad shape from what I hear. Came across some other odd things as well. We’re looking to question the owner, Nathaniel Bishop, about several things, including some information associated with the recent murders, but it seems like he’s up and vanished. No sign of him anywhere on the property. Sounds like all of his vehicles are in the garage, so if he ran, he did it on foot.”

"The...the sewers," Jake manages, and swallows a curse. "Part of what I was looking up with the Prof, we thought from the distribution of the old murders and these ones, it's like our guy - some guys, obviously, if the historic stuff's connected this is, heheheh-" Jake cuts off a horrified giggle with his handkerchief, tasting blood, "-uh, family buisness - it's like he's coming up in a regular pattern around a grid. Couldn't work out what that could be 'til I took a walk around there and started pacing out the manholes."

Jake pauses, aware his heart is going too fast and he's talking like he's back on the snow; he swallows thickly and forces himself to slow down, not even really registering that he's half-lying, all truth a blur. "Did you look in the basement, see if there's any way Bishop could get access to the sewers? Might want to look at access points, anywhere workers get a place to put down tools out of the muck: if we were onto something he'd know about them, right? Beats running around in broad daylight. Any ID on the shot guy?"

Sully has drifted into the room and stands listening to Jake's end of the conversation. He lights an Old Gold and offers it to the private eye, along with what remains of the rye in his flask.

The cigarette gets a grateful nod from Jake as he tucks the receiver against his shoulder, though even though he can't currently smell the alcohol he freezes a moment at the offer of the flask like a stray dog too starved to wholly remember it's not a wolf when offered meat. There's an odd moment where Sully feels he might get his fingers bitten before the detective waves 'no thanks' and adjusts the cigarette to quietly uncrush the end between his teeth. The smoke helps a little as he listens.

The Professor listened quietly to Jake's end of the conversation, eager to hear what was coming through on the other line. Hopefully the man's contacts in law enforcement were proving to be useful with at least some other information they would not have had access to. He had been wondering what would have come of the shots fired call.

Watching Sully offer up the flask, Arthur, himself, wondered whether the booze several of them (including himself) had ingested was actually wise, but this only took a moment to dismiss as nonsense. After all, the very thought of reading everything he had read, after they had all experienced everything they had experienced--well, it made him laugh nervously and quite suddenly.

After a split second he calmed himself and said, "Uh, I'm sorry."

”The sewers? I don’t recall anyone mentioning a sewer access but I’ll ask,” MacBrady replies, ”Might be that Bishop used ‘em to run when he was giving patrol the slip. Could be anywhere in the city by now.”

“We got nothing on the stiff. No identification on him. Nothing in the house to point to who he was, if he even lived there. But he had a weapon on him, a straight razor, which brought up suspicion about the recent murders in the area. We’re keeping everything quiet with the papers. Don’t want to give them anything til we know what exactly the situation is.”

He sighs. ”Wanted to make sure you knew. Maybe you can tell the Hargrave family the police are looking closely at a suspect. But if you happen to hear anything about Nathaniel Bishop’s whereabouts, give me a call.”

The detective pauses, then asks. ”Say, you doing alright? Sound like you had a rough night or something.”

Jake flaps at Arthur to hush as the others join him around the secretary's desk, giving her a 'sorry' look and moving to the end of the cord so that they're no longer quite such a crowd directly over her workspace. "Yeah, but even with New York drains you'd think someone would notice the smell of a guy coming up out of them, if nothing else. If he runs to his contacts in whatever buisness had him running off after shooting a guy he should have been able to pass off as a home invader there's a good chance he'll lead you right to them." Jake takes the cigarette out of his mouth and briefly bites his handkerchief to silence rising hysteria at this perfectly rational observation.

"Huh. Well that's easy enough checked out, what with the perp's unusual dentistry. The press won't hear anything from me, either, you rest easy on that. Mm. Yeah, will do."

The detective's last question causes Jake to study his hand and the cigarette in his fingers, assessing its shake. Some part of his brain is turning an interrogation lamp on the query, suspicious as to whether it's from the cop or the man, but nothing seems real enough to grasp right now, so he just tells the immediate moment's truth as though his audience didn't exist.

"I...fell down a pretty deep hole on leaving the force, picked up some scumbag habits, going clean's...harder some days than others. I met someone, though: the kind of girl I wouldn't deserve on my best days, and I'm trying not to have her ever think sober Jake is the exception to the rule. Even if it comes to nothing. This girl...I'm alright, MacBrady. I'm okay."

”That’s a fair point,” MacBrady concedes, ”Anyone who comes up out of the sewer tunnels isn’t going to be smelling like a rose. I’ll make sure to mention the possibility to the fellas that walk a beat in the area.”

He listens quietly to Jake’s explanation, remaining silent for a moment after the private detective finishes speaking. Clearing his throat, he says, ”I understand. I do. This job jabs you with the worst that people can dream up. I can’t say I haven’t hit the bottle pretty hard myself, here and there.”

“I hope it works out with you and your girl, Morris. But…look, if you ever need to talk about things, you know where my office is.”

The secretary gives Jake an understanding smile as she returns the receiver to its cradle, clearly accustomed to working with academics who are entranced with their own research, to the exclusion of all other considerations.

"...thanks," Jake says softly. He flushes slightly at the secretary's look on putting the phone down, belatedly realising he did say all of that aloud.

He clears his throat, not looking at any of the gathered men directly. "MacBrady asked if I'd been sleeping right n' such," he says. "How 'bout I tell you about it back where the coffee is?"

---

Once they're back to relative privacy, he fills the others in on what the police know, or at least what they're telling the not-quite-public. It would be more dignified without the crusty splotches around his nose, but Jake's pushed all such thoughts away for the moment. "So. We got Top Hat, but Bishop and his tunnel cannibal-animal guys are running around loose, if he hasn't been dissolved or stored or something. How do we make sure all this doesn't happen again, or if they're planning something worse than under-the-table body trading, warn them off?"

"Is Agatha willing to trade for this stuff? Can we send it express with a free bomb? What do we think here?"
This message was last edited by the player at 21:00, Tue 24 Jan 2023.

"Hmm...Your police friend didn't mention the fellow in the deep freeze. Wonder what happened to him?" Sully caps his empty flask and slips it into his pocket.

"We don't really have any way to contact Bishop or Agatha to propose a deal or make threats. The Professor's bag of swag may slow them down temporarily, but if Agatha's longevity is any indicator, they'll be back in business eventually. Time doesn't seem to mean much to them."

He turns to Wells and Art. "Have you guys read anything that suggests why they're killing people now? If we knew their goal, we'd be in a better position to thwart them."

OOC: Could I ask each of you to give me an INT (Idea) roll?

Sully has no Idea.

Sullivan (Sully) Quinn rolled 69 for INT 65.

"Coulda run out of juice or been turned off from afar somehow, like they see things with mirrors," Jake suggests, supressing a surge of something almost like nausea at discussing such things so easily.

"I figured if we dropped meat down a manhole somewhere in the district with a note, the dog men would find it...maybe with a box to slow down the rats, but they've got to be pretty sensitive, smell-wise: Arabia or New Mexico, you don't wander around deserts just looking for carrion, not if you've got to get your unholy wolfman ass back in a cave by sunup. Agatha can be next century's problem, we can work that out once we've got her to knock it off now."

He stops ranting and listens for the others' input before voicing his thoughts.

[[19:50, Today: Jake Morris rolled 55 using 1d100.  Idea (70)]]
This message was last edited by the player at 20:03, Thu 26 Jan 2023.

Arthur simply thought on the whole thing before he said anything, trying to turn the whole situation over in his head. He wasn't sure, but he thought he had an idea rattling around in the old cobweb up top.

OOC: 18:51, Today: Arthur G. Flatt rolled 49 using 1d100.  Idea roll (int 85).

"We could I suppose, attempt to do some research on the Bishop family. Agatha, Nathaniel...who knows, perhaps others are involved in this situation," he said.

OOC:

15:29, Today: Anthony Wells rolled 28 using 1d100.  INT vs 75.

Some idea?

Outside, a brief shadow interjects itself between the office’s window and the morning sun. After a moment, the muted light is followed by the first, tentative patters of rain.

"Nathaniel's one of the homunculusses - homunculi - isn't he? Agatha's the one running the show. That's where Nathaniel was last night, off talking to her..." Jake drums his fingers on the arm of his chair, all nervous energy, then slows a bit, cocking his ear to the rain.

"...should I call Vicky up - uh, Miss Surrette, I mean - and have her start looking into where you'd have to block off or blow out, to flood that bit of sewer we saw tunnels coming out of? The ghul dwelling's probably dirt tunnels all the way back: one good wash through and it'll probably come down on anything that don't believe in drowning."

"I suppose it might come to such a desperate measure, but..." Sully hesitates, rubbing his chin. "Why do you suppose Bishop would disappear like this? I mean, he was the injured householder, why not set the police on our trail? Perhaps he went down into the tunnels and met with... a mishap."

Sully wishes something would preclude their having to go back to that place yet he fears that course is inevitable.

Jake doesn't seem to care much about the prospect of drowning ghul-elders and infants or potential damage to nearby streets, clearly having decided the unruly tunnel people are ontologically evil: fiends manifest. "I messed up the door to his cellar pretty good: if he's not hiding out from what the cops found but didn't tell an "outsider" - me - about, and Agatha hasn't eaten him for messing up, maybe we got mistaken for a rival tribe."

He gets himself more coffee to have something to drink and do with his hands, going quiet a moment. "Why'd anyone want to pass off made-up people for real ones, anyhow? I figure defense, if the ones made by black magic are naturally better at it than those bitten or born...maybe they can do the heart thing from further away, or to more people."

"I don't know if it's infighting among fiends or there's an angel buried snhhuhhuhh-" helpless giggles break from Jake until he swallows, "-in New York somewhere, you know, the 'slew in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred eighty-five thousand' type, not the Christmas card kind. I don't know that either would help us any, if that's what's going on. Anyone else got some idea? I'm not the smartest guy in the room, I know that."

"Now that these are daytime hours, we can place a telephone call to the funeral home and see if anyone answers it. Asking to speak to Nathaniel Bishop and the answers to that question could give us a little information - at least as to his whereabouts," he said.

"If you figure whatever beat cops are handling the place'll know any more than my buddy in Homicide," Jake shrugs. "You got any thoughts on what Agatha's up to in general?"

"But, Jake, surely the flatfoots aren't answering the telephone at the funeral home, so they don't enter into the Prof's idea."

He turns to the older man. "On the other hand, if Bishop hasn't returned, it seems unlikely there will be any answer at the mortuary. Still, I don't suppose it will do any harm to call. At least we'll know that much."

Jake holds his fairly cold coffee up as though warding off the suggestion he's stopping anyone. "Hey, no objection, but even if Bishop was hiding out next door once the cops had looked in and locked it up again, coming out of his whack-a-mole tunnels, he's not going to pick up. Beat cop might, if they haven't squared things with the switchboard yet."

"Might even be bored enough to talk, though Sully, you'd probably have more luck sidling up with some clams to change hands." He fidgets, ready to drag the conversation back to Agatha's motives and means to stop her as soon as an opportunity presents itself.

Arthur nodded and, after this latest pause in the talk, he cut in.

"Well, I'm not sure, but I think I have an idea for where old Bishop might have gone. Do you remember that alcove we spotted on our way in?"

This gets a 'go on' gesture from Jake, who nonetheless has the expression of a man who's unlikely to take a plan to crawl into said tunnels and physically haul Bishop out well. He may simply be suffering from too long sober, of course.

"The suggestion was most certainly not to call the funeral home in an attempt to speak to beat cops. So we know for certain that the police are in occupation of the funeral home, and that there are no owners or employees present?"

"Well, Jake, it's not much, it's just...we never figured out what it was for, but it occurred to me that the alcove would be pretty near by to the actual graves, right? Just what a...ghoul would need nearby, as far as I can tell."

"Yeah, there were tunnels coming up into that vault we looked into, at least, though they weren't used recently. You figure we could drop explosives or something down on them from the surface, or just that Bishop might be hiding in a mausoleum out there? I guess he was feeding any bodies he didn't turn into a zombi to his friends."

"...and yes, Professor, the cops have charge of the house and will have shut up the buisness and told Cortéz to keep to himself, if they haven't taken him in. Unless any owners - seems we shot the other employee enough that he's staying down - come up from the tunnels whilst the building's locked, we can say they're not in there." Jake gives the Professor an enquiring look.

"I'm no expert in demolition, but I think before we begin dropping explosives in the middle of New York City we consult such an expert."

As possibilities are being discussed, Sullivan Quinn is able to place a call from the department secretary’s desk to the Stanton Street Cemetery. The seasoned reporter is unsurprised to hear the phone ring repeatedly with no response.

Sully hangs up the 'phone.

"Nobody's home," he says quietlywith a slight twist of his lips, "Why don't you make that call, Jake? No harm having a few facts to consider."

Jake nods and takes himself out into the corridor, belatedly cleaning up his nose a bit. His handkerchief looks like it's just come out of a war, but he gives a slightly apologetic smile to show he's all right really as he asks the secretary for the use of her telephone.

"My concern in this whole situation is that what we've learned indicates the possibility that some of these disappearances have occurred in an effort to offer sacrifices to Nyogtha - and in some of these cases, it is possible that the victims may still be alive. I'm not sure how long the police will take to act, or that we can convince them that there's a family of morticians that worship strange deities never before heard of to most people - and that they're planning some human sacrifices below the ground here."

He cleared his throat.

"It may be best that we attempt the tunnels once again, though this time more prepared for what we are going to find down below."

At the desk, Jake is able to retrieve a slip of paper from his jacket pocket, upon which he has carefully inscribed Victoria Surette’s number. The phone rings only once before she answers. ”Hello?”

"Hi," Jake says, his voice gentle. After making sure she's all right and not feeling followed or bothered by anything he lets her know where he's calling from and gives a vague and secretary-friendly account of where they've been, what they've done and at length poses his question about the sewers - for research purposes, of course.

Victoria listens quietly, not interrupting the detective as he provides the abridged account of his and his fellow investigators’ recent activities. Clearing her throat she says, ”I honestly can’t recall where the closest active water line is in relation to that tunnel. Let me check the records at the office and I’ll call you as soon as I can,” she tells him.

She pauses, then adds, ”You still owe me a trip to Coney, Morris. Don’t forget. I’m holding you to it.”

Jake summons up all his courage - not the sprinting-through-a-hail-of-bullets kind, but the kind it takes to hope or show a dime's worth of tenderness - and pushes things, just a little: "To Coney? Sweetheart, we're going to Coney and staying 'til I've won you anything you want," he replies, and hopes she didn't hear his fractional moment of panic in replacing 'a fish' with something more grandiose, in case she didn't like fish, or that played down his skills too much, though now maybe she thought he was conceited? Please let me show off to you, whatever's best in me, you can have it.

Sully watches as Jake blushes and stammers. Love, he thinks, It's wonderful.

Arthur got to thinking about a lady he knew. He thought that, once this thing was over with, he would have to go and see her. That would be a relief, he thought.

”I know you will,” Victoria answers, warmth in her quiet words, ”Please don’t do anything foolish.”

The remainder of the afternoon passes quickly as the investigators gather the tools they need for another expedition beneath the New York streets. Soon, perhaps too soon, dusk is stretching its wide hand across the city, and the long shadows of afternoon are silently yielding to full dark.