"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.