The Call of Cthulhu (looking for players)

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The Call of Cthulhu (still looking for players)

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
-Abdul Alhazred, Kitab al-Azif (Necronomicon), c. AD 730

Miskatonic University Department of Psychology
Arkham, Massachusetts
27th of September, 1934

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

The insane cry of poor Danforth had continued for over two years, now, since his return from the ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic, when all but a handful of the University staff sent to explore that ancient and mysterious continent had perished at the base of those very ancient and immense mountains they had discovered. Dead from windshears and cold as the initial reports had suggested, no doubt, and not from the nameless and eldritch terrors Professor Dyer had maintained only after the latter Starkweather-Moore Expedition had been prepared.

“Preposterous, really,” Professor Wingate Peaslee, the youthful head of the nascent psychology school, said to his companion as they watched an aide comfort Danforth through the sanitarium's glass. “To think that a race of star-spawn could exist in the first place. Let alone build an entire city at the South Pole. Really, Dyer should be in there with him.”

His partner did not respond, his face one of contemplation mixed with one other emotion – one that Peaslee could have mistaken for envy, as ridiculous as that sounded. He nudged the younger man's arm. “Did you hear me, Delapore? I said, Dyer should be committed as well.”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, Dyer.” Dr. Franklin Delapore, of the Department of Ancient Languages, shook himself from what was no doubt a reverie on a reflection of the frailties of the human mind brought on by the sight of the two scientists' former colleague. “Well, to be fair, Dyer can actually string two sentences together. And he did have the evidence.” Not to mention you thought him sane enough to go with you and your father on your Australian jaunt.

“So could Danforth, at first,” Peaslee retorted, closing the viewing portal and walking with Delapore down the hall of the wing, unaware of his companion's scorn for the scientific skeptic. “He had periods of remarkable lucidity. And no one would think seeing the others, dead in that windstorm, would be easy – on either of them. But Dyer's so-called proof?” The psychologist scoffed. “A bunch of blurry, doctored photographs and rough sketches of his 'Old Ones' and 'shoggoths' and what-have-you? And only presented two years after his return, contradicting everything he said? It's a psychosis, Delapore, I tell you, brought on by those poor souls' deaths and not wanting to lose his place in history to the new expeditions. So he concocts his story of ancient and alien beings reawakening from their slumber to slaughter his friends. Sensationalist and escapist worldbuilding. Freud covers it all, you know, my good fellow.”

Peaslee looked back at the silent linguist, the man's face once more contemplatively blank. “Delapore? Have you heard a thing I said? What's wrong with you, man?”

Delapore once more had the appearance of one being roused from slumber. “Huh? Oh, well, you'll have to excuse me, Wingate. I'm just a linguist. I'm afraid all this medical stuff is far beyond me. And truth to tell, the expedition, Danforth...He was my friend, still is of course, but I just find the whole thing so...morbid.” Yet if he showed any signs of revulsion or fright at the sight of his colleague and friend reduced to mindless and abject terror, Peaslee could not tell. Once more, he showed only that he was deep in thought...and certainly that small portion of envy was only envisioned.

Yet envy it was, though the good Professor Peaslee would never know it, or could even conceive of the reasons why, Delapore mused while heading back alone to the smallish office on the third floor of the Social Studies wing his junior position afforded him. Danforth and Dyer didn't realize how lucky they had been. And Peaslee was a fool, like so many men of science, to still doubt their claims, even after all he himself had seen in person in Western Australia and written by his father.

To have actually been there, at those distant and Archaean mountains of madness of the south pole, to have seen the Old Ones themselves, to have seen the remnants of the Great Race, all that he had merely read snatches of in the Necronomicon!

Reaching his office, Delapore closed the heavy oaken door, shoving off old copies of the Arkham Advertiser, the statement of a certain Mr. Randolph Carter, the notes of the late Professor George Gammell Angell and his anthropologist nephew, the depositions of the elder Professor Peaslee and the accompanying transcriptions of the Pnakotic Manuscripts from the surface of his desk to reveal what lay beneath. It wasn't quite illegal or against University policy for him to have it, and there was not quite a need to hide the heavy and ancient tome, yet Delapore would have done so even without the strange and heavy compulsion that came over him whenever he was in the mere presence of the mad Arab's Necronomicon.

Dr. Henry Armitage, chief librarian of the Miskatonic University Library, had allowed him to take possession of it only with great reluctance (understandable after the horror of that Dunwich case a few years ago) and strict promises that he was only studying its linguistic properties as opposed to the subject matter of the text itself. And so he had, at first. But how could he not read what he had been studying, egged on first by the curiosity fueled by the corpus of rumors and legends surrounding the ancient book, and then by the compulsion that seized him as if a cloud rising from the opened pages, growing stronger every time his gaze passed by the name of that primeval and cthonic deity who had filtered down from the interstellar aether so very long ago.

Dr. Delapore stroked the spine of the Necronomicon, sighing as if drawing pleasure from his wife's caress. It would not be long now. Despite the fiasco, the Dyer expedition to Antarctica had been a public and scientific success, as had the more recent and just-returned Peaslee expedition to Pilbarra, even if it had been done much quieter and of a smaller scale. The president of Miskatonic had had little qualms about authorizing a third journey to expand mankind's knowledge of the unknown areas of this Earth and bring prestige to the school. Delapore's eyes moved from his beloved tome to the globe in the corner of his office, centered on a spot in the barren Pacific under which promised wonders and horrors far beyond the dead Antarctic city of the Old Ones or the crumbling Australian remnants of the Great Race. Wonders and horrors that Delapore fully intended to personally discover – when the expedition that was now being prepared at Innsmouth Harbour was finally ready to depart, not too far from now. A mere few days. Soon.

Soon, Delapore would at long last be able to answer that distant and beckoning and eldritch call of Cthulhu.

OOC: This is a thread based loosely on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. At least a general knowledge of his setting is required although I'll allow deviations from his canon for purposes of storytelling. I'd also like posts to be more than just a few sentences worth, although they certainly don't need to be as long as this intro. I have a rough plot outline in mind so this won't just be people sitting around the University talking about the Necronomicon.

One character that I would like to have is Delapore's wife, a proper Christian woman of goodly New England stock who no doubt – at least at first – is unaware of her husband's increasing fixations. The rest I leave up to your imaginations. Other faculty, students, expedition personnel, journalists, government agents, Cthulhu cultists, Yog-Sothoth attendants, Innsmouth degenerates, occultist-hunters, wizards, reanimators, et cetera, ad nauseam, are all possible ideas.

If interested, please PM me.

 

[magbeam]

I know it's a long shot but just figured I'd bump this...

 

[magbeam]

Bump again *sigh...*

 

[magbeam]

OOC: I figured that if no one else wants to play now, I might as well try to continue it on my own for a bit, and maybe someone will get interested, and if not, at least I'll be able to work out some of my ideas.

The Esoteric Order of Dagon
Innsmouth Harbour, Massachusetts
27th of September, 1934

Bill Moore grabbed the grip of his Tommy gun, shifting uneasily under the moonglow of Innsmouth midnight. The Bureau of Investigation field agent looked out into the harbour, with Devil's Reef looming along the horizon, and shuddered. Knowing what was beneath the water - what he had seen before, when first assigned to this forsaken town that no man should ever have seen - he would almost prefer pitch darkness. At least the reef was free of the bonfires of unholy and spectral rites.

Moore fingered the small copper sigil worn on a thong around his neck. He was a good Catholic boy. Momma Moore wouldn't take well to her oldest son wearing...whatever it was. A five-pointed star with a flaming eye in the center, it certainly wasn't Christian. It stank of evil; he could barely stand to put it on, and not only because of his upbringing. It was almost as if it was not something meant to be seen let alone touched, by human beings, a remnant of a much older and cosmic significance. But all the agents assigned to Innsmouth wore it, on order of Director Hoover himself, and even he had worn it when he had supervised the town's...police action...a while back.

A slither in the darkness, the hint of a vague, possibly-human shape. Trembling more than he would like to admit, Moore swung around, raising his Thompson, visions of beings with impossible-shaped limbs and unnaturally-wide eyes in his mind. "Who goes there?" he announced, voice rock-steady. Hopefully it would only be one of the town's few remaining denizens breaking curfew. No one answered, and no more movements came to his eyes. Perhaps he should go over to investigate. But on a night with a full moon and a sea wind that brought cold ghosts ashore, even with the pagan ward, Moore was content to just sit still and make it through one more night.

* * * * *

Zecharias Marsh slinked his way by the G-man whose fear was thick enough to be almost palpable. Fools. All of them. The fear - and they all were afraid - were the smartest things of them. If they only knew what they had stepped in! Soon, they would pay their penance. Soon. The Great Ones would teach them their errors through liberation - them and the rest of the ignorant and fearful outer world.

It was easy enough to make it past the G-man. Why wouldn't it be? Marsh had lived here all his life, as had his family. Innsmouth was in his blood, in more ways than one. Outsiders were bad enough. When they thought they could meddle in the Innsmouth way or life or outwit its proud citizens at their own game, it became pathetic. Still, he was glad that he wouldn't need to kill the G-man. That would only cause more trouble, make it harder - not impossible, but harder. Of his weapon of crude matter, Marsh cared not. The pathetic facsimile of the Elder Sign would be little better in a true confrontation of strength. Witness their failed submarine torpedoing of Y'ha-nthlei itself. The fact that the Bureau had the use of the Sign and knew enough of its abilities to assign one to each of its agents was a bit troubling, make no mistake. No doubt influence from the occultists at Miskatonic. They, too, would see true light in the end.

Having evaded the G-man and making sure no other unwanted outsiders were glancing on, Marsh swiftly opened the door to the building, heading into its basement. Centuries ago, when Innsmouth had first been founded by Puritan settlers evading the witch trials, the building had been the First Congregational Church of Innsmouth. It was not until the middle of the last century that it had been converted, by his great-great-grandfather Obed Marsh, to its current use: the headquarters for the Great and True Church of the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

Marsh was not the only one who had evaded both the current curfew and the earlier mass arrests to come to service today. A good four or five dozen attentive citizens were already seated at their pews, waiting for their good pastor to make his sermon. The candles already lit, the words coming to mind as easily as dreams, Marsh made his way to the pulpit, making the customary convocation address.

"What has risen may sink and what has sunk may rise."

"What has risen may sink and what has sunk may rise," the congregation repeated through duty and conviction.

"Father Dagon is the Lord of the Sea, even to the Old Ones themselves. He has graced us with the fruits of His followers and the blood of His enemies. So from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!"

"Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!" came the dutiful retort.

"Tributes to Him in the Gulf! Azathoth, He of Whom Thou has taught us marvels! To Nyarlathotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among Enemies, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of the Seven Suns to mock the impure and lesser beings!"

"Iä! Nyarlathotep! The Mighty Messenger of the Outer Gods!"

Marsh's voice grew more emotional, sweat doting his brows while, among his congregation, women and men alike swayed joyously as if a Negro revivalist meeting as they heard the sacred elder language of Aklo spoken.

"To Great Cthulhu! Patron of Father Dagon and Consort of Mother Hydra! Master of the star-spawn! Defeater of the Elder Things! Enemy of the Great Race! Protector of Sacred Y'ha-nthlei and Ahu-Y'hloa and one thousand other cities of the deep! Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Iä! Iä Cthulhu! Iä Cthulhu!"

"Iä! Iä Cthulhu! Cthulhu fhtagn! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

The congregation worked into a joyous aggregation, a wave of sounds that grew and grew, a fevered pitch reaching a final orgasmic state as Magus Marsh held out his hands, eyes closed with a look of pure joy on his face, as if urging the sacred and elder incantation on its way through the aether.

* * * * *

A hundred miles away in his office, Delapore blinked, eyes glazing over as he worked at his desk. In a voice low enough that even he could barely hear, his lips formed the words, over and over.

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming..."

* * * * *

And on the other side of the world and the bottom of the sea, an Elder God stirred in his slumber, dreaming of a day that would arrive just a bit closer.

 

[magbeam]

First National Grocer's
Moodus, Connecticut
27th of September, 1934

"That'll be a dollar fifty," the blonde teenaged greengrocer said to Susannah Nourse, smiling at her over the counter. Susannah passed over the money, smiling back, as she picked up the small paper bag, heading out of the store and into the dying sunlight of another sleepy Moodus day.

It was nice to get smiles every once in a while. The Lord knew Susannah didn't get many of them from the natives. That was the main reason she purchased her groceries at First National; even if its selection wasn't as good, she grew most of what she needed anyways, and certainly all of the more...exotic herbs. It was a chain store, and the local headquarters sent out its small staff from around the state. They were less likely to act like the townsfolk.

At least until they were settled in enough to hear the stories.

It was nothing new, of course, and that was the problem. Her family had been...not hated, but kept at arm's-length, ever since her ancestors had moved to Moodus, back in the year 1693. The fact that they had moved from Massachusetts, and during the infamous witch trials of a certain town there, had been enough to set the rumors started. Thankfully, it had not been for several more years, until the trials had ended and amnesty against all suspected 'practitioners' of magic had been enacted, that it had come out the Nourses were from Salem itself. Whether or not they had any relation to a known and executed witch of the same name had been a stirring matter of debate in Moodus that year, and remained an undercurrent of speculation among the older and more distinguished residents even in this distant and scientifically-enlightened age.

Of course, Moodus was a small and rural town, far from the centers of great learning and industry. And at night, when the strange cracking noises came down from the hills and flitting lights could be seen in the air, the answers of science paled even more than usual before the corpus of tried and tested legendary fact.

For the billionth time, Susannah thought as she saw another townsperson hurriedly cross to the other side of the cobbled Main Street, maybe it was just because they looked different. Their skin was just a touch darker than the proper New Englander Puritan's, enough to suggestion a distant ancestor or two who was Negro or Indian, or even worse, both. To the ancient Puritans, such a background was unconscionable less because of the social aspects of such interbreeding; their ancestors had been freedmen and Negros were rare enough in New England to be tolerated as curios rather than shunned into ghettos like in much the other country. Rather, the forbidden aspect came from the dark, mystical, even diabolist connotations their pagan and voodoo backgrounds suggested.

If only they had known just which of the Salem witches the Nourses had shared blood with.

The Nourses had not been hated or persecuted, of course, even in the days before slavery had been abolished. But over the years, even mild suspicions and superstitious shunning from the good Christian people of the town would have been enough to drive even the most goodly people mad. There were few among the townsfolk who would consort with, much less wed, one of those strange dark Nourse men and women; and so, many of the marriage between the family had been between them and outsiders, and increasingly, among the scattered branches of the family. Pure bluebloods weren't the only ones with a desire to keep the family lines clean.

Unsurprisingly, it had resulted in the family slowly dying down; never large to begin with, it was now only Susannah, her older sister Abby who had married an Innsmouth man, and their older brother Wilmot, studying up at Miskatonic. And with them gone to their husband or lessons, it left Susannah - funded by a seemingly never-ending family fortune which few in town saw, and thus wondered about openly - to reside in their creaking, 17th-century stone house with gambrel roof, alone save for her garden, cats, and most of all, books. Through centuries of educational encouragement, the Nourse family had amassed what would likely be a fortune, a veritable library, of ancient, out of print, and - in one or two cases - forbidden books. Even before Wilmot had enrolled, more than a few of the professors of Miskatonic's literary and historical departments had been down to request to purchase, or at least browse, their collection.

Susannah, like all her kinsmen before her, had politely but unflinchingly refused.

It was dark as she arrived back to the home on the edge of the New England forest, still nearly as dark and thick in this area of Connecticut as in the days when the Puritans had suspected they shielded Satanic pacts and pagan courts of the Indians. The grass near the edge of the woods rustled as Susannah approached, and even in the dim light, she could make out the tawny form of her oldest and most favorite cat, Pilgrim, as he jumped out, rubbing around her legs with a mrrow?

"Hey there, fella," Susannah said, putting the grocer's bag down to pet his back. Suddenly, she paused, then doubled over, a queasy sensation through her stomach accompanying a sudden rush of words, as if in a man's voice, with a thick provincial Massachusetts accent, ran through her head.

"Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Iä! Iä Cthulhu! Iä Cthulhu! Iä! Iä Cthulhu! Cthulhu fhtagn! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

Susannah groaned, mouthing the words, before her eyes flew open. The language. She knew it. Aklo, the speech of ancient and terrible cults which were brought to earth by the star-spawned outer entities who predated the rise of mankind. Only one book of her collection listed it - the book, translated into English by Elizabeth's pet mystic John Dee from an ancient and horrible Arab text...

Forgetting her bag on the ground, Susannah grabbed Pilgrim in her hand and rushing upstairs, lighting a candle and bringing it with her, up beyond the bedroom floor, and the loft, into the dusty yet spaciously-clear attic. Plopping Pilgrim down at her feet, she took a key from the ring in her pocket, before hurriedly stripping her clothes off, kicking them into a pile in the corner once her thin body was totally nude. Using the key, she unlocked the oaken chest before her, before throwing the key onto her clothes.

Picking up two items - a wooden, darkly-glossy board and an obsidian knife, she laid the former on the top of the chest, the latter still in her hand as she scooped up the sleepy Pilgrim, placing him on the board.

"Sorry, boy," she whispered, taking the knife and slicing him down the middle in a single swipe. Reaching down, she once more went through the chest, picking up one of the few books not in the spacious living room library - the Magdalene Grimoire. Flipping through it, she studied the entrails, muttering to herself. Satisfied, she turned to another page, reading the familiar and thrillingly forbidden incantation there.

Smearing her face, breasts, and nether-regions with Pilgrim's blood, slicking it into her hair, Susannah picked up the knife, stepping over to one of the heavy oaken beams that propped up the gambrel roof of the ancient colonial house. Carving a series of runes into it, she dutifully repeated the passage from the grimoire.

"Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. Yog-Sothoth, hear this supplication. I offer You the All and the One. Y'ai'ng'ngah Yog-Sothoth h'ee-l'geb f'ai trhodog uaaaah."

As the final words of Aklo were carved and incanted, Susannah could feel herself growing cooler, sleepier, as if a mist had descended through the roof to surround her, her vision growing fuzzier, suspect. If she was as ignorant as the fearful townsfolk of Moodus were, she would know that it had to be that which caused her to think the runes she had just carved were moving of their own accord, twisting and writhing across the wall like snakes, multiplying like rabbits, growing thicker, bulging out from the wall, drawing towards her as an unearthly foetor accompanied their growth...

Susannah suddenly realized she was not cold any more. A warmth had surrounded her, or rather, it was as if the warmth of Pilgrim's blood was growing, infusing her through her skin, her most tender regions growing slick and her sensitive areas hard, even before the serpentine runes flowed out from the walls, entwining around her, lifting her up as they caressed her, their hard scalyness moving over her sweating, panting flesh...

Susannah cried out as she was penetrated by the summoned incantation of Yog-Sothoth, Opener of the Way, the Key and the Gate, the runes/tentacles thrusting and pumping harder and harder, going beyond her threshold of tolerance. It was not the first time she had made this bargain; not the first time she had made an appropriate sacrifice to the All-in-One and the One-in-All to gain His gift of the Supreme Knowledge that surpassed science and legend both. The first time, she had been terrified beyond all belief, even having witnessed her mother's final supplication. Even this time, she was unable to halt her bloodcurdling screams or the wave of pain that, even overwhelming, wouldn't let her collapse into blessed unconsciousness.

But at least this time, she knew the results would be worth the sacrifice.

Yog-Sothoth's actions grew even harder, furiously pumping in and out now, and Susannah was unable to even scream any longer. She felt the pressure inside her grow, and grow, until she was certain she was being torn apart. She could feel her legs being ripped asunder, her arms wrenched from her sockets, her privies literally mashed into pulp, and just when it was unbearable...

Susannah's voice returned as she yelled, the largest and most unbelievable orgasm she had ever experienced - even greater than those her earlier incantations had brought her - washed over her, mixing with the peak of her pain, the absolutely intolerable knowledge that her body had been destroyed, that only her head was left, that if she were to but open her eyes she would see only a miasma of pulped meat before her.

Then, she blacked out.

When she awoke, Susannah groaned, unsteadily leaning up. Her body throbbed, dull pain radiating up nearly from every part, especially between her legs - but not nearly as much as if she had truly been torn asunder. And her head...her head felt as if a steam hammer were at work inside. It got worse every time, and there would come a point when Yog-Sothoth would not be content His release, but claim her as the sacrifice - take her to be His servitor, in His realm or this one. She was always mindful of the use of His summons.

But as her head cleared, Susannah nodded, her shock growing. Yes, this had definitely been worth it. She would have to hurry if disaster was to be averted. Locking everything away - the remains of Pilgrim save for the blood on her body, just like the runes etched in the walls, had vanished with nary a trace when she had awoken - Susannah grabbed her clothes, hurrying downstairs. She would wash quickly - feeling the first twinge of guilt for Pilgrim, but it had been necessary, and oh so worth it - and then she would need to think things over.

But quickly.

A witch's work was never over.

 

[magbeam]

OOC: Thanks to Lady_Mornington for helping with Emilia Kristina's backstory and some of the German. If anyone wants to step in and play any of these new characters, or original ones of course, please feel free to ask...

Friends of New Germany Building
Boston, Massachusetts
27th of September, 1934

Doktor Emilia Kristina von Heidern tugged her gloves off, revealing an impeccably-manicured fingernail that she examined under the soft lighting of the Bund building. It was such a rarity these days for her to have proper attention done to her, not with the old days gone - but perhaps not forever, one could hope - and not with her chosen profession. One that she devoted so much energy to, much more than her fellow - male - peers. That was why she succeeded so well, in spite of her unfortunate sex. Emilia Kristina often wished she were a man, even before the laws regarding female employment in the Reich were turned around. But, as she observed reactions from the man walking across the foyer towards her, in this world of men, being a woman had its advantages as well. Especially one with such properly Aryan features as herself.

Emilia Kristina was not a German proper, but rather a Volksdeutsche from Czechoslovakia. The von Heiderns held noble titles under the Hohenzollerns during the good old days of the Austrian Empire, but found themselves subjects to the democratic Czech government after the Great War. Thanks to the family influence, her father secured her an enrollment the Charles University in Prague, where she became fluent in five living languages (and several dead ones) and fought tooth and nail to secure a degree in archaeology. She, like her family, was a loyal supporter of the proposed annexation of the Sudetenland to the Greater German Reich; after all, ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. After graduation she moved to Berlin, joining both the staff of the Egyptian Museum of Berlin and the Nazi Party itself.

Then came 1931, the hushed American expedition to the Antarctica, and the signature of the secret Dresden Agreement. She had met the Führer himself soon after he rose into power. The Führer and the Reichsführer-SS, to be more precise, both of whom had a strong interest in the lesser-known aspects of archaeology and human mythology. Especially when, as the now-classified reports from the American expedition made clear, it could be combined with a chance to give the Reich the vengeance-weapons it needed to crush the Western powers and the Soviet monster. The claiming of Neu-Schwabenland at the south pole just after Emilia Kristina's secret organization was established was no accident.

And that, indirectly, was what had brought her halfway around the world, sitting in the office of a provincial branch of the Friends of New Germany, waiting for this bald, pale-faced man to tend to her.

"So sorry to keep you waiting, Fräulein von Heidern," the man said in somewhat-accented German. "I'm John...ah, Johann Dietrich, the head of the Boston office. So sorry, so long used to the English...Please, please follow me, into my office. Your, ah, companions as well," he gestured to her two 'aides' - SS bodyguards to all but the most dull - who stood next to her, each carrying a secured briefcase. Emilia Kristina gestured them - assigned to her personally by the Reichsführer-SS - to follow her, and soon they were seated in comfortable leather chairs beneath a portrait of the Führer and an American flag, with tea being served by a girl who, in the Fatherland, seemed like she would be a sterling member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel.

"I must admit, Fräulein von Heidern," Dietrich began, breaking the ice, "I didn't expect someone from the Egyptian Museum to come visit my station, much less with such prestigious forward notice from the Party. Thank you, Helga, that will be all," he said to the young secretary, who closed the doors behind her. That done, his demeanor shifted. "It does feel nice to speak uninhibited, and you may do so as well, Fräulein. I promise that this is likely one of the few places in New England where that is fully true. Now, how may I help you?"

"Miskatonic University." Her answer was simple, enjoying a sip of her tea to hide her smile. Emilia Kristina had hardly batted an immaculate eyelash at Dietrich's no-doubt preplanned dramatic transformation from Bund staffer to SS chief for foreign intelligence of Northeast America.

"Miskatonic?" he repeated after a second. "The Ivy League wanna-be over in Arkham? With all due respect, Fräulein von Heidern, with the background you seem to have, and with the reputation for that institute, I do not understand what you could hope to find there."

Emilia Kristina fixated him with a properly icy stare. "Herr Dietrich, are you familiar with the contents of the Dresden Agreement?"

To his credit, Dietrich was nonplussed. "Dresden Agreement? I can't say I've even heard of it."

"Or something called Project Mara?" she politely inquired.

"Something to do with the Organisation Todt being sent somewhere in the south Pacific, isn't it?"

"Quite so, Herr Dietrich, and as you do not know much about those two developments, I would not expect you to know anything about my reasoning for needing to visit the Miskatonic University Library," she said with an air of disinterest, taking another sip of tea. "And as I know about these developments and you do not, I can only assume that my security clearance - which comes direct from the Führer, I will remind you, Herr Dietrich - is superior to yours, and thus I cannot explain any more."

Dietrich stared at her blankly for a few silent moments. "Very well, Fräulein von Heidern-"

"I believe I would prefer Doktor von Heidern."

"Of course." His face was dark. "I will of course do everything that I can to get you a visit to the campus. I am sure they will be thrilled to host a scholar of your esteemed magnitude. But, I must warn you, Doktor von Heidern, from what I have heard, you will not be the first to be politely refused entry to the, ah, more esoteric sections of their library. Assuming that is what you are there to see."

"Once more, Herr Dietrich, I do believe that I must correct an inaccuracy on your own part." Emilia Kristina's smile was more than a match for his own smirk of self-satisfaction, as she raised her hand to point to one of the cases her SS man held.

"And they are?" he inquired dutifully, with a resigned air.

"Why, these are my tickets in. The Unaussprechlichen Kulten, an original copy written by von Junzt himself in Düsseldorf in 1839, one of the few not destroyed. And that," she pointed to the other case, "holds the Liber Ivonis, written before the dawn of Christianity by Eibon of Hyperborea."

Dietrich paused, obviously not knowing if he was being put on or not. Finally, he bit. "Hyperborea? The fictional realm?"

"Yes, Hyperborea. And I assure you, Herr Dietrich, that it is, or at least was, quite real. I suggest you read some of the corpus of the Thule Society. You see, Dietrich, I have not come out here on a whim, as you seem to think. I am well aware of Miskatonic University's policies towards their occult department, which is second to none in the world. And yet despite that, they have only fragments of the Liber Ivonis and a third-hand translation of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I believe that, for a sizable donation in the name of their friends and fellow scholars in the Third Reich, they will grant me access to what I need."

"From their collection of ancient occult books." Dietrich was unimpressed.

"Precisely," Emilia Kristina answered. "The future of national socialism and the existence of the German Nation could very well depend on a musty old scroll from the bottom of an obscure New England university's library."

For all his failings, Dietrich at least was able to furnish her with suitable lodgings for the night, in a posh downtown hotel. Her valuables were under lock and key and unofficial guard at the Bund, and one of her SS men was in the connecting room. As she brushed out her long platinum tresses, she had to sigh. The kind of people she had to deal with. Could the SS find no one better for section chief? It was almost enough to make her question what she was doing.

Not that she would ever halt. Not now, not after all she had seen. Right alongside Ansgar, Professor Ansgar Liebkunst, that was. Emilia Kristina resented men for thinking less of her merely because of her sex, but Ansgar never did, and if she had to fall for one, at least it was the silver-haired gentleman scientist. Just like her, he was one of the few who truly believed in the threat even before the Molotov Raid of 1930 had given the Reds access to an unknown amount of the dread shoggot'im servitors. That closeness brought on by pariahism had only been the beginning of their emotional bond.

And uncovering the Liber Ivonis had been just the start of their professional one. From Greenland to Babylon to Antarctica, they had worked together, their shared passions for history and the Cause naturally developing into a shared passion for each other. Just thinking of him now brought a pang of longing to her heart and tingling elsewhere.

The last expedition had been the most exciting. The brief fragments they had found, von Braun still hadn't been able to explain, and the remains...They had thought that that young physician, Mengele, would go into shock when he first saw them upon their return to Berlin.

But now, they were separated. Doktor von Heidern had her mission, Professor Liebkunst had his, and professionalism and loyalty to the Cause outweighed personal attachment. She could not help but think, still, that she had been given a lesser part of the bargain merely because of her sex; but he had assured her that she needed to dredge from the depths of Miskatonic was just as important as what he needed to dredge from the citadel of a sunken city for Project Mara. The one was worthless - or worse, uncontrollably deadly to all - without the other.

Project Mara. Emilia Kristina had to snort at the name as she turned down the lights for the night, not looking forward to the rural train ride awaiting her in the morning. It might fool ignorants like Dietrich, but to those in the know, it would be a dead giveaway.

No, she certainly would not mention the demon of nightmares to the occultists of Miskatonic as she supplicated them for the Necronomicon.

 

[magbeam]

Delapore residence
Arkham, Massachusetts
28th of September, 1934

Mrs. Asenath Delapore sighed into her pillow as her husband got up. He had gotten home late again last night, was getting up now at the crack of dawn, and even though she had slept as soundly as was possible for her the last few days, she was reasonably certain that Franklin had just lain awake all night. And now, here he was, getting up out of bed without saying anything, off to spend another day beyond normal hours at the university.

Asenath perched herself up on her elbow, staring sadly at Frank through the pre-dawn light coming in through their bedroom window. Even in the dim lighting, she could tell he looked sallow, his once-healthy tan from outdoor work vanished; thin, as if something was eating him from the inside. When this had first started, she had asked him where he was going. By now, she knew better. It would only be an irritable "Work, of course. Be back late. Heavy load now, gotta work it through." Perhaps a peck on the cheek for her troubles.

Asenath had at first taken it in stride. He was working up for his tenure at Miskatonic, had a number of students to watch over, was involved in expanding curricular activities and a number of special duties for the President of the university. But as the weeks wore on, and it only got worse...As ridiculous as it had seemed even then, Asenath had been worried that there was another woman in Frank's life. He was fixated on his work even in normal time, devoted to her fully as a wife; but what else was she to think? Yet as the weeks became months, and he started to lose weight, looking like he was aging rapidly, never sleeping...No woman could cause that.

But that wasn't even the worst part.

She had been finding it harder and harder to sleep herself, as if whatever was keeping Frank up at nights was slowly leaking over to herself. And when she did sleep...Asenath had had her share of nightmares over her life, but they were nonstop now. And so one night, she had lain awake, pretending to sleep (although she rather doubted Frank would even notice, or care if he did) as he finally returned well past midnight, veritably collapsing into bed. Mumbling.

Not English.

Horrible, horrible worlds. Words that seemed to worm their way into her head and rot her dreams.

When Asenath awoke, she was trembling and not sure whether to be glad or terrified of her loneliness.

Asenath had gone to the President of Miskatonic himself, demanding to know what Franklin was doing, ordering him to stop, be put to something else. She knew the reputation Miskatonic had, its dabbling in the occult, the strangely high rate of bizarre, covered-up deaths for faculty and student alike. They might try to downplay and bury it, but she knew, and she wasn't going to let her Frank fall into it.

The President had assured her that he had no idea what she was doing, that Dr. Delapore was engaged in no unusual, and certainly not illegal or dangerous, works and that she should best talk to her husband about the matter.

She tried, only to be patted on the head in a daze, as if she were a dog, and be told she was overreacting.

So Asenath spent her nights doused in sleeping pills to make sure she at least didn't remember her dreams and terrified of listening to her husband's nocturnal incantations more than she ever was of him physically hurting her.

As Asenath stared out at the rising sun as Frank got into Ford to head off to work, she felt a tear slide down her cheeks. They were good people. Why was this happening to him? Why was this happening to her? Asenath felt certain, more certain than she had of anything before in her life, that she was completely and utterly alone, for certainly there was no one, living or dead, who could possibly understand her position.

Marsh residence
Innsmouth, Massachusetts
28th of September, 1934

Mrs. Abby Marsh whimpered at the stinging blow that her husband delivered to her cheek, her head turning as much with a desire not to look at the man she had once loved than due to the simple force of the smack. Mrs. Marsh née Nourse had grown all too used to such actions in recent times. Ever since the night the town had gone in an uproar over poor old Zadok Allen, and then the Government men's arrival a few days later.

All she had done was ask Zecharias where he had been for the night.

"And why do you think I'd trust an outlander like you, you little Jezebel?" he'd coldly asked, his claw raking out almost as if an afterthought, a mere addition to the coldly furious words flowing from his mouth. Like many of the inbred populace of Innsmouth, Zecharias's eyes had a tendency to bulge out. Now, it was almost frightening, as if his rage were forcing them to expand as a last-ditch effort to release his pressure.

It hadn't always been like this.

Innsmouth men and women were notorious in not approving of outsiders coming into their town. Even before the current troubles, there were more than a few cases of outsiders poking their noses into a part of town they maybe shouldn't have, and never being seen again. But every once in a while one of them would go off to live outside, or take a bride or husband from Arkham or Dunwich or any of a number of local towns. They were tolerated, even accepted to a certain degree, even in they were never allowed into the Esoteric Order of Dagon that formed the basis for the town's social and spiritual network.

They had met when he had come down to visit her house in Moodus, back when it had been her and Wilmot and Susannah and even Mother, still alive, all living together under the same gambrel roof. He had come down in a semi-official capacity for the Esoteric Order, inquiring as to their personal library of ancient errata. Mother had of course refused but, polite and enjoying a man who did not shun them for offenses committed by their family 250 years ago, invited him to stay for once. Zecharias had stayed, and Abby had been fascinated by the polite, charming, urbane, exotically foreign - all the way from Massachusetts! - man. When he had shown the same interest in her, well...Abby had never had a mind for studying like Wilmot or like following family traditions like Susannah. And she had at first been worried that that was the main reason that Zecharias returned from Innsmouth all those times to court her. But she had seen that he had plainly loved her for who she was, and when he had proposed to her, she had answered the only way that she could. It was, honestly and without hyperbole, the happiest day of her life.

And now, he slapped her for asking where he had been all night, past curfew with G-men patrolling the town and him already on a blacklist.

It was Abby's own fault, really. He had been like this ever since the G-men arrived. By now, she should know not to question Zecharias, not to do anything to anger him, not to do anything but pine for the days before his love had turned to hate and the man she had once adored more than her own life had become such a...such a monster.

Rubbing her bruised cheek and unable to halt the tears in her eyes, Abby looked out the window at the dawn, wondering if there was anyone else in the world who could possibly understand what she was going through.

 

[magbeam]

Miskatonic University Library
Arkham, Massachusetts
28th of September, 1934

"No," the old man insisted politely and firmly for the third time. "I am afraid I cannot help you in that area, Doktor von Heidern. As I have said twice now, the artifact in consideration is undergoing repairs at the moment. It cannot be disturbed for some time. I assure you that this fact has not changed in the past ten minutes nor will it change during the length of time our conversation is likely to last."

Doktor Emilia Kristina von Heidern kept her face sternly impassive as she listened to the words of Dr. Henry Armitage, the ancient and wisp-haired Chief Librarian of the Miskatonic University Library, reply to him yet again. The old man fidgeted at his desk beneath a large portrait of Ward Phillips, the first president of Miskatonic and the founder of its library, shuffling between papers and speaking with Emilia Kristina.

She had seen many lies throughout her life, and had learned both to recognize and disguise them herself. It came with politics and academia both.

Armitage was lying through his teeth.

"I do not mean to be rude, Dr. Armitage," she began in her most soothing voice. Even if the old man was too old for her blonde bun and strategically-positioned long legs to be of any useful service, at least her melodic voice might yet entrance him. "But I have come so far for this. Gone through so much trouble. It would mean so much to me if I could just examine the contents, even briefly. Even for that, I would be more than willing to conclude our deal and lease the Berlin Museum's manuscripts to your Library."

Armitage's eyes moved from his desk over to the briefcases her omnipresent companions held. He licked his lips, greed - even if he would not want to call it that - present on his face. Emilia Kristina smiled. She had had him read right from the start, the academic who could not let two rare originals, much less ones that would virtually seal his niche, leave his grasp.

Armitage licked his lips again, then seemed settled on something. "Once more, Doktor von Heidern, I cannot-"

Her smile fell at his halting, lying words. Perhaps she had misread him, after all - not his desire to collect and catalogue and research, but rather the depths he feared the book. Fancy that, actually fearing the unknown. How...un-scholarly.

She had one shot left in her armory. If this didn't do it...

"I am afraid it is you who does not understand, Dr. Armitage," she said, cutting him off. Her voice had lost its charm, and now was rather like the tone she used in lectures to especially dull university students. "I am not an idiot, Doctor. I understand more than you know. I am not as completely ignorant of the contents of the Necronomicon as you seem to think."

He stared at her, the flush of anger at being cut off in mid sentence eclipsed by a wide-eyed horror, before passing into a dawning understanding.

"You know that," he finally spoke, "and yet you still want to read the rest of...that tome?"

"That is correct, Dr. Armitage." Emilia Kristina's warm charm was back.

He stared at her, blinking once more, slowly, before standing. "Then I am afraid that you are even more ignorant than I originally thought, at least, I pray that that is all that it is. And I further regret to say, Doktor von Heidern, that it now appears that that artifact will be indefinitely in restoration, and that I suddenly find myself rather drowning in work."

Her porcelain cheeks tinged with rose, Emilia Kristina rose. "I see. Then I shall bother you no further. Good day, Dr. Armitage. Gentlemen?" Briefcases still in hand, the SS officers followed her out of the office, Armitage's eyes on them - thought whether filled with regret at losing the Unaussprechlichen Kulten and Liber Ivonis, or glad that her muscular friends had not...imposed themselves, she could not say.

"Schiesse," she muttered to herself once they had left the library. They were in a courtyard, a smattering of students milling around, with construction work - assembling the new Andrew Ryan Biological Sciences Building, paid for by a wealthy industrialist alum - beginning on one side. Emilia Kristina lit a cigarette, thinking, ignoring the looks of the almost-entirely male students as they walked by. Insignificant insects.

She dropped the butt, crushing it beneath her Italian heels. There was one other option. Armitage might have not shown her the book, but she had seen its registry card on its desk. It had been out, and recently - and she had seen the same name, repeated over and over again, to who it had been lent to.

On a hunch, she took out the university pamphlets she had been given upon being welcome to the campus, flipping through the faculty pages, finally smiling as the turning ended. Perfect. A few seconds to get her bearing, and then Emilia Kristina was off, quickly strolling through the pleasant New England air towards the building that housed the Department of Ancient Languages.

 

[magbeam]

Delapore's office, Miskatonic University
Arkham, Massachusetts
28th of September, 1934

Dr. Delapore sat in his office, his desk for once cleared off of the accumulation of his life's work. The Necronomicon had been replaced into the bottom of the Library's vaults last night; as always, Armitage hounded him until he left, his caution with his most dangerous possession surpassing even the almost-fatherly regard librarian showed with even his most humble books. And with the Necronomicon gone from the office, there was little need for him to have his other notes and accompanying texts to shelter its shell and illuminate its interior.

No, now Delapore's desk was sectioned off into thirds. On the left, the largest pile; on the right, a smaller one; in the middle, the smallest yet. They were, respectively, the term papers he had yet to read, those he had finished grading, and the one to which he was examining presently. Truth be told, Delapore hated this part of his job like no other. It was even worse than teaching the little ingrates.

He didn't get into teaching to teach, he did it for the research. And when he had gotten to the point when only Miskatonic could give him access to what he needed, and all faculty - despite the large number of sabbaticals and off-campus expeditions they all seemed to take - had to teach...well, it was a necessary evil. Although to be fair, not all of them were that bad. This one, for example, whose paper he was currently reading: Wilmot Nourse. He was one of the few students who actually got it, whose passion for the subject met his own. Delapore scanned over the paper superficially, before scribbling an 'A' on it. No sense wasting time on an assured endpoint...

There was a knock on the door, and Delapore's head looked up. Who could that be? Armitage again to complain? The President to once again reject his petition for joining the staff the Pacific survey? God, it had better not be Asenath showing up to his office once more...

A woman it was, but certainly not Asenath. Blonde where she was mousy, statuesque where she was slight, graceful where she had a tendency to bumble. Delapore did not mean to slight his wife; he gave no judgments, and indeed increasingly felt himself unable to be stirred by such lowly, merely-human passions. He simply and objectively compared this newcomer against Asenath, the basis – the control – for his standards of femininity, as any good man of science should.

“May I help you, Miss...?” Delapore inquired.

“Doktor, actually,” she spoke in delicately-accented and quite legible English as she helped herself to his office's spare chair. “Doktor Emilia Kristina von Heidern of the Berlin Museum. And you are Professor Franklin Delapore?”

“That is correct, Doktor von Heidern,” he said, pushing his papers off to a single pile on the side of his desk, this already seeming a more interesting waste of his time. If nothing else, it was the first time in his life he had seen both a German and a female holder of a doctorate. “How may I help you?”

The woman sat primly, obviously thinking. “We have similar interests, I believe. I am an archaeologist by degree and an expert in languages of the artifacts I uncover by necessity. You are a professor of, I believe, the ancient Semitic languages of the Orient?”

“Correct, again, Doktor von Heidern.” Delapore offered nothing else, not out of a sense of propriety or a desire to e uncooperative, but seeing no reason to say anything beyond a confirmation of the simple question she obviously already knew the answer to.

“And you have studied the ancient texts held by your university's esteemed library?”

“Again, correct.” There was a longer pause.

“I will be frank, Professor Delapore,” she said finally, her blue eyes fixated on his in a way no doubt intended to be piercing or seductive but which failed to register on the tired man. “We both have studied the arcane works of the ancients who describe certain races of star-spawned Old Ones and the cthonic and eldritch deities and cults associated with them. I need to consult to Necronomicon of Abdul Alhrazed. I could find a copy nowhere else, Dr. Armitage will not let me see it, and I know you have had nearly exclusive access to it over the past few weeks.” She leaned closer, over his desk. “I would be much obliged to read it. There are only a few passages I must note.”

Delapore's hands were gripping the edge of his desk, knuckles as fair as his guest's deceptively-delicate skin, his eyes almost unfocused, a look of shock and confusion frozen on his face. He had felt a certain sick dread well up within himself as she had taled and he had become more and more certain of what she was speaking of, up until her final confirmation. So. A fellow traveler down those dark paths.

Emilia Kristina was staring, confused, at the man Delapore. His reaction to her proposition – both of them – were curious in the extreme. Finally, he seemed to rouse himself. “Is that so, Doktor von Heidern? Excuse me for a moment.” He picked up his phone, calling the number for the chief librarian's office. Within several seconds Delapore was in a heated exchange with a loud voice that Emilia Kristina remembered as Armitage's. She could hear the words 'dangerous,' 'too much,' 'exposure,' and 'President's office,' mentioned, and soon afterwards Delapore slammed his phone back into its cradle.

“It seems you are not the only one whose access to our secure vaults has been revoked,” he said, lowering his face into the hands that were propped up on his desk. How could they? How could they? So what if he spent so much time going over the Necronomicon? It was a damn-near exclusive text vital to his work, the work that he had come to Miskatonic to do! It was his choice how much time he spent on the job! If he chose to pour over ancient tomes all night, they should be applauding his academic fervor, not whispering behind his back that he should be institutionalized, was as bad as that old Herbert West fellow, cutting off his access, destroying his work, betraying him...

“Ruined,” he cried to himself, all but dimly remembering that there was a strange woman sitting just across from him. “All my work. All those years. Gone like that. Those timid little mice, pathetic excuses for researchers...”

A delicate cough reminded him of his German scientess on the other end of his desk.

“If I may make a suggestion, Professor Delapore?” She leaned across the desk, conspiratorially rather than seductively this time. Delapore made a noncomittal grunt, and Emilia Kristina frowned, but took it as a chance to say what she wanted.

“It is clear that your associates do not share the high opinion of your work that I do – it is, after all, my work as well. We are brethren in a way, Professor Delapore. The faculty of Miskatonic are well known for going on research jaunts, correct? The Antarctic expedition was something of an...inspiration to me when I was younger. And would I be correct in assuming that it has been rather a long time since you embarked on one?”

Delapore looked up, interest starting to percolate through the despair he felt at never again being allowed to touch those ancient leather bindings...

Emilia Kristina smiled at that, glad she had provoked a reaction. “The Berlin University is arranging an...archaeological expedition led by myself and my associate, Professor Ansgar Liebkunst – have you heard of him? Ah, good, let me assure you he is as charming as he is brilliant – to depart very soon. Our destination will be...ah, ruins. In the south Pacific. Ruins I do believe a scholar such as you will be educated enough to know.”

Delapore's gaunt face was frozen now, in equal mix terror and hope. She couldn't really...? It surely could not...?

The German's plump red lips split as she exhaled the single word. “R'lyeh.”

It was.

Delapore felt a shockwave of adrenaline suddenly flood his body, sweat beads popping out on his forehead at the name of R'lyeh. The ancient, forbidden, sunken citadel where the Great One lay, not dead but dreaming. The city of non-Euclidean geometry constructed by the star-spawn untold millions of years before the rise of humanity, upon whom it would cause untold madness and nightmares to even view...

And she was inviting him to join her in viewing it. Entering it. Raising it.

There could only be one purpose.

Delapore felt he might faint, from fear and joy equally. He sat down in his chair, not sure what to say, drained too much to stand let alone think. Emilia Kristina watched, the small smile on her lips. Excellent. It had gone much the same way with her when she had first comprehended just what Project Mara could mean. That fact that he had spent so much time with the mad Arab's text, wasn't already shuddering on the floor in terror or exhorting her to stop meant that he would come around, on his own time. Once he had fully thought it through. Delapore was already hooked.

Emilia Kristina took out a calling card, scribbling the phone and address of the Friends of New Germany Building in Boston on the back, laying it down on the desk in between them. His sallow eyes locked onto it, as if afraid of a trap. Sparing him the need to ask, she explained.

“This is where I am staying in Boston. I will be there for another week. Please do not agree to or reject my invitation right away. Think it over. Either way you decide, please contact me before I depart. I do hope you will agree to join the expedition, however. I think we will have such wonderful things to teach each other. Good day, Professor Delapore. I do hope you feel better.”

With one more smile, she was gone, leaving him alone to contemplate the card on the desk and the horrible nightmare it meant.

* * * * *

Once more, Delapore did not sleep that night, but neither did he lapse into the semi-somnolent state that enabled him to mouth the words of Aklo, either. This time, he was fully immersed in thinking over the events of the past day – one path destroyed, but a new one offered. One that could see his life's work complete. One that could unleash an untold, unspeakable eldritch Outer Entity, unstoppable, upon the world.

One that could awaken the Dreamer.

Asenath took him not sleeping or muttering as a good sign, and showed a degree of intimacy she had not for many months that night, and as a result was even more hurt when he still rose early to depart to the campus almost wordlessly. He headed straight to his office, sitting down at his desk and, instead of beginning to do any sort of work, pulled out the card with von Heidern's contact information on it. He placed it on his desk, centered it, stared at it. The incantation cycled through his head endlessly.

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Delapore started at the sound at the sound of another knock on his office door. Hoping and dreading it would be von Heidern, he nervously spoke “Enter.” It was not the blonde German, but rather two men in pinstripe suits and fedoras. It could not be more obvious that they were G-men, even before they both pulled out badges identifying them as Burea of Investigation agents.

“Professor Franklin Delapore?” the lead man – dark-haired, lined face – asked in a New York accent, mirroring von Heidern's opening salvo of the night before. “Agent Jerry Cotton, and this is my partner, Agent Phil Decker. We'd like to ask you a few questions, if you're not too busy, that is.” As the other man, Decker, was already closing the door to the office and Cotton was sitting down in his chair, Delapre didn't see what choice he had. Suddenly realizing what he had before him, he reached out to cover the possibly-incriminating card, with the information of the German Bund on one side and a German scientist on the other, but Cotton's hand reached out to stop him.

“No need for that, Professor. It's actually what we're here about. A German dame, brainy bombshell, came to talk to you yesterday? An Emilia von Heidern, asking you to join an expedition being prepared by her Berlin Museum?”

“Yes, that is correct,” Delapore asked, sensing a trap.

“What would you say if I was to tell you that she is an agent of the SS, that her expedition is actually part of a secret Nazi project organized personally by Hitler and Himmler themselves, and that we have reason to suspect that its goal is to violate a 1931 agreement signed in Dresden to restrict the use of all, ah...things that perhaps ought not to be meddled with?”

Delapore could only gape – not at the somewhat obvious facts that von Heidern was a Nazi mysticist or that her expedition had ulterior motives not to be shared with an American, but that these government agents knew of...the things that were only spoken of in shadows. “You-”

“Professor, we've both served in Innsmouth. We both helped classify the Miskatonic Expedition reports. We both were guards for the Starkweather-Moore Expedition returned. Yes, we know all about it.”

“Guards? But-”

“The Starkweather-Moore Expedition was a hoax.” The other man, Decker, finally spoke up. “It was no more a part of the University of Chicago than this Kraut one is the Berlin Museum. It was a United States government expedition, authorized by the President himself, as a response to that hornet's nest your college's expedition found at that base of those mountains. As soon as those results came in, we knew they could cause...undo panic. Secret executive order restricted all research and knowledge on all topics to a newly-created organization of the Bureau. Reports directly to Director Hoover.”

“I will be square with you, Professor,” Cotton was back in control. “We don't want to tell you not to go with her. Point of the matter is just the opposite. We need you to go, Professor.”

“Pardon?” Delapore asked, even more confused now. What the hell was going on here? First they come in, throw him curveballs, shake him up...then reverse their stance one-eighty degrees?

“Think of it, Professor Delapore,” Decker was now speaking again. “We cannot legally do anything to stop this German expedition. It's in international waters and ostensibly a non-military, non-government research expedition. But there is no question that we cannot just let it go on and twiddle our dingles. Her coming to you was really a godsend. How the hell else would we get an American onboard?”

“And just what makes you think that I would agree to this? That I was even considering her proposal?”

Cotton's eyes drifted to the card on the desk between them. “Besides the fact that it will be the culmination of your life's research, that your future in the university here seems somewhat dim, and that, I guarantee, there will never be an American expedition to that particular location?” Cotton smiled. “Other than those reasons, and an appeal to your patriotism, there is the fact that, should you refuse, you will be spending the next several decades in a jail cell in DC. Ever since the, ah...shadow fell over Innsmouth, you can say that the Director has been taking these sorts of matters very seriously.”

Delapore stared at the two G-men, although in truth, he felt only a small amount of anger at being badgered and threatened in this manner. The larger part of him was relieved – the decision had been made for him, and if he did succumb, he had – at least for his own conscience – an excuse. It was beyond his control.

He picked up the phone and the card on his desk, and as the G-men looked on, called his new partner in science.

* * * * *

Emilia Kristina smiled as she put the phone back down into the cradle. She had returned late last night to the Bund apartment, and the nighttime train ride had given her much time to think. All her assurances to the contrary, she could not help but consider that, just possibly, this Delapore would not consent to join her, that the allure had not been enough, that she should have stayed longer, cajoled harder, dangled more before him.

And here, it had all worked out, just as she had predicted. She really should stop doubting herself so much.

It was...misfortunate that she had been unable to procure the Necronomicon at Miskatonic. More than that; if Ansgar was right, it could be fully catastrophic for Project Mara. What good was a weapon without a way to aim, restrain, disarm it? It still was a large blow, no doubt about it, and she was filled with both personal and professional shame in having to face Ansgar and tell him that she had failed her part of the project, the part she had derided as mere woman's work.

But now, at least she was not completely empty-handed. Delapore was one of the foremost scholars of the works of the mad Arab and others who followed him, had likely read, memorized, taken notes on the Necronomicon more – and more recently – than any other person alive, at least that she was likely to be able to find. There was no doubt that the Necronomicon was preferable to him. But, with a little amount of hope, perhaps Delapore would be able to serve well enough for their purposes.

But only until a replacement could be found, of course. At which point he would have the same fate as all redundants.

Smiling, Emilia Kristina picked up the phone to call Dietrich and arrange a ship to take her and Delapore to the Arminius – and Project Mara.

 

[magbeam]

OOC: Again, thanks to Lady_Mornington for help with names and German.

47°9′S, 126°43′W
300 meters beneath the South Pacific
30th of September, 1934

Professor Ansgar Liebkunst stared out of the portal of the Träumer, Project Mara's bathysphere. Just as his last glance a minute earlier, the water was pitch-black beyond the scope of the searchlight. It had seemed so strong and powerful when tested on the Arminius – the Project's surface support ship – and in shallow dives, but here seemed just a pitiful reminder of how little mankind had progressed when compared to nature.

And even less when compared to the other things that lurked outside of it.

A member of the Party and a firm believer in the necessity of a Germany revitalized and taking its place as leader of Europe he might be, but Liebkunst considered himself a rationalist, a man of science, and a believer in peace. There might be another national struggle but it would be for the end result of a peaceful, orderly Europe.

Even then, a small but growing animal portion of his mined wished for the thousandth time that they were in a proper military submarine. One with torpedoes.

It was ridiculous, of course. Only a bathysphere could reach the depths they needed, and torpedoes would likely be as impotent as a Frenchman against...the target. A reassuringly rational thought that, strangely, did not seem to cheer him up.

Of course, the purpose of this first test dive was not to disturb the target in any way. It was merely to ensure the Träumer could reach the target, and if so, to make preliminary visual studies of the sunken city. No active scanners, no physical contact, no attempts at waking. None of them would fall asleep. According to their plans, the plans he had been chief in forming, the Dreamer would not even stir from its slumber.

That, too, did not reassure Liebkunst as it ought have.

He glanced at the other two occupants of the Träumer. Gustav Stahlschmidt was only a few years younger than he, and even less emotional. A veteran of a number of deep-dives and an engineer who had helped design this bathysphere, he was a bastion of stability in any situation. And then there was Eugen Muhl Ritter von Zeidlich who, while younger by far, had survived all four years of hell in the Great War, and had accompanied Liebkunst – and his dear, gentle Emilia Kristina – on their other expeditions in the earlier programs that had lead up to Project Mara. On land they might have been but there had been no lack of danger and, in some cases, active hostility from locals or targets, on them.

Both men were normally the veritable rocks, pillars of sanity and reason that were impossible to faze.

Both were now just as sweaty – despite the cold of the deep – and jittery as Liebkunst was.

He didn't know whether to be glad he wasn't alone, or to fear for the sanity of them all. They hadn't yet even arrived at the Dreamer's citadel. There, it could only be worse. He could only tell himself – as the others no doubt were – that there was logically little reason to worry, and that this was necessary, for Germany's sake as well as the world's.

Imagine, after all, if a truly dangerous nation was to take possession of this!

The results of the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930-1931 had swept the National Socialist movement by storm. The Thule Society, personal beliefs of ranking Party officials, and the membership of such men as Wilhelm Strasse and Herman Wirth had enabled the Party leadership and official ideology to have a much more enlightened view on matters that, to more close-minded people, would seem esoteric and mystical.

The ancient cities of the Elder Things, deep beneath the Earth's surface, had only gone to prove the hollowed Earth theory correct. Atlantis, the Holy Grail, and other such unexplained anachronisms could easily be explained as relics or interactions by the star-spawn. The fact that they existed at all was proof that the Christian view of creation, and therefore the entire base of the religion, was false. But most important was the fact that the glyphic inscriptions confirmed the passages in the Necronomicon that hinted at the Elder Things creating all life on Earth as jest or mistake, and forming and guiding the evolution of old creations while constantly forming new ones.

Aryans were the supreme race of mankind. Could it not therefore be deduced that the Elder Things and their racial engineering technologies and distant foresight might not have planned for this? Created a perfect race of humans to replace them as the dominant masters of the planet? To have plotted millions of years in advance the ascension of Aryan dominance on the planet?

To Liebkunst, a man of science as much as a proper National Socialist, it was exciting indeed. That alone would have fueled his desire to join the Karotechia occult-science division, one of the earliest and most secretly-formed branches of the SS, once the Nazi government had come into power.

And to think that this was where that trail ended, all these years and thousands of miles around the globe later. South latitude 47° 9', west longitude 126° 43', three hundred - no, three-fifty now - meters below the surface. The ancient city of R'lyeh, built by the slave-spawn of the ancient Dreamer, serving as his citadel in prominence and his tomb when it collapsed beneath the waves, impeding his ability to send his dreams, locking him in an eternal slumber.

The demon of nightmares.

The Mara of Project Mara.

Cthulhu. The Great and Dread Dreamer.

The Träumer shuddered as it came to a stop, its descent ended, the bathysphere near the limit of tolerance for even a device of Stahlschmidt's design. The ocean floor was far beneath, but they did not need to reach it. R'lyeh's immensity surpassed by far any of the crumbled artifices which a humbled humanity had termed wonders of the world. And like any overlord, Cthulhu sat at the highest peak of his city, the great citadel of dreams which had, several years before, even been thrust up beyond the surface of the waves for several weeks by seismic activity.

Then, only a few dozen people had died, unfortunate sailors who had been forced to land at the citadel due to storms, or victims of the cultists who even know continued to worship the Great Dreamer, praying that he would return to life to liberate mankind in a holocaust of freedom and insanity. And merely a hundred or so more - sensitives, psychics who had managed to listen to the weakened nightmares - had been driven to madness.

If the Dread One could be risen, revived properly, controlled if not tamed through the ancient spells of the mad Arab's tome and the fused technology of the Elder Things and National Socialism...Then, the Führer would have the ultimate weapon, the German Reich would become synonymous with the human world, and all but the pure Aryan race would be purged from its surface.

But that was for later. This was just a scouting mission. A test run. Nothing untoward would happen this time, that much was certain. It would be lunacy, anyway, to even think of attempting such a thing before Emilia Kristina returned with the key to controlling Project Mara. Pure madness.

Then Stahlschmidt activated the exterior floodlight, and as Professor Liebkunst looked upon the utterly alien, trans-natural architecture of the city of the demon of nightmares, twisted beyond all ability of human sight or mind to comprehend, madness did not seem so far away any more.

The three men were glued to the small viewport, like moths to a flame, as the light searched out, stabbing into the darkness, highlighting a different malformed, cosmic spire and boulevard with each passing second. Before their eyes - unable to move, as if their static position grew in direct proportion with the terror the simple wrongness of R'lyeh invoked in them - the melted, sunken towers and spires and bridges seemed to blur, as if they grew less distinct, more organic. Responding to their terror, feeding off it - as if it were hungry after a long slumber. As if it were running together, forming a shadowy, immense image; no, not image, but an actual thing, made all the more terrible by the sick realization in all three men that they could not possibly be dreaming.

Even as the shadows formed a four-fingered claw, a claw that grew bigger as it reached to pluck the bathysphere like a nut, cracking it to consume the kernels inside...

* * * * *

In Sacramento, Madame Lee rested her head on her pillow. Life was hard in America, for women and poor and Chinese and one who was all three especially. However, she knew she shouldn't complain. She had it better than most. Her palm-reading and psychics forecasts paid well, for the primary reason that she could actually have them mean something, unlike the other frauds who still managed to rake in cash - not that she was poor in that area, of course. Her friends urged her to try to go for higher clients, of course without any suggestion of just how she was to do it.

Madame Lee fell quickly asleep. Her dreams centered around a storm-swept citadel that rose from the dark ocean. No human lived within it, no human had built it. The stone masonry was twisted, deformed, defying any sort of logical arrangement. In her dream, Madame Lee was wafted closer and closer, up and over the top of the citadel, until finally she could look down, and see what lay inside the protective walls...

She closed her shop the next day. No amount of pay could ever force her to do anything that would bring her close to that again.

* * * * *

In London, the Grand Magus of the Order of Ancient Mysteries went to sleep. He dreamed of a tentacles beast, of pure malevolence unleashed, of a nightmare that would never end and would consume all of the world, burning and freeing mankind.

He did not wake, not the next morning or even again.

* * * * *

In Arkham, Randolph Carter stirred in his sleep, his dream-quest continuing for yet another unbroken night. The gates of Celephaïs were before him. He had been through so much, already. Zoogs and moonbeasts and the Enchanted Forest. Celephaïs was a port town and his friend the king. Perhaps he would be able to find passage here. Perhaps he could soon find his sunset city.

As he looked on, however, Carter saw the sun grow dark, a shadow fall over Celephaïs. Trees withered and died as it passed beneath them, animals went berserk. But the worst...the worst were the travelers going too and from him on the road. As the shadow passed overhead, a strange and deep and decidedly dangerous incantation being repeated, the merchants and traders fell to their knees, some convulsing, some tearing at their own skin, some stabbing each other with their dirks. But that was not the worst part, either.

The worst part was that they all smiled and laughed as they did so.

* * * * *

In a train between Hartford and Arkham, Susannah Nourse screamed as something dark invaded her dreams. Forced itself on her. Into her. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

It had begun. It was too late, too late, too late...

* * * * *

In Innsmouth, Zecharias Marsh led his congregation in shouting for joy. The time of redemption had begun.

* * * * *

And in a castle that existed only in a realm beyond reality, the local lord sat in his chambers, looking out over his demesne. A tall, pale man clad in a bone helm and dark raiments, he watched in anger as a sudden ripple of disturbance spread throughout his kingdom. The Dreaming was being poisoned. A few individuals only, at least for now, but he would not sit idly by. Not again. Standing, the lord left his throneroom to the gallery.

Perhaps Death and Destiny could offer an insight.

* * * * *

Kapitän Jürgen Beier of the Arminius watched as the electric winch finished raising the Träumer out of water. It had been four hours since any sort of communication had been heard from its occupants, just after they had reached the target depth and just before a minor ripple - perhaps the remnant of a distant tsunami - had passed beneath the ship. They had raised the sphere as fast as possible, but with decompression and structural limits, it had taken far too long for his liking. He reported to Himmler. If his prized scientists died on his watch...

"Get up there! Open it, hurry!" Beier yelled to a group of sailors nearby, with the ship's doctor standing at attention just off to the side with his equipment. The men hurried to get the access scaffolding in place, but before they could, the top hatch of the Träumer started to turn, finally opening, a ragged brown mass emerging only to fall to the deck.

"Mein Gott in Himmel!" Beier muttered. That ragged, brown mass was Professor Liebkunst. His clothes were soaked, by sweat or seawater he couldn't tell; his mouth moving, over and over again; his hair ragged, even sparser than usual, deep red lines in his face as if he had been clawing at himself. With a sickening feeling, Beier realized that he had been tearing out clumps of his hair.

The ship's doctor moved towards him, reaching out, but Liebkunst shoved him away, stumbling to the deck once more before rising. Beier was now close enough to hear what the man was saying.

"Not dead, only dreaming. Not dead, only dreaming. Not dead, only dreaming..."

"Professor Liebkunst!" Beier reached out, holding the older, skinnier man firmly by the shoulders as he tried to twist and evade, but Beier was back to his command mindset, and would not allow one of his subordinates to act in such a manner. Shaking the man to rouse him, he asked, "Professor Liebkunst, what happened? Were you successful? What did you see?"

The old man's mouthing trailed off, his sunken eyes slowly looking up at Beier's, as if a thick mist separated them. "Successful?" he finally wheezed. "See? What did I see?" Liebkunst shuddered. "All possible outcomes. All potential endings. Contemplated...contemplated them all." His eyes looked back up to Beier's.

"I saw all my dreams, and all my nightmares."

With that, he suddenly went limp, collapsing into Beier's arms.

"Kapitän!" one of the sailors had yelled from the top of the bathysphere, the access scaffolding having finally been wheeled up to it. "Kapitän! You need to see this!" The sailor's voice had an edge of desperation in it. Handing the unconscious (dead?) body of Liebkunst off to the doctor, Beier climbed the scaffolding.

“Yes? What…” he asked, his voice trailing off as he looked down the open hatch of the Träumer, into its small pressure sphere.

Liebkunst, Stahlschmidt, and von Zeidlich had gone in the bathysphere, eight hours before.

Liebkunst had just emerged.

And the other two had vanished.

 

[magbeam]

Phillips Hall, Miskatonic University
Arkham, Massachusetts
1st of October, 1934

"This is Dark Adventure Radio Theatre, and you have been listening to 'The Forbidden Gateway: A Nate Ward Adventure.' I'm Chester Langfield, reminding you that if you prefer soft tobacco, then you need look no further than Fleur-de-Lis cigaret-"

Wilmot Nourse turned off the wireless set in his dorm room. Worldwide Wireless News was next, and while Wilmot was fully aware of the social and intellectual responsibilities of being aware of current affairs, he just could not stand the voice of the announcer, Nathan Reed. Besides, he had wasted enough time as it was on listening to Dark Adventure, his guilty pleasure. It already seemed that half the day had gone by. This assignment would not do itself.

Wilmot returned his attention to his desk, and the book that was opened to one side of it, his own notes to the other. It was a rare copy of a singular original, a diary written by an Englishman named John Smith, who had disappeared - vanished off the surface of the Earth for all the traces he left behind as to his whereabouts - just before the outbreak of the Great War. Appropriately enough given the content, it was entitled A Journal of Impossible Things. The things inside it...Magic boxes, mechanical men, shifting visages, tank-like things with cephalopodal occupants.

It was the latter drawings and their descriptions that intrigued Wilmot and had caused him to study the book, largely unknown and extremely new in comparison to his usual texts. At first - an avid reader of scientific romances and pulps that he was - Wilmot had thought that Mr. Smith had been influenced by the physical descriptions of the Martians, and the mobile perches upon their fierce Fighting Machines, from The War of the Worlds. It was only the next night, while dreaming, that Wilmot realized the similarity between the tank-occupants of the Journal and the descriptions of certain Cosmic Entities as given by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, in his Necronomicon. The fact that this Mr. John Smith had had his inspiration come to him in dreams - the known province of the star-spawn and the elder deity they served - only intrigued Wilmot more, and had cemented his desire to study it. On his own time for now, but perhaps he could write a paper on it given time. He would have to talk about that to Professor Delapore when he returned from his sabbatical...

He had been at work for several hours before he heard a knock at the door. "Henri?" Wilmot asked, assuming it was his roommate who had had to return to his native New Orleans for family reasons over the weekend. "Back so soon? And lost your key?"

Wilmot had already begun to stand when he heard the reply that accelerated his haste to the door. "If you had any connection to the family blood, Big Brother, you'd already know," a feminine voice, slightly muffled, retorted through the door that Wilmot immediately flung open to reveal his sister.

"Susannah!" He pulled her into an embrace which she returned. "What in heaven's name are you doing here? Why didn't you telegraph ahead?" He pulled away from her, noticing even in the dimming light that her physique looked even paler and thinner than its usual lifestyle of library reading and nocturnal jaunts left it.

"You look horrible, Little Sis. Come in, come in out of that hallway. I'll get you something to drink. Rest and tell me all about it." It would be best to get her out of the hallway as soon as possible, anyways. Miskatonic's faculty and student bodies were all male. Having a woman on campus - like that blonde European he had heard about a few days ago; double damn that he had missed her - caused enough of a sensation, and having his fellow residentials seeing one entering his room...Well, Wilmot certainly did not need those sorts prying around him with nosy inquiries.

Susannah gratefully laid her travel bag - overly large compared to her stature - on her brother's bed, as Wilmot turned on the new electric hotplate, filling a kettle with hopefully not-too-brackish water and setting it on. Susannah, meanwhile, instead of succumbing to her first wishes - no one could accuse her of being weak-willed - stepped over to look at the work on her brother's desk, having caught a glimpse of it and with curiosity doing the rest. As she looked over the Journal's illustrations and his notes, she shuddered, quite clearly coming to the same conclusions as he.

"You don't think..." she began to ask, seeming even more disturbed by the family taboo than he could ever remember.

"I don't know, Susannah." Wilmot, usually more than content to let his youngest sister speak her intelligible mind, cut her off, seeing the effect it clearly had on her. "This was before the...last time the Dreamer awoke, a decade back. This journal was written before the Great War. Surely to a sensitive there would be much darkness on the horizon." His voice became somewhat sad. "Even you should remember how it affected Mother."

"I'm sure that was the least of her worries at the time," Susannah answered, voice tinny and distant. Closing her brother's research, she sat down on his bed, next to her bag. "But I didn't come here to talk about Mother or your studies, although this topic has been uncomfortably close."

"Oh?" Wilmot asked, pulling his chair out from the desk and positioning it the opposite direction, so he could face her as he sat. Susannah was wringing her hands in her lap, biting her lower lip, before she spoke.

"Wilmot, something dark is coming. I felt something. A few days ago, the work of a sensitive, an enemy. I, I consulted with the Opener of the Way." Her lower lip broke free of her teeth, trembling at the memory of the raw sacrifice to the One-in-All and All-in-One. Ignoring his knowing and shocked gaze, Susannah continued.

"He showed me such things as you could not believe. It was then that I knew I had to hurry up here to you. It took somewhat longer than I had hoped, you know it can be. I would have sent a message except I got so swept up, and...well, I didn't know who could be listening." These days, it wasn't just the devotees and cultists to the Cosmic Entities, be they the Dreamer or the Great Race or the Fungi from Yuggoth; even the government might be listening in for topics such as these, as unbelievably and flagrantly illegal it might seem.

"And last night, on the train, in the middle of the night..." This time she actually did shudder. "I...I heard His call."

"'His'...?" Wilmot asked, his own blood running cold. He had never doubted his family histories, and had wondered if his broadened education away from home might dilute those beliefs; and perhaps they would at any other institute, but not Miskatonic.

"You know of whom I speak, Wilmot," Susannah answered miserably. "The Dread One. Someone had stirred Him from His eternal slumber." She looked up suddenly, fear and intensity, a desire to be believed if not comforted, in her eyes. "It was the call of Cthulhu, Wilmot. I heard it as clearly as I can hear you now, if only for a moment. He's not awakened yet, but he's beginning to. Someone...someone did something they shouldn't have. Now it might be too late, too late for us all..."

Her eyes wandered off to match her voice's trailing, as if both were leaving the present reality for a more transient and beyond world, only for Susannah to seem as if she had returned, had forced herself back. "Are you sure you didn't feel anything, Big Brother?" she asked with a certainly levity and air of joking scorn, quite clearly trying to buoy her spirits from the terrifying words she had just said.

"I'm afraid not, Susannah, but then again you already knew that would be the answer," Wilmot said, moving from his chair to sit next to her on the bed, letting her rest her head on his shoulder. Among the Nourse family, the talents - the real talents, ego-brushing to the side - seemed to be passed on through matrilineal succession, and almost always only manifested itself in the family's womenfolk. Sure, most of the men seemed to be talented in mental faculties as far as the basics went, and a very few women - their sister Abby a prime example - failed to develop any talents at all. But those were the exceptions by far.

Susannah left her head on his shoulder quietly for some time. When she did speak, it was what Wilmot was half-expecting.

"It may be too late already, but I can't sit around and wait for the end of the world. I aim to do something about it." She lifted her head to stare at him, almost accusatorily, daring him to make a smart remark. "One person can make a difference, Wilmot, even in circumstances like these. I believe it. Our family history shows that. Even your university's history, what they try to hide, shows it. And even if I am wasting my time ultimately, it will give me something to do. Other than brood in a stuffy house full of ghosts."

Wilmot smiled. "Still the same fiery little Susannah I remember. Pity to the man who ends up fancying you. You're right, Little Sis. If anyone can stop it, you can. I wish you the best of luck."

"You can forget wishing me anything, Wilmot." She was now poking a firm finger into his chest. "You see, you're coming with me."

Wilmot stared at her for a second, mouth open, before laughing. "You're joking. Me? You have to be joking. Oh God, you're not joking," he suddenly realized, his laughter dying as the sight of her stony face sunk in. "Why me?"

"Why not?" Susannah shot back. "Listen, Wilmot, you may not have the family gift, but you're smarter than I ever could be, you know more about this stuff than me and you remember it better. That could be a lifesaver. I won't need to explain to you what we're going up against, waste time for me or their safety beating it in. Plus you're part of the family and I don't really know anyone else. Especially anyone else I can take this to."

The Nourses were traditionally independent and aloof of the surrounding opinion of them held by the local community, and Susannah was never an exception - in fact, Wilmot had often thought her on the extreme side of the enjoyment of isolation. Now, however, he could swear that he heard a note of sadness, even loneliness in her voice - even a desperation that seemed rather independent of the unknowable cosmic hardships they would be facing soon enough.

Sighing, Wilmot nodded. "I am going to regret this, but I suppose I can arrange a few days off-"

Susannah's arms were around his neck, hugging him almost tight enough to cut off his circulation. "I knew you wouldn't let me down, Big Brother!" she squealed, for the first time since she arrived acting like the little sister he remembered. "Get your bags packed, we don't have a moment to spare!"

"Pack my bags?" Wilmot asked, as Susannah left his bed to rifle through his drawers, apparently intent on doing it for him - less a sign of her feminine domesticity than her impatience in what would no doubt be her older brother's marked inertia.

"That's right, Wilmot. We're going on a trip. You're going to want to take something dressy with you, too. You're going to want to impress our sister and her husband." She paused what she was doing, hands wrist-deep in his sock drawer, to turn to look back at him, all humor gone from her face.

"We need to go to Innsmouth."