Upon our return to the office from the Tresk/Arab affair, we found an invitation in the mail to a lecture and gathering at the Gotham Legion Hall of Anthony Fava, a good friend of Will’s, who is a member of Fava’s Hall. Fava had recently returned from Italy and had a lecture to give concerning his trip. The Legion is a very liberal social club focusing on total egalitarianism, fancying itself a ‘secret society’ like the Freemasons, and the tenants of which include the ignoring of social strata in relating to your fellow man. Fava is a nut, as they say, for ancient Rome, and sees their ideals of Roman citizenship for all under the empire as one to emulate in today’s society by way of people of all social, monetary, cultural and racial ranks treating one another as equals. A fine ideal indeed.

Fava runs an import/export business and founded the Legion some 20 years ago. Will says he is “a bit weird but a wonderfully nice man. Though he truly believes the Roman Empire to be grander and greater than both the British Empire and America.” Will explained none of the Legion take the Roman element seriously like Fava, and some not even the egalitarianism outside of the club. They find it quaint and a fun change to interact with lower classes as equals a couple times a month, but most do no such thing in their day to day lives. The lower classes do also enjoy the chance to be on the same level as the rich and powerful, at least for a night here and there. This is all evident in how hall is sparce when he is away, but bustling when he is present.

The upper crust of society tend to dislike Fava for his egalitarian ways, but those who knw him tend to love him. He has a long family history in the area since the Revolutionary War, with a long line of medal-winning family members in the military since. His father was a NYC police commissioner, known for his kindness and for protecting the rights of immigrants. Our entire investigative team joined Will, and it became interesting upon our very first step through the door.

At 6:30 we arrived, the lecture scheduled for eight o’clock. This night would yield a number of surprises and thrust us into a mess of cults and old gods. We were first greeted by one… He is a potent example of those using the Hall simply to be seen, and believes none of the tenants set forth by Fava. Even at the hall he looked down his nose at Theolonius and Jack, wanting only to talk to Will, myself and Atwater. Will took the opportunity to get into his good graces in case it would prove useful later.
Jack, John and Theo went for the library and spoke to several of the serving men including the head named McGillicudy, and it was evident throughout their conversations that they all looked up to Fava like a guru and believe strongly in the Legion.
While in the gathering room, we spotted Cassandra Hargrave across the room. Will immediately made his way toward her, and upon his return said he had an appointment for lunch with her in the next few days. He will have to be watched carefully, but perhaps he can uncover something. I worry, though, that Will is smitten with the lady, and is incapable of thinking properly when it comes to her. We shall see.
The Lecture

Fava spoke of being at an archeological dig in Italy, that of an old Christian church from centuries ago, actually a series of churches built on top of one another. Within it was found evidence of an even older temple preceding the first church, and an ancient well far older than the church itself. In this well, a book was discovered, which Fava was able to procure, written in a Latin shorthand. It was authored by Flavius Rusticus, as Fava explained, an ancient author well respected by his contemporaries, but with no known texts extant. A truly great discovery this should be. The book seemed to be a hisory of the reign of the emperor Nero, but had much to do with cults and secret societies which he was supposedly the head of, strange gods worshipped by him and his followers and speaks of magic being a real phenomenon. I looked to my right, and saw Theolonius and Father John looking at each other with grave faces. This, I thought, did not sound like something Fava should be talking about in public. My suspicion of his foolhardiness became absolute fact in the next few seconds, as Fava told a harrowing account of what followed. He made an appointment to meet with an historian friend to give him the book, for it was written as if by a mad man, making it very difficult to grasp. Beforehand, Fava made a copy of the book for himself. He had several sessions with the historian as they tried to decipher the meanings of the book, until his friend was found murdered and the book missing. Fava, by means of his business, quickly got out of Italy under an assumed name. Yet here he was, speaking of it at a public gathering for all to hear, also announcing that the book was in the library adjacent to this very room. The fool! Father John left upon this remark, heading for the library and the book.
As Fava was wrapping up his talk, I was nudged by Jack and saw Theolonius making his way to the front with intent. Jack pointed out 4 men, Italian looking, glaring sternly at Fava as he spoke at the podium, and making their way toward the front. I alerted Atwater and Will and we all began moving toward them. Atwater soon noticed two of them fingering knives under their jackets, and we knew a battle was about to take place for Fava’s life.
When Fave finished, he stepped down and we were the first to him. One of the Italians began to make his move, and I stepped immediately between Fava and the dirty assassin. A general battle then broke out between ourselves and the assassins, with us proving victorious with aid from Fava himself who joined the battle with a flagpole as a weapon! Brave and foolhardy, this Fava is.
We then heard a scuffle in the library, and Theolonius and Jack made haste. There they found Father John battling 3 more Italians and the book, in a glass case, looking like it had just been burning, though briefly. They dispatched the remaining attackers and got the book, Father John hiding it within his robes.
With the police coming soon, we found one attacker alive. Questioning him was difficult, as he spat gibberish like we are finding insane cultists typically do, but we did get some useful information. He is from the Cult of the Sleeping Spear, who believes “…once again Rome will rule the world”. They worship a being called Great Cthugha, husnand of Isis. The grandfather of their cult, he admits, was Nero himself.
The police appeared and the Captain not only took the Italian into custody, but tried to arrest us as well. Thankfully, Commissioner Roosevelt appeared and was immediately on our side. “Bully” he said, “what fine citizens we are”, and quickly dismissed the Captain to transport the Italian to holding. We told him of the attack on Fava, the murder of his friend in Italy over an ancient artifact, but left out that a copy was here and that they seemed to be members of an ancient cult.
After everyone else was gone, we met with Fava and explained of our own experiences with evil books, and that he should keep it safe and leave it alone. He agreed, and we departed.

This morning, Will and Theolonius were dispathed to the usual spots to research the book, Nero and the Sleeping Spear, while Father John perused the Necronomicon. They all met us for a late lunch and relayed what had been discovered. Other than the known information on Nero (at least to the educated man), like the burning of Rome, he may have sent an expedition up the Nile to discover its source. One which never returned, reminding Atwater and I of the Carlyle Expedition from some time back. Nothing was found concerning Flavius Rusticus at some point going insane, indeed he was well respected and used as a sourced by many later ancient authors. Theolonius could some good infomation on the Sleeping Spear: that it was rumored to have been in Rome since before Christ; it’s temples were destroyed when Christianity became the official religion; it supposedly had something to with fire but failed to contact some sort of god which they worshipped. Father John, in his readings of the Necronomicon, found that Cthugha is a Great Old One, a "being of pure fire, like the heart of a star. Theolonius also recalled the name from Monsters and their Kind, which describes a servitor race of Great Cthugha called Fire Vampires, beings of pure fire “who dwell off in the heavens”. The connection is obvious. Father John says his bishop recommended the Theosophical Society for further assistance.
We went to their headquartes just before dinner and spoke to their head, Annie Bassat. Her greatest interests lie in India and mysticism, and believes it the birthplace of modern civilization. At the mention of spellcasting during the Fava attack, her interest perked up significantly. She did not know much of the Sleeping Spears, to our dismay, but she did mention rumors she had heard of a cult in harlem, the cult of a being named Nyarlethotep. He, or it, is worshipped the world over, she explained, but in many guises. Each of his cults may see him very differently. Some believe him to be Satan himself, others much worse. He is known as the Gatekeeper, but what and where the Gate is none can say. She recommends we speak to the establishments lawyer, William Judge. We explain to him what has been going on, and he insists we undoubtedly encountered Atlantians, the 4th root race. The magic they used against Fava, he says, was Atlantian magic from 850,000 years ago. (This certainly does not mean they were such, for couldn’t this magic have been simply found or transferred down through the ages?) They now exist in the inner world, the hollow center of our Earth! Only a year ago I would have insisted the man be committed, yet with all we now know and have seen with our own eyes, who could claim anything is impossible.
Our fair city is a hotbed of despicable activity, a fact apparent to us all now. We have much to investigate, starting tomorrow.

The arabs did not show at the ship launch. Friday tells us that upon the police checking on train departures, 2 tickets were purchased by arabs and departed in the afternoon heading west. We have lost them.

I awoke with my coffee this morning to some news in the paper of interest to us, and not long after good ol’ Joe came calling at my office door in connection with the event. There had been a bloody affair in the tenaments of the East Side yesterday, with several arab looking men and another large man killed. Friday informed me that the other body was identified as Tresk, Nathaniel Bishop’s missing Butler, with six dead arabs, all seemingly armed for the fight that took place. The tenament belonged to the arab men, and Friday suggested we check it out. During the conversation, that dependable Atwater arrived. We gathered our remaining companions and headed over briskly, not hastily, for the heat is getting quite worse than usual for New York, a full fledged drought is striking the city with force.
Upon arrival, we saw that the police had all the locals held in a courtyard as witnesses and were questioning them. We proceeded to the stairs leading to the upper story apartment, and quickly came across the first dead body. An arab man, almost beheaded as if his head were twisted by sheer brute force, lie on the staircase, and a trail of blood leading up. In the room past the splintered open front door lie the deceased Tresk, practically chopped to bits by the knives and curved swords, scimitars as they call them, of the arabs. Six of them lie dead surrounding him, bludgeoned to death. From the accoutraments in the room and witness testimony, the police had correctly surmised that at least two other arabs not present had lived here. One arab was had a passport ID on him, and upon following that lead they had discovered that on 22 June, he and 10 others had arrived from the port of Said in Alexandria, Egypt. At this point I began my investigation of the room. Will, Atwater and Father John began questioning witnesses outside. The witnesses, as it turned out, gave quite accurate accounts as they matched up with what all the evidence showed.

• An Irish family next door said the arabs only ever seemed to go out at night. They felt the arabs were strange folks, and scary at that. The children, on a few nights, had been hiding around the corner when the arabs came home late at night, blood stained at least twice and once with “funny lookin’ pots, and definately blood on their clothes that night”. They had also rarely been out since. This must have been the night the canopic jars were stolen from Hargrave’s room and she was murdered, by the arabs. At least half would be home at all times from that point, as if they were guarding something. Again, the jars. Others would go out in disguise. One night, one of the boys, a quite intrepid and foolhardy youth I must say, hitched a ride on the back of their cab, taking him uptown. It stopped on a side street and waited. When some other men came out of a house the cab followed. From the route he described, it was us they were following during our Hargrave investigation.
• Another neighbor confirmed seeing Tresk come to the bottom of the stairs. An arab, apparently keeping watch, ran up the stairs upon seeing him. Tresk caught him and practically tore his head off with his bare hands! Obviously, this Tresk was some creature created or human enhanced by Bishop’s dark alchemy, as we had suspected. Another arab on the deck saw this and fled into the room, slamming the door behind him. Tresk busted in easily, there was a minute of violent noise, and then silence, followed by two arabs escaped out a window with the jars.

Back in the room I discovered, buried deep in a pile of garbage, an itinerary for the docks with one entry circled, a steamship headed for Egypt in two days.

We, and the police, will be waiting.

The Case of the Hargrave Murder
We were having tea on the afternoon of 12 July, 1889, that is I and my old friend Atwater, when we were visited by one Harry Hargrave, brother of the recently deceased Jennifer Hargrave, whose murder I had just seen in the paper the day before and which had already piqued my interest in conjunction with several other recent murders. Indeed, I was going to bring the subject to Atwater’s attention that very afternoon and ask for his assistance in my own investigation of the matter. For I have not been able to shake from my mind the surprising and eye opening events concerning the Egyptian Scarab Amulet, the same events where I first met one Jack Burton of the Porkchop Express packing and delivery services, and Sir Dr. Rick Rathbone, famous British archaeologist and adventurer. I can only gravely assume that if one instance of the supernatural exists there must certainly be many others of which I am not aware and which must have even happened in this very city of New York right under my nose. How can a man such as I ignore such facts once brought to attention?
The man Hargrave asked if I would look into his sister’s unfortunate passing, as the police had given the situation barely a once over. I wasn’t surprised at this, seeing as I knew Captain Bosworth was heading the investigation. I agreed of course, and the case began. He said his sister had palled around with a Cassandra Bishop who was into high society parties and drug use. This Cassandra had recently been in Egypt and was given 5 canopic jars by an archaeologist named Galloway. Why she gave Hargrave the jars, he could not say.
Our first order of business was to see Sgt. Friday at the precinct, with whose help we saw the case file, if one could call it that. I did, however, glean some interesting tidbits. Interrupted by that insufferable Captain, we were not so politely asked to leave. Before doing so, we had still to see the body of the girl and examine the evidence from the scene. Good old Cpl. Harold showed us the evidence which I then examined, and Friday took us to the morgue where Atwater examined the truly grisly remains. The girl had been essentially ripped to pieces, all valuables from her person missing, with a pair of earrings obviously torn from her ears during the attack. She was also certainly a cocaine user. The bites on the body were made by razor sharp teeth, larger than a man’s, and the slashes by sharp instruments in parallel lines of 4, as if by claws, or by one wishing it to look as such.
Outside the station we had ran into Will McNamara, who joined in our investigation. He being on sabbatical from writing duties to perform some independent investigations of his own along the same vein as ours was sizing up to be. With the evidence pointing toward something more sinister and more in line with the scarab case than a serial killer, Theolonius Wang and his brave but verbose sidekick Jack were enlisted to assist our investigation, as well as Preacher John J. Johnson, known by us to have an interest in the ungodly.
The next few days of investigation and research brought to light both dark information and dangerous foes: Not much was gotten from Cassandra herself in a conversation Will had with her at a high society party; She brought the canopic jars and other artifacts back from Egypt personally, having received them from an archaeologist named Galloway working in Egypt (his work this season is at Memphis); Myself, Will and Atwater encountered and killed what is known as a ghoul in the subway tunnel where Mrs. Francis Edwards was attacked previously. However, upon inspection it did not fit the description of what attacked the poor woman; On another night, Theolonius, Father John and Jack were accosted by as many as 5 of the creatures as they cased the cemetery and were forced to retreat; we discovered the horrifying story of the Bishop family’s history with the unnatural, dating back to the Arkam witch trials and Agatha Bishop 200 years ago, and their connection through Agatha with a being known as Nyogtha, a union which is the origin of the degenerative curse that afflicts the male Bishops; that the Bishops seem to worship this Nyogtha being as it were; that canopic jars given to the late Hargrave by Bishop’s sister were now missing from her apartment; and that Bishop was more than dabbling into unspeakable acts of grave desecration, animating and associating with the dead as well as his undead minions being responsible for the local murders, including that of Ms. Hargrave.
In our search of the grounds while Father John entertained Nathaniel Bishop, we found many facts of his horrific behavior and experiments: combating 2 zombie like creatures in the mortuary and finding a ‘sleeping’ pale-skinned man which was the true attacker of Mrs. Edwards; Bishop’s interest in things Egyptian by way of artifacts from the country in his house, an interest that Cassandra told Will he did not have; all graves in the mausoleums are empty, the bodies extracted from the back by ghouls that burrowed from underneath the cemetery; the business is financially broke, kept up only by valuables stolen from crypts and murder victims; 2 passages via rung ladder heading down into the old sewer lines; Iron doors in Bishop House leading to old sewer lines. We left that pale creature to be apprehended during the police raid we planned for the next day. After raiding the cemetery with the police the morning after, where Friday and his men showed courage beyond the call of such duty, and where the Captain ran with urine filled pants, we came into the possession of Bishop’s journal as well as 2 forbidden tomes of things dark and maddening. Theolonius and Father John have identified them and plan to study them in depth even at the risk of their sanity, for the villainy we now have come to deal with, and which I feel in my soul will become our great pursuit for a long time to come, is more that of madness than of evil as most folk would think of it. In the basement we found a ritual and summoning room with arcane symbology, and a room full of morbid and vile paintings by an R. Uptan Pickman. All evidence of dark activity in each room is to be destroyed. Unfortunately, the sleeping pale creature from the night before was not found in its secret resting place. We did not recover the canopic jars.
Bishop detained, we made our way into the sewers to attack the lair of Bishop’s ghouls, accompanied by Lt. Bauer, Friday and 6 of the officers who had showed bravery the day before. After coming face to face with 2 new and unexpected opponents, humanoid fish creatures Theolonius calls Deep Ones, and rescuing a young girl from their clutches, we proceeded to discover the entrance to the old sewer lines where the ghouls laired. After combating more of Bishop’s zombies like those we fought to the death in his mortuary, we rescued a room full of unfortunate souls: Men and pregnant women driven at least somewhat mad from their experiences. Only time will tell if any of their fragile psyches are recoverable, even worse what sort of spawn the women bear. Finally, after sending for reinforcements which came led by the Cpt., we attacked the 2 main rooms of ghouls, coming out victorious and with casualties less than we had anticipated. We were forced to allow the creature that was, in life, Elizabeth Bishop to escape in return for the lives of 6 infant humans which may now be returned to their families once they are found. One mightily built ghoul also escaped through one of 2 so called gates, which are magical portals capable of taking one who steps through them great distances. Where they go, as well as the pillar of ice, we dare not explore, and they will be bricked up as soon as possible and their passages filled with cement. Additionally, the pale-skinned cannibal corpse from the secret cave under the coffin in the mortuary was never found and is still at large. As are several ghouls who refused to work with Bishop and lived as they put it, ‘free ‘.
We must assume Cassandra may be in danger from the pale skinned cannibal corpse, and from Bishop himself as he was missing from his cell upon our return. It seems now that she was estranged after refusing to go through the mating ritual with a ghoul or Nyogtha itself just as the other Bishop matrons have done, but that is still conjecture at least until I am informed of the results of her interview. If so, Cassandra’s knowledge and experiences within her own family may be what have driven her to drinking and drug use. She too, observed by Will the night of the party, is a heavy user of cocaine.
Note: the pregnant women rescued must be watched closely, and their pregnancies handled by someone other than medical or asylum doctors. They need not know of the unspeakable atrocities the wretched souls likely carry inside them.
I give now a summary of my brave allies in this endeavor. I am unimaginably lucky to have such a group presently at my side through such harrowing experiences, against villains which I would have been powerless to stop on my own. I take solace in knowing thanks to said Dr. Rathbone that there must be others in this world of ours fighting against the same horrors as we. That, though the enemies we face are blasphemous and powerful and intelligent, we six are not alone.
John Atwater: My best friend, a former military man, a medical doctor of great skill, and utterly trustworthy. His combat skill, medical ability and camaraderie will of course be invaluable.
Jack Burton: a blowhard and sometimes overconfident buffoon, he is nonetheless as brave in the face of danger as anyone I have known and has a knack for survival. His porter business will allow him to be inconspicuous in many places.
Will McNamera: reporter for the paper, exhaustive research talent and glib tongue for gathering information. Though willing to follow us anywhere as evidenced by this case, he is a fragile one, and should spend most his time using his true skills to our benefit.
Preacher John J. Johnson: Jesuit of the church, willing to actually delve into the maddening texts we recover to discover ways to defeat the great enemies I fear we will continue to confront in dangerous times ahead.
Theolonius Wang: Kung Fu master and wise man, superb linguist, and along with the Father willing to study vile tomes for invaluable information on the madness we face.
Loose ends:
- ‘free’ ghouls still on the loose
Elizabeth Bishop where did she flee to?
- at least one pale skinned cannibal corpse loose
- where are the canopic jars and why were they important? Is Penhue important?
- Lurch is missing
- Research R. Uptan Pickman thouroughly.
-Why murder the Hargrave girl at all? If a cult wanted the jars, they didn’t need to kill her in the streets to get them. It’s not like she was home when they broke in or walked in on the burglary.
-once NY gets Explorer’s info, double check Bishop family tree for a cousin named Nathan and try to dig up a picture of him.