Arkham, Massachusetts: Nightboat to Cairo!

I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey. It seemed a rather ordinary trip when Dr. "Mackie" MacKenzie, Mr. Jules Pollack, Ms. Moira Baker and Mr. Henry Chester, four young, ordinary, reasonably sane paranormal investigators, left Arkham that early June morning, to find the whereabouts of a professor Artburthnot MacKenzie, the ex-tutor and father of Ms. MacKenzie. It is true, there were dark storm clouds, heavy, black and pendulous towards which they were travelling. It's true, also, that the equipment they carried was somewhat outdated, but they being normal paranormal investigators and on an important mission… well, they were not going to let a storm spoil the events of their journey, were they? On a trip to Egypt….it was a trip they were going to remember...for a very long time.

Professor MacKenzie was indeed lost together with professor Marston-Hyde, despite contradictory telegrams and letters. As soon as the paranormal investigators descended upon Cairo, strange things started happening. Moira Baker was almost smothered in her hotel room by an unknown assailant, only to be saved by the outstanding marksmanship of Jules Pollack. Strange individuals associated with the Fellowship of the Black Sun seemed to be keeping track of the investigators, and after securing the assistance of professor MacKenzie's old friend Mustafa al-Bakr, they all proceeded to the excavation site.

The German, Herr Mattias Brenner, was initially suspected of having had something to do with the disappearance, but alas, no. He was simply running an excavation, and together they figured out approximately where professors MacKenzie and Marston-Hyde had ventured. As it turned out, there was indeed a remote oasis way out to the west of Sohag.

The horrors encountered in the oasis defy description, and the investigators were quite reluctant to describe the true nature of the abominations they encountered. Mackie MacKenzie stared out into some unfathomable inner abyss, Jules Pollack emptied his hip flask in one gulp while Moira Baker simply wept in complete silence. Only Henry Chester provided hints of gunfights against unnatural creatures followed by an encounter with an insane or even possessed Marston-Hyde and an immobilized professor MacKenzie. Chester claims that the meeting led what can only be assumed to be a strange, possibly drug-induced, excursion into a desert, if one disregards Chesters mumbled account of intra-dimensional travel to hinder a cosmic horror named "Iogsattoth" from acquiring a "Demon Orb" that would devastate our world. Whatever happened in the far, far reaches of the desert claimed the lives of both professors, and the investigators did display some very weird injuries.

The story is more than a little odd, and it gives me a dark sense of foreboding. What really delves out in space or in the depths of Earth's unknown corners? After all, crawling on the planet's face, some insects called the human race, lost in time, and lost in space, and meaning.