Arkham, Massachusetts: The MacNamara Expedition, part 1.

From the diary of Howard Lake:

The Explorer Club. Again at the Explorer Club. We met once more with Arthur Bentley III, the elderly Walther Prendergast (who this time did not go on about "Remember the Maine"), Johanna Scarborough, Anscomb Blakely and, of course, professor Henry Armitage from Miskatonic U. There were also two gentlemen present whose looks seemed to betray less of an academic background. They introduced themselves as Special Agents Smith and Jones. One of them had an entirely scarified right hand. It may have been Smith. Or Jones. It did turn out that they were exceptionally well read, despite their appearances.

Special Agents Smith and Jones.

Regardless, Professor Armitage was very excited. He showed Mackie a photograph of an old Egyptian stela. Mackie pulled out a magnifying glass and read the hieroglyphs:

"Let one remember Samontuweser! He says: "I was director of the hall, steward, overseer of services in the property of Montu, the one who invested with their authority the officials of the palace of the prince by anointing them, being a man who cares for his city. I owned beautiful artificial lakes and tall sycamore trees. I was one who founded a vast estate in his city and excavated his tomb in its cliffs. I established a water supply for my city, I ferried its inhabitants across in my boat. I was a wise man in ruling my subordinates until the day will come when I shall be blessed. I handed this on to my son in my will."

Mackie scowled at the photograph. "Pretty ordinary stuff. Who doesn't do great things on a regular basis?" Mackie was clearly not impressed. Armitage, on the other hand. looked smug. "Well, that may be the case, but what if I told you that the stela was found deep in the jungle on the border between Mexico and Guatemala?" The room became quiet, with the exception of Moira grasping her pearls. Armitage continued: "The Leighton-Shaw Expedition set out more than six months ago, and they were really just doing a very basic survey of some, well, less interesting pre-Columbian sites. But something must have happened on their way back. This photograph was mailed from Kingston, Jamaica more than a month ago by Johnny Gale, a graduate student that accompanied Leighton and Smith. As for these three gentlemen, they seem to have vanished into thin air." At this point, the special agents intervened: "You see, that is why we are here. A journalist by the name of Johnny Schwartz has been investigating this unique find as well as other oddities at the Miskatonic University together with an individual that may be named Arkady Zimin. Professor Armitage contacted us, and we believe that Mr. Schwartz real name may be Janis Sarts, a Soviet citizen of Latvian heritage working for the OGPU, that is the Cheka. Sarts worked for Trotsky before Trotsky fell from grace, but Stalin decided to keep Sarts, mainly for his particular and brutal efficiency around Leningrad and Kronshtadt. Sarts has also displayed keen interest in strange religious matters, and he is believed to be employed by an organization known as Proletkult, which is a special organization devoted to liberating the Proletariat spiritually and culturally from the bourgeois past. The occult tenet that the individual is a microcosm of the macrocosm and traditional Orthodox injunctions against self-will and to aestheticize rather than oppose the Bolshevik suppression of the individual. Proletkult (Proletarnyj Kultur) is possibly led by a Vyacheslav Ivanov or a Sergei Bulgakov."

Sarts or Schwartz?

Armitage

To sum it up: Mackie has been forgiven (at least temporarily) by Miskatonic, if not Thornton-Smythe, and she is now in charge of the MacNamara Expedition. The actual expedition will be organized by Dr. Evan Sinclair, the Deputy Head of the Department of Archaeology. Jules volunteered to add some able-bodied veterans from the 369th Infantry (Harlem Hellfighters), and we would head to Kingston while the main parts of the expedition was being organized by Dr. Sinclair. Oh, and Armitage wondered if we'd be able to arrange a "permanent loan" of the Nahariya manuscript...

From the diary of Irwin Bowers:

- Unintelligible

From the notebook and prescription pad of Franz Alter:

I will never let my dear Ima visit Grand Central again! We did manage to commit the crazy woman Diana Spinoza to Bellevue and hand off Billy the Cat to Ima, praise be G-d, but whatever horror she may have contacted or summoned seemed to remain in the strange tunnels below Grand Central Station. We were dressed as common laborers and entered the tracks from one of the outside locations around 92nd Street. The tunnels below the station are well-nigh uncharted, and any maps are classified, so we entered that dirty and dimly-lit Gehenna with utmost caution. We almost got lost in this subterranean hell, and time seemed to lose all meaning. Apparently the unleashed monstrosity had claimed yet another victim, a vagrant, and we tried to find that location. However. the abomination found us first, but I was prepared with five fire-bottles filled with medical-grade alcohol and prepared with fuses. I was hoping that the indications in the Nahariya manuscript were correct, and that the entity would be susceptible to fire.

The entity is beyond revolting. It assaulted me and almost violated me in ung-dly ways. It is rancid, foul, and clammy, and it creates a mass of tendrils that seek out every part of the human body. Being exposed to the formless mass is being both squeezed and torn apart, and one lose both breath and composure. Fortunately, the spell that Jules and Mackie has prepared seemed to work, and I actually believe that the being is banished from this Earth. That being said, I still have recurring nightmares of what it did to me, over and over again. Oy vey ist mir!

From the diary of Mackie MacNamara:

We took a most civilized cruise to Havana between May 17 and May 23, and then we had an adequate passage to Kingston, arriving on Tuesday, May 26, 1925. It was difficult to manage both shuffleboard and champagne, but by now I'm an expert! It was a tad more difficult to figure out where Johnny Gale and the Americo-egyptian stela might be, but by asking the right questions to the right people, it turned out that young Johnny Gale had been drawn into the company of one Jonas Hennessy, who owns a major banana plantation and who's in cahoots with United Fruit, apparently using his reputation as a prophet and would-be wizard treat his laborers in a most inhumane fashion, promising the destitute workers that their toil would enable them to do an exodus to their roots in Africa. It was utter balderdash, of course, but for some reason he wanted the stela. Was it to prove the connections between Africa and the Americas? We just didn't know.

Meanwhile, Jules decided to try out his new diving equipment on the ruins of Port Royal. He managed to find a decent-sized vessel, the Cormoran. The captain of the Cormoran was a real character, a Irish fellow by the name of Fergus Sharkey. Black Irish, he insisted. Oh, and Jules was also incredibly lucky in finding an old book from the early 1700s with a small but quite visible so-called Elder Sign embossed on the frontispiece. It seems to be a tale of travel around the Caribbean during the reign of Queen Anne.

Hennessy's plantation was located just north of Kingston, and was known to hold religious mass meetings in and outside Kingston together with a female, an albino medium named Jacques. This time, we decided to abandon any pretext of pleasantries and simply simply barge in to find Johnny Gale. We had Sergeant Washington and his Harlem Hellfighters as well as our own armed selves, and after arranging for an explosive diversion by what seemed to be a pagan monument at the edge of the plantation, we went in, guns blazing. Moira Baker managed to get hold of a Lewis gun, and we were clearly more well organized than the defenders. Rounds were being fired in every direction, and several guards left in automobiles to find the cause of the explosion. We took the parlor floor, and we squeezed Moira and her machine gun into a dumbwaiter, and she apparently found Jonas Hennessy and Jacques. They did indeed have Johnny Gale imprisoned, and we somehow reached a détente. Johnny Gale was in ill health, but we took care of him, and all seemed to be going well when Moira emptied her Lewis gun upstairs. I really did not know what happened, but Moira came down the stairs with a befuddled look on her face: "The abomination known as the eternally voracious Tsathoggua is apparently inhabiting the mortal flesh of Billy the Cat in Sara Alter's Lower East Side apartment." Franz Alter's expression was one of utter horror.

From the diary of Jules Pollack:

Thursday, May 28. The Cormoran is an excellent vessel, and I am glad that we could leave Jamaica on this neat ship. Onwards to Mexico!