The First Interbellum (1918-1939)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

McCord had only five men with him as they followed the all-too-apparent trail through the night. The distance they were covering was not, in fact, all that great, in absolute terms. Had the weather been mild, they might have covered the few kilometers in question fairly quickly. As it was, though, in the near-total darkness, with a steady wind, rain freezing on exposed surfaces, and a rough terrain to navigate, the trip required hours.

McCord was not sure what they would find when they got where they were going, but as it happened, they found that the trail came to a large opening in a rocky hill-side, and passed underground. The sane thing to do would have been to turn back, to seek help, but McCord pressed forward, driven by his personal obsessions and his fears for his men, and his well-paid men followed, guns ready and lights at hand.

Not long afterward, Conners and Bingham reached the same site. They were more used to operating under such harsh conditions than McCord and his men, and had made better time, but they too faced the same dire choice of proceeding into the underground or turning back. The opening into the tunnel was clearly artificial, and beyond the entrance was dim light.

By choice, they would have waited until dawn. But time pressed, they had reason to think their people were inside, and after a few minutes consideration, they went on, posting two men outside to watch the entrance and wait for their reinforcements.


They were not actually all that far from Harrystown, and Conners
knew that and this underground tunnel was still part of the same
range of hills that lay around the town. They were somewhat to
the west and south of the city, McCord had been making for the
nearest bridge to cross the river. This ridge was actually a branch
of the long, high cave-riddled ridge to the west of Harrystown,
and it was quite possible that this tunnel connected to the tunnels
and caves there.

Not that that’s altogether reassuring, Conners mused as they
made their way down the tunnel. Considering some of what
we have reason to think is down in those tunnels!

Conners found his mind going back to LeMoine, and his death,
apparently having been fed upon by something while he
was still alive. Something in the tunnels under the ridges.

Conners shook that off and forced his attention back to matters
at hand. Inattention was deadly and he had no time for it.

The passageway was clearly artificial, it was rectangular in
cross-section, with a smooth floor, rough walls, and a rough
ceiling a good three meters above the floor. The passageway
was about four meters wide, give or a take, and cut through
solid limestone. It should have been dark, but in fact there
was a dim, pale light that filled the passageway, but which
came from no visible source, and seemed to cast no shadows.
It was almost as if the air itself faintly glowed. [1]

The light was dim, certainly too low to read by, but it was
bright enough that they could look up and down the tunnel
and make their way through it by sight.

It was also clear to Conners that the tunnel was old. There
was a layer of thick dust across the floor up and down most
of its length. Cobwebs and other signs of age could be seen
on the walls and corners where the walls and ceiling met.

The dust had been recently disturbed, though, something
large had passed down the corridor and left a wide and
clear disturbance, and there boot prints as well, here and
there, interrupted the thick dust layer.

The air in the tunnel was fresh, however, though there was
a scent in the air that Conners could not identify. It was more
like a mixture of strange scents, some familiar and some not,
but there was definitely an element to it that defied recognition.

The tunnel terminated just past the entrance through which they
had come on one side, and continued northward along the ridge in
the other direction…toward the cave riddled larger ridge to the west
of Harrystown. Toward whatever had killed Phillipe LeMoine,
Conners could not help recalling nervously.

The tunnel ran fairly straight, with the occasional right-angle
twist, but always it would swing back onto the northern line.

It was a relief, in a way, to be out of the icy weather outside, but
that relief soon gave way to nervous fear, as they pondered what
might be waiting for their lightly-armed group. Conners was
already surprised that they had not encountered something, but
there was no sign of resistance and no sign of any kind of guard
or sentinel, either. Only the broken dust showed that someone
or something had passed that way not very much earlier.

Then one of the advance men found something else: a small bit
of metal jewelry. Conners recognized it immediately: it was a
pin that had been regularly worn by Allan Trovillion, one of his
men, an Ace who had been recruited about a year earlier. He
was one of the missing men from the earlier chaos in the night.

“Think it fell by accident?” Lake asked quietly.

“Could be, or maybe Trovillion dropped it as a marker for us,”
Conners said. “Either way, it means he came this way.”

“Or his captors dropped it,” Lake reminded his chief. “As a lure
to draw us on.”

“Anything’s possible,” Conners admitted reluctantly. “But why
bother? If they know were coming, they could lay a trap in here
easily. It hardly seems necessary to draw us on.”

They continued forward, but had not gone far before the sound of
gunshots echoed back through the passageway from ahead.


MORE LATER



[1] In fact, that was close to the truth. There was a low-level Flux Manifestation in place, lighting the passageways, the omnipresent light prevented shadows.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The gunshots in question had been fired by McCord himself. He and his men, further down the tunnel, had come to the end of the passageway, and encountered one of the creatures that had attacked their convoy. They got the drop on it, and it proved gratifyingly mortal, the three shots McCord put into it from behind dropped it quite efficiently. They had hoped to sneak past it, but it had been turning toward them and would have seen them, McCord opted to take no chances.

The creature was easily two and a half meters tall, and covered in a thick, curled, wiry fur. Its proportions were not quite human. It had two legs and two arms, but the arms were too long, the legs too thick, for a normal human frame. The fingers were too long for the hands, and tipped with long razor-sharp talons of some kind. The face was disturbingly close to human, but there was a heavy ridge across the eyes and the features were subtly out of proportion as well.

The sound of the shots echoed through the tunnels, and McCord and his men found themselves at a junction where the artificial passage joined to what looked to be a natural cave passage through the limestone. It went in both directions, but the dust trail was disturbed to the left, and so McCord and his men went in that direction.'

A few minutes later, the Aces and the B-Jones men arrived at that same location, and found the corpse, which disturbed them no little. There was no time to linger, though, like the men ahead of them they followed the trail as it lay, through the natural cave, still lit by that odd sourceless light. Conners and his men were marking a trail as they went, in case they had to retrace their path to get out, but even so they were acutely aware of the danger of getting lost in the tunnels.

McCord and his men had covered perhaps two hundred meters through the winding natural tunnel when they were suddenly attacked by something, or many somethings. Dozens of creatures came at them, fast and wiry and tough, with sharp claws and teeth. A gunshot would put one down, but there were many of them and they were coming from all sides. McCord and his people would have gone down, except that the pursuing group caught up to them just about then, and their added firepower succeeded in wiping out the attacking creatures in a few moments.

There was little time to study the remains, but the creatures were about a meter and a half tall, bipedal, but not at all human in proportion. Their legs were strangely articulated at the knee, and their arms ended in claws. Their eyes were large, and clearly adapted for darkness, their mouths were full of sharp carnivore teeth. Lake, looking at the teeth of one of the dead monsters, was quite sure that these were the creatures who been feeding on LeMoine before he died.

In a tense discussion, Conners, McCord, and Bingham concluded that for the moment, working together offered a better chance to get out alive than against each other. It would be far too much to say that there was any trust involved, but Conners and Bingham had many more men than McCord did, and their situation as such that survival and immediate necessity had to come first, and none of the men involved were by any stretch fools. A certain amount of information was exchanged, and the combined party proceeded forward, allied for the moment against…whatever awaited them.

As far what did await them…the story went back centuries, and involved people, places, things, and entities about which nobody in any of the groups had the slightest knowledge. Suffice it to say that the region around the city of Harrystown was criss-crossed by several of what certain people would someday call ‘ley lines’. One such, as mentioned already, ran directly through the city, past the warehouse site that had been the center of all the confusion, and on through the great ridge to the west of the city. Other ley lines ran back and forth through the area as well, and it had been a region of high Flux activity since before the end of the Antediluvian Age.

More direly, that region had been a center of activity for that dark power known as the Malignium since well before the end of the Antediluvian Age, as well. [1]

This activity had varied in intensity and nature for millennia, suffice it to say that many dark and dire things had happened in that region, both before and after Atlantis was lost. There is little purpose in detailing such things, suffice it to say that there had been a ‘quiet’ period lasting over one thousand years, from about A.D. 700. This lull had ended with the events described in the old diary mentioned upthread.

The soldier and his wife described in that diary upthread had been contacted by the Malignium, or contacted it, or come into contact with it, through a third party known to the soldier. The Malignium had been the power that enabled the couple to conceive children, overcoming the genetic problem with childbearing that had run in the maternal family. The children had been healthy and normal, but had the parents known the true nature of the entity they dealt with, they would have never started down that road.

The third party who had enabled the Faustian bargain had been apparently a human being, and had once been just that. By that time, however, he had become one of that dark and dire breed known to a few as consumidoro. He looked human, he sounded human, but he was no longer a human. [2]

MORE LATER.


[1] For information about the Malignium see here: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=147153

[2] For information about the consumidoro see here: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=147422

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

There is little reason to go into the details of what happened so long before the events of our tale, suffice it to say that the ex-soldier and his bride came to regret their dark bargain very profoundly, well before their final murder. The 'obelisk' that had so puzzled the folk of the region, at that time and later, had been set up at the command of their 'friend' and later tormentor, for reasons of his own. Other horrors occurred as well, which need not concern us. At the end, husband and wife and both children were murdered, by hanging, as part of a larger plan. A few days later, relatives who had come to investigate the strangeness had arrived and been similarly treated.

Things did not go all as the evil ones planned, however. Only a day afterward, the local sheriff and several of his men, accompanied by a number of relatives and friends of the deceased family, arrived, and discovered a horror unfolding. A battle ensued between a few consumidoro, and something far worse, against the shocked and horrified men from the town, and against most odds the men of the town had been the survivors.

The men had piled the bodies of their enemies, the bodies of the victims, and some of the other things they discovered atop the ridge, inside the old house, and lit it afire, burning it down to the foundations and standing watch, ready to shoot anything that emerged from the fire…and some things did. The men shot those things, and threw the corpses back into the roaring fire. When the flames finally burned down, there was little sign that anything had survived the blaze, or even that anything of the strangeness they had fought was still recognizable.

In later years most of them kept silent about what they had seen and done, and why they had done it. A few had spoken quietly to friends or loved ones, mostly many years later, only one account had been incidentally written down and so come into the hands of the Seven Aces, over a century later.

The sheriff and his men had done their best, but they did not fully understand that with which they were dealing, nor could they have been expected to do so. The thing that most horrified them had been a ‘creature’ of a sort they had never seen or imagined, and more than anything else, the fire had been set as a means of trying to destroy that creature. They had come close, very close, but the creature was powerful and highly resistant, even to fire. It still lived even after the house within which it had been trapped had burned down around it.

It was burned, it was damaged, it was practically comatose, but it lived. It likely would have died soon, but that creatures of its dark, invisible master had come to it in following weeks and months, and taken its half-living remains deep into the tunnels within the great ridge-line. There it lay comatose, in a healing trance, as it was tended by creatures that had never been human. [1]

From time to time, the creature was fed. It had been brought into being through a combination of ancient Flux knowledge, and the power of the Malignium, the hanging deaths of the family atop the hill had been a step in the process. Now it needed nutrients and raw materials to heal, like any other living creature. Mostly, its attendants fed it flesh from animals, wildlife was abundant in the region, from time to time a local human would ‘disappear’ under plausible conditions, to provide more succulent food.

In the meantime, the Malignium brooded more closely over the region than it did some places, its attention drawn there by the horrible events near the turn of the Nineteenth Century, and held there by the existence of the ‘creature’ slumbering within the caverns. This attention from the Malignium, in turn, brought others to the region, now and then, over the subsequent decades. Some of those people were consciously aware of what they sought, others were drawn unconsciously. Some of the beings drawn to the region around Harrystown were not even human anymore. A few had never been human.

One such person was quite human, but there was at least as much malice and evil in his soul as might be found in the creatures of the Malignium, by the time he reached Harrystown. He came in the 1830s, he lived in Harrystown in quiet secrecy until his death in the 1880s, and he was laid to rest in one of the cemeteries around the area.

It was this grave that was sought, in the cemetery desecrations that had stirred such fear and anger.

MORE LATER.


[1] We will learn more about these creatures in due time. Suffice it to say that legends in old New York State about little people in the hills are not entirely imaginary, though far from accurate.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The events that were occurring in late 1927 in Harrystown were like a river arising from the confluence of several streams. One such stream was the above secret history of the region. Two more streams were Henry McCord and 'James Davis', his notional lieutenant.

Henry McCord was more or less what we have seen, a rich, obsessive collector of Antediluvian artifacts and remnants. Ruthless, smart, and able, he was still a mortal man with mortal priorities, interests, and needs. It was his obsessive need to collect that brought him to the attention of the man he knew as ‘James Davis’. ‘Davis’ had become the right-hand man to McCord on the esoteric subjects, as well as his extra-legal business activities, and had been so for many years.

What McCord never suspected, until events came to a head in Harrystown, was that ‘Davis’ had put himself in position to be recruited. ‘Davis’ was a very able and effective man, and most of what he did for McCord was real enough, he was a genuine asset to the wealthy magnate, most of the time. All this was in service of a different agenda, though.

Most of the time, ‘Davis’ faithfully carried out the wishes of McCord. Generally, their short term goals were coordinate, and so there was little reason to do anything else. From time to time, though, ‘Davis’ acted on his own, secretly doing things McCord would have disapproved, had he known. Sometimes, too, when more than one good option existed, ‘Davis’ chose the one that suited his own agenda.

For example, when McCord decided that he needed to create a safe repository for his secret collection, that was entirely his own idea. It suited ‘Davis’, though, because it served his own agenda as well, and it was ‘Davis’ who was charged with selecting the place, from a list of requirements given him by McCord. This made it easy for ‘Davis’ to arrange for the repository to be sited in Harrystown, amid several other possibilities. All the other possibilities would have been just as good, for McCord, but ‘Davis’ had his own reasons for preferring the Harrystown area, reasons linked to the dark past of that locale.

It was also ‘Davis’ who supervised the day-to-day preparation of the hidden cache, under the normal warehouse overhead. It was ‘Davis’ who also arranged, purely on his own initiative, to prepare the secret tunnel linking the natural caves in the ridge to the west to the underground cache. All this took place years before the climax in 1927, and indeed ‘Davis’ was not planning everything out. He was merely making arrangements that left him options when and if needed.

It suited ‘Davis’ for the repository to be in Harrystown, because he was using McCord as a means to an end. McCord sought the artifacts and remnants out of his obsessive collecting impulse. ‘Davis’ saw this quest as a means of finding and accessing certain specific remnants, and by locating the repository in Harrystown, the collection was near at hand for use if and when the time came.

Yet another stream feeding the confluence of events was the glistening yellow ‘egg’ around which so much trouble had swirled. This ‘egg’ was, of course, a ‘paralens’, one of the ancient devices used by the Atlanteans to make Flux use easier and safer. It was more than just that, however, this one was one of the ‘tainted’ paralenses created by the terrible shortcut process created by the Unity and its servant fluxons at the very end of the Antediluvian Age.

Even still, it was unusual even among those devices. There were things about this specific device that made it unique in the world, or at least one of only two such, depending on how one looked at it.

We first saw this device when we observed the story of its recovery in a remote corner of Australia, in 1871, earlier on this thread. The events Garley and Chase experienced were hardly the beginning of its tale, however. It had lain buried in its remote grave in Australia for thousands of years. Before that, its history ran back through Antarctica, before that to the Nile Valley, and before that back to the Great Isle of Atlantis itself. Along the course of its journey had been treachery, brutality, and murder.

The final leg of its ancient journey had taken place in the dark, terrible post-apocalyptic years after the Great Cataclysm, and the men who moved it from Antarctica to Australia, and finally into its unmarked grave paid with their lives to do so, perishing alone and forgotten in the empty wilds of inner Australia. Their actions marked them among the unsung and unknown heroes of humankind.

For thousands of years, the artifact lay where it was buried. The men who concealed it there had chosen well from their limited range of options. There were few people to be found in that region in the Antediluvian Age, and it remained thinly peopled in the centuries and millennia to follow. It was buried deep enough that it was unlikely to be revealed by the elements, and the region was fairly stable, geologically, there was little likelihood of earthquake or other convulsions revealing the device again.

Indeed, the Earth would orbit the Sun more than six thousand times before the light of that orb fell again on the device hidden away at such cost.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

We have already seen a small glimpse of the removal of the artifact from its long dark rest in Australia, at the beginning of this thread. We can not yet reveal the why or the who of that removal, but we can note that the golden was moved around the world from place to place, passing through Texas and remaining there for a time. As Bingham told Conners, there was a spate of grave desecretations in that area at that time as well, we shall see why shortly. Eventually, the ‘egg’ came to rest in San Francisco in 1904. It was from San Francisco that McCord, by underhanded means best not examined closely, obtained the artifact in a secret auction.

The bidder who should have won the auction, disgruntled and angry and nearly as obsessive as McCord himself, hired the Bingham-Jones group to track and retrieve ‘his’ artifact. This was how the Bingham-Jones men initially became involved in the whole business, as Terrance Bingham explained to Conners in the meeting we saw upthread.

In the meantime, the arrival of the ‘golden egg’ in the repository in Harrystown was one of the things that ‘Davis’ had been hoping to see happen. The man calling himself ‘Davis’ had long known of the existence of the artifact, and sought for it. He also knew that a group of fluxons, a sort of cult, sought the ancient device as well. The man mentioned above, who came to Harrystown in the 1830s and lived there until his death in the 1880s, had been the leader of this group in his day.

His followers knew he was dead, and for their own reasons sought his corpse.

What ‘Davis’ had learned was that he had not let his followers know exactly where he was at the time of his death. They knew that the man sought the ‘egg’, and when they learned of its location in Texas in the 1890s, they assumed (wrongly) that he was buried somewhere near it. Thus the cemetery troubles in Texas that Bingham had briefed Conners and McLaird about: they had been digging up graves they thought might contain the mortal remains of their former leader, but they were looking in the wrong place. The presence of the ‘egg’ had not been a direct cause of the desecrations, but the people tracking the ‘egg’ thought he would be buried somewhere near it, so there was a acausal linkage.

As to why this group sought the corpse of their leader, that will be revealed in time.

What ‘Davis’ deduced, after the ‘egg’ came to rest in Harrystown, was that the dead leader had known or suspected it would come to rest there in time, possibly by Flux-based prescience or psionic ability, and had been there hoping to still be there when it came. This was always a risky gambit, because even an accurate vision of the future might be far away, far beyond the time horizon of a normal life. The man had gambled and lost, his projection had been right, the ‘egg’ had reached Harrystown, but it had done so nearly four decades too late for the man.

Still, as a result, his body lay interred in Harrystown, and ‘Davis’ knew enough about the activities in the secret world to suspect that his former followers would track the ‘egg’ to Harrystown, and begin their search for his remains again. This presented both problems and opportunities to ‘Davis’.

Because of this, ‘Davis’ was still laying his plans when events in Germany, as we saw upthread, forced him and several others to scramble to change their plans. The accident in Germany sent a shock pulse through the ley-lines, spreading through the spiderweb that girdled the planet, and one such ley-line ran directly through the site of the artifact repository on the river front.

‘Davis’ certainly knew about the ley-line, but the Flux surge caused by the events in Germany caught him by surprise. ‘Davis’ was as surprised as everyone else when the warehouse above the repository exploded, and it took him some days to figure out what had happened, and even by the time Conners and McCord were penetrating the warren under the ridges, ‘Davis’ still did not know what had caused the power surge in the first place.

Before he could do more than begin to deal with the effects of the explosion, Harrystown was suddenly overrun by foreign agents as well, and ‘Davis’ had no idea what brought that about, either. He could not simply ignore their presence, but he was not sure what their presence meant, either, because he knew nothing about what had happened in Germany.

It was this unexplained influx of foreign personnel to a backwater town like Harrystown that had first brought the Seven Aces into the matter.

Caught off-guard by, and distracted by, the explosion and the influx of agents, ‘Davis’ was caught by surprise when the flux-cult arrived in Harrystown and began their own activities. Though he had expected that they would come soon, he suffered ‘tactical surprise’ when they actually began their activities, because of the other distractions on his plate at the time.

The first sign of the presence of the dark order in question had been the ‘flu’ epidemic in Harrystown.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

For now, let us call this group of fluxons the Order of the Grey Hand. That was not what they actually called themselves, but it's not a bad English translation of a common (in the secret world) term of reference for them.

The 'flu epidemic' was actually the result of a powerful Flux Manifestation, which was also why it was associated with a narcoleptic tendency after the initial symptoms. The narcolepsy-effect was a Flux-based equivalent of a psychic vampirism attack, draining some of the life-energy of the victims and diverting it to help drive a more powerful Flux Manifestation later. The particular form of Flux art being used was one taught to the Grey Hands by the Malignium, which was part of why it was so depending on such dark ways.

Some of the pain and energy loss of the victims went to feed the Malignium itself, even as the rest was diverted for use. At the same time, the Grey Hands began to search for the remains of their former leader, and now they knew they were on the right track, if only they could find the right grave. They were in a hurry, and this made them careless. In addition, the Grey Hands were associated with the Malignium, and so preferred to induce pain and suffering as a matter of policy when possible. Thus they did not only tear open graves in their searches, but sometimes deliberately damaged them and desecrated the remains within.

Thus the desecrated cemeteries that had caused so much outrage and fear in the town, and so puzzled Conners and his men. As Conners had surmised, the people behind the grave robbing had been looking for something specific, he simply had never guessed that it was a specific corpse that was sought.

At first, it seemed that the foreign agents were, for whatever reason, seeking information about the blast that had destroyed the warehouse. Then, though, some of the agents began to show signs of knowing something about the secret activities in the region. One such French agent even began to show signs of interest in the obelisk atop the ridge line.

This was, of course, Phillipe LeMoine.

Already ‘Davis’ knew that somebody had come to Harrystown years before, with some sort of inside information about the area, and he had even carved the date on the obelisk before he was murdered by some of the creatures who ‘Davis’ controlled. ‘Davis’ still did not know who that earlier man had been, and now the French agent showed signs of having information about him, and to be following in his footsteps as he entered the caves in the ridge.

Davis had decided to waylay LeMoine, and had attempted an interrogation. He had learned little, LeMoine had been tougher than he expected, refusing to break even after the hungry creatures began to feed on his living flesh. Before he could weaken to the point of telling ‘Davis’ anything useful, LeMoine had manage to break loose and try to escape, and the creatures had killed him before ‘Davis’ could stop them. ‘Davis’ suspected that this was what LeMoine had in mind, he was already too damaged to have any real hope of survival, but his death put him beyond the reach of ‘Davis’.

‘Davis’ had been forced to try to figure out how all these different factions interacted, while keeping McCord from doing anything rash as his worries about his collection grew. The pressure rose steadily as the days passed. The Seven Aces were applying legal pressure on McCord through indirect means, the Grey Hands had the entire city in a state of near hysteria with their grave robbing, and ‘Davis’ knew that some of the devices in the repository might well still produce new effects, especially after that power surge in the ley-lines. That surge could easily have activated, or destabilized, any of several potentially dangerous things stored in that underground chamber.

After some thought, ‘Davis’ revealed the existence of the secret tunnel to McCord, and manipulated him to take the risk of cutting into the repository from below and starting to remove the items. ‘Davis’ did not really want to move the items, but he did want into the cache to make sure that the situation there was not about to get worse. As we saw, McCord and ‘Davis’ and their party had used the acid paste to break through the concrete seal and enter the underground chamber holding the collection.

Already, 'Davis' had arranged a 'shooting incident' to slow his official employer down, this was the crossfire that had wounded the Bingham-Jones personnel and led them to call in their own superiors. Now, though, there was no slowing McCord down any further.

This enabled ‘Davis’ to ascertain that the collection was not about to do anything immediately dangerous, which was a relief to him, but it also opened up a new problem. As we saw, once he knew that his collection was safe, McCord started to get suspicious of ‘Davis’, and began insisting on moving the collection out quickly, and he also brought in additional men to assist in this project.

This was worrisome because ‘Davis’ knew that all the men already with them would follow his orders over those of McCord, in the event of a conflict. ‘Davis’ had been acting as the right hand man to McCord for a long time, and had taken advantage of this to make sure the men with them were all loyal to him first and foremost. The new people McCord now brought in, without consulting ‘Davis’, were from different parts of the McCord corporate/criminal empire, and ‘Davis’ knew that they would follow McCord over him in any confrontation.

‘Davis’ tried to convince McCord to wait, but he now found that McCord was not open to persuasion. In spite of his best feigned arguments, ‘Davis’ found that McCord was still determined to empty the chamber and move the entire collection to a different location, far away. In the short term the items were accumulating in the rented house down the river, but ‘Davis’ knew McCord would let them sit there no more than a few days at the most.

In all the confusion, ‘Davis’ had no time to properly see to the disposal of the corpse of LeMoine, he had planned to let his creatures devour it, but before he could do that the Aces had found the remains.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

In the midst of all these swirling events, 'Davis' had been forced to take unwontedly radical steps, steps far more risky than he would normally have dared to indulge. One such step was to make contact with the Grey Hands, and strike an alliance of a sort, just a couple of weeks before the events that had brought the Aces, the Bingham-Jones team, and McCord himself into the tunnels outside Harrystown.

The Grey Hands had their own agenda, and so did ‘Davis’, but they had some goals in common, and it proved possible for them to work together, very cautiously. One of the things ‘Davis’ did for his new allies was to assign some of the creatures he controlled to aid them in their search for the specific grave of their former leader. With the aid of ‘Davis’ and his associates, they tracked down the specific grave, and one of the creatures ‘Davis’ controlled retrieved the body.

This was observed, in part, by the fishermen on the north bank of the river, some nights before the events now unfolding. The creature ‘Davis’ had sent on this errand had been observed in the moonlight by the young men on the other shore, and partly tracked by the Aces and the Bingham-Jones allies.

When McCord had removed almost all of his items from the cache and decided to move them quickly out of the area, ‘Davis’ had known that his own options were closing. His plans required that some of those items, most particularly the ‘golden egg’, remain in the Harrystown area for some time yet. Yet McCord was implacably determined to move them.

‘Davis’ had laid a trap near the cave entrance that led to the cache, this one a deadly real trap. It was meant to kill McCord and his men. ‘Davis’ had not yet decided how he would explain this, his initial thinking was that there would be time later to make it all look like some sort of accident, when things had calmed down. This turned out to be a moot point, though, because McCord had anticipated the trap and laid his own counter-trap, as we have already seen.

McCord successfully counter-trapped ‘Davis’, and wiped out the men ‘Davis’ had been counting on to carry out the ambush, as we observed. ‘Davis’ was caught completely unprepared by this, and because of that McCord actually came relatively close to carrying out his rapid departure. ‘Davis’ had to scramble frantically to set up a countermove in time to keep McCord from getting clear.

Unfortunately for McCord, ‘Davis’ had resources that McCord not only did not suspect, but could not have been expected to suspect. Those resources were not even possible as far as McCord (or most people in 1927) knew. Unfortunately, not knowing something is possible does not protect against it was it is in fact entirely possible.

McCord called on the fluxons of the Grey Hand to use their Flux talents to interfere with the local weather. This would have been futile in the time available, normally, because they had only a few hours of window to work within. In this case luck was with them, however, because there was a powerful winter storm system crossing the region just to the north of Harrystown. With several powerful and skilled fluxons working, it was just possible to cause that storm to move slightly out of its natural path, and sweep through the Harrystown area, arriving shortly after dark.

(This was why the meteorological predictions Conners had seen had gone so badly off.)

While the Grey Hand members were tampering with the weather, ‘Davis’ quickly gathered those of his monsters most suited to the task, and set out to slow McCord down. They were hampered by the daylight, most of the creatures ‘Davis’ had available either were seriously threatened by bright sunlight, or at least disliked it intensely and were reduced in efficiency when operating out in the sunlight.

On the other hand, the area was riddled with tunnels and passages, some of them natural caves in the limestone ridges, some of them artificial, dug by various hands down the millennia, some of them human and some of them not. Those tunnels could be used to avoid the sunlight, though the entrances were not always in the most convenient places.

In order to slow McCord and his convoy, ‘Davis’ had set several of the huge creatures the task of uprooting the huge tree and dropping it across the road at a strategically useful location. This they could manage, even in the daylight, though it was a difficult and unpleasant task and the creatures were grateful to retreat below ground once again.

(‘Davis’ dared not set those particular monsters against well-armed humans in the daylight. They were able to function in daylight, but they were so hampered by it that a well-armed, experienced group of fighters like the men with McCord would likely have made short work of them while the sun shone.)

Once the huge uprooted tree forced McCord to pause, though, time switched from his side to that of ‘Davis’. The late autumnal daylight was fleeting, the precious hours of daylight passing rapidly while McCord and his men worked to clear the obstacle in the road. ‘Davis’ also knew that the winter weather was now diverted just enough that it would come slamming in not long after sunset, adding to his advantages. As the hours passed, and McCord and his men worked, ‘Davis’ prepared his attack in the underground tunnels, all too near at hand and all unsuspected by his targets.

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[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

When the sun had set, and the storm arrived to add confusion, 'Davis' made his move, sending the huge hairy humanoids that made up part of his monsters to attack McCord and his men in the darkness. Caught by surprise, hindered by the weather and the darkness, McCord and his men were overcome, some taken prisoner, and some of the key items from the convoy taken, all before McCord quite knew what was happening.LATER.

When the sun had set, and the storm arrived to add confusion, 'Davis' made his move, sending the huge hairy humanoids that made up part of his monsters to attack McCord and his men in the darkness. Caught by surprise, hindered by the weather and the darkness, McCord and his men were overcome, some taken prisoner, and some of the key items from the convoy taken, all before McCord quite knew what was happening.

McCord and his men followed, as we saw, and not far behind them came Conners and Bingham and their men, along the trail and into the tunnels. ‘Davis’ had been operating in great haste, and so had not had time to properly conceal the trail or otherwise carry out the operation in a ‘professional’ way. Haste and precision and care are incompatible in any activity.

As we have seen, Conners and Bingham and their men caught up with McCord, and an alliance convenience was struck after the initial ambush by the small, ferocious creatures. Even as McCord and his new temporary allies proceeded forward, however, ‘Davis’ was busily making his own preparations.
This was part of why the invading force had met relatively little resistance, and none of it properly organized. Indeed, at that moment ‘Davis’ had no idea that they had even entered the tunnels, he was entirely occupied with his own activities, in a chamber deep inside and below the great ridge that ran to the west of Harrystown. He was still some miles from the invaders, but they were penetrating ever deeper into the tunnels, and ‘Davis’ would have been very concerned had he known.

He did not know, because he had been in too much of a hurry to remove the critical items at the time of the attack to properly supervise his monsters, who were more intelligent than most animals, but far from human-level intelligent. While he was making his exit with the key items, and the prisoners, he did not know that McCord and a few of his other men had survived. Nor did he suspect that the Seven Aces or the Bingham-Jones men were near at hand, either, ready to add their own strength to an impromptu attack force. Thus such careless errors as the improperly guarded tunnels and open entrances.

This sort of ‘sloppy’ work was by no means characteristic of ‘Davis’. Normally he would have been far more thorough and professional, but he was racing against the clock and simply did not have the necessary time to take his usual careful precautions. The careful plans of many years had been totally disrupted, and now ‘Davis’ was striving to salvage what he could from the unfolding disaster.

In that chamber below the ridge, rested the monster that the old sheriff and his party had tried so manfully to destroy, on a dark day well over a century earlier. They had tried, and failed, but in failing they had inflicted much damage and come within a narrow margin of success. The creature was by no means immune to fire, and had taken immense burn damage. Over half of its total body had been destroyed in that struggle a century agone, between the flames and the hail of bullets that had riddled it. If not for the fact that it had been carefully tended by various servants and creatures of the Malignium, it would most certainly have died. Even now, it was not yet fully restored, though ‘Davis’ hoped to bring it near to that point in the near future.

‘Davis’ knew much about this creature. ‘Davis’ was in fact one of the people who had first brought it into existence, it had been ‘Davis’, by another name, who had been the ‘friend’ who made the connection between the soldier and his wife and the Malignium, arranged the dark blessing that had been the birth of their children, and it had been ‘Davis’ who had hung husband, wife, and infant children in their own home, so many years before, as part of the process of bringing forth the new creature.

What was ‘James Davis’, that he had been active in the years immediately after the Revolutionary War, and remained active and engaged in 1927? He was a powerful psion, gifted in biopsionic talents, and well trained in the disciplines of metabolic control and life extension. In some ways he could be compared to Karl Jurgensen, but his psionic strength, at least in biopsionic talents, was far greater. Indeed, ‘James Davis’ was in fact more than five centuries old in 1927.

‘Davis’ was not a consumidoro, but he did work in alliance with the Malignium, of his own free will, and he had the assistance of many consumidoro, and access to vast amounts of esoteric knowledge through the Malignium and its mortal and immortal servants.

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[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

'Davis' had been planning to eventually use the 'golden egg' that had been purchased in the San Francisco auction as part of a plan to accelerate the recovery of the creature. His original plan would have taken another two or three years to reach fruition, but the recent events in Harrystown had totally disrupted his orderly time table.

The same power surge in the ley-lines that that destroyed the warehouse, and brought the 'golden egg' to unexpected life, had also awakened the monster from its healing torpor, and now they could not easily restore that healing trance. Without the protective effects of the trance, the creature was in danger of expiring from its own restored activity, activity the body of the monster was not yet sufficiently healed to handle.

The wounded monster was like a human patient who was being kept alive by deep sedation to keep his body calm and still. Now that sedating effect was gone, and the creature was becoming ever more active, and this in turn meant that the creature would likely perish in a matter of weeks at the most.

Still, the confusing events offered a way to prevent this, if ‘Davis’ could get everything together in the right place at the right time. The fluxons of the Grey Hand, in exchange for his help in finding the body of their former leader, could provide the necessary Flux skills and knowledge for the project. The golden egg was available and active, and could in theory be used in a ‘rough and ready’ effort instead of the carefully calculated plan that had been so badly disrupted.

The ‘rough and ready’ method would require processes that Davis and the Grey Hand had learned from the Malignium, and the nature of that dark entity meant that the techniques it had taught Davis and the Grey Hand fluxons required that innocent victims pay the price in pain and suffering and death. For this purpose, ‘Davis’ meant to use the captives he had taken in the battle shortly after sunset.

Time was of the essence, both because the creature was rapidly becoming more ‘awake’ and a moment would come when the process could no longer work, and because local conditions in the Flux required precise timing as well. ‘Davis’ had calculated that a moment about an hour before local dawn would be the best time, and after that it would be over forty hours before another opportunity appeared.

In order for the necessary action to culminate at the right time, preparations had to be made immediately: there were only a few hours to prepare and everything had to be precisely correct for the process to have any hope of working. Thus the careless errors ‘Davis’ had made already that night.

Even as ‘Davis’ was frantically busy with the Grey Hands, preparing for the key moment, the men Conners and Bingham had sent back to Harrystown for reinforcements were assembling those reinforcements, such as they were. Those members of the Aces and those of the B-Jones men who were not already with their leaders were assembling in a rented garage at the edge of the city, readying their weapons and gear and preparing to sally forth into the cold rain and ice of the evening.

They had divided into two groups, one was heading out to the same entrance that had been used by Conners and Bingham and their force. The other was going to take a calculated risk: they had decided to blast open the other tunnel entrance they had discovered, and gamble that it would provide a faster way into the tunnels, since they were reasonably sure that the first tunnel would connect to that same set of caves. They had all too few men on hand for either project, but they had to work with what they had available and there was no more time to get further help.

In the meantime, Conners, Bingham, and McCord had penetrated deeper into the tunnels, following what signs they could find of the group they were following. From time to time they faced disjointed, half-random attacks from the diminutive but ferocious creatures, but they were able to deal with them fairly easily, since they had firearms and the creatures attacked with tooth and claw.

The trail was partly disturbed dust and mud and sand, partly the occasional bit of dropped gear or other artificial items. Their fortunately break came when they captured a human being, one of the Grey Hand fluxons rushing on an errand as they prepared for their pre-dawn efforts.

The man was a brilliant fluxon, and knowledgeable in many areas of esoteric lore, but he was neither a soldier nor was he at all familiar with immediate violence or danger. In sheer terror, he was prepared to tell Conners, Bingham, and McCord everything they wanted to know.

It would be fair to say that none of the three fully understood what their terrified prisoner was telling them, both because it was so esoteric and outside their experiences, and because the prisoner was so afraid that his answers were only half-comprehensible amid his babbling and shaking.

Now, at least, though, they had some idea of where the prisoners were being held, which was a start.

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