January 15, 1925 – New York City

Mid-afternoon, relaxing after a long morning of listening to confessions, Peter’s phone rang. Peter almost failed to recognize the voice on the other end: it was Jackson Elias, calling him on the 15th as promised. But this was not the confident, unflappable Jackson that Peter had long known. Jackson sounded anxious, almost panicked. Jackson was scared.

Jackson demanded that Peter meet him that night at the Chelsea Hotel, room 410. Peter, confused, tried to ask him what was wrong, but Jackson abruptly hung up.

With a confused urgency that Peter rarely felt outside of middle of the night trips to the water closet, he directed his alter boys to travel across the city to round up his company of friends.  It was close to 8pm when they all finally made it the Chelsea hotel, and Peter and Gene were particularly happy to leave the wet, cold snow for the warmth of the hotel’s lobby.

Peter, having neglected to change out of his bishop robes, was immediately recognized by a few parishioners in the lobby. After urging them to attend mass more often, the group followed him to the front desk where he started asking the receptionist, Barbara, a series of confusing questions about guests in the hotel. Barbara, although pleasant in demeanor, didn’t seem to understand what Peter was trying to ask about. For that matter, as the group quickly realized, it didn’t seem as if Peter understood what he was asking either.

Realizing this was hardly productive and delaying their meeting, they apologized to Barbara and proceeded directly upstairs to meet Jackson in his hotel room. They knocked loudly. There was no answer in return.

Peaking through the crack under the door assured them that the light in the room was on, but despite their knocks and shouting Jackson wouldn’t open the door. Peter shuffled back downstairs to try, again, to get help from the receptionist Barbara. Meanwhile Marvo impulsively considered trying to break down the door, but held short when Riley, ear to the door, pointed out that he could hear shuffling sounds on the other side.

Sensing that something wasn’t right, Gene grabbed a few tools from his cobbler kit and quietly picked the lock. Marvo drew his snub-nose .38, and Riley pulled out his fisherman’s knife. Riley pushed the door open slowly, worried about what surprises he’d find if he ventured into the room. As it turned out, the anxiety was unnecessary: the surprise found him, as a strangely robed African man in a grotesque headpiece leaped out of the room and crashed into him!

The man screamed in an unrecognizable language while Riley struggled to pin the attacker against the wall of the hallway. Gene and Marvo jumped in to help Riley, but not before noticing two other similarly robed people in the room: a white man wielding a large machete-like knife, and a black man opening the window in the back of the room. The machete-wielding man, screaming unintelligibly, rushed out of the room at Marvo and slashed him across the chest. Marvo collapsed to the floor instantly, unconscious with blood pouring from his sternum, gun limp in his hand. Riley and Gene looked on in horror.

[ed. note: Riley took a major wound from this attack and was at a real risk of death. Based on how combat was going, I was convinced Brandon’s first ever RPG character might die before he had a chance to make a single roll.]

—

Downstairs and unaware of the action in the upstairs hallway, Peter was in the middle of a conversation with Barbara, who seemed to have no intention of helping even the archbishop of New York break into a guest’s room. In fact, as Peter continued to try to persuade her, she seemed to get more and more irritated, eventually asking him to leave. Giving up, Peter left the building to see if he could see anything from Jackson’s window, just in time to see a black man in strange robes and a grotesque mask squeeze out of Jackson’s window onto the fire escape. Peter stood and watched in confusion.

Barbara, meanwhile, picked up the phone at her desk and made a quick phone call….

[ed. note: On his first real roll of the game while trying to persuade Barbara, Jeff rolled a straight 100 (a critical fail). Until that point she had been a normal, if difficult to persuade, NPC. After that roll, well, her purpose changed in a big way. WAY TO GO JEFF.]

—

Back upstairs, Riley kept the first attacker pinned against the wall as Gene struggled to hit the knife-wielding white man with his toolkit’s hammer. Marvo, unconscious hands still loosely gripping the pistol, continued to bleed out at their feet. Realizing a better weapon lay at his feet, Gene grabbed Marvo’s gun, forcing the knife-wielding white man to run back through the hotel room to the open window. The gun shook in his trembling hands. He opened fire but missed wildly, and the man dove through the window to the fire escape.

Fortunately, however, the gunshot alerted the other guests to the commotion, and a few larger men ran out of their rooms to help Riley tackle the restrained attacker to the ground and hold him for the police. A few others ran to call the police. With the no immediate threat around him, Riley took one of his two favorite white handkerchiefs, and, with a small sigh of regret for the stains he knew he’d never get out, gingerly cleaned and wrapped Marvo’s wound. Marvo awoke and Riley slowly helped him to his feet.

Though he had missed, Gene was determined   not to let the man who sliced opened his friend get away. He finally entered Jackson’s hotel room and headed toward the fire escape. But less than 10 feet into the room he stopped abruptly as a pestilent smell overwhelmed him. He turned toward the bed, and vomited at what he saw.

Lying naked on the bed was the mutilated corpse of his friend Jackson Elias. Jackson’s stomach had been carved open and his intestines systematically removed, hanging loosely from the sides of his stomach cavity. In his forehead was carved some sort of runic symbol. The sheets were soaked with still warm blood.

It wasn’t until Marvo, having followed him into the room, shook him and grabbed the gun from his hand did Gene realize he had unloaded the entire clip of the pistol into the wall above the bed in a stupefied daze. Marvo and Riley, somehow managing to keep their last meal inside them despite the sight of their mutilated friend, helped cover the corpse with the bed sheets.

—

In the alley down below, Peter heard the gunshots, and watched as the two strangely-robed, masked men fled down the fire escape and to the opposite end of the alley. There, he could just make out in the dim light, was a black Hudson car waiting idly. Although he knew he could never catch them himself – the night’s cold had already set in his bones – he was able to flag down an arriving police officer to chase after the men.

Another officer arrived and introduced himself to Peter as Lt. Martin Poole, coincidentally a parishioner of the archbishop’s diocese. The two walked back into the hotel and up to the room together, while Peter explained what he knew of the situation.

—

Still in the room, Gene, Riley, and Marvo realized that the police sirens they heard meant that the room would shortly turn into a crime scene and they would be locked out of any information that would explain what might have triggered Jackson’s horrific death. They quickly sorted through the room for evidence and pocketed what they could find:

• A business card for the Penhew Foundation in London, with the name “Edward Gavigan” elegantly engraved on it.
• An empty matchbox from the Stumbling Tiger Bar in Shanghai.
• A blurry photograph of a Chinese yacht with the first 3 letters of its name visible: DAR.
  • Riley, having been there once in the past, was able to identify the area shown in the photo as Shanghai.
• A business card for Emerson Imports in New York, with the name “Silas N’Kwane” scribbled on the back.
• A letter dated 1919 addressed to Roger Carlyle from a man named Faraz Najir in Cairo, offering to sell certain “ancient” and “singular curios.”
• The symbol carved into Jackson’s forehead, which Gene sketched onto a piece of paper from the hotel room’s desk

—

Finally returning to the room after what he considered quite an adventurous evening, Peter introduced Lt. Poole to the rest of his company and listened with increasing horror and sadness as they explained the story of the night’s events. Curiously, although Lt. Poole was clearly disturbed by the grusome murder, Peter sensed that Jackson Elias was not the first corpse Lt. Poole had seen desecrated this way.

Quizzing him, the group discovered that the police department had encountered nine other victims ritualistically butchered the same way as Jackson over the last two years. So far the department was at a loss – the victims seemed to have no connections to each other, and the few suspects they had arrested were less than helpful; most seemed clinically insane. The only thing Poole was certain of was that the murders were being conducted by some sort of African death cult. But even that they’d been unable to narrow down any further.

Lt. Poole, realizing that his archbishop had a personal interest in this but that the shocking events of the night had heavily taxed the group, offered to speak to them more the next day at the station. He assigned a few officers to take Marvo to Bellevue hospital to see to his wounds (who, fearful of confiscation, slyly transferred his handgun to Riley hidden behind the bloodied handkerchief before the officers could find it). The rest of the company thanked the Lt. before heading to the hospital to see to their friend. It had been a long, terrifying, and upsetting night. They could certainly use some rest, or at least a stiff drink at the Yellow King.

They left the hotel exhausted, too tired to realize that Barbara was no longer sitting at the front desk.

 

• The next morning, after a well needed night of rest, they call Miriam Altwright at Harvard. While initially charming, Marv-o quickly loses control of the conversation when he has a horrible flashback to Jackson’s opened body and starts peppering his questions with allusions to it (entrails being ripped from bodies).
  • His story rapidly changes (first lying that he doesn’t know about the murder, and then seeming to know too much) and confuses Miriam, who abruptly hangs up on him. The investigators do learn a book titled “Africa’s Dark Sects” was what Jackson had been after, but it had mysteriously disappeared from the library recently.
• The investigators visit Lt. Martin later that day as promised and the Martin promises to keep the Bishop informed of future evidence they discover.