Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER 5


“Dr. Rigby.” I shook his hand when I arrived at the Institute.

I knew I wasn’t safe there from pursuit by the MCB. But there was a certain weight taken off my shoulders.

“Chad.” Rigby waved me to one of the wing-backed chairs in his office.

The primary Institute offices were in a large Georgian mansion in Midsomer. Convenient to Oxford and a bit less convenient to London, the estate was a useful place to train incoming Monster Hunters as well as kick back and relax when things got a bit on the tough side. The grounds were pleasant and heavily warded, the local pub was good and many of the locals had been read in on supernatural at one time or another.

Rigby’s office had large windows letting in pleasant English spring sunshine. I definitely was starting to feel my shoulders unwind.

“Have you found anything more about the entity?” Tea had been laid out. English High Tea was another thing I’d missed. Only the English could do scones.

“Nothing beyond the Ashanti reference,” Rigby said, taking a bite of scone. “We’ve scoured our archives and have a team looking at Oxford.”

“The PUFF adjuster said that they were only known in West Africa, northwestern Mongolia and interior Indonesia. The only area that’s been extensively studied by English ethnologists, of those three, is Africa.”

“A point we’re discovering,” Rigby said. “But there has been very little formal research into Mongolia or Indonesia. At least the interior. The Dutch did some work on coastal areas. You should look into pre-Enlightenment archives from those areas. I believe Oxford has many from the Chinese as well as extensive records from the Indians. Alas, mostly untranslated from a variety of different languages and dialects, many of which are lost.”

“Fortunately, I’m good with languages.” I shrugged. “I’m going to just do research for a while and hope that I can come up with something. The PUFF adjuster definitely knew more than he was telling.”

“They always do,” Rigby said with a sigh. “I’ve only dealt with the American adjusters three times in my entire career. They are the independent oversight over the PUFF program, I’ve been told. It is a very small, secretive, and select group which requires a certain kind of expertise.”

“I didn’t really get the feeling he was a saint.” I shook my head. “But he certainly was odd.”

“Which one was it?”

“Coslow.”

“Ah, yes.” Rigby winced. “Dealt with him when I was a junior operative. Taught me to mind my P’s and Q’s I’ll say that. Do not waste his time. He becomes rather surly. However, enough about our mysterious worm for now. Since we are together and not speaking over a potentially wiretapped line, it is time to dwell on the MCB believing you are in league with a death cult.”

“I’m not.”

“If I thought for the briefest moment you were, we would not be having this meeting. The MCB’s findings are rubbish. I spoke to some of my contacts at MI4 based on your information. They’re not willing to get involved. Not worth their time. But they did confirm that the information came from a reading and that it indicated you were the alpha and omega of this sacrifice-selling ring.”

“I certainly didn’t start it but I’d be more than willing to end it. Did they vouchsafe the nature of the casting?”

“They did not.” Rigby shrugged. “The one contact who was most open said he was unaware of the details. But he also said you and your brother were entwined in the matter supernaturally. ‘Fated as Cain and Abel’ was the exact quote he’d been given. I pointed out that could have myriad interpretations. I think MI4 is humoring them, but since you were still allowed in the country, at this point I don’t think anyone on this side of the pond thinks you’re a culprit.”

“I’ve got people asking around, trying to find my brother, but he’s gone off the grid. Once he’s found, we’re going to have a little talk.”

“Having a family member fall in with dark forces is a terrible thing. Are you prepared for the repercussions?”

I snorted.

Rigby nodded thoughtfully. “Very well then. Personal history aside, please refrain from jumping to conclusions. That would make you no different than the MCB. The meaning of this reading could be something a bit more complex.”

“I hate the complicated hoodoo.” I frowned. “I like the big stuff you can shoot.”

“Don’t we all, lad, don’t we all. So, you are off to research your menacing kifo?”

“Definitely,” I said. “I always feel like a salmon returning to its stream there.”

“They go to those streams to mate and die, Chad.”

“Ever seen the girls at Oxford, Doctor?” I asked, smiling. “I’ll just have to avoid the die part!”

* * *

The main Oxford library was well known to visitors. They even had tours. Not at this point the largest library in the world, it was nonetheless extensive, and its rare books collection was one of the finest in the world. There were Marlowe manuscripts from the time of Shakespeare, original Dickens first drafts, and rare scrolls from the time of the library of Alexandria.

What was less well known to all but the most stringent researchers were the many supplementary libraries scattered around the town. Most of those were designated to specific areas, one was devoted solely to anthropology, another to linguistics, still others to math and sciences. Those held an enormous amount of information garnered over the centuries.

What a select few people knew about was tucked away in Summertown, mostly under an unpretentious and not particularly large manse, was the Library for the Study of the Supernatural and Occult, aka the Unseen Library.

On the surface it was, again, a very small place. The building was three stories and about ten thousand feet. In the various rooms were many general works of the occult. Books about the supernatural you could find, with some looking, in any standard library.

But take the side door into the basement. Show your ID to the nice librarian with the subgun behind the desk and you entered the real library.

It was an unknown number of stories deep. The deeper the level, the higher the clearance needed from the BSS to enter, and the guards here were polite, professional, and ready to kill anybody. As a visiting “scholar” I was only allowed access to the first two floors.

Supposedly there was a copy here of every book, manuscript, scroll, and tattooed flesh chunk with supernatural information on it, ever discovered by the British Empire. It was rumored that the lower levels had vaults containing the most powerful of grimoires, original copies of the Necronomicon, Das Rad Der Zeit, the Cluiche na gcathaoireacha and other works so deep and evil I wasn’t even sure of their names.

They kept the books in Oxford. They kept the artifacts in London. However, since there had been an incident involving a mummy and a rogue MI4 operative, that collection had been closed to scholars. Or at least that’s what the VHI people told me over drinks.

I started in the Oriental sector and dove in. I was up on Hindi and sort of familiar with Cantonese. I quickly discovered that wasn’t going to be enough. Most of the texts held there were not only in other languages, they were in obscure dialects thereof.

It was in a scroll written by a Gujarat yogi and traveler that I found the first reference to the mava paṇauvaā. The traveler, one Sundar Drupada, had studied the magic of the Hulontalangio. He described a similar sacrifice to the Ashanti as well as great power over the dead. However, the Hulontalangio wizards were more knowledgeable of the beast he called the mava paṇauvaā which translated in Gujarat as “Mother Worm.” They knew what they were sacrificing to was simply an extension of the Great Worm which lay below. But exactly where below was unclear. The text spoke in increasingly shrill tones of subterranean horrors that lingered beneath the earth, he listed dozens including the well-known shoggoth, grinders and something I’d never heard of called the Āntarika-pavitrakaratāṁtuṁ-ghrṇājanaka-ri’ēkśana-dharmāndha, which he appeared to find the most horrible of all. The book eventually drifted off into mad ravings.

Even figuring out who the Hulontalangio were took a few days as there were no other references to them. I went back to the main library, then the ethnology library, and finally found a reference to a Dutch punitive expedition which had been sent into a department of the Indonesian territories to deal with a tribe that were slave traders, cannibals, and workers of black magic. They had “destroyed their unclean altars and their black deity” and returned to Jakarta with heavy losses. But nowhere in the libraries was there an original report from the expedition. Just a report of “heavy losses fighting the unclean forces of the dark god.” And no description of how to destroy the dark god, presumably the mava paṇauvaā. Or it was possible they just destroyed the kifo pseudopods. In which case, the damned mava was still there.

I checked Oxford’s references and if there was an extant original report, they couldn’t find it. Not even through the Dutch. Stuff got lost over the years.

I did find one other item which was an early news report, in Dutch, that spoke of the walking dead attacking the expedition. Okay, so the local houdoun used shamblers. Good to know.

West Africa there was only the Ashanti report. That was it for Indonesia. That only left Mongolia.

I searched for a week—during which there was no sign of my brother but Milo torched a few more kifos—before finding a reference in a decayed scroll seized from the Imperial Library in China during the Boxer Rebellion. According to the documents, the scroll and numerous others were taken as loot by a Hunter who was at the time a major in the British Infantry. He had recognized the scrolls as containing supernatural information and, rather than have them be destroyed or end up in some other officer’s library, had traded two Ming vases for them.

The very decayed scroll was in the dialect of the Eastern Jin Dynasty dating it to between 317 A.D. and 420 A.D. It spoke of a punitive expedition against a mystical force which went deep into Hun territory north of the Great Wall. The expedition was ordered by the Light of Heaven for infractions against the Order of the Heavens. This generally meant really black magic. The Huns were not the culprits. They were much more fearful of magic than the Chinese. The culprit was a foreign, did not say what nation, alchemist. He had raised a great dark god in the Ulun Buir region. This dark god was in turn bringing all manner of dead things back to life such that the alchemist had a vast army of the undead with which he planned to unseat the Son of Heaven from his throne and bring all of China into a long night of dark magics.

At least that was what I could get from the fragments of the scroll.

What happened was unclear. The scroll was very degraded. It looked as if, with the allowance and even support of the Huns, a General Kong Li Rong led a large expedition deep into the arid wastes of the Hulun Buir. Only a fragment of the force returned bearing the beheaded body of their general. The great evil had been defeated and destroyed utterly by the alchemists of the emperor but none of them had survived either. The general had ordered that all the fallen were to be beheaded and in most case their bodies burned.

It was in pieces and I had to guess as to the meaning of some of the pictograms. Pictograms are always more of a by-guess-and-by-gosh thing but in this case it was worse. They were barely legible, most of them were half eaten away and a single pictogram of the period could have a dozen meanings. As an example, the pictogram for “water” could, depending on variables, mean water in general, rain, a spring, being transparent, being opaque, a lake, an ocean, a river, et cetera.

But the sole useful reference was to “mining/digging/boring/tunneling to the darkness/deeps/cavern/hole in the ground” and “bringing to the darkness/etcetera the powder/ash/sand/dust of the sun/fire/volcano.”

The reason for the slash is that any of the above meanings would hold for what I was pretty sure were the pictograms. Ancient languages frankly suck.

What that probably meant was what made sense. Find the worm body, dig down to it and burn it with alchemical fire. The Chinese of that period knew not only the making of gunpowder but various other fast burning chemicals. I checked and they even knew how to make an early version of thermite.

However, the alchemical fire was of no use so they called upon a mystic to fight the beast. The pictogram for that could mean alchemist, wizard, sorcerer or certain categories of priests including Tibetan or Ainu shamans. They then attacked it with materials which were known only to them. That damaged the beast, possibly killed it.

Alas, the bit about what happened after that was the most degraded. The main noticeable bit was that the writing changed. The writing up to that point had been in one hand, then changed to a less capable hand. The scroll was marked with the chop of the scribe to General Kong Li Rong at the beginning. The latter chop was of a lesser scribe and it was in part his less capable writing as well as preparation of the inks that made the rest of the scroll pretty much useless. There was a list of casualties that appeared to be long to the extent it could be read. And the writing to that point was more or less a log by the general. After that it was by a Captain Tai Bo Li. But how the general had died and why a lesser captain was now in charge of the remnant force was missing or illegible.

The main battle seemed to have taken place after they got down to the mava paṇauvaā.

That was worthwhile to know.

As it turned out, it was pretty much the most important thing to know.

There also wasn’t a single reference on how to find the damned thing.

I went searching for anything I could find about General Kong Li Rong or Captain Tai but there wasn’t much. The problem was that every dynasty in the long history of China had at one point or another tried to erase prior history so as to make themselves look more important. Mao’s destruction of religious texts and historical documents during his reign was simply a continuation of a very long process. Most Chinese history depended upon secondary sourcing and remembered details and was thus extremely suspect.

General Kong had had an illustrious career to that point and his death was noted in remnant Imperial archives. He was laid in state with great honors and guaranteed a position in heaven. Captain Tai was promoted to general for his exploits, unspecified in other documents, and also went on to great things. But there was no further information about the Lost Expedition. There were no references to which alchemists they had brought with them to fight the mava paṇauvaā nor what mystic “stuff” they used.

I talked to a professor who was a specialist in the period and he really had nothing to add. He’d never read that particular scroll and did find it fascinating. Since he wasn’t read in on supernatural, he saw it as just another punitive expedition of an evil empire oppressing the poor herders and farmers of the region who, based upon the “great mother” being, were probably matriarchal and…

Could we get back to the point? Were there any extant writings by alchemists of the period?

There were. The particular emperor of that period was a proponent of Tibetan alchemists and had filled his court with useless soothsayers and shamans from Tibet instead of spending the money on the poor and downtrodden people of…

GAH! Not ancient Tibetan!

Ancient Tibetan is the worst ancient language ever. Except maybe Coptic. In both cases all the words are suppositional, meaning they are dependent upon other information in the text and outside of the text, and the Tibetans for religious reasons absolutely opposed direct description of anything abhorrent or unclean. They wouldn’t even directly describe poisons.

To explain, when it came to anything “bad” or “unwholesome,” the ancient Tibetans were more politically correct than a Harvard academic. They were so into euphemisms it was insane.

Example: The Tibetans wrote many books about medicine. Say that they are describing the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. They would describe the symptoms—bluing of the lips, fingertips and tongue—but when they got to the cause

“The cause of this malady is that which is of the Fire of Deva, that which is of the Dust of Shetal, that which is of the Path of the Heron.”

You would have to then go try to find something that explained what that meant. Problem being that it was invariably word of mouth and very closed even then. A junior doctor might look up the text and find that the malady was described but would have to go to a more senior lama or shaman to ask what the hell “that which is of the Fire of Deva” was. Because you didn’t get to learn about poisons until you were a trusted fourth dong or something. And even then it was hierarchical. Sort of like MCB come to think of it. Everything unclean was classified.

Since most of the senior lamas and shamans (who knew what all the classified euphemisms meant) had been killed by the Chinese Communists in the takeover of Tibet, for being, you know, lamas and shamans and thus unclean in the eyes of Communists, most of the really hard information a Hunter needed had been lost.

Also, the way the writing is laid out has always made my brain ache. And I’m good with cuneiform and Sanskrit. Ancient Tibetan? Hate it.

I should probably add an explanation. As noted above, every time the Chinese went through a major civil war, which was frequent in their history, the winners would try to get rid of history and were in many cases very thorough about it. This isn’t a purely Chinese thing. The Mayans and Byzantines did much the same thing. Try to find specific details about Jeshua, a carpenter of Nazareth, sometime. You’ll find references to references; you can find his name in indexes of tax records, for example, but all the original references are missing. Why? Byzantines collected them all up and either hid or destroyed them.

The Tibetans never really had a civil war so their written knowledge had been preserved for thousands of years continuously. It was nearly impossible to decipher, but it had been preserved. That was until the fucking ChiComs came along and destroyed it. Fuckers. I might hate ancient Tibetan but I hate book-burners more.

I reminded myself that at least it wasn’t Coptic and dug into the texts that were available from the period.

Oddly enough, most of those were in the regular Tibetan section. I’d used those libraries extensively when studying Yeti so they were familiar stomping grounds. It was well known that the supernatural didn’t exist and all these references to demons, yeti and walking dead were just superstitious nonsense. And since the Tibetans were so oblique in everything they wrote it was nearly impossible to glean actual incantations, spells, demonic names, et cetera. All those details were handed down by word of mouth and unless the Dalai Lama knew them, they were lost to time. So the writings, unlike that of medieval alchemists, Islamic sufis, and Hindi yogis, were harmless enough. You had to really know your stuff to get anything out of them.

The other problem is that Tibetans had all sorts of references to call it “what lies beneath.” In their mystical pantheon, Hell isn’t that far down in the ground. Miners and farmers are tightly bound to the Wheel by the fact that both dig in the ground which is, in and of itself, unclean. And they firmly believed that there are monsters absolutely riddling the crust of the earth. Drop a shovel and you’re going to hit some demon or other eldritch thing. They were especially scared shitless of some buried sleeping monster called “unbinder of the path and unmaker of all things.”

So finding a reference to one particular monster in underground Mongolia was tough. They also had very little concept of geography outside of Tibet. The Chinese may be described as insular but it’s nothing compared to classic Tibetans. If it wasn’t in Tibet, it didn’t really exist. And if it was in Tibet its location was described the same way a small-town resident would describe a location. “Up the valley where Tom used to live, take a left where his house used to be. Walk nineteen paces of the length of the Most Illustrious Lotus. Dig down about as tall as Adam who lives over in the next valley and you’ll find the Eater of Air.”

Never try to follow a Tibetan treasure map.

I finally found a third- or fourthhand story that seemed to match the data.

A major lama of great alchemical knowledge had been engaged by a “King of the Lower Lands” (to the Chinese “the Son of Heaven,” to the Tibetans of the period nearly as important as a rich farmer) to accompany an expedition to fight a great evil. This evil, like most evils in Tibetan hoodoo, was found to exist at a great depth. The user thereof was a sorcerer of “lands to the West beyond the enlightenment of the Buddha,” which could mean anything from the Persian Empire westward.

There were some problems getting to the location of the beast, battles didn’t really matter to the Tibetans. But the lama had used the power of “the peace of Buddha” to put most of those to rest. Then he cast the “rune of Onesh” to determine the location of the “foul one.” After it was positively located, “ones who plumb the depths for riches at loss to their soul upon the Wheel,” miners in other words, were summoned to dig down to the depths and find this foul beast.

This took more than ten cycles of the moon, during which time the lama was also said to have cured many illnesses including most notably blindness, brought people fully back from the dead and summoned a great chariot of fire from the sky to ride about doing good deeds.

Given my job, I wasn’t sure which bits were entirely made up and which bits were pure history.

The mava was described in detail. I mean, really extreme detail. Went on for a page and a half. Problem being, it was all in nearly impenetrable euphemisms. The body was “of the crown/head/sun/light/helmet of the Most Enlightened.” There were many “of that which is of the high/airy/well-loved/most holy places.” However, the horror of the sight of the thing came through even with all the euphemisms and the ancient Tibetan.

Once the foul body of the beast was exposed, pathetic and useless alchemists of the Low Lands—Chinese in other words—tried various forms of their alchemy and magic to attack the beast to no avail. Many were lost in battling it. The lama was persuaded to take a hand and laid unguents upon it and certain rare alchemical materials.

This caused the beast great harm and it, in turn, reacted by summoning “its servants” from the “unclean earth.” What the servants were was unclear. It was assumed you’d know what the servants of the beast were! So what were they? The kifo worm pseudopods? Shoggoths? Grinders? Homunculi? There were many of the “servants” described, but without that word-of-mouth knowledge you really got bupkes. Exact description was forbidden!

Damn ancient Tibetans!

The lama again brought “the peace of Buddha” to many of them but it was insufficient. The beast was pushing back and even the power of Buddha has limits. Many of the rest of the expedition fell and even became servants/sacrifices/monsters to/of the great beast. But in time they were defeated as was the foul beast. The lama perished in battle along with many lesser souls, you know those “bound upon the Wheel” lowlanders, i.e. Chinese, but the story was brought back by his apprentice and thus it is written. I shall bow to the four winds.

So…

You find this Great Worm Mother using the rune of Onesh. Dig down to it. We could probably drill these days. Lots of oil drilling in Louisiana. Hit it with some sort of mystic unguents. That may not kill it right away. Then it brings its “servants” to attack you. The servants were probably the kifo worms. Fire for those, bring flamethrowers. It looked as if the Chinese expedition had lost about five thousand people fighting this thing. They didn’t have flamethrowers and good explosives, so I was pretty sure we could keep the casualties under five thousand.

The “rune of Onesh” was surprisingly easy to find. It had been written about any number of times. The rune was inscribed on a jade pendant which was then enchanted and it basically pointed towards certain types of evil—primarily undead, but it sounded like basically anything with the stink of the Old Ones on it. I hadn’t been aware of the rune but it sounded useful as hell as long as it worked for someone other than a Buddhist lama. And if they were the only ones who could use it, I knew where to find dozens of lamas in the US. Some of them might even be able to translate the rare unguents and alchemical stuff.

On a tip from Rigby, I ran down to London and some of the alleyways behind Portobello Road and picked up an authentic rune of Onesh pretty quickly and surprisingly cheap. It appeared fairly old and I suspected it might have fallen into the shopkeeper’s hands after falling out of the back of a truck. Given that whoever the previous owner was they probably had no clue of its use or its value, I could live with that.

I didn’t bother to go to Chinatown to see what I could dig up about alchemical materials. The Chinese ones hadn’t worked anyway and they’d ended up using fire. If this thing was as big as the PUFF adjuster suggested, we’d probably need quite a bit of thermite. Maybe magnesium would do it? Then the servants would attack and we’d defeat them, hopefully with fewer than five thousand casualties, then defeat the mava paṇauvaā and live happily ever after.

Sure. It was going to be eeeasy. But at least it was the beginning of a plan.

I had no clue what the PUFF was going to be on an entity that was supposed to be over a hundred meters long, but it was sure to be pretty decent. Depending on how many servants and what kind, I suspected we were all going to be able to retire.

Assuming we didn’t take five thousand casualties when we only had a handful of people.

This was going to get interesting.

* * *

When I returned to the library, the guards politely but sternly barred me from entrance. It turned out that when the MCB had realized I’d left the country, they’d asked their British counterparts to monitor my activity. Even though the MCB had a working relationship with MI4, it wasn’t like secretive government bureaucracies communicated efficiently, so when MI4 eventually got around to processing their request weeks later, and it was discovered that a suspected cult member had been hanging out in the world’s best collection of occult tomes delving into ancient mysteries, MI4 had shit a brick.

Having caused an international incident, it was time to go home.



Back | Next
Framed