Masks of Nyarlathotep - Session 2

The prologue chapter continues as the investigators depart from Lima in a race to the Peruvian Highlands.

1. The Prologue Continues

Lima, Peru - March 20, 1921

The sinister encounter with Luis de Mendoza the previous evening motivated us to do all we could to prepare for the upcoming journey. We met with Prof. Sanchez to coordinate our efforts, and he revealed that he would not be able to secure the trucks needed for the 4-day trip to Puno without a significant amount of funds up front. Arthur thought better of it and went with him to negotiate the amount down to $500. While he and Sanchez secured transportation, the rest of us gathered our supplies for the journey.

Considering again the journal collected from Sanchez’s office, Elias said he had come to determine that the story regarding the cult of the kharisiri had started appearing after the original looting of the temple by the conquistadors¹ in the 15th century. We weren’t sure exactly what to make of this, as how could it possibly be related to anything going on in the 20th century? Unsure of what the future could hold, we finished preparing for our journey and boarded trucks, heading south.

2. Journey to the Andes

Puno, Peru - March 24, 1921

The trek south took four days but was unremarkable. We arrived in quite a small town, fit only to secure animals for the trek up to the ruins. We looked around town for a newspaper, library, or somewhere else we could find out any further location about the area, but nothing was available. Not wanting to waste any further time, we loaded up on our mounts for the 3-day journy to the ruins.

The first night of the trek saw the weather turn foul. The temperature dropped significantly and we were glad we had packed our warm clothing. The winds picked so it was all we could do to keep our tents on the ground. Nobody noticed when one of the pack mules was attacked and killed sometime during the night. Just like at the museum, a disk of skin had been removed and all the fat had been sucked out of the resulting hole. Perry and I examined the ground to try and determine what had done this, and he located human footprints that led past several of our tents before arriving where the mule had been hobbled. Not wanting to risk running out of supplies, we took a few hours and redistributed the load among the remaining animals before resuming the journey.

Towards the afternoon of the second day, as we were approaching a hilltop, several of us heard gunshots in the distance ahead of us. Several of us dismounted our horses and took our rifles to the top of the hill to investigate. We shaded our eyes and peered around, finally picking out a pair of figures in the distance. Cursing at ourselves for not thinking to bring binoculars, we were able to make out that one of the figures was prone, and the other standing over him in a defensive posture with a rifle. He seemed to be looking away from us in the direction of the ruins. Concerned that this may have been an encounter with the kharasiri we hastened to remount and see if we could render aid.

When we drew close to the pair, the man whirled and aimed his rifle at us, shouting in Spanish, calling us ‘white devils’ and bandits. Despite my years of expertise, the excitement and stress of having a gun pointed at me again (for it had been some years since the War ended) caused me to lose all facility with the language. Luckily, Sanchez stepped in and convinced the man that we were merely travelers who had just come upon the scene, and that we had nothing to do with those who had attacked them.

Arthur and Eleanor dismounted and rendered aid to the boy while Sanchez, Perry, and myself spoke with the man. He told us his name was Julio, and that he and his son Domingo had been attacked by two people, a white man in tattered rags and an Uru² woman wearing local dress. Both looked like they had been living outdoors for quite a while. They attacked but Julio was able to fight them off, at which point they fled south towards the ruins. Once Domingo had been stabilized, we propped him up on one of the horses and accompanied Julio back to their farm.

The farm turned out to be more of a shack, where these two lived by themselves and raised their sheep. Julio graciously prepared a dinner and we spoke at length about the surrounding area and its history. According to Julio, very few people lived in this area close to the ruins because of the stories of the kharasiri. We asked him about the kharasiri attacks and he said that they had only really started relatively recently, within the past several months. This caught our attention and we asked if this had anything to do with Larkin’s previous expedition. Julio hadn’t met Larkin, but he had seen the man come south to the ruins several months back, accompanied by a man we quickly recognized as de Mendoza. Larkin had attempted to hire some of the people in the area but all had refused.

Concerned about the possibility of another attack, we took turns keeping watch, though thankfully nothing happened. We set off the following morning in the direction of the ruins, hoping to still be able to get there ahead of Larkin and his team. About halfway there, Perry and Eleanor spotted two people ahead of us, walking through some tall grasses. Perry set up a telescopic sight on his rifle³ and we paused for a few minutes so he could observe the pair. He saw a man dressed in extremely old clothing, tattered rags really, with very long hair, very dirty and quite old. Accompanying him was a woman in her 20s, with relatively normal clothes for the area, except that they were dirty and torn. Curiously, both the man’s and the woman’s stomachs were bulging and distended. None of us were sure what to make of that but it seemed quite ominous.

We took stock of the situation. I pointed out that we were possibly heading into a situation which could be considered dangerous, and if were likely to come to blows with this pair it would be best to get it over with. The others disagreed with me, deciding that it would be better to follow the pair and see if we could learn anything useful without revealing ourselves. While I didn’t like them disagreeing with me, I must admit that I am glad they talked me out of it. I have experienced enough violence for ten men’s lifetimes. Keeping our distance, we followed the pair (who we had determined must be kharasiri) onwards towards the ruins.

3. The Hidden Valley

Peruvian Highlands - March 27, 1921

By evening, the kharasiri had led us to a valley with a plateau in its center. Atop the plateau was the remains of an ancient structure, about 50 yards across, with the top of a pyramid extending out of the earth on its northwest side. We were quickly faced with a difficult decision between two routes to the temple. On the one hand we could take the road which wound through several switchbacks down to the temple. If we were willing to leave our mounts behind, however, we could try to climb down the valley wall and arrive much sooner. Not willing to risk abandoning the mounts, we opted to play it safe and take the road. Much to our chagrin, as we were doing so, we saw the two kharasiri had taken the fast route and outpaced us to the temple.

We stood and watched as the pair passed through a gate on the east side of the outer wall and walk up the steps to the top of the pyramid. One after the other, each kharasiri stepped over to a large crack in the roof of the pyramid, then proceeded to crouch and bend down so to bring their face near the opening. What happened next was difficult to believe, yet I swear it to be what we saw! The kharasiri, huddled now over the crack in the roof of the pyramid, unhinged their jaw and disgorged a thick stream of some sort of white fluid from their mouth directly into the opening below. This took several minutes each, and for the entire time our group stood on and watched in stunned silence. Once they had finished their foul obeisances, the kharasiri stood and descended down the far side of the pyramid and out of view.

We stood for a few moments looking at each other, but nobody seemed willing to put voice to the question of whether we wanted to turn back. As a group we pressed onwards, reaching the plateau and the crumbling outer wall surrounding the ruins. Looking in past the wall, we could see the remains of interior walls to the south of the pyramid, showing the skeleton of other structures which had worn away. We hobbled the mounts in the northeastern corner of the courtyard, where there was an open section of ground near the wall. With only an hour or so of daylight remaining, we split up to search the grounds.

4. The Ruined Temple

The pyramid dominated the northwest portion of the ruins, and was partially covered with earth, with only the top 5 stone steps exposed above ground. The skeletal remains of the ruined structures filled the space to the south of the pyramid, while to its east was a scattering of rubble and some sort of structure about waist-high. To our south was some sort of large pit or shaft. We split up in several groups to try and examine these different areas and determine where the kharasiri had disappeared to.

Perry moved to the south side of the pyramid in order to try to pick up any tracks that they may have left behind, and those who went with him noticed immediately that a horrific smell was emanating from the top of the pyramid, as of some sort of corruption or filth, as well as a loud buzzing sound like flies. Though he was unable to locate any tracks in the dry ground, it was feasible that the kharasiri had moved south through the ruined walls, so he and the others moved that way.

Approaching the walls, we saw that they were in fact decorated with block-like figures that were similar (but not an exact match) to the style we saw on the pendant which Larkin showed us at our first meeting. Whether this indicated that Larkin had actually recovered the piece here, we couldn’t say, but it was interesting nonetheless. There were no signs that the kharasiri had actually gone this way, but they certainly could have, so we continued onwards to the strange pit we had seen earlier.

What we saw there reminded me all too strongly of what I saw at the Somme. The southeast corner of the ruined courtyard was occupied by an square pit, fifteen feet on a side. As we approached we could smell the foul stench of rot and corruption, and my fear was confirmed when we closed enough to see that it was an open grave, filled with rotting human corpses reaching about ten feet below the ground. Looking at my companions one could immediately distinguish those who had fought in the War - the only difference between my experiences at the Somme⁴ and what we saw before us was that the earth here was dry, and that instead of uniforms the people had been wearing the typical clothes of a farmer or shepherd in the area. Even still, we each of us covered our faces with handkerchiefs and the like, and retreated as soon as we were able.

Rejoining the others, we decided to further explore the opening in the northeast section. Perry, ever the adventurous sort, shone his torch below and revealed a drop of some fifteen feet to a floor of packed earth. Not seeing any other means of descent, and with no other ideas to explore, we broke out rope, tools, lights, and our weapons, and made ready for the group to descend into the shaft. Perry led the way with one of those great American pistols and a torch, descending on a rope we secured above.

5. The Depths of the Earth

As I looked at this dark hole in the ground, I could not help but think about the two kharasiri we had spotted earlier, and how we had still not found them. Dr. Dibden had been muttering to himself all day about them, saying that he could not figure out how they fed because the wounds they left behind looked nothing like human bite marks. All I could picture was running into one of them in a dark tunnel! And yet, brave as he is, Perry climbed down the rope with gun in hand as if it were just a walk to the cafe.

Pausing at the bottom of the rope, he surveyed his surroundings. He stood in a T intersection, where one tunnel started and led to the south, with two other tunnels leading east and west. Shining his torch down each of the tunnels in turn, he was able to make out some sort of objects in a room to the east, and to the west was a bundle of rags and sticks in the middle of the dirt floor. The tunnel south led off into darkness, so Perry decided to check the vicinity to make sure it was safe before calling us down after him.

Investigating the path to the west, Perry moved closer to the pile of rags and shone his light on it and discovered that it was actually a mummified corpse, swathed in wool and cotton. It was clear the corpse had been laying there for quite a long time indeed. To his great astonishment, as Perry stepped closer the body started to move! Its limbs flexed and stretched, dragging itself along the ground slowly towards him. Perry stood for a moment transfixed in horror, but (thinking much more quickly than I ever could) he swiftly pulled out a cigarette lighter, flicked it, and tossed it into the moldering pile of rags wrapping the body. The rags caught fire immediately, and luckily it rapidly spread so that in a matter of seconds the creature was being consumed in flame. Perry stood back and watched the thing burn for a few moments as it slowed and eventually stopped entirely before the flames went out. The horror continued as a small white larva of some kind crawled out of the thing’s ear and began slithering away. Perry rapidly stomped on the sluglike creature and it burst, giving off the distinctive corruption smell we had detected earlier near the pyramid.

Giving a quick glance down the other two tunnels, Perry did not see anything to the south, and to the east the tunnel ended quite nearby in a small chamber filled with glittering objects. Not seeing any other items of immediate importance, Perry called for the rest of us to climb down the rope and join him. This took rather a long time as there were 6 of us, and some of us were not so accustomed to this sort of exertion. However, after a short while we had convened as a group, crowding in the dark tunnel around the intersection. We oriented to the east, weapons at the ready, and proceeded into the small chamber.

5.1 Sleeping Dogs

Before us lay a small chamber, approximately fifteen feet on a side. Around the edges of the room were, for lack of better words to describe it, piles of gold. There were a great many golden artifacts and objects piled loosely against the walls, stretching from the pre-Incan all the way to modern. In the center of the room were three filthy sleeping mats woven from reeds of some kind. Astonishingly, two of these mats were occupied by the kharasiri we had, seen earlier, who were somehow sleeping. We were in luck, and had managed to stay quiet enough not to wake them! I had my Mauser at the ready, and backed away to keep them covered while Dr. Dibden moved in for a closer look. From the corner of my eye, I could see Jennifer and Perry take up similar ready positions, while Eleanor, Elias, and Prof. Sanchez kept out of the way down the tunnel.

Dr. Dibden squatted down and began examining the male kharasiri in an attempt to determine just what made them different. He pulled a few of the man’s rags aside but wasn’t able to find anything. He finally pulled the man’s shirt up to uncover his stomach, but this woke the monster up. He jerked awake and tried to grab the doctor and I am ashamed to say I was so nervous I pulled the trigger without thinking. Mercifully, I was on target and hit the kharasiri, not the doctor, but still there is no excuse!

As soon as the first shot went off, the room descended into chaos. Two more shots went off in quick succession, and the first kharasiri was dead, but in the time it took the second had leapt to her feet and pounced on Eleanor. I didn’t see what happened in the confusion, but the monster did something to her chest and the next I saw she was clutching her stomach as her blouse suddenly soaked through with blood. I don’t even know what happened next except that the three of us with guns all seemed to shoot into the melee with reckless disregard for our safety, all of us thinking only of trying to save Eleanor from the fate of Sanchez’s assistant, Rizo. It seemed that I blinked my eyes and when I looked up again, both kharasiri were down and unmoving, and Eleanor had fallen to the floor, leaning against one of the walls.

Hardly knowing how to react at this point, Perry and I moved to try and help Eleanor with her wound, while incongruously Dr. Dibden started inspecting the dead kharasiri. Perhaps he did not realize what had happened? Perry barked at him to come help our wounded friend, and he seemed to come back to reality and hurried over to bandage her.⁵ We checked each other over to make sure everyone else was all right, then I went to keep watch in the tunnel while the others searched the room.

Thinking on what we found, the kharasiri must have been feeding on victims and collecting their belongings there in that chamber for generations. No other explanation makes sense. There were hundreds of different objects, mostly made of gold, silver, or other valuables, and almost all were the sorts of thing someone might carry in their pocket. There were fine watches, good pens, money clips, a great many earrings, rings, and bracelets, spurs, monocles, canes, knives, and more than we could really count. What’s more, none of the material seemed to belong here in the ruin, but was (so far as we could tell) the ill-begotten gains of devouring passersby on the road for more years than we could count. We determined to work out how to recover this treasure before we left so we could bring it with us on our return to Lima.

Steeling ourselves to what lay ahead, we took the tunnel south. Our suspicions were confirmed, as the passageway ended in a chest-high hole, plugged with rotting corpses. There clearly was some form of hidden tunnel entrance in the mass grave we had seen earlier, and this must have been how the kharisiri had entered their lair. We didn’t waste any more time here but moved to explore the western passage.

5.2 Ruined Foundations

Ahead of us lay another intersection, and a different sort of wall. Behind was packed earth, while ahead and to our left was stone - we had found the base of the pyramid. We took the left-hand fork and traced it around, examining the intricate inlays on its surface. There were nonrepeating geometric shapes, just like the worked gold carving we had found in the storeroom at the museum.

On the south side of the pyramid we found something quite out of place. The strip of inlaid carving which we had been following was missing a section, which seemed to us must have been the piece we’d brought with us. We wouldn’t be able to find out immediately, however, as the missing section was right over a two-inch crack in the wall and floor of the pyramid. Rancid white fat slowly dripped out of the crack in the wall and fell to the floor, forming a knee-deep pool covering the passage and stretching out for several yards in each direction.

We paused to consider the quandary and discuss our options. When it was proposed that someone could simply wade through the puddle to inspect the crack, I pointed out that the kharasiri may have been infected with something from within, and that we should avoid touching it at all costs. The gold inlay piece was fetched from above and the rest of the pyramid structure was inspected, but this was the only point where we were able to do anything. All we could think to do was replace the inlay piece on the pyramid wall and hope that this would somehow seal it up again.

We stood around scratching our heads for a while, and then I proposed that we form a sort of makeshift platform using the rest of our rope and the woven sleeping mats. By tying them together into a sort of hammock at the center of several lengths of rope, we could suspend someone over the middle of the pool by stretching the rope ends taut from both sides. If the person were light enough and the ropes taught enough, they would be able to replace the inlay piece without being exposed to the pool.

Nobody else had any ideas, so we set about to work. It turns out I am the smallest among the men in our group so naturally I volunteered to be suspended over the pool. I tied my kerchief around my face and got to it. Sitting as still as I could, the others lifted me up and carried me over to the center of the pool. Keeping well back from the crack, I held the inlay piece up and pressed it firmly into place. The reaction was almost immediate, the steady stream of rancid fluid slowed to a trickle over a period of ten seconds or so, like someone shutting off a tap very slowly, before finally coming to a stop. We couldn’t see what else to do, so we recovered ourselves and retreated to the main intersection.

The day had fully escaped us at this point, so we set about recovering the treasure and preparing our camp. Dr. Dibden graciously took first watch while the rest of us got some much-needed rest.

6. Revelations

Later in the evening, while Arthur was still on watch, he heard the sound of footsteps coming up the dusty trail from the east. He quickly woke the rest of us, and we were rolling out of our tents when Augustus Larkin stumbled through the gate to our south, holding a withered and sickly Luis de Mendoza up by the arm and practically dragging him along.

When they got to the center of the courtyard, Larkin paused and lowered Mendoza to the earth. No sooner was he down than Mendoza let out a bellowing scream and then practically withered away before our eyes. It was almost as if he were a figure from a pulp novel, as he faded away into a pile of dust.

We confronted Larkin, who seemed shocked to see us and asked why we had abandoned him in Lima. Ignoring his questions, we asked what he was doing here, and he tried to bluff his way into our good graces. Being none too polite about it, we told him that the pyramid was not the only thing that stunk, and he had better try harder than that if he wanted to convince us.

At this, he underwent some sort of transformation. What had been a weak, almost pleading sort of man disappeared, transforming himself by manner and voice into a powerful and threatening figure. He conceded that we had got the better of him this time but taunted us that there were many more where this one came from, and that he would be seeing us again soon.

And then he reached his hands up to the sides of his head and broke his own neck before our very eyes.

We had a sort of collective gasp of astonishment at this, but the night grew still and nothing else seemed to be happening, so we moved to examine him for any further information. We found that he had very little in his posession, just a small vial of morphine and the clothes on his back. But when the doctor examined him, he found a curious tattoo on Larkin’s chest.

7. Conclusion

There is not much to say about the rest of our expedition. Eleanor was quite heavily wounded so we took our time returning, first to Puno and then to Lima. We recovered quite a lot of treasure, enough to amount to about $5,000 apiece. Mr. Elias gathered quite a bit of detail for his book, and Prof. Sanchez the opportunity of a lifetime which I suspect he might regret having taken.

After resolving our affairs in Lima, we each went our separate ways. I decided that I had had enough of academia for the moment, and wrote the Dean at Berkeley to let him know that I would be taking an extended sabbatical. I decided that I could do with some more time out in the world, and spent some time travelling about Central America before deciding what my next course would be.

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1. Gaspar Figueroa, Hernando Ruiz, Diego Garrido, Luis de Mendoza, and Pedro de Velasco, as we had learned in Figueroa’s journal. ↩︎

2. The Uru are a culture indigenous to the area around Lake Titicaca. ↩︎

3. Those of you paying attention may be wondering why he didn’t use this the previous day when we first encountered Julio - we were wondering the same thing! ↩︎

4. I’m not super familiar with how it works yet, but I was expecting some Sanity loss from seeing this open grave. In retrospect though it would probably not have been all that different from what was described in some of the bigger battles in the war. Over three million men fought at the Somme and there were over a million casualties. ↩︎

5. Playing online comes with a certain set of technical issues as a matter of course, and in this case the person playing Dibden hadn’t realized that anyone had been wounded because they hadn’t been able to hear properly. ↩︎