It wasn’t long since Tom had started burning papers and random books in the bathtub before the first response came from Savitree.
Knowing that it would not take long, I was doing my best to organise a somewhat defensive position for us in the library. With Tom’s help, we toppled tables and made a makeshift barricade facing the door as Will locked the large doors with the key. Carter was in his own world, his panic seemed to be taking over him, his thoughts strained as we all heard the echoing footsteps from the long hallways outside. Before long the footsteps seems to originate from several places. Outside the door, then above the library, then below, she was moving fast, moving all over.
The first attack came, gunshots through the wall, kicking up plaster and timber from outside the section of the library where the large circular table was located. We all spun to face the direction on to hear nothing once the shots had been fired.
After a few moments, again shots through the wall, the hallway wall, two more chunks of plaster spat at us, again we all spun, this time Tom and Will returning fire with shotgun blasts of their own. Again silence.
Footsteps above us, was there an attic we had missed?
We all followed the sounds of the footsteps with our firearms, waiting for them to settle before we opened fire. Another two shots come through the ceiling, crashing into the floor of the library near the fireplace. It was at that moment that Carter reminded us that she was known to her followers as the Shadow Lady, was this her ploy? Distract us, then emerge from the shadows?
Carter was again agitated, calling that he had endured enough, vaulting the barricade and moving to the large doorway where Savitree’s grandmother was sitting in her chair. He wheeled her back towards us, as he did, two more shots from behind him, glass breaking as buckshot caught Carter in the upper thigh. He grimaced as he pushed the old woman behind the barricade. He made Tom translate his threats to the old woman so that Savitree could hear. He then placed his hand on her shoulder. His hand, containing that ungodly mouth. The woman began screaming, it was biting and tearing at her flesh.
I looked at Tom and motioned for him to do something, he read my mind, slamming the butt of his shotgun into Carter’s face, sending him to the floor, if this fight was going to happen, Carter was in no shape to fight it.
As Carter hit the floor, another gunshot rang out, the lock of the large doors echoing as its broken pieces bounced across the wooden floor, it had been shot out.
Frank, Tom, Will and I all trained our weapons on the door, the wait was over.
The Doors burst open as Savitree came tumbling into the room, rolling along the ground as we opened fire at her, she in return fired, her shotgun blast slamming into the table I was using for cover just inches from my face, sending all manner of splinters and lead into my shoulder. I didn’t even seem to feel it, all I could do was continue firing back. The blast from Tom’s shotgun seemed to slow her down, grazing her side, Will’s blast however made a terrific mess of the wall behind her, sending dust and plaster in all directions. Frank, it wasn’t like him to miss, his short volley impacting the ground all around her. My first shots were also wild, the table explosion near my face saw to that. Again she fired at me, I could hear the air parting as the cloud of buckshot buzzed inches from my head and sailed into the wall at the far end of the room.
Tom had thrown down his shotgun in favour of his pistol now that Savitree had stopped moving. She was taking aim again as Tom’s pistol rounds punctured her stomach and thigh, slowing her ability to raise her weapon, Frank and I both also struck her, two of my shots impacting her chest and shoulder, Frank’s her ribcage and neck. Whatever Will was doing, he clearly wasn’t having a good time with his shotgun, managing to send a blast of buckshot that blew out Savitree’s left knee. She was done, she slumped to the floor, a bleeding mess. I didn’t know who had landed the killing blow in all of the confusion, but taking lead from so many, no one could have survived. As she fell to the floor, Carter rose his head over the barricade to see what remained, a bleeding, crumpled girl slumped at a strange angle on the decaying floor boards.
Picking up the shotgun he had dropped when Struck, I moved closer to Savitree, I wasn’t prepared to take any chances, not for Carter’s sake, he was already a mess, he didn’t need to think about this woman any more. I squeezed off a shell, spraying her head all over the floor behind her and onto the skirting boards of the wall, she was not going to get back up from that.
The firefight seemed to be the crescendo of our fear. After it had ended, a strange calm took over. Carter was back on his feet, nursing his head as a large bump was clear an the side of his scalp, blood oozing slightly from his ear. Frank had taken it upon himself to aid Carter, clearly a more effective medic than any of the rest of us.
I took Tom with me as we decided to throw the remains of Savitree to the floor of the ballroom, out the door and over the railing. The mouths that were on her body still emitted that strange sound, even though she was truly dead, they were not. Tossing her body to the ground floor was easy, Tom seemed less convinced, he began hauling the another bathtub from a room and setting it alight with books and papers before adding Savitree’s corpse to the flames. We needed to know how to destroy these mouths, we needed to know how to kill them, after all, Carter now had one as his personal pet.
We decided we needed rest, we would take it in shifts, Carter and Tom would Sleep, Will and I would take the first watch. We all seemed to have the same Idea, we spent the next day sleeping and investigating the house, stocking the library with food from the pantry for the time we would be spending living in this room, going through all of this wonderful research.
When the embers of the flames consuming Savitree had turned to smouldering ash, Will and I returned to its side. Everything was charred and burnt, there was no evidence that anything solid was ever in this tub, the papers and books were little more than dancing embers, the corpse itself, a shell of black ask that had been slowly collapsing on itself. The only thing that remained, bones, charred, black bones, and on those bones, the mouths endured.
Will came to me with another idea, reminding me of my clerical vows, he asked me to try holy water. As it was not my belief that I could turn water into ‘holy water’ for these purposes, I decided to appease him. I blessed water and began covering the mouths in the bath tub, to no surprise of mine, nothing happened.
Again, we poured oil and flammable, non-essential books into the tub and again ignited it, surely once the bones had been reduce to ash, the moths would be no more?
Will and I returned to find Tom, Carter and Frank all looking over the stacks of notes on the table. This was going to be long process. Weeks of work, not that I wasn’t excited to penetrate the mind of the enemy, this research had a purpose that I was keen to uncover.
Weeks had past, we had traversed the complex research methods of Savitree, her notes, although not overly specific, were all in relation to expedition across the world, all in search of something. Reading the notes and journals about each location and deciphering some truth from fiction, her finders against her hopes, she had come to the conclusion that many were not of interest, despite sending people all over the world. Many of the people she had sent had gone mad, or perished during the endeavours, only a precious few remained.
After reading and re-reading many of the expedition notes, I could not help but draw similarities between what the expeditions had encountered, and several of the lore books I had only recently read. The book that came to mind most of all, ‘Seven Masks’.
Savitree herself references names from the book, the Black Pharaoh, a stand out. In several of the locations, I drew similarities from what was encountered with several of the creatures listed in Seven Masks, the most obvious, the Crawling Mist, the Black Pharaoh, the Pale Death, all of these beings, or at least what I could tell from my study, these were all happening to the expeditions, madness and death the result.
Looking at these locations, only one stood out as a curious point to myself and Carter especially. Carter had never forgotten the painting above the altar in Brookes apartment. The devouring mountain. The closest location to this kind of depiction was a location in Tibet, Mt Kailash.
Reading into the journals corresponding to the location, strange things could be found. Of all the locations researched, Mt Kailash had the most inconclusive and strange ending. The expedition leader apparently did everything he could to investigate, however where many of the journals came to sound and summary conclusions, this expedition has a rather abrupt end. As if the expedition all of a sudden reached something, then held information back, or had a secret to keep. Another interesting fact of this expedition, it contained information on a German named Kramer, it was Tom who told us that this man was the same German who was here in Bangkok and had recognised them, the same German that I had spoken to through the door of my cell. He was the security chief of the expedition.
Carter was convinced that this was the location for the devouring mountain, he would not take no for an answer, I had to ask myself if he was right, or was he suffering some strange side effect of what he had endured so far. He was after all, not himself, thinking that he hides it well does not stop me from noticing the constant irritation and whispers of his new ‘growth’. Forever whispering in his ear. Tom and Will both looked at me as if to ask, when are we going to cut it off?
I returned to the downstairs ballroom constantly, the mouths on Savitree’s bones had not disappeared, merely shifting. The bones where now ash and dust, the mouths however had taken up residence on the sides of the bath tub. Whatever these were, they were not going to be removed so easily. I gave thought to the notion of subduing Carter with the help of the others and taking a knife to his hand to remove the skin from his palm, almost down to the bone, only for the reason that he could still have a hand. The more I thought about it, the more it would cause him pain, he would also, no doubt, never forgive me, however I thought it a possible alternative to the full amputation.
I continued to read the notes on Savitree’s table, my attention now shifting to the complete set of “Revelations of Glaaki”, we had been missing volume 12, now seeing that this set was complete, it was going to be my focus for a while.
I couldn’t help myself, I devoured the volumes, days went by as if they were minutes, the volumes seemed to communicate the consciousness or mental thought processes of the cult mind. Aside from the frustration that these volumes contained no answers to what these numerous global cults actually worshiped as a named deity, it seemed certain that these volumes revealed the outlook of the cult collective. These volumes had caused me pain, my head felt like it was splitting open. I found it hard to look away from the text, however the constant reading causing my mind to wander, not in the way of losing concentration, but it some other strange way, as if the enlighten through pain or consume through agony.
The nature and origins of the cults left undefined, however the main focus of such a text seemed to do nothing more than preserve the knowledge of the god, interestingly, this is not plural, they are wanting to preserve one god, no matter how false it is.
Setting the volumes aside, I could not read them anymore, my dreams were already showing signs of strangeness, reading this book surely would not aid in their recovery.
Looking around the table for something new to pick up, it was Tom who passed me another leather bound text, explaining it was her person journal from the 1920’s, more specifically 1924.
Tome was the silent type, when he looked at something, I was sure it was of importance, of the two new members of our party, Will seemed to be easily excited. Every volume he read spoke to him of new clues and locations that he desperately wanted to visit, Tom however seemed to watch how our minds worked, only voicing an opinion when he absolutely had to, was this the mind of a journalist? Or something else? Something stranger?
I opened the journal of Savitree, within an hour, my mind was racing, she was there, she was at the barn in 1924. She was one of the women in the photos of the parties, she was a member of Echiavarria’s circle.
Savitree’s notes seemed to be that of a woman in love with the idea of what was happening, yet later discovered that it was not the true nature of what they all believed. She echoed the sentiments of both Ayers, Brookes and Trammell in believing Echivarria’s ritual and guidance was a perversion of the true nature of what they wanted.
The second fascinating discovery was the importance of Edgar Job. In the field where the barn once stood, Carter and I found the same thing. A circle of stones for conducting the ritual, however the second circle was for something else entirely, a spell by Echiavarria upon Edgar Job according to Savitree. No one present could see the importance of Job, he was not the mathematical genius they believed him to be, he was a nobody, nothing special about him at all.
I was left to wonder if the weedy, reserved man we had interrogated in Savannah was so much more than he seemed, was he the key to returning whatever was summoned on that day in 1924, back to the dust? Was he the vessel for something grander? What was he, in the end, who was he?
Savitree continued in her journal to explain her efforts to reconstruct the ritual of 1924, only to be continually frustrated with her results, after trying on and off for years, it seems she eventually gave up on attempting to achieve the result she desired. Something was missing to her, something she did not yet understand, now she will never.
After reading all of these texts and tomes within Savitree’s library, it was clear that we were reading sources of information that ultimately led to confusion and answerless questions. There were things here that showed promise, yet Savitree seemed to lack the understanding of how it all tied together. Carter and I had experienced so much that Savitree was yet to have any notions of. Our time in the Yucatan and Mexico yielded so much more understanding than she ever had, our conversation with what we found at the pyramid in the Yucatan revealed so much more to us that no one else seemed to grasp. We knew that Savitree, Trammell, Echiavarria and Ayers were all worshipping something totally different to what they thought they were, however the thing they had been worshipping Y’golonac, still managed to escape our complete understanding and reasoning.
If we were right, and Malta contained another mouth and nectar production plant, Ayers possibly had found yet another mouth and at its centre, the Tibetan mountain, where were we to go? Deal with the mouths, or go straight to the source. Carter and I were in agreement. Reading that the Mountain was once the source of all this evil, nectar flowing like rivers from its peaks, however when it retreated, the mouths showed up in other locations, several of which we had dealt with, our thinking was to deal with them first, slow the nectar, stem the worship and followers of this insane cult before dealing with its heart. The ramifications of doing the reverse could mean a new centre at one of the existing mouths still producing nectar, we did not know.
After listening to Will and his constant desire to go to Ethiopia based on little more than the chance Ayers was still alive and his desire to flex his archaeological brain, he took some convincing to follow us on our path to Malta. His other troubles were that we had removed Savitree, Trammell and Brookes, the heads of the hydra that had been producing nectar, yet we had missed Walker and Kramer, men who would take over. Our only solace was that Walker and Kramer were not true believers, for them, this was about money, not the worshipping of some foreign deity.
Malta still seemed like the most logical choice, I had no doubt we would yet travel to Ethiopia, my only concern having read as much as I could manage, and suffering all we had been through at the hands of the nectar infused cultist, was to stem the flow.
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