Case 31: Entry 5

Well, I've done what I was hired to do. I sent a comprehensive report (including any notes and pictures I took in the course of my research) to Shauna and Gilbert. That was the job. I got hired to do research, and that was it. There is no reason I need to be involved any further... Sometimes I hate being me.

I had to steal almost five pounds of phoenix ash, but I was able to put something together to drive the Moarte Verde out of the stronghold. Not that I'm sure it was ever truly present in here, but I do know the Archives got a lot more friendly after I finished that concoction. Then I tried to decide how best to proceed. The security in the stronghold is much more arcane than technological once you get below the ground floor, which makes it much easier for me to get into places I technically shouldn't be. I thought of talking to the Director (I'm not sure if it's true, but I've heard that he's a direct descendent of Markus Dufresne) but I'm kind of afraid of getting tangled up in the bureaucracy. I also considered seeing what I could sneak out of the armory, but I doubt that would work out well. Besides, I'm not the guy who goes charging into battle with a flaming sword. I'm more of a cackling lunatic than a raging barbarian. Anyway, I decided to follow my traditional route. I stole some more materials, found a nice little corner in the Archives, and went to work.

I spent a few hours praying and reading through my Bible, and then I went to work. Tore any blank pages I could find out of the journals I had read and wrote Mark 5:1-13 on them seventy-seven times. Then I made a few more concoctions, and I sat down to write the story of Moarte Verde and all the times the Agency and its allies have fought against it. Unlike the verses, that particular bit of writing wasn't much of a weapon on its own, but I needed to really capture that story in my own mind. I needed to carry the heritage of Dufresne and all the others in my heart. I'm a storyteller, a keeper of the lore, and that's what I do. That's what makes me dangerous. Once all that was taken care of, I set off for Shauna and Gilbert.

The Agency stronghold I've spent the past two weeks or so at is located beneath the mountains of Northern California, and Shauna and Gilbert live about thirty miles from the sea in Northern Oregon. Normally it would have been an easy trip, but the fiend still had its feelers out. I got several hours added on due to all the traffic jams I kept running up against, and then I started getting the feeling I was being watched. I took some backroads and dropped another spirit bomb like I used in the Archives. That got me clear of the fiend for a while, but then the feeling came back. Then I got hit. Things got fuzzy for half a minute, but I quickly took in the situation. The car might not have been totaled, but it certainly wouldn't get me from A to B anytime soon. My materials were still relatively undamaged, though, and Nox was on the sidewalk mewing at me. I got out and immediately started walking. I needed to keep moving. I walked around the block a few times as I called someone to tow my car away and then I tried to figure out my options. It seemed like the situation was intensifying, which meant buses and other public transport would be too slow. I've never used a rental service before, so I wasn't sure how long that might take or if I would even be able to do it. Besides, things were still feeling a bit too fuzzy for me to be at all confident about driving a giant metal box around at speeds no human being was ever designed to achieve. So I did something that turned my stomach. I called Straub. The man's a bastard, but I do have a working relationship with him, and so do Shauna and Gilbert. He tried to play games with me, but I made it very clear that I was not in the mood. Which shouldn't have worked. He gave up on screwing around way too easily, but I didn't have time to wonder why.

The car that showed up shortly after that looked like a slightly busted Camry. When I got in, my arcanometer went nuts for twenty seconds or so and then went completely still. I have no idea what went into building that thing, but I doubt I would be able to replicate it if I sold or used every last arcane item in my possession plus my house. The car was a panic room on wheels specifically designed to hide from and withstand supernatural attacks. Which was a good thing, because the Moarte Verde was getting really anxious right about then. I kept seeing flashes of green out of the corner of my eye, and at one point a murder of crows tried dive bombing us at a red light. I didn't bother about that, though. Mostly I just slouched in the back and in my head I ran through the story and Mark 5:1-13 (in the proper Greek, obviously) again and again. I saw other things out the window too. When we passed through the woods I saw a Black man in full cowboy getup riding beside the road, at a particular river I saw a woman standing at the prow of a galleon, and in one town I saw a man in brown and grey garb scaling a building. I may or may not have had a concussion.

I've never met Gilbert Flamel or Shauna Freeman on their home turf, but I wasn't surprised to see the address I had leading up to a large and nondescript warehouse. There were a few people banging on the entrance with weapons varying from kitchen knives to hunting rifles. From what I've read, the Moarte Verde can only possess one central host, but it can influence a lot more as long as it's in a strong (in whatever way it measures strength) host. This meant that I probably didn't have to worry about any of the people on the outside bringing a whole new level of danger to the situation.

"Good luck, Underhill," said Straub through the car's speakers. The driver handed me a camera to clip onto my person. "I'm very interested in seeing how this plays out."

I took the camera (it was better than being sent a bill or owing him a favor, which I suspected were the alternatives) and got out while the thugs were mostly still preoccupied with trying to get in. I tossed my very last spirit bomb at them and then used a couple charges from my rod (the same kind of thing I used with Mr. Ash; this one was a bit better, but still nothing like what a wizard might make) to knock out the ones that still looked like trouble. Then I knocked on the door and waited to see what answered. I was very happy to see Shauna let me in.

The inside of the warehouse was a maze of equipment, glass rooms, and storage containers. And nearly all of it was covered in luminous, green writing. Most of the projects that I could see had been either destroyed, mutated, or otherwise fiddled with. There was incessant ruckus of thuds, shrieks, and howls coming from deeper in the warehouse. As it turned out, they had managed to capture the fiend (or at least the main host) a few days earlier, but it didn't look like they could hold it for long. In fact, as Shauna was explaining this to me, we heard the tearing of metal and a scream of visceral rage and hunger.

"That vampire I gave you," said. "You've killed it by now, right?"

"Don't worry about it," she said. "It's not here."

That did not make me feel even a little bit better, but I rushed forward with her anyway. As I did so, I tossed out the pages on which I'd written Mark 5: 1-13 over and over. They flew around the warehouse as if driven by heavy winds, and as they did so the writings all across the walls began to blur and flicker away. Then the Moarte Verde came around the corner. The host was a medium-sized man with dark hair, a completely unnatural and freakish physique, and sores all across his body. As the creature roared again, I began the recitation. It charged, slammed me against a storage container, and knocked the wind out of me. When I was back on my feet it was going at it with Shauna (who had some kind of baton in one hand and a needle in the other) and Gilbert (who had a pair of homemade gauntlets of some kind and what I could only assume was a death ray slung over his shoulder). It also happened to be winning, so I went for the rod again and fired until it was all out of juju. And then I started in again with the Greek.

This time the fiend ran. I vaguely remember my friends mouthing and jerking their heads at each other--probably working out how to outmaneuver it--but I wasn't paying attention. I just followed it through the maze, my awareness of its trail and my sureness of purpose growing with each word. As I began the twelfth recitation, I heard a rasping sound like a thousand barely audible mutters drifting down from above. I jutted out of the way as the Moarte Verde crashed down, all the while continuing the passage. It rose shakily to its feet and snarled, and as it did so I saw Shauna come around a corner several yards behind it.

"I come in the name of Markus Dufresne," I said after the twelfth recitation. "I come in the name of Coribeth Breckenridge. I come in the name of Caleb Dietrich. By their legacies I bind you." I rushed forward and grabbed a hold of the fiend. The moment I touched it I felt a shrill, bitter cry run through my psyche. "I come in the name of the Man of Galilee," I shouted. "By His blood I bind you."

I think I would have died right there if Shauna hadn't driven a needle into the fiend. I'm also pretty sure things wouldn't have gone so well for her if I hadn't played my part. I could still hear it in my head, and now I knew its pain, its pride, and its sheer, unbridled hatred, all of them coming together into a single horrid cacophony. I don't know if it threw me off then or if there was some burst of energy or what, but the next thing I knew I was on the floor. Over me I saw the Moarte Verde's body writhing, twisting, and bulging rapidly as a green vapor flowed out from it.

"Oh, come on," said Gilbert as he peered out from the roof of one of their makeshift labs. "I haven't even had my turn yet."

It turns out I was right. That was a death ray on his back. It poured crimson and azure power down onto the fiend, power that chased down and burned out every last tendril of the fleeing mist. As the lights of the battle went out I heard the cacophony go silent and the pages finally flutter to the floor. I waited several seconds, and then let out a long breath as all kinds of shapes failed to jump out or otherwise appear with the intention of ripping me apart.

There were quite a few more seconds before any of us spoke spoke to each other. Then someone started to laugh, and the post adrenaline giddiness took over. After a while, we remembered that there was still stuff to deal with. Gilbert showed me a living area I could stay in while he and Shauna checked out the damage and made plans for how to fix it. I'm actually in there right now.

I think I might write a paper on this. Or maybe not. I'd prefer not to be the next Leandre Flamel.

Case 31: Entry 4

It's been almost a week since the last entry. I found plenty of brief mentions of the Moarte Verde, but none of it told me anything new. They were all about rampages or searches for an adequate host, just more of what I had already learned from the accounts of Markus Dufresne and Coribeth Breckenridge. In the meantime, the Archives began to demonstrate bouts of increasing hostility. Four days ago I got chased down several aisles by some gibbering mass mismatched limbs and mouths about the size of a large cat before I managed to climb up a few shelves and drop a sufficiently heavy volume on it. A bit earlier than that it lured me into reading something that has...deprived me of the ability to sleep soundly every night since. Just yesterday on my way back to my room I found myself wandering through endless hallways, talking to Agency staff who spat out utter nonsense, and being taunted by my own shadow. At first I thought it was residual psychological damage (maybe even a stroke) until I realized I had never left the Archives. After that, I decided to add some warding symbols to my quarters. It should already be entirely secure, but I feel like the recent hostility has been a bit more than just the Archives...being the Archives. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I sort of get how paranoid Gilbert and Shauna have seemed. Even more so after reading the accounts of Caleb Dietrich.

Born in Vienna in the fourteenth century, Caleb Dietrich was a thief and a con artist until he tried to burgle an Agency safe house. He nearly made it out of the city with a chest containing an ancient, Carthaginian spirit before a he was stopped by a huntsman named Petrus Moser and an alchemist named Leandre Flamel. Moser was furious, but Flamel was merely fascinated. They locked Caleb away for the night and told him they would decide his fate in the morning. A few hours later the man had nearly reached a balcony when a trap door opened up and dropped him into a room with Moser looking even more annoyed and Flamel looking even more intrigued. That was when the alchemist offered him a job as his assistant. Caleb agreed quite readily, but it took three or four months before he really decided to settle into the role. That was after he had taken several opportunities to run and had been caught by Moser every single time. It was also after he'd had the chance to see Flamel at work. It's said that Leandre Flamel could catch a storm in a bottle, brew up concoctions to bring down manticores, and build fortresses that could man their own defenses. Some of his brews and mechanisms have never been replicated because no one else could figure out how to get the materials just right or what confluences of natural and supernatural forces needed to be present.

To understand Leandre Flamel, it's important to realize that the Agency was then in a time of transition. For quite a while, it had been under the management (in theory, at least) of the Catholic Church, but now it was being funded by and using the infrastructure of a handful of highly placed nobles. The trouble was that many of those nobles wanted to use the Agency and its resources for their own purposes, and it was slowly being split into factions and deprived of its autonomy. Like many his comrades, Leandre Flamel disliked the changing atmosphere, and he believed that with enough wealth and arcane power he could bring unity back to the Agency and put the upper management back at arms length. And when the Black Death first hit Europe, he was convinced that if he could conjure some weapon against it then the final victory would be his.

Unlike his more famous nephew, Leandre Flamel had little interest in the Philosopher's Stone. What did grab his interest was another marvelous and highly theoretical substance that as yet had no name. All anyone who had previously hinted at it knew was that it would have to be a substance possessed of life and even a sort of spiritual element. Theories about actual uses varied, but most alchemists agreed that it could be employed to perform medical marvels. Flamel began work trying to create the substance a few years after he acquired Caleb Dietrich as his assistant, and it took about fifteen years before his quest was completed.

It was slow going at first. Caleb would simply help him toy around with various fluids and other such things whenever they had the time. Sometimes Flamel would want the spinal fluid of a ghoul or some other exotic material, and the two of them would travel with huntsmen in search of ingredients. At that point he was just looking for the base substance, the thing that they would later project a spirit or other metaphysical form onto. But then things started to get worse. Flamel would spend days locked in his lab. He would send Caleb out to "acquire" increasingly dangerous materials, and he showed less and less interest in the feats of cunning that his assistant enjoyed bragging about. There were books of magic bound in human skin. There were sealed containers taken from the dungeons of dark sorcerers. There instruments taken from Agency safe houses which had been lost various disasters, accidents, and attacks. Then one day, Caleb was sent to track down a caravan of artists, performers, and fortune tellers in Eastern Europe. After several days of studying the group, and one very near miss, he got away with a locked chest containing the skull of a pig. Ever inch of the artifact was carved with arcane symbols and one brief phrase written in some ancient language. The mere knowledge that he had such a thing made Caleb uneasy, and he quickly locked it back up after he'd inspected it. He delivered the skull back to his master and then took a leave to consult with another scholar of the Agency about Flamel's obsession and the phrase carved into his latest find. Shortly after that, Leandre Flamel completed his work and consequently lost all that remained of his mind to the Moarte Verde. On that same day, Caleb Dietrich was in Florence learning the meaning of the phrase written in Aramaic on the skull of a pig. It meant, "We are Legion, for we are many."