Desperate Remedies

Someone close to the investigators is succumbing to a horrific disease. Symptoms include unpredictable attacks of agony; loathsome swellings, horrible alterations in skin texture and bone structure, and foul excrescences. Conventional doctors are mystified and alternative therapies are futile - because the sufferer is turning into a ghoul.

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Oddly, a group of stalkers seem interested in the invalid, following him everywhere and breaking into the offices of some of his doctors to steal case-notes. If observed, they too are suffering from a disfiguring disease.

As the character becomes increasingly debilitated, his friends (the investigators) discover Dr Ladislav’s Sanatorium. Ladislav is a gaunt cadaver of a man who greets his new patient with strange excitement. The patient has a private dorm with every luxury during his stay but the doctor will not discuss his radical therapy and is very anxious for his friends to leave. These characters notice a larger wing of the Sanatorium which more closely resembles a high-security prison (yes, Ladislav explains, the Sanatorium was once a gaol last century). Orderlies leaving the Old Wing have blood on their uniforms.

And that is the last they hear of their friend. Mail isn’t answered nor are calls returned. The stalkers ransack the sick character’s old residence and will be seen lurking near the Sanatorium. If the investigators return to the Sanatorium, Dr Ladislav, looking disturbingly decayed, has no records of the patient’s admission and the luxury dorm is occupied by an elderly man with gallstones.

Possibilities

1 Ladislav heads a necrophagic ghoul-cult, and the Old Wing’s cellars access nearby ghoul warrens. Patients are treated with foul transfusions and rituals until they transform fully; others are eaten. All food served at the Sanatorium is human flesh, either that of patients (their extremities surgically removed over a period of time to grace the Doctor’s table) or from corpses from the old gaol cemetery.

The ‘stalkers’ are a group of patients who escaped through the ghouls’ tunnels: half-demented and hideous, they are desperate to rescue fellow-sufferers from the Doctor, but are in terror of ‘regular’ humans and ghouls alike. The sick character is in the last stages of transformation, but may be saved in the nick of time. A long-term cure is still needed...

2 Ladislav is a Mythos scholar dedicated to finding a ‘cure’ for ghoul-ishness. His treatment is exceptionally brutal, involving electrocution, organ transplant with hallucinogens instead of anaesthetic and physical purgings. Obviously, he would be incarcerated if his therapeutic methods were known.

The ‘stalkers’ are true ghouls, looking to liberate their half-changed brethren from the good doctor’s clutches. They are hideous, but oddly sympathetic - compared to Ladislav, anyway. The ghouls would like to destroy the Sanatorium and rescue the inmates, but aren’t sure how.

3 Ladislav is himself becoming a ghoul. His treatments are all attempts to stave off his own inevitable transformation: he used to transplant fully-human organs into himself, but his ghoulish body has started rejecting them. Now he needs partial-ghouls for transplant subjects, victims less far gone than himself.

The ‘stalkers’ are Ladislav’s former-patients, too far gone into ghoul-ishness to be useful transplant subjects (though they bear the amputations of earlier surgeries). Instead, they now locate fresh victims for the Doctor in the (futile) hope that, once he is cured, he will in turn cure them. They’re a pitiful crew, but may be turned against the one who did this to them by a investigator sensitive to their tragedy.

© Jon Rowe

Deja-vu?

Now this is odd...

You’re absolutely sure that’s the same man again. Two days before, he was the waiter in that small restaurant (a real dick, he nearly poured coffee over your jacket), and yesterday he was the kiosk owner who called you a [censored] when you didn’t have the correct pocket change. And today he was the bus driver who yelled at you to shut up when you made small talk with the other passengers. Is this guy following you?

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Possibilities

1 Nothing odd, just an overworked fellow, who has three jobs to pay support to his ex-wife and children. Unfortunately he thinks now, his ex-wife sent you to watch him...

2 It’s an impostor – a being, which sucks out a person’s life, than takes on the appearance of his victim and lives his life for a few years, before it gets hungry again. Coincidentally, the investigator is one of those rare persons that can look through the impostor's disguise and, since the impostor has no visible true form, always see him in the appearance of his first victim a few decades ago.

The impostor has already sensed the investigator's disturbance and therefore tried to hide in a new body. Since this didn’t work, he’s decided to make the investigator his next victim...

3 It’s a ghost, an ancestor or a close friend to the investigator's family. While alive, he was always known for his grumpy behaviour and mysteriously disappeared a few years before the investigator was born. He was actually murdered by members of a secret cult, who are still continuing their dark rituals – and the investigator shall be their next victim...

The bus driver, the waiter and the kiosk owner – who all look different - swear, that they’ve never seen or spoke with the investigator before, and that they weren’t ill or absent the whole week.

© Philipp Mählmann

Deeper than Skin

Tokyo Museum of History reports a theft of a three-hundred-year-old collection of tattooed human skins from their vaults. Among these is a full-body piece known as the “Hinzo Pattern”.

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The Hinzo Pattern is unique in that, though it is obviously of Japanese style and design, the images are not uniquely Japanese. Photographs of the skin show that among its images were divine beings from Muslim, Buddhist, even Aztec mythologies.

The photographic record is incomplete, however, and key photos are missing. The museum claims that the record was complete but has no idea where the photographs may have gone.

Possibilities

1 The skin collection has been stolen by art thieves who plan to make a small fortune selling such rare and illegal pieces on the world’s black market.

2 Images hidden in the Hinzo Pattern are actually formulae for elder incantations, capable of opening up doorways to other places should they be deciphered.

3 The Hinzo Pattern is to be worn by a cult leader during the performing of an ancient ritual. The skin itself works to focus the energies of the wearer in ways unimaginable.

© Eli Arndt

Cold Logic

Miskatonic University professor of Higher-Dimensional Mathematics, Dr Simeon Rasen, disappears in mysterious circumstances just after submitting for review the research paper that he proclaimed would take his career, and the entire science of mathematics, to a whole new level.

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Then, the people reviewing the paper begin to disappear as well...

Possibilities

1 The paper proposes the existence of “angular space” alongside the curved space that we inhabit, and describes how it might be proven. Angular space is indeed real and is home to the nightmarish Hounds of Tindalos. Rasen’s exploration of angular space lured the Hounds to him, and they killed him effortlessly. The same fate awaits anyone who tries to continue his work or attempts to verify the ideas in his research paper.

2 Rasen’s work caused him to suffer from insane episodes, during which he was able to construct part of the mathematical formula that would allow him to summon the Elder God Daoloth, the render of the veils. Once recovered, he was unable to remember the periods of insanity, but he discovered the formula scrawled across the walls of his home. He based his research paper on this, but after submitting it for review he declined into insanity again, and realised he needed the formula in the paper to continue his search for Daoloth. He has since been trying to track down the original version of his paper so that he might complete the unfinished formula and summon the Elder God. All who stand in his way must die.

3 Years ago, Rasen was possessed by a Yithian. Eventually, the creature learned all that it could from Rasen and departed peacefully, and Rasen’s spirit was brought back to his normal body with all memories erased. However, with his formidable strength of mind he overcame the influence of the Tabula Rasa device and recalled many aspects of the science of the Yithians. He incorporated their brilliant mathematical concepts into his new paper before submitting it for review. Only later did he recall the final details that allowed him to create a gate to the Yithian city. From there he has uncovered more of the work of the Yithians and is a master of travelling across limitless space and even time. He has begun to contact his former associates and offered them the opportunity to accompany him to distant worlds. Those who refuse he is forced to kill rather than risk them revealing his secrets to the world.

© Thomas Parfrey

The Lion Kills Tonight

The zoo has a new attraction: a rare specimen of an African mountain lion. The lion was the pet of the deceased Mayor Templeton, who brought him back from Africa and, since he had no heirs, has been donated to the zoo.

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The terror starts one morning when, after opening its gates, the zoo's visitors make a shocking discovery: the lion gnaws on a human forearm, covered in blood!

 Possibilities

1 After the first shock it seems that someone has played a terrible joke: the forearm isn't real. Instead it belongs to a window dummy and it's covered in ketchup. It seems that the lion likes ketchup.

2 The lion is more than just an ordinary lion - trapped in its body is the spirit of an evil witch doctor. During his time in Africa, the Mayor saw how (and was horrified by) the witch doctor would take possession of younger men to lengthen his (the witch doctor's) life. The Mayor tried to kill the witch doctor by shooting his new body, but the witch doctor escaped death by possessing the body of the nearest living creature, a lion pup.

Realizing, that the witch doctor's spirit was trapped, but that it was impossible to kill by conventional methods, the mayor took the pup with him and searched for occult ways to end the foul magic. The mayor never succeeded, and when the lion was left to the zoo they did not realise quite how dangerous it was. Now a keeper has been killed. Worse, putting the lion down might set the witch doctor's spirit free again.

3 The animal keeper accidentally left the the door open, so the lion could go hunting for its favourite meal - human flesh. The mayor himself fed it to the lion from an early age, mostly remnants of the victims of his circle of the African Cult of the Bloody Tongue, an avatar of Nyarlathotep. An autopsy of the lion will reveal a silver signet ring in its stomach. The ring belonged to one of the mayor's rivals, a rival who vanished under mysterious circumstances.

© Philipp Mählmann