Division Hexe

After winning his position in early 1933, Hitler cemented both his own position and that of the Aryan master race through military conquest and genocide. But there are other, infinitely older forms of power that he also tried to tap...

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The interest in the occult held by Hitler, Himmler and many other leading Nazis is well documented, and during their reign of terror, expeditions were despatched to all corners of the globe, searching for lost and potentially war-winning lore. Several, in the 1930s, were sent by Hitler to Tibet in order to seek out Agharti-a secret underworld populated by enlightened immortals. Unfortunately for the Reich, Agharti was little more than a fairy tale, dreamt up in 1871 by English Occultist Edward Bulwar-Lytton. But these were not the only expeditions sent out by Hitler; some, in pursuit of more definite and real goals, may have been a lot more successful.

After the war, much of the knowledge was either lost or buried in infinite national archives (which is much the same thing). These days, no one knows for sure where these expeditions went, nor what they sought - nor whether they were successful or not. Only occasional, tantalising rumours loom out of the mists of time, perhaps best left hidden.

Recently, however, a series of documents have surfaced and are currently being posted around the internet by an anonymous source claiming to be in Moscow. The documents appear to be a series of intriguing typewritten sheets from towards the end of the war, detailing the activities of the ‘Division Hexe’; an elite development group made up of leading SS officers and occultists. It makes for interesting and dangerous reading.

Possibilities

1 The documents detail a range of biological experiments carried out upon unfortunate Jewish and Gypsy children in Auschwitz, on behalf of Dr Josef Mengele. It appears that they grafted the skin of a Deep One, retrieved by U-boat crews in the Pacific, onto a living human. Photographs and some convincing scientific details add an element of realism, and no evidence of tampering can be found. Unfortunately for the Auschwitz researchers of Division Hexe, the war ended before the results could be fully described or used-although their purpose still remains unknown (the final sections of this information, according to the anonymous source, were destroyed by disgusted Soviet officials – or so he claims). According to the unnamed source, the last sheet is stained with blood and even now smells suspiciously of fish.

2 According to these pages, Hitler called in the services of a team of top Gestapo spies to track down books and other sources of power and evil from across the world so that their secrets could save the Third Reich. Their research and discoveries from all corners of the globe are carefully listed, and include such titles as the ‘Necronomicon’ and ‘Unausprechlichen Kulten’. The pages describe the results of experiments using what was found in these texts, together with some interesting photographs showing the preparations and-occasionally-the results of various magical ‘experiments’.

3 In January 1945, a desperate Hitler sent a team of experimental researchers, ‘Division Hexe’, together with all their materials to a secret location, from where they would continue to develop further eldritch methods of defeating the Allies. According to the text, they departed Germany on a U-boat in late March 1945 and were never heard from again. The documents make it clear that they were well prepared, and that all were not expecting to regain contact with the Reich for many years. Strangely, it appears that no food rations were sent with them, and most of what they did take was in top secret, sealed boxes, some apparently marked with pentagrams and crosses. Where did they go? Why didn’t they need any food? What was in the sealed boxes? Are they still wherever they went? Most importantly, what have they been doing for the last 55 years?

© Rory Naismith

Drinks from Strangers

One of the characters is invited to a convention for occultists at a hotel. During the event, a character encounters a woman who invites him to have drinks with her and her husband. After some drinks, the couple invites the character to their three-story house in a nearby bedroom community.

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Possibilities

1 The couple has been enslaved by an undead sorcerer who thrives on draining psychic energy from unsuspecting victims. Victims are reduced to dust by the creature. The couple chose the convention because what little free will they possess is bent on getting free from their condition.

2 They are dangerous serial murderers seeking prey. The man, who is deranged, favors victims that have what he thinks are reservoirs of personal energy that he can harvest to prolong his life. The character is in for a bad evening unless help arrives.

3 They are harmless swingers. The husband wants to watch from the closet while the character has sexual intercourse with his wife. Unfortunately, burglars in the employ of a rival occultist who wants a rare occult manual owned by the couple choose to raid the house during the “festivities.”

© Brian Woodman

Eyes in the Mirror

Local night time drivers have been reporting seeing strange eyes following their vehicles when they look back in their rear-view mirrors. The eyes seem to all have appeared as they drove down a stretch of local road known for strange occurrences, accidents and mysterious crimes. So far none of the drivers has reported anything more than a simple presence of the eyes, but every person reporting them has been so frightened by the encounter that they have stopped using the road or at least only used it before nightfall.

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Local authorities have dismissed the stories as the stuff of rural folklore and urban legend. Many of the witnesses have reputations as crackpots and other local persons of “character”. Still, the locals all share a certain feeling of dread for the eerie phenomenon and the growing dread of the town can be felt.

Possibilities

1 The eyes are the result of a local witch bent on driving the township to madness out of revenge for some past event. Perhaps she or one of her ancestors was a victim of the township. Perhaps her vengeance is focused more toward a specific member of the community but indirectly through sewing unrest among the townsfolk.

2 The eyes are a manifestation of a malign spirit that has haunted this region for centuries. The spirit comes and goes, stirred by the actions of the community until it reaps its vengeance on one or more of the townsfolk.

3 The township is the stalking grounds of a legendary creature, such as a Moth Man or Owl Man, that has remerged in recent months to hunt and prey on the townsfolk. The creature is remarkably selective about its prey and the sightings in the rear-view mirrors have only been coincidental spotting of an otherwise stealthy and crafty beast. Nobody knows who the creature will choose as its prey but all live in dread as its presence in the community grows.

© Eli Arndt

Dark Road

The new road was a gift to the voters; straight, even, black, no potholes, and a solution to several unfortunate traffic impediments. And in the beginning, it was.

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Then, the accidents started. Without apparent outside interference, many cars swerved off the road, hit trees or just crashed. The police ruled out climatic reasons. A search of the slopes on the side of the road revealed no sign of pranksters. No other cars were ever involved, and witnesses are rare. The road acquired an ominous reputation, and its shining black surface seemed to hint of black ice and death. Even commuters take to the more cumbersome side-routes.

The new, black tar comes from a natural deposit of pitch at La Brea, Trinidad. It is well-known for its high quality and superior texture, more able to withstand extreme temperatures and humidity. This time, however, the pitch taken from La Brea was not pure. Pitch Lake is well-known for the underground currents and movements of the earth at work in the area. Objects are dragged into the deposit from as far away as 15 miles, and disgorged years later from the lake proper.

Possibilities

1 The load for the Dark Road contained a few fragments from the burial place of a Carib sorcerer. He died in the first clashes of Carib defenders and Spanish colonialists, and is now haunting the road, as he haunted the ship carrying the pitch. The sorcerer is beyond reasoning, full of blind hate, and attacks the life force of anybody of Spanish descent using the road.

Some survivors have vague recollections of seeing “a man wearing feathers”, others remember hearing wild ululations. The wraith can manifest anywhere on the road, and wherever else the city decides to use the leftover material from the La Brea-shipload.

The situation grows worse as a number of despondent ghosts start haunting the sites of their crashes.

2 The load is impurely refined. This causes slickness in certain sections of the road, which require extensive repairs. However, the refinery in Trinidad can be blamed for the poor quality of the tar, and the city will be spared the costs

3 Before people started taking things out of Pitch Lake, the Caribs were using it to get rid of things. A shoggoth was lured onto the lake and magically sunk around 1430; only modern industrial technology has enabled man to delve deep enough to uncover it. The shoggoth’s protoplasmic structure was able, over 500 years, to merge with the semi-organic pitch.

Thus, the city has just covered an important stretch of real estate with shoggoth-tar, and while this transformation has slowed the shoggoth, it has grown considerably stronger and bigger. Only a few spasms are enough to send any vehicle going faster than walking speed off the road, and after devouring its victims, the shoggoth always returns to its stable shape, straight, even, and black.

© Felix Girke

Dangerous Play

Wilfred Higgs is an author. A brilliant one. And he’s also a madman.

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He’s written a new play, “The Coming of the Master” and is currently rehearsing it with a troupe of actors. A relative of one of the investigators was part of the cast, until he was committed to an asylum a few days ago, totally insane. Now all he says is: “They’re there! I know that now, I saw them! They know, they wait, and they’re coming!”. If the investigators decide to ask around, they will find out that several actors went insane in the last few months. Surprisingly, no one seems to have noticed that. There’s no mention about them working for Wilfred Higgs, either. Contacting relatives of these actors may reveal that they were trying to get a role in Higgs new play.

Higgs is very cautious in the approach of his candidates, conducting private tests and lectures. All the candidates are interviewed on an individual basis. It’s not the usual procedure, but no one really pays much attention to that. Every director has their quirks, after all. All the actors currently on the cast are normal people, without any discernible mental problem.

An investigation about Higgs will turn up that he, himself, had been committed to a mental institution many years ago, but was considered cured a couple of years later.

Possibilities

1 Wilfred has made a deal with a powerful entity he contacted many years ago, just before he went mad from the sight of it. The creature spared him, because it knew Higgs could be useful in the future. Higgs incorporated the spell needed to bring it to our world in his play, and intends to sacrifice the entire cast to complete the spell, poisoning the wine they are supposed to drink during a toast in a certain scene.

2 Wilfred always wanted to present “The King in Yellow” to the public, but the general rejection of the book on the part of the producers proved that impossible. He doesn’t understand why; a book that opened his mind to the truth shouldn’t be repressed like that. So, he tried another approach. He cleverly disguised that play within his own creation. The story changed, but the awful truths he saw are still there, so this new play is as dangerous as the previous one. The sanity of the cast hasn’t been affected too much, as Higgs is presenting the story little by little. But as the work continues, they will probably become more and more disturbed. Higgs hopes that this gradual exposure will make them see the “truth” and join him in his quest.

3 Wilfred is only a madman, and considers his madness to be true freedom. He thrives in “freeing” other people too. To that end, during the interviews he chooses persons who are already unstable, and reproduces the accident that gave him his liberty (he was once trapped inside a mausoleum for several days); he traps the victim inside a cellar full of dead bodies, without food or water, until their sanity snaps. Sometimes the victims kill themselves, sometimes they survive, eating the bodies. Either way, they’re now free from their bonds.

© Mauro Reis

Curses for sale

It’s the strangest advertisement ever to have appeared in the local paper:

Curses for sale

Afflict your enemies

Sabotage your rivals

Take revenge for misdeeds

Send $50 cash (no cheques)

plus a photo of the one to be cursed

to

PO Box 55/141

Results guaranteed!

It seems like the work of a harmless crackpot, but it’s harder to laugh off a week later when the post office where the private box is located burns to the ground.  Firefighters investigating the blaze find the bodies of a young man and woman in the wreckage.

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The man is charred beyond recognition, the woman is identified as Regina Trett, a local who has often been seen in bad company and is known to have an interest in the supernatural.  She seems to have died of smoke inhalation, her body is unmarked except for an occult symbol burned into her neck.

Possibilities

1 Regina recently broke up with her lover, and helped herself to a few of his prized occult books when moving her things out of his house.  The spells she’s read don’t look too hard, and she’s always been inclined towards mysticism, so she decided to set up shop as a witch for hire.  She had some sporadic success with the curses, managing to summon the odd swarm of flies or force a car to swerve off the road.  This was enough to alarm Mitchell Firth, the ex-boyfriend.  He knew her haphazard approach and willingness to gloss over anything she didn’t understand was courting disaster.

She ignored his warnings, and an attempt to break in and reclaim the books was foiled by the tough women Regina has been rooming with.  Becoming more and more worried, for his own safety as well as hers, he waited at the post office and confronted her when she arrived to pick up the latest batch of answers to her advertisement.

Furious at the interference, Regina spoke a spell she’d memorised and summoned a mystical fire creature to scare him.  She flubbed it though, and while she got the creature she wanted, it wasn’t bound to obey her.  Mitchell was killed on the spot and Regina was burned as she attempted to call it to heel while it spread flames around the tiny post office, eventually succumbing to the smoke.

Regina’s adventure is over, but the danger isn’t -- somewhere along the way she managed to summon something much stronger and darker than she imagined, without making any of the customary offerings or taking any of the basic precautions against its malevolence.  It’s still making its way closer across the planes, but it won’t be long now.  Its approach can already be sensed by the psychically gifted.

2 The adverts were placed by a secretive order of modern-day alchemists.  They’re not serious about curses, their interest is in the people who answer, as test subjects for their research into the chemical processes of human hatred.

Regina was the first of their customers, and studying her advanced their understanding of the brain’s function tenfold.  Completely drained of anything resembling will or thought, she also made a useful living automaton, returning to the post office every day to collect a new batch of subjects presenting themselves for research.

Sick with worry after days of wondering where she’d been, Mitchell was alerted by a bystander who recognised Regina’s face from a flyer posted outside the post office.  The reunion was short-lived, though -- Regina had been programmed to immolate the letters and herself if recognised by anyone.  The pair of them lost their lives in the fire that destroyed the post office.

Even without the latest batch of customers, the conspirators have a list of dozens of potential victims and no fear of being uncovered.

3 The advert was placed by Terry McGivern, a university student studying psychology.  He didn’t believe in the supernatural, he just wanted subjects to write about for his thesis.  It was a pleasant surprise to the amoral young man that he could make some money from their credulity at the same time.

Regina wasn’t interested in buying a curse, but she was terrified that someone had paid to have one put on her.  She staked out the post office and latched onto Terry as he arrived to pick up the money from his next bunch of suckers, begging him to sell her protection.  Amused as well as hoping for a profit, he made a show of reluctantly agreeing to sell her a magic charm to protect her from bad spirits.

It’s Terry’s bad luck as well as Regina’s that a friend of hers was injured in a car accident the same afternoon.  Convinced she’d been outbid by whoever intended her harm, she confronted him again the next day, demanding that he honour their deal and provide her with stronger protection -- as well as healing the friend.

Nothing he could do would persuade her that black magic wasn’t the cause of the accident, or that he didn’t have the power to mend her friend’s wounds.  Pleading escalated to threats.  Regina splashed Terry with a bottle of gasoline and repeated her demands holding a lit match... which she subsequently lost control of, causing their deaths.

Terry is out of the curses business, but his landlady discovered his stash of research material and is embarking on a campaign of blackmail against his customers.

© Chris Kerr

The Ride Home

Following a near-fatal bus accident, which the characters survive unscathed, they begin to notice that they are being followed by gaunt cadaverous beings with ashen skin and eyes the color of frozen meat dressed in drab gray Victorian suits; their faces are locked in a deathlike grin associated with rigor mortis.

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When the characters are together, these beings stay their distance, watching the characters with their cold unblinking dead eyes. Once the characters break up or go their own way they attack that individual investigator working their way until they have killed everyone who survived the encounter.

Possibilities

1 The beings are apparitions of accident victims on that stretch of land. They are haunting the investigators to see if they can get released into the other side. However, after several days of being ignored, they no longer seek release but instead seek to make the investigators one of them.

2 The investigators escaped death - they should have died that night. The cadaverous beings are minions of the grim reaper, sent to kill the investigators and uphold the balance of nature.

3 The investigators did not escape the accident unhurt; they are all in Miskatonic Hospital in comas. The beings that they are seeing are the warped form of their visiting friends and loved ones.

© Timothy Goss

The Power Cut

During a storm a few nights ago there was a power cut affecting a wide area around a nearby town; when the lights came back on, Robert Wilkinson (a friend of the investigators) was found dead in his home. His body was strangely withered and aged.

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Possibilities

1 Wilkinson is actually the malignant agent of a local cult. In the cellar of his home he keeps a young Colour Out of Space that he uses to kill captured victims and unwary investigators. The Colour is trapped within an electromagnetic field that Wilkinson can switch on and off at will; however, with the house’s generator undergoing repairs the energy for this field is tapped directly from the local power lines. With the power cut, the Colour was released, and it quickly fed upon its captor. Now it has once again been drawn into its magnetic prison, and only the strange drain on the nearest power plant indicates its existence to the outside world.

2 Wilkinson was older than he appeared. A lot older. He had discovered an ancient scroll bearing a ritual that would allow him to regularly rejuvenate himself, effectively bestowing eternal life. However, a few nights ago he made a fatal error when choosing to perform the ceremony, and the sudden power cut – a possibility he had entirely overlooked – interrupted his reading of the all-important magic words. With the spell suddenly broken he reverted to his real age, and the scroll – a contract with the Outer Gods – crumbled into dust, its final conditions met. Only Wilkinson’s secret diary bears any clue as to the terrible pact he made, a pact he paid for with his soul.

3 The investigators have made some dangerous enemies, individuals who will stop at nothing to destroy them. This group travelled under cover of darkness to the home of Wilkinson, where they tortured and interrogated the player’s friend with the Shrivelling spell, before finally ending the interview – and the poor man’s life. Now this group is ready to strike, strengthened by the information they have acquired. They know as much about the players and the progress of their investigation as did their late friend.

© Callum Pearce

The Postman Always Rings Twice

The character has started receiving mail meant for someone else. The first item was a magazine, then some junk mail, but soon afterward bills start arriving, and then personal correspondence. 

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The letters and postcards are the most peculiar of the bunch, as the stamps and franking, which seem normal at first glance, are in fact not of this earth. The stamps are from no known nation, the franking refers to a government that doesn’t exist. The personal mail is all from someone calling himself Lt. JG Oscar Millett, of USF Bonaventure. Judging by the stamps, the Bonaventure is currently posted overseas, and somewhere tropical; some of them could easily be mistaken for Japanese or Philippine stamps. USF stands for United States Frigate, a designation that hasn’t been used since the 19th Century. Lt JG Millett always starts his letters and cards “Hey, bro!” and signs off, “Ozzie.”

Possibilities

1 The postman has gone out of his tiny mind. He believes that he is Lt JG Millett, that the year is 1943, that the United States didn’t gain its independence until 1848 and is part of the Commonwealth of England, and that the west is now engaged in a bitter military conflict with China. He’s latched on to the character as his ‘brother’ and is manufacturing all the personal mail, including the stamps and franking, himself. So far, he’s just about functional, but his activities have aroused his employer’s suspicions such that he’ll be fired before too long. When that happens he’ll snap, and since he happens to be physically fit and a good shot with a rifle, this will cause further problems. He’ll invade his ‘brother’s’ apartment looking for refuge, or possibly just a decent firing platform.

2 The mail is coming from an alternate universe. Lt. JG Millett is a naval officer in that universe, and his brother lives at the character’s address. The problem won’t stop with the mail. Soon the character’s furniture will be replaced by furniture from the other dimension, the clothes in his closet will be the other man’s clothes, the pictures on the wall will change, and the view out of the window will become subtly different. The character will either have to find some way of anchoring his home in his current universe, or one day the face in the mirror will not be the character’s own.

3 The mail is meant for the character’s neighbor, who is a member of a reenactment society. The postman seriously dislikes this neighbor, which is why the mail is being misdirected. The society isn’t particularly interested in historical accuracy, so some of the information in the personal mail doesn’t match known historical fact. (The stamps and franking are actually real - just from some very obscure equatorial countries.)

Unfortunately the character’s neighbor is slightly paranoid and believes that the character is in on the joke. One day he and six of his friends will turn up on the character’s doorstep – in full reenactment kit complete with replica swords – and demand an explanation.

© Adam Gauntlett