Masks of Nyarlathotep 3

After the fight on the floating island, Nayra tells us that these Kharisiri were locals, not foreigners as they are often thought to be. She does help us determine the route we need to take to get to the Pyramid, and it’s obvious from our maps that there are no roads leading that way.

We will have to switch from trucks to mules, plus we’ll need to stock up on supplies and warm clothes. Clayton wants to get brandy, and Monty wants bullets. Since we probably need to do some archaeology, we will also need some dynamite.

Friday 25th March

It’s going to at least three days walk to get there, and it takes us a day to get back to land and stock up on supplies and prepare for the trip. My shoes are reasonably practical, but I decide to purchase some boots and trousers.

Saturday 26th March

We head south towards our destination. The landscape is beautiful, though it seems that we are being followed by condors. The day passes without any incidents, though we do spot a spectacled bear. That night, we settle down as the temperature drops drastically. There is hot food, music and tents. We arrange for a watch, just in case there are jaguar.

We are woken in the night by a gunshot. The camp erupts into activity, with people shouting and getting up. There is shrieking from the mules, and flashes of gunfire from that area. Getting up and looking outside, Monty is standing amongst the mules, firing at someone as they seem to lunge at him.

Getting there, a dead body is laying on the ground. It has a terrible stench of decaying filth about it. It may have been human once, with long scrawny arms and dressed in rags. It had been feeding on one of the mules, and Monty had been disturbed by the cries of the mule. Our guard had missed it all because he had been dozing.

Monty describes the thing as having had a large lamprey mouth, and the wound on the mule look similar to the one that had been on Trinidad. We take the corpse out of the camp and burn it, whilst I tend to the mule’s wounds.

Sunday 27th March

We pack up and head onwards the following day. Larkin is seeming to be feeling better today, and is more active. Around lunch time, my American colleagues notice the sound of freedom from up ahead, though to me it sounds like gunfire. There are a couple of figures with rifles and llama in the distance. As we crest a hill, a bullet ricochets off a rock nearby, and I try to drop into cover.

After some shouting between our two groups, it turns out that they were possibly shooting at jaguar and somehow hadn’t spotted our train of a dozen or people plus mules. On closer look though, it seems one of them is smaller, possibly a boy, and is laying on the ground. We head down to meet them, with me going along in case they need first aid.

The man is standing with a gun, whilst (his son?) is laying on the ground with a giant sucking wound in his chest. I don’t speak Spanish, but fortunately I can make myself partly understood with Latin. The boy is Domingo, and I try my best to deal with his wound. Apparently he was attacked by a woman, and the older man saw a man who he was shooting at. It wasn’t jaguar they were shooting at, but possibly Kharisiri. How many of these things are there?

Domingo recognised the woman as Narcisa Quispe, someone he knows from a nearby town (about a day’s walk from here). Their home is on our way, so we offer to escort them and their llamas back to their home, where they put us up for the night. Asking about Narcisa, she is a local who lives with her parents and looks after chickens. The locals think that you need to have Spanish heritage to be a Kharisiri, though Jackson and myself talk about the possibility of being able to ‘catch’ it. Jackson thinks it’s just a cult and people are hallucinating what they claim to see. I’m pretty saw that what I’ve seen hasn’t been a hallucination.

Monday 28th March

We are offered a spicy porridge for breakfast, and then we head off. Mid afternoon, Monty calls a halt. He has spotted movement in the long grass ahead. As the movement gets to the top of a hill, they reveal themselves as what looks like a woman and someone with very long hair and wearing rags. They are about a mile ahead, and moving up towards a plateau.

The top of the plateau seems to be covered in old structures. This could be our destination. It seems unlikely that we’ll be able to get our mules up to the top, so the plan is to just take ourselves and set up camp at the base of the plateau. Getting up is still difficult, and I need a bit of help getting to the top.

There doesn’t seem to be anything growing at the top of the plateau, except for bloat flies, which really shouldn’t be here. Not only should there be anything freshly dead, it’s also too cold and high up to normally get flies.

There are remains of old buildings here, as well as a pyramid with a flat top. We can see a couple of figures climbing up the stairs to the pyramid. Larkin, who has been lethargic for most of the journey, has really perked up, and seems to be very enthusiastic about the architecture. The figures reach the top of the pyramid, where we have a good view of them. One drops to their knees, and vomits forth a long stream of white liquid. A swarm of flies can be seen rising up from the fluid. The second figure does the same.

Both figures then get up and head up over the top and down the other side out of view of us.

We head around the side of the pyramid. The smell of rot becomes quite excessive. The stench seems to be coming from a pit, which when we go to take a look, turns out to be filled with emaciated human corpses. Glinting amongst the corpses is what looks like the glint of gold, as well as the entrance to a tunnel. It looks like someone has recently pushed through the corpses to get into the tunnel.

Well, that was a bad decision. When I was trying to take some rubbings of some carvings the ground beneath my feet gave way, and I fell down a hole into tunnels. Fortunately I didn’t break anything other than my dignity.

My colleagues turned up, and offered to lower me down a lantern. Once I had light, I took a look around to find very low passages, about 4ft tall, heading off three different directions, all going steeply down. There is broken rock on the floor, and a stench of decay still. It was a relief when I was pulled up.

I found a hole, Clayton seems to have found a solid gold necklace. Searching around, Monty finds some old tools which could have been used to dig through to this hole.

It was getting late, so we headed down off the plateau to the camp.

Tuesday 29th March

We got some sleep last night, though the stench meant it wasn’t great sleep. The plan for today is that Lefty and Clayton will lower themselves down into the hole which I discovered, and then carefully make their way down the steep passage that heads down beneath the pyramid.

Myself, Jackson and Monty stay up top whilst we wait for the others. Lefty and Clayton report back to find they’ve found a large passage system beneath the pyramid, as well as piles of rotting corpses. I do wonder where the corpses have come from. The population here seems to be not large enough to allow a large number of people to go missing without it being noticed.

They come back a second time, to say that they’ve found a room full of gold, which also had three beds and the two ‘people’ that we spotted before. A man with very long hair and a woman. Clayton and Lefty weren’t spotted, and crept back to let us know.

Monty goes down to join them, and they explored the rest of the tunnels. These tunnels had a strip of gold, with carvings upon them, running along the walls. Following them around, the passage was blocked with a pool of white ooze which is coming out of the wall. Part of the gold has been pulled off the wall at this point – maybe it is the gold strip that we were given at the university.

Not wanting to go through the ooze, they headed around in the other direction, coming across a corpse wrapped in blankets and with a maggot crawling behind his eyes. The corpse began to crawl along the tunnel towards Lefty, who let loose with his shotgun.

From up top, all I heard were several shotgun shots until they returned back to the hole and filled us in on what happened. After the shooting, they discovered that the pool of fatty ooze was flammable.

Once everyone is up top, we have a discussion about what to do. Larkin wants to take the gold strips back with us, in order to store then in a museum. I’m partly in favour of this, but I’m also worried about what may happen if we remove all the writing. I’m beginning to worry that there is mythical stuff happening here, even though I’m also trying to stay rational. Possibly the gold strips are in some way keeping something contained in the pyramid.

Another option is to set fire to the entire pyramid. There seems to be fat stores within the pyramid, so we may be able to burn it all. The myths told that something very hungry was trapped here. Possibly the fat is feeding it and stopping it from going looking for food elsewhere. Burning it may be bad, or it may destroy whatever is there.

There are also the two Kharisiri to deal with.

As we discussed things, Jackson hits Larkin on the back of his head, and he fell unconscious to the ground. We all turned in shock at the sound, and Jackson claims that Larkin was ‘doing something’ whilst looking at Monty. He doesn’t know what, but it looked dodgy. I wasn’t sure who to trust, but checking Larkin’s tattoo it seemed ‘brighter’ than it was, and pulsing. We tied him up, just to be sure.

First, Monty and Clayton go down to deal with the gold strip and try to fix it, whilst Lefty keeps an eye on the Kharisiri. The gold strip we obtained from the University fits nicely into the gap on the tunnel wall. According to Monty and Clayton, once it was put in place it seemed to flow together with the rest of the strip, and the white ooze seemed to dry up and blow away.

Lefty, who was watching the Kharisiri, claimed that the two Kharisiri just ‘died’. The woman fell over, and the man seemed to collapse and decay.

Up top, myself and Jackson notice that Layton begins to scream, and his tattoo begins to ooze necrotic flesh. I try to wash away the infection, and all that is left was an open sore where the tattoo was. He falls unconscious at some point during the process, which is probably best for him.

Over the next few days we carry the loose gold up from below. Eventually Larkin comes to, and he looks to be in much better condition. The black veins seem to have cleared up, and he seems more clear headed when he finally wakes. He doesn’t remember coming here – or for that matter, anything from the last couple of years. He was in Kenya, and remembers going out for a drink and meeting a native woman. He has no idea why he is in Peru.

We use the opportunity to go through Larkin’s stuff, and remove anything that might suggest what Larkin has been up to. Checking his passport, it looks like he went from Africa to Egypt, to London and from there to Peru. We spin a story about having encountered him here and allowing him to join our group. We definitely don’t want anyone coming back here to investigate things.

Since the wall was sealed up, the plateau has become a much more pleasant place. It doesn’t smell as much, and the flies seem to be less. The locals don’t want to return here though, and we need to ensure that nobody does. Our plan is to hand over some of the pre-conquistador gold to the University, and tell the professor that the only thing that there was here was a camp of thieves and bandits who had been stealing artefacts from various local sites. The rest of the gold we can split up amongst ourselves.

Saturday 2nd April

We have returned to Lima and explained our story to the Professor. He buys it, so hopefully nobody will go looking for the pyramid. I don’t know what happened there for certain, but I’m willing to believe that whatever it was, it wasn’t entirely ‘rational’. There are things which science doesn’t fully understand, and I intend to find out more about them.