Parasite Peak

An adventure for Calcutta PCs, working for the Great Detective Chatterjee.

A dead Gurkha found between the rows of a Darjeeling tea plantation.

Embedded in the earth. Still clutching his kukri - the blade smeared with moldy fuzz, and traces of a gray-green substance that bears a vague chemical resemblance to insect hemolymph. Wearing a military uniform.

His name was Padam Gurung. A veteran of the 5th Royal Gorkha Rifles.

Fought at Gallipoli and in the Mesopotamian campaign. Retired from the service after the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Vanished for a while. Seen the night before his death leaving the Darjeeling Planters’ Club. The coroner’s conclusion is that he fell from a tremendous height - perhaps an aeroplane.

Kumar Banerjee, one of the few non-British plantation owners, would like you to sort this out.

Wants no corpses on his land. Paranoid about his tea - has planted it in accordance with a very specific set of astrological principles. Worried that the dead man’s bad energy will ruin the flavour of the second flush.

Gyatso Lepcha, a Nepalese plantation worker, was up smoking wild ganja before dawn. Saw lights in the sky. Circling erratically, flickering green. Not quite like birds. Heard a scream, and a wet thud.

Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, is visible from Darjeeling on a clear day. As Gyatso watched, the lights flew north towards it. Disappeared.

He’s seen them before.

Records of sightings date to before Darjeeling’s founding. Nepalis say they’re demon guardians of Beyul Demothong, the paradise valley hidden beneath the mountain’s snows. Brits deny they exist - blame Venus, native superstition or a distress beacon left by Aleister Crowley’s failed climbing expedition of 1905.

Gyatso’s grandmother told him a story about a lama who climbed Kanchenjunga. Taken by demons to the Moon. Spent seven years studying with lunar monks. Tibet’s Gyantse Dzong holds the scriptures he brought back - anyone who reads them is converted to the cause of universal peace.

The Planters’ Club.

Gin fizzes. Back issues of the Times. An elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. A stuffed leopard over the fireplace - nobody can remember who shot it. Oil paintings of various colonial dignitaries. Second-story verandah with view of rolling green fog-shrouded hills. Rooms upstairs - gruff colonels and bureaucrats, escaping the heat and monotony of the Indian plains. Don’t like wogs asking questions.

The staff are more helpful.

Frederick Bailey, political agent for Sikkim, responsible for maintaining a vast network of spies across the Himalayas, met with Gurung that night.

Cordial. Urbane. Excellent liar. Claims if pressed that Gurung accosted him with some wild story about the Chogyal of Sikkim’s birthday party. Gave the lad a few rupees. Suggested he lay off the bhang for a while.

Fought with Gurung at Gallipoli, and knows him well. Will not tell you this.

Being controlled by Lord Morya, Ascended Master of the mi-go - fungal parasite wasps from the Oort Cloud who colonise Earth’s highest mountain ranges.

Rode with Francis Younghusband on the British Tibet expedition of 1903. Killed the Gyantse Dzong wasp monks and took their sacred scrolls. Used the scrolls to summon Morya, who laid eggs in his brain. If you kill him they will hatch.

In his room there’s a copy of Gurung’s report on the situation in Sikkim, a luminous green crystal, and a lot of books. If you eat a bit of the crystal (it crumbles into salt) you will feel a metallic buzzing sound in the exact centre of your head. Morya will briefly be able to read your mind.

Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. Leadbeater’s Invisible Helpers. Steiner’s Atlantis And Lemuria. Roerich’s Leaves of Morya’s Garden. Younghusband’s Life In The Stars. Lunacharsky’s Religion And Socialism. Tsiolkovsky’s The Will Of The Universe. Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?.

On his bed - Aleister Crowley’s private diary of his 1905 Kanchenjunga trip. The only extant copy, written in China in 1906. Scrawled handwriting - opium-influenced cartoons of huge scribbled apes with hollow eyes and giant floppy penises.

A map on the back flap - a safe route up the mountain. Crowley got this from a British officer who’d served on the Younghusband expedition. An acquaintance of Bailey’s. Crowley met him in a Cairo brothel in 1904.

Nicholas Roerich, Russian Theosophist, is also controlled by Morya.

An honoured guest of Chogyal Tashi Namgyal, king of the British protectorate of Sikkim - a tiny Himalayan state tucked away in the mountains between Bhutan and Nepal. Staying in his palace in Gangtok. They drink butter tea each morning at a table with skeletons for legs.

Believes he is in telepathic communication with the Mahatmas - the Great White Masters who rule the world from a secret Himalayan lodge.

Destined to help the King of Shambhala establish the Sacred Union of the East - a Buddhist total state across Central Asia and Tibet. Has in his pocket the Chintamani Stone - a small black pockmarked pearl that can cure disease and create treasure, given to him by a hooded figure in a Paris hotel in 1923.

His wife Helena - sharp, persistent, manipulative - lives with him in the palace.

With the Chogyal’s help, and Soviet funding, they are arranging a production of Alexander Scriabin’s Mysterium. A synaesthetic symphony, several hours long. Requires an orchestra, a choir, a ballet corps and a hundred other things. Will be staged in the Rumtek Monastery in a few days’ time.

Darjeeling’s full of performers.

Clowns. Perfumers. Sopranos. Pyrotechnicians. Acrobats. Lion-tamers. Flamenco dancers. Female impersonators. Comedians. Geishas. Strongmen. Harlequins. Violinists. Jazz bands. Taiko drummers. Choirboys. Ballerinas. Mimes.

Getting off the crowded train from Calcutta.

Hauling luggage through the streets. Booking out all the hotels. Complaining about the rooms. Escorted by porters with donkeys and palanquins the hill road to Gangtok. Think it’s the Chogyal’s birthday. Assume he must be fabulously rich.

It’s hard to get to Gangtok. A grand piano was brought up from Darjeeling last year. On elephant-back. Took a month to arrive.

The Mysterium is an occult ritual.

The performance will punch a hole straight through humanity’s noosphere - its collective psychic defence. Enabling the King of Shambhala, currently broadcasting from atop Kanchenjunga, to establish total psychic domination over every human being on Earth.

Helena’s bombastic piano practice sessions echo through the halls of the Chogyal’s palace, maddening the guards and the binturongs in his menagerie. She will take centre stage - the axis around which the show revolves.

Breaking the piano will delay the show. So will killing Helena. Or otherwise seriously disrupting the theatrical arrangements.

You won’t be truly safe until you climb Kanchenjunga and eliminate the King.

Kanchenjunga is guarded by lobotomised yeti.

Peaceful superbeings from the Huronian glaciation, 2.5 billion years ago. Turned into vicious psychic warriors by evil mi-go science. Still smarter than men. Bilocate. Hop dimensions. Time travel just a little bit. Kill you in your dreams.

Peak’s riddled with tunnels - like a giant wasp’s nest. Mi-go breed inside. Fungal blooms. Grids crawling with larva. Paralysed space whales - eggs laid in their eyes.

Soviets have climbed it. Made camp at the top.

Gleb Bokii, the OGPU’s chief cryptographer - tubercular, collects mummified penises, obsessed with tantric sex - mans the radio station in the ruins of a ten-thousand-year-old monastery overgrown with slime.

Vladimir Lenin’s brain is hooked up to an alien computer.

Still alive. In a glass cylinder. Tended by Dr. Oskar Vogt of the Moscow Brain Institute. Barking orders to subordinates from a tinny speaker. Hooked up to a giant antenna capable of broadcasting directly to humanity’s collective unconscious, replacing our core instincts with Leninism’s self-evident truth. Converting us all to New Soviet Men.

He is the Maitreya. The World Teacher. The King of Shambhala. He will be the General Secretary of the coming world.