Servants Of The Worm

An adventure for New Orleans PCs, working for Belasco’s Rare Books.

A visit from Josiah Graves, director of the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind.

He lays the artefacts down on the table. Rattles made from box turtle shells. Human skulls, in conquistador helmets, holes punched neatly through the metal and the bone. Rune-carved onyx pebbles.

A pale, round, soft spherical object, sticky to the touch. If you cut it open, goo pours out. Feed it blood and it will hatch into a malformed worm thing that imprints on you as its mother.

Graves bought these from a former student. Elmo Stubb, blind since birth, for the last six months a janitor at Childersburg Carnival. Great singing voice. He got in touch with Graves a few weeks ago to make a little pocket money by selling “things he found.”

He told Graves there was “more where that came from”. Then he disappeared. If you go to his tin shack in Childersburg, you find only a beaten-up top hat and a banjo with all its strings broken.

The neighbours will tell you a couple of white folks came in the night and took him away. “And when I say white I mean, real white. White like the moon. Those fellas glowed in the dark.”

The Childersburg Carnival is built on top of the DeSoto Caverns.

Folks come from miles around, all the way from Birmingham and Talladega, to ride the carousel and see the clowns. You notice a surprisingly large number of single men, wandering around.

Rough types. Poor whites, millworkers and itinerant farmhands. Birmingham’s an industrial hub and you see guys who work in rail and steel. Plus a few flappers, looking for a good time.

They go into the haunted house. If you watch you see they don’t come out. Same deal with the mirror maze.

Down in the cavern, accessible through secret doors, is the Bucket of Blood speakeasy. Open day and night but things really kick off around sundown, when the jazz band begins to play. Onyx stalactites hang over a makeshift wooden bar.

It’s a lively place. There’s good whiskey, dancing, bouncers in snazzy vests. Behind the bar a cave leads to a storeroom, stacked high with illegal booze. A pool of water in the corner. If you fall asleep while drunk you’re liable to be thrown in.

The barman’s keen to chat. Morton Jaggard. Slicked-back hair, thin lips. He thought Elmo was a little slow. He offers you a shot of mezcal and tells you about the local lore.

Some folk say the Bucket’s haunted. And people do go missing. But they’re just running out on their wives.

Showman Buckham Barnley came south around 1920, following a rare map of the DeSoto expedition he’d discovered in a Philadelphia archive. He and his gang of freaks founded the carnival over what he believed, correctly, to be an entrance to the Hollow Earth.

The Ani-Kutani priests of the Cherokee Indians used the caverns as a trading hub, selling fruit and slaves to the morlocks and chthonian worms who reign under the earth. They ruled as sacred kings, until the Cherokee got sick of their foul ways and cut their throats.

Barnley has re-opened the trade. He started the speakeasy as a way to get more victims - ones who won’t be missed. At night the morlocks crawl out of the pool of water and anyone sleeping on the bar floor is dragged below, to toil in fungus mines and have eggs laid in their torsos while they’re still alive.

He bought from the morlocks the secrets of fire magic, and a seven-word incantation that enables him to cloud men’s minds. They didn’t come cheap.

All the carnies are evil, and on board with Barnley’s plan.

Yorgos Grammatikos, the Illustrated Greek, was taken captive in Siberia by a clan of Chinese Tatars and tattooed from head to toe. Most of his comrades died of infection or shame. The obscenities on his biceps can be seen for a price - the ones on his belly he’ll never show to anyone.

Professor Infinitesimal, the World’s Smartest Dwarf, in glasses and a powdered wig, provides daily lectures on the Secrets of the Atom. In his lab there’s a dynamo purchased from the morlocks, and an experimental lightning gun that he is trying to replicate. Omar, the Bethlehem Giant, is his slave.

Sad Sack Sal, the Melancholy Clown. Tears painted on his face. Suicide attempts thwarted by his partner, Yellow Joe, who swaps out his cyanide for ink and puts confetti in his gun. Follows you round the carnival, wordlessly begging you to kill him. Sincerely believes most people would be better off dead.

Rondo Barbosa, the Mato Grosso Maniac. Trick rider and sharpshooter. Horses are terrified of him and do as he says. Wanted for the murder of three nuns in his native Brazil. Expert with the lasso, the bolas, and the thrown knife. Birds treat him with maximal disrespect - he kills them on sight.

Nestor Alfresco, the Upside-Down Man. Geek and contortionist. Rubber bones. Elasticated skin. Can bend himself through a letterbox, given time. Found as a child compressed beneath the floorboards of a Cleveland flophouse, subsisting on dropped food. Hypnotises chickens before eating their heads.

Daniel Sunbird Smith is a morlock hunter.

Raised in Oklahoma by his uncle, an active member of the Keetoowah Nighthawk Society, who passed down tales of the moon-eyed albinos said to live across the South before the Cherokee came. Learned to brew the black drink, and sip it from the shell of a lightning whelk, granting him night vision and the speed of a bird.

Armed with a tomahawk and rifle. He’s here to kill Buckham Barnley and shut down the trade with the underworld. Hopefully blow up the caverns and close them off for good.

If any bodies are discovered, he’d be a natural person to frame.