The Centipede's Claw

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

You have three days until Dr. Mahesh Viswanathan is hanged.

Pe Maung Tin, the well-known Burmese historian, co-founder of Rangoon University and translator of the Glass Palace Chronicle, lies one inch from death in a bed at Rangoon General Hospital. Babbling about “the lotus dwarves”, “the Twin Obscenity” and “the Lake of Dread”. Veins pulse black under his skin.

Dr. V stands accused of injecting Tin with a rare Oriental poison during a standard eye operation.

Now sitting with five other men in an overcrowded, stinking, bug-infested jail cell at Insein Prison. Loves the British. Can’t seriously believe their justice system would put him to death. Confidently anticipates a last-minute pardon from the King.

You are contacted by Eric Blair, Assistant Superintendent of the Insein Police.

Tall. Clumsy. Toothbrush moustache. Small untidy blue circle tattooed on each knuckle. Pinko leanings - litany of complaints about the Empire. Cautiously probes to see if you might share his views. Occasional guilty fantasies about stabbing Burmese monks. In poor health. Trying to resist the impulse to write novels.

He thinks Dr. V’s been framed. He’s right.

The trial took fifteen minutes.

Evidence was given by Dennis Weyland-Jones - a universally respected officer of the Indian Imperial Police.

Jones’ job is to combat the Chinese criminal mastermind Wu Fang, deemed by British intelligence to be the Empire’s single most dangerous foe. Has a roving commission - can call on police resources as needed, and legally do anything he deems necessary to keep the Asiatic threat at bay.

Testified that he saw Dr. V enter an opium den in Rangoon’s Chinatown, where agents of Wu Fang are known to lurk, and the dread substance known as “black lotus powder” can be bought.

Accused V of being a lotus addict - maddened by delusions of omnipotence, capable of performing any outrage to secure another dose of the vile drug. Observed that nobody else had access to the patient’s room.

The verdict was delivered by the magistrate U Kyu Sein.

Hugely fat but graceful - like a ripe swollen fruit. Addicted to chewing betel and smoking green cheroots. Unable to rise from his chair without a servant’s help. Wildly corrupt. Takes bribes from both sides of a case, then decides it fairly and dares anyone to complain.

Gets a cut of every robbery in his district. Extracts ten rupees a month from every village headman - sends dacoits to raid the towns who don’t pay up.

Ruins enemies’ reputations with poison pen campaigns. Plans to pay his karmic debt by building a hundred pagodas before he dies. Good friends with Jones - will undersign any judgment the Englishman decides upon.

Tin’s colleague Gordon Luce has been kidnapped. Accosted by men in black silk masks as he was walking home one night. Bundled into a waiting sampan and carried off down the Rangoon River. The police have no leads.

Tin and Luce had been working together on a biography of the Portuguese mercenary Filipe Nicote, who governed a township near what’s now Rangoon in the 17th century on behalf of an Arakan king.

Tee Tee Luce, Gordon’s wife and Tin’s sister, in her colonial teak villa near the Shwedagon Pagoda, can show you the exciting new documents they bought from a West Virginian oil engineer the other week.

A sheaf of letters from Nicote. Certainly authentic. Found in a Rangoon brothel, behind a hidden panel in an antique Chinese black lacquer cabinet. They describe a trip to a “Red City”, populated by stunted hill tribes who grow a “marvellous black tobacco” and sell it to caravans trading on the Yunnan Tea Horse Road.

Tee Tee opens her desk drawer to get the letters. A foot-long red centipede scuttles out.

Attacks the nearest person. Faster than you expect. Venom inflicts hallucinations, black veins and a sweating, babbling fever - death in several days, unless you immediately chop off the bitten limb. Hides behind the furniture if it gets away. Waits in the house for another chance to strike.

Someone put it there.

A four-foot agile dwarf with reddish-brown skin. Wearing a black loincloth. The houseboy saw him creeping out the back gate yesterday morning. Tried to tell the butler, but was accused of making up silly stories again.

The Yellow Dragon opium den. Under the 26th Street Market.

Prawns. Pomelos. Red bananas. Beetle larva. Shan doctors in wide straw hats selling grape-sized throat pills and using Buddha-shaped lead weights to measure out bushels of dried herbs.

Betel nut. Dried fish. Bolts of silk. Tiny jade amulets. Coconuts. Chilis. Live chickens. Old black-toothed women rolling green and white cigars between their wrinkled palms - if you’re handsome they’ll give you one for free.

A flight of stairs in the courtyard behind a tea house. Strips of silk, embroidered with Chinese characters, hanging down over a narrow door.

A tattooed bald man on a stool, smoking a cigarette. Keeping an eye on you. An assassin’s mace leans against the wall. He does not anticipate having to get up.

The red dwarf, Tsang, sits behind the counter. Offers you tea. Accent hard to place. Explains unprompted that everyone in his village shares his strange appearance.

Tells jokes to put you at your ease, their level of bawdiness expertly calibrated to your comfort level. A faint smile, like he’s having a relaxing holiday with his friends.

Casually mentions, after a measured interval, that some people find opium rather pleasant.

If you disagree, he waits a few moments. Tastes vary, he observes. Perhaps you might enjoy a more complex experience than humble opium can provide.

Follow Weyland-Jones around for long enough, without being caught, and you’ll end up at the Yellow Dragon.

Jones is of course hopelessly addicted to high-grade black lotus, which makes him feel that he is a god striding across a shadowy plain and crushing settlements full of tiny screaming native women under his feet. They beg him for mercy - he mockingly denies it, but allows the prettiest ones to crawl under his fingernails and ride in his hair.

He would do anything for more of the drug. Wu Fang controls the supply.

The den’s surprisingly big. Tunnels lead to the river. Triad soldiers hang out here, black silk masks in their pockets, playing a mahjong drinking game that involves copious amounts of largely non-toxic cobra wine.

In a locked cupboard there’s a stack of bamboo cages full of furious centipedes. In a soundproof room behind a trapdoor there’s a terrified Norwegian sailor, strapped to a table, for testing the centipedes on.

A tiny vial in Tsang’s possession contains the antidote to centipede poison. An oily black substance. Hisses when dropped on the tongue. Only enough for one person. In the Red City they can brew more.

The Golden Chimera is Wu Fang’s Burmese base.

A huge paddle-steamer. Modelled on a Burmese royal barge. A floating gilded pagoda atop twin dragon-headed hulls. Carved hybrid creatures with fish tails, hooves, antlers, elephant trunks.

Docked in the Rangoon River. Wu Fang uses it to travel through the Twante Canal to the Irrawaddy Delta, and up to Mandalay.

He picks up loads of black lotus from a secret drop-off point in Pagan.

The city of 9999 shrines - now a forest of ruined pagodas overgrown by jungle. Infested by hungry ghosts, hook-fanged flower-eating ogres and the red-hatted gnome alchemist Zawgyi who commands bats and makes women out of fruit.

His crew are dacoits and river pirates.

Fearless. Utterly loyal. Would die rather than betray him. Recruited from the Mayalan triads and the Burmese jails. Captained by Man Singh - a burly one-eyed Rajput highwayman with a huge moustache, a shotgun and a love of dead policemen, formerly known as the Lion of Chambal.

The Chimera has a restaurant, Cantonese-style, with live fish and crabs in bubbling tanks. A fully-stocked bar. Casino tables. A roulette wheel, with croupier.

Sometimes Wu Fang holds banquets for the Rangoon upper class, inviting the Burmese governor and hundreds of guests. They all know he’s a crook, though he smilingly pretends to be no more than the heir to an old mandarin family. They show up anyway.

Master bedroom. Steam bath. Library. Meditation chamber.

A few dozen concubines, of all genders, who love him madly and will kill themselves if he dies. A whole room just for incense. A disguise closet. A massage table. An enslaved chef who’d rather be in France. An uncrackable vault full of blackmail dossiers, Chinese and Egyptian artefacts, gold sovereigns, rubies, opium and cocaine.

A chemist’s lab equipped with every possible scientific tool.

Seven of the world’s most brilliant scientists - Japanese, Americans, Danes - hard at work devising new toxins and weapons for Wu Fang’s evil schemes. Atlantean crystals. Martian fungi. Lemurian crawling corals being tested on live subjects. Cages full of scorpions, cobras, rabid baboons. A small nuclear reactor, driving the paddle wheel.

Machine guns at the prow, ostensibly to defend from pirates. An entourage of crocodiles - fed each day by the chef with lotus-laced meat. Don’t swim around the boat or they’ll tear you apart.

Nobody in Burma knows that the Wu Fang on the boat is just a body double. Not even the double, who’s been hypnotically conditioned to believe he’s real. The real Wu Fang never leaves his mountain fortress in northwest China, thousands of miles away - you will have to go there if you want to kill him for good.

The town of Panlong, in the Burmese highlands. A few hundred palm-thatched huts in a valley, surrounded by jungle and poppy fields.

Governed by Ma Hongyi. Panthay Chinese Muslim warlord.

Round hat and long white beard. Eyes deep-set in wrinkles. Ten brave sons. Trapped in low-level war with the Wa headhunters, who decorate their villages with the skulls of his caravan guards. Brings silk and tea over the mountains from Yunnan - trades it for edible bird’s nests, amber, silver and rubies from the Mogor mines.

Yuan Lin is Ma’s second in command.

A former Spirit Soldier. Fights with a cutlass-tipped bamboo spear. Briefly ruled a Sichuan fiefdom as the Second Jade Emperor Of Ghosts, in the midst of the inscrutable chaos of the Chinese Civil War. Can brew a special elixir that summons his ancestors to fight beside him. Short and intense.

They control the entrance to the Red City.

A narrow mountain pass, overshadowed by dripping jungle. A valley. Bubbling hot springs and mud volcanoes. Red pagodas and huts. Strangely-shaped domes. Collapsed palaces. Giant sculpted grinning faces on the side of temple spires. Square wells cut into the earth. Ruined spaceships - crash-landed and occupied. Moss-buried UFOs.

A steaming lake. Half the surface carpeted with circular leaves. Dwarves in reed boats sail across it, harvesting the finest black lotus flowers, inspecting them critically for any flaws. A long stone pier with an altar at the end.

In the lake dwells Zhar-Lloigor, the Twin Obscenity.

Native to the angles of time. Netted by mi-go trawlers, fifty thousand years ago. Imprisoned in their laboratory fortress atop the Himalayas. Experimented on. Mutilated and bisected. Disposed of as lab trash when no longer required.

Dragged itself down from the mountains, painfully, over a period of centuries. Worshipped by the tcho-tcho - offshoot dwarf hominids, a cousin race of Homo floresiensis - who want to nurse it back to health and restore its primeval beauty.

Eats human consciousness. Turns it into black lotus. Dive into the lake’s waters and you’ll see its tendrils grasping up at you from the muddy floor. Broken limbs kicking up clouds of muck, punctured organs spraying goo. It’s still in great pain. It needs your soul to knit its tissues back together.

Black lotus makes you more palatable. Restructures your thoughts. Lets you glimpse Zhar-Lloigor’s inherent majesty. At the final addiction stage you become a lotus pilgrim - feel an overwhelming urge to migrate to the Red City and dive into the lake. Wu Fang can help you arrange the journey into the hills.

The tcho-tcho sometimes kidnap sacrificial victims, or buy them from Wu Fang. But it’s the pilgrims they really want. Wu Fang is helping them spread their drug network across the world - devoting a global network of helpless addicts to the resurrection of their god.

Luce is an honoured guest of E-Poh, a high priest of the tcho-tcho.

They sit on a balcony overlooking the lake, drinking tea and talking about history. Luce is not allowed to leave.

The tcho-tcho are expert jungle fighters. Spears. Poison darts. Psionic death rays. Trained hunting centipedes. Puffball bombs that explode into deadly fungus. They’ll track him down if he escapes.

Wu Fang wants to kill him.

E-Poh disagrees. Has read Luce’s books. Thinks Zhar-Lloigor will enjoy the flavour of the historian’s mind.

Wants Luce relaxed and curious. Open to new experiences. Ready to consume a huge dose of black lotus, jump into the lake and live for a billion years as a single throbbing cell of the Twin Obscenity’s luminous soul.