The Crawling Hand

An adventure for Istanbul PCs, working for the Manzikert Hotel.

Bert Hill, director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, is a nervous wreck. Flinches at small noises and watches every corner like he’s afraid something is going to jump out at him. Insists on meeting you outside, at midday. Won’t go into any cramped spaces.

Explains his Family is dead.

First to go was his wife, Ida, found strangled in the bedroom of their house on Ploutarchou Street with the marks of long fingers on her neck. Then her girlfriend, Eliza, stabbed to death with a trowel at a dig site in Eleusis. Oily footprints in the dirt. Workmen surrounding her tent saw nothing but a rustle in the bushes.

Finally Carl Blegen, Eliza’s husband and Bert’s occasional lover - throat bitten out in the ship’s cabin they were sharing. Door locked, one small porthole open. More oily residue down the side of the ship.

Bert’s being followed by a pair of sinister Sicilians. After you meet with him they’ll warn you off. In a friendly way.

Nero. Short. Stubby. Bald. Half his pinky finger missing. Knows he’s supposed to be acting subtle. Keeps picking fights with women in shops.

Mosca. Tall. Handsome. Slicked-back hair. Acts polite. Gets his way by assuming you already agree with whatever he wants you to do.

Staying in a cramped apartment by the docks, sharing a room, which neither of them like. In the corner there’s a covered birdcage. In the birdcage there’s a stunted murder homunculus, pale and fleshy, glaring at you through a single limpid black eye.

Nero can just about control it, with whispered birdlike chirps. Neither of the Sicilians know that it can get out of the birdcage any time it likes.

Carl bought a manuscript from an old Greek woman in Trebizond. A piece of Biblical apocrypha. Silver ink. Purple vellum.

Most likely a product of the Byzantine imperial scriptorium. Based on the quality of the illuminations - nude sexless figures in a garden full of animals, bowing before a lion-headed serpent - Carl thought it might have been intended as a gift for the Empress Theodora.

Written by John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelations.

Describes a vision John received on the isle of Samothrace. Christ appeared, bathed in holy light, and explained that we live in a dim and corrupt world - created not by God but the demiurge Yaldabaoth. Only by rejecting the flesh, and venerating the supreme principle of the Barbelo Aeon, can we escape it.

The Family went to Samothrace.

Conducted a dig at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods - temple complex where the Greeks paid homage to a pantheon of nameless chthonic deities. Hoped to find evidence that John was initiated into the ancient Mystery Cults - sacrificing bulls to the Great Mother and drinking entheogenic wine.

Found a cave with an altar to the Dactyls - underworld smiths and magicians, sons of Cybele - and a mummified, mutated, cancerous hand with a different implement at the end of each finger. A claw, a pincer, an octopus sucker, a bulbous segmented eye. A ring of magnetic iron on the humanoid thumb.

To Ida it looked like a Hand of Sabazios - a cult object still venerated by Samothrace fishermen. She made the mistake of letting people know that she was going to write a monograph on it.

Bert still has the Hand. If you take the ring off - which he hasn’t done yet - it will come to life and start scuttling around, trying to build things.

Underneath the fortified Monastery of Saint John the Theologian, in the town of Chora on the isle of Patmos, you will find a secret lab.

Bubbling vats of goo. Homunculi blooming in glass jars. Vast collection of alchemical literature. Zosimos’ Cheirokmeta. Jabir al Hayyan’s Book of Stones. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Back issues of The Journal of Biological Chemistry. Tended by eunuch monks, who throw their cut-off balls into the vats.

Presided over by the evil scientist Yakub.

Tall black man with a gigantic head. Last survivor of ancient Atlantis, which he sold out to the Lemurians in a fit of pique. Determined to create new species - life entirely lacking the divine spark of God. Already had some success. Particularly hates women - wants to completely transcend the need for the feminine principle.

Secret tunnels link the lab to the Cave of the Apocalypse, and to sea-cave harbours where crooked local fishermen bring in the necessary reagents.

Underneath it all there’s a pit containing the Great Mother - a huge bloated toad-like Venus-thing, seated on a throne, constantly giving birth to monsters which scream and whistle and intone prophecies in low flat voices before they die. Yakub both despises and worships her.

Yakub’s assistant Wallace Fard, a dapper, racially ambiguous man, acts as his liaison with the outside world. Doesn’t really like his abusive boss. Enjoys the rare opportunities he gets to talk to normal people.

Patmos, like the rest of the Dodecanese, is currently Italian territory. Architect Florestano di Fausto acts as agent for the Fascist government.

Presided over the rebuilding of the Grand Master’s Palace on Rhodes - uncovering the secret bio labs of the Knights Hospitaller, a colossus skeleton and telchine breeding pool. Pack-hunting fish children are still sometimes spotted in the island’s waters.

Hired Nero and Mosca from the Mafia to keep Yakub’s secret. Plans to breed a new race of supermen, reclaim Constantinople and make it the capital of a new Roman Empire. With himself as Emperor, of course.

Backed by Mussolini and the Freethinkers’ Party of Ioannis Metaxas, who hasn’t given up on the Megali Idea, and believes the Seven Churches of Asia mentioned in the Book of Revelations are rightfully the property of Greece. Has an expedition at Ephesus, hunting for the Seven Sleepers’ cave and the lost epistles of John’s disciple Polycarp.

Building a huge underground harbor, staffed by Fascist soldiers, near the sleepy village of Monolithos on Rhodes.

Claims it’s a submarine base. Intends to clone the ten-headed Sea Beast from the Book of Revelations - whose giant pallid not-yet-alive body is currently floating in a subterranean lake of brine, watched over by monks and scuttling scientists - and establish it as a new God.