The Feast Of Fools

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

You vaguely knew Isabel Katz. You saw her at Belasco’s sometimes. 

She was a graduate student at Tulane. Studying anthropology at the Middle American Research Institute, under Frans Blom, who’s just concluded his first major expedition into the Mexican hinterland.

She’s gone mad.

She walked into the Jaguar Lounge, a speakeasy on Basin Street, at three in the afternoon, and started firing a revolver wildly at the customers. Flat Joe the bouncer was able to subdue her before anyone got hurt.

The cops have her in custody. In a few days she’ll probably be transferred to the State Insane Asylum in Jackson.

Belasco got a strange phone call the night before. He didn’t recognise Isabel’s voice, didn’t connect it with her until he heard about the shooting. She babbled about “the overlord of the holes”, “the blind piper” and “the face inside the face inside the mask”. She whistled him a few notes of a jazz tune before he hung up.

There’s a makeshift studio in her Decatur Street apartment, with a brass recording trumpet and a set of vinyl records. Among these vinyl records is one labelled SPIDER HOLE BLUES (?).

Make a Sanity check the first time you listen to it. The tune is scratchy, drawn-out, the mournful wail of the cornet giving way to a strange glissando of bass notes.

Everyone knows there are certain books, i.e. certain combinations of letters, that make you go insane if you read them. It’s less well known that this is true of musical notes. If you listen to Spider Hole Blues for long enough, you will lose your mind.

In 1905 the businessman Sam Zemurray, an immigrant from Bessarabia, purchased the Cuyamel Fruit Company and began to import bananas from Honduras to New Orleans. (Which of course has the busiest banana docks in the world.)

In 1910 he sponsored a coup in Honduras, installing a puppet president with the help of mercenaries Sam Dreben and Lee Christmas. (Both now deceased under mysterious circumstances). 

Cuyamel now controls a huge chunk of northwest Honduras, full of banana plantations carved out of the jungle. It owns railroads, power plants, workers’ dorms and steamship lines. Sam Zemurray is essentially a king.

A few years after the coup, Lee Christmas led an expedition into Honduras’ La Mosquitia region, in search of the legendary Ciudad Blanca. Which he found. 

All that remained of the city, after the mass suicide of its inhabitants sometime in the early thirteenth century, was a number of disquieting murals and a nearly complete version of the Mantua Codex - a book of instructions for worshippers of the Spider Hole God. Plus some pits full of spikes and bones.

Doris Zemurray, archaeologist, works for the Middle American Research Institute. Sam, her father, is its biggest donor.

Leonidas Poole is chairman of the Knights of Proteus, a highly exclusive and secretive carnival krewe for the sons and daughters of New Orleans’ oldest and richest families. His father, Jackson Poole, is president of the venerable and only slightly decaying Grand Marine Bank.

Nobody knows they’re in love.

The Zemurrays, while insanely rich, are Jewish, and so excluded from much of polite New Orleans society. They’re never invited to the extravagant Mardi Gras costume balls. But Leonidas is forward-thinking.

Doris came to him with a plan.

There’s a colony of mutant swamp people, living in stilt villages in Barataria Bay, who learnt the agonising rituals of the Spider Hole God from a wandering Franciscan monk in the late eighteenth century, and still keep the faith alive. Recruit their musicians. Get them to play at the Knights of Proteus ball.

All the guests will go insane. The sacrifice of their minds will let an aspect of the Spider Hole God, aka the Devourer, into the world. A giant protoplasmic mass, bristling with lamprey mouths, who will bless his loyal servants.

Leonidas’ fiancée, Clara Monroe, doesn’t know about any of this. She comes from a very old plantation family, an offshoot of the de Marignys, but they haven’t worshipped any ancient Mayan gods in at least fifty years. She’s just excited to be elected Carnival Queen.

She has her own bodyguard, a six-foot-four black guy named Paris, who she’s not sleeping with. Although you could easily get the wrong impression.

Isabel’s speciality was Mayan music. She worked pretty closely with Doris. She got kicked out of the Institute for getting too close to the truth.

One day in a honky-tonk on Bourbon Street she heard a jazz band play snatches of an eerily familiar tune. She persuaded the bandleader, Leroy Riggs, to come in for a recording session. You can hear him talking on the Spider Hole Blues record, his voice sounding a little slurred.

Riggs and his All-Star Tuxedo Band were playing in the Jaguar Lounge a few nights before when a white guy with a lazy eye got up and joined them. The white guy had a strange instrument, like a flute - looked like it was made of bone or something. Some pretty wild sounds came out of that thing.

Riggs is not at all feeling well. You can find him wandering around Jackson Square, muttering to himself. The white guy’s name was Laroux, and he mentioned he was staying over at the Pickman Club - which is weird, since that’s a high-class establishment. It happens to be the Knights of Proteus’ HQ.

Incredibly hard to get inside the Pickman Club.

Even harder to get an invite to the Knights of Proteus masked ball. This year it’s at the Pontchartrain Hotel - the theme is Legends Of The Sea. Undercover swamp folk work security. Smiling moon masks hide their mutant features.

Doris can sic the Cuyamel Company’s soldiers of fortune on you. She has friends in the Mafia. The Jaguar Lounge is owned by Silver Dollar Sam, who also runs the waterfront unions that unload Sam’s bananas. Hassle her and she’ll send someone around to make you knock it off.

The Mantua Codex can tell you how to protect yourself against the music. Sam has the Ciudad Blanca version in his mansion at 2 Audubon Place. There’s a certain tune that, if played correctly on a thigh-bone flute, will trap an avatar of the Spider Hole God in the form of a howler monkey. 

The monkey’s harmless. You can keep it.