The Horrible Bird
An adventure for Lima PCs, working for Morris’ Bar.
Argument in a necropolis.
The Cerro Colorado on the arid Paracas Peninsula. Shaft tombs cut into the lunar desert. Ancient geoglyphs - the Paracas Candelabra, 2000 years old, cut into a stony hillside overlooking guano-flecked ochre cliffs. Obese burnt-umber sea lions. Evil-eyed brown pelicans with beaks in sunset orange and sky blue.
Bundled mummies of Wari Kayan. Deformed skulls. Wrapped in cloth like sad fat dumplings. Grave goods - shell necklaces, feather fans, ceramic orcas with modeled human heads between their teeth. Bone flutes. Crimson mantles decorated with grids of flying shamans. Hexagonal serpents precisely intertwined. Bodies made from faces. Goofy square grins.
Archaeologist Julio Tello busy excavating the site. Cheerful little Quechua man with round spectacles who expresses childlike wonder at every new find.
Evgeny Yakovlev. Learnt archaeology in Tashkent before the war. Fled to the Americas via Istanbul after the Bolshevik Revolution. Stopped over in Peru on his way to California and discovered it was a digger’s paradise. Got a job with Tello’s museum. Extremely distant cousin of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov. Tall. Thin. Prone to fits of melancholy. Walks with a cane he doesn’t really need.
Falls in love with Rebecca Carrion, Tello’s best student, also present at the dig site, who does not reciprocate his affections. Spends more and more time taking long walks in the desert, brooding alone. Sometimes not seen for days.
Develops a theory that the Paracas people, ancestors to the Nazca, worshipped the whale as Cosmic Father and ancestor of all life. Also persuades himself they were blue-eyed and blonde.
Has a screaming match with Torribio Xesspe, Tello’s other best student (he could never choose just one) over his increasingly esoteric interpretations of Paracas mythology, which he insists are self-evidently correct. Storms off into the night. Disappears.
Six months pass.
Pirates raid the dig site. Swarthy men with pistols. Bandanas. Coarse laughter. Narrow eyes. Stubble. Knife fights over games of dice.
Led by Captain Leo Klaw, a bulky Klaus Kinski-esque German with a blond bowl cut and look of uncomprehending mania in his cold blue eyes. Chews wads of tobacco with slices of mescaline cactus. Jaw always working. Calls his guns by women’s names - polishes them endlessly in the privacy of his cabin.
Steals Tello’s most curious find - fat-faced androgynous doll with a bemused expression, carved from the tooth of an unknown species of whale. Kidnaps Carrion. Drags her onto a fishing boat. Bashes Xesspe over the head - he’ll live.
Take the loot to pirate hideout on Chincha Islands. Old guano dock. Tin sheds. Cantilevered rusty jetty. Bones of Chinese workers. Cormorants shitting everywhere - reconstructing the great excrement cliffs that were once Peru’s most valuable resource.
Like an abandoned quarry - square-cut ledges in the rock-hard guano. Sea stacks. Rocky archways. Penguins lurking in grottoes. Creaking iron staircases and ladders bolted to the stone. Hidden sea-cave shrine to the Chincha jaguar god. Used as a pirate fortress before the guano rush. Carrion, as yet unharmed, shackled to the wall in subterranean dungeon once used by Francis Drake.
3000-year-old whaling station. Polished chrome bones of extraterrestrial leviathan embedded in guano. Pirates making desultory effort to dig it up.
Klaw well known in nearby faded desert port of Pisco. Raids coastal shipping and outlying desert farms. Comes in with his men on Sundays to pick fights with vineyard workers and smash up dockside cantinas. Has paid off the police.
Meets Yakovlev once a month in the Hotel de Gusanos Morados along the waterfront. Provides him with a sack of trophy heads. Taken from captured sailors. Rope handles punched through skulls. Lips pierced with thorns so the spirit can’t escape.
Argues occult philosophy over pisco sours. Plays Wagner on the gramophone. Shoots at shaky-handed bartender’s feet to make him dance.
Yakovlev wants to win Carrion over with true love. Sentimental. Sends her bottles of fancy perfume, fur coats, rapidly-wilting roses. Writes bad poetry in halting Spanish - claims it sounds better in Russian.
Will release her only if she agrees to marry him. Proposes to establish her as Queen of the Universe. So far he’s had no luck.
His clean-cut Nordic thugs sneer at Klaw’s bandits - challenge them to wrestling matches among stray chickens and old bicycles in the hotel’s dusty yard. Lose. Claim the enemy cheated - demand to go again.
Ernest Beaux. Thule Society lieutenant. Head perfumer for Coco Chanel. Designer of Chanel no. 5.
Dream is to create a fragrance that captures the Arctic purity of a concentration camp on the White Sea, where he worked as Allied interrogator of Reds during the Russian Civil War. Dissatisfied with Chanel’s current output. Needs the perfect scent to awaken the white race from their slumber.
Contacted by Yavkolev through Grand Duke Dmitri with the startling information that the Nazca Lines in southern Peru (discovered by Xesspe) are in fact a trap for space whales - the cosmic leviathans who patrol Deep Heaven. Field notes from Max Uhle, stored in Thule archives, confirm this.
Geoglyphs attract the brutes’ attention. Cactus-high shamans bait them down with pipes, drums, automutilation, huge piles of delicious trophy heads. Landing is easy. Taking off is hard. Harpoonists lie in wait. Meat is greasy but delicious. Oil fuels sweet-scented white flames that expose ghosts and lies.
Beaux wants their ambergris for his divine perfume. Thinks anyone who smells it will instantly be able to see through all Bolshevik propaganda. Technically correct.
Encamped near the Cahuachi Pyramids with bored Nazi henchmen and the Sigurdsson Brothers - identical Icelandic harpoonist triplets who rehash endless petty squabbles over gambling debts and women in forgotten Baltic ports.
Has thus far managed to bring down only one small leviathan - the cosmic equivalent of a porpoise. Twenty metres long. Made from crinkled glass. Ridden by a goblin of pure light who sat in the hills all night and sobbed as they cut it apart. Zero ambergris in its guts.
Beaux unhappy with the way things are going. Screams at his underlings. Wants the pirates to fetch him more heads.
Morris Klaw. The Dream Detective.
Little round bald man. Thick Austrian accent. Brown bowler hat. Gold pince-nez. Black silk muffler - holds it to his mouth to avoid the contamination of dry desert air. Impossible to say what colour his eyes are. Short peppery beard.
Spritzes self with lemon verbena water from a small perfume bottle. Treats you like you smell bad - maintains his distance. Apologises. Claims to be highly sensitive to odylic disturbance - unable to bear the physical presence of the morally corrupt.
Leo Klaw’s father. Thule Society agent.
Sleeps on sterilised pillows. Can absorb the energy of crime scenes in his dreams - the muddy tang of violence, the taste of fear and blood. Writing a monograph on “crime cycles” - the idea that evil deeds and degenerate periods recur at regular intervals in history. Sordid acts echo across generations.
Isis Klaw. Morris’ daughter. Leo’s sister. Small. Dark-eyed. Vivacious. Reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian princess. Only wears red. Like a walking flame. Stiletto concealed among her hat’s black ostrich plumes.
You’ll run into them in Pisco or Nazca. Keeping an eye on you. Trying to work out if you’re useful.
2000 years ago the Nazca shamans killed a god and ate its heart. Stole its cosmic power. Brought centuries of darkness down upon the world. We are all haunted to this day by the echoes of its death-song, keening in our souls, seasoning even our greatest pleasures with the bitter taste of ashes and unfulfilled desire.
The Klaws want to do it again.
They have a vision of a perfect lifeless world. A cold black lunar wasteland where bodiless intelligences reproduce via machine. Brooding hives of common maggot-servants handling all the messy essentials, freeing the ruling class to endlessly contemplate their own genius. Led by Adolf Hitler’s preserved head, barking orders from a jar.
They’d do anything to make it real.
Man Immortal. Man Ubiquitous. That’s their dream.
