The World Encompassed
An adventure for Lima PCs, working for Morris’ Bar.
The hills of Valparaiso. Brightly painted houses sloping to the bay.
Ascensors - steep funicular cable railways. Wooden cars and tracks. Jammed between dockworker cottages and blocky apartments. Facades in all shades of the rainbow - dusky red, butter yellow, indigo, sky blue. Cobbled alleys. Stone stairs. Green doors. Wrought iron. Bougainvillea. City an amphitheatre with ocean as stage.
British and German merchants. International schools. Courtyard football. Sombre men in fedoras on bicycles en route to dockside offices. Cafes and patisseries where poets drink tiny cups of coffee and talk confidently about France. City’s wealth fading with opening of Panama Canal - still major Pacific port.
Peddlers with donkeys. Italian watchmakers. Violin lessons advertised by Hungarian Jews. Retired sailors from every nation. Flophouses. Knocking-shops. Broken bottles in gutters. Boys sell dirty postcards. Pickpockets stalk drunk Yankees. Anarchist stevedores knock each other down. Melancholy Belfast exiles bore strangers in pubs.
Basement bookstores. Repurposed figureheads. Tea rooms. Talking parrots. Pacific idols. Recluses in cobwebbed attics with spectacular harbour views. Scottish admirals trying to grow orchids in pocket-sized rooftop greenhouses. Fish market at Playa Caleta Portales. Sea lions under pier fighting pelicans for scraps.
Powder-blue Victorian manor teetering at cliff edge over Ascensor Artilleria. Weatherbeaten. Three stories. Seems liable to collapse at any moment. Overlooks port.
Boarding house. Run by Angela Potter. Elderly tyrant. Fines lodgers a dollar for failing to appear at breakfast, where she serves kippers and toast.
Dead sea-captain husband’s photo on the mantelpiece. Talks ceaselessly of what he wouldn’t stand for if she was still alive. Sons all working overseas. Gets brief letters from Seattle, Dublin, Auckland every six months.
Soft spot for Azaro.
Poet. Lives upstairs. Rarely leaves his room. Monosyllabic at meals. Pale. Gentle. Oily. Supposed to be working on mysterious surrealist epic about the conquest of Araucania. Hasn’t been seen in weeks.
Deformed corpse found on the funicular track below the house.
Battered. Clearly fallen from a great height. Hairless. Corpse-blue. Backwards head. Twisted limbs. Forked tongue. Sharp teeth. One of its legs bent upwards and tucked behind its neck - apparently sewn in place.
Returns to life in police morgue. Strangles attendant one-handed. Escapes into the street.
Police break into Azaro’s penthouse. Find it empty. Unmade bed. Food stains. Rotting dissected street cat - vivisected and roughly resewn. Pinned to walls - newspaper airship photos. Diagrams from bicycle repair manuals. Torn-out pages from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Film-magazine celebrity photographs cut up and reassembled.
Signs of a scuffle. Furniture knocked over. Broken window above corpse landing site.
Detective Alberto Bolaño has no clues. Rigid atheist. Not looking for help. Sergeant Juan Donoso has guilty habit of visiting clairvoyants - quietly reached out to nearest esoteric detective society, which is you.
Vicente Azaro has sold his soul to the Devil.
Born into a prominent aristocratic family. Grandmother Luz Lynch married and had children with her diplomat uncle. Mother Ximena Azaro Lynch founded Grupo 7 esoteric circle - held woman-only seances with sisters, became Chile’s most prominent spirit medium. Father’s identity unclear.
Raised in isolation on sprawling wine estate in Casablanca Valley. Taught from an early age that he was God. Servants instructed to obey his slightest whim. Sincerely believed self omnipotent until seventeenth birthday, when he was introduced to outer world.
Handful of early publications - poetry collection called The Mirror of Silence, magazine called Blue. Moved to Paris. Hung out with Picasso, Modigliane, Tristan Tzara. Studied astrology and the Kabbalah in Madrid. Contributed to Borges’ ultraismo movement. Briefly kidnapped by Ulstermen for criticising the British Empire.
Returned to Chile, penniless. Developed creacionismo - aesthetic philosophy which posits that the artist is divine. Fixates on idea of writing “omega poem” - creating new cosmos through language alone.
Makes bargain with Asmodeus. Has one year to complete greatest poem in Spanish language. Succeed - become God of pocket universe. Fail - Hell claims his soul.
Deadline passed three days ago.
Hell has called in its marker - sending agents to collect.
Teresa Wolff. Poetess.
Pressured by family at a young age to marry rising conservative politician. Tried to hang herself. Cut down in time. Sent to a convent. Rescued by Azaro, who snuck into her window at dead of night.
Become Azaro’s lover. Refused to marry him on feminist grounds. Travelled with him to Paris. Caught by him in one of many affairs. Tried to hang herself again, this time from a tree in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Legally dead for twenty minutes. Talks volubly but not always coherently about what she saw on the Other Side.
Inherited Wolff Castle in Viña del Mar (just north of Valparaiso) from eccentric uncle Gustavo, who died of yellow fever in 1917.
Sprawling seaside manor amusingly fashioned to resemble medieval castle, with spire and turrets. Full of artefacts from Gustavo’s travels - Chinese vases, Javanese shadow puppets, Tlingit totem poles. Builders across street working on Chilean president’s summer palace. Perched on rocky headland. Trembles in storms.
Huge library in squat Norman-style tower, separated from main house by covered bridge across frothing water. Azaro holed up here. Hunched over typewriter. Books all around him - torn apart, strewn across floor. Poem almost completed. Needs a few more days.
Teresa brings him food. Watches door with shotgun. Insists visitors prove all four limbs are in their proper place. Will reward you with money and secret wisdom for helping her boyfriend cheat Asmodeus and become God.
El Caleuche. Legendary ghost ship. Haunts the waters off Chiloe - island of cold rain, potatoes and warlocks in Chile’s far south. Docks at Mocha Island, the Mapuche abode of the dead. Sent north by Asmodeus to claim Azaro’s soul.
Cruises off Valparaiso coast. Burns with eerie flame. Visible at night - blue spark on the horizon. Waterfront gossip subject. Seen by fishermen and hands on cargo steamers. Captain pacing the foredeck. Telescope aimed at land.
Crewed by demons, witches and drowned sailors. Conjures storms and fog. Lures travellers aboard with laughter, music, the smell of roasting meat. Press-gangs them into service. Nobody can quit until they recruit two more souls.
Thomas Doughty. Sailed with Francis Drake. Fell to worshipping the Tehuelche god Setebos in Puerto San Julian in 1578. Sentenced by Drake to death for witchcraft. Jumped ship. Lived for seven years with giants. Found the City of the Caesars in a volcano’s crater beneath the Southern Patagonian Ice Sheet. Defeated its finest gladiators - claimed immortality as his reward.
El Caluche’s captain. Dashing black-bearded pirate. Expert with sword and gun. Thinks he’s funnier than he is. Demands his crew act like they love him. Flogs men to the bone for not having enough fun. Plays the fiddle, badly. Swigs horrible rum. Can only be killed by fire - always prepared to jump into the sea.
El Trauco. First mate. Son of the snake god. Ugly dwarf. No feet. Hobbles around on stumps. Claims to be able to seduce any woman with his hypnotic glare. Declines to demonstrate this power. Married to Fiura, a wrinkled cackling moss-clad hag.
Owen Coffin. Second mate. Eaten by survivors from the wreck of the whaling ship Essex in 1821. Now a cheerful animated skeleton. Bones visibly gnawed. Loves to gamble. Doesn’t blame his crewmates - would have done the same thing in their place.
Alonso Hurtado. Ship’s chaplain. Jesuit missionary. Decapitated by Mapuches at Valdivia during the Destruction of the Seven Cities in 1599. Grumpy. Devout. Carries head under arm. Shakes his fist in protest whenever it’s stolen by sailors as a prank.
El Cuero. Aquatic beast like an outstretched cowhide. Claws around its edge. Bulging red eyes. Circular beak. Envelops its prey. Clings to hull of ship. High-pitched whistling voice. Greedy. Wriggles up over gunwale - demands to be thrown food.
La Sirena. Musical blonde mermaid. Daughter of Millalobo, the Golden Wolf of the Sea. Conjures other monsters - hippocampi, feathered rat basilisks, flying vampire snakes, aquatic bovine unicorns who control time. Wants a boyfriend who won’t drown.
Mateo Coñuecar. King of the Righteous Province - Chiloe warlock consortium that owns El Caleuche. 117 years old. Eats babies. Waistcoat made of human skin. Meets with subjects in cavern near forlorn coastal village of Quicavi, lit by human-fat candles.
Feeds women noxious elixirs. They vomit up bones and organs - become heads attached to vestigial sacks of skin. Sprout feathers. Change into black birds. Spy on his enemies. Carry messages. Deliver curses. Inflict bad luck by screeching. Peck out eyes.
Debaptises stolen babies. Twists their limbs around. Sews one leg to back of neck. Applies magic cream. Raises them on diet of black cat’s milk, goat meat and rotting human flesh stolen from cemeteries. Creates imbunche - slaves bound to his will.
Sending these after Azaro. Wants him dragged back to the ship in chains. Plans on taking him to R’lyeh - impossible futurist city at the Pacific Ocean’s most isolated point. Deliver him up as a bribe from Hell to the nameless octopus god that slumbers below the oceans of the human soul. The oozing presence in all nightmares who commands us in his sleep.
Azaro can impose new standards of poetic order, reverse entropy, manufacture worlds. This makes him delicious. He must be shucked like an oyster - his thoughts eaten raw. Mateo wants him alive.
The ghost of William Doughty, Thomas’ brother, haunts the Cave of the Pirate on a barren promontory in Quintero, north of Valparaiso. Set there by Drake to guard the archangel Uriel - imprisoned in an obsidian Aztec mirror by John Dee. Only permits true heroes of England to enter. Will ask what great deed you have performed in Albion’s name.
Uriel craves freedom. Will grant one boon to anyone who liberates him. Can easily destroy the imbunches and send El Caleuche back to hell.
Then will revive Bogomilist heresy. Awaken the Patagonian giants. Found race of nephilim. Melt the ice caps. Reveal the City of the Caesars. Flood the world below a hundred feet of water so that only the very tall survive.
Visible in mirror as reflection without source. Beautiful. Wise. Fatherly. Peacock-feather robe. Offers advice. Tutors in rhetoric. Reveals secrets of heaven - always holds back the best bit. Explains in detail why it would be a good idea to let him go.
