I heard a noise then, sounded like tapping... no, not just any tapping. Morse Code.
SOS. Trapped. SOS.
I quickly managed to yank my foot out of my bonds - the cloth was rotten - and began responding with the heel of my boot on the wall.
Roger that. Francis. Am OK but bound. Are you?
OK. Mahmoud. I hear Xu. Small room. Bound. Working on it. Muuzaji?
Negative. I ca-
I then heard a loud bang from a few doors down, followed by frantic poundings on the wall.
SOS. SOS. McCloud?
I smiled and rapped out a Chief in acknowledgement, then went to work getting the bonds undone. It was easier said than done, but thankfully I was able to work out one of the knots with my extended range of movement from my freed leg and got myself out. Then I heard the sound of footsteps outside and realized we were being guarded, and my military instincts kicked in once more.
Quiet. Being watched. Free. Will distract ASAP.
And then I launched my plan. Getting the guy to me was no problem. knocking him out was somewhat harder, as the best weapon I had was my metal leg. Have you ever tried to knock a man out while balancing on one leg? It's not easy, let me tell you. Apparently this guy was a rookie, though, because he went out like a light, and from there I was able to nab his keys, find the others, and get ourselves back together. Our new task? Escape this damned manor, or die trying. Hopefully the former, rather than the latter.
Of course, it couldn't be that easy. We ended up having to hide and sneak around the shadows, without any clue where to go next. So, we wandered, hiding, knocking guards out where we could, anything and everything to remain hidden. We stuck to the shadows, and thought nothing could surprise us after the torture gardens. We were wrong. Dear God, were we ever wrong.
It began with us managing to secret ourselves in Ho Fong's workroom, attached to a lush library. It was there, as we hid from the cultists crawling around the mansion, that a distinct shape on the desk caught Mahmoud's eye.
"There, do you see?" he whispered urgently. "That scroll... It has similar characters as the sickle we saw before..."
"No, not quite," Mei-lin corrected. "Those are close, but they read, 'Black Fan Goddess'. It's a title..."
"Pick it up, see what it says," I encouraged, and she began to open the scroll and read aloud, her voice hushed and low as we huddled close.
I wish she hadn't. What followed in that scroll was depraved, but beautiful. It told the tale of a fallen Buddhist who had uncovered an ancient temple in a bamboo forest. Therein, he met a beautiful woman, dressed in fine yellow and black silk with seven sickles about her waist, her face hidden behind a shimmering black fan. All he could see of her face were her brilliant green eyes, and he took her for a Goddess instantly. But the things she requested of him... He killed children for her. He slaughtered infants and let her eat their brains. And then, at the end of his long nights of service... she rewarded him with herself. God, it was deplorable the acts those two got up to in that temple. Things beyond simple experimentation, let me tell you. Things no sane person would ever consider, things involving the dead, things involving animals... all written in horribly beautiful prose.
Mei-lin's voice cracked as she read it, but it was as if she couldn't stop reciting it. Like she was in a disbelieving trance. And of course at the end, the Goddess wasn't human, she was more like a mockery of a distended, bloating corpse, vast and rotting and hideous. She had tentacles, for God's sake, and yet her eyes remained the same shade of green... Yeah, it ended with the protagonist's death by his own hand, and I can't blame him for it. Who wouldn't have, when confronted with that? The shock of the piece reverberated in silence around us long after Mei-lin finished, and fear settled in our stomachs. That was what these Order bastards worshiped? No wonder they were such fucked up fanatics, with religious texts like that...
"We have got to get out of here," Chief soberly murmured, and the rest of us wordlessly agreed, listening at the door. And then we heard the humming from the library, and our blood ran cold.
"Oh God, what is that?" Laurent muttered as I peered through a crack in the door.
"It's... a girl," I responded, bewildered. "It's just a little girl... maybe eleven at the oldest. She's just standing there..."
I pulled the door open ever so slightly more, revealing the child. Her greyish-pink robes were filthy and faded, and her long stringy hair hung unkempt and limp past her shoulders. She was barefoot, and her fingers twitched erratically as her sleepless dark eyes stared at the wall. It looked like she hadn't been fed well in days, or given new clothing since she was maybe four. And that disjointed humming she was making...
We watched in absolute horror as she spotted something, a centipede on the floor, and quick as a cat pounced upon it. Seizing it in one hand, she then sat and proceeded to jam the entire insect, alive, into her mouth and chew. We were alarmed, and immediately tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn't. She fought and struggled with me when I grabbed her, and made disturbed noises before finally breaking free and running out of the room.
"Merciful God, he's keeping children here," said Mahmoud, horror-struck. "He is sacrificing children, and there perhaps are more..."
"If that's the case, we have to find them," I added, face furrowed in concern. "Who knows what the hell kind of depraved shit he's doing to them? There has to be a basement somewhere... and maybe, from there, some sort of alternate way out."
"First, we should get our own skins saved," chided Laurent, and I reluctantly had to agree. A dead bunch of heroes would be good to nobody, especially not to any trapped children in the building. We had to consider ourselves first, as cruel as that seemed.
Assuring we were alone, we moved to the next room we could think of, hoping to find an escape. Instead, we found a dark, empty room... and the sound of humming. This was her room, the girl's room, and peering in, we found that our guess was right. Yet, we couldn't see her. We saw bugs, both crushed and live, everywhere... but the girl was nowhere to be found.
"Uh... McCloud?" Chief nervously muttered, and I turned to her. "Look up..."
I turned my attention to the rafters... and sure enough, she was there, the girl, climbing and scaling them like some sort of mad monkey. As she saw us, she drooled and made a throaty gurgling sound, and then began to make noise. Loud, whining noise. Noise that, we could hear, was drawing footsteps...
Needless to say, we made out of there like bats out of Hell. Unfortunately, we were spotted by a guard, and we had no choice but to grab whatever we could find and attack him before he attacked us. I'll say this - trying to fight quietly is not easy, and trying to garrote a man is harder than you'd think. I'm just surprised we even got ourselves hidden in the garden's foliage before anyone else found us. The patrol was still constant however, and the only other place the shaken Laurent could think for us to go was a pagoda where a bronze Buddha rested, a peaceful-looking waterfall feature trickling down behind it. At least there, the paper-screen door could provide us some cover...
Thinking fast, Mahmoud grabbed a rock and threw it in the opposite direction, distracting the guards just long enough for us to make a break for the pagoda, sliding the door shut and remaining as quiet as possible.
"Dammit, Laurent, this is a dead end!" I hissed. "Now what do we do? They're gonna find us eventually..."
He then suddenly motioned for me to keep quiet, and pointed to Mei-lin's observing of the Buddha. It wasn't much taller than one of us, and she turned to point out a seam in the Buddha's neck.
"I think it may turn," she replied, and reached up to twist it. Sure enough, she was right, and we watched as the wall behind the waterfall pulled forward and parted the stream enough to form a doorway. Beyond was a tunnel leading into the dark, peppered with small glowing lights set into the stone itself as it wound downward. And so, taking this new avenue out, we hastily moved until the door shut behind us, hoping and praying the cultists didn't find out where we had gone.
Down into the black we went, and soon enough we found ourselves faced with three doorways. To the front, gold filigree covered a latticework door. To the right, a path opened into a small storage room. To the left, another, but we couldn't tell as the path took a turn before the end. We opted to split up here, and went looking. Mei-lin stayed behind to keep watch.
Mahmoud and Laurent later confirmed that the rightmost room held books, vials of poisons, torture tools, weapons... and ceremonial cult robes, voluminous and large in yellow and black, embroidered with the characters for the Order. They told me it looked unwieldy and hard to move around in that bulk, a good point to remember later in case we end up in the middle of a cult ceremony or something. Meanwhile, Chief and I found weapons - lots of them, including our own. The others were ecstatic to hear this - not only did we have our kits back, we had a few new tools, too. Mei-lin even found what looked to be a pair of steel-tined fans, which she explained to me were a sort of weapon used in close combat. Battle fans, of all things - who knew?
After exploring these, there was only one more place to look - the door at the end of the main hall. Its gold filigree glinted enticingly in the vague half-light as we picked the lock and pushed it open. If only we had known just what horror hid behind that alluring shell, we might have been more prepared. Then again, I don't think anything could have prepared us for Ho Fong's shrine of worship. As we entered, a smell like kerosene hit us, and we soon realized we stood on a stone bridge in a lake of flammable liquid. Setting torch to the liquid, a blaze quickly spread light around the room, and what it revealed was a nightmare. I will try my best to explain, but I'm not sure I'll even do my description of the place justice.
The stench of rot and gasoline clung like tar, and we soon discovered why. All over the floor, over the gilded Order crest set into the stone, were arms. Human arms, in varying states of decay, brutally yet carefully separated from the shoulder joints, of a hundred or more victims of the Order. The bloody remnants and liquefied rot drained into a sluice, which led to a drainage pipe to the outside world. And presiding over this dreadful scene was the most hideous bronze statue, arms strewn over it and as tall as the very ceiling. It was of a distended, slug-like, obese, tentacled, rotting female corpse, its eyes inlaid with emeralds. Four mouths it had, all ringed by soft lips and all bearing sharp, shark-like teeth, all of them placed in very disconcerting and lewd areas of her body. Seven sickles it had, five hung from its belt and two each within a hand and a tentacle. And in the other hand, made of burnished and burnt-black metal, was a fan splayed open like a disarmingly beautiful flower sprouting from a carcass.
To say it shook our foundations to see all this is an understatement. I found myself trying to count every arm laid out, neatly, in their intricate and morbidly beautiful patterns. Mahmoud retched violently, and I'm not sure how the ladies kept their composure so well. And Laurent... well. He simply lost it, his already jarred nerves overwhelmed by the sight, the stench, the realization. I watched as he stared at a rotting arm in front of him and then collapsed before it. My eyes met his, and I saw something very much like mad, ravenous hunger in them as he suddenly, to my horror, grasped the rotting limb and proceeded to bite into it, chewing at it like a lion on a gazelle. Of course, we stopped him before he got much further, and tried to snap some sense into him, but he was adamant and would only murmur vague snippets of speech. "The living feed on the scraps of the dead," he babbled feverishly. "It's only right... only right... only right..."
It wasn't until I looked up from aiding him that I noticed the recessed area, and heard a muffled moan of pain. Then I looked closer, and saw a figure inside it. A human figure, bound down and half-beaten. Their feet were covered in bite marks and scratches, that seemed to be showing signs of infection; clearly they'd been here a few days at least. Above where their face would be was a box of very mean-looking rats, desperately trying to scratch into where the person was to feed on them.
"Guys, there's a prisoner!" I shouted, and a few of the others quickly came to my aid as I ran over to free the poor soul. It didn't take much effort to open the trap... or realize that it was a rather attractive young woman, muscular, short-haired, and rough-looking, who was bound and gagged within. Her eyes flicked to us as she sat up, pulling herself free and examining her wounds.
"Thank God, I thought I was dead," she said, hard voice streaked with nerves and adrenaline. "It's a miracle you came along when you did... The name's Brady. Jacquiline Brady, Jack for short."
The realization floored us immediately, and Chief gave a wry smile as she realized she'd found a kindred spirit. After all this searching... Jack Brady had been a woman the whole time. And to think we'd been looking for a man all along! No wonder neither us, nor Clayton and Sarah, nor any of the cults had found her... until Ho Fong captured her.
"Your, uh," I stammered stupidly, "Your feet are kind of torn up..."
"Shut your damn mouth, you'll catch flies," Brady responded. "And I'm aware. That bastard Ho Fong did it, and it hurts like hell. You saw the rats, didn't you? Well, I got nabbed by Ho's goons one day, and woke up here. He sicced the damn rats on my feet, told me if I didn't tell him where to find my girl Choi, he'd kill me with 'em. Let them eat my eyes. But that doesn't matter now, I didn't let the fucker have what he wanted from me. Looks like you lugs could use some help, though, and I know just the guy. That drainage pipe over there goes out to the river, we should be able to make it there if we use it. Follow me."
Chief at least insisted on bandaging Brady's feet before she waded into the sludge, but the tough customer was having none of it. It took a bit of convincing before finally, after finding some suitable boots in one of the other rooms of the temple, she acquiesced and we left. I won't say the trip out was pleasant. Wading knee-deep crouched in horrible corpse effluent certainly isn't ever pleasant, but it got us out of that nightmare trap alive. Brady proved to be a helluva tough woman, she knew the streets of Shanghai like the back of her eyeballs and she got us hidden away to boot.
As we slunk through the shadows, she related her story of how she'd gotten wrapped up in the Carlyle Expedition. Apparently, she had a bit of a rap sheet, and Carlyle saved her from prison. The two were fast friends after that; he helped her turn her life around and even financed her education in photography. She was much later asked to help out on the expedition, as the photographer, and she readily agreed, craving some adventure. But all the while, she noticed how off Carlyle was acting more and more oddly... having strange dreams, believing he was going to be a god. She was worried about her friend, but soldiered on, hoping he would get better during the trip.
She played along with his delusions at first, and things seemed to calm down - until they arrived in Cairo, and things really started to unravel. Brady went with the expedition to camp near the Red Pyramid, and something... happened in the middle of the night out there. They disappeared, as she put it, and she ended up going back into Cairo with one of the bearers. She had no idea whatever became of the man, Warren Besart, I think she said his name was. The next day, Carlyle found her, babbling about how he "broke the eye" and could be a god now. Then the rest of the crew found her, and she had no choice but to continue with them. They told her she'd die if she didn't. And the crew seemed... different in other ways, too, ways she couldn't quite place.
They left Cairo for Kenya after that, and traveled towards the mountains there. Hypatia, Carlyle's girl, was sick a lot and possibly with child, Brady thought, but she thought it rude of her to pry and never asked. The others said they had to go to the mountain no matter what, and at that point Brady lost her nerve. Carlyle seemed to be more stable at this point and agreed they needed to run for it, so she grabbed him, the rest of the expedition money, and some supplies, then beat it by train to Nairobi. From there, the two went to Hong Kong... but then Carlyle's condition worsened. He realized he'd done something terrible, unleashed something, and his dreams came back as nightmares. By the time they reached China, Carlyle was hopelessly insane, so she set him up in a hospital somewhere in Hong Kong and ran for Shanghai.
That was where she had been for years, hiding away from the other members of the Expedition in fear of her life. During that time, she found other kindred spirits like her, people who knew about the corruption in Shanghai and Ho Fong's hands in some sort of conspiracy. One of them, her girl Choi as she put it, was hoping to turn China's corruption around, and told her that she might want to dig deeper. Another one of the people she made contact with was Mu, whom she stayed with and was leading us to. Eventually, she learned of Elias and his travels, and was going to make contact with him, but he left before she could reach him. Then, a year later, she found out about us, and had tried to get in contact but could not without being caught. As for the Expedition, she had thought she had seen the last of them.
"That is," she added as she turned to knock on his door, "Until I was at the market one day this past spring, and I happened to notice Sir Aubrey Penhew preening on the deck of the Dark Mistress..."
Damn it, it's never easy, is it? At least Mu was able to hide us out for a bit, keep us low profile. I'm concerned about Brady's wounds, but Mu assures me he can make sure they're kept clean, and Mahmoud knows enough First Aid to help her out if things get sticky. Damn, do I ever wish Ludwig was here with us now...
I'm beginning to think maybe Clayton wasn't so crazy after all. Here I am, in Mu's house, cleaning off purge fluid and blood from my clothes and contemplating how a madman isn't actually insane. The hell does that say about me or anyone else here, huh? Am I losing it? Laurent certainly has, he's locked himself in a room with one of Mu Hsein's books and he won't come out, not even to talk. He won't eat his food until it's half rotten on his plate. He won't talk to us, and we're scared he's going to make himself sick. He won't even do more than grunt at us when we go to the door. How much longer can I stand this shit before I end up in a rubber room?
How much longer do I have before I'm like him?
-- Francis McCloud, Wary and Worried (May 29th, 1928)