It was around five in the evening that Silas finally closed up shop... but oddly enough, we never saw him leave. It was then we realized he must be in on it - maybe there was another doorway into the shop, one we hadn't seen before. One we hadn't anticipated. We were right. A few minutes later, we watched several men and women - black and white, of varying age - approach the workhouse door near to the Ju-Ju House. A specialized knock let them in, and they were swallowed by darkness. There must have been 27 of them or so total that went in, all of them wearing fairly normal clothes. Our guess was that somewhere between the warehouse, the shop, and the basement below, the cultists discarded their normal clothes in favor of ceremonial garb, robes perhaps as Dr. Baker suggested. We waited another hour to be sure nobody else was coming, and then once night fell, we made our move.
Entering the warehouse proved easy - it was locked from the inside with a chain-bolt lock, but the door opened enough that Clayton pretty easily undid it and got us inside without much fuss. Within, we didn't find any street clothes, just darkness and empty shipping crates marked with the Emerson Imports label, big enough to hold a man. An adjacent door in the wall proved to lead out into the Ju-Ju House store space through a hidden panel behind a shelf, and we made our way in.
The curtained windows of Ju-Ju House made it easy for us to slip in unseen and unheard. If the place seemed foreign and slightly uneasy during the day, it was now even more so at night - the hollow eyes of a mask seem malevolent and alive when cast in shadow, and the slightest glimpse of carved ivory looks chillingly like the dead bone it is in the wrong light. Unnerved but undaunted, we crept towards the trap door Ralph had found earlier, and easily picked the lock on it, too. The trap door swung open freely, revealing the stairs below, leading some twenty feet below street level or more into the dank, black darkness.
Clayton, his arm still healing and feeling a bit cowed by the darkness, opted to remain upstairs and alert the police to send backup with his flashlight, just as we had agreed earlier, if we signaled that more help was needed. Meanwhile, the rest of us descended, guns in tow, traveling through a carved stone tunnel down into the earth below. The occasional rumble of a subway station was heard below as we traveled, and the glint of our flashlights on the walls revealed strange markings - carved there with knives or some tool, they were of monsters, odd sigils, strange beings... and, as we all recognized, the symbol of the Bloody Tongue. On and on into the dark we went, sure now we were on the right track, until we hit the flickering, feeble light of what we soon realized was a subway platform - and an out of commission one at that, too, though still with power as we all heard and saw. What we weren't expecting was the massive hole in the wall on the other side of the tracks, blocked up with plywood... a further route in?
Around this time, Dr. Baker's acute hearing heard something, a chanting... she couldn't tell what was said, but quickly realized that the voices were many, far more than we had with us. We soon recognized, as she drew our attention to the chanting, that we were outnumbered. There were four of us down here, nine with Clayton above and the police officers waiting on standby. We'd have no chance of stopping whatever ritual was going on down there if we didn't bring more men. So, we backtracked, signaled Clayton, and waited for the cavalry to arrive.
Arrive they did, en masse. We soon had about fifteen more officers with us, ready to tackle the cultists, all armed with guns. Clayton too came with us, armed as best as he could be, and we all headed downward. Clayton also recognized the symbols on the wall - he knew they were African and tribal in origin, and denoted that a great evil or disaster awaited those who dared enter. A foreboding message to be sure, but not one that we dared let ourselves be cowed by. We steeled our nerves and pressed onward into the subway station, dropping down onto the platform and opting to send an officer over the gaps in the tracks to remove the plywood over the adjacent hole. Once more, Dr. Baker's acute hearing and Ralph's quick thinking detected the humming, crackling electricity of the third rail. Ralph, making his way over, helped angle the piece of plywood such that the rail wouldn't be an issue. Clayton, however, was confused about these counter-measures - there's no subways in Brazil, after all!
Behind the plywood was an ornate African woven rug, decorated with the Bloody Tongue's sigil, and the chanting's volume increased in fervor so that it was clearer to everyone what exactly was being said.
"Nyar ghshan! Nyar ghshana!"
Well, I said we all heard the chanting, not that we understood it at all. What we did understand was that a horrible thing was taking place, however, because the next sound we heard was that of someone screaming in fear.
"Dammit, Brad!" Ted hissed, his gun at the ready. Everyone else quickly followed suit, and quietly, we made our way down another twisted and carved corridor, the chanting and screaming only growing stronger by the second, echoing around us like a vast web of sound to ensnare our senses...
"Nyar ghshan! Nyar ghshana! Nyar ghshan! Nyar ghshana!"
It was around this time that Dr. Baker started to have a bit of a nervous breakdown, and to this day none of us understand what exactly did cause it. She had placed a hand on one of the tunnel walls, then stopped to get a closer look. Her practiced medical eye roamed over the tool-carved marks there... and a look of absolute horror crossed her face, the color draining from it slightly.
"No..." she murmured, backing away, her eyes still glued to the wall. "No, that's not possible... That can't be right..."
"Morgan, you alright?" Ted asked, laying a hand gently on her shoulder. "Look like you've seen a specter..."
"Uh... the uh..." Her voice shook tremulously, and she pointed to the wall. "You see those marks on the walls?"
"What about 'em?" I asked, stopping and turning to face her. Her own face was a pallid mask of concern.
"Well... look at the way they're shaped," she whispered. "Those scrape markings... I've seen that kind of mark before, from hand-to-hand combat injuries on the battlefield. Those are the kind of scrape marks that can only be made by teeth. Human teeth..."
As disturbing as her statement was, we knew it couldn't be. Human teeth can't carve stone. Human teeth are just bone, and bone would break far too easily to carve stone with. The human bite wasn't even that strong, the teeth would crack before the stone did. But despite our insistence, Dr. Baker continued to shake and would not be reassured, her nerves frayed by the impossibility of what she saw. We, of course, assumed they were tool marks, but we had always known her to be level-headed before. Perhaps something about the darkness and heat, the damp and the chanting and screaming, disturbed her... and maybe her nerves were frayed from her time spent healing fallen soldiers during the Great War.
At least, we thought it her nerves, until we neared the great oak door at the end of the tunnel, and heard the horrific wailing. Constant wailing, of many voices, like thousands dying the most horrible death imaginable, being killed as if through an act of genocide or great torture...
Well, we all unhinged a bit hearing that, no more so than Dr. Baker, whose nerves finally betrayed her and brought with it panic. She seemed to rapidly flashback to her time in the trenches: the screaming of a man with a bullet in his leg and a broken femur protruding through the skin, the horrific stench of death as a soldier's leg rotted away from trench foot, the wailing of a jawless man struck by a shrapnel bomb and the strangled coughing and breathing of a captain who'd been hit by phosgene gas. She shook perceptibly, unable to correlate reality from fantasy, tears streaming from her eyes and her mascara running, as she murmured to herself in the quietest, gentlest voice we had ever heard this tough woman speak.
"I-it's alright... let me just get this dressing on... I know, I know it hurts... it'll be alright, son. It'll be alright..."
We knew then she needed to be taken from here until she calmed down, until she was stable enough to deal with the raid. We needed her, and we knew she would be tough enough to handle an episode of shell-shock. Three officers were kind enough to escort her out of the tunnel and to the subway platform, but seeing her laid low was enough for all of us to realize we had to act - and now.
Slowly, carefully, the rest of us pushed the huge oak door open... and unveiled a scene of primal, raw nightmare. I want you to imagine a room filled with 27 or so naked, blood-smeared people, dancing and chanting in an animal frenzy, a great stone pit before them barely uncovered with something squirming in it and wailing. The leader, Mukunga, a man dressed in feathery robe with lion's claws on his gloved hands, his voice as loud as could be. Two terrified people chained to the wall near ceremonial talking drums, one trembling and babbling, the other shaking his head and madly repeating, "This isn't happening" over and over again, scarred by some horrific experience. We all recognized that last one. It was Brad, his boyish face soaked with tears and his wrists raw from struggling against his shackles.
We wasted no time in going in, guns blazing, and chaos quickly unfolded. Have you ever seen 27 naked people panic as shooting starts? Five of those same 27 cluster about the leader as he screams orders in Swahili? Men get mowed down en masse by police, the most brutal kind of slaughter imaginable? It's not pretty. Then again, a raid often isn't, and not a single one of them were armed. Not a pranga in sight. I'm guessing they weren't expecting a visit from so many of us, or at least thought they were better hidden. Damn amateurs, at the least they could have been more organized!
Well, except for the leader, Mukunga. He was organized well enough to take the fight into his own hands, quite literally. We all saw and heard him murmur in a strange tongue, his hand glowing whitish as an orb of energy grew around it, but Ralph got to see and feel it first hand when it struck him. None of us know what exactly Mukunga did, but as soon as that orb hit, Ralph became a gibbering idiot. He stumbled in confusion, then turned to the wall and started punching it hard, drooling and babbling and utterly useless to any of us. It was around this point that Dr. Baker had finally calmed her nerves enough to engage in the fight again, and she too jumped in, along with the three officers who were assigned to help her. God bless the NYPD.
Then we heard Mukunga bark some order at his acolytes, something none of us understood, but one word we all recall was something that sounded very similar to "Jakota". His followers all started to coalesce around him and several turned to the lever on the wall - a winch which we quickly realized lead to that pit, with whatever was squirming in it. They were trying to let whatever was inside out... and whatever it was, we knew it had to be bad. Ted thought fast, and took aim right at Mukunga's head. I don't know how the man managed to shoot the leader instantly right between the eyes, firing into the crowd around him as he was, but he did it. Unfortunately, that meant Mukunga's body slumped over right onto the lever, causing the pit to open in full...
I'm sorry. I need a second to correlate my thoughts before I write this next segment, because what was in that pit... It was a fleshy, veiny, purplish mass of muscle and sinew, creeping forward on quivering pseudopods of skin as it pulled itself from the pit towards us, and adorning the thing were many, many faces... all human, their teeth cracked and worn down. It was as if someone had melted a pile of men into a fleshy wad of gum, and then given it hideous, sickening life as a constantly wailing, shrieking horror, its many faces burbling and rising to the surface of its flesh before melting back into the skin again and again. We all heard Brad shriek in terror and clamp his eyes shut as it rose from the pit, because he knew precisely what was coming next. The beast then looked at us with its many maddened eyes, an unspeakable hunger in them, and what remained of the cultists fled in fear.
This was what greeted us all, so it's understandable that the formerly calm Dr. Baker couldn't handle it, especially not after recovering from her bout of panic. None of us to this day know why she broke so quickly, why she snapped the way she did, but damn did she do it fast. The change in her eyes was instant as she saw the gummy, fleshy beast rise from the pit, and you could almost see a coldness and harshness come over her, the kind of look a sociopath gives you right before they stab you in the throat. With her mind frayed and broken, her body too gave out, and she fainted dead away... right in the path of the monster.
We didn't waste time in getting the hell out of there, leaving what police were out of the range of the creature to free Brad and the other prisoner. Ted scooped Dr. Baker's unconscious form up, and we ran for it. Out through the tunnel, across the tracks... and then, then Ralph had a brilliant idea. The plywood, still covering the tracks... and its third rail.
"C'mon, give me a hand!" He cried as the last of us made it across and the multi-faced beast barreled down on us. "Let's move this thing, fry the fucker!"
Just in the nick of time, we moved it, just as the beast landed on the tracks, just as its flesh contacted the third rail... and it screamed in unholy agony as several thousand volts of electricity slammed through its body, searing its flesh and cooking it alive. Within seconds, it was nothing more than a dead tumorous mass lying on the tracks, the smell of burned flesh thick in the air. Crisis averted.
The rest of the night was a blur, honestly. We all were traumatized after what we experienced, especially poor Dr. Baker and Brad. Brad wouldn't stop screaming and mumbling to himself, his nerves were a wreck. Dr. Baker, when she woke up, wouldn't talk at all and had a glassy, cold look to her eyes, like the world was her enemy and deserved nothing less than death. We had no choice but to set them up at Bellevue to, hopefully, heal their shattered psyches. Brad was lucky - his break with reality was only temporary, though the doctors couldn't quite do more than calm him down. It was like his mind blanked out the whole thing, he stopped talking about what he saw at Ju-Ju House and almost acted like he couldn't recall any of it. We think he has selective amnesia about it, and we're not about to jar him any further.
As for Dr. Baker, she fared better - the doctors said she might never break out of her catatonia, but against all odds, after weeks of care, she did... although, she was never quite right after that. She became a much crueler woman, a harsher woman, her mind almost always in the mode of combat and death and her eyes always steely and hard. Something in Dr. Morgan Baker died that night at Ju-Ju House, and it was more than just the innocence that we all lost that night.
It took weeks and a lot of effort, but after some time we were able to gather our thoughts and continue our work. Elias' legacy counted on us, after all. Erica and Jonah were counting on us. We had to continue, even after what happened, because if we didn't... then who would? Nobody would willingly choose this path if they saw what we saw. Nobody would believe us if we didn't do something. Elias really was on to something, something big, something spanning the globe... something deadly, sinister, and monstrous. And it was up to us to solve the case.
We quickly assessed that London might be the next best port of call, since Elias apparently lost his mind there according to Kensington. His notes from London were scattered, and there was proof someone or something he encountered there caused it. We also had a link to the Penhew Foundation in London, which Roger Carlyle had been to before he left for Cairo. Maybe they would have further leads for us, another piece to the great puzzle Elias was trying to solve. Make no mistake, London had something to hide... and damned if we weren't going to figure out what it was.