Case in point, crate one of Penhew's two. When we levered it open with a nearby crowbar, we found very little inside for how big the crate was. There was a ton of hay for padding, and as we dug down we eventually found the cargo. It was little more than a curious statue or idol, somewhat like a scarecrow clad in tattered cloth scraps long since faded yellow from age and tobacco smoke. Its face bore an odd bit of blank metal I couldn't help but approximate to a mask, and the base of the statue was finely carved and painted. Yet as I continued to look at the object, the stranger I began to feel, until something about it... clicked.
It was like I had stared into a car's bright yellow headlights and was suddenly blinded by its intensity - a flash of light, followed by a bizarre landscape, like I was dreaming, but awake. I stood upon a strange, black-sanded shore near a massive, murky body of water, stretching so far into the off-white horizon it nearly could touch the black stars that glimmered there. Twin suns hung in this faded sky, and as they set beneath the lake my eyes followed them to a massive black basalt city of bizarre angles and architecture I'd never seen before, though dominant over all was the great ominous castle, fortified and strewn with shredded yellow pennants billowing in the oddly discomforting wind. Then I felt eyes on me, intense and malevolent eyes, and turned to see a figure behind me - just like the idol, he was all rags and his face was covered by a blank, pale, and cracked mask, but he was also tall and skeletal, and now that I think of it... perhaps the mask was his face. He was so close to me, I could hear his ragged breathing, like the death rattles of a man with a punctured lung. His aura was regal, darkly so, and I felt myself reel before his dark and all-consuming power as his deathly voice slithered into my ears like oil.
Tell me... have you found the Yellow Sign?
Instantly, I knew who the figure was, and I understood the place I was standing in, and realized what the idol was in the form of. The decadent being reached a scaly hand for me and I wanted to scream, but it all ended in a mercifully quick flash of sickly yellow light before I could do so. I nearly dropped the idol in shock, swooning, and as soon as I was out of the vision, the welcoming sight of my companions' frightened faces swept relief over me as I lay on the floor.
"Francis, are you alright?" Ludwig asked, hands on my shoulders and face marked with worry. "You were off in your own world for a moment, then you began to look very scared... What happened?"
"I... I saw..." The words struggled to come to mind as I fought to correlate my thoughts. "Listen. That idol, I know what it is... It's him. The Yellow King. I saw him, he lives in Carcosa, I..."
The others looked at me oddly, and I soon realized they had no idea what I was talking about. Then I realized how insane I sounded.
"Look, this is the second time I've tried to understand something and weird shit has happened," I continued, embarrassed. "Just like back in Shanghai, when I knew what those glyphs on the blueprints were. It's happening again. I don't know how I know these things, but... I just know. And I know for a fact that idol is fucking creepy, maybe even cursed for all I know. It's bad, okay? Really bad. Keep it away from me..."
"Oi, whatever you lot's talking about over there," Neville shouted from the other end of the warehouse, "Drop it and come take a gander at this, yeah? I found something in the other crate!"
I've never felt so relieved for a distraction in my life, and moved probably the quickest of anyone to see what Neville had found. I don't honestly know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't the bizarre object of rods, wheels, and mirrors that opened up before him like a metallic flower. In the center of it was a tube of some sort, with a cup to place one's eye like those vision things they have at the doctor's office. Neville was fiddling with the device, trying to peer down the tube to see what was inside.
"Hey, be careful with that!" Lucas said, moving to stop him. "You dunno how that thing even works, it could be a weapon or something..."
"Aw, sod off, mate, I know what I'm doing! It's no different from one'a them mechanical telesco-"
But Neville never finished his sentence. We had noticed the mirrors rotate towards him, and were about to warn him when there was a sound something like a great electrical hum and Neville sat bolt upright. Then he was suddenly, and violently, thrown to the floor, seizing up for a second as the device folded itself shut.
"Mein Gott, Neville!" Ludwig cried as he quickly took to the man's aid, reviving him gently. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, you okay there, mate?" Lucas added as the man came around. Neville's eyes were wide and blinked slowly, and he looked at each one of us in turn as if we didn't know us. Then, slowly, he spoke - but it wasn't with the Aussie accent we had come to know and love so well, nor were his words very clear at all.
"Oh yeah, man, I'm like, totally cool..."
We all shared puzzled looks. Cool? Last I check it was pretty damn hot in this warehouse. What was he talking about?
"You sure you're alright, Neville?" I asked, and he replied with a gormless look.
"Neville...? Oh yeah! Yeah, that's me, I'm Neville... Where are we?"
"Darwin. You're in Darwin, Australia."
"Oh, well that's not too far from where we gotta go to," he said, continuing. "Listen, man, we need to go to this city, it's really happening, man! We really, really need to get there from here, but I dunno where the way is. Can you cool humans help a brother out?"
Okay, "Neville" calling us "humans" was about as much as I needed to hear to realize this wasn't straightforward amnesia, and certainly not actually Neville. I didn't waste time in training my gun on the impostor, and neither did Lucas.
"Alright, who the hell are you?" I demanded, narrowing my eyes. "And if you say you're 'cool, man' again, I'll nail you between the eyes."
"Don't do it, man! I don't wanna have pieces of toxic metal in this body! I don't wanna die in this body, man..."
"So you're not human, then!" I adjusted my grip on the weapon. "I knew it, you're probably out to trick us or something - now tell us who you are."
"No, man, I just..."
"Wait a second!" Ludwig cried, "We don't need to be violent about this..."
"He is right, you know," added Chief. "The impostor clearly does not mean us any harm..."
"Yeah?" I smirked. "Well then, if he's really human and that object over there that conked out Neville isn't a weapon... he won't mind if we just destroy it, would he?"
To say the impostor panicked was an understatement. He absolutely lost it, and the fear in the eyes he'd stolen intensified greatly.
"No, no no no, man, don't do that! I don't wanna be stuck in the body of a mammal, man, they smell!"
"Start talking, then," I replied, my smirk widening to a smile.
"I... I..." Suddenly, its shoulders slumped, and a look of resignation came over its borrowed face. "Okay, fine, look. You're right, I'm not a human, my name is Chak'xiraxi. I'm from another time. My race, we do that by like, switching brains, you know? I just wanted to find out where my city's located. I come in peace and stuff, man..."
"And Neville?" I asked, lowering the weapon."Is he okay?"
"Oh yeah, he's fine, just kind of in my body somewhere waaaaaay in the past, man. He'll eventually come back, but it might be a bit. I dunno when they're gonna make me go back, man. We're not like humans, you know. We're kind of these far out cone-shaped things, with tentacles and claws. I think the closest you'd call us is... I dunno... a cnidarian, I guess?"
I'd heard enough, and went to go drink heavily from a crate of rum I'd noticed earlier while the others asked this Chak'xiraxi questions. Apparently, it was a very old being, and had spent some time with the Saxons in Middle-England during some war or another. It also explained it had tried some sort of chemical that made it see things in the future, 1965 it said, and yet it had never had booze before and was eager to try it. You see what I mean by "things getting weird"? First we have sea-cucumber aliens with starfish heads, then we have cults trying to murder us, and now this. If this is the kind of bullshit Clayton and Sarah had to deal with, I could leave it rather than take it.
In any case, it seemed like we were stuck with Roxy, as we came to call him, for the time being, at least until it decided to give Neville back. I got lacquered enough that I didn't even recall half of what got said by him, or what we did next. I do remember the museum though. It was afternoon when we got there, and already sweltering. Dodge was waiting for us, and proceeded to show us the collections he had - various Aboriginal artifacts pertaining to many aspects of their life. Roxy was fascinated by the various depictions of native Australian life, enjoying them as we might enjoy fine art in a gallery.
"You know, it's a real shame these are here, and not in a library," he said, smiling. "There's an awful lot of crazy information here if you could just read it..."
"Yeah, I'm sure it's 'really cool, man' or whatever," I murmured as I continued to follow Dodge. What really caught my attention in particular was a specific wooden carving. It was some sort of dark wood in the shape of a great bat-like figure, and it held a single eye with three inlaid red stones - rubies, I think - in the shape of something like a three-leaf clover. The nearby placard described it as a carving of a "Koori bat spirit", but I realized what it was instinctively.
"Sand-Bat?" I queried Dodge.
"That would be the name for it, as far as we can tell," he responded. "There's a curious legend that goes along with it as well, about their prime deity Rainbow Snake. Traditional song-cycle. The story goes that once, humans drank sand, until Rainbow Snake appeared and created rivers for them to drink from. Sand-Bat was jealous, so dried up all the rivers, and the people began to die. Rainbow Snake confronted Sand-Bat about this in his cavern in the skies, to which he showed little concern. So, Rainbow Snake told him about another place with more sand than the desert, however when Sand-Bat flew there, he found only the bottom of the ocean. Angered at being tricked, he and his kin went to someplace far away from water, and it is said that ever since, bats have dwelt deep underground in caves and Rainbow Snake was able to flow freely across the land as rivers. Quite a quaint legend, I think."
"Huh, interesting," I said as I peered up at a painting, done in a colorful and abstract style on eucalyptus bark. It was rather violent despite its colorful paints, depicting a man dying - bloated and blackened and being beaten by other figures with strange clubs.
"Oh, that's supposedly a depiction of a Koori bat-cult sacrificing someone," Dodge explained. "From what I understand, this was not a very common ritual. Anyway, on the Koori song-cycles, there's certainly quite a few of them - some of them discuss great god-like creatures with an odd city, but the city was assailed by great wind-spirits that blew it down and killed the inhabitants. Very odd legends, indeed..."
At this, Roxy seemed intrigued and a bit frightened, and interrupted.
"They weren't like big polypy things, were they?" he asked, an eyebrow raising in suspicion. "And was there any mention of lightning or anything?"
"No, not that I'm aware of, sir," replied Dodge, "But that's of little import now - What I really want to do is show you these great blocks they found in the Outback... quite curious, indeed."
He showed us to two large, weathered sandstone blocks, like the type described in the journal we'd been granted, covered in strange, spiraling petraglyphs which looked more like scribbles than actual characters. I peered at the glyphs on the stone, intrigued, sure I had seen them before... and then another flash of insight came to me, just as before with the idol, and on Grey Dragon Island. I recognized the glyphs - they were the same style as on that blueprint. The same writing. The writing of the Great Race, and, well, we did have an alien visitor with us...
"Hey Roxy? Come over here a second, I want you to see this..."
Roxy ran over awkwardly, then became excited seeing the blocks, explaining they were basically sign-posts. He didn't, however, say what was on them, only started babbling about how they came from the city, and begging Dodge to tell him where in the desert they were found.
"Well, I don't rightly know." A quizzical look crossed his features. "MacKenzie would know, but he's at his home in Port Hedland right now. He and MacWhirr, that's who found the place. MacWhirr's the bloke what owned that journal I gave you."
MacKenzie, that's who we had to ask next. Dodge was kind enough to give us his location, and from there all we had to do was take the train. Have you ever taken an Australian train before? They don't have matching gauges for one, so the trip involves hopping trains a lot, and it's oppressively hot. As for the coaches, well... they're non-existent. More like re-purposed cargo carriers, with no airflow and few windows except for the doors slightly open to provide some cool breeze. Jam-packed with workers of all stripes, too, as well as crewmen and us.
Yeah, now add a talkative alien who's aped your new friend's body to the whole experience, and you start to understand how annoying riding the trains in Australia can be. Especially when said alien decides to drive three Aboriginal workers bonkers by telling them, essentially, that it was around their people during the age of the dinosaurs. One of them reacted by jumping off the cargo carrier and probably breaking something, and the other two reacted by babbling and alternately praising Roxy as a god, something that distressed him greatly in the way we might be upset by accidentally stepping on a puppy's tail. Yeah, it wasn't a fun ride.
At least arrival in Port Hedland was smooth. Finding our way to MacKenzie's wasn't hard, either - he had a very nice house, and was quite polite, even poured us some tea soon as we stepped foot inside. I'd give anything for some coffee, to be honest, but tea works. Nice earl grey, too, so I'm not complaining. As we asked about the expedition to the dig site, he concurred he had been part of it, but only to outfit it. He knew something had happened, but MacWhirr was pretty quiet about it, only telling him to read the journal. He did, and what he found he scarcely believed... or would have, if he hadn't known MacWhirr to be an honest and forthright man. He even showed us a few photos of the stone blocks taken during the expedition, which Roxy confirmed to us later were indeed from the city. His borrowed eyes lit up as he looked them over, as if seeing home for the first time after a long trip. As for where the blocks were found, MacKenzie gave us precise directions by map: 22ᵒ3’14” South by 125ᵒ0’39” East, Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia. He even offered to help us with gearing up for the trip out there, if that's where we were headed, but said he would be unavailable for the trip itself.
There was one other thing he mentioned concerning the items. He told us he'd had more evidence, but that he had lent them to some American man named "Howston", and the man had run off with it. As far as he knew, this "Howston" was going to the same place MacWhirr did on some sort of expedition, probably from Miskatonic University back in the states. Damned fine institution, he said. Had we come from there?
That was all the information we needed, and spent the rest of the night at MacKenzie's, who graciously offered us a place to sleep since we'd come so far. It's where we are now, resting up and hoping Neville comes back to us. As interesting as Roxy is, I'll be glad to get rid of him - he's awkward, and the way he speaks drives me up a wall. I just hope Neville isn't too shaken up by his experience, if he even remembers it at all...
-- Francis McCloud, and it is not 'cool' out here, dammit! (June 17, 1928)