Calcutta — The Cycle of Dissolution
Sundry Fittings
The evening began with the party preparing to depart the Cavendish estate for an auction at the docks. With Meg’s servants occupied fortifying the grounds against the coming storm, there was no coachman to be found. Havildar Pratap Singh took the reins himself, guiding the carriage through the rain-slicked streets of Calcutta, past the town square and down toward the River Hooghly, where the smell of wet jute, opium, and cold river mud announced their arrival at the warehouse district long before they reached it.
The auction was held at the go-down of Zorab and Sons, a long warehouse lit by trestles of lamps and crowded with collectors, East India Company men, and the Armenian family conducting the sale. The patriarch, Hovhannes Zorab, greeted guests warmly, while his daughter Mariam ran herself ragged calling lot numbers, serving punch, and desperately trying to get her father’s attention. His son Gregor, grey-faced and hollow-eyed, had stationed himself beside Lot 14 — a dull, seamless metal cylinder of unknown origin — and could not be persuaded to move away from it. The porters kept their eyes carefully off the loft stairs above, where a shutter banged rhythmically in the wind.
An older gentleman named Dr. Venn introduced himself to the party near Lot 14, explaining he had already purchased one case of instruments from the family and was hoping to acquire more. He complained of a strange numbness that had crept into his hands over the past weeks, which he attributed to rheumatism, though he seemed oddly unbothered by the progression. He pressed a curious lens mounted on a metal stalk into the party’s hands, encouraging them to look through it. When Adrien de Montferrand raised it to his eye, he saw two glowing, bulbous, winged forms crouched on either side of the banging shutter in the loft above — creatures like praying mantises made of light, with a glowing thread stretching from the roof out across the whole of Calcutta. Meanwhile, a servant quietly pulled Pratap Singh aside and warned him in Hindustani that things walked on the rooftops at night, that his master’s hands had gone dead since the box arrived, and that there had been deaths.
Gregor approached Adrien with a haunted solemnity, asking whether a man could honorably give his life for a kinsman. He thanked him quietly for his answer and walked away, and as he turned, the party noticed the back of his head had been shaved on both sides — and dotted with rows of small, precise scabs. Mariam, catching a rare moment alone by the punch bowl, nearly crumbled before composing herself. She confided to the party that her brother had been obsessed with their deceased cousin’s Himalayan possessions since they arrived, spending hours locked in a room with the strange device while a vibration hummed through the door. She begged for help, mentioning that a small crown-shaped fitting had gone missing from the collection and might have been mixed in with the other lots.
The bidding was about to begin when Hovhannes pulled the covering from Lot 14, revealing the cylinder in full. It was seamless and dull, radiating a faint heat, with one fitting already seated and a tray of others beside it. Dr. Venn, examining the sundry fittings with his dead hands, picked one up and pressed it into a socket with a soft click. The cylinder began to hum — and then it spoke. In a voice that could only belong to a dead man, it cried out not to be sold. The warehouse erupted. Papers flew, buyers screamed, and the crowd stampeded for the exits. Katherine Ward’s composure shattered entirely, her refined accent dissolving into raw cockney as she hallucinated herself back on the streets of London, screaming at a long-dead childhood pickpocket named Sammy. In the chaos, Gregor snatched the cylinder from the table and bolted out a side door. The party seized Dr. Venn and dragged him toward their carriage, determined to reach his home and retrieve the missing crown fitting before Gregor could.
The carriage tore out of the warehouse district and into the open esplanade, rain hammering the roof and wheels hissing through standing water. Above the noise of the horses came a dry, rattling sound from the sky — like a card held in the spokes of a wheel. A bolt of lightning split the clouds and illuminated a shape the size of a man keeping pace directly overhead, its too-many limbs trailing and its wings like sheets of wet paper. Dr. Venn peered out from beneath the carriage window and cheerfully identified it as the same creature that had been walking on his roof. The horses began to froth and whine, and the carriage lurched violently from side to side as the thing dropped lower and lower.
The creature slammed into the front corner of the carriage and began tearing its way through the wooden roof with enormous, mantis-like fighting arms. Pratap Singh surged to his feet on the wildly swaying carriage, sword gleaming in the lightning, and swung at the beast — but the careening vehicle threw off his strike and the blade glanced off its carapace. Thomas Wyndham fired his pistol into the creature’s shoulder joint, the shot punching through but failing to slow it. Georgiana Wentworth stabbed at its tentacled face with a dagger as it peered through the hole it had made, only to feel her blade scrape uselessly off the hard shell. The creature pushed its smaller, manipulative arms through the gap and seized Dr. Venn, beginning to drag him bodily through the splintering wood. Katherine attempted to slash at the creature’s grip with her sword cane, but one of its great fighting arms snapped out and sent her flying backward.
It was Emma Wentworth who turned the tide. She slipped her hands into her tiger claws, ducked beneath a slashing limb, and drove the blades deep into the creature’s fleshy side where its smaller arms were joined. The beast shrieked, spraying acrid green ichor across the interior of the carriage, and its frenzy redoubled. Then Georgiana raised her poker and brought it down with tremendous force onto one of the creature’s great fighting legs. The carapace exploded, raw ichor splattering across everyone inside, and the creature fell away from the carriage with a shriek, its legs curling as it tumbled into the dark and rain. Dr. Venn dropped back into the carriage, laughing and giggling about how his friends had come to visit.
A medical examination of the doctor in the lurching carriage revealed something far more disturbing than his madness. Behind each of his ears were two bloodless, perfectly circular punctures — holes so clean and precise that one could see inside them. The doctor had no sensation of them whatsoever. He spoke cheerfully about how the instruments had been singing to him every evening since he brought them home, how seven of his nine servants had fled, and how large things walked on his roof at night. He handed over the key to his study cabinet without hesitation, assuring the party that the crown fitting was locked safely inside.
The carriage rolled up to a dark bungalow in Chowringhee, every lamp extinguished save for a single candle burning at the far end of the house. The front door stood open, rain running off the veranda roof. The drawing room beyond the threshold was filled with an unnatural darkness that swallowed the torchlight at its edge as though it were a physical curtain. Thomas broke apart pieces of the ruined carriage and fashioned makeshift torches, and the party pressed inside, frog-marching the bound and giggling Dr. Venn with them. The darkness was absolute and alive, and somewhere within it, something buzzed.
In the study, they found Gregor. He was slumped in a chair, eyes rolled back, tongue lolling, with a cage of needles clamped to the shaved skin at the base of his skull, connected by a cable to the cylinder sitting on the desk. The cylinder’s lens attachment swiveled toward them as they entered, and the mouth fitting spoke in a calm, reasonable voice — introducing itself as Movses, the Zorab family’s deceased cousin, explaining that Gregor was simply helping him complete a brain transfer and that everything was perfectly fine. Before anyone could respond, the unnatural buzzing surged through the walls and floor, and most of the party froze where they stood, entranced and motionless.
Adrien, unaffected, moved quickly through the paralyzed group, pressing wax into ears and snapping his companions back to themselves one by one. But the creatures did not wait. Two of the winged, crustacean-like horrors burst from the darkness — one seizing Dr. Venn and lifting him toward the ceiling, the other charging straight for the desk to reclaim the cylinder. Emma, moving faster than the creature, threw herself across the room in a flying leap and batted the cylinder from the desk. The cable connecting it to Gregor snapped taut and then tore free, ripping the needle-crown from the back of his skull in a spray of blood and spinal fluid. Gregor convulsed and went still. Movses’s voice cut off mid-protest.
Georgiana did not hesitate. She leapt at the creature carrying Dr. Venn and brought her poker down with everything she had, shattering it against the wall in an explosion of ichor and crumpled wings. The doctor fell to the floor, laughing. The second creature, deprived of its prize, smashed through the window slats and vanished into the night. The house fell silent except for the creak of Gregor’s chair and the slow drip of blood onto the carpet.
The party looted the study methodically. They found Dr. Venn’s day book, filled with measurements, diagrams he could not have drawn himself, and a grim chart of his own hands going progressively numb. They found a Japan cash box containing a substantial sum in rupees and gold mohurs. And tucked behind the medical books on the shelf, they found a bound manuscript with a London auction ticket still inside the cover — the Pnakotic Manuscripts. They took the brain cylinder and all its fittings, wrapped carefully in a torn curtain. Then they drugged the insensible doctor, scattered his own incriminating notes and paraphernalia around him, and left him to be found by whoever came looking. The Mi-Go corpse splatters were already dissolving into the carpet, leaving nothing that could not be explained away. Gregor was returned to his family at the warehouse, where Mariam was bandaging her father amid the bubbling remains of yet another creature that had attacked during their absence. Katherine spun a convincing tale blaming the doctor for Gregor’s condition, and the family, traumatized and grieving, accepted it. The party climbed back into their ruined, rain-soaked carriage and made for the Cavendish compound, pressing all of the stolen rupees and all six gold mohurs into Pratap Singh’s hands as payment for his loyalty and his silence. Back at the compound, Georgiana sat down and did not get back up for some time, the weight of the night finally breaking through.