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An investigation dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

MEMORANDUM 11-W Do not ask where the subject went. Do not reconcile the timestamps. Do not put the photographs in chronological order. If two witnesses disagree, interview them apart and keep both statements without deciding between them. The subject is dangerous while his history stays indefinite. He becomes vulnerable the moment one history is fixed. He also becomes visible, at that moment, to whatever made the indefiniteness necessary in the first place. Decide before you begin whether this operation is meant to capture the subject or to feed him to it.

The five deaths of Martin Vale

Martin Vale died at 21:14 in a locked room at the Hotel Bernier. A constable and two paramedics saw the body. There was a revolver in its right hand, a gunshot wound through the palate, and prints later confirmed as Vale’s. At 21:19, railway cameras recorded Vale boarding the northbound train, and the footage passed every authenticity test there was; his ticket had been bought three days earlier and the conductor remembered punching it. At 21:26, Vale stabbed an archivist seventeen kilometres away, watched by three witnesses, his blood on the broken handle of the knife. At 21:31, Vale phoned his wife from their apartment and stayed on the line eleven minutes, the call logged to that address, a neighbour seeing him through the kitchen window. At 21:44, a car registered to Vale hit a bridge abutment and burned, and dental remains identified the driver.

Not one of those reports was fabricated. None described an impostor, a twin, a recording, a hallucination, or any ordinary duplicate. The investigation stayed safe right up until Inspector Baines laid all five files on one table and announced that only the railway sighting could be genuine. Four bodies vanished. Aboard the northbound train, Vale screamed for seventy-three unbroken seconds, every window in the carriage grew the same hairline crack in its upper-right corner, and blue vapour came through all of them at once. That is the working definition of a Which-Way Man: a person who stays alive by making sure reality can never establish which history is his.

A multi-observer entity for Cthulhu Eternal

Incident 6-14: Bellweather Pumping Station

All four witnesses agreed on this much. At 21:17 something came into the eastern service corridor. It stopped under the emergency light. It covered twelve metres in about four seconds. It struck maintenance supervisor Imran Patel once, hard enough to put him through the wired-glass door, and then went on into the turbine hall, where it stayed until electrical engineer Lena Cho brought up the inspection array. Everything past that depended entirely on who you asked.

Lena Cho. It was an animal. Black, six-legged, no hair. The front legs were shorter, so its shoulders kept falling forward. Long skull, two mouths, one over the other. When it hit Imran it bit him round the chest and threw him sideways.

Imran Patel. There was no animal. It was a burned man crawling backward with his stomach to the ceiling. He grabbed my coveralls. His hands were too hot to touch. I know what Cho says she saw. She is wrong.

Officer Daniel Reeve. It looked like a break in the building. Not a crack on anything, a crack standing upright where there wasn’t a surface. The corridor folded along it. Patel was already flying before it reached him.

Paramedic Sofia Alvarez. A sheet of insects came round the corner. Not a swarm, a flat sheet, one insect thick. When it touched the door the glass bent without breaking, and then it broke, after Patel went through it.

Body-camera review. The recording shows a loose bundle of wet electrical cable moving with nothing holding it up. No mouth, no hands, no fracture, no insects. At 21:17:11 the bundle changes position between frames without crossing the distance between. At 21:17:13 Patel accelerates sideways into the door.

Every witness identified the recording as authentic. Every witness insisted it showed the wrong creature.

They inched toward him. Their shape was a vague idea of a human. Wet. Armless. Faceless. Naked. Dark blue veins visible under pale pink skin the color of undercooked meat. Lipless, toothless mouths flexed and gaped at the tops of their heads, each of them emitting a faint, deep warbling moan. Some stumbled on two legs. Most flopped along the floor, squelching as they moved. He backed into a corner, looking for an escape. They were on him. One grabbed the calf of his leg, another his hand. Their mouths sucked at the limbs, trying to draw them in. Another threw itself against him. He fell and the rest were on him. He felt their wet, gooey mouths on his skin. In that instant, his entire body went numb, refused to listen to him. He couldn’t even scream as one covered his face with its mouth. The last sound he heard was the popping of his skull as it pulled him in deeper.

Incident dossier B-5: colonial life at geometric discontinuities

The landlord blamed subsidence.

The first crack showed up above the pantry door. The second branched off it at exactly ninety degrees. By morning there were seven, each running to meet another surface without ever crossing it. The tenants heard scratching, though microphones pressed flat to the walls picked up nothing at all.

On the third day a surveyor fed a fibre-optic camera into the plaster. The void behind the wall held no insects, no nest, no moisture, nothing moving. It held blue dust, arranged in a single line along the seam where two surfaces met. While the surveyor watched the monitor, the line grew another angle. The camera cable came back in two pieces, and the cut was perfectly flat.

A reconstructed Tindalosian manifestation for Cthulhu Eternal

The first photograph showed four depressions in wet plaster, too deep for fingertips and too evenly spaced to be tools.

The second showed the same marks six feet higher, up where the wall met the ceiling.

The pathologist laid both photographs beside the victim’s wounds. He did not notice the room getting colder. He drew four lines between the punctures and added an arc to show how far the jaw had probably spread.

Something above him grew a mouth.

The toys have been in the box longer than the child has been in the house.

Throughout history, toys have brought merriment and joy to children of all ages. Dolls and teddy bears are widespread across cultures, varying in size and materials, from simple scraps of cloth bound by twine and crudely painted faces to elaborate, articulated figures of plastic, porcelain, and soft fur.