Case Report 1-001:  Arson on Hawker Street, Lynn, MA

or, "The Case of Satan's Helper Monkey"

Investigating Arcanists (Salem Chapterhouse, Lodge 1):  Bennet, Denman, Pickering, Priory, Reinhardt
Assisting Arcanists (Salem Chapterhouse):  Liddell, Quinn

September 14, 2002

Deus provided newspaper clippings (transcribed below; originals on file) from a local newspaper concerning vandalism, arson, and apparently murder over the previous six weeks on Hawker Street in Lynn, Massachusetts, beginning with a fire on August 1 at number 127 of that street, in which a cyclist passing through the woods nearby had perished after approaching the burning building.  Acts of petty vandalism followed, culminating on Sept. 12 in the burning death of a homeless man sleeping in the ruins of that building, purposefully set on fire by mysterious assailants.  Bennet determined through Internet searches that the homeless man was a certain "Old Jim," but the identity of the first victim was still unknown -- a riddle that would not be solved for nearly two more months.
 

August 1, 2002 - Lynn - Fire trucks responded to a blaze at 127 Hawker street yesterday afternoon. The four story, multifamily building was well ablaze by the time they got there.  After 4 hours battling the fire, it was eventually stopped, leaving only the bottom floor in any sort of intact condition.
    On searching the wreckage in the backyard, police found an unidentified body. The victim, a male, was apparently crushed when a three story tower of back porches collapsed on him. The medical examiner believes he died instantaneously.  Wreckage of a bicycle was found with him and it was believed that he was biking through the wooded trails behind the house and saw the fire.  Police are awaiting identification via dental records.

September 9, 2002 - Lynn - The problems for the residents of Hawker Street continue.  This weekend, the owners of three houses in the area awoke in the middle of the night to find rocks hurled through their windows.
    The brazen vandals even attacked one house while police were investigating another bit of their vandalism down the street.
    Police are stumped at the recent wave of vandalism in the area.

September 12, 2002 - Lynn - Hawker Street residents were awakened today by another blaze on their street. Just six weeks after the blaze that consumed 127 Hawker Street, neighbors reported yet another fire started in the ruined shell of the four story home.
    The fire department showed just after 2 am to find that the blaze was localizd in one of the less damaged parts of the first floor.  Apparently, a vagrant had been sleeping in the burned out house. Persons unknown set the vagrant on fire, killing him.

Once we arrived at Hawker Street we learned, through Denman's investigations, that "Old Jim" had been first soaked in an accelerant such as gasoline before being set on fire. Denman and Priory questioned elderly neighbors to either side of the house; Priory's informants had been burgled on the 11th, the miscreants taking beer, cookies, reading glasses, and a newspaper. Denman learned through a combination of interview and window-peeping that in the basement of the other next-door house lived a man confined to a wheelchair who apparently kept a pet, and diapers for it, possibly one trained to fetch things for him, such as the mail and other things out of reach; neither man nor pet seemed to be then at home. Priory added the information from her elderly couple that the invalid had been a burn victim, which seemed strikingly coincidental. Theories ranging from joking to serious centered on the possibility that the invalid was some sort of vengeful fire-mage with a homonculus familiar (or, as Bennet would have it, a possibly less sorcerous individual possessing a pyromaniacal companion from among the lesser primates), although Denman did his best to discourage such speculation.

Priory volunteered the striking information that the area was surprisingly free of ghosts, although she claimed to have sensed an angry presence in that part of the house in which "Old Jim" had met his cruel demise.

In the wreckage Pickering found a small scrap of quilted fabric upon which had been inscribed, by means of black ink, certain symbols of unsavory appearance.

Bennet observed that, oddly, there were no visibly worn paths into the woods behind the house, which, apart from being unusual, would, it seemed, make for difficult passage for any putative bicyclist. Denman had learned from the upstairs neighbor of our wheelchair-wizard that a third, unreported fire had taken place in those woods, and it seemed that we had no choice but to investigate.

Not far past the trees we discovered evidence of a fire, and Bennet realized that the shape of the burn disconcertingly matched one of the patterns on Pickering's quilted scrap. Unable to determine much further, it seemed best to depart, whereupon we discovered that the door-handles of Denman's car had been smeared with animal feces; Zeke, Denman's informant, kindly loaned him the use of a hose.

Returning to the Chapter House, we discussed the oddities; for instance, the peculiar duplication of the symbol both in the house and in the woods. Upon consultation Quinn was able to identify it as "a werewolf symbol of evil," although he could not clarify whether it meant evil werewolves, or what the lycanthropes themselves considered to be evil, or something else altogether.
 

One notes certain similarities between the symbol and
August Derleth's version of the Cthulhu mythos "Elder Sign."

October

Bennet was able to ascertain only that the woods had been reforested by 4-H in the 1970s, and that the neighborhood had no previous reputation as a supernatural "hotspot" or even, it seemed, a particularly interesting place to live.  Pickering failed to uncover any useful information about the "werewolf symbol of evil."  Priory engaged in a "stakeout" on more than one occasion of the house on Hawker Street where our pyromaniacal suspect lived. The enemy was too vigilant, for upon returning to that vicinity once (presumably the last time) a message had been left for her in the form of the word "bitch," burned into the landscape.

November 9, 2002

Denman suggested a return to Lynn. We arrived at the house on Hawker Street where it seemed our suspect, Denny Parsons, was not at home. To judge from the mail piled up, that had been the case for some time -- since, in fact, more or less the time of the incidents which prompted our initial investigation.

Denman, wearing rubber gloves, examined the mail, and soon set what must have seemed to him afterwards an unfortunate precedent. He carefully opened a vetinarian bill that involved a two-year-old animal named "Mr. Chips."  Pickering opened rather less carefully a package from the ominously named "King in Yellow Book Club," which contained two books of spells of summoning and binding and a full-color catalog. Bennet found that a package from Amazon.com yielded a picture book on monkeys, the "Anarchists' Cookbook," and a book about the Chicago Fire. Denman at last opened a letter from social services and another from the parole board, and learned that our man (a) had a helper monkey; (b) had a criminal record involving arson; and (c) was rather younger than we thought;  apparently cosmetic damage from his burning accident had made it hard for neighbors to guess his age.

It soon occurred to Denman that the pedal found in September in the wreckage of the house next door must have belonged not to the bicycle of a passing doomed cyclist, but rather to the wheelchair of Parsons the monkey-owning pyro-man. We had identified the first victim. The sigil-bedecked scrap of fabric we recovered must therefore have sprung from some sort of warded lap blanket, or robe of protection, which failed nevertheless to protect him from a falling building.

Bennet's portable computer searched Amazon.com records, whereby he ascertained that our subject had been ordering all sorts of books on occult matters. More ominously, now that we had decided he must be two months dead, the account had continued to be active as recently as days before.

The inescapable, if odd, conclusion was that Mr. Chips the helper monkey still resided at the Hawker Street apartment and was ordering books. And yet it had left some mail untouched.

The time seemed ripe for breaking and entering. Denman bade us all wear rubber gloves. Inside we found a strange videotape collection: mostly "Barney," with the most recently viewed a disturbing science fiction piece, "Event Horizon." While we replayed a section of that video Pickering claimed to have heard a voice offering power in exchange for subservience. No one else heard that voice, and at any rate it did not continue when the tape had stopped. The collection also contained three copies of filmed performances of "The King in Yellow," a play (generally presumed to be fictional) said to bring madness and death to its viewers, first mentioned in a series of connected short stories under the same name by Robert W. Chambers (1895) and subsequently alluded to by H.P. Lovecraft and his imitators.

In the bedroom we found piles of occult books, mostly dealing with the summoning and commanding of spirits. Still open at the top of the heap was a nameless tome that contained the same "werewolf symbol of evil" we had found on the blanket scrap. Pickering took that book for further study, along with the two books from the "King in Yellow Book Club," a book club for which one must always be very careful to cancel this month's featured selection in a timely fashion.

We had explored the house, finding ominous things, to be sure, but no necromantic monkey, at least. There was, however, still a room we had not checked, beyond the door of which a certain horrible stench seemed to emanate. Cautiously we opened the door: to our horror, a scene from a nightmare: the corpses of birds hung hideously from the ceiling, blood and less palatable substances flung about the room. A scene from a particular nightmare, it seemed: Pickering and Priory were reminded of the bloated hanging corpses in a shared nightmare the night before (see Pickering et al., "Research Report: Dreams of the Dark Man," filed March 6, 2002). Bennet accordingly hurried the two outside.

It was then, of course, that we noticed that Denman's car was on fire.

Hearing the shouts, Denman raced out and phoned the fire department, and then hurried back inside to erase traces of our visit. The car was a loss, but it seemed clear nonetheless that Priory's coat and house keys had been removed from the vehicle.

Since Priory had attracted the attention of our Adversary previously, we feared the worst. A taxi took us back to Salem, and Bennet's car to Priory's home. Upon opening the door we noticed more dead animals hanging from the ceiling. As Priory prepared to step across the threshold, Pickering noticed powerful wards turned inward: something was being held inside the condo, waiting to be set free when, by entering, we disturbed the ward. Denman detected the presence of gasoline or another accelerant in the hallway just as we all noted a terrible flickering heat moving about inside: an elemental spirit, which would ignite the door and hallway as soon as we tried to enter.

The warded area did not extend to Priory's bedroom, which she was able to enter through a window in order to recover some personal effects.

It was clear that we were dealing with, however ludicrous it seemed, a helper monkey with command over fearsome spirits, not to mention the ability to travel rather rapidly, and, what is more, one that we had seriously vexed.

November to January

Priory avoided her residence.  Pickering attempted to make sense of the books found in the "monkey house," especially with an eye to desummoning the entity at Priory's condo. There were, remarkably, no further incidents involving Mr. Chips or his terrible minions, and members of Lodge 1 concentrated mainly on other  investigations.

January 11, 2003

In January evidence began to point to the fact that Mr. Chips was once again ready to cause trouble for Priory, and it seemed best to return to Lynn in force, augmented by our new lodgemate Reinhardt and Arcanist Quinn.

Upon our arrival, we cautiously entered the apartment, finding evidence that Mr. Chips had "moved out":  books and other objects were missing, and an attempt at a "ward" to keep us out was found in the bedroom, possibly directed at Priory, for it featured a "female" stick figure.

Accordingly we went into the woods, Denman discovering quickly that the monkey had set some crude but effective traps. Quinn, with Bennet as lookout, saw to his injury while Pickering returned to the apartment there for such medical supplies as could be found.  Priory and Reinhardt proceeded more carefully into the trees.

Priory and Reinhardt were soon faced with the presence of a fire spirit, as well as of Mr. Chips himself, a deformed chimpanzee of smaller than average size (and not the capuchin we had expected). Priory wounded the monkey (in fact ape) with her pistol, but was in turn burnt by the fire spirit -- not severely, fortunately.  She and Reinhardt escaped without further damage, but so did Mr. Chips.  We returned to Salem.

Later in the evening, regretting the indecisive nature of that confrontation, and likewise hoping to recover a blood sample left in the woods by the wounded Mr. Chips, Reinhardt, Quinn, and Pickering returned to Hawker Street.  The sample collection, undertaken by Reinhardt and Quinn, was a success; meanwhile, Pickering, drawing on what he had learned from his research, entered the animal-corpse-bedecked room in the apartment and attempted to "de-summon" the fire entity that had earlier attacked Priory.   Reasonably confident of success, Pickering -- by now joined in the apartment by the others -- was about to leave, when the television there turned itself on and began to play a "Barney" video.  Pickering reports hearing "Barney's" voice congratulating him on the disposal of the fire spirit, and offered him even greater power in the future.  While the others, again, did not hear this voice, all observed the fact that the video continued to play even when the power supply had been disconnected.  Acting perhaps irrationally, Pickering destroyed with a sword a DVD recording of the "King in Yellow" (mentioned previously); a puff of black smoke was seen to rise from it.
 

Since January

Other investigatory concerns have taken precedence for many members of Lodge 1.  In the meantime Bennet has done valuable research concerning the training of helper monkeys and Pickering has successfully repeated the ritual of banishment at Priory's condo, which is now fire-spirit free.  Pickering also has visited the "monkey house" on one further occasion (in late March), and it seems that Mr. Chips had returned there at least once, venting his wounded monkey rage on inanimate objects and then quitting the scene.  It is possible that Mr. Chips was involved in the disappearance of two young boys who vanished from their back yard in Saugus, MA, while "camping out" on the night of April the **th; police report animal tracks that "looked almost like palm prints but longer," according to news accounts. Hopes that the wretched creature might have shuffled off its mortal coil as a result of Priory's pistol shot seem to have been disappointed.
 

Conclusions

In the course of occult dabbling it seems that Parsons happened on something quite real. We cannot determine at what point, if any, he began to use supernatural methods to promote his arson hobby.  At some point, however, a powerful entity was attracted to the proceedings, and by its intervention, along with the exposure to the occult materials the chimp must have assisted his master in reading, Mr. Chips soon learned how to control the fire spirits, leading by accident or design to his master's death as well as the death of "Old Jim," and possibly others.

Concerning Mr. Chips, the case seems largely to be closed. Two questions nonetheless call for answers:

1.  At the risk of sounding foolish, is Mr. Chips a very special monkey, or might any chimpanzee (at least) under the same circumstances have been able to become a minion of dark powers?

2.  How, and should,  the threat Mr. Chips poses both to Arcanists of the Salem Chapterhouse and to the general populace be neutralized?

Problems stemming from both of these seem to require a single solution: the capture of Mr. Chips, alive if possible, for study (potentially as a new investigation, case Salem 2003 1-001A), not necessarily an easy undertaking.  A deeper look at where he was trained as a helper monkey may also be in order, if this is possible.  The possibility arises that, ultimately, this case may intersect with case 1-002 (research into the DNAstics corporation).
 

Theories

It is theorized that the "King in Yellow Book Club" materials, especially the DVDs and the book of summoning, binding, and warding recovered by Pickering, served somehow as a gateway for the entity that has chosen to manifest itself as "Barney."  It is not unlikely that the entity chose that form in order to appeal specifically to Mr. Chips, a fan of the beloved purple dinosaur, but one cannot rule out the possibility that the entity has a previous association with the character or at least with some sort of reptilian form.  Whatever its nature, "Barney" seems to delight in corruption, in violence, and in wanton destruction;  while one may posit a preexisting resentment of Parsons on the part of his simian servant, surely "Barney" inflamed it to the point of violence (perhaps the murder was some sort of required initiation). This leads to the following

Other Future Avenues of Investigation

1.  The nature of "Barney" and its fire spirits (1-001B).  Pickering has already begun looking into this, as, regrettably, the entity has contacted him on a number of occasions.

2. "The King in Yellow Book Club" (1-001C).  How active, if at all, are they in promoting the goals of "Barney" and related entities?  Do they have some sort of occult agenda, or are they just dabblers trying to make some money from books, ignorant of deeper mysteries?