Call of Cthulhu : Prologue

Six years.

Six years since I entered that house in Boston. Six years since I was taken to Arkham Asylum suffering from acute schizophrenia and total amnesia. Six years missing from my life.

I remember the beat cops calling me to the house – I think I’d picked up something of a reputation as a hotshot detective. Five cases cracked in quick succession. Maybe they thought that joining them in the pouring rain that night would bring me down a peg or two. Maybe there was something more to it.

The house was owned by a religious cult. They been there for a few months, and there’d been plenty of complaints about them. Petty thefts and harassment of neighbors, strange lights in the night, chanting, music and, most disturbing of all, screams. When gunshots were reported, they couldn’t be ignored any longer.

I entered the house by the side door. It was a mess. Paper peeling from the walls, splintered floorboards, books and papers strewn all over. I made my way upstairs to find the first of many horrors of that night. A dormitory where five or six of the cultists had committed suicide. Poison it looked like. Their bodies all shared the same tattoos and scars, carved into their flesh.

In one of the rooms at the front of the house, one of the cultists was still alive. He appeared to recognize me and called my name as he stood up in front of the window. Before I could say anything, one of the cops outside shot him, spraying me with his blood. More death. More horror.

Downstairs, I found another room. On the walls were pinned a series of photographs of the same man. I felt my heart beginning to race as I recognized the face in the pictures. It was my own. Why were they watching me? What was happening here?

I found a cellar door leading down into the darkness and I could hear screams coming from below. The stairs collapsed behind me as I made my way through a makeshift tunnel to what looked like a morgue. More bodies were in evidence, and from their wounds it looked as though they had been …. experimented on.

Further down, I found somebody alive … barely. He was strapped to a slab, with tubes leading away from his body towards tanks. With mounting horror, I realized that the tanks contained his internal organs, his brain, his lights, his heart still beating. What in the name of god had they done to him. Electricity flickered and danced around him, and after a while the poor wretch was finally dead. I retrieved a green crystal from what looked like some sort of control panel in front of the slab.

The final room contained another control panel amidst some alien machinery. I felt strangely compelled to place the crystal in an empty slot and then operate the controls … 

Time slowed. Unimaginably bright lights shone from the machinery. I covered my eyes with my hands, but still I saw … things that I hesitate to describe. Creatures. Rugose cones, ten feet high, with tentacles. Horrors from beyond the stars …

Oblivion.

 "We eventually found him by following the sound of his screams -- I'd never heard anything like that before, and I hope I never hear anything like it again. When I first saw him lying there, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I've never seen a human being so drained of life, yet still breathing...he just kept chanting some strange words over and over again. It took three of us just to subdue him enough to carry him outside" – Robert Armstrong