The Case of the Missing Doctor-Part 3, Bears, Otters and Bisons oh my!

March 21, 1873
 
I guess that mist affected me more than I thought.
 
The next thing I knew we, Mumple and I, was outside somewhere at night watching a stone house as a bear tried to jump off a bluff and eat Walker for some reason. As I drew my pistol Mumple blew its head clean off with his Winchester rifle in one shot. Dang he is good with that thing have to let the family know they need to start making guns like that.
 
Anywoo I returned my pistol to my holster and we went down to the house.
 
It was getting dark and we would obviously have to spend the night here. So I gathered some of the firewood stacked outside and after Mumple cleared out the fireplace, which he seemed obsessed with, I got a fire started.
 
The cottage was a weird place. It seems like some sort of Apothecary with various vials and tinctures on the shelves but most of them had been swept into the fireplace, smashed and burned. While Mumple went over the remains of what had been in the fire Elijah started cleaning guns, all of them, compulsively. That was odd.
 
The cottage had one main room, an attic, a cellar and a spare small room on the side which was bare. Walker opened the cellar and went down only to discover the bodies of three ladies arranged in some sort of macabre nest. Each had had their hearts torn out and some sort of tar smeared over them. Very peculiar that. Mumble joined him and while I held a light for them Walker also found a hole in the wall that apparently led down to the river which was covered in tar.
Meanwhile upstairs Herb and Sister Marie had found a bed, an armoire and some unusual clothing. There were a bunch of ladies clothing in different sizes that seemed to match the three women and that of a man as well as a carpetbag with the initials JAL and a leather overcoat, a black mask/hood, boots, a sword and several trunks. They brought the items downstairs and someone produced a key that opened the carpet bag.
They then told me of how we came to be in this place.
 
It seems that there had been a number of deaths among the railroad workers that Big Swede asked us, as Hennessey Agents, to investigate. Naturally we obliged and Mumble examined the body of the fella who had died at the Devil’s Rockpile only to discover a weird tattoo that matched the fob and that the fella was very oddly built, his upper body was highly developed but his legs were not. He had abnormally muscled arms and shoulders as well. After that they went to investigate what happened at the railroad work camp, whose colorful name I have forgotten in my mist induced stupor.
 
The Irish and Germans were not very helpful and the Chinamen were vague and seemed uninterested in helping but when the group went and asked the black fella’s what was going on they were very informative and told us where the bodies had been found and what had happened to them, they was all excited that some white fella’s were treating them all respectful. Sad how that doesn’t happen more these days.
 
Anywoo that set the team out towards the cottage which was a good two hours outside of the camp along the Neosho river, which brings us up to date. Now the cottage seems to hard to get to as somehow the geography, the river and such kept getting us all turned around, but they had managed with Sister Maries wise guidance.
 
The carpetbag contained the clothes and supplies that seemed to match that of the dead fella from the Rockpile, the Artist. It also contained drawings of the three ladies we found dead in the basement. The sword was beautifully made in a European style and had the same flaming sword symbol as the fob I now carried. The corpses all showed signs of being hacked to death before being deposited in the cellar. One of the bags or chests contained various correspondences that revealed the names of the ladies, Ceri, Maureen and Agnes or some such names.

What was most interesting is that one of the chests had a false bottom that revealed two books, one in German “Die Fibel de Loren” and one in Gaelic “Coipleabhar Gorm Marbhan.” I have only peripherally studied either but knew the first was something like “The Myth of Lore” and the second “Leather Grimoire of the Black-something to do with dead things,” Both contained strange pictures, recipes and drawings, the second of something called the “Deasghnatha Dobhar-chu” or “spirit-something related-to-black-animal lord” and a picture of a black otter-like thing. The decidedly non-Gaelic word “Adramalech” was also inscribed in it, a name Sister Marie recognized as that of some sort of Sumerian Fire Devil.
 
Naturally this all made total sense now.
 
So here is the story I will sell to the Penny Dreadful's on the East Coast, its' a good one!
 
The dead fella, JAL, the Artist, was clearly a Witch-Hunter who had tracked these three witches from Chicago a few years ago, where they probably went about causing all those fires the Sister, Herb and I investigated before to their new hideout, in the middle of nowhere, finished them off, dumped their bodies in the basement before his curiosity got the better of him and he headed off, alone, to investigate the Devil’s Rockpile where in what almost-like what almost happened to me, issued forth gases that suffocated him, See that is why you need friends my dears, preferable more sane friends than yourself. After that the witches familiar, the Dobhar-chu, or as we were later able to translate as “Otter King” decided to start making trouble.
Oh, by the way as the rest of the team was investigating the stuff I had taken the time to nail the door and cellar door shut. Since we was staying the night I wanted no surprise visitors. And dang if we didn’t have them.
Mumple was too strung up to sleep and Walker stayed up with him while Herb, Marie, Elijah and I got some shut-eye upstairs. About halfway through the night they awoke us due to hearing some noise. Yeap, something was scratching at the cellar door alright. Mumple started shooting and shouting out to it and wanted to pull up the nails and let it in. Cooler heads prevailed and we kept it firmly shut. Meanwhile I spotted what looked like three bison up on the bluff, Walker confirmed it before they ran off. The scratching stopped for a while and we had almost relaxed when we heard it at the door. The damn thing was still trying to get inside. We spotted some shape just outside the door but remained steadfast. After a while it relented and disappeared into the night.
The next day we decided to bring the paws of the bear, the three female bodies and items back to town and made travois to cart them back. On the way Mumple started trying to say that the Otter Thing was just some guy dressed up in a otter suit and running around murdering people and removing body parts with his trusty bucket of tar.
 
Walker declared that the most disturbing idea yet and I had to agree with him.
 
We had almost made it the whole was back before Mayor Ass-in-hat intercepted us. He demanded to know if the problem had been dealt with. Mumple and I replied that we found and killed the bear that had killed the men but discovered that it had some sort of “black-foam rabies” that had been causing the strange smears on the bodies. We advised him to avoid the river and have his men travel in groups, preferable well-armed and to watch out for other such crazed animals. He informed us that three bison had trampled through the camp the night before, leading credence to out total fabrication we had decided upon in order to not to have to try and explain witches, witch hunters, summoned otter spirits and strange spells. He wanted to believe the lie, so he did and congratulated us upon our actions.
 
We returned to Big Swede and let him know what we had discovered, the more mundane parts of it anyway. He seemed happy to be ready to have the deceased buried as quick as possible and be done with the story. He propped up the body of JAL, i.e. the Artist, in a coffin and had a daguerreotype taken for posterity. We rested up the night in the hotel and before we left early in the morning to continue out search for the missing Doctor York, we managed to find someone to help us translate the titles of the books which turned out to be “The Lost Primer” and the “Book of the Black Corpse.” Sister Marie wanted to turn them over to the local clergy for disposal but Mumple and I did not agree, that was probably the right thing to do but when is the right thing to do the most interesting thing to do! I decided to try and continue deciphering the Gaelic book myself while Mumple “borrowed” a German/English language book from the Church’s library leaving a suitable deposit in the till, I mean donations box. Oh, and I also kept JAL’s sword, it goes so well with his purple octagonal reading glasses, journal and fob, quite stylish.
 
Goodbye Osage Mission, most interesting town in Kansas yet!
 
Cody Caldwell, March 23, 1873