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>If this Intel was classified it would be locked up in City Hall or placed in a bank, not kept tantalizingly out of reach in the Public Library!
…This is the Town Hall? So yes, it is locked up in the Town Hall.
>Go look for whoever's spying on you and see if they're the rule-breaking type of junior spy.
As much as you try, you can’t spot anyone who might have been the one staring at you. It’s like they just disappeared into thin air! …or maybe you just imagined things?
Either way, as you have no idea what titles and authors may be hidden in the vault of forbidden knowledge, you instead opt to ask for different subjects matters. Specifically, The Miskaton Tribe as well as anything they have on the Kråkholme’s, especially Bövel or Sigmund. You almost ask for anything on the red star, but in the last second you change your mind and ask for any local myths instead. The angler fish disappears for a minute or two, before returning with a massive tome, a decently sized book and finally a small booklet, barely a few pages long. With a gesture she tells you to sign the register with both your name and book titles, and when you do you can’t help but notice a familiar handwriting just above your own. Your husband read a book here yesterday, which coincidently is one of the books that you now have in your possession, the large tome to be exact. With a nod, you thank the librarian before finding a place to sit and read these things.
The first book you decide to leaf through is “Local Myths of the Miskaton River Valley”, the very same book your husband was reading yesterday when you called him. It’s a large tome that would take hours to go through completely, but luckily for you, one of your husband’s cute little quirks is to use a lot of small bookmarks in every book he touches, three of which is currently sticking out from the book in question. Turning to the page marked by the first bookmark, you find a chapter about a “Strangling Mist”.
Rather unique to the lower Miskaton River Valley, this tale centers around a seemingly malevolent fog that roams the forests and lonely night roads, choking the unwary traveler with invisible, untouchable hands. The experience of being attacked by this strange entity is described in an 1855 journal as: "...lyke as thowe a deade man were to put his corpsey fingers downe yr throate withe one hande, & up yr nostrille withe the other..."
No two telling can agree on the origins of this terrible mist. Some accounts insist that it is a spirit of the restless dead; others attribute the effect to malicious hobgoblins. Other versions implicate witchcraft, a pirate's curse, swamp faerie... the list goes on. Some of the more esoteric explanations seem to indicate that the legend was adapted by white settlers from native superstitions held by the tribes indigenous to the Miskaton region; however, there is no evidence as yet that the "strangling mist" existed in any form prior to the appearance of Europeans.
The only theme that reoccurs in several of the telling is that it is possible to tame the mist. Supposedly, by playing an instrument attuned to the tune of the correct harmonic resonant, the mist can be dispelled momentarily and allow safe passage.
The second bookmark is for a chapter titled “The man on the threshold”. Nearly all of the early European settlements circulated stories of a being known as "The Dark Man" that lived in the primordial woods beyond the settlements' borders. Deeply religious and at the same time almost hysterically superstitious, clinging precariously to the edges of an unexplored and therefore terrifying continent, it was only natural for people in those times to project their collective fears onto the unknown. For the predominantly fundamentalist Protestant sects that first colonized the New World, these projections typically were embodiments of the Christian concept of the Devil. The Dark Man generally takes the form of a man of unknown species, sometimes of large or even giant stature but more often no larger than a natural anthro, who is invariably dark-furred with glowing red eyes and featuring several extra arms. He is regularly portrayed as the consort of witches. He has many names: The Dark Man, The Grinning Man, Old Scratch, Springheel Jack, The Evil One, etc., but always his formal, Biblical appellation, "Lucifer" or "Satan", is scrupulously avoided, a holdover from the tradition that to speak a demon's name is to attract his attention and perhaps even summon him.
More interesting to the folklorist are the names that harken further back than these simple Christian superstitions, recalling a more pagan portrayal of the dark and unknown. These tales, which originate from the more reclusive colonies, often bring out the more animalistic, nature-worshipping aspect of the Dark Man. He is sometimes pictured as being a feral creature, or having aspect of several species at once, resembling classical images of a chimera. His names are more obscure: The Wicker (or Wicca) Man; The Black Goat With A Thousand Young. Therein lie tantalizing clues offering the enterprising folklorist still deeper glimpses into the collective unconscious.
A few rare instances of The Dark Man have been uncovered that point beyond even these antiquated references -- bizarre aspects that seem to reflect some of the less understood concepts of Native American mysticism. Such baroque names as "The Lurker At The Threshold”, "The Watcher Beyond The Stars" or even “The Bleeding Eye of The Night” point to a substratum of human mythology as yet untouched. These versions typically describe not physical manifestations, but rather abstract concepts of Evil and Time that some scholars have linked to the pre-Roman god Saturn, before he became characterized as merely the father of Zeus, when he was instead identified with the Ouroburos Dragon, Devourer of Worlds. The biggest find concerning this myth was discovered in New England, where several old Misquat artifacts has been dug up connected to it, most often depicting the creature as a red rimmed eye looking down from the sky. Hopefully, as more archaeological evidence is uncovered, we will be able to speak of these primordial connections with greater confidence.
The third bookmark is for a chapter that deals with the strange mythology surrounding the person of Bövel Kråkholme, the first of the American Kråkholme, who immigrated from the Dales region of Sweden in the early 1600s. He settled in the Miskaton Valley and there helped establish the small fishing port soon to be known as Crowmoor. Bövel sired six raven-haired daughters and schooled all of them at home. The girls were reclusive and odd of habit, and by the time the eldest turned fifteen the town had all but openly accused them of witchcraft. The townsfolk shunned the Kråkholme daughters and called them "the Old Man's Coven of Crows" -- although never within earshot, since Bövel was already a very powerful and influential man in that region.
Although he never had a son, Bövel apparently sired a number of grandsons by more than one of his daughters, ostensibly to keep the Kråkholme blood pure, such practice being not uncommon in the more secluded and xenophobic early settlements. However, most of the male children were born dead, or horribly deformed, or both, and there were furtive whispers that Bövel was practicing some form of dark sorcery on his progeny. It did not help matters that Bövel had lost his right arm in an unspecified accident before this, playing into the common fear at the time of those that uses their left hand being aligned with evil forces. The fact that Bövel fell ill on the day that the first healthy male child was born (to his youngest daughter), and died before day's end, did not go unnoticed.
After Bövel died, the townspeople turned against the "coven", burning all of them to death on the 12th of February, 1652, except for Cristina, the youngest, who managed to escape along with her infant son, Marius. She returned some years later, after an outbreak of smallpox wiped out much of the town's older population, including the Calvinist minister and every last man and woman who had participated in the burning of Kråkholme's brood.
…huh, Chris has written something on the bookmark… “Need to check the dates. IMPROTANT”…
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