“All yours, mister,” the youth said with a sneer, and turned up along the South Ferry pier to enter the train station.
Bauer returned to his own thoughts. The oppressive temperatures made him testier than usual. Having spent more than a year in Egypt, he ought not to have been so bothered by the City of Brooklyn’s late August heat wave. Of course, that had been a dry heat.
Mopping his brow with a sleeve, Bauer took a last glimpse at Brooklyn’s sister city across the East River. His grip on the package never loosened. Every other artifact he’d uncovered on this expedition had been shipped directly to his benefactors at the Boston Museum, but he’d felt compelled to make a side trip of his own to New York. He’d hoped to consult an antiquities expert at Barnum’s American Museum, perhaps learn something of its mystical nature from the Fox Sisters. The latter meeting would not have met with his sponsors’ approval.
It had all proven a waste of time. Barnum’s so-called experts were anything but, and the museum staff was preoccupied in preparations for the arrival of Swedish singer Jenny Lind.
With a sigh of self-pity, the Professor entered the station himself to board the train to Boston.
The car was sparsely populated; this was hardly the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad’s most profitable run. He slid his traveling bag under a seat and placed the package in the unoccupied space next to him, resting his arm less than casually atop it. He could not say why, but the professor was convinced this item was the most important discovery of the expedition.
Seven years earlier, archeologist and occultist Enoch Bowen had explored the ruins of the tomb of Nephren-Ka, discovering, in a box covered with indecipherable symbols, a bizarrely shaped object he dubbed the Shining Trapezohedron. The socalled Black Pharoah had built a temple around that item, in which unspeakable acts occurred.
Apparently its geometry affected Bowen as well. On returning to his hometown of Providence, Bowen formed a cult known as the Church of Starry Wisdom, and subsequently cut all ties to his scientific colleagues.
Exploring those same ruins, Bauer discovered what Bowen had missed: a second oddly marked box, containing an artifact even more weirdly shaped. Following precedent, Bauer dubbed it the Lustrous Triacontahedron. It was a clumsy nomenclature, he had to admit, but the thing almost seemed to name itself, emanating a weird power. Again, Bauer could neither define or adequately describe the sensation. He hoped his museum colleagues could help him discover the source.
After what seemed an interminable wait, but in reality was less than a quarter-hour, the train lurched forward. The open cut down the middle of Atlantic Avenue, created a few years earlier to compensate for the steep grade of Cobble Hill, had only recently been covered over. The outside world went dark.
Bauer felt a sudden urge to gaze once more on his treasure. He’d only examined it in the light before, and for the briefest of moments each time. Steadying his hands, the professor carefully unwrapped the stone box and raised its lid.
A greenish glow temporarily blinded the archeologist.
Then it enveloped him.
Half a mile further on, the train returned to surface level. The traveling bag tucked beneath the seat was the only sign that a Professor Wolfgang Bauer had ever been aboard.
Six and a half decades later, Robert Suydam sat brooding in his study. Shelves covered every wall of the room, even partially blocking the single window, as they displayed a lifetime’s collection of mystic artifacts and arcane books.
On this particular evening, the white-haired Suydam was taking advantage of 1916’s leap day to expand on a new line of mystic research. Glow from the lone lamp on his desk deepened the furrows of his brow, highlighting swollen cheeks. In recent months he’d begun focusing his studies more on immortality and methods of transcending time; death, he’d come to realize, would render moot his search for ultimate power.
Piled on his desk were archived issues of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, recently liberated from the newspaper’s vaults under a spell of distraction. These were not the most recent ones, of course; Suydam cared little about the Great War that had raged throughout Europe for the past year and a half. It was also unlikely any of the staff would notice mid-19th century gaps in the library before he returned the trove.
Behind the desk lamp, partly in shadow, sat a glass jar in which floated a human brain preserved in formaldehyde. None of the weak-brained fools Suydam employed for menial tasks truly appreciated his genius. If by chance any of them did, he still preferred not to share his knowledge. The anatomical artifact provided him with the perfect sounding board.
“Well, Clarence,” he addressed the organ, “let’s see what we can find tonight.”
Clarence’s sole response was a slight tremor as Suydam slammed open the August 1850 volume. He was working chronologically backwards through the archives.
Suydam of course was well aware of Enoch Bowen’s 1843 Egyptian adventure. As a young man, he’d even made a personal visit to the Church of Starry Wisdom in Providence in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to obtain the Shining Trapezohedron for himself. According to certain forbidden texts, the wielder of said artifact could, simply by gazing into it, summon the ancient being known as Nyarlathotep. In exchange for horrible unspecified sacrifices, that entity would then reveal other worlds and much arcane knowledge. The insanely angled stone had been created by an unknown race on the far-off planet Yuggoth, and somehow brought to Earth eons before humans evolved.
Suydam did not push his bid for that object further, as he soon discovered there was bigger game to be found, capable of far greater power: the Lustrous Triacontahedron, which allegedly could open portals between worlds, bend time, and, if the legends were remotely true, even invoke mighty Cthulhu himself.
Itself.
For months the trail of that object led to one dead end after the other. A German archeologist named Wolfgang Bauer supposedly found the Triacontahedron on an expedition to Egypt half a decade after Bowen’s discovery. Every artifact save that one was shipped directly to the Boston Museum. Bauer himself made a side trip through New York, and was never seen again.
Then, a week ago, while ferreting out more information regarding what might lay under the Red Hook docks, Suydam came across an off-hand reference to the closure of the Cobble Hill rail tunnel in 1861. A mention of unclaimed luggage would mean nothing to anyone else, but it revived his interest.
“And here it is,” Suydam announced to Clarence. “A single sentence — not even complete, just a police blotter notation — a distinguished gentleman, W.B., mysteriously vanished from a Boston-bound train on August 29, 1850.”
Suydam clapped his wrinkled hands. “Bauer did not lose himself in New York, as we believed! He actually boarded a train here in Brooklyn, headed home. There is no record of his being seen at any later stops, so I’d abandoned that line of inquiry. Do you understand what this means?”
Clarence waited in polite silence for him to continue.
“The Lustrous Triacontahedron must still be somewhere in that tunnel.” Suydam frowned. “A tunnel that has been sealed since the Civil War. Gathering the resources to enter it could attract much unwanted attention.” He tapped the glass jar. “Have you any suggestions, friend?”
The brain bobbed briefly.
“I like that idea. Yes. Let the U.S. government do the work for us. This city is already paranoid about German spies. We can spread word over the next week or so that saboteurs are using the tunnel as a base of operations. When the Bureau of Investigation checks it out, we can slip in behind them.”