The Terrible Old Man

The Terrible Old Man returns to a similar theme to the case of Charles Dexter Ward. In this tale we hear about a man so old that no-one knows who he is, or how old he is... Just that he has lived in the house for a longer than anyone can remember Ad talks to some bottles as if they are long lost friends. Local rumours have him owning a mirage horde of treasure that is too good an opportunity to turn down for three burglars; unfortunately for them things don't quite go their way and they are found mutilated as if hacked apart by cutlasses and stomped by boots.

In the Charles Dexter Ward tale, Curwen is able to store and reanistores dead, who he stores in bottles. We can only assume that in his travels, this old man discovered how to keep s friends close in a similar manner; wether through malice, or loneliness we don't know. It does, however, raise an interesting idea that the Germans, Russians or Japanese may decide to follow similar experiments in order to drop large armies behind enemy lines more easily.... Just imagine dropping a crate of bottles and one person to animate the dust contained within? Invading a city would be easy... Who would suspect one man and a crate?

Charles Dexter Ward

The Charles Dexter Ward tale revolves around a young man who discovers a mysterious lineage to an ancient wizard who somehow managed to defy the aging process and who looks exceedingly like him. Charles becomes more and more frantic in his search modernise information about this ancestor, eventually discovering his connections to wizards in Eastern Europe and a mysterious bungalow in Pawtuxet. As the tale unfolds, we discover that Joseph, Charles' ancient relative is attempting to resurrect himself through Charles.

Most, if not all, of the manuscripts from the Curwen/Ward libraries will have either been destroyed, or moved to  Miskatonic university, but we don't know what happened to the notes created by Curwen's allies in Europe. It is not belond the realms of possibility that they have ended up in the hands of the Nachtwolf, or one of the other occult groups working inside Germany.

Some of Curwen's experiments lived on, entombed within the basements beneath the bungalow for years, so the investigators could be tasked to investigate an abandoned research facility in Eastern Europe or hunt down and prevent the nazis from creating the essential salts needed to keep a man alive forever... Fom what I can remember, the salts were created from the bodies of the recently dead; could this explain some of the mass cleansings that took place during the war?

Rudolph Hess & mystical plots

 

While reading an article on The Weirdest Unsolved Mysteries of WW2 I came across a few interesting tidbits that could lead to some missions either in Britain, or in Germany; both leading to the downfall of Rudolph Hess, Hitler's second in command.

In the real world, Hess was Hitler's Deputy Fuhrer, the two of them working together for years before the war. In 1941 Hess took a plane from Germany and flew, on his own, to Scotland where he attempted to persuade local forces to either defect, or help him arrange peace between Germany and Britain. Obviously this didn't work and he spent the rest of his life in prison for war crimes. He was mentally unstable and by the time he got to trial, he had a hard time remembering key parts of his life.

There are numerous conspiracy theories surrounding the journey and what happened when he arrived; I'm more interested in some of the really odd theories surrounding his life before he left Germany. He'd been known to be ill and had started consulting hypnotists, astrologers and other occult groups. There were even tales of him being Hitler's private astrologer at one point.

Two of my favourite conspiracies are both perpetrated by one Ian Flemming and his occult friends Aleister Crowley, Vanessa Hoffman, Ellic Howe and Dennis Whealey.

The first one is fairly tame and involved feeding Hess fake astrological predictions to make him feel that flying to Scotland was a great plan and that Britain would ally with Germany against the Russians.

The other, more fun one, involves something called Operation Mistletoe. Aleister Crowley and Fleming (amongst others, including Maxwell Knight, Tom Driberg and Louis de Wohl) were said to have performed ceremonies in Ashdown Forest using a throned effigy of Hess in order to influence him into defecting.

Both of these could be interesting sub-plots based upon real theories, but we can also expand on this with a few mythos based theories of our own.

We know the Germans in the Achtung! Cthulhu universe are exploring the Dreamlands as well as other Mythos based summonings. As a high ranking occultist and a member of the Thule society before it was banned, Hess would have been well placed to be involved in  either the planning or execution of these plans. Given the fragile state of mind that he was in upon landing in Scotland we can only assume that he'd witnessed more than a few things he wished he hadn't. Maybe his defection was actually bringing some top secret documents on these German occult experiments in order to prevent Hitler from awakening one of the Old Ones and unleashing hell on earth?

The rumours of Crowley and other occultists being involved in his debriefing/interrogations also lends some credence to this as Section D would want to have him debriefed by someone with an understanding of the issues at hand. Any number of missions can spin out of Hess' defection; it just acts as a neat catalyst for Section D expanding their Mythos investigations and locating lots of potential targets around the world.