EVEN DEATH MAY DIE
By John McNabb

	Max squinted as he looked at the streetlight shining bright yellow light through the pelting rain into the grimy window of his second floor office on Prince Street in the North End. Got to get window shades, sometime, he thought. He had just wrapped up a big case in Kingsport putting some reanimated corpses back into their graves and was in need of a rest. He never found out how they had gotten their hands on Herbert West's formulae, but since it unfortunately got burned up in the fire he was never able to turn it over to the Feds, who badly wanted it. Too bad.
	"Now let me get this straight," he said, taking a drag from his Lucky and turning back to face the woman sitting in the chair on the other side of his large cluttered wooden desk. His snub nose .38 was in the shoulder holster. His suit coat, brown top coat, and fedora were on the iron coat rack in the corner.
	"Yes Mr. Stone, its really very simple," she said, not letting him finish. "All I want you to do is to take this package and hold it for a period of time until I come back for it. No questions asked. I trust in your discretion. For this very simple task I will pay you $40 a day, $200 in advance, which I believe is your usual fee as a private investigator." She was  about 5 feet 5 inches, 115 pounds, trim, pretty, brunette, green eyes, about 30, wore all black but didn't look like she was in mourning. She gave him a kiss, on the cheek, to say goodbye.
	Well, business is a little slow, so why not. He didn't even know her name. Why ask any questions? What could go wrong? His secretary Lara let the woman out. He stuck the package, which was about the size and shape of a hardcover book, covered in brown wrapping paper, in a hidden compartment in the wall further hidden by writing the symbols on the side of the wall which effectively created a concealment Τspell' to protect it from thaumaturgic searches.
	The next day Max found that the office had been ransacked – chairs tipped over, drawers left opened, papers strewn about. Obviously someone was searching for something, probably the mysterious package. He checked but it was still there. He saw a small story on the front page of the July 8, 1947 Boston Post, just below the fold. "Woman killed by hit and run driver." Yes it was the same woman. No identification found. There was no description of the car but there was the usual line that the police expected to corral a suspect at any minute.
	There was a single knock on the still open office door, and a well dressed man with wire rimmed glasses and a bowler hat came in. 
      "Mr. Stone, I have a proposition for you," he said in a strong German accent.
      "Do you now?" said Max. "Please continue."
      "Your visitor yesterday left you a package, we know that as a fact. The package can have no monetary value to you or anyone else, it is only of historical significance to those who can truly understand its meaning. Nevertheless, we will pay you handsomely for its safe return, unopened."
      "I don't know what you're talking about," said Max. "Get out!"
      The man advanced toward Max, pointing his finger at him. Max, who at 6 feet 2 inches towered over his opponent, grabbed his arm, deftly flipped it behind the mans back and put pressure on it until he heard him groan.
      "What's this all about? Who are you?" Max asked, further twisting the arm until it almost broke.
      "Stuff it," the man said, gritting his teeth in pain. "You might as well let me go, you will get nothing from me." Max let his arm go and the man left.
	Then the siege began. First Lt. Carmine Poole of the State Police, who asked what she hired him to do. He denied that she hired him for anything, but could tell that Poole didn't believe him. Then came two polite FBI agents who asked him a lot of questions that he didn't answer. Next was an agent from the new Central Intelligence Group, formerly the OSS, who asked if she left a package, which he denied. Clearly they had all have to have been tailing her and very certainly something very big was up. Next time one of them comes they might have a search warrant, though.
	But he got her name. That's a start. "Lara, also please see what you can find about our visitor yesterday. Her name was Betsy Costello."
	Time to open the package. Max locked the door to the his inner office, retrieved it from its hideaway, and unwrapped it. He found a collection of papers, some official looking Nazi documents in German, and papers in Russian, and the rest which were a hodgepodge of unfamiliar script, hieroglyphics, and poetry or chants in different languages. A few words caught his eye – Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. Shaking, he quickly bound it back up in the wrapping paper and handed it to Lara.
 	Those words mean ""In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." R'lyeh was known to be located under the sea in the South Pacific at 47' 9" South, 126' 43" West. Cthulhu is one of the Great Old Ones who came to this planet aeons ago, millions of years before man, before dinosaurs. Cthulhu is said to be dead but dreaming. The infamous Necronomicon says "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die." Cthulhu has been described as "a mountain which walked or stumbled" with a cuttlefish like head – pulpy and tentacled, and scaly wings. 
      Cthulhu telepathically communicates with humans, and his brief emergence from the sea in 1925 resulted in thousands of people having horrific dreams across the world. There are thousands of Cthulhu cultists across the planet from China to Louisiana who worship him and commit sacrifices in his name. The return of Cthulhu is said to lead the way for the return of all the Old Ones, and to cause worldwide madness, violence, and insanity as the Old Ones destroy humanity and reclaim the planet.
	"Lara, please call Dr. Frost and tell her I have something for her to look at."
	"OK, Max." She dialed the number for Miskatonic University. "Send it the usual way?"
	"Yes." Certainly his building was now being watched. This has happened before. There was a maze of tunnels under the North End. The tunnel of the privateer Gruchy, dug during Colonial times, which extended from the crypt at the Old North Church, to the Copps Hill Burying Ground, then up Salem Street, under Charter Street, and then to Gruchy's Wharf on Boston Harbor, was the best known. But there were others.  Lara would bring the package to a tunnel under the basement of their building, where a courier protected by the horrific creatures that prowled that underworld would then go through the tunnels and then overland to Miskatonic. No one would be following him. Max headed to the City Morgue.
	He entered the Morgue, nicknamed the Southern Mortuary, through its ornate Massachusetts Ave. entrance and walked under the hourglass engraved over the door and then between the two golden sphinxes which guard the stairs he took down to the examination room.  The fetid smell of formaldehyde was in the air.
	"Hey Max, here to look for a stiff?" said Clarence, the pathologist on duty.
	"Yeah. Auto accident. Female. Would have come in yesterday." Clarence checked his clipboard and led Max over to one of the banks of sliding storage drawers and pulled one out. Max peeled off a five, handed it to Clarence and shooed him out of the room.
	Max lifted up the shroud and verified, yes, it was her. With a piece of blue chalk, he wrote some mathematical symbols on each side of her head. He quickly set up two candles, one on each side of her head, lit them, and in a low rumbling voice chanted the required verses into her right ear. The candles were made from the fat of a "Hand of Glory" which, along with the right application of mathematical principles, had established thaumaturgic properties such as the temporary revival of the dead.  Max used magic, but sparingly, because there was always a cost. He was pleased to think that the evil he rubbed up against daily hadn't corrupted him.
	The corpse jolted as if hit by an electric bolt. Her mouth opened, trying to speak. Max knew he had less than 5 minutes for this temporary revival. He leaned into her right ear and carefully whispered. 
      "Betsy, who killed you?" Max then put his right ear over her mouth so he could hear her labored, faint, speech. He listened for about a minute, asked another question, then listened to her tell her story until she finally fell totally silent, this time for good.
      Clarence ran back into the room, huffing and puffing. 
      "Max, I know you're busy, but I thought you'd like to avoid the cops. They are on their way in here about another case. You'd better go out the back way."
      Max rubbed out the equations, blew out the candles and put them back in his pocket. He gave Clarence another five, then headed out the back way through the dank rat infested tunnel toward Boston City Hospital. He could hear the rats in the walls. He walked back onto the street and took a cab back to his office.
      He opened the door to his office and saw Detective O'Rourke waiting for him.
      "Jimmy, what took you so long?" First Max asked Lara to fill him in on what she had learned. Then Max and Jimmy had a long talk. Max offered him a slug of Jim Beam, but Jimmy demurred, because he was on duty. Max had a shot, though. He told Jimmy to look for a black 1945 Bentley, like the ones uses by the Soviet Consulate in New York. He said there was a witness, a blond woman just coming out of a florist shop in sight of the accident. The driver was a short stocky balding man in a black coat sporting a black chauffer's cap. The source of his information? "Just an anonymous tip," Max told him. Let's see if the cops can get him. He didn't have time now, he had other fish to fry right now. Hopefully she got her money's worth.
      The next day he checked the front page of the Post and thank God  nobody whom he had just met had died. But there was an urgent phone call from Dr. Frost who said she needed to see him immediately. She was soon on her way to the office, via the underground route to avoid surveillance, protected by the courier.
	"Hi Babs," said Lara as Dr. Barbara Frost arrived. They chatted for a few minutes.
	"Barbara, nice to see you," said Max. "How big a problem is this?" Dr. Frost, a professor of physics at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Mass.,  has two PhD's from Princeton, one in ethnology – languages and cultural history – and a double PhD in physics and astronomy. Or is that three PhD's? She was his go-to guy, as it were, for the really tough cases like this one.
	"The biggest," she said. "Your little package was put together by the Waffen SS during the war. It's the result of their world wide search for the mathematical formulae, in the form of chants and incantations of course, necessary to release Cthulhu from R'lyeh. The documents explain that after the war, the Soviets got their hands on the Waffen research and are preparing to release Cthulhu. Since the US is the only country that has the atomic bomb, they must be desperate."
	"What, are they nuts? Wouldn't that mean the end of the world as we know it? How could they expect to gain anything from that?"
	"They also have what they think is a binding spell, to bind Cthulhu to their will. Then the Soviet Union could rule the world, bringing to fruition their goal of a worldwide communist dictatorship. Or a universal proletariat utopia of freedom and prosperity, if you believe their propaganda. Stalin insists that it will work, so it looks like they are going to do it. However, Stalin is wrong - that will never work. Cthulhu is too powerful."
	"So we must have just a copy, that Betsy Costello somehow obtained from the Soviets before they killed her?" Dr. Frost nodded. "So they still have the original, so this insane plan is probably still going forward, right?"
	"Right Max, as far as we know. Now that they have the formulae there is little else they need in materials or manpower to carry this out. Unfortunately we don't know when but we must assume its imminent."
	"Can you reverse engineer the chants and incantations in those documents to recreate the formulae that keeps Cthulhu in R'lyeh?" asked Max.
	"Sorry it can't be done," she said. "Many have been looking across the globe for decades to find them, but no one has found that formulae yet, that we know of. They weren't created by man, but by the beings known as the Elder Gods, according to folklore. And its not simply the inverse of the chants used to release Cthulhu - the math involved is too involved for that."
	"I thought Cthulhu couldn't be released until 'the stars are right' which I understood to mean that the Solar System had passed into a certain region of the cosmos," asked Max.
	"Correct, but those conditions can apparently be recreated using the appropriate vocal intonations to approximate the harmonic vibrations that would be encountered when the 'stars are right'," she said. "While these chants have been passed down by oral tradition by dozens of societies for thousands of years – which the Waffen SS had succeeded in eventually compiling – there hasn't been any chants or methods passed down to keep Cthulhu in or to put him back that we are aware of, I am afraid."
	"Scientifically," she continued, "Cthulhu is contained in a localized bubble of space-time curvature, according to a mathematical interpretation of the personal account of the sailor Gustaf Johanson, who witnessed the brief release of Cthulhu in 1928 in the South Pacific when R'lyeh was forced to the surface by an earthquake. The mathematics necessary to fully describe this curvature of space-time, and how to further contain it, challenges the present state of the art. Simply put, we don't have the math and physics capability at this time to do it."
 	"Barbara," asked Max. "So its impossible. What's the plan?" She never gave him a problem without a potential solution.
	"You're not going to like it."
	"Compared to what, the end of the world? Obviously we can't just call the President, or put this in the newspapers. They'd have us in the funny farm in no time. Can't we just turn this over to those bastards at the NTA and have them handle it?" The NTA always like to have Max do their dirty work. He didn't mind doing so, once in a while, as long as he could choose which dirty work he would do.
      The National Thaumaturgic Agency regulates, or attempts to regulate, the use of 'magic' which is merely an application of advanced mathematics on not commonly known aspects of physical reality, and to conceal the existence of real 'magic' as much as possible from the general public. Can't have just anyone wielding magic; letting that knowledge loose in the world would be like giving everyone their own atomic bomb.
	"Well, yes and no. Don't be mad at me Max, You understand I had to call them myself when I realized what we had here. I told Agent Carson I would be coming here. He should be here momentarily."
	Like on cue, there was a knock at the door and Agent Carson entered. He carried a medium-size case that he put down on the floor.
	"Max and Barbara," he said. "So nice to see you together again." They had been a couple, but she had broken it off and that was a long time ago.
	"Can we cut the small talk," said Max. "Get to the point."
	"We had anticipated this eventuality," he said. "Our 'seers' predicted that these formulas would be found and that some madman would plan on using them. They further predict that Stalin is preparing to set Cthulhu loose in the next few days, from a secure location in the Kremlin. We had sent agents to infiltrate them, but our agents were discovered and liquidated, and then they have placed wards around their team that prevents us from attacking them magically."
	"Brilliant play on your part, as always," said Max. "So is the end inevitable?"
	"No, we have a new plan. Using the information that Dr. Frost got from you, our Τseers' have projected that while we don't have the mathematical ability today to keep Cthulhu in his bubble of space-time curvature, that capability will be developed in the future, in exactly 70 years, to be precise."
	"But what good would it be to travel to the future, assuming that is what you are talking about, to get the equations we need, if the Soviets release Cthulhu now end the world ends now so there is no future? Or wouldn't it create a paradox if there was a future only because we got the equations in 2017 and brought them back here in time to stop Cthulhu?"
	"Yes, Max, you are correct," said Carson. "We are not complete idiots. Our plan is a little different. Using the correct equations and a lot of electrical energy, we can create a portal between different dimensions, to a different time-space. It's a rudimentary form of the type of transformation we need to keep Cthulhu in the bubble. We can't do it often because it does take a lot of energy, an enormous amount of energy in fact, and its very dangerous as it can create discontinuities that can bend or break the existing space time continuum. We would not go into the future of this universe, we would instead send our agent or agents to the same future in a parallel universe, so we will avoid time travel paradoxes.  And we need you, both of you, to go."
	"Why us," asked Max, feeling uneasy. "You have plenty of agents of your own – why not send some of them instead?"
	"Max, Max," chided Carson. "We have you right where want you. We are very upset with you for letting the West formulae burn up in the fire. You were sloppy on that last job, very sloppy, and we know literally where the bodies are buried. That's multiple murder, you know, and the 'but they were zombies' defense won't cut it you know. We know what really happened and why but a court of law in the mundane world won't."
	Max didn't have to go far to realize who the only person was who could have ratted him out to the NTA. He made sure he didn't change his expression or look at Dr. Frost, who must have been the culprit. Probably not for the first time, he realized, since she had always been a little too chummy with those bastards.
	"Looks like you have me over a barrel. Sure, I'd be very happy to volunteer to go. How do you know exactly where and when to send us?" Max asked.
	"Our seers have pinned down the exact time and place. Unfortunately they can't see clearly enough to get the data themselves, but there is enough to be certain we are sending you to the right space-time. There might be other time and places but this is the only one we know for sure. We will be sending you to a conference at a hotel in Las Vegas on July 28, 2017 when a speaker will be presenting a paper on how he used the powerful calculating machines of that time to precisely calculate the incantations needed to keep Cthulhu imprisoned in the bubble of space-time curvature. We want you to get the calculations, which Dr. Frost can get from listening to his talk, and hopefully from a from a written version of his paper. We also want you to get a recording of the incantations."
	"So we bring a wire recorder with us?" Max asked.
	"We have something better." Carson pulled up the case he had brought. "The Germans have an advanced audio recording and playback system using magnetic tape, called a Magnetophone. It uses a thin coating, which can be magnetized to replicate the analog waves of an audio emission, on a plastic tape. This is another of their secret technologies we have just learned about. The Army recovered a few of them and we had the Signal Corps build this portable version for us. It's superior to wire recordings, so we have a better chance of getting a truly effective recoding of the incantations to paly back when you return. It also has a battery and a magnetic tape that can record for up to 2 hours. This way you will be able to get you the calculations and the exact incantations for us, on a silver platter."
	Before they made the trip, Max made some incantations to call for help in the other universe, and prepared the medicine bags for him and Babs to protect them from extra-dimensional threats.
	They arrived through the portal in a wall in a deserted corridor in the Bally Hotel at 1:00 pm on July 28, 2017. Max carried the 40 pound Magnetophone case in his right hand. They were dressed in their regular 1947 street clothes, which Carson had said wouldn't really stand out too much in this type of conference.
	The portal took a lot of energy. The NTA blacked out the entire New England - Eastern Canadian grid interconnect for 6 hours gathering the needed electricity for the brief burst of megawatts needed to punch a hole through to the parallel universe. They were scheduled to go back in 8-12 hours, which was the minimum time needed by the grid to get back to full strength before being blacked out again for another 6 hours before they could return.
	Max thought he sensed something else come through with them and asked Babs about it. She arched an eyebrow, nodded, and said simply "Yes that's always a risk." Max had protection from mundane physical threats from his .38 he carried in his shoulder holster, and the both had protection from extra-dimensional threats from the medicine bags sewn into their clothing.
      This couldn't be good news, Babs thought. Well, they can't go back so nothing else to do but to move forward and deal with it if it manifested any hostile action.
	"I wonder what kind of conference this is," said Max, looking around bewildered as they walked into the busy hallway filled with people wearing all manner of clothes – mostly black t-shirts and slacks. Some men wore coats & ties. Many had weird tattoos. There were also many wearing various hats, vests, and watches. Most were busy listening to a small metal box they held close to their ear, or reading and punching their fingers onto the top flat surface.
	"Maybe those are phones – what do you think?" asked Max.
	"Hard to say," said Babs. "They could be just highly miniaturized recording/playback devices for audio & video, and also text. I'd love to get a look at one."
	"Ahhh, but remember what our friends from the NTA said – don't bring back any knowledge of future technology, or it cold foul up out timeline."
	"We really don't have to worry, you know," said Babs. "The forgetting spell they gave us will erase all memory of this future technology within 60 minutes of our return."
	Following the information that the NTA seers had given them, their first step was to find the registration area and pay their admission, in cash, to get their badges, and the conference program. They had brought plenty of cash, and could only hope that it was consistent with what was used here.
	"Wow, look at this 1944 Silver Certificate," said the staff person at the registration table who held the stack of bills Max had handed them. Their money did stand out, but at least they were acceptable and paid their way into the conference. They didn't know what was so special about a silver certificate and didn't ask.
	The program for DEF CON clearly indicated this was a conference of "hackers." They weren't sure what that meant, but inferred from the talks and the other events that the attendees liked to "break stuff" and see if they could make devices do more than they were designed for.  Just the kind of people who could figure out how to 'hack' the math of Cthulhu, Max thought.
	They read through the program and of course couldn't find anything about Cthulhu or cracking the math of a localized bubble of space-time. But they did find the hidden codes in the program which the seers had said would tell them where the "inner conference," the "secret conference" within the conference, the DEF COV, could be found.
	Babs traced her finger over the program in a certain pattern, which revealed the program for the secret conference on the same pages. There, among talks such as "Detecting and Preventing Extra-Dimensional Malware," "Producing the Medusa Effect in Common Household Devices – Don't Try This At Home!," and "Can Any Cloud Be Made Truly Possession-Proof?" they found the talk they were looking for – "Supercomputer Calculations of the Optimum Incantations to Permanently Bind An Ancient Entity Into An Existing Localized Bubble of Space Time" by Professor Karen Marsh of Miskatonic University.
	The talk wasn't scheduled to start until about four hours, so they decided to take the next three hours to look around the conference but to be at the talk an hour before it started so they could be sure to get a seat. It was hard to make headway among the thick crowds of the thousands of people who filled the corridors. They tried to not appear too wide-eyed and incredulous at all they saw, especially at the CTF and the Contest area. In the Vendor area they saw a few radio-type hardware with vacuum tubes that looked a little familiar, but the rest of the technology there, and in the rest of the con, was something called solid state electronics which was at least three decades beyond them.
      Max bought a portable video recorder to get a backup recording of the talk – they could even see the replay on the small screen on the recorder! Babs was intrigued by all the hardware she could see and was frustrated she couldn't buy them all, and settled for a small handheld minicomputer. They were sure that the NTA would just confiscate them when they got back to 1947, but they couldn't resist. They separated for a while to look around some more by themselves but then met back at the entrance to DEF COV.
	Babs got the magnetophone recording started just before Dr. Marsh started her talk. Max started the video recorder while sitting in the front row with Babs but then moved further back to get a better video picture. Babs was also taking notes as fast as she could.
	"I must first introduce myself as, as many of you might have guessed, as one of the Innsmouth Marsh's," she began. "However I will not make the full transformation to a sea creature to join my brothers and sisters under the sea. Those genes are substantially watered down and the only vestige I have are my slightly webbed hands and feet, like you can see in this picture." She also explained she has a PhD from MIT in Mathematics and a PhD from Miskatonic in Thaumaturgic Theory & Practice.
	"We have a scant amount of documentation on the island that rose from the sea between March 22 and April 12, 1925 which resulted in the temporary release of the extra-dimensional creature known of Cthulhu to this world. The best account is from the Norwegian sailor Gustaf Johanson, which contains a fantastic description of the island and its structures which seemed to defy the strictures of Euclidean Geometry," she continued.
	"The most logical conclusion, first set forth in a paper by Professor Benjamin K. Tippett, which I paraphrase here, is that these descriptions of weird geometry can best be explained the three dimensional space around the island is curved hyperbolically – and that the island is contained in a bubble of localized spacetime curvature." She then explicated many complicated mathematical formulas that describe the nature of this bubble, which could not be made of 'normal' matter but of some exotic matter from another dimension.
	"This bubble is what keeps Cthulhu contained, neither dead not alive, waiting for the time "when the stars are right" to escape again, perhaps for good, to wreak havoc on the world. There are many Cthulhu cults around the world which are striving mightily to release Cthulhu. They believe that once they find the correct set of incantations they will be successful. While they think of it as 'magic' we know it as science – that such audio utterings can have an effect on the harmonic vibrations of this universe and of other dimensions, having a physical effect."
	"Those incantations, to be successful, need to be precise, which is why, thankfully, they have not been successful – yet. To head off any such attempt, myself and my team at Miskatonic, assisted by computer scientists around the world, have been using prodigious amounts of supercomputer resources to concoct the opposite set of incantations – one that will permanently bind Cthulhu into that bubble. I am pleased to report that we have been successful."
	There was a stir in the room and a round of applause.
	"I am going to play a recording of the resultant incantation, which is only 30 minutes in length. Be assured we already have performed the incantations and have confirmed that the space time bubble in the South Pacific is secure and all our readings show that Cthulhu is secure in that bubble. We are confident that this will defeat the attempt of any Cthulhu cult to resurrect that creature."
	Before she could turn on the recording there was a stirring in the back of the room. A tall shadowy figure, horribly misshapen and about 14 feet tall, started to manifest itself then move swiftly toward the speaker. Babs jumped up and ran to Marsh to try to give her the protection of her medicine bag, but when the entity ran into Babs she died and crumpled to the floor. The entity then disappeared at the moment Max reached Marsh's side.
	"Doc I have to get you out here. There might be another one coming for you" Max held Marsh around her shoulders. "Bring the recording." He led her to the portal, which they got to just in time, and brought her through back to 1947.
	"Did you get it? Where's Babs? Who is this?" said Agent Carson, noticing her webbed hands.
	"We got it. Babs is dead. This is Dr. Karen Marsh – she has the incantation."
	Carson explained the situation to Marsh.
	"We're almost out of time. Can you do the incantation right now?"
	Marsh nodded. She played the recording. Carson made a phone call. After a number of "uhmms" and "OK's" he hung up.
	"Looks like it worked. The readings we are getting from our ships in the South Pacific show that the bubble is stable and that its integrity has been increased significantly. We'll have to wait for Stalin to try his incantation to know for sure, but things look good."
	"That's great," said Marsh. "When can you send me back?"
	"Unfortunately, not for at least a year," said Carson. "We have to use the portals sparingly, to avoid making the boundaries between universes porous."
	"Dr. Marsh was a professor at Miskatonic University in 2017," said Max. "Perhaps she can get a position there until we can send her back. I'll take care of it."
	"Good," said Carson. "Maybe she can help you with cases like Babs did. I've got to go now to follow-up on the incantation. I'll be in touch later to process Professor Marsh. Professor, you are cautioned to never tell anyone where you are from or to reveal anything about the future. The consequences to do otherwise could be highly unfavorable" She nodded. He left them, taking the Magnetophone and video recorder.
	"Don't think I didn't see what you did," said Marsh. "That entity wasn't after me."
	"Nonsense," said Max, trying to hide his surprise. "Obviously it was trying to prevent you from revealing the incantation."
	"It had your fingerprints all over it. I don't know why you wanted her killed, but we don't need to speak more about it now. Magic, especially black magic, has a cost and I predict you will be paying that price for quite a long time."
	"The important thing now," sad Max, trying to shrug it off, "is to get you situated at Miskatonic." He knew she would have no way of proving her allegations, even to the NTA, but why take chances?
	"Let me show you our secret tunnels below this building. Surely you have heard of Pickman?"
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