Hallie and the Sepulchre of Destiny, chapter 4

Chapter 4

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
--William Styron

According to myth, the Improbable College was a collection of misfits, free-thinkers, radicals, and adventurer-scholars from around the time of the Renaissance. Based upon stories of the travels of their even more mythical founder, the College fought for freedom and art, science and beauty, and because it was a really good way of annoying the bad guys.

Their most secret place was the very tomb of their founder, carved by the Knights Improbable and said to be located in far Hy Brazil, the legendary land of the West, upon an island touched by the gods and holding secrets of the Parodyverse. Here, after a terrible struggle, the broken body of a man who may never have been real at all was laid in a hidden sepulchre in the roots of the world.

“This must be the place,” suggested Rasputatius, gesturing grandly to the ancient stone wall that blocked the mouth of a deep cave beneath the Lair Mansion. “Look at the inscriptions. Um, did anyone bring my spectacles?”

Chompvski was still benefiting from the scholar he’d eaten a few days earlier. “It says Post CCCLXX Annos Paterbo - when 370 years have passed,” he supplied. “Who knows what it means.”

“And this,” Buggerov added, looking at the faded indentations on the stone door of the hidden crypt. “Nequaquam Parody?”

“The Parody Should Not Exist,” translated Chompvski. “I hate crossword puzzles.”

“The Improbable College found great secrets in here,” Rasputatius promised. “And in their turn they left all they had accumulated before their fall. In here we have the means to…”

“Rule the world?” Fingers guessed.

“You don’t know that I was going to say that,” the Abyssal Rasputatius retorted crossly.

“Were you?”

“Just get the door open. We need to gain the secrets inside. Then all power will be ours.”

I promise, the voice in the ghoul-lord’s mind said, that when you open that tomb you will get all that is coming to you. And then so will the world.

“This is it” Hallie noted in a flat tone.

“What?” Fleabot asked, looking around the mansion sub-basement level in alarm for signs of magical whatnots about to jump out and attack them. Instead the lower levels seemed as quiet as the upper levels. Quieter, in fact, as Amber apparently snored louder than a chainsaw.

“This is where the Hellraisers killed us. Killed them.” she amended. “This is where Art, Randy and Mindy died.”

He looked at her pale face in the soft glow of the electric lights strung down the rough-hewn hallway. “It’s not too late to turn back and go for help.”

“No” she said, blinking away the memory that was occupying her thoughts. “It is too late for that... There isn’t much time left.”

“How do you know?”

She shrugged. “I just can tell.”

“You, ah… you don’t think it’s the Hellraisers again, do you?”

She bit her lip, but then shook her head. “No. This feels… different. More personal.”

“More personal than facing the specific demons that murdered you?”

“They murdered a lot of people” she noted tightly. “I doubt they’d even remember me.”

Fleabot looked around the lonely chamber, but didn’t ask whether that made it better or worse.

“What’s that sobbing?” worried Buggerov.

“Nothing,” Rasputatius told him. “It’s just the banshee we bound, weeping. She can’t do anything to hurt us. She’s completely helpless.”

“Except that her echoing sobs could lead the Abyssal Greye and his mob right to us,” Chompvski pointed out.

“Bring ‘em on,” Fingers growled. “Bunch of lily-livered book-reading prissy new World nancy boys.”

“Greye can’t find us,” Rasputatius told them. “Nobody can find us. We’re in the heart of Parody Island’s mystery, and nobody who isn’t a part of it could get here to stop us. Is that door open yet?”

“We’re working on it, boss,” Buggerov promised. “It’s kind of old and kind of…”
Just then the heavy stone block came loose and fell on him. “It’s open, boss.”

A wicked grin spread over the ghoul-lord’s face. He strode into the darkened sepulchre, his thin rotted fingers twitching to gain the treasures within. Chompvski followed with the dark lantern, its narrow light playing over the carved walls and the sarcophagus that was draped with some rotted yellow mantle.

“Is this it then?” Fingers sniffed, unimpressed.

But a change had come over Rasputatius. He stood taller, his whole body language different, demanding respect, commanding obedience.

“Boss?” Buggerov asked uncertainly.

"No," replied the ghoul beside the tomb of Visionatus Improbablus. "Don't call me boss. The name is Vernold. Humbolt Vernold." He smiled unpleasantly at the undead following him. “But as a special favour you can call me HV.”

“What do we do when we find whatever is down here?” Fleabot asked in a whisper as they made their way deeper into the maze of tunnels beneath the island, now only lit by the bobbing beam of a flashlight. “I mean, if it’s a big enough threat that the island’s mystical defences are supposed to kick in… well, that’s Celestian category stuff. Do you really think a big-ass gun from the weapons locker is going to stop it?”

Hallie paused and considered the weapon that she had slung over her shoulder before they had descended past the last developed levels of the mansion. “I… I don’t know. I didn’t know what else to bring. Do you think I should just leave this here?”

“What are you, crazy?” the robot replied. “I was wishing I had one of my own. I just wondered what happens after we’re out of ammo.”

“I was thinking I’d throw the gun at it.”

Fleabot nodded. “Well… So long as there’s a plan in place.”

“HV?”

“Yes,” responded the time-projected consciousness of the leader of the Church of Conformity that had been the great enemy of the Improbable College.

The other ghouls exchanged worried looks. "Is this part of ruling the world then?" Chompski asked uncertainly. "Taking new monikers?"

The spirit transferred from the Necronastycon turned to regard them with a fresh glint in his dead eyes. "What a splendid idea" he agreed darkly, opening his arms in generosity. "New names for everybody."

“I’ve always wanted to be called Marylin,” Fingers admitted spontaneously.

“I mean, select yourself a new name to reflect your new and dark place in the kingdom of woe that we shall make of this sinful world,” HV told him.

“What’s wrong with Marylin?” Fingers demanded. “And if you say it’s a girl’s name Chompvski, I’ll tear your legs off.”

“Don’t call me Chompvski,” the other ghoul answered. “Call me Chompvski the Magnificent. No, King Chompvski the Magnificent. Magnificent and Majestic. Yes.”

“Can I be called Elvis?” Buggerov wondered.

“You can be called dolt,” snapped HV. “Imbeciles. Look in the Necronastycon, and select an aspect. Take it upon yourselves. Draw the dark power into you by the name you choose.” He opened his hands and the ghostly outline iron-bound volume that Xander had taken from him appeared before him; it was the best he could do given the wards the sorcerer supreme had laid upon it. Even this would ring alarm bells for the Master of the Mystic Crafts and his lackey the Abyssal Greye, but now it was too late for them to get to the tomb and interfere.

“Wow, that’s actually a good trick, boss,” King Chompski the Magnificent and Majestic admitted, looking at the shimmering outline of the vile volume. “I mean HV.”

The Necronastycon wasn't called the Book of Rude Names for nothing. As each of the ghouls picked themselves a new title at their possessed leader's behest they found themselves twisted and suffused with dark power.

"Aaaahhhh," exalted Digituss, formerly Fingers, as his hands swelled into cilia-flailing tentacles that could crush metal. “Now I can really pick my nose properly.”

Buggerov swelled up to toad-like proportions, his bulbous body blotched with arcane calculations, his bulging eyes literally popping out of his head to float on gory stalks, his mouth widening to allow his twelve-foot forked tongue to flick freely around the room. “Call me Bugga-Roffa,” he boasted. “The world’s best kisser.”

But Chompvski was already flickering between the shadow dimensions, his silhouette filled with livid red stars burning in distant galaxies. “Void I am,” he whispered, as if from far away. “Darkness eternal, and screaming silence.”

“How can silence scream?” Digituss demanded. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“We’ve just been blessed by the Fairly Great Old Ones,” Bugga-Roffa pointed out. “It doesn’t have to make any sense.”

“So what are you going to call yourself?” Digituss demanded. “Big sparkly shadow thing?”

“I am Dark Ch’mp’vski,” Dark Ch’mp’vski announced.

“Now with far less vowels and accrual body mass,” Bugga-Roffa noted.

“Digituss, Bugga-Roffa, and Dark Ch’mp’vski,” sighed Humbolt Vernold. “I suppose you’ll have to do.”

“Do? What do we have to do, boss, er HV?” the agent of darkness formerly known as Buggerov wondered, absently scratching at the equations that skittered over his bloated body.

Humbolt Vernold frowned. “Just guard the passageway. I have to do a little occult ceremony here. The contents of this tomb are sufficient for me to create a necromantic link to the being known in this time and place as Visionary. When I wreak my death magics upon him here and now he could never journey back in time and found the Improbable College which seeks to thwart my triumph then.”

Digituss raised one obscenely long finger to ask a question. “Er, what are you talking about? Only this is getting kind of weird. You’re not ranting in the same way as usual, boss. Still ranting, granted, but a kind of different ranting.”

“Guard. The. Passageway.”

“I thought you said nothing could get to us now?” Dark Ch’mp’vski objected.

“I said nothing that was not part of the island’s mystery could get to us. The fool Rasputatius has neutralised the banshee, but who knows what other protection this devious manse may have devised?” HV turned back to the tomb of Visionatus Improbablus. “Whatever it is that comes, you are now powerful enough to kill it.”

“So what’s it like?” Fleabot whispered, nervously breaking the silence once again.

“What’s what like?” Hallie whispered back, her eyes scanning the darkness for the slightest movement.

“You know… being all… fleshy” he answered. “I never got around to asking.”

“And you want to know now? When we’re about to run into who-knows-what monstrosity down here?”

He shrugged. “I thought it might be harder to ask after we’ve been sucked up by Galativac or whatever.”

“Galactivac is not in our basement” Hallie insisted. “Though the phrase “sucks” does come to mind in regards to your question.”

“Oh, come on…” he prodded. “Is it really that bad?”

She spared a moment to glare down at him on her shoulder. “My stomach is churning in my guts, my heart is hammering painfully in my chest, my mouth is dry while my palms and other parts of me are drenched in clammy sweat, and I feel like I may throw up a half-gallon of ice cream at any moment” she growled. “And you know the worst part? It’s all because, thousands and thousands of years ago, a monkey with these traits was attractive enough to get lucky.”

Fleabot nodded. “So Pinocchio…”

“Was a complete moron” she assured him. “I mean, if you could smell what I’m smelling right now… Why human senses don’t come with a toggle switch is beyond me.”

“So there are no upsides?”

Hallie sighed. “Water” she admitted. “I had absolutely no idea how much I would love the water. Being submersed in it… feeling it all around you… having it pouring down on you. Even drinking it. It wasn’t like I ever imagined.”

The tiny robot blinked in surprise. “And here I thought all humans were hardwired to answer ‘chocolate and sex’ to that question.”

“I enjoyed both of those quite a bit as well” she agreed. “But I wish I had gotten a chance to swim in the ocean at least once…”

“Well, you can always… Whoa! Hold up… What do you mean you enjoyed sex?! When did this happen?”

She gave him a pointed look.

“Fine… be that way. But don’t think I’m forgetting that little tidbit any time soon…” Fleabot sighed. “And quit talking of regrets… We’re not dead yet, you know.”

“Oh no…” a voice assured them as two dark shapes seemed to suddenly appear in the pale beam of the flashlight. “She’s quite right. You are both very, very dead.”

Footnotes and Epitaphs:

The Improbable College: We first met the Confraternity of the Improbable College in 1720, which revealed them to be a secret society of free-thinkers, adventurer-philosophers, and Renaissance interferers dedicated to fighting oppression of the imagination
The beginnings of the so-called Improbables lie shrouded in mystery. Many trace its origins back to the publication around 1614 of The Alchemical Wedding of Visionatus Improbablus,, an allegorical tract published by the “Honourable Confraternity of the Improbable Circle”, purporting to detail the historical journeys of a hapless simple who stumbled upon the secrets of the Parodyverse. It claims that this Improbablus founded the Improbable College on his return from mythical lands such as Vesalia, Atticland, Ausgard, Wakandybar, Chemmis, and Austernalia, reviving and revising the earlier Knights Improbable, which had been suppressed by the church over three hundred years earlier.

Of special interest is the role of the shadowy Marquis of Herringcarp behind the scenes. The College maintained that researches at one of the ancient sites of the Knights Improbable had uncovered Improbablus’ tomb (although the corpse may have been fake), behind a door marked “Post CCCLXX Annos Paterbo (when 370 years have passed) containing information about the future, and preserving the inscription “Nequaquam Parody” (“The Parody Should Not Exist”). It seems however that the Marquis may have been responsible for recruiting many of the key active participants in the improbable College from at least the latter part of the fifteenth century.

The Improbable College became a public legend with a declaration nailed to the door of the Church of Conformity in Dresden in 1700 which began the secret war between imagination and repression that became one of the defining conflicts of its age.

And More on the Improbable College: In “real life”, the Rosicrucian movement followed a similar path as the “Invisible College”, including the 1614 publication of The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, claims of decent from the Templars and of traditions dating back through the wisdom of Solomon to ancient Egypt, and support from many of the greatest scientific and philosophical figures of the age (such as Francis Bacon, Leonardo Da Vinci, Rene Descartes, and Ben Franklin – allegedly). Many of the Masonic movements today like to claim descent through the Society of the Rosy Cross.

Humbolt Vernold is one of the most sinister of the mysterious beings through history who have taken the initials HV. Head of the inquisitionary Church of Conformity which sought to suppress the Renaissance, the powerful cleric and his disciples clashed with scholars of the Improbable College (including the then-living member who was to become the Abyssal Greye). This is the first time he’s had an “on screen” appearance in a story.

The various HVs have been quite different in method and motive, but all have gathered together powerful coalitions of extraordinary people, including the League of Improbable Gentlemen and the Abandoned Legion as well as Vernold’s Church of Conformity. The reasons for this remain obscure but each incarnation of HV seems to respond to an imperative to accomplish some overwhelming task which may require such forces. What this task might be has yet to be revealed.

Post By by The Hooded Hood and Visionary Sun Apr 03, 2005 at 03:42:11 pm EDT	Subject Hallie and the Sepulchre of Destiny, chapter 4

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