Category: Kennings

Or

The Bling on the Doorstep

(Early Convention Teaser)

“Let me get this straight,” Lyman Orm said, with a perplexed smile.

“You’re first name,” he nodded in the direction of the thin, humorless-looking man with the Van Dyke, “Is Atticus?”

When that worthy nodded in confirmation, he turned to the stout, tough looking fellow to Atticus’ left. “And your last name is Finch?”

“Yessir,” Finch said, with a sour, “oh boy, here we go again” expression.

Atticus, who looked a bit as if he’d fallen out of a steampunk anime, cleared his throat, and stretched his lips in the wince that, for him, passed for a smile.

“I assure you,” Bane said in the voice of a professor ordering a bagel in the cafeteria. “Birdie and I…”

“Birdie?” Orm’s eyes widened with shear incredulity. “Birdie Finch? Oh, c’mon – who’s putting you two up to this?”

Now it was Finch’s turn to clear his throat. “I’m afraid so, sir,” he said, “My Christian name is Bertram, so it was rather inevitable, given the ways of small children and upperclassmen worldwide.”

His face the very definition of “gobsmacked”, Orm sat back, shaking his head in bemusement.

“I’ve already had breakfast,” he said. “But I suppose I can add one more impossible thing. So… What can I do for you gentlemen?”

Bane leaned forward with the air of an undertaker preparing to knot a client’s tie.

“It’s about a distant ancestor of yours, Dr. Orm…”

A woman receives a package, left by UPS on her doorstep, ostensibly from her estranged mother.

It in fact contains a cursed medallion that immediately begins to threaten her life, and the lives of those around her.

Bane and Finch to the rescue!

During a particularly mild autumn in the Catskills, Bane and Finch become involved in a minor Mythos outbreak.

(This story is not a riff on Trucks/Maximum Overdrive, but rather on the 1974 TV movie Killdozer! which was itself based on a 1944 Theodore Sturgeon short story of the same name.)

This is a sequel to The Cooler Out of Space, in which the last fragment of the Entity contained in the cooler temporarily escapes Bane and Finch, following the Miskatonic upstream until it arrives in Dunwich.

There, it possesses and animates an abandoned field harrow, and literally cuts a bloody swath across the Upper Miskatonic Valley, until it is cornered and destroyed by the investigators.

Not exactly a cooler, but rather a cryogenic container for exotic biological specimens.  It plummets to Earth when a returning corporate Mars probe breaks up just outside the atmosphere.

It impacts in the Miskatoic Valley, and the entity that emerges is both alien and eldritch.  Mythos mischief ensues.

Atticus Bane and his trusty sidekick Finch come to the rescue.