The manic ramblings of a dying gangster hold important secrets.

Any conspiracy theorist worth his salt knows about the last words of Arthur Flegenheimer, aka Dutch Schultz. For those of you who don’t know about them, you can check them out here. These are the last words recorded by the court stenographer at the bedside of the gangster as he lay raving and dying, and they have been analyzed by more psychologists, criminologists, conspirologists, and whackos than you can shake a stick at. Everyone’s got a theory about what they mean, even if their theory is that they’re the nonsense spouted by a dying man with a fever of 106.

The reason that the secret hasn’t been uncovered is that the stenographer didn’t turn over all the notes he took. He only transcribed about 80% of Dutch’s last rant. The remaining 20% contained certain key phrases that sounded like gibberish but were actually verbal artifacts granting a certain power over the Cruel Ones.

Dutch was a candidate for the Godwalker True King, you see, and he was an extremely bloody and violent competitor. His rise was marked by numerous vicious killings and other cruel acts. As he grew more and more aware of the mystical aspects of his path, he became fearful of the ghosts of all the men he had eliminated. He was convinced that they would be waiting for him on the other side, and that they’d want vengeance. Through some means still not completely understood, Dutch managed to learn a few words in the language of the Cruel Ones.

These words are too powerful to be spoken in complete form by mere mortals, and must be broken up and concealed in a human language to be speakable by humans, wrapped up in mnemonics so that the mind will hold them. Even so, the strain of speaking them puts incredible pressure on the human psyche, and most people don’t make it through a recitation with their minds intact.

Their are ten words in the phrase that Dutch knew, and each must be wrapped into a sentence with the word itself broken up and only hinted at by strange mnemonic constructions: “A boy has never wept, nor dashed a thousand kin…” is probably at least part of one word, as is “French Canadian bean soup.” The original manuscript of handwritten notes that the stenographer used to type up his edited version contains them all, and adepts may be able to pick out the key phrases using random magic. Even if the phrases aren’t identified, the whole transcript can be recited to make sure that all the words are spoken in the proper order.

Speaking the complete words aloud attracts the attention of the Cruel Ones on the far side of the veil. Once someone has started with the first word, they are doomed unless they successfully complete the entire phrase. Each word they speak unlocks powerful primordial pools of memory and meaning in the speaker’s mind, forcing a stress check on a random meter for each word. The degree of the check is equal to the number of the word, from 1 to 10. If, at any time, a check is failed, the recitation stops, and the Cruel Ones gather in the soul of the speaker, carrying him into oblivion.

If all ten words are spoken and the speaker remains in possession of himself, he has the ability to order the Cruel Ones to destroy the souls of any person or people that they can name. This request doesn’t have to be verbal, or specific, but the group must be finite and definite: the souls of everyone I have killed or have had killed is acceptable, the souls of everyone who hates me is not. The Cruel Ones perform this task, but then claim the soul of the speaker in payment. Now you know why Dutch waited until he was dying anyway to speak the phrase.