Three perspectives on a nasty little newcomer…

Seen from the street…

James Mason, Private Eye, speaks to a persuasive young thing who happens to be, unknown to him, a Dipsomancer…

There’s this one event, happens every year. Occult thing. It’s called the Dirge of the Gods’ Fallen Soldiers, which is a crappy name, so it just gets dubbed “The Dirge” by everyone who goes. And a lot of people do, about fifty-sixty of them each year. The vast majority of them are in the 14-18 year old age bracket, for a fairly simple reason — It’s filled with sex and drugs from start to finish.

Although from what I’m hearing, the drugs thing isn’t coming from the organizers… they just turn a blind eye to it all. I couldn’t pick them up for dealing, though I could definitely pick them up for statutory rape. The sex is definitely part of the event proper.

Everything gets promoted through mostly the Pagan/Wiccan communities, as well as some of the goth crowd, and it all takes place at this one abandoned hospital. That’s what I know for a fact, the rest is what I’ve picked up from interviewing some of the party-goers.

The thing begins the morgue. There are at least two organizers, one of ’em a man and the other a woman, but a few thing there’s a few others doing behind the scenes work. I’m inclined to agree, there’s a hell of a lot of preparation work that goes into this.

Anyway, I got distracted. The two organizers are out the front, and lead everyone to the morgue. Everybody gets on one of the tables, and the organizers pull the sheets over their eyes. Then they make their big speech. This is apparently the whole thrust of the thing: The Dirge organizers believe there are gods of stuff, kind of like the old Roman pantheon. Certain humans act as their angels, and they have enemies who try to kill them. The Dirge is meant to be a memorial service for all of them, complete with re-enactments, which take up most of the rest of the thing.

OK, you’re not understanding this. Fine. An example, then.

At the one last year, this one girl got pulled aside from the group, and then two boys were. The girl got told nothing, but she knew more or less the sort of things that happen at Dirges, so she wasn’t upset when she ended up playing Harriet Meehan’s death. You remember her? Last year, February, that Catholic girl who got raped by two assholes and had her throat slit? OK, they re-enacted that. She has sex with the two boys, and then they run a red scarf over her neck.

What’s sort of scaring me about it is that they really do their research. I got the girl to describe what they had her wear, and she was wearing the same clothing that Harriet was when she died. Not the same same clothing, but the same brands, colors, the works. Exact re-enactment.

This goes on for a week. Everybody ends up either playing a murderer or someone murdered in the last year who was, supposedly, an angel. Then, the whole thing wraps up and everybody heads out to this one bus-stop. And the two organizers ask everyone to think about all the gods they’ve been hearing about all week, and try to be one of them. Then everyone shakes hands with the organizers, and the ten who do the best job pretending to be a god get instructions to go somewhere.

And then they’re never heard from again. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t chase ’em up. I never abandon a case, but…

From the Global Players…

Brenna Wilson, TNI intel, chats on an inter-department phone call…

. . .so I’m as confused as anyone else, but I guess the boss just wants us keeping an eye on them. He’s got eyes on everyone else in the Underground, so I suppose this mob is just one more.

What’s that? Yeah? No, no. They’re not new, really. The Dirge has been going on now for six years, but it was smaller and at a different location for the first two. Not the same thing, really, but it was the same group and probably the same basic ritual. It just was kept solidly in the Occult Underground, whereas they’ve been reaching into the mainstream for the last few.

I really wish we could somehow get some surveillance cameras into that hospital. Yeah.

Well, that’s where it’s getting interesting. I’ve been chasing up the two leaders of this thing. The woman I’ve got nothing on, but the man is almost certainly Christopher Spector, and we’ve got a file on him. He’s attached to Divine Order of the Wounded King, a cult group operating out of Chicago. From there, they have groups in LA, New York, Jacksonville in Florida, and Adelaide in Australia. Largeish, a hundred, one-fifty maybe? We think they’re more or less clueless… no real idea how magick works, but they’re in the Underground, not the mainstream. They know magick is real, but other than that they don’t know jack or sh…

OK, they’re coming out now. There’s that bus stop, everyone’s gathering around it. I really wish that woman would look up. Play nice for the satellite photo, damn you. Hang on, one of the girls in the crowd is crowd surfing, I’ll snap that for later identification. At a glance, about fourteen, dark haired, smallish.

This part’s done, they’re all splitting up. Ten of them are headed in one direction, the organizers are heading back to the hospital, and the rest are getting on busses or going for the train station down the road. Those ten have walked into a shop, I’m checking the address… Turner’s Pages, it’s a bookstore. Why are they meeting in there… they’re not, that’s why. I can see them coming out the back, into a dead-end alley.

Strange. Hm? Oh, it’s strange. They’re milling about, they don’t really seem to know what’s going on…

Fuck me.

Listen, I need to go. This… a car just drove into the alleyway, and ran over two of them. Then three guys got out of the car and butchered the kids. Knives… guns. Guns. Automatic guns. Oh hell, they’re going and putting shots in their skulls to make sure. Jesus Christ. I want to get this to whoever can deal with it now. These monsters should be put down, now.

The kids were fourteen. Little kids…

The Global Perspective

Derek Jackson writes in a private e-mail…

OK, I’ve got good news and then increasing bad news, in sequence.

The good news is that the Mak may actually be ahead of the curve on the Dirge, which is a nice change. Since we actually have guys in the group who are teenagers we’ve been able to get inside the thing and see what goes on first hand. Capriel Drusse went in more or less undercover and found out a lot of stuff, plus we learned some other stuff from … elsewhere.

The bad news is that we get to be first in the curve to learn that the guys organizing this aren’t the clueless money scammers we first thought they were. They’re definitely clued-in. At the very least, they know about archetypes. And we think they’re actually a cult following the Martyr. Worse, they’re a cult following the Martyr who think that this means they need to attack the other archetypes.

This is why the Dirge happens. They’re symbolically pulling on the deaths of people who reflect archetypes. Some of them might be avatars, most of ’em aren’t tied closely enough for that. It doesn’t matter. By making this memorial service, they’re symbolically tying the power of other archetypes to the Martyr. The finale, in which ten of the ‘cultists’ who best symbolize an archetype of some kind are murdered, seals the ritual off perfectly. We have no idea if the ritual actually works, but I’m not convinced it doesn’t.

Here’s the worse news: That elsewhere thing? We think they’re looking to make this event global, holding Dirges in different cities at different times worldwide. And they’re constantly lining up pretty close to our burger joints.

Here’s the questions, then: How much do they know about archetypes? How much do they know about ley lines? Does the ritual work? Can we find out how the ritual works, and can we have any use for it?