The Coffin Club

I will not fall in love with the sea like Captain Nicholas Flagg. Mother has forbade me from sharing in the same love of the sea as my father. She was right and I was foolish and I will go home and she will chide me and I will say "I am so sorry I did not listen, mother" and she will hug me with tears in her eyes and it will all be wonderful. I will go to the school we have decided on, find a husband, bear him many sons, build a home together. They will ask me of the summer I spent with my father and I will never, ever tell them of what we did. His name will be a distant memory. As we sit here I can see the gears turning in his head. Father defines himself by his worth. Not his income, not his possessions, but a more esoteric thing, a je ne sais quois that he feels makes himself important. He will have a story to share, one that earns him sympathy, even empathy. But these are not worth. He hides it well but he is my father and I am clever. He has already decided there will be another boat. It does not matter if we survive this. He has made up his mind. So be it. There is only so much ocean, only so many sailors. There is this island and there is me and him and the sea. Somewhere out there are all of the dead and the wreck of the Isabel. I have made up my own mind. Because I am a girl I know I am not supposed to speak my thoughts aloud. I hold them close to my heart unless a man asks, and he will never ask, because he wishes to protect me, even though I am here because of him. I have decided that if he returns to this line of work, I may never forgive him. My worth will be of my own measure. And I will never fall in love with the sea like Captain Nicholas Flagg. https://bullypulpitgames.itch.io/desperation https://thecoffin.club

They asked if they could come and speak to me, and so I set the table for the four of us. Spent the day cleaning the house, getting everything in order, had food delivered (nothing fancy, just a roast chicken from the place down the road and all sorts of sides). The three of them were so nervous sitting at the table with me, I almost forgot to eat. The tension was palpable; they didn't quite know what to make of me. I scared them. I relished it dearly, just in case this was the end of my little game. I was the top of their list. An anomaly. A red flag, highest possible danger. Little old me. Can you believe it? I was clever, but I was outnumbered by people who knew what to look for. Someone who can access juvenile medical records, someone tied into the legal system, someone who knew how to connect the dots on the east and west coast. It's not ever day a girl gets given the treatment and respect she deserves. So I came clean. Yes, you've got me. The executioner of Forest Glen, a person of interest in assorted cases along the Pacific coast, someone in the periphery of misfortune and misery as I got what I wanted. They told me what they thought I wanted and I laughed. Why would I want that? I have my life, my rules, my honor, my game. That repulsed the youngest one, she had to excuse herself. The other two found their voices and made their pitch: if I joined them, I would know more. About the things I still dreamed about, deep within my loveless heart, the mystery of the world that captivated me as a girl. The beautiful thing out in the sea would be mine to understand. How could I ever pass up such a reward? Once again, I remain unpunished. Once again, my game continues. This time I had other players. https://thecoffin.club

It took longer than I'd like to admit to decrypt the Witch's notes and even then they weren't the most clarifying. Nance had been an assistant until he was on the wrong side of the ritual, and they had been working for decades with no real rhyme or reason. It wasn't until I brought others in on the secret that I started to get it. They believed they could get what they wanted through sacrifice and they had high hopes. The notes were riddled with inarticulate racist screeds, paranoid doctrines, petty delusions, manic hopes. They had theories and hypotheses and experiments. More organized than I wanted them to be, to the detriment of everyone around them. It was interesting, inexcusable work; they were testing responses, seeing what could or couldn't be given to them. I don't know what caused the Witch and Nance to come to odds, but once Nance was out of the picture it was clear the goals became more desperate, more sloppy, leading me to him and to his death. I sat on it for another 15 years. Isn't that funny? To keep it all inside for 34 years of my life. I was 42 when I told someone else and it was a woman I met at a gay bar. I told her less than a year after meeting her. Yet that still just broke a seal. It demystified something forbidden. And it lead to a new purpose: community pillar by day, scholar by night, surrounded by three other women. A piece of my heart, even if she never returned my advances, by my side. A protégé who helped us all realize our potential. An asset embedded in the community, watchful, patient, lethally clever. We all believed in the purpose of containing the knowledge, up until we started to see what holding it back was costing the world. https://thecoffin.club

On a good day, I was their protégé and they were my teachers. On a bad day, I was their pet and they were my owners. I didn't really care one way or another, the work was important and I never really cared for other people. Maybe in some part of my heart I hoped they saw me as their daughter. Seeing as how this all shook out...they eventually disabused me of that notion. I disappeared from the world. They funded my transition, my new identity, my studies, my work for them. A history student can access a lot of materials without raising a brow. Put together a historiography of the Bay, looked at surveys, maps, stories. Why did nobody else know about this? Why did a teenage boy with a spectrograph get a community killed and the NSA, with all their fancy toys, had no idea? Mysteries abounded, deeper, ever deeper. I became their pet scholar, their witness. I figured out who else would know. I probed, confirmed, helped construct a threat dossier. In 2012 we held a sort of convention. All the threats in one place to be assessed, weighed, measured. I did not attend; the three of them wanted to consider the targets without my immediate bias. And I was busy with moving to the island facility. We had to consolidate everything we had and ensure it could hold enemies and witnesses. The first night in Flagg House I couldn't sleep. Found myself sitting on scrubby, shitty shore in the twilight, bare feet dipped in the shifting tides, smoking a cigarette. It was there, and it was real, and I would be its neighbor until the day I died. A part of me was tired of the loneliness and compartmentalizing, and I decided. If we were to be neighbors, maybe we should learn more about each other. And so I put out my cigarette in the sand, took off my dress and waded out into the surf. https://thecoffin.club

Picture this: it's 1998 and everyone thinks you're an asshole for thinking better things are possible. Strike that: they think you're an asshole for thinking they should be better and wanting to say something about it. You're doing this because you're just boiling in your own anger and you don't even feel good about it. Because you saw that man throw everything away he promised in 1992 and now it's 1998 and he got caught with his dick out and is gonna get away with it. All the campaigning and politicking and theory for what? After the 80s, you could've had anything if you stuck to your guns, and your biggest political allies threw it all away for paychecks with another zero. It's 1998 and it's vapid. The decade has been aimless. You dodged Don't Ask Don't Tell being implemented because you've been out of the game for a while, and it's all your service branch friends want to talk about, and you're tired of it. You all went on that queer veteran march together, heads held high and voices raised. One of the greatest nights of your life. This political news shall pass. But nobody wants to focus on the future. Just the now. The money going up, the newest TV shows, the hottest movies. It's over and your country won and by proxy you won and who cares if you're happy. It's 1998 and she walks into the bar and maybe there's something good in this decade. She's a doctor, she's educated, she's funny and witty and you share the same politics. You swap CDs and books and enrich each other's worlds; she takes you to the theater, you take her to wrestling. The two of you are like magnesium and aluminum and when you hold hands you could burn together forever. She wants to make the world better. She's seen things too. Maybe you could improve the world together as a couple but she never says anything about that so you don't either. It's 1998 and she wants to tell you about a secret. A weird secret. You gotta keep an open mind. But it's her. So you will. https://thecoffin.club

I don't know why they never said anything about me. I think that at the end of the day they were either afraid or ashamed. Afraid of what I'd do or say. Ashamed at the fact that I did their dirty work and they couldn't take responsibility. We never coordinated a response, I never had to say anything to them, they all came to the same conclusion independent of each other: the young ones get away clean. Maybe they thought I'd grow up to atone, make amends, fling that light into the future. Prove what we believed in was true. The truth is, if it came down to me or them, I'd pick myself any time. Not to say I don't appreciate their sacrifice. It just wasn't needed. They moved me out of state, thought it best if I go somewhere else. The dice landed on Portland. The Millers were good folks: bohemian, stable jobs, never had a daughter before me. They tried their best. I learned what people expected of little girls, and I conformed. It was helpful. Instructive. Experience is a great educator. What Forest Glen taught me was that if you make a mistake, you learn from it. Get caught? Have a plan. Need to do it? Don't need permission if you don't get caught. If you give them what they expect, they don't look deeper. There was plenty to learn, before and after college, all the way up until I moved back to Brindlewood Bay. And I was an eager student. https://thecoffin.club

I kept my own separate notes during the investigation, and from 1979 to 1983 I would imagine the man I called the Witch of November. This was not the man who took Donna; he was Christopher Nance, and he had an extensive history. Veteran of Korea, long-time resident of NYC, roving working man. Publicly, the authorities assumed he took Donna out of some twisted desire for revenge or to make a point. He made for a perfect scapegoat, too easy an answer. Privately, when I autopsied him and involved myself in the investigation, the authorities had screwed up and knew it. They assumed he took Donna into the woods. We should have thought to look to the bay. I had been expanding my horizons, becoming more cultural and worldly as a student is wont to do, and was struck by this failure and the grim truth that the sea never gives up her dead. His body had been put on display with markings and cuttings. And Nance had been found before Thanksgiving. Hence, the Witch of November. Though I never said it aloud to them. What a strange, sad hope I had at the time. I didn't try to get my parents on board, I kept it all to myself. All I had was the work, my studies, music and the desperate fear I might never recognize Donna if she had been alive all these years. In May of 1983 I put her memory to rest for good, along with three bullets in the head of the Witch of November, his body in the bay, and everything he owned in a locker. He was in no state to answer my questions. I had to do my own research. https://thecoffin.club

In retrospect it was a power play. They wanted to humiliate me and force me to back down. I probably should have listened. But what's done is done.The two of them invited me back to her house, made me dinner, opened wine, lovely evening until it wasn't. I really thought I was being propositioned by the two of them and pillow talk would be folk tales and history books. They brought me to the library after dinner and told me to tell them everything and I did. That's likely what saved my life.It was 2009. I was working on my senior thesis, history major, lit minor, and the East Coast is steeped in so much unrecognized history. It saturates everything and it just becomes normalized or forgotten. I'd heard about the Chimera from a niche corner of New England historians who were convinced it was the unsung inspiration of Innsmouth. There was too much different, but I gambled and researched and read the Testament and that got me hooked. I dug deeper and here I was, full of veal parmigiana and good wine and grand ideas.They got quiet and shared a look and that's when the questions began. Who knew I was here? How close was I to other people? Do I have my thesis on me, do my teachers know, etc. etc. Not subtle in the slightest. I felt the sobriety crest inside of me and I braced myself in my chair and managed to find my voice and I said...I wanted to know more. I could keep quiet, I could change my paper, but I needed to know more. They were a doctor and an advocate; a humanities perspective couldn't hurt. And if I followed the breadcrumbs, and they felt this strongly, maybe someone else did.They smiled. Sure? Why not. Let's keep a secret between us girls (I hate this is what endeared me to them so much). See if you can't be useful. https://thecoffin.club

We left Kaserne that afternoon and went down into Wiesbaden-Erbenheim. They'd made the mistake of paying us that weekend, we were sick and tired of drinks on the base, and enough of us knew how to solve for X. Climbed into the back of a passing motorist's truck and within a half hour we were trying Old World lager for the first time. Funny enough? I don't have a taste for it.O'Malley must've seen the way I was looking at the bartender. When the conversation was quiet enough, and he found his courage, he asked the whole table if they thought I was "a queer". Phrased it like that. Fuckhead. He saw the way I paused a little too long and gave me this grin. So downed the rest of my beer and said "Of course I am, your mom kisses your forehead with the same mouth she uses to lick my lips". That got him real pissed, especially when Fieldman accused me of fucking goats, on account of the lineage of O'Malley's mother. But god bless him he saved my ass with that and we all laughed and carried on like the grand ol' finest of the U.S.A.About a week later I crept up on O'Malley, pulled a bag over his head and whipped his ass until he begged me to stop. Didn't see me coming, off the cameras, wore gloves, whole nine yards. Shame he took it out on Fieldman with the military police. Meant I had to hit him again until he rescinded the incident. https://thecoffin.club

Mr. Isaacs got a radio with a satellite dish and everything and Roger asked if I wanted to see it. Said he had something cool to show me. Didn't sound like it was cool. Daddy said Roger's a good-for-nothing like his old man but what does he know, all he does is sit by the TV and listen to the pastor and agree with him. Momma says I gotta think for myself so I did and I went over to Roger's house and he showed me how you can make pictures out of radio waves, it's like how bats can see in the dark.And it was so beautiful.And Roger was so scared.I don't know why he was scared, seeing a thing like that, but he started crying. Mr. Isaacs didn't believe him, he showed him the picture and everything, but he talked to Dougie Montgomery and Markie Shipman and Betsy West and they all understood, they all saw it too. What're we gonna do, what're we gonna do, it's the end of the world. How's the bunker under Forest Glen gonna stop that, daddy doesn't have big enough guns. Blah blah boo hoo.Maybe the world ends. Maybe it doesn't. It's all just a game. All I know is that Roger Isaacs' radio showed me something amazing and real and true and if Momma and Daddy don't believe me, then heck with them, maybe I can do something about it. https://thecoffin.club

They recovered what they could from her backpack. It was torn to ribbons, everything inside ruined by water. They kept it all as evidence, but we knew it was useless. She'd disappeared into the hills around the bay with that man and I knew we'd never see her again. Not like I didn't mourn. We all did. A traditional burial. Mom wanted an urn for the churchyard but Grandpa was firm. We held the funeral on the third day after they found the backpack, people came. No eulogy for Donna. It's tradition. I said something quiet under my breath and that was that. She would've been 33 by the time I entered medical school. Fifteen years without my sister. Funny how you get used to it. We just didn't talk about her anymore. And then suddenly we did again. When that man turned up dead and they found him on the trail where they lost her. When they pulled me aside and asked if I knew anything. And when I asked if I could help and they said yes. https://thecoffin.club

Refusal to change is a powerful motivator. When the people of the INZ were denied a chance at defining themselves, it made the relationship between the nation and the UCC crystal clear. There are whispers in the streets of Walltown, there are meetings in the back rooms of warehouses in Tower Hill, the shows of Ticketton are leaning more and more political, strangers local and international move through the Underground and Westanchor. Tensions are rising in the INZ. Only time will tell if the pot settles or boils over. But there will come a resolution to the question of occupation or independence. https://thecoffin.club

Decades after the collapse of Icarus and the ensuing wars, the Icaran Neutral Zone is occupied by its neighboring nations. One part colonial military government, one part philanthropic action, one part economic experiment, the INZ is a nation of people who do not control their borders, their laws and their enforcement, their industry. That does not mean the country is dead and buried; far from it. The brushes of other nations, the paint of the INZ, the colors of its people, all of these will paint a different picture. Something that wants to be self-sufficient, something new, something built on the bones of old history, national grudges, wars, theology and long-neglected magic. Change is hard, but can start with a single spark. https://thecoffin.club

The arc of history is longer than you think, its weight heavier than you ever expect. Icarus will never be the Empire that birthed it; its ambitions run contrary to its dead progenitor's, its intent safer, its people working for all and accepting of its neighbors. Something good is not good forever. There must be maintenance done to ensure it endures. Icarus is what happens when the work of prevention is put off for too long, when the traditions run too deep, when you reach such wondrous heights and forget the foundations beneath you. Icarus will fall. See where it lands. https://thecoffin.club

About a decade after the events of The Student Body and The Daughter of the Knife, the Empire finds itself in a conundrum. The war on the Eastern Front continues apace with production of zauberpanzers, monstrous weapons and soldier mages, their industry of magic and terror unmatched, unthreatened. But a new enemy has coalesced to the south, the margins of logistics too thin to redirect anything towards them, and many fronts is how an empire falls. Five high-ranking officers of the Experimental Weapons Division are given carte blanche to create a new weapon to push back the southern soldiers, secure the border and further the grasp of the nation. They don't realize their choices will echo into consequences and history they could never anticipate in the war to come and years beyond. https://thecoffin.club