Years ago, Adam Scott Glancy wrote a 13,000-word novella in the form of a series of emails from a Delta Green operative code-named “Graham” to his handler, “Alphonse.” Agent Graham was investigating a disappearance in New Orleans and his team slowly uncovered inhuman horrors — and then began uncovering them far too quickly for their own good.
This was a classic Delta Green operation, with good men and women struggling to hold everything together in the face of overwhelming terrors and threats. These are the descendants in spirit of the federal agents who lanced the boil of Innsmouth in 1928 — but Delta Green agents don’t have the luxury of ignorance. They know there’s more going on than just one town’s corruption. And sooner or later they realize that overcoming these threats that may be far beyond the best they can do.
Since our Unspeakable Oath subscription drive passed its first milestone, Scott and I are revisiting “Down in the Delta,” editing and updating it and preparing it for a new publication. We’ll send it free to all Oath subscribers and to everyone who bought The Unspeakable Oath 22 by itself. We have more great material planned for the next milestones.
Here’s an glimpse of the work in progress.
April 26, 20XX
10:12am
Alphonse,
These guys just screwed the pooch big time.
We ran the plates on the cars and the van, and the property records for the warehouse. The cars are owned by four different corporations, I’ve already got Wu’s people at FinCen running that down, but I know where it’s going to end up: some shell corporation in the Grand Caymans with nothing more than a brass plate on the door, a secretary and a telex number. Last I heard there were so many paper corporations down there that they had more telex numbers than people.
We found the corporation that holds the title on the warehouse, but just in case we thought we ought to check back through the previous titleholders. After all, if these things have been hanging around since the early 1700s, they probably held the deeds themselves for a while before deciding to hide behind walls of incorporation. Land records just aren’t something you can easily alter. All kinds of realty companies keep their own records, especially the petroleum companies. Land isn’t just land in Louisiana, it’s oil.
And here’s where we struck oil.
Agent Garret traced the chain of ownership back to the King of France. Along the way he ran into a few names that didn’t mean a thing to us, but he noted them all, just the same. Here’s one that sticks out.
Nancy King.
Didn’t mean a thing to me either, but that intel program Wu got us from Langley thought it looked familiar. I’ve been dumping stuff into it ever since this thing got started, trying to see if the same names, addresses and whatnot turned up in two different databases. Like cross-referencing the De La Cruz transcripts with Father Marks’ files with what we’ve picked up. When we fed Nancy King into it, it started throwing out matches.
Check that genealogy website that Father Marks had visited.
http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/la/orleans/death_epid.htm
specifically this page-
http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/la/orleans/deaths/yellow/1878ijkl.txt
Nancy King died at the age of three months on October 28, 1878. She then went on to buy that warehouse on Tchapitoulas in February of 1927.
I’ve sent Agent Gillian to chase down the rest of the names through the birth, death and probate court records, but I bet I’ll know what we’ll find. Soviet illegals used the birth certificates and social security numbers of dead infants ever since the 1940s. That sorcerer in San Antonio was using the same technique to cover his immortality, passing his inheritance to himself by impersonating a string of dead kids for something like four hundred years.
And that’s not all.
Remember those fake cops who paid Dolores De La Cruz a visit just before her heart attack? Det. Sgt. John Hagan and Det. Sgt. Charles Eishold? Just for shits and grins we ran them too.
John Hagan died August 14,1853 of yellow fever at the age of 32 and his bones would be in St. Patrick’s cemetery if these things hadn’t eaten his corpse. Eishold. died August 24, 1853 from yellow fever at the age of 38, buried in Lafayette cemetery.
Using the names and the faces of their dinners was a mistake. Who knows? Maybe they’ll make some more.
I’m going to need a couple hundred K more worth of surveillance gear or we’re going to get spotted. We particularly need more remote tracers. There’s too many of these things to keep track of and there’s too few of us. I don’t want any more agents in here. It’s already getting crowded.
We’re zeroing in on them Alphonse. Just a couple more weeks of surveillance and we’ll have enough intel so that the strike teams can exterminate these things.
Be Seeing You,
Agent Graham
P.S. No, they didn’t show up as monsters on the thermal or the film we shot of them. So that won’t help to identify them. On the plus side, at least they have body heat. I hate freaking zombies. With this voodoo shit floating around I suppose it’s just a matter of time.