Call Of Cthulhu - Secrets Of The ...

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Secrets of the
Kremlin
by E.S. Erkes
INTRODUCTION
found none. The cable had struck him like a hammer
blow in the night. Unexpected stories begin
unexpectedly.
The material presented in this story is designed
specifically for use with "Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium
Inc's fantasy role-playing game of the macabre, based
on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, by permission of
Arkham House.
THE TUNNELS
The real beginning of the story had occurred about half
a year earlier, when Soviet construction workers were
excavating a portion of Red Square for the permanent
Lenin mausoleum. Almost immediately after his death
in 1924, Lenin had been interred in a temporary
wooden structure on the square; Soviet planners had
the intention of constructing a permanent stone
mausoleum for him on the site, and work began in the
late summer of 1928. During the digging for the
foundation of the monument, in September of that
year, workers came upon a network of secret tunnels
running beneath the Square, extending deep into the
earth even under the Kremlin. Although many such
underground passages had been known to exist, this
network was entirely new to the modern world; these
tunnels, and the chambers that adjoined them, were
significantly deeper and more remote than any other
known Kremlin passages. They had been unseen, as
far as anyone could determine, since the late 1500s.
They dated from the era of Ivan IV ("the Terrible").
They had been sealed up after Ivan's death, for
reasons unknown.
The primary purpose of the information presented
here, although it is loosely based on historical facts, is
dramatic and any similarity of events or the major
characters to persons alive or dead is purely
coincidental.
This story is designed to allow the Keeper of Arcane
Knowledge (Keeper) to stage an adventure for the
Players. Narrative descriptions and specific time lines
mesh easily together to form a living backdrop against
which the Players will act out their drama. Ultimate
presentation, however, is entirely at the Keepers
discretion. Use this story in any way you see fit.
Keepers are urged to photocopy the various pages
contained in this story and hand them out at
appropriate times.
BACKGROUND
Alexei Samsonov, who had achieved the rank of Major
in the Red Army and would soon reach Colonel, sat
relaxing in a small, private beerhall; in spite of its size it
was the finest in all Berlin. The two men at the table
with him were also officers, but they wore the uniform
of the German Reichswehr. They had been drinking
freely. They were not talking about their work. They
were in too pleasant a mind to talk about their work,
and it was forbidden anyway. The two men in
Reichswehr uniforms asked him playfully to describe
the girl they had seen on the Alexanderplatz, using
Ancient Greek, and Samsonov replied that he would
be glad to do so, but that he would first have to decline
a certain noun in all its forms; he did not see his
adjutant behind him until the man whispered in his ear.
The most significant of the discoveries in these tunnels
was of the half-legendary, so-called "Lost Library of
Ivan the Terrible." This small chamber contained the
rarest of the books and manuscripts evacuated from
Constantinople during its fall to the Turks in 1453.
Included in this trove was a copy of the Necronomicon
in its Greek translation.
Josef Stalin, at that time consolidating his absolute rule
over the Soviet Union, immediately recognized the
value of the book; he had heard whispers of it in the
superstitious backcountry of his native Georgia. He
had all the archeologists who had discovered the book
while cataloguing the library shot; the entire
construction team that had found the tunnels was sent
en masse to concentration camps north of the Arctic
Circle. He needed someone to translate the book into
Russian. Stalin would have preferred that the book be
translated into Georgian, his first language, so that the
translation could not be understood by the native
Russians around him; but he did not trust the scholars
of his native land. Nor did he trust any other scholars,
and when someone in his secret police mentioned a
Red Army officer who was fluent in Greek, Stalin
ordered the man brought to the Kremlin immediately.
The officer, Alexei Samsonov, was working with the
German Reichswehr in Berlin on a secret training
mission. Stalin had him replaced, and installed
Samsonov in an office in the Kremlin, where he
worked on the translation. Stalin, characteristically,
intended to have Samsonov shot after he completed
the work, but circumstances intervened: The officer
translated a significant portion of the book before
losing his mind.
"Immediately?" said Samsonov out loud, in Russian.
Several people in the hall, hearing the word in the
unfamiliar language, turned to look at him.
"Da," said the adjutant impassively.
When Samsonov reached his room another attaché
was there, and handed him the cabled message. For
all its importance, the order had not even been coded:
RETURN TO MOSCOW IMMEDIATELY, it said. He
glanced at the upper right corner of the message,
where its point of origin was imprinted in neat black
letters, and knew that there could be no mistake.
"Draft a message for our hosts," he said to the attaché,
and tottered slightly, putting a hand to the heavy table
before him to steady himself. He felt the drunkenness
leave him like a spirit. Why did they want him? He
searched his mind for failures, for improprieties - he
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© 2002 TOC [www.tentacules.net]
Secrets of the Kremlin
PLAN OF THE KREMLIN
1. Borovitsky Tower
2. Vodozvodnaya Tower
3. Blagoveshchenskaya Tower
4. Taynitskaya Tower
5. First Bezimyanaya Tower
6. Second Bezimyanaya Tower
7. Petrovskaya Tower
8. Moskvoretskaya Tower
9. Konstantino Eleninskaya Tower
10. Nabatnaya Tower
11. Tsarkaya Tower
12. Spasskaya Tower
13. Senatskaya Tower
14. Nikol'kaya Tower
15. Uglovaya Arsenalnaya Tower
16. Srednya Arsenalnaya Tower
17. Troitskaya Tower
18. Troitsky Bridge Tower
19. Kutafya Tower
20. Komendantskaya Tower
21. Oruzheinaya Tower
22. Kremlin Walls
23. Sobornaya Square
24. Uspensky Cathedral
25. Blagoveshchensky Cathedral
26. Rizpologen'e Cathedral
27. Granovitaya Palata
28. Archangel'sk Cathedral
29. Ivan the Great Bell-tower
30. Terem Palace
31. Vershospassky Cathedral
32. Cathedral of the Twelve
Apostles
33. Poteshnyi Palace
34. Arsenal
35. Old Senate
36. Old Armoury
37. Kremlin Grand Palace
38. Armoury
39. Czar-Cannon
40. Czar-Bell-tower
41. Old Cannons
42. Cannons captured from the
French Grande Armée in 1812
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© 2002 TOC [www.tentacules.net]
Secrets of the Kremlin
ALEKSANDROV
There seemed to be only one type of weather up here:
driving snowstorm. Aleksandrov looked back again,
but all he could see was the forms of several men
straining to pull thick chains. The withering snow cut
off vision at a point a few feet beyond the men, so that
Aleksandrov could not see what was on the other end
of the chains. He was grateful.
The men had been working without a break for hours,
but Aleksandrov did not want to stop now. Nor did the
men. The heavy physical labor took all their energy,
and they did not have to think about what they were
doing, and what they were doing it with. They were
actually on a downhill slope, not particularly steep, and
they could have let their burden simply roll on down
the mountain. But they did not. The image of whatever
it was they had chained up being out of control for any
length of time was more than they could bear; And so,
more from general agreement than any order or policy,
they had been dragging the thing on a zigzag,
sideways course down the mountain, like a slalom
skiing run. The men worked on. Someone called to
him.
He turned around. One of the soldiers was running up
to him. "The pass," was all he said.
Aleksandrov brought his binoculars up, peered down
the mountain, and saw nothing; the snow covered the
lenses right away. "Where?" he said, and spat snow.
"Right there," the man said, pointing directly below.
"Were right on top of it and didn't even know. It's a few
hundred yards down the mountain." There was a
panicked jubilation in the voice.
The pass. From there it was only a few miles to the
foot of the mountain where the trucks were waiting,
and from there only a hundred miles to the railway
spur that would take this thing to Moscow. Then they
could have it, if they wanted it so badly. So badly that
they couldn't wait for better weather. Aleksandrov had
turned them down - flatly, he had thought - until they
made it clear that this was not an order that could be
turned down. A direct command from the Big Man,
they said. Otherwise, it was "nine grams," they said,
and one of them held up the bullet for emphasis. More
than a few times on this mission, held wished held
allowed himself to be shot. But now its completion was
in sight.
"Hold up, men," he said. He had someone - in this
endless mass of white, he no longer thought of names
- bring out the radio. He had to tell somebody, to let
them know that held succeeded. At the higher
altitudes, the radio had been useless - whether
because of the storm, or the mountain, or, as
Aleksandrov had suspected but not told anyone, some
sort of interference from the thing itself, he did not
know. The soldier set up the radio. The storm was
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Secrets of the Kremlin
worse than ever - he could see nothing. Surprisingly,
he reached the contact station immediately.
replaced into areas where they could not see the Dark
Young.
He waited for a second, and then halfshouted into the
sender:
As the work progressed Stalin remained
characteristically unsatisfied. He saw it as his destiny
that he should come upon the private, secret tunnels of
Ivan the Terrible, whom he had already taken as a
virtual role-model. He was convinced, however, that
Ivan's tunnels held even greater secrets, in chambers
and passageways as yet undiscovered. He brought in
various Soviet authorities on the underground Kremlin,
but none could help. They were all shot. Then Stalin
learned that the greatest living scholar on the
subterranean Kremlin was one Evgeny Potapov, a
former professor at Moscow University in Tsarist days.
Potapov now lived as an émigré in Berlin.
"We have it."
And that was all. He held the sender tightly, gripping it
like a trophy.
As he was waiting for a reply, he felt his right foot get
entangled with one of the cords from the radio. But
when he looked down to shake it loose, he saw that it
was not a cord. He screamed, and wished they had
shot him.
THE DARK YOUNG
POTAPOV
Stalin read the Russian Necronomicon with great
interest. Although there was little of it he could
understand, he knew, as always, what he was looking
for. Eventually he found it. There was only one
reference in the book to the current territory of the
USSR: An area in the Pamir Mountains, near the
Chinese border, was mentioned in connection with the
worship of Shub-Niggurath . Stalin dispatched an
expedition to the Pamirs, led by the famed Soviet
mountaineer Vladimir Aleksandrov. After great loss of
life and sanity - Aleksandrov himself was killed - the
expedition captured a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath .
The children were out again.
Though Berlin was full of Russian émigrés (but not as
full as it once was), he was the only one on his street.
Potapov often despised his fellow expatriates with their
pointless, endless political arguments, their insipid
fantasies of the future. He lived apart from them by
choice. Potapov rarely regretted it; this was one of
those times.
He saw them, gathering at the mouth of an already
darkened alley. They had not yet seen him, but he
knew there was no way to avoid them. Turning around
so abruptly would surely attract their attention. "Their"
ally was at a point roughly perpendicular to his
apartment and where he was now. Potapov quickened
his pace, hoping they wouldn't notice until he was
close to his front door. But as usual, luck was not with
him.
The Dark Young - with its mouthed ropy tentacles, its
unearthly physiological configuration, its ungodly
secretions - was impossible to sanely look at for long.
For most people, that is, but not Stalin, who looked
upon everything - even cosmic horrors - with a view to
what personal political advantages it would have for
him. Stalin, using a secret entrance in the rear of the
newly-built Lenin Mausoleum, had the thing lowered to
the largest of the newfound "Ivan" rooms, where it was
to be kept until all it's secrets had been extracted from
it. For the survivors of the expedition, Stalin had only
one reward; they were imprisoned in another sub-
Kremlin dungeon, in case they might reveal something
else of importance about the creature.
He was striding forward, looking straight ahead, when
he heard the first shout of "Russ," elongated
contemptuously as Rooooos. This was their main
derisive term for him and they yelled it gleefully, as if
he were supposed to be aggrieved by being called
what he was, a Russian. What sort of people were
these?
An immensely pragmatic man above all else, Stalin put
his scientists to work on finding practical applications
for the discovery. He instructed a team of chemists
under the leadership of the ex-pharmacist Genrikh
Yagoda (soon to head the entire Soviet secret police)
to work on synthesizing solvents, acids, and poisons
from the unusual secretions from the monster's skin.
When problems appeared, Stalin would apply the most
brutal and direct solutions. When the creature showed
a definite taste for human flesh and grew listless
without it, Stalin had the population of several insane
asylums transported to dungeons beneath the Kremlin
to serve as a ready food supply. When ordinary secret
police and Red Army personnel could not guard it
without going insane from the sight of it, Stalin had
blind Army veterans brought in to do the task. Stalin
moved chemists and other personnel who could not be
Here they were in front of him already, screeching and
howling. For children of such an allegedly civilized
race, they were dressed in little more than rags. They
spoke to him in their ugly Berlin dialect, still
indecipherable to him after a decade. How he hated
them.
"Go back to your mothers," he said to them in German,
but the thickness of his accent set them off again.
"Rooooos, Rooooos," they chirped. They had not
physically attacked him - yet. That he attributed only to
their age; the oldest in the group could not be more
than eleven. But they followed him, jumping to within
inches of him, screaming in his ear. He waved them
away with a sweep of the hand, but they came right
back. "Roooooooooos!"
Secrets of the Kremlin © T.O.M.E.
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© 2002 TOC [www.tentacules.net]
Secrets of the Kremlin
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