The Weight of Truth (1:00 AM, August 28th, 1930)

The early hours of the 28th of August brought no respite for the survivors of the Miskatonic University expedition. Gathered within the sterile, gore-splattered confines of the geology lab in the Science Annex, Professor Lilian Neill, Teddy Harris, Sofia Picado, and Peter Goodman were forced to reconcile with a reality far more terrifying than the violence they had just witnessed. As Sofia’s shoulder wound was miraculously sealed by a strange, alien device that emitted a “knitting gel,” the group listened to the chilling testimony of the entity inhabiting Clarissa Thurber’s body.

The being, identifying itself as “Wesley Smith,” spoke with a level-headed coherence that was more disturbing than any manic outburst. He confirmed the impossible: the Mi-Go are real, hailing from a waystation on the ninth planet, and they possess the technology to swap human brains into metal cylinders as easily as one might change a disposable blade on a razor handle. The oddities that had plagued their return—Harry Higgins’ sudden German accent, the surgical precision of the mutilated library books, and the uncanny behaviour of their peers—finally coalesced into a single, terrifying conspiracy.

A Campus in Hysteria

Outside the lab, the sound of a dull explosion signalled that the Mi-Go agents were not yet finished. The group faced a desperate choice: intervene at the Orne Library or pursue the agents to a secret safe house Wesley revealed was located on Aylesbury Pike. Driven by a cold fury, Teddy Harris stood over the cowering Wesley, his shovel still dripping with the “wet, meaty” remains of Lewis Gibbons, wordlessly demanding the details of their rendezvous point.

Wesley, visibly cowed by Teddy’s murderous intensity, sketched a rough map of a rundown, two-story farmhouse two miles out the pike, hidden deep within a wooded driveway. As Professor Learmonth retreated to the safety of his locked office, the investigators commandeered an expedition truck, loading it with a grim arsenal of survival gear, jerry cans of gasoline, stolen sticks of dynamite and a bound “Wesley”.

As the shutters of the garage rose, the group was greeted by a scene of absolute pandemonium. Something unseen was stripping the faculty and students of their inhibitions and social conditioning. The investigators witnessed the Dean of Students, Marinus Bricknell, streaking naked across the quad with wild eyes, while others engaged in public brawls or climbed trees to rain branches down on the screaming crowds. The air was thick with the scent of fresh vegetation burning, a sensory precursor to the destruction awaiting them at the heart of the university.

The Burning of the Stacks

The truck roared toward the Orne Library, only to find the historic building already disgorging thick, black plumes of smoke into the moonlight. In front of the flickering flames stood a dishevelled Dr. Henry Armitage, a pistol trembling in his hand. Armitage, his clothes smudged by char, confirmed the investigators’ worst fears: the agents had breached the Restricted Collection, retrieving or incinerating rare tomes and occult records before fleeing in a black car.

“Go,” Armitage urged, his voice cracking as he looked back at the burning library. “Retrieve the books. I must protect what remains”. With a screech of tires, Sofia executed a frantic turn through the campus crossroads, tearing up the grass as she gunned the engine toward the Aylesbury Pike.

The Pursuit to Aylesbury Pike

The drive was a blur of adrenaline and mechanical strain. Following a black Buick that was barely a half-mile ahead, Sofia pushed the heavy truck to its limits, cutting through garden hedges and clipping a chicken coop to maintain speed as the agents attempted to disappear into the darkness. Peter Goodman, leveraging his knowledge of the local hunting grounds, guided Sofia through the tree-lined, unlit turns.

As they approached the farmhouse, the Sofia extinguished the headlights and allowed the truck to coast silently into the shadows of the woods, a hundred yards from the target. The house loomed before them, a derelict wooden structure with boarded-up ground floor windows and a single, dull light flickering from an upper-story dormer.

Horror at the Treeline

The investigators divided their forces, moving through the trees to encircle the house. The humid night air was suddenly punctuated by a searing beam of electricity that arced through the trees, ground-level and horizontal, narrowly missing Teddy and Sofia. The smell of burnt wood and ozone filled the clearing as the flash momentarily illuminated the silhouetted shape of an observer in the darkness.

While Teddy and Sophia moved toward the back of the property, Professor Lilian Neill and Peter Goodman cautiously approached the black Buick parked near the entrance. Peter, peering through the rear window, was met with a jarring sight: the figure of Harry Higgins—whom he had seen fall in the cemetery only hours before—stared back at him, holding a leveled firearm. Peter recoiled, but when he looked again, the seat was empty. 

This unsettling incident was like watching the surface of a still pond ripple when there is no wind; it provided undeniable evidence that something was present and active, even if the investigators’ eyes were not equipped to see it.

Amidst this tension, Teddy Harris’s fragile mental state shattered once more. He became fixated on a hallucination—believing he saw his research notebook in flames on the forest floor. Ignoring Sofia’s warnings, he charged into the woods, bodily slamming into a mass he believed was a person. He began flailing wildly with his shovel, hacking at the muck and detritus in a catatonic-yet-conscious frenzy. When the “red mist” finally cleared, there was no fire, no notebook, and no victim—only the sound of a distanced, organic buzzing emanating from the house.

Lilian, having slipped into the car to search for the keys, found the cabin abandoned and the ignition empty. As she crouched low, she witnessed the impossible: the heavy front door of the farmhouse creaked open. A faint, dull light from the second floor spilled out onto the porch, revealing nothing but the humid night air. Seconds later, the door swung shut and clicked into place, though no physical form had crossed the threshold. This unsettling display of the unseen was a chilling reminder that their adversaries possessed ways of moving through the world that remained entirely beyond human perception.

The Skyward Exodus

Determined to end the threat, Peter Goodman and Sofia Picado saturated the boarded walls of the farmhouse with gasoline. As Peter arced a lit match into the fuel, the dry timber erupted into a wall of blue and orange flame.

The response was instantaneous. A violent crashing sound echoed from the roof as the buzzing intensified into a deafening roar. As the investigators retreated toward the treeline, they watched in paralysed awe as seven or eight dark, winged shapes burst through the roof of the burning building. The moonlight caught the glint of metal in their claws; the creatures were carrying the silver brain cylinders. The “Masters” took flight in a calculated beeline toward the north, leaving the farmhouse as souls leaving a funereal pyre.

The Grisly Discovery

In the following days, the university attempted to dismiss the campus hysteria as a mass case of “peculiar food poisoning”. However, the truth could not be so easily buried. When the fire department finally cleared the charred remains of the Aylesbury farmhouse, they made a grisly discovery that the press struggled to describe.

The searchers recovered the bodies of five individuals, only the investigators certain of their identities: Professor Harold, Jason Trent, Terrence Laszlo (the agent Jarvis), and William Noakes. The fifth body was identified as Harry Higgins, who appeared to have been shot in the head prior to the fire. Most horrific was the condition of the remaining corpses; the initial reports of decapitation were corrected to reveal that the tops of their heads had been surgically removed and their brains were missing. It became clear that the Mi-Go had not merely fled; they had completed their harvest, taking the consciousness of their agents with them.

What about “Clarissa”?

Wesley had aided them and that had put him in danger. The Mi-Go were not forgiving, but he was at a loss for how to get away from them. He agreed to a final sit down with the investigators, Dr. Armitage and Prof. Learmonth. He retold all he knew, Armitage listening intently. They gathered some money for Wesley and urged him to flee. Who know’s how long he might evade the ‘Masters’?

Abelard’s Generosity

In the wake of the tragedy, Federated Oil and Chemical (FOC) acted with speed. Michael Abelard made a sizeable donation to the university to help rebuild the Orne Library, effectively silencing any official inquiry into the strange events of late August.

Just days before the start of the autumn semester, each of the four investigators received a letter in their university pigeonholes or to their dorms. The message, signed by a man named Leon Pasqualle, was brief and carried the weight of a command: “Mr. Abelard would like to meet you. I will make contact in the coming days”.

The investigators had survived the Mi-Go’s occupation of Miskatonic University and now had an invitation from one of the world’s most powerful corporation on their desks. This semester promised to be like no other.

Postscript: Concerning the Ultimate Disposition of the Entity Known as “Wesley”

The withdrawal of the being that named itself Wesley Smith remains the most disquieting epilogue to the Miskatonic disturbances. Following a night of strained vigilance under Professor Lillian Neill, and after prolonged, exhaustive interrogations conducted by Dr. Henry Armitage, the intelligence inhabiting the appropriated form of Clarissa Thurber appeared to falter. It spoke not with the menace of a servitor of alien powers, but with the exhausted sorrow of something wrenched from its proper century—claiming a life abruptly arrested in the year 1880, and burdened by more than fifty years of enforced dislocation. In that final state it seemed less an infiltrator than a ruin: a consciousness eroded by time, misuse, and proximity to immensities it could neither name nor escape.

At Dr. Armitage’s recommendation—he judged that the shattered mind had yielded all knowledge it possessed—the investigators permitted the entity’s departure. Its sole petition was pitiably modest: to abandon Arkham entirely, to efface itself within anonymity, and to endure whatever remnant of existence remained to it beyond the notice of the “Masters,” whom it described with a terror too deep for elaboration. It expressed the forlorn hope that a single, defective instrument might be beneath their regard.

The enigma of its fate commenced only days after its last recorded sighting, when it was observed proceeding alone along the Aylesbury Pike. A groundskeeper later reported an encounter among the collapsed timbers of a colonial homestead long erased from local memory—a property archival records associate with a Smith family in the latter nineteenth century. There he observed a young woman answering Clarissa Thurber’s description standing utterly motionless amidst the ruins. She appeared to seek nothing. She only wept, emitting a sound the witness likened, with evident distress, to “the dry rattle of an old man’s throat struggling for breath.”

Several weeks thereafter, hikers in the outer reaches of the Aylesbury woods made a discovery of singular unease. Upon a weathered stump lay Clarissa Thurber’s university blazer, folded with an exactitude suggestive of ritual rather than habit. Within its pocket was found a final message, scrawled in a trembling, antiquated script:

The hum has returned. It is not in the air, but in the marrow. They do not abandon their tools; they merely set them down.

No corporeal trace of Clarissa Thurber—or of the mind that called itself Wesley Smith—was ever recovered. Yet even now, there persist among the students of Miskatonic certain whispered assertions: that on oppressive nights, when the air grows thick with ozone and the campus seems to wait in breathless anticipation, a faint, rhythmic vibration may be heard drifting across the quadrangle—suggestive not of machinery, but of a colloquy conducted in cadences and meanings never intended for human apprehension.

Until next time,

Owen