Red-Eye to Burbank
April 19-20, 1974 | Friday-Saturday
Michael
Before Archie leaves for the airport and for Los Angeles on Friday evening, George Washington has sent over to him (through a convenient cut-out address or a courier meeting Archie at SFO) a sheaf of about 20 Xeroxed notebook pages. In the accompanying note, Washington says, "Archie: to give you something to chew on regarding our conversation today, I give you (a copy of) the Last Testament of Carl Irving Wheat. One of the Clampers by Carl's deathbed took notes on his delirium-induced ravings. None of us understood at the time, but over the past eight years, its meaning has only become more and more clear. But I have a feeling you may be able to glean even more from it. I hope we can continue to correspond on this and other matters of import to our brotherhood. I hope you'll join us at the Clampout in June for your full induction as a brother member. Yours, G.W."
(I'm not going to write out the entire 20-page transcription of Carl Wheat's deathbed ramblings, but I think it makes sense to abstract out the information-gathering to two rolls: one Intelligence Analysis-18 to make sense of the document and then one Hidden Lore (History B)-18 to interpret the reality-war-pertinent portions of it. Remember that Intelligence Analysis can benefit from Corruption, and that Intelligence Analysis is one of Stoney's specialties, just as Hidden Lore (History B) is one of Enki's.)
Rob
Archie will read the pages on the flight without aid of puppets or corruption. If I flub these rolls, maybe he'll crack out the puppets when he gets to L.A.
Intel Analysis.
>> SUCCESS by 3
History-B.
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
The testament of Carl Wheat is handwritten—even through the faintness of the print on this old Xerox sheet, most of the handwriting looks like George Washington's when Archie compares it to the personal note G.W. slipped in; it looks like he himself was the "one of the Clampers" he mentioned in that note.
There are dates at the top of several of the pages; as amanuensis, Washington spent days at Wheat's bedside listening in for explanations as to what happened at Bohemian Grove, and in the end, he got it, in a fragmented, confused set of utterances.
The first half of the Testament takes the form almost of a straight-up narrative—a detective yarn, no less. Wheat makes clear that he'd spent the last few years growing more uncomfortable with the gentlemen he was mixing with at the club. (It becomes apparent to Archie that Wheat's resurrection of the Clampers from the mists of Old West myth was in part done to puncture the self-importance of Bohemian secrecy and self-importance... and maybe to salve his own conscience.) But in the early days of Grove Week in 1966, those suspicions went into overdrive. In the lodges of the Grove that week, Wheat, a skilled cartographer as G.W. mentioned, saw maps of Northern California he couldn't explain, all marked from the period between 1906 and 1926, with names of cities and topographical features he couldn't recognize. A street-level map of San Francisco with buildings Wheat knew well had fallen, been smashed to bits in April of '06 in the 'quake. Merely Bohemian whimsy? As an assiduous mapmaker and -reader, they rubbed Wheat the wrong way (despite his having been a historical prankster; this didn't have the feeling of fun that ECV did with its plaques and hoaxes, it felt more like... a reminder of a real, forgotten history). He kept his guard up, he said, because this seemed to explain some measure of the discomfort Wheat had had with the Bohemians since his initiation back in the '50s.
Then there was the Grove Play. Titled "The Valley of the Moon" ("title stolen from [Jack] London," G.W. notes Wheat having noted dismissively) it was an allegory about three servants of "Apollo" who fly to the Moon on wings of fire to complete the alchemical union of solar god with lunar goddess Artemis. In the end, the King of Earth chants into a magical device to consecrate the chemical wedding and congratulate the three emissaries for their success.
Wheat to G.W.: "Whole crowd laughed like they were in on the joke. Took me a while. The King of Earth was obviously meant, in affect, costume and makeup, to be former VP Nixon."
That was when the penny dropped for Wheat. These people obviously planned to put Nixon in the White House, in time for the eventual Apollo moon landing.
What did a realization like that do to Wheat? It seems possible to Archie that that moment, the evening of the play, must have been when Wheat had his first stroke or illness, because the rest of his reminisces have a vague, dream- or trip-like quality, or his condition began to deteriorate. He began to speak more cryptically to G.W. and visitors on his deathbed. (The rest of these cryptic utterances will be found in the next post.)
"How do I know they control the world? They brag about it, behind the scenes they are overjoyed to show members exactly how they do it, summoning world leaders to their desks like a demonologist"
"The eyes of the owl are on a neck that can stretch and view through 270 or more degrees. They can't see everything, but they can see more than you or I"
"They cleaned up on fire insurance after the quake in ought-six. Do you know how they knew which buildings would fall?"
"Laughing as I stumbled about, they thought me drunk, a drunken Clamper. The privilege of the jester to hear their inner thoughts, but they also like to brag"
"Fred came down to see me. Maybe he and the others could see I'd be trouble. Told me the precise time of my death a few days hence, you'll have to confirm if he's right since I won't be here to do it myself. He held me in his grey lightless gaze and spoke at length to me"
The next section is titled
FRED:
And is full of quotes of quotes from Carl's rantings
'This is how the world has always been, Carl, a few men at the top hoarding power. But it is only that way because we have always dreamed it that way'
'It was dangerous, what George Sterling and Jack London and the rest of them did, they dared to dream differently. It's important we have men like that. But they were weak, and let in monsters'
'It fell to us to be the grown-ups. You can't be a kid at play forever. There are dangers. You're one of them. You're a kid who needs to grow up now. You'll go somewhere [could be "somewhen," the writing is too blurry] else, tell them what we're here for: to make sure the world goes right'
'We knew we wouldn't be immune from what George and Jack had allowed into Bohemia, even with total control. You need police for a safe, happy, world, don't you agree Carl?' (That italic sentence was underlined by G.W.)
'The dream with which we took back our lives and our beautiful cool grey city of love required brave men to stand, both on the ramparts and in the shadows, and ensure that right wins out over wrong, that the genie that Sterling unleashed would never harm us and our position and comfort'
'Luckily we had everything we needed to make these men: blackmail, leverage, power, knowledge of past and future, of who'd been touched by the monsters before the First Bohemia, and learned to hate and fear them properly'
'It's all right now, Carl... you were a good Bohemian for a while, your maps have helped us immensely, but it's time for you to go home and die' Back to Carl's words: "That's when I remember the ambulance coming. Redwoods. Giant trees, here longer than any American, any Spaniard... the Indians remember the trees, the Indians and the refugees"
"I loved my California so much, George. I loved her unto death."
and then a single obelus to mark Carl's passing: "†"
---
Febrile visions and rantings aside, what this monologue from "Fred" seems to hint at is that the Bohemian Club, the businessmen who control the world using (presumably) esmology, carefully-targeted blackmail, and murder, knew about History B and chose to dream into being in the new 1906 a police force that could hold History B at bay for them while they got on with the important business of ruling the world from their own—much safer and greyer—Bohemia. They found its core in the few men who'd seen History B (or at least learned some of the Anunnaki backdoors in humanity's collective mind) before Sterling made the world that contained his Bohemia. Men like the ones Archie learned about in SANDMAN training. John Wilkie. William Randolph Hearst. Harry Houdini. And maybe eventually some of the Lord Duncorne's crowd over in Britain, the Office of Archeological Control, sure.
Fright Check-11 for Archie.
Rob
>> SUCCESS by 7
Nice.
Michael
shiiiiiiiit
That is a critical success.
Rob
Can you get a crit on a fright check? What does that mean? You become less frightened? Archie knew all this already?
Michael
Hahaha, no, there's no extra effect strictly by the rules unfortunately but I'm all for Archie slotting this wild revelation into his worldview with a slightly off-putting amount of normality and Stoneysian realpolitik.
Rob
I guess I can interpret it as, the more Archie learns that SANDMAN's origins were poisoned from the start, the less conflicted he is about turning against it.
Michael
Yeeeeeah, that definitely fits the third-act arc, for sure.
Rob
Lots of possible things to follow up on here, but basic stuff first: any hints or indications in the document of who Fred might be?
Michael
There is no evidence of who Fred might be, either in the portions of the document that are straight transcripts of Wheat's words or in the sparse, faint marginalia in George Washington's hand (and in the handwriting of a couple of other presumed Noble Grand Humbugs).
But of course Marshall earlier in the week mentioned this Fred Merrill character from the Firemen's Fund Insurance Company. Not sure if Marshall dumped all the information from this bit, but canonically Brant did say that Marshall was going to mention the possibility of Archie meeting up with him here.
So the name at least should ring a bell. And Archie himself would probably have enough local big business/civic poohbah Area Knowledge and Savoir-Faire to know the big picture about Merrill that Marshall got from the photos at the Bohemian Club.