Mirror Man, part 1
This storyline incorporates characters and situations from the adventure "A Garden Full of Weeds" by James Palmer
Monday morning, DAE gets a call from a reader, Daphne Horton. Daphne works at the Lexington Children's Home in North Long Beach. The Lexington is a home for orphans and wards of the state between the ages of 4 and 6. Saturday night, a little girl named Darmeka Poe disappeared from the home. The police have been out, naturally, but haven't yet discovered what happened. Some of the children have told Daphne that Darmeka was taken by the Mirror Man.
The Mirror Man is a sort of bogeyman character that the children have been talking about for the past couple of months. He wears a black trenchcoat and mirrored sunglasses, and appears in the mirror if you sing to him. Spiders and centipedes crawl out from under his shoes. He hates children and wants to "get" them. If he chases you, you can get away by playing hopscotch. Daphne doesn't know if the Mirror Man stories are true or not, but she knows the police aren't taking it seriously and so she's contacted the DAE.
Arriving at the Lexington Home, the team split up. Arnulf and Ray search the dormitories while Floyd and Kellie interview the staff and a few of the children. One boy, Henry Sanders, 4, says he saw the Mirror Man and Darmeka in his mirror the night she disappeared. They learn the home's routine. The children go to bed at 8:00. There's a bed check at ten and again at midnight. Overnight, there is one case worker, a nurse, and a security guard on duty. Darmeka was in her bed at the midnight bed check.
Up in the dorms, Arnulf and Ray check the layout. There are two big long rooms, the boys on the second floor and the girls on the third, with rows of bunkbeds along each wall. Between every other set of bunkbeds is a dresser or wardrobe of some kind. (So each dresser or wardrobe is shared by four children.) The furniture is obviously donated or surplus. Some of the dressers have mirrors on them, but not all. There is a mirror directly opposite Darmeka's bed. There are bars in the windows of the dormitories. There is a fire escape on each floor, but an alarm goes off if the door is opened.
While Arnulf chats with the staff member who's showing them around, Ray uses Past Sight to see what happened when Darmeka disappears. At first, he's slightly disoriented and has an "insightful" flashback to the Umbrella Men's pendulum spelling out the name Russel McGlynn. Then he finds himself in the dark dormitory. He hears a man's voice, but can't see anyone. The voice says, "Yes it is. Yes it is. Look, just shut up." Ray glances at the wall clock (it's a little after 1:30 in the morning) and is suddenly aware that a man is in the room. He's a light-skinned black man in a black trenchcoat and mirrored sunglasses, and he's standing right in front of the mirror across from Darmeka's bed. He steps over quietly and gently picks the girl up, not waking her. He walks back toward the mirror, and then he's suddenly not there.
They arrange to come back in the evening and talk to the security guard. Then they all head out to Santa Monica to find Russell McGlynn. They find "Cutter" at a vegetarian taco stand and strike up a conversation. He strikes them as a typical beach bum. They ask him about the Night of Big Weirdness, and he remembers that he had a nosebleed for no reason for about an hour. He tells them about finding some books that somebody threw off the pier a couple nights ago. They had a tag on them that said "Return to the University of Idaho Library," but he hasn't gotten around to going all the way down to the Post Office yet. Floyd asks to see them, and it turns out they are the missing copies of The Invisible Clergy and The House of Renunciation.
Interlude 2Ray watches the security tape and confirms that the man who was in the warehouse is Travis Crowe. From the jukebox, they learn that Crowe is most likely working for David Temple. Brainstorming with Eric, they speculate that the point of kidnaping Ray may just have been to get him out of the country. Eric's fairly sure that leaving the area you're trying to be King of would be a major setback, and wonders if Temple sees Ray as a potential competitor.
Arnulf calls up the Umbrella Men at their hotel room and arranges a meeting with the person who answers. He's surprised when a pair of homicide detectives show up, asking a lot of questions. It seems two men were found shot to death in the hotel room, amid signs of a struggle. Neither man had any identification, and the hotel clerks says they paid in cash. They question everybody who was there, and get mostly straight answers. They've been told that the two men were working for a New York underworld figure known as the Blind Man, that the DAE were interviewing them about a story, when the two men got violent. A brief struggle ensued, but the men were alive and well when the DAE team left.
Ray uses Gnostic Gossip to plant three rumors. 1: Travis Crowe killed those two guys in that hotel. 2.: Travis Crowe is taking payoffs from David Temple. 3: David Temple is trying to keep the Blind Man from moving in on his territory.
