The Murder Room

“THE RED GOD WAKES.”
—Found writ in blood at the home of sub-prefect Boaz Chaim, who remains missing along with the severed heads of his family members
The story of the Murder Room is a myth whispered
by murderers and madmen to each other in the long
emptiness of the night. Certainly few outside of the
most forlorn halls of the sanatoria or the blackest depths of
the Arbites’ death cells have even heard of it. The Inquisition,
however, has come to the dread suspicion that the story is
no mere dusk dream or feverish imaginings of the damned.
It believes that at the core of this story--repeated with
alarming consistency on worlds whole sub-sectors apart---lies the dark truth that the Murder Room is quite real, and
its bloody legacy a thing spawned in the foulest depths of
the warp.
==The Red Tale==
The stories speak of a terrifying and secret place, a room
drenched in the blood of countless victims, a place where a
thousand screams linger and the air is heavy with the scent
of acrid copper and as sharp as a razor’s kiss. It is said that
every room there has ever been where blood has drenched
the walls, every home whose safety was shattered by terror in
the night, or defiled by murder from within---all are caught
forever, remembered in this one red room, the Murder Room.
It is a place built from betrayal and malice, fed by blood and
death, furnished by unreasoning slaughter, and echoing with
the unheeded pleas of the lost. More terrible yet, this Murder
Room lives, it thirsts, and it waits.
Open a door, any door, and you might find yourself in the
Murder Room. The tale says it does not matter where. Open
any door and you might set your foot in a room that should
not be there, a room with red-soaked walls and the reek of
the charnel house. No sooner will you have stepped within,
the door will close behind you with the finality of a tomb-lid
slamming shut.
The lowly grey scribe who meekly attends his workstation
each day but whose home is filled with the bloody trophies
he has taken from his secret victims, the loving family man
that returns home to his hab as he has a thousand times
before, only to slaughter those that wait for him with open
arms, the killers the enforcers can’t catch, that seem to simply
vanish into thin air, perhaps one day they opened a familiar
door and found themselves lost. When something walked out
again from that very same door, it may have looked the same,
but beneath the skin was unholy murder, dying of a bloody
thirst it could never quench---or so the storytellers claim.
== The Evidence ==
It is the business of whole divisions of Ordos savants and
adepts to collect and shift data. They consider and collate
reports on everything from the political maneuverings of the
great houses on Malfi and the price of the season’s grain from
Regulus, to scattered reports of strange phenomena, bizarre
murders, lost or overdue vessels in the warp, and countless
other factors. It is from the study and assessment of such data
that many Inquisitorial investigations first originate, looking
into either specific incidents which display signs of special
note or evidence of some troubling pattern that deserves more
direct attention.
Approximately 11 years ago, a pattern began to emerge
concerning numbers of previously unconnected and often
seemingly motiveless serial murders, spree killings, and
massacres on dozens of worlds. Commonalities of victim,
the details of the suspected perpetrator, the method of
murder, and often the simple savagery of the killings
themselves were striking. In many cases, the murders sowed
fear and terror in areas usually all but untouched by such
horrors, and the killers (or suspected killers) had often led
blameless, uneventful pasts before their murders began. Most
telling was that on investigation, the killers often evidenced
a period of disappearance or “dead time” in the record of
their whereabouts before the killings started. Rarely were the
killers in these cases apprehended and never were they caught
alive. Most, after a protracted bout of killing, would simply
seem to disappear without a trace, leaving authorities baffled
and a bloody legend in their wake.
Some within the Inquisition saw the pattern as too defuse,
too spurious. They suspected it to be a “false-positive,” a
phantom thrown up by the idiosyncrasies of the lexmechanics’
cogitator engines. Inquisitor Hydris Bloch, however, was of
a different mind. Not aligned to any single Ordo, Bloch was
a wanderer who operated largely outside of the Conclave’s
control, and was considered something of a Radical by
some.
He and his network of Acolytes made the killings their
primary investigation and for several years journeyed to
worlds prominently featured in the pattern data, building a
huge catalogue of fragmentary and circumstantial evidence.
For the first time, they linked the “Murder Room” myth to
the matter. Frustrated by the lack of hard fact, when a report
reached Bloch of a spate of murders in progress that fit the
Murder Room pattern perfectly, he dropped his painstaking
investigations and made all speed to the impoverished and
ill-famed world of Sinophia. In the city of Harrow Ridge, he
made a decision that would later prove to cost him dearly.
== The Harrow Ridge Massacre ==
The city of Harrow Ridge was, in truth, little more than a
large, ramshackle settlement housing no more than a few
thousand inhabitants. It had grown up over the decades
from a cluster of mining camps in one of the more desolate
corners of Sinophia---a world long renowned for its moral
and physical decay. A rough and lawless place, Harrow Ridge
had long been accustomed to casual violence and the rule of
the gun, but was now gripped by a far worse terror.
A murderer was stalking its alleyways, shanties, and
tenements, and whole families were being butchered in their
homes behind locked doors. Savagely mutilated corpses
were turning up on a near daily basis and no one was safe.
Crackdowns by the local regulators, lynchings, mob justice,
mass-shriving---nothing had stopped the killings, and the
uncaring and distant planetary authorities blithely ignored
requests for aid.
When Bloch and his Acolytes arrived, they found a
virtual ghost town paralyzed by fear, hundreds having fled or
barricaded themselves in their homes. As his Acolytes fanned
out through the city, they quickly found evidence of warp-tainted
radiations and an unholy hand behind the murders.
They returned to collate the findings only to be shocked by
the discovery of their master savagely murdered in his own
lodging chambers.
Bloch’s Acolytes did not succumb to despair, however, but
kept their master’s demise secret lest panic should spread.
One, the adept Septimus Golgol, took charge. Sifting through
the evidence, he traced the epicenter of the killings and the
warp disturbances to the house of a man named Edmund
Flinders. An undistinguished mineral assayer, Flinders was
a quiet family man whose absence had gone unnoticed in
the chaos. However, he had gone missing for several days
in the weeks prior to the slaughter. The record of what was
found when they confronted Flinders was sealed by order of
Inquisitor Harkness of the Ordo Malleus, but it is known that
Golgol alone survived the experience and no further murders
took place in Harrow Ridge.
== Golgol’s Obsession ==
During the six years since the Harrow Ridge incident, former
Acolyte Golgol was elevated to the rank of Inquisitor within
the Ordo Malleus by the enigmatic and infamous Inquisitor
Harkness to lead the tattered remnants of Bloch’s former
network. This move has not proved popular with the wider
Ordos, and the obsessed Golgol has few friends or supporters.
He continues to slavishly pursue his late master’s work under
Harkness’s direction, reporting his findings regularly to
the Conclave.
He believes he has identified over 150 incidents stretching
back more than 30 years that he blames on the “Murder
Room.” Some cast doubt on his findings and indeed his
sanity. Others whisper behind closed doors that Harkness
is merely using Golgol as a disposable tool to root out the
truth, claiming that Golgol has neither the experience nor
the stability to wield the Inquisitor’s Rosette.
Recently, Golgol has believes that he
has finally tracked down the source of the enigmatic Murder Room. A mysterious pattern of killings upon Fenksworld
is leading up to some great event, an outcome Golgol believes
involves summoning one of the most powerful servants of the
Blood God.
== Inquisitorial Threat Briefing ==
Although the Bloch-Golgol theories of the Murder Room are
widely known within the Ordo Malleus, they are greeted with
widely differing levels of credence, ranging from cautious
consideration to outright disdain by some. The theories are
not widely circulated outside the Ordo, save for those with
a penchant for occult murder plots and intra-Inquisition
scandal. As a result, the Inquisition has no avowed position
on this threat or even its definite existence. Most wait to
be convinced.
== The True Nature of the Murder Room ==
Just what dark truth lies behind the Murder Room and killings
that surround it is up to the GM, but the following section
posits three different takes on just what the monstrous secret
could be. Of course some combination of all three (or more)
is entirely possible.
With a Bloody Right Hand: Cults of Murder
Though the Ruinous Power known as Khorne, the Blood
God, is primarily considered to be a deity of battle and rage,
some also see the Skull Lord as a patron and embodiment
of violent death and murder in all of its forms---from the
spilling of blood to the screams of the dying. Cults devoted
to such a vile being are rare but not unknown. They tend
to be composed of isolated groups of deranged killers, lone
butchers, and, more rarely, organized societies devolved from
Imperial death cults or assassin brotherhoods.
Such groups might have begun killing for profit or cause
but have succumbed over time to madness, sadistic brutality,
and the addiction of dealing death for its own sake. The
Murder Room could be a front for such a cult, or perhaps a
true phenomenon summoned by them by the very act of ritual
murder itself. It could be an altar of blood, half within reality
and half within the warp, a borderland for fitting sacrifices to
the Throne of Skulls, its victims chosen at random or by some
esoteric selection process impenetrable to a sane mind.
Echoes of Agony: Tormented Space
There are places where the barrier between corporeal reality
and the warp wear thin. Some of these weakened veils exist
for no known reason save perhaps for ancient accident or
mischance of location, whilst others are places where sorcerous
rituals have been worked or terrible atrocities committed. The
aftershocks of such incidents echo in the warp, and if, by a quirk
of cosmology or chance they become trapped in the weave of
things, their violence and anger can be reflected and amplified
back on themselves endlessly to create a Murder Room.
Like a supernatural trap waiting in the skein of reality
for the unwary to trigger it, there need not be any malign
intelligence to such a “fold” of tormented space for it to be
fatal to the sanity of those that encounter it. Such a frozen
moment of horror, caught forever in time, would be a
dangerous labyrinth to become trapped within---its reality
shaped only by suffering, grief, and pain. Such a dangerous
wound in the universe would be difficult, but not impossible,
for a servant of the Inquisition to battle and unmake.
The Wake of the Red God: Daemons of Blood
There could of course be far darker things at work than mere
human evil or twisted ruptures in the fabric of reality. There
may be a daemonic intelligence, thirsting for blood, at the
center of the Murder Room. If this is the case, then stepping
across the threshold to the Murder Room is crossing into hell
in a literal sense---it is travelling into a sinkhole of murder
immemorial and becoming the plaything of the bloody
denizens that dwell in this red abyss. What returns from such
a fate will no longer be human. It will either be corrupted
beyond reason, fused with utter wickedness, or no less than
a daemon wearing the mask of earthly flesh. The servants of
the Red God will walk the world with the sole purpose to do
murder, but particular piquancy will be had by the Red God
from the deaths of the innocent and the betrayed, as it revels
in the terror left in their wake.