Characters / Entities

• Barnes (The Artifact, The Meeting) — Coventry’s silent chauffeur and bodyguard; ultimately revealed to be a hollowed-out vessel sustained by an enchanted necklace, dissolves into pinkish sand once it is removed.
• Beatnik (Faucheux Monuments sculptor) (The Artifact, The Hot Date) — Long-haired, tie-dye-shirted artisan of unsettling talent who carves a copy of the Jar from onyx for Coventry; lives by his shop in Belle Chasse.
• Cindy (The Artifact, Back Home) — Cheery operator at Rev’s Pensacola answering service, Dependable Answering Service.
• Cornelius James Randolph (The Artifact, Kinsey’s Legacy) — Atlanta-based occultist and grifter, founder of the Society for Esoteric Knowledge; mind-controls victims and binds Calhoun as cat’s-paw to steal the Jar; killed by Rev at Besonwa.
• Donald Coventry III (The Artifact, Back Home) — British, bowler-hatted “Lord,” Director of the Cultural Preservation Society; secret cultist who hires Rev as a discretion-hire and ultimately tries to summon the centipede entity through Rev’s blood. (First named over the phone in Back Home; arrives in person in The Meeting.)
• Douglas Randolph (The Artifact, Randolph) — Cornelius’s wrinkled, cue-ball-bald first cousin in Covington who warns Rev that Cornelius “always was passing strange.”
• Dr. Ibrahim Aziz (The Artifact, Digging Deeper) — Tulane University researcher pioneering the modified-CT technique used to image the Jar’s contents.
• Freddy Guidry (The Artifact, The Hunt is On) — NOPD captain in the fourth district, Rev’s old captain in homicide and his closest friend; runs records for Rev throughout the case.
• Hassana Sani (The Artifact, Initial Inquiries) — Tall, dark-skinned Intake Supervisor at the Cultural Preservation Society’s New Orleans warehouse; Calhoun’s direct manager.
• Hubert (The Artifact, The Hunt is On) — Morbidly obese Cajun dispatcher at King Cab who digs up the fare ticket leading Rev to Oleg.
• Isabelle Randolph (The Artifact, Lacombe) — Cornelius’s daughter, the Searchlight Staffing recruiter who placed “David Kinsey” at the Cultural Preservation Society then quit; lives at a luxury Atlanta high-rise.
• Jack McDougall (The Artifact, The Decision) — Bartender at Lili Marlene’s in Pensacola.
• Janet Guidry (The Artifact, The Hunt is On) — Freddy’s wife; absolves Rev for the post-Rebecca drunk-driving wreck and welcomes him back to the family table. (First named in Freddy’s phone-call; appears in person in Digging Deeper.)
• Janet’s son Fred (little Fred) (The Artifact, The Hunt is On) — Freddy and Janet’s teen son, whom Rev once knew as a small child.
• John Calhoun (David Kinsey) (The Artifact, The Meeting) — Naïve young man from Tucker, Georgia, recruited by Randolph and given a fake “Egyptologist” identity to steal the Jar; bled and consumed at Kayrevla. (First seen as the alias “Kinsey” in The Meeting; real name revealed in Georgia.)
• Laura Wagner (The Artifact, Digging Deeper) — New York Times reporter whose article publicly announces the gifting of the Jar.
• Lurch (The Artifact, Clash of the Titans) — Coventry’s seven-foot-plus acromegalic enforcer at Besonwa; killed by Rev with a Smith & Wesson Model 60 after a brutal hand-to-hand fight.
• Maddie Brooks (The Artifact, Lacombe) — Lead Recruiter at Searchlight Staffing in Atlanta who uncovers Randolph’s nepotism in placing his daughter on the Cultural Preservation Society account.
• Marvin Brown (The Artifact, Georgia) — Black PI partner at Brown and Williams in Atlanta; subcontracts a property search for Rev pro bono.
• Mr. Calhoun (Gerald Calhoun Jr.) (The Artifact, Lacombe) — Calhoun’s father in Tucker, Georgia.
• Nephren-Ka, the Black Pharaoh (The Artifact, The Meeting) — Last pharaoh of the Egyptian Third Dynasty by legend, around 2600 BC; described as a sorcerer-diviner whose name was deliberately effaced from most King Lists.
• Oleg Nikolaev (The Artifact, On Kinsey’s Trail) — Russian-immigrant King Cab driver in Westwego, the cabbie who took Calhoun (and later Rev) to Lacombe.
• Pete (Peter) Abrams (The Artifact, Randolph) — Former Nola assistant DA, now partner at Collins, Griffin, and Abrams; legal counsel to the Cultural Preservation Society and the man who recommended Rev to Coventry.
• Rebecca (The Artifact, Digging Deeper) — Rev’s ex-wife, who left him without warning four years before the case.
• Rev (Revel) Parata (The Artifact, Franklin Surveillance) — Six-foot-seven, half-Maori half-Chiricahua-Apache PI based in Pensacola, ex-NOPD homicide and ex-Army recon scout; protagonist.
• Rufus Freeman (The Artifact, Initial Inquiries) — Older Black truck driver at the Cultural Preservation Society loading dock who watches Rev’s car for him.
• Sherelle (The Artifact, Initial Inquiries) — Coventry’s middle-aged Parisian-French-accented assistant on the second floor of the warehouse.
• The Centipede / Crawling One (The Artifact, The ‘Production’) — Multi-legged, three-lobed-red-eyed insectoid entity birthed from Coventry’s body during the plantation ritual; flees into the swamp when Rev’s grandfather appears as a coyote.
• The grandfather (tsúyé) / Coyote spirit (The Artifact, Kinsey’s Legacy) — Rev’s late maternal grandfather, an Apache healer; appears as a coyote at the plantation ritual to draw the centipede away.
• Turbo (Lloyd Franklin) (The Artifact, Franklin Surveillance) — Strung-out Louisiana bail-skip Rev brings in from a Calhoun County, Georgia trailer in the opening chapter.

Places

• Besonwa (The Artifact, BESONWA) — Cornelius Randolph’s stately columned white-stone house at 1 Old Jones Place outside Quitman, Georgia, with a priest-hole behind the parlor fireplace, a ritual basement, and an old graveyard among the outbuildings out back (four recently disturbed graves).
• Cultural Preservation Society intake center (The Artifact, The Decision) — Two-story brick warehouse at 920 Julia Street in New Orleans where Coventry processes acquisitions; HQ at the Manhattan gallery. (Address first given in The Decision; first visit in Initial Inquiries.)
• Kayrevla (The Artifact, KAYREVLA) — Decaying three-story Victorian on a Lacombe estate inherited from Randolph’s father; the house where Calhoun is consumed in bed.
• Lacombe / Slidell / Westwego (The Artifact, Lacombe) — Bayou-edge towns north and across the river from New Orleans through which Calhoun’s trail runs.
• Lafon Home for Boys (The Artifact, Lafon Boys Home) — Abandoned brick orphanage on Chef Menteur Highway east of New Orleans where Coventry’s circle holds rituals around the Jar.
• Lili Marlene’s (The Artifact, The Decision) — Pensacola jazz bar in Seville Quarter where Rev unwinds with Johnny Walker and Arturo Fuente cigars.
• Parata & Associates office (The Artifact, Back Home) — Rev’s Creole-townhouse storefront on Palafox Street in the Pensacola historic district.
• Vacherie plantation (The Artifact, Plantation) — Coventry’s Greek-revival plantation house off Oak Alley Lane on the Mississippi, with a marble obelisk-square ritual ground for the centipede summoning.
• Washington Manor (The Artifact, Kinsey’s Apartment) — Squat U-shaped apartment complex on Washington Avenue in New Orleans where Calhoun rented unit 214.

Organizations

• Cultural Preservation Society (The Artifact, The Meeting) — Manhattan-headquartered non-profit ostensibly preserving historic apocrypha; front through which Coventry acquires and ritualizes the Jar.
• King Cab (The Artifact, The Hunt is On) — Yellow-painted New Orleans cab company on Howard Avenue.
• NOPD fourth district (The Artifact, The Hunt is On) — New Orleans Police Department station Freddy commands; Rev’s old shop.
• Pinkerton, Globe, Valdez (The Artifact, The Meeting) — Big-name New Orleans investigative firms Coventry deliberately bypassed in hiring Rev.
• Searchlight Staffing (The Artifact, Initial Inquiries) — Atlanta-based technical staffing agency the Cultural Preservation Society uses; secretly captured by Randolph via a $300,000 “investment.”
• Society for Esoteric Knowledge (The Artifact, The Hunt is On) — Cornelius Randolph’s South Atlanta cult front masquerading as a spiritual non-profit.

Mythos / Concepts / Rituals

• The asymmetric pentagram circle (The Artifact, What Lies Beneath) — Warped five-pointed star inside a chalk circle ringed with foreign script; Randolph and Coventry both use it to contain or channel the Jar’s power.
• Black pearl eyes of the Jar (The Artifact, Aftermath) — The two iridescent black pearls set into the Pharaoh-head lid that catch and seem to focus the entity’s regard.
• Canopic jar (The Artifact, Initial Inquiries) — Sealed Old Kingdom Egyptian vessel containing a single mummified organ; second only to a complete mummy in archaeological significance.
• Hypnotic compulsion (The Artifact, What Lies Beneath) — Randolph’s ability to override another’s body with sustained eye contact, used to nearly force Rev to commit suicide with his own revolver.
• Nyarlathotep / “the crawling one” (The Artifact, What Lies Beneath) — Egyptian-named entity invoked by Coventry’s chant; the larval centipede is its servant or child. (Name first appears in Randolph’s chant in What Lies Beneath; “the crawling one” first invoked in The ‘Production’.)
• Sunrise Ceremony / Apache rituals (The Artifact, What Lies Beneath) — Four-day Chiricahua coming-of-age dances Rev’s tribe practiced; their memory is what breaks Randolph’s compulsion.
• The compulsion-breaking chant (The Artifact, The Ritual) — Half-remembered Apache syllables Rev’s grandfather taught him as a child; rises unbidden and dispels the cult’s chant in the auditorium.

Texts and artifacts

• The Book of Eibon (The Artifact, Aftermath) — Ancient leather-bound, iron-clasped grimoire on Randolph’s basement workbench at Besonwa, written in archaic English.
• The Jar of Nephren-Ka (The Artifact, The Meeting) — Black-onyx oval Canopic jar from the Black Pharaoh’s tomb, lid carved as a pharaoh’s head with black-pearl eyes; per Sani its specific organ contents are unknown (the CT-scan plan is to find out without breaking the seal); tomb find dated 1913, sold at Sotheby’s 1918 to John Birch.
• The Kinsey/Calhoun journal (The Artifact, KAYREVLA) — Small leather-bound diary Calhoun kept of his “explorations into the occult,” found in the Kayrevla nightstand; documents Randolph’s grooming.
• The Kris knife (The Artifact, Tracking Cornelius) — Wavy-bladed Indonesian dagger displayed in Randolph’s Atlanta office; the murder weapon used on the white sacrifice at Besonwa.
• The “stylized sun” glyph (The Artifact, Tracking Cornelius) — White-on-black painted symbol — filled circle with arrows pointing outward in each of the eight compass directions (N, NE, E, SE, etc.) — hung above the candle-shrine in Randolph’s office. Rev finds it both creepy and oddly mesmerizing; the manuscript never names it as a Nyarlathotep glyph or otherwise identifies it.

Events

• The Calhoun consumption at Kayrevla (The Artifact, KAYREVLA) — Calhoun arrives with the Jar, lies down in the four-poster bed, and is liquefied in his sleep, leaving only a blood-soaked oval of sheets and mushroom growth.
• The Lafon Home ritual (The Artifact, The Ritual) — Five black-robed Coventry cultists chant around the Jar in the abandoned orphanage’s auditorium; Rev sees the three-lobed red eye behind his closed lids until his ancestral chant dispels it.
• The Quitman ritual / Randolph’s death (The Artifact, What Lies Beneath) — Rev surprises Randolph mid-rite over a heart-extracted sacrifice in the Besonwa basement; a ricochet from Rev’s revolver kills Randolph after his foot smudges the protective circle.
• The plantation summoning (The Artifact, The ‘Production’) — Coventry uses Rev’s blood to draw the asymmetric pentagram on the marble obelisk-square; the centipede hatches from Coventry’s mouth before fleeing into the swamp.
• The Sotheby’s 1918 sale (The Artifact, The Meeting) — Auction at which the Jar of Nephren-Ka sold for £1.24 million to John Birch, a record at the time for an Egyptian artifact. (Lineage documents introduced in The Meeting; sale price detailed in The Decision.)