Generated: 2026-04-24

POV is Rev Parata throughout (first-person). Book 1 of the Parata series; introduces Rev as a Pensacola PI with a struggling office and a bum knee, who gets hired by Lord Donald Coventry of the Cultural Preservation Society to find an “errant employee,” David Kinsey, who has stolen the Jar of Nephren-Ka. The case opens Rev’s eyes to the supernatural for the first time and ends with Coventry dead, Barnes reduced to a pile of sand, a chitinous three-eyed centipede loose in the bayou, and Rev secretly keeping the Jar.

Sunday, June 3, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Franklin Surveillance”] Rev — Calhoun County, GA (12:38 PM) — After 18 hours of surveillance on a trailer park, Rev follows skip “Turbo” Franklin to a liquor store and apprehends him; the comb-over clerk pulls a sawed-off and Turbo cold-cocks Rev’s right eye before going down.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Drive to Nola”] Rev — Calhoun County, GA / I-65 south (1:09 PM) — Cuffed Turbo perp-marched to the Caprice; Rev makes him squat in the woods at gunpoint when he claims he needs the bathroom; long road trip to Orleans Parish Sheriff to deliver him.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Back Home”] Rev — Pensacola, FL office (9:12 PM) — Rev’s cot-and-chest one-room office on Palafox Street; he eats cereal from a hubcap-sized bowl, types up Franklin expenses; sleeps. (Chapter spans into next morning — see Mon 6/4.)

Monday, June 4, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Back Home” (continued)] Rev — Pensacola office (8:05 AM) — First phone call from “Mr. Coventry” with clipped British accent; Coventry sets a 10 AM appointment. Answering service tells Rev that Coventry had also called the previous (Sunday) evening.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “The Meeting”] Rev — Pensacola office (10:00 AM) — Coventry arrives in a black sedan (Rolls/Bentley/old Plymouth — Rev unsure) with a chauffeur (Barnes), produces a folder on David Kinsey and provenance papers for the Jar of Nephren-Ka, leaves a $5,000 check; Rev refuses but Coventry leaves the check anyway.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “The Decision”] Rev — Pensacola (10:38 AM) — Rev’s domestic chores; an evening cigar and single scotch at Lili Marlene’s in Seville Quarter; staring at red ink in the ledger overnight, Rev rises in the small hours, fishes the check from the trash, and signs it.

Tuesday, June 5, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Initial Inquiries”] Rev — Cultural Preservation Society intake center, 920 Julia St., New Orleans (1:52 PM) — Meets Rufus the trucker on the dock; first encounter with director Lord Coventry’s office (warehouse-floor view, hieroglyph tablet, shrunken head); interviews intake supervisor Hassana Sani; reviews surveillance video confirming Kinsey’s theft at 5:30 PM the night of May 23.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Kinsey’s Apartment”] Rev — Washington Manor, Washington Ave (3:19 PM) — Spots Coventry’s two surveillance men in a brown LTD; bumps the lock on unit 214 to find the apartment tossed; takes Kinsey’s last credit card statement.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “The Hunt is On”] Rev — Cultural Preservation Society conference room (4:14 PM) — Calls Capt. Freddy Guidry (NOPD 4th District) for a record search; finds a single recent charge — King Cab fare, $17, 10:37 PM May 23 (theft night); visits King Cab on Howard Ave, meets dispatcher Hubert “Frogman.”
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Chasing Leads”] Rev — Washington Manor / The Court motel (6:31 PM) — Canvasses the apartment complex at dusk; older neighbor in 212 confirms Kinsey gone two weeks; rents room 121 at The Court motel.

Wednesday, June 6, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “On Kinsey’s Trail”] Rev — King Cab / Westwego (10:05 AM) — Bribes Hubert ($40) for the fare ticket; tracks driver Oleg Nikolaev to his Westwego apartment; Oleg admits driving Kinsey to a locked gate off LA-434 in Lacombe.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Lacombe”] Rev (with Oleg) — Lacombe, LA (11:51 AM) — Oleg guides Rev to the rusted gate hiding an overgrown drive into cypress swamp; they spot a Victorian gable in the distance but do not enter; Rev drives Oleg back. Calls Searchlight Staffing, learns Kinsey was placed by Isabelle Randolph (now ex-employee); reverse-look-ups link the Tucker, GA, address to Gerald Calhoun Jr.

Thursday, June 7, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “KAYREVLA”] Rev — Lacombe (3:08 AM) — Cuts the chain, creeps up the drive to the abandoned Victorian “KAYREVLA” mansion; finds a single set of fresh shoe prints, a guest-room bed soaked in fresh blood under the comforter with mushrooms sprouting from the wet center, no body, Kinsey’s duffel and a leather journal in the nightstand, an empty depression on the table where the Jar had sat.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Kinsey’s Legacy”] Rev — The Court, New Orleans (5:47 AM) — Buys new boots, dumps the old ones evidence in a K-Mart dumpster; takes sleeping pills; nightmare of Kinsey liquefying under the comforter while Rev watches paralyzed; reads Kinsey’s journal — confirms Kinsey was groomed by Cornelius Randolph and the Society for Esoteric Knowledge from March 1983 onward; the May 23 entry confirms Kinsey believes the Jar must be destroyed.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Randolph”] Rev — CPS office, NOLA / Covington land records / Mr. Douglas Randolph’s home (12:33 PM) — Tells Coventry that Kinsey is dead; pushes Coventry on why Rev was hired (Coventry admits he wanted a single, out-of-town investigator for discretion, fearing the Jar’s provenance); identifies “Kayrevla” as owned by Cornelius James Randolph; Cornelius’s first cousin Douglas in Covington warns Rev that Cornelius is “passing strange.”

Friday, June 8, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Georgia”] Rev — New Orleans → Atlanta, GA (4:00 AM) — Drives the long haul to Atlanta; visits the GA Department of Public Health and obtains John Calhoun’s birth certificate; meets fellow PI Marvin Brown of Brown and Williams (Calhoun’s father’s address dead end); calls the Society for Esoteric Knowledge and hears a recorded voice he pegs as Cornelius himself; tries Isabelle Randolph repeatedly with no answer.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Tracking Cornelius”] Rev — Atlanta apartment lobby / South Atlanta (7:21 PM) — Bribes Isabelle Randolph’s doorman ($5) with his card and motel info; she has not been seen in three weeks.

Saturday, June 9, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Tracking Cornelius” (continued)] Rev — South Atlanta, SEK building (8:00 AM onward) — All-day surveillance of the Society for Esoteric Knowledge from a parked spot under a magnolia. No one shows up; no lights come on at dusk. Rev returns to motel for sleep before the night’s B&E.

Sunday, June 10, 1984 (early hours)

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Tracking Cornelius” (continued)] Rev — South Atlanta SEK building (3:00 AM) — 3 AM B&E; finds donations from John Calhoun (over $3,000 total, last $1,723 on 12/4/83), a $300,000 voided “Investment” check from SEK to Searchlight Staffing signed by Cornelius (Polaroided), an upstairs office with an unfamiliar white-on-black sun-like glyph painted on a canvas, a Kris knife in display, and Cornelius’s letterhead listing 1 Old Jones Place, Quitman, GA 31643.

Sunday, June 10, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Quitman”] Rev — Quitman, GA / Tallahassee Army surplus (Big Red One) / Empress Road (1:08 PM) — Locates “Old Jones Place” (formerly Worn Lane); white-stone, columned house with a single luxury sedan in the drive; drives to “Big Red One” Army surplus outside Tallahassee for fatigues and combat boots; hides cruiser behind an abandoned house south of the property; pushes a dead birch onto the barbed-wire fence to gain entry.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “BESONWA”] Rev — Quitman, GA (7:34 PM) — Behind the outbuildings finds an ancient graveyard with four recently disturbed graves; observes through binos a tall, thin man in a black suit (later “Lurch”) and a small white-haired older man in the upper room; both descend and disappear into a parlor; Rev breaches the house, finds the parlor empty, reads “BESONWA” carved over the front door arch.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “What Lies Beneath”] Rev — Quitman, GA (11:17 PM) — Discovers the parlor mirror is steel, framed with carved Ouroboros snakes; twisting it clockwise opens a priest’s hole; KOs Lurch on his way out with a pistol-whip; descends a narrow spiral staircase to a stone cellar where Cornelius Randolph stands at a chalk pentagram with the Jar at center, a young man eviscerated on a slab with his heart partially eaten beside a Kris knife; Randolph compels Rev to put his own revolver under his chin via mind-control; Rev’s grandfather’s Sunrise Ceremony memory breaks the trance just as the gun fires; ricochet hits Randolph in the chest. Randolph dies.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Aftermath”] Rev — Quitman, GA (11:42 PM) — Examines the chalk circle, finds a smudge where Randolph’s foot scrubbed it just before his death; takes the Jar (small black-pearl pharaoh-head lid, ten pounds of onyx); finds a French book and an old leather “Book of Eibon” in fragments; identifies bite marks from human teeth on the eviscerated man’s heart.

Monday, June 11, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Clash of the Titans”] Rev — Quitman, GA (12:08 AM) — Lurch (acromegalic, ~7 ft) recovers and ambushes Rev with a fireplace poker as Rev climbs out; long brutal hand-to-hand; Rev tears Lurch’s bottom lip free, then puts three rounds into him with the model 60 (chest, neck); Lurch dies face-down on the rug.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Evidence”] Rev — Quitman → Tallahassee → Pensacola (12:13 AM) — Patches his own laceration with peroxide and a torn shirt; pours gasoline through the parlor and over Lurch, leaves the basement scene intact for police to find; lights a Zippo to the trail; drives to Tallahassee ER, lies about a “roofing accident”; X-rays show a few cracked ribs; back in Pensacola, files the serial number off his revolver.

Tuesday, June 12, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Coventry”] Rev — Cultural Preservation Society, NOLA (9:47 AM) — En route, drops the .357 over the Twin Span and chucks the bagged fatigues into Lake Pontchartrain; delivers the Jar to Coventry, whose face takes on a “feverish intensity” when he touches it; reports the case as solved (Calhoun real name, Randolph’s con); Coventry pays the full $5,000 and mentions a Friday CT scan and a July 9 Manhattan exhibition. Rev asks the question: “Is the Jar magic?” Coventry guffaws it off, eyes flicker with something else.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Digging Deeper”] Rev — NOLA, The Court room 105 / NOLA gun shop / NOLA public library / Guidry residence (10:43 AM) — Buys replacement Smith & Wesson model 60; finds a Feb 5, 1984 NYT article (by Laura Wagner) confirming Coventry’s CT-scan plan and crediting Dr. Ibrahim Aziz of Tulane; calls Freddy and accepts dinner at the Guidry home that evening (Jambalaya/Boudin); Janet absolves Rev of guilt for the four-year-old wreck (drink-driving incident with Janet and Fred in the car); Rev opens up about the Coventry case on the porch over bourbon.

Friday, June 15, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “The Hot Date”] Rev — Julia St. paid lot, NOLA / Tulane School of Medicine / Belle Chasse (8:17 AM) — Tails Coventry from CPS to Tulane Medical for the CT scan, then back to CPS, then to Faucheux Monuments, an isolated metal building on West W St., Belle Chasse, where a tie-dyed sculptor (“Beatnik”) receives the Jar’s crate.

Saturday, June 16, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Faucheux Monuments”] Rev — Faucheux Monuments, Belle Chasse (1:48 AM) — B&Es the shop in the small hours; nearly fires on a black-stone bust of a cobra-spider-pharaoh head with seven red gem eyes; finds disturbing alien sculptures (the centipede, a tentacled tree-form, an amorphous “brain” with vertical mouth); finds the empty Jar crate and an unworked block of onyx; tapes scotch tape across a man-sized safe in the rear office.

Monday, June 18, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “The Long Watch”] Rev — Engineer Rd auto shop / Faucheux Monuments (7:34 AM) — Pays mechanic Denis $100 for a parking spot to surveil; week-long watch as Beatnik works long hours; Rev re-enters nightly to verify the onyx is being carved into a duplicate Jar (the safe is opened — tape torn — and Rev marks the original crate with a streak of dirty mud for later identification).

Sunday, June 24, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Lafon Boys Home”] Rev — Cultural Preservation Society / Chef Menteur Hwy, East New Orleans (7:48 PM) — Beatnik delivers two near-identical crates to Coventry’s Rolls; one crate goes back to CPS, one (the smear-marked original) goes east; Barnes drives Coventry through a chained gate to the dilapidated Lafon Home for Boys on Chef Menteur; Rev pulls his cruiser into a swamp track south, slogs through bayou and scales a vine-covered brick wall; observes additional cars arrive (BMW/Mercedes, a beat-up compact = Beatnik’s Gremlin); Barnes locks the gate behind everyone.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “The Ritual”] Rev — Lafon Home auditorium, East New Orleans (8:22 PM) — Slips in through the warped front doors; upstairs in a long auditorium five robed figures stand at the points of a five-pointed star drawn in a black substance (charcoal or paint), encircled, with the Jar at the center, chanting the cult-language (“Ep gn’thorr mgepog…”); wind whips through the closed room, candles flutter, Rev sees afterimages of a single three-lobed red eye behind his eyes; finds himself unconsciously chanting his grandfather’s words to repel the vision; while retreating, Barnes ambushes him on the staircase, they brawl, Rev breaks Barnes’s nose; Coventry appears at the top with a Webley, takes Rev captive and puts him in the Rolls trunk.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Plantation”] Rev — Vacherie, LA, Coventry’s plantation (11:15 PM) — Greek-revival plantation house (Oak Alley Lane is the country road through the property — confirmed in next chapter); Rev tied to a westernmost marble obelisk in a tiled square out back; Barnes punches Rev’s nose repeatedly to fill a stone goblet with his blood for the ritual; Rev fakes unconsciousness, spits saliva at the circle-line drawn in his own blood to create a gap.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “The ‘Production’”] Rev — Vacherie plantation (11:54 PM) — Coventry, robed, conducts the ritual (“Llll ahfhtagnor ehye c’ tharanak…”) and translates “for the crawling one we bring, a vessel for your need”; flings sand at Rev; Rev knocks his head against the obelisk and passes out. Wakes to Coventry’s body face-down, dead, with a centipede creature with a single three-lobed red eye birthing itself from his mouth; the creature curls around the Jar, then approaches Rev — a coyote (Rev sees his grandfather’s spirit) appears at the wood line, draws the creature off, both vanish into the swamp.

Monday, June 25, 1984

• [The Artifact, Ch. “Escape”] Rev — Vacherie plantation / Oak Alley Lane (12:09 AM) — Frees himself by sawing the rope against the obelisk’s sharp corner; recovers the Jar; in the front hall, finds Barnes’s clothes in a heap with a hundred-pound mound of pinkish sand spilling from his slacks; recovers a silver “Barnes” pendant with strange glyphs from the sand; experiences a dissociative break; comes to on Oak Alley Lane and sees the plantation burning in the distance; rushes back through the burning hall to retrieve his weapon (in Barnes’s pants pocket) and the Jar from a sideboard.
• [The Artifact, Ch. “Loose Ends”] Rev — gas station phone booth on LA-20, Vacherie / Lafon Home / hospital (2:12 AM) — Calls King Cab from 7790 LA-20; Oleg drives ~2 hours to pick him up (arrives ~3:30 AM), eats the fare ticket on Rev’s instruction; back at Lafon, Rev recovers his bag from where he dropped it, sees no trace of the ritual; ER (city not specified in the chapter; receptionist has a “Foghorn Leghorn” Georgian accent — see “Uncertain placement”) — broken nose, mild concussion, surgery; from his hospital room, sees a TV news story about the fire and bodies in Quitman (“Besonwa”); calls Freddy with a tip that the Quitman victims may include Calhoun’s body in the disturbed graves; tells Freddy to attribute the tip to an anonymous informant. Lies to Freddy that he hasn’t seen Coventry in two weeks; Freddy notes Coventry’s death is unexplained.

Uncertain placement

• The Quitman crime scene goes public via the news story Rev sees from his hospital bed; Freddy is later able to push for the exhumation of the four disturbed graves at Besonwa (likely confirming Calhoun was buried there). The exact follow-up dates are not established in this book.
• The hospital city in “Loose Ends” is not stated. Cab fare from Vacherie to a “1.5 hour” ride could land in NOLA proper or further; the receptionist’s “Foghorn Leghorn” Georgian accent doesn’t pin a city. Earlier ER visit (after Quitman, in “Evidence”) was explicitly Tallahassee — not necessarily the same hospital here.