Characters / Entities

• Bernie (Commune, Briefing) — Saint Christina’s gardener, back to his routine after the Burke ordeal.
• Cindy (Commune, Message) — Operator at Dependable Answering Service.
• Randolph (Commune, First Night) — Dead cult leader from the Coventry case, recalled when Walsh’s mind-control trick mirrors his.
• The Elder (Commune, Aftermath) — Hunched, walking-stick-wielding Cajun-French-speaking patriarch of Psikinépikwa; orchestrates the comet-night ritual and is taken willingly by the entity.
• Father James Kelly (Commune, Briefing) — Saint Christina’s priest, dispatches Rev and Rae to find Walsh; later takes custody of the Skelly Bible and Walsh’s diary.
• Father Peter Walsh, S.J. (Commune, Briefing) — Aging Jesuit scholar studying Las Tribus Olvidadas; takes prescription chlorpromazine, is taken over by a parasitic worm in Psikinépikwa, then shot by Rev and stabbed by Felix during the comet-night ritual; his body is later dumped into Skelly’s Hole.
• Felix (“Wax Man”) (Commune, Father Walsh) — Severely burn-scarred, web-handed Psikinépikwa mute who paints Eye-of-Ra wards on the church windows; ultimately stabs Walsh and is dragged into the hole by the entity.
• Franklin (Commune, Boat) — Psikinépikwa villager who lends Skeeter the small johnboat used in the late-night attempt to leave the island.
• Louis (Commune, Caught) — Bug-eyed scaly-skinned Psikinépikwa villager who stands guard with Rev’s confiscated revolver.
• Martha (Commune, Message) — Goth-styled twenty-something research assistant to Professor Diaz at Franciscan; hand-transcribes passages from Las Tribus Olvidadas for Walsh’s research.
• Mason (“Skeeter”) (Commune, Walsh’s Rooms) — Lanky, chain-smoking Cajun airboat captain in Gibson; secretly aligned with the Psikinépikwa cult, gator-killer with a Smith & Wesson Model 29. (Skeeter business card found in Walsh’s Rooms; first met in person in chapter Skeeter; given name Mason revealed in Father Walsh.)
• Andrew Carter (Commune, Message) — Branch manager at First National Bank in Pensacola who calls Rev about the ant infestation around the Jar’s safe-deposit box.
• Ms. Thelma (Commune, Boarding House) — Wizened black housekeeper at the diocese boarding house in Baton Rouge.
• Professor Emilio Diaz (Commune, Franciscan) — Short, bearded Franciscan University history professor who places Psikinépikwa on a map and dismisses Las Tribus Olvidadas as likely a hoax.
• Rae Gordon (Commune, Briefing) — Rev’s PI partner; nearly walks into Skelly’s Hole under the entity’s spell.
• Rev Parata (Commune, Briefing) — PI working for Father Kelly out of New Orleans (banks in Pensacola), sent to retrieve Walsh; protagonist.
• The Sleeper / The God in the Hole (Commune, The Awakening) — Boxcar-headed, bony-ridged, six-tentacled aquatic god dwelling at the bottom of Skelly’s Hole, summoned through the comet-night hymn; sound from it warps reality and explodes air around it like sonic booms.
• The Worm (Walsh’s parasite) (Commune, Waking the Dead) — Four-inch-long fat white grub with two acid-secreting tongues and proto-eyes, larva of the centipede; lived in Walsh’s ear and controlled him; killed by Rev’s boot, dissolves into greenish-black acid.
• The Coventry centipede (recalled) (Commune, Dream) — Alien centipede with a three-lobed red eye and six smaller V-pattern orbs, encountered in the Coventry case; now grown and hunting in the Louisiana swamp in Rev’s recurring dreams.

Places

• Bayou Black Drive / Gibson (Commune, Skeeter) — Last toehold of civilization before the bayou, where Skeeter’s Airboat Charters operates.
• Diocese boarding house (Commune, Boarding House) — Two-story shotgun in Baton Rouge run by Ms. Thelma; Walsh’s rooms.
• Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University (Commune, Briefing) — Baton Rouge university where Las Tribus Olvidadas is held in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
• Louisiana State Archives (Commune, Boarding House) — Baton Rouge repository where Rae searches in vain for Psikinépikwa’s articles of incorporation.
• Psikinépikwa / Skelly’s Hole (Commune, Skeeter) — Forgotten bayou village in Terrebonne Parish around an azure sinkhole, evacuated in the 1920s after the sinkhole opened and now home to a degenerated cult.
• Saint Christina’s (Commune, Briefing) — Father Kelly’s New Orleans parish; the order’s local nexus.
• Skeeter’s Airboat Charters (Commune, Skeeter) — Cracker-Barrel-decorated tin-roof shop on the outskirts of Gibson.
• The Court (Commune, Dream) — Themed-room New Orleans motel Rev keeps returning to.

Organizations

• Kelly’s order (Commune, Briefing) — The unnamed “monster-hunting” secret order Rev does paid investigations for through Father Kelly; sober, precise, and as secretive as the CIA.
• Psikinépikwa cult / village (Commune, Bonfire) — Inbred, Cajun-French-speaking holdouts at Skelly’s Hole who perform a ritual hymn each Friday and prepare a comet-night summoning of their god.

Mythos / Concepts / Rituals

• Chlorpromazine (Commune, The Jar) — Antipsychotic drug Walsh has been taking; suggesting he had been hearing voices long before the worm took him.
• Comet-night summoning (Commune, The Hymn) — Once-in-history comet alignment that opens the storm-cloud “eye” over the hole and lets the village’s hymn pull the god to the surface.
• The Eye of Ra ward (Commune, Walsh) — Filled-iris right eye inscribed inside an asymmetric pentagram, which Felix crayons on the church windows; protective glyph used here through threat of violence.
• The five-tentacle dance / hymn (Commune, Bonfire) — The villagers’ weekly rhythmic chant whose movements mirror the entity’s whipping luminescent tentacles.
• Skelly’s Hole’s pure azure water (Commune, Skelly’s Hole) — Lapis-blue water of Skelly’s Hole, locally said to be “pure”; abnormally clear because a circular undercurrent vacuums any debris into the depths.
• Mind-control by gaze (Commune, Captive) — Walsh’s worm-driven ability to mentally paralyze and remote-control someone via locked eye contact, the same trick Randolph used in the Coventry case.
• The Jar’s call (Commune, Message) — The artifact’s pull on small creatures and on Rev himself; ants flood the Pensacola safe-deposit box, prompting him to deliver it to Kelly’s safe.
• The larva (Commune, Worm) — Acid-blooded grubs the centipede injects into corpses (and, here, into Walsh’s brain) to control hosts and breed.
• The undercurrent (Commune, Skelly’s Hole) — Bottomless suction current at the lip of the hole that drowned the original Skelly Oil crew and acts as the god’s threshold.

Texts and artifacts

• Las Tribus Olvidadas (Commune, Briefing) — Anonymous “lost-tribes” book attributed to Álvarez de Pineda’s expedition, full of Sumerian-flavored ritual glyphs; the text that lured Walsh into the swamp.
• The 15th-century Spanish Bible (Skelly’s Bible) (Commune, Felix) — Water-warped Old-Testament-heavy Bible that has lived at Psikinépikwa since the de Pineda expedition; Rev later carries it back to Father Kelly.
• The Jar of Nephren-Ka (Commune, The Jar) — The Coventry-case artifact Rev relocates from a bank vault to Father Kelly’s safe at Saint Christina’s.
• Walsh’s coded diary (Commune, Civilization) — Hardback journal in Walsh’s nearly impenetrable handwriting that Rev pockets from the church.
• Walsh’s room sigils (Commune, Walsh’s Rooms) — Wall-covering pencil sketches of eel-like sea creatures arrayed around protective glyphs from the Key of Solomon, which seem to writhe and produce inky tendrils when stared at.

Events

• The Christmas comet-night ritual (Commune, The Awakening) — Walsh, atop a rock with his back to the hole, chants the summoning Cthulhu-fhtagn line; the village gives itself to the rising god and the eye in the storm closes when he falls.
• The fishing-cabin dream (Commune, Dream) — Rev’s nightmare of the swamp fisherman dragged under by the centipede.
• The mid-bayou airboat trip (Commune, Boat Ride) — Rev and Rae cross to Skelly’s Hole with Skeeter, learning the place’s history and undercurrent.
• The Felix capture (Commune, Felix) — Rev cuffs Felix behind the church and discovers his web-fingered burned hand and inability to speak English.
• Skeeter’s betrayal (Commune, Caught) — Skeeter ambushes Rev at the disabled airboat and locks him and Rae in the village’s plank cells.
• Felix’s jailbreak (Commune, Escape) — Felix blackjacks the guard with a bag of pebbles and frees Rev and Rae the night before the ritual.
• Walsh’s death and de-worming (Commune, Waking the Dead) — Rev shoots Walsh during the rite; Felix stabs him; the next morning the worm crawls out of his ear and Rev crushes it underfoot.
• The body dump (Commune, The Return) — Rev throws Walsh’s corpse into the hole to avoid having to fabricate a believable police story for the entire massacre.