Monday Adam gets a letter from a Ken Hito in San Francisco. Hito is worried about his daughter Kay. He felt the problem was occultish in nature and he had apparently, through recent events in the media, heard about Ray's bust of occult meeting (with "Squidzilla," which I would say went very badly, since we failed to stop the ritual, but anyway...) So this Ken Hito was worried about his daughter Kay. She was apparently a developmentally problematic teenager and had been sent to Still Mountain, a little place with a traditional Japanese monastery, to chill out and get centered, or something. Hito was worried because he hadn't heard from her in a while (for some reason "3 weeks" sticks in my head), and because he had received phone calls from some really creepy person asking about Kay, like what sorts of things did she fear, etc. Hito felt that this caller was EVIL. He didn't feel like the police would or could do anything, so he wanted to hire us out there to look into it.
So the five of us fly to San Francisco. Get to Hito's apartment. No answer to knocking. Find door unlocked (or was it ajar?). Go in, look around. Creepy stuff. Am I right in thinking there was an easle with *skin* hanging over it? No sign of Hito until someone opened the refrigerator...ah, there's what was left of Hito. He had been skinned.
Call police, answer questions, etc.
Go visit elder Japanese wisewoman, Ukiko. She reads our palms. There seems to be something interesting about Adam and Kathy. Ukiko thinks ______ is interested in Kay and maybe in Adam for the same reason. And there was something about Kathy's aura or whatever glowing redder when so-and-so was named.
Ukiko taught Hazel three spells and gave her an ankh (needed for the demon spell) and a book of spells in Japanese. One is a protection spell, one is supposed to command and/or dispell demons, and I forget what the third was. Then she said she was going to disappear for a while.
The group drives out to Still Mountain. On the way, they see the spectre of a great black horse with a flaming bleeding heart on its flank. It leaps over the car and disappears. They also experience massive amounts of cockroaches coming out of all vents and cracks in the car, but when they jump out and start trying to brush them off, the bugs have vanished.
They stay at a small B&B in the town. There's not a lot there except the monastery. They visit the monastery and Hazel tries to join in the meditations, resulting in Kathy smacking her hand over Hazel's mouth and the group being asked to leave.
They talk to Kay's uncle, with whom she had been staying, and he has her diary. They look through it for clues. According to her diary, Kay seemed to think Kage and Takahashi were all right, but that there was an elder monk there she thought didn't like her. One of her last entries said something about going up to the observatory, so the group checked that out as well. Someone reported seeing a large (dog-sized) rat, as well as possibly hearing a scream a while back. Not much else to go on but there seems to be a glen where the monks used to go pray, that's on the other side of the observatory/mountain. It used to be accessible through a passage in the monastery on the side of the mountain, but some years ago there had been a rockslide and it was now inaccessible. Kay's diary indicated she might be trying to find a way up there via the observatory.
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