An adventure for Sydney PCs, working for Dr. Crabbe.

The Coogee Palace Aquarium and Swimming Baths.

Big enough to hold three thousand people under its meaty dome. Small boys peer down into a swimming pool full of ocean water, holding a sullen tiger shark, captured a few days earlier by fishermen working off the coast.

The shark convulses. Vomits up another, smaller shark. The smaller shark, half-chewed, thrashes around weakly before puking out an intact human arm. Conspicuous tattoo of a naked woman entwined with an anchor on the back of the hairy hand.

The first shark is still alive. Bert Hobson, owner of the baths, wants you to work out how the hand got in its belly. He’s a plain-spoken man and he doesn’t want any funny business in his establishment. He’s already been made the subject of enquiries by the ratbags at the Bulletin and the Sydney Truth.

Kate Leigh. AKA “The Snow Queen” and “The Most Evil Woman In Sydney.” Jolly, fat, piratical. Wears fur coats and big hats. Diamond rings on every finger. Runs a network of brothels, betting houses and sly-grog establishments across the Cross, Darlinghurst, Surrey Hills and Woolloomooloo.

Sells Columbian cocaine through her brothels. Employs a rotating crew of enforcers, armed with straight razors, to protect her business from standover men and the machinations of rival crime lord Tilly Devine. High-profile receiver of stolen goods. Routinely hauled in for questioning by detective Big Bill MacKay - the charges never stick.

Voltaire Murdock was last seen heading upstairs at one of her knocking shops.

Leftist firebrand. Columnist for the tabloid Smith’s Weekly. Member in good standing of the Australian Seaman’s Union. Critic of state premier Jack Lang. Born in New Australia, the utopian socialist colony in Paraguay, in 1894. Has run for office twice on the Nationalist Party ticket. Fears the Yellow Peril. Translates Japanese as a hobby - self-published novel called The Spider In The Chrysanthemum about an honest Aussie cricketer who falls in love with a sinister Oriental princess.

It’s his arm in the shark. The tattoo is well known. Scored as a cabin boy on shore leave in Manila. In decent company he covers it up with a white glove and claims that an old war wound prevents him from shaking hands.

The Star Amphitheatre at Balmoral.

Seating room for 2,000. Overlooks Balmoral Beach. Contains tea rooms and a tin-lined meditation chamber.

Built by the Order of the Star in the East. A spinoff of the Theosophical Society. Founded in Benaras by C. W Leadbeater and Annie Besant. Exists to prepare the world for the coming of the World Teacher, personified as a young Telugu man named Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Leadbeater and his acolytes have settled in The Manor, a ramshackle mansion in the affluent suburb of Mosman. Short walk from Balmoral. Egyptian statues in the foyer. Two dozen guest bedrooms, hosting Theosophists from across the globe. Overworked servants. Frightened cook. Hosts the 2GB radio station, short for Giordano Bruno, which plays the latest jazz hits mixed up with friendly sermons from presenter Uncle George.

Dutch sociologist Dr. Pieter Roest, freshly home from studying rainforest tribes in Java, hard at work on the society’s Greater American Plan. Scottish missionary doctor Mary Rocke, brilliant and imperious, prone to sudden bouts of depression, with ten years’ service in South India under her belt. Portrait artist Erling Roberts, often found visiting friends in the painter’s colony at Little Sirius Cove. Mexican lecturer Consuela de Aldag, always smiling, who wears beads of Olmec jade and can talk for an hour unprompted on any given subject. Plus all their kids, screaming and running around.

James Wedgwood, organist and self-appointed bishop with the Liberal Catholic Church. Believes that the practice of Holy Communion creates what he calls an “energy basilica” on the astral plane. Freemason of the Egyptian Rite. Strongly implies that he’s associated with the regular Catholic Church, which is in no way true.

Dr. Jacobus van der Leeuw. Psychoanalyst. Amateur pilot. Corresponds with Freud. Author of The Fire Of Creation and The Conquest Of Illusion. Big smile. Strong Dutch accent. Slightly misunderstands everything you say. Runs the King Arthur School For Boys, with assistance from ex-missionary and Ohio public school teacher Mary K. Neff.

Leadbeater’s office is strictly off-limits.

Along with all the predictable wizard stuff - crystals, mind-enhancing drugs, occult library, rare maps of the Pacific, orgone accumulator, gun - he keeps a gigantic sheaf of files labelled Stars Of Alcyone: Rents In The Veil Of Time. In these he charts the past lives of every Manor inhabitant, with all their complex relationships, going back to the days of Atlantis in 20,000 BC. He’s a master clairvoyant, studying for years under Master Koot Hoomi to train his inner eye.

He’s of the opinion that group showers are good for the spiritual development of growing boys, and sometimes leads the Manor’s male teenagers on special camping sessions in the bushland that adjoins the house. Group swimming expeditions on hot summer nights at Chowder Bay and Balmoral, under the light of the stars.

Sometimes the boys don’t come back.

The Hydro Majestic Hotel.

Built on a clifftop overlooking the Megalong Valley, in the Blue Mountains, just outside Katoomba. ~2 hours from Sydney on the Main Western Line. Popular health retreat for Sydney’s upper crust. Has played host to opera singers, dying prime ministers, munitions heiresses and Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his spookier phases.

Sits over a cave temple to the prisoner god Ghatanothoa.

Dug ten thousand years ago by refugees from Lemuria’s fall. Helictites, stromatolites and Silurian fossils. Kept in use as a site of worship by a heretic faction of the Gundungurra aborigines. Discovered in 1827 by the bushranger Jack Donahue, who terrorised Sydney’s outskirts as the leader of the gang of thieves known as the Wild Colonial Boys. Nicknamed by him “the Kingdom of Baal”. Briefly explored by Charles Darwin during his visit in 1836 - the Australian Museum may hold some of his lost notes.

Secret of its location passed down to John Cooley, aka Echidna - head of the mysterious Sydney fraternity known as the Old Guard. A mild-mannered man, like a greengrocer, with a droopy, inquisitive look and a way of snapping his suspenders. Lives at the Hydro Majestic, in a modest suite with a view of the valley. Sometimes shows his face at the Australia Club. Has command over a fanatic legion of coppers, politicians and returned Great War vets who have sworn to follow his every instruction to the death.

Cooley will make any sacrifice to save Sydney from the great evil of Communism, as personified by Jack Lang. Leigh and Leadbeater are both in his thrall. It was on his order that Murdock was baited, trapped and killed by Leigh’s enforcers - muscled aboard a smuggler’s yacht and sacrificed at sea. Thomas Ley, serial killer and Member of Parliament for Barton, presided over the whole operation.

Cooley’s men are hard at work on the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge - inscribing the great rivets with Lemurian sigils, anointing the steel cables with the blood of exotic animals stolen by Leadbeater’s boys from the Taronga Zoo. They’re making it a gateway. Once it opens, Leadbeater will conduct a ritual at Balmoral, disguised as a Theosophical dawn ceremony, to summon Ghatanothoa from his Pacific tomb.

Cooley believes this will establish him as Eternal Emperor of the Antipodes. He may well be correct.