Bath

Bath is a historic center of supernatural activity in the Checquy’s account of Britain, but by the time Myfanwy is sent there, its former prominence has faded. That reversal gives the city particular significance: a place once central to the Checquy’s founding and recruitment becomes the setting for an extraordinary manifestation that again demands a major response.

A former center of the Checquy

Myfanwy’s records describe Bath as a place where supernatural manifestations were once so frequent that encounters with the inexplicable seemed part of ordinary life. The city’s history was also bound to the organization itself: Thomas had found evidence suggesting that the Checquy was founded there in response to a continuing succession of bizarre events. For centuries, Bath supplied more operatives to the Checquy than any other place in the country.

That history had become difficult to reconcile with Bath’s more recent status. About twenty-two years before the operation, the frequency of unusual incidents began to diminish noticeably. The local office, once the largest in the United Kingdom outside the London installations, contracted until it retained only a token force. Bath was repurposed as a training ground where new Pawns could become accustomed to supernatural events, and where unsuccessful personnel were left. Its old reputation persisted in the records even as its operational importance waned.

The manifestation and the Checquy response

Ingrid’s daily briefing identifies manifestations in both Bath and Exeter, with city teams dispatched as soon as the incidents erupted. The Bath operation therefore begins as one part of a broader response, but the episode proves far more consequential than the city’s diminished status would suggest. Myfanwy travels there with Shantay, arriving at an airport where a car and a purple-clad driver are waiting to take them through the city.

At the operation site, Myfanwy finds an ordinary-looking street lined with tidy row houses, yet the scene has been cordoned off by massive trucks blocking traffic at both ends. Pawn Poppat accompanies the visitors toward an armored vehicle occupied by Barghests in gray armor. Their presence establishes the scale of the Checquy deployment: this is no routine training exercise in a quiet regional office, but an active containment effort that has drawn soldiers and personnel into the city.

The manifestation takes the form of a fungus capable of controlling human hosts and extending across a wide area once activated. Myfanwy later describes interrupting the instructions passing from the fungus to its hosts. The disruption makes the chanting stop and enables the opening of small pods in a cellar where Checquy troops had been held. The response thus turns on Myfanwy’s ability to interfere with the system linking the organism to the people it has captured, rather than on force alone.

Aftermath and continuing consequences

The operation leaves the Bath headquarters crowded with Pawns, soldiers, and doctors, all working amid the demands of the incident. Myfanwy and Shantay, having insisted on showers after leaving the house, find that the city’s hotels are full and end up waiting for a car at a youth hostel. The mundane inconvenience of finding accommodation contrasts with the emergency still unfolding around the Checquy personnel and illustrates how thoroughly the manifestation has occupied the organization’s attention.

Bath’s place in Myfanwy’s later decisions remains practical as well as historical. When a subsequent manifestation at a police station produces an immediate danger, she recalls that the Bath operation had already cost three Checquy teams, including a Barghest team, before she and her companions went in. She also remembers coming close to having her mind broken down by the fungus. Those experiences inform her later order that no one approach the police station, because the Checquy cannot assume that another amorphous entity will treat its personnel as gently as the Bath organism did.

The city also resurfaces in the account of the wider Grafter conspiracy. Graaf Gerd de Leeuwen reveals that he had overseen the establishment of Camp Caius and the development and placement of a fungal weapon intended to subjugate people and engulf large areas. His mention of the weapon brings Myfanwy back to the terror of the Bath incident, connecting the local manifestation to a deliberate campaign rather than an isolated outbreak. Bath is therefore both a place with a deep history of supernatural activity and the site through which the threat of the fungal weapon becomes immediate to her.