Malena is a biologist and the scientific conscience of the group of Operativo Cóndor in 1966, marked in body and mind by the descent beneath the Malvinas and killed by a shoggoth in Buenos Aires.
| Type | Character |
| Era | 1966 |
| Father | Walter |
| Houses of the Cycle | ☷ House of the Descent |
| Spanish entry | Malena |
Background
A biology graduate and zoology teaching assistant, she had read At the Mountains of Madness and wanted to believe it: she came to find what lies inside the mountain. In the group she measures, catalogs and asks for proof. She had wanted to be a doctor like her father, but was told it was “no career for women”. Her mother would not let her drive, and she has a nineteen-year-old brother to protect. At first the records call her only “the biologist”.
History
After a bribe, she visited Antonio Portet, committed to the Borda Hospital. She analyzed the black slime of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, an organic tar that evaporates once isolated, and found matter behaving like blood, type B positive. For the incursion she made Molotov cocktails and tear gas. In the dungeon beneath the islands she read the pyroclastic statues like strata, recognized an ossuary and gave first aid.
Her father
Her father, a doctor named Walter, disappeared: he “had to make himself scarce”, the family says, without saying from what. Debts and a second family are suggested, and something not of this earth is suspected. Malena receives calls that hang up.
In a dream she descended to an underwater laboratory where Walter worked among parasites, the Mi-Go or space fungi, which she recognized under the microscope. The dream forced a choice: inject herself or save her father. Something of her reason stayed below.
The mark
Her arm became furrowed with necrosis in the shape of a tentacle, and in the mirror, in place of her face, she saw “Yoigor”, the name the island corruption gives the power looking back. Antonio Portet bears the same necrotic arm and tentacle marks.
Death
In the crypt beneath the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Barracas, where an organization that looked to the future kept a shoggoth chained as a generator, she met the protoplasmic creature of the book she had read. The shoggoth devoured her head. The other four escaped through a box to the Dominican Republic.
See also
- The Hybrid Son, another child torn by a father who belongs to the deep
- Antonio Portet