Hulk drops into
the middle of a parade on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, looking for Charlie…
…who is being
pursued by the monster Frozen Charlotte down into the space below her shop
which looks increasingly like a mansion, a dungeon, and a cathedral. Then she
is cornered by the monster, an old woman with ghastly elongated limbs and a
veil covering her decayed face, wanting to add Charlie to her collection….
As Hulk wanders
the city, he encounters Private Inspector Francis Bergeron of the Pinkerton
Detective Agency who promises to enlist the militiamen to search for Charlie. Hulk
knows Bergeron is a ghost which the fellow refuses to believe. He takes Hulk
back to the first murder he was dispatched to solve…in 1873. Then another a few
weeks later then they started accumulating over the years. On a hunch, Bergeron
had several bodies in the cemetery exhumed and discovered the same MO,
indicating the killer had been active for decades or perhaps a century. Then
the killer was sighted, a creature with some strange qualities. It escaped but
left behind a Frozen Charlotte doll that resembled the victim, so that name was
used to refer to the killer. After that the case was quietly closed and the
killer was said to have been captured; not long after this, Inspector Francis
Bergeron vanished, a victim of Frozen Charlotte….
Hulk wants to
know where Charlie is. Bergeron sifts through his memories and directs Hulk to
the old lady’s shop. He walks through the building, down into its catacombs
where he discovers a huge number of Frozen Charlotte dolls, each pleading for
help. He also discovers the monster, calling herself Nephele, Mother of Angels,
refusing to give back even one of her angels—and then she attacks….