Arkham, Massachusetts — (SBW) At 6:15 in the evening the Reverend Joshua Strawn arrived at the Church of Our Lady of The Sea to prepare for the night’s services, lighting candles, making sure that the choir robes are clean and pressed, going over his sermon nervously, hemming and hawing between the pews. At 7:15 the Arkham Police Department sent two dozen gas canisters crashing through the seventeenth century stained glass windows and came storming in through the smoke, gas masks distorting their faces, guns at the ready. It was a scene out of an action movie.

The police were responding to a anonymous tip that alleged that the church — which has just recently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the traditionally cosmopolitan college town — was harboring a ring of pedophiles and child molesters, and that the crypts underneath the venerable stone floors were stuffed with the bodies of seven and eight year olds. After herding the weeping, vomiting Reverend Strawn and his twelve-person choir into the back of a police wagon, Arkham’s finest began a sweep of the church, grimly prepared for the worst. They found nothing, no pornography, no dead children, only a pile of dusty reliquaries stacked in the crypts pending removal to a storage facility.

“This was a very reliable source,” said Deputy Sheriff Eric Mulrooney at a press conference this morning. “We’ve received tips from [this source] before that cleared up a number of unsolved cases, some of them decades old.” Mr. Mulrooney declined to name the source or to answer any further questions.

Reverend Strawn also declined to comment on the particulars of the case, although he and the church “are considering filing charges” against the APD in Massachusetts Superior Court.