Jimmy turns from his perusal of the clippings in front of him to a filing cabinet he had searched earlier and discounted as irrelevant. He mumbles to himself as he does so: "Where was it? Come on, come on, come on." And then, with an excited exclamation, he finds the story he's been looking for.
He holds it triumphantly in front of George and Chet. "It's something Jisandra mentioned she found in Corbitt's diaries. Some place called the Chapel of Sacred Contemplation. I was so set on finding out more about the house I skipped over this earlier." George and Chet move closer and examine the story in the clipping. The Chapel is mentioned as the site of a police raid in 1912. The police had received a tip off about practices only described as 'unnatural' in the article, and the disappearances of several neighbourhood children, forcing the police to raid the building. It's unclear how it started, but a fire broke out in the church, and over a dozen people inside at the time died. Three policemen are also reported to have been injured or killed by gunfire. Three dozen more citizens, some of them described as 'of some standing', were arrested on unspecified charges. No further stories about the raid or the sentencing of those arrested can be found, which, considering the scale of the event, seems absurd. The story itself seems to have been lost on page thirteen of the newspaper. Why wasn't more made of this?
The official police records might shed more light on the event, or perhaps a visit to the site itself ...
After all, the chapel seems to be but a single block away from the Corbitt house.
"Guns, cops ... Two things that never seem to lead anywhere good. I don't think we'll get anywhere with the cops even with a 'please'. If this chapel has a history, I think we'll have better luck snooping around there proper than getting tangled in bureaucracy."
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Finding no dissenters, you head over to the librarry to pick up your companions (@Vanguard still has to make Jisandra's library use roll for the morning). On the way to the Chapel, once Ida and Jisandra cram into Chet's flivver, the various threads of the story you seem to be following twist in your minds, trying to find a way to mesh into a coherent whole.
Walter Corbitt died over fifty years ago, and seemed to be involved in unnatural practices, culminating in a bizarre request for him to be buried in his own basement. He seems to have been involved in some way with the Chapel of Sacred Contemplation, an innocuous sounding church in his neighbourhood that is raided fifty years after his death in a violent manner that results in death and, seemingly, a cover-up. Now, Corbitt's old house seems to be the locus of supernatural events that have driven tenant after tenant into the arms of madness or an early grave.
Such dark and troubling thoughts bubble in your skull as you arrive at the location of the Chapel. You are around a block away from the Corbitt House, but it feels like another world. Set well back from the street, the site of the Chapel is a sorry site. Standing on the sidewalk you can barely see the derelict ruins past the tangled and twisted trees that occupy the patch of scrub garden to its front. Heading through the trees, noticing no birdsong in their branches, you come to a broken down arch way of stone. A odd combination of triangles and eyes has been drawn on one side of the arch in chalk. You glance at it for a moment, strangely captivated, and the shapes seem to shift almost imperceptibly the longer you stare. You blink, and find a dull throbbing in the back of your head that signals the onset of a headache that seems to have sprouted from nowhere.
Looking ahead, the ruins of the Chapel are a blackened mess apparently left almost untouched since the fire over a decade ago. Stone and timber lie where they fell, and the building seems to have been left to rot like an unwanted corpse. It was never a large building, holding perhaps forty worshippers for a full service, and the walls now climb barely higher than a single storey. The roof has vanished entirely, as have the windows.
If the place has been left largely untouched clues might still exist in the ruins, if you were to explore them. The fragments that remain of the Chapel's door seem to beckon to you.
Jisandra followed up on Ida's discovery that Corbitt left instructions in his will to be buried in the basement of the very house you spent the previous day exploring, and discovered that no court decision on the lawsuit bought by neighbours against that instruction was ever recorded. Presumably it was thrown out of court, or the neighbours withdrew it.
Jisandra is pretty sure they've exhausted the library as a means of research about the house.
"I suppose we should try to figure out where the fire started" says Jimmy, "It would give us some idea of whether it was an accident, or something else, at least."
I'm going to assume that the lanterns are still in Chet's car, and that we've brought them with us this time, unless there are any objections?
Warily, memories of the house in the back of his mind, Jimmy pushes the chapel door open.
japan on
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Warily, Chet follows Jimmy in, unobtrusively holding a tire iron halfway up his sleeve just in case.
@Bogart - so are the chapel ruins open to the air and sunlight?
You enter the ruins, and are suddenly conscious of the silence that seems to envelop you. Every footfall on the creaking, blackened floorboards sounds preternaturally loud. The three of you spread out while Jisandra and George examine the outer walls. Little catches your eye as you kick over piles of ancient rubbish.
A loud creak suddenly echoes through the ruins. "The floor!" you think. Sure enough, after damage from the fire and the withering effect of years left untended, the floor is beginning to give way. The boards beneath your feet splinter and crack and you make a leap for the walls to stop yourself from falling.
Make a DEX x 4 roll to grab on to something solid and stop yourself from falling.
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
His senses dulled by an almost sleepless night and...other things, Chet is only able to stare mutely beneath his feet in shock as the floor gives way entirely.
Seeing the floor begin to bow, Jimmy throws himself to the side, grabbing hold of a fixture as a series of shattering cracks resounds through the chapel signals the floor joists giving way.
Chet falls badly, crashing through the splintering floorboards to land heavily on his side.
Chet takes 3 damage from the fall. Anyone wanting to make a medicine check can do so and give him 1d3 hit points back. Only one successful check can be made.
The others waste no time in climbing carefully down to his aid. After helping Chet to his feet Ida lights the lantern, illuminating the cellar you have inadvertently discovered. The fire seems to have reached down here as well, but nowhere net as badly. If it had, the two skeletons slumped against one wall of the cellar would not be wearing tattered, rotten remnants of robes. Examining them more closely you do not recognise the robes to be of any Christian denomination you recognise. The symbol barely visible on the front is familiar, though. The sigil you saw on the archway as you entered the ruins is replicated here.
Elsewhere in the cellar you can see a lectern, on which a mildewed book rots, and a series of cupboards and bookshelves against the wall next to the corpses.
Let me know where you're searching, and feel free to make a spot hidden check as well.
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Chet leans against the wall and groans, covered in a mix of blood and sawdust. "I...I think I landed the wrong way," he coughs. He stares at the skeletons and their heathen robes. "This isn't right. This place is...it's wrong." He looks around nervously.
The three of you sift through the detritus of the cellar, but come up with little. One cabinet seems to contain records of the Chapel. Flicking through it you see they go back decades. Walter Corbitt features prominently among the entries for his era, and the final mention of him indicates that he was indeed laid to rest in his basement, "in accordance with his wishes and those of our master, the Opener of the Way".
Jimmy sifts through a few piles of paper distractedly, nothing seeming to have any significance.
"Well, we know he was buried here, and it looks like there was something going on that ain't exactly out of the King James. Don't really know what else there is to do here, unless we want to dig him up."
"Ida, can you make anything of that book? I don't have the first idea what the 'Opener of the Way' is supposed to be."
Jisandra recognises the symbols on the clothing of what she now believes to be cultists. They bear the symbol of some entity whose name she has never seen written down, but has heard referred to in hushed whispers as The Opener of the Way, or Hypnos, or any one of a hundred different names. Hypnos invades people's dreams, and can seep into the minds of the unwary, allowing his devotees to control them in their waking hours.
You turn to the others, beginning to tell them of your find, when you feel the fabric pull away from your hand.
The skeleton is moving.
You fall backwards and push yourself away in a desperate rush of fear, your mouth open ready to scream.
The skeleton falls backwards through the wall. Around you your companions stand stock still, alerted by the noise and as scared as you are. It takes a moment before you understand what has happened to the skeleton. It has fallen against part of the wall that seems to have swing open on a loose hinge, perhaps disturbed by your investigations in its robes.
Warily, you creep forward, Ida following you with a glowing lantern, until you can see just what the opening is. You nudge the skeleton aside with your foot and peer through the opening. It's a narrow tunnel leading directly away from the church, perhaps three feet high, loosely constructed of wood. Occasional tree roots poke down into the tunnel, and it seems to stretch away for some distance.
It occurs to you that the tunnel seems to be pointing directly to the Old Corbitt House.
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Chet puts a hand to his mouth and calls up. "George! George! There's some sort of tunnel down here! It looks like it leads to that damned house!"
He looks at the others, producing his tire iron. "How do we want to do this?"
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BobCescaIs a girlBirmingham, UKRegistered Userregular
"Do you think we should go through this?" Ida asks nervously. "There's obviously a connection here we are not seeing." She bites her lips nervously as things which have previously been only academic are coming to life before her eyes.
Holding a lantern in one hand and his blackjack in the other, Jimmy crouches down and shuffles into the tunnel. Chet follows him, tire iron in hand. Carrying the second lantern, Ida follows him. George and Jisandra being up the rear.
The tunnel is cold, and seems to grow colder the further in you get. the ceiling has been loosely secured with wooden boards but earth still falls occasionally where a tree root has broken through. Before long, your legs being to cramp up and you sweat with the effort, despite the chill. After perhaps twenty minutes of shuffling you see what must be the end of the tunnel ahead. You make some quick guesses as to the distance you've travelled and figure you're somewhere under the Old Corbitt House. Ahead, the tunnels ends in some boards. In the centre of the boards the familiar mixture of eyes and triangles has been drawn in what you tell yourself is red paint.
Drawing closer, you examine the boards while trying to avoid looking at the baleful symbol. Holding the lantern up against it and attempting to peer through the narrow cracks, you come to the conclusion that the boards block the entrance to a room of some kind, though you can see no details beyond the sense of a larger space behind the boards.
Chet wriggles past Jimmy to the head of the party, and crouches in front of the tunnel's end, trying to figure out how to gain enough swing room to get the tire iron through the boards. Eventually, he lunges forward with the tire, hoping to break through in enough places to give him enough of a headstart to lay on his back and simply kick the boards away.
The boards are old, and untreated, and splinter easily. Finishing the job with his boots, Chet wriggles forward into the room, quickly joined by Jimmy and Ida. George and Jisandra are still in the tunnel while the first three take in the contents of the room by the dim glow of the lantern.
A large, square chamber greets their eyes. A stale smell of decay and death pervades the air. A faint rustling noise from the far, unlit end of the chamber scratches at your attention. A low table on which rests ancient parchment occupies the near right hand corner. Every wall is covered in a strange script, something that seems to owe more to heiroglyphics than English. And above, on the ceiling, the symbol you have begun to see when you close your eyes is writ large in red.
In the centre of the room, lying on a dusty pallet, is a body. Dessicated and naked, skin drawn tight against the bones beneath and of a faint, yellowish cast, the body seems almost an alien from a pulp magazine.
THUMP
From somewhere above, that awful sound again.
Jisandra and George exit the tunnel and join you in silent thrall to the sight before you.
THUMP
The scratching noise at the far end of the room seems to become louder, as if in desperation or anticipation.
Ida tears her gaze away from the body long enough to scan a few lines of text on the wall. Almost, she grasps a sentence from the crazed scribblings, but the meaning slips away.
As Jimmy creeps closer to the body the noise from upstairs seems to become deafening and regular.
THUMP THUMP THUMP
The scratching noise from the far end of the room also increases in volume, and then seems to get closer. A teeming mass of wriggling fur and sharp teeth and beady eyes barrels across the room, covering it in a carpet of shrieking rats. Over the body they run, around your feet as you stand there, petrified by the tidal mass of diseased vermin. Some crawl up your legs and cling mercilessly as you frantically beat at them through your clothes. Some ascend as high as your head, and you pull desperately at your hair trying to loosen their limpit like grip. Most crawl around you and head towards the tunnel through which you entered, and eventually, after what seems like an age, the swarm has gone, leaving only a few stragglers and the bodies of those you tore off yourselves and dashed to the ground.
Panting with effort and wild-eyed, you fling your gaze about the room, anxious to avoid whatever comes at you next.
From behind you, you hear George utter a strangled cry. His face seems to twist unnaturally, and then slacken into dumb vacancy. He reaches into his overalls and draws out a hammer, then raises it as if to strike Jisandra.
In the centre of the room, the body sits up, and the head turns on a shrivelled neck to face you. It's mouth opens, lips drawn back to reveal rotten teeth and the stub of a tongue. Slowly, as you watch, transfixed, it stands and reaches out bony, yellowed hands to you.
SAN check (roll under your SAN to pass). If you fail roll a D6 and lose that many SAN points.
After you make the SAN check tell me what you're going to do (i.e. attack the corpse of Corbitt - for tis he - restrain George, run away, offer your companions as sacrifice if he'll let you go, etc).
Jimmy reels back from the suddenly animated corpse. Turning to run, he comes face to face with the blank expression and strangely aggressive posture of George. Relying on the impetus of his first couple of steps, Jimmy barrels into him, trying to simultaneously disarm him and knock him out of the way.
Posts
Looking up from a stack of clippings, Jimmy rubs his eyes, stares into space for a second, and says:
"I think I got something..."
He holds it triumphantly in front of George and Chet. "It's something Jisandra mentioned she found in Corbitt's diaries. Some place called the Chapel of Sacred Contemplation. I was so set on finding out more about the house I skipped over this earlier." George and Chet move closer and examine the story in the clipping. The Chapel is mentioned as the site of a police raid in 1912. The police had received a tip off about practices only described as 'unnatural' in the article, and the disappearances of several neighbourhood children, forcing the police to raid the building. It's unclear how it started, but a fire broke out in the church, and over a dozen people inside at the time died. Three policemen are also reported to have been injured or killed by gunfire. Three dozen more citizens, some of them described as 'of some standing', were arrested on unspecified charges. No further stories about the raid or the sentencing of those arrested can be found, which, considering the scale of the event, seems absurd. The story itself seems to have been lost on page thirteen of the newspaper. Why wasn't more made of this?
The official police records might shed more light on the event, or perhaps a visit to the site itself ...
After all, the chapel seems to be but a single block away from the Corbitt house.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
"Guns, cops ... Two things that never seem to lead anywhere good. I don't think we'll get anywhere with the cops even with a 'please'. If this chapel has a history, I think we'll have better luck snooping around there proper than getting tangled in bureaucracy."
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Walter Corbitt died over fifty years ago, and seemed to be involved in unnatural practices, culminating in a bizarre request for him to be buried in his own basement. He seems to have been involved in some way with the Chapel of Sacred Contemplation, an innocuous sounding church in his neighbourhood that is raided fifty years after his death in a violent manner that results in death and, seemingly, a cover-up. Now, Corbitt's old house seems to be the locus of supernatural events that have driven tenant after tenant into the arms of madness or an early grave.
Such dark and troubling thoughts bubble in your skull as you arrive at the location of the Chapel. You are around a block away from the Corbitt House, but it feels like another world. Set well back from the street, the site of the Chapel is a sorry site. Standing on the sidewalk you can barely see the derelict ruins past the tangled and twisted trees that occupy the patch of scrub garden to its front. Heading through the trees, noticing no birdsong in their branches, you come to a broken down arch way of stone. A odd combination of triangles and eyes has been drawn on one side of the arch in chalk. You glance at it for a moment, strangely captivated, and the shapes seem to shift almost imperceptibly the longer you stare. You blink, and find a dull throbbing in the back of your head that signals the onset of a headache that seems to have sprouted from nowhere.
Looking ahead, the ruins of the Chapel are a blackened mess apparently left almost untouched since the fire over a decade ago. Stone and timber lie where they fell, and the building seems to have been left to rot like an unwanted corpse. It was never a large building, holding perhaps forty worshippers for a full service, and the walls now climb barely higher than a single storey. The roof has vanished entirely, as have the windows.
If the place has been left largely untouched clues might still exist in the ruins, if you were to explore them. The fragments that remain of the Chapel's door seem to beckon to you.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Jisandra is pretty sure they've exhausted the library as a means of research about the house.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Warily, memories of the house in the back of his mind, Jimmy pushes the chapel door open.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
A loud creak suddenly echoes through the ruins. "The floor!" you think. Sure enough, after damage from the fire and the withering effect of years left untended, the floor is beginning to give way. The boards beneath your feet splinter and crack and you make a leap for the walls to stop yourself from falling.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Seeing the floor begin to bow, Jimmy throws himself to the side, grabbing hold of a fixture as a series of shattering cracks resounds through the chapel signals the floor joists giving way.
The others waste no time in climbing carefully down to his aid. After helping Chet to his feet Ida lights the lantern, illuminating the cellar you have inadvertently discovered. The fire seems to have reached down here as well, but nowhere net as badly. If it had, the two skeletons slumped against one wall of the cellar would not be wearing tattered, rotten remnants of robes. Examining them more closely you do not recognise the robes to be of any Christian denomination you recognise. The symbol barely visible on the front is familiar, though. The sigil you saw on the archway as you entered the ruins is replicated here.
Elsewhere in the cellar you can see a lectern, on which a mildewed book rots, and a series of cupboards and bookshelves against the wall next to the corpses.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Not seeing anything she heads towards the lectern and the book.
@Vanguard, @Eddy
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Jimmy sifts through a few piles of paper distractedly, nothing seeming to have any significance.
"Well, we know he was buried here, and it looks like there was something going on that ain't exactly out of the King James. Don't really know what else there is to do here, unless we want to dig him up."
"Ida, can you make anything of that book? I don't have the first idea what the 'Opener of the Way' is supposed to be."
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
You turn to the others, beginning to tell them of your find, when you feel the fabric pull away from your hand.
The skeleton is moving.
You fall backwards and push yourself away in a desperate rush of fear, your mouth open ready to scream.
The skeleton falls backwards through the wall. Around you your companions stand stock still, alerted by the noise and as scared as you are. It takes a moment before you understand what has happened to the skeleton. It has fallen against part of the wall that seems to have swing open on a loose hinge, perhaps disturbed by your investigations in its robes.
Warily, you creep forward, Ida following you with a glowing lantern, until you can see just what the opening is. You nudge the skeleton aside with your foot and peer through the opening. It's a narrow tunnel leading directly away from the church, perhaps three feet high, loosely constructed of wood. Occasional tree roots poke down into the tunnel, and it seems to stretch away for some distance.
It occurs to you that the tunnel seems to be pointing directly to the Old Corbitt House.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
He looks at the others, producing his tire iron. "How do we want to do this?"
He hefts his blackjack in his hand.
"I just hope he's still buried."
The tunnel is cold, and seems to grow colder the further in you get. the ceiling has been loosely secured with wooden boards but earth still falls occasionally where a tree root has broken through. Before long, your legs being to cramp up and you sweat with the effort, despite the chill. After perhaps twenty minutes of shuffling you see what must be the end of the tunnel ahead. You make some quick guesses as to the distance you've travelled and figure you're somewhere under the Old Corbitt House. Ahead, the tunnels ends in some boards. In the centre of the boards the familiar mixture of eyes and triangles has been drawn in what you tell yourself is red paint.
Drawing closer, you examine the boards while trying to avoid looking at the baleful symbol. Holding the lantern up against it and attempting to peer through the narrow cracks, you come to the conclusion that the boards block the entrance to a room of some kind, though you can see no details beyond the sense of a larger space behind the boards.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Chet wriggles past Jimmy to the head of the party, and crouches in front of the tunnel's end, trying to figure out how to gain enough swing room to get the tire iron through the boards. Eventually, he lunges forward with the tire, hoping to break through in enough places to give him enough of a headstart to lay on his back and simply kick the boards away.
The boards are old, and untreated, and splinter easily. Finishing the job with his boots, Chet wriggles forward into the room, quickly joined by Jimmy and Ida. George and Jisandra are still in the tunnel while the first three take in the contents of the room by the dim glow of the lantern.
A large, square chamber greets their eyes. A stale smell of decay and death pervades the air. A faint rustling noise from the far, unlit end of the chamber scratches at your attention. A low table on which rests ancient parchment occupies the near right hand corner. Every wall is covered in a strange script, something that seems to owe more to heiroglyphics than English. And above, on the ceiling, the symbol you have begun to see when you close your eyes is writ large in red.
In the centre of the room, lying on a dusty pallet, is a body. Dessicated and naked, skin drawn tight against the bones beneath and of a faint, yellowish cast, the body seems almost an alien from a pulp magazine.
THUMP
From somewhere above, that awful sound again.
Jisandra and George exit the tunnel and join you in silent thrall to the sight before you.
THUMP
The scratching noise at the far end of the room seems to become louder, as if in desperation or anticipation.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Scanning the wall she hopes to recognise some of the symbols painted there.
Ida tears her gaze away from the body long enough to scan a few lines of text on the wall. Almost, she grasps a sentence from the crazed scribblings, but the meaning slips away.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
THUMP THUMP THUMP
The scratching noise from the far end of the room also increases in volume, and then seems to get closer. A teeming mass of wriggling fur and sharp teeth and beady eyes barrels across the room, covering it in a carpet of shrieking rats. Over the body they run, around your feet as you stand there, petrified by the tidal mass of diseased vermin. Some crawl up your legs and cling mercilessly as you frantically beat at them through your clothes. Some ascend as high as your head, and you pull desperately at your hair trying to loosen their limpit like grip. Most crawl around you and head towards the tunnel through which you entered, and eventually, after what seems like an age, the swarm has gone, leaving only a few stragglers and the bodies of those you tore off yourselves and dashed to the ground.
Panting with effort and wild-eyed, you fling your gaze about the room, anxious to avoid whatever comes at you next.
From behind you, you hear George utter a strangled cry. His face seems to twist unnaturally, and then slacken into dumb vacancy. He reaches into his overalls and draws out a hammer, then raises it as if to strike Jisandra.
In the centre of the room, the body sits up, and the head turns on a shrivelled neck to face you. It's mouth opens, lips drawn back to reveal rotten teeth and the stub of a tongue. Slowly, as you watch, transfixed, it stands and reaches out bony, yellowed hands to you.
After you make the SAN check tell me what you're going to do (i.e. attack the corpse of Corbitt - for tis he - restrain George, run away, offer your companions as sacrifice if he'll let you go, etc).
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
d6 roll for lost sanity points (1d6=6)
Jimmy reels back from the suddenly animated corpse. Turning to run, he comes face to face with the blank expression and strangely aggressive posture of George. Relying on the impetus of his first couple of steps, Jimmy barrels into him, trying to simultaneously disarm him and knock him out of the way.