Did I not do an update about what happened to Larry Crosswell? Did I not describe the frantic battle across the Asylum’s ornamental gardens or the awful sights at the lake’s edge? I could have sworn I did.
Well, I had better get to it.
The night of the new moon found our erstwhile-Egyptophiles renting a delivery van from a nearby village’s grocer, piling in with what guns and equipment as they could gather on short notice.
Get in losers, we’re going to stop a ritual.
The plan was for Timely Tom and Leon to infiltrate, with everyone else sort of converging on the suspected site of the ritual, the lakeside amphitheatre.
I kind of remember something about Tom and Leon faffing around with the deserted gatehouse, before some hospital goons came looking for them and chased Tom off, but not before they got a big set of keys.
As it was, Tom and Leon were captured and taken into the largely deserted (or at least on heavy lockdown) hospital before being strapped to gurneys.
The crew that advanced on the lake chose to go directly, cresting the hill at the part where it was all dilapidated ornamental garden. Across the shrubbery came wild-eyed patients and orderlies, who seemed to be struggling against themselves. Ernst put his rifle to his shoulder and started picking them off, with Shea adding to the violence as they got closer and closer.
In real life, the formal gardens at Danvers were lovely and part of the overall idea that recuperation should take place in pleasant, calm and natural surroundings.
And as they got closer to the amphitheatre they saw the torchlit bacchanal of violence. Patients, nurses, doctors and orderlies writhed in a mass of biting, punching, gouging and kicking, cries of exertion, glee and anguish rising into the dark sky. With his back to the lake, standing apart from the orgy of pain was Dr Shine.
A procession of gurneys was brought down the hill and the celebrants fell upon the unfortunates strapped on there, beating them mercilessly. Among the train of victims was Larry Crosswell and Tom, having an unusually terrible time riding this particular train: it’s usually his jam.
Bradford, standing apart from the action enough to take some time to focus his mind, began casting Claws of the Void. He centered the effect on Dr Shine, trying to fling the creepy physician’s being into a whole bunch of planes of existence at once. But the words slipped away from him and he could feel the spell going awry: he fought for control to get the spell to go off, but it was too late. Unable to focus on Shine sufficiently the energy of the spell reverberated through Bradford’s body and tore him to pieces that never hit the floor.
Shea and Terrance closed in on Dr Shine as Wilbur scouted the water’s edge… a lake under which could be seen the suggestion of some sinuous monstrous shape.
Ernst cracked off a shot that missed and seemed to snap Shine out of his glassy eyed ecstasy. But the next one didn’t miss and Terrance took a syringe to him, I think, before Shea got stuck in with a shotgun for good measure. The collected violent denizens of Danvers continued to fall about each other with fist and foot but also battered those who had closed in on Dr Shine and as they did, a terrible tension was palpable in the air, like bands of pressure crushing the area of the abominable ritual. The air began to shimmer with tightening coils and Tom, Larry and Shea were dragged to safety just in time before the area suffered and explosion of flesh and bone, the ritual’s celebrants torn apart where they fought like brainwashed eggs in a microwave.
In full flight, they hoofed it back to the delivery vehicle parked in the woods, one Bradford down and with Leon nowhere to be found. The accelerator hit the floor and barely came up between there and Boston, with a brief stop to raid the hotel for their belongings and flee. They were done with Danvers, and would just have to return this grocery jalopy someother day.
However, as they recovered from their scrapes and bruises (Shea was looking at a stretch in the hospital) Larry told them why he had committed himself: he had checked in on young Walt Resnick, the freshman anthropology student who had accompanied them on their ill-fated trip to Providence and seen things college kids ought not to see in the ballroom of the Milton Hotel.
Resnick was technically still on the campus and books at Miskatonic University up Arkham way, but had all but dropped out. Unable to deal with the things he had seen and the voices that had talked through him, he had turned to refreshment of a chemical nature. He raved about the incredible things he had seen while taking a new drug he had been given, called The Black. He convinced Crosswell – who is usually open to new experiences – to try some and Crosswell’s mind was blown. He hallucinated incredibly realistic vistas of a different world, a jungle-like environment filled with amazing, brightly coloured creatures flitting between the gigantic palm frond forests. Yet while all of the visuals were great, he was also filled with a sense of dread and a paranoid feeling of being observed by something dangerous just beyond sensing.
This was too much for Larry, whose mind had taken a real doing in Providence, and the image of opened gates that should have stayed closed stuck with him after his trip. He checked himself into Danvers and left Resnick to his decline into… whatever was happening to Resnick.
Back in Boston, they got the medical care and rest that they needed and got on the phone to some gals that may be able to help them: Would they be free for a jaunt up to Arkham and some investigating at the University.
Tandyanne, a librarian, but like pathologically, in that she is bad at everything else and blames it on her librarian-ness. Sylvie, apparently an artist, or art-lover or maybe some sort of curator, but actually, I think, an art thief.
They took the delivery truck back, with apologies that fell on deaf country ears that would know better than to trust city folk in the future. After that they took the train up to Arkham.
