Story HourPost your ongoing tales from your campaigns, and read those from others for inspiration. Lots of other RPG boards post "Story Hours", but this is where it started!
They entered the refrigerated film vault. Servers flanked the walls, beeping and humming. Along one wall were gas masks behind a glass-proof case. But it was the object in the center that was the focus.
A five-foot long cryogenic tube lay flat, taking up much of the room. A small fold-up table was the only other piece of furniture.
The reinforced door whisked closed behind them, locking into place.
Jim-Bean plunked his medical bag and his lunch bag on the table. Snapping on plastic gloves and a mask, he turned to the cryogenic tube.
“I don’t suppose you can open this thing?”
Goodrich sighed and placed his hand over a button on the side of the tube. “I’m legally obligated to note for the record that we are not making any attempt to influence your observation of the corpse. You are an independent entity and have not been coerced to form any opinions on the subject.”
Jim-Bean nodded impatiently and waved at Goodrich to open the thing already.
Goodrich pressed the button and the opaque shield slid open.
The Grey’s corpse was laid out limb-stiff in the tube. Its lidless eyes stared at the ceiling. Jim-Bean hesitated only for a moment before he started probing it. He took out measuring tape from his bag and extended it.
“Subject is four feet long with gray skin,” said Jim-Bean. “Body is elongated and lacking in muscular definition. The legs are shorter and jointed differently than a human—must have an awkward gait.” He lifted one arm, twisting it this way and that. “Hands have three digits and a thumb.” Jim-Bean let the arm drop with a thud. Goodrich frowned.
“Subject has a bulbous, hairless head supported by a thin neck. The head is dominated by large, black lidless eyes.” He roughly jerked the head to and fro. “It has a small flat nose, tiny mouth and small ears.”
“Please be careful with it,” said Goodrich.
“Hello, what’s this?” Jim-Bean leaned over to take a look at the Grey’s forehead. There were several odd indentations. “Interesting.”
Behind him, Hammer’s eyes widened.
A black phone on the wall beeped twice. The security guard picked it up. “Mr. Goodrich? There’s another expert here to see the body.”
Goodrich stalked over to the guard and snatched the receiver from him.
Hammer typed furiously into his cistron. Jim-Bean’s cistron, set to vibrate, hummed in response.
Jim-Bean fished it out of his pocket. It read. “PROBLEM.”
“?” typed Jim-Bean back.
“HOLES IN HEAD,” responded Hammer.
Goodrich was barking angrily into the phone. He didn’t like unannounced guests.
“Y?” tapped Jim-Bean, growing annoyed.
“HEALED,” Hammer typed back.
Before Jim-Bean could respond, Goodrich turned his key in tandem with the security guard and the next expert walked through the door.
A dark-haired man wearing glasses in a black suit entered, followed by a pretty blonde in a pencil skirt and two security thugs in gray suits and sunglasses. The door whisked shut behind them.
“Doctor Van Oberschmeier,” he said, brushing past Goodrich. “Who iz this?”
“That’d be Doctor Chan,” said Goodrich, careful to avoid saying his full name. “I’m surprised you don’t know him.”
Oberschmeier smiled. “Of course, of course. I just didn’t recognize him from his picture.”
Oberschmeier’s blonde assistant scribbled notes furiously behind him. One of the security guards plopped a medical kit on the other side of the room. The assistant took out plastic gloves and snapped them onto Oberschmeier’s outstretched hands.
“Are you done inspecting ze corpse, Herr Doctor?” he asked, looking Jim-Bean up and down.
“Not yet,” said Jim-Bean. “But my preliminary observations indicate that this is nothing more than a movie prop. A very advanced movie prop, but a movie prop nonetheless.”
“I’ll be ze judge of dat,” snapped Obeschmeier. “My specialty is pulmonary and circulatory systems.” He took hold of the corpse’s wrist and lifted it.
“Sure, right. I think—“
“Tell me, Herr Doctor. As a plastic surgeon you must know something about ze pulmonary system. Have you found any evidence of capillaries in ze fingertips?” He held up the three-fingered hand.
Jim-Bean lowered his mask. “That’s a trick question. It’s a dummy. It doesn’t have a circulatory system.”
“Oh quite ze contrary. I see evidence here dat it does indeed have such a system—“
BEEP-BEEP, went somebody’s cistron.
Jim-Bean looked at Hammer. Hammer shrugged at Jim-Bean. They had both put their cistrons on vibrate. And yet there was a distinctive ring to their cistrons that was unmistakable.
BEEP-BEEP.
Oberschmeier looked at his assistant.
BEEP-BEEP.
“Is somebody going to get that?” asked Goodrich in irritation.
BEEP-BEEP.
Oberschmeier cleared his throat and nodded at the assistant. She reached into the bag and clicked something. The beeping stopped.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you all to hand over any communication devices. Part of our security procedure.”
Hammer and Jim-Bean dutifully handed over their cistrons. One of Oberschmeier’s men fished out four identical communicators and handed them over to Goodrich.
Goodrich peered at the cistrons. “Hey, you all have the same cell phones…”
Oberschmeier reached into his suit jacket and drew a pistol, pointing it at Jim-Bean. “Figures Sprague would send his people in to clean up his own little mess.”
In a flash, Goodrich’s pistol was out, aimed at Oberschmeier.
Oberschmeier’s guards drew their pistols and pointed at Jim-Bean and Hammer.
Goodrich’s security guard drew his pistol and shakily aimed it from one man to the other.
Oberschmeier’s assistant drew a pistol and pointed at the guard.
Jim-Bean cowered behind the folding table. “What is wrong with you people?!”
Hammer drew his pistol and aimed it at the alien corpse. “Everybody calm down or I shoot it.”
Goodrich’s brow was furrowed, still trying to figure out what the hell was going on. “You’ve got to be kidding…”
“I don’t like to kill team members,” said Oberschmeier, “but I will if you don’t put the gun down in the next five seconds.”
“I bet your superiors will be pissed when they find out you killed a Grey,” replied Hammer.
It was unclear who fired first. The security guard jerked backwards even as his shot went wide, grazing one of the rival team’s guards. Hammer ducked down behind the cryogenic tube as gunfire peppered the air over him.
Goodrich, a crack shot, finished off the wounded thug and then dove behind the tube along with Hammer. The cistrons clattered to the floor.
Jim-Bean picked them up and deposited them in his bag.
“It doesn’t have to be like this!” snarled the agent formerly known as Oberschmeier.
Klaxons went off and whirling yellow lights descended from four corners of the room.
The unmistakable hissing of gas permeated the gunfire. Everyone stopped firing.
“What the hell is that?” shouted Hammer.
“HALON system,” barked Goodrich. He started crawling towards the gas masks on the wall.
Jim-Bean grabbed a gas mask out of his larger bag and tossed it to Hammer.
The other agents all dove for Oberschmeier’s medical bag.
Goodrich smashed the window, donned a gas mask, and crawled back to the other side of the cryogenic tube.
Jim-Bean came up out of the bag with a gas mask on and a tear grenade in one hand. He lifted it triumphantly, ready to pull the pin.
When he looked around, the Grey alien was staring back at him, the same blank expression on its face. The rival agents on the far side of the room were all wearing gas masks. And wielding shotguns.
Smoke and halon gas filled the room, making identifying targets nearly impossible. Shotgun blasts blindly tore into the cryogenic tube, rocking it several feet backwards. Hammer ducked around the left side and squeezed off several shots.
The Grey’s vacant gaze focused on the blonde assistant. She grunted with exertion as her own limbs betrayed her. After a brief struggle, she tore off her own gas mask. The agent fell to the ground, wheezing.
Jim-Bean grabbed his two bags. “We have to get out of here!” He shouted through his gas mask to Goodrich.
Goodrich fired his pistol into the smoke and backed up to the door. Jim-Bean crawled over to the security guard’s dead body and yanked the key off the corpse’s neck.
More blasts echoed in the chamber. Servers sparked as they were perforated by shotgun shells.
Goodrich plugged his key into the wall. Jim-Bean felt his way up the wall and found the opening for the key. He plugged it in.
“One…”
Hammer dragged the cryogenic tube backwards on its wheels, firing around the Gray who sat placidly amidst the chaos.
“Two…”
Hammer swung the cryogenic tube around, his back to his assailants for a terrifying moment. He was relying on the smoke, confusion, and maybe even the Grey to keep him safe.
“Three!”
They turned the keys and Hammer shoved the tube forward.
The door whisked open. Two security guards who stood in the doorway were rammed out of the way. Hammer hopped onto the back of the tube and, like a kid riding a shopping cart, rode it through the crowd of guards outside of the vault.
Jim-Bean came through next. He tore off his mask. “Get in there, your boss is trapped!”
The two nearest security guards looked at each other in shock and then rushed forward just as Goodrich tried to exit.
“Get out of the way you morons!” screamed Goodrich.
“Lunch time!” shouted Jim-Bean. He tossed his lunch bag over the heads of the two guards.
“Nooo—“ was all Goodrich got out before the reinforced door slammed shut again.
The remaining security guards aimed their pistols at Jim-Bean. He turned to face them, something clenched in his fist.
“Put the weapon down!” shouted one of the guards.
“It’s not a weapon,” said Jim-Bean. He clicked the detonator with his thumb.
The ensuing blast in the reinforced film vault turned the doorway into a cannon. The door shrieked off its moorings, tearing through the crowd of security guards and blasting a path to freedom.
Jim-Bean stepped over the unconscious bodies and corpses on his way to the exit.
Jim-Bean and Hammer loaded the Gray’s cylinder into the back of the van, which they had parked in the parking garage. It never said a word, just staring at them with unblinking eyes.
Jim-Bean hopped into the driver’s seat and hit the gas. The van lurched forward towards the exit even as sirens wailed in the distance.
“Now what?” asked Hammer.
“We’ve got to get rid of it.”
They exited onto the street, passing ambulances, fire engines, and police cars.
“Get rid of it how?”
“I dunno. We’ve got C-4 mate, it’s not hard to figure it out.”
“You mean kill him?”
Jim-Bean’s eyes were on the road. “Him? Are you pissing me? It’s barely an IT!”
There was the telltale sound of a pistol being cocked. Cold metal pressed against Jim-Bean’s temple.
“I can’t let you do that.”
Jim-Bean didn’t turn his head, trying to keep the van on the road. “What in the bloody hell is wrong with you?”
“Our mission was to remove the Grey. That’s what we did. We’re returning him to Majestic-12.”
“Return it? Are you barmy? We were supposed to eliminate all evidence!”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“Well I know what I heard, and I don’t think putting a pistol to my head was part of the mission.”
“I can’t let you harm him,” Hammer repeatedly mechanically.
“Listen to yourself, mate. It got inside your head! That’s not you talking…”
The doors to the van swung open. There was a thump-thump in the back.
“Damn it!” Jim-Bean slammed on the brakes.
The cylinder rolled behind the van. A winged blur of flashing, multi-colored lights swooped down and, grabbing hold of the cylinder, soared upwards again into what looked like a cloud. With a flash, it was gone.
Sprague, his feathered gray-blonde hair spiked like a bird of prey, was sitting patiently when Warner entered. Like Sprague, Warner was a military man. Unlike Sprague, he was a ten-year veteran of the Army who wasn’t yet considered washed up. His military buzz cut gave him a lean and hungry look.
Warner sat down across from Sprague. Sprague waited.
“We have ascertained RAGDOLL’s final position, but…”
“Yes?” asked Sprague.
“The wreckage at the Axelrod Building is substantial. It'll be some time before anything's recovered.”
Sprague allowed a sympathetic smile. “This has been a terrible tragedy, Lieutenant Warner. And I can only stress that if you'd notified me earlier, it might have been avoided.”
“I appreciate your candor in the matter,” said Warner, death in his eyes.
“And I yours, Neal.”
“Perhaps in the future technology will allow a more thorough investigation of the wreckage,” said Warner.
“Perhaps.”
“There is another matter,” began Warner, “one that I'm reluctant to...”
“Please,” said Sprague with an encouraging gesture. “Go on.”
“One of my teams was last reported in the area near the Axelrod Building. I have not heard from them for some time.”
“Neal,” said Sprague with a sneer, “first Platte, now the Axelrod Building. You’ve got to stop losing teams like this.”
Warner cleared his throat.
“My men found this.” Sprague reached into a drawer and lifted a bag out of it. “Maybe it will help.” He upended the bag’s contents and four cistrons clattered out of it.
Warner slowly picked them up in turn. It was the cistrons belonging to the agents from X-Team: Knox, Maverick, Ghost Bear, and Knockdown. Without a word, he walked towards the exit.
“You should keep better track of your agents,” said Sprague calmly before he left. To his credit, Warner shut the door behind him without slamming it.
Sprague picked up the phone. It was time to track down one of his own.
This scenario, “Nemo Solus Sapit,” is a Cthulhu Now supplement “The Stars Are Right” by John Tynes. Guppy can read more about Delta Green at http://www.delta-green.com. Please note: This story hour contains spoilers!
Hank “Guppy” Gupta (Smart Hero) played by Joseph Tresca
Kurtis "Hammer" Grange (Fast Hero) played by George Webster
Jim “Jim-Bean” Baxter (Charismatic Hero/Telepath) played by Jeremy Ortiz
In chapter twelve, quite a bit of damage was inflicted to the campaign’s overall theme of secrecy and the paranormal. When an Indian agent single-handedly rescues a jet from a terrorist attack by strapping a bomb to his chest and parachuting to safety, it’s bound to get some attention. I had originally envisioned the agents resolving the event by landing the plane, but as always my players surprise me.
So I rolled with it. Two things happened as a result of that scenario: 1) Majestic-12 is even more pissed at the agents and decided to punish them, and 2) a major news outlet (GNN) took a personal interest in Guppy. This leads up to a scenario that I’ve been eager to run for years now: committing one of the agents to an insane asylum.
That’s right, Guppy’s going right back to where he started, an asylum. Has he been committed? Disavowed? Is he really nuts? This scenario required a bit of flipping back and forth between the agents investigating the disappearance of Guppy and Guppy trying to survive in the sanitarium.
The original version of the scenario suffered from much the same problem I have with a lot of the modern scenarios for Call of Cthulhu: they’re chock full of really interesting ideas and characters, but no clear way to introduce them. There are two cultists with personality disorders that don’t really come up in play unless the agents happen to stumble upon them at precisely the right moment. The horror of their insanity isn’t amped up; in fact, the horror of Damon Newcomb’s mental illness seems to hinge almost entirely on the fact that the man is willing to eat a cat. And ultimately there’s no big reveal – the conflict between the two bad guys just happens to the agents and they’re expected to escape (or not) rather than there being an actual resolution to the plot.
How did I resolve it? By my usual hack tactics: I ripped off the movie script of the awful Halle Berry movie Gothika. I have this theory that bad horror movies make for great scenarios, and Gothika is no exception. By dividing up the scripted events amongst characters on the inside and the outside of the asylum, the plot of Gothika actually fits better for this scenario and gives the agents on the outside something to do.
There’s something of a metagame philosophy to the original version of this scenario, with the assumption that one of the players is co-opted to be part of the occult conspiracy. As a player, I dislike this tremendously; I’ve had it happen in two different campaigns to my character, and in both the betrayal felt more like the other player being a jerk and less like a major contribution to the narrative. Instead, I’d much rather have the player suffer through being in an insane asylum rather than simply have him gobbled up by the bad guy and used as a foil.
I used audio files from Session 9, one of the scariest horror movies ever. If you’re a fan of horror, YOU MUST GO OUT AND RENT RIGHT NOW. It too, deals with an asylum and the tapes help flesh out poor, pathetic Damon.
Defining Moment: When the Shan starts jumping bodies, it takes the combined efforts of Guppy, Jim-Bean, and Hammer to take it down.
Yes I'm alone, but then again I always was
As far back as I can tell
I think maybe it's because you never were really real to begin with
I just made you up to hurt myself
--Only by Nine Inch Nails
Ever since he returned to the United States, Guppy was a hunted man. He was a celebrity, claimed by the Indian government as one of their agents, denounced by the Pakistanis as a rabble-rouser, and denied by the U.S. as having anything to do with CIFA at all. GNN had taken a peculiar interest in him and it seemed like they were dedicated to tracking down his identity.
Guppy was returning to base when a van suddenly screeched in front of him. He slammed on the brakes.
Out hopped a news team pointing a camera at his head. A pretty blonde stepped out and shoved a microphone in his face.
“Mr. Gupta! Margaret Ellens, Global News Network: Is it true that you’re the agent who single-handedly saved Indianational 270?”
Guppy threw the car in reverse, backed up, and tore around the GNN crew. He couldn’t go back to base using his normal route.
As dusk fell, Guppy suspected he had a tail – at least a few times he thought he saw someone pointing a camera at him from the passenger side of the pursuing vehicles.
He slowed down at the sight of colored lights up ahead.
A knocked-down telephone post blocked the road. Emergency vehicles were at the scene. A patrolman waved him down.
“Telephone post just decided to fall. It'll take us a while to clear this up so I'm afraid you’re gonna have to take the long way home.”
Guppy drove down a curvy road toward an old bridge. There was something definitely creepy about the deserted place. He checked his mirror to see if he was still being followed…
And looked back just in time to see an older woman standing smack in front of the car. Naked. And about to be hit by his vehicle.
Guppy swerved to avoid her and slammed his car into the railing.
Metal screeched as Guppy struggled to regain control of the car and finally broke to a halt.
Guppy looked in his rearview mirror: the woman was standing back there. He guessed she was drunk or high, and in any case completely out of it. He stepped out of the car.
“Lady, are you crazy?”
As he got closer, Guppy could see that the woman was covered in bruises. Clearly something horrible had happened to her. She was probably in her forties, and had a busted lip and black eye.
“Lady?”
The woman suddenly gripped Guppy’s arm, hard. She reached out to touch his face. Her movements were desperate, smothering. Like the movements of a drowning person.
“Hey!” shouted Guppy.
The woman tried to speak but no words coame out. Instead she produced a strained, wettish sound. Suddenly she was prying Guppy’s mouth open and she was much stronger than he expected…
The woman opened her own mouth wide like a snake. And as Guppy muffled a scream, blood started leaking out of the woman’s eye sockets and from wounds all over her body.
SAMSON, CA--“So what was this important mission Sprague pulled you off of?” asked Hammer.
Jim-Bean took a long drag from his cigarette. “Remember the brain spiders?”
“How can I forget them?”
Jim-Bean nodded . “Right. Remember how we were supposed to be partners?”
“Yeah?”
“You may have noticed I’ve been gone a lot. I’ve been tracking those bloody things down, one in particular. It was in a serial killer in the Severn Valley, named Simon Slater.”
“The brain spiders have names?”
“They’re called Shan. And yes, they have names. We call him Simon. All the Shan believe in some kind of weird god known as Xada-hgla. But Simon, he was a heretic even for the Shan. He worships a different version known as Azathoth, the nuclear chaos.”
“Azathoth, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s barmy I know.” Jim-Bean took another puff, staring out at the setting sun. “In the seventies, Simon was fond of killing people with a walking stick. He got his own nickname and everything: the Cane Killer. But then he disappeared. I was able to pick up on his trail again in San Francisco, California, in 1983. There was a series of murders at a sorority house in which six girls were murdered by a walking stick.”
“So he hopped bodies?”
“Yah, think so. The cane is unmistakable, made of a very odd material we’ve never been able to identify. I’ve seen pictures but nobody’s ever recovered it. It was used in the killings in the Severn Valley and then in San Francisco.”
“But something stopped him.”
“A bit of fluff named, Katy Rose. Who’d have thunk, eh?”
“But you never retrieved the cane?”
“No cane. She married Jared Newcomb a year later and had a child, Damon Newcomb. When he was twelve, Damon’s records were sealed. His parents died in a mysterious accident.”
“Let me guess,” said Hammer. “They were murdered with a walking stick.”
Jim-Bean shrugged. “Don’t know. But I think Simon got smart enough to avoid using his signature weapon.”
“Wait a minute…you’re saying Simon the brain-bug hopped from Slater’s body to Katy, and then from Katy to her son?”
“Right. A bit squicky if you think about it.”
Hammer blanched. “I’d rather not.”
“The trail went cold after that. For all I know Damon’s dead and Simon hopped to a new body. And yet…”
“Yet what?”
“I’ve been having some really strange dreams. A nightmare, actually. It involves an older woman, but it also involves Guppy.”
“Guppy? You think he’s alive?”
“I don’t believe in any of that mumbo-jumbo. Probably some messed up part of my psyche. But anyway, in the nightmare the woman holds a box in her left hand. It’s a small box. And she repeats a series of numbers.”
“Just a dream.” Hammer shrugged. “Everybody has them.”
“I’ve had this dream for ten days straight. Whoever she is, this woman’s getting insistent. She repeats the same series of numbers too.”
“Numbers?”
“Yeah: One-zero-two-two-zero-one.”
“Sounds like a date,” said Hammer.
Jim-Bean rubbed out his cigarette. “That’s bloody brilliant! I’ve been trying to puzzle that out…”
Their cistrons beeped. Jim-Bean’s cistron shrieked, “Tacos! I need tacos or I’ll explode!”
Hammer’s hand reflexively went for his pistol. “Jesus, why’d you change your ring to that?”
“Invader Zim. After that last incident I thought it might be a good idea for us to have different rings.”
“Point taken.” Hammer looked down. “Someone sent us an address to a bank in San Francisco.”
The note read, “Since you found something I lost, I’m returning the favor.”
“Think that’s from Drake?” asked Hammer.”
Jim-Bean shook his head. “Sprague. Bet that’ll lead us to Guppy.” Jim-Bean read off his own cistron. “Looks like he’s repaying us for saving his ass.”
Guppy woke up in a cold sweat. It was all just a bad dream.
Faint at first but growing louder, Guppy could hear a repetitive sound outside, like an echo of some sort, but vaguely familiar: thwip, thwip, thwip.
Guppy glanced around the room and realize it was not his bedroom.
He climbed off the bed and walked in the dark, tripping over something. A tray clanged loudly.
Guppy felt his way along the wall to a small opening in the door. A glass pane.
He peered through the glass at the empty corridor outside, realizing what it meant…he was inside a cell.
The door opened and Hector walked in. Guppy knew Hector from before; he was the Majestic-12 friendly who had smuggled him out of the Van Dyson Center.
“Hello Hank. I’m Hector.” Hector showed no signs of recognizing him. “It’s time to take your meds.”
“Wait a minute,” said Guppy, his voice rising. “Hector, where am I? What is going on?”
“Now Hank…”
“No, I want to know what’s going!” shouted Guppy. “The last thing I knew I was driving along trying to avoid a news crew and then there’s this naked woman and she grabbed me by the mouth and—“
“Hank, are you going to be difficult?” asked Hector with the disapproving tone reserved for a child.
“Difficult? I’m not being difficult! I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on here!”
There was a knock at the door. Petrov Van Dyson, Hank’s old doctor, entered. He nodded to Hector.
“It’s okay, I’ll take it from here.” Van Dyson turned back to Guppy. “How do you feel, Hank?”
“I feel like I don’t know what is going on here!” He sat down on the bed. “The last thing I remember is this naked woman. She was bleeding from her eyes…”
Van Dyson was half-listening to him, half-signaling to Hector. Guppy noticed he was wearing the uniform all patients wore: a white T-shirt and sweats.
“Now Hank, I’m going to give you something to calm down.”
Van Dyson grabbed the meds from Hector. “Just take this and we can sit down and chat.”
“What? I don’t need medication!”
Van Dyson cleared his throat. “Now Hank. I understand you had an experience. But you have to look at it from our perspective. You’re obviously very distraught. We can’t have a rational conversation until you calm down, and the valium will help.”
“How many milligrams is that?” asked Guppy weakly.
“Just twenty. Enough to take the edge off. Take the pills and then we can talk.”
Guppy sighed and nodded.
Van Dyson handed him the pills and a plastic cup of water. After Guppy swallowed it, he motioned for Hector to leave.
“Hank, this is very awkward. Technically I shouldn't even be treating you, but the court has granted us a waiver until you’re transferred. So whatever is said here won't leave this room. Let me ask you a question: How long have you been here?”
“What? I just woke up in here!”
“Just answer the question. Humor me.”
“I…I don’t know. A few hours?”
“You’ve been here five days, Hank. You were admitted to the neurosurgical unit seizing violently. That lasted three days. Scans revealed left-sided weakness, numbness and severe frontal lobe deficits. You came out of it and tested negative for PCP, underwent extensive hypnosis and received amytal injections.”
Guppy looked down at his wrists. They had reddish marks.
“You were tied down for a day and a half so you wouldn't hurt yourself and then you went into a state of, well – you’ve been pretty much catatonic. This is the first time you spoke. Do you remember what you were doing before you ended up here?”
“I was driving along. I think I was being followed. When I looked up there was this woman. She was naked. I got out to try to help her, but she grabbed me. She was so strong…and then I blacked out.”
Van Dyson sighed. “When you left us here, you were transferred to Arkham Asylum. Against my wishes, granted; and I see I was right.”
“Right about what?” asked Guppy with rising dread.
“You escaped. You killed an orderly, Hank. You said you thought he was an alien. You shot him dead. Then, you climbed a clock tower with a homemade bomb strapped to your chest and threatened to blow yourself up. You kept ranting about being a government agent, and that him wanted the government to admit the truth…”
“I don’t remember that!” but Guppy remembered something similar. His last mission. The one that got him into so much trouble in the first place. Could he have completely imagined it? Did he ever really leave the safety of the mental health system?
“There was indeed an accident. The police gave you a vehicle as per your demands, but you crashed it in a gully. I’m sorry Hank, there was no report of any woman.” He patted Guppy’s hand. “Rest now. The sedatives should help. I’m just glad you’re once again among the living.”
As Guppy slunk back onto the stiff bed, he wasn’t so sure.
A solemn guard placed the safety deposit box on the table in the middle of the room. He stepped back through the gate and waited.
“Great, it requires a code,” said Hammer.
Jim-Bean said the numbers out loud as he punched them in. “October twenty second, two thousand and one.”
He sorted through some paperwork that meant nothing until his hands felt a thick envelope. Jim-Bean opened it and spilled the contents on the table. Audio tapes.
The deposit box contained audio transcripts of Van Dyson’s dialogue with Newcomb. The return address listed Dyson’s home address.
“According to these records,” said Hammer, reading from a sheet, “Damon Newcomb had multiple personalities: Billy, The Princess, and…Simon.”
Jim-Bean slapped the dashboard. “I knew it!”
“Looks like Damon was dressed as a little girl until he was eight,” said Hammer. “His mother called him Mary.”
They listened to the tapes as they drove back down to Van Dyson’s home in Samson.
Guppy woke with a start. The darkness rendered the room almost void of any color. It took Guppy a moment to orient himself.
His eyes wandered across the unfamiliar room. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.
Then he heard it. A ragged breathing sound, like someone standing over his bed. But he didn’t see anything.
Guppy gingerly crossed to the door and peeked through the glass partition into the empty corridor. He glanced back at the room, and still saw nothing.
There was the sound of footsteps approaching. A light switched on down the corridor. The footsteps got closer and closer, until they stopped right outside the door.
Guppy recoiled from the door, waiting.
A key entered the lock and jiggled it. The door didn’t open. He could make out a shadow at the glass partition.
After a minute where nothing happened, Guppy crept back to the door. He slowly inched up to the glass to peer through it.
A pair of piercing eyes met his gaze. It was the woman who had caused his car crash.
He fell back with a yelp.
Faintly at first, but growing louder, footsteps once again approached his door. He crept back to his bed, terrified. Guppy squeezed his eyes shut and…
Everything flashed white. Color returned.
Hector was standing over him.
“Rise and shine, Hank!” shouted Hector.
Hector tried to shake Guppy awake. An orderly and nurse stood by.
“That means you, Hank. Up -- !”
Guppy sat up, clutching his head. He didn’t feel right.
Hector reached out his hand and the nurse placed a cup with meds on it. “Time for your meds. You can either do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Guppy was done fighting. He took the pills without comment.
And outside, he heard the sound, faint at first but growing louder. It was a repetitive sound, like an echo of some sort. Thwip, thwip, thwip.
Later in the day, Guppy wandered into the rec room. It contained a television and DVDs, an audio system, and places to talk and eat. The back walls of the room were glass-paneled, providing a comforting view of the wilds surrounding the clinic. Doors led to a pleasant outdoor patio where patients could rest and chat.
The male patients performed their regular activities: Some watched television, played dominoes, some pretended to read, some stared out blankly.
Damon Newcomb wandered over to Guppy.
“Back so soon? You're not like, undercover here, are you?” He squinted at Guppy. “They pulled that at Arkham, had a bunch of doctors pretend they were patients, see if they could handle it. Most quit after day one. You're not, are you?”
He handed Guppy paper and some crayons and whispered, “Drawing is a great cover. Good luck to you.”
Patients undressed in the bare-bones locker area. Hector handed Guppy a bar of soap and towel.
“You go in last because you're special.” He caught Guppy’s look. “It's not a Mexican prison. Everybody here minds their own business. State law says we keep you boys clean. And I'm a stickler for the law. Now come on. If you go downtown, you gotta dance.”
The shower, like everything else in the Van Dyson Center, was regulated in shifts so that various groupings of patients each got their turn.
Hector checked his watch. “That's five minutes, group one. Alright, boys, nice and easy.”
The first group of bathers filed out, dripping wet, past Guppy, in all shapes and sizes. Each had their own scars and tattoos, like maps of troubled souls: names of women, places, religious quotes. Burn scars, cuts, needle marks. They began to towel off as Guppy, slowly and painfully self-conscious, undressed in the corner. A moment later Hector nodded for him to go in.
Guppy hung his head under the spray and closed his eyes, trying to shut it all out. The sounds of the Van Dyson Center slowly faded out until all he heard was his own ragged breathing.
Looking down at the water dripping into the drain, Guppy caught sight of a hole in the tile where a busted water pipe poked out. Clearly at some point there was a handle there, but now it was just a hole with a busted pipe.
As he looked closer, a perfectly formed globule of blood emerged from the pipe, following by a gurgling sound that seemed to come from deep in the bowels of the plumbing system.
The blood lingered tentatively, as if unfamiliar with the laws of gravity, before tracing an upward line along the tile.
The gurgling grew louder, closer, and then more blood flowed from the hole and spread up the wall.
Guppy looked away, disturbed. There was no one else in the showers.
When he looked down again, the blood streaming from the pipe had formed five letters written in blood. N-O-T-A-L.
Shaking, nauseous, Guppy focused on his feet and the drain, too scared to look back up.
Blood dripped by his ankle. Suddenly, a shooting pain laced his arm.
“What the hell…?” asked Guppy.
Sharp slashes appeared on Guppy’s skin, like some invisible knife was slicing his arm.
There was a shout behind him. “What did you do?”
Orderlies rushed in to haul him away.
Hector grabbed Guppy’s arm and held it up. “What the hell did you do to yourself?!”
Perfectly carved into Guppy’s arm, the scar read: "NOT ALONE."
“Billy, you understand that you, the Princess and Simon are all in Damon?” asked Van Dyson on the tape.
“Yes,” replied Damon’s sing-song voice.
“If Damon is sick, then all of you are sick. You want Damon to get better, huh?”
“Yes!” said Billy/Damon, his voice rising.
“So, help him. Tell me about the night in Samson.”
Damon’s voice quivered. “We were playing hide n' seek. Simon was looking for his toy and Peter -- It was real dark.” Suddenly Billy turned hysterical. “No, I won't tell! Simon’s a good boy. He doesn't need to know!”
“What?” prodded Van Dyson.
“What Simon did!”
“To who?”
“To Peter!”
“What did Simon do to Peter?”
“I won't tell!” shouted Billy.
“Tell me,” said Van Dyson. “I need to talk to Simon.”
Van Dyson’s office was decorated in southern California’s typical High Sierra look, reflecting the natural surroundings of the clinic. Spanish artworks and wall hangings accented the tasteful, though not indulgent, furnishings.
Guppy stared at the picture frames on Van Dyson’s desk, the diplomas on the wall, the books by noted fathers of neurology (works by Hughlings Jackson, Kurt Goldstein, Henry Head, A.R. Luria). A framed quote read: "If You Do Know That Here Is One Hand, We'll Grant You All The Rest.' -- Wittgenstein"
Van Dyson hung up the phone. He took a look at Guppy and tried to smile, but it came off as condescending – there was nothing to smile about.
“I’m sorry about this, Hank. I know you’re in a difficult situation, but cutting yourself is not the solution.”
“But I didn’t cut myself! The woman—“
“Hank, has it ever occurred to you that this woman is a projection of your fears? I’m concerned that your personalities are continuing to fracture. We can up the dosage of your medication, but I’m concerned about you…if you start harming yourself we’ll have to restrain you, and nobody wants that.”
“I…” Guppy shook his head. “I didn’t do it…”
“I know you didn’t mean to, Hank. We’re going to do everything in our power to help you. Since your father disowned you, we're your family now and we're all going down to the wire to protect you and help you in any way we –“
Guppy focused on the picture on Van Dyson’s desk. It was the woman who haunted his dreams.
“That’s her!” said Guppy. “That’s the woman!”
“Who?” asked Van Dyson.
“Her!” Guppy picked up the portrait and turned it around. “This is the woman whom I’ve been seeing!”
“Well now we know where you’re getting your visions from.” Van Dyson sighed. “Hank, that’s my wife, Candice.”
“I know what I saw!”
“You've seen that photograph at least a dozen times, every time you've been in this office. You're just confused –“
Damon knocked on the door. “Doctor, can I speak to you?”
The men step outside.
Guppy turned the portrait around to stare at it. “I know it’s you. But what are you trying to tell me?”
“Hello, doc,” said Damon in a strange, deep voice.
“Simon? Do you know who I am?” asked Van Dyson.
“Billy told me a lot about you,” said Simon. “Billy is a…smart boy.”
“What happened on Christmas night in Samson?”
“Use your…imagination.”
“I'd rather you tell me, Simon.”
“Peter was…naughty,” said Simon.
“What did Peter do?”
“He shouldn't have done it.”
“Tell me, Simon,” prodded Van Dyson.
“He scared Damon. He crept up behind him in the dark. And he scared him. Damon fell down. He fell on his toy. It cut him up. It cut him up real bad.”
The voice turned mocking. “Damon needed someone to help him. So I…introduced myself.” He chuckled.
“I told him to cut up Peter. To cut him up real bad. Good thing his knife was brand new. Real sharp. And then, just so his mommy and daddy wouldn't get mad. I told him to cut them up too.”
The voice seemed to be enjoying the revelation. “There was a lot of blood. So much blood. But Damon wanted to do it.”
An odd noise cut through Guppy’s feverish dreams. He sat up with a start.
Guppy strained to listen, but he heard only silence. Then the bedsprings creaked behind him.
He whipped around and started to scream as a big hand covered his mouth. It was Damon Newcomb.
“Hullo, Hanky.”
Damon shoved Guppy against the mattress and pressed his full weight against him.
Guppy flailed desperately, but Damon pinned him. He uncapped a syringe with his teeth and brought the plunger to Guppy’s throat.
“He didn’t want to do it this way. Thought you were an interesting case!”
The bedsprings trained violently. Damon straddled Guppy, squeezing the plunger to his throat.
“Azathoth doesn’t care if you’re interesting. I know you’re a spy.”
Damon brought the syringe towards Guppy when suddenly there was a loud clanging at the door, nearly shaking it off its hinges.
Damon looked up, confused. Nobody was there.
The split-second distraction was all Guppy needed to shove Damon off the bed. The syringe went flying.
They both stared at it, reaching the same conclusion.
Guppy dove first, grabbing it with both hands. He spun on his back and pointed the needle upwards just as Damon landed on him. The impact pumped the syringe’s contents into Damon’s chest.
For a second nothing happened. Damon’s pupils became pinpricks. Then he slid off of Guppy.
Built on the side of a slope, Van Dyson’s home was a new, split-level affair with large windows providing a view of the abundant scenery. The neighborhood was perfectly quiet late at night.
“Lights are off,” said Hammer, peering through binoculars. “We’ve waited long enough, we should be okay.”
As they approached, the gate to the property squeaked open.
Hammer drew his Glocks. “What the hell?”
The front door swung open and the living room lights switched on.
Jim-Bean had his SIG out, but he kept it pointed at the ground. “I think we’re expected.”
They crept up to the front door. Jim-Bean and Hammer took up opposite positions, covering the room with their pistols. No one was home.
It was apparent that Van Dyson liked to be surrounded by nice things. Not necessarily expensive things, but things that were pleasant and tangible. The carpeting was plush, the furniture comfortable and attractive, tending towards the earth tones of the outside surroundings. An interest in the exotic showed up in his objects d’art, which included small representative bits of statuary and carvings from many cultures, ranging from kachina dolls of American Indians, to little jade status from Japan, to amulets and jewelry of Celtic, Roman, and Russian origin.
The television set suddenly came to life. Hammer swung his pistol at the television but managed to not squeeze the trigger. The unmistakable music from some old WB cartoon was at full blast.
Van Dyson’s entertainment center had a collection of compact disks, with an emphasis on Russian composers – Mussorgsky and Stravinsky were particularly well represented. His DVD collection indicated a preference for film noir and included cinemaphile editions of classics in widescreen format.
Jim-Bean walked over to the television and shut it off. “Did you hear that?”
“Besides the television?” asked Hammer.
“Yeah,” said Jim-Bean. “From the bathroom.”
They turned to listen.
There was a faint at first sound at first, but it was growing louder…a hollow, wet sound, coming from the bathroom.
Jim-Bean crept into the room and flicked the light switch.
Quote:
He caught a sight of himself in the mirror, but it wasn’t him. Jim-Bean saw himself naked, arms raised. Wrists shackled. The roar of an electric saw tore through his brain…
When he looked up at the mirror again, the image was gone. It was now deathly quiet.
“You okay?” asked Hammer.
Jim-Bean blinked. He was staring in the mirror at the reflection of something just behind him.
He turned around. “What’s that?”
It was a folded newspaper discarded in the far corner of the room. Hammer walked over and picked it up. “This?”
The newspaper was opened to the realty listings page. There was a picture of a property recently purchased by the Vangogo corporation. The address was in Willows Creek.
“That’s where we need to go,” said Jim-Bean.
“Why?”
“Let’s just call it a hunch,” said Jim-Bean, rubbing his temples, “and leave it at that.”
After Damon’s attack, Van Dyson had Guppy transferred to another room, a better one. At least it had a view. Heavy bars were on the windows, but still, it was better than no window at all.
As Guppy dozed off, entering the twilight between wakefulness and the sleep paralysis, he became aware of a ragged breathing sound. He cracked opened his eyes.
Then he saw it: a shadow crouched in the corner, roughly the size of a person. There was a putrid smell coming from it.
The ragged breathing grew louder. Guppy slid out of his bed.
“Candice…?”
He reached for her, but when he was just about to touch Candice she disappeared.
There was the sound of the deadbolt being unlocked. The door to Guppy’s cell opened quietly.
Guppy peered down one side of the long, empty corridor outside his cell, lit by the glare of neon lights. There was nobody there. When he looked down the other way, he caught sight of a pair of bare feet disappearing around the corner. It was so quick, Guppy wasn’t sure if he saw it.
He padded out into the hallway. At night the clinical corridor took on an unsettling quality.
Guppy stumbled upon two nurses watching television. He crouched low and snuck past the glass partition.
Guppy started at the sudden sound of laughter behind him. The nurses were laughing at their late night show. Momentarily distracted, he almost knocked over a mop and bucket resting by the wall.
He resumed his journey down the hallway, but stopped when a door’s title caught his eye. It was a sanitation closet.
Guppy cracked the door open and rifled through its contents. It contained a vacuum cleaner, carpet shampoo, and other household items. He came out with a small screwdriver.
Guppy hugged the wall to stay clear from the surveillance camera silently sweeping the area at the far end of the corridor. He turned a corner and then ducked back as a janitor passed, making his rounds.
After he was out of sight, Guppy rushed the distance to Van Dyson’s office. He pulled out a stolen screwdriver and brought it to the lock. After a few minutes of fumbling, he removed the screws around the lock and, carefully replacing them, entered the room.
Van Dyson’s office was shrouded in darkness. There was a switch for the surveillance monitor. Guppy switched the power strip on.
The security monitor and its accompany computer flickered to life with a view of the corridors: two guards here, a nurse going for a smoke, a janitor at the coffee machine and so on.
On the surveillance monitor, he could make out the janitor with his coffee cup heading back towards Van Dyson’s office corridor…
Guppy looked up. The glare of the computer screen was reflecting against the glass pane. He grabbed a piece of paper and pushed it in front of the blinds to block the light.
The computer finally powered up. It was open to the Van Dyson Center’s intranet. Guppy’s fingers danced across the keyboard as he searched for information.
The Van Dyson Center was turning a tidy profit from its frequent upscale patients to consulting fees, lectures, and seminars sponsored by the Center. Guppy typed in a search for Candice Van Dyson.
A few articles popped up. One, an interview conducted with James Brady for the PARADE syndicated newspaper supplement, made brief mention that the Van Dysons were married on October 21, 2001 but had recently divorced. It coyly related Van Dyson’s utter refusal to broach the subject. “The wounds are deep,” wrote Brady with his usual perception.
Articles from before the divorce mentioned Candice in pleasant terms. She was often said to be hovering about during interviews, bringing coffee, one ear monitoring the questioning in a warmly protective manner. It was mentioned that Candice was a professor of astronomy at UC-Samson.
More articles detailed the mysterious disappearance of Candice six months following her divorce from the doctor. The articles related that after resigning her position at UC-Samson, she paid off the lease on her apartment and moved away. Parents and friends had no idea of her whereabouts.
Guppy hacked into her credit card account. There was reference to Diaz Transporters, who delivered the contents of her office to Candice’s apartment. The entire fee was paid up front. A few clicks later and Guppy was looking at the work order.
Signed at the bottom was the signature, “Candice Van Dyson.”
“Why didn’t you use your maiden name after your divorce?” Guppy whispered to himself.
He looked back at the surveillance monitor. The janitor was walking away. He watched him disappear slowly but surely disappear down the hall. And then the screen was empty.
But just for a second. Because suddenly Candice was there. Staring straight at him.
Guppy swallowed hard and shut all the systems down.
Retracing his steps, he shut Van Dyson’s office door and hit the stairs.
As he reached the landing, Guppy heard voices coming his way. He detoured down another corridor and hid from view. Hector and a nurse exited down the staircase.
And then he turned at another sound coming from inside the room immediately behind him, Room 237. He stepped to the small glass pane on the door and peered inside.
It took a moment to adjust his eyes to the darkness, but Guppy could make out two figures in the room involved in some sort of struggle.
He saw a flash of metal, something sharp. It wasn’t a knife, but what looked like a syringe. And then a blur of hair was yanked up by a strong arm. In the dim light, Guppy could can make out Damon, eyes glazed, drooling.
But just for a beat, because he was slapped down on the bed like a rag doll and the man with the needle was visible. It was Van Dyson.
“You’ve gone too far,” Van Dyson said to Damon. “I let you have free run of the place while I was away. But this is too much. It ends here.”
Damon was on his back on the bed. His pale naked skin was marked with scratches and bruises. The needle was stuck in his arm, which hung limply off the side. His mouth was open but it was impossible to tell whether he was laughing or sobbing.
Van Dyson climbed on top of Damon, pulling out of his pocket what looked like an ice pick.
He lifted Damon’s upper right eyelid and placed the ice pick under the eyelid and against the top of the eye socket. With a grunt, he shoved it downward slightly and then whipped it side to side…
It was too much for Guppy. He collapsed into darkness.
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