Our month of horror one-shots continued with "Dead Light," an adventure for Call of Cthulhu. This session was fun because we got to catch up with the characters from our Call of Cthulhu campaign from earlier in the year, plus we got to know a new character who joined the group of investigators for this outing.
I ran this particular adventure on Friday the 13th, which was particularly apt as the monster at the heart of this scenario is a bit like if Jason were a floating cloud of mercury that was emitting a baleful light. Also, like a Friday the 13th movie, this scenario had a body count.
People say that you can't do horror in rpgs because the players never really experience fear, but if the players decide to bail on a scenario because they're afraid of what will happen to their characters if they press on--I totally think that counts. Which is exactly what happened here.
The Characters
Sirus Mean, former boxer and hobo
Leslie Cowell, antiques dealer
Hazel Murphy, flapper
Tony Tunacelli, wiseguy
Kunihiko Takeuchi, professor of folklore
Events
The investigators had assembled again because a psychic medium called "Madame Zatarsky" was holding seances that were garnering a lot of attention in Arkham. However, the group suspected that Madame Zatarsky was a fraud who was preying upon the grieving. They had managed to secure an invite to one of Madame Zatarsky's seances and were currently en route. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain as they headed north, and the storm behind them looked even worse. Hazel was at the wheel. Suddenly, a pale figure loomed into view on the road. Hazel spun the wheel, but she clipped the person.
The car was now stuck in the ruts of its skid. Hazel and Leslie jumped out of the car, getting drenched in the process, and found that the figure was a girl in her twenties. The woman was wearing a thin dress, hardly reasonable clothes for the heavy rain pelting down. She also wore a strange necklace, the pendant of was a golden, "foreign" coin. Most importantly, the girl was unconscious. She murmured something about her grandfather and "the light." They bundled the woman into the car, got the vehicle unstuck, and continued up the road to find help.
They drove as fast as they dared considering the conditions of the road and eventually saw lights in the distance. The lights belonged to the Orchard Run Diner and the gas station next door. A cattle truck was stranded diagonally across the road, its driver side door still gaping open. The investigators carried the woman into the diner. Inside the diner was a teenaged waitress named Mary, an elderly couple called Winifred and Teddy, and a farmer with a big beard named Jake. The farmer looked terrified; his hands were shaking, causing coffee to slosh from the sides of his mug.
They attempted to give the young woman first aid, determining that nothing was broken and she probably didn't have any internal injuries. She did have some bruises and cuts, but they suspected that they were older wounds. While they worked, Jake claimed that his truck had been run off the road by a "strange cloud" that looked like a floating clot of mercury that was giving off an intense and eerie white light. Sensing that the supernatural had once again reared its ugly head, Tony went out to the car and came back with the group's collection of firearms--and a few sticks of dynamite.
Leslie moved Jake's truck out of the road while Kunihiko went next door to the gas station to call for an ambulance. Inside the gas station was a mustachioed man named Sam, who owned both the gas station and the dinner. Sam told Kunihiko that there was a retired doctor nearby named Dr. Webb and got him the number. Predictably, the phoneline was out due to the storm. No help was coming.
Meanwhile, back in the diner the group was beginning to become suspicious of Mary. Mary kept looking at the clock and was relieved to find out that the group weren't cops when Tony started handing out firearms to his friends. When questioned, Mary explained that she was just anxious about her boyfriend, who was supposed to pick her up from the diner. Sam came in from the gas station to check on the situation. He immediately recognized the unconscious girl as Emilia Webb, granddaughter of the doctor he had tried to put Kunihiko in touch with.
At this point, Tony was feeling the unavoidable call of nature. He was told that the bathroom was only accessibly by leaving the safety of the diner and going around the corner. He didn't have to go alone, however, as Teddy piped up that he also needed to go. At the bathroom, Tony let the elderly man go first, but when it seemed to be taking a long time he peaked his head in and saw a pile of ashes in front of the urinal--with Teddy nowhere to be seen. Tony was pretty sure that Teddy had been reduced to ashes by something.
Back in the diner, Emilia was finally roused from unconsciousness. Unfortunately, she didn't remember what happened at her grandfather's house or why she had been running through the rain in the road. The group spotted an intense light coming from the windows of the gas station, so Leslie, Tony, and Hazel went to investigate.
However, as they got closer to the gas station they could see that an oval shape in the door was boiling away and the wood of the door was smoking. Hazel found a stick and managed to poke a hole in the melting portion of the door. They couldn't see anything through the hole due to all the light pouring out of it; then, an illuminated silvery fluid began to run from the hole. The investigators turned tail and ran back to the diner.
The group watched in horror as the fluid coalesced into a cloud of shining fluid that began to float through the air toward the diner. Some of the group panicked at the sight of it; Sirus ran to the kitchen and contemplated fleeing through the back door, Hazel began screaming, and Tony moved to confront the cloud with a rifle. The rest of the people inside the diner also didn't fare well. Sam passed out, Jake cowered in the corner, Winifred hid under a table, and Mary fled through the kitchen door and ran off into the woods.
Tony exited the diner for his last stand. He shot the approaching cloud, causing a tiny portion of it to dissipate, but it was soon on him--entering his body through his eyes and mouth. Tony seemed fine, but the knowledge that the cloud was somewhere inside of him was extremely disturbing. The rest of the group locked Tony out of the diner, but Tony accepted his fate. He sat in Jake's truck and experimented with using fire to get the cloud entity to exit his body.
Light began to stream from from Tony's eyes and mouth. He felt extremely cold, as if his very core was freezing solid. The light emanating from Tony grew brighter until all the other investigators could see in the truck's cab was blinding brightness. When the light receded, Tony had been reduced to ash and the glowing cloud was again gently floating toward the diner.
The group sped into action. They got everyone present to leave out the back door, into the storm, and then turned all the diner's gas burners on to high. Most of the group fled as well, planning to cut around the building to Hazel's car. Sirus stayed behind to plant dynamite and throw a lighter into the volatile gas once the cloud had entered the diner. He jumped clear just as the diner exploded in a fiery conflagration. Sirus was picked up by Hazel in the car. They drove away, but in the rearview mirror they could see the luminous cloud rise from the wreckage.
History almost repeated itself, as Mary darted into the road as they drove off--but this time they didn't hit the girl in the road. They did bring Emilia with them, but even when she hysterically pleaded to be let out or taken to her grandfather, they flatly refused. They chose to take their chances with the storm rather than solve the mystery of the cloud.
Tony's death and the fire that consumed the diner and gas station would later be reported in the newspapers as a gangland hit or a revenge killing in the criminal underworld. The continuing unexplained disappearances in the area, each accompanied by a strange pile of ash found near the victim's last known whereabouts, would never be explained.
