Here's what they had gathered before setting foot in the house: twenty years ago the house was owned by the Hook family, who were prominent back in the day. However, when the town's mines closed they went broke and had to live in this smaller house on the hill. The family consisted of a mother, son, and father, but there were always rumors of another child--who may have been hidden away due to being mad or deformed. The family was killed by an intruder or intruders--and the murderers were never caught.
Characters
Pellinore Bonnet-Price aka Pell-Mell
Vincent Lazarus
Artemsia Grimmsby
Flossie Greenspurn
Cedric Mortimer-Shaw aka Ceddy
Lester Mire
Events
The kids abandoned their bikes on the front lawn of Hook House as a thunder storm threatened to break overhead. They found that the front door was unlocked, so they stepped inside into the foyer. The air smelled stale; dust coated every surface. They took note of the closet in this room, as that is where Mister Hook was supposedly found--beheaded. They also found a scrap of fabric on the floor that was embroidered with a large H. They recognized this to be part of Hieronymus's rucksack.
Suddenly al the doors in the room slammed shut and their flashlight began to flicker. Gathering their courage, they opened the closet. One of the floorboards inside was cracked; wedged into the gap was a small iron ball--pitted and rusty.
Through the glass in the door leading to the next room, they could see a family portrait of the Hooks, a roaring fireplace, and stately objets d'art, but when they opened the door the room proved to be empty. In this room they acquired a poker, an ash shovel from beside the fireplace, and a cryptic note.
The dining room was scarcely better, as there was a rotten food smell wafting from the kitchen. Using the cryptic note as a guide, the kids spent some time figuring out which chair each family member sat at to take their meals. When they stood in the spots the family members had occupied, they could feel an icy grip on each of their necks.
The kitchen was a room of damp, crooked cabinets, mold, and flies buzzing around a sludge-filled sink. However, they were able to recover the three cups the family used in life--a cracked wineglass, a chipped teacup, and a broken child-sized glass. Using the poker, the kids could tell that there was something hidden in the sludge in the sink, but the poker wasn't up to the task of dredging it out. A dented pot, the last of the family's cookware, proved useful for bailing the sludge out so they could retrieve the item--a key!
Before they left this floor, Vincent, Ceddy, and Artemesia arranged themselves so that one kid was standing in each family's members spot at the dinning room table, each holding that family's member's favored drinking vessel. This caused them to be momentarily possessed by the ghosts of the family, each of whom vented their anxieties about what happened that fateful night.
The key from the sink allowed they to unlock the door headed up to the next floor. When they passed a broken widow in the staircase they could see that the world outside was lit by broad daylight. Since the house looked down upon the town, it was in full view--but it appeared that they were looking at the town as it was twenty years ago. They also noticed clumps of fur snagged on the windowsill.
They decided to explore the door with a sign on the handle proclaiming it to be "Harrison's Room." This was clearly the son's room, as the rug was strewn with wooden horse toys and lead soldiers. The mattress had been slashed open as if someone had searched for something inside of it. They also noticed a nail in the window frame, around which was tied fishing line that snaked outside. They pulled something up by tugging on the line, but could not see the object through the window. Inside of simply opening the window, they smashed it and hauled the tin pail attached to the line inside. Vincent cut himself in the process.
Inside the pail was a rubber ball, some jacks, and a diary marked "Top Secret." The diary had several entries detailing Harrison's adventures with a friend named Charlotte; however, toward the end of the diary the writing became frenzied and frantic until it devolved into crude symbols. In fact, the symbols lifted from the page and resolved themselves in the air, forming a knife, a series of cubes, and a small key.
They went to the water closet next. A cracked mirror hung over the sink, which clouded up--and caused Cedric to have a phantasmagorical hallucination. They could also hear a young girl's voice seemingly coming from the drain; she said, "It’s dark down here" and "I’m lost and hurt." They confirmed that the voice was Charlotte's; she claimed that the Hooks had put her down there because "bad men" from "the other place" were coming to the house--when they got there, these bad men killed the Hook family. The kids were justifiably skeptical of this account. When Flossie got mouthy with Charlotte, water erupted from the tub and knocked all the kids from the room and back down the stairs.
Once they recovered and ventured back upstairs, the kids explored the parents' bedroom. There was a strange curio cabinet in this room holding a variety of elements on little stands with placards. Pell-Mell deduced that if the elements were placed in the right order, they would spell out KNIFE CUBES. (Groan.) When they did so and closed the cabinet's door, all the elements dissolved, ran together, and reformed into a small key. In his haste to get his hands on the key, Vincent burned himself on the still-hot metal.
This key allowed them to open the trapdoor in a closet to pull down the stairs and ascend to the house's attic. However, when they entered the attic they found that they were no longer in the house at all--they were in a rainy, gray park they knew well from in town. The stairs had also vanished behind them. Since they already knew the park's layout, they knew they were near an infamous well in which a child had drowned years ago--for some Edweirdian reason, the well had never been sealed.
They went to have a look at it and saw that Hieronymus was curled up in the fetal position beside it. Unfortunately, as they approached to wake him, thick ropes of wet hair emerged from the well, entangled them, and pulled them into the watery depths.
When the kids awoke, they found themselves shivering and sodden in an unfinished basement. Their was a Victorian washing machine--the kind powered by a hand crank--from which Charlotte's voice emerged. She begged them to turn the crank to release her from the machine. They did so, and from the machine a thin sheaf of skin, hair, and fabric slopped down into the tub. Charlotte reformed herself and emerged from the machine.
The door to the basement washroom began to thump and rattle as something on the other side was trying to break down the door. Whatever it was did not have proper hands to simply turn the door handle. Their act of altruism paid off, as Charlotte agreed to aid them to get past the creature--which Charlotte confirmed was one of the beasts the "bad men" had used to kill the Hook family.
Lester had a very bright idea--since they knew from their misadventure in the attic that Charlotte could conjure illusions, they had her use her power to create an illusion of the kids standing against the far wall. They opened the door, giving the creature a nice look at the illusory kids. While it hurtled past to get at the false kids, they ran down the now-clear corridor, with Charlotte in the lead to show them the door out.
Traversing the doorway felt like pushing through a veil of cold water--indeed, they saw fish made of teeth swimming in the "other place"--but when they exited it they found that they had just left the front door of the house. Gathering their bikes, they rushed to the real park, where they found Hieronymus huddled by the well. They gathered him, and Charlotte, and snuck back into the orphanage--a plan to get Charlotte taken on as a foundling already brewing in their heads.