Felvolio's Carnival

We returned to the current Krevborna game. This one...has clowns. Thankfully, Savage Worlds has stats for "Evil Clowns" in one of the companion books. The folks over at Savage Worlds HQ always got my back.

Characters

Panthalassa, a necromancer with a missing arm

Daytona, a dhampir gunslinger fresh from Hell (again)

Garazi, a beautiful young witch with a bird familiar

Willard Corn and King Beebo, a farmer and his monkey (?)

Heck, a revenant seeking vengeance on witch hunters

Khamaat, a newly awakened mummy

Events

Autumn had ended and winter brought the first snowfall to Hemlock Hollow. Adrian Vergara and Ivara Graymalk crunched through the snow to pay a visit to Garazi's family home. Adrian brought a picnic basket of food and drink for Garazi's family, but more importantly he brought his translations from the book of necromantic lore they had obtained while in pursuit of the Fraternitie du Cadavre. Adrian explained that the book noted that the Nightmother bestowed the ability to raise the dead indirectly upon her cultists; to access that power, the cultists needed to construct an avatar of the Nightmother that she could inhabit--the "goddess" herself could then resurrect the dead on their behalf. 

Meanwhile, Ivara visited Heck in the lower level of the house. She gave Heck the results of her mother scrying the location of the witchfinder Grigori Trask; Trask was inhabiting an old fortress north of Chancel. She also gave Heck a note from her mother for Panthalassa the revealed that her missing arm was somewhere...on the Ghost Moon?! Finally, she gave him a letter to be opened later; this letter was from Ivara herself and she intimated that Heck, in his living incarnation, may be her father!

While en route to the Skarnesti Circus, the group saw firsthand evidence that the War in Hell had spilled over onto Earth. First, they smelled smoke--which proved to be coming from a village that was aflame. The cause made itself apparent: a number of demons were running amok, the chief of which was a corpulent demon with a massive maw. The demons were chasing a woman, who would turn out to be Khamaat. 

The party moved to fight the demons, but most of the party found themselves unnerved by their infernal presence. During the battle, Daytona was swallowed whole by the corpulent demon and it was only through the efforts of the dinosaurs that Panthalassa summoned that he was freed from the demon's gut. They did notice, however, that the demons bore the mark of Legion.

When the group arrived at the Skarnesti Circus, they found it far less bustling than they expected. They were approached by Melusine, the circus's "snake dancer" and former lover of Daytona, who explained that Zoskia Skarnesti, the circus's ringmaster, and Felvolio, the circus's star clown, had both gone missing. She brought them into a tent where an argument about what to do about that was already in progress. 

Of course, the group got themselves involved in the mystery. They got the sense that the circus had some odd visitors. The local constable had told them to move on; a woman (who was described as looking similar to Serafina) tried to join the circus, but Zoskia had turned them away; a trio had been seen stalking around the fairgrounds, seemingly uninterested in the circus's attractions. 

After searching Zoskia's wagon, they uncovered several clues--which they did not follow up on. Instead, they split into two teams: Panthalassa and Daytona went into town to talk to the woman who had wanted to join the circus and the rest walked into the northern woods to find the three strangers who seemed out of place at the circus.

Daytona and Panthalassa discovered that the town was populated with members of the Yezhuli, a heretical sect of the Church of Holy Blood that practices bigamy. After talking to the constable, they obtained the location of the Maitland residence--the home of the woman who wanted to run away with the circus. The constable also showed them that his jail was currently empty--he had not arrested Zoskia and Felvolio surreptitiously. 

Meanwhile, in the woods, Heck was able to track the three strangers to their camp, though only two--an older priest with an eyepatch named Father Ambroys and a young nobleman with a rapier at his side called Jean de Cote--were apparent. The third, the nobleman's Polnezna half-sister Winter was recalled from her sniper's nest to join the group. They explained that they are all members of the Hounds of Velun, a secret society that believes a tsar should be returned to Krevborna's throne. 

However, they disagree with Valton Blakely's quest to resurrect a dead tsar to lead the country--they want to find a living descendent instead. As such, they were led by the priest's mystical visions to the Skarnesti Circus--they were milling around the fairgrounds in search of the party because they wanted to give them a map to an old abbey on an island that Blakely is using as the headquarters of the Fraternitie du Cadavre. 

Back in town, Panthalassa made her way to the Maitland house. She knocked at the door, and when the man of the house answered she told him that she was having "woman problems." He promptly sent her around to the back of the house where one of his wives was taking laundry down from the line. Panthalassa immediately saw the resemblance between this woman, Agniezka, and Serafina--there could be no doubt that they were sisters. Agniezka confided that her husband was abusive and that she wanted out of the marriage; Panthalassa told her that if she could manage to sneak away that night, she would help her get to safety.

Both the group emerging from the forest and the group exiting the town were surprised to hear a discordant calliope playing on the circus fairgrounds. As they approached, they could see that the Skarnesti Circus's familiar black-and-white striped tents had been replaced by green-and-white striped canvas. A new sign was hung above the ticket booth that read FELVOLIO'S CARNIVAL. The sign also included the image of a sinister, god-like clown surrounded by animated laughing mouths. 

Once they had bought tickets from the elderly clown at the ticket booth, he let them in after saying "All hail the God of Dark Laughter!" which really set the tone for what followed. They saw their deceased friend Rudolpho in a monkey suit dancing to the sound of the calliope; Garazi was knocked into a mud puddle at the pillow fight contest; the ring toss proved to be obscene--they were meant to toss rings onto the upturned codpieces of gyrating clowns. Worse yet, entering the "Tragic Kingdom" exhibit shrunk the party down to size and forced them to face off against a giant ant for survival!

Eventually, they heard the sound of heralding trumpets and an announcement that the show in the big top was about to commence. Once in their seats, they found the spotlight trained on them and they were invited to the stage--where they were forced to fight many clowns to the death. The odds tipped against them when a mechanical contraption pulled up and even more clowns spilled out. Felvolio, the master clown and secret cultist of the God of Dark Laughter, also joined in the fray but ultimately the fools were defeated.

Of course, once defeated, the big top began to creak and groan--it was about to topple to the ground. The group ran for it, but as soon as they cleared the tent they could see that Felvolio's Carnival had been replaced by the Skarnesti Circus once more. The Skarnesti carnies were still trapped in glass bubbles floating in the nearby pond, but they were quickly freed.

That night, Serafina and Viktoria arrived in separate carriages. Serafina explained that she wanted the group's help in taking down Patchwork Jack. There was a wrinkle here, though--Serafina wanted to take him alive. The group balked at this and Serafina was outvoted. They have put themselves on the path of death.

Meanwhile, Viktoria presented Panthalassa with two replacement arms that she had crafted: one a perfect replica of the arm she had lost, the other decorated with raised scars depicting a variety of ancient fossils. Panthalassa chose the latter, and the doctor prepared to operate...

Skalloche Isle and Thornlight

Two more adventure locations on the Judas Sea! Skalloche Isle is as yet unexplored in any of my campaigns, but it might be fun to run a mini-game in which the players all take on the roles of Skalloche's raiders. Thornlight, on the other hand, is the location of one of the best adventures I've ever written. I think I've used it in three different campaigns so far.

Skalloche Isle

Skalloche Isle is a snowy, mountainous island in the northern waters of the Judas Sea. 

    • The island is home to merciless barbarians who set sail in dragon-prowed long ships to engage in piracy and raid Krevborna’s coastal settlements.

    • Skalloche Isle is also inhabited by a groups of outcasts, the Corvidians, who have been warped by supernatural forces.

    • The corvidians—crow-like birdfolk—are the descendants of humans who were cursed by the Word and the Light due to their heretical beliefs; they live within ruined cathedrals that they jealously guard against outsiders.

    • The island’s corvidians adopted the folk saint Vionka as their savior long ago.

Thornlight

Thornlight is a supposedly abandoned lighthouse standing on a lonesome island near Piskaro. 

    • Only the pirates contracted to supply the lighthouse’s owner, Doctor Hesselius Reichman, with foodstuffs and the “raw materials” he puts to macabre purpose in his laboratory visit the island and leave safely. 

    • Doctor Reichman uses the lighthouse’s beacon to trick ships into dashing themselves on the rocky shore; anyone who washes up alive on the island’s beach is used in his disturbing experiments.

    • Reichman experiments with vivisection and artificer magic, following notes left behind by Doctor Moreau, to create tortured hybrids of man and beast. 

    • Reichman uses the threat of pain and dismemberment to keep his creations subservient and docile.  

    • Although Reichman is clearly mad, his research has a tragic purpose—he hopes to find a technological or magical innovation that will allow him to restore his comatose wife to consciousness.

    • Until Reichman can find a cure for her condition, his wife Rebecca is kept alive by magical machinery of his own invention inside a glass coffin. 

Fathom's Reach and Flotsam

Two more adventure locations on the Judas Sea in Krevborna! The first one, Fathom's Reach, was invented as a location the characters visited in my previous Krevborna campaign. Flotsam, on the other hand, was inspired by the (criminally underused) Saragoss from the Ravenloft setting and the floating city of Armada from China Mieville's novel The Scar.

Fathom’s Reach

Though its presence is unknown to most, Fathom’s Reach is an accursed city lurking beneath the waves of the Judas Sea.

    • Fathom’s Reach is an undersea city whose buildings are made of a strange, greasy black stone. 

    • The black stone used in its construction leeches an inky miasma into the water surrounding Fathom’s Reach that obscures it from view.

    • Fathom’s Reach is inhabited by fish-like greshnik who were once human.

    • The first residents of Fathom’s Reach made a compact with Scylla, a primordial creature of the depths, in order to survive a terrible shipwreck; as part of their pact, they were transformed into their current degenerate, amphibious forms.

    • The greshnik of Fathom’s Reach continue to worship Scylla as their patron “goddess.”

Flotsam

Flotsam is an unnatural island east of Piskaro comprised of an amalgamation of seaweed, wrecked ships, the bones of the drowned, broken chunks of coral reef, and other bits of ocean-borne detritus. 

    • Flotsam's nutrient rich soil, made fertile by the rot of the island’s accumulation of refuse and debris, births a verdant jungle spreading over much of the island. 

    • Some claim that the overgrown jungles of the island’s interior are vaster than its spatial boundaries should allow for and that ruins belonging to ancient civilizations are hidden within them.

    • The isle serves as a neutral meeting ground for Piskaro’s pirate captains.

    • Many believe that a number of legendary pirate captains buried their treasure on Flotsam; maps purporting to lead to their hoards sometimes surface, but thus far all who have flowed their paths have failed to return.

    • Captain Laurant maintains a plantation farm on Flotsam, but its location is a closely guarded secret; the plantation is worked by zombie laborers under Vanessa Laurant’s control.

Abrigor's Triangle and The Annalise

Two adventure locations in Krevborna's Judas Sea.

Abrigor’s Triangle

Abrigor’s Triangle is an expanse of the Judas Sea regarded as its most dangerous and mysterious region.

    • An unusually high number of ships disappear without explanation in Abrigor’s Triangle.

    • Superstitious sailors attribute the treachery of the triangle to numerous causes: a demon named Abrigor who pulls ships to the bottom of the sea, magnetic and temporal anomalies that render traditional navigation methods useless, or a preponderance of sea serpents and krakens.

    • Many vessels that travel to or from Krevborna via the Judas Sea go out of their way to avoid Abrigor’s Triangle, even though it lengthens their voyages to skirt its edges.

The Annalise

The Annalise is an infamous ghost ship crewed by the undead that prowls the Judas Sea.

    • Legend has it that the Annalise was a pirate ship captained by a greedy cutthroat, now known only as the Phantom Mariner, who betrayed a coterie of buccaneer captains he was partnered with.

    • He absconded with the ill-gotten wealth meant to be split between them, leaving them to be captured and executed at the hands of privateers. 

    • The gold and jewels the captain hoarded did not serve him well; when a sudden storm cast its net over the sea, the Annalise was too heavily laden to maneuver to safety.

    • The Annalise sank with all hands on board dying amid the thrashing waves. 

    • However, during storms at sea, the Annalise is spotted cutting a ghostly path through rough waters; bathed in ghastly green light and crewed by the barnacle-encrusted dead, the Annalise attacks other vessels who stray into its path. 

    • The accursed captain of the Annalise is compelled to add to the wealth that doomed him to a watery grave.

Wombs and Teeth

This adventure was the completion of the previous week's scenario. This one had the potential to have a much more involved and tense combat encounter or two--but they avoided one by not picking that fight and the other ended absurdly early due to two extremely lucky rolls by King Beebo's player. That's something that just happens with systems with exploding dice; you can't be mad at it! Live by the exploding die, die by the...exploding die.

Characters

Aria, a paladin struggling with her true nature

Panthalassa, a necromancer with a missing arm

Daytona, a dhampir gunslinger fresh from Hell (again)

Garazi, a beautiful young witch with a bird familiar

Willard Corn and King Beebo, a farmer and his monkey (?)

Events

Daytona arrived back in Hemlock Hollow after his harrowing adventure in Hell. As he walked through the night market, he was hailed by the snow elf Eshrevaal, who was talking to a Graymalk witch he did not recognize. The witch was introduced as Ivara Graymalk, one of the daughters who was present for the rest of the party's dinner with her mother Helena. When Daytona asked where he could find his friends, Ivara offered to take him through the Forest of Loss to where they were. Daytona agreed, and they set off, with Ivara plucking a Halloween mask from a passerby and handing it to Daytona. The townsman balked at the theft at first, but when he realized who he was dealing with he apologized and scurried away.

The pair were quickly enveloped in thick gray mist within the Forest of Loss, but as they emerged from it they found that there were before a farmhouse from which Daytona's friends were now emerging--expect Heck was no longer with them. When Heck's absence was discovered, they ventured back inside the farmhouse and discovered that Kestra had snatched him from the cellar and was keeping him as "collateral" until they got her her womb back.

And so the group returned to the House of the Maiden to attempt to get Sadira to give up the womb. Sadira was not pleased that they had returned empty-handed without her teeth, which Kestra still had in her possession, so attempts to intimidate and persuade her into an exchange fell on deaf ears. Eventually, Sadira became enraged and her monstrous nature became apparent: massive spider legs burst from her sides and an arachnid head emerged from the other side of her head. She attacked the group by enwrapping Garazi in threads of sticky spidersilk. Daytona cut Garazi free, but it was King Beebo who settled the matter decidedly: he fired both of his pistols into Sadira, putting her down like a mad dog before the other prostitutes in the brothel could even think about joining the fray. 

The patrons of the House of the Maiden fled and the women of the brothel made themselves scarce, giving the group time to ransack the building in search of Kestra's womb. Daytona found a safe hidden in the wall behind a painting, and Panthalassa was able to crack it. There were gold bars and bags of coins inside the safe, as well as a large stained leather sack. Dumping the sack onto the floor revealed its contents to be an extremely large--and terrifyingly fresh--womb. Pondering its size, Ivara was able to determine that Kestra had been warped by anger and grief into a "gargantuan"--a monstrous, physical ghost of prodigious size. This probably explained why Kestra never left the dark of the cellar; she was too big and too solid to exit the lower floor.

With the womb stuffed back into the sack by the bravest of the adventurers, they returned to the farmhouse to give it back to Kestra. Aria really wanted to force Kestra into trading the womb for the teeth--on the presumption that Sadira would "come back"--but the rest of the party just wanted to be done with the vile task and get their reward. Garazi and Aria got into an argument about it--and Kestra didn't help matters by rattling the tin can she kept Sadira's teeth in to taunt her. Ultimately, Aria said something unkind about witches in Ivara's presence. Ivara used her diabolic magic to force Aria to her knees and whispered in her ear that she didn't want to hear that kind of talk.

The rest of the group decided to venture down the cellar steps and give Kestra the sack. Horrifyingly, they could hear her inserting the organs back into her body. She did, however, keep her end of the bargain--she sent a very dazed and bewildered Heck out of the darkness, a fistful of tickets to ride the last "iron beast of the Vlaak" clutched in his hand. 

She also made good on providing "one secret known only to the dead." The group asked her if there was a way to restore a revenant to life--and told them that that occult secret resided in a Grail Tomb within the corrupted bayou known as the Stain. 

As Ivara led the group back through the mists to the Forest of Loss, things came to head within the party and Aria stalked off on her own after arguing again with Garazi and threatening to kill to Ivara. The party is now hunkering down to figure out their next move, but a plan is in the works to lure their foe Patchwork Jack into an ambush to deal with him once and for all. But...there's a wrinkle or two there they don't anticipate so we'll see what happens when the campaign resumes.

Capitalism: A Horror Story

To be fair and spell out one of my biases at the outset of this post on my thoughts about Jon Greenaway's Capitalism: A Horror Story, I've long been skeptical of the idea of "Gothic Marxism" for a reason this book does little to dispel: it seems like either an attempt to make Marxism "sexy" or to align someone's taste in entertainment to their avowed political ideology. Perhaps it tries its hand at both at the same time. The concept of Gothic Marxism often feels like a manifestation of the impulse to rebrand your politics as "cool" and to politically justify your fandom.

The book's vision of "the Gothic" mellows and becomes diffuse as it proceeds, eventually transforming into a catch-all category for the various horror films and texts it analyzes. However, Capitalism: A Horror Story doesn't excel at illustrating how the Gothic, or horror more generally, is necessarily a Marxist mode. This is an especially vexing omission in light of several authors under discussion being notably not radically left-wing in their politics yet somehow still existing under the book's political purview. For example, Ann Radcliffe was a champion of the middle-class bourgeoisie; the polite moralizing of her "Gothic Romances" and her status as an upwardly mobile middle-class woman whose ascendance was deeply entwined with the rise of capitalism evidences that. As another example, despite his belief in home rule for Ireland, Bram Stoker was a monarchist and supporter of the British Empire--two facets difficult to reconcile to claims of Marxist potential within Gothic authorship. In general, the linkage between "Gothic" and "Marxism" does not feel natural or self-evident.

The book's desire for Gothic Marxism to possess a transcendental, utopian political value also strikes me as odd and feels like something that can only be conjured by avoiding the material conditions that made the Gothic, and horror more generally, a viable commodity in terms of cultural production. This seems like something a Marxist account would want to explore in detail, but those concerns are largely left dangling. 

My biggest complaint with the book is stubborn insistence that horror is essentially a "hopeful" genre. I have taken a screenshot of a relevant paragraph so that you can judge the book's rhetorical position for yourself. This desire for a hopeful utopian turn does, in fact, cause problems when the book tries to use the cited fictions as political examples. You can read the ending of Dracula as hopeful--but it is hopeful about the continuation of British patriarchal power. Dracula features a collective that defeats evil--but it is a collective of elite imperial agents reinscribing Western superiority over foreign otherness. 

On the other hand, the ending of Frankenstein is hard to read as anything but Romantically bleak; it is far more apocalyptic than utopian in both tone and intent. 

However, the chapter on witches best illustrates the major flaw in the book's utopian argument: it dearly wants figures of monstrosity to be positive, nearly messianic, figures of resistance to capitalism, but as such it is ill-equipped to deal with the actual monstrosity of the figures it valorizes. Take its analysis of The VVitch as an example. It reads the witches in the film as liberatory and the ultimate event of Thomasin joining the coven as a political act, which may be, but it does not--and perhaps cannot--grapple with the fact that the witches in the film are actually figurations of evil by almost any standard. A baby is stolen and is mashed up into a flying ointment by one of the witches; another child is seduced in the woods and returned only so that he might die a horrible death in front of his helpless family. The climax of the film also problematizes the anti- capitalistic reading of its context. What is it that Thomasin is offered by the Devil? Butter, a pretty dress--she is offered commodities. I somehow think Marx wouldn't approve.

What this means is that many textual elements have to be ignored to get where the book intends to go. The same problem occurs in the offered reading of Frankenstein; the monster's body is a "site of politics," which again is certainly true, but that site of politics is fraught and contradictory because the monster puts its body to use by killing the innocent. I suspect this complication is uncommented on because that would countermand the hope of utopian change through the symbol and cypher of monstrosity. 

Capitalism: A Horror Story ultimately leaves the reader empty-handed. The utopian project of the book wants us to believe that there is revolutionary hope in monstrosity, in horror, in darkness--but even if that is an unmined possibility, what are we to do with that epiphany? As with other books of this style, there is no roadmap forward provided. 

This is particularly galling because in one of its chapters two horror film franchises are criticized for being unable to move beyond the ideological confines of neoliberalism to imagine something better. And yet, this presentation of Gothic Marxism similarly suffers from an inability to realize its utopic dreams in anything approaching concrete terms. How does an embrace of the monstrous usher in a much-deferred revolution? What praxis flows from the disturbed burial ground of the Gothic? Where does the "radical imagination" touted on the book's move from dark dream to attainable action? By the end of the book, questions such as these remain unanswered. 

The Horror of Hook House

As part of this year's Halloween gaming offerings, I ran Kids On Bikes for folks on my Discord. I used the scenario in the second-edition rulebook, but I swapped the setting out for something Edweirdian: the kids were all residents of an orphanage looking into the disappearance of one of their fellow foundlings--a boy named Hieronymus. They knew he had been dared to enter Hook House, an abandoned home on the hill thought to be haunted. 

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.