I’ve just discovered that there are two more versions of this game than I thought, and they have different behaviours!
Original competition release: 130928
Competition update: 131003
The version from Ryan’s site listed as the storyfile on IFDB: 140117
The play online version on Ryan’s site: 210127
You can get the skull, book, and ball in 210127 but not in any of the others. Ryannnn!
140117 is almost identical to 131003, only a few bytes are different. 210127 seems to have quite a few differences.