(Chapter the Seventeenth, continued)
Retracing our steps, we duck down the basement hatch:
>d
Under the Basement (Ivan Roth)
Tentatively, you lower yourself down from the ladder, and discover that you’re in a rocky cavern, colder and wetter even than the dank basement. It is also dim and shadowy, but you can make out strange carvings on the rock walls, a sinister iron cage that dangles from the roof of the cave, and a large black cabinet of ornate design, set into the western wall. An ink-black tunnel entrance leads north.You blink, and suddenly right before you is a pale figure ? one that wasn’t there only moments ago.
The ghost speaks. “I am Fedwick Baines, the sub-librarian of the Cragne library’s Forbidden Annex. This is the home of the books that the Cragnes could not allow to circulate; as far as I know, each of these volumes is unique in all the world.”
Oh, OK! Ivan Roth also did the basement, so this is another sub-area off of that rather than an independent room. The basement didn’t have too much going on, but this seems much more interesting, albeit I wish the ghost librarian (which I think is the second one we’ve seen so far?) wasn’t quite so overeager to share his S&M preferences with the world.
>x carvings
On the wall are strange, unholy hieroglyphs. You can barely make them out, however, because it seems like the carvings have been scorched and defaced - almost like someone was trying to erase them from the wall, but without doing serious damage to the rock. How peculiar.
As we were discussing earlier in the thread, a correct use of “hieroglyphs” here!
>x cage
This heavy iron cage looks like it was last disturbed in the Stone Age. Inside, an angry-looking vampire bat flutters around in a rage. A silver bell on a long chain dangles from the bottom.In the hanging iron cage is a vicious-looking bat.
Last disturbed in the Stone Age? Nitocris, I know you’re old and keeping track of the course of human development is tricky, but I’m pretty sure this thing post-dates the Iron Age – trick is in the name.
>x bat
A black ball of fur and fangs sulks inside the cage. “That little ball of furry malice is sulking because it’s in a brand-new enclosure,” Fedwick tells you. “Chewed right through the bars of the last one, took me days to catch. I had to chase the infernal rodent through every single room in Cragne Manor.”He pats the thick iron cage with a smug expression. “Well, that won’t happen again on my watch!”
You, uh, haven’t met Nitocris yet.
>x bell
It’s a beautiful, delicate little silver bell, patterned with intricate designs too small for your eyes to make out in the dim light.>ring bell
The little bell tinkles softly.The sub-librarian busies himself ‘dusting’ the surface of the black cabinet with a transparent feather duster; when he’s done, the duster vanishes.
>open cage
It seems to be locked.
Well, that presents a challenge for our chaotic intentions!
It’s pretty clear what we’re here for:
>x cabinet
An ornate, ebony cabinet, bedecked with curlicues and wingéd cherubs, has been set, improbably, into the western wall of this stone cavern.
I know I shouldn’t reward bad behavior, but seriously, “wingéd” here is making me giggle.
>open it
The ghost of the librarian bats you away with a spectral hand, a bizarre sensation that chills you to the bone. “Take a book, leave a book,” he says icily. “If you want to read something, bring me a book.”
Oh my friend, little do you know:
>open book pocket
You open the book pocket, revealing Tatooine 1: Anchorhead (smelling faintly of mildew), an old newspaper (smelling faintly of mildew), a faded delivery note (smelling faintly of mildew), a soggy tome (smelling faintly of mildew), a moldy, waterlogged journal (smelling faintly of mildew), a tiny leather journal (smelling faintly of mildew), the diary of Phyllis Cragne (smelling faintly of mildew), a postcard of Big Ben (smelling faintly of mildew), The Modern Girl’s Divination Handbook – Volume Three (smelling faintly of mildew), a small blue journal (which you know is a journal because it says “Mein Journal” on the front) (smelling faintly of mildew), The Seven Gaunts (smelling faintly of mildew), The Lives of the Roman Emperors (smelling faintly of mildew), Hyper-Gastronomy, Exactness, and String Theory: a Theoretical Subdiscipline of Cooking and Baking by Chef Wheldrake (smelling faintly of mildew), A Culinary Overview of Superstitions in the Miskaton Valley Region by S. Jarret Zornwharf (smelling faintly of mildew), Mama Hydra’s Deep Fried Ones (smelling faintly of mildew), De Zeven Testamenten van de Krijsende Zeeworm (smelling faintly of mildew), a 'Pataphysical Approaches to Quantum Superfluids (smelling faintly of mildew), a pink-bound book (smelling faintly of mildew), Legends of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley (smelling faintly of mildew) and an old paperback book (smelling faintly of mildew).
This looks like it’s a way to help the player feel good about unloading some of their useless books, and we certainly have plenty of those! This cookbook, for example:
take mama hydra
Taken.>give it to ghost
(the ghost)
The ghost snatches the book from your hands. “Ah, fresh pages! I haven’t read something new in ages.” Turning to the cabinet, he plunges his hand through the door and pulls out a book: The History of the End, or, Last Men. He hands it to you, reluctantly. “Take good care of it,” he says. “And give it back to me when you’re done.”
Er, are you going to give me mind back, too?
>read history
You glance at the cover first.A slim volume, titled “The History of the End, or, Last Men,” by Frances Bansaku. You feel vaguely that you’ve heard the title before - it was one of those “literary events” that was announced and then never released. Now you know why.
…this must, somehow, be a Francis Fukuyama joke?
You flip to the introduction. It begins:
“This is an essential moment in the world’s history. We are standing now on the howling cliffs of Time. Those, like Atrakut, who would retreat from the edge are doing our civilization no favors. We must face the truth head-on. It is the challenge of our times to confront the teeming darkness which lurks beyond our feeble precipice of understanding. The Millennium has a thousand faces, each more baleful than the last, and it is our job to either slay this monster, or become one with it.”
Though that’s not quite how I recall the thesis going.
There now occurs a brief ellipsis in the transcript as I decide to check whether this book is on the library list (I mean it’s in A library, but not THE library), but I’m unable to locate it after checking my Brobdingnagian inventory and turning out the book pocket. After worrying that I’ve left it somewhere, I think to check my old transcripts, and realize that I stashed it in the side (quest) pocket of the backpack some updates ago. I am forever putting things in the logical place for them, them immediately forget doing so and lose them, so art is imitating life here (the “throw it all in a heap, it’ll be fine” approach to inventory management you see in this thread is very much my preferred way of doing things).
Anyway it’s not on the list, but maybe something else will be?
I jumped straight to figuring out the mechanics here, but maybe, unlike the Librarian Above, this one’s going to be chatty?
>ask ghost about himself
The ghost just fixes you with a blank stare as you stutter out whatever question you’re trying to ask.“I can answer questions about people I’ve known, and the individuals mentioned in the books we keep here,” he says. “Because I’ve chosen to hold on to those pieces of my memory. I am not a general-purpose almanac.”
Huh, that’s an interesting degree of agency this ghost has!
Asking him about “Cragnes” doesn’t get us anywhere, but:
>ask him about me
“You? I’ve only met you just now. I didn’t even know Peter had been married,” he says.>ask him about peter
“I knew your husband when he was a little boy, but that was many years ago. I couldn’t tell you anything about his recent whereabouts.”Something in the phantom’s voice gives you chills as he says this.
Intriguing yet useless!
>ask him about frances
(Frances Bansaku)
“Frances was very sharp, but she tended to get out over her skis. Leopold - Leopold Cragne, I mean - met her at an inn at Geneva, as he told it to me; they were lucky to be the only two who escaped that inn without succumbing to a deadly poison that had been introduced in the beer. I believe that was when Leopold started teetotaling. The History of the End was meant to be Ms. Bansaku’s magnum opus, but something about it twigged Leopold’s suspicions - he had every copy destroyed but the one in the Annex. That was after her terrible skiing accident in the Alps; naturally, no one told her before the end. Or so I’m led to believe.”
Again, this could be an oblique joke about Fukuyama, because his book, published a decade before 9/11, two decades before resurgent fascist movements started making major inroads in societies worldwide, and three decades before a new war of territorial acquisition in Europe, argued that with the fall of the Soviet Union, Western liberal democracy had permanently triumphed and history, in terms of the development of new forms of ordering society and political institutions, was over. So you could definitely accuse him of getting out over his skis.
Anyway this is a new Cragne:
>ask him about leopold
“Leopold?” the ghost looks surprised. “He never wrote anything. I can comment on the authors of the books on these shelves and some of the people mentioned therein, but my relationship with Leopold Cragne- he was my employer and he took good care of me. I did his bidding, and I have no regrets. That’s all I will say on the matter.”
Once again, pretty much useless.
>give history
(to the ghost)
The ghost snatches back The History of the End, or, Last Men, by Frances Bansaku (smelling faintly of mildew). “Don’t think you’re getting another one for giving this back,” he says, wagging his finger. “I do this to find new things to read.”
Has… has no one ever explained to this dude the concept of a library? Serves him right that I’m stinking up all his books.
Anyway, to test my theory that this is set up to let you dump unneeded books, I try to give him one of the important ones:
>give venator
(to the ghost)
(first taking the pink-bound book (smelling faintly of mildew))
The ghost snatches the book from your hands. “Ah, fresh pages! I haven’t read something new in ages.” Turning to the cabinet, he plunges his hand through the door and pulls out a book: The Monolith. He hands it to you, reluctantly. “Take good care of it,” he says. “And give it back to me when you’re done.”
Er. So much for that theory?
>ask ghost for venator
(the ghost for the pink-bound book (smelling faintly of mildew))
“I’m not in the habit of giving gifts,” Fedwick rumbles.
I’m guessing there’ll eventually be a way to get these back, but I’m a little nervous about this ghost’s greedy little fingers. Let’s just keep playing things out for now:
>x monolith
A black-and-white cover of abstract and intersecting lines that looks like it’s been photocopied far too many times has been taped to the cover of this binder of typewritten pages. The title reads: The Monolith, by Georgi Vogot. It looks very well-worn, as if somebody has been reading it over and over.>read it
The book falls open naturally to one particular page. It reads:“And this is the Monolith, the thing to which we feed our hopes and despairs, whose delphic vision we trouble with our worthless lives. It is like a black sponge of granite, like the cold-hearted eye of some merciless technician-king, ascendant on the mighty throne of pain which the Monolith throws up, for those it deems worthy. But no FSB, no CIA and no meddling Cragne can silence my tongue now, for I have seen the Monolith’s true face: It is the name that most men dare not speak ? but if only they knew what joy* the saying brings! I am free to write the name: I type it out, a V, an A, a second A, a D, an-”
and there it stops, and when you turn the page you see the next is a blackened, illegible mass, covered in black boils and ruptured cracks, as if it had been blighted by some kind of terrible book-worm or -mold or some flammable oil - something specialized for the destruction of books.
If this one’s a parody too, I’m not getting the reference – maybe it’s riffing on The People of the Monolith, a tome Robert E. Howard created for his Mythos pastiche The Black Stone (yes, the Conan guy wrote some Cthulhu stuff, in case you’ve ever found yourself reading Lovecraft and thinking “this dude just isn’t racist enough”)
>ask him about vogot
(Georgi Vogot)
The old ghost wrinkles his brow. “Ah, Vogot was a special man. He and Leopold had a long correspondence in the '20s; pen-pals, as Leopold would tell it. But as the political situation worsened it was harder to keep in touch, and Leopold says something about Stalin just broke the man. Georgi was always an idealist, and in the '30s he simply went mad. This manuscript, the Monolith, was smuggled out of Stalingrad in a crate of oranges bound for Cuba, that Georgi’s daughter Ana was hiding in, a vain attempt to reunite with her boyfriend Roberto, in Nicaragua, whom she had known during the first war when they were both- ah, I am getting off track.”He composes himself for a moment. "The manuscript, yes. After Ana and Roberto both succumbed to a rare, tropical blood-swallowing parasite, the manuscript made its way to Daniel Woodstock, and by means of his corporate spies Leopold contrived to be delivered the only copy. Oh, Woodstock was enraged. But the book made mention of serious things, things that Leopold had let slip to Georgi, or that Georgi had discovered on his own, in what was then the underground labyrinth of Leningrad. Leopold made his own excisions, and for posterity’s sake the remains of the book were entrusted to me, and the Forbidden Annex.
“The Monolith is all that remains of Georgi Vogot, I am afraid. He perished in the gulags. But the Monolith is here - his final work.”
We’re developing quite the web of characters and relationships here. Who’s this Woodstock:
“Daniel Lionel Woodstock was Leopold’s fiercest competitor in the areas of his
interest, corporate and otherwise. Woodstock became bitter and paranoid in his
later years, blaming Leopold and Cragne Coal for the collapse of his company. But
he was not an indecent human being, I will grant him that. He played the game, like
the rest of us.” Fedwick looks a little bit sad.
My dude, if your business has been outcompeted by Cragne Coal – there being no coal reserves in Vermont – maybe you should have stuck to a career in the liberal arts.
(“Daniel Lionel” feels like it could be another joke – the den etc.)
>ask him about ana
The ghost shakes his head. “Ana Vogot was a silly girl who made stupid decisions. She was sharp in some ways, could have been a valuable asset to certain people - but in the final analysis, I believe she was doomed from the start.”>ask him about roberto
Which do you mean, Roberto Vasquez or ir-Roberto?
Oops!
>vasquez
The ghost grimaces. “Vasquez was a cagey customer. He met little Henry Cragne during one of their vacations in Cancun, and he immediately cottoned that there was something… off about the Cragnes. The man wrote novels like some folks eat bread, and this was the last he churned out before- well, before Leopold got to him. He had it suppressed as a precautionary measure; who knows if some reference, however oblique, to the thing that is wrong with the Cragnes might have slipped through and into the pages of that book.”
Oh, I guess this is a different Roberto, who wrote another book we can get?
>ask him about henry
“Doesn’t your husband talk about his older brother? I can see why he wouldn’t. …Perhaps this is one of those matters upon which an outsider should not intrude.” The ghost lapses into meaningful silence.
Anyway, we give him back The Monolith, and swap him that Star Wars book about Anchorhead, getting something called “The Ant That Breeds” in return:
>x ant
This book looks frankly like it was self-published; the cover art is clearly supposed to be an unnerving expressionist design, but you can also spot the telltale stippling of a photocopier. Glancing at the back, you’re confronted by a hideous, staring portrait of the author.>read it
You flip open to a random page, and it’s an incredibly graphic description of someone being flayed alive. Who reads this stuff?As you close the book, something on the inside cover catches your eye. In faint, wabbling pencil marks, someone has scrawled a name: Barach’speroth Arguule. You wonder if the ghost knows his book has been defaced with these strange words…
Huh, that’s interesting (the name, not the flaying).
>ask him about barach’speroth arguule
You wouldn’t have said it was possible even moments ago, but somehow the pale white ghost manages to blanch with fear. “Bara- uh, that name is not the name of any author, or any human being. If you have to know, B- Ba- Ba- that being is the first servant of the one who binds me here, the one whose name I will not even try to say. The incantation of Arguule may be hidden somewhere in these books; it is not his name, it is something more baleful…” he demurs. “I’ve said too much,” he says, and falls silent.You resolve to examine these books more attentively than ever when you read them, in case you might discover - whatever that is…
Oh, huh – if we can figure out who’s binding Fedwick, we might be able to convince them to get our books back (and whatever we’re here to retrieve).
Taking inventory reveals this gem of a book was written by one Nightgrim. Asking about him:
“Oh, Nightgrim! I knew that man’s father; he was expelled from the Miskatonic University after calling in a bomb threat during a basketball game. The son did no wrong that I know of, but he came very ill in SoHo about ten years ago and wrote a phenomenal number of mad books in his convalescence. The Ant That Breeds was the worst of them, the last one he wrote, edited and published posthumously by his Pinguidite sister. I think he was on the edge of something beautiful…”
I am striking out on “Punguidite” – I guess it’s supposed to be some kind of sect?
Next exchange is for the soggy tome about crawfish, and we get…
This is one of those slick academic tomes with partly uncracked binding, like no one’s ever really tried to read it through. Certainly believable. It’s called “Beyond the Dream of Moons: The Orientalist Mode in a Post-modal Context,” by Dr. Silas Fong.
>read it
You flip through the dense academic text. Trying to dive in, you can’t help but be reminded of that professor you had in college who tried to make the whole class read Deleuze and Guattari. No rhizomes here, but there’s a lot of stuff about modalities and intertextualities and Orientalisms that you don’t really understand. Flipping to the illustrated inserts in the middle, you see a lot of facsimiles of pages from a book called “Mysteries of the Red City”.
Ooof, I’ve read enough (post-)structuralist philosophy to wince at this. Those interpolated pages seem interesting, though, and if we try to read the book again:
You shut the book, but one page catches your eye and you quickly flip it open again. In the margin, someone has scribbled: “It must be said three times, in the presence of the carved seal… that is the only way to banish the spirit and secure what he has stolen… he is covetous, it is the only way… but it is so dangerous that I am afraid to do it, even to retrieve my precious and defiled memory… the god’s first servant will be summoned… but I will mark the word, the incantation, before he kills me… it is the only way…”
That’s tantalizingly little information - all you need to learn now is what that incantation is!
Ah, this is a clearer indication of what we need to do! Banishing the librarian seems a little harsh, but he is a covetous fellow, it’s true. So we’re looking for something to chant to summon that Baruch fellow Fedwick seemed so afraid of, in the presence of the “carved seal” – I wonder if that’s the not-quite-defaced hieroglyphs?
>ask ghost about fong
Which do you mean, Beyond the Dream of Moons, by Dr. Silas Fong, Irenius Fong or Silas Fong?
That’s a lotta Fongs!
>silas
(the ghost about Silas Fong)
Fedwick sighs. “I knew him from his brief stay in this house, but more so from the stories his father told; old Irenius Fong stayed with us for years in his convalescence. Poor old fool. He and Silas had grown apart, and I think he harbored some bitterness about that. In the end, of course, they were both destroyed by the same… ah, but that’s beside the point.”The ghost falls silent.
>ask ghost about irenius
(the ghost about Irenius Fong)
“Irenius Fong? When I knew him, he was already an old man; he and his adult son, Silas, lived in this Manor for a while. Irenius was sharp as a whip, although his English was not always perfect. He and Silas would get into the screamingest arguments; Irenius made a small fortune from his memoirs, but Silas thought he was a sellout and a fraud. Especially in later volumes, he made up a lot of absurd and mystical details that he thought would appeal to his American audience. That one, Mysteries of the Red City, is one of the later books; at least half of it is outright fiction. But there was something in there that Leopold didn’t want to be seen, so he suppressed it and locked the only copy here. Boy, was Irenius furious when he found out. That might have been the last straw for him - he threw himself out of the seventh-story tower window the next week. They never found his body.”
This backstory is even more intertwined with the Cragnes than I would have thought – honestly this is seeming less and less like a library of near-forgotten texts, and more and more like a record-vault of Leopold’s crimes.
Anyway, we next trade Phyllis Cragne’s diary, and get:
“Between God and Madness,” by Hiram Strangecraft. It’s a somewhat beat-up old book that looks like it used to be a library copy. The inside front cover is marked with a strange seal.
I can’t quite put my finger on who this might be riffing on. But that seal seems interesting:
>x seal
You already have that.A seal of curious design, stamped in red ink with such force that it impacted the pages behind it. The design appears to be just an abstract shape, although maybe it’s writing in a script you can’t read. It gives you the shivers, a little bit.
(Huh, there’s some weird implicit take firing there).
>read hiram
You open up to a random page and start reading:“them. The nightmares come again, faster this time, as if driven by some invisible engine that makes as it destroys, loosening the innermost screws that hold perception to experience, fastening mortal souls to the invisible word. It is God, it is the Devil, it is the infernal nothingness of an ancient rite betrayed. There is no name for the horror I must face; it is eternal, unburied, unbroken, even though O God I so dearly wish that it could be destroyed, that the endless midnight of my spirit could be leavened by its absence; but absence is all that it is not; it is slithering, it is dripping, it is the god before the god that ever made machine, …”
It goes on and on like that. Don’t you have better things to do?
>g
You flip through the book again, but it’s all the same: the endless, meaningless ramblings of an insane person. He doesn’t even name the thing that’s frightening him; you would need some kind of religious reason to be interested in this.
The prose itself doesn’t feel quite Lovecraftian enough – I feel like his clauses are usually more precise than this – but this last dig strikes true.
>ask him about strangecraft
(Hiram Strangecraft)
“They used to keep Strangecraft up in the attic, which seemed cruel to me, but I suppose there was no other solution. He was absolutely mad. And they couldn’t turn him over to the Asylum - not with everything he’d heard, and not with Dr. Wagner still running the Asylum like his personal panopticon. There are some things that have to stay in the household. I convinced Leopold not to burn all the man’s manuscripts, but of course they could never be published, so I keep them here in the Forbidden Annex.”>ask him about wagner
A dark look passes over Fedwick’s eyes. “Doctor Wagner ran the asylum downtown for many years. He was an extremely sharp and observant man. When Leopold found a letter from Wagner in Dr. Stashwart’s study, during a visit, he flew into a rage that lasted months; he wouldn’t even look the good doctor in the eye when they passed on Main Street. Understandably, of course. Doctor Wagner was a natural spy, as sure as they come. He got what was coming to him eventually.”>ask him about stashwart
“Stashwart is a distinguished researcher in the field of blood-swallowing parasites; a brightly-burning woman. She would come over some times to show Leopold some of the things she was working on; he had an amateur interest in parasitology. Someone once claimed to me, and I won’t say who, that that she wrote The Imagined Worm as an amusement for her young nephew. But as far as I know, she never had a nephew, and it doesn’t seem like much of a children’s book to me…”
Again, lots of intertwined detail here, plus a nod towards what’s probably another book we can get (how many of these are there going to be?) I have to say, “Stashwart” is a great, Gormenghastian sort of name.
Another swap – this time I see if I can unload the postcard of Big Ben (it shows up in the disambiguation prompts when I type X BOOK), which I can – but Fedwick tries to one-up us by foisting The Monolith off on us again. Nitocris, not one to be trifled with, invokes the fell power of UNDO to correct his behavior and we get something new this time:
>x sky
Reading the Sky, by Roberto Vasquez, is a slim paperback, with an artsy sketch of the night sky on the cover. The text on the back is in Spanish.>read it
…this book is in Spanish. You had to take a couple Spanish classes in college, but since then you’ve gotten really rusty. Flipping through Reading the Sky, about all you can glean is that it’s some kind of romance(?) between a man named Umberto and a woman name Julia. Maybe it’s a romance. There are no illustrations.
This doesn’t look promising, but I try reading it a second time just on the off chance:
On the back cover, you notice a blemish, and you realize it’s a smear of blood - but when you tilt your head you see that there are dozens of blood smears on the cover, spelling out a single word: ANGARITHEP. The P trails off, as if the one who scrawled it was being dragged away…
Ah hey, that sure looks like what we’re after:
>angarithep
The ghost shudders and flickers. For a moment you see a glimpse of tangled limbs. Upon reconstituting, he whispers hoarsely. “Do not say that word!”Out of the corner of your eye, you thought you saw the carvings on the wall glow red.
>angarithep
The ghost flickers again, and takes on form after form. A squirming mass of tentacles, a waterfall of slime, a thousand cockroaches in the shape of a body, a blazing orb of purple light, and then again the shuddering form of Fedwick Baines. “Stop, I beg of you! I’ll give you anything!” He pulls out a stoppered vial and a stack of books, trying to hand them to you, but they flicker and shudder along with his ghostly body.
Er this is unnerving? I try to grab the vial and books, but there’s nothing doing, so with maybe the merest iota of regret we say the word a third time:
>angarithep
You say the word again, but the moment that the last syllable slips out you can only regret it. This time, the ghost screams, before flickering so violently that it gives you a searing pain behind your eyes. An eviscerated tiger; a flock of screaming crows; a burning book, with yellow, judging eyes in the dancing flames; your husband, Peter, his arms bound and a thrashing tentacle forcing its way out of his throat; the tilt of a nauseous ship; the wail of an injured child; a leopard with a thousand eyes instead of spots. And then it’s Fedwick Baines again, but his ghostly form is cut, as if with a razor, bleeding from ragged lacerations that criss-cross his torso, almost in the form of a star. His voice is curt and ragged. “You did th-”But at that moment, a mass of enormous, toothy tentacles bursts from his chest, splattering his ghostly organs in every direction and cutting him off mid-speech. The tentacles flail and grab, seizing chunks of his spectral body and pulling them into the void of his ruptured chest, now seemingly a portal to another dimension.
The tentacles are reaching towards you, too, now, and you flinch in terror as one ice-cold, rubbery tentacle brushes your jaw. You need to act fast.
Sweet Christmas! The ghost was kind of a greedy jerk, okay, but he didn’t deserve this! More to the point, we don’t deserve this.
Maybe that seal will protect us?
>touch seal
You hesitate, and a tentacle seizes you. One wraps around your ankle, one hooks its chitinous tooth into your shirt and finally one wraps its whole girth around your torso, dragging you by force into the horrible void of Fedwick’s mutilated chest. You try to struggle, thrashing your arms to get away and screaming, but a tentacle pours through your mouth and into your digestive tract; your spasms of nausea only allow its bone to slice your organ linings faster. As you’re dragged inexorably into the ragged void, for a moment, all that you can see is stars…*** You really fucked up ***
Well that was deeply unpleasant. New plan – RUN AWAY!
>u
You scramble up the ladder in a mad rush, those hideous tentacles lapping at your thighs, and you just slip through the hatch as they’re reaching for your body, trying to pull you down. You slam the hatch shut and stand on it, shaking. It’s impossible not to hear the slapping and scraping of those horrible tentacles, wherever they come from, desperately searching for something in the Forbidden Annex to devour.
Whew, we escaped – let’s see if the danger has passed:
>d
Cragne Library Forbidden Annex - Under the Basement (Ivan Roth)
You’re in a rocky cavern, colder and wetter even than the dank basement. It is also dim and shadowy, but you can make out strange carvings on the rock walls, a sinister iron cage that dangles from the roof of the cave, and a large black cabinet of ornate design, set into the western wall. An ink-black tunnel entrance leads north.The ghost of Fedwick Baines floats solemnly in front of you.
You can also see a mass of tentacles here.
That’s a hell of a “you can also see.”
We rabbit back upwards:
>z
You hum a little.>listen
You hear nothing unexpected.>d
…
A pile of things lies on the cave floor, where Fedwick was standing.
You can see Buried Tales of Old Vermont, a little stoppered vial of blue liquid, [all the books we gave him]
Fedwick is gone to a fate that’s best not to contemplate, but we’ve got our stuff back! Plus, there’s whatever’s in that stoppered vial, and as expected, we’ve got a new book for the real library in Tales of Old Vermont.
(continued in a bit)
