Drinking in the Blues

A black musician arrives in town with a guitar and a suitcase done up with string. His name is Simon Turner and he plays sweet music for anyone who asks him to, be it for a couple of dollars in a smoke-filled speakeasy, or for a meal and a bed for the night, or even for nothing but a few kids loitering on a streetcorner. The gentle guitar notes trickle like gold into the ears of Simon’s audience, and his mellow bass voice soothes all troubles.

An investigator encounters Simon accidentally, bumping into him in the street or hearing him playing in a rented room in a flophouse, where the music drifts down to the listener as he walks home at night. The investigator is enchanted, longing to hear it again. However, no matter how much she tries to meet Simon, she misses him every time, by only a few minutes.

After staying for a few days, Simon moves on, but in the weeks that follow, the town’s attitudes start to mellow. Racists and bigots become less ardent, and life becomes just that little bit easier for blacks in the town. While not a complete turn around, things have improved, and Simon Turner has left his mark.

Possibilities

1 Simon Turner is an ordinary, if incredibly gifted, man. His music is beautiful, but not Mythos inspired. Not all strange events relate to madness and tentacled monstrosities.

2 Simon is one of the less malevolent avatars of Nyarlathotep. His music is the music of gods and demons, an ambrosia for the ears, a melody divine. And, like his music, his favour is heaven sent. Anyone actively antagonising the black community without fair reason disappears with a slither of tentacles and a strange piping at night.

3 Simon is an Outer God named Yd’gh’tjetye, the same who lured Erich Zann to music and to madness. This inhuman musician seeks an audience. The mellowing is a side effect of listening to such unearthly music.

P.S. Please use this Tale of Terror as an excuse to play some really fine music.

© Eamon Honan

The Weeping Madonna

The statue of the Madonna has started weeping blood at the Church of St Mary. The church is a local landmark, brooding on the hill as it does. Made of a dark stone turned darker by pollution it has a strangely intimidating quality about it. Inside, the beautiful stained-glass images provide a stark contrast to the grey stone and dull brown woodwork. The Madonna itself is a vibrantly coloured statue with rich gilt detail rumoured to have been smuggled in from Hungary in the last century.

Possibilities

1 Local occultists have magically placed a body inside the statue as a kind of sick joke. The spell keeps the body fresh, but the wounds inflicted upon it during the ritual killing continue to leak blood into the remains of the cavity inside the statue. The blood level has reached the only apertures in the statue and so the statue cries blood.

2 The statue is a medieval artefact, originally made in the shape of a tall man with the face of a squid, created by heretical wizard Jan Zykar from the town of Stregoicavar. Just before the Muslim destruction of the town in 1526 Zykar left the town and took his statue with him. Zykar remodelled the exterior of the statue prior to reaching Budapest. There he died in 1576 in unknown circumstances. The Madonna was transferred to The Church of Our Lady in Budapest where it remained until 1856 when it was sold to the present church owners by an unscrupulous and thoroughly scared priest whose research into the history of the church had revealed his imminent doom.

Every 70 years it requires a sacrifice. Its method of obtaining the sacrifice is to magically drain blood from its owner; the priest of the church. The priest gets weaker and weaker until he dies. However, Zykar’s remodelling resulted in a deficiency in the statue’s ability to drain blood and some appears around the Madonna’s eyes. Any detailed examination of the statue reveals the remodelling work that hides the original horror beneath the mask.

3 The statue itself is not weeping blood. The blood that appears on the face of the statue has been dripping from a dead body up in the rafters of the church. If investigations do not reveal this to be the case then after a couple more days the blood stops. The next ‘miracle’ is a smell of rotting that permeates the church.

Eventually somebody realises the true cause and the corpse is discovered. The body is that of a local dignitary thought to have been on business abroad. His wrists are cut.

© Ric Norton