Sentence Served

A Correctional Officer (CO) at a county jail is worried that an inmate who is currently incarcerated on a drunk driving conviction is set to be released in a few days. He wants the investigators to help.

Image by Artflow.ai

The inmate had been isolated from general housing because he caused too much of a disturbance with the other inmates. He’d never done anything directly; in fact, he’d been nothing short of well-behaved the entire time he’d been there, but he seemed to have a natural ability to make everyone around him agitated. He stank to high heaven, like rotting meat no matter how often he showered and, whatever housing unit he went to would start having problems--fights, unruliness, and a general sense of malaise--as soon as he arrived.

Once in isolation, the CO heard strange noises coming from the inmate’s cell at night--sounds like baying dogs, lions roaring, and hyenas laughing. Yet when he investigated, the inmate would be curled up in his bunk, apparently asleep.

One night, while doing his security rounds, he checked inside the man’s cell through the window in the cell door. The inmate was lying down with his eyes closed; as he turned to walk away, he felt something staring at him. When he turned, the inmate was peering out the cell window at him, his eyes pitch black, his lips drawn back to reveal a smile of pure malevolence.

The officer doesn’t have anything concrete to base this on, but he worries that the area will not be safe once this inmate is released from custody. He’s looking for the investigators to keep an eye on him.

Possibilities

1 The inmate is a powerful cult leader and a practitioner of black magic. He only allowed himself to be caught and arrested so that he could make contacts within the jail. The Correctional Officer is right to be worried - this man is dangerous and has nefarious plans once he is freed.

2 It isn’t the poor inmate’s fault; he’s been tormented ever since he inadvertently summoned a powerful demon during what he thought was some harmless fun with a ouija board. This demon haunts and sometimes possesses this man. He finds some respite in booze, which is how he ended up in jail.

3 The CO is making the whole thing up. He is the real evil one. He knows who the investigators are and wishes to dispose of them, and concocted this story as a mere red herring; something to distract them so he can catch them off guard.

Copyright (c) 2009 Luke Manning

Bad Dog

There hasn’t ever been a problem with strays in the neighbourhood, until about three weeks ago. A huge, black dog has been seen and has caused all kinds of mischief. Bins have been overturned, cars have been chased and the local children routinely terrified when something sleek and threatening bursts through the undergrowth, teeth barred. Cats refuse to go outside. Nobody’s really gotten a good look at the dog, so its breed hasn’t been identified. Nor has any owner.

Things change when a man is found dead in an abandoned house, savaged and ripped to shreds. The victim is identified as homeless man Ken Charles, and for a time the police comb the area hoping to catch the dog, but have no luck. The predator remains at large and the sound of howling echoes through alleyways, to the terror of man and beast alike.

Possibilities

1 The dog is normal in body, but not in mind. It contains the spirit of a murder who vowed to survive death and return to have vengeance on those who condemned him. The murderer, Wilbert Johns, was a homeless man who shared an abandoned house with Ken Charles and another man, Tom Warburton. Johns murdered Warburton as part of an occult ritual but didn’t realise he was being observed by Charles, who went to the police. Johns died fighting with the officers sent to arrest him, but not before he had put certain plans in place for his survival. He viciously killed Charles by trapping him in the house they’d squatted in, displaying intelligence highly uncharacteristic of a normal dog. The only problem for Johns is that he has to share his mind, that of a coldly psychological killer, with that of a dog, sometimes causing him to act out animal impulses.

2 The dog is a creature of a magical nature (demon, faerie or ghost, etc…) that was attracted to the neighbourhood by the magical energy radiating from the abandoned house which had a powerful artefact hidden away within it. Charles was killed when he disturbed the dog while it was searching the house. The dog isn’t really a large problem, but the artefact is going to start attracting things that are smarter and more dangerous in the hopes of claiming its power.

3 Ken Charles was not a simple derelict, but in fact a disgraced professor who had been researching the possibilities of time travel, requiring isolation to perfect his research. In a secret room in the basement he designed a machine that could facilitate the opening of a portal to the past, but to his misfortune it let through a prehistoric wolf that gravely injured him and ran off into the streets. Charles was able to drag himself into the basement and seal off the time machine room, but didn’t manage to close it off before he died.

© Paul Hebron

Aztec Troubles

In the dusty cellar of a fine restaurant in a close-by city lays a strange clay or stone tablet. It is an Aztec Sunstone and it houses the trapped and dormant spirit of an Aztec Priestess, or so legend goes. There used to be a magic shop in the building and was left behind when the store closed their business in the late 50s. This was a piece of the occult collection that was left behind and long forgotten.

Possibilities

1 The tablet contains the spirit of the Aztec priestess Xiuh-Tu-Nal who, according to ancient Aztec Lore she will be the key to her people’s revenge on the “White men invaders” (the Spanish landfall in the 15th century).

When awakened, Xiuh-Tu-Nal instinctively takes possession the nearest unfortunate victim - but suffers from memory lapses and confusion. She doesn’t speak English and will try to flee unless someone calms her down. As she stays in the possessed body, it warps and transforms into her original form – a process that takes about three weeks.

Before too long, Xiuh-Tu-Nal will remember the ritual for possessing another victim - and will quickly become a body thief, possessing victims and discarding them.

2 The tablet is a valuable Aztec sunstone, worth tens of thousand dollars to collectors. William Fletcher, the son of the former magic shop owner remembers seeing the tablet when he used to play at the shop when he was a kid. He has since seen a similar tablet at auction and stages a ‘bust’ with a couple of his friends. The bust is staged as a gang robbery – however Fletcher’s real goal is not the cash from the register, but the Aztec sunstone.

3 The tablet is sacred to an Aztec cult of cthonian worshippers, and is occasionally the cause for strange tremors. The tremors, when they occur, reverberate throughout the old building. Should the tablet be “used” properly, it will act as a beacon, summoning nearby cthonians.

© Dennis Toepoel

Pussy's in the Well

Sasha Oldman is an attractive young woman, although she looks older and sadder than 15, her actual age. She has wild, dark hair and her left forearm, where it rests on the bed covers, bears many parallel scars.

“She did that with a drinking glass last time she got out of her room,” explains the nurse on seeing your eyes linger. “The doctor lost his eye. But don’t worry, she’s heavily sedated now.”

Sasha’s eyes are deep hazel in colour, but are dead, staring at the wall. Her face is immobile. You know she killed her family a year ago. She was found in the street with a kitchen knife in each hand, spattered with blood. There was more in the house, a lot more. Mother, father, and brother. All stabbed and slashed repeatedly.

You talk to her, she makes no response. If you discuss her family she hums Bohemian Rhapsody and avoids your eyes. The more insistent you are, the louder she hums, and jerks against her waist restraint. If you show a picture of her family she goes wild, screaming lots of gibberish, “They made me do it, bad fucking fuckers! Ding Dong Dell! Fuck fuck! Bad lights in the dark down below! Can’t run! Not me now. Jack and Jill all fall DOWN!”

By the last sentence her voice is inhuman. Spittle flies from her lips and her face becomes a mask of hatred.

Possibilities

1 Sasha and her family were cultists, who practiced foul rites and disposed of human remains in their basement well. Sasha was driven over the edge by what she witnessed and in a subconscious attempt to escape the cult and her memories, slaughtered her own family. She knows that the rest of the cult still exists and that someone will try to silence her. The investigators, in attempting to help Sasha or uncover the cult’s activities, themselves become the target of supernatural and mundane attacks.

2 Sasha’s home lies on top of an ancient well used by an old cult. Spirits infest the place and Sasha’s brother accidentally released their malevolence when he discovered the well. Sasha was possessed (and still is) when her brother showed her the “cool stuff” he found in the basement.

Exorcism is Sasha’s only hope, but to perform it the investigators must battle the institution authorities, cultists and the possessed Sasha herself.

3 Below Sasha’s home, below their basement well, lies some kind of subterranean cavern or extra-dimensional realm. Sasha’s brother inadvertently destroyed the elder sign sealing the entrance and whatever was trapped entered the house and quickly tore everything and everyone apart. Sasha defended herself and family as best she could, losing her mind in the process.

So what happened to whatever Sasha’s brother released? And where is it now?

© Jon Freeman

Smiling Jack and Mr Smith

Some years ago, ventriloquist Drew Smith made a radical change to his vaudeville act. Instead of mediocre "Gottle of gear" and "He's behind you" routines, Smiling Jack (his puppet) became a bully and "forced" Drew to cower and beg. This bizarre angle kick-started his career and he quickly became a celebrity.

Apparently inspired by his audience's response, Drew allowed the act to become steadily more strange. Smiling Jack often hit him on stage and reviewers wrote of Drew's disturbingly realistic acting. Rumours started - Drew was unstable and could be heard arguing and pleading with Smiling Jack in his dressing room.

Events took a turn for the worse when, halfway through a show and with tears streaming down his face, Drew implored his audience to rescue him from his tormentor. The shocked silence that followed was described by the papers as "Breath-taking" and "Macabre and beyond decency."

That night Drew Smith was found dead in his dressing room, his arm ripped from its socket. Smiling Jack was a never found.

Possibilities

1 Drew Smith had made a dark pact in return for fame. A demon possessed Smiling Jack and first gave him what he had asked for - then tortured and destroyed him. Once Drew was mentally destroyed the demon lost interest and killed him brutally. Then, still in its little clown outfit, it sought new prey.

2 Drew is a sorcerer who has used Smiling Jack as a juju doll to contact creatures from beyond. He has been fooling the otherworld creatures into thinking that theatre audiences are actually worshippers. Unfortunately the entity he has contacted is demanding more from his congregation and wants them to demonstrate their faith. Eventually the thing became tired of Drew's reticence and returned to the otherworld, taking the doll and Drew's arm with it.

3 Drew is a sorcerer using his act to perform mass suggestions on his audience. He has trapped a lloigor in Smiling Jack, and the suggestions which are "demanded" of him by the lloigor affect everyone in the audience.

The suggestions affect everyone emotionally, and are very useful to Drew. For instance, pity (for Drew) usually engenders some charity, anger causes increased criminal activity that mask Drew's other activities and so on. However, Drew miscalculated - one of his audience persuaded to "rescue" Drew burst into his dressing room and killed the puppet by cutting it off Drew's shoulder.

© Nathan Gribble

Scarlet Fever

It is a rather peculiar disease, liquefying flesh into a thick red jelly, leaving only bones and skin untouched. Bodily functions continue unimpaired until the end. It is so rare that it does not yet have a name, let alone a cure.

Victims are often completely unaware that they carry the disease. Realisation sinks in only when cut: instead of blood, jelly wells out of the wound. Their skin does not heal, and if left unbandaged shrinks and wrinkles as the victim’s liquefied flesh oozes out.

Possibilities

1 The disease is caused by a body thief. The body thief possesses human victims in the course of its evil design. It is so successful at possession, that it has not had to materialise into its original, monstrous, form for many years now.

The unfortunate human is unaware of the possession, which lasts for a maximum of six months. After that the disease, a by-product of the process, causes the human body to fail irretrievably. The body thief then moves on.

2 A vampire is afoot, feeding on pre-digested human flesh. It has two forms; the first a tall and handsome human, the other a multi-legged maggot-thing with a stabbing proboscis.

The vampire-thing needs to inject its prey with digestive juices some months before feeding. It makes two visits, injecting juices at first and then returning once its victim is ripe.

3 Nyarlathotep occasionally chooses a bride. Or groom, it makes no difference. Nyarlathotep appears to the chosen individual in full regalia, and proposes. If the chosen individual accepts, they become its bride or groom and reside in the Daemon Sultan’s court for the rest of eternity.

Those that refuse are set free and cursed: everyone they encounter for more than a few hours will die, afflicted with a terrible liquefying disease. At midnight on the night of each full moon Nyarlathotep returns to ask, again, for their hand. If they accepts, the Outer God takes them to Azathoth’s court for the wedding and matrimonial bliss. If they decline, more are consigned to a grisly fate.

Eventually Nyarlathotep becomes bored with its bride/groom, and it is time to choose another.

© Steve Hatherley

The Writing on the Wall

The symbols and half-letters scrawled messily on the wall are not from any recognisable language. They look like the drunken attempts of a lone vandal, and are not particularly remarkable. Except for one thing: they appear elsewhere. On lorries and trains, schools and churches. In the country, in town. On sheds and walls, windows and signs. Usually in paint, and once or twice in blood.

Possibilities

1 Each instance of the symbols is accompanied by a body. The cause of death is unknown – other than being dead, the victim is otherwise healthy.

The victims have been possessed by body thieves, spectral haunters who take control of their victims and discards them when they become bored. Possession is fatal to the victim, but in their last moments the victims leave clues to their tormentor. Unfortunately, the clues are written in the symbol language of the haunter and are not easy to decode.

2 The symbols are written by the Royal Order of the Third Man, a secretive society originally founded by Queen Victoria. The Order is dedicated to opposing the forces controlled by an entity it knows as the Bone Swallower. The Order’s oracles have recently foretold that the Bone Swallower will emerge at specific co-ordinates. The Order is using the symbols to weaken the Bone Swallower: the symbols face the appointed location, and are arranged at various distances from it. They can be marked on a map, and the co-ordinates determined.

Some symbols are decoys (including those on vehicles) to hide the Order’s intent. To most onlookers, the decoys look no different, but a practiced eye or ‘sensitive’ can tell one from another.

Some in the Order have concerns, however. They suspect that the Order has been infiltrated, and that the symbols, far from weakening the Bone Swallower, are instead bringing it into being.

3 The symbols (written by sleepwalkers) originate from a long-forgotten language. Eventually they are translated to form one word. ‘Rejoice.’ What does it mean? Is it a sign from God?

Then, a second word: ‘for.’ Then ‘He,’ followed by ‘is’ and ‘coming.’

‘Rejoice for He is coming.’ But who?

© Steve Hatherley

Snuff

Dear Montagu,

 I hope this reaches you as I am not sure I have your current address and I'm not sure what a stranger will make of this.

  

Do you remember Great Uncle Sebastian? We were finally permitted to declare him legally dead. He had been missing for 15 years after all, and he had been 87 when he went missing, but his will had been contested and... Anyway, to cut a long story short we've now had The Reading of the Will.  

It turned out that Great Uncle Sebastian had three houses that none of the Family knew about. All of them in Blackheath, all of them boarded up and hadn't been lived in in decades. So obviously we've had to clear them out.

Which brings me to the parcel accompanying this letter. In the attic of one of the houses we found a collection of snuff boxes - and remembering your collection of antique pipes, I thought you might be interested in them.

I hope you can use them and that this letter finds you in good health. Do let me know your latest news.

Sincerely, Miriam

Along with the letter, the package contains a small wooden box with a mahogany veneer, brass fittings and a family crest inlaid with mother of pearl on the lid. Inside the box are a dozen or so small containers - each exquisitely hand-decorated and no two the same.

They are snuff boxes.

Possibilities

1 The snuff boxes contain the cremated remains of Burnt Yates (so named because he famously singed his fingers once when cooking toast), a south London undertaker. Burnt Yates was notorious for breeding emperor rats in a bid to create a rat-king. Nobody knows if he succeeded or not.

The crest on the box is a family crest that Yates invented for himself. The box contains (apart from Yates' dusty remains) a secret compartment and in that compartment is Yates' last will and testament.

2 The snuff boxes all contain fine black crystals - a little like obsidian sugar granules.

The crystal are known has "hadgh" and are a dietary supplement required by body thieves. Without regular doses of hadgh the body thief starts to lose control of its host - hadgh is used to supress the victim's spirit. Extended possession can lead to the victim developing mental illness when the body thief finally moves on.

3 The snuff is a set of experimental Victorian snuff, lovingly collected by Sir Cromwell Higgins, the eccentric hunter-explorer.

The bottles are labelled in Sir Cromwell's spidery handwriting and are now rather faded. Deciphering his handwriting reveals titles such as "extract of duck", "scrapings of a Belgian church pew" and "essence of the Kilimanjaro elephant". What they really contain is another matter altogether.

© Steve Hatherley

The Gibbet Frame

The old gibbet on Gallows Hill in Shropshire had a long and eventful life before executions were moved to the county town of Shrewsbury. Famed executions that met their end on the old gibbet included murderers, arsonists, poachers and even witches. The gibbet’s most famous victim was Salton Paxton, an unchristian person (it is not appropriate to describe him as a gentleman) who incorporated the bones of his victims in the walls of his hall. These were only found after his death, when the hall was being renovated. The hall has since fallen into ruin.

The old gibbet was dismantled, and only the stone blocks that made up the foundation remain, slowly weathering over time.

The timber that made up the gibbet was considered unlucky by the Shropshire residents, and left to rot. However, small pieces of the timber were taken by a witch, Luella Cawford and fashioned into a crude picture frame. Luella was eventually caught, tried and put to death by pressing. After her execution, the magistrates returned to her cottage to dispose of Luella’s possessions. They found the cottage completely bare. No one knows what became of her possessions.

Possibilities

1 Luella cursed her enemies with her gibbet frame. She drew or painted a likeness of the object of her enmity (a person or place) and placed it within the frame. From then on, corruption and foulness would befall the individual or location. If a person, they would suffer terrible accidents, or a wasting disease, or a became the victim of a brutal crime: they rarely lived for long. If Luella was cursing a place, then it suffered from infestations of vermin, vandalism, burglary and worse.

As the curse takes effect, the picture foretells reality. If the picture was of a person and the picture showed a bruise, then that person would soon receive a corresponding bruise.

The frame is now in a property managed by the National Trust. The frame is accurately described as being thought to have once belonged to the noted Shropshire witch Luella Cawford. The picture inside the frame is of a ruined folly in the property’s grounds. It seems that no matter what the Trust do, they cannot preserve the folly.

2 Luella used the gibbet frame to escape her fate. Some time before she was arrested as a witch, Luella poured her essence into the frame. From that time on, Luella’s was able to possess the body of whomever’s portrait the frame contained. Upon leaving the body, the victim had only a hazy memory of what had happened, and was often plagued by nightmares.

It mattered not the accuracy or likeness of the image in the frame. If the portrait was drawn with the intent of being the likeness of somebody, then Luella was able to possess that person. If the frame contained a picture of more than one person, Luella could posses any of them. Photographs, however, do not work.

Over time Luella became quite skilled. She learned to ‘lightly’ possess someone and watch through their eyes and listen through their ears, learning their ways and manners before fully taking over. In this way she saw her enemies act against her, and before she was arrested she took flight in the body of one of the magistrate’s clerks, took her possessions and fled.

With her real body gone, Luella is now a body thief. Her frame is now stuffed with portraits, and when she tires of a person, she simply adds a new portrait to the frame. The gibbet frame is her most important possession.

3 Luella was a kind witch and was commissioned by the local landowner, Sir Arthur Musgrove to protect him and his family from harm. For this she crafted the gibbet frame, and instructed Sir Arthur to place likenesses of those he wanted to protect within the frame.

Luella, however, did her work a little too effectively. The frame protects its wards from ill health and unfortunate accidents, and provides lucky escapes from calamities of all kinds. It effectively grants immortality. One side effect, however, is that the frame’s wards become barren and may bear no children.

Sir Arthur’s family enjoyed good health and vitality for many years, until, for reasons unknown, the picture in the frame was changed. Shortly after, Sir Arthur’s family suffered a run of shocking bad luck, as if their good fortune had run out. They were all dead within the year.

The gibbet frame is now owned by the reclusive Whistler family of north London. Mabel Whistler, on learning of the gibbet frame, understood exactly its powers and dangers, and uses it to protect her family - her sons, daughters and grandchildren. They are all much older than they appear.

© Steve Hatherley

The Paper Under the Bed

The sheet of paper is covered in black ink. Crabbed, spidery words and diagrams cover one side of the A4 paper in a disturbing pattern that vaguely resembles a crooked cobweb. Around the edges of the paper are two rows of Arabic-looking script and in the centre of the paper, and the web, an eye.

The sheet of paper was taped to the underside of a bed in an unremarkable hotel room. It could have been there for months, it was only discovered when a guest was searching under the bed for their dropped keys.

Possibilities

1 The paper is a dreamcaster, a component of a powerful ritual. A dreamcaster allows a sorcerer to influence the dreams of another person – and in really skilled hands allows the sorcerer, over a number of nights, to place detailed subliminal instructions into the victim.

The dreamcaster itself must be tailored to its victim and, if deciphered, includes clues as to the dreams and instructions it will induce. It must be placed underneath wherever the victim is sleeping, which suggests that whoever put the dreamcaster in place knew who was going to be in the room.

2 The words and diagrams are the work of a disturbed child. The child was staying in the hotel with her parents some weeks ago, and in the process created many, many artworks and taped them over the walls and furniture. Housekeeping cleared the rest of the art – but missed this one last piece.

3 The paper under the bed is an inshō-shi, an ancient Japanese device used to identify victims of possession. When the inshō-shi spends a few hours within close proximity to someone who is possessed, it reacts to possessor’s psychic emissions. By recovering the paper and examining how it has reacted, the exorcists can (by referring to their comprehensive archives) determine exactly what has possessed the victim and how to deal with it.

In this case, the inshō-shi was placed by Vatican exorcists. The hotel is funded directly by the Vatican and as a matter of course inshō-shi are placed beneath each of the beds and are inspected each morning by the housekeeping team. Any inshō-shi that looks as if it has been affected is reported immediately to the hotel management who then contact the Vatican.

A guest who finds a inshō-shi showing a reaction is most likely possessed themselves (but may not realise it). As the Vatican exorcists are very experienced and very thorough, it is unlikely that the entity possessing the guest will recognise the inshō-shi – and the first they learn of it is when the exorcists come knocking.

© Steve Hatherley