Wild in the Country

People start disappearing when they take a walk in the moors near a certain lake. The disappearances are gradual, taking place over years, but eventually someone is able to put together the pieces and an investigation by the police is launched. They exhaustively comb the hills for clues and go to great lengths to have the lake dredged but find nothing of the five missing people who seem to have simply vanished.

The moors aren’t normally dangerous and it’s true that sometimes walkers become stranded and die, but even then there’re traces. In this case there is nothing. No obvious factors link the victims: they’re men and women, white, a range of ages from 23 upwards, from different parts of the country and from numerous backgrounds.

Possibilities

1 The lake is home of the Great Old One Glaaki or one of its spawn, an entity that ensnares new worshippers by injecting them with one of its spines, turning them into undead servants.

With a bit more research, it turns out all those who disappeared suffered from mental illnesses and spent time in institutions, making them easier prey for Glaaki’s psychic attacks. They all had violent outbursts before setting out for the lake, but told no one where they were going.

Currently they are fully transformed into Glaaki’s servants, resting at the bottom of the lake waiting for a chance to increase the fold. The Great Old One and his followers evaded the police using Glaaki’s unusual dimensional properties, and the disappearances will continue as long as the Glaaki remains.

2 The lake and surrounding moor was regarded in the past as a magical place: a sacred site dedicated to the gods. When the gods were angry they made the animals and the crops wither, so the people would choose a sacrifice to walk out into the moors and offer themselves to the gods to appease their wrath.

Eventually people drifted off or died, until there was only one family left who still remembered the old ways. Then they died in a bad winter, a few years ago. With nobody to worship them, the gods of the moor became angry and malnourished they started abducting those walking on the moors.

Nobody knows much of the lore that surrounds these beings, but certain experts suggest they dwell in an underground kingdom, only reachable when stairs are revealed at the bottom of the lake by a shaft of moonlight.

3 Few people live on the moor today, but one who does is a loner named Isaac Lighton, known in the local village of Upstanton for his furtive and sometimes peculiar behaviour. Secretive Lighton, who often acts violently around the time of the full moon and once broke a man’s neck in a brawl at the local pub, is a werewolf and the root cause of the disappearances.

The bones of Lighton’s victims inevitably end up dumped in the lake; the bones were so tiny and fragmented that the police dismissed them as animal bones during the dredging.

Lighton lives for the thrill of hunting his prey and dispatching them in secret, taking great pride in never being caught. So far he has only taken campers or others foolish enough to stay out alone at night, but before long he’ll become desperate and attack in the village. It won’t be the first time: Lighton is at least over 100 years old.

© Paul Hebron

Bad Trip

It is a long, hot, dry summer. News reaches the papers of a late-night bus crash in a mountainous part of the country. While travelling between two small, remote communities, the bus came off the road on a steep incline, crashing through a fence and hurtling down the near-vertical slope of a steep gorge to smash into the rocks at the bottom, where it burst into flames. Anyone on board unlucky enough to survive the horrendous descent was burned to death in the conflagration.

Twenty-two people have been killed, nearly all of them from the small town the bus was travelling to. The bodies have been taken to the nearest hospital mortuary pending identification. Local police have called in expert help from a nearby city to assist the accident investigation.

Possibilities

1 Mi-Go in the area want several healthy human brains for a diabolical project. Intercepting the bus on the remotest part of its route, they remove the tops of their victims’ skulls and take the brains of everyone on board. The skulls are crudely repaired, and the bus and its cargo of brainless dead are crashed into the ravine and set on fire to conceal evidence of the crime.

2 The crash is a genuine accident, a coincidence that draws any investigation to the site of a cave within the ravine, the entrance to which had been concealed by dense undergrowth now burnt to ashes by the fire.

Deep inside the cavern, hidden within a maze of cramped tunnels, is the grave of a sorcerer who once held the native peoples of this area in thrall until a band of warriors gave their lives to overthrow him. Shamans placed his corpse in this deep cave, surrounded by wards to guard against an evil magic that might awaken him once more to walk amongst them. But now their spells are losing their efficacy and the sorcerer’s crazed spirit wanders the caverns, reacting venomously against anyone it comes across, seeking a way to return life to the shrivelled corpse that was once its home.

3 Around here lurks a small pack of werewolves. The crash occurred at the time of the full moon when one of the werewolves, mindless with blood-lust, flung itself on the bus in a savage attempt to get at the succulent flesh within. Not surprisingly this caused the driver to lose control of the vehicle. The werewolf was thrown clear before the bus made its final plunge into the ravine.

Although not killed, the werewolf was injured and, now in human form, is bed-ridden and weakened. Evidence of the werewolf’s attack can be found in a careful inspection of the wreckage: raking claw-marks in the bodywork of the bus and bite marks on one of the corpses (the werewolf smashed through a window to attack the victim before being thrown clear).

© Tony Hickie

Cop Killers

Four police officers died one night in the small, rural town of Cadillac, Michigan. According to the police department, two officers on patrol drove out to check on a disturbance call. The disturbance turned out to be a group of rowdy teenagers who shot and killed both police officers. The second car arrived soon after, but they too were killed by the teenagers. A third car was unable to locate the murderers.

The bodies of the four dead police officers were immediately examined by the coroner, who declared the cause of death as gunshot wounds. The officers were cremated, the funeral taking place two days later. The group of teenagers has yet to be found, and they have not struck again. No one witnessed the shootings, and the police do not know who phoned in the original disturbance report.

One of the four widows, Jake Dean’s wife, Heather, doesn’t believe the official story. She has hired the investigators to discover what the police are hiding. The only information that Heather can provide is that she was given a call about midnight and told that her husband was dead. Then, she was pressured into cremating him.

Possibilities

1 That night, Spencer Monson’s dog woke him up. The dog was barking quite loudly at a figure in the darkness. Spencer, a 70-year old senile widower, called the police, went back to sleep, and forgot all about the incident.

The first patrol car arrived and quickly found the figure – it was a werewolf! The policemen opened fire, but it killed them both. It killed the next two officers as well. The policemen in the third car were finally able to kill the weakened creature. To prevent hysteria, the deaths were blamed on a group of rowdy teenagers with guns and the werewolf’s body cremated.

Currently, the police are searching for the origin of the werewolf. Within the next week they will find out that four werewolves have been living in the woods around the city for the past several years. Only recently, since construction has begun invading their sacred lands, have they become hostile.

2 The police chief belongs to an in-the-closet cult consisting of several high-ranking city officials. Recently, one of the cult members was arrested on murder charges. The chief caused these charges to be immediately dropped. Since then, the chief has ended a number of other investigations. Jake Dean and three other officers had become suspicious of the chief and started snooping around.

Soon after the snooping had begun the police chief figured out what was going on and killed the officers by summoning a gug. He then invented the story of the armed teenagers to cover up the truth. The coroner, also a cult member, backed up the story by saying the officers died of gunshot wounds.

Fortunately, one of the officers kept a journal. This journal includes the officers suspicions as well as a list of the investigations the chief ended. Unfortunately, the journal appears to be missing.

3 The four murders were committed by a gang of nine teenagers. The police department has leads which leads to the murderers’ arrest within a few days. What the officers don’t know is that the gang leader was being controlled by a malicious member of the Great Race of Yith, which constructed a deadly weapon.

The weapon stopped the heartbeats of the officers, but the gang leader then shot them so the police department would have a murder weapon. Afterwards, the Great Race member returned to his native body. When the police arrest the gang leader he will have no idea what happened. The other members of the gang describe the alien weapon, which no one can locate.

© Vince Vatter

A Wolf at the Door

A doctor is contacted by Charlotte Langley who is having disturbing dreams at night and wishes the doctor to prescribe something to stop them.

Charlotte is twenty-three and rather attractive. She has had dreams ever since she was about thirteen. They have almost always been the same – blood, matted fur and a longing to run free through dark, damp forests. Charlotte has no idea where the dreams originate.

Then, about a week ago, the dreams started to intensify. They became stronger, more possessive. She has been waking in a dreadful fright every night since. Could the doctor do something about it?

Possibilities

1 Charlotte is a werewolf. She contracted the disease when she was bitten by an infected dog at thirteen. Since then, the disease has been slowly maturing. She will shortly develop the full symptoms and turn into a terrifying werewolf and murder several innocent people. Charlotte will have no memory of the incident.

The dreams themselves are an unpleasant prelude to the change.

Curing Charlotte would be a considerable accolade, if any of the doctor’s peers would believe it. A silver bullet will kill Charlotte, but can one be justified when Charlotte could be cured instead?

2 Charlotte was scratched by a werewolf, but hasn’t contracted lycanthropy. Instead, she has become psychically linked to the werewolf that wounded her. Her nightmares intensify each month and are at their worst when the werewolf kills. Her dreams contain fragments and clues that can be used to track and destroy the werewolf. Only then will she sleep soundly.

3 Charlotte is a werewolf, but only in the Dreamlands, beyond the wall of sleep. During the hours of the disease’s climax a terrible, unstoppable beast stalks the streets of Dylath-Leen. Silver is rare in Dylath-Leen and nobody has thought to waste it upon the beast.

Charlotte does not remember anything of the Dreamlands, just the terrible nightmares, which occur every month for three consecutive nights, as if by clockwork.

© Steve Hatherley

The Book

Following a successful tour in the SAS, Jim Book started a private security business (Book and Templeton Security) with an ex-colleague, Mark Templeton. They set up office on a business park in Redhill, south of London and prospects, initially, looked good.

The business was only in its fourth month when they were hired to protect Dr Michelle Crompton. Crompton’s enemies sent a werewolf – which killed Templeton and Crompton, and hospitalised Book, scarring him for life.

Possibilities

1 Book and Templeton Security now specialises in occult and preternatural security. Following the incident with the werewolf, Book investigated Dr Compton and found himself in a world of the supernatural and occult that he initially found hard to believe.

Once he overcame his scepticism, he pursued a crash course in the occult and mystic and has developed a niche in the security business – providing occult and preternatural security services to discerning clients.

Book runs the company alone, hiring in specialists as and when he needs them.

The business is now doing well (good occult security services are hard to find), and has moved from its original office in Redhill to a converted Islington town house.

2 The werewolf and its master are still out there.

It was three weeks before Book left hospital and the trail was then too cold to follow. With the business in ruins, Book vowed revenge. Starting with Dr Crompton, Book is slowly, methodically, patiently tracking the werewolf and its master. And when he finds them, Book will kill them both.

Book’s single-minded pursuit has led him to research and document various means of killing (or protecting oneself from) preternatural creatures. He is becoming quite an expert, and his documented research is now a valuable store of knowledge.

3 Following his near-death encounter with the werewolf, Book was rescued by Mr Broach, one of Dr Compton’s associates. Mr Broach brought Book into his carefully protected home and nursed back to health.

Mr Broach is a warlock, and a member of one of several factions battling for occult control of London. He plans to recruit Book, arm him with weapons and knowledge, and send him into battle.

© Steve Hatherley