Ghost Train

Over the past few weeks people have spotted an antique subway train going through the underground. It is always seen in the dead hours of the night and it never seems to stop at any of the stations it is sighted at. Witnesses have described it as having three cars and have also seen strange lights moving around inside it. The transit authority has no information on the train.

Possibilities

1 The antique subway train is being used in a film. It is on loan from a museum and is travelling to various underground stations for filming. It is only seen at night since that is the easier to transport it during the non-peak hours. The strange lights are from the film crew setting up lighting for various interior shots. The Transit Authority knows what is going on but has been asked to keep quite by the movie company.

2 It really is a ghost train. Back in the early 1900 a novice driver took a wrong turn and barrelled into a dead-end tunnel filled with fuel. Everyone on board was burned to death in a gruesome fashion. Now years later the site of the wreck is being excavated and it has disturbed the ghosts. The ghosts, in their hate for the living have used their powers to recreate the subway train and lure victims to a similar fate.

3 The train belongs to an undead sorcerer who was alive at the turn of the century. Feeling nostalgic it has returned to the old stomping grounds of its life. The train has been created by means of magic most foul and populated with rotting and monstrous servants. The sorcerer takes on passengers for the purpose of needing food or experiment subjects.

© David Kapsos

Game Over – For Good!

Recently, a couple of teenagers have disappeared in the town. Research leads to a video arcade.

Further investigation reveals that all the victims were hooked on a new video arcade machine installed a few weeks ago. All were last seen in the hall playing the game.

Possibilities

1 The arcade machine is home to a flying polyp. These semi-solid creatures have, in modern times, learnt to shatter their bodies and send themselves via viruses and even live in digital form on the Internet and in computers.

This polyp uses the game as bait.

2 The machine is connected to the Great Old One, Gog-Hoor via a dimensional rift concealed inside. If the machine is pulled from the wall, one of Gog-Hoor’s multi-eyed tentacles reaches out from the rift. The vanished kids have all been sucked into the rift and are now with Gog-Hoor...

3 The game was designed by a man with considerable knowledge of the Cthulhu mythos. He went insane shortly after finishing it and is now in an asylum.

He poured much of his knowledge into the game - too much perhaps. At certain points in the game players can combine symbols and (seemingly) random letters and risk forming an invocation. The invocation summons something – a dimensional shambler, a nightgaunt, a star vampire or similar. Each time this has happened, the entity has arrived to carry off the hapless player...

© Stefan Jonsson

A Well-Respected Man

Newton Palmer is a pleasant and charming man who finds it easy to make friends no matter where he goes. Newton has gone from a sad and pitiable condition in his youth to a successful and well-regarded businessman. Through shrewd investing he has made a comfortable life for himself and his family and lives a life of luxury few could dream of.

Everybody likes Newton, and he personally knows many celebrities, and makes donations to many small charities. Newton is not famous himself and has built a built a wall of privacy around himself and his wife and young children. The only people who don’t really like Newton are the people who remember him as a sad and bitter wage worker, who Newton has snubbed off every time they have tried to contact him.

Possibilities

1 The real Newton Palmer is now dead. Palmer was once a down on his luck manic depressive. He had a thankless job at the offices of Rand, Webb and Sturgeon, a highly successful publishing firm run by the wealthy Patrick S Sturgeon. Sturgeon inherited the business, but it was insufficiently challenging for him. Sturgeon is a talented businessman, and a fantasist with a major ego problem and a determination to build a business on his own and away from the shadow of his father.

To this end, he decided to take on a new identity – that of a social misfit nobody would miss; Newton Palmer. After a faked helicopter accident, costly plastic surgery and a detailed study of Palmer’s life, Sturgeon killed Palmer and took over, quitting his job and using his skills to quickly rise in status, severing ties with Palmer’s family to avoid speculation.

2 Palmer worked for Rand, Webb and Sturgeon, a shell of a publishing company that had once been successful in the 50s but has been steadily declining ever since. Eventually Palmer’s job was cut, and the company went into liquidation, and Palmer drifted from one job to another. When he hit his lowest, he decided to take out his problems on the closed building of his old company. He broke in, using his position as a former security manager there, and started rooting around for things to steal but instead found a secret collection of books in the basement. Thinking them valuable, he took them home with him and started to read through them to assess their value.

Palmer had found a complete set of the Revelations of Glaaki, and he read of mysterious knowledge and dangerous rituals. However, upon reading Volume 12, he has contacted by the god Y’Golonac. The corpse god offered Palmer a choice; allow him to take over Palmer at certain times and he would have great fortune or be consumed alive. Palmer accepted, and found his fortunes increasing rapidly. However, Palmer is occasionally taken over by Y’Golonac without his knowledge, and the corpse god inflicts unspeakable things on his family. If he weren’t addicted to the thrill of power and control, he would have stopped himself long ago.

3 Palmer is a great success story but has relied on the all-too-human lure of crime to carry him to the top. He owes large amounts of money to various criminal organisations and is now struggling to pay off his debts. Out of frustration, a criminal named Robert Kime, who Palmer owes large amounts of money, has kidnapped Palmer’s wife and children. Palmer would do anything to get his family back, except of course, call the police.

© Paul Hebron

After the Funeral

One of the investigators is attending the funeral of an old friend with other investigators. After the funeral, they have drinks together and talk about their lost friend. Suddenly one of the investigators look through the window and sees the dead friend staring back.

Possibilities

1 At first, the investigator thins it’s just a trick of the mind... until he sees his friends staring at through the window too. Is it a ghost? Is their dead friend trying to send a message from the other side?

2 The dead friend is now a vampire and wants to see his acquaintances one last time before leaving for somewhere else.

3 After blinking the dead friend disappears. It was just a trick of the investigator’s imagination. But why are there footprints below the window?

© Nicolas Dao Phan

Ashes

On an island, an old volcano has erupted again for the first time in centuries. While there is no imminent danger for the few settlements on the island, big clouds of ashes are spreading over a wide area and the near continent.

Possibilities

1 In the areas where the ashes sink down, the deceased rise from their graves and start spreading terror, eating the flesh of the living...

2 In a night after a larger eruption, witnesses claim that amidst the ash cloud a big shadow was seen, as if a gigantic creature had emerged from the volcano, before disappearing into the night - and the volcano still hasn’t come to rest...

3 In the areas where the ashes sink down, certain people – artists, poets and other daydreamers – start having nightmares in which they claim to have seen an ancient city of strange and twisted proportions, as if not made for humans. As the nightmares continue, more and more of these people are driven by an overwhelming desire to go to the volcano and look for the city there, finally even climbing down to its centre, never to be seen again...

© Philipp Mählmann

A Matter of Taste

Mrs Jane Crispin lives in a little detached house on the edge of town. Although in her 60s, she is still hale and hearty despite the handicap of her blindness (exceptionally near sighted, she only sees blurred colours through her milk-bottle lensed glasses). She makes a modest living selling the product of her labours in her well-equipped kitchen. Across town her pies are famous for their wonderful pastry and delicately herb-flavoured meats.

However, horror stalks the town at night. Senior citizens are slain in their beds or disappear in the night, never to be seen again. The bodies left at the crime scene are mutilated horribly, missing limbs and organs. The authorities have been unable to keep the murders from public knowledge, but they have been able to conceal the fact that they have been occurring sporadically for over a year.

The glare of the media spotlight has forced the police to institute a manhunt, and they have no manpower to spare to chase a new (although very slim) lead. Their lead comes from Mrs Crispin, who has reported a strange man hanging around her herb garden. Under normal circumstances such a report from a blind old lady would receive little attention, but with a maniac on the loose, things are different. Independent, discrete and trusted persons may be able to assist the police by looking into the matter.

Talking to Mrs Crispin brings unexpected results. She is very sorry to have disturbed the police, but she is fine really. The stranger is no longer a stranger, but a new friend whom, at first, she mistook for a potential thief. Her friend George is a shy type not easily traced. She doesn’t know where he lives, but he helps her around the house and garden, and does errands for her.

Possibilities

1 Mrs Crispin is being stalked by George the homicidal odd-job man. His modus operandi involves befriending his victims to lull them into a false sense of security. He also gets a thrill from the stalking. George is a genuine gardener (or social worker), real name Henry George Baird. He lives out his twisted dark fantasies by killing the pathetic senior citizens upon whom he depends for his living.

George lives with his innocent Christian wife Mary, an organiser of church fetes and charities. Mary provides many of his initial contacts. George and Mary are childless due to George’s impotence, one of the factors which has sent him over the edge. George has an extensive collection of tools such as scythes, hammers, axes, saws, a furnace, a nondescript van, and a good-sized garage next to his rose garden.

2 Mrs Crispin’s new friend George is a ghoul who moved to town in the last year or so. He has been unable to let go of the world of man and can often be seen raking through garbage bins and scrounging. Unless scrutinised carefully he appears to be just another homeless person. Naturally he is quite sneaky and very good at moving around unobserved. George and Mrs Crispin met by accident when George was attracted to the smell of her cooking. As Mrs Crispin couldn’t see him, George found it easy to make friends with her. George has started running small errands, but he keeps the money that he should spend on butcher meat and substitutes the best cuts from his victims. Forensic examination of remains has identified odd partly-human bite wounds on the victims, but this has not been made public and will only be divulged after much bureaucratic manoeuvring.

Mrs Crispin’s usual butcher Andrew Cross drops the clue that the amount of meat he supplies her has decreased in recent weeks (as the rate of murders has increased). The distributor of her pies, Norman Kent, is most pleased at how well Mrs Crispins’ pies are selling and is due to call on her to ask if she can increase her output.

Norman may unwittingly become the ingredient for her next batch!

3 Mrs Crispin is a homicidal cannibal who has been doing a nice line in long pig pies for over a year. She is inhumanly strong due to her unnatural diet and, although blind, has the senses of a bat. She is very adept with her old-fashioned razor-sharp butchers knives. The offal from her victims helps her herbs and vegetables to grow rapidly. Mrs Crispin selects her victims during her bi-weekly visits to the Women’s Guild and senior citizens outings. George is a relative of one of her victims who met her just before his own mother Eleanor Trent was killed. He feels sorry for the blind old lady and is working out his grief (and suppressed guilt at having left his mother alone to be killed) by looking after Mrs Crispin.

He should be looking after himself.

© Peter Devlin

A Grave Situation

After going to bed one night in the hotel of a sleepy rural town, one of the investigators wakes up to find himself lying inside a padded coffin with air running out!

Possibilities

1 The investigator has been contacted by a Great Old One or Outer God (Nyarlathotep would work well), who has constructed a dream-trap for him in order to extract a service. As the investigator’s last gasps shudder through his body, he hears a whispering in his mind: ‘Serve me or die.’ If the investigator agrees, he awakens in his bed, covered in sweat, with a mind-numbing certainty that he will be contacted soon, and he won’t be able to refuse. If the investigator declines, he awakens in a similar manner, but certain that he has been marked for death by the god’s cult.

Either way, it is time to prepare for a brush with a god.

2 The investigator was drugged and kidnapped by a degenerate cult that worships ghouls. As an offering to the flesh-eaters, they have buried the investigator as a meal for their ‘underground gods.’ As the investigator begins to suffocate, a scratching noise occurs and great claws rend through the wood of the coffin and drag him down into a faintly lit cavern where he is surrounded by six hungry ghouls. Hopefully, his fellow investigators have figured out what is going on and are on their way.

3 The investigator died during the night from natural (or were they?) causes and has been resurrected by a local sorcerer to serve as his undead servant. Within moments after awakening, the coffin lid is pried open by the sorcerer. At first, the investigator is unable to do much except obey the sorcerer’s commands, but over time, when the sorcerer’s mind is on other things, the investigator can act on his own. He needs to break free soon, because the sorcerer is laying a deadly trap for the rest of the investigators, and his new servant is the bait.

© C C Chamberlin