Thursday April 1st,1920. Randolph Carter invites you to Professor Armitage's home. Randoph has a car come round to the asylum and pick up Col. Angus and Buck Reynolds. The driver brings them to Armitage’s house. It's early afternoon and Randolph shows you the majestically mounted feathered serpent butterfly that he has added to the professor's extensive insect collection hanging on the walls of his study. He also hands you a vial of bad corpse dust made from the components you retrieved from the Yucatan.
Carter introduces Lord Jaundice the newest member of the investigation society. He's a young man who dropped out of medical school to pursue his interests in parapsychology and the occult.
Armitage arrives a few minutes later as Randolph serves you all tea and coffee. It seems that there may be terrible trouble brewing in Arkham. Just last night a group of investigators from Mikatonic University failed to report back from their patrol of the cemetery on the edge of town. The team consisted of Professor Warren (a specialist in languages) and his two research assistants Joel and Howard. Being that it’s April fools day, at first they thought it was a joke, but as the day wore on, they became more concerned that something was amiss.
The cemetery caretaker asked them to come and look into some strange happenings in the area. He has long been of great assistance to Armitage and the investigation society, helping them out by looking the other way when discretion was needed with the disposal of bodies and other remains. He's been worried lately that he may lose his job after a spree of grave robbing that has gotten some public attention in the press. These are the facts as they are known:
1. A month ago the cemetery caretaker was asked to exhume a corpse for the sheriff and when he dug it up it was missing. A hole was torn in the bottom of the casket and there was a tunnel leading down into the earth. He called the police, but no one came to take his report. Some reporters came and gave him a hard time when he told them what happened and the mayor got wind of it. Last week he saw a shadowy figure dragging a body into a sewage drain near the creek that runs along the north edge of the cemetery grounds. When he checked later, he found that several fresh graves had been opened and their contents removed.
--The sheriff wanted the body exhumed because he was sure that the person, Norton Anders was buried just last week, but the sheriff responded to a call that a farmer nearby saw Norton crawl out of a sewage drain in a ditch nearby. He chased the thing through the woods all the way to the old Winthrop house and shot it down. Turns out the corpse was pretty rotted already. Sheriff was so disturbed he asked for the body to be exhumed to see if Norton was really ever buried there or not. He’s been drinking every day since in his house and won’t leave. His deputies are guarding his house and letting no one in, since he’s in a sorry state. The arkham PD knows the story but are all too scared to go near the cemetery. They know something foul is afoot.
2. To the west of the cemetery, along the road approaching it, there's the old Winthrop house. Shrouded in trees and rumored to be haunted, this home has been abandoned to the elements for at least 100 years. A local folktale says that the terrible visage of some unnameable thing is permanently etched in the attic window upstairs. The legend says the image was the result of some ghastly horror staring out of the window over the decades, burned onto the window like a photocell. Many students at the university have entered the house on a dare for a laugh, but none venture there at night.
3. On the south edge of the cemetery is the mysterious black cave. Some geology students went missing a few years ago while exploring there and the authorities sealed it off. The police investigated reports there were strange rituals there several months ago, but there were no police reports filed and the incident was promptly dropped and left alone. The caretaker said he sees robed figures prowling the cemetery grounds nights when the stars are bright and the moon is full in the sky. He has never interacted with them as they terrify him.
The party sets out toward the cemetary. Lord Jaundice drives his rolls, and Buck takes his pickup. The Col and his dog take his truck as well. Approaching the cemetary around 2:30pm they pull up to the old Winthrop house to the right of the road a quarter mile outside the cemetary.
They enter the dilapidated home and search the main floor finding nothing. The colonel searches the basement and sees a hole in the far wall large enough to crawl through and sees a shadowy figure in the corner. He throws stones at the figure until it reveals itself as the terrified cemetery caretaker Mr. McLaughlin. McLaughlin says that Joel headed upstairs and never came back. They lead the caretaker upstairs and outside to rest and get some fresh air.
Detective Toni Lauratzi shows up and explains that the police never came out here because they're all creeped out by the cemetery. He also said that the Sheriff hasn't left his home for the past week since he ordered the body exhumed.
As the head towards the stairs they see a young man shamble down the stairs. He appears unresponsive when they call him and he moves toward the party. At a close distance he starts strangling Lord Jaundice. Toni blasts his head off with a short burst from his tommygun.
They search the second floor which has two rooms. The first room is a ruined nursery with tattered dolls a crib and other broken furniture. The second room has candles set around an altar and a circle of blood. Bloodied bodies litter the floor along with the remains of other small creatures. Inside the circle of blood is a black bound book and a bloody ritual dagger. A trapdoor is visible in the ceiling.
The colonel tries to enter the circle of blood and immediately begins vomiting and retreats to the next room for several minutes. Buck sets a pillow on fire and throws it in the middle of the circle with no effect other than threatening to set the old floor of the house on fire. They throw a body on top of the pillow to put out the fire and terrible smell of roasted dead flesh fills the room. Everyone must retreat into the nursery.
When the smoke clears, Lord Jaundice enters the cicle cautiously and retrives the book and the dagger. The colonel tries standing on some furniture to reach the trapdoor and falls when it breaks injuring himself. Lord Jaundice agrees to help the colonel lift himself up through the door to see whats up there with his flashlight and elephant gun.
The colonel pokes his head up and searches around. He sees a humanoid shape of bent nearly invisible light waves rush towards him and savagely claw his face, nearly cutting his head in half. The colonels disfigured form falls down on top of the others below. The successfully heal him but he is permanently disfigured, beyond the war wounds and battle scars he already had.
They hear a banging upstairs so they open fire on the ceiling, riddling it with holes. The banging and howling stops. The colonel pokes his mist generator through one of the holes and fills the upstairs with icy mist. Waiting a moment, toni pops up through the trapdoor to investigate. With his flashlight he spots the creatures nearly invisible slumped form laying in one corner, motionless. He fires a large volley from the thompson at it and it still doesnt move.
Lord Jaundice goes upstairs and heads over toward the creature while bucksteps over toward the window and witnesses the creatures terrible visage imprinted in the glass. He retreats back toward the trapdoor and downstairs. Lord Jaundice pokes at the motionless heap with his dagger and to his horror he realizes that the form doesn't yield to his blade and he sees several bent bullets laying around the things body as though they reflected off of it. The colonel takes a firing position in the corner farthest from the creature. They blast open the window, venting some of the cold mist.
The unnameable thing rises up and viciously slashes lord jaundices face and guts open, killing him. The beast rushes Toni who opens up with his tommygun on thing at point blank range. bullets richochet off of it spilling down the trapdoor to pelt Buck who's standing down below. Toni rushes over to Lord Jaundices body and throws the book back down through the trapdoor. He then grabs the Lord's body and drags it back toward the opening.
Meanwhile the colonel blasts the beast at point blank range with his elephant gun, knocking the creature back but not injuring it. The monsters rends him limb from limb and sinks its gnashing fangs into his neck. The colonel dies twitching spasmodically. Toni sees the blood, mist and gunsmoke coalesce into the form of the creature for a moment and it is a horrible winged and horned humanoid demonic creature. He throws Lord Jaundice's body down the hole and leaps after him.
The colonels blood pours down the trapdoor onto Buck and the floor in the ritual room. Buck throws several sticks of dynamite upstairs onto the colonel and the thing feasting on him. The ceiling shakes and then begins to collapse, several beams hit Buck as he dashes out of the room towards the stairs.
Toni drags the lord back to the stairwell and Buck is slashed from behind by the things claws as he steps into the stairway, knocking him unconscious. Toni turns back around and sees that the creature cannot enter the stairway because there is an elder sign above the doorway. The fearsome thing retreats from the doorway.
Downstairs Toni resurrects the Lord as they contemplate their fate. As they raise the Jaundice they hear screaming and see the caretaker try to rush back in but instead get beheaded by the unnameable thing. A car pulls up in the driveway and an old man steps from the vehicle and draws a sword cane, rushing toward the beast. He stabs the creature and injures it with a magical blade and it flys back up to its perch on the roof howling in pain.
The man enters and introduces himself as a visiting Professor LaTerveau from Louisiana. He heard professor warren was missing and came to help the investigation society find him.
They examine the book and find a letter inside from Mr. Winthrop, the original builder of the home. Mr. Winthrop testifies in his letter that he raised a terrible demonic creature with a fertility spell and this creature, his daughter named Alyda was confined to the attic. Before his death he was unable to cast the spell to banish her back to the world she came from, but it is included.
The party does the chant right before sundown. After two hours they see a great vortex start spinning outside the cottage and they see the creature drawn up into it. They step outside when the spell ends and find that buck's car has a flat tire from debris and the Lord's rolls has been crushed by a fallen tree. The other cars are intact.
They take the book and dagger back to Armitage before sunset. He identifies it as the Necronomicon and pleads with them to return to the cemetery to find doctor warren. They reluctantly comply.
Before they leave Armitage says that Randolph stopped by the Sheriffs home and found that the reason he's locked himself in is because a few weeks ago he had reports a man was wandering in the countryside. When he investigated the man attacked him and he shot him. The sheriff identified the man as James Norton, who he knew was buried a month ago. He had the caretaker exhume the body to confirm if it was Norton or not. When the caretaker advised the body at the cemetery was missing, the Sheriff lost his mind, realizing he had killed a dead man.
When they head to the cemetery they visit the caretakers shed. There they find exhumation paperwork, a drawing titled "the thing I saw come out of the sewer" and a dog like skull. They identify the picture and skull as being evidence of ghouls, creatures who consort with wizards and eat the flesh of the dead and sometimes fresher things.
They check out the grave of James Norton and see a portable telephone with a cable running into the coffin below and through a hole in the bottom of the coffin big enough to crawl through. They get a call on the phone and it's professor warren who pleads with them to help him. He says he's trapped below and everything is dark.
Toni goes to check it out and emerges shaken, unable to talk about what he witnessed. Lord Jaundice also investigates and returns confused, unsure what he saw. The professor heads down and sees that the mangled body of professor warren clutches the phone in his dead hands, his legs missing, while his disembodied spirit chats with them on the telephone. LaTerveau retrieves the phone and the body, which the party loads into Buck's truck to take to Armitage.
As they prepare to leave they hear chanting in the black cave on the far side of the cemetary. They proceed to investigate. Wading hip deep in fetid muck, some ditch water and diluted sewage, they find a larger cavern on the far side with loud chanting and firelight.
Around a ritual fire they see seven robed and hooded figures surrounding a giant bloated goat. They raise blades and carve open the goat, dragging out a naked woman's body in a fetal position after chanting to Shub-niggurath a mythos fertility godess. The party opens fire on the horrible cult, killing all of the cultists quickly in a hail of gunfire and a powerful dynamite blast. After the gunbattle, Toni flees back toward the entrance.
Still the bloody naked creature which looks somewhat like a woman but appears to have a fanged mouth crawls unharmed toward a sewer drain pipe along the far end of the cavern. The professor rushes in with his blade and runs her down, stabbing her in the abdomen while lord jaundice kicks at her trying to keep her from escaping.
As the professor twists his blade in her guts and the woman is obviously injured by it, she casts a foul spell on him that makes him see horrible visions of ageless horrors, writhing tentacles, and cyclopedian cities. Buck rushes in to assist just as the professor is overtaken with the terror of the horrific things he sees in his mind. He runs back and slips on the dead cultists bodies falling on his face in a pile of gore.Buck reynolds chases after him getting the magical sword, then returning to attack the goat-spawned woman.
Lord Jaundice fires at the creature point blank and sees tentacles poke out of her skull. Then he is set on fire by the goat-spawns magical attack and he prepares to jump into a pool of foul water nearby when he sees a towering tentacled mass standing atop three great hoofed legs rise from the sludge. He turns still burning and flees toward the entrance screaming. The creature shambles forward and grabs Buck reynolds in one of its great tentacles and trambles him with a cloven hoof.
The professor climbs back up toward the cave entrance and turns just in time to see Buck Reynolds destroy himself by lighting his remaining dymanite. The blast vaporizes Buck and tears off one of the creatures tentacles which immediately regenerates. The main trunk of the creature absorbed the blast unharmed. LaTerveau runs screaming through the muck back outside as Lord Jaundice expires in a burning heap just inside the entrance to the cave.
Toni and the professor are too horrified by the experience to retrieve the lord's body and head back into town. The next morning the lord awakens inside the cave amidst the carnage of the cultists. The great tentacled thing and the goat spawn are nowhere to be seen. Without a vehicle he crawls back to the main road where someone finds him and takes him to the hospital. He spends the next month in the hospital recovering from intense burns all over his body.
Toni, the professor, sadie, madeline, and father jonas spend the next month in the asylum. Toni and the professor deal with their experiences from the black cave. Sadie overcomes her fear of insects and some of her sanity, madeline overcomes her obsessive talking, and father jones overcomes his fear of flying things.
Armitage and Carter decide its time to give the investigators a break from the horrors of Arkham and announce they'll be leaving for Egypt next.
Survivors: Toni, Lord Jandyce, Prof. LaTerveau
Dead: Colonle Angus, Buck Reynolds
