Because we don't seem to have a Call of Cthulhuworld yet...
The setting is Ipswich, a small town in Massachusetts. The Verser Verses in at night, and the town is lit by gaslight. Cobblestone streets make an echoing clatter under foot, and few people are about.
One of the few sources of light comes from the windows of a pub up ahead, the Brawling Hog. It has a quaint wooden sign hanging outside the door, depicting two pigs standing upright and boxing as per the Marquess of Queensbury Rules. Inside, the mood is at first boisterous, with music and drink and gambling, until they notice that there is a newcomer in their midst. At that point, the taphouse becomes suspicious, and everyone begins to clam up. The innkeeper – a fat, balding man by the name of Howard – is cordial but distant, and offers the Verser a room (expecting American or English currency circa 1905).
Events happen. Perhaps there are rumors of a murder, or, more dramatically, someone runs screaming through the streets only to die in a bloody pile at the Verser’s feet. Eventually, a mystery is afoot. The dead man was clutching a letter, addressed to him from somewhere in England:
“My dear Mr. Patterson,
I must implore you not to endeavor to broach this line of reasoning any more deeply, for you tread upon ground whereon wise men dare not go. Remember this, above all else: when you come to the end of all that man was meant to know, what you find staring back at you from the abyss that lies beyond will be something you cannot see and come away from unchanged. I beg you, my friend, go no farther. I cannot bear the thought of what will become of you if you do.
Still, I cannot put aside all of our years of friendship, and deny your request simply out of my own flit-witted sense of foreboding. You will find enclosed the volume you had requested – a copy of the Way of the Unbounded Soul by the mad Persian Abdul-Iblis Al’Rashid. You hold in your hands one of only four known extant copies, as I am sure you know, and I am certain you know its worth, both to the scholarly world at large and to me personally. I trust that you will exercise your best judgment in its use and care until such time as you are able to return it to me.
Yours in good faith,
R.L. Poe, Esq.”
This is where it gets weird. The address leads to a house on the poor end of town, that appears to be in better repair than most of the other houses around it. The door is locked when the Verser arrives, but is fairly primitive as locks go and easily picked or broken into. The inside of the house is a disarray completely at odds with the tidy exterior. Books lie in heaps and piles everywhere, to the point where the Verser must elbow her way through them to get past the entranceway. Stairs lead up, and a door that might be a basement stands beside them.
One side of the entryway opens into a drawing room, with a rich carpet under foot and a large fireplace. The fireplace is piled high with ashes, and the woodpile beside it is picked nearly clean. The piles of books and loose papers continue into this room, and the couch in the middle of the room is also marked by burn scars that look like cigarette burns. An ashtray in the middle of the coffee table holds a foot-deep pile of cigarette butts smoked right down to the filter.
The other side opens into a more formal dining room, which is an eerie opposite. Everything is neatly laid out, on a long rectangular table set with seating for 13. No food is left out, but there are fresh, unlit candles in two elaborate candelabras and the settings are fine china, obviously taken down from the empty cupboards in two corners of the room. A stately grandfather clock ticks placidly in one corner.
A door from each of these rooms leads into the kitchen, which lies behind the main stairs. The kitchen is another study in creepiness – it is completely empty, picked clean as though it had never been used. The butcher’s-block table is unscratched. No pots hang from the cast-iron rack above it. The huge ovens are cold and unlit, and no tools or utensils are to be seen anywhere, nor a single morsel of food, the cupboards empty right to the boards.
Upstairs lies a master bedroom with its own bath, and two smaller bedrooms that share a bathroom between them, along with a spacious linen closet. The hallways here are lined with formal oil-on-canvas portraits of men in period attire – the line of Misters Patterson from a man who could be the dead man’s father, all the way back to Lord Governor G.H. Patterson III, whose dates of life and death indicated he may have been the original Lord Governor of Ipswich.
The master bedroom is… completely normal. The bed is made. The floor is swept and polished. The rug under the bed is cushy and soft. The windows and shutters are neatly drawn. The master bath is clean and shows just enough evidence of being ‘lived-in’, some personal effects left out.
The other two bedrooms are sterile and dusty, as though Mr. Patterson has not had guests in his home in some time. It is upon examining both the master bathroom and the second bathroom that the Verser might start to notice that there are no mirrors in this house.
The basement is locked. Locked, barred, and burglar-chained, all of it done from inside. If the Verser has no other means to bypass this, there is an axe and chopping block in the back yard, and the door can be chopped down, though with no small amount of noise.
The stairs creak. There is a lot of dust, but no cobwebs. There is a barrel of candles just inside the door, which is handy considering most of the candles along the stairs are burnt almost down to nothing. (If the Verser does not bring new candles as she goes, the candles will be burnt out by the time she comes back up, applying appropriate penalties for trying to climb stairs in the dark.)
The basement is a library of unspeakable horrors. There is a copy of the Necronomicon in here somewhere. A copy of The Nine Gates. A copy of the holy books of every major religion in the original languages. Books of occultism and arcane theory, philosophies unspoken of in polite company. The bare stone floor has a Sigil of Baphomet acid-etched into its surface, complete with the word ‘Leviathan’ written in Hebrew around the outer edge. The air reeks of incense, and a close examination of the writing desk in the corner will reveal a hearty supply of salvia divinorum among the writing supplies, along with a desk stuffed full of hand-written notes.
These notes are written on parchment in a quick, hurried hand, all of them in the same brown ink, written with an old-fashioned nib pen. A locked box on the desk contains more incense, a blue glass bottle filled with seawater, a single fist-thick torch, and a foot-long crystal of pure salt, along with an unsharpened stiletto.
An altar stands in the middle of the sigil out in the middle of the floor. It is made of a single block of granite, and seems to merge with the floor as though they were one continuous stone. It has lettering carved into it that the Verser can recognize as unspeakable blasphemies even though the language is indecipherable. Two objects are covered with black cloths on the altar. One is a flat, low, rectangular object: the book described in Mr. Poe’s letter. The other is a tall, narrow, round object: a mirror.
Uncovering both causes the Verser to see a vision out of madness in the mirror, accompanied by a wind that rises to an ear-piercing shriek before fading away…
