Arkham had a noticeably different atmosphere than they had been used to, in a way that was different to explain. Since their time in Providence a pall had hung over them… a sort of weight you got used to. When they entered Arkham’s environs that weight lifted, the pall was weirdly gone. They didn’t feel better, necessarily, but there was a change that they couldn’t put their finger on, like walking from a silent Burn Unit in a hospital to a silent Maternity Ward in the same hospital: it’s just not the same. Call of Cthulhu the RPG gets along just fine without my advice, but switching Psychology to Vibes, would make the game more accurate and prepare players during character creation. Nobody wanted to set-up double-blind studies or set up another null-hypothesis test; but if you gave people a skill called Roll To Figure Out What Is Weird About This Guy, they’d be all over it.
Tomasz Jedruszek’s rendering of Arkham for Arkham Horror. Do you know how hard it is to search for a picture of Arkham without the World’s Greatest mopey Detective, posing on a rooftop?
They checked into their lodgings, the newly refurbished and magnificent Silver Gate Hotel, before checking on Walt. This took a bit of doing; he’d moved across campus recently and out of his shared lodgings, taking a dingier apartment in a shitty part of town. But they eventually tracked him down… and found him dead in his armchair. He hadn’t been dead terribly long, but enough to start getting ripe.
Searching the apartment turned up the most obvious clues and almost nothing else: this was a guy who had liquidated his entire life to buy small bottles which now lay around his feet, the inky black substance clinging to the insides of a few. His tongue was stained thoroughly black, but was now a dried, leathery thing in the dead man’s mouth.
So that’s what happened to Walt Resnick. They also got the feeling that they were being followed because an extremely out-of-place-in-this-‘hood car was observing them when they left Resnick’s place. I mean the driver was, this isn’t Transformers.
The next sequence of events is hazy, mostly because at a point the investigation became incredibly unfocused. From the cops that they talked to in the wake of finding Walter, they discovered that two other students had been found dead with black tongues.
So with this angle that the black fluid was being peddled among students they decided to go check out the local students gangsters. No, the local O’Bannion branch had nothing to do with this, and was very down on this sort of thing, that’s a student thing that is killing students.
So they went to ask students artists. Tom ended up performing in a jazz band at a speakeasy and Ernst got an invite to the bohemian New Colony artist community, but the artists had only heard about students taking this drug that was killing students.
So they went to the poor part of town to see if students poor people were also taking this student drug that was studiously killing students.
And they went to the students school administrators to do some background research on Walt Resnick, one of the students who took this drug that was killing students.
Finally – fucking finally – someone had the idea to ask some students. And sure, eventually they found some rumours about the drug and its source as a college dropout called Paul.
From a helpful scientist who had some new microscopes to calibrate, they found out that the black liquid was primarily Ethanol mixed with some sort of biological material: skin cells or blood cells? They could observe no movement (although one of the slides did break) and it DID look different than the black plastically mobile sludge they’d encountered in Providence.
They found Paul, and watched a deal go down but decided to follow him back to his place. An interview was not forthcoming, he was a jerk, and they were unable to get into see him and he told them to get lost. So they waited out of sight. I think while they waited or pretended to leave they spotted the same fancy car that had been at Resnick’s shitty neighbourhood and the occupant called Terrance over for a wee chat.
The driver was Seamus O’Shea and he looked every inch the Buttonman for the O’Bannions that he was, from his granite features to the sawn-off shotgun he levelled at Terrance. He inquired as to the purpose of their presence in Arkham and politely demanded that they share intelligence as to the source of the Black should they discover it. His bosses would be most appreciative.
At Paul’s place, they waited long enough that they heard an argument between Paul and a young woman, who eventually left and walked into town for her gig as a waitress. Not wanting to let this pass without making it extremely creepy, Wilbur and maybe Terrance, but maybe Ernst (that seems less likely, he’s very charming) managed to stalk the young waitress and when they attempted to ask her some questions gave her the ick so bad that she fled to the safety of the diner, whose patrons quickly mobilised to defend against the two creepy guys trying to stop young women at night.
They decided to wait thing out and break into Paul’s apartment later when he had gone out. I remember only a few things about this part… someone accidentally ingested some of The Black and went on a bit of a trip? but before that they found some big overboots that just couldn’t lose the farmyard smell, no matter how much they’d been rinsed. I think they found a supply of The Black, and they definitely found a scrap of paper with some very basic bookkeeping scribbled on it, probably Paul figuring out his cut of the profits. Best yet, the scribbled note was on a torn business card and that gave them something to look into.
They made their way back to the Silver Gate Hotel, walking back into town and had just arrived when, from a great height, Seamus O’Shea was dropped in front of them. He hit the sidewalk outside the hotel like 8 pints of blood and 28lbs of bone in a skin and Irish wool suit container. So it wasn’t silent, but there was no scream either. Well, at least not at first, because at this point Tandyanne temporarily lost her marbles.
