With Al in hospital recovering from hundreds of spider bites, Eva Angel, Danny's sister and owner of the agency, joined the investigation. The next day the investigators stocked up on cans of kerosene and went back to the Sister of Mercy house to search for survivors and, if necessary, burn the place to the ground. All was quiet and much as they'd left it the day before, except now an unoccupied Boston Police patrol car was parked outside.
They decided to enter via the back garden this time and head upstairs to the unexplored first floor. There they found a series of hospital rooms -- the Sisters were a charitable organisation that as well as helping the needy, provided medical training for young Catholic women -- and in each an exsanguinated corpse. Also on the first floor were the Sisters' rooms, all but two empty; in the first a spider attacked the group and was quickly squashed; in the second the investigators found a lone surviving Sister, driven insane by her experiences. The group tried to talk to the woman, to calm her and perhaps get some insight into what had happened at the house, but their efforts seemed to make the Sister's condition worse, and they were forced to sedate her.
They took the unconscious Sister to Al's car, and returning to the house, gave the ground floor rooms they had already explored a quick check. No further spiders were encountered, but to their surprise the investigators found that all the bodies had been removed!
All, that is, except the cocoon in the chapel. Frank, looking over his broad shoulder for spiders the whole time, cut the cocoon open and found the body of Wesley Brooks, covered in bites and drained of blood.
They could put it off no longer; it was time to enter the cellar where Al had almost met his doom, and face whatever dwelt there. No spiders assaulted them this time but heading further into the cellar they encountered a police officer, stumbling around as if drugged. As the investigators approached, he lurched towards them, arms outstretched, eyes bloodshot, and face all bloated and grey.
And then they saw the spider.
A couple of hairy arachnid legs emerged from the officer's mouth and eight malevolent eyes gleamed within as the creature attempted to grapple with Frank. Bullets seemed to do very little to the thing but fire slowed it down and a gunshot to the back of the head forced the spider to emerge, where it burned in the kerosene-fuelled flames the investigators were splashing about.
Another spider-puppet emerged from the deeper cellars but waited at the edge of the flames, further suggesting that these arachnids were not just simple animals, but the investigators killed this one off too, with the clever and patient application of fire.
Once the flames had died down the group explored further, finding no more hostile entities, but instead a vast web stretched across one cellar wall, with hundreds of tiny spiders crawling and weaving, adding to it as the investigators watched. Worse, the web was a deep, dark red, and pulsed as if it had, um, a pulse. As Frank looked on he was sure he could spy a passage in the wall behind the web but the investigators decided this was horror enough and sprayed the creepy construction with fuel before setting it alight.
The tiny spiders fled into cracks in the wall and floor and the web burned away, leaving -- to Frank's shock -- an unmarked and very solid brick wall...
Finding no other survivors, the investigators retreated, soaking the house in fuel as they went. They stayed just long enough to make sure that the house caught alight and then drove away into the fog to try and forget the terrors they had experienced.
The adventure was "Dance of Death" by JB Hill from Challenge magazine #73, with some of my own additions and modifications, and of course conversion to Cthulhu Hack. I've had the adventure for years and have never had a chance to get it to the table, but with a Halloween gap in our Vaesen campaign and an itch to get one of my unplayed role-playing games to the table, I thought I had a perfect opportunity to give it a try at long last.
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