Weekend at Dracula’s, Part 3

Street Theatre

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Hawkes & Fitzy

The team retreats from Singleton’s house. They decide that they need some spiritual assistance, and contact a Network ally of theirs, Revered Rogers (any resemblance to Simon Rogers of Pelgrane is purely deliberate). Rogers meets them in a private room at a nearby pub, and brings along a bag of crucifixes along with two potential allies (and our second two temporary player characters – a Metropolitan Police detective names Hawkes and an actor called Fitzy.

(Elgin’s player missed half this session; the thief hid in Singleton’s house until he was able to escape and rejoin the rest of the group. He also had a weird vision-flash when he broke the circle of blue candles – he was in the body of a woman, dressed in modern-day clothes, and there was a man shouting at her in German.

A Message From Beyond
A Message From Beyond

When he recovered, he found he was holding a copy of Hawkins Paper 14, on which he’d circled several key words.)

Hawkes had discovered the Met’s extensive files on vampire-like attacks, dating back to the 1890s. She’d also discovered that officers who looked too deeply into any of these incidents tended to get transferred to dead-end jobs. Fitzy, meanwhile, was a former regular at Singleton’s decadent parties who had fled to Reverend Rogers after a troubling spiritual encounter with the occultist. Furthermore, Singleton just contacted Fitzy again, offering him a role in a ‘dramaturgical ceremony’ tonight (“the role of a lifetime, dear boy”).

After a lengthy discussion of options, the team decide to start by checking out Coldfall Woods. They quickly uncover a ruined cellar in some waste ground that matches the spot on an old map of London they found with the Dossier in Whitby. Exploring, they meet Richard Crinn (the Madman, DH p. 121), who Hawkes recognises as a known junkie. He rants about the three girls – one dead, one alive, one un-dead, and other cryptic nonsense, but the team are more interested in finding out what’s behind an Architecturally-suspicious wall than sifting through Crinn’s babblings. Hawkes calls some local social workers to take Crinn away, and warns them that he might be violent by night.

After some poking at bricks, the team smashes through the wall and finds a mysterious upright coffin and an even-more-mysterious partial skeleton entombed in concrete. Fitzy starts pulling bits of the skeleton out of the concrete, and has a psychic flash of the Norman Shaw building (DH p. 193).

The team drags the coffin out into the daylight, and – stakes and crucifixes in hand – open it. Inside, they discover the already-staked corpse of Inspector Cotford. A close examination finds that his throat has been torn open, and stuffed into the wound are several items: Cotford’s wedding ring, some photographs of his family, and a collection of teeth wrenched from a child’s mouth. They reseal the coffin and hide it again.

Fitzy gets some more details from Singleton about the arrangements for the evening. Fitzy will be playing Alfred Singleton, Osman Singleton’s putative grandfather. Enchanted by the idea of playing a sorcerer, Fitzy puts on his robe and wizard hat.

McAllister prepares some silver bullets and the team load up with crucifixes, holy water, and other counter-vampire measures.

Elgin contacts an ally in Germany and arranges for the mysterious brooch to be couriered to England.

Suspecting that the Norman Shaw buildings are central to Dracula’s plans (mainly because they’re central on the map), McAllister and Hawkes head there. Elgin heads to Hillingham;  Baptiste accompanies Fitzy back to Singleton’s. While Singleton and Fitzy argue over how to portray the original, Baptiste sneaks into the Psychic’s study and starts looting handfuls of clues.

At Hillingham, Elgin manages to get into the tent containing the mysterious machine and examines it. It consists of a portable generator, a computer console, and a contraption that consists of a jackhammer-like pillar of solid engraved silver, covered in occult runes. Elgin’s able to access some files on the computer console – they resemble heat maps, or images from ground penetrating radar. They seem to show parts of London as they were in the past, including ghostly tracks where people gathered. Zooming out, it looks like Edom have used the machine at other places around London, but there’s a big DO NOT USE sign on the map near Kingstead Ceremony.

Despite Fitzy’s increasing nervousness, he gets dressed in Alfred Singleton’s old suit and gets on the bus. (He also takes the drugs offered by Singleton.) He meets other actors playing the roles of Kate Reed, Lucy Westenra, Mrs. Westenra, Quincey Harker and other characters from the novel.

At Westminster, McAllister and Hawkes find the entrance to a maintenance tunnel, and hear spectral whispers in the darkness. Before they can investigate, Hawkes spots a man she knows to be an MI5 Agent (DH p. 122) watching them. The pair lay a trap for the Security Service office, and manage to ambush him.

The… performance? Ceremony? Séance? begins again. The machine starts up again, hammering the ground. Vibrating the old walls of Hillingham. The actors somehow become more like the characters they’re portraying, and seem almost possessed. The “scene” is the 17th of April – just after the death of Lucy Westenra (p. 202 of Unredacted for those reading along at home). As Single – as Fitzy approaches the door, he sees the other actor, the man standing next to him playing Cotford, change so he more closely resembles the corpse they found in the sealed coffin earlier that day.

At Singleton’s house, the blue flame returns. Baptiste witnesses another séance, but this time, the ghost in the circle is alternately a beautiful blonde woman or a hideous skeleton – it’s the spirit of Lucy Westenra!

At the Norman Shaw buildings, Hawkes and McAllister question the captured MI5 Agent, who’s clearly running security for Edom. They ask him if it was the Child Vampire who killed Dr. John, and he laughs at them. The Master is at hand – and mist starts to pour down from street level, coagulating into the shape of a tall man…

Fitzy tries to change the script (at this point, we were literally putting on a performance of Page 202 of Unredacted), but the psychic pressure is intense, and changing a single word requires a tremendous effort of will. In Singleton’s house, there’s a wrenching sensation as Lucy’s vampiric ghost becomes more and more manifest. The blue flames of the candles are now these blazing blue columns of fire, impossibly tall.

Under the Norman Shaw buildings, Hawkes and McAllister face down Count Dracula. McAllister fires a blessed silver bullet at the Count, injuring him, but it’s nowhere near enough to stop the vampire. He advances on the pair. Crucifixes hold him at bay; he snarls in fury and snaps the downed MI5 Agent’s neck with a casual gesture, like a man kicking a dog. “You will suffer for this insolence. Your families are mine! Your friends, mine! Your country, mine!”

Just before the actor playing Quincey Morris can announce that Lucy is dead, Elgin shoots the machine, knocking it out of phase. Fitzy collapses; everyone at Hillingham goes silent, apart from the actress playing Lucy. She just starts screaming and screaming, this banshee keen that doesn’t stop.

DraculaAnd back at Singleton’s mansion, the summoning circle is empty. The blue flames have all gone out. Baptiste listens from his hiding place as Osman Singleton orders his remaining followers to bar all the doors and windows and bring up the garlic from the cellar. “We have failed HIM, and he will not forgive. Bar the doors and pray, and we might survive the night!”

 

Spiritual Subduction Zones and other weirdness: I wanted a twist on the both the regular damned vampires and the telluric-bacteria vamps presented in the Director’s Handbook, but I also knew that the campaign works best if you can preserve the earth-tremor connection to Dracula. What I came up with was a breed of vampire that exists on a spiritual borderland between life and death.

A subduction zone is a geological term – it’s the place where one continental plate slips beneath another, causing earthquakes. This setup posits that the physical and the spiritual, life and death, are like continental plates, usually moving in parallel with one another, but in certain places, life can slip beneath death, opening a route to some spiritual underworld. This subduction, this violation of normal reality, causes both psychic and physical feedback that manifests in many ways, including earthquakes.

Vampires are spirits that have crawled out of such a subduction zone. They shouldn’t be alive, so reality keeps trying to drag them back down into that spiritual underworld. Vampires drink blood to cling to life. Staking or beheading a vampire isn’t enough to kill it, as they’re unquiet ghosts inhabiting a body. The only way to kill it is to carry its soul into the underworld, usually by weighing it down with other ghosts. That’s why the vampire Cotford was buried with tokens reminding him of his family – their ghosts would carry his spirit down into the afterworld. That’s why grave goods work.

Certain vibrations can also create artificial subduction zones; resonate the old stones of a building or the bedrock of a region at the right frequency, and it pushes the physical a little into the spiritual realm. That’s why, for example, hauntings are associated with running water. The mundane explanation is that people mistake the gurgling of some buried river or the drip of some leaky pipe for ghostly sounds, but what’s really going on is that the vibrations caused by the running water happen to resonate at the right frequency to push that site into the spiritual realm a little, allowing ghosts to form. 

Edom doesn’t have earthquake machines – they can make earthquakes, but that’s not their real purpose. They’ve got ghost engines, machines that resonate at the right frequency to create subduction zones. They used one of these to resurrect Dracula in 1940 – they opened a subduction zone, and Dracula’s spirit was able to crawl out of the spiritual realm and back into his body. (He was carried down into Hell by the ghost of Quincey Morris; if none of the company had died there, then no amount of physical damage would have stopped Dracula from returning the next night. Edom had to pull him out of Hell in 1940 to bring him back.)

Ghost engines can also be used to call up ghosts, or at least create conditions where ghosts are almost certain to manifest, as the team saw at Hillingham.

< Session 2 – There Was An Explosion Adjacent To A Helicopter

The Prime of Miss Ellen Mowbray – Session 4 >

 

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