Narrative replay of the Japanese Call of Cthulhu scenario A Cup of Horror (コーヒー一杯分の恐怖), written by Uchiyama Yasujirou (内山 靖二郎).
This narrative replay is for the Japanese Call of Cthulhu scenario, A Cup of Horror (コーヒー一杯分の恐怖), written by Uchiyama Yasujirou, the first entry in the scenario collection Bibliothek 13. If you’re a player, or just don’t want to know everything about the scenario ahead of time, you can read or listen to the first, spoiler-lite section of my review of A Cup of Horror here, and you can purchase Bibliothek 13 from Amazon Japan or the stores listed on the KADOKAWA site. It is currently only available in Japanese.
And now, on to A Cup of Horror.
On a frigid February day in Sapporo, four friends marched through a growing snowstorm. It was their day off, they planned to meet over coffee, and they would be damned if a little blizzard stopped their get together. They spotted a sign through the sheeting snow and made that their target. A small café called The Whippoorwill.
Announced by a barely heard bell over the raging storm, into the café stepped; well-meaning and well-to-do physician Dr. Asahina Aoi; Over-worked and under-paid salaryman Ishiwata Tamotsu; Long-studying and eccentric university student Uno Fujimaro; and dedicated and distracted programmer Arai Hiromi.
None of them had been to The Whippoorwill before, and if they had to describe it based on the first few seconds before everything went wrong, they’d call it cozy. A few tables, a counter ringing the narrow kitchen, and landscape photographs framed on the walls. There were no customers, no staff. Only one cup of coffee at the counter.
A strange, slurring voice seemingly above them moaned ‘Welcome.’
Legs dangled lifelessly from a ragged hole in the ceiling. Then smoothly, but as if pulled with great strength, the legs disappeared up into the hole.
As the group came to terms with what they had just seen, Ishiwata spun around to leave. The door didn’t budge. Arai tried to help, but the door was solidly refusing to open. They fumbled for the lock, but found it unlatched. Ishiwata took a breath, then gently pushed the door. Again, no movement at all. As if something was holding it shut.
Uno, nonplussed, clambered up on the counter to get a better look in the hole. Though dark, he could see painted walls and a ceiling, evidently in the café’s second floor. He briefly considered climbing up, but his curiosity did have bounds, and those were getting sucked up by who-knows-what into the ceiling.
Asahina noticed something on the ground, beneath the hole in the ceiling. A smartphone. It was open to an SNS app. Whoever the phone belonged to had been waiting at the café for their friend. Their last three messages read:
“No one’s here.”
“This is weird.”
“I’m getting out of here.”
For a moment Ishiwata banged on the glass to gain the attention of passerby, but the snow thickened to the point they could barely see the sidewalk anymore.
With the door not working, Asahina called the emergency number. She told the operator they were stuck in a café but did not mention the body in the ceiling. She thought maybe she’d just imagined that. The operator said there had been other accidents in the blizzard that might delay the fire department, but help would come in five or ten minutes. Then they hung up to deal with more pressing calls.
Fujimaro crept into the kitchen, seeing a backroom he thought might lead upstairs. Passing by he briefly noted the kitchen was plainly stocked, containing a small oven and a syphon coffee filter, as well as a picture a middle-aged couple in a rural landscape. He shrugged and rounded the corner into the backroom, finding it to be storage area with an inner door, an outer door likely leading into an alley, and a staircase up to the second floor.
He could hear running water from the inner door.
As Fujimaro opened the door, Arai also poked into the kitchen. Picking up the picture, she though the landscape behind the couple was not Japan. She whipped out her phone and took a picture, cropping out a house in the background. Between luck and expert search terms, Arai figured out the picture had been taken at an old village called Dunwich, in Massachusetts, USA.
Ishiwata and Arai jumped at Asahina’s yelp. She pointed at one of the tables, on which now sat four steaming cups of coffee.
The door under the stairs led to a bathroom, the sliding door to the shower closed and fogged up, steam rolling through the cracks and steams. A man’s clothes lay in a hamper with a notebook on top. It was a yearly agenda, only filled out to February so far, and mostly just boring daily observances.
One of the latest entries dated two weeks ago was of interest though. It read, “My boy made coffee today. Could it be he wants to help out in the store? I’ll need to tell him to be very careful so the customers don’t notice.”
He looked up at the foggy, closed door. With a swallow, he promptly turned around and left the bathroom. Rejoining the others, he told Dr. Asahina there might be a body in the bath.
Before she reacted, they all stared at the coffee for a few seconds. “Maybe they’re for us?” Arai wondered aloud. They thought for a few more seconds. No, no, no, they were not drinking mystery ghost coffee. Asahina followed Fujimaro back to the bathroom, and along the way Ishiwata tried the backdoor. Shut, of course.
Fujimaro held back, deciding he did not need to see whatever was taking a long shower. Asahina glared, but pushed open the door, unleashing a great wave of steam.
When she wiped the film off her glasses, she saw the body in the shower. Shriveled and bloated. Her shock quickly faded as she inspected the cadaver, finding it to be an old man with no obvious signs of injury besides some bruises from a fall. She quickly concluded he’d likely died from heart attack brought on by sudden temperature change. It had been colder than usual this February, and stepping into a hot shower did him in.
Conferring in the kitchen, recognizing the body as the man in the picture, they presumed him to be the café’s owner. Presumably, the woman was the owner’s wife, and they had child somewhere, possibly upstairs.
Armed with this new information, Arai once again called the emergency number and relayed it to them, hoping it would hurry them up. Once again, the operator apologized, saying that a large traffic accident had diverted them. As the man was already dead, they didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but firefighters and EMT would arrive as soon as they could. In the meantime, they should look for the missing child. And with that they hung up. Once again, Arai didn’t mention the body-eating hole in the ceiling.
With little else to do but wait, the group decided to go upstairs. Asahina grabbed a cup of hot coffee. If anything surprised her, they would get a scalding face full of bean-juice.
The stairs opened into a short hallway: two doors on the right, and a door at the far end, likely to a closet. To start, they checked the first door on the right, finding a tidy bedroom. Bed, bookcase, desk, all fairly standard.
A corkboard on the wall over the desk showed various photos, mostly of the couple at various stages in life. One in particular stood out though. A night shot of the woman standing in a circle of fires, lighting ancient-looking standing stones. Her hands raised over her head. Remembering the various spiritualist and occultic books he had scoured through the university library for, Fujimaro thought she was praying in a sort of ritual.
Later picture showed the woman in stages of pregnancy. But there were no pictures of her post-birth, and none of a child.
Scattered on the desk were electrical looking components. Turning them over, Arai realised they were charges for a cattle-prod. She checked around the room but didn’t see the device anywhere.
Fujimaro looked over the collection of books, finding most of them related to infertility, but there were also a number of occultic texts, including an English tome. He tried to recall his English studies he thumbed through the rambling pages. It described an incident in Dunwich, Massachusetts, USA, and a way to connect with a being of great power. A being that could grant any desires. With a shudder Fujimaro closed the book with a feeling like he had read something he shouldn’t have.
They filed out of the bedroom and with Asahina in the lead, they approached the closet. The handle was cold under her hand as she pulled the door open. A waft of frosty air rolled out. With a few portable air conditioners, the closet was crudely refrigerated.
And it was crammed full of five bodies. Skeletal-thin, as if they had lost all their fluids.
The friends stumbled back, some stumbling, some screaming. Stealing herself, Asahina approached the corpses to determine cause of death. At first she didn’t see any obvious wounds, but probing around, she found punctures. Not very large, but deep. The dead were of various ages and genders, with no obvious patterns, and she thought they had died at various times over a seven-year period.
Sufficiently frightened, Arai once again took out her phone, and this time told the operator, “Bodies!” Finally convinced that urgency was needed, the operator said they’d have police on the way right away, but once again urged Arai to find the child, and to protect themselves. It might still take up to ten minutes for police to arrive on foot through the storm.
Hanging up, Arai ran into the bedroom and grabbed a lamp and a cattle-prod charge. After some hasty engineering, she had some sort of stun stick she was confident would work at least one time, and most likely wouldn’t hurt whoever held it.
They stacked up outside the last door. With a deep breath, Ishiwata opened it, revealing a mess of a bedroom within. Between the light from the hallway and the light streaming up though the hole in the floor, they could make out a smashed crib, scattered toys, and a butsudan in the corner of the room. Amidst the scattered debris, Ishiwata spotted the cattle-prod. With another nervous look around the empty room, he crept forward, reaching for the prod.
Something thick and solid wrapped around his shoulder, and stinging pain jabbed at his neck. He went light-headed, and in the darkness he thought he saw a shimmering silhouette. Something as big as a large cow, spider or octopus-like with numerous appendages. One of which released itself from his neck, circling back to the thing’s main bulk, where a boy-like head emerged, sucking at the end of the tentacle.
With a scream Ishiwata fled back to the safety of his friends. When he looked back, he didn’t see anything. The others asked what had happened. He stammered his explanation, and when Asahina pulled down his collar she found the same puncture would on his neck as on the corpses in the closet. But they couldn’t see anything in the room.
Arai had an idea. She shoved her taser invention into Ishiwata’s hands then ran downstairs. She returned a moment later with a bag of flour in hand. She tore it open, then fluffed it into the room.
The powder drifted to the floor, except for the bunch that stuck to the ox-sized, boy-headed spider-octopus thing that crouched in the centre of the room, two of its tentacles reaching down through the hole.
Unable to process, Asahina tossed her cup of coffee at the thing, screamed and sprinted down the stairs, slamming full force into the back door and landing flat on her back. Arai stared wide eyed for a split second, then followed her companion downstairs.
With a screech the thing flung its tentacles at Ishiwata and Fujimaro. Ishiwata avoided them, but Fujimaro was not so lucky. Before it could get suck any more of their blood, Ishiwata jabbed the lamp at the beast and activated the charge. Arai’s engineering proved solid, and the bulb burst with a great flash and shower of sparks.
The beast slurred something that sounded worryingly like ‘I’m sorry!’ and scrambled away through the hole. Fujimaro grabbed the cattle-prod, slapped a battery in, and together with Ishiwata ran downstairs.
Arai was in the kitchen with a bottle of syphon-burner alcohol in hand when the thing clambered down from the hole, landing right in front of her. The boy face curled in a sneer. She splashed the liquid over the creature.
Fujimaro sped past Ishiwata and the crazed Asahina battering at the back door. As the creature readied itself to eviscerate Arai, Fujimaro thrust the cattle-prod into the centre mass of the creature. The burst of sparks ignited the alcohol, and the creature, and much of the flooring, went up in flames.
As soon as the backdoor loosened Ishiwata was out and down the alley at full sprint. Asahina followed on her hands and knees, and just a second later Arai jumped out. Fujimaro crouched and jumped through burning tentacles waving about and fruitlessly trying to beat out the blaze, only managing to spread it. He almost reached the exit when a blazing tentacle smacked into his shoulder, lighting his shirt on fire.
He stumbled out into the alley, where the snow and Arai managed to put out his smoldering clothes.
The four huddled in the street as the café burned. When police and firefighters arrived, they were moved away from the scene as more officers, including some in suits without emblems, moved in.
The news later reported the café burned down due to an incident in the blizzard, without any mention of a spider-squid monster. The friends tried to go back to their daily lives as best they could, though Asahina needed a stay at a facility to get over her experiences.
And while there, mulling over what she’d seen, Asahina became convinced those cups of coffee were indeed for them, and everything would have been fine if they’d just drank and left. All the thing had wanted was to run the café, just like its dear-old dad, after all.
If A Cup of Horror sounds like something you’d like to run, you can buy Bibliothek 13 from Amazon Japan or the store listed on the KADOKAWA site. It is currently only available in Japanese (if you message me after buying it, I might be able to give you some notes on running it).
Before you go, though, maybe take a look at some more scenario replays?
MJRRPG: Branches of Bone
Seeds of Terror: The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, Endless Light, One Less Grave, Hand of Glory
Chaosium: Amidst the Ancient Trees, The Necropolis, What’s in the Cellar?, The Dead Boarder
Japonism: Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs?
Bibliothek 13: A Cup of Horror
