Replay of the Call of Cthulhu Scenario, Hand of Glory (Seeds of Terror #4), written by Allan Carey of Type40.
This narrative replay is for Call of Cthulhu scenario, Hand of Glory, the fourth entry in Type40’s Seeds of Terror series of concise one-shots. 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 Hand of Glory here, and you can purchase the scenario on DriveThruRPG individually, as part of a 3-title bundle English Insanities along with One Less Grave and Scream of the Mandrake, or as part of the 12-title Miskatonic Repository Halloween 2021 Collection.
And now, on to Hand of Glory.
Rain poured down over the Yorkshire moors, soaking the road and the five ramblers trotting upon it. The old friends spotted a coaching inn down the road and set course for dry land. The Wych Elm, its sign read, tucked in among dark woods, miles from the nearest village.
Audrey Fulton, antique dealer, marched through the downpour undeterred – a little rain never hurt anyone. The shopkeeper Charlie Newell followed closely in Audrey’s wake, as he always did, but then, always one to remember to be polite, stood aside to hold the door open for his companions. The towering Dan Whelan, PhD, stooped through the doorway, drawing eyes from the pub’s denizens, gazes that quickly broke as soon as Dan made eye contact. Hid childhood friend, the book dealer Patty Graham, stepped out of his shadow, patting dry her bag and fretting over the damp books inside. And lastly, before Charlie closed the door behind him, strode in Howard Bumpton, antiquarian and pipe-smoker extraordinaire.
The party found an open table, ignoring the poorly-disguised stares from the locals, three couples at the other tables, and waved ordered drinks while drying themselves by a crackling fireplace. A cheery landlord took their orders and suggested some specialty meat pies. The ramblers eagerly added them to their tab.
After an hour of comfortable conversation and eyelids growing heavy from hearty drink and pie, the friends noticed the landlord lighting an odd candle. It looked like a desiccated hand. He gave an embarrassed smile and simply said, ‘local tradition, keeps the evil spirits away, you know?’
Dan came to the light of consciousness like swimming through a deep lake of mud. Eyes blurred with tears, he tried to wipe them, but his hands wouldn’t budge. Looking down through a bleary smear of sleep, he found his arms bound in iron clamps to the chair. As his head and eyes both cleared, he became aware his friends all sat around the table – a different table, black, pitted, and decrepit – chins on their chests as they slowly came to the land of the waking, and their wrists bound by iron manacles.
More detail came into Dan’s world, and he realised the five were not the only ones in the room. Standing off to the side of the room – the hut, he thought – the inn’s landlord swayed side to side with a dazed look in his eyes and a wicked looking cleaver in his hand. And in the corner of the hut – the mud and daub hut with a straw roof – a witch perched over bubbling cauldron.
Preposterous.
But as the others awoke, they all saw the hunch backed old crone mumbling over the steaming stew. She peered over her shoulder, gnarled nose, and twisted eyebrows, and cackled. Definitely a witch.
She left her stew and hopped over to the table with surprising grace. Circling her captives, she spoke in a creaky, sing-song voice.
‘He brings all of you, but Auntie needs but two.’ She reached out with one hand. One stump, rather, and ran it lovingly over Audrey’s hand.
‘One for left and one for right!’ She skipped over to Howard, caressing the back of his hand with her stump.
‘Who shall it be?’ She bounded to Patty, baring yellowed teeth, and prodded her hand. ‘Shall you choose, or me?’
Another hop and a skip, and she stared into Charlie’s wide and terrified eyes. ‘Two hands taken, two hands given, on this eldritch night forgiven’
Charlie squirmed under her gaze, under her foul and worryingly hot breath. Then her watery gaze snapped over to Dan, and she raised her stump high over her head.
When she brought it down in a chopping motion, the landlord’s cleaver slashed down, parting Dan’s right hand from its wrist. Dan let out a scream, and the others promptly answered with their own, but his was an outburst of surprise, as he soon realised, he felt no pain. Indeed, only a single drop of blood rolled out on the pitted table surface.
The witch, Auntie, put her arm next to the decapitated stump. Dan’s horror only increased as fleshy tendrils drew his hand and Auntie’s stump together, until his large, muscular hand had fused entirely to Auntie’s spindly limb.
She wriggled the fingers in front her face, gave a grunt of approval, then flipped it about and waggled Dan’s hand at his face.
‘That’s one done, but there’s still more fun!’ She held out her left arm, also ending bluntly in a stump. ‘I chose first, now you chose who will be left for worst!’
The others all began babbling, at each other, at Auntie. Pleading, questioning. She just pranced around the table, tapping them on the head one by one with Dan’s big hand, ignoring their questions.
After a few laps, she suddenly stopped, the smile slipping from her wrinkled face, and as the room noticeably darkened, she said in a voice not-at-all sing-songy, ‘I grow bored. You?’ She pointed her remaining stump at Audrey, and the landlord lurched towards her, cleaver raising.
Charlie cried out, demanding Auntie take his hand. She shrugged. ‘Okay,’ and a heartbeat later the cleaver thumped into the table.
Clasping Dan and Charlie’s mismatched hands together, Auntie began speaking again, but with less enjoyment, and much more understandable.
If the party returned her hands, Dan and Charlie would be given their own back, and they would be free to go on their way. She explained that the local cretins had taken her hands and banished her and her children from the world. In return, before slipping away to her prison, she took their children until they returned what is hers.
The locals came back twice for their children, and both times refused to return Auntie’s hands. And so, the children stayed. Oh, she treats them well, she’s not a monster. But if they refuse to return her hands, she’ll keep those little brats forever. If the ramblers return her hands, though, all will be forgiven and all returned. Her hands are in the wretched inn, a place she cannot enter, but the ramblers can.
She didn’t answer further questions and attempting to talk to the innkeeper proved fruitless. He seemed to have lost his mind, now little more than a puppet for Auntie. And as if she pulled on his strings then, he lurched towards the party, corralling them out of hut’s door. With one last cry from Auntie to get her hands before daybreak, the door slammed shut.
Looking around their surroundings, it became clear they weren’t in Yorkshire anymore. Dark woods ringed the hut under a spinning alien starscape. Dan sourly noted he didn’t recognise the stars at all. They weren’t on Earth, not even in the same galaxy. A pair of moons visibly glided over the tops of the black trees. Auntie had said they had until day light, but how long did night reign on this unearthly realm?
The party trudged down a path leading away from the hut into the forest. The bloated trees swayed as they passed them. No wind blew here. Shivering, the party hurried forward, keeping to the centre of the path, as far from the glistening branches that seemed to grasp towards the ramblers.
They heard the laughing of children ahead, and then the dark woods opened into a clearing. The couples from the inn stood among a crowd of children. The kids smiled and eagerly chattered up at parents trying their damnedest not to openly weep.
While at least appearing ashamed to have involved the party, the parents explain they had to use the ramblers, as this was their last chance to see their children. Through further questioning, the party learned that the innkeeper, Addison, had a book that contained a ritual allowing the travel to this realm, as well as the banishing of Auntie in the first place, and a ring on one of Auntie’s hands functions as a key for the ritual. Addison conducted the ritual each time, but he progressively became weaker, physically and mentally, and this last time had finally done him in.
The parents believe their children can only leave with Auntie’s permission. When asked why Auntie had been banished to start with, the parents whisper that people would disappear, and their bodies later turn up in the woods. After the death of a young women five years ago, the locals had enough, and with Addison’s help, banished Auntie to somewhere far, far away. The bodies stopped turning up, but the old witch took their children.
Getting all they could from the locals, the ramblers left them with their children, and continued down the path to the Wych Elm. The pub was silent and cold, but otherwise unchanged. They quickly grabbed the candle, clearly one of Auntie’s hands in reality. Besides having singed fingertips and tightly curled into a fist, it seemed otherwise in good condition, and more importantly had a gold ring on its index finger.
Behind the bar, Howard found a trapdoor to a cellar. Within, amongst storage cabinets and barrels of beer, was a table, and upon it, an old leather-bound book. Next to the book, a journal, newspaper clippings, and a glass case holding a gnarled old hand, its fingers closed with exception of a pointing, crooked index finger.
Audrey flipped through the journal, finding sketches of tree-like creatures, branch-like tentacles raised in the air and walking on thick, hooved limbs. Scrawled writing described them as ‘her children,’ and that ‘the woods are safe now.’
Howard read the newspaper clippings. They were stories of peoples gone missing near the woods around Wych Elm, most notably one from five years ago of a young woman found dead.
Patty and Dan read over the open page in the leather book, which described something called ‘Banyshmente and Returne,’ while Charlie meandered around the cellar. Dan realised that between the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo were equations and formulas. It was some sort of transportation, and he intuited it would be used to move between incredibly vast distances of space.
Patty, with her love of the occult, quickly realised it was a ritual, and an elaborate one at that. No wonder the innkeeper Addison had lost his marbles doing this four times over. But despite Patty’s self-proclaimed expertise in all things magical and mystical, she made a beginner’s mistake. She read it out loud.
Charlie was peering at a bottle on a shelf, considering popping it open to see what sort of fun Addison had been hiding in it, when the shelf simply flipped out of existence. Between blinks it simply ceased to be, sending the bottle crashing to the floor. Whisky, it turned out.
The others turned at the crash, wide eyed. Patty felt faint, and not just from the excitement. Even just reading the ritual had taken something out of her.
With the hands in hand, they made their way up the path. The parents watched them pass, but did nothing to stop or argue against returning to Auntie. Maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to end Auntie’s banishment and allow her to continue whatever dark deeds she dealt, but they also wouldn’t stop the ramblers if they could save their children.
The friends stopped in front of the hut and had one last moment of indecision. They could potentially use the ritual instead to transport themselves home. But what would become of the children, the parents, Auntie? In the end, the old witch hadn’t done that much to harm them, besides cutting of a hand or two, and in Patty’s opinion the locals seemed like a bunch of superstitious yokels that blamed an old woman for their own problems.
And so they opened the creaky door and handed over the hands without further ado. With a wide grin Aunty held out her arms, and Dan and Charlie’s hands plopped off. Once again fleshy tendrils tied Aunty’s wrinkled hands to her decrepit wrists, and she motioned for Dan and Charlie to do the same. After a few disgusting seconds, the men had their appendages fully restored.
Without so much as a thank you, Aunty spoke some horrible words, and the world flickered in and out of existence.
The ramblers stood outside the Wych Elm, looking at the dark woods, once more under a blessedly mundane night sky. Children wined behind them as their parents hugged them tightly and promised never to let them go again.
There was no wind, but the dark woods wriggled. Black trees, branches bloated and glistening, roots capped with hooves pulling out of the soil, danced in savage celebration, welcoming the return of their mother.
If you’d like to see how Hand of Glory turns out for your group, you can purchase the scenario, along with the other Seeds of Terror scenarios, on DriveThruRPG individually, as part of a 3-title bundle English Insanities along with One Less Grave and Scream of the Mandrake, or as part of the 12-title Miskatonic Repository Halloween 2021 Collection.
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
