Replay of Type 40’s Call of Cthulhu Seeds of Terror scenario, One Less Grave, written by Alan Carey.
This Call of Cthulhu game of Type 40’s Seeds of Terror scenario, One Less Grave, written by Alan Carey, was run on the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord server. I highly recommend the scenario for just about any group, and you can read my review of it here, complete with a short spoiler-lite version for players and a longer spoiler-full review for keepers. You can find it for purchase it here (DriveThruRPG single), or here (DTRPG Bundle), or here (Type 40 Patreon).
This narrative replay is completely full of spoilers. If you are a player, I would suggest not reading any further – but do share it with your friendly keeper!
Beneath a blanket of stars only occasionally hidden by wispy clouds-made silver by a bright half-moon,
five young friends sauntered down the stone-laid street of a small English town. Their singing, joking, and laughing were the only sound at this hour, nearly midnight on All Hallows’ Eve, their echoes preceding them to the ancient St. Bartholomew’s Church, sitting silent on a hill overlooking the street. Rumour had it, every year on All Hallows’ Eve at midnight one could commune with the dead from St. Bartholomew’s crypt.
The insufferable student of poetry Wilfred ‘Wilf’ Gosling, recited his dreadful poetry, unmindful of the others very clearly not listening to him, and occasionally brushed the ivory-handled revolver in his pocket, always loaded with a single bullet. The detached student of art Allison ‘Allie’ Power deliberately positioned the others between her and Wilf, and looked up at the stars and moon lighting their journey. The eager-to-please student of poetry Edward ‘Bunty’ Bunton smiled and tried to be noticed, even occasionally risking paying some attention to Wilf’s massacring of the English language. Accompanying the three students were their two companions; the heavy-set professional artist James ‘Jimbo’ Roxburgh, his walking stick tapping and scratching on the cobbled street, and the fun-seeking bartender Celia ‘Seal’ Norman, her weaving to and fro growing wider with each pull from her flask. As aspiring Romanticists, they thought they could have a go at a séance, have some fun, and undoubtedly get some inspiration for their next works.
They entered the graveyard that crept up the hill and encircled the church. Silent. Walking up the narrow path between crumbling tombstones, they noted four freshly dug graves, yet to be filled. The students, versed in history to different extents, recognised the old church stood pointing north-west to south-west, notably differing from its medieval contemporaries. Inside the old stone walls of St. Bartholomew’s their hushed voices and footsteps echoed back uncomfortably loudly as they entered the hall, electric torch beams chasing off the cloying darkness. Allie and Seal strayed off to make a lap of the worship hall, and the men walked up the aisle towards the pulpit.
Wilf noted that the hymn board displayed the numbers 50, 37, and 57. Jimbo pulled out a hymn book from one of the well-worn wooden pews, and flipped to the pages. The songs related to the falling of night and the coming of dawn. Bunty stood at the pulpit, perhaps feeling a surge of excitement at the prospect of being at the head of something. Resting on the pulpit, he found floor plans for the church and crypt, with red-ink markings pointing to cardinal directions and locations of importance, possibly indicating astrological or occultist significance.
On their loop of the hall, Allie and Seal first stopped at the Apse, partitioned off from the rest of the hall, and gazed up at six looming stained-glass windows. They depicted six seasons, rather than the traditional four. Allie dawdled for a moment, curious, while Seal shrugged, took a pull of whisky, and sauntered off. She soon found the door down to the cellar and hollered for the others to join her.
A spiral staircase led down into the crypt. Torches illuminated the low-ceilinged, T-shaped chamber, shadows splaying out behind stone pillars and a dozen stone coffins. Poking around the crypt, they found a wood door likely to lead outside, digging equipment probably used by a gravedigger, and an alcove with murals stretching across its walls.
Jimbo and Wilf shone their torches on the murals, concluding that the three walls were to be taken in from the left to right. Painted in a late medieval style, the left most mural showed a night scene outside a church, where the dead rose from their graves and joined hands with people of different walks of life, while other people buried themselves in the ground. The centre wall showed the sun rising over the horizon, and the people dancing with the dead had shorn their skin, bearing grinning skulls. The final mural showed a silent day, the dead gone and the dancers reduced to unmoving skulls in the dirt, while those that had buried themselves in the first painting dug themselves out from the earth. Jimbo ogled the murals, so brightly painted despite their apparent age, and when he gently brushed it with his finger tips, he decided it must have been retouched, and expertly so.
As Wilf tried to turn the murals into some self-important soliloquy, Bunty picked up a dusty hammer from the gravedigger’s equipment and sat on the edge of a coffin, hefting the tool. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt more comfortable, safer, with the iron in his hands.
Midnight was approaching, and already sick of the dust and wanting the fresh night air to breath out the room, Allie rightly guessed the wood door lead outside. A short staircase led up and out to the graveyard behind the church. Allie took a deep breath, then froze. Something wasn’t right. She squinted up at the stars. Then nearly lost her footing in a wave of vertigo. She didn’t know these stars. These stars weren’t right. These weren’t her stars. They swirled over her, their voices like horns, a song infernally mocking.
She closed her eyes to regain her balance, but she could still faintly hear the song. It wasn’t coming from above though, but from in front of here. Slowly, she peaked out between squinted eyelids, looking down the sloping cemetery. People danced between the graves. They held hands, a long circle ringing around the church. Some had horns, tooting that inane tune. Her confusion rose to terror. They weren’t people. They had no skin. No flesh.
With a cry Allie rushed back into the crypt, and tried to explain what she had seen to her friends. Dead men, stars, dancing, horns, what little the others could understand in her ravings didn’t make any sense. Saying as much, Seal swaggered up the steps, waving her hand out at the graveyard as if to say, see, nothing to see! But she stopped, blinked to clear her whisky-vision. With every hop and twirl the dancing dead closed on the church. The trumpets sounded in a single blast, the sound wave ear-splitting and mind-breaking, sending Seal scrambling back into the crypt, hiding behind a pillar and draining the rest of her whisky down her throat in a single long pull.
The others all heard the trumpets, cupping their ears against the stabbing notes. When they uncovered their ears, they turned as one to Jimbo, who hummed the tune and bounced on heels in time with the music. After a moment he came to his senses and apologised, but he had to fight to not start whistling along with the dread rhythm and keep his legs locked lest they start up a jig on their own.
With the music piping clearly through the wooden door, and Seal backing up Allie’s story, the others looked around frantically. Maybe they could wait out the things in the cellar, there were only two ways in. Wilf propped a shovel up against the door, hopefully locking it. Bunty looked back at the coffin he had been sitting on and called over Jimbo, suggesting they hide in the coffins. Together, they slid off the heavy lid, revealing the dusty bones within. The dusty, wriggling bones, rattling against the coffin and reaching to clamber out. With a shriek Bunty bashed it in the skull with his hammer, knocking it back down, and Jimbo slammed the lid back on top. Breathing hard, they listened to its muted scratching and clattering. The racket seemed to come from all around them, growing louder, adding a percussion beat to the music. With ever growing horror, the group realised the rattling was growing louder – it came from all the coffins. Lids started shaking, slowly sliding open.
In perfect unison all five friends sprinted up the spiral stairs.
Upon reaching the church hall, the group rushed towards the main doors, with the exception of Bunty. He stopped, looked around, then ran up to the pulpit and hid beneath it, pulling a table cloth over the open side. Clutching his hammer tightly and ignoring the splinters digging into his slick hands, he waited, breath held.
Seal, the quickest of the bunch, reached the doors first, and outside she saw the jumping and spinning line of corpses, flanked by the corps of trumpeters, quickly approaching the church. She couldn’t take it, she had to get out, she had to get home. She sprinted full tilt into the line of corpses. Skeletal hands wrapped around her wrists, pulling and twisting her into the dance. Despite her shrieking and terror, Seal found herself being dragged along with uncomfortable ease, as if her bones acquiesced despite her frenzied muscles.
Jimbo’s cane smashed through the undead’s skull, and the creature collapsed in a pile of dust and cracked bones. Freed, Seal resumed her flight, dodging past the dancers between her and the gate. With a surge of triumph, she ran to the gate, towards the street.
She passed through gate. She stopped. She blinked.
The back side of the church stood high on the hill ahead of her, the carpet of alien stars blazing overhead. A ring of undead dancing in the graveyard. The church’s rear gate behind her. She knew, then. They couldn’t leave.
Jimbo, Wilf, and Allie had watched Seal run up to the edge of the gate, then simply vanish. Something clicked in Wilf’s head. The murals. The skeletons had rose, danced the living until they too become only bones. Except those who had buried themselves, who arose at dawn. He ran to one of the unfilled graves, throwing himself into it, landing hard on his shoulder.
Another great blast of the horns thundered across the graveyard, staggering everyone. Even inside the church, under the pulpit, Bunty almost dropped his hammer and stuffed paper torn from hymn books into his ears. Jimbo stumbled back. Shaking, he took out his pipe and a match, and humming along with the skeleton’s jaunty tune, lit it up and started puffing away, hopping from foot to foot, twirling his cane.
Allie stared at her giant of a friend as the skeleton’s reached him, eagerly taking his hands and joining in his skipping dance. Then she heard a voice. Wilf, from his grave, yelling for her to get in one, quick! With a last look at a smiling Jimbo being pulled deeper into the dance, Allie ran for the grave.
She hadn’t been the only one to hear Wilf’s call. From the bottom of the grave, Wilf’s rectangular view of the vulgar stars became obstructed. A grinning skull stared down at him, reached out to grasp his jacket and start dragging him out. Wilf struggled, unable to break the things’ rock-hard grasp. It tingled with the music, and Wilf felt the tune seeping into his bones. His flesh felt uncomfortable. In the way. He drew his pistol, frantically cocked it, and fired a round point-blank into the skeleton. Had it been a man of flesh and blood, the shot would have killed him. Sans flesh, the bullet harmlessly passed between ribs.
The pistol clicked. Only one bullet, of course.
Allie tossed herself into an open grave as Wilf was dragged out of his and into the waiting embrace of the dancers. Hearing his screams, though uncomfortably similar to laughs, Allie whimpered and started clawing at the dirt on the edges of the grave, trying to bury herself.
Wilf struggled for a time, but at some point he didn’t want to anymore. Or more accurately, his bones didn’t want to, the terrified commands of his brain be damned. Jimbo had given himself over to the music long ago. Dragged around and around by the skeletons’ claws, Wilf and Jimbo’s flesh sloughed away from blood-soaked bones, their glistening skeleton’s still dancing away the night.
The dancers had noticed Seal. With nowhere to turn, she screamed and charged them with swinging fists.
His ears full of hymns, Bunty didn’t hear the skeletons skipping through the hall. He only noticed when one yanked away the tablecloth and pulled him into an embrace.
Allie dug, frantic, the dirt piling on her. Only centimetres thick. Would it be enough?
Seal and Bunty fought on. Skeletons collapsing in heaps, but always more took their place. They swung away, fists cut, slashed, bloody, bones breaking throw flesh, until they weren’t swinging any more, but swaying with the Danse, their flesh puddled on the ground, shed by dancing bones.
Allie stayed silent, breathing as shallowly as she could. Unable to do anything but listen to the music, muffled as it was.
She realised she could see light. The music was gone, only an echo in her mind. Digging free and rising from the grave, Allie looked across an empty, untouched graveyard under bright blue skies. She searched the cemetery and the church, but didn’t find her friends, nor any bones. Only a walking cane, a hammer, a flask, and an ivory-handled revolver. The last reminders of her friends in bundled arms, she staggered home.
Life didn’t go well. She took to whisky, preferring Seal’s old flask, and kept Wilf’s gun in her desk. But her fans, of which she grew to have many, adored her dark, macabre works, and her fame lasted after she finally returned to her grave.
If you’d like to see how it turns out for your group, you can purchase the scenario, along with the other Seeds of Terror scenarios, here (DriveThruRPG single), or here (DTRPG Bundle), or here (Type 40 Patreon).
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
