Outside the château, Ellie circled clockwise toward the side, shivering against the chill, salt wind that rattled the nearby tree branches like dry bones. On the opposite end of the mansion lay a smaller wing with two turret that stretched at least one extra story above the tiled roof. Somewhere, the surf pounded against rocks. The dark, leaden sky churned with menace. This was going to be a storm all right. She couldn’t help grinning with the feeling that she was walking through some Gothic scary movie and Christopher Lee’s Dracula or some buxom vampiress was going to jump out at any moment.

Just as she was thinking about droplets of bright red against a colorless, washed out background, she rounded the corner of the house, and the world became splashed with them.

Not blood. Roses.

Blood-red roses grew in great profusion, dozens of blooms the size of her fist, the only real color she’d seen since arriving on this little island, shocking in its vibrance. The thorny stems populated a decrepit wooden trellis, a deep, luscious green with prominent, black-tipped thorns. The sheer force of life itself in this backdrop of dilapidation and neglect caught her breath in her throat.

Then she had to remind herself that it wasn’t real.

She looked for clues with every step, blinking for skill checks. Since they had started the game, she had been making skill checks right and left and was really enjoying the fact that Elwood Velásquez knew things. It made her wish that when she made it to fifty, she would be just as knowledgeable and worldly. She wondered when she would have the chance to distribute the new skill points, so she asked the GM.

Galadriel’s voice came to her clearly. “When you level up, you may allocate all new skill points.”

“When do I level up?”

“If you complete Stage One of your mission: discover what really happened to the Delacroix Diamond.”

“Good to know, thanks.”

As Ellie circled the house, its decrepit stateliness, not quite ancient but far from modern, loomed over her, and the dark windows felt like eyes watching her every move.

She shook off a shudder, then occupied her mind by trying to gauge the house’s outside dimensions and figure out which window might be the study.

The ground at the front of the house sloped down toward the back of the house, revealing what had to be a basement level. The earth underfoot was soft, as if saturated with moisture, and she couldn’t help but wonder what materials Karnath’s Crimson Castle was made of to give that effect. This place was a marvel.

She was pretty sure that the study lay in the rear corner of the ground floor. In the front corner lay another room, the nature of which she did not yet know.

Something highlighted in her vision drew her attention. Another successful Investigate check, but since she had already received skill points for that, she couldn’t get any more for now. Two marks in the soft earth about four feet from the wall. Just where a ladder would be situated and sink under a person’s weight into the soft earth. Her gaze traced up the lichen-encrusted stone wall and found two fresh scuffs in the lichen and stone a couple of inches below the window sill. But this window was not the study. Just to be sure, she moved toward the rear of the house and searched the ground and wall for evidence of a ladder there, finding none.

But she had to be sure. She went back into the house, letting herself into the massive front door, passed through the foyer and turned left, which led her down the hallway toward two doors on opposite sides, one of which led to the study where she had left the others, and the other…

She turned the door latch and pulled it open, releasing one of her favorite smells—old books. A library. Across the hall, she heard Ash and Ivy talking in muted tones, but Ellie was on a roll. This was fun.

The library was filled from floor to high ceiling with old books. A wing-backed chair of cracked dry leather. A lantern. A modest fireplace. A stepladder leaned against one of the shelf units.

And there, on the bottom of the rails, traces of dry dirt as if the ladder had been sunk in soft earth. She tried the window and found it opened smoothly, as if oiled.

Two spots lit up in her vision. More crumbles of dried earth on the floor near the window. A blood-red rose petal had been ground into the dusty old carpet. She looked closer. The petal had a twist to it, as if it had been underfoot as someone spun. Then a shiver of excitement went through her. A dark spot on the floor about the size of a dime. She knelt and peered close.

“Yup, that’s blood all right,” she said, startling herself with the sound of her own voice.

Footsteps in the hallway turned her around, and she found Ivy’s beautiful gambler character standing in the doorway. “Elwood, have you found something.”

“Indeed!” Ellie said. “I am on a roll. Someone climbed in through this window. Or maybe out. And there’s a spot of blood right there.” She pointed to it. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

She ran past Ivy back outside and studied the ground below the library window. The indentations in the earth seemed to match the feet of the ladder. Could there be footprints, too? Ones that weren’t hers.

Her own footprints looked fresh, easy to identify. “Come on, Galadriel. Give me some perp footprints. There have to be some.”

They glowed with identification, leading toward the edge of cliff toward the mainland.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Gotcha!” she said.

But the footprints were coming toward the mansion. She searched the area as thoroughly as she could but could find no set of footprints leading away, at least not on this side of the house.

Successful Insight Check! Gain 4 points to increase any skill! Insight checks represent moments of inspiration or lucky knowledge that might lay outside your character’s general skill set. This set of footprints leads toward the mansion. You can find no set of footprints leading away from the mansion in this area. Furthermore, the style of shoe resembles a workman’s shoe. One of the shoes has a hole worn in the bottom.

So this intruder was a workman of some kind, probably a poor one with the sole of his shoe worn through. But did he sneak away by another exit? Did he walk out the front door down the cobblestone walk, a route that would leave no tracks?

First, she would look for other sets of tracks. She continued her circuit of the mansion. Reaching the rear corner, she stepped out onto a broad flagstone veranda on a level with the floor above. A sweeping stone stair led down from the veranda to the where she stood. t ran the length of the mansion. Beyond the veranda, lay a sward of overgrown lawn, scattered with topiaries of animal shapes now so ill-kempt they were unrecognizable. That one might be a lion, or a panda? In the middle of the veranda, below great bay windows stood a marble fountain empty of water, choked by moss and lichen. Beyond the lawn, a line of dark trees, naked of leaves, clawed at the iron-gray sky. Nestled among the trees was a wrought-iron gate.

It would be hard to spot footprints on flagstones, so she followed the edge of lawn, which she found to be just as soft as the earth along the side of the house. The stately windows were so grimy she could see only dim shapes within. A tingle up the back of her neck made her feel like she was being watched, but she saw no human figures in the windows above.

A thorough scan around the perimeter of the house revealed no footprints. “Don’t these people ever go outside?” she said to herself.

The opposite end of the mansion was shaped like a smaller wing, with two-story high roof rather than three-story one, but on the corners two sharply spired turrets stretched back up to three stories. All the windows of this wing were completely blacked out, as if painted on the inside, which of course tweaked her curiosity greatly.

She found no more footsteps around the house, however, only the one set leading toward the house, so she returned to that trail and followed where it came from. The intruder’s trail led to the precipice of the cliff, which dropped away to dark, churning surf forty feet below. From here she could see that the tide was coming in. The walkway back to the mainland was almost inundated. But where did the trail of footprints go?

Then she spotted a path that was part natural shelf, part carved from the natural stone, snaking down the cliff face away from the mainland. As she followed it down, it narrowed to less than three feet, slick with surf, making her hug the cliff face.

If this were a horror movie, she mused, this would be the perfect place for something to happen to her. She’d broken one of the cardinal rules: never go off alone. But the game wouldn’t take her as a casualty so early in the story…would it?

The path landed on a small patch of sandy beach with a vegetation-topped dune. The beach led farther around the base of the island toward…a sea cave?

And then she saw it, situated there among the dune’s low-growing vegetation..

Her vision went red and blurry and began to swim. Her heartbeat filled her ears. The effect made her instantly dizzy.

You have failed a Stability check! Frightening experiences can shake your mental and emotional well-being, and the effects are cumulative. Failing Stability checks can affect what you perceive, as well as your available actions.

Her vision cleared and steadied and she approached the thing on the beach.

Two-foot rib bones thrusting up from a tangled mass of entrails and dried blood. Too big for a human. A half-eaten mass of meat and brownish hide and exposed bone. And it was moving.

No, it wasn’t the carcass moving. It was the things eating it.

Crabs. Little pincers snipping and tearing and devouring. Unblinking alien eyestalks seeking the next juicy morsel.

The carcass of a horse.

A saddle lying among the twisted flesh.

The footprints in the soft sand led straight to the horse.

Ellie’s heart hammered for real.

This was the thief’s getaway horse.

She stood over the animal’s half-devoured carcass, clenching her teeth, and tried to convince herself this wasn’t real. But she could smell the punctured entrails and the congealed blood.

“I got to hand it to you, GM,” she said shakily. “This is incredible.”

Galadriel gave no response.

Ellie used the tip of her cane to poke through the remains, careful not to disturb any of the crabs, the largest of which were the size of dinner plates, ranging down to the size of her palm. Could something here identify the thief? Something on the saddle maybe?

She grabbed a brass ring and pulled it away from the carcass, but in so doing, the horse’s rear leg came away, revealing itself to be hollowed out, covering a seething pocket of….

Worms.

The same hideous purplish monstrosities she had seen before, squirming in the hollow of the horse’s abdomen. They weren’t eating just the horse, but the crabs, too, chewing through chitinous carapace with nasty little tooth mouths. The crabs that were so assailed squirmed and fought and struggled, but the worms held them immobilized on their backs or had chewed off their legs and pincers. Pincers that remained waved and stretched, sought something to attack.

“GM, can you identify these worms?” Ellie asked. “Do not tell me you don’t know they’re there.”

There was a pause before Galadriel answered. “A number of marine worms are indigenous to the Newfoundland coast, but none of them are visible to your character.”

“These worms eating these crabs right here!”

“I apologize, but I do not know what you mean. Are you feeling all right? Your vital signs are elevated—”

“Don’t give me that! Is lying to me part of the game?”

The GM did not respond, and Ellie found herself getting seriously frustrated. Then she realized she hadn’t taken another hit to her Stability.

“GM, did I just make a Stability check?” she asked, dragging the saddle a couple of yards away to examine it.

“You failed a Stability check when you saw the horse.”

“But succeeded when I saw the worms?”

“There are no worms visible to your character.” Galadriel’s voice was neutral, unflappable.

Ellie frowned and gritted her teeth. “Then you need to have a talk with your tech people.”

“I will submit an alert.”

Ellie rolled her eyes. No matter how smart and human-like an A.I. seemed to be, they were still just running programs. She examined the shadow thoroughly, looking for anything that might identify the owner, but found nothing. As she searched, however, she felt eyes on her again. She looked up and scanned the cliff face, the trees on the edge, but saw nothing. She looked around the rocks, out to sea, but saw nothing.

The tide surged higher, splashing close, splashing over the lower section of her route back to the top. Time to go. She wiped the sand from her hands—then chuckled, a little uncertainly. It really did feel like sand.

She hurried to the stone steps.