3/3 - Colorado
Played: December 19, 2020.
Saturday, May 26, 1973. Mitch and Marshall have assembled their Houdini Seance Midnight Crew:
Our Heroes
Dr. J.B. Rhine, founder, Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man
Dr. Louisa Rhine, botanist and parapsychology researcher
Sydney Omarr, Astrologer to the Stars
Eugene "Dr. HipPocrates" Schoenfeld, advice columnist and counterculture expert
Tina Allen, a radio admin (and friend of Dr. Hip's)
Anna Turner, a Bay Area radio producer
Douglas Scott Rogo, a symphony musician from San Diego interested in the paranormal
Richard Jay Potash, bartender, card sharp, amateur magician and historian of magic
The musical performance wraps up with an all-star jam. When the theater finally empties out, the midnight crew get up on stage and climb down through the trap door (Mitch helping the Rhines). Marshall’s bodyguard is present, but not part of the circle. He stays in the theater, standing guard.
Ten people under the stage is an extremely tight fit. Dr. Hip and his date are snickering a little. Scott Rogo is wide-eyed, ready to believe. Ricky Jay recognizes the paraphernalia from the Chinese Water Trick Mitch and Marshall have assembled. “Was all this stuff down here all this time?” he asks.
Marshall has told each participant what they would most want to hear about the purpose of the séance. Some are cynics, some are crackpots, some are old friends of Houdini’s, but now he needs to get ten minds all focused on the same thing. He and Mitch have cooked up a mantra that includes pass phrases and code words a proto-SANDMAN agent like Houdini would have recognized in 1926. Marshall leads the group in chanting the mantra, over and over, effectively hypnotizing them. As the group unites in purpose, Mitch focuses on the History B pinhole, and hear’s Houdini’s voice: “Is that Joe … and Louisa?”
Louisa says, “Erich! Is that you?” She can hear Houdini too. “Louisa, it is me,” he says.
It’s getting noticeably warmer under the stage, not just because of the press of bodies. Ricky Jay is the first to start visibly sweating, then Dr. Hip. “That’s not me,” Mitch says. He detects a strong History B presence on the stage above their heads. Is the kusarikku up there? The trap door slams shut.
Marshall keeps the group focused, maintaining the chant. Mitch tells Houdini, “We don’t have a lot of time. Tell us how we can help you, what you need us to do.”
Houdini asks, “Louisa, how do you remember me dying?”
Louisa says, “You were in Detroit. You were challenged by a professional hockey player, to take a punch in the stomach.” But Mitch and Marshall heard that it was a college student, and that it happened in Montreal. Ricky Jay says, “No, Houdini died in Boston. He was performing his suffocation trick.”
It seems Houdini wants the group to realize that whatever they believe about his death is false. Marshall asks everyone in turn: “How did Harry Houdini die?” Some don’t know. Others have similar, but different, stories: he was punched in the stomach, he was kicked by a horse, he was hit with a bowling ball. Even J.B. and Louisa realize their memories are different.
As the group recounts a half dozen different stories about Houdini’s death, the pinhole to History B grows in size. Mitch says, “Seriously, Houdini, this is an ‘every second counts’ situation. Fill us in.” (Jeff: “Hopefully we’re not the instrument by which Houdini destroys the world. But still, what an honor.”)
Mitch senses the pucker in reality turning inside out. The room shimmers for a moment. Then everyone hears a loud click. Scott Rogo reaches into his bag and pulls out one of those new-fangled tape recorders. He’s been recording this whole time; the tape just clicked off, full. (Brant: “Refresh my memory on who this guy is. How many people will miss him if he disappears?” Mike: “Well, the entire San Diego Symphony Orchestra.”)
But something has happened. Houdini’s voice is gone. The temperature in the crawl space drops back down to a perfect 68 degrees. Mitch feels pretty sure that they’ve been transported somewhere, that whatever is above their heads is not what was above their heads a moment ago. He tries to detect History B, but it’s like a geiger counter in a uranium mine. All there is is History B.
Marshall commands the group, already half hypnotized, to sleep. Mitch opens the trap door. It’s dark up there. The theater lights, and Dave, are gone. Mitch and Marshall’s flashlights aren’t working, but Marshall has a cigarette lighter. Mitch doesn’t normally carry a lighter, but he can steal one from the sleeping group. Marshall grabs Rogo’s tape recorder, too.
Mitch and Marshall climb up through the trap door and flick their lighters. They’re still on a stage, still seem to be in a large dark room the same shape and size as the Stanley’s theater. But the decor is different. There are stone sphinxes on either side of the stage.
They hear a slow clap. There are people in the back of the theater. One by one, they begin, weakly, to applaud. Mitch tries to read their auras, but struggles. Their auras are very dim, missing something, as if they were very sick, had suffered a ‘soul death’ or some other great loss.
Mitch waves at the people, says hello in English. An older man says, “Welcome. Are you feeling better?” Mitch says, “Can we turn on the lights?” The house lights come on, only they are weird oblong crystals where electric bulbs used to be. Mitch and Marshall are in a theater, but the decor is Babylonian, Mesopotamian, strange. At the back of the theater is a group of eleven people, wearing white gowns or shifts. They have old-fashioned hairstyles, like from the 1910s. They seem weak, dazed, like “thanatoid zombies.” Many of their gowns are spattered with blood. “If you’re not feeling better yet,” says the old man, “you will be very soon.”
Mitch says, “Is Erich here? Harry?” They don’t know anybody by that name. Marshall says, “Where are we?” They say, “This is the Sanctuary. This is where our masters help us get better.” Marshall asks, “Who are your masters?” They don’t like this question. Everyone gets confused and upset. Mitch tries to smooth things over: “This is Dr. Redgrave. He’s an, uh, auditor. He’s here to audit!” But the eleven people immediately stop talking and file out of the theater.
Mitch and Marshall try to find the pinhole: it’s gone. They try to contact Houdini: nothing.
Marshall: “All I can think of is going back in the crawl space and hiding.”
Mitch: “We can’t live in the crawl space. But all I can think of is exploring this History B leper colony, which also seems like a bad idea.”
Mitch’s plan prevails. They leave their eight sleeping companions under the stage and exit the theater. The building they’re in seems to match the Stanley Hotel. There are equivalent spaces to the theater, the lobby, the bar. But everything is pressed bronze, crystals, ornate carvings. Through strange, quartz-glass windows, they see the topiary garden, which looks unchanged, except it is lit by burning torches. And in the torchlight is the kusarikku. It too looks confused.
Mitch and Marshall venture out into the garden. The kusarikku is immediately upon them. “What did you do?” he asks. They counter: “What did you do?”
“I pursued my quarry,” says the kusarikku. “Where is he?”
Marshall says, “Do we look like we know? Isn’t this what you wanted? We’re in your fucked up world.”
Mitch says, “Maybe Houdini gave you the slip and shoved us all over here.”
“There is no ‘over here’,” says the kusarikku. “This sanctuary has replaced your hotel. That is agreeable, but I have not fulfilled my function.” The kusarikku is a simple beast; all he cares about is finding Houdini and killing him for good.
Mitch and Marshall confer in Danbe. Marshall says, “I think Houdini fucked us.” Mitch says, “I think Houdini fucked us.” Marshall says, “If those eight people, all remembering Houdini’s death differently, triggered a local ontological event, sending us to History B… if we could get them all to remember his death one specific way, could we reset it?” This might work, but reverberations will be left behind; the story and the place will require prolonged memetic reinforcement.
The kusarikku doesn’t like them speaking a language he can’t understand. It paws the ground, growing angrier. A large crowd of people, more gown-clad “patients”, have seen the kusarikku and are coming out of the hotel.
Marshall tells the kusarikku: “O great lord, we think we know how to get back to Houdini. We think he tricked all of us into enacting something that caused this to happen.”
The kusarikku snorts: “I am not surprised.”
Marshall says, “We need to reenact the rites we performed. But we need to get past all these people first.”
The kusarikku says: “Are you sure your fellow sub-creatures have the power of belief to accomplish that?”
Marshall says, “Yes. We do.” with the serene confidence of somebody who owns a million-dollar property in Northern California.
“They will make way for me,” says the kusarikku, and indeed the people are falling on their knees, making signs of obeisance to the monster. But as the bull-man gets closer, he sniffs the air, then sniffs Marshall. “My quarry is on you somewhere.”
The kusarikku commands Marshall to strip off his clothes, discard every object he is carrying.
Mitch, in Danbe: “Houdini is hiding in the tape recorder.”
The kusarikku: “Stop speaking that language!”
Marshall, in Danbe: “We need to run.”
Mitch and Marshall make a break for it, running for the theater, the stage, and the trap door. The kusarikku is incredibly fast; they need to dodge through the crowd of patients, using them as cover. The kusarikku simply tramples the patients in its way; goring one, tossing another into the air.
Mitch makes it to the stage and down the trap door. Marshall is only a second behind. As he dives through the trap door head first, the kusarikku slams into him, goring his leg with its horn. Marshall clatters down into the crawl space, badly wounded. Mitch slams the trap door shut, grabs a wooden plank to wedge it closed. The kusarikku pounds on the door, enraged.
Splinters fly. The plank won’t hold for long. Marshall is unconscious.
Jeff spends two uses of Serendipity to find “a Potion of Healing, or the History B equivalent.” The plank Mitch grabbed to bar the door is from a crate; the crate is half full of small blue bottles. On the bottles are labels that look like old-timey patent medicine. The text is in cuneiform, but every label bears the picture of an elderly Mitch’s face.
Mitch fails a fright check, and suffers a sudden certainty that his doppelgänger placed these bottles here for him to find, that most everything he perceives as “serendipity” is really the machinations of his double, pulling Mitch’s strings for years.
Still, Mitch pours the patent medicine down Marshall’s throat. The gaping wound on Marshall’s leg knits itself back together with magical speed. Marshall comes to.
The kusarikku is still pounding on the door above. The plank is splintering. Marshall does a bump of coke to focus, then wakes the sleeping crew, implanting the hypnotic suggestion in each of them that Houdini died in Montreal from a punch to the stomach. (His roll succeeds by 13. “That was the cocaine.”)
There is another shimmer in the air. The pounding on the door stops. The group has returned to the Stanley Hotel, or, the Stanley Hotel has returned to History A.
The group awakens from their trance. Everyone is disoriented, confused. Rogo can’t find his tape recorder. The hotel is dark; it’s 3 am again, though only fifteen or twenty minutes have passed on everyone’s watches. They wander back to their rooms.
Walking through the dark hotel, Mitch can sense the wan, ghostly presence of the Sanctuary’s patients. The temblor is repaired but the border between realities is thinner now; the entire hotel is suffused with History B energy. The Stanley Hotel is now haunted and, through retrocreation, it has been haunted since at least the 1920s. There are now decades of ghost stories and legends about the hotel. (“The Shining is now your fault.”)
Marshall and Mitch go back to Marshall’s suite. Marshall takes out Rogo’s tape recorder, rewinds the tape and presses play. All he hears is a loud, needly, grindy sound. He stops the tape, not wanting to damage it. Mitch says, “Maybe Charley can make some sense of it.”
Out of immediate danger, Marshall starts thinking about how to spin all this. “The way I see it, there are two options,” he says. “Either we report all this to Granite Peak and suffer the consequences, or we cover this all up completely, and never speak of it to anyone again.”
Mitch says, “I don’t like either of those two options.” He says it’s irresponsible to keep it secret. The hotel is now an ink spot on the map. It will have to be monitored, the weak spot in reality protected. Marshall says, “But it’s going to be our heads! We broke every protocol, we created an esmological event!”
Marshall does yet another bump of cocaine to help himself think—cocaine that’s been to History B, the GM points out. “Maybe,” he says, “maybe we didn’t fuck things up. Maybe we made things better. Maybe, before we got to the hotel, it was in an even worse situation.”
Mitch says, without conviction: “That could be the truth.”
Marshall has enough conviction for both of them. “That is the truth! There was a fucking kusarikku at a party! And he’s gone now! That’s a good thing, right? I’m telling you, we did History A a favor.”
Mitch: “Well, things could have gone worse than they did. I suppose we deserve credit for whatever differential is there.”
Marshall: “No, no! We made things better. We’re heroes, really.” He’s convinced himself now. “And as long as I have buy-in from you, that is how I am going to spin it in my report.”
Mitch consults his tarot cards on the advisability of Marshall’s revised options: 1. Cover up the whole thing; 2. Report it, but put as positive a spin as possible on it. For option 1, Mitch draws the Hierophant. For option 2, he draws the Two of Cups reversed. Mitch’s clear sense is that the cards are saying it would be better not to tell anyone. But he doesn’t feel right about that. He defies the cards, telling Marshall to do another line of cocaine and make the report as positive as he can.
Marshall gives him a high five: “My man!”