Death House

Where

Nowhere, any more. It stood alone in the mist at the top of a staircase that had no business existing. When we stepped off its grounds, the mists closed behind us and the house was simply gone.

Explored

Sessions 1 to 3, attic to altar, against a clock.

Status

Its evil is ended. A greater evil, the dead warned us, is still here.

How we got there

Five of us, on a warm summer evening, in four towns up and down the Sword Coast, each on some small errand. Cold mist rolled in, and each of our heirlooms came alive and pulled: Fëanor's stone rolled away from him, Lily's tooth tugged like a magnet, Osric's banner streamed out of his pack, Drew's amber held the only steady direction her compass had left, Sirius's feather floated off down an empty street. Each of us ended up at the foot of the same flight of stairs.

Sirius and Fëanor tried to walk home through the mist, hand in hand. Cobbles, then grass, then bog, for what felt like hours. They came out exactly where they started, and for the rest of us only seconds had passed. So we went up.

What it was

A thin, four-storey townhouse on spacious grounds behind a wrought-iron gate, with a stone cherub on the lawn and a wall of mist all round. The door opened by itself. Once all five of us were inside it slammed, the fire went out, candles lit themselves, and a verse appeared on the wall in dripping red: a beast beneath the house that wakes at the midnight chime, and a gift to bring to "his secret room." The grandfather clock struck six. We had until midnight.

The house lied. The feast rotted when we touched it; the crystal crumbled, the silver tarnished to dust, the painting fell apart in Fëanor's hands, and the wine was vinegar (Sirius checked, by drinking it). The dining-room panelling hid carved wolves and twisted faces. The study's bookshelf opened when Lily pulled The Opening of this Door, by Paul Mybook, and the secret room behind it was full of impressive fake books about the Priests of Osybus.

The house also armed us. A shield painted with a golden windmill, which Sirius still carries, and a sword with a windmill on the hilt, which went to Fëanor. A cabinet of crossbows with sixty bolts, ten of them silvered. Warm cloaks in adult and child sizes. Armour we beat into scale mail on the landing. Spell scrolls, and a letter, in a chest that had already killed the last person to open it. It is hard not to think it wanted us strong enough to reach the bottom.

What we found

• The family. A portrait on the landing named Mr Gustav and Mrs Elizabeth Durst and their two children, Thornboldt and Rosavalda, but three children were painted: a baby in the father's arms, whom the mother regarded with thinly veiled scorn. See The Durst Household.
• Lancelot, a thin hound starving under the harpsichord, who told Lily he had seen a tall figure he could see straight through. We took him home to Mary in the village.
• The ghost maid, who stepped out of a mirror, didn't know she was dead, and loved the baby.
• Rose & Thorn, in the locked attic, with a dollhouse that mapped every secret passage in the house. Their mother had run a cult and locked them up, and they starved. The baby was taken below for "innocence and sacrifice." They asked us to bury their bones, and Drew promised.
• The letter, on the devil's own stationery, to the lady of the house: "My most pathetic servant." It ends "In darkness, I endure." See The Letter from Death House.
• Below the house, through tunnels that looked as if they'd been dug with spoons: cult quarters, a well (Fëanor threw the cult's logbook of "unsuccessful" experiments down it), empty family crypts, the father hanged above his bed, and the mother, grown into something with a black heart, bursting out of the wall to call us "Mistwalkers". Fëanor put a fire bolt through her heart.
• A painted statue of a gaunt, pale man in a hidden shrine, one hand on a wolf, the other holding a smoky crystal orb, which Fëanor lifted with a spectral hand. The next day, in the village, we saw the same face on the coins.
• Thirteen alcoves of relics, while the cult's chant rose around us: "He is ancient. He is the land." Whatever the relics were for, Fëanor could tell it was already done. Among them were a white feather and a lump of amber resin. Two of us carry a feather and a piece of amber. We noticed that later.
• The altar, over knee-deep black water, with a knife laid ready and a bundle of very small bones. On a gallery above, thirteen robed apparitions with no faces chanted "One must die. Only one." Lancelot was standing right there.

The end of it

We would not pay. Sirius struck the altar instead, just as the clock reached midnight, and the thing the cult had been making rose out of the filth: a mound of corpses with a glittering crystal heart. Fëanor spotted the heart. Osric rolled two natural twenties and shattered it with the second. The mound screamed, the apparitions screamed and vanished, and something that had been building all evening simply lifted.

The mist in front of the house parted. We rested on the steps, walked off the grounds, and the house was gone. We buried Rose, Thorn and the maid beside the road, a polite distance apart. Their ghosts came to say goodbye: "You have defeated a great evil, although a greater evil still stays here. May the Morninglord protect you, and may you stay out of the sight of the devil, Strahd."

That was the first time we heard the name spoken.

Open questions

• What was the ritual for, and what did it finish?
• Why were a feather and a lump of amber among the relics?
• What is in the yellow spellbook none of us has read, and what is the orb from the shrine for?