DEAD OF WINTER AT ASHMORE COURT
Summary
In Devon, the winter has come early and brought more than usual…
Chapter 1
DEAD OF WINTER AT ASHMORE COURT
A scenario for Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition — 2 to 5 Investigators — One Session
“The trouble with real ghosts is that they don’t know they’re in a mystery novel.”
— Lady Constance Ashmore, Ashmore Court, December 1938
Keeper’s Introduction
It is December 1938. The Munich Agreement is three months old, Germany has occupied the Sudetenland, and Mr. Chamberlain’s piece of paper is already feeling like a different kind of document than it did in September. The newspapers still debate it, but the debate has a quality — a specific quality that anyone paying attention will recognise — of people arguing about something that has already been decided.
In Devon, the winter has come early and brought more than usual.
The branch line from Exeter to Devonport runs through old country: market towns, agricultural villages, the moorland rising between them. Tonight, the 7:15 has developed a hot box on the rear axle somewhere between Crewthorpe and Ashmore Crossing. The guard has walked to the single-platform halt and confirmed: no telephone, no facilities, breakdown crew dispatched from Exeter, arrival in three to four hours depending on conditions. The conditions are a storm. The investigators are among the passengers.
Visible through the dark and the horizontal rain from the Ashmore Crossing halt, a quarter mile across a field: the lights of Ashmore Court — a substantial Georgian country house, residence of Lady Constance Ashmore, author of fourteen mystery novels translated into twenty-one languages. The guard has taken it upon himself to request shelter. Lady Constance has said yes — immediately, and with what the guard will later describe as “a good deal more enthusiasm than the situation strictly warranted.”
:::callout What Has Already Happened
Dr. Farouk Ali, celebrity mystic and Lady Constance’s research consultant, completed a summoning ceremony at approximately 9 p.m. tonight. The Winter Horseman — a genius loci of the Ashmore valley, a local spirit of the dead season — arrived. It arrived fully, rather than in the diminished form Ali’s incorrectly rendered invocation was designed to produce. Ali’s ward held, but it sealed the drawing room from both directions. Three people are now trapped inside with the Horseman: Lord Gideon Fell-Ashmore (Constance’s husband), the Reverend Patricia March (Constance’s oldest friend), and Flavia Brent (Constance’s niece). Ali has barricaded himself in the study. The telephone line came down at nine. The storm is getting worse. The ward will hold until dawn — or so Ali says. He is being optimistic.
:::
This is a scenario about a winter night in 1938 in a country house in Devon where something local and ancient has been called into the wrong context and needs to be helped back to its right one. It is not a scenario about the Outer Gods. It is a scenario about a piece of the landscape that has been given too small a room, and the six hours between that happening and the train being repaired.
The Hook — The Stranded Train
The investigators are passengers on the 7:15 from Exeter to Devonport. They do not know each other or, if they do, they are travelling together for reasons of their own. The Keeper should establish briefly, before the train stops, why each investigator is on this train tonight. The reason does not need to be sinister. The sinister part comes later.
The train stops. The guard appears. The rain is remarkable. The quarter-mile walk to the house across a field, in December, at night, in this weather, is not comfortable. The lights of Ashmore Court are very welcome.
The Cast
Lady Constance Ashmore — Author, 52
:::stats Lady Constance Ashmore, 52
STR 40 CON 50 SIZ 50 DEX 55 INT 90
APP 65 POW 65 EDU 95 SAN 60 HP 10
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 13 Luck: 60
Skills: History 75%, Library Use 95%, Occult 65%, Persuade 75%, Psychology 80%, Spot Hidden 70%
:::
In person, not quite what her readers expect from the publicity photographs: the photographs show composed literary authority, and Constance is composed and authoritative, but there is also a quality of barely-contained energy, of ideas arriving faster than politeness can process them. Tonight she has the expression of a woman who has created a magnificent narrative situation and is slightly horrified to find herself inside it rather than writing it.
She is brilliant and she is genuinely sorry and she is, underneath both of those things, quite excited. The Winter Horseman is in her drawing room. Whatever else is true, this is extraordinary, and a part of her that the novelist will never quite subdue is already taking notes.
She is the investigators’ most effective practical ally — the only person in the house who has read everything Ali has read, followed his methodology closely enough to understand his mistakes, and has unrestricted access to the library. She is also occasionally infuriating, because she keeps stopping to write things in her notebook.
She knows the solution. She is embarrassed by how straightforward it is after a week of watching Ali’s elaborate ceremonial preparations: the old form from the 1743 Folklore Collection, the bread and salt, the front door, the hearth. The traditional tools. She has been standing next to a celebrity mystic for a week and has absorbed his aesthetics.
:::callout Constance’s Tell
She writes in her notebook at approximately eight-minute intervals regardless of circumstances. During a crisis she writes faster. She has never been observed not writing during a crisis. Her notes for tonight will form the basis of her fifteenth novel, The Horseman in December, published in 1941 and dedicated “To the passengers of the 7:15 from Exeter, with grateful thanks.”
:::
Dr. Farouk Ali (Frank Allen) — Celebrity Mystic, 47
:::stats Dr. Farouk Ali, 47
STR 50 CON 55 SIZ 55 DEX 60 INT 80
APP 70 POW 70 EDU 75 SAN 40 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 14 Luck: 35
Skills: Charm 75%, Fast Talk 80%, Library Use 65%, Occult 80%, Persuade 65%, Psychology 60%, Spot Hidden 55%
Spells: Contact Spirit (8 MP, requires preparation he no longer has materials for), Ward (already placed on the drawing room, cannot be recreated), Compel Spirit (10 MP; requires the entity’s true name, which he has in the wrong form)
:::
Born in Birmingham. Real name Frank Allen. His persona — cultivated across fifteen years of West End salons, private séances, and two bestselling books on Eastern mysticism — is sufficiently convincing that only determined research will puncture it. He is, beneath the persona, a genuine practitioner of something, and the something is real enough that fifteen years of impunity have made him precisely as arrogant as a man who has done inexplicable things without consequences tends to become.
He is in the study with the door barricaded and a glass of brandy, wearing the expression of a man whose experiment worked and went immediately and catastrophically sideways. He has been in here for three hours telling himself the ward will hold. He is less certain with each repetition.
:::callout Ali’s Error and His Confession
The Horseman’s true name-form is in the valley dialect, recorded in the 1743 Folklore Collection. Ali found a Latinised form in a secondary text and used it. The Horseman came, but not in the diminished, tractable form the Latinised invocation was designed to produce. The full Horseman arrived instead.
He will not admit this voluntarily. He will admit it under pressure — presented with the 1743 Collection and the discrepancy — or when the ward cracks. Once confessing, he is cooperative: he can modify the ward to create an exit without dissolving it, which requires only a prepared phrase spoken from the study. He will do this. He needs persuading that this is better than waiting for dawn, which his own private estimate now puts two hours past when the ward will actually hold.
:::
Lord Gideon Fell-Ashmore — Retired Diplomat, 74 (Trapped)
:::stats Lord Gideon Fell-Ashmore, 74
STR 45 CON 50 SIZ 60 DEX 35 INT 75
APP 60 POW 65 EDU 90 SAN 65 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 5 MP: 13 Luck: 45
:::
Came in at half past eight to ask about dinner, found Ali in mid-ceremony, said “what the devil is all this,” and has been in the sealed drawing room ever since. He has the specific fortitude of someone who sat through four diplomatic postings’ worth of genuinely dangerous situations and considers his primary responsibility in any difficulty to be neither a hindrance nor a source of additional anxiety. He is managing this responsibility with some success. He brought a book. He is reading it.
He will communicate through the drawing room door with calm precision and share, in organised paragraphs, three hours of careful observation of the Winter Horseman. He does not need to be calmed. He needs to be listened to.
:::callout What Lord Fell-Ashmore Has Observed
The Horseman does not disturb objects — he passes through the room like wind through open country, where there are no objects to displace. He is most agitated near the windows. He has touched the glass three times; each time frost formed from inside. He has not touched any of the trapped people, though he approached Lord Fell-Ashmore once and looked at him for thirty seconds with what his Lordship describes as “considerable interest and not inconsiderable contempt.” He is not attacking anyone. He is, in Lord Fell-Ashmore’s assessment, deeply inconvenienced.
:::
The Reverend Patricia March — Deaconess, 51 (Trapped)
:::stats Reverend Patricia March, 51
STR 45 CON 55 SIZ 50 DEX 50 INT 75
APP 55 POW 75 EDU 80 SAN 55 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 15 Luck: 50
Skills: First Aid 65%, History 65%, Library Use 60%, Occult 45%, Persuade 60%, Psychology 65%, Read Latin 55%, Theology 80%
:::
Ordained in 1919 — one of the first women in the Church of England to be so, which is not quite the same thing as a priest, a distinction she has spent nineteen years being extremely clear about and extremely clear about how she feels about. She came to Ashmore Court for a quiet week and has found it anything but. She has been trying to pray for three hours. The Winter Horseman, who predates Christianity by several thousand years and is quite clear about this, finds her prayers unimpressive. She has not stopped praying.
She has excellent theological knowledge of the psychopomp tradition. She knows, systematically, what the Winter Horseman is: a driver of the season, a keeper of boundaries between the living world and the dead one. She knows he is not interested in them except insofar as they are in his way. She knows that being in a room with him is wrong for him, that the wrongness is the danger, and that releasing him is the solution. She cannot implement this from inside the room.
Flavia Brent — Niece, 23 (Trapped)
:::stats Flavia Brent, 23
STR 40 CON 55 SIZ 50 DEX 70 INT 65
APP 75 POW 65 EDU 55 SAN 70 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: -1 Move: 8 MP: 13 Luck: 75
Skills: Art (Photography) 55%, Charm 70%, Fast Talk 60%, Listen 60%, Spot Hidden 65%
:::
Arrived for Christmas from London, where she works for a picture agency and goes to parties. She has been deeply bored since arriving, because Ashmore Court in winter is not her natural habitat, and the summoning of the Winter Horseman has been, from her perspective, the most interesting thing to happen this week.
She has been talking to the Horseman. Not in language — he doesn’t use language — but in the exchange of temperature signals and frost patterns that Flavia has been interpreting with the confidence of someone who hasn’t read enough about him to know it’s impossible. She is, in fact, not entirely wrong.
:::callout What Flavia Has Understood
The Horseman has communicated, through temperature and the quality of frost forming on the window glass, that he wants to leave, that he is not interested in any of them, that the window and what is beyond it are all he cares about, and that the thing preventing him from reaching it is the source of everything wrong tonight. Flavia has been translating this for Lord Fell-Ashmore and the Reverend March with the combined accuracy of genuine sensitivity and confident guesswork. The genuine sensitivity is real. She doesn’t know which parts are which.
:::
The Fellow Passengers
These four arrived with the investigators from the stranded train.
:::stats Henderson Caul, Civil Servant, 58
STR 45 CON 50 SIZ 55 DEX 45 INT 65
APP 50 POW 45 EDU 75 SAN 60 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 9 Luck: 40
:::
From the Ministry of something, vague about which. Travelling to Devonport on departmental business with a briefcase he has not let go of since boarding. Under the pressure of the night, he will become convinced that the Winter Horseman is a German operation of some kind, and will need to be managed away from this interpretation before he does something counterproductive with it. He is not stupid. He is a man whose professional framework provides a German explanation for everything unusual in 1938, and it is December 1938, and his framework is not entirely unreasonable.
:::stats Miss Wren Soames, Schoolteacher (Mathematics), 34
STR 40 CON 55 SIZ 45 DEX 60 INT 80
APP 55 POW 60 EDU 80 SAN 70 HP 10
DB: 0 Build: -1 Move: 7 MP: 12 Luck: 55
Skills: Accounting 55%, Library Use 60%, Mathematics 80%, Psychology 55%, Spot Hidden 60%
:::
Going to Devonport to visit her sister for Christmas. Efficient, practical, not easily rattled. She will immediately attempt to be useful and will, once the nature of the problem is established, be useful in ways that are not obvious. She treats problems as problems: things with solutions, approached systematically. She was reading Keynes on the train. She is the one who finds the 1743 Folklore Collection before anyone else asks her to look.
:::stats Captain Henry Roach (Ret.), 61
STR 70 CON 65 SIZ 65 DEX 55 INT 55
APP 50 POW 55 EDU 55 SAN 65 HP 14
DB: +1D4 Build: 1 Move: 7 MP: 11 Luck: 50
Weapon: Webley Mk VI revolver (4D6), in his luggage.
:::
Retired Army, going to Devonport to help his son move into new naval accommodations. He will, at some point between midnight and 3 a.m., decide to deal with the situation by shooting it. The bullet will travel through the Winter Horseman without effect and into the drawing room wall. The Horseman’s attention will fix on the Captain for fifteen seconds, during which the temperature around him will drop to something below comfortable. Then the Horseman will lose interest. The Captain will sit down and will not fire again.
:::stats Mrs. Dorothea Quarr, Widow, 69
STR 35 CON 50 SIZ 50 DEX 35 INT 70
APP 65 POW 70 EDU 70 SAN 75 HP 11
:::
Going to Devonport for Christmas. Not frightened — inconvenienced. At one point, chosen by the Keeper at the moment of most potential panic, she will stand up and say: “I think it would be best if everyone had a cup of tea and sat down and allowed the young people to get on with it.” The room will calm. This is useful. It will work because it is said in the voice of a woman who once sorted out a seating crisis between an Archduke and two Foreign Ministers by sheer force of behaving as though the correct thing was already happening.
The Staff
Mrs. Peel, Housekeeper, 58. Has worked at Ashmore Court for twenty-four years and is managing tonight’s situation with the resigned professionalism of a woman who has managed Lady Constance’s research phases before, though not at this intensity. She is making tea. She will continue making tea throughout the evening as a form of psychological maintenance. She also knows the old household protocols — the doorstep bread and salt, the shuttered windows in winter — because her grandmother told her and her grandmother knew what they were for. When shown the schoolmaster’s phonetic guide to the dismissal form, she will read it and her voice will settle into something older than herself. “My nan used to say something like this. At the door. At Christmas.”
James, Footman, 22. Frightened and trying not to show it and showing it. Useful for fetching things. Not useful for thinking about things. Do not send him to investigate the drawing room alone.
The House — Ashmore Court
Early Georgian, 1734, built on the site of an older structure whose foundations survive in the cellar. Not enormous by country house standards but comfortable and book-filled — every room has shelves, the collection assembled over four generations of heterogeneous taste. In the storm and the dark it is warm and lit and almost comforting, until the investigators establish what is in the drawing room.
The Entrance Hall
Where investigators arrive: large, with the staircase on the right, the drawing room door at the far end, and a corridor left to the library, the study, and the kitchen. The drawing room door looks ordinary.
:::callout What Is Wrong With the Drawing Room Door
A successful Spot Hidden: the temperature is measurably lower near it. And there is a smell — not unpleasant but specific — of cold air and wet earth, as though the door leads outside rather than to a room. Frost has formed on the lower panel of the door from inside. The frost is in patterns. The patterns are not random. They are a landscape — fields, a hillside, boundary stones on a ridge — drawn by something that cannot reach the window.
:::
SAN Loss on understanding what is in the room: 0/1.
The Library
Three walls of shelves, a central table, a northeast corner devoted to local history. The 1743 Folklore Collection is here — a quarto volume in brown leather with a handwritten spine label reading Traditions of the Ashmore Valley, collected by J. Birkett, schoolmaster, 1743. It is not rare or obvious. Miss Soames will find it before anyone asks her to look.
:::callout The 1743 Folklore Collection — Key Passages
The relevant section: “On the Winter Rider, called in the old tongue the Horseman of the Boundary, who runs the parish in the dead season and drives what should not linger before him.” A description of the figure — short of stature, black of hair, small dark horns, face ageless and exterior to human categories — and of the traditional dismissal practice: bread and salt on the doorstep, the hearth kept lit, the form of words spoken at the threshold.
The form of words, in the schoolmaster’s hand: “I have set this down as Margery Witch of Crewthorpe spoke it in 1739, she being then above eighty years of age. She would not write it herself but permitted me to do so, and I have recorded her pronunciation below as faithfully as I may.”
The phonetic guide follows. It is close to the valley dialect. Mrs. Peel will complete it.
SAN Loss on reading the description of the Horseman: 0/1. Cthulhu Mythos: +1D4.
:::
The Study
Where Dr. Ali has barricaded himself. His equipment: chalk circles (two of them, one smudged), censers, three texts from his personal library, notes on the desk. His notes are comprehensive and contain his error clearly visible in the margin — annotated in Lady Constance’s hand: “this doesn’t match the schoolmaster’s record.” She did not tell him. She assumed he knew.
The Drawing Room
Sealed by Ali’s ward. Communication through the door is possible. Through the gap at the bottom, investigators can see: a quality of light that is wrong — too cold, too blue — and frost spreading down the lower panel from above.
The Cellar
Old foundations: carved stone older than the 1734 building, older than anything above-ground in the house. Mrs. Peel uses it for wine and root vegetables and does not go in after dark, a preference she has never examined closely but which turns out to be the correct instinct.
In the northwest corner: an old hearth, built into what was once an exterior wall. The hearth is not empty.
:::callout What Is In the Cellar Hearth
On the hearthstone, placed there before the Georgian house was built and not disturbed since: a small wooden figure, rough-cut, approximately eight inches tall. Not quite human and not quite not. It should not be moved. It should not be disturbed. Light the fire around it.
When the fire is lit around the figure, the warmth in the cellar changes character — a quality of the inside being properly inside, of the hearth being what it is supposed to be. The figure is not warm. The fire is warm. The figure simply is.
SAN Loss on finding the figure: 0/1.
:::
The Structure of the Night
The scenario runs in real time from approximately 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. Dawn is at 7:52. The train departs at 8:05. The ward has, truthfully, four to five hours. Dawn is six hours away.
Hour One — Arrival (11 p.m.)
Investigators arrive, receive tea, and are introduced to the situation by Lady Constance. Dr. Ali emerges from the study long enough to be unhelpful and returns. First communication with the drawing room: Lord Fell-Ashmore’s report through the door, Flavia’s translation of the Horseman’s temperature signals.
:::example
The drawing room door is at the end of the entrance hall. Close to it, the cold is different — not the draught-cold of an old house but a specific cold, the cold of something that belongs outside and is not outside. Lady Constance stands beside you and says, in the voice of someone who has been composing this sentence for three hours: “There is a Winter Horseman in my drawing room. There are also three people in there with him and I need to get them out.”
She pauses. She opens her notebook. She closes it. She says: “I’m sorry. I know how that sounds.”
:::
Hour Two — Midnight
The storm outside intensifies. The Horseman makes his first hunting call: low, felt through the floor rather than heard through the air, travelling through the house from the drawing room outward and through the soles of the investigators’ feet. SAN 0/1.
The ward shows its first visible degradation: a dark line where the chalk circle under the door has cracked. The investigators understand the timetable.
:::example
Miss Soames is already in the library. She has a system — she has been going along the local history shelves from left to right, which is what she would do with any unfamiliar library. She brings the 1743 Collection to the table and opens it to the right page in the way of someone who has been looking for the right page and recognised it immediately when she found it. She says: “I think this is relevant. Will someone check whether this matches what’s in the study?”
:::
Hour Three — Ali’s Confession (1 a.m.)
Dr. Ali, confronted with the 1743 Collection and the margin note, or confronted with the physical evidence of the ward’s degradation, makes his partial confession. The name form was wrong. The Horseman arrived in full. The ward is holding by less margin than he told Lady Constance. He has a solution but cannot implement it himself — he is the summoner and the Horseman’s attention to him is too intense. If he approaches the drawing room door the ward will be stressed past its limit.
The investigators will need to speak the form. He can modify the ward — create an exit in it without dissolving it — from the study, with a prepared phrase. He will do this. He needs to be persuaded that this is better than waiting for dawn.
:::callout Persuading Ali
He needs to understand, concretely, that his estimate of the ward’s remaining time is wrong by at least two hours. Evidence: the frequency of the Horseman’s contact with the ward (Fell-Ashmore’s report), the speed of the chalk fracture, the temperature drop rate. Miss Soames has already done the arithmetic if asked. Ali, presented with the numbers, will go quiet for a moment and then will say: “I see. The entity’s pressure is higher than the secondary texts indicated.” He will then, without further persuasion, agree to the ward modification.
:::
Hour Four — The Ward Cracks (2 a.m.)
The ward’s first genuine fracture. Not a failure — a crack, a line of stress visible under the door as the chalk breaks in one section. The temperature in the entrance hall drops several degrees. From inside: the Reverend March’s voice, steady, still praying. From Lord Fell-Ashmore: “I would suggest we accelerate whatever is being planned.”
SAN 1/1D4 for investigators present as the crack appears.
The radio is on in the drawing room — Lord Fell-Ashmore turned it on at midnight for normality’s sake. The BBC has concluded its evening broadcast. Through the static: something that is not static and not the weather service. It is not quite language but has language’s structure, repeating. It is the Horseman. He is the storm and the storm is in the frequencies and he is not addressing anyone in particular but the investigators will feel addressed.
SAN 0/1 for hearing this. Someone will turn the radio off.
Captain Roach will, at approximately this point, produce his Webley and fire it at the drawing room door — not through it, at the ward, which he has decided is the source of the problem. The bullet passes through the ward without effect. The Horseman’s full attention fixes on the Captain for fifteen seconds. The temperature around him drops past comfortable. Then the Horseman loses interest. The Captain sits down. Mrs. Quarr says: “I think it would be best if everyone had a cup of tea and sat down and allowed the young people to get on with it.” Mrs. Peel already has the kettle on.
Hours Five and Six — Preparation and Release (3–7 a.m.)
Everything that is needed must be assembled before the ward is modified and the door opened.
The form: Memorised and rehearsed, or written on a card (Mrs. Peel’s suggestion). It must be spoken at the drawing room door by a person who has been in the house long enough for the house to know them — meaning at this point by any investigator who has been inside Ashmore Court for at least an hour.
The bread and salt: In Mrs. Peel’s kitchen, immediately available. James can place it on the front doorstep if given a specific task and a clear instruction and someone to come with him.
The hearth: This is the hard part. The old form requires a kept hearth — the inside marked warm before the outside is marked cold. The drawing room hearth is sealed inside the ward. The cellar hearth must be used.
:::example
The cellar stairs go down from the kitchen corridor. Two investigators, a lamp, the matches from the kitchen shelf. The foundations of the older house are visible in the lamplight — the carved stone of something that predates the Georgian building by at least a century, perhaps more. The northwest corner: the hearth. And in the hearth, on the hearthstone, sitting in the cold and the dark where it has been sitting since before anyone now alive was born: the small wooden figure.
Don’t move it. Light the fire around it.
When the fire catches, the warmth in the cellar changes character in a way that is difficult to account for and impossible to argue with — a quality of the inside being properly, completely, correctly inside. As though the house has taken a breath.
:::
SAN Loss — Finding the figure: 0/1.
The ward modification: Ali speaks the prepared phrase from the study. The ward shifts — not dissolves — and an exit appears in the sealed door. The door can now be opened. The room will not explode. The Horseman can leave.
The Release
:::example
You open the drawing room door.
The cold comes through first — not gradually but immediately, a wave of it, the cold of a December night on the open moor. The three people inside are pressed to the far wall: Lord Fell-Ashmore in his armchair, still holding his book; the Reverend March standing with her hands folded; Flavia Brent on the floor, looking at the open door with something that is unambiguously excitement.
The Horseman is at the window, where he has been for six hours, looking at what he cannot reach. When the door opens he turns.
This is the full attention of the Winter Horseman of the Ashmore Valley, and it is an enormous thing to have aimed at you. Short, dark-haired, the small horns of something only half-manifested in this context. His face is ageless in the way of old hills. His feet do not quite touch the floor.
You speak the words. The bread and salt is on the step. The cellar hearth is lit. The front door is open and the storm is coming through it.
He holds your gaze for one second. Two. Then he looks at the door.
:::
He moves — not walks, moves, the way weather moves — through the room, through the investigators’ space (the temperature drops twenty degrees as he passes; frost forms immediately on clothes and hair; the investigators’ breath hangs in clouds), through the entrance hall, past the study door (where the temperature at Ali’s keyhole drops to something extreme for exactly two seconds), and through the front door.
He pauses in the doorway. One second. Two.
Then he is the storm.
SAN Loss — His full passage through your space: 1/1D4.
The ward dissolves. The drawing room temperature normalises over twenty minutes. The three people are released. Lord Fell-Ashmore closes his book and says: “Well, that was tedious.” The Reverend March finishes her prayer. Flavia Brent says: “Can we do it again?” She is firmly told no.
Outside, the storm intensifies for approximately one hour. Then it does not. Then it is simply a winter night, cold and clear, the moor white under the stars.
Dawn at 7:52 a.m. The train is waiting.
The Complications
Henderson Caul’s Theory
At some point around 2 a.m., Caul will become convinced that the Winter Horseman is a German intelligence operation of some kind — a projector, perhaps, or some form of atmospheric manipulation. He will express this theory with the reasoned conviction of a civil servant who has been thinking about Germany in 1938 for three years. He needs to be managed away from this before he attempts to document it officially or, worse, before he opens the briefcase.
The Radio
Around 2 a.m., the BBC static resolves briefly into something that is not static. Not language — the structure of language. The Horseman is in the frequencies. Whoever is nearest the radio should turn it off. They will not do this immediately. SAN 0/1.
Captain Roach’s Webley
He fires it at the ward. He is competent and the weapon is maintained. The bullet passes through the Winter Horseman without effect. The Horseman’s attention fixes on the Captain for fifteen seconds. Mrs. Quarr speaks. Tea is produced. Order is restored.
Mrs. Quarr’s Authority
At the moment of most potential panic — the Keeper’s choice — Dorothea Quarr will stand, straighten her back to the posture of a woman at a Viennese diplomatic reception, and say: “I think it would be best if everyone had a cup of tea and sat down and allowed the young people to get on with it.” The panic does not happen. This is her contribution and it is not a small one.
Ali at the Study Door
When the Horseman passes through the entrance hall, he pauses one second near the study door. The temperature at the keyhole drops to something extreme. Ali, inside, says nothing. The Horseman moves on. In the morning, Ali packs his equipment efficiently and leaves as soon as the roads are passable. He says to Lady Constance, before departing: “The entity was larger than the secondary texts indicated.” She says: “Yes. I noticed that in your notes. I thought you knew.” He says nothing and gets into his car.
The Morning After
Breakfast at Ashmore Court at half past seven. Mrs. Peel has been cooking since six. The food is excellent. The house is warm. The valley outside is white with frost, the sky pale and clear, the kind of morning that only follows something extreme.
:::example
Lord Fell-Ashmore eats his breakfast with the deliberate pleasure of a man who has decided to be grateful for ordinary things. He says, to the table: “I should like it recorded that I behaved well throughout.”
The Reverend March says: “You did, Gideon.”
He says: “Thank you, Patricia.”
This is the most intimate exchange anyone has witnessed between them, and it is, unexpectedly, moving.
:::
Flavia Brent has taken fourteen photographs with the camera she brought for Christmas and is composing a telegram that will be significantly shorter than the story she intends to tell.
Lady Constance is writing. She has been writing since half past five. She will not show anyone what she is writing.
The investigators catch the 8:05 to Devonport. The line runs through the valley, past Ashmore Court, past the fields of the estate, past the old boundary stones on the hill. If they look out the window as the train passes the hill: nothing. The frost on the grass. The pale sky. The old valley in winter, quiet and cold and entirely itself.
The Winter Horseman — Entry
The Winter Horseman is a genius loci — a spirit of the Ashmore valley specifically and the Devon winter generally. Pre-Christian in origin, associated with the boundary-running tradition of the old agricultural calendar. He is not associated with any of the Outer Gods and is not a Mythos entity in the strict classification. He is a piece of the landscape that has developed enough coherence across enough centuries to be a distinct presence. He is dangerous only when confined. Outside, he is simply a feature of the winter.
He cannot be banished — he belongs to this valley and banishment has no meaning in this context. He can be released with the correct form, the correct materials, and the correct address. He will respond to the old form regardless of who speaks it, provided it is spoken correctly at the door of a kept house with a lit hearth and the bread and salt on the step.
These are the terms. They have always been the terms.
:::stats The Winter Horseman (Confined State)
STR 90 CON — SIZ 100 DEX — INT 70
APP — POW 120 EDU — SAN — HP —
Cannot be physically harmed — he is weather and winter, not flesh. Bullets pass through him without effect.
Presence: All within the ward lose 1 MP per 30 minutes of exposure. Temperature in the ward drops 2°C per hour.
The Hunt Call: When distressed, a sound felt through the floor. SAN 0/1 for those in the house; SAN 1/1D4 for those in the adjacent room. Each Hunt Call degrades the ward by an additional increment.
Full Passage: When he passes through the investigators’ space during the release, temperature drops 20°C instantaneously. Frost forms on clothing and skin. SAN 1/1D4.
Ward: Ali’s seal will hold approximately 4–5 hours. Dawn is 6 hours away. The margin is the scenario’s clock.
:::
SAN Loss — Full awareness of what he is: 1/1D4.
SAN Loss — His full attention: 1/1D6.
SAN Loss — His passage through your space: 1/1D4.
Mythos Gain: +1D4 Cthulhu Mythos.
SAN Cap Reduction: 1 per Mythos point gained.
:::callout A Note on 1938
No one in this scenario needs to mention Munich or Hitler or rearmament or what is coming. It is present in every room the way it was present in every room in Britain in December 1938: as Henderson Caul’s briefcase, as Captain Roach’s reflexive military competence, as the specific quality of Flavia Brent’s twenty-three-year-old recklessness in a year when being twenty-three is going to mean something soon. It is in Lady Constance writing through the night because she is a woman who knows that certain windows close. It is in the Reverend March’s prayer, which is for more than just the drawing room.
The winter is the winter. What comes after is coming whether the Horseman is released or not. The train will leave at 8:05. There is somewhere everyone needs to be.
:::
Handout 1 — Lady Constance’s Note (Left in the Entrance Hall)
:::handout
To whoever has just arrived from the train —
Please forgive the somewhat unusual conditions. My name is Lady Constance Ashmore and this is my house. I am delighted to receive you and Mrs. Peel will find you tea immediately.
There is a situation involving the drawing room which I will explain in full as soon as possible. In the meantime I ask only that you do not attempt to open the drawing room door, do not approach the window at the end of the entrance hall, and if you hear anything unusual from below your feet, please remain where you are.
I am sorry about all of this. I will explain.
— C. Ashmore
P.S. The library is open and everything in it is available. You will want the local history section. Northeast corner, brown leather volume, 1743.
:::
Handout 2 — The 1743 Folklore Collection (Relevant Passage)
:::handout
“On the Winter Rider, called in the old tongue the Horseman of the Boundary, who runs the parish in the dead season and drives what should not linger before him. He is not the Devil nor any servant of the Devil, as the old women are firm upon, but a thing of this valley as the valley’s own cold is a thing of this valley — purposeful and not to be argued with.
His form: short of stature, with hair as black as the turned field, and small horns as of a young thing first grown, and a face which has no age, and feet which do not meet the ground as ours do.
He comes inside no house where the hearth is kept and the threshold maintained. He may be spoken to and sent away by one who knows the form of address, spoken at the open door with bread and salt upon the step and the fire within burning. The form is as follows, set down by Margery Witch of Crewthorpe who spoke it in the winter of 1739 and would not write it herself but gave me leave to do so.
She said: it must be meant. He knows the difference.
[The form of address follows in both the old dialect spelling and the schoolmaster’s careful phonetic rendering.]*
— J. Birkett, Schoolmaster, Ashmore Crossing, 1743“
:::
Handout 3 — Ali’s Notes (The Margin Annotation)
:::handout
[Typescript notes on cream paper, heavily annotated in two different hands — the original in Ali’s precise type, the annotations in Lady Constance’s swift pen]
“The entity name-form as recorded in Mathers (1887) and cross-referenced in Waite (1911): EQUITATOR HIBERNUS, from the Latin, being the Winter Rider of the Ashmore tradition, Devon. Suitable for formal invocation using the standard Goetic address modified for regional—”
[Marginal annotation in Lady Constance’s hand]: “this doesn’t match the schoolmaster’s record — Birkett 1743 gives the name in valley dialect entirely, not Latinised. The Latinised form is Mathers’ own interpretation. Do you know which form the entity answers to? —C”
[Below this, in Ali’s handwriting, clearly added later and in some agitation]: “I did not see this note before the ceremony. I see it now.”
:::
Handout 4 — Flavia’s Translation (Slipped Under the Door)
:::handout
[A page from a small notebook, the handwriting quick and confident and slightly crooked, slipped under the drawing room door from outside]
For whoever’s out there —
I’ve been watching the Horseman for hours and I think I’ve worked out what he’s saying. He’s NOT saying he wants to hurt us. He wants out. He keeps going to the window and when he touches it frost goes up in what I can only describe as a landscape — fields, a hill, stones on a ridge. He’s drawing outside on the inside of the glass.
He’s been inside for three hours and it’s wrong for him. That’s what’s making him scary. Not malice — context.
Also Lord Fell-Ashmore is fine, he’s on chapter 12. Rev. March is still going with the prayers, bless her.
Get us out.
— F. Brent
P.S. I’ve used half a roll of film. Whatever happens, the pictures are going to be extraordinary.
:::
Handout 5 — The Form of Words (Written Out by Mrs. Peel)
:::handout
[Written on a sheet of Ashmore Court notepaper in Mrs. Peel’s careful domestic hand, with pronunciation notes added in pencil]
For the speaking at the door
Go thee to thy running (GOH-thee-too-thy-RUN-ing)
Go thee to thy cold (GOH-thee-too-thy-COLD)
The house is warm and kept (thee-HOWSE-is-WARM-an-KEPT)
And thee art of the old (an-THEE-art-ov-thee-OLD)
Bread for the giving (BREAD-for-thee-GIV-ing)
Salt for the way (SALT-for-thee-WAY)
Go thee to thy running (GOH-thee-too-thy-RUN-ing)
Till the long day (TILL-thee-LONG-DAY)
[Below, in Mrs. Peel’s hand]:
My nan said this every Christmas eve at the front door before she bolted it for the night. She said it was for keeping the cold where the cold belongs. I didn’t know what she meant till tonight.
Say it like you mean it. He’ll know.
:::
Chapter 2: Minor Variations
DEAD OF WINTER AT ASHMORE COURT
A One-Night Scenario for Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition
For 2–5 Investigators, One Session
“The trouble with real ghosts is that they don’t know they’re in
a mystery novel.”
— Lady Constance Ashmore, Ashmore Court, December 1938
KEEPER’S INTRODUCTION: THE EVE OF EVERYTHING
It is December 1938. The Munich Agreement is three months old and
Germany has occupied the Sudetenland and Mr. Chamberlain’s piece of
paper is already feeling like a different kind of document than it
did in September. The newspapers still debate it but the debate has
a quality — a particular quality that the investigators will recognise
if they have been paying attention — of people arguing about something
that has already been decided.
In Devon, the winter has come early and brought more than usual. The
temperature has been dropping since the first of December and the
landscape has passed through bare and arrived at bleak and is now
heading somewhere past bleak toward a severity that the locals are
calling unusual without quite calling it unprecedented. The moor in
winter is a specific thing — the wide grey sky, the black fields,
the trees stripped to their working structure, the streams running fast
and brown in the lanes. Old country. Old, old country.
The branch line from Exeter to Devonport runs through this country,
through the market towns and the agricultural villages and the moorland
that rises between them. It is a line that the Great Western Railway
operates with the resigned pragmatism of a company that has committed
to a route and finds it uneconomical but unavoidable. The rolling stock
is elderly. The timetable is aspirational.
Tonight, the 7:15 from Exeter has developed a fault — the driver
describes it as a “hot box on the rear axle,” which means a bearing
has overheated and the train cannot safely continue. This has happened
somewhere between the villages of Crewthorpe and Ashmore Crossing, on
a section of track that runs along the bottom of the Ashmore valley.
The guard has walked forward along the platform of the Ashmore Crossing
halt — a single-platform affair with a corrugated iron shelter and no
station master — and established that there is no telephone, no facility,
and nothing to do but wait for the breakdown crew, who have been
dispatched from Exeter and will arrive in “three to four hours,
depending on conditions.”
The conditions are a storm. Not a dramatic storm — not thunder and
lightning — but a Devon winter storm: horizontal rain, wind that finds
every gap in every coat, a cold that is below seasonal and accelerating.
The passengers of the 7:15 are: the investigators, four other passengers,
and the train crew. The railway guard, a man of determined professional
competence, has established that Ashmore Court — a substantial country
house visible through the dark and the rain from the halt, perhaps
a quarter mile across a field — is the residence of Lady Constance
Ashmore, whom he recognises (as does, in all probability, every
literate person in Britain) as the author of fourteen mystery novels
translated into twenty-one languages. He has taken it upon himself
to approach the house and request shelter for the passengers.
Lady Constance has said yes immediately and with what the guard, a man
not given to literary analysis, will later describe as “a good deal more”
THE SITUATION: WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED
Lady Constance Ashmore, now fifty-two and at the height of her
considerable fame, is researching her fifteenth novel. Her fifteenth
novel is to feature the occult. She has been thorough — she is always
thorough; it is what her readers pay for and what her publishers have
come to rely on — and her research has taken her, over the past eight
months, through the literature of demonology, folklore, ceremonial
magic, and local supernatural tradition with the brisk efficiency of
a woman who has been absorbing research materials since 1921 and knows
how to separate the useful from the decorative.
She has also, which is the source of the evening’s difficulties,
engaged Dr. Farouk Ali.
Dr. Ali is the most fashionable mystic in London, which in 1938 is
not a competitive field but is not entirely empty either. He was born
in Birmingham and his real name is Frank Allen, but his persona —
cultivated across fifteen years of West End salons, private seances,
and two best-selling books on Eastern mysticism — is sufficiently
convincing that only the most determined research will puncture it.
He is, beneath the persona, a genuine practitioner of something: the
exact nature of that something is ambiguous, but he has done things
that cannot be explained by showmanship alone, and he knows it, and
it has made him precisely as arrogant as a man who has done inexplicable
things with impunity for fifteen years tends to become.
He has been at Ashmore Court for a week, ostensibly assisting Lady
Constance with research. He has actually been using Lady Constance’s
library — which is extraordinary, assembled over three generations of
a family with eclectic collecting habits — and Lady Constance’s house —
which sits in the middle of the oldest part of the Ashmore valley,
a location with what he has been calling “exceptional receptive
properties” — and Lady Constance’s money — which funds the considerable
equipment requirements of a serious ceremonial summoning — to attempt
something he has been building toward for seven years.
The Winter Horseman.
In the folklore of the Ashmore valley, the Winter Horseman is the
spirit of the dead season. He appears in the old accounts — pre-Norman,
in some cases, though the tradition persists in fragments into the
eighteenth century — as a rider without a horse, a figure of short
black hair and small dark horns and a face that is simultaneously
young and ageless, who runs the parish boundaries in winter and
drives things before him: the last warmth of the autumn, the small
spirits of place, occasionally the newly dead who have not yet
understood their condition. He is a version of the Wild Hunt, but
local, specific, scaled to a valley rather than a sky. He is not
a devil — the tradition is firm on this, pre-Christian in its
certainty — but he is not friendly, and he does not come inside,
and the old practice of the valley was to leave bread and salt on
the doorstep at the winter solstice and keep the hearth lit and
the windows shuttered.
Dr. Ali, who has studied the tradition with professional thoroughness
and approached it with professional arrogance, has summoned the
Winter Horseman into the drawing room of Ashmore Court and contained
him there with a ward he is very proud of. The summoning worked,
which surprised him slightly. The Horseman arrived at approximately
nine o’clock this evening, tearing through the ward with a force
that scattered three of Ali’s four protective circles before the
fourth held, and the drawing room is now sealed — from inside and
from outside — by Dr. Ali’s remaining ward, which is perfectly good
and which will hold until dawn when, the texts suggest, the Horseman’s
power diminishes.
There are problems.
The first problem is that the drawing room contains, besides the
Winter Horseman and Dr. Ali’s ward, three people who were in the
wrong room when the summoning went off: Lord Gideon Fell-Ashmore
(Lady Constance’s elderly husband, a retired diplomat who disapproves
of all of this), Reverend Patricia March (a female vicar, unusual for
1938, who is Lady Constance’s oldest friend and who came to Ashmore
Court for a quiet week and has found it anything but), and Flavia
Brent (Lady Constance’s twenty-three-year-old niece, who came for
Christmas and is considerably less alarmed than she should be, which
is itself alarming).
The second problem is that the ward works both ways. Dr. Ali warded
the room to keep the Horseman in. The effect has also been to keep
the three trapped people in. He did not intend this. He is very sorry.
The third problem is that the Winter Horseman, who is a spirit of
the outside and the winter and the open land, has been inside a room
for three hours and is becoming increasingly agitated, and the ward
is very good but it is under pressure, and “very good under pressure”
and “indefinitely reliable under pressure” are not the same assessment.
The fourth problem is that the storm is getting worse, the telephone
line is down (it came down at nine, approximately simultaneously with
the Horseman’s arrival, which is not a coincidence), and Dr. Ali —
who has been managing the situation with increasing hysteria for three
hours — has just used the last of his ward materials reinforcing the
drawing room seal and cannot create any additional protective barriers
for the rest of the evening.
The fifth problem is that the investigators have just arrived.
THE CAST OF TONIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENT
LADY CONSTANCE ASHMORE — 52, NOVELIST, AUTHOR OF HER OWN DIFFICULTIES
Lady Constance is, in person, not quite what her readers expect from
her publicity photographs: the photographs show a woman of composed
literary authority, and Constance is composed and authoritative, but
there is also a quality of barely-contained energy, of ideas arriving
faster than politeness can process them, that the photographs edit out.
She is tall, she has iron-grey hair worn short, she has the excellent
wardrobe of a woman who earns well and spends thoughtfully, and she
has, tonight, the expression of a woman who has created a magnificent
narrative situation and is slightly horrified to find herself inside it
rather than writing it.
She is brilliant and she is genuinely sorry and she is, underneath both
of these things, quite excited. The Winter Horseman is in her drawing
room. Whatever else is true, this is extraordinary, and a part of her
that the novelist will never quite subdue is already taking notes.
She will be the investigators’ most effective practical ally, because she
is the only person in the house who has read everything Ali has read,
has followed his methodology closely enough to understand his mistakes,
and has a library that contains the materials needed to correct them.
She will also be the most infuriating ally, because she keeps stopping
to write things in her notebook.
She knows the house completely, knows its history in the valley, and
has access to everything. She does not know how to get the Horseman out.
She has a theory. The theory involves the front door, the hearth, and
the bread and salt, and she is embarrassed by how straightforward it
is because she has been in the same room as Dr. Ali’s elaborate
ceremonial equipment for a week and has absorbed his aesthetics.
PERSONALITY: Precise, warm, energetically sorry, occasionally
distracted at the worst possible moments by the narrative potential
of whatever is happening to her.
TELL: Writes in her notebook. This happens at intervals of approximately
eight minutes whether or not there is a crisis.
STR 40 CON 50 SIZ 50 DEX 55 INT 90
APP 65 POW 65 EDU 95 SAN 60 HP 10
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 13 Luck: 60
Skills: History 75%, Library Use 95%, Occult 65%, Persuade 75%,
Psychology 80%, Spot Hidden 70%.
DR. FAROUK ALI (FRANK ALLEN) — 47, CELEBRITY MYSTIC, IN OVER HIS HEAD
Dr. Ali arrived at Ashmore Court a week ago with a car full of
ceremonial equipment — censers, candles, chalk circles, three texts
from his personal library, a quantity of dried herbs, and a confidence
in his own ability that has, tonight, undergone significant revision.
He is a handsome man in the specific way of men who have cultivated
handsomeness over many years and achieved it through effort rather
than accident: the trimmed beard, the beautiful jacket, the rings.
The rings are real — he is a genuine practitioner of something, and
the rings are part of that something.
He is, at the moment investigators arrive, in Lady Constance’s study
with the door barricaded and a glass of brandy and the expression of
a man whose experiment has worked and gone immediately and catastrophically
sideways. He has been telling himself, for three hours, that the ward
will hold. He has become less certain of this with each telling.
He did not want real entities. He wanted a manifestation — a localised,
identifiable, photographable and documentable contact with the local
spiritual tradition, something he could write up and Lady Constance
could fictionalise, something that would demonstrate his capabilities
in a controlled and impressive manner. What he has is the Winter
Horseman in the drawing room and three innocent people trapped with it
and a ward under sustained pressure from something considerably larger
than he anticipated.
He knows the most about the situation. He will not admit this easily,
because admitting how much he knows means admitting how catastrophically
he has mismanaged what he knew. He will be useful under pressure and
insufferable while pressure is not being applied. He will not share
information voluntarily. He will share it if given no alternative.
He will at some point — when the investigators have established that
they understand what they are dealing with — admit, quietly, that the
Winter Horseman is real, that the ward is holding by narrower margins
than he is comfortable with, that he has a solution but it requires
things he doesn’t have, and that he genuinely did not mean for anyone
to be hurt, which is true, and is also not the most important thing
about the situation, which he doesn’t quite understand yet.
His persona, the constructed Dr. Farouk Ali, is a more useful character
than the underlying Frank Allen. The persona has confidence, authority,
the specific carriage of a man whom people expect to be competent.
He can use the persona as a social tool even now. It is his best skill.
PERSONALITY: The persona: elegant, authoritative, slightly mysterious.
The man: frightened, intelligent, unwilling to be seen as either.
TELL: The persona frays whenever anyone uses the word “trapped.”
STR 50 CON 55 SIZ 55 DEX 60 INT 80
APP 70 POW 70 EDU 75 SAN 40 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 14 Luck: 35
Skills: Charm 75%, Fast Talk 80%, Library Use 65%, Occult 80%,
Persuade 65%, Psychology 60%, Spot Hidden 55%.
Spells: Contact Spirit (his primary method, costs 8 MP; requires
preparation he no longer has materials for), Ward (the drawing room
seal, already placed and holding; any new ward would require materials
he does not currently have), Compel Spirit (the spell that should
have contained the Horseman and has not, quite, done so as intended;
costs 10 MP; requires the entity’s true name, which he found in the
library texts but has been pronouncing in the Latinised form which
is not the form the Horseman answers to).
The Key Error: The Horseman’s true address is in the old Devon dialect
form, which appears in one source — Ashmore’s own library, the annotated
1743 collection of valley folklore compiled by a local schoolmaster.
Ali found the Latinised form in a secondary text and used it. The
Horseman came but did not come in the form Ali expected, which is
a smaller and more tractable one. The full Horseman arrived instead.
LORD GIDEON FELL-ASHMORE — 74, RETIRED DIPLOMAT, TRAPPED
Constance’s husband is twenty-two years older than she is, a fact
that has occasioned exactly the amount of comment that facts about
women’s marriages always occasion and to which Constance has been
indifferent throughout. He was a significant figure in his time —
four postings, two ambassadorial, a knighthood for services that are
vaguely described in Debrett’s. He is now retired and resident at
Ashmore Court and increasingly of the opinion that he has made a
dreadful mistake because the wife he married for her competence and
intelligence has turned out, in retirement, to express those qualities
in directions he finds challenging.
He is in the drawing room with the Winter Horseman. He has been in the
drawing room with the Winter Horseman for three hours, because he came
in at half past eight to ask Constance to come to dinner and found Ali
in the middle of his ceremony and said “what the devil is all this”
and the Horseman arrived and the ward closed and here he still is.
He is a man of seventy-four with the specific fortitude of someone who
has sat through four postings’ worth of genuinely dangerous diplomatic
situations and who considers that his primary responsibility in any
difficult situation is to be neither a hindrance nor a source of
additional anxiety. He is managing this responsibility with some success.
He is sitting in the armchair furthest from the window where the Horseman
has primarily stationed itself. He is reading. He brought a book with
him when he came to ask about dinner.
He will communicate through the drawing room door — which is sealed but
not soundproofed — with calm precision. He has observed the Horseman
for three hours. He will share what he has observed. He is not hysterical.
He is, he will say, “significantly displeased” and “looking forward
to an explanation,” and he will say this in the tone that won concessions
from three Foreign Ministers.
WHAT HE HAS OBSERVED: The Horseman does not touch anything. He moves
in the room but does not disturb objects — he passes through the
space around them in the way of something accustomed to open country
where there are no objects to disturb. He is most agitated near the
windows. He has touched the window glass three times. Each time, frost
formed on the glass from inside. He has not touched any of the people
in the room, though he has approached Lord Fell-Ashmore once and looked
at him for approximately thirty seconds with what his Lordship describes
as “considerable interest and not inconsiderable contempt.”
He is not a benevolent presence but he is not, Lord Fell-Ashmore
reports, currently attacking anyone.
STR 45 CON 50 SIZ 60 DEX 35 INT 75
APP 60 POW 65 EDU 90 SAN 65 HP 11
THE REVEREND PATRICIA MARCH — 51, CLERGYPERSON, DEEPLY FRUSTRATED
Patricia March was ordained in 1919 — one of the first women in the
Church of England to be ordained as a deaconess, which is not quite
the same thing as a priest and she has spent nineteen years being very
clear about the distinction and very clear about how she feels about
the distinction. She is Constance’s oldest friend from their school
days, which is the context in which she is usually described in the
narrative, but she is more accurately described as a woman of very
considerable theological and practical intelligence who has been
constrained by her institution in ways that have, over the years,
been refined into a very particular kind of furious competence.
She is in the drawing room. She has been trying to pray. The Winter
Horseman, who predates the entire Christian tradition by several
thousand years and is quite clear about this, finds her prayers
unimpressive. She has not stopped praying. She has theological
objections to several aspects of what is in the room with her, and
she is going to express them.
She is also, underneath the theological objections, more frightened
than she has been since the Somme — she was a nurse, briefly, before
the ordination, and she has seen what fear looks like in its worst
expressions, and this is fear at that level. She is managing it with
prayer and with the controlled breathing that she teaches in her
retreats and with the company of Flavia Brent, who does not appear
to need the same management techniques and whose composure is,
from the Reverend’s perspective, a source of both comfort and
unease.
What Patricia knows, from the systematic theology she has spent
thirty years studying: the Winter Horseman is a psychopomp of a
specific kind — a driver of the dead, a boundary-keeper between
seasons. He is not interested in the living except insofar as they
are in his way. He is in his way because he is inside a house and
he should be outside running the valley in the cold, and he cannot
get out. He expressed this, approximately an hour ago, by standing
at the window and making a sound that the Reverend describes, through
the door, as “a hunting call. Very low. It went through the floor.”
STR 45 CON 55 SIZ 50 DEX 50 INT 75
APP 55 POW 75 EDU 80 SAN 55 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 15 Luck: 50
Skills: First Aid 65%, History 65%, Library Use 60%, Occult 45%,
Persuade 60%, Psychology 65%, Read Latin 55%, Theology 80%.
FLAVIA BRENT — 23, NIECE, DISCONCERTING
Flavia arrived for Christmas three days ago and has been deeply bored
ever since, because she is twenty-three and has come from London where
she works for a picture agency and goes to parties, and Ashmore Court
in winter is very quiet and her aunt’s household, while warm, is not
her natural habitat. The summoning of the Winter Horseman has been,
from her perspective, the most interesting thing that has happened
this week.
She is not stupid. She is not reckless, exactly. She has the specific
quality of the very young and rather resilient of finding things
interesting that should be frightening, not because she doesn’t
understand the danger but because she has not yet fully internalised
that danger is something that applies to her personally. She will
develop this internalisation at some point in the next six hours.
She has been talking to the Horseman.
This is the element that no one else in the room has managed and that
Flavia has accomplished with the ease of someone who has not read enough
about the Winter Horseman to know it shouldn’t be possible. The Horseman
does not speak. He communicates — in images, in weather-change, in the
specific quality of cold that arrives when something is wrong versus
something is neutral versus something is as close to agreeable as this
entity gets. Flavia has been translating these signals for Lord
Fell-Ashmore and the Reverend March with the confidence of someone who
is mostly making it up but is, in fact, not entirely making it up.
What the Horseman has communicated to Flavia, through the medium of
temperature and the quality of frost on the window: he wants to leave.
He is not interested in them. He is not interested in the house. He
is extremely interested in the window and what is on the other side
of it, and the fact that he cannot reach it is the source of everything
that is wrong tonight.
She is the person who most clearly understands what the Horseman needs.
She is also the person least equipped to provide it without the
investigators’ help, because providing it requires the ward to be
modified in a way that requires knowledge she doesn’t have.
STR 40 CON 55 SIZ 50 DEX 70 INT 65
APP 75 POW 65 EDU 55 SAN 70 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 8 MP: 13 Luck: 75
Skills: Art/Photography 55%, Charm 70%, Fast Talk 60%,
Listen 60%, Spot Hidden 65%.
THE OTHER PASSENGERS (FELLOW TRAVELLERS, ARRIVED WITH INVESTIGATORS)
These four individuals were on the stranded train. They have been
brought to Ashmore Court along with the investigators and are now
dealing with the situation from the position of people who did not
expect their evening to contain any of this.
MR. HENDERSON CAUL — 58, CIVIL SERVANT
A man from the Ministry of something — he is vague about which
Ministry, in the way of men who have been vague about which Ministry
for so long it has become the truth. He is going to Devonport on
“departmental business.” He has a briefcase that he has not let out of
his hands since boarding the train. He is, on contact with the
situation at Ashmore Court, going to process it as a departmental
problem and attempt to manage it with the tools of a civil servant,
which are procedure, hierarchy, and the implied threat of eventually
filling out a form about it. He is not stupid. He is accustomed to
thinking inside the structures that have shaped him.
His briefcase contains documents relating to the naval installation
at Devonport and the expansion of British naval capacity in the context
of what everybody is calling rearmament. He does not talk about this.
He does not need to for the scenario. It is there as texture — as the
1938 that is always present in the room whether anyone mentions it or not.
STR 45 CON 50 SIZ 55 DEX 45 INT 65
APP 50 POW 45 EDU 75 SAN 60 HP 11
MISS WREN SOAMES — 34, SCHOOLTEACHER
En route to Devonport to visit her sister for Christmas. Efficient,
practical, not easily rattled. Her field is mathematics, which gives
her the useful habit of treating problems as problems: things with
solutions, approached systematically. She will immediately attempt to
be useful and will, once the nature of the problem is established,
be useful in ways that are not obvious but that are genuine.
She is the sort of person who reads the signs and works out the
exits and notices that the measuring instruments on the study wall
are not standard household items. She was reading Keynes on the train.
STR 40 CON 55 SIZ 45 DEX 60 INT 80
APP 55 POW 60 EDU 80 SAN 70 HP 10
Skills: Accounting 55%, Library Use 60%, Mathematics 80%,
Psychology 55%, Spot Hidden 60%.
CAPTAIN HENRY ROACH (RET.) — 61, FORMER MILITARY
Recently retired from the Army and going to Devonport to help his son,
who is in the Navy, move into new accommodations. He has seen enough
of things going wrong to have a systematic response: establish the
perimeter, identify the threat, determine what’s available, and work
with it. He is the most immediately useful of the passengers in a
physical confrontation and the least immediately useful in any
situation that requires reading anything.
He has a service revolver in his luggage, which he has kept for
thirty years as a matter of principle. It will not help with the
Horseman. He doesn’t know this yet.
STR 70 CON 65 SIZ 65 DEX 55 INT 55
APP 50 POW 55 EDU 55 SAN 65 HP 14
DB: +1D4 Build: 1 Move: 7 MP: 11 Luck: 50
Weapon: Webley Mk VI revolver (4D6 damage).
MRS. DOROTHEA QUARR — 69, WIDOW
Going to Devonport for Christmas with her daughter and finding the
whole situation somewhat beneath her dignity but managing it with
the tremendous social authority of a woman who once, at a diplomatic
reception in Vienna, found herself between the Archduke and an
escalating argument about table precedence and resolved both by simply
behaving as though the correct thing was already happening. She is
not frightened. She is inconvenienced. There is a difference.
She will be the most stabilising social presence in the room and
will at two distinct points in the evening prevent a panic by sheer
force of personality.
STR 35 CON 50 SIZ 50 DEX 35 INT 70
APP 65 POW 70 EDU 70 SAN 75 HP 11
THE STAFF
MRS. PEEL — HOUSEKEEPER, 58. Has worked at Ashmore Court for twenty-
four years and regards the current situation with the resigned
professionalism of a woman who has managed Lady Constance’s research
phases before, though not at this pitch. She is making tea. She will
continue to make tea throughout the evening as a form of psychological
maintenance. The tea is very good. She knows the house and its history
and will tell investigators things that Lady Constance has not thought
to mention — specifically the old household protocols for the winter,
the doorstep practice, the shuttered windows. Her grandmother told
her. Her grandmother knew what these things were for.
JAMES — FOOTMAN, 22. Frightened and trying not to show it and
showing it. Useful for fetching things. Not useful for thinking
about things. Do not send him to investigate the drawing room alone.
THE WINTER HORSEMAN
He is here because he was called. He does not want to be here.
He wants to be outside, running the valley in the storm, doing what
he does in December — the boundary-running, the driving of the dead
season ahead of him, the work that requires open fields and black
sky and cold wind and no walls. He has been inside for three hours.
He is becoming like a storm inside a room: all the pressure of an
enormous outside thing in a space that cannot contain it.
He appears as: short, black-haired, with small dark horns like the
first growth of something rather than the full rack of something demonic.
His face is ageless in the way of old wood or old hills — not young,
not old, simply outside the categories. He is wearing what might be
clothes or might be the dark of a winter night shaped around a figure.
His feet, when visible, do not quite touch the floor. He moves in the
room like wind moves in a space — present everywhere, concentrated
nowhere, and then very suddenly concentrated here.
He does not speak. He communicates:
COLD: A general drop in temperature indicates his presence and attention.
FROST: The formation of frost on the window glass, in patterns that are
not random — they are the patterns of something trying to draw the
outside on the inside of the glass, a landscape it cannot reach.
SOUND: Once, perhaps twice in the night, the hunting call — low,
felt rather than heard, that goes through the floor and into the
investigators’ feet.
ATTENTION: When he focuses on a specific person, the temperature around
them drops five degrees specifically and they will feel, with absolute
clarity, that something enormous has decided they are worth noticing.
He is not malicious toward the trapped people. He is a thing of the
outside and they are inside things and he is increasingly distressed
by the inside and this distress is what makes him dangerous. A distressed
spirit of this age and specificity, inside a room, pressing against
the seams — the ward is the only thing preventing the room from becoming
a very particular kind of winter that nothing inside it survives.
THE WARD AND ITS FAILURE: Dr. Ali’s ward will hold until dawn, which is
at 7:52 a.m. — approximately six hours from when the investigators arrive.
However: the ward is being compressed. Each time the Horseman presses
against it — which happens with increasing frequency as his distress
grows — the ward degrades slightly. Ali estimated it would last until dawn.
The investigators, if they assess the ward’s condition using Occult or
if they press Ali for the truth, will establish that his estimate was
generous. The ward has perhaps four hours. Maybe five. Dawn is six hours.
The margin is not comfortable.
THE SOLUTION: The Horseman needs to be released. Not banished — he cannot
be banished, because he belongs to this valley and banishment has no
meaning in this context. Released: the ward modified to allow him egress,
the front door opened, the old form of dismissal spoken, and the household
hearth maintained to mark the boundary between the inside world and his.
The old form of dismissal is in the 1743 Folklore Collection in the
library. The bread and salt for the doorstep is in Mrs. Peel’s kitchen.
The front door is obvious. The ward modification is the hard part and
requires Dr. Ali’s cooperation or the investigators managing without him.
If the old form is spoken correctly (it is in the valley dialect — the
schoolmaster who recorded it also recorded a pronunciation guide, because
he was a schoolmaster) and the door is opened: the Horseman will depart.
He will pause in the doorway for a moment — not threateningly, not
gratefully, simply in the way of something that is finally in its right
context — and then he will be outside, in the storm, and he will be
the storm, and the night will get measurably colder for about an hour
and then it will simply be a winter night.
The three trapped people will be released when the ward comes down.
Lord Fell-Ashmore will close his book and say “Well, that was tedious.”
The Reverend March will finish the prayer she started three hours ago.
Flavia Brent will say “Can we do it again?” and be firmly told no.
THE HOUSE: ASHMORE COURT
The house is early Georgian — 1734, built by the third Ashmore baronet
on the site of a much older structure, the foundations of which are
still visible in the cellar. It is not enormous by country house
standards but it is comfortable and it has the specific quality of
houses that have been lived in by people who like books: every room
has books in it, the shelves have been added to rather than replaced,
and the collection has the pleasantly chaotic quality of four generations
of heterogeneous taste.
In the storm and the dark, it is warm and lit and almost comforting,
until the investigators establish that the drawing room is sealed and
something is in it.
THE ENTRANCE HALL: Where the investigators are received by Lady Constance
herself (who has been watching from the window for the last twenty minutes)
and Mrs. Peel (who has immediate tea). The hall is large, with the staircase
rising to the first floor on the right, the drawing room door at the far
end, and a corridor to the left leading to the library, the study, and
the kitchen. The drawing room door looks ordinary. A successful Spot
Hidden will notice: the temperature is measurably lower near it, and
there is a smell — not unpleasant but specific — of cold air and wet
earth, as though the door leads outside rather than into a room.
THE LIBRARY: The best room in the house for the scenario’s purposes.
Three walls of shelves, a central table, and in the northeast corner
a section devoted to local history that contains, among other items,
the 1743 Folklore Collection. The Collection is not rare and not obvious —
it is a quarto volume in a brown leather cover with a handwritten spine
label. It contains the old valley traditions, including the Winter Horseman.
It also contains the schoolmaster’s phonetic rendering of the dismissal
form, which he recorded because he heard it performed as a child and
wanted to preserve it. He was, in this, the investigators’ best ally
and has been dead for one hundred and ninety-five years.
THE STUDY: Where Dr. Ali has barricaded himself. His equipment is here:
the chalk circles (two of them, one partially smudged — the one he was
standing in when the ward closed), the censers, the remaining texts.
His notes are on the desk. They are legible and comprehensive and they
contain his error (the Latinised name form) clearly annotated in the
margin by Lady Constance, who read through them two days ago and wrote
“this doesn’t match the schoolmaster’s record” and did not tell Ali,
because she assumed he knew. She did not assume correctly.
THE DRAWING ROOM: Sealed by the ward. Investigators can communicate
through the door. They can, with Spot Hidden, see through the gap under
the door: a quality of light that is wrong — too cold, too blue — and
the frost on the lower panel that is spreading slowly, slowly, down
from above.
THE CELLAR: The old foundations. Not relevant to the solution but relevant
to the context: the cellar contains the remains of the previous house’s
kitchen hearth, which was the original site of the valley’s winter hearth-
keeping tradition. Mrs. Peel uses the cellar for wine and root vegetables
and does not go in it after dark, which she has not examined closely
as a preference but which turns out to be the correct instinct.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE NIGHT
The scenario runs in real time — or close to it. Six hours of a winter
night in Devon. The train will be repaired by dawn and waiting at
Ashmore Crossing halt.
HOUR ONE (ARRIVAL — APPROXIMATELY 11 P.M.):
The investigators are received, given tea, and introduced to the
situation. Lady Constance explains what has happened with the specific
quality of someone who has been waiting for someone capable of helping
to arrive. Dr. Ali emerges from the study for long enough to be
unhelpful and return. The investigators first attempt to communicate
with the drawing room occupants. Lord Fell-Ashmore provides his
report through the door. Flavia provides her translation of the
Horseman’s communications. First Spot Hidden: the temperature near
the drawing room door.
SAN CHECK on first understanding the situation: 0/1.
HOUR TWO (MIDNIGHT — THINGS CONFIRM THEMSELVES):
Midnight. The storm outside intensifies. The Horseman makes his first
hunting call — felt through the floor, throughout the house. SAN 0/1.
The ward shows its first visible degradation: a dark line appears in
the chalk circle visible under the drawing room door (the ward’s physical
expression is a chalk circle, Ali’s specific method). The investigators
understand the timetable. Lady Constance takes them to the library.
Miss Soames, the schoolteacher, has found the 1743 Collection already —
she began exploring the library as soon as she understood the situation.
THE 1743 COLLECTION: The relevant passage. The dismissal form. The
schoolmaster’s note: “This was spoken by old Margery Witch of Crewthorpe
in the winter of 1739 when the Horseman was seen on the boundary of
the Ashmore estate. She said it was the old form and she had it from
her mother. She would not write it herself but permitted me to do so.
I have recorded her pronunciation below as faithfully as I may.”
SAN on reading the description of the Horseman in the 1743 text: 0/1.
Cthulhu Mythos: +1D4.
HOUR THREE (1 A.M. — ALI’S CONFESSION):
Dr. Ali, pressed by the investigators or by the evidence of the ward’s
condition, makes his partial confession: the name form was wrong, the
Horseman came in full rather than in the diminished form, the ward is
holding by less margin than he told Lady Constance. He has the solution —
the old form of dismissal — but he cannot perform it himself, because
he is the summoner and the Horseman’s attention to him is too intense;
if he approaches the door the ward will be stressed beyond its limit.
The investigators will need to speak the form.
The form is six lines in the valley dialect. The schoolmaster’s phonetic
guide is close but not perfect. Someone in the house speaks a form of
the Devon dialect: Mrs. Peel, born and raised in the valley. She knows
the old words, not consciously — she has never thought of them as words —
but when shown the schoolmaster’s guide she will read it and her voice
will settle into something that is older than her, and she will say:
“My nan used to say something like this. At the door. At Christmas.”
HOUR FOUR (2 A.M. — THE WARD CRACKS):
The ward’s first genuine fracture. Not a failure — a crack, a line
of stress visible under the door as the chalk line breaks in one place.
The temperature in the entrance hall drops several degrees. The
Horseman’s attention shifts to the fracture and the pressure intensifies.
From inside the room, Reverend March’s voice: steady, still praying,
the words audible but not the meaning. From Lord Fell-Ashmore: “I would
suggest we accelerate whatever is being planned.”
SAN 1/1D4 for the investigators present as the crack appears.
The investigators need: the old form memorised (or written on a card,
which Mrs. Peel suggests and Constance immediately acts on), the bread
and salt from the kitchen, the front door open, the ward modification
agreed with Ali. The modification is straightforward — Ali can adjust
the ward’s directional property from inside the study using a prepared
phrase, which creates an exit in the ward without dissolving it entirely.
He will do this. He needs to be persuaded that this is preferable to
the alternative.
HOUR FIVE (3-5 A.M. — PREPARATION AND EXECUTION):
The preparation. Lady Constance, who has been writing in her notebook
throughout, volunteers a discovery: the old hearth position. If the
household fire — the main drawing room fire, which is sealed inside
the ward — cannot serve, there is the cellar hearth. The cellar hearth
must be lit before the Horseman can be released, because the tradition
is specific on this point: the inside must be marked warm before the
outside is marked cold. A lit hearth in the oldest part of the house.
The hearth protocol.
Someone must go to the cellar and light the hearth. The cellar is dark
and old and the foundations of the previous house are down there and
the Horseman’s influence, even at this distance from the drawing room,
has been working on the cellar in the way that cold works on old stone.
The hearth is in the northwest corner. There are matches in the kitchen.
THE CELLAR SCENE: One or two investigators. The old foundations are
visible in the torchlight — carved stone, earlier than the 1734 building,
earlier than anything above-ground. The northwest corner’s hearth is
built into what was once an exterior wall, now interior. The hearth is
not empty. On the hearthstone, placed there by someone a very long time
ago and not disturbed since: a small wooden figure, rough-cut, approximately
eight inches tall, that is not quite human and not quite not.
SAN 0/1 for finding the figure. It is votive — it has been here since
before the Georgian house. It should not be moved. It should not be
disturbed. Light the fire around it. This is the correct thing to do.
When the fire is lit, the warmth in the cellar changes character
in a way that the investigators will feel in their feet and in their
chests — a quality of the inside being properly inside, of the hearth
being what it is supposed to be. The figure in the hearth is not warm.
It is the fire that is warm. The figure simply is.
HOUR SIX (5-7 A.M. — THE RELEASE):
Everything is in place. Mrs. Peel has the words. The bread and salt
are on the doorstep — James, given a specific and simple task,
performed it without incident. The cellar hearth is lit. Ali has
modified the ward. The front door is open and the storm comes through it
with the full enthusiasm of a Devon December.
The investigators — or the investigator who has the words — stands at
the drawing room door. Ali speaks the modification from the study.
The ward shifts — not dissolves, shifts — and the exit appears.
The door can now be opened. The room will not explode. The Horseman
can leave.
What happens when the door opens: cold, enormous and specific, comes
through it. The investigators can see, in the cold blue light of the
drawing room, the three people pressed to the far wall (Lord Fell-Ashmore
still in his armchair, the Reverend March standing with her hands folded,
Flavia Brent sitting on the floor looking at the door with something that
is unambiguously excitement). And the Horseman, at the window, turning.
He turns slowly. He looks at the investigators. This is the full attention
of the Winter Horseman of the Ashmore Valley, and it is an enormous thing
to have aimed at one.
The words are spoken. The bread and salt is on the step. The cellar
hearth is lit. The front door is open.
He looks at the investigators for a moment longer. Then he looks at
the open door. Then he moves — not walks, moves, the way weather moves —
through the room, through the investigators’ space (the temperature
drops twenty degrees as he passes, the investigators’ breath visible,
frost on their clothes immediately), through the entrance hall, and
through the open front door.
SAN 1/1D4 for the full passage.
He pauses in the doorway. One second. Two. Then he is the storm.
The ward dissolves. The drawing room temperature normalises over the
next twenty minutes. The three people are released. Lord Fell-Ashmore
finishes his page. The Reverend March finishes her prayer. Flavia Brent
says “Can we do it again?” and is firmly told no.
Outside, the storm intensifies for approximately one hour. Then it does
not. Then it is simply a winter night, cold and clear, the moor white
under the stars.
Dawn at 7:52.
The train is waiting at Ashmore Crossing halt. The guard reports that
the breakdown crew arrived at five and the repair is complete. The 7:15
to Devonport will depart, significantly delayed, at 8:05.
COMPLICATIONS AND WILD CARDS
THE BRIEFCASE: At some point in the night, Henderson Caul’s briefcase
will become relevant — not because it contains anything occult, but
because he will become convinced, in the heightened atmosphere of the
house, that someone is interested in it. He is wrong. He will also,
under pressure, become convinced that the Winter Horseman is a German
operation of some kind, which is incorrect but which he will maintain
with the conviction of a man whose professional framework provides a
German explanation for everything unusual in 1938. He needs to be
managed away from this interpretation before he does something
counterproductive with it.
THE CAPTAIN’S REVOLVER: Captain Roach will, at some point between
midnight and 3 a.m., decide to deal with the situation by shooting it.
The revolver will fire — he is competent and his weapon is maintained —
and the bullet will travel through the Winter Horseman (who is not
physically present in any sense the bullet can address) and into the
drawing room wall, which will alarm everyone and accomplish nothing.
The Horseman’s attention will shift to the Captain for approximately
fifteen seconds, during which the temperature around him will drop to
something below comfortable, and then the Horseman will lose interest.
The Captain will sit down. He will not fire again.
MRS. QUARR’S AUTHORITY: At one point — the Keeper should choose
the moment of most potential panic — Dorothea Quarr will stand up
from wherever she is sitting and speak in the voice of a woman who
once sorted out a Vienna diplomatic incident and say: “I think it
would be best if everyone had a cup of tea and sat down and allowed
the young people to get on with it.” The room will calm. This is
useful. Mrs. Peel will already be making tea.
DR. ALI’S FINAL MOMENT: When the Horseman passes through the entrance
hall on his way out, he pauses briefly — one second — near the study
door. The temperature at the study door drops to something extreme.
Ali, inside, says nothing. Then the Horseman moves on. In the morning,
Ali will pack his equipment with the specific efficiency of a man
packing to leave as soon as the roads are clear. He will say very little.
He will say, before he goes, to Lady Constance: “The entity was larger
than the secondary texts indicated.” Lady Constance will say: “Yes.
I noticed that in your notes. I thought you knew.” He will say nothing
to this and get into his car.
THE RADIO: At some point in the night — probably around 3 a.m. — someone
will turn on the radio for normality’s sake. The BBC has concluded its
broadcasting for the evening. What comes through is the weather service,
briefly, and then static, and then something that is not static and not
the weather service and is not quite language but has the structure of
language, repeating, until someone turns the radio off. This is the
Horseman. He is the storm and the storm is everywhere including the
frequencies and he is not addressing anyone in particular but the
investigators will feel addressed.
SAN 0/1 for hearing this.
THE MORNING AFTER
Breakfast at Ashmore Court at half past seven. Mrs. Peel has been
cooking since six. The food is very good. The house is warm. Outside
the windows, the valley is white with frost and the sky is pale and
clear, the kind of morning that only follows something extreme.
Lord Fell-Ashmore eats his breakfast with the deliberate pleasure of
a man who has decided to be grateful for ordinary things. He says,
to the table: “I should like it recorded that I behaved well throughout.”
The Reverend March says: “You did, Gideon.” He says: “Thank you,
Patricia.” This is the most intimate exchange anyone has witnessed
between them and it is, unexpectedly, moving.
Flavia Brent has already taken fourteen photographs with the camera
she brought for Christmas and is composing the telegram she intends
to send to a friend in London that will be, in the interests of the
telegraph service’s bandwidth, considerably shorter than the story
she intends to tell.
Lady Constance is writing. She has been writing since five thirty.
She will not show anyone what she is writing. She will, three years
later, publish her fifteenth novel, which is called “The Horseman in
December” and which her readers will consider the finest thing she has
done and which will be dedicated “To the passengers of the 7:15
from Exeter, with grateful thanks.”
The investigators catch the 8:05 to Devonport. The line runs through
the valley, past Ashmore Court, past the fields of the estate, past
the old standing place of the boundary stones on the hill. The
investigators, if they look out the window as the train passes this
point, will see: nothing. The frost on the grass. The pale sky. The
old valley in winter, quiet and cold and entirely itself.
Good morning.
THE WINTER HORSEMAN — FULL ENTRY
The Winter Horseman is a genius loci — a spirit of the Ashmore valley
specifically and of the Devon winter generally, pre-Christian in origin,
associated with the boundary-running tradition of the old agricultural
year. He is not associated with any of the Outer Gods and is not a
Mythos entity in the strict classification. He is something older and
more local: a piece of the landscape that has developed enough
coherence over enough centuries to be a distinct presence.
He is dangerous only under the specific circumstance of being confined.
Outside, in his proper domain, he is simply a feature of the winter —
the cold intensification, the sense of something running the boundaries,
the instinct to stay indoors on the worst nights. He does not harm the
living except by proximity, and proximity outside is a matter of choice.
Inside, confined, his distress generates conditions incompatible with
human survival over several hours.
He cannot be banished. He can be released with the correct form and
the correct traditional materials. He will respond to the old form
of address regardless of who speaks it, provided it is spoken correctly,
at the door of a kept house with a lit hearth and the bread and salt on
the step. These are the terms. They have always been the terms.
IN THE CONFINED STATE (current):
STR 90 CON — SIZ 100 DEX — INT 70
APP — POW 120 EDU — SAN — HP —
Presence: All within the ward lose 1 MP per thirty minutes of exposure.
Temperature: The ward’s environment drops 2°C per hour.
The Hunt Call: When distressed, the hunting call. Heard through the
floor. SAN 0/1 for those in the house; SAN 1/1D4 for those in the
adjacent room.
Ward Pressure: Each Hunt Call degrades the ward by an additional
increment. Three Hunt Calls will shorten the remaining time
considerably.
He cannot be harmed. Bullets pass through him — he is weather, not flesh.
RELEASE:
Once the correct form is spoken, the door opened, the hearth lit, the
bread and salt in place: he departs. The release takes less than a
minute. The passage of his full presence through a space occupied by
investigators costs 1/1D4 SAN. The investigators are not harmed
physically — the cold is intense but passes.
SAN LOSS — Full awareness of what he is: 1/1D4.
SAN LOSS — His full attention: 1/1D6.
Mythos Gain: +1D4 Cthulhu Mythos (he is not Mythos per se but his
existence implies things about the nature of the world that are).
SAN Cap Reduction: 1 per Mythos point gained.
A NOTE ON 1938
No one in this scenario needs to mention Munich or Hitler or
rearmament or the thing that is coming. It is present in the
room the way it was present in every room in Britain in December
1938: as Henderson Caul’s briefcase, as Captain Roach’s reflexive
military competence, as the specific quality of Flavia Brent’s
twenty-three-year-old recklessness in a year when being twenty-three
is going to mean something soon. It is in Lady Constance writing
through the night because she is a woman who knows that certain
windows close. It is in the Reverend March’s prayer, which is
for more than just the drawing room.
The winter is the winter. What comes after is coming whether the
Horseman is released or not. The train will leave at 8:05. There
is somewhere everyone needs to be.
