Welcome to Hemlock Falls

[Sarah Whittaker]

She blushes again, and murmurs "I couldn't say." About French romantics, anyway.

The chopper puts her back in her element, and she considers. "Not up near the fire tower, obviously. Um." She has to look around, then says "If it HAD to, we could probably put one down at one of the campgrounds, or at the park near the falls. Or we could .... um. I'm not sure."


((Editted because I screwed up and didn't check with Atrus and changed the geography of Hemlock Falls. Oops.))

 

[Mathewsen]

Mat is happy his diversion maneuver worked as expected.
"Great, that's noted, thank you." He smiles. "Oh, and I was wondering earlier, why was the mine closed? Ran out of interesting stuff to dig out? Or maybe Coblynau told you to? Or Knockers?"

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

"Who's Kobblyno?" Her brows draw together, and she looks puzzled. "Knoc... oh!" She mimes Gibbslapping him. "No, little scary gnomes didn't tell us to." She pauses, then shrugs.

"Actually, for all I know, the Harpes family forgot to give Chipmunk his proper due. It just .. shut down. Late in the eighteen-hundreds, or something. And they tried to open it after the War, but I guess they didn't have enough men, or the men wanted to work at the sawmill instead." She shrugs. "It just closed."

 

[Mathewsen]

Mat laughs "Heh, you already have one legend about spirits and animal, so you could have one about knockers! And you see 'em as scary? In general it's the 'benevolent prankster' that seems more common. Like, stealing food, tools, but knocking to warn miners about imminent mine collapse!"

"I can get that, working in the mine is quite hard, and it takes a big toll on your health too. I have to admit I was hoping for something a bit more... Dunno... Something else than just men not wanting to work there!"

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

She laughs, and then leans her head back and to one side, her eyes half closed.

"Late in the eighteen hundreds ... let's see."

"Deep in the darkest, lowest level of the mine, the miners were working a seam. All was going well until the night shift came in." She opens her eyes and looks at Mat. "It has to be the night shift, of course." Back to the 'thinking' pose. "Suddenly all the knockers went silent, the canary stopped moving, and the lanterns all glowed blue...."

 

[Mathewsen]

Mat takes that as an invitation to continue the story.

"The air had an aftertaste of static electricity, that sensation one gets when things are about to go really wrong. Suddenly, the fire from the lanterns started to rise in the air, swirling above their heads, and forming an enormous blue flame. The miners heard a distant laughter, and realised it was coming from the flame."

"It started to form into a body and limbs, as they all stared, unable to move the slightiest..."

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

Sarah grins at Mat and laughs, then continues making up the story. "Most of the miners ran, of course. Or stood and stared, helpless. But one of them was either braver or crazier than the rest and headed towards the creature, pickaxe above his head, screaming like a banshee."

 

[Mathewsen]

Mat and Sarah kept talking until someone came, Marcus came out of the Church or interacted with them, or something caught their attention.

 

[Atrus]

Marcos twirls his beard in thought — and maybe a bit nervously — as he steps away from the lectern and looks again around the church. Whatever — whoever — left these marks on the pages is bound to have left some marks elsewhere.

It took some time -and probably the use of a small torch too, given the low lighting- but eventually Marcos found some more black stains on the seat of a bench, as well as the footrest and the back of the bench in front. Maybe the 'whoever' had knelt down to pray, or maybe they just tripped on the bench and gripped it for support.

 

[Marcos Medeiros]

Marcos, figuring that Mathieu is chatting with Sarah outside in order to buy him some more time to investigate (that is what he's doing, right?), continues snooping around the church for anything interesting. Normally, dirt on a well-used footrest wouldn't be interesting, but in this case...

Marcos squeezes himself into the pew and-... wait, what was he going to do, exactly? Oh, that's right. If it works for heroes in action movies, it might be worth a shot here...

Marcos kneels down in the same place as the mysterious sooty being would have, then looks around the church once more. Maybe this... whatever it is was looking for something that could only be seen from this position.

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

((Since we were considering the radio tower, shall we join the offstage gather for a group to go there?

ICly, we can probably either happen to be going back, or if the route to the walking path goes past the church, hear/see them passing))

 

[Atrus]

Marcos knelt down on the bench, trying to position himself exactly over the stains. His eye didn’t fall on anything in particular, not did he spot anything hidden or half out of sight - the church didn’t offer much in the way of nooks and crannies. He even tried closing his eyes for good measure, as maybe there was something supernatural going on that couldn’t be seen with regular sight. Nothing.

With a sigh Marcos rose from the bench, sand creaking under his boots, and patted his trousers to clean them up. Hopefully they had not stained too much.
Wait. Sand?

He turned around. In the space of a blink, the whole church floor had been covered in sand, forming small dunes and slopes among the pews. There were leafless branches sticking out of the sand like sad little trees, connected between them by a long thread of twine.

A sand-free path was cut roughly in the middle of the church, snaking from the altar to the door, which was now closed. In fact, the whole church seemed to be suddenly a lot bigger than it was before.

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

((I ... guess we probably won't be taking Marcos.))

 

[Atrus]

((Hah, sorry, you posted while I was writing. Probably not, if you leave now. ))

 

[Marcos Medeiros]

Ooookay. So maybe Marcos was desperately wishing that he could be sunbathing at a beach back home instead of investigating some creepy signal, but he was not expecting the beach to come to him.

...Well, now that he looks at it, it's really more of a desert. In the middle of a church. That was spotless and empty and very much not near any kind of sand and what the hell was in that soot.

Marcos rubs his eyes for good measure but, when the dunes are still there after the umpteenth time, he resigns himself to his fate. Well, looks like it's time to put on that detective cap.

Marcos carefully makes his way down the path through the dunes and peeks out of a window by the door, first, to see if Mathieu and Sarah are still outside. If they are... well, he'll find something to barricade the doors with. There'll be no explaining this – if it's not all in his head, anyway.

 

[Atrus]

Marcos started to make his way towards the entrance. He realized quickly that something was wrong - well, more wrong: no matter how many steps he took he always had the same number of pews ahead of him, and the entrance door seemed to be actually getting further away.

He turned back to see how far he had actually walked, and was only mildly surprised to see that the walls had receded to a far distance, turning the interior of the church into a desert cathedral. He couldn’t see the roof any more, only a vague blackness above.

Small lights like stars had lit on the twine that connected the branches, giving the whole thing a surreal atmosphere.
There were now objects strewn around the sand, too. Rocks, bottles, scraps of canvas, metal tins and crates.

And there was also a sound. It was vague and distant but persistent, like a low whistle or tinnitus.

 

[Marcos Medeiros]

Marcos is stubborn, but thankfully not stubborn enough to waste too much time on trying to make it to the door. More than he's willing to admit, though.

The young sailor crosses his arms over his chest and squints angrily at... something. He's not quite sure what he should be looking for. He tries following the lights, then half-heartedly searches through the items scattered about the dunes. And that's when a novel thought strikes him. Maybe he shouldn't be looking for something. Maybe, just maybe, he should be listening for it.

Marcos tries to hone in on the source of the whistling sound, all the while idly wondering if he still gets cell reception... wherever he is. If he's going to spend any more time in here, Mathieu might just want to know.

 

[Mathewsen]

Mat gets up from the rock he was sitting on, and tries to open the church's door, to take a peek.
If he can open it, he'll look after Marcos without getting inside. Whether or not he sees him, unless he looks/sounds in trouble, he'll just tell him they're going back to get his coat from the others.

If he can't open it, he'll try to not make it noticeable to Sarah, who is absently pulling out weeds from the garden, and talk all the same before pushing the door hard enough to make it clink and sound like he closed it.

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

If Marcos wants to spend absolutely ages in a church, who is Sarah to criticise him? Presumably, he's praying. And what a man says in his prayers is between himself and God.

So since she and Mat are ready to go meet up with the others, she'll just wait while Mat makes sure Marcos knows where to meet them. And there's weeds in the bed of flowering annuals again. May as well pull a few out by the roots while she's waiting.

 

[Atrus]

The whistle slowly became louder, enough that Marcos was sure he was not imagining it any more. It seemed to come from... everywhere, really. With the acoustics of the church at work, he couldn't be sure of the source.

The sound grew steadily into a roar, strong enough to make the pans and bottles vibrate and clink against each other. As he raised his phone looking for a signal, Marcos noticed a yellow-red light high above his head in the pitch black, a light that was steadily coming closer. The noise was now deafening. Sand was swirling about his feet.

A sensation of dread swallowed Marcos, a sense of inevitability like he'd never felt before. This was it. This was the end. He would never come home. He would never see Hemlock Falls-


The door clicked open.
Mat entered and found Marcos standing in the middle of the church, phone raised high, pale as if he'd seen a ghost.
There were no signs of sand, rocks, bottles, lights, or loud noises. Everything was as he'd last seen it a few minutes before.