Wherein the investigators continue their interviews, and visit the house.
Day 2
While driving to Baltimore to visit the Macario children, Rachel dozed off at the wheel, and crashed through a farmland fence. She was roughed up the most, but nobody else seemed to even notice the damage.
All four of the investigators showed up in the morning on the doorstep of the Macario children’s guardians. When the caretaker came to the door, she immediately was suspicious of Adams and St. John, and refused to speak any further. When Rachel returned alone she was able to win over the woman, and she was able to speak with the kids.
The kids explained how when their dad got hurt falling down the stairs, he was alone in the house a lot. After a few months without leaving the house, he became deliriously ill. They said that they had often heard him speaking to someone in the basement, and would spend a lot of time down there, but their mother wouldn’t allow them to go down there to see him. They think they know who he was talking to, as a man with “bright eyes” would often look at them in their beds at night. The children became quite fond of Rachel in their short interview, and the children’s caretaker, their father’s cousin, invites Rachel to come back any time, as she seems to have cheered the kids up.
Returning to Miskatonic, the group decides to give the Chapel of Contemplation a glance. The chapel is in terrible shape and overgrown with foliage, but Jane, sweeping aside some of the brush finds a symbol.
Adams and Jane both found themselves unnerved by the chapel, and left to go drown their unease in booze at a local bar. St. John and Rachel both stayed to investigate the chapel further, and stumbled across a weakened spot on the premises, and collapsed into what looked like a large underground meeting room. The fall knocked St. John unconscious, and after reviving him, the two stumbled across two bodies in old silk robes with the same one-eyed symbol on them. Clutched in one of their hands is a molded book that appears to St. John to be in Latin, although they cannot make out any words in the book itself. Taking the book with them, the two scrambled out of the pit and met back up at the bar with Adams and Lady Jane.
Now knowing the fate of the family, the investigators turned to the house to determine if it was still fit to live in. Located downtown, it was the last house on a block filled with commercial buildings. The windows had been nailed shut and new locks recently added to the doors. Using the keys the landlord gave them, all four investigators enter the house and began to poke around.
The first few rooms the investigators came across were empty, and obviously abandoned in haste, the dining room had molding plates of food, and the pantry even worse. It became evident that no one had returned to the house since the Macario couple had been committed to Roxbury.
The living room was as any normal living room, except for a painting on the wall. Looking directly at it seemed to make the investigators dizzy, and the images seemed to change shape and composition every time they blinked or looked away.
While pawing through the leavings of the Macarios, Jane and Rachel stumbled across three densely scrawled books with the name W. Corbitt inscribed in the inside jackets of each. While examining the books, their friends Adams and St. John started to hear a tapping in the house, and began investigating where it may be coming from. The nearer they drew to the stairs at the end of the hall, the louder the tapping grew. The tapping echoed from the stairwells both leading up and down, so Adams and St. John, wary of being separated, called Jane and Rachel over to the stairwell, and together walked upstairs, the tapping becoming louder thumps with every step.