202: The Good Doctor

Synopsis

The investigators are still in the Orchard Run Gas and Cafe, where Billy McConnell asks the room whether anyone recognizes the dazed young woman they pulled off the road. Dan Keelhan knows her at once: she is Amelia Webb, who lives just up the road, and he immediately wonders what the strangers did to her. Billy explains that she ran out of the woods and that he only just avoided hitting her. Simeon Kantstandyerbitz tries his psychology on the catatonic girl and gets nothing, then turns it on the waitress instead. Mary (Mary the Hoebag) confirms that she knows Amelia, who stops in all the time, but Simeon and Dom Druncard both think her shock looks more like surprise at seeing Amelia alive. A second, better roll tells Simeon something else is going on, and he advises the group not to drink the coffee.

Simeon spends much of the scene getting into a squabble with Jake, the soaked trucker, who takes offence at Simeon's suspenders and his "soft science" and has to be talked down. Dom tries to question Mary at the counter in what he believes is a classy tone, and Mary, distracted, keeps handing him coffee instead of answering. Tallahassee Turner lays a hand on Amelia's shoulder to reassure her, and she promptly passes out. Billy catches her before she hits the floor. Dan, who proves to be no help at all, insists he cannot leave the cafe because he is the manager, so he suggests that the investigators go and fetch Amelia's grandfather, a doctor, from the cottage up the road. Tallahassee uses the moment to tell Dan he will appear in his next book as the man who does not help.

An elderly couple who have been stuck at the cafe through the storm offer to look after Amelia. They introduce themselves as Teddy and Winifred Brewer and mention that they run a motel back up the road and have left their grandson Norman in charge. Someone jokes that their name must be Bates. Simeon passes a psychology check on the two and decides they are honest, so he asks Teddy to keep Mary away from the girl and to give her no food or drink. Winifred wraps Amelia in the blanket from the truck. After some arguing about whether to split up, the whole group heads out into the storm, leaving Jake watching the truck through the window and Mary busy behind the counter.

Dan's directions are to take the first road on the right, about a mile back. Billy drives the box truck up a muddy, washed-out hill under a canopy of pruned trees that feels oppressive at night. He makes a hard Drive Auto roll with an extreme success and pulls out of a slide. At the top they find a dark single-storey colonial cottage with a barn beside it. Nobody answers the horn. Billy angles the headlights at the house, and Tallahassee, who spots nothing amiss, finds the front door banging in the wind and a crowbar lying in the mud by the steps. Inside, the hallway is lined with framed medical certificates and family photographs of Amelia, her grandfather and a woman who is clearly her mother, though recent pictures of her are missing. The lights do not work, a telephone sits on a table, and no one answers when they call for Dr. Webb.

In the front sitting room Billy and Tallahassee find an old man with a trimmed beard who matches the photographs, sitting dead against a chair, and bleeding from the shoulder as if from a shotgun blast. Closer to them lies a twisted, spider-like shape with a black, faceless head, which turns out to be a young man in a burlap sack with eye holes, burned away to ash from the waist down, joints dislocated as though by convulsions. Billy and Tallahassee, and later Dom, Simeon and Major Bakersfield, lose a point of Sanity each, except Major Bakersfield, who fails badly, screams and drops his flashlight. When Billy pulls off the sack, the dead man's burst blood vessels and blackened eyes look exactly like the man the Major shot in the orchard. Dom finds a key and a pocket watch on Dr. Webb. The younger man's wallet holds two shotgun shells, a dollar, a coupon for the gas station and a photograph of a small blonde girl eating cotton candy at a fair who looks like Mary. His ID reads Clem Taylor. Beside him stands an open silver coffer, about sixteen inches wide, lead-lined, with a wax seal around the lid and ash inside and all around it. Neither Dom nor Tallahassee can identify it through the Occult. A window in the room has a baseball-sized hole that appears to have been melted through the glass. Simeon checks the telephone while the others argue about telling Mary.

The rest of the house offers more. The kitchen is ordinary. The study has diplomas, a shelf with Tallahassee's own book on it, and framed moths and butterflies that seem to move whenever lightning flashes. The key opens the locked roll-top desk, though Dom has to spend a point of Luck to find anything. They take $600 in cash, an Arkham First National Bank account book, a pot of strange-smelling wax ointment and a black leather journal buried in the papers. In Amelia's room Billy and Simeon find sleeping drafts and letters showing she recently spent time in an asylum. Billy takes a pocket Bible from the doctor's room, inscribed with a plea for mercy on the physician. Beyond a door off the hall, stairs lead down to a basement containing crates and an out-of-fuel generator, whose casing turns out to be full of human skulls.

In the journal, the writer, a physician, describes inheriting a practice from Dr. Sanger and his unease at the doctor's discreet "special services" for troubled women, an unease that Sanger brushes aside. A later entry that July gives instructions involving the silver coffer and a light. As the last entry is read, a glow like moonlight on a lake begins to dance along the doorway out into the hallway.

Funny Moments

• Simeon tells Jake to shut up and spends the next scene insisting it was all psychology. Jake takes offence at his "fancy pants" suspenders, Simeon warns him that nobody wants to see what they can do, and he eventually calls Mary a hoebag in front of her. Jake approves and tells him he is "all right".
• Dom tries a "classy tone" to sweet-talk Mary at the counter. A player asks him to demonstrate, and Dom admits he doesn't know what one sounds like. Mary, oblivious, keeps loading him with coffee while he apologizes for Simeon, and Dom decides she is annoying.
• Tallahassee Turner tells Dan Keelhan he will be in the next book, titled People That Were Worthless in My Adventures, and promotes him to subtitle. Dan, who cannot leave the cafe, takes the news happily and asks about royalties.
• Dan refuses to go and fetch the doctor, and when Tallahassee tells him to go bake a cake instead, he says he only manages.
• When Simeon claims that Amelia went catatonic after Tallahassee touched her, Tallahassee agrees that most women do. Tallahassee later labels Simeon and another holdout "perverts" for wanting to stay behind with the girl.
• Major Bakersfield keeps predicting "butthole monsters" at the cottage. Simeon asks Teddy to watch out for buttholes, and when Teddy asks why he doesn't need to, Simeon says it's because he is in a diner. Later Simeon asks whether the generator is full of human skulls, and the Keeper says it is.

Notable Quotes

• "I don't bake. I manage." —Dan Keelhan
• "You're the subtitle, Dan." —Tallahassee Turner
• "Friend is a strong term." —Simeon Kantstandyerbitz
• "Hey Mary, why don't you move it with the coffee, you hoebag?" —Doctor Simeon Kantstandyerbitz
• "All pockets of all dead people are being searched by me!" —Dominic Druncard