305: The Shining... Skin

Synopsis

The episode picks up where 304: Pet, Cemetery left off. As Tallahassee Turner caws atop the truck, the approaching vehicle backs away out of sight. Tallahassee first calls it a Model T, then corrects himself: it was a Packard, a car that seems too expensive for this backwater town. The group turns to J.G. Faust's tomb. When pushing fails, Tallahassee finds that the words of the Latin inscription are embossed and can be pressed into the stone. Dr. Simeon translates it: "We send the spirit of the beloved above, so we remember the life below." The group realizes that "as above, so below" is the key. Simeon presses those words in, and the upside-down compass can then be turned until north points up, which pops the door open. A smell of smoke, charred meat and something sickly sweet and musky drifts out, along with black smudges of soot.

Before going in, Tallahassee casts Flesh Ward (a spell the table will forever after call "Diamond Skin"). He spends ten magic points and some Sanity, and he gains 35 points of armor as an oily sheen ripples over his skin. Simeon invites everyone to feel his newly hardened biceps. Inside, the investigators find a stone staircase leading down into darkness, its landing and walls covered in old dried blood and huge gouges. Percival Warthrop says the gouges look like the claw marks of a very large creature. Billy props the door open with a rock and finds a severed, desiccated hand still gripping the handle on the inside. The spell seems to have unsettled Tallahassee's mind. He sees a torch-lit temple with the snake idol of Nefertiti waiting at the end, then draws his cavalry saber and charges down the stairs, nearly falling.

At the bottom lies a 40-foot-square room dominated by an open cage with a key still in its door. Inside it are burned straw, a nest-like pile of bedding, a large trough and bones. Across the room are the remains of a burned desk, chair and bookcase, and scorched books and papers are strewn everywhere. Simeon's hard success on Psychoanalysis brings Tallahassee back to reality, and most of the group loses Sanity at the scene. They conclude that someone set the "phantom fire" down here, and that the tomb door later swung shut and smothered it, which is why no fire was ever found. Major Bakersfield bags the surviving papers. Three partly burned bodies lie by the cage. Two young men in stylish city suits were torn apart, one missing an arm and part of his ribcage and the other bitten in half. The third, an old man in shabby clothes, is identified from townsfolk's descriptions as Mordecai Shep, and he appears to have been shot. On the torn-in-half man, Tallahassee finds a dog tag reading "Vernon A. D. Bergenberger." The other side bears a stylized squid or octopus head inside a circle. Neither Simeon's occult knowledge nor the Major's military experience can place it. The Major suggests it might belong to some top-secret branch of the military. Percival notes that whatever killed these men, their deaths were covered up, and he asks whether to go to the authorities or keep investigating quietly. On the way out, the investigators see that the claw marks lead upward, as though something clawed its way out of the hole. They emerge from the tomb into an overcast morning.

Funny Moments

Someone suggests opening the tomb by saying "Carcosa," followed by a round of "Melon."
Tallahassee keeps citing page numbers from his own books as instructions for opening the tomb.
Simeon invites everyone to touch Tallahassee's armored biceps.
Tallahassee sees the snake idol of Nefertiti and charges "in the words of Teddy Roosevelt," but nobody else can see an idol.
The severed hand on the door prompts "Need a hand?" and gets pocketed as a spare.
The Keeper compares the scene to "that classic Tallahassee Turner novel, Tallahassee Turner in the Lost World."
Simeon's psychoanalysis technique: "Show me on the doll where it hurts the most."
Someone locks Billy in the cage and tells him to dance.
Asked whether the dog tag names him, the Keeper reads out "Major Aloysius Baker."
Leading the way back out, Tallahassee yells "Charge!" again and runs up the stairs.

Notable Quotes

"Feeling good, boys?" —Tallahassee Turner
"Touch these, touch these biceps. Everybody want to take a touch?" —Simeon Kantstandyerbitz
"And I say in the words of Teddy Roosevelt: Charge!" —Tallahassee Turner
"They unfortunately look like the claw marks of a very large creature." —Percival Warthrop
"This must be some kind of top secret branch of the military." —Major Bakersfield
"At the very least their deaths were covered up." —Percival Warthrop
"Obviously, the trail has gone somewhat cold from this, wherever this creature is now." —Percival Warthrop