413: Your House
Synopsis
While the Major and Dr. Simeon go for supplies after 412: My Enemy, Tallahassee, Billy and Dom go to Bernard Corbitt's house to dig up his spell book. The once pristine house is running down: the lawn is overgrown and dead in patches, windows are broken, and police signs on the door say "Do not enter." Dom reaches through a broken window by the front door, unlocks it and lets them in. The power is off, the house has been ransacked, and it smells of mold, mildew and death. Tallahassee takes a hat from the hall closet, and they find small animal bones scattered among the debris.
As they start down to the basement, Dom hears skittering and claws on hardwood upstairs. They decide to keep going and close the door behind them. They pass through the old operating room, with its refrigerator and compartments now open and empty, and through the cabinet with the false back into the dirt-floored den where Corbitt's first creation had lived. Billy and Dom feel an overwhelming sense of dread there. While Tallahassee keeps watch with his flashlight and gun, Billy digs in the back left corner and, six to eight inches down, finds a loose brick hiding a small locked lockbox, about the size of a shoe box. He pockets the brick for Simeon.
Coming back up, they hear more movement from the back of the house. Tallahassee pushes into the dining room and finds, under the table, a creature the size of a Labrador: a horrible combination of dog and spider, with a furless canine head, many legs of different kinds and sharp fangs. It is one of Corbitt's monstrosities, the kind of thing that earned him the nickname "the Frankenstein of Arkham." Tallahassee loses 1 sanity and fires his Colt three times, hitting it in the body and shooting off one of its legs. It bowls him over but does not bite him, and scrambles out through the broken kitchen window. Dom, who loses 4 sanity on seeing it, chases it into the backyard, but it scales the back fence and is gone. Tallahassee follows its trail of blood over the fences into the neighboring yards.
When Dom comes around to the front of the house, the car is gone and there is no sign of Billy. In a scene for Billy alone, the Keeper reveals that Billy has slipped out the front with the lockbox, locking the door behind him. He remembers sitting in a chair at the hospital in a haze after Raymond Goddard was killed, when Goodman Gray squatted down in front of him, pointed in his face and spoke words that went past his broken psyche straight into his mind: if he found anything of interest, he was to bring it to Gray immediately. As the memory fades, Billy is driving through the morning rain toward the home of Erastus Goddard.
Funny Moments
- Seeing a broken window by the door, the group says "looks like Simeon's been here" and blames him for throwing bricks through windows.
- Tallahassee's sniffing of the air prompts the cast to tell the real-life story behind "It smells like skin in here."
- Finding a hat in the closet leads to "Tallahassee Turner and the invisible college."
- The Keeper describes the basement: "It's dark as a butthole down here," and the table agrees the word is "100% legal Arkham Files terminology."
- Billy finds a loose brick and says "I'll save this for Simi."
- Billy digs in the dirt "like a dog," throwing it between his legs.
- Dom explains why he will go last: "I got shot, so I'm going to be last."
- The group argues over whether to go on three, on one or on go, ending with "Alright we go on seven."
- Told he is a fool for charging after the creature, Dom answers "I'm a fool that loves you".