Evening Activities
The investigators continue their discussion regarding Ms. Collins and Mr. Fresno’s medieval book. Dr. Miller seems to know a surprising amount about medieval manuscripts. He suspects that the book is, effectively, priceless, and that Ms. Collins is practically defrauding them by offering only $300 for it. He also suspects the book is more likely a magical grimoire than a Bible or other religious work. Ada agrees with this.
Everyone agrees that Ms. Collins likely knows more than she’s saying about the book. They resolve to confront her with their suppositions the next time they encounter her.
Dale, desperate to steady his nerves, goes out to the garage and gives Mr. Fresno’s car the once over. He also makes friends with the racoon. The car turns out to be in surprisingly good shape.
Martin steps out to go to the nearest Western Union office. He cables someone in the Dakotas and asks them to put his horse on the next available train.
Everyone else splits up to continue searching through/cleaning the house. Ada busies herself organizing Fresno’s journals, which seem to be evenly split between dossiers on potential heirs and documentation of various occult phenomena.
The Fresno Journals, In No Particular Order
Father Wilk locates a small door in Fresno’s office
that leads to the attic. He decides to poke around in there for a bit.
A few minutes after he enters, a loud crash shakes the house. It turns out Father Wilk dislodged a load-bearing bit of detritus in the attic and became trapped under an avalanche of stuff. Between Dale’s strength and Val’s nimbleness, a bruised Father Wilk is quickly extracted and tended to.
Shortly after that bit of excitement, the investigators decide to head to bed. Val, Father Wilk, and Martin all remain at the house. The rest return to their rooms at the Sutter Root Inn.
Nighttime Noises
Val seems to be an insomniac and spends most of her night awake and outside by the back porch.
At about 3 am, Val hears some noises in the back yard and goes to investigate. These noises also awaken Father Wilk, who comes to the back door to see what’s going on. When he doesn’t notice anything amiss, Father Wilk launches into a fiery religious diatribe, demanding that whatever ne’er-do-well is lurking on the premises show themselves or face the retribution of hell.
His speech is so intimidating that Val worries that Father Wilk is talking about her.
No one answers Father Wilk’s challenge, other than a dog three streets over who starts barking its head off.
With a shrug, the duo go to bed. Meanwhile, Martin sleeps on, untroubled by the disturbance.
Sunday, November 16, 1924
The investigators reconvene at the house to continue going through Mr. Fresno’s personal effects. They are soon joined by Gus and Gabby Detherage, who have returned with a list of their rates. The Detherages charge a dollar a day and twenty-five cents per load they take to the dump. This seems equitable to the group, and so the Detherages are hired to clean out the house. They work with the investigators to clear the kitchen and dining area.
The investigators notice that Gabby keeps looking nervously at her grandfather. They eventually deduce that this is because Gus is an old guy and Gabby is worried about him, and not because the Detherages are finding any weird or untoward things in their excavations.
Gabby Detherage
Dale decides to check out the attic in the daylight, to see if he can find anything that Father Wilk might have missed. He notices something that looks very much like a warding circle carved into the floorboards. He points it out to the others, and everyone worriedly discusses what it means and what they’ve gotten themselves into.
During this discussion, Gus approaches the investigators. He tells them that he and Gabby have started to clear out the basement. He also says that he has found a locked door behind some junk and wants to know if the investigators want that cleaned out as well.
“If’n you do, I’ll need you to unlock it, o’course.”
The investigators proceed to the basement to find that the Detherages have uncovered not only the door, but also a nearby workbench. Val goes through the ring of keys and ultimately finds one that unlocks the padlock on the door. Opening the door reveals a crude alcove that seems to have been hacked out of the basement wall. There seems to be a shaft leading down into the earth, which is blocked off by an unadorned metal manhole cover.
Taped to the manhole cover is an envelope that reads, “to my friends.”
The Letter
The investigators take some time to read the letter, which is from Nicholas Fresno and written in June of 1919. Fresno welcomes the reader to his house and hopes that they will be able to carry on his strange and dangerous work. He mentions that the "Veil" around Port Harbor is very thin, and that he has tried--with some success--to keep any cracks from growing or spreading.
He closes with a crude drawing of some tunnels that he claims run beneath Port Harbor. He hopes that the map will be of use to the reader in some of their future endeavors.
The investigators mostly cannot decipher the map’s labels. They
suspect that it is not to scale and that at least one tunnel leads to the
shores of the Abbenasset River. Ada wonders if the label “UR” means that the
tunnels—or part of them—were once part of the Underground Railroad. Dr. Miller thinks that the map looks suspiciously like a ritual symbol he's seen once or twice before.
To My Friends
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