Clod of Cthulhu: There Is No Cod

To recap: last time we left off, we’d just antagonized the local evil cult, set loose a monster, and gotten a little girl killed. If I told you that it gets much, much dumber from here, I’m not sure you’d actually believe me, so I’ll just ask that you read on.

The girl’s father has arrived home, which is a tad on the awkward side, since we kinda killed his daughter. He mumbles some cryptic nonsense, then gives us a key to his general store, telling us to get something from the safe and protect it from the local Order of Dagon. He does not give us the combination to the safe, he just tells us that it’s, “In his diary.” Okay, I mean, thanks for the heads up, but couldn’t you just tell me the number? I’m a detective, I’ve got a notepad. I can write it down. I know what you’re thinking: maybe he just forgot the combination. An easy thing to do, since the combination is his only daughter’s birthday, an event they celebrated yesterday. I’m sure little things like today’s date and how old his daughter is slip right out of his mind.

Anyway, before he can tell me what’s in the safe, fish people arrive and drag him away, claiming that he murdered the daughter. For no fathomable reason, they leave me at the crime scene unattended, so I loot the child’s coloring book on my way out. You’ve gotta love the description of it in your journal. Once again, quoting directly from the game, here:

“There are pictures of strange, unnatural creatures – crudely drawn, but still able to provoke visceral feelings of revulsion. One of them is captioned with the word “Mother” – what can it mean?”

What, indeed.

Long story short, I leave and go to the store. I bump into the missing man’s girlfriend, who’s actually able to give me a few answers. The two of them had been planning to get some money together and get out of Innsmouth. After a few hours here, I can sympathize. There are plenty of unpleasant towns, but few are so committed to generating a theme of hostility and unhappiness as this place. It’s kind of like Disneyland with a goatee, if that makes any sense. Apparently, she’s the daughter of people heavily involved in the local Order of Dagon, so she knows what she’s talking about when she says that if the Order’s taken the guy, he’s probably going to be killed.

Then she says, out of nowhere, “I’m gonna go wait in an abandoned fishing cannery for two days. If you find him, bring him there. Oh, and give him this picture of me.”

What? Why are you going to the cannery? Even assuming that I find this guy in that two-day stretch, why make it harder for us to get to you? I don’t have a car, so I’d have to ask the bus driver to stop over at an abandoned building, and then put you on the bus without him recognizing you or wondering why you were waiting out there in the middle of nowhere. Plus, won’t people notice you’re gone? Won’t they get suspicious? Anyway: aren’t you pretty much safe, since you have connections in the order? Hey, come to think of it, is there any chance you could give me a hand? But no, of course not. That’d make far too much sense.

She leaves, and I crack open the safe. Inside is the Book of Dagon, which (from the summary provided in the journal) is basically a large-print illustrated primer to the Cthulhu mythos, incompletely translated. Apparently, there’s this underwater sea-god, Dagon. People worship him and make sacrifices to him, and these people are quite evil. And there’s another particularly evil god named Cthulhu. And then there’s some other information that is stunningly irrelevant.

So, what have I learned? That:

1.)    There’s a god named Dagon, who people worship.
2.)    The people who worship Dagon sometimes kill people.
3.)    There’s a god named Cthulhu.

Great stuff, there, Book of Dagon. Whatever information I haven’t already gleaned from the even-more-cryptic musings of Innsmouth environs, I could probably grasp from the back of the box. Actually, hell, make that the front of the box.

So, Jack figures he might as well call it a night. Time to head over to the inn, I guess.

As I walk inside the dark, dank, badly-lit inn, I see the bus driver talking to the innkeeper. I won’t paste their whole conversation, but I want you to trust me when I say that this transcription is in no way inaccurate or even an exaggeration.

“Hey, hear about the murder? No time to talk about that though, I’ve got instructions from the Order to make sure that outsider doesn’t leave tonight.”

“Oh, good, I’m expecting him to seek lodgings here.”

The bus driver leaves. I walk inside, a little hesitantly. My survival instincts are already screaming at me not to go into this inn, but I’ve learned to do the exact opposite of what those dictate by now, so I go up to the desk and gamely ask the manager for a room. And might I just note that the innkeeper’s name is Gilman? Just though I’d bring that up.

He says he has plenty available on the top floor, nice views, good ventilation, impossible to escape from in case of a group of murderers coming to kill the death out of you. As if to hammer this point in, at this very moment, Jack has a vision of someone cutting out another man’s heart in a dimly lit room very similar to the ones in this inn.

When he’s recovered from his traumatic brainflash, Jack responds, “That sounds just swell.”

What are you doing, you lunatic—Oh. Ohhh. Okay, never mind, this makes sense. Obviously, Jack’s not planning to try to sleep here. His real job is stringing out the innkeeper, making it seem like he’s blind to the whole deal, then escaping when the opportunity is right. Makes sense, makes sense. Sorry for doubting you there, Jack.

Oh, yeah, at this point Jack has another vision, this one of the innkeeper coming out behind the counter. It strongly implies that he’s the murderer in the last vision, but you’d just about need the clairvoyance of a piece of buttered bread to figure that one out.

An officer of the Innsmouth law appears and asks to speak to the innkeeper outside, privately. If you follow them, they have the following conversation. Again: no exaggerations, here.

“So, how about that outsider? He’s not going to leave the inn alive. Explicit orders.”

“Right. Here’s the number of the room he’s going to sleep in.”

“Good. We’re going to kill him, you know. He’s seen too much.”

“Yes. I will do it properly, as I have done many times in the past.”

The innkeeper just hangs around outside for a while, so you have time to go back and scout out the downstairs. By stealing a key you saw in the last vision, you can access a back room. In case the gory first-person decapitations and the single entendres of the Innsmouth Welcome Wagon were too subtle for you, the back room’s full of organs, organ-stained weapons, and a ledger about how much he enjoys removing the organs of people who stay in his inn.

You leave, and the innkeeper appears. Then he shows you to your room: the exact same room he told the man downstairs he’d be putting you in, right before he brought people ’round to murder you. In case all of this is still too subtle for your sensibilities, as he leaves, you get a vision of him shooting a woman and slashing her throat inside this very room.

The situation is this: your room is one or two stories above the ground, secured by a deadbolt and connected to a second room. The second room is also secured by a deadbolt, and is connected to a third room, but there’s a dresser moved in front of the door. If you try to push it, Jack gets all snippy and says he doesn’t want to bother the other guests. What other guests? I thought nobody ever came through this place, and I was the only one on the bus? Also: we’ve got more important issues.

I was starting to get a sinking feeling, like Jack didn’t actually have some brilliant escape route planned. I mean, I’d think it’d be a given that he wasn’t actually going to try to stop and go to sleep here, but…well, I was starting to worry, you know? It wouldn’t be the first stupid thing he’d done, although it’d certainly be his worst offense to date. Still a little bit in denial, I scouted around, looking for some secret way out—but no dice. I couldn’t really leave the way I’d come in, the windows were shut and locked, and I couldn’t use the dresser in any meaningful way. Great.

It…it doesn’t want me to go to sleep, does it?

Filled with trepidation, I approach the bed and hit, “use.” To my instant relief, Jack says, “I don’t feel safe going to sleep just yet.” Thank god. I knew he wasn’t actually that stupid. I mean, there’s thick, and then there’s clownishly thick.

I start poking around some more. Rug? Nope, no trapdoors. Ceiling? Empty. Dressers? Empty. Nothing special about the mirror. What the hell am I supposed to do?

As I pass by the door, a tip appears.

“You can bolt some doors to make yourself safer! Bolt doors by looking at the mechanism and pressing the use button.”

Oh no.

No.

You’re not telling me…

Mutely, I walk to my door, throwing the bolt. Then I walk to the one in the next room, throwing that bolt for good measure. Then I go back to my bed, the exact same bed the innkeep had all but promised I’d die in.

Jack says:

“Better… not exactly safe, but the best I’m gonna get in this infernal town.”

Then he crawls under the sheets and goes to sleep.

Jack, I don’t say this lightly, but you straight up deserve to die.