Continues...

Once back in the house we were pleasantly surprised to find that Mr. Blue had arranged a tidy selection of cake sand biscuits for the guests pleasure and seeing that there was enough to feed a small army it seemed only right that the staff also joined the feast as we were slowly becoming to know each other after our shared ordeals over the course of the evening. After a while there once again came a banging on the door that by now did not surprise me to see a lot of weaponry suddenly appearing in people’s hands. On opening the door we were shocked to see two washerwomen with a bundle of cloths. They said that they had not seen any peculiar goings on when questioned, but nonetheless we thought it only right to search their belongings, which was a good job too, because there at the bottom of the basket was the missing rod that we had been searching for. They seemed quite genuine when they said that they had not seen it before so we spared them any further interrogation in exchange for the rod and let them on their way back into the night. 

Over dinner, through trial and error we managed to fit all the rods into the correct holes on the urn when we received quite a shock. The very moment the last rod was placed into its hole, Mr. Fate started acting very strangely indeed. He mumbled some strange words in an unrecognized language and immediately I could not move but I could still see and hear that the rest of the party could not move either. He reached for the urn as the door swung open behind him and a few of the thugs, who were revealed to be Cultists, entered the dining room. The man had betrayed us, and it appeared that he was one of “them” all along and was just waiting for us to do the hard work and find all the artifacts. From the urn he pulled what appeared to be an idol representing one of those fish men we had earlier encountered, made of a black stone and began talking to it about a sacrifice. He then proceeded to pull out a very fancy looking knife and plunged it into poor Mr. Blues chest, and then left the room. 

Once again we were in a position of not knowing what we were to do so I left the rest of the party trying to work on that whilst I went upstairs to find my writing book. I would need to write an advert for the position of a new chef, but I was accosted by some more masked men who gagged me and dragged me in to the woods to come face to face with the evil Max Fate, two of the ‘fish’ creatures, known as “Deep Ones” and the rest of the thugs. I braved a question of what was going on and he explained to me that the Professor had summoned the “Deep Ones” when he translated a stone tablet from one of his finds. They had summoned their Cultists, of which Max was their leader, and had stolen the Professor’s artifacts en-route, including 2 statues. Also, they intended to use all three statues and sacred sand from the urn to open a portal to summon someone or something called Father Dagon. At the end of his story he burst into a manic laughter as did his followers and I saw this as an ideal opportunity to take my leave and return to the party with my new found information which we could work to our advantage as he also gave me the time and location of where the ritual was to be held and further more we only had about half an hour to go. 

We then gathered up and divided all our remaining bullets and handed out anything that could be used as weapons, even some garden tools, and bravely made our way to the back yard. Now it was about this point where events were becoming a bit fuzzy in my mind, I remember what little there was left of us running out to the back paddock where we met a terrible sight of lots of the odd chaps in balaclavas and masks so we rushed them with guns blazing but onwards I charged remembering my old army training, for some reason I had become detached from the rest of the party, (well a life of a butler can be a lonely one, my old teacher used to tell me) but hastened to the spot they had come from so that I could try and stop what I could only imagine was another of those awful rituals. I found a small patch of well-trodden grass and this being so late in the year the rest of the grass was in need of a good cut. On the ground lay three of those odd little Idols, one of them being the one that the evil Max Fate had stolen from the box earlier; one of clay, one of obsidian and one made of metal. I decided that they must be destroyed immediately. It only took a couple of shots to take out the first two but the metal one just split so I got the sacrificial knife and drove it in and prised it in half. Immediately the ground started shaking just like an earthquake and ripped open revealing what can only be described as an arm covered in scales with webbed fingers tearing through the earth and great beams of light shooting into the night sky. This, I presumed, was Father Dagon whom I had heard about earlier. It took a swipe at me and knocked me flying about 15 foot. I just caught a glimpse of it being drawn back down and the ground looking as it had always been. At last the evils of the world had been vanquished or so I thought.

 Coming towards me I could see two lumbering beasts heading towards me no doubt to punish me for banishing what could only have been their God. They were the fish people we had encountered earlier. (Now I remembered why I bought that Tartar sauce the morning after). Now if I was to kill these creatures I knew it would probably take more than the few bullets I had remaining. But at least I still had that sacrificial dagger we had found earlier. The first and smaller of the two was soon felled but in doing so I was left with only two bullets remaining so I quickly fired these at what I thought was his head, it was hard to tell due to fact that it did not have a neck. This seemed to knock a bit of wind out of its sails but on it limped towards me. I reached for the knife and thrust it into its chest but due to its thick layer of skin and blubber, it did not appear to harm it too much so I thrust again with all my might but I was too slow and the creatures great webbed hand smashed the dagger from my hand and knocked it into the night, which I was never going to find in the long dark grass. I am sure I had seen a pickaxe only hours earlier by the servant’s entrance, so I made my way back to the house. 

As I was running through the dark with as much haste as my old shrapnel wound would allow and heart pounding, I noticed that there were bodies of Cultists and house guest all around, they were all dead or so I thought, but I pressed on any way, through the back lawn I staggered, where I came across what first appeared the lifeless body of young Master Atkins but soon realised that he was just unconscious so I pressed on vowing to come back after that damned fish had been reeled in. Once inside the house I saw a figure cowering under a table, at last a survivor I thought, I dragged him into the light were in turned out to be none other than that odd Count but I left him where he was seeing that he was in no state to help out due to what appeared to be shell shock. So I ran to the back door, fumbled for the pickaxe and returned to the paddock in time to plunge it into the skull of the foul creature waiting for me. 

I returned to find my right hand man where I left him and found that he was now conscious and clearly confused. He fired many questions at me like where was every one and what was that foul smell in the air, but I calmed him down with a nice cup of tea and I told him not to think of what was on his mind. He did have one question left, which I felt I was my duty answer truthfully. He asked me who had saved all mankind from those terrible creatures? All I could respond with was a very modest “The Butler did it!”