Part 21: Day Two- Page 21

>d
The ancient rungs creak alarmingly as you descend.

Upstairs Hall

A rickety wooden ladder stands here, descending from a three-foot by three-foot square of darkness in the ceiling.
>w
Upstairs Landing
>d
Foyer

Your luggage is still here, spread out all over the foyer.

A cold, noiseless draft coils through the narrow entrance hall. You shiver, wondering where it came from.
>e

Sitting Room

The portrait gazes down at you with crimson-edged malice.


Good call.

>look at fireplace
The fireplace is carved from beautiful, dark-veined marble, a strange shade that is not quite a deep, forest green and not quite a murky, dusky red.

A subtle movement from the portrait makes you turn. For a moment, it seems like the eyes are looking directly at you, but it's only a trick of the light.

>search fireplace
You find nothing of interest.


>look under sofa
You find nothing of interest.

>look behind picture
(the jewelry box)
You see nothing of interest behind the jewelry box.

Wut?

>look behind painting
The portrait doesn't move; it's firmly attached to the wall.

>look under rug
You lift one corner of the rug and look underneath. Nothing but dust and floorboards.

>pull sofa
That would accomplish very little.

>pull fireplace
That would accomplish very little.

Well MAYBE Miranda just wants to redecorate. Did you even think of THAT, game?!


>poke painting with broom
That's not a verb I recognise.

I think "poke" should be in ever IF game's verb list.

>hit painting with broom
Violence isn't the answer to this one.

We'll see about that.


Finally, Miranda's escalated from a klepto to a pyro.

>light painting with matches
(first taking the book of matches)
The match isn't lit.

>strike match
One of the matches starts to burn.

>light painting with match
Petty arson isn't going to solve your problems.

>light fireplace with match
Petty arson isn't going to solve your problems.

Ouch! You drop the match as it burns down to your fingers.

Alas, Maybe Miranda isn't such a lover of fire as she is of petty theft.

>look at match
A label on the side reads, "Water-resistant matches. Strike on cover." There are five matches left.

And I guess once she's dropped a burnt match, it stops existing.
Well, I'm not going to waste the matches when I have a saved game.

>restore
Ok.

>look

Attic
It's much cooler up here than in the rest of the house, and you find it hard to suppress a shiver. Grotesque, looming shadows crawl across the low, slanted ceiling, and the dust hangs thick and motionless in the air. To the west the ceiling dips even lower until the space beneath leaves hardly room enough to crawl, while to the north stands a wooden door, draped in shadows and half-hidden by the slanting eaves.
>d
The ancient rungs creak alarmingly as you descend.

Upstairs Hall

A rickety wooden ladder stands here, descending from a three-foot by three-foot square of darkness in the ceiling.
>w
Upstairs Landing
>d
Foyer

Your luggage is still here, spread out all over the foyer.
>n
Back Hall

The Gallery is East of the Back Hall. Also, you can get to it by going north from the siting room.

>East

Gallery
A long, oak-paneled room, with doorways to the south and west. Paintings line the walls, mounted beneath small, shaded lamps that would illuminate the canvasses nicely if only the electricity were working. Still, even in the shadowed gloom you can see that all were done by the same artist.

As of now, the paintings are purely decorative, which is lovely. And has a sort of trick to it.

>look at paintings
All of them are bizarre, and most of them border on the grotesque. Alien landscapes peopled by writhing, malformed creatures; ancient temples built in strange, eye-bending architectures; monstrous beasts crawling through shadows that cannot quite conceal their disturbingly human shapes -- these seem to make up the bulk of the paintings' subject matter. And yet, despite the fantastical nature of the images painted, the style is neither abstract nor surreal. In fact, the level of detail approaches the photorealistic. Excruciating attention has been paid to light, shadows, and textures; even the alien creatures are depicted with gruesome anatomical accuracy. It is as though the artist had worked from actual, living models rather than from what must have been a thoroughly deranged imagination, and the overall effect is rather chilling.

One scene in particular catches your eye.

See, every time we "look at scene..."

>look at scene
A group of white men in Revolutionary period clothing, taking prisoner a group of Native Americans. The exact situation is unclear: the white men stand around with muskets threatening, while the natives, who are chained together, file into a fenced enclosure, as though being herded into a compound of some sort.

In the extreme background, at the far end of the enclosure, stands a large brick building. Dark, grainy smoke billows up from two stone chimneys rising above the structure. Leaning very close, you can just make out another group of natives being herded into the structure by more of the white men.

You shake yourself suddenly, and realize you've been staring intently at the painting for minutes on end. You step back and rub your tired eyes. When you look again, however, the picture you were just examining is no longer in front of you. None of the other paintings have moved as far as you can tell, but that particular scene seems to have disappeared without leaving so much as a blank space on the wall.

>look at scene
You search the paintings thoroughly, but cannot find the scene you saw earlier.

Poof! It's gone! But if we leave and reenter...

>w

Back Hall

>e

Gallery

>look at scene
A group of old midwives cluster around a bed-ridden woman who is apparently giving birth. The old women are wizened and grim, with crooked hands and bloodstained aprons. They seem to confer with each other in dark whispers that the younger woman, who is drenched in sweat and obviously in great pain, cannot hear. By the corner of the bed, an ominous detail: a bucket full of murky, red water.

Strangely, though, the old women are not the only ones present at the birth. Nearby, in another bed, lies a shriveled, decrepit old man. Although seemingly at death's door, he struggles to raise himself, as if to see the birthing over the heads of the hunched midwives. His wasted visage shows an expression of satisfaction or approval, and he is reaching out with one skeletal arm in a manner curiously similar to the famous picture on the Sistine Chapel, of God giving life to His creation Adam.

You shake yourself suddenly, and realize you've been staring intently at the painting for minutes on end. You step back and rub your tired eyes. When you look again, however, the picture you were just examining is no longer in front of you. None of the other paintings have moved as far as you can tell, but that particular scene seems to have disappeared without leaving so much as a blank space on the wall.

So, let me just edit out all the leaving and coming back and go through some of the paintings. They're randomly selected and there are TONS of them.
I can honestly say, I'm not certain how many disappearing scenes there are.

>look at scene
A young apprentice butcher learns his trade in a slaughterhouse. The older man -- heavyset, thick jaw and sloping brow -- holds his cleaver above a severed calf's head, looking expectantly at the boy as though demonstrating the proper technique. The boy, holding a smaller cleaver of his own, looks on attentively. It would be reminiscent of something by Norman Rockwell, except for the frankly alarming amount of gore. The aprons and faces of both master and apprentice are streaked with blood; blood pools on the chopping block and overspills the gutters; blood drips from the walls and from the skinned carcasses that can be seen hanging in the background. The two butchers stand ankle-deep in a reeking abattoir.

And... there's something wrong with the boy. Most of his body is hidden behind the chopping block, but there are details about the parts you can see that... don't seem to fit quite right. The arm holding the cleaver is slightly misshapen, for example, the fingers deformed in a way that you can't quite make out. And his neck seems just a bit too thick, and his head seems just a bit too large and blocky. His face looks normal enough, except that it seems to have been placed just slightly off-center. It's a very subtly disturbing effect.

>look at scene
The simple but striking image of five young women being burned to death at the stake. Around them stand a crowd of men and women dressed in rustic, 17th century clothing; they jeer and throw stones. The ringleader, standing in front of the five glowing pyres with the smoking torch still in his hand, wears a clergyman's collar.

The artist obviously went to painstaking lengths to depict the burning in ghastly detail: skin curling away from blackened flesh; hair shriveling; eyes boiling in their sockets and melting across cracked and splitting cheeks... repeated five times over, on the bodies of five thrashing, screaming girls. It turns your stomach to look at.

>look at scene
A strange scene, showing only a clergyman staring down into the pages of a large, black-bound book. The point of view is that of someone standing beneath the pulpit, looking up -- so that the text of the book is hidden from the viewer, while the preacher's face is clearly visible.

He seems to be caught in a paroxysm of terror: his face livid; his lips stretched back in a gruesome rictus; his eyes bulging wide and shot red with blood. The cords in his neck are rigid and taut, as though he were straining to tear his gaze from the page, and yet he still grips the edges of the pulpit with whitened knuckles.

>look at scene
A madman, clad only in a filthy, ragged loincloth, his thin body covered with dirt and sores, dances wildly on a precipice between two massive, metal pillars. His long, gray hair whips about his face in an unseen wind; behind him, beyond the precipice, violet clouds seethe and roil. He seems to be playing some strange sort of wind instrument, like a flute, making the whole scene look oddly like a macabre Jethro Tull album cover.

>look at scene
A somewhat Boschian scene, depicting a line of naked, emaciated men, their ankles shackled and chained together, shuffling forward to offer obeisance to the glowing maw of an enormous furnace. The men are malnourished and covered with terrible burns. The foremost is kneeling, offering... something, you can't make out what... up to the mouth of flames, while the rest stand as far back as they are able, their heads bowed in what appears to be fear and penitence. It isn't clear where this is supposed to be taking place; beyond the fiery glow there is nothing but soot-filled, Stygian blackness. An artist's rendition of Hell, perhaps?

For some reason, you are reminded of old photographs of the Nazi death camps, in which Jews were forced to feed the ovens with the corpses of their own.

>look at scene
A group of primitive tribesmen dance within a ring of standing stones, beneath a lightning-streaked sky. Their dress and some of the fetishes they carry -- feathers, rattles, ceremonial masks -- all seem to represent a Native American culture, but the men themselves are... strange. They look truly savage and degenerate, in a way that you don't often see Native Americans depicted. Peering closely, you can see that some of them even appear to be deformed.

Overlooking the dance stands a tall obelisk on a hill, silhouetted against the storm clouds above. The artist added a strange effect to the cloud formations directly above the obelisk; the color and shading seem to suggest a red, baleful eye looking down upon the strange ritual below.

You shake yourself suddenly, and realize you've been staring intently at the painting for minutes on end. You step back and rub your tired eyes. When you look again, however, the picture you were just examining is no longer in front of you. None of the other paintings have moved as far as you can tell, but that particular scene seems to have disappeared without leaving so much as a blank space on the wall.

That's enough filibuster for now. If memory serves right, all those scenes have one thing or another to do with the Anchorhead story.
But I'll leave the rest of the sleuthing to you lot.

>s

Sitting Room

The portrait gazes down at you with crimson-edged malice.

>yell at painting
I only understood you as far as wanting to yell.

>w

Foyer

Your luggage is still here, spread out all over the foyer.

The Dinning Room is West of the Foyer and also attached to the south of the kitchen.

>West

Dining Room
Much of the elegance has faded from this room. The huge dining table running the length of it is covered with a thick gray film of dust, and the china cupboard standing against the far wall is draped in shadow. Doorways to the north and east offer little relief from the gloom. For what must be the hundredth time, you wish you could open the windows in this place.

>look at table
It's a finely built table, a valued antique like much of the furniture in this house. It will need to be oiled after so many months of neglect, though.

>look under table
You find nothing of interest.

>look at chair
You can't see any such thing.

Odd that there's a table, but no chairs.

>look at cupboard
It's a free-standing cabinet about as tall as you are, crafted of cherrywood. The double paneled doors are closed.

So the goal of Zork I was to put treasures into the trophy case. Well, every time I play Anchorhead, this cupboard ends up being my trophy case. Some items can't fit in Miranda's Amazing Hammer Space Trenchcoat, but they DO fit in the Cupboard!

>open cupboard
The cupboard is empty; the china must have been auctioned off, in the confusion before Michael was contacted, perhaps. Down at the bottom of the cupboard is a velvet lining, where the silverware would usually be kept.

>look at velvet
The lining is soft, dusky burgundy. One corner in back is pulled up a bit and slightly torn.

It's a lovely cupboard, if damaged slightly.

>put cup in cupboard
You put the styrofoam cup into the china cupboard.

>

Alright, tomorrow, I'll cover the entire cellar (there's not much). In the meantime, we've still got mysteries to uncover with the house so far. If you have any suggestions, put them in bold.
Also, sorry for the lack of picture this time. I over-slept and prioritized getting this update done before noon over illustrating.

Items

In Trenchcoat