Kathy, Didier, Adam & Ray get up to find that Hazel went sometime in the night to the Switzman estate by herself, to look for Marion Switzman's diary. Fuming, we head out in two cars to look for her. We eventually found the house up a long-abandoned and overgrown road. The house itself had long been neglected, though it appeared to have been abandoned with some apparent intent to return: the shutters had all been closed, and inside there was still furniture, all covered with drop cloths. The front door was unlocked. There was no sign of Hazel aside from scuff marks in the dust on the floor. We searched the house, Adam and Ray taking the ground floor and Kathy and Didier taking the upstairs, largely looking for Hazel but also keeping an eye out for the book as well.

Ray and Adam found nothing of interest on the ground floor. Upstairs, Didier stumbled upon an apparent resident of the house. It was child-sized and looked more or less human, except that its face was oddly lopsided and deformed. It screamed when Didier found it, which brought the others running. Before anyone else could see it, it went out a window and onto the roof. Ray and Adam went back outside to see if they could see it, but eventually we decided it wasn't a threat and ignored it.

Then we went down to search the basement. At the far back of the basement we found a small black granite room with a heavy wooden door. In the center of the room was a black obelisk, like the one we had all seen in our dream. Stuck on it were some candles, which smelled recently burned.

We looked around the room, which seemed to be a dead-end, until Ray found a small outline in the granite on the wall. When he pushed on it, a mechanism slid the obelisk back, revealing a hidden stairway. We followed the stairs down, down, into the limestone bedrock. At last we found a chamber. This apparently was where the Order of the Ebon Tower had held their rituals. We found two scepters and a collection of folded robes. There seemed to be a draft in the chamber, but we couldn't determine where it was coming from.

We couldn't find anything else of interest there, either sign of Hazel or sign of another way out, so we went back up. Didier and Adam took with them five robes and the two scepters. When we got back up to the basement again, we heard footsteps walking around on the floor above. Cautiously, we made our way upstairs and Kathy and Ray drew their guns. It turned out to be Elizabeth Switzman. She was in the study looking through the books. She was alarmed at the sight of Kathy's gun, but she knew Adam. Introductions were made and we had a chance to ask her some questions, but she hadn't seen Hazel and she said she didn't know anything about the creature upstairs.

We looked around some more, knocked a couple holes in the wall upstairs, and finally gave up and decided to head back to campus. A trail led from campus through the woods to the back door of the house. Elizabeth said that was the way she got to the house, when she came there to pray to the "Queen." We thought Hazel might have gone that way; she sure as hell wasn't in the house. We left Elizabeth rummaging through boxes in the attic; Didier and Adam drove the cars back to campus while Kathy and Ray attempted to track Hazel. At Elizabeth's request, we left one of the robes with her. She didn't know about the scepters.

We all met up back on campus without having found Hazel. Finally someone had the idea to check Jason's lab. Didier stayed out in the parking lot with the car, to keep an eye on it, the surroundings, and the trunk full of cult artifacts. Hazel was, in fact, in Jason's lab. She had apparently been there for some hours, indeed, since before we'd gone to the house looking for her in the first place. We were all ready to throttle her, and gave her a thorough ass-chewing, but she didn't see what the big deal was. (Kisha: beautiful rendition of Hazel, by the way. In my mind's eye I see Amy when I think back on it.)

Hazel had found the book and was eager to show it to us. As she opened it, we all had this weird shift in sensation and caught a brief glimpse of the black obelisk and city again. Adam took the book away from Hazel and refused to let her read from it. Hazel also mentioned meeting a "boy" at the house-apparently the being we'd encountered, who she said was afraid and ran away from home because people made fun of him, but she had given him her peanut butter sandwich. She described the secret stairway and the chamber, and also had two amulets she had taken from the chamber.

We decided to take Hazel back to the hotel. Adam wanted to let Elizabeth know the book was found, but couldn't get an answer when he tried her cell phone. As we trooped down the stairwell from the third floor down to the ground floor, we heard a metal clang. We thought nothing of it until we reached the door at the bottom of the stairs and found it blocked from the outside.

Hoping to catch sight of whoever had blocked the door, Ray charged back up to the second floor and down to the other stairwell at the opposite end of the building. Kathy called Didier to let him know what was up, and then she, Adam, and Hazel followed. Didier was going in to investigate about the time Ray reached the bottom of the stairs and opened the door.

What Ray knows:
Ray popped his head out of the stairwell door and found himself face to face with a throng of pale, sunken-eyed zombie-like wretches who shouldn't even have been alive, much less walking around. They could have been from the drug house Ray and company had seen the night before, except those people had been barely alive. These-things-were walking, like the living dead. Something snapped in Ray's mind. He fled. Never mind years of police training and conditioning, never mind his sense of duty or older-brother-protectiveness for Adam. He broke and ran. It was all a blur, he can't really remember what happened. He had a dim recollection of racing back up the stairs with Adam following, of being surrounded, of a window breaking. He's not sure how he got to the ground from the second floor. He just ran. He assumed Adam and the others were right behind him. He ran until his lungs threatened to burst, and he stood gasping. When he came to his senses he was blocks away from campus-alone. He tried to make sense of what had just happened.

Then he remembered-those sunken eyes, pale skin stretched over bones, like the living skeletons rescued from the Nazi concentration camps at the end of the war. Except somehow, he knew, these were far more threatening. Where was Adam? Hadn't he been right behind him? Oh Jesus, thought Ray. With the awful sinking feeling in his stomach, combined with the exertion of the flat-out run, Ray nearly threw up. A car sped by, driven by someone who looked suspiciously like Didier. Ray tried to flag him down but he just honked and kept going. With growing dread, Ray turned around and ran as fast as he could, back to the chemistry building.

Didier was there outside when he got there. The fire alarm was shrilling in the chemistry building, but otherwise all was quiet. There was no sign of Adam, Kathy, or Hazel, or any of the zombies. There was only a large leather-bound and ornately covered red book lying on the ground, which Adam had taken from Hazel for safe-keeping. They were gone.

What Lisa knows:
Ray popped his head out of the stairwell door and found himself face to face with a throng of pale, sunken-eyed zombie-like wretches who shouldn't even have been alive, much less walking around. They could have been from the drug house Ray and company had seen the night before, except those people had been barely alive. These-things-were walking, like the living dead. Something snapped in Ray's mind. (He failed his "unnatural" check.) He broke and ran. About the same time, Didier entered the building from the other end and found the hallway full of zombies. He fled as well, but had the advantage of being near an outside door. He took the car.

Adam and Kathy tried to follow Ray back up the stairs, but he was moving too fast, and Hazel freaked out at the sight and became incapacitated (she failed her mind roll too). Kathy and Adam, dragging Hazel with them, ran back up to the second floor and saw the window Ray had broken to escape, but he was long gone, and Hazel was in no condition to climb down the outside of a building. Zombies were starting to come down the hall, and across the skywalk from the neighboring building. They ran up to the third floor, and managed to break a window above the skywalk. They climbed out and went (dragging Hazel) across the roof of the skywalk and over to the roof of the next building, which was only two stories. They were able to break open the roof-access hatch and climb down a ladder, finding themselves in a janitorial closet. When Kathy looked out in the hall, zombies were already coming. They ran to a room with a window and broke it, then climbed out and lowered/dropped themselves onto the grass one floor below. Adam and Kathy landed all right, but Hazel hurt her ankle in the process.

They set off toward the car in the parking lot, only to discover with dismay that Didier and the car were gone. Zombies were coming out of both buildings. There were at least 50 of them. Then they were surrounded, and their escape route cut off. Kathy shot several of them, but they were far too outnumbered. Hazel insisted she had found a spell in the book that would stop the zombies, and as the situation became more desperate, Adam finally relinquished the book to her and let her try it. She read the words, but nothing happened. With the zombies closing in, Adam tried reading the words, and Kathy tried saying them. They caught a brief flash of an image of the black obelisk, but the zombies were unperturbed. They reached their quarry and laid hands on them. At the last, Adam, Kathy and Hazel were knocked unconscious.

Gaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!! Shitshitshitshitshitshit!!!!!!

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