Player Handouts: “The Madman”

This is the third scenario from the sixth edition of Chaosium’s “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying game. It’s a relatively straightforward narrative – strange things are reported in the press from a remote area in Vermont and a trail of evidence leads right to the heart of the matter, via an alcoholic backwoodsman in the thrall of Mythos entities. In terms of handouts, everything is fairly upfront – a bunch of newspaper articles forms the background of the mystery and then it all boils down to talking to the locals. There is a pretty stiff fight at the end against the invaders of Strafton Mountain, which could lead to some party fatalities if not approached with forethought.

The bulk of the evidence can be found in the pages of the “Brattleboro Tattler”:

(This is based on an actual image of the ‘Tattler from July 1911 – I’ve obscured the date somewhat so that you can fit it in better with your own campaign timeframe.)

The only other piece of physical evidence which the scenario calls for is a piece of crumpled paper with a name written on it in pencil. This may or may not be discovered in a wastepaper basket in the missing journalist’s home.

And that’s it! From here on it’s all over bar the shouting!

(All information presented here is copyright Chaosium Inc., taken from CALL OF CTHULHU 6th Edition, 2004.)

Long Lankin...

I plundered the folk section of our store’s CD range the other day, in order to provide some tunes for the clients and I discovered a Steeleye Span collection that I had not seen before. I hadn’t listened to this group in an age, so – if nothing else - it promised to be a good run down memory lane. There were the inevitable mainstays – “All around My Hat”; “Cam Ye O’er Frae France” – but then I heard one song that I’d completely forgotten about: “Long Lankin”.

The song is based on a story first published in Kent by Bishop Percy in 1775 and concerns the lord of a castle who, being summoned to London, must leave his wife and newborn child behind:

“Said the Lord unto his Lady as he rode over the moss

‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives amongst the gorse.

Beware the moss, beware the moor, beware of Long Lankin;

Be sure the doors are bolted well

Lest Lankin should creep in.’

“Said the Lord unto his Lady as he rode away

‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives amongst the hay.

Beware the moss, beware the moor, beware of Long Lankin;

Be sure the doors are bolted well

Lest Lankin should creep in.’”

So far, so good. These two verses are delivered by Maddy Prior to a slow and mournful accompaniment of fiddles and pipes (with the usual Steeleye Span electronic input which irritates so many purist folkies). The scene is quickly established – the lord of the castle has left, and the presence of some wilderness-dwelling being is highlighted as a possible threat.

“‘Where's the master of the house?’, says Long Lankin;

‘He's 'way to London’, says the nurse to him.

‘Where's the lady of the house?’, says Long Lankin;

‘She's up in her chamber’, says the nurse to him.

‘Where's the baby of the house?’, says Long Lankin;

‘He's asleep in the cradle’, says the nurse to him.”

Suddenly, the tempo changes: everything gets sharp and angular and we get one of those jarring time-signature changes that Jethro Tull is so renowned for. Suddenly, Lankin is with us and another character – that of the Nurse – is introduced. We quickly discover that the two are in cahoots, and that they have an evil plan:

“We will pinch him, we will prick him,

We will stab him with a pin;

And the nurse shall hold the basin

For the blood all to run in.”

And they waste no time going about it:

“So they pinched him and they pricked him,

Then they stabbed him with a pin;

And the false nurse held the basin

For the blood all to run in.”

The basin is an interesting sidelight on these horrible events. The story has travelled widely across England and America and was well known even before Bishop Percy committed it to print in the late 1700s. Other re-tellings have Long Lankin named as “Lambikin”, or “Lamikin”, and this has led some commentators to think that perhaps our villain was afflicted with leprosy, giving him an obvious pallor (and probably forcing him to live in the wilderness, away from others). An old folk treatment in grimoire circles for the disease – probably not widely used – was to bathe in the blood of a newborn child. What we’re seeing here then, is less of a Nurse and more of a Witch. But there’s still more villainy to come:

"‘Lady, come down the stairs,’ says Long Lankin;

‘How can I see in the dark?’, she says unto him.

‘You have silver mantles’, says Long Lankin,

‘Lady, come down the stairs by the light of them.’

Down the stairs the lady came, thinking no harm;

Lankin, he stood ready to catch her in his arms.”

The song skips over some of the salient points of the original legend. In that version, the Lady of the House, bothered by the sound of her child screaming downstairs, calls out to the Nurse to do something about it (go parenting!). The Nurse responds, offering a list of things that she claims to have tried to stop the baby’s cries and then says that nothing but the presence of its mother will calm it down. The Lady is stymied by the lack of a light to guide her down the stairs but is persuaded to use the light provided by her “silver mantles” in order to find her way. Rather than a fireplace accoutrement, this is in fact her expensive outer robe – a kind of cloak worn indoors in order to provide warmth. Using the reflected light provided by this garment, the Lady proceeds downstairs to her doom:

“There was blood all in the kitchen,

There was blood all in the hall;

There was blood all in the parlour,

Where my lady she did fall.”

The jaunty tone adopted for these verses is quite at odds with the nature of what is happening and reminds me starkly of the short story “Frolic” by Thomas Ligotti. Both works display the evil doings of a gleefully capering psychopath on a rampage. The tone continues on into the next verse as well.

“Now Long Lankin shall be hangéd

From the gallows, oh, so high;

And the false nurse shall be burnéd

In the fire close by.”

And so, our villains are destroyed, and Justice is seen to be done. Or is it? Certainly, given all of the preceding awfulness, it’s a relief that the source of the horror has been removed, the role of the False Nurse here as Witch is underscored by her being burnt at the stake. But has every aspect of the story been truthfully retailed up until this point? A few scraps, it turns out, have been carefully omitted:

The story upon which this song is based is often referred to as “Lord Wearie’s Castle”. It tells how Lord Wearie contracted a down-and-out Mason to build for him a castle appropriate to his current standing. The Mason – Lankin – did as he was bid and, when it came time for Lord Wearie to pay up, he was surprised to be turned down. ‘I haven’t the cash to pay you,’ says the backstabbing Lord, ‘unless I were to sell some of my lands and I certainly won’t be doing that.’ Lankin shakes his fist and storms off, telling the Lord he’ll rue the day that he reneged on his contract. Later, Lord Wearie is summoned to London, and he gives his wife explicit instructions to seal the castle against an incursion, specifically by Long Lankin; however, Lankin had the foresight to install a small window in the castle at a point where it would be overlooked (such chinks in the security of a grand building were often created by medieval builders, mainly as last-resort escape routes, but also for nefarious reasons). Consequently, when the castle staff were bolting the windows, they missed one of them.

We might conclude that Long Lankin’s response to being cheated by the ruling class was a trifle extreme, but can we really say he didn’t have cause? It starts to look like this is a snow-job, to prevent any ignominy falling upon the ‘noble’ classes and to paint Lankin as a mindless serial killer, or some kind of goblin. The song concludes with a coda back to the starting verse, adding a peculiar hint of possible repetition to the narrative:

“Said the Lord unto his Lady as he rode over the moss,

‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives amongst the gorse.

Beware the moss, beware the moor, beware of Long Lankin;

Make sure the doors are bolted well

Lest Lankin should creep in.’”

This might be interpreted as not so much a general warning about marauding home invaders, but also about scheming Lords who might’ve tired of their current spouse and who are looking for a way to dispose of them.

Thus, a disgruntled workman with anger management issues is transformed into a bogeyman of legend and is committed to folklore. The Steeleye Span song is perhaps the best-known and most easily obtained version of the story – available on their album “Commoner’s Crown” (1975) and reinterpreted by them on their ‘best of’ album Present (2002), a selection of fan favourites re-recorded by the band’s current lineup. Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick and Alasdair Roberts have all recorded versions as well (along with many others).

Naturally others have toyed with the ideas promoted by this narrative. British author John Banville’s early collection of short stories is entitled Long Lankin (1970) and explores ideas of destructive relationships and the things that can tear people apart – in a relationship sense: it’s not everybody’s cup of tea and it plays heavily off the notions implicit in Lord Wearie’s perfidy. Lindsey Barraclough, on the other hand, has taken the supernatural elements further in her dark fantasy novel Long Lankin (2011), firmly entrenching the titular character as a paranormal entity preying upon a family and its grand estate. And a character called “Lankin” appears as a retainer of an amoral fairy court in the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, Lords and Ladies (1992).

*****

In terms of gaming and especially Call of Cthulhu roleplaying, this premise can be pillaged in all kinds of interesting ways. The poem – or a performance of it by one of the many folk bands out there – can form a handy touchstone for your party of adventurers, as well as being a nice piece of mood-setting music to play in the background. The setting, of course, would have to be one replete with moors and bogs, especially of the peat variety.

First of all, you need to decide if this is a Mythos event taking place; some other type of paranormal happening; or a scubidüberism. Let’s take them one-by-one:

Mythos Event: there are quite a few Mythos entities that conform to a notion of Long Lankin as bogeyman. His defining traits would seem to be paleness; bloodthirstiness; and an ability to creep in to places undetected. Spawns of Abhoth; Crawling Ones; Broodlings of Eihort; Trolls; The Worm That Walks; Worms of the Earth; Xo Tl’mi-Go; the Lesser Old One, Lam; the Roman deity Summanus; any of these may be used to represent the villain from the poem. It might take a little bit of massage, but any of these might be a way of embodying the legendary bogeyman in a real, Mythos-affected reality.

Paranormal Event: Here we can turn to folklore for some inspiration. We know from the song that Lankin and his pal, the False Nurse, were executed together; from years of reading “Hellboy”, we know that a funeral pyre curse issued by a witch at the moment of her death can lead to all kinds of demonic consequences. Given her willingness to catch blood in a basin, the witch may well have been allowed to return to the world as a Vampire; she, in turn, may have resurrected her partner-in-crime, Long Lankin, as a Ghost, a Skeleton, or, better still, a Scarecrow made from hay and moss and gorse (and possibly some of his bones).

Scubidüberism: Obviously, with this kind of tale, there needs to be a reason as to why someone would go to all the trouble of impersonating an entity who died in the distant past, but which now has resurrected itself to continue its depredations. Perhaps Lord Wearie’s castle stands in the road of a new highway development? Or has the land been ear-marked for a new suburban offshoot of the local township? As usual with these takes on the supernatural, the Investigators should immediately ask themselves “cui bono?” How the perpetrators go about faking the existence of Long Lankin – and how far they are willing to push it – is entirely up to the Keeper. Alternatively, perhaps there is simply a serial-killer out there who has decided to adopt the mantle of Long Lankin, becoming his new incarnation…

*****

Horror can be found anywhere (even in the folk music section of your local music store! In fact, especially in the folk music section of your music store, given some of the vicious peccadilloes of that musical form…). Oftentimes, the more benign-seeming a cultural tradition appears, the more sinister can be the things that it codes for – look at the sources for many of the world’s so-called Fairy Stories (and keep in mind that these are meant for children!). If you’re looking for inspiration for your next Call of Cthulhu session, try taking a trip through the nursery…

Japan Supernatural Exhibition, February 2020

“Japan Supernatural: 1700s to Today”, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain, Sydney NSW, November 2^nd 2019 – March 8^th 2020

I had been waiting for this for awhile. The Japanese approach to the supernatural is quite unique and this exhibition promised to get right to the bottom of things Japanese going bump in the night. The scope for this show ranges from 1700 through to the present and offers a good selection of material, covering woodblock prints, paintings, sculpture, books, film and installations – definitely something for everybody.

My reservation going in was coloured by my attendance at the “Alexander the Great” showing at the Australia Museum some years ago. That whole experience for me was ruined by the plague of small children washing around the place being ‘monitored’ by a decidedly lacklustre display of ‘parenting’. Witnessing the proud relics of history to the earsplitting background cacophony of sugar-jonesing, badly-behaved children and the murmured inconsequence of their un-engaged parents was not an experience I wanted to repeat, so I decided to wait until the school holidays were over before going anywhere near this event. Once I had determined that all of the hellspawn would be safely locked away for the day, I whistled up a friend and we agreed to meet at the Gallery.

My attendance was contingent upon a two-hour train trip into the heart of the city, so I left home pretty early on the day. As I departed, it was pleasantly foggy – after weeks of imminent destruction by fire, any kind of humidity is welcome at this stage. As we progressed down into Babylon however, that fog turned into drizzle, then rain, and then into a steady blatter which became the hallmark of the rest of the day. And, foolishly, I had decided that I could manage without an umbrella. Aided by all of Sydney’s connected underground and street-level shopping malls and covered thoroughfares, I managed to get as close to the Domain as I could before reconciling myself to dampness as I ran across Hyde Park. Fortunately, a fellow pedestrian heading my way took pity on me and offered me the shelter of her brolly; thanks to her I then only had to dodge from fig-tree to fig-tree along the drive to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and I was all set.

My timing had been excellent, and I had only a short wait beneath the Palladian portico of the Gallery until the place opened. Then I had my first intimation of disappointment: as I waited there for the doors to open and my friend to arrive, groups of school kids began to appear being ‘organized’ by teachers with the same degree of success usually discovered when herding cats. I had forgotten about school excursions! It seemed that even outside of the school holiday period I was doomed to be exposed to an unwanted amount of kiddage. As the teachers bawled uselessly though, I determined that these scions of the overly-moneyed from their exclusive school were here to see some other part of the Gallery’s offerings, so I pinned some hope on being relatively child free for the exhibition I had come all this way to enjoy.

Once the doors were open, my friend in attendance and tickets purchased, there was only one objective in mind – caffeine. I had come too far already without a single coffee onboard and I don’t function at all well when I’m pre-caffeinated. So, we went to the Gallery Café and got outside a light breakfast while watching the rain battering the windows from across Woolloomooloo. After that it was time for some Japanese horrors.

Sadly, while one of the groups of silver-spoon chewing schoolkids had been diverted to another section of the Gallery, the other – much younger – agglomeration of schoolboys was destined to come to Japan with us so, grinding my teeth quietly, we sauntered through the entrance and were on our way.

(And look, I understand the need to expose children early to the wonders of art and the creative process but these events are not free and these brats simply drift into corners where they titter and point at images of naked women, or they wander around in a self-absorbed daze getting in the way of paying guests. At this event almost every child simply stood in front of the artworks pointing their ‘phones at them – recording even the video presentations – as if by chance they might capture the answer to a question in an upcoming quiz while wondering vaguely when they were going to eat next. I got to the point where I deliberately walked in front of every child holding out their mobile phone while digging in their nose with a finger of their free hand, in order to just be a prick about it. And were their teachers present? Not that I could tell. Kids and I do not mix.)

*Ahem!*

Any one who’s done any kind of social history research about early Japanese culture knows that it quickly moved to a very refined cultural pitch. Artistic forms rapidly focused on subtlety and nuance and many creative outlets became ratified by various implemented structures and systems of imagery. Certain activities were confined to specific times of the day, or year, and a huge cultural mechanism of creativity was the result. One activity – the telling of ghost stories – became organized in this fashion, leading to an annual tradition of telling one hundred spooky stories over a series of evenings to entertain household or court members.

Inevitably, these stories were codified and written down, and then were illustrated in various fashions by notable artists of the period. The exhibition uses these scrolls as the jumping-off point for its raison d’être. These hyakki yagyō (“night procession of a hundred demons”) began to systematize the presence of supernatural beings within the culture. Some of these are exquisitely detailed renderings of all the creatures involved in the stories on long scrolls (emaki) while others are woodblock printed books depicting each creature and its behaviour; still others are collections of the stories from which they emerge.

Having determined the origins of this paranormal literature within the culture, the exhibition then traces the use of these concepts across all other areas of artistic expression. Thus, we see imagery of yokai and yurei (“supernatural phenomena” and “ghosts”, respectively) appearing in kabuki dramas, in fashion, in history – even in political discourse. Some narratives began to take precedence – the village headman crucified for speaking out against imperial cruelty summoned back to haunt his killers in the form of a gigantic skeleton; the demon posing as a samurai’s aunt trying to retrieve the arm he cut from her six days previously; the samurai approached by the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth begging him to look after her child – and were interpreted over and over in various ways.

At a point in the early 1800s, political opinion turned against ideas of folklore and superstition as Japan tried to modernize, in the face of increasing exposure to the West. Accordingly, discussion of supernatural creatures and events was banned, and those professing to have experienced such events were ridiculed and mocked. It was not until much later when foreign travelers began to collect Japanese folk legends and export them back to their own countries that interest was revived, and the Japanese began to reclaim these traditions and re-work them into their creative concepts. Most notable among these foreign collectors was Lafcadio Hearn, an American of Greek and Irish extraction who worked for a time as an American diplomat to Japan before moving there permanently. He is most renowned for his books of Japanese ghost tales, especially Kwaidan (1909), which was made into an award-winning movie by Masaki Kobayashi in the 1960s and which helped revive Japanese interest in mythology and folk traditions.

In the modern era all of this impetus has seen modern artists re-discovering these narrative traditions and using them as springboards for their own contemporary creative works. Thus we have Fuyuko Matsui reinterpreting a Buddhist tradition of realistically depicting the decomposition of the dead, in order to discuss the role of women in the modern world; Chiho Aoshima playing with the liminal notions of graveyards and childhood; and Miwa Yanagi’s disturbing Fairy Tale series of photographs which, just like Hearn’s reinterpretation of Japanese stories for the West, takes European and other non-Japanese children’s narratives and refocuses them through a Japanese supernatural lens.

Of course, the big noise of the exhibition is Takashi Murakami’s contributions to the show, which have caused some angry discussion in the local media. The main bone of contention is the 10m x 3m mural installation especially created for the Gallery entitled (only moments before the exhibition opened) “Japanese Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters”. This is a colourful series of vignettes surrounding a kabuki-inspired image of a cat (chosen for its appeal to children, apparently) and assembled by a 350-strong staff working for the artist. The disposable, last minute, group-effort nature of this work has thrown some critics into a tailspin, not the least for the amount of money that the Gallery forked-out for it. Personally? I found it garish and a bit haphazard, too much like glittery wallpaper at a catwalk fashion show. I did like his temple guardian-inspired statues, though.

All-in-all I thoroughly enjoyed this event from the tiniest netsuke to the largest club-wielding bakemono. I had to suffer the inconvenience of twice having some pubescent moron step backwards into me in order to get an artwork into frame on their mobile ‘phone, but that was a small price to pay overall. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is lavish and well worth the cover price (although you can find it cheaper at Kinokuniya – heads up, locals!) and will repay re-reads into the future. This was a well presented and carefully constructed parade of night creatures that could be enjoyed on many levels and it’s a credit to the Art Gallery of NSW to have taken such a potentially-dubious notion and to have run with it so successfully. The exhibition continues until March 8^th this year so, if you can, you should definitely make the effort to catch it.