For today's Chill game, we cast our eyes back into the hoary mists of time. (It's a prequel. A PREQUEL.)
It's October 31, 2003. Three young girls, all 9-10 years old, all attendees of the same elementary school in Boise, have gone missing within a week. The police have been unable to make headway and there's no physical evidence to suggest what might have happened. The case comes to the attention of one Eleanor Henry, retired nurse, Army vet, and envoy of SAVE.
Eleanor, with the help of Dee Addams, quickly assembles a group of envoys. This includes: Felix Willis, a cattle rancher from rural Oregon; Susan Wisnewski, former professional swimmer and SAVE envoy; George Bloch, wrestling coach and high school history teacher; and Toby Matthews, cab driver and transplant from Chicago. All of these envoys have some degree of experience, though Felix, Eleanor, and Susan are all more seasoned. Time is of the essence, here.
The envoys go over what they already know: The first girl, Carrie Bay, disappeared while walking home from a sleepover. Two days later, Brianna Pennington, also a sleepover attendee, vanished from her bedroom. The next afternoon, Ashley Fernier (the girl who hosted the sleepover) disappeared from her backyard.
The envoys decide to go and join the search effort. George finds a couple of teachers from the elementary school and asks about the disappearances. He learns that the girls were close friends. He also learns that Carrie left footprints in a park, but that they just...stop in the middle. The neighborhood is maybe four square blocks, and it's very much the sort of place that folks know their neighbors and wave to strangers. Everyone is on edge.
The other four envoys head out as well, and Eleanor looks at the park where Carrie disappeared. She spots something colorful up in a tree, and has Felix climb up and poke it. It falls to the ground - a little blue and pink beanie bear, with "CB" written on the tag loop. Clearly Carrie Bay's.
George joins them, and senses the Unknown. He feels his gaze pulls up, past the treeline, to the east. He, Toby, Felix, and Susan follow George's nose (as it were), while Eleanor goes to the HQ of the search effort to show folks the bear.
She winds up meeting Brian and Carl Bay, Carrie's daddies. They are, of course, very excited to see evidence of Carrie, and Eleanor talks with them a bit. She learns that Carrie headed out from Ashley's in mid-morning, but they didn't know that until later in the day (they thought the girls slept in, and didn't have any reason to miss Carrie). Brian takes Eleanor to meet Ashley's mother, Colleen, to maybe look around the yards where she disappeared.
Meanwhile, the other four envoys discover that east of where they were is a cul-de-sac, at the end of which is a show house, furnished and designed for people to tour when they're thinking of buying in the area. They check around the house and find that the doors are locked and there are alarm signs. George is ready to break in a door, but caution wins out, as they have an envoy (Susan) who can leave her body.
She sits in Toby's car and astrally projects, and "swims" her way to the basement. Once there, the place feels wrong - the air tastes dirty, and it's darker than it should be. She tries to go back, and finds that she can't figure out how. The room feels confusing and lost. She starts to panic, but has no way to contact the others.
The other three envoys watch and, as Susan doesn't come back to her body, start to get worried. Felix tries to Disrupt on her body and Susan feels someone shaking her body, but it doesn't help. Toby tries to peer in the glass block basement window, but can't really see anything. He uses Premonition and realizes that breaking the window will let them get Susan back, so they take the risk - George activates his Feat of Strength discipline and kicks in the window. Susan gasps and appears in her body, and the envoys decide to head back towards Eleanor.
Speaking of Eleanor, she talks with Colleen Fernier, Ashley's mother. Ashley shows her the backyard where Ashley disappeared - she went outside in the later afternoon, and just...vanished. There's no evidence, and Eleanor looks around but there's nothing in a sightline that indicates what might have happened. Colleen takes her upstairs and shows her Ashley's room.
Ashley had an interest in, let's say, the macabre. Lots of spooky drawings and artwork and costumes around. And in her closet, Eleanor finds a note, written in crayon:
Dear Jimmy Boots, This is crazy but are you here? Did you take my friends? Are they in the Dark Place with you? If you did this I’m gonna bring a red light and red drips to you I swear to god Jimmy Boots! You let my friends go! NOW
She shows the note to Colleen, and Colleen tells her that Jimmy Boots is the name of a doll that she made for Ashley when she was younger. She used to tell stories about Jimmy Boots, often working in whatever movies or books she was into at the time. Eleanor takes a picture of the note with her 2003 flip phone and tries to send it to Felix, and then heads over to Brianna Pennington's house (still escorted by Brian Bay).
At Brianna's, Eleanor learns that Brianna vanished from her room in the middle of the night. They woke up because the house had gone cold, and found Brianna's window open. Eleanor checks sightlines again, and there's no way Brianna went out that window without help.
The envoys hook up again and pore over the note. Eleanor, feeling peckish, heads over to get a sandwich, while Felix talks with Colleen and asks about the "red light" and "red drips" mentioned in the note. Colleen explains that while the stories about Jimmy Boots changed with Ashley's interests, one thing that stay consistent was that he was afraid of red light. As for "red drips," she recalled an incident where Ashley knocked over a red taper candle (part of a centerpiece) and nearly set fire to a tablecloth. She remembers yelling at Ashley, and Ashley clearly remembered that moment - the "red drips" refers to candle wax.
The envoys now have some sense of what they're looking for, even if they don't know exactly what Jimmy Boots is. George heads out to a hardware store and buys some flashlights with red filters, some red candles, and some road flares. Toby goes and buys some red t-shirts, and the group of them goes to the show house.
Eleanor calls the real estate company and explains that, as part of the search, they'd like to check the show house. The realtor agrees and meets them there. They search the upstairs and the ground floor, but there's no sign of the girls (or Jimmy Boots, for that matter). That leaves the basement, and they know there's something down there.
Eleanor tells the realtor to watch the door, since other folks from the search party might be showing up, and the five envoys descend into the basement. Toby's Premonition discipline shows him crawling through a small aperture in the wall, and they find a loose plank nailed between the washer and dryer.
George holds it back, and Felix tosses in a road flare. And then Felix starts crawling in, unable to resist the idea. Something stabs him in the shoulder repeatedly and lets out a high-pitched giggle.
They pull Felix back out and Eleanor patches him up as best she can, but it's pretty bad. They yell at Jimmy Boots to come out, to let the girls go, but he petulantly refuses. "You're old," he says to Eleanor. "Take a nap!" She feels herself get sleepy, but resists the urge.
Jimmy Boots gets angry, and a million spiders crawl out of the hole. Felix raises a Sphere of Protection and the spiders melt away. Susan and George wiggle through the hole in the wall, and Eleanor tries, but her arthritis is too bad and she can't get through.
Inside the hole, which is bigger on the inside than the architecture would seem to allow, the characters find dirt floors, puddles, gross bugs, and four little girls sitting against the walls (wait, four?). The girls are non-responsive, and horribly, their flesh is starting to merge with the dirt. Toby realizes (again via Premonition) that if they pull the girls out, it'll tear their flesh, and he yells to stop George (who was already making a beeline for the nearest kid).
Getting into the hole is hard for Felix because of his injury, but with Toby's help he manages. He moves the Sphere over two of the girls, and they pull themselves out of the earth and, understandably, freak out. They try to head for the exit, but it's gone - the plank has fallen over the entrance again.
On the other side, Eleanor tells Toby to drip some wax on it, and Toby does. The plank loosens and moves, and the envoys get all four girls out. The girls run for the stairs, but the Sphere sputters as Felix' will breaks. George moves into the dark, and he hears giggling as Jimmy Boots slashes him open. He collapses, bleeding, as Toby helps Felix and Susan out of the "Dark Place."
They see George's bloodied hand appear, and try to yank him through, but then Jimmy Boots drops down from the ceiling and stabs him in the back! Toby frantically hurls red wax at him, and as soon as it strikes the doll, it goes inert. The Dark Place seems to implode, pushing George the rest of the way out. They throw the evil doll into the laundry sink and burn it with a road flare, and George is rushed to the hospital.
Over the next few weeks, the authorities try to make sense of what happened. The envoys aren't suspected - they all have alibis for the girls' disappearance and their parents are overjoyed to have their kids back safe. But who was the fourth girl? She wasn't around when EMS arrived to take care of Ashley, Carrie, and Brianna, but the girls did know her, as she was a classmate of theirs. Her name is Beth Anne Stallard. Beth Anne, however, was never reported missing...
The envoys go back to their lives. Toby decides this whole "SAVE" thing probably isn't for him. George is willing, but he has a long recovery ahead of him. Felix moves back to his ranch in Oregon and loses track of SAVE, but they catch up with him eventually. Susan, likewise, mostly retires from SAVE, although she does provide some hospitality for the Boise cell some years in the future. And Eleanor continues working with the Boise cell until her peaceful death in 2017, after which Dee Addams sends some envoys to collect her notes.
