We move through a hallway to another swinging door. There is thunderous piano music, drums, and horns.
We push through the swinging doors into a room that is a mix of a small diner and statuary with mardi gras decorations everywhere.
There is a bar in the back that is covered with coffee cups, the tables are all polished, and empty save for the musicians and a bartender.
A very large african american man pounding at the keys, a white man is banging on the drums, and another african american man playing the trumpet. The music is very good. Terrance "Tarantula" Jones is an unbelievable piano player.
We look around for a place to deposit the count but before we can a couple of things happen:
Germaine Cazenave comes barreling across the room toward her father.
All of a sudden Jones just starts banging on the keyboard, in time with a hammering sound coming from somewhere else in the building. He is mad about it and exclaims that they need to be able to practice.
We deposit the count in a chair and Cillian takes the wet cigarette from him, gives him a new one, lights it, and asks Germaine to get her father a cup of coffee.
He seems to be mostly oblivious still, does not drink the coffee and is just out of it.
Jon asks the bartender about Tristan Torne and the bar tender says he knows him. The last time he say Torne was about a week ago when he was in the cafe with Irina Martin.
Cillian notices that the count is coping with something in his own way and is not dealing with it will. He seems to have suffered a break in his sanity and is trying to cope. He needs time to recover from the break and the drugs from Absinthe House.
Cillian also notices that the man who came out of the bathroom and is drinking coffee, this guy gives some money to the bar tender who pours something a little extra in the coffee. He downs the coffee and then heads back to the bathroom and more construction noises start drifting down the hallway.
Jon heads down to the bathroom to check out what is going on down there.
He sees that there is a 15' hallway with restrooms on either side. The noise is coming from the men's room.
He looks in cant see the guy who is working, but the hammering seems to be coming from one of the stalls.
He is removing a large panel from the wall and there is an opening into the drywall.
John notices that the rain seems louder near the opening in the wall.
There is an actual opening into some kind of passage or something that leads down into a cellar.
The guy gets annoyed that John is bothering him.
Doc and Cillian go to try and talk to Tarantula and it does not go well of the jump. He seems tense at the mention of the Jazz Operetta.
The Doc tries to talk him up about music and Tarantula warms suddenly and opens up to talk about that.
Doc is able to learn that the Jones Trio is going to be playing again at the Absinthe House in a couple of days.
He brings the conversation around to the Count's condition.
He says that they were supposed to play, but they were replaced by Torne. Torne told him that they were going to another level that they couldn't go. Said that he practiced for a whole week, but when they showed up they were replaced by a guy with the clarinet, an idiot in a tourist hat, and a drummer.
Says that the music that Torne wrote made no sense. Said the music was weird, sounded awkward. The notes didn't quite go together. Apparently Torne said that there was a singing part by the audience that tied it all together.
Said there was weird stage that had a strange cardboard boat and bats on the ceiling hanging from strings.
He says the the concert was supposed to be at the Old Cigar Factory on Conti south of Bourbon street. He said while he was taking a break with his night off, there was some caterwalling in the street, after midnight, moving north. The noise reminded him of that horrible music that Torne wrote.
Moving back to Boris he tries to ingratiate himself with Germaine, trying to appease her.
He is able to convince her to use the car to take the Doc, Boris, herself, and the Count back to the count's house.
Cillian offers to walk with John after John gives him a look.
John and Cillian walk to get the car for them.
John tells him about the passage and they make plans to investigate this development while the Doc and Boris take the Count and Germaine home.
15 minutes before the place opens the workman leaves
Rudolf tells us that Irina and Torne were in the business together until about five days ago, when Torne came in covered in filth. They were all cutesy together, passing notes, and acting all lovey-dovey.
We go into the stall and there is nothing out of the ordinary, but it looks like a paneled wall.
Cillian hears running water even about the rain outside.
Cillian inspects the panel and finds some sawdust on the floor and some signs that something happened.
There is a seam in the paneling where John believes that the opening was.
Cillian finds that if he presses in, he can lift the panel out.
He does so, sticks his head in the ragged hole behind it, and looks down.
There is a cistern like hole, someone has driven spikes into the stone wall of the cistern to be used as a ladder.
We decide to wait for the rest of the crew before exploring below.
Cillian tells Boris about the passageway and Boris remembers that there were papers about conversations about underground passages and the construction of them on the Count's desk.
The butler told him that the count was into weird architecture.
We decide to head to the warehouse to see if there are any clues to Jackson Elias's whereabouts.
It takes us a while, but we are able to find the Cigar Factory. There is a bad vibe to it. It is an old beat up building that sits back from the street.
John and Cillian feel like we are being watched, but we believe that we have seen a person following us since we got to Conti Street. But we haven't seen anything.
Cillian pushes the door open, it creaks on its hinges.
The entranceway does not look like a factory, it looks more like a foyer into a manor.
The stairs leading up to the next floor have collapsed and everything is very dilapidated.
There is signs of activity, that people have come in and out, but there is nothing specific.
John rolls a critical and finds that there are tracks of lots of people that have moved deeper into the building. There is a doorway to the left near the staircase and it looks like someone has been through there, but the majority of the traffic is to the right. He also sees a piece of paper underneath some debris that is pretty clean.
John grabs the paper and takes a look at it. He finds that it is a Playbill for something called the Swamp Song: A Voyage into madness. This is written by Torne. The final act is supposed to be at the St. Louis Cemetery, at the Faucher Crypt.
The second act was supposed to be a parade, probably the event and caterwalling that Jones mentioned.
Boris feels that the Faucher name has some significance in occult circles.
We start moving further into the building. It is dark, creepy, and damp.
Just inside the door to the right there is an old collapsed, rotting cart. There are crates stacked around it.
The crates just say cigars that have flor di lis motifs printed on it.
For just a moment we hear the faint sounds of piano music from up ahead, it seems out of place.
John finds a bottle that has been dropped to the side of the path where the tracks lead. There is no dust on the bottle even though its path has disturbed dust.
There are tables in the room and the have been moved into a semi-circle. There is more detritus that points to recent activity. The tables look like they came from the factory, but there are no chairs. There is a stage in front of a stage that looks more recently constructed. There is a dark shadowy box tucked back away behind the stage.
There are yellow candle stubs on the table and the bottles and cups have the same sludge as the bottle from the Absinthe House.
There is Spanish Moss hanging from the ceiling obscuring the stage.
There does not appear to be anyone on the stage, but there are cardboard cut outs of waves and a ship. The ship looks like it is on a runner that would allow it to move across the stage. Its all tacky, looks like it was made by elementary school kids, not a prominent entertainer and showman.
The large object is actually a piano. It looks like it covered with something, making the surface not smooth. John sees there are yellow candle stubs on the top of the piano. The cherrywood finish of the piano is covered in carvings. The keys of the piano are old and warped. The carvings are of long limbed creatures consuming people and using parts of human anatomy as musical instruments.
John takes some sanity damage, he drops his knife and it clatters to floor as he steps back away from the piano.
Cillian looks inside and finds that it looks like a piano, he tries to pop one of the keys off, does, and takes it to the Doc to see if he can figure out what it is made of.
Doc says that the key is made of bone, he wonders if it might be human bone, but he isn't able to definitively say.
John can tell that the tracks are heading from the door leading into the room and the stage.
In a room to the side we find a decrepit old office on the floor there are old cigar boxes, broken glass, and the remains of desk. There is a faded painting hanging on the wall.
There is an old family portrait. There is a small plaque that says Faucher family, 1783.
One of the members of the Faucher family has a port wine crescent shaped birthmark, just like one of the musicians at the absinth house.
There is also an african american woman in the painting with the family.
We go back to the stage room and John pulls the lever. Some strange geometric shapes pop up behind the waves and the stage. Its all very angular.
As we are all looking around, Doc sees the Strange Pianist with the Mardi Gras hat in the shadows beyond the doorway into the stage room.
We ended the session there.
Session 17:
The Piano Man
He was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound.
