Thursday 18 September 1930
By one in the morning with no sign of Boswell, the others leave too, all returning to Audrey’s house and keeping watches. It’s perhaps four in the morning when Audrey notices a slow rise in the level of magic; she steps out to the hall and finds a forest where it ought to be. She returns to the kitchen and starts banging pans to wake the others; Lin Tan wakes up immediately, and finds that her bed is apparently now in a forest. She stabs a tree with her silver knife, and as before it starts to bubble and form organs. She tries to feel her way to the door and the stairs.
Bessie wakes up to the same vision, and casts a spray of salt into the trees; this cuts them apart like a powered saw. She also heads downstairs.
Audrey sees the kitchen door open quietly (apparently it wasn’t bolted after all), and a shining figure steps through, with a drawn rapier. She calls on him to surrender, and he growls that “you’ve done far too much damage to let you live”. She fires; the bullet staggers him slightly, but doesn’t seem to do much damage. She retreats and keeps shooting, to slow him down; Bessie arrives and throws the cloth of salt at him, which definitely harms him, as well as giving him a new target.
Lin Tan has diverted into the drawing-room to get the poker that’s been left in the fire, and comes back, treating it as a broadsword and stabbing the figure in the torso; he immediately catches fire, burning to thin ash in a few seconds, as the rapier clatters to the ground. Apparently the fern-seed may have been of some use…
Audrey secures the back door; Bessie searches the house, finding nothing out of the ordinary.