text: [Themes: horror]
  
  The door to the left looks very similar to the wood panels which cover that side of the hallway so you can see why you weren't able to see the room by the light of the moon when you first came into the house. You go up to the door, turn the handle and push open the door.
  
  The candlelight falls upon a pleasant looking parlour. There is a small table with four chairs in the middle of the room and a tea set laid out on the table which seems very odd to you since the house is supposed to have been vacated.
  
  You walk into the room and see that the tea set has been recently used and there are wet tealeaves coating the bottom of two of the cups. You look around the room warily, half expecting to see the tea drinkers stood by the fireplace or sat writing a letter at the bureau. You were alone in the room though, which was both a reassuring thought and one which left you nervous.
  
  There was a variety of seats and around the room and a comfortable looking pair of chesterfields seemed to be the main focus of the room. There was a variety of furniture around the room and you set about looking through them for anything which might help your sister.
  
  Most of the furniture proves to be empty when you open them up, save for a few packs of cards and an abandoned piece of embroidery, until you get to the bureau. When you open the bureau, you find a variety of writing materials but also some letters which are addressed to Langdown Hall and what looks to be some notes.
  
  You open the letters to read them, but you find that most of the writing has been written in the same type of symbols which were on the letter you received at the start of this ordeal and so they're completely meaningless to you. The notes however, seem to be written partially in English.
  
  Blood of an innocent. Magical blood, family connection.
  
  Find an apprentice, we don't want anyone with any real power here.
  
  Night of the full moon is the most powerful.
  
  These notes seem to explain why your sister was taken, she was certainly an innocent. Were they considering her blood to be magical because of her relation to you though, or were they referring to your blood and was that why they had sent you the letter to bring you here? What are they doing which needs the power of a full moon night?
  
  You feel as though you're left with more questions than answers and one thing you know for sure is that you have to get your sister away from these people. You leave the parlour and return to the entrance hall.
  
  Where do you go next?
  
  > go up the stairs.
  You slowly and carefully start to ascend the staircase to the first floor. The stairs sweep around the edge of the room, starting on the right-hand side and ending in a landing over the entrance hall on the left-hand side. There are a few uncovered windows over the landing allowing a little moonlight to creep in, but your candle is lighting up the area to a far better extent than the moon.
  
  The landing spreads out to your left over the top of the entrance hall and to the right there is a corridor running parallel to the top of the stairs, across the width of the house. You move around into the corridor and hold out your candle.
  
  You can see that the corridor extends all the way from one side of the house to the other with an ornate window at the far end of it. You walk forwards a little and you can see that there is another corridor branching off to the left and to the front it looks as though there is a door on either side of the corridor.
  
  You kneel down and put the candle onto the floor, take the notebook out of your bag and consult the map there. The corridors on this floor seem to line up with the map in the notebook, which would put the red circle marked there in a room off to the right of the corridor which is branching off to the left.
  
  Which way do you go?
  
  > continue down the corridor and go into the door on the left.
  You walk down the corridor towards the window at the end of and stop in front of the door on the left. You carefully turn the handle and push the door open.
  
  The room is very wide but not very deep. To the left it has a double bed against the wall with a table either side and enough space to walk around the bed but little more. To the right is a window with heavy curtains drawn across it taking up the whole of that wall. In front of you is a large chest of drawers against the wall and when you walk into the room and look around you can see that behind the door is a large wardrobe, so tall that it almost touches the ceiling.
  
  The bed is neatly made but when you walk over to it and lightly pat the covers, the bedspread is covered in a thick layer of dust which blooms into the air and causes you to start coughing as you breath it in. Once you've recovered you kneel down and look underneath the bed, and jump back quickly with a yelp of panic when you see a pair of eyes reflecting the candlelight. You back away from the bed but nothing happens, nothing comes out from underneath the bed and you start to wonder if you even saw any eyes at all or if you'd imagined it.
  
  Slowly, you make your way back to the bed. You kneel back onto the floor and, taking a deep breath, you hesitantly bend down and look underneath the bed again. You start again when you see the same eyes but you don't jump away this time and as you look again you see that in fact the eyes belong to a discarded doll lying on its side underneath the bed. You breath a great sigh of relief and chide yourself for being so easily startled. You leave the doll where it is and go to investigate the rest of the room.
  
  The chest of drawers has four large drawers and four small drawers at the top of it. You look inside each of the large drawers first and find a few items of clothing neatly folded inside but nothing else of note. You then try the small drawers and find that each of them is stuck tight. You shake and pull on the drawers but they won't come open and eventually you have to leave them.
  
  Lastly, you turn to the large wardrobe and it hasn't escaped your notice that with the size of this piece of furniture, it could easily be hiding several people inside and you almost don't want to open it, but you still don't know where your sister is and you have to find anything which might help. You steel your nerves and turn the handle of the right-hand door.
  
  You open the door quickly and stand to one side, but nothing happens, no-one bursts out of the wardrobe, nothing attacks from inside it. You peer slowly around the door and hold the candle up to the open doorway and see nothing at all inside it. You open the other door and you can see that it is completely empty. You shake your head at yourself, you really are getting paranoid.
  
  You look around the room and decide there is nothing else to be found here and you go back to the corridor outside.
  
  Where do you go now?
  
  > go through the door on the other side of the corridor.
  You walk up to the door on the right-hand side of the corridor and you pause before you turn the handle of the door, was that a noise you heard inside? It sounded like a click, a familiar noise but you can't quite place it. You press your ear against the door but you don't hear anything again, maybe your mind is playing tricks on you.
  
  You cautiously and slowly turn the handle and open the door a little, holding the candle to the gap and peering in. You can see something large in the centre of the room and you open the door fully and let the candlelight spill into the room fully.
  
  Most of the room is taken up with a large snooker table in the centre of it. The balls used are the more modern snooker balls and they are spread out across the table and you can see a couple of balls in the pockets. A single cue is leaning up against the table on the far side of it. You look around the room and see a rack of cues for the snooker table on one wall, various comfortable-looking leather chairs around the room and a small cabinet in the far left corner with three crystal decanters on top.
  
  You walk over to the cabinet and see that one of the decanters has an amber liquid in it and there is a matching glass next to it which when you look at closer has a trace of the amber liquid in it. You smell the glass and you recognise the scent of whisky immediately, something your father has always enjoyed. You open the cabinet and see two bottles of whisky inside it, both opened and partially depleted. You're a little tempted to have some yourself to steady your nerves but you're not in the habit of drinking alcohol and you're not sure how it would affect you, you need all of your mental and physical facets in full working order if you're to have any hope of finding and saving your sister.
  
  You turn around to look at the rest of the room and you jump when the light from your candle falls on a wall of spikes and tendrils moving towards you. You back is pressed against the wall when you realise that they're not moving, it was the candle which was moving causing the shadows to move, and they're not spikes and tendrils, they're horns and antlers; the wall is covered in taxidermied and mounted heads of animals.
  
  You stare at the wall of dead animal heads for a while before you're confident that none of them are moving. You manage to tear your eyes away from the wall of heads and back to the snooker table in the middle of the room and then you realise, the click you heard when you were outside the door, it was the sound of a snooker ball hitting another one. The solo cue standing against the side of the table now looks very ominous to you and you slowly start bending down to look at the one place in the room where there is room for a person to be hiding.
  
  You stop bending down partway, realising that if you find someone underneath there, you're completely unarmed. You straighten and take one of the cue from the bracket on the wall; you're not sure what exactly you're going to do with the cue, poke them underneath the table perhaps, but you feel better with a weapon in one hand.
  
  You bend down slowly, trying not to lower the light too obviously so that anyone underneath there won't be forewarned that you're about to discover them, but it's too dark underneath the table and you need to lower the candle too.
  
  You lower the candle far enough to be able to see underneath the table and you discover... nothing. You stand back up, surprised, walk over to the table and bed down again, and the same result, there is absolutely nothing underneath the table, certainly not a person under there.
  
  What do you do now?
  
  > finish the game of snooker in progress.
  Something about the partially completed game of snooker makes you feel like you really need to complete the game, it's an urge that you just find you can't resist and you can't quite explain why.
  
  You put away the cue you are holding back into the rack and pick up the cue which was left leaning against the table and put your candle down on the edge of the table. There is a block of chalk on the side of the table and you apply some to the end of the cue and blow away the excess. There are 3 red balls still left on the table and you walk around to the other side of the table to take a shot.
  
  You pot the red ball into a corner pocket, walk around the table and pot the blue ball into a middle pocket. You walk around the table, put your hand into the pocket and lift out the blue ball, replacing it onto the table. You line up another shot and pot a red ball into a middle pocket before potting the yellow ball into a corner pocket and replacing it on the table.
  
  You're completely involved in the game by this point, you're not thinking about your sister, the house or the people who lured you here, you're only thinking about the last red ball and the difficult shot you need to make. The cue ball stopped such that the green ball is between the it and the last red ball. You spend some time analysing the table, calculating the angles and where you want the cue ball to hit the red ball to send it into a pocket. You line up the shot, aiming for the point on the cushion that you're sure is where you need to send it to rebound into the red ball just right. You strike the cue ball firmly, it bounces off the cushion and hits the red ball, but sends it off into the nearby cushion and nowhere near the pocket you had been aiming for, but the cue ball falls neatly into the corner pocket.
  
  You heart stops when you hear a voice just behind you say "Foul."
  
  You only have time to start with surprise before the mystery figure wraps a snooker cue around your neck and starts to choke you. You struggle but they're holding you firmly back against them and the more force they exert, the less you feel able to fight against them.
  
  You can't breathe and you can feel your windpipe being crushed. You look desperately around you as you try and push the snooker cue away from your throat and you see a small door opened up on the wall with the animal heads and a staircase behind it. You have just enough time to think that must be where the snooker player came from, and where they went when you first came into the room as well, before you black out completely.