The RPG Blog Carnival is an idea to get groups of bloggers to all writing about a monthly topic, the aim being to build a dialogue across many different blogs, providing different viewpoints and ideas to the viewer. The way it works is that a blog discussing a monthly topic will post the RPG Carnival Logo and will link back to the 'hosters' post.
This month the topic is spooky spots.
I've already done a post for this topic entitled "Rose Corner" that you can find here (http://wh40krpg.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/rpg-blog-carnival-october-2013-spooky.html), but I enjoyed writing that so much that I decided to do another; as with my previous entry i've attempted to keep the specifics (location names, etc) fairly vague so that people can easily transplant the idea if they like it.
The Noises in the Pipes
The tenement building is old, really old, it originally belonged to a private owner who died, the tenement building was caught up in a land zoning dispute for a number of years, and slowly fell into wrack and ruin, eventually being acquired (after the dispute had been resolved) by a housing agents, who performed the minimal necessary government mandated repairs and used it as a convenient place to put undesirables and those who could not afford more luxurious housing, tucked out of sight in the tenement they could be conveniently forgotten about. In this sort of environment you might expect anger, hatred, suspicion and a whole other gamut of negative emotions to flourish amongst the dereliction of the tenement block, but the level of crime is suspiciously low in the immediate area and an aura of mute acceptance hangs over the place; this is not to say that the tenement block is a happy place, far from it, people shuffle about their daily business with a listful lifelessness bordering on somnabulance, as though they merely sleepwalk through the place, events and incidents in the world outside drawing only the most cursory of interest from them. Local councils and city officials put this malaise down to urban decay and a low standard of living conditions, little do they know that something preys on the people of the block, drawing the life and joy out of them.
Many years ago a man lived in the tenement, a poor man who worked long hours in a factory job to support himself and his daughter, after his wife had died money had been tight and they'd had no choice but to move into the crumbling block; unfortunately, with the man away, his teenage daughter fell prey to the drug dealers and other such predators who stalked the tenement. Becoming more and more addicted to forgetting her situation using chemical means, but worried that her father would notice if she starting stealing money from him to supply her habit (and there would have been precious little money to steal anyway) and, without a job, the girl turned to selling the only thing she had, herself. This worked for a while and she made enough cash to support her habits, but her new vocation bought its own perils and eventually the daughter contracted a serious disease; her father was forced to watch is his daughter (who had always been his pride and joy) slowly wasted away infront of his eyes, and there was nothing that medical services could do for her. With no-one to blame following the death of his daughter, all joy in his life was gone, replaced with a cold numbness, one morning the father went down into the basement of the tenement, knotting a belt around the light fitting and leapt from a chair, gasping out his last breath amongst the hissing and clanking pipes of the basement heating system.
It was three days before the man's body was found, and local people still say that, if you listen carefully, behind the noise of the pipes hissing you can hear the keening cries of the lost father, crying for his daughter; the heating has never worked properly since those days and something seems to be slowly draining all of the joy and the love out of the tenement. Perhaps it is just urban decay, or perhaps the father's anguished spirit seeks to draw to it the warmth that was taken in life, who can say?
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