The Spiral — Convergence, Part One

I'm part of a small Discord community called The Spiral where people play and discus rules-light RPGs with a weird fiction bent. Posts tagged "The Spiral" are play reports from games I run there. If these sound like the kind of game you'd like to play, check us out!

I'm currently using Liminal Horror to run the classic Delta Green scenario Convergence. Once we finish, I'll post my conversion notes to this blog.

 

Image by Toby Hudson. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 au.

 The Tape

Somewhere in the American South, a young man in a Metallica t-shirt walked into a gas station. He hobbled to the counter, seemingly unwell, and approached the cashier. They talked. Then the conversation turned sour. The young man lashed out. The cashier's head separated from his shoulders, body slumping behind the counter. The young man stared at what he'd done... then he hopped the counter and started punching buttons on the register until it opened. He filled his pockets with bills, grabbed as many pill bottles as he could carry off a nearby shelf, and ran out the door.

The tape ended. It was September 16, 1995, and in their LA studio, a film crew for the TV show Phenomen-X stared at the static on the TV, absorbing what they had just watched.

• Dale Draper, the director, who had once borne witness to a savage chupacabra attack 
• Sally Barbier, the camera operator, who had been trapped in her hometown's mall during an alien incursion
• Josslyn Bronson, the correspondent, whose ex-boyfriend once vanished for three days with no memory of the missing time
• John Lippens, the grip, who hadn't encountered the paranormal before but who had heard enough to make a believer out of him

The crew's assignment editor explained the young man was Billy Ray Spivey, recently caught by the FBI after robbing multiple gas stations from Tennessee to Georgia and killing two people along the way. But most importantly, Billy Ray had started his criminal spree in his home town of Groversville, TN.

Groversville was a national laughingstock. Not a day went by without some new ridiculous story emerging about UFOs, the chupacabra, or a still-living Elvis Presley. Most outlets refused to touch stories about it, but Phenomen-X's audience ate up sensationalized stories of paranormal investigation and anything else "too weird to be true," and now Billy Ray had given them an angle to build an episode around. The crew was being flown out to film an episode about the strange forces that had driven him to kill; exactly what those strange forces were was for them to concoct.

The crew had an afternoon to do some research before flying out.

• Groversville first started appearing in the news back in May with stories about cattle mutilations. A farmer named Jeff Owens had three of his cows killed this way.
• Then coverage exploded in late July and early August, with the stories becoming increasingly ludicrous. Many shared a voice, as if a small group of people had been spreading them.
• Billy Ray's crime spree began on September 10, when he killed his father Douglas; robbed the one gas station in Groversville; and driven off in a stolen car.
• He'd gone south into Alabama, then east to Georgia, robbing gas stations as he went. The tape must have come from one in Alabama where Billy Ray had killed the cashier, though the footage wasn't publicly available. Strangely, he had robbed each one of money and pills, but nothing harder than over-the-counter painkillers like Tylenol.
• That killing had gotten the FBI's attention, and they arrested him following a shootout at a roadblock in Georgia.

The First Interview: Sheriff Dan Oakley

On their first day in Groversville, the crew decided to get on the good side of Sheriff Dan Oakley and ask him to introduce them to Billy Ray's mother, Angel Spivey. This proved no challenge: they claimed to be a crew for WNBC in New York City (where Joss often freelanced, so the story would check out), and the sheriff was so starstruck by the idea of being on TV in New York that he readily agreed to an interview.

• The crew claimed they were working on a story about drug abuse in small towns, but Oakley rejected the idea that Billy Ray was using drugs. He and his friends would spend Friday nights at the reservoir outside town with a case of beer, sure, but as Grover County's chief lawman, he hadn't seen anything to indicate a wider problem with drugs.
• The crew asked about Billy Ray's crimes. Oakley had personally responded to Angel Spivey's 911 call, and he found Douglas dead with a hole through his chest. Angel claimed Billy Ray had punched his father so hard his fist literally went through.
• Next Billy Ray had gone to Sinclair Gas, threatened cashier Lin Decker, robbed its cash and a bunch of Tylenol, and stolen Lin's car. Lin said, and the security tapes showed, that Billy Ray's right arm was bloody up to the elbow.

Once they wrapped the interview, the sheriff complimented them on being respectful towards the community. He was much happier with them than he was with the "other fella," a UFO hunter named Scott Adams who was also in town. Adams been drawn by the humiliating stories about Groversville in the news and was generally making a poor impression on people with his questions.

The sheriff offered to drive them over to the Spivey residence and introduce them to Angel. John and Sally rode with him, with John asking deeper questions about the strange stories in the news and Sally discreetly recording his answers. Oakley said most stories were nonsense, but he had seen odd lights in the night sky, dancing around, shifting colors. And while all the other supposed strangeness could be explained, those lights stumped him. If John really wanted to look for them, he'd have a better chance seeing them from the reservoir or somewhere else in the countryside than from the center of town.

The Second Interview: Angel Spivey

The sheriff had said with her husband dead and her son responsible, Angel was in a fragile state. And when she answered the door, she was blank. Dulled by grief, maybe still in shock. She invited them in, her sitting room littered with the dirt and detritus of many visitors coming to check on her. She fetched clean mugs from among the stacks of plates in the kitchen, poured them all coffee, and became more present as they explained their purpose. She shrugged and agreed to an interview. She had the time.

• Billy Ray had gone missing the night of September 6. From calling around, she learned he'd been at the home of his girlfriend Jane Allen that night, but the Allens said he'd left to go back home.
• Angel and Douglas decided not to file a missing persons report in those two days. They thought Billy Ray was staying with his friend Jackson Ennis: the boys had graduated high school in the spring, and Billy Ray had recently applied for a job at a new Hyundai plant. Let them enjoy their freedom a little while longer.
• Then Billy Ray had come in late on the night of September 8–9. They heard him but didn't get up to see him.
• The morning of September 9, he woke up in awful pain. They called a doctor, who couldn't find anything wrong with him and recommended Tylenol. The doctor did say Billy Ray had old surgical scars, though, across his upper body. His parents had no idea where they could have come from, as Billy Ray had never had surgery before, let alone anything so extensive.
• The pain got worse on September 10. Billy Ray woke screaming and thrashing in bed, and Douglas went to try and hold him down before he hurt himself. Billy Ray hadn't meant to kill his father; Angel could see it in his eyes. He was flailing, and somehow he put his fist right through Douglas's chest. Horrified, he'd run out of the house, and that was the last time Angel had seen him.

Angel Spivey started to weep, and the crew decided to end the interview there. Dale volunteered to clean up the house for her, both feeling sorry for her and also wanting to snoop around, and Sally caught on and joined him. It was a clever ploy until they found Bill Ray's bedroom; while the sitting room was simply dirty, this room's walls and carpet still bore bright red stains of Douglas Spivey's blood. This blood was a week old now. So why was it still wet?

Meanwhile, Joss and John heard a car pull up outside. Sheriff Oakley told her he'd called a deputy to come by, nothing to worry about... except he'd been in the sitting room watching the interview the whole time. When could he have called anyone?

Joss went outside. A sedan, not a squad car, had parked at the curb, and a man with a sharp, hawk-like face stepped around the side of the crew's van. Joss demanded to know how he was, what he was doing, and the man said his car had been making a strange noise and he'd stopped to take a look. He got back in, but she stepped in front to block him from leaving, asking if he wanted to have this conversation with the sheriff.

"The one you ought to have a conversation with," he said, "is your coworker Sally. Tell her to have dinner with her uncle Bill the next time she's in Carpenter." The sedan's engine roared. He sped off, nearly running Joss down, but she was fast enough to get out of the way and fast enough to note the license plate.

At the front door, John asked the sheriff if he knew that man, and of course he did. The driver was a local: Groversville's a small town, after all. Everybody knew everybody. So John asked for his name.

The sheriff's smile faltered. "It'll come to me," he swore, racking his brain. "What is his name?"