The Carfax Chapel

# The Carfax Chapel *A solo horror journal in the Wretched & Alone tradition. For readers of Bram Stoker's* Dracula. --- It is the autumn of **1922** . Twenty-four years have passed since the matter at Purfleet was closed by Dr. Van Helsing and the surviving members of his circle, and the house on the Carfax estate has stood under a solicitor's standing order ever since. The deed-holder — a Mr. **J. Harker** , resident at an address in Exeter — has notified the firm that the estate is to be put on the market in the spring. He has further requested that the chapel in particular not be opened by any valuer, auctioneer, or prospective buyer, under any circumstances, until a Mr. **P. Wrenn** — a solicitor's clerk from Lincoln's Inn — has inventoried its contents and filed a report in his hand. Mr. Harker's letter contains no explanation. The firm's file on the Carfax matter is thirty-one years old and consists of invoices for a caretaker who died in 1912 and has not been replaced. You are Mr. Wrenn. You arrived on the second of October. You have six weeks. --- ## How it plays The Carfax Chapel is a **Wretched & Alone** game (Chris Bissette, Loot The Room —   attribution follows the standard CC-BY-3.0 licence). Each day of your autumn at Carfax, you draw one card from the deck, consult the day's prompt, and write an entry in your report. Some cards instruct you to pull a block or two from the tower. **Before you place a pulled block on top of the tower, you write one word on it, in permanent marker.** The tower, by the end, is a text — the inventory you have taken of what Carfax is in 1922. The game ends when one of three things happens: - **The Solicitor** — the Queen of Hearts is drawn. A car comes up the drive. Mr. Thornley has driven down from London unexpectedly, with the authority to close the estate without the chapel inventory. You may leave with him. The standing tower is the inventory you take to London. - **The Lid Falls** — the tower collapses. The altar box opens, by your hand or another's. You read the fallen blocks in the order they landed, as the final entry of your report. - **The Report** — the deck empties without either. You have finished your six weeks. The report is complete. You file it with Hawkins & Thornley. You take the first train home. You dream of Carfax, from time to time, for the rest of your life. The Queen of Hearts is removed from the deck at setup and shuffled into the bottom pile, so that Mr. Thornley cannot arrive before the end of your fourth week. ## The signature mechanic: words on the altar Each block you pull from the tower earns a single word, written on the block in permanent marker, before it goes back on top. The best word is small and English and nineteenth-century — *lamp, latch, dust, ivy, salt, moth, oath, silence,* the surname of a dead solicitor, or the single word that describes what you smelled in the chapel this  morning when the key turned. Words accumulate. The tower becomes an inventory you cannot delete and cannot revise. How you read it at the end depends on which ending you reach. ## The four suits - **♠ Spades — The Chapel.** The ruined 13th-century chapel at the east of the grounds. The stone altar. The box on the altar. What is wrong with the physical place. - **♥ Hearts — The Papers.** The living correspondence. Letters from Exeter, from London,  from an Amsterdam address you did not expect, from the Purfleet post office boy who will not come inside the gate. - **♦ Diamonds — The Earth.** The 50 crates of imported soil delivered in 1897. Their remnants. The scraps still in the chapel floor. The weeds that have taken root in some of them. The ones that have not. - **♣ Clubs — The Report.** Your daily practice. The ledger, the ink, the lamp. The small  tasks of a clerk's temporary residence. Your own hand, when you cannot avoid writing it. ## For readers of *Dracula* This is a work set in the aftermath of Bram Stoker's novel. No character from Dracula appears onstage; the property at Carfax does. Mr. Harker, Mrs. Harker, and Mr. Van Helsing are offstage figures in the player's correspondence, referenced by name under nominative fair use. The game asks you to notice what the inventory finds, and to decide, at the end, what you will tell the firm, and what you will not. If you have read *Dracula* , you will notice the inventory marking the earth. If you have not read *Dracula* , the inventory is still legible — the game is standalone — but you may find yourself picking up a copy of Stoker's novel afterwards. That is a reasonable  response. ## What's inside - 52 card prompts split across four suits (one lens on the same six weeks) - The *words on the altar* Wretched & Alone mechanic (CC-BY 3.0) - Three endings — The Solicitor (escape), The Lid Falls (collapse), The Report (silence) - Six original editorial still-life photographs (cover + four suit dividers + a closing) - A content note and safety framework - 27 pages, editorial single-column layout, PDF --- *If you play, we would like to know which ending called you — and what word was on the block at the top of the tower when it did.*