[@Dark Light] [@Pineappletumble] [@Song book] [@Snarfulblast]
 [@Dannyrulx]

As the final, chilling notes of the rhyme faded, the almost trance-like state that had held Hardwick captive abated and he was left once more at the bar, fully aware and filled with boundless terror - compounded by the fact that, try as he might, he could not recall ever having heard the song before, nor could he remember the lyrics that he had chanted mere moments before.

Back in his own time, on his own plane of existence, the soul-crushing weight of powerlessness and cosmic insignificance was something that he had slowly come to terms with. He had made it his mission to investigate the great and terrible Eldritch powers that lurked just beyond the human perception, and to prevent them at all costs from tearing reality asunder - or, at the very least, to delay the inevitable for as long as humanly possible.

But this... [i]invasion...[/i] of his mind, of his free will, was a darkly sobering threat. He had heard the stories of the Witch-House, he had spoken to Dreamers and Sages of the unknown, he had seen those who gave up their souls in service of the Old Ones, yet he himself had taken every precaution to prevent himself from succumbing to the infinite darkness - his body still bore the scars of the hellish arcane rituals, the warding runes he had carved into himself during his sojourns into the darkest and most secretive places of the Massachusettsan countryside. And yet, all this preparation could not stand up to a little girl and her strange nursery rhymes.

A jarring scratching sound pulled Hardwick from the depths of his thoughts. Across the tavern, the soft glow of many candles began to flicker wildly as the shadows in the darker recesses of the room began to shift and darken. The other patrons looked around in mixed confusion and fear as the scratching grew louder still, until throughout the room all that could be heard was the almighty din of innumerable claws scraping on ageing timber.

Before he could process what was happening, the shadows began to coalesce; no longer two-dimensional impressions of the objects behind them but rather three dimensional, twisted impressions of the human form. They dragged themselves from the depths of the sinister darkness as if from a pool of liquid, globs of shadows falling from their straw bodies to splash upon the floor. Once again, that terrible feeling of [i]knowing[/i] washed over Hardwick as the grotesque imitations drew themselves to their full height, worn leather heads and terrible false faces staring unblinkingly at the patrons.

The Straw Men had come to take what was theirs.