The Boundary Stone
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1666. A village that agreed not to leave, and the one woman who goes into every house.
The sickness came to Coldbarrow in September 1665. In November the rector stood on a mounting block and asked two hundred and sixty-one people to agree not to leave — not to go to Wardlow, not to go over the moor to their sisters — and to be supplied from outside at a stone on the parish boundary, and to bury their own.
They agreed. All of them. It is eleven months on, a hundred and sixty-one of them are in the burial field, and not one village within twenty miles has taken it.
You are Alice Rowntree, forty-four, searcher of the parish. You are paid fourpence a body to go into the house, look at what is on the dead, and say what it was. You go into every house in Coldbarrow. You are the only person alive who does.
Things remember being touched
Your hands carry it. Every object carries it. The game never rolls a die: if a clean house takes it, you took it there, and it will tell you whose house and it will tell you their name.
Washing is hands, and hands only, and the game says so out loud every time — because the commonest way to kill somebody in this village is to wash carefully to the elbow and then hand over a shirt.
What an object is made of decides what can be done about it. Metal takes vinegar or fire. Wood takes fire. Cloth, paper and food take nothing at all, and the two most important pieces of evidence in this game are paper, and the thing you carry out of the pest house is feather and ticking, and there is no help in Coldbarrow for any of it.
Five doors with no cross on them
Ellen Ash has kept two children alive for eleven months by not letting one single person over her step since March, including you, twice, politely. When you stand at that door the game tells you what is on you, and how many things you are carrying that have it, and where the pump is.
It will not stop you. It stops you once, in as many words, and then it says that it will not stop you a second time, and after that the arithmetic is yours.
What the searcher knows
She counts. Nobody asked her to; she has kept a book since 1655 out of nothing but habit, and it means she is the only person in the parish who has the whole shape of this in one place — the numbers, the months, and two dates that do not agree about how it got here in the first place.
And in eleven months and four hundred and thirteen bodies she has never once written anything in the cause column except the sickness. In August she writes something else.
How it ends
The Justices at Bakewell will not decide about the cordon. They have written to say so: the certificate of the searcher will be taken as the fact of the matter. Four things can go down the hill in a sixty-year-old man's hand, and every one of them is true, and the game will not choose between them.
Two and a half to three hours. No sign-up, no download, and it saves where it stands.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.