When we left the hut the next morning, MM (his name turns out to be Luc, which is what I'll call him henceforth) decided to come with us. Not that he told us anything, of course, but having acquired a walking, if silent, shadow, it was fairly obvious what his intention was. We poled for a few more hours before walking the last mile into town (a thoroughly miserable experience, by the way: everyone else seemed relieved to be upon dry land, where crocodiles seem to be less frequently encountered, but the knee deep mud ruined it for me).

Upon arrival, we noticed something rather weird: the town appeared to be deserted! Closer inspection showed that there was a funeral today, so we approached the graveyard, having nothing better to do (in retrospect, this is why adventurers aren't well loved everywhere -- who needs a bunch of passing strangers pushing their noses into the town's daily life?). Well, the weirdness increased: the coffin was chained! I mean, who chains coffins shut, in Corellon's name? Apparently, the answer to that question is "the people of Marais d'Tarascon." It soon became apparent that the reason they chained the coffin shut was that something in it was still alive. I was very confused -- humans are beyond my understanding sometimes -- but Prihelm tried to stop them (while I don't understand humans, most of them are at least rational enough not to bury the living, so I was thinking they probably had the dead man's cats in the coffin or something silly like that, but Prihelm thought they were burying a live person; I really really worry about him sometimes). Of course, this just led to your friendly local adventurers being evicted by the constabulary, but not before I tried asking what was going on. Funny thing, but they wouldn't talk to me!

Well, we eventually asked the priest, and he proved to be amazingly unhelpful -- wouldn't tell us anything about the burial. We made it to the Full Moon Inn, from whence I write this entry. The people here also proved to be music haters, which further lowered my estimation of their sanity, but the food was good and I got a nice, long, hot bath, so I'm not going to question their customs too closely. And eventually, we were able to find a pair of chatty people: I met a guy named Duncan d'Lute, who is a merchant from the nearby town of Port d'Elhour. He didn't know much except that the village people were acting a bit strangely, but he was polite (even though he spent a bit more time staring than I'm comfortable with, not being like Mitsy), so he might be a worthwhile contact. But Prihelm was able to extract some information from Katha, the barmaid (she was busy flirting with him, but subtly, and as the poor boy has been around Mitsy's blatant flirting so much recently, he didn't notice. A pity, because she was cute and probably would have told him more had he gone for her). Still, he was able to get a story about how a few people (including the recently deceased Jeremiah d'Gris) in this town have died recently in unexplained ways, giving off a horrible odor of rotten meat and not wanting to stay in the grave. Seems a little hard to credit, but then, the coffin was chained shut, and something in it was alive...

I hope to find out more tomorrow, but for now - wait, what was that scream?