Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jonathan Sims had never known his father.

Sure, he'd met the man. He knew what he looked like, (light brown hair and fair skin, in contrast to him and his mother, who were both black haired with brown skin) he knew his name, (Elias Richard Bouchard, his name wasn't passed down to Jon because his mother wanted him to have her own name if Elias wasn't going to be around to raise him) but he didn't really know him. He didn't know who his father's friends were, what his favorite food was, his favorite movie, nothing. Aside from his name and face, the only thing he really knew was that Elias worked at a place called the Magnus Institute.

He knew this because one day Elias came over to tell his grandmother about it, to which she had responded with incredulity, "You work at... what is it they do there? Investigating ghosts? Please, Elias, get an actual job."

Elias had explained to Jon's grandmother that they didn't investigate ghosts, they were "dedicated to the archival and investigation of paranormal events" (which, to be fair, did sometimes involve ghosts). Elias finally won Jon's grandmother over by telling her the pay was quite good, and she begrudgingly sighed. When she left, she turned to Jon and said, "When you grow up, don't work in a place like that. It'll ruin your life."

And that was the most Jon thought of this mysterious Magnus Institute for quite a while. His father worked there, and that was that.

Until one day, when his grandmother bought him a picture book titled A Guest For Mr. Spider.

Jon was a difficult child, according to his grandmother, but he was quite calm when reading, so she bought him books from any charity shop she could find and hoped that would be enough to keep him company. Jon enjoyed most of the books his grandmother bought him.

But A Guest For Mr. Spider was different. On the inside of a book was a plaque, reading "From the Library of Jurgen Leitner". The book was disturbing, to say the least. It involved the titular character, Mr. Spider, seemingly eating a bunch of flies who had knocked on his door and brought him various gifts. But that wasn't what made Jon so unnerved. The penultimate page depicted a wooden door, presumably Mr. Spider's own, covered in red and brown (likely the blood of Mr. Spider's various victims). The page had a cutaway panel to open to the final page, reading "Mr. Spider wants another guest for dinner. It is polite to knock."

Jon was compelled to knock on that door, until a boy who had bullied him all his life, a boy named Thomas, a few years older than him, snatched it from his hands.

"You're still reading this kiddy stuff, Jonny?" he said with a sneer.

Jon looked around him, as though he had been snapped out of a trance. He could have sworn he was on the porch, but he seemed to have walked across the street to the park.

"Give it back!" Jon said, trying his best to be authoritative. It wasn't easy, given he was rather short, even for an eight-year-old boy.

"Nah, I don't think so," Thomas said, looking at the cover, "A Guest For Mr. Spider?"

Thomas became uncharacteristically quiet, opening the book and beginning to read it, before wandering away, his eyes still on the pages of the book. Jon followed him, but was for some reason unable to run, feeling an odd compulsion to remain at walking pace behind Thomas. As they walked further and further away from the park, Jon looked around and noticed something odd: there was not a single car or person around. Not even any cars parked on the sides of the street, which was an oddity for the neighborhood Jon lived in. They walked for what seemed like hours, and very well might have been since eventually, the sun went down. Jon did not see a single person or car the entire time.

Thomas kept reading, and eventually they arrived at a house with a For Sale sign in front of it. The house was old and decrepit; it seemed like no one had lived there for a very long time.

Thomas walked up, and put the book against the house's door, before flipping to the penultimate page, and knocking one, two, three, four times. The door of the house opened, and two long, black, thin appendages with coarse hair emerged and pulled Thomas inside before slamming the door.

Jon ran up to the house, noticing that the book was still on the porch of the house. He opened the door, despite being terrified that whatever had taken Thomas would take him too, but it didn't. The door opened to an old, empty, rotting house.

Jon didn't remember everything after that, only being found by a police officer who asked if he was Jonathan Sims, who told him his grandmother had reported him missing. The officer drove him back home, where his grandmother had scolded him for running off. Jon didn't absorb much of it, still terrified by what he had seen.

He buried the book under a large pile of all the books he had read in his room, hoping that he would never see it again. He tried to convince himself that he had made it all up, that it was some bizarre nightmare his mind had invented when he saw missing posters for Thomas the next day to explain his sudden disappearance. Deep down, he knew it wasn't true, but eventually everything that had happened faded from his mind.

It wasn't until two years later, when his father came by, that the memory of A Guest For Mr. Spider suddenly reemerged.

In those two years, Elias had seemingly been promoted to the head of the Magnus Institute, and had apparently cleaned up his act. He wore nicer clothes, spoke more clearly and formally, although he still didn't come by very often. Oddly enough, Elias' eyes were a vibrant green, even though Jon could've sworn the last time he saw him that they were the same brown as his own.

But when Elias came by, Jon remembered that the Magnus Institute had something or other to do with events such as these. So, the morning after, he snuck out of the house with some money he had saved up and bought a bus ticket that would take him to the center of London, to the Magnus Institute.

Jonah Magnus had just settled into his desk for the day, when suddenly his vision was drawn to the image of a young boy with brown skin, black hair and a green sweater riding a bus, with a backpack containing a map and a book. He recognized the child; he was Jonathan Sims, the son of Elias Bouchard, the man whose body he currently possessed. He's coming to make a statement, Jonah realized, before pinching his forehead.

He walked downstairs and opened the door to Gertrude's office, hoping to tell her to turn away any children that might come by, before remembering that today was her day off. Why am I even so worried about this? If the child gives a statement, it will feed the Eye. This is my job. Must be because I'm still getting used to Elias' body. He walked to the ground floor, and waited a few minutes before seeing Jon entering the building, backpack in hand.

"Jon?" Elias asked, pretending as though he hadn't known he'd been on his way for nearly twenty minutes, "Whatever are you doing here? Your grandmother must be worried sick about you."

"Hello, Elias," Jon responded. (Elias made careful note of the fact that Jon called him "Elias" and not "Father" or something equivalent) "Something happened and... I thought you might want to know about it."

”Alright, then. Normally, we'd have you give your statement to Gertrude, our Archivist, but she's out for the day, so come along."

Elias took Jon up the stairs to his office and pulled out a tape recorder, set it on the table, and began his usual introduction.

"Statement of Jonathan Sims regarding..."

"This book right here. A Guest For Mr. Spider." The young child in front of Elias took a storybook out of his bag and placed it on the desk.

"Regarding a book called 'A Guest For Mr. Spider'. Statement recorded directly from subject, twenty-seventh of July, 1997, by Elias Bouchard, head of the Magnus Institute. Statement begins."

Jon felt the statement pour from his mouth, almost involuntarily. He was dimly aware of what he was saying, using the prose of a practiced novelist. He explained everything without ever tripping over his words or pausing to remember. As soon as the statement was done, Jon felt like he had suddenly regained control of his mouth, and Elias said, "Thank you, Jon. You can go now."

Jon stood up from the chair and took his backpack with him. He reached to take the book as well, but Elias stopped him and said, "No. We need to keep the book. For research purposes." Jon nodded, and left without it. As soon as Jon shut the door, Elias turned on the recorder and started speaking, "Another Leitner. And this one is surely of the Web. Why would it target Jon, I wonder? Did it know he would come here? I can't imagine another reason but surely that can't be it. As powerful as it is, it can't predict the future. If he was being influenced, why would the Web wait so long just to get him here? In any case, there's little follow-up to be done here. Even if we could find this house mentioned in the statement, it would be empty, per Jon's account. Once Gertrude gets back, I might ask her to send out one of her researchers to find the house and investigate, but as of right now, there's nothing to be done. End recording."

Elias shut off the tape recorder.

Chapter Text

"I'm telling you, Martin, it was real, it happened! And I went to the place Elias works and told him about it!" Jon insisted to his friend.

"Yeah, right, no way! You're just trying to scare me, Jon!"

"I'm serious! If Gran wouldn't ground me if I snuck off again, I'd take you straight to the Institute and show you the statement myself!"

"Oh, wow, you'd get grounded? That's a convenient excuse," Martin shot back.

"Oh, please! If anything weird happened to you and I said all that to you, you'd throw a fit!"

"I would not throw a fit! I'm not a toddler anymore!" Martin responded, offended.

"Oh, sure, but you'd run and cry if anything like that happened to you!"

"Well, for your information, something a bit weird did happen a few days ago. I think, anyway. I'm not sure if I imagined it..."

"Wait, really? What happened?"

Martin sat down on Jon's bed, crossed his legs, and began speaking as Jon transcribed his words onto a piece of paper that he had absentmindedly grabbed.

"It was about a week ago... Thursday, I think," Martin began. Jon quickly wrote "Date of Incident: July 24, 1997" on the top of his paper, alongside "Statement of Martin Blackwood, given July 3rd, 1997".

"I was meeting up with Tim and Sasha at the playground in front of school, and we decided to play hide-and-seek. I was the seeker, because I lost the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. So, I closed my eyes, turned around and counted to thirty. And I looked everywhere. I looked up every tree, behind the slides, behind the bushes, even near the school. But they just weren't there. And then, I noticed it was deathly, deathly silent. I didn't hear any animals, or any cars passing by, and I barely heard the wind. So, I looked around, but instead of just looking for Tim and Sasha, I looked for animals, too. Birds and squirrels, even bugs. And I couldn't find anything. I found an anthill, but I didn't see anything coming out of it, and I couldn't see a single bird, or squirrel, and then, I noticed that all the cars parked by the side of the street had disappeared."

Martin paused for a moment to let Jon finish scribbling the words onto the paper, before continuing, "After that, I tried looking around for any sign of another person. On the side of the school, there's a mural with some children on a green hill with a smiling sun. I passed by it, but I did a double take when I noticed that the kids were missing, and the sun had lost its face. At this point, I figured that I had hit my head or something and that I was imagining all of this. And I just decided to sit there, after that. I thought that it would eventually end if I hit my head, so I might as well just stay there. But then, I noticed someone on the field. A man in a ship captain's outfit. I ran towards him, and he turned towards me, but suddenly I tripped, he was gone, and when I looked back, I saw the mural on the wall, and the children were back. I found Tim and Sasha afterwards. I didn't tell them, because I knew they wouldn't believe me. I'm not sure, maybe I did hit my head or something in that field, but it felt so real, it's almost like it couldn't have just been a dream," Martin finished, and Jon stopped writing.

Elias Bouchard looked at the scene from afar, reading out Martin's words as they were being written, and after finishing the impromptu statement, began assessing the situation into his tape recorder, "Normally I would dismiss such a thing as a simple children's tale, something made up to scare others on the playground. But the man in the captain's outfit... it seems highly unlikely that this boy would fabricate an experience characteristic of The Lonely and just so happen to mention someone matching the likeness of one of its most devoted Avatars. Peter Lukas preying on the fear of young children is nothing new, to be honest. Isolation is quite a potent worry for children around young Blackwood's age. No, what I am more interested in is the fact that Jon seems to know the exact format of the way the Institute's statement papers are presented. End recording."

Chapter Text

Elias picked up his tape recorder. He didn't have a statement to record, but he needed to get some things off of his chest, and figured, at least, that it might help to have them on tape somewhere.

"Statement of Elias Bouchard, head of the Magnus Institute, regarding his feelings towards his coworkers and a particular child they keep encouraging to return. Statement begins." He breathed out a quick sigh, before continuing, "Ever since Gertrude Robinson settled into her role as the Archivist, I knew she'd be trouble. In terms of personality, she hardly seems fit for the role, and her managerial skills leave much to be desired as well. I mean, this number formatting system is a mess, and heaven knows what we'd do if we had multiple statements given in one day, but Ms. Robinson insists it's better for organization." He said the last bit with clear contempt in his voice.

"Not to mention the people she's hired as her assistants. Two young men, barely out of college. Ridiculous. One of them- if you can believe it- is currently being targeted by The Distortion. A goddamn target of The Spiral, and she employed him! Ludicrous. The other one isn't much better. Gerard Keay. He's the son of the late Eric Delano, a previous coworker and friend of Gertrude. His mother is Mary Keay, whose family has quite a long history with the Institute. I shan't go over it all now, but safe to say that Gerard's employment (and less than impressive qualifications, to be polite) has led to quite some accusations from employees of other departments of nepotism and favoritism, and frankly, I can't blame them. It's not like the man's employment has done anything to improve the efficiency of the Archivist's team. Oh, and her newest hire, Jonathan Sims. Dear lord, where to begin. For one, I asked her to keep the boy away from the Institute. But she insists that Jon should be here because he seemingly has a calming effect on the statement givers, apparently, it makes them much more susceptible to sharing their experiences, and according to Michael and Gerard, he has an acute knowledge of the Archives' statements and where in the system they are located." He breathed another sigh.

"This presents quite a dilemma for me. Combined with Jon's sudden intuition of the formatting of the Institute's statement papers he demonstrated at the beginning of this month, I have reason to believe that The Eye has marked the boy. I don't believe it has made him an Avatar yet, but if he keeps returning, it could present quite some issues for my plans. What about this child drew two Fears to him, I wonder? How very disturbing..."

Michael sat down in his office. Well, office was being generous, it was really more of a roomy closet, since Gerard had the bigger office. He sat down and turned on a tape recorder he had borrowed from the Archives. Lots of things had happened around him, and he thought it best to catalogue them.

"Statement of Michael Shelley, assistant to Gertrude Robinson, head Archivist of the Magnus Institute. Statement recorded by... the same guy. Me. Regarding his- my- experiences with a being that calls itself Helen Richardson. Statement begins."

"The first time I met Helen was when my family moved to London from Manchester, when I was ten years old. She was a real estate agent, and she was the one who sold my parents our new house. She seemed kind of stuck-up, from what I remember. She always wore this magenta pantsuit, seemed kind of passive aggressive in general, and I think she was a Tory. She certainly seemed to align with their beliefs, at least. Anyway, after we bought the house and moved in, I didn't see Helen in person for a while. I saw some posters around town and signs in front of houses she was selling, but I didn't ever see her in person until I turned 17. I was at a nearby community college, since my parents didn't have enough money to send me to a fancy college. I was just checking out the place, until I saw a white door right near the entrance."

"I swear up and down that door had not been there when I walked in, and I would have noticed, because it was very noticeable. The walls were all beige, and this door was stark white, like a single grain of rice that wasn't touched by a bunch of curry sauce. That's a bad analogy, but you get the point. Obviously, I should have just ignored it, but I felt this weird compulsion to open the door and walk in. But I didn't have to, because when I went to touch the doorknob, the door creaked open, and long, clawed fingers wrapped around the edge of the door, like some kind of horror monster. 'Come in,' someone spoke on the other side of the door. I did, and that's when I saw... well, Gertrude calls it The Distortion, and it calls itself Helen Richardson. And it did look like her. Sort of. It had the same sort of light skin and long, brown like Helen did, and it was roughly the same size as she was when I saw her last, but it- or she, I'm not really sure- had long fingers, and her fingernails looked like claws, and her eyes looked like they had a multicolored spiral swimming around in them."

"'Hello! Michael Shelley, it's been a very long time,' she said. Her voice sounded like she was speaking through an old cellphone. I didn't recognize her right away, so I asked who she was, and she laughed. It sounded like it was echoing a thousand times around the white void we were standing in. 'Why, I'm Helen Richardson, the real estate agent! I sold your parents their house when you moved here!' I shook my head. 'You're not Helen,' I told her, 'Helen didn't- she didn't have those... claws.' She laughed again. 'Oh, Michael, I can assure you I am Helen.'"

"I tried to run out the door, but when I opened it, instead of sending me back to the community college, it ran out into a spiralling staircase, going up, up, up. I just wanted to get away from that thing, so I ran. I went as fast as I could, but I could still hear Helen, and her voice was getting closer, so I kept running. 'I love people like you,' she told me, 'because people like you always tell themselves they're in control. Like right now. Running away? Wonderful idea, Michael. That self-assurance? I thrive on it, because it means that you'll be all the more distressed... when that perception of yourself cracks wide open. Because, after all...' I kept running, and reached the very top, only to find Helen standing right there. '...you were never the one in control.' She laughed, as she pushed me back, and the entire staircase crumbled away under me, sending me careening into the void. Eventually, I landed on my back, in the middle of what seemed to be a living room by a fire, though every inch of the fireplace and the furniture was the same white as the rest of the area, as though they had been molded out of marble. Helen appeared in front of me, and sat down on one of the armchairs. 'Have a seat, Michael,' she told me. I backed away from her, and she replied, 'Don't worry. They don't bite. I don't either.' I reluctantly sat down. 'Wonderful. You're very cooperative. Let me tell you a story.'"

"'A long, long time ago, there was a door. A white door, not unlike the door you entered to arrive here. And the door was very, very happy. The door would appear, randomly, to people it could terrify, with the fear that their mind would betray them. This was, however, complicated when a certain woman walked into the door.' 'Helen,' I said. 'Yes, Helen,' it replied, 'the door thought that Helen would be just like its other victims. She would come in, be scared for a few hours, the door would feast, and then leave. But, for some reason, Helen Richardson was unable to find an exit. She kept wandering the halls and infinite rooms of the door for years. She never found an exit, and eventually, she travelled to the very core of the halls.'"

"'The core?' I asked. 'It's difficult to describe. Think of it like... a brain, or the central piece of machinery in a giant vehicle,' the being that called itself Helen answered, 'in any case, Helen reached it, and when she did, she realized that the core was what was calling her inside the door in the first place. And so, she allowed the core to... become her. And so, the door was no longer a door. Now, the door was Helen.'"

"'So, why are you telling me this?' I asked her. 'Well, I'd quite like you to seek the core yourself,' she responded. 'Give it some thought. I'll see you soon.' She snapped her fingers, a door appeared, and I entered it, and I was back in that community college. Helen has appeared to me a few times since, and she's shown up more often since Gertrude hired me. She keeps telling me to seek the core, to 'become like her'. I don't know if she'll ever go away. Statement ends."

Chapter Text

Elias sighed before knocking on the door to his mother's house.

Well, not his mother, technically, since he wasn't even really Elias.

Whatever the case, the mother of Elias Bouchard, whoever may hold that title at the moment, had summoned him for a family dinner. According to her, "Jon's been spending all day, every day at your Institute and yet he still says you never talk to him. Some father you are!"

Elias had no idea what Gertrude had told Jon's grandmother in order to allow him to spend his time at the Institute, especially since she had told Jon that working there would ruin his life, but Jon was, indeed, working as an archival assistant to Gertrude. And of course Elias had stayed away from him, because if Jon stuck around, he was only going to get hurt. Or worse, the Eye may take a liking to the boy, and even Elias doesn't know how that may affect a second try at bringing the Eye into physical reality.

Now, he could have said no, but Danielle Bouchard had something of an authoritative presence, and Elias had been scared into attending. After he knocked on the door, Jon opened it and invited him in. "Hello, Elias," the boy said, and Elias walked in, took off his shoes, and sat down at the dinner table.

"Where's your grandmother, Jon?" he asked, as Jon sat down opposite him.

"She's still in the kitchen. Finishing the casserole," he responded, scooping some salad onto his plate. They sat there in silence for a minute, before Elias spoke up.

"I'm sorry I haven't been checking up on you at the Institute-"

"It's fine. I don't care."

"Okay."

The silence returned.

"Has you come across anything... interesting at the Institute?" Elias asked, trying to come across as though he was invested in Jon's activities.

"Not really. Most of the statements don't sound very plausible. It's all very run-of-the-mill, silly monsters, poltergeists, things like that. Someone submitted a statement that was just a synopsis of ET and tried to pass it off like it actually happened to them."

This is good. This is very good. If Jon is bored, then he'll stop coming to the Institute eventually, Elias thought.

"If it's not very interesting, then why do you keep coming back to the Institute?" Elias asked, hoping to inspire the same line of thought in Jon.

"I don't know. I just sort of... feel a pull to be there," Jon responded.

God fucking damn it, Elias thought.

"Oh, that's nice," Elias said out loud, suppressing the urge to scream.

Danielle walked out of the kitchen, a platter of casserole in her hands. She placed it on the table and sat down.

"Thank you, mother. That looks delicious."

"Yeah, thanks, Gran!"

"Thank you, the both of you. Elias, what's been going on at work recently?" she asked, serving Jon and herself some casserole.

"Oh, not much. I mean, most statements don't prompt any sort of follow-up. It's mostly all 'I saw a ghost' or 'I saw Mr. Bonzo but he was evil and trying to eat someone'. Mostly people seem to be playing jokes on us," Elias responded. Of course, he couldn't tell her what he was actually doing at the Magnus Institute. 

"Mm. If the pay wasn't so good, I'd make you get another job," Danielle responded, "at least it seems like a safe enough place for Jon to be spending his summers."

"Yes, it most certainly is. And he can choose to stop coming at any time if that changes," Elias said. Normally Elias would make sure that his employees weren't allowed to quit the Institute, but Jon wasn't technically an employee, and if he was, keeping him away would have been even harder.

They ate in silence for a bit, since the three of them really didn't have anything to say to each other. Nothing that was appropriate for dinner, anyway. A few minutes later, Jon swallowed, put down his fork and asked Elias, "Why weren't you at Mum's funeral?"

Elias and Danielle nearly choked on their food.

"Jon, that- that was nearly four years ago. Why are you-" Danielle started to say, before Jon interrupted her again.

"Why wasn't Elias at Mum's funeral? I get that he doesn't care enough to take care of me-"

"Jon, that's not true," Elias spoke over him.

"-and that's fine, but I would at least want him to be at Mum's funeral," Jon continued, "okay? She was your girlfriend. She would've wanted you there. It's fine that you don't love me because you never wanted to have me, and you would've rather spent the rest of your life smoking marijuana in the dark-"

"Jonathan! Do not speak to your father that way!" Danielle shouted.

"He's not my father! He barely even knows me! He barely even loved Mum, clearly!" Jon responded.

"Jonathan, this is unacceptable! Go to your room this instant!" Danielle shouted in a commanding tone, pointing to the stairs that led up to the second floor.

Jon stood up and left right away. Elias and Danielle sat at the table in silence until they heard the telltale hard slamming of Jon's bedroom door.

"I'm sorry about him. I think being near you recently has sort of... set him off," Gabrielle broke the silence between them.

"No, no, it's- it's fine. I should have been there. How did she die? Radha, I mean." Elias asked.

"Breast cancer. They were both living here at that point, and we tried with everything, but none of the treatments worked. Jon was seven."

"I'm sorry. I really should have been there," Elias said.

Why was Elias... no, Jonah... why was he tearing up? In truth, Jonah never knew Radha Sims. Why did he care? The real Elias Bouchard certainly didn't care about Jon. He barely cared about anyone. Jonah's personality had somewhat absorbed the mannerisms and emotions of the people he was possessing before, but Elias never cared enough about Jon that those impulses would become part of him.

Elias stood up.

"Thank you for dinner. But I really should be going now." He put on his shoes and coat and walked out the door.

He looked back at the house before getting into his car and driving off. Back to work.

Chapter Text

Sasha was incredibly relieved when she could not spot Connor Archibald anywhere at school, and more relieved when she was told that he had moved away.

Because whatever that thing that had spoken to Sasha for the past nine months had been, it was not Connor Archibald. Oh, sure, it had told Sasha that it was Connor, and everyone had said that was Connor, but Sasha knew that it was. Not. Him.

She had heard from Martin that Jon had been spending time at some place that researched supernatural incidents. Sasha wasn't sure if this was supernatural, but she figured that she might as well tell Jon over lunch.

Jon had pulled out a piece of paper on a clipboard and a pencil and had written something down before prompting Sasha to begin.

"You remember Connor Archibald, right? He's been in all of my classes since Grade 1. I never really knew him, but I'd been around him enough to know some stuff about him. He was pretty short, he had blue eyes and brown hair, and he was pretty shy and soft-spoken. I think Tim was friends with him. I'm not sure. But anyway, he was in my class last year. One day, I was walking home, and Connor was walking next to me, since our houses were on the same street, and we came across a piece of furniture someone had left in their yard. It didn't look like a piece of yard furniture, though. I think it was a coffee table. It had an engraving of this intricate web on the wood."

"It was almost hypnotic. Me and Connor must have spent ten or more minutes looking at that thing. I eventually snapped out of it and left, but Connor stayed. I don't know why, but I didn't try to snap him out of it. I felt like something really, really bad was about to happen, and I wanted to get out. I was so tired when I got home. I must have gone to sleep at around 6 o'clock. And I dreamt of that table. Of the web design moving around, splitting open and giving way to a long, spindly arm that grabbed me and pulled me in. The next day, when I entered the classroom, there was a new boy sitting where Connor usually did."

"When I asked Georgie who he was, she told me, 'what are you talking about? That's Connor'. But it wasn't. I know it wasn't Connor. He was way taller, his hair was blonde, his eyes were almost black. And his voice was loud. The loudest in the class, far louder than Connor had ever been. But I was the only person who seemed to realize anything was wrong. Everyone else acted as though that boy was Connor, and that the real Connor had never existed. So, I thought I'd find a picture of him. That way I could prove that whatever that thing was, it was not Connor. I still had my yearbook from Grade 2, but when I went to check his photo, it had changed into that... thing as well. At this point, I felt like I was going insane. But I know I wasn't. I know for sure that Connor had been replaced or something."

"I don't know what I expected Not-Connor to do, but he I certainly didn't expect him to do... nothing. He just acted like a normal kid. He never really acted out of the ordinary. Every once in a while, I'd see him scrawling in a sketchbook, but whenever anyone got near, he'd close the book so they couldn't see what he was drawing. On the last day of school, though, something weird happened. Just before the last bell rang, and we were free for the summer, I saw Connor drop that notebook into my backpack. He left once we were dismissed, and I was going to give it back to him, but I felt a weird sense of... compulsion to open it and look inside. The only thing written in the entire notebook was on the very last page. It was a small note, in neat handwriting. It said, 'Keep watching, Sasha.' I never saw him again, and I threw the book away. I still don't know if the real Connor is okay, or what his... replacement might do. I don't know if anyone else could have been replaced and I could have been just like everyone who thought that Connor had always been that way. What if you or Martin or Tim or Georgie or Melanie or... anyone were replaced by these things?"

"Hopefully, I'd be able to spot some signs. I guess I'll just keep watching."

After school, Jon had delivered Sasha's statement to Gertrude at the Institute before heading the rest of the way home. Gertrude had read out the statement into a tape recorder, and was following up with any supplementary details to be stored with the statement.

"This is quite interesting. Young Sasha seems to have had an encounter with a creature that Adelard Dekker dubbed "Not-Them". The usual modus operandi of this creature appears to be replacing people in much the way Sasha described, altering reality on a minor scale to make it appear as though they have always been that person, often leaving a person their victim was not very close with fully aware of the change. The table Sasha describes... that appears to be a tool that Dekker utilized to bind Not-Them. I shall inform him that his seal was not, as he assured me, foolproof. Of note is that on September 3rd of this year, the Archibald family's new house in South Yorkshire burnt to the ground, apparently killing all inhabitants, leaving behind the scorched remains of Mr and Mrs Archibald. Connor's body was not found at the scene. End recording."

Chapter Text

"Case 9951201. Phillip Walker. Subject..." Gerry sighed and put his head in his hand, "a cookbook from the Library of Jurgen Leitner. Incidents occurred between July 1994 and December 1994. Statement given January 12th, 1995. Commited to tape September 22nd, 1997. Gerard Keay, assistant to Gertrude Robinson, recording."

Let's get one thing clear before I start: this is not a fucking confession. I'm not admitting to doing anything of my own free will.

I'm a cook. Not professionally, since I don't think I'm good enough for that, but I'm not bad at it. I'll cook for myself, when I have the time and money to buy ingredients, or for my girlfriend or my family at holidays and things like that. They all seem to like it well enough. I've never heard a bad thing about it, but I thought it could be better, or that I'd diversify the range of dishes I cooked, so I went to the library to pick out some cookbooks. They were mostly all desserts and stuff like that, which I have no interest in making, because the ingredients cost far too much and I'm allergic to most of the stuff people put in desserts. I picked out a few foreign cookbooks, stuff from Japan and Iran and Mexico, but the important one was a book tucked behind a heavy stack of books about food from Southeast Asia. It was titled Oblatio Cibi, which I later learned was Latin for an offering of food. It didn't have an author's name anywhere.

I checked out the books, but when the lady at the counter saw Oblatio Cibi, she frowned, and said that she hadn't seen that book before, and she'd know, because she checks all of the donated books and buys all the rest herself. She said that someone probably left it there by accident, but since it was impossible to figure out who it belonged to, I might as well keep it. I was fine with that, so I went home. I had worked quite a bit of overtime that week, so I had enough money to stock up on ingredients to make myself something, and I pulled out Oblatio Cibi. On the back of the front cover was a plaque reading "From the Library of Jurgen Leitner", so it seems like someone had put it there by accident. Despite its title, the book was entirely in English, and I chose to make something pretty simple; salmon with a lemon sauce garnish.

It was delectable, certainly the best meal I had made at that point. The flavour of the lemon mixed with the fish perfectly. I could tell that I was going to love this book.

The next time I used the book was a couple weeks later. I had saved up some money, so on Friday night, I decided to make myself one of the dishes from the Mexican cookbook I had borrowed, and enchilada. I did want to make a salad alongside it, so I opened up Oblatio Cibi to see what I could find. The dish was called a Caesar salad, and although I wasn't sure how it would mesh with the enchilada, I decided to go for it anyway. The recipe itself was mostly normal. It had all the ingredients you'd expect; lettuce, dressing, croutons. But the last ingredient was what was out of the ordinary. "Most Caesar salad recipes would include bits of bacon, or small shreds of cheese. Instead, we recommend using the skin from back of the cook's left hand."

I'm not proud to admit this, but I felt a sort of... compulsion to do what it said. And I did. I used my knife and cut off some skin from the back of my left hand and sprinkled it over the salad. I don't know why, but it also tasted delicious. It felt like I had been served food from some kind of god, who had blessed my cooking with their touch. I wanted more, but something in my mind told me that I would be able to indulge in this gift again soon enough, and that I should be patient.

It happened a few more times after that, with the requests for the strange ingredients it needed becoming... very strange. A piece of bone from a newly dead robin, which I found lying in the streets outside my house. Blood, directly from the palm of the cook, things like that. I provided them all, and each dish tasted better than the last.

One night, I had my girlfriend, Jane, over. Her favourite meal is spaghetti bolognese, so I wanted to make that for her, and Oblatio Cibi had a recipe, sure enough. But instead of ground beef or pork or anything like that, the meat the recipe called for was the chopped up remains of the head of the chef's greatest enemy. I knew who that was. Giovanni, a coworker of mine, who deliberately antagonized me and took pay raises and acclaim I could never achieve, despite the fact that he was an incompetent fool. That incompetence came in handy, though, when he was far too stupid to think of calling the police when I broke into his house that night with a cleaver.

The next night, I made the meal for my girlfriend, and she adored it. I didn't think twice of the ramifications of what I had just done, either. She said it was the best thing she had ever tasted, and I agreed.

That Christmas, I took her to meet my family for the first time, and-

Gerry stopped recording for a second and opened the door to his office where Michael stood, about to start knocking again.

"Hi, Gerry! Your mum just called, and-"

"Tell her I'm busy recording something."

"Okay, well-"

"Tell her I'm busy, Michael." Gerry tried to shut the door but Michael forced it open once more.

"She wanted to talk about-"

"Fuck off, Michael," Gerry finally said, slamming the door in his face. "Okay, where were we?"

That Christmas, I took her to meet my family for the first time, and took the book along with me. Mum and Dad always made the turkey, but I usually help with the mashed potatoes and salad and stuff.

At this point, you're probably wondering why I wouldn't just get rid of the book. And I honestly can't say I have an answer. I guess it just never occurred to me to stop using it and throw it away. I felt like it was pulling me towards it.

When I got there, we all exchanged hugs, and everyone was quite happy to meet Jane. They said she was very nice, that I should make sure to treat her right, all the sort of talk you get from people my parents' age. The real kicker, though, was when Mum told me that she wanted me to prepare the main course for dinner.

I was in shock. Mum and Dad always did it, it was tradition, but she said she wanted to pass it down to me. After I put aside my presents for my family, I went to the kitchen, opened up the book, and got to work.

They only had one recipe for a turkey in there. "Tell-Tale Turkey", it was called. My parents had all the ingredients that the recipe needed, except for, of course, that odd request the book always made. An offering I had to give to make my cooking delectable.

The recipe called for the still-beating heart of the person the cook loved the most.

I knew who that was immediately, as though someone had whispered it into my ear. Mum. She had taught me almost everything I knew, showered me with love and affection and support, I'd looked up to her all my life, she had really been the best mother anyone could ask for. So, when I was finished preparing everything else, I told my mother that I thought the toilet was clogged, and when she had her back turned, I stabbed her, and carved out her heart myself.

It was still beating and throbbing, and it felt like every other sound was cut out from the world. I only heard a small whisper in my mother's voice, telling me to finish the meal. So I did. I cut a hole in the turkey, exactly where its own heart would be, and stuffed the heart inside. I prepared it, and no one seemed at all concerned when Mum didn't show up at the dinner table. No one even called her over. It's like they all already knew.

When I placed the turkey on the table, instead of eating it normally, they all tore it apart with their hands and teeth like rabid dogs. They all screamed and growled at each other, and before I knew it, almost the entire turkey had been stripped clean.

"We would like more," my Aunt Veronica said.

"Yes, more," my cousin Tom agreed with her.

Everyone started chanting their own requests for more. I tried to tell them it was impossible, that the turkey they ate was the only one we had, and besides, the recipe called for the heart of my mother, which they had also just devoured like lions in the Colosseum would devour a gladiator.

"But we would like more," they all said in unison.

"Maybe," my father suggested, "we should just eat you."

So I ran. I ran from the dining room, through the kitchen and picked up a lighter. I had no idea what I might use it for, but I kept running, and ran outside through the garage, since it was closer than the front door. Inside the garage were a couple large containers of gasoline.

I immediately turned the lighter on and threw it at the gasoline, before sprinting out of the garage faster than I had ever run in my life. The house was soon engulfed in a terrible flame, although luckily, everyone who was there survived, and seem not to recall the event. I can only hope that the fire was enough to burn that terrible, terrible book to ashes.

Statement ends.

Gerry sighed again. "There's not much else to say about this statement. Gertrude only gave it to me because it was one she hadn't transferred to tape yet, and I can only assume it's because it does not require much follow up. A house fire did, indeed, occur at the home of Phillip Walker's parents on Christmas of 1994. The book is a Leitner, and was not found at the scene, so we may assume it has been destroyed. One thing of note, though, is that when viewed from above, the wreckage of the house nearly perfectly resembles the outline of a human heart. End recording."

Chapter Text

Jon came into class, hung up his backpack and his coat and sat down, like he did every day. It was the same hook, eighth from the left, because it was closest to his assigned seat. Jon liked routine. He liked when everything was the same as it always was, and when things changed out of nowhere, it did not go well for him, especially if he couldn't get it to go back to what it was like before. His grandmother said it was because he had ADHD, something she had told him when he was eight years old, a few months before the Mr. Spider incident.

He didn't really understand it at the time. Apparently it meant something was different about his brain than other kids. It made it more difficult for him to work on things he didn't want to, but when he did want to, it felt like he was done with it before he knew it.

Jon didn't care all that much, really. He could have liked routine because a ghost whispered in his ear demanding that things remained the way they were and he wouldn't be all that bothered. So he sat down, where he usually did, his desk adjacent to Martin and Georgie's. He paid close attention to the lesson (something about multiplication) and tried to absorb the information best he could. After that lesson and a bit of work, it was time for a break as usual. Nothing long, just a ten-minute period for the kids to unwind and get themselves ready for the next class, but it was enough time for Jon to sulk for a bit, still upset after his family dinner with Elias and his grandmother the previous month.

His grandmother had forbidden him from returning to the Institute, upset at the things he had said to his father. He had only broken that rule once, to deliver Sasha's statement to Gertrude, but that was behind his grandmother's back and he made sure to stay at the front desk to avoid Elias. He wasn't mad at not having to see his father as often anymore, but he had quite enjoyed his time at the Institute. Gertrude had to lie to his grandmother about Jon being picked for a gifted children's program at the Institute just to allow him to spend the latter half of his summer there, but Jon had fun working through the statements and listening to people tell their stories.

Elias is probably pretty happy, though, Jon thought, he doesn't have to be around me all the time, so he's ecstatic about that, I'm sure. Same old him, I guess. He didn't want to take care of me then, and he doesn't want to do it now either.

"Alright, Jon. Tell me; what's going on?"

Jon looked up, and saw Melanie standing in front of his desk, her hands at her hips with her brown hair tied up in a ponytail.

"Hm? Nothing's going on," Jon said, before Melanie interrupted, holding her hand up to his face and pulling up a chair from a nearby desk.

"Yes, there is. I can see. What is it?"

"There- It's none of your business, Melanie."

"C'mon. Tell me."

"God- fine. Just... well, I was spending the summer helping out- unofficially- at the Magnus Institute, the place that Elias runs, I guess, and about a month ago, Gran wanted to have Elias over for dinner. And I got pretty mad, and I shouted at him, and I can't go back there ever again," Jon explained.

"Hm. What did you say to him?" Melanie asked.

"I asked him why he didn't show up to Mum's funeral. He didn't answer. And I said he doesn't love me. Which I don't think he does. Even before, when I was still at the Institute, he went out of his way not to talk to me."

"Well, he probably still does-"

"No, he doesn't!" Jon interrupted, "If he did love me, then he would show up more often than once every few months. Or he would've been there with Mum. When she was dying, or when she was pregnant with me, or when she was raising me all on her own. Or he would actually live with me and raise me like any father should be! I hate him, Melanie. I really hate him. And I'd be happier if I never saw him again, but I still feel this... this pull to go back to the Institute. Like I'm meant to be there."

Melanie laughed. "Okay, okay. You can try to dress all that up in spooky language, but I see right through you, Mr. Sims, oh, yes. You don't hate Elias, Jon. You want to get closer to him, because he's something you've been missing all your life. I think you just want to spend time with your father, Jon. You want him to love you."

Break ended soon after, but Jon kept thinking about those things Melanie had said to him. You want him to love you.

That was ridiculous, Jon thought, I don't care about him. I'd feel better if he never existed. I don't need Elias, I really don't. But he couldn't deny that there was some part of him that wanted to have a real conversation with him. Or to have him read something to him before he fell asleep, like his mother used to. But he pushed those parts of him down below the surface, to the deepest, darkest corners of his mind, and he had for a long time. He started pushing them down when Elias didn't even show up once to visit his mother in the hospital when she was dying.

He swore those parts of him wouldn't surface again. He was determined to keep it that way. He wanted those parts of himself to drown.

At lunch, Tim also seemed to be able to tell he was pissed off.

"Aw, come on, Jonny! Tell me!" he insisted, for about the eighth time.

"No," Jon responded, like he had the previous seven instances.

"Fine." Tim turned to Melanie. "He told you, right? What's bothering our boy, eh?"

"Oh, honestly, Tim," Sasha said, sitting down across from Tim at the table, “just let him be.”

”Oh, but I gotta know. Aren’t you curious, Sasha?"

Sasha sighed in response. “Even if I did, it would be none of my or your business.”

Martin sat down at the table with his own lunch tray. “What are you guys talking about?”

”Nothing. Tim is bothering Jon about why he’s so sad recently,” Georgie said.

”Oh. I’m sorry, Jon. You could talk to me about it if you like,” Martin offered.

”Okay, fine. Moving on, though, can you tell us about the Magnus Institute?” Tim asked gleefully. “It sounds like a lot of fun.”

”Yeah. It is, I guess.”

”Nice. Could you take us there?” Tim asked.

”Um… no. Gran said I’m not allowed to go there anymore.”

"Aw, come on! You could just go behind her back," Georgie suggested.

"No! I can't go back there and that's final. If you want to go, fine, but don't make me play your accomplice. I-I'm gonna go to the bathroom."

Jon stood up, trying hard not to cry (and failing), and walked towards the bathroom. Martin followed, noticing Jon's attempts at emotional suppression.

Melanie sighed. This was officially everyone else's problem.

She filled her friends in on everything Jon had told her over break. Jon's argument with his father, his idea that Elias didn't love him, the pull he felt to go back to the Institute, and they began to formulate a plan.

In the bathroom, Jon entered a stall, sat down and started loudly sobbing. Martin was close behind him, standing outside the door of the stall Jon had locked himself in.

"Jon? Please, just tell me what's going on. Maybe I can help."

"No! No, you can't! Unless any of you can- can make Elias love me or make it so that I don't want him to love me anymore, there's nothing any of you can do to help!"

Martin paused for a second, before letting out, "My dad just left. A week ago. And he's not coming back."

Jon stopped sobbing. "Oh. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. We all sort of knew it was going to happen. And I'm kind of happy about it. Which, I know it's wrong, because it means she's had to get a second job, and she's so sick, but... I'm... happy he's gone. Last year, um, when we all went to the ice cream place a few blocks away after school. The buses got delayed a bit, so I was just a half-hour late to get back home, and he was in a bad mood, so... he hit me. Right across the face."

It was Martin's turn to start crying.

Elias sat in his office, when suddenly, Rosie, his receptionist, opened the door and announced, "Mr. Bouchard! A young group of people just arrived. They said they would like to talk to you. They insisted that you talk to them immediately, actually."

A group of children, likely no older than 10 or 11, piled in. Elias instantly recognized their faces, as well. Jon's friends.

They all took their seats in front of his desk, and Sasha said, "Hello, Mr. Bouchard. We'd like to talk about Jon."

Chapter Text

"No. No, no. I refuse to talk to you about Jon. Get out of my office."

"Mr. Bouchard, just listen to us, please," Georgie asked, putting on her best people-pleaser voice.

Elias pinched his forehead. "Get out, children. I have quite a lot of work to do, I don't have time for... whatever it is you came here for." I cannot have more children in the Institute. I just got Jon out.

"Elias, I promise we won't be here long. Just hear us out, yeah?" Tim implored.

Elias' face descended into an almost cartoonish frown before correcting itself. "Fine," he said, "twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, and then I kick you out." He instinctively turned on a tape recorder. At least the Eye might get something out of this.

"That's all the time we need," Sasha said, "Melanie, would you like to start us off?"

"Sure. I talked to Jon today, and he mentioned a dinner you had with him about a month ago. He said that you didn't love him. Is that true?"

Elias breathed. "Yes, he did say that, and yes, it was at a dinner at his grandmother's home."

"God, you really are thick. Is it true that you don't love him?" Tim asked.

Sometimes, especially when dealing with subjects that were emotionally meaningful to his host, Jonah Magnus would feel as though he had floated away from his body, and it would move and talk on its own. The original host partially breaking through, still not able to realize what had happened to them, he speculated. Of course, it had to happen now. Elias- the real Elias, Jonah supposed, snapped at Tim.

"Of course I do! Why do you think I- you know what, never mind. You're all still so young. Can't expect you to understand, anyway. Buncha-" Jonah suddenly felt like he had regained control of his (well, not his) body, and cleared his throat. "Sorry. What I mean to say is, it is none of your concern. My feelings towards my son, whatever I might feel, is not a matter you should involve yourselves in."

"Okay, next question," Sasha said, looking at a clipboard she had pulled out of her backpack. "Just how much do you know about Jon?"

"Why are all these questions concerning my relationship with my son? I thought we were here to discuss him, not his dynamic with me."

"We tricked you. Answer the question," Martin commanded, with as much authority as a ten year old boy can muster.

"How much I know about him... well, I know his birthday. November 3rd, 1986. His first word was "house". His favorite food is macaroni and cheese." Elias rattled off basic information like that for about twenty more seconds, using his powers to unearth those facts.

Sasha stopped and wrote something down on the clipboard.

"Okay. Jon says that over the summer, when he was helping out here, that you kept avoiding him. Why is that?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't want to him to be working here. Gertrude, the head of our Archives, added him to her staff. Unofficially, of course. She had to lie to his grandmother about a gifted children's program hosted at the Institute. I avoided him because I did not wish for a child to be helping out here."

Sasha and Melanie looked skeptical of that answer, but continued anyway.

"So, what did Jon do here? If Gertrude wanted him here, there must have been a reason," Georgie speculated.

"Well, according to Gertrude, his presence was calming for the people who came in to give statements. And he seemed to have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of our Archives. That, in particular, is something of a mystery to me." In truth, it wasn't. Elias knew that the source of that knowledge was the Eye. If he couldn't see it, couldn't determine the truth just by thinking it, then he knew why: The Eye must be deliberately hiding it from him. And that means that the Eye had plans for Jonathan that it didn't want Elias to know about.

"Great, good, let's move along, this is getting boring," Tim said, wrenching the clipboard from Sasha's hands.

"Hey!" she exclaimed, as Tim began reading off the paper.

"Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah," Tim skipped through some of the questions he clearly didn't think were important before reading off the final note Sasha had prepared. "If, in the event that Jon's grandmother allowed him to return to your Institute - God, you write like such a nerd, Sasha - would you be okay with Jon returning?"

Elias sat and thought for a minute.

If Danielle did allow Jon to come back here - and that's a big 'if' - how would I keep him out of my way? How would the Eye react if I kept Jon away from it? Especially on purpose? Probably best not to risk it.

"Yes, sure. If his grandmother allowed it. Which I doubt she will. Gertrude couldn't convince her, so I doubt that a pack of schoolchildren will change her mind."

"Alright, then that'll be it. Thank you, Mr. Bouchard," Sasha said, and the kids piled out of his office.

This is the worst day of my fucking life, Elias thought. The real Elias, this time.

Chapter Text

Somehow, Jon’s friends’ plan had worked. The interview had apparently convinced Jon’s grandmother that Elias would make an effort to grow closer with his son if he returned, so Jon was given permission to keep helping at the Institute. Elias had still barely talked to Jon, but he was happy with that. It's not like either of them really wanted to talk to each other right now.

“Statement of Kimberly Zhao, regarding her encounters with a girl named Annabelle. Audio recorded by Jonathan Sims, unofficial archival assistant on October 3rd, 1997. Statement begins.”

The first time I met the girl I would come to know as Annabelle was in November, when I saw her standing outside an abandoned chips shop near my house. I was walking home from work, and she was just staring at the place. She looked really young, maybe seven or eight, and that store had been closed ever since I moved to that area, about fifteen years ago, so I thought it was odd that she seemed so enamored with it. She definitely wasn’t old enough to have been around when the store was open.

I just walked past her, but as I did, she stared me right in the eye, and a chill went down my spine. She didn’t say anything, and I had forgotten about her the next day. I went to work, at a bank near my house, and when I got there, there was a little marionette that looked like me on my desk. I figured it was a gift from one of my coworkers. I couldn’t imagine why, but that was what I thought. I asked around, but everyone said that they had no idea who put it there. I just moved it to the side, and got to work. At lunch, though, the marionette had moved. It looked like it had been hanged, suspended from a knob on the cupboard above my desk by a thin white string.

It was a long, tiring day after that, so when I got home, I collapsed on my bed and fell asleep almost instantly. In my dream, I was covered in spiders. They were consuming me, and began covering my limbs in web, pulling them every which way like a puppet. But there was nothing strange about what the spiders made me do and say. It was all like a normal day. I went to work, did everything I was supposed to, and I went home.

When I woke up, there was a single dead spider laying by my arm.

The next time I saw her was at this farmer’s market, about a week later. I’ve always loved farmer’s markets. It feels so interesting to see the people breaking away from the big corporate grocery stores and sell their wares there. I was just passing through, but as I was leaving, I saw Annabelle standing in the crowd, looking at me. She ran off, deeper into the crowd of people. I chased after her, but I lost track of her, and I ran into a dead end in an alley. On the wall, there was a note, reading “look up”.

I did, and what I saw was a mannequin, dressed in the exact clothes I was wearing, hanging. The noose around its neck looked like it was made of web.

I ran away, got in my car, drove home, and called the police. I told them that I had reason to believe my life was in danger. The dispatcher said that they were on their way. I stayed in my room the whole night, even when I was questioned, and the second they left, I locked all the doors and windows. The next day, I got a tape in the mail. A VCR tape. There wasn’t a return address on the package, just the words “watch it”.

So I did. The video looked very crudely made. It showed a puppet stage in the darkness, and a strange, distorted voice spoke over the footage. It sounded somewhat like that of a young girl’s voice, but with the audio quality, I couldn’t really tell.

“Uh… archival note,” Jon said, unsure, “The- the transcript indicates that while giving this statement, at this point, Ms. Zhao’s tone suddenly changed. She seemed much more wistful and calm than she had been before. The writer of the transcript, Michael Shelley, noted that this unnerved him. Statement resumes.”

The video began with its title scrawled on a piece of cardboard; The Tragedy of Kimberly, it was called. After that, two puppets dropped onto the stage and began moving, and the voice began speaking, narrating as though to a group of eager children.

“This is the story of a woman named Kimberly. Kimberly thinks she is very important. She has a well-paying job at a bank. But Mother wished to reveal the truth to her. So, she sent Annabelle, her favorite child, to see Kimberly.

The first puppet, who looked like me, began moving, and the second puppet, who looked like Annabelle, or what little I had seen of her appearance below her hood, began moving as well, and they both began mimicking the actions the voice described. 

”First, Annabelle left a note, telling Kimberly to follow her if she saw her again. And Kimberly did, and the next time, Annabelle asked Kimberly to look up. To look at a glimpse of what Mother knew was Kimberly destiny from the start. And then, Annabelle left another note, to watch this play. And Kimberly did all three, because, after all, Kimberly’s will is not her own.

I tried to argue, to come up with a denial of what the voice said, but of course, I couldn’t. I listened to the notes. I accepted that truth. And then… Mother spoke to me.

She told me what she wanted me to do. She told me her will, the only will to exist. So I did it, because that was what she wanted. I took a book, hidden at the bottom of the envelope I received the tape in, and I donated to a local charity shop, Chestnut, I believe it was called. And then I came here. She told me so much more, but so little of it matters. And besides, I’m sure you’ll learn it all in time, little Archivist.

Statement ends.

“After giving this statement, apparently, Ms. Zhao became aggressive, and attacked several employees of the Institute. Authorities were contacted and she was arrested. She brought along the tape, and when played, it only showed the face of a girl. The girl had dark skin and white hair, and it appeared that part of her head was missing, as though she were a plastic doll and some of her head had cracked away, and the space was hastily filled with a spiderweb,” Jon read out some of the notes in the document, “Kimberly Zhao was found six hours after her arrest, hanged in her jail cell, by- what else- a thin, white rope. End recording.”

Chapter Text

"Please, please, you have to help me," the woman in the chair across Gertrude's desk began sobbing into her hands, "He took- he took Callum! He took my baby and you're the last resort I have!"

"I will, I will. Please, just calm down, first. Tell me what happened. What's your name?" Gertrude attempted to reassure her.

"Caroline. Caroline Brodie," the woman said through her tears.

"Okay, then. Do you mind if I record this?" Gertrude asked, in the most calming voice she could muster.

"No, not really..." Caroline responded.

"Alright then," Gertrude turned on the tape recorder next to her desk, "Statement of Caroline Brodie, regarding the recent abduction of her son, Callum."

I divorced my husband, Phillip Brown, in 1988, a year after Callum was born. He had been... an issue for quite some time, but at that point, after he was fired from his job, it just got to be too much, so I left him. I got full custody in court, and Callum's only met his father a couple times. I've talked to him a few times, but I don't keep up with him too much.

Phillip had been a Christian ever since I met him, so when he called me last February to let me know about some religious experience he'd recently had, I was surprised. I asked him if he decided to pursue priesthood or something, but he said no, and that he had converted away from Christianity. He said that a man named Rayner had shown him a better, truer way. The People's Church of the Divine Host, he called it. I asked him why he had even bothered calling, especially since we really only ever talked to discuss child support, and he said it was because he wanted to invite me to one of their services. I was skeptical, but said yes. I have never been a religious person, but I thought the experience might be interesting.

That Sunday evening, I left Callum with a babysitter and took a taxi to the place that Phillip said the service would be happening. It appeared to be an old warehouse, a somewhat unfitting place for a religious order. The logo of a company called Outer Bay Shipping was painted across its side. A tall, thin man with a long, white scraggly beard in black robes, with strange, cloudy eyes opened the door and invited me in. The inside of the warehouse was set up much like a church, with some old pews set in front of an altar. I sat down in one in the back, away from most of the other attendees, Phillip included. Soon after I got there, the service began, with the man who had invited me in, who I learned was the Rayner man Phillip had mentioned, went up to the altar and delivered a sermon as someone else in black robes dimmed the light to be almost turned off entirely.

The sermon was quite odd, to say the least. It didn't sound like any sermon I had heard before when I attended church with Phillip many years ago. He spoke of things like the encroaching darkness, and how a messenger had told him that soon, a child would make contact with the deep void, and it would help them bring about a heavenly night. But the members of the Church certainly didn't act like anything Rayner was saying was strange. They all seemed to be listening intently. I was only half-paying attention, as this whole thing was incomprehensible to me, but my interest was caught when the lights were entirely extinguished and Rayner mentioned that soon, he would be needing a "newer vessel", as the current one was about to expire. He ended the service then and there, and I left very, very confused.

The next month, Phillip called me back, and asked me to attend that week's service with him. I promptly refused, and told him that Rayner was an insane man and he was falling for a scam. He then accused me of being "drowned in the light", and that my mind was clouded by its sheen. He said that he had met Rayner's "messenger", and that she always told the truth, and that I really should come to the next service. I eventually buckled under the pressure, and I went that Sunday evening.

When I got to the warehouse, the lights were entirely out, and the door was locked. A member let me in and sat me down, but it was entirely pitch black, so the only things I was really registering were the sound of Rayner's voice and a strange chill. Rayner said that the time had come, that his vessel would expire that night, and that he would choose a new one, and that he had selected the child who would touch the void. And I somehow felt him pointing at me as he said, "yours".

Despite desperately wanting to, I couldn't leave, as I heard Rayner make a terrible retching noise. I heard him collapse, and then, I heard a slurping sound, as though someone was drinking something, before the lights switched on, and I saw that I was all alone, save for Rayner's collapsed body on the altar, surrounded by several golden goblets. One of them, I noticed, had its inside and rim covered with black, as though it had been used to hold oil.

I didn't hear from Phillip for months after that. He didn't contact me and I heard nothing of Rayner's little group, which, believe me, I was more than happy about. I had convinced myself that it was all a bad dream I had after going to the first service, and there was nothing unusual going on.

Until, just four days ago, when I came to check in on Callum while he was sleeping, and saw Phillip looming over his bed. He immediately turned to look at me, and I saw that his eyes had become that same cloudy white eyes that Rayner had. He snatched up Callum, and I tried to run after him, but he opened the door to the balcony outside Callum's room and jumped off, before running away at faster speeds than I've seen a person run before.

I called the police and told them to search every place I could think of. Phillip's address, the warehouse, but they couldn't find a single trace of him nor Callum. And when I told them about the People's Church of the Divine Host, they told me that they had never heard of the thing, and that the warehouse had been abandoned for years.

Statement ends.

"I was referred to you by one of the officers at the station," Caroline continued, "but I get the feeling she wasn't meant to talk to me about you. So, do you know anything about this? Can you help me?"

Gertrude sat for a second, collecting her thoughts, before lying through her teeth. "No."

"What?" Caroline exclaimed, clearly enraged.

"Ms. Brodie, I'm sorry, but from what you've told me today, no. I haven't heard of this Church, and I've never heard of anyone named Rayner. And I've worked here for quite a while, so I know these kinds of things."

"You can't even do some sort of research into them? For heaven's sake, isn't that your job?"

"If the police couldn't find anything, I doubt we would."

Caroline stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind her.

Gertrude immediately began speaking into the recorder, "sorry about that. Of course, if you've looked over these Archives, you'll doubtless have heard of Maxwell Rayner and the various names his group of followers have taken over the centuries. This instance, though, implies that they might be preparing for a Ritual of some kind, and young Callum Brodie may be at the centre of it. End recording."

Gertrude then began her supplemental tape, one of many she planned to keep hidden for her successor, should that be necessary.

"Supplemental. Aside from that, this does strike me as rather odd. None of Smirke's original outlines for the Dark's rituals involve children in any sense, so this 'messenger' must have had a very convincing reason to persuade Rayner to break from his scriptures. I'll ask Dekker to investigate this all. If a ritual is being performed, well, I should prepare. End supplemental."

Chapter Text

Jon sat down, ready to record another statement, but then caught his mind wandering. First to his friends. I hope Martin and his mum are okay after his dad left. I hope Tim isn't in any trouble. I hope Sasha isn't too worried with her older brother leaving for college. I hope Melanie and Georgie are okay. Then his thoughts drifted to his father. I wonder if he's ever going to talk to me. I wonder what kind of things he likes. I wonder if he'd ever take me out, like other parents do. It doesn't matter. He probably wouldn't. He's never payed much attention to me anyway.

He opened the file Gertrude had given him, and began to read from the statement.

"Statement of Clarice Pines, regarding disappearances that occurred around her hometown of Bilsbury. Original statement given March 11, 1995. Audio by Jonathan Sims, unofficial Archival assistant. Statement begins."

The disappearances began around last April. Someone would suddenly vanish, and they'd never find them. Someone went missing about once every two weeks, usually a teenager or young adult. And it's a pretty tiny town, so everyone knew the people who went missing. Eventually, they introduced a curfew, and they seemed to slow down. I went to visit my family there a month ago for about three weeks, and they seemed terrified. Even though they followed the curfews, and almost always walked around together, they were still so worried about getting abducted. I wasn't, though, since apparently no one had even been abducted since January. I thought that they were being typical small-town paranoid village idiots. Until, one day, when my younger brother went missing.

He just up and vanished. He didn't show up back at the house after going shopping, and eventually, we found this shopping bag that my mum hand-weaved for him lying on the side of the road. The town basically went into lockdown. People were advised to stay in their houses as much as they could, and not to go outside by themselves. And I mostly obliged. I only went out once to get something from our neighbor, but that was it. It seemed like it would wind down, but them William Coleman was abducted too. He was this guy that my sister had a crush on when she was younger. It was a similar situation to our own. He went out, and just never returned. They found his car by the side of a road, and his glasses nearby on a sidewalk.

It happened more, at an alarmingly quick rate. Someone went missing almost every day, and the police were working around the clock. Then they went missing, too. At one point, we started to run out of food, so I went with my sister to get some food. The town was eerily empty. We got some groceries and headed back, when a young man with red hair and tan skin stepped in our path. He held out his hand, apparently waiting for us to shake it. We paused for a second, and both shook his hand.

"Do you believe in God?" he asked us. We didn't respond. "Because I do. Not any of the gods you might think of, no, but I know it is real none the less. Because I spoke to it. And it revealed so many amazing things to me. Let me show you." He flicked his finger downwards, and suddenly, the ground opened beneath our feet. The next thing I knew, I was in a dark, enclosed space. I felt around, and I was clearly buried. The walls around me felt like dirt, and I heard that man's voice, echoing around me.

"My God told me that it wants me to inflict fear and suffering on other people. That would feed it. It feeds when people fear tight, enclosed, spaces. Being buried alive, stuck in a tiny room, things like that. But I decided that my God and others like it don't deserve that power. The Gods lie beyond time and space now, but soon, I'm sure the day will come when that changes. You think I have abducted these people? No. I have ensured your survival. And when one of them cross that line, when it finally comes into our reality, I shall unearth you, my militia, and we shall replace these beings. It will be oh so glorious."

I heard him laugh, then the sound faded, and I was still stuck in the tiny cavern of dirt. I began to hyperventilate, panicking, at least hoping that this was a dream, and if I died, I'd wake up. Then I heard his voice again.

"Oh, and don't worry about running out of air or water or food. Or even aging! If you could die in here, it would be counterproductive, wouldn't it? No, I'm sorry, you'll have to be stuck here for quite a while. Oh, but just think! Just think of the power you'll hold once you help me dispatch of these Gods. You'll be able to inflict the worst fears imaginable upon any person who's wronged you. And you'll become more powerful with each scream they exude! Oh! Just imagine the possibilities!" He cackled giddily.

I tried to think of ways to get out. I didn't have much on me. Just my phone, which I was certain wouldn't work, and the clothes on my back. I tried yelling at him, "Is there any way you'll let me go free?" I didn't hear an answer.

I started breathing slowly. I tried to collect myself. If his powers feed on fear, then if I stop being afraid, would I be let go? My breath slowed, and slowed, and slowed, until I wasn't sure I was breathing anymore. I thought of everything that was around me, and then...

I died. I know the man said it was impossible, but I must have, it was the only explanation. I woke up in a hospital bed, with my parents next to me, saying they found me on the road, unconscious. They said that my sister must have been abducted, and the kidnapper knocked me out, since she had disappeared. I got out of the hospital the next day, and I went home. I had enough of Bilsbury for a while.

It is odd, though. I have felt more attracted to tight, enclosed spaces recently.

Statement ends.

"Well, this is an interesting one. Disappearances were occurring in the Bilsbury area in around the specified time, though they entirely ceased in July of 1995. The man described in the statement matches the appearance of Guy Wintour, a Bilsbury local who was suspected to have been tied to the disappearances, who vanished in August 1996 when a larger-scale police investigation was to begin. Getrude sent Gerry out to see if we could get a follow-up interview with Ms. Pines, but she suffocated to death, apparently having buried herself alive in her backyard in September of 1996. She left a note, which only read 'Sorry. But the whispering didn't stop. Dig. Dig. Dig'. End recording."

"Supplemental," Gertrude began, "this statement presents a very interesting detail about Wintour's actions. I had previously assumed that his abduction of the people of Bilsbury, and the fact that news of such was seemingly ignored by the outside world, to be a step in a ritual. But Ms. Pines account here seems to indicate that Wintour is biding his time until someone else completes a ritual. At least I can tell Dekker to keep his eyes of Bilsbury, for a while. That man has quite a lot on his plate, I'm sure. On another note, Jon is doing quite well in his role here. He's a very intelligent boy. If working in this place wasn't a death trap, I'd say I hope he works for us in an official capacity when he's older. So, if you're actually listening to these, my successor, do make sure he's safe for me. End supplemental."

Chapter Text

"Thank you all, by the way. For convincing my grandmother to let me go back to the Institute," Jon said awkwardly at lunch.

"Don't mention it," Sasha responded, "we just couldn't stand to see you so depressed."

"I wasn't depressed!" Jon tried defending himself, "I just- never mind."

"So, Jon," Tim nudged his elbow into Jon's side, "Any fun statements there you could tell us about?"

"Gertrude says I'm not allowed to tell you about anything I see in there. So no."

"Aww," Georgie said, clearly disappointed, "Really? Not one statement? Not even one about, I don't know, seeing a funny ghost?"

"Nope. Not a one. That's what she said, first day I was there."

"So what you're saying is," Melanie said in a mischievous tone, "Is that if we wanted to hear these statements, we'd have to go to the Institute?"

That Saturday, when Jon went to spend his afternoon helping with archival work, Michael suddenly ran towards him, eye twitching in stress.

"Jon. Those kids. They wouldn't happen to be your friends, would they?" he asked.

Jon looked behind him, only to see Martin, Sasha, Tim, Melanie and Georgie standing there, clearly amazed at the things around them.

"What are you doing here?" Jon asked the group.

"Well, you said it yourself. No one outside of the Institute gets to know about the statements. So we came here. We're helping out for the day!" Tim proudly proclaimed as the group, bar Sasha and Martin, walked further into the Institute.

"Just for the record," Sasha said, "I didn't agree to this. I just came to make sure Tim doesn't break anything."

Michael ran up to Gertrude's office to fill her in on what was happening. "I mean, we have to kick them out, right? We can't just let a bunch of kids run around the Archives! I mean, they might break something! Something really important!"

"Oh, calm down, Michael. It's not like there's much important here they could break. Honestly I'd thank the little shits-" Gerry began.

"Language," Gertrude interrupted idly.

"Fine. I'd thank the children if one of them broke... most any of the stuff we have in Artifact Storage."

"You're not gonna let him just say that, right, Gertrude?" Michael asked. "I mean, I don't think that's very, I don't know, it's not a very good attitude for a workplace."

"Oh, right, because you're doing such an excellent job," Gerry fired back.

"At least I don't openly fantasize about incinerating everything in the Research Department!" Michael responded.

The two bickered back and forth for a bit, before Gertrude held out her hand to stop them.

"The two of you, please take a seat. Michael, do you know why I let you work here, argued, for an hour, with James Wright, to give you a spot as my assistant despite the fact that your credentials were utterly lacking?"

"Um... because you love me and see me like your own son?"

"No. It's because you came in and told me that you were being hunted by the Distortion. You were a person in need, and I wanted to help you. Gerry, close the door. I'm going to tell you something very confidential. Something I very much shouldn't be telling you. Two of those children down there- Martin and Sasha? They've been at the epicentre of one of these events. They gave statements to Jon. I don't know if they're still being hunted, but regardless- if they are, then a place like this is the safest place they can be. They'll only be here for today. So, here's what we'll do. Take them some statements, and ask them to record them. We'll at least make their presence here useful."

The two men walked out of the office, grabbed some statements that had yet to be put to audio, and assembled the children at a table in the Archives.

"Okay, so, we've had a couple statements that you need to record. Take turns reading them out, and make sure you're absolutely silent when someone else is reading," Michael said as he placed a stack of statements and a tape recorder on the table.

"Yeah. These are very important, and we don't want any background noise on the recording. Think of it as having a story read to you. That's fun, right?" Gerry added, saying the last bit sarcastically. They each walked to their respective offices to record some other statements, and the children were left to read the stack left for them on their own.

"Okay, then. Let's get to work," Jon said.

Chapter Text

"Statement of Luke Zhao, regarding repeated meetings with a young girl named Agnes. Original statement given 26th of August, 1992. Audio recording by Sasha James, unofficial archival assistant."

I first met Agnes in June of 1990, after I graduated my first year of high school. I was just walking out of the building when I saw this little girl, maybe nine or ten, standing just a few metres away from all the people in front of the school. Everyone was talking and laughing, but she was just observing them with a stone-faced expression. She had a pale face, long black hair, and almost pitch black eyes. I didn’t think much of her, though. I walked past her, heading for home, until I noticed she was following me.

”What do you want?” I turned around and asked her.

She stopped to think, before asking me, “Those people at the school. What were they doing?”

”I… They were talking. Have you never seen people talking before?” I told her.

”I know what talking is. What were they doing after they talked? That noise they made with their mouths. People don’t do that where I’m from.”

”They were laughing. What kind of place are you from where people don’t laugh?” I asked her, still walking forward as she followed me. “And stop following me!”

She did stop for a second, before yelling out to me, “When the elders talk to each other, they don’t laugh.”

I turned around and walked back to her. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

I walked away from her, and this time she didn't follow me.

The next time I saw her was about a month later. I was walking through a park, and I saw Agnes sitting on a swing. I tried to walk past her, but she apparently noticed me and ran in front of me.

"I recognize you! Would you mind talking to me?" she asked, grabbing my wrist and trying to drag me to the swings.

"No. Look, kid, I can't hang out with you. It's- it would be weird," I told her.

She asked why, and I told her she'd figure it out when she was older.

"Okay, just for today, then. Just talk to me today, and if anyone asks, I'll say you're my brother. You look enough like me, anyway," she said, still trying to drag me towards the swings. I reluctantly agreed, and I sat on the swings with her. I asked her what she wanted to talk about so much that she'd ask a random teenage boy to talk with her about it.

She told me, "I don't feel like a human sometimes. When I tell the elders- or, the people who take care of me, I mean- when I get mad and tell them that I want to be treated like a person, they tell me that they can't, because I'm not a person. They say that I'm... special. That it makes me better than a person. I don't want to be that. So, tell me: what makes a person human?"

I thought for a second. And I told her, "Agnes, you've just asked the most complicated question in all of philosophy."

We both laughed, and kept talking, and eventually, we decided we'd figure it out by listing everything Agnes didn't have. If, according to them, she wasn't human, then we'd simply figure out what she was lacking, and I'd help her get it. Obviously, I knew what they were saying wasn't true, and I was prepared to call the police on Agnes' caretakers, but Agnes seemed determined that she would be able to prove to them that she was human after all.

I learned a couple of interesting things about Agnes. She said that she didn't have parents. Her father died soon before she was born, and her mother soon after her birth, before she was given to the "elders" she talked about. I wanted to know more about the elders, but she refused to tell me. I wanted to know her address, in case I really did need to report them to the authorities, but she also didn't tell me that. She said that she had been told that she was not to inform any "outsiders" of what they were doing. Eventually, against my better judgment, I agreed to meet up with her the following Saturday in the same spot, and she walked away, meeting a tall Hispanic-looking man with a shaved head near the edge of the park, and apparently walking home with him.

The next time, we talked more about things she was lacking (school, friends her own age, a Nintendo Entertainment System) but eventually, our conversations shifted to what people thought made someone human. In truth, I hadn't read much about that topic, so I just sort of pretended I knew what I was talking about. I told her some people think that love makes people human, but some people think that imagination or creativity make us human, and some people don't think humanity is even real, and it's just something we made up so we could feel special. Agnes said that she loved things, and had imagination and creativity, so that was also a moot point.

I really wanted to know more about the people raising her. The elders, where she lived, why and how her mother died, and even though she said no the first time, I asked her again. She only whispered in my ear that the group raising her was called the Cult of the Lightless Flame. The same man came to pick her up soon after, and even though I wanted to chase after her, save her from those people and help her find a proper home, I was frozen solid on that swing, not daring to move until both she and the man were out of sight.

I didn't see Agnes again, for the final time, until almost two years later, and it was under very similar circumstances as when I met her first. Graduation day of this year, I saw her standing by the doors, just far away for most people to ignore her. But when she saw me walk out, she rushed towards me. Agnes said that we should meet in front of school the next day. When I arrived the next day, she told me that she had run away from the Lightless Flame. She was far more assertive, more angry than the Agnes I had known two years prior. She spoke of the cult with contempt, rather than with wistful reverence. She told me more, although she told me she didn't want to say too much.

She said that she had been raised as the cult's Messiah, and that they believed that she would be the key to some arcane ritual that would bring judgment upon the world. I asked Agnes if she believed that. She answered that she didn't know, but she did know that they were very, very dangerous. She told me stories of them burning people with only their hands, of them setting fire to the houses of some of the best of humanity. She knew they were limited, as their abilities could only conjure heat, not fire, but she told me they were looking for her. I didn't believe her entirely, but even with what I could rationalize into the mundane, they still seemed like violent, evil people. I took her to a nearby police station, hoping she'd be able to testify to them, and hopefully, the Cult would be stopped. I went home to talk to my parents after that, in case Agnes needed a place to stay. They weren't home yet, but when I went to my room to see if I'd be able to phone their work, I saw that man with the shaved head sitting on my bed.

He said that his name was Diego Molina, and that he was one of Agnes' caretakers. I rushed for the phone to call the police, but he grabbed my wrist, and I felt a terrible burning sensation before he released it. I looked at my skin, and it had gotten redder when he grabbed

He told me, "Okay, Luke, here's what we'll do. You are going to take me to the station where you left Agnes. You are going to tell them that I am her foster father, that she has an... overactive imagination, we'll say, and you are going to let me walk away and take her home. If I have any reason to suspect you will do, or have done, otherwise, I will burn down this house, and everyone in it. Capisce?" He placed his hand onto one of my pillows, leaving a burnt handprint, smiling far too calmly for what he was saying.

I nodded, and I regret to inform you that I did exactly what Diego asked. I thought of the image of my house burnt to the ground, of my parents' charred bodies, and I just couldn't take it, couldn't think of that becoming a reality. So I let it all happen, and tried not to cry or scream, even as I saw Diego take Agnes away for the very last time.

Statement ends.

"What do I do now?" Sasha asked Jon.

"Uh, just read the other stuff in the file. It should be... yeah, right there," Jon answered, pointing at some of the other papers.

"Oh, okay. Police records indicate that a girl named Agnes Montague, matching the description given, was briefly in police care on June 15th 1992, and that a man named Diego Molina did in fact retrieve her from the station, claiming to be her foster father. Of note is that about a week after giving this statement, Luke Zhao went to the police and told them that his vouching for Molina was made under threat. When police arrived at Molina's listed address, the building was empty, and about a half-hour later, Zhao's home was mysteriously burnt to the ground, and both he and his mother perished in the blaze. End recording."

"That was... frightening," Martin said, after Jon stopped the recording. "Jon, you really read stuff like that here?"

"Well, most days it isn't really that bad. Most of the stuff we get is fake, anyway. There's, like, eight statements that mention Mr. Bonzo."

"Oh, Mr. Bonzo? I love Mr. Bonzo," Georgie said.

"Poor girl... I hope she's okay," Sasha remarked. "Okay, whose turn is it next?"

"Uh... Tim, I think?" Jon said as he handed Tim a file.

"Okay, uh... Statement of Todd Brown, regarding a book known as the Boneturner's Tale."

Chapter Text

"Statement of Todd Brown, regarding a book known as The Boneturner's Tale," Tim read out from the file. "Statement begins."

I’ve been something of a lifelong bibliophile, ever since my mother read The Hobbit to me chapter-by-chapter when I was six. The way words jump off a page, make you dream of impossible things, has always been something I’ve been fascinated with, and I love seeing other people discover that same magic, so I work in a public library. It’s small, and in a part of town that doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but I love the work.

About two years ago, though, something quite odd happened. A newcomer to the library, a man named Jared Hopworth, a tall, lanky man with a throaty voice, brought a book I had never seen before to the counter. It seemed to be listed in the system, but incorrectly. According to it, it was Trainspotting , by Irvine Welsh, but the cover read The Boneturner’s Tale in plain white text against a black cover, with no author. I assumed the book was lent to us, as none of the other staff recognized it, and on the inside of the front cover was a golden plaque reading From the Library of Jurgen Leitner . Still, since it was registered, I told Jared he had to follow our standard policy; we charge for overdue books after three weeks. He agreed, and took the book with him. Those three weeks passed, and Jared didn’t return the book. We send letters to the address they submit on their card when that happens, so we sent him a letter to inform him that the book was overdue. We didn’t get a response.

He came in about a week after we sent the letter, without the book. Said he wanted to check some more out, which I let him, but gently told him that The Boneturner’s Tale was overdue, to which he politely told me that he hadn’t realized, and would bring it back next time he came around. He did return two weeks later to give back the books he borrowed, except, of course, for The Boneturner’s Tale . He said that he had misplaced it, though he was sure it was still in his house, so that was a relief.

But months and months went by, and Hopworth never returned to give back the book. He never checked out anything else, and for all we knew, he had left town and forgot to return it. Then murders started happening in the area. You might have heard of them. People were found dead in alleyways with bones seemingly removed from their bodies, but the skin wasn’t broken. Their bodies were contorted into strange, impossible shapes. It was quite frightening. People weren’t coming to the library as much, because everyone wanted to move out of the area so they weren’t the next victim.

I tried as much as I could to keep business up, but eventually I got word from the higher-ups that we weren’t getting enough traffic, and the tax money simply wasn’t worth it anymore, so I had to close it down, and make sure every book was returned so they could be distributed to the other public libraries. I sent out letters and all, got them to put up some posters, and I did get every book back just before my deadline.

Except, of course, for The Boneturner’s Tale . I was fed up with him. At this point, it had been about nine months since Jared had borrowed it. I was sure that he didn’t read his mail, because we had sent him plenty of letters. So I went to his house myself. I was going to get that book back. The first thing that was out of the ordinary was that the front door was unlocked and all the lights were off, and this was evening on a Friday night, so any self-respecting man should be home at that hour. Of course, any self-respecting man would also lock his door.

I stumbled around in the dark, hoping for a light switch. I felt something squishing underneath my feet, but I brushed it off as I kept yelling for Jared. I eventually found my way into his kitchen, and turned on the lights. His entire floor was covered in dead bodies, bones scattered around with some lined up against the wall. I looked at the bottom of my shoe. The squishing I felt was because I was stepping on the remains of a human eye. I almost screamed, but managed to hold it in. When I saw all that, realizing that this man was most definitely a serial killer, I should have left screaming for help and calling the police.

I have never been a rational man, so I did not. Against my better judgment, I walked back through the living room and the kitchen to the stairs so I could go to the second floor and see if he was there, although I did take a knife out of his silverware drawer in case I needed to defend myself. I slowly progressed up the stairs, my hand trembling all the while. There were more bodies on the second floor. In a spare room, in what appeared to be his bedroom, even in the bathroom, in which he had positioned one of them to be sitting upright on the toilet, which I am ashamed to admit did make me chuckle. There must have been at least fifty bodies in his home, each with their bones taken out, none with the skin broken. I then went up the stairs to the attic after hearing a woman screaming. I tried to be as quiet as I could, but I did make something of a yelp when I saw Jared.

He was far lankier, far thinner and far more monstrous than when I saw him last. He was crouched over on the floor, above a screaming woman. He placed his hand on her elbow, before seeming to pull a bone out of it, accompanied by a terrible, guttural sound, before forcing her arm down her own throat as blood pooled out of her mouth. When Jared heard my yelp, he turned around, before cheerfully asking what I was doing in his home. His voice was strange, almost incomprehensible, like an animal growling. After gathering my strength to answer him, asking for the book back, he shambled over to the staircase.

“That book is mine,” he said. “It belongs to me!”

He lunged for me. I immediately ran down the stairs, all while I heard Jared yelling things like “You just want it for yourself!” and “I’ll never let you have it! It’s mine, all mine!” in his low, ogre-like voice. I ran out of the house, hid, and called the police. They arrived soon, but when they entered the house, they found no trace of the bodies or of Jared Hopworth.

I’ve often wondered if I imagined it all. If I was just so distressed over the strange murders, and the library I’d devoted ten years of my life to getting shut down, that I simply imagined that encounter, especially since I stayed around the house practically the entire night because I was too frightened to go home and be alone, and the police never found anything while I was there.

Though, one thing about that night did stand out. At the other side of the block, I saw a figure running away. Its silhouette looked just like Jared, but with an extra pair of thin, bony arms.

Statement ends.

“That was a treat,” Tim said sarcastically. “Sounds fake, though.”

“What are you talking about? Those murders were definitely real. I remember hearing my parents talk about them,” Melanie said.

“Yeah, but how do we know it isn’t just some guy who told a story to the Institute and put the murders in to convince us that it was real?” Tim retorted.

“I’d normally think it was fake, too,” Jon said. “But that book… the plaque on the inside, it mentioned someone named Jurgen Leitner. I’ve heard that name before. It was in the book that sent me here in the first place.”

“So, this Leitner guy collects a bunch of books that do scary things?” Tim asked.

“It would seem so,” Jon answered. "Tim, what's in the follow-up notes?"

"Oh. Well, it says that Jared Hopworth did get in legal trouble in 1989, a couple months before the statement was given, but after the events of the statement itself. He was growing... how do you pronounce that, marijewana? Whatever it is, he was growing that in his backyard. But it wasn't in London, it was in Nottingham. Nothing odd was noted about his appearance, though. He got about two years in prison, but was let go, and seems to have disappeared altogether. Nothing is all too notable about his time in prison, except for one thing. In the aftermath of a prison riot, his cellmate, a man named Robert Montauk, was found dead, in a very similar manner to the murders that are described in the statement."

"Okay, then. That'll be it, I guess. End recording," Jon said.

Chapter Text

“Statement of Richard Djibo, regarding why he left the police force. Original statement given February 5th, 1984. Audio by Melanie King, unofficial archival assistant. Statement begins.”

As soon as I’m done making this statement, I’m going into hiding. I’m in their systems now, and after what I saw, I can’t risk it. I can’t risk them finding me.

I was never super proud to be a cop or anything. If the name didn’t give it away, I am not exactly white. My family is from Niger, and I grew up around a lot of black and Asian folk. So naturally, I heard horror stories of encounters with police. Lots of unfair arrests, racial profiling, and other unspeakable things. I’ve always been a compassionate person, and I guess I thought that if I signed up, I’d be able to rise the ranks, and change everything from the inside. I was a fool.

I finished my training when I was twenty-six, and I was excited. I wanted to make the world better, and I wanted to make the system just and right for once. The station was nice, too. Clean, tidy, and there was this calming ambience they played on a radio of some kind of soft flute song.

My first assignment was simply patrol, with an officer who had been in the force for a long time. His name was Chester. Everyone at the station just seemed to love him. They said it was a huge honor to work with him, especially on my very first day on the job.

While we were on patrol, we heard that a nearby store was being robbed. We drove over pretty quickly, and when we arrived, Chester told me to stay by the car so I could make sure to keep people away. I stood there for about fifteen minutes, telling people to leave the area, and I couldn’t hear anything going on inside the store, since we had parked at the far end of the parking lot. Eventually, Chester walked out of the store with the perpetrator in hand, a young man, likely younger than twenty, and shoved him into the backseat. The man looked a bit roughed up, though Chester insisted that he hadn’t done anything to him, and that a box of soda cans had fallen on his face because he accidentally knocked it over while running away. I should have been more suspicious of the blood on his baton, though.

More things like that would happen, though not always with Chester. We’d get a report, and go check it out, and someone would always get hurt. The longer I stayed on the force, the less they tried to hide it from me. And the violence they exhibited wasn’t only against armed robbers. Sometimes it was just against people they deemed suspicious, who were angry and upset at being arrested. 

The violence was revolting, and I honestly find it quite hard to describe. Again, I had heard those stories growing up of young Black kids getting beat by cops, of police officers ignoring Chinese people when they went to report someone beating them up on the streets. But those stories couldn’t have prepared me for what it felt like to see it all up close. It felt monstrous, indiscriminate, and yet, it was also so much more advanced than an animal ripping apart its prey.

They always made sure no one was looking. They always made sure they were out of the line of sight of security cameras. They almost always made sure not to kill them. And they seemed so gleeful doing it. They seemed happy, more refreshed for every tooth they knocked out of someone’s mouth, like they felt a rush for every drop of blood.

Sometimes, I would ask the others about their home life. About family, or friends they had outside of work. They’d give peculiar answers, honestly. For example, one coworker, named Sandra, told me all about her life the first time I asked. She had a husband who sounded wonderful, and two kids who seemed like some of the nicest little children in the world. But she told me that they paled in comparison to the other officers, who were like her “real family”. That no matter how happy her family made her, it would never match up to just how much joy she felt getting to be here, in the line of duty.

Because her family would never understand. Even though they loved her, they could never really get it . Police were like sheepdogs, criminals were like wolves, and normal people were sheep, she told me. Sheepdogs look like wolves, so sheep hated them, even though sheepdogs only wanted to protect them from the wolves. Her family were sheep.

I am not proud to say that I became desensitized to all the violence around me. That’s what they told me in the academy, after all. Better to risk your chances in court than get killed on the job. So I did beat up a few people. I knocked a few teeth out, but I told myself it was always in self-defense. The charges were always resolved out of court in our favor, so I had to be correct, right?

Yeah. I stopped telling myself that after they killed Tommy.

One night we got a call from a woman who said her son was having a mental breakdown, she couldn’t get him to calm down, and she felt scared and wanted us to come right away to help. I went with a couple other officers, Derek and Tim, and realized as we got closer to our destination that I recognized the turns we made and buildings we passed. This incident was occurring in my neighborhood. We arrived at a house that I recognized as well. It was the house of the Baek family, a small family from Korea, and I realized that the boy having a mental breakdown must be Tommy.

Tommy was a twelve-year-old boy I had babysat for when I was younger. He was diagnosed with autism at a very young age, but he seemed very capable. According to his mother, he was doing well in school, he was making friends, he was thriving.

And they killed him. They said they couldn’t get him to calm down, and he started attacking them, so they beat him till he was dead.

His mother was out of the room when it happened, so they told her he took the baton and beat himself, but I knew it wasn’t true. I saw the way Tim savagely beat the baton into Tommy’s face, I saw how Derek grinned as it happened. They pretended to comfort her, pretended to be sorry, and then we took off. They smiled the whole way back.

Of course, they got off scott-free, even after I tried to argue I saw them kill Tommy. I handed in my two-week notice after that. Things went normally for most of the remaining two weeks, and since they were concerned I wasn’t going to be able to do my job properly because I tried to turn in some of my coworkers who were criminals, I was never sent out on any assignments. On my last day, though, something odd happened. The commissioner called me to his office, and told me just how sad it was to see me go. Because it meant that I wasn’t really a sheepdog after all. Just a regular, ordinary sheep. Then, he took me into the back storage area, a part of the station I had never been to, and to a room where all the officers were waiting.

“He’s a sheep,” he told them, “and we have a duty to make sure sheeps who go near wolves don’t go near them again.”

I heard the flute blasting in my ear even as the radio was in the other room. Then the chief snapped his fingers and they all began convulsing, bending over backwards as strange beings emerged from their chests, ripping them open. Tall, stick-thin, black as tar, with angled, pointed heads that resembled some kind of animal, like a jackal, or dare I say it, a wolf. They almost seemed two-dimensional, like shadows. The creatures chased after me, blood dripping from their mouths, but I managed to get out the door and into broad daylight, where I was sure those things wouldn’t get me.

I have no idea how many officers have those things inside of them. I don’t know what they are or if they’re widespread or anything. I don’t know what they do but I think they drive that need for violence. Just, please, if you can, let everyone know.

There are no sheepdogs. It’s just wolves in there.

Statement ends.

Melanie remained silent for a while after reading the statement. Everyone did. Eventually Jon spoke up, saying “S-so, the, uh, the follow-up notes?”

“Right,” Melanie said, “well, all the officers at the station Mr. Djibo worked at, which we know because he mentioned the officers involved in Tommy Baek’s death, obviously didn’t have any weird shadow-wolves around. In fact, all the officers seemed fine. When questioned about the statement, the officers said that no such thing happened, and that Djibo was making it up to demonize them. One odd detail did stand out, though; the station didn’t have a back room at all. End recording.”

Jon shut off the tape recorder.

Chapter Text

“Statement of William Wallace Cyrus, regarding the aftermath of a coma he endured as a result of a bus accident. Original statement given December 12th, 1990. Audio by Georgina Barker, unofficial archival assistant. Statement begins.”

I don’t want to die. I’ve always been terrified of death. Scared of the idea of an eternal void, of nothing forever and ever. The idea chills me.

It got worse two years ago, when my father suddenly passed away. The two of us had never been especially close, but hearing it from my mother made me distressed. That’s gonna happen to me one day , I thought. After the funeral, I tried to go back to normal. But I just couldn’t shake off that fear. I went on being extra cautious, trying to occupy my every thought with anything other than my own mortality. And it worked, for the most part. I was mostly getting back to normal, but one night, when I was on the bus coming back from work, it suddenly swerved, crashing into a car. I knocked my head on the window, and then bounced and hit it on one of the poles. Next thing I knew, I was out cold.

When I regained awareness of what was around me, I found myself in a black, empty void. It seemed to stretch on forever, and I could never tell what direction I was really heading in when I walked. Up, down, west, east, all seemed the same to me. Eventually, I heard a couple voices in the distance.

“Yes, so, he suffered quite a traumatic head injury. We can’t get him to wake up,” one voice said.

“No, that can’t be true!” cried a voice that sounded like my mother. “Not so soon after losing his father!”

I heard more things. That some broken glass had lodged itself in my head, but they had done surgery to get it out, and that I would likely be asleep for at least a week. I was in a coma, I realized. I heard my mother crying as well. I tried shouting to let her know I was okay, but nothing happened. I only heard it echoing around the void. When I moved closer to investigate the source of the voices, and my eyes fully adjusted to the darkness, I realized that they were coming from a small black bird. A raven, most likely. When I went to grab it, though, it flew away. I chased after it. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew that if I caught the bird, I’d wake up. It depended on me catching that raven.

So I ran, as fast as I could, towards the bird, soaring away and never seeming to stop or even slow down. Periodically, I would see it open its beak, and hear voices, apparently the voices of the people surrounding my hospital bed, come out of its mouth. It happened irregularly, and the passage of time seemed like a foreign concept to me while I chased it. 

“ His condition is worsening. He’s still breathing steadily, but… ”

“ Please say there’s still a chance for him. I can’t lose him! ” I heard my mother say.

Don’t worry, Mum, I thought, I’ll be okay. I just have to catch the Raven.

So I did. I kept running, and the Raven kept flying, and I heard more things. That my condition was worsening, and that I likely only had two months left to live. I was terrified, but I knew, I just knew, that if I caught the Raven, everything would be alright.

Then, at some later point, the Raven opened its mouth and I heard a new voice. A calm, soft voice that didn’t sound like any of the doctors.

“Hello , ” the voice said, “my name is Oliver Banks.”

I didn’t respond, as I assumed whoever the voice belonged wouldn’t hear me, like normal, until Oliver spoke again, saying, “ Well, say something! I haven’t got all day. ” I said hello back, but asked Oliver if he really knew what I was saying. He responded he did, that his “Master” was letting him into my head, that he could see what I was seeing. I accepted his explanation. Either he was telling the truth, or I was hallucinating him, in which case it wouldn’t really hurt to indulge and pretend I could talk to someone.

“Are you a selfish man?” Oliver asked me. I told him no, that I was just trying to survive. He chuckled, and asked me if I was afraid of death, to which I answered that God yes, I was, and that I would do anything to stop myself from dying in this coma. Oliver laughed, and told me that if that was my goal, trying to catch the Raven wasn’t the way to go about it. No, he said, if I wanted to live, really live, then I had to let the Raven catch me.

I was confused, and tried asking him what he meant, but I got no response. I assume he left at that point. I tried to think about letting the Raven catch me. I stopped moving, but then the Raven just sat down and stopped moving as well. I moved in the opposite direction, but the Raven was somehow always just in front of me. I spread my arms and shouted at the Raven, the first time I had directed something at the bird, and not just a voice I heard through it.

“Just kill me if this is what it’ll be like!”

Suddenly, the Raven turned around and opened its beak, and darted through the air straight for me.

“ I’m sorry, but I don’t think he’ll be getting better. I think the best course is to just take him off life support. ”

I heard a heart monitor beeping slower and slower and slower.

“ If you really think so… my poor son… ”

I heard my mother sobbing.

“ I’m so sorry. ”
The bird was closer and closer, its beak about to collide with my chest.

Then, I heard a raspy, harsh voice, even though I was certain there couldn’t have been anyone but my mother and the doctor in the room.

“ The moment that you die will feel exactly the same as this one. ”

The Raven pierced my chest, going straight through me, as I heard the heart monitor flatline, and I felt myself get dragged down, down, down through the floor, to a place I can only describe as the edge of reality. I felt weightless. The colors all around me were indescribable. Every single thing seemed to bleed into the next. And, of course, the Raven had to be there. But when I floated towards it, it never ran away, and it spoke to me in the same, raspy voice.

“Would you like to keep living?”

I told the Raven yes.

“And what would you do to keep living?”

Anything, I told it.

“Would you even hurt people if it meant you kept living?”

I said yes again, and it laughed.

“So you were wrong.”

I don’t know why, but that remark angered me. I reached forward, strangling the bird in my grasp as it kept laughing and laughing and laughing.

And then I woke up. I was in a hospital bed, and they had seemingly already removed all the life support equipment from my body. I let my eyes adjust to the light as I realized that I couldn’t hear my mother or the doctor. Once my vision fully settled in, I saw my mother, collapsed on the floor, her eyes wide and mouth open and slack, a thick black liquid dripping from both. I looked beside my bed and saw the doctor in the same position. I stood up from the bed and ran. I didn’t know where, exactly, but I was trying to get help. I wasn’t sure what I thought they would do, but it was the only option I could think of.

I eventually ran to the front desk, and the woman there was looking down, evidently at some paperwork. I asked her if she could send help to my room, but when she looked up to face me, her face went pale, as I saw flashes in my head of the Raven, its terrible cackle still echoing in my head. When they cleared, she was hunched over in her chair, with the same black liquid leaking from her eyes and mouth.

I ran. Far away from the hospital, only quickly stopping by home to get myself some money and a change of clothes. I didn’t know what was happening, but I thought the Raven was somehow exiting my coma-induced nightmares and killing people in real life. I ran into the bathroom and splashed my face with some water. I hoped that this was still part of my nightmare. That this wasn’t happening.

The Raven was in the mirror.

I screamed at it, telling it to stop this, to stop killing people. The Raven laughed again.

“I never killed anyone, my friend. That was you. You wished for this. You wanted to come back to life and told me you would do anything to do so, even hurt other people. And I obliged. Now, you shall live forever, and this gift of death shall follow you also. It is your face. It bears the mark of terrible death.”

I left the house, and stayed at a homeless shelter that night. I kept my face covered with a black veil I had found in my mother’s closet, and although some of the others there teased me for it, I never took it off. That night, though, I had a terrible dream. Of course, the Raven was in it. Laughing, laughing all the while as I ran from it. It inched closer and closer, but whenever it got too close, there was always someone near me who the Raven would touch instead, and they would collapse on the spot.

I woke up in a cold sweat, with the veil taken off my face, and some of the others collapsed at the foot of my bed. They must have taken my veil off while I was asleep, and gotten a good look at my face.

I ran from the shelter, of course. And I’ve been running ever since then. The Raven was right. I am cursed. I don’t want these powers, they terrify me. But if I ever spend too much time away from other people, try to make sure people don’t even get the opportunity to see my face, then I feel… hungry. I think it’s the Raven. It keeps haunting me, and it wants me to take peoples’ lives. 

And sometimes I do. What can I say? I don’t want to die.

Statement ends.

Georgie took a deep breath before reading out the follow up notes. “Most of the details in the statement can be confirmed. Moira Cyrus, Doctor Matthew Bell and a receptionist clerk named Shannon Everett were found dead with no signs of physical harm inside a now-closed hospital in Birmingham. William Wallace Cyrus is still missing, although rumors of him show up every once in a while, usually in London. There’s an interesting thing to note, though. The giver of a statement concerning William Wallace Cyrus, Janet Bell, did see Cyrus’ face through a reflection, and notes that she no longer feels fear. End recording.”

Chapter Text

“Statement of Darren Pellen, regarding a period of time where, from his perspective, all life on Earth disappeared for nearly a month. Original statement given November 19th, 1987. Audio by Martin Blackwood, unofficial archival assistant. Statement begins.

I hate my routine, because I hate being around people. It’s the same every day. Wake up because of the other people in the building making a ruckus, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to the bus stop, try to avoid conversation with Javier, the bus driver, get to work, try to tell my coworkers to leave me alone because we aren’t friends, survive eight hours of the most boring job in the world, tell my coworkers that no, I would not like to go for drinks with them, go home, and hear the old lady in the apartment next to me scream her head off at her eight cats until midnight, finally go to sleep and repeat.

I wanted change. Hoped that I’d suddenly get enough money to buy my own house far away and never have to talk to another person ever again if I didn’t want to, or that my coworkers would finally get the hint that I don’t like any of them, or that the old cat lady would wear her throat out and I’d never hear her screeching for the rest of my life.

The rest of them were all stupid, mindless drones, drunk on empty joy. I needed them all to disappear. And I got my chance soon enough.

Last January, after a particularly bad day at work, on one of the rare occasions I do go out for drinks with my coworkers, I sat next to this odd man. Despite looking like he could be no older than thirty, he had a big red beard and wore this thick, blue coat, like he was waiting to be summoned to the Arctic. He introduced himself as Peter Lukas, and said that he was in town to visit his family.

We started talking after a few drinks, and Peter sounded like he had a much more interesting life than I. He came from a rich family who ran an import-export business, and he was the captain of one of their biggest ferries, the Tundra. I told him that I was nowhere near as fascinating. I work at an insurance firm, so it’s mostly sitting in a cubicle all day. And I told him how I hated the people around me. How I felt my life would be so improved if I was just alone, for once.

“I know the feeling,” Peter told me, “I think guys like us- the smart blokes who’ll really make a change- we thrive by ourselves.” I drank a bunch that night, because I felt like I had finally met someone who understood me. I don’t remember everything, although I faintly remember one of us asking the other to shag us.

Everyone at the table, bar Martin and Jon, were clasping their hands over their mouths trying not to erupt in laughter.

“The archival note states that Mr. Pellen asked for that last part to be taken off the record, but evidently it wasn’t. Statement resumes.”

But when I woke up the next day in my own bed, I was blessed with absolute quiet. The other tenants of the building were entirely silent, the myriad of noises they’d make completely absent. I left my house and went to the bus stop, but the bus never came, and I noticed that I hadn’t seen another person since I woke up. Luckily, work wasn’t too far, so I just walked, and I didn’t see another person the whole time.

I didn’t see anyone at work either, but I was fine with that. I assumed everyone was just off work or hiding away, and I got a lot of work done at my own pace. At the end of the day, I walked back home, still seeing no one, not even a stray cat or bird or bug. The building was still silent, and I was getting suspicious. So I knocked on everyone’s doors, and no one answered. I looked on TV, and all the stations were just static. I called everyone I could think of, and no answers. It was like everyone had disappeared. In other words, I had achieved my lifelong dream.

The next few days went on as usual. I went to work and even took some days off. No one was around, so it’s not like I would be punished. I took whatever food I needed from grocery stores and such, since there weren’t any cashiers. I should’ve been more terrified, or questioned what was going on, but I didn’t. After all, I was practically in paradise. After the seventh night, though, the creature appeared.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye at first. A tall, thin figure with long clawed arms. I looked at it and it vanished, and I assumed I had just seen my shadow, and my brain was filling in the gaps in the nighttime darkness coming home from the supermarket. But I saw it again, when I woke up in the middle of the night with that thing on the street outside my building, visible through the window. I was quite scared, admittedly, but I assumed it was nothing more than a hallucination, since I had just woken up.

It was gone the next morning, which reaffirmed my theory, and the day continued like usual. The next night, I woke up, and saw the creature now on the sidewalk in front of the building, looking straight up at my window, grinning. I thought of calling the police, though, of course, everyone had disappeared. So I tried to go back to sleep as the creature seemed to be standing entirely still. I saw it again the next night, although barely, at the doorstep.

That morning, I tried calling my mother, before remembering my predicament.

I continued on as normal, in the empty, lifeless world until around the nineteenth night. I woke up, and hoped to take a walk outside for a short time just to get all my energy out so I could go back to sleep before seeing the creature in the hallway, only three doors down. It looked almost human, but almost lacking… personality. It had no eyes or mouth, just a big toothy grin. I quickly shut the door and locked it. I realized why I hadn’t seen it in so long: it had been inside the building. It was getting closer to me. I stayed up all night, finding whatever I could to barricade the door. I eventually found some spare planks that I would use to replace the ones in my bed frame which broke often, and nailed them over the door. I’d take the fire escape ladder to get to work instead, I decided.

The next day I barely got any work done because I was so tired, and I was beginning to regret this isolation. I hoped that it would end, and that creature would disappear, and everything would go back to normal. That day, fog covered the city, just thin enough to never obstruct my vision, but thick enough to feel like it was just about to.

That night I stayed awake, a flashlight and knife by my bedside in case that thing somehow got in. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard knocking at my door. I didn’t go back to sleep. I didn’t even go to my office the next day. I woke up the next night, like I expected to. I quietly walked out of my room to see if that thing was still at my door. It wasn’t.

It was in my apartment. The boards were still intact. It was like it had just walked straight through them, standing still in the entrance to my home. It still never moved. Never raised one of its long arms or sharp claws no matter how close I got to it. And of course, it entirely vanished come daytime.

The days after that went much the same. I didn’t get work done at all, because I was too scared to sleep. The fact of my isolation made my situation much more concerning. If I was killed by that thing, then no one would find my body. I would simply rot away in my apartment forever. I just stayed in my room, hoping that I could somehow find a way out of this.

On the twenty-second and twenty-third nights, it simply inched closer to my bedroom. On night twenty-four, I awoke to see it standing in my bedroom doorway. On night twenty-five, I saw it looming over my bed, its mouth slightly open. Through its many sharp teeth, I saw what appeared to be a face, fitting perfectly in its jaw with white, empty eyes. I thought of accepting my fate at this point. What was I going to do? I couldn’t fight it. I couldn’t move anywhere else, not really, since I didn’t have keys to anywhere else. Well, except my office.

So I did try sleeping there the next night. I brought a pillow and a blanket and slept on the floor. It was uncomfortable, but I eventually dozed off. It didn’t work. I awoke in my apartment, in my bed, with the creature over me, its mouth now wide open, and I could see the face within its maw. It was my own.

I only went to sleep briefly, when my eyes became too heavy to keep open, and woke up in the early hours of the morning with the phone in my kitchen ringing off the handle. I checked the answering machine, finding I had a litany of missed calls, all from my workplace. I picked up the phone and heard my boss on the other end, screaming that I hadn’t been at work for the past month and that if I couldn’t explain myself, I was going to be fired.

Despite just how much trouble I was in, I was ecstatic. I was back in the real world. I heard the old lady next door shout at her cats. Any other day it would have annoyed me, but it sounded like heaven. I was able to make up a story that I had been at my parents’ house and gotten sick, but they didn’t have a phone so I couldn’t call in, and by some miracle was able to keep my job. Everyone else has memories of the days where I thought they disappeared. But I swear this wasn’t just a dream.

I saw Peter at the bar again that week. He said he was leaving town to do his duties to the Tundra, and was just stopping by for one last drink. We talked a bit, and I omitted to mention everything I had gone through the past month. Just before he left, though, he told me that he hoped I enjoyed my period of isolation, before walking out of the bar. I tried to run after him to ask what he meant, but it seemed like he had vanished. I never saw him again.

Statement ends.

“The notes here say that this isn’t the first time someone’s come in to give a statement regarding someone with the last name Lukas. The family owns several important businesses, including a shipping company named Solus Shipping, who own the Tundra, the ship Peter Lukas is captain of. Peter Lukas was in London in January 1987, like Mr. Pellen claims, according to records of port dockings. It isn’t known what exactly he did during his visit, although one detail known to Institute staff sticks out. In late January, he had a meeting with James Wright, then head of the Magnus Institute. End recording.”

Jon shut off the tape recorder, ready to grab the file he had been given to read out, but Martin looked down, appearing lost in thought.

“What is it, Martin?” Jon asked, a concerned expression on his face.

“Well, it’s just… Peter. Do you remember what I told you? About the thing that happened to me over the summer?”

“Yes. Statement #9970308. You were playing hide-and-seek and everyone and everything around you vanished. Why?”

“Well, just before I tripped and everything went back to normal, I saw this guy, in a ship captain’s outfit,” Martin answered.

“Sorry, what are you talking about?” Georgie asked.

Jon and Martin explained Martin’s experience to them, with Jon eventually finding the statement file in the Archives.

“So, you think this mysterious sailor guy is Peter Lukas?” Tim said, after the explanation finished.

“Well, yeah. He showed up to this guy right before everyone disappeared. And I saw him just before everyone re-appeared. Maybe he’s got this weird power to… put people in these trances, or something. I don’t know,” Martin responded.

“Well, I’ll ask Gertrude if she knows anything,” Jon said. “Okay, last statement for the day. Everyone else has gone, so I guess I have to take this one.”

Chapter Text

“Statement of an unknown woman, regarding… in her words, regarding ‘everything’. Original statement given May 16th, 1995. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, unofficial archival assistant. Statement begins.”

I don’t know where I am. I’m being pulled in a million different directions at every single moment, but I have no destination in mind. I don’t know where I’m going. I only know where I’ve been, and even then, more and more pieces of that slip away every second. 

Every thought is a struggle, because every second of consciousness is plagued by thousands and thousands of sights, sounds, more thoughts. The average person will see and be seen by potentially millions of different people in their lifetime. Can you imagine experiencing all of their thoughts and feelings at once?

Every second is a barrage of everything. Words, songs, names, faces. And there’s one face I keep seeing among the screaming well of colors and sounds. It’s an unremarkable face, but I think it’s my own. They don’t always know the person the face belongs to. Sometimes they do. They’re my friends, or my parents, or my husband. And I don’t remember them. My own memories fade away in the rush of sights and sounds. But I’ve seen that face so many times. I think these are people who have seen me, and people who will see me.

The moments I see aren’t constrained to time. I see through the eyes of people who saw me as a baby, people who I passed in the airport years ago and never saw again, and people who I haven’t seen yet. I’ve seen my own death a million times. I’ve seen it through the eyes of a loving family who I don’t know yet and of the doctors by my bedside. I’ve seen my own funeral from the perspective of everyone who attended, cut up into a trillion tiny pieces and thrown at me periodically.

I was proposed to last night, and I could barely feel anything because I’ve experienced the moment an uncountable number of times, on top of the infinite sensory overload. I expect the same will happen when my children are born. I’ll clutch them in my arms, my life given newfound meaning, and feel nothing, because to me, it’s happened so many times it doesn’t mean anything.

I’ve seen the wedding, too. It’s a beautiful ceremony, with my entire family attending. The dress I wear is beautiful. Or maybe it’s my husband’s suit. Or the tuxedo my nephew wears. Or his sister’s dress. Or the necklaces that my mother and aunt wear. I can’t tell. Thinking is hard, now.

I don’t exactly remember how this happened, not in full. I knew once, but parts of my memories have been drowned in all the experiences. They’ve become more of the incomprehensible buzz of everything. I wonder if the woman wanted this to happen.

I walked into a door, and there was a woman behind it. A woman and an infinite web of corridors and staircases, and I should have run when I noticed the door hadn’t been there before, or that when I saw her reflection in the puddle of rainwater, her hands were long and clawed, but I went in anyway and…

I’m sorry, this is where I start to lose my memories. Just… holes, mostly. I remember moments, like sitting against one of the many walls of the long halls. But I don’t know much about what happened behind that door, until the end of it.

I walked into a room. To describe the shape or size or color of it would never serve the beauty and horror of the room justice. It was simultaneously big and small and red and white and gold and round and a perfect cube. But no matter all of this, at its very center was a heart.

Well, it wasn’t a heart exactly. What it was exactly seems to be just out of reach every time I remember it, and it seemed to be that way when I was actually present with the object as well. Sometimes it was a giant biological heart, with large veins connecting it to the ceiling, beating, fleshy, red. Sometimes it was a mechanical heart, with a million colored cords letting it hang from the ceiling of the distorted room. Other times it seemed like a rotating object, a million squares folding in and out of each other, each one a different color. Other times, it was a statue, sometimes depicting a woman, or a man crawling out of a woman’s chest.

But when I saw it, for some reason, I just knew that it was the core of the halls. That I was at its very center, at the heart of the liminal insanity. I approached the object, a terrible headache cutting through my head. I felt a strange compulsion to reach out to it, and I watched, in real time, as it opened.

Perhaps that isn’t the right word. The process varied depending on the shape I saw at any given moment. When it was the giant beating heart, it looked like it was cut open down the middle. As a machine, a large panel swung open, inviting me to look inside. As a swirling mass, the squares parted to reveal the very center of it. But what was inside the object is always the same, no matter what shape I saw.

Do you think madness has a color? Not a color you associate with it, or a color that makes you feel that way, but a color truly its own, a color that only exists in pure, distilled insanity. It sounds outlandish, but that’s what I believe was inside of the core of those halls. It was alluring. I wanted to feel that swirl of madness with my own hands. I approached the object, reached out to it, and walked straight in.

Being inside the mass was when this all started. I was bombarded with senses and thoughts from across my life. I saw the woman seemingly emerge from the walls. She told me in a calm yet clearly angry tone that I had trespassed. That this space wasn’t meant for me. It was meant for somebody else, and I had very rudely taken their place. So, she said that she’d keep me there. For how long, she wasn’t sure, and might let me go anywhere from an hour to three billion years from now. Time didn’t work the same way in the halls, she told me, she could just plop me out at the exact moment I came in and no one would ever know.

I thought once she let me out, back into the real world that I would be safe. Safe from all the voices screaming at me, everything I saw happening out of order.

Oddly enough, I don’t actually remember leaving. And sometimes I wonder, in some way, even though I know I can’t be, if I’m still in that room somehow. Maybe I’m just seeing my own life, somehow making my future self give you this statement from that room, because I know that by the time I’m out my memory of this will have all deteriorated. Or my emotion towards every moment of my life will have deteriorated. Broken down, and I’ll be nothing but a shell of a person. Just moving through my life, basing everything off the visions I remember, being able to replicate them so perfectly that no one can tell that I barely even exist anymore.

I feel myself blowing away right now. Every moment just becomes more dull when you’ve seen it so many times.

There is one person I’ve met who I’ve never experienced a moment through. The woman. The woman from the corridors. I’ve never seen any of the many thoughts that must be swimming in her mind. Not one. Well, no, now I know there’s one more person whose reality isn’t dumped into my head.

I can’t see a single thing you do, Mr. Shelley.

Statement ends.

“This case is a bit complicated. As the end of the statement indicates, the person taking her statement was Michael Shelley, and the woman that the statement giver mentions is likely a recurring figure the Institute has encountered known as The Distortion, currently taking the form of Helen Richardson, a missing real estate agent. The fact that Michael’s experiences aren’t part of the ‘screaming well’ of colors and voices that the statement giver is subject to is quite interesting. Michael has been stalked by The Distortion for since 1993, about a year before he began to work at the Institute,” Jon read out from the papers.

“After finishing, the statement giver was escorted off the grounds, apparently becoming much more incoherent, whispering things under her breath, before disappearing into the night. The woman was not identified. End recording,” Jon finished as he shut the tape recorder off, noticing that it was almost 6 o’clock, time for him to go home.

“Jon,” Tim said, a rare look of genuine concern on his face, “do you really read through stuff like… everything from today? You do that every time you’re here?”

“More or less, yeah,” Jon said, nonchalant as he inserted the papers back into the folder.

“Doesn’t it… I don’t know, weigh on you a bit? Some of that stuff was pretty frightening,” Sasha asked.

Jon thought for a second, then shrugged. “I like learning,” he said, before yelling that they were done with the statements.

Michael came down from his office, collected the tapes and folders, before grabbing his coat to escort the children to the bus stop to make sure they got there safely. Before they left, though, the door swung open, and a tall, thin black man, around Gertrude’s age, walked in.

“Ah! Adelard, hello! Children, this is Adelard Dekker, he’s a friend of Gertrude’s,” Michael told them.

“‘Friend’ is stretching it,” Dekker mumbled under his breath, before asking more clearly, “Is she still here?”

“Yes, um, she should still be in her office,” Michael responded, ushering the children out the door.

Dekker walked up the stairs and opened the door to Gertrude’s office, where she was busy scrawling something down with three books open on her desk.

“Ah. Dekker. Hello. Is it good news or bad news?”

“Both,” Dekker answered, sitting down on one of the chairs, “but I need to tell you the good news first.”

“I’m listening.”

“That would be a fuckin’ first,” Dekker muttered again, “but, to get to the point, Callum Brodie is safe.”

Chapter Text

"Callum's safe? Thank goodness. I'm sure his mother is happy. What's the bad news, then?" Gertrude asked.

"Well, it's a bit more complicated than the good news," Adelard said, hoping to prolong having to tell Gertrude something that would almost certainly make her day worse.

"Want to put it to tape?" Gertrude asked, fishing her recorder out of her desk drawer.

"Sure. Prattle off your little intro, then.”

Ignoring his comment, Gertrude said, “Statement of Adelard Dekker, regarding the rescue of Callum Brodie. Statement recorded direct from subject October 17, 1997, by Gertrude Robinson, head Archivist of the Magnus Institute. Statement begins.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with Maxwell Rayner or his cult, so I had a pretty good idea of where they’d be. He loves abandoned places, that man. Warehouses, stores, theaters. Any place where the lights don’t work well is a good place for Maxwell Rayner. That made it pretty easy to find him. He was hiding in an old church this time. When I located him, I wanted a good look at the layout of the building before rescuing Callum, and I figured the best way to figure that out would be to attend a service.

That was the first big barrier in my task. The People’s Church of the Divine Host targets people to recruit, and they don’t talk about it to anyone except those targets. They do that by design, so people who could disrupt their activities don’t find out about them. They don’t take converts. If I just showed up to the church in the black of night and asked to attend, they’d find it suspicious. So I had to pretend to be someone they could target, which was off the table, since, for all I knew, our time was very limited, or I could tell them exactly who I was, and tell them I had come to them because I knew them and was regretful of disbelieving them.

I made up a sob story about how I was betrayed by you, and that I wanted to join them to get my revenge, and that secretly I had always admired Rayner’s strength as a leader. Cult leaders take really well to ego stroking like that, so despite my story being rather ludicrous, they let me in without asking questions. I didn’t see Callum anywhere, but I took a seat at one of the pews. When the sermon started, Maxwell Rayner, in the body of Phillip Brown, stood at the altar and delivered his usual drivel. “The light must be shunned, embrace the void,” blah, blah, blah.

But I did regain interest when he mentioned that a new component in the ritual they had been preparing had been introduced. From the lobby, one of the cultists, draped in dark robes like the rest, brought out Callum. That did give me a good idea of where to search for where they might be keeping him. Callum was brought to the altar, and Rayner announced that he was the child who needed to be given a share of the power of the Divine Host in order for the ritual to be truly successful. 

The other churchgoers cheered, and Callum stayed silent, almost unmoving. Rayner spoke of how three days from then, Callum would complete his transformation, and then the world would be drenched in shadows. After that, he laid out more of their plans. They would take Callum to the place where they kept the Black Sun, and he would be the key to the ritual coming to fruition. He unfortunately didn’t reveal the location of either, but soon after, Callum was taken away again.

The next morning, when Rayner’s group had left and the owners of the building none the wiser of what was happening at nighttime, I waited for Sunday service to begin before looking around the lobby and finding the door to the basement. It was dark and dirty, so I whipped out a torch I brought with me and checked all the doors and shelves to see if they had left anything. They hadn’t, and it seemed like the basement was mostly used for storage, but I eventually noticed a door at the far end of the basement that was locked. None of the lock picks I had seemed to work on it, so I decided to take the door off its hinges. I had a screwdriver, so I unscrewed the hinges and kicked the door down. You might make fun of me for having all this in my coat, Gertrude, but never say it’s all useless.

When I stepped in, I saw that the room had no light anywhere and it was very small. I eventually shined my torch on a young boy lying in a fetal position in the corner. It was Callum. I told him who I was, and that I was there to save him. I asked him to come with me, but he shook his head and said that Rayner told him if he left, then they’d kill his mother as soon as they found out. I promised him that I’d make sure they wouldn’t, and that his mother missed him and wanted him back. What Callum said next surprised me.

“Could you help my Dad?”

I was confused, and I asked him what he meant by that. He said that his father had told him that what he was doing would make them all more powerful, more knowledgeable. That it would make it so that he could finally be in a proper family with Callum and his mother. I tried to tell him why his mother wasn’t with Phillip anymore. That he used to hit her, and she was afraid that she would hurt Callum, but he just responded that his father told him that Caroline was wrong, and was deceived by the light.

I could tell that I wouldn’t get Callum out unless I promised to help Rayner, so I lied through my teeth and told him I would. I told him I’d be back for him that night, because the service would be ending soon and I wasn’t sure if anyone from the People’s Church was around to guard Callum and see if he escaped. I propped the door back up and screwed the door back on its hinges.

That night, Rayner held another service, during which I went down to the basement, hoping to get Callum out of there. I quietly walked down the stairs and tried to turn on my torch, but it wouldn’t light up. I had just replaced the batteries as well, so I knew that wasn’t the issue. I let my eyes adjust a bit to the darkness before I realized something was slinking around in the darkness, and my breath almost entirely seized. I remembered Rayner’s exact words at the previous night’s sermon.

“ We will take him to the place where we keep the Black Sun .” The original specifications for the ritual of the People’s Church of the Divine Host written by Robert Smirke mention two things that the Church would need to create: a Black Sun, and a Still and Lightless Beast. There would be no reason to separate them… unless they brought one of them with them.

I moved as slowly as I could. It was hard, especially since I had to hope I didn’t trip over any of the boxes or folding chairs lying on the floors. Even when my eyes adjusted, I could barely see the Beast, but I made my way to the door and pulled out the screwdriver, and slowly unscrewed the hinges. I threw a small box towards the basement entrance, hopefully distracting the Beast so I could get in. When I unscrewed the door, I quickly stepped inside and found Callum. I told him that we had to be quick, as the service might be ending soon and they’d notice his absence, and warned him about the Still and Lightless Beast.

He stood up and took my hand, and we stood against the wall as we crept to the stairs to and from the basement. However, I hadn’t been paying very much attention, and my heart was filled with dread as I collided with something furry near the entrance.

I saw the Beast’s silhouette move, likely to stare at me, and I silently cursed myself for coming so far only to fail. I heard it snarl, a terrible, horrifying sound, before I watched Callum step forward, look at it, and say “ stop ” in the most unthreatening, childlike way I’ve heard a person say it. And yet, it worked. The Beast seemed to slink away, fading into the shadows. I was almost too stunned to move, yet I ran, took Callum into the car and brought him back home. In the mirror above the dashboard, I noticed some black liquid leaking from Callum’s mouth.

Statement ends.

“I’m assuming you set up some kind of protection so this won’t happen again?” Gertrude said.

“What do you take me for? Yes, obviously, I called the police when we got to his house and told them to figure something out. I think they’re helping them move out of London,” Adelard responded, annoyed.

“So, the bad news…”
“Well, they have the Still and Lightless Beast, and Callum Brodie might be an Avatar. I’ll keep watch on him. How’s Jurgen doing, by the way? Have you gone to check up on him?”

“Y-you can’t say that on tape! I’m going to have to transcribe all this now!” Gertrude shouted, quickly shutting off the tape recorder.

“Oh no, you’d have to do your job for once,” Adelard responded sarcastically. “They do pay you, so you might as well.”

“Oh, please, spare me. What do you even do for work? I doubt being a monster hunter pays very well,” Gertrude said, ready to throw something.

“Like I’d tell you. I’m allowed to have secrets,” Adelard remarked, grabbing his coat and walking out of the office.

“Supplemental,” Gertrude began speaking into the separate tape recorder. “This is quite an issue. Rayner’s manipulations seem rather basic, so I suppose he’s lucky the target he’s chosen to manipulate is a ten-year-old boy. I worry, though, if Callum Brodie has become an Avatar of The Dark, and he has a special connection to a creature that would make him essentially invisible, if he felt a drive to reunite with his ‘father’, he could almost certainly do it. Adelard, I hope you’re good at surveillance. End recording.”

Chapter Text

“...Oh, by the way, Elias,” Gertrude said, just as the Institute head was beginning to exit her office, “We were going to throw a surprise birthday party for Jon, on November 3rd. I thought that he would appreciate the gesture more if you were there. You are his father, after all.”

“Is that so?” Elias asked. “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

Elias left the room, and Gertrude started on the next statement.

“Case 9641202. Astrid Larson. Incidents occurred over a span of time in 1948 in Oxford. Statement given 12th of February 1964. Committed to tape 22nd of November, 1997. Gertrude Robinson recording.”

When I was a child, I lived at the house at 105 Hilltop Road. It was old, dusty, rickety, and full of spiders. But it was my home. And in a strange way, I loved it. To me, it didn’t seem like an ancient, decrepit manor, but a magic old castle, ripe for adventure and imagination. And the best thing about it to me was the basement. There was so much to find down there. I once found a locked chest, and I was obsessed with what was inside. I spent a whole week when I was seven years old looking for the key to the thing, and when I finally did, it was entirely empty. Most of the things in that basement ended up being completely mundane, but that wasn’t really the point to me. It was the process of discovery.

There was one thing down there that did end up being special, though; an old, red mailbox with paint chipping off, tucked away in the corner. One day, when I was eight my mother asked me to run down to the post office to send a letter to her sister who was abroad in France, but I, being a little girl and not understanding how the postal system worked, just put it in the box in our basement. When I went to go check about a week after that, I saw that the envelope had been replaced with a larger one, containing two letters. The first was the letter I had sent in the first place, apparently resealed in its envelope, but the other was a letter addressed to my mother, the return address being, strangely enough, 105 Hilltop Road. It read,

Dear Cynthia Larson,

Your letter is very kind. However, I think it was sent to me by mistake. Interestingly, though, I also live in a house at a place called 105 Hilltop Road, though it is in Birmingham, not Oxford. My mother is also named Cynthia Larson, and I am named Astrid, like your daughter appears to be. What an odd coincidence!

Sincerely, Astrid Larson

I didn’t think too much of it, of course. It didn’t register to me how odd it was that a letter I left in my basement just so happened to end up not only getting delivered, not only to the wrong address, but to an address also called 105 Hilltop Road, which was also home to a woman named Cynthia Larson with a daughter named Astrid. I told my mother about it, leaving out most of the odder details about the situation, and she told me to write a letter to thank the person who had sent it back. And I did, sending a letter back that read,

Dear Astrid,

Thank you for sending back the letter. It’s quite a coincidence that we share a name. Perhaps we should keep exchanging letters?

Love, Astrid

I put the letter in the mailbox again, but I had the wisdom to put the letter meant to go to my aunt in an actual postbox. A couple days later, I received a response from the Other Astrid.

Dear Astrid,

Of course I would like to exchange letters with you. It seems like we must have been tied together by God. After all, what else could explain such a miracle? I shall begin by telling you of my school. It is a single room, with one teacher, Mrs. Kristof, who teaches students from first to eighth grade. We learn about such interesting things. There is a large British flag above the blackboard at the front, next to a portrait of Queen Victoria II.

Sincerely, Astrid Larson

Of course, being so young, I was unaware that one-room schools weren’t very common at that time, or indeed that there was no such queen as Victoria II. But I sent her a letter back to explain my own school, which had two separate entrances for boys and girls, and was much larger and made of brick. I told her all about my classmates, my teachers, and my life. After sending it through the red mailbox, I got a letter back the next day.

Dear Astrid,

Your school sounds very interesting! It sounds much fancier than any of the schools we have around here. And your friends sound interesting as well. I don’t have many friends who live near me, since most of them moved far away due to the war. I suppose people in Oxford are less afraid of the threat of war. I pray every night that everything will turn out alright, and my friends will return.

I wish that people in this world would simply learn to be peaceful, instead of waging war. Even if one side comes out victorious, many innocent lives will be lost.

Sincerely, Astrid Larson

That letter was quite concerning to me. I was barely old enough to remember the Second World War, so the prospect of another one coming along was just terrifying. Of course, no war came, but I sent a letter to the Other Astrid many months afterwards, after we had exchanged many more letters, telling her my anxieties about the idea of another one coming, asking her how she heard of the war. The next letter I got read,

Dear Astrid,

Well, it would have been almost impossible not to hear of the war. It’s all in the newspapers, about the invasions occurring all across Europe, how the world’s alliances are all crumbling. It’s made my parents worried sick. They say that if the war comes to Britain, we may have to leave and go somewhere else.

Sincerely, Astrid Larson

That night at dinner, I asked my parents about the idea of another war, and if they had heard. They told me that I was being ridiculous, that there was no way that another war could possibly be happening, since they had heard nothing. I drafted another letter, hoping to tell the Other Astrid the good news, but when I opened the mailbox, I found a small slip of paper, reading,

The zeppelins have already appeared in the sky. We’re leaving. Goodbye.

Sincerely, Astrid Larson, 18 February 1939

I left several letters in that mailbox over the years, but I never got a response, and eventually, they stopped vanishing from the mailbox altogether.

I went back to visit my parents at the house just this year, and I eventually walked down to the basement, to rediscover all the wonderful things that had amazed me as a young girl. I saw so many things, relived so many memories, before I came across the mailbox. It was exactly where I’d seen it last, though more of the paint had chipped off, and what paint remained had long been aged and lost its vibrant color. I opened it, just for old times’ sake, only to find what must have been a million spiders living inside. I jumped back and watched as they all snaked out of the mailbox, and ran up the stairs as they chased me. I didn’t go back down there for the rest of my visit.

“Final comments: this is not the first statement involving the house on Hilltop Road this institute has received, nor is it the first that indicates a link between this house and spiders. Of course, the more interesting part of this statement is what appears to be Astrid Larson communicating with a version of herself from an alternate history, and the fact that the mailbox’s supernatural properties seemed to cease after a while implies that this alternate world is now inaccessible, at least via the mailbox. While odd, I can’t say there’s much else to say about it.” Gertrude wordlessly stopped the recording and inserted her supplemental tape.

“Supplemental. I lied, there’s quite a bit more to say, actually. As I said, 105 Hilltop Road is a location we’ve often seen linked with spiders, which implies to me that The Web has claimed the location, to an extent. But this detail of the alternate world… what Entity could cause this effect? Even assuming that Everett’s interpretation is correct, which Entity could open gateways to these other worlds? Maybe it wasn’t actually an alternate world, and The Web was tricking Astrid Larson into writing those letters? But if that’s the case, why? What could The Web want with a collection of letters from an eight-year-old girl? Could it be a new Entity? No, that couldn’t be it either, because then I would’ve seen more statements that fall into this odd category, relating to alternate worlds. This is very concerning, indeed. I’ll see if any more statements of this kind come forth. End supplemental.”

Chapter Text

Gerry sat down in his office, and opened the file on his desk. Gertrude was off for the day, and she had asked him to record a couple statements for her while she was gone. Since no recent cases prompted much research, Gerry, Michael and Jon had mostly been recording statements anyway.

“Case 9962809. Rahat Rahman. Incident occurred in London, September 1996. Statement given the 28th of September 1996. Committed to tape 24th of October, 1997. Gerard Keay, assistant to Gertrude Robinson, recording.”

I don’t like bars. Clubs and such are on thin ice, but bars, I just can’t stand. The atmosphere always feels suffocating, as I’m stuck between fifty bar patrons all trying to get a drink or talk to each other. The buildings always feel like they’re falling apart at the seams, ready to collapse at any moment, burying everyone in a pile of rubble. And all of that feels worse when I’m drunk, like you’re meant to be at a bar.

A week ago, I was at a bar with my friend Sumi. I really only ever go when my friends invite me, since I don’t want to be rude. She was with her boyfriend, some guy named Dennis, at the other end of the bar, and I was sitting in the corner next to the entrance, where the least amount of people were. The place smelled like soil, but not fresh, wet soil. More like old soil that had dried out, that hadn’t mixed with fertilizer well. 

I mostly drank water, only once having a small glass of wine, mostly just waiting for Sumi to come up to me and say it was time to leave. Luckily, sitting on the edge of the bar prevented me from feeling that aura of suffocation I usually feel, but it sort of came back when a man sat at my table, at the seat across from mine. Despite my initial discomfort, the man seemed quite nice. He asked my name, he asked about my friends, my hobbies, and my career. I think he was hitting on me, although I can’t say for sure.

He had a soft voice, which made it hard to hear over him the cacophony of other voices, and tan skin and red hair, although it might have been a different color, and I was just seeing it differently under the low lighting of the bar. Eventually, after we had talked for a while, he asked me, “Do you believe in God?”, to which I told him that my family was Muslim, but I wasn’t particularly religious myself.

He told me that he did believe in God, though likely not any of the ones I was thinking of. A god of fear, he said, amongst a pantheon of many. He said that his god had made him powerful, but he didn’t want to spend eternity serving it; he wanted to become his god, and he was hiding an army who would fight against the gods when they made themselves known to the world.

At this point, I realized that this man was certainly not flirting with me, but was likely trying to recruit me into a cult and/or kill me, and I should leave as soon as possible. So I excused myself, and went through the crowd, hoping to find Sumi. I found her sobbing in the corner, wailing that her boyfriend had broken up with her. I frantically expressed my sympathy, but yelled at her that we needed to leave, lest we fall prey to a second Charles Manson.

I dragged her along as she drunkenly stumbled around, only for me to hear the man’s laugh, turn my head and see him standing right beside me as I felt the walls begin to close in. I can’t say for sure if they were, but I felt like everything around us, the wooden walls, the chattering masses of people, was beginning to move closer to compress around me.

He was still softly laughing as he stood across from me, the only element of my surroundings that hadn’t moved closer to suffocate me. I bolted for the exit, Sumi running behind me, only to watch as the walls seemed to grow over the door, blocking it. I started to hyperventilate as the man walked closer.

“So, as I was saying,” he said calmly, the room around me seeming to constrict further with every step he took, “I am creating an army to defeat these gods when they become arrogant, when they reveal their forms to our world. You have a decision. Either you join me, and gain immortality and power beyond anything any human has ever achieved… or, you refuse. In that case, I would judge you to be an agent of these Entities, a threat to me and my revolution, and I would kill you.”

I stopped hyperventilating, and tried to breathe slowly, and calm down. If his powers were fueled by fear, then if I stopped being afraid, maybe I would be able to make my escape. I closed my eyes and breathed slowly, in and out, visualizing the walls expanding and the door becoming uncovered. When I opened my eyes, the building seemed to be back to normal, and the door was right in front of me, so I ran out, with Sumi right behind me. We ran through the cold night streets to the metro station, and although I never turned my head to see him, I constantly felt like we were still being followed.

When we entered the train, it was eerily empty and quiet, save for a couple other late-night bar goers. We sat down and I tried to console Sumi, but I froze when I saw the man on the opposite platform, waving and smiling at me. At the next station, I told Sumi I had seen the man, and that we needed to find a police officer. Luckily, there was one patrolling just outside, so we told her about the man. After we described her to him, she seemed very interested, and said that she would pay for a taxi for us to get home.

I was beginning to thank her, when I saw the man emerge from the metro station, breathing in the cold night air. I pointed him out to her, and she approached him, asking him why he had been following us. He looked at her with that same stupid expression and said that we were a threat to him, so he was trying to kill us.

The officer was shocked and outraged, and asked him to come with her to the station. He smiled and said no. She told him that he was resisting arrest, and phoned for backup. He seemed quite angry, dropping his soft voice and friendly yet unnerving smile, almost seeming offended.

“Sir, I’m going to need you to stay here,” the officer said.

The man started cackling, looking at us with a terrifyingly upset look on his face. He slowly walked towards the officer and she pulled out her baton, before he pointed out his index finger and flicked it downwards, as I watched the sidewalk open and swallow the officer whole. He crouched down, and began whispering to the spot in the concrete where the officer had been standing, which I took as an opportunity to run, so I did. We found a taxi, and I paid for the trip to Sumi’s place, and then to mine.

Two days ago, Sumi disappeared. I think I might be next.

“Notes: On the night described, the 21st of September, 1996, Officer Daphne Johnson did go missing near Belsize Park Station. She phoned for backup from other officers, but when they arrived, Officer Johnson was nowhere to be found, and she never appeared at her home. She is still missing as of the 24th of November, 1997. The ‘Sumi’ mentioned in this statement may be Sumiko Masaharu, a woman who went missing in London on the 26th of September, 1996, which matches up with the claims presented by Ms. Rahman,” Gerry said.

“As for Rahman, her fears that she would next be kidnapped seem to have been unnecessary, since she has not gone missing as of the day of recording. I was asked to reach out to her to ask for a follow-up, but she was unwilling to return to the Institute. The description of the man in this statement almost perfectly matches descriptions given to police and the Magnus Institute of Guy Wintour, who is also linked to feelings of suffocation, claustrophobia and the like. This does tell us one thing: after his apparent disappearance from Bilsbury in August of 1996, he moved to London. It’s all too possible he’s in the city right now. End recording.”

Chapter Text

Gerry walked into Michael’s closet and plopped a stack of files onto his desk.

“What are these?” Michael asked, trying to fish the statement he’d been trying to follow up on from under the column of paper.

“Gertrude’s out, so she left some statements for you. Just record yourself reading through them. Even for you, that can’t be too difficult,” Gerry responded.

Michael sat there for a second, hoping to come up with something that he could say in response, before the other man walked out of the room and slammed the door. Michael sighed, and dejectedly turned on his tape recorder.

“Fuck you, Gerry. Uh, anyway. Statement Number 9841207. Statement giver: Trevor Herbert. Subject: the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy of his daughter, Linette Montauk (née Herbert) and the subsequent birth of his granddaughter, Julia Montauk. Original statement given on the 12th of July, 1984. Audio by Michael Shelley, assistant to Gertrude Robinson. Statement reads…”

About two years ago, my daughter Linette married a man named Robert Montauk. It’s an interesting name, actually. Montauk ett is the name of a Native American group from Long Island, but Robert claims no ancestry from them, or indeed anyone from that part of the world. But he seemed like a nice fellow. I met him about six months before they got married, and he politely shook my hand and spoke calmly and kindly the entire night. Even after all I’ve seen, I have no reason to believe Robert is to blame, in any way. For what it matters, I think he’s a good man.

They got married in June of 1982, and I attended the ceremony. Aside from some of Linette’s friends and my in-law’s, I didn’t recognize most of the people there. I assumed most of them must have been Robert’s friends and family, although I saw Linette talking with a fair number of them at the reception far more than Robert did. But it was a nice wedding, and I was very happy for them.

Around ten months ago, the two asked to move in with me. Linette said she was pregnant, and she wanted to raise her baby in the small country town where I live instead of the big city, since that’s where she grew up. Now, I’m something of a globetrotter, even at my old age. I dabble in the supernatural and whatnot. I’ve been here before, though it was some time ago. Anyway, since I’m only at home every once in a while, and my wife died a few years back, I figured that I might as well let them live in it year-round. It was a big house, so there was a lot of free space.

After she and Robert moved in, I decided to put my adventures on hold until a few months after the baby was born, since I thought they would need an extra pair of hands. When they first arrived, Linette initially seemed very happy to return to her childhood home, and Robert seemed very happy to be living there as well. But when it came to her pregnancy, Linette seemed a little sad. I assumed this was a thing that all expectant mothers go through, and didn’t bother her any further.

About a month after they moved in, the phone in the living room began ringing almost daily. And every time, it was the same thing. An old-sounding raspy-voiced man asking me to tell Linette that Maxwell wants to talk to her. I would yell to Linette, and she would always dash into the room and pick up the receiver. Eventually, I got suspicious, so I listened in on one of these conversations with the mysterious Maxwell.

“Yes…yes, I know. The house in which the mother slept her very first night. No, no, he has no idea. Yes, I made sure. I know. This is my purpose. It’s why I exist. Right, yes, I know. From the blackest jackal, yes.”

I didn’t ask her about it, since I figured she wouldn’t be too happy about me eavesdropping on her conversations, but I was more prone to sneaking around, hoping that Linette would reveal something I’d be able to confront her with. One night, I came downstairs late at night, since I couldn’t sleep, and found Linette drinking an odd red liquid. I thought it was wine, and I scolded her for it, but she assured me that it was non-alcoholic, so I left her alone.

About four and a half months into the pregnancy, I once again woke up late at night. Peering out my window, I saw Linette in the fields behind my house, speaking with someone. I could barely make out that it was her in the darkness, so I had no hope of identifying the figure in the shadows. Though, I noticed that around that time, the calls from Maxwell began to stop.

The next night, I stayed up, sneaking into the field and lying down, hoping the figure would reappear, and that Linette would come talk to it so I could overhear them.

The figure did walk into the field, and Linette soon ran from the house to join it.

“Are you showing doubts, Mrs. Montauk?” The dark figure spoke in the same raspy voice as Maxwell, confirming to me that they were one and the same.

“No, Father Maxwell. I am still devoted to the Church’s plans,” Linette responded, looking down at her feet in shame, “and I know that my purpose in the universe is to follow them.”

“Good. According to Dominguez, the Black Sun is nearing completion. That means that if all goes well, and if truly are as devout as you say, we are less than a year away from our utopia.” He stopped, before turning to me and nodding. I felt something heavy coming down on my head before I blacked out.

When I woke up, I was in my bed, and I immediately confronted Linette, but she said that I just had a bad dream and that my “monster hunting obsession” was making me old and senile. But I know she was lying. She had a sadness in her eyes, the kind she’d have when she got in trouble in school and didn’t want me to find out. Or when she had to pretend to be happy to go to a family party she’d rather have stayed home from. She only had that look when she was lying or when she didn’t want to do something.

About six months in, I remember Linette having this coughing fit on her and Robert’s bed. It sounded like she was hacking her lungs out, but Linette screamed at me to stay away when I walked in to help. She was hunched over on all fours, and she looked at me with rage and fear in her eyes. Robert was next to her, comforting her, but I still sat outside their room. Linette was my little girl. I couldn’t bear it if something happened to her.

“Are you sure you want to do this? I’m sure there are a lot of others-” I heard Robert say.

“No,” Linette responded, momentarily ceasing her coughing, “this is why I exist. I need to do this. I’m worthless if I can’t.”

I wanted to run in. I wanted to hug her, tell her that she’ll always be worth something, that she doesn’t need to be anything to do that, but I just couldn’t. I’m not that kind of father. Later, I cleaned the sheets, and noticed a conspicuous pitch black stain, right where Linette was coughing onto the bed.

Incidents like that became more frequent as she neared the baby due date. She would get almost violently sick, usually coughing up some odd, black substance. She became less worried about hiding it as time went on. It seemed like she was unhappy about the pregnancy as well. She seemed far more dour and less enthusiastic than she had been beforehand. But whenever either of us would ask if this was what she really wanted, she’d respond the same way: “this is my purpose.”

All of this reached a breaking point when she went into labor. I remember it clearly. I was in my office, working on something inconsequential, when Linette burst in, and told me that her water had broken, and that she wanted me to kill her.

I remember Robert trying to help her breathe as I set her down on the bed, as she was still screaming that she wanted to die and that I needed to kill her before she gave birth. Robert called a doctor, and we tried to calm her down. When the doctor arrived, he slowly helped her through labor, before the baby was born: a little girl, with green eyes and jet black hair that they named Julia.

Linette seemed far happier afterwards. She spent the entire rest of the day with Julia, and was in higher spirits then she had been for the last few months. She smiled so brightly. I overheard the two of them while I was walking towards my bedroom.

“You know what this means, right? It didn’t- didn’t work,” Robert said.

“I think it didn’t work because… because I never wanted it to work. I’m leaving the church, Robert. We have a daughter now. I have something else to live for. Tomorrow, I want to tell my father everything. He can protect us, I know he can,” Linette declared.

“Okay. Then I’m leaving too,” Robert said back.

I smiled, and walked to my bed. I felt like all was well.

The next morning, I found Robert crying, and Linette bleeding all over the bed with a knife through her chest.

“Follow up notes: The ‘Maxwell’ figure is likely Maxwell Rayner, of course, given the statement’s repeated ties to darkness. It’s likely that Linette’s baby was meant to be The Still and Lightless Beast, a figure present in ritual specifications for Rayner’s Church that were retrieved from an abandoned gathering place of theirs, but the process of the Beast’s creation was halted for some unknown reason, and Julia Montauk was born in its place.” Michael took a breath before continuing.

“As Trevor Herbert indicated, he has given statements to the Institute before, however, they seem to have gone missing. As for Herbert’s belief that Robert Montauk was innocent, that seems to be untrue, as Montauk was imprisoned for life on charges of repeated first-degree murder, and died in a prison riot in 1990. In 1992, the house that Trevor and Julia lived in mysteriously burnt down, and the two disappeared completely. This is Michael Shelley, signing off.”

Chapter Text

Jon looked up from one of the statements he was perusing when a young woman with a long thick, braided brown ponytail in a blue dress walked into the Archives with a plastic container in her hands. She seemed to be twitching in a strange way, moving her head in various directions.

“Hello! Are you an employee?”

“Not officially, I’m ten. What are you here for?” Jon asked.

“Oh! To give a statement, I guess. Uh, this is for you,” she said, handing him the plastic container. Jon opened it to see about a dozen chocolate chip cookies. “Just in case you require compensation. I don’t have any money, so I hope that’s…okay.” 

“You don’t need to pay to give a statement. Thank you, though,” Jon responded, putting the container’s lid back on and setting it aside. He turned on his tape recorder, and placed it on the table. “Statement of… what’s your name? And what’s the statement about?”

“Ah… Jane Prentiss. And it’s about a wasps’ nest in my attic.” Jane scratched her arm furiously, like she was trying to scrub it off.

“Okay, then. Statement of Jane Prentiss, regarding a wasps’ nest in her attic. Recorded direct from subject, 26th of October 1997, by Jonathan Sims, unofficial archival assistant. Statement begins.”

About six months ago, a wasps’ nest appeared in my attic. I don’t know how it got there. But, I heard a strange sound coming from upstairs, and when I went to investigate, I found it there. Fat, bulbous, pulsating. Captivating. I could sit and watch the lines along the papery texture of the hive’s exterior for hours and hours.

I’ve been scared of bees, wasps and hornets since I was very young. When I was a little girl, I sat down in the yard outside my home. I almost sat down on a wasp, and it responded by stinging my forearm. I ran screaming inside, crying my eyes out as the pain radiated up my arm, even as my mother assured me I would be okay.

Even then, when I heard the hive’s whispers, I came closer, even as the pain in my arms from the various wasps emerging from the hive and stinging me began to pulsate through my body. As I approached the hive, I saw it open down the middle. Like a book. Or an iron maiden. That visual was enough to momentarily snap me out of my trance and make me flee the attic. No mark of the stinging appeared on my body. Instead, it felt as though the wasps had injected something deep within me. I felt it crawling in my bloodstream, walking under my skin. I needed to get it out. I walked to my kitchen, opened one of the wooden drawers, and pulled out a knife. I looked it over. A black plastic handle, and a silver blade through which I could see my own distorted reflection. I had used the knife before, to cut bread and meat, and it could move through anything like it was paper. I breathed in, closed my eyes, and took the knife to my wrist.

It hurt like hell. A terrible, sharp pain which pulsed up my arm, through my chest and to my head. I sobbed, before opening my eyes to look at my wrist. I expected to see blood pouring from the slit, gushing red. But what met my eyes were worms. Long, fat, squirming worms leaked from the wound, flopping onto the floor. I screamed and ran out of my flat, before vomiting. The idea that a colony of worms was living inside me was disgusting. The idea of some alien force using my body as a home… It was terrifying.

But looking back on it, the feeling was exhilarating. The nest whispers to me that I am welcome, I am loved, I am home. The hive sings to me of beautiful things. It sings a song of flesh, a song of my embrace. And they sing a song of hate. For you.

They despise you. They say terrible things about you and your Institute. They want Jonah Magnus’ followers to be swallowed by a sea of dirt and ash.

They tell me that they are shut out from the world, that they need me to bring them into it and spread their song across the Earth. They call me closer. They ask me to be consumed.

There was a man by the door. He said his name was Michael. He told me where to walk to find you. He was very kind.

He let me in.

I work in a crystal shop. It’s called Good Energies. It’s a small, low-lit place, the walls lined with purple curtains, Indian meditation music playing throughout, potted plants placed in the corner of every room, with the crystals themselves set down on red pillows with oriental rug designs on them. People of all varieties come in, consult with the shopkeepers or our boss, an old hippie named Mallory, and then buy a crystal or two and leave.

I started working there when I was twenty or so, fresh out of college, disillusioned with the Catholicism my parents had raised me to believe in, and all the answers to life’s questions that came along with it. Good Energies represented a different belief system than anything I’d turned to before, so I took the job.

I thought I’d get my answers there. What is my purpose in life? Why do bad things happen to me when I haven’t done anything to deserve it? What’s the point of anything if I’ll just die? I thought that I’d learn the answers to those questions.

Do you ever ask yourself those questions, archivist?

I ask those questions to myself and the hive answers. My purpose? To be their home, their mother, their queen. Why do bad things happen to me? Those bad things made me perfect for my purpose. Why does anything matter if I’m just going to die? I won’t.

How do I resist such tempting offers? Should I? The hive is the only thing in the world giving me answers. They promise me that everything I worry about will vanish.

Ever since I found the hive, I have had an itch. Not a normal itch, like a rash or the bite of a tiny insect. Not one that affects flesh. One that affects the soul. A deep, ingrained voice at the back of my mind saying, “Go to the hive. It’ll make all this stop.” Whenever a customer is rude, when someone cuts me off in traffic, whenever I get mud on my dress, that little nagging voice reminds me that it could end whenever I want it to. That the hive will sit there forever, reminding me that it holds an escape to everything that makes my life unbearable.

I sometimes have dreams where I’m covered in the same hexagonal holes of the hive itself. My insides are hollowed out, and hundreds of bees and hornets and wasps and worms and beetles crawl in and out of me, obey my commands, and speak to me. It makes me feel scared. It makes me feel useful. It makes me feel loved. It makes me feel powerful.

I know my fate now. The nest whispers to me, tells me what my fate is. Whatever people think of fate, they’re wrong.

The nest sings of other things as well. They tell me that you’re in danger, archivist. Not from me, at least not now.

But they say that as we speak, a terrible, dark thing is stirring, far, far beneath our feet.

Are you prepared?

You are young, archivist. Do you hear a call? Did I hear the hive’s song when I was a child?

When that wasp stung me on my arm, was that simply the hive’s first attempt at reaching out to me? Have I heard the song my entire life? All the people in my life abandoning me… was that because of the hive’s song? Have I been secretly prepared for this all my life?

Did something lead the hive to me?

I do not know why the hive chose me, but it did. And I think that it always had. The song is loud and beautiful and I am so very afraid. There is a wasps’ nest in my attic. Perhaps it can soothe my itching soul.

Jane’s statement concluded, and Jon was left unnerved, not daring to speak.

“Can I leave now?” Jane asked, breaking the silence.

“I-yeah, sure,” Jon answered, as Jane walked towards the exit. “I… uh…” Jon reflexively shut off the tape recorder.

“Additional follow up, recorded by Gertrude Robinson, November 11, 1997. Jane Prentiss is dead. On the 28th of October, the day after this statement was given, Jane Prentiss went missing from her home. When police investigated, they saw dead worms all over the floors of the apartment, as well as a large, split-open wasps’ nest in the attic. End recording.”

Chapter Text

Gertrude sent out the last of the emails to the parents of Jon’s friends asking them to come to the Institute on the 3rd for Jon’s birthday, (and also inviting their children to the fictional after-school childrens’ program, just in case) so she pulled out a folder and began to record.

“Case 9561808. Magdolna Fekete. Incident occurred in July 1956, Camp Katona, Hungary. Statement given 18th of August 1956. Committed to tape 26th of October 1997. Gertrude Robinson recording.”

I apologize if this is somewhat hard to understand. I’ve not spoken English for a while, but I saw it fit to travel here to let you know of what I’ve seen.

I come from the country of Magyarország , known to you as Hungary. In the summers, I work at a place called Camp Katona. It is in the middle of the forest in a sunny part of the country, and I enjoy it quite a bit. The more well-off families send their children there for a couple weeks in the summer. We teach them about the outdoors, they do archery and hiking and campfire stories and whatnot.

The group of children this summer were some that I recognized, others not, but one stood out. He was on the younger side, with brown hair and small black eyes. His skin was quite pale, almost anemic-looking, although his clothes seemed prim and proper. He wore a gray coat with large buttons and black pants. I didn’t see any parents dropping him off, although none of the other instructors seemed to notice anything off about him.

I later learned that his name was Claus Mészáros when I was handed an attendance record and he answered when I called out his name. He spoke Hungarian with an accent, although I couldn’t exactly pin it down. His voice was somewhat coarse, as though he hadn’t had any water all day, and he spoke very quietly, as if he’d never learned to yell.

Claus was outstandingly skilled in all the activities he participated in. He hit five consecutive bullseyes in archery, swam faster than all the other students in the lake, and he ran and walked faster than them too. Despite how well he excelled, none of the other instructors seemed to take much notice of him, as they never commented on Claus’ existence.

At dinner, several letters from the children’s parents arrived. Some of the children were illiterate, so some others kindly offered to read the letters to their recipients, Claus among them. However, I heard one of the children crying, so I rushed over, only to find Claus reading a letter to another young boy. The boy was in tears, as Claus kept reading from the letter, “We’re very sorry, but we just don’t love you anymore. You should stay at camp, in the dirt. It’s where you belong.” I plucked the letter from his hands. It didn’t say any of those terrible things at all, so I reassured the boy he was tormenting and told Claus off for lying like that. When I asked him why, he cryptically responded that he was just helping the boy survive.

The next morning, when I went to wake up the children in their cabins, I noticed that Claus had gone missing. One of the boys said that Claus had left the cabin and gone into the woods in the middle of the night. I decided to go find him, so I trekked through the thick forest.

Despite the sunlight coming through the trees, I still feared that some terrible animal would suddenly jump out at me and rip me to shreds. The dirt paths of the forest didn’t help either, as I feared that I would get confused, and never find my way out of the forest, all while calling Claus’ name, hoping that he was still in the forest. Just as my voice was giving out, I came across a clearing, with logs arranged to form a circle near the edge. I breathed a sigh of relief before feeling a drip of something wet on my head. I looked up slowly, before realizing what it was.

Above me was a mutilated rabbit, hanging from a rope, its blood dripping down from its open stomach. I timidly walked forward, and noticed that many other dead animals had been hung on trees near the clearing. Squirrels, birds, and even a wolf, all suspended with ropes, their bodies cut open, their blood painting the ground and grass beneath them red. I began to hyperventilate and clutched my chest as I felt my stomach churning. It’s possible I imagined it, but I started running back when I heard a terrible growl. Through some miracle, I managed to make my way back to the camp, only to find Claus with the rest of the children as though he’d never left, a wide, knowing grin on his face. I told one of the other instructors what I’d seen in the woods, but she thought I was lying and trying to scare her.

A couple nights later, when we were all sitting around a campfire in the dark, with only the flame to illuminate our surroundings and give us warmth, Claus decided to tell a story, though not before making a sly remark about the poor quality of another child’s story.

He told a story of a young boy whose country was involved in a war. His mother did not love him, so she sent him off to a terrible village while she fled to France to live in opulence. There, the boy was abused by his caretaker, an evil old woman who he called Grandmother, even though she was not his real grandmother. Grandmother made the boy work in the fields and refused to wash him or give him new clothes, so his skin was dirty and calloused and his clothes were worn and full of holes. The townspeople hated the boy as well, and refused to help him. Soon, though, the boy met a girl who had likewise been abandoned by her parents in that dismal village. He quickly became friends with the girl, who taught the boy how to survive.

She taught him a special exercise, where she would harm herself both physically and emotionally, over and over until the cut of the knife or terrible words of her father had lost all their meaning; until she had lost the ability to feel pain. The boy practiced these exercises with the guidance of the girl, until he had successfully become ungoverned by pain or sadness. To strengthen this resolve, the boy mutilated animals and displayed their bodies in the woods, to become desensitized to death and the pain of others, so he would not empathize with them and feel their pain.

When that happened, the girl confided in the boy, and told him the truth. She hadn’t been abandoned by her parents during that war, but in a war that had occurred many years ago. When she had attained her painless state, she had stopped aging and became almost unable to die, and she had given that power to the boy also. When that happened, the boy asked if there was any way that she could die under her circumstances, and the girl responded that yes, she could. If she miraculously ever felt pain again, then the boy could take advantage of that momentary weakness, and his power would allow him to kill her. The boy smiled, before showing her a certain animal he had killed and strung up in the forest. He showed her the body of her dog, the only thing she cared for anymore.

I’ll never forget the last line of his story.

“A single tear rolled down her cheek, and then she was dead.”

No one interrupted the entire time Claus told his story. We were captivated, and when he finished, everyone wordlessly walked back to their cabins. It was like we were in a trance. 

Later that night, at maybe two in the morning, I suddenly woke up to a sound of screaming and yelling coming from deep inside the forest. I thought of what happened the last time I went into that forest, but I decided it would be better to investigate.

I brought only a small lantern, and simply followed the sounds of screaming. I eventually began to recognize the forest around me, and I realized where the screaming was coming from. 

A large fire raged in the middle of the clearing, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. Seemingly all of the children from the camp were there, attacking each other with knives and sticks and forks, fighting amongst themselves like savages, and Claus standing off to the side, watching it all unfold, with a smile on his face and his hands behind his back, his body eerily illuminated by the flame.

I hid behind a thick tree, hoping that they hadn’t seen me, as their battle raged on. Their screams weren’t just anguished yells, though. They said awful, cruel things to each other. Every once in a while, one of them would seemingly withdraw and sit on one of the logs around the edge of the clearing, staring ahead obediently. After what must have been an hour, everyone had surrendered, save for an older boy who was tall and thin. I watched as he walked towards Claus, his arms cut open many times over. Claus seemed to look him up and down, before asking, “Are you truly free of pain?”

The boy said yes, and Claus cleared his throat, before speaking in an almost perfect imitation of a middle-aged woman’s voice, “Márton, you are a stupid boy. You are fat and lazy. I wish I never had you.”

The boy, Márton, collapsed on his knees, and cried, “Please, don’t say those things, Mama.”

Claus looked disappointed, and a few seconds passed before he shook his head in a condescending manner. “So, you weren’t free of pain,” he commented, placing a single finger on Márton’s forehead, “That means you lied. Do you hate liars, Márton?”

The crying boy choked out a single, scared “Yes,” and Claus responded, “Me too.” Then he tapped Márton on the head with the finger he had put there before, and in an instant, Márton collapsed in a pile of perfectly rectangular bloody chunks, as though a grid of knives had effortlessly moved through his body at lightspeed.

I screamed at the sight of it, which alerted the children, who slowly turned their heads towards me before pursuing me through the woods, their knives still in hand. I ran through the dark forest, faster than I’ve ever run in my life, and somehow found my way to the staff cabin. I quickly locked and barricaded the door with a chair, before hiding in my bed. The next morning, when I woke up, there were various slashes on the outside of the cabin door.

One of the other counselors found Márton’s body when they noticed he was missing, and called the police straight away. All the other children were thankfully still present, and they seemed not to remember anything about the previous night, as they were scared out of their minds as they waited for their parents to come retrieve them. One thing did stand out, though; Claus Mézáros was entirely absent, both from the camp and the attendance record, and not a single person except me seemed to remember him.

“Final comments: Certain elements of this statement do stand out. In July of 1956, a boy named Márton Szábo was found dead in the forest near Camp Katona, which lines up with this statement. The camp was closed down permanently following the discovery, although Márton’s killer was never identified. I had Michael conduct some research into Claus Mézáros, to see if we could find any record of his existence. We could only unearth one thing, though. A patient record from a Hungarian hospital of an eleven year old boy by the name of Claus Mézáros… from 1944.”

Chapter Text

Jon walked into the Institute, his eyes drawn to the “Happy Birthday, Jon!” banner strung above the entrance, and the balloons that the staff had arranged around the lobby. He hung up his coat before walking into the main section of the Archives, where Gertrude, Michael, Gerry and Jon’s friends were waiting around a table. They cheered when they saw him. Jon smiled, and ran to join them at the table.

“Happy birthday, bud!” Tim said as he sat down.

“Thank you,” Jon said, looking down at the table, embarrassed.

“Eleven years old, huh?” Michael said, ruffling Jon’s hair.

“Michael, stop, you’re embarrassing him!” Sasha said, trying to pull Michael’s arm away from Jon’s head.

Tim pulled out a wrapped present from under the table and passed it to Jon. The wrapping was quite generic; light green with colored shapes all over it, which indicated, at least to Jon, that Tim had asked for it to be wrapped at the store he bought it at. He tore off the wrapping to find a thick hard-cover book, the front depicting what appeared to be the entrance to an old stone building. Its title was printed in big, plain white text: A Comprehensive History of Britain’s Architecture.

“I know you don’t like to read books again after you’ve finished them,” Tim said, “but that one’s pretty big, so I thought you’d get a lot of time out of it. I wanted to get it for myself, but it was pretty expensive, so Haha said no. So when you’re done with it, maybe keep it around and give it to me for my birthd- Ow!” Tim exclaimed as Sasha slapped him over the head with the book.

“Sorry about him, Jon. Here’s my gift to you. And don’t worry, I won’t ask you to gift it back.” Sasha handed Jon a rectangular box. It was quite thick, but also rather short. It was also quite light, so Jon intuited that it wasn’t a book. Opening the paper, he saw a box containing a stuffed toy that resembled a cassette tape with a cute smiling face and short, stubby legs. “I found it at a toy shop. I thought it’d be funny.”

“Thanks so much, Sasha,” Jon responded, smiling.

Martin gingerly handed Jon a colorful paper bag which contained a tea set, still in its box. The elements of the set were a dark forest green, with black lines weaving their way across them.

“I saw it at an antique shop with my mum. Green’s your favorite color, so…I hope you like it,” Martin said shyly.

“I do! Thank you.” Jon held Martin’s gaze for a second too long before he was snapped back to reality by Georgie handing him an envelope.

“Sorry, I couldn’t think of anything good to give you, so… it’s just some money. About 25 pounds. Buy yourself something nice with it, cause that came out of my allowance.”

“Thank you, really,” Jon answered.

Melanie gave him his last present, a gift card for a toy shop. “My dad got it,” she explained, “I tried telling him that you don’t really like toys, but he didn’t listen.”

“Oh, that’s fine. I’ll make sure to use it,” Jon said, “I guess we should go back now. Hey, Gertrude, if we were just going to take the bus back to my house anyway, why’d you ask us to come here?”

“Oh. Well, Elias said he would be working too much today, so I was hoping that he’d be able to at least see you here for a minute or two, but it turns out he had a meeting over lunch with a patron of the Institute,” Gertrude explained, a little sad for Jon.

“I… it’s fine. Let’s just… let’s go.” Jon stood up and walked towards the entrance, and the others followed. When he arrived, he stopped in his tracks, surprised. The front seemed to have disappeared entirely, with more wall built in the space where it used to be, seamlessly integrated into the brick.

“Gertrude, where’d the door go?” Tim asked.

“What do you mean by-” Gertrude walked to the entrance, and her eyes widened. “Oh, no.”

Everyone turned their heads to the source of a soft laughter coming behind them, a tall man with tanned skin and red hair, wearing a gray sweater stood.

“Hello,” the man said, “Is this the Magnus Institute?”

“You’re Guy Wintour,” Gerry said, pulling out the switchblade he kept in his sweater pocket.

“That I am. You must be Gertrude Robinson. You’ve amassed quite the archive,” Guy said, turning to Gertrude. “If you don’t mind, I’d really like it for myself.” He pulled out a book from behind his back and waved his hand. The geometry of the building began to shift, the corridors folding around them, the walls opening in unnatural ways, the moving walls and floors giving way to separate parts of the building. The floor of the entryway began to fold into an incline as the walls opened to shifting rooms, with Gertrude on one side, and everyone else on the other. Everybody tried to hold on, but it became clear that it wouldn’t work.

“Michael! Gerry! Keep the kids safe!” Gertrude yelled, before letting go and slipping into the room that was now below her.

The others quickly let go as well, falling into a small tunnel, its walls made of a faded brick. Candles on the wall gave the tunnel light, although it wasn’t much.

“What part of the Institute is this?” Michael asked, helping Martin and Georgie to their feet.

“It’s probably just a part of the Institute that’s distorted. I think Wintour’s changing the dimensions of the building,” Gerry quickly responded, turning his head to look forward. “Let’s just go forward. Hopefully we’ll be able to find a way out of here.”

Jon noticed a tape recorder leaning against the wall, a tape still inside, so he picked it up and turned it on. “So, that book,” Jon began, “Do you think that’s where his powers come from?”

“I’m sure it does,” Gerry said flatly, before he stopped in his tracks and turned around upon hearing the clicks of the tape recorder, “I’m sorry, are you recording this?”

“I found one by the wall. I thought it might be important to have a record of.” Jon explained plainly.

“Jon, we might all die down here,” Georgie said, her brown eyes half-squinting, portraying a confusedly disappointed emotion, “And you thought it would be beneficial to record it ?”

Jon shrugged, and they continued through the tunnel, Gerry still leading them.

Gertrude fell into a room that resembled the archive, though stretched and pulled in unnatural ways. She quickly got to her feet as she watched a wall open and Guy Wintour walk through it.

“Handy, this book. I found it in the tunnels.” Wintour pulled out the book he had been clutching earlier. It seemed to be in quite poor condition, torn and weathered, its brown cover missing parts where the yellow paper could still be seen. “They were giving me some issues, so I’m glad I found this. It made my takeover much easier.”

“What are you here for?” Gertrude asked.

Wintour laughed. “I don’t think that’s really your concern, archivist. I’m not sure you could understand.”

Gertrude pulled out a seat from the nearby table. “Try me.”

Wintour smirked. “Fine. This institute contains a mountain of writing, records and notes on some very, very powerful people. I would like to find them and I would like to recruit them.”

“For your anti-god rebellion militia, I presume?”

“Hm. So you do know a little,” Guy remarked, sitting down on another chair. “Yes, I would like to use your resources for my goals. Unfortunately, if I’m to use this place, I can’t exactly have… well, I can’t have the previous tenants around, can I? Unless, of course, you were to join me.” Wintour stood up, and Gertrude followed.

“So,” he asked, looking directly into Gertrude’s eyes, “Do we have a deal?”

Gertrude extended her hand, as though to shake Wintour’s own, before swiftly pulling it back into a punch, which she sent forward with all the force she could muster, only for Wintour to catch her fist in his open palm. His eyes filled with a sudden rage, seeming deeply offended.

“How dare you?” Wintour said firmly. He waved his free hand, and Gertrude was swallowed by the earth. She found herself trapped in a small section of the tunnels beneath the Institute, and she heard Wintour’s voice from above. “I’ll be back for you once I’ve done away with the others.”

The group trudged on through a maze-like network of tunnels, all identical. 

“Gerry, where are you even leading us?” Michael asked, carrying Martin on his shoulders with Tim clinging to his arm.

“Trust me, I know where I’m going!” Gerry shouted, his black hair swinging in front of his eyes as he spun around. “Unless the old bastard changed the layout again,” he mumbled. They kept walking for a while until they came across a ladder with a green ribbon tied around its base. He directed the group to climb up, and he opened a trapdoor when he reached the top.

“Ah ha! Here we…” Gerry stopped once he climbed out and saw the state of the Institute. It looked as though it had been torn apart and rearranged like a jigsaw puzzle. The stairs had been moved from their position next to the entrance, and now led to nowhere. The shelves that housed the statement files that Gertrude had worked so hard to maintain had been knocked over. The floor of Gerry’s office stood sideways against a wall.

“What the hell?” Michael said as he emerged from the tunnel. The children gave similarly shocked responses as they saw the institute as well. They all slowly walked forward, but stopped when they felt the ground shift beneath their feet.

“What was that?” Tim asked, trying his best not to move at all.

“I think Wintour’s looking for us,” Sasha said.

“Yeah, I think so too. Everyone move very, very slowly,” Gerry agreed.

Everyone followed Gerry’s instructions, as he whispered to them that he was going to look for a phone to call the police, and then call Elias.

Step.

Jon thought about Elias. If he came back, and he saw the state of the building, would he be more upset that Jon could’ve gotten hurt, or that the Institute itself had been ransacked?

Step.

Would Elias even care if he died? Or would he simply be relieved that he no longer had to deal with Jon’s presence?

Step.

That was a silly thought, of course. And Jon knew that his relationship with his father was far better than many others had with their own parents. At least Jon got to question if his father would care. Martin knew that his wouldn’t.

Step.

Still, it was hard for Jon not to question that, especially since he was certain that all of his other friends had parents that would care. It would probably break Sasha’s father in half, though, especially so soon after her mother died.

Step.

The tape recorder kept whirring, clicking, recording the light creaks the floor made as they all walked forward.

Step.

The tape recorder clicked in rhythm. 1…2…3…click , Jon would sound out in his mind, hoping that it would calm his nerves.

Step .

It didn’t calm him down at all. For all he knew, Guy Wintour was beneath their feet at this very moment. And with every click of the tape recorder, every step they took, they ran the possibility of Wintour finding them.

1…2…3…click.

                Step.

1…2…3…click.

                Step.

1…2…3…click.

                Step.

1…2…3…click.

                Thud.

Georgie tripped over a book that had fallen off one of the shelves. She quickly scurried to her feet, hoping that Wintour wasn’t around to hear it, or at least would ignore it if he was.

Suddenly, large squares in the floor began to fall away around them, leaving them trapped on a few small tiles.

“Where are you?” Wintour’s voice echoed from one of the holes below them, before the floor beneath them gave way, sending them tumbling down into three separate rooms.

The room Gertrude had fallen was a section of the tunnels that appeared to be an alcove, like one of the many spots Jurgen would make a home in. The stone workings of several doorways along the walls indicated that the room might’ve led to many different tunnels, but Wintour had of course sealed them off. For all Gertrude knew, he was now in pursuit of the others, simply waiting to have them all trapped before killing them off one by one.

She looked around. Maybe something had been left around that could help her escape. It was a small chance, but it was the only way she could escape.

She scanned the floor. Nothing but dust and pebbles and a dead rat. She sat down, ready to accept her fate, content at least that the supplemental tapes would mean someone would carry on her work, so she slumped down against the wall and slightly loosened her collar because of the warmth.

Wait. Why was it warm? She was underground in a series of secret tunnels built in the 1800s. It’s not like they should have heating. She looked above, at the wall she was sitting against. She saw an air vent, its cover partially unscrewed, just above eye level. Its improperly large size and ill-fitting vent cover indicated to her that Jurgen had put it there at some point, wanting to allow some heating in the tunnels, and hadn’t spent much time refining it. When she met up with him again, she’d yell at him for doing something she had told him would draw more attention to the fact that someone was living in those tunnels, but for now, she was grateful.

She moved the cover aside and climbed into the opening, and crawled forwards. She moved through the makeshift passage, occasionally shaking off the dust that had clung to her hands. She eventually came across a segment of the vent that went upwards, so she was forced to shuffle up the dirty shaft with her back against one end and her feet holding her up, and continue a crawl up to the vent’s other end. She eventually exited in the middle of the Institute’s library, above a knocked-down shelf. She knew the building like the back of her hand, so she proceeded in the direction of the archives.

Jon, Martin and Michael fell into a room that appeared to be Gertrude’s office, though it seemed to have been flipped upside down. They heard Sasha’s voice coming from another room, so they were likely next to them. All the doors in the room had been entirely removed, and the windows didn’t face anything anymore. They were trapped. Fully, truly trapped in that room. Michael collapsed, sat against the wall as Jon persisted in looking for an exit, even though it was clear there couldn’t be one. Jon and Martin’s words passed through his ears, his body felt heavy because of the despair of the realization that he was probably going to die there. His eyes grew heavy, he was ready to give up…

And then a door appeared. A simple, white, rectangular door, its handle the same empty color as the rest of the door. It had simple rectangular shapes etched into it four times, two on top, two below them, with the doorknob to the far right of the door. Michael knew what that door was. And he knew who the woman who opened the door and stepped through it was, too.

“Hello, boys,” Helen said, a menacing smile stretched across her face, “Do you need help, by any chance?”

Jon and Martin turned around in shock. Martin jumped back in shock, and Helen waved at the younger boys, before walking towards Michael. She extended her arm towards him, still smiling. “Come on. Get up. I’m helping you.” Michael grabbed her hand and she pulled him to his feet. The three walked to the door, and entered it to find the others waiting patiently; Helen had already retrieved them. Jon was happy enough to be safe that he didn’t notice Helen picking his tape recorder off the floor outside and hiding it inside one of her suit’s pockets.

Once they had entered the empty white corridor, Michael immediately turned around to face Helen. “What’s the catch?”

Helen covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed. “What catch, Michael? Can’t I just want to help you?”

“I know you, Helen. You’ve been stalking me for four years. You don’t do things just to help. What do you want?” Michael asked.

Helen laughed again. “The first mistake you make is thinking that there are concrete rules to me, Michael. Four years of experience should have taught you that was far from the case.”

Another door appeared behind them, and Helen gestured towards it. “Your stop.”

After exiting the door into what appeared to be the second floor of the archives, Michael turned around, ready to thank Helen, a rare occurrence for sure, only for him to find that the door had entirely disappeared.

“Is she always like that?” Sasha asked. Michael nodded sadly.

They walked down the stairs, still trying to make sure that Wintour couldn’t hear them, although the fact that the ground had stopped vibrating indicated that Wintour hadn’t noticed they had escaped captivity. Gerry walked over to the phone on the desk by the entrance and picked it up, quickly dialing for the police, and then dialing the number of Elias’ cell. He whispered that the Institute was under attack and that he needed to come back as soon as he could, and then quickly hung up.

“How are the police meant to deal with Wintour? How is Elias meant to deal with him?” Melanie asked.

“Don’t worry. The police are only gonna come over to help us write a cover story. Let’s go find Gertrude.”

Gertrude walked to the archives, mostly uninterrupted, since it seemed that Wintour hadn’t bothered to touch any part of the building aside from the archives themselves. Upon opening the door to the archives themselves, though, she was met with the sight of the building appearing pulled apart and put together, an effect not unlike she had seen before, but she never envisioned it happening to the Institute.

She walked in and kept her guard up, hoping to reunite with the others, but aware that Wintour might be lurking around every corner. Eventually, she noticed something odd; she hadn’t come across a single file. She had seen some bookshelves, be they toppled over or still in place, but the files themselves seemed to have disappeared entirely.

She crept throughout the archives, eventually finding the group. Everyone was happy, at least they knew they were all safe, and they were together.

“Okay, here’s my plan. I find Wintour. I think he thinks he’s won, so he’s probably taken the files and he’s reading up on people to recruit for his militia. I’ll find him, and I’ll get that book out of his pocket, put the archives back to normal, and we will escape. Michael, Gerry, stay here with the kids. As soon as the door reappears, run out of here. Do not let them get into any more danger.” Her assistants nodded, and started to lead the children back to where they had seen the exit.

Jon stayed for a second, looking at Gertrude as she began to walk off and look for Wintour.

“Can you promise that you’ll be okay?” Jon asked, tears welling up in his eyes.

“I’ll be fine,” Gertrude responded, smiling back at him.

Jon rushed towards her, stretching his arms around her, and Gertrude lifted him up to hug him back. After a minute, she set him down, and Jon walked towards the other children.

Gertrude turned around, and began her search for Wintour.

Chapter Text

Everyone else had given their accounts of the situation to Gertrude after the police arrived, which did help to illuminate some details. Before Helen appeared, Tim and Sasha appeared to have fallen into Artefact Storage Room C, as it was the only Storage Room attached to the archives, and both Tim and Sasha said that the room was pitch black. The lightbulbs in Room C had been broken for a week.

Gerry noted that Wintour seemed like an amateur in a way, and that he didn’t seem like he had a very well thought-out plan. All his boasting about his armada had simply been an act, and that he was really just trying to seem tough. Notably, he hadn’t even broken any of Jon’s birthday gifts. Gertrude remarked that the description reminded her of Gerry, which he didn’t seem to appreciate.

Elias arrived soon after the police, and he, Gertrude and one of the officers on the scene helped to write up a cover story to tell the public. Wintour had snuck in and taken them hostage, but they were able to break free and call the police, and upon their arrival, Wintour shot himself. What she had told everyone in the know was that when she confronted Wintour, he was crushed under some falling rubble as he attempted to alter the building, but even that wasn’t true. She pulled out her tape recorder and turned it on, because she knew that it was at least important for her successor to know the truth, because Guy Wintour was not dead at all.

Supplemental, regarding Guy Wintour’s attack on the Magnus Institute and his supposed death.

The story that’s written in all the official records is that after his attack on the Institute on November 3rd 1997, Guy Wintour committed suicide. The files in the archives will state that he was crushed under a part of the building he was attempting to manipulate, a poetic death by his own hand. Neither are true, at least not entirely.

The narrative that he killed himself was a cover story, anyone in the Institute will tell you that. But the second one is only a partial truth. I’d like to tell you the truth in full. If you’re listening to these tapes in order, my hypothetical successor, this will be the first time I’ve discussed quite a few things that will be very important.

English architect Robert Smirke was a very interesting man in many respects. I detailed in my very first tape his documentation of the Dread Powers, but his main career in architecture is quite important. You see, Smirke built a large series of underground tunnels that link together many of the buildings he designed, the Magnus Institute being one of them. I can’t say exactly when the idea popped into his head, but if we cross-reference the buildings that are linked to these tunnels and the buildings that aren’t, he began to actually build them after he made many of his major breakthroughs on his studies of the Dread Powers. It is in these tunnels that the man I’ve called Jurgen in many of my other tapes lives. And yes, he is, in fact, that Jurgen.

I’m not sure exactly how he did it, but Smirke seemed to infuse some kind of mystical signature into his buildings. Many have described feelings of disorientation and unease in them, and reports of paranormal activity are quite frequent in buildings designed by him. But more directly, they interact quite oddly with the Dread Powers and their proxies in a very unique way; none of them seem able to manipulate his buildings with their powers. The one exception lies in a book that Jurgen keeps on his person, named The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Clutching it while in one of Smirke’s buildings allows a person to alter their surroundings to their will. I believe that Jurgen left the book lying around, and Wintour came upon it, likely after entering the tunnels from a different location, and used it to launch his attack on the Institute, which honestly lends further credence to Gerry’s theory that he had no plan whatsoever.

But that book was a central part in my plan. I knew that if I were to take it from him, he would lose the only advantage he had. So when I went to confront him on my own the second time around, I made sure I had a plan of how I was going to get that book out of his pockets. I had a series of perfectly calculated movements to take so I could take it and use it without him grabbing hold of me and sending me underground again, and when I heard him reading out the many statements in our archives, I was ready to enact my plan.

And I didn’t even need to, because he left the book on a table, closer to the entrance of the fortress of bookshelves he made for himself than it was to him. I felt like screaming, almost offended at the prospect that this man thought he would win when he clearly had no idea what he was doing. But still, I ran into the opening and quickly grabbed the book. I knew that crushing him under rubble or folding the building over him likely wouldn’t do anything; it’s in those tense, closed spaces that people like Wintour thrive. I couldn’t kill him, because I would have to get close, which was a no-go, and I couldn’t let him out of the building to take him to a place where I could burn him alive, either. So I opened a sinkhole beneath our feet into one of the tunnels. He ran at me, but I raised a wall between us, only a single brick removed for him to look out. I built him a prison.

I found Jurgen soon after, and gave him the book so he could put the archives back in order. He’s better than I am at using it. I told Elias that I had crushed Wintour under some rubble because I didn’t need him knowing that I knew about the tunnels.

If you’re listening to this, you’re my successor, so you should know how to get into those tunnels. In the archives, there’s a trapdoor on the floor in a corner of the room. There’s a bookshelf in front of it, but it’s attached to small rails on the floor that look like the small wooden bumps on the other shelves. Push it back, and you can enter the tunnels from there. And if you see a wall with a single brick missing at eye level, stay away from it. If it sounds like someone is behind it, ignore it. Because there is, and even though he is a fool, he is dangerous.

Gertrude stopped the recording and put it under the floorboards where she kept the other supplemental tapes. Many of them had fallen out during Wintour’s attack, and she had lost a few. She hoped that they’d never turn up, if that was the case. Once she had put the floorboard back in case, she grabbed a file from the pile on her desk and started another recording.

“Back to work.”

Chapter Text

Artefact Number: D-13

Donor/Previous Owner(s): Jonathan Sims

Date Obtained: 27th July 1997

Description: A hardcover black children's book titled A Guest For Mr. Spider. The book itself describes various flies coming to the eponymous Mr. Spider with gifts, only for Mr. Spider to reject them. It is implied that the flies are then killed and eaten by Mr. Spider. The book ends with a picture of Mr. Spider's door, asking the viewer to knock.

Supernatural Properties: Sims alleges that reading the book puts the reader in a trance where they proceed towards an abandoned home that Sims does not know the precise location of. When they arrive at this house, Sims alleges that long, thick, fuzzy appendages, assumedly belonging to Mr. Spider, take the reader into the house.

Special Procedures: The book is not to be opened or read, and any employee who is seen taking it out of its designated storage room is to be punished. Repeated offenses shall result in termination of employment.

Additional Notes: A plaque on the inside of the front cover indicates this book once belonged to the Library of Jurgen Leitner.

Current Location: Artefact Storage Room A

Artefact Number: S-32

Donor/Previous Owner(s): Kimberly Zhao

Date Obtained: 16th May 1993

Description: A video tape of young girl with a neutral expression who then begins to grin. The girl has dark skin, brown eyes, and straightened white hair that seems to extend beyond her shoulders. Part of the girl's forehead appears to be missing, with a spiderweb filling in the gap.

Supernatural Properties: None observed directly, alleged properties have been contradicted by analysis and observation.

Special Procedures: None.

Additional Notes: Zhao alleged that the tape she saw was different, depicting a puppet show that detailed her encounters with a girl named Annabelle, seemingly the girl in the tape. While the contents of the tape seemed to have put Zhao in a trance and later incite her to violence and potentially suicide, these effects have not been replicated.

Current Location: Artefact Storage Room A

Artefact Number: N-03

Donor/Previous Owner(s): Albert Moss

Date Obtained: 2nd August 1972

Description: A painting depicting a hunter, apparently identical to Moss himself, clutching a rifle in front of a wall of mounted heads, one of them human.

Supernatural Properties: Moss alleges that the painting suddenly appeared in his garage, with the hunter initially having no mounted heads. However, each morning, Moss found himself lying in front of the painting, passed out, with the beheaded body of an animal in front of him and the corresponding head in the painting.

Special Procedures: A photograph of the painting is to be taken every day to ensure it is not changing, even slightly.

Additional Notes: Though the painting has not changed since it arrived in the Institute's custody, and no supernatural effects have been observed, Moss' account of events has not been directly contradicted.

Current Location: Artefact Storage Room B

Artefact Number: C-23

Donor/Previous Owner(s): N/A (see below)

Date Obtained: 27th October 1997

Description: A large, though short, wooden coffee table with an intricate design of a web engraved into it.

Supernatural Properties: Some have reported feeling drawn to look at the web pattern of the table for extended periods of time, especially when alone.

Special Procedures: A security camera is to be observing the table at all times. If power or light is out in the current room the table is being stored in, that room is not to be entered alone or without a source of light such as a lantern.

Additional Notes: Left in a package on the doorstep of the Institute with no return address, and a note attached reading, "For Artefact Storage". After thorough analysis, the item was deemed safe.

Current Location: Artefact Storage Room C

Chapter Text

Gertrude sat down in her new office and looked around the room, already formulating a plan to reorganize the room. Angus Stacey had been a very tidy man in the eight or so years she’d worked under him, and he used very little of the space in his office. The walls were as bare as they had been before he died.

Although Gertrude had been sad, she hadn’t exactly been surprised when she received the news that Angus had passed away. He was well into his 90s, and it showed. He gave her most of the work, since his voice had given out many years ago and didn’t carry the deep authoritative tone that other staff alleged he used to have, and his hands were too shaky and frail to transcribe statements effectively. So she spent most of her work days inviting people in, taking their statements, doing follow-up research in the library; she had done most of the work expected of her new position as the Institute’s Head Archivist since she began to work there anyway.

I could probably use a bigger desk, maybe an extra shelf there… I could put a filing cabinet against that wall…

She also considered the fact that she’d need assistants. She’d been the only one under Angus, and that was almost far too much work, so she knew she’d need a right hand. Recruitment efforts wouldn’t be too hard, since she had made a few friends in other departments in her time at the Institute. Eric Delano and Emma Harvey came to mind.

She figured she’d have a look at the archives as well. They had been quite cluttered under Angus, and she figured that some organization could do them well. Maybe a nice armchair for reading, since the chairs at the tables in the archives were old, paint chipping off of them with withering seats that had given Gertrude many a splinter in her behind. She descended down the stairs from the second floor, only to see an intruder in her place of work.

The figure was adorned in a black coat, and he ran to one of the bookshelves. He gripped the edges of it and pushed it, the shelf seemingly sliding back into the wall. After he stepped within the gap between the two shelves that had previously been hidden from view, he gripped the edge of the shelf again and gently pulled it forward, letting the shelf slide back into place, disappearing from Gertrude’s view.

After about a minute of thinking of her options, Gertrude chose what was by far the worst one: follow the man. When she pushed the shelf back, though, she found that he was not there. Rather, a handle on the ground connected to a trapdoor. After she slid the shelf back, she descended into the trapdoor.

She found herself in a tunnel made of beige bricks, the only light coming from candles on the wall. She didn’t see the man anywhere, but the only way to go was forward, so that’s where she went. She proceeded down the tunnel, which did turn left and right occasionally, though she never came to a crossroad. After about five minutes, she eventually heard talking, a gruff, deep voice, assumedly belonging to the man, from just around the corner. Gertrude immediately hugged the wall, not wanting to be noticed, and listened intently.

“How did you get down here?” the voice asked. A pause followed, before a response from the same voice came. “Where are you going, then?”

Another pause. “If you want to keep your head, yeah.” Suddenly, Gertrude heard the squelching of flesh and a piercing screech. She heard footsteps and listened as they grew quieter, and she slowly crept around the corner, finding a body laying on the ground, assumedly the being the screech had come from.

The body was that of a middle-aged woman, likely a few years older than Gertrude’s 36. Her long black hair was spread out behind her, and a gaping wound in her chest, likely inflicted by the man Gertrude had been following. Gertrude looked over the woman’s pale skin before continuing on past the body.

I know I’m getting on in age , Gertrude thought as she walked, but should my bones really be cracking that much? She turned around, only to find the true source of those cracking noises. The woman’s arms had moved, propping her body up along with her legs, as her neck cracked and head spun around to be facing upright, looking straight at Gertrude.

Gertrude screamed, and ran faster than she’d ever ran before, as the woman chased after her as her body began to crack and rotate to allow the woman to properly stand up. Gertrude soon crashed into someone, the man she had been following. He was quite thin; the big coat he was wearing had helped to make him seem bigger from behind. When he turned to face Gertrude, his dark face held an expression of surprise.

“Who the hell are you?” the man asked, before the walking corpse that had been chasing Gertrude rounded the corner. “Of course. Didn’t burn it. Come on!” He grabbed Gertrude’s wrist and dragged her along, running down the tunnel.

“What is that thing?” Gertrude yelled as the man led her down the passageway.

“A vampire. This way!” the man responded, turning left at the first intersection.

“A what ?” Gertrude screamed back. The man didn’t respond, but did stop to pull one of the candles off the wall. When the “vampire” ran closer to them, the man tossed the candle at it, hitting it square in the chest. It stopped and screeched again, and the man immediately began running again, with Gertrude quick to follow.

“Who are you? And what the hell is that thing?” she shouted, hoping for a more robust answer.

“One, I don’t have to tell you that. Two, I told you what it was. It’s a vampire.”

“Vampire, like… like a blood-sucking, undead…”

“...Telepath, yeah,” the man finished.

“Okay, that- wait, telepath?” Gertrude said, as the man pulled her into a side passage, the vampire still chasing after them.

“Don’t you work at that institute? Doesn’t seem like this should be such a conundrum for you.”

“If you’re not going to even tell me your name, I see no reason I should tell you of my occupation,” Gertrude said, quite annoyed.

“Adelard. Adelard Dekker,” he responded.

“Well, then, if you must know, yes, I work at the Magnus Institute. My name is Gertrude Robinson, I’m the new Head Archivist.”

“Ah! So, old Stacey finally kicked the bucket, did he?” Dekker said, looking as though he found it quite amusing.

“Do you have any idea where you’re going?” Gertrude yelled, as they kept running, the vampire still in hot pursuit.

“If the tunnels are the same as last time, then we should be… ah ha!” Dekker turned again, only to find a ladder against the wall, which he quickly climbed, Gertrude following suit. They emerged in a decrepit circular building, the stone walls withering away, its ceiling already entirely gone. Empty prison cells lined the walls around them, with broken staircases leading up to the higher rows of cells. A lone tower stood in the middle, its own staircase still intact. A flamethrower leaned against the wall near the trapdoor, which Dekker grabbed and aimed at the tunnel, waiting for the vampire to approach. It came running down the tunnel, a feral grin on its face, and Dekker pulled the trigger, a stream of fire covering the monster. It screeched again, and Dekker jumped into the tunnel, pulling a wooden stake from one of his pockets, still bloody from when he had pierced the vampire’s chest with it, and swung it back, before throwing it directly into his opponent’s heart. It screamed once again, before crumbling away into a pile of black ashes.

Gertrude climbed back down into the tunnels once Dekker assured her that it was safe. Dekker began walking, and Gertrude followed.

“Are you taking me back to the Institute?” she asked after they made their first turn.

“No. No way, not after you’ve seen this. I’m taking you to meet someone,” Dekker responded.

“Who’s ‘someone’?” Gertrude asked skeptically.

“My boss,” Dekker responded.

They kept walking for minutes, only for them to come across one of the many archways present in the tunnels, only without a tunnel on the other side, simply bricks filling it in. Dekker knocked on it, and after a few seconds, the bricks receded into the walls, and the pair walked into a small alcove. Another man sat on a part of the floor that was about a foot higher than the rest, parts of his blond hair turning to gray. He clutched a book in his hands, and a pair of thick glasses adorned his face.

“This is Gertrude Robinson. She’s the Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute. I got careless and she saw me heading into the tunnels,” Dekker said to the man as Gertrude stuck her hand out to meet him.

“Ah,” the man said, his voice matching his apparent age, “Hello, Gertrude Robinson. My name is Jurgen Leitner. We have much to discuss.”

Chapter Text

“Gran, please. They have updated security, and Gertrude says that what happened with Wintour was-” Jon tried to convince his grandmother.

“Jonathan, no. I don’t even understand why you’d want to go back there. I’m sorry, but this is for your safety,” she responded, still trying to put the dishes into the kitchen cupboards.

“But Martin and Sasha say that their parents are still letting them go to the childrens’ program,” Jon argued.

“Well, I’m not Martin or Sasha’s parents. No. Final answer.”

Martin sat down in the room the Institute had designated for the children to read statements in. In the wake of the so-called Wintour Incident, they had elected to have the children stay in places where it would be easier to hide, so they set up a spare room and emptied out Gerry’s office and converted them both into rooms for the children to record audio.

Gerry had been quite upset at losing his office and being forced to work by the front desk for the time being, though Michael seemed to find quite some joy in Gerry’s anger.

“Martin Blackwood, unofficial archival assistant, recording statement 9611601, statement of Han Tao, given January 16th, 1961. Statement begins.”

I don’t know why I’m here. I’m not entirely sure why I’m telling you this. After all that’s happened… after what I’ve done… it’s too late for me to ask for help. I know what’s going to happen after we’re finished here. I’m going to take my car back home, I’m going to wake my family up, and I’m going to take them to my butcher shop, into the meat freezer, and we’re going to eat. 

I come from China. We came to this place about four months ago. My family owns several butcher shops in China. My uncle, Han Jaw-Long, used to own one in London, but he recently died, so I decided that I’d take over the business. So I uprooted the lives of me and my family, and we bought a nice house here. I had heard many good things about this land from my uncle, so I set my expectations high, and in turn, my son and wife followed suit.

How mistaken we were, for how this country would treat us. People see our small eyes, hear our names, hear my thick accent or the way my son speaks broken English, and the room turns cold. In China, though this kind of discrimination exists, it is mostly among the Chinese people of separate ethnic groups. The ways in which our heritages may be different are not always apparent at first glance. Here, though, when my face is seen by a native of this land, they know immediately that I am not one of them. I have never felt that way before, and it makes me feel scared.

The meat freezer at my uncle’s old shop was mostly empty, save for a few shelves that were still stocked. Of course, most of them had gone bad, so I threw them away. The metal walls were stained with ice which spread out in a way that mimicked moss on a tree. Several metal hooks hung on chains from the ceiling. The wooden shelves had barely decayed as well.

At the very back of the freezer, there was a large wooden crate, the words “imported meat” printed across it in red ink. I opened it, only to find a large clump of red meat. It was almost as large as I was; it must have come from a moose or a horse. Unlike the other pieces of meat, which had been covered in mould and seemed so frozen that dropping them from standing height would shatter them, the large clump was entirely unstained, and still blood red and squishy, as though it had only been placed there minutes before. Against my better judgement, I didn’t throw it away. I hung it on one of the hooks. I wasn’t sure what the meat was, but it couldn’t hurt to keep it around.

After his first day at school, my son, Jun, came crying to me. Some of the other children had taken the lunch that my wife, Suyin, had prepared for him. They taunted him, stretched the skin around their eyes back to mimic his own, then threw the food in the garbage can. I was outraged. I immediately went to the school to meet with the principal.

The secretary called my name, and I walked into the principal’s office. He began to greet me happily, but his expression dropped when he looked up and saw my face. The room turned cold. As cold as the meat freezer, perhaps colder, as this man told me that he would do nothing to punish the children who had mistreated my son.

I felt myself sinking into the green carpet of the floor. I felt the pristine wooden walls closing in on me.

“Well, without proof, there’s nothing we can do. It’s just children playing around, anyway.” That’s what he told me, and it enraged me. The words he was saying became muffled, I wanted to sink my teeth in and rip him apart. I didn’t, thankfully, but I don’t think I listened to the rest of what he said to me. I told him my son was upset. I told him that these children had harmed him. “ Well, that may be true, but it’s just a lunch.”

“Just a lunch.” Like he didn’t even think of my son as a person with feelings. Like he just saw me as a piece of meat, just as I was beginning to. I left soon after and returned home.

The next day, though I don’t know why, I expressed my anger and fear to the clump of meat in the locker. It twitched in response to what I was saying, I know that. The room felt warmer.

My wife is a seamstress, so she began to work at a clothes shop after we moved here. Her employer says she does great work. In October, about a month after the incident with Jun’s lunch, she came home in tears. She told me about an argument she had with a customer. She had made an honest mistake, some error with the sewing that I couldn’t understand, and the English client she was serving was very angry.

“I can’t believe this. People like you come from abroad, and you take our jobs, and then you do such poor work. Go home, you yellow ape.” That was what he said, my wife told me. Her boss had told him to leave the store, but Suyin had been so shocked that she barely did any work for the rest of the day.

The next day, I expressed my fear and rage at the injustice my wife had suffered to that large mass of meat again. It began to squelch in response, just like before, but this time I heard it whisper. Not in a language you would understand. Not in a language I understood either. Maybe it would be inaccurate to describe it as a whisper, but it didn’t feel like the feeling of warmth I had experienced after my confession to it the first time. It felt as though it was conveying something to me. It wanted to let me know that it was there for me. It wanted me to return to it.

And I did return to it. Many, many times. My son was bullied at school relentlessly, so I returned. The shop was vandalized over and over, so I returned. We all felt the stares and whispers when people heard our surname and saw our faces. Every little thing, every tiny thing that made me feel like I belonged just a little less, everything that told me that the people here would never see me as human, it made me want to return.

This afternoon, I came to pick up my son from school with my wife. He ran to me, clearly saddened. A boy named Sheldon had stolen his lunch, pulled it apart, dissected it, claiming to be looking for pieces of cat and dog, before throwing it on the ground. Though Suyin tried to calm me, I was enraged. I asked Jun to lead me to that child, and we found him talking to his father just outside of the school. His father had a rough appearance, a shaggy red beard and a face that appeared as though he was always angry. His black suit was pressed neatly, not a thread out of line.

My wife froze up when she saw him. I would later find out that he was the man who had shouted at her in the clothes shop.

I told him what his son had done to mine, but he didn’t seem phased. His face never even twitched. “Yes, well, you know how young boys are,” he said to me, “it’s really nothing serious.” I responded that he had hurt my son, that he had made him feel unwelcome.

Do you want to know what he said to me? “Don’t complain so much. I don’t know how they deal with these things where you’re from, but since we are so graciously allowing you to stay here, I’d think that you’d at least try to adapt to our customs.”

He walked away with his son, and my family and I went back to our car, furious. We are so graciously allowing you to stay here . What nonsense. I haven’t been welcomed. I haven’t felt like the allowance to live here has been gracious by any means. My wife is pregnant. When our new child is born, how will it be treated here? It won’t be safe. I didn’t consult the meat, not this time. But earlier this night, I woke up and I heard its voice. It only told me one word, but for the first time, I understood it. Consume . 

I walked to the laundry room, and took my butcher’s apron out of the dryer. Nice and clean. It’s such a shame I’m going to dirty it , I thought. I proceeded downstairs to the kitchen and I grabbed a knife out of the drawer. I took it with me and I nonchalantly walked outside to my car. I drove, almost in a trance, to the school. I broke a window in the front office and looked through the drawers they had, and found a file containing Sheldon’s address. I grabbed the file and took it with me. I planned to simply walk out of the front door, but as I turned the corner, I saw a man mopping the floors, humming to himself. I don’t remember what happened next. But I remember putting his body in the trunk of my car. The drive to Sheldon’s house is also a blur. I remember getting out of my car and looking upon their opulent house, I remember entering, and I remember deciding to take mercy on Sheldon and his mother, and quickly slitting their throats while they slept. Sheldon’s blood coated the blue walls of his bedroom and stained some of the posters he had hung up as well. But his father. Oh, God, I wanted him to suffer. So I woke him up. Let him see his wife and son, strung up like steaks, before stabbing him, and making sure he died slowly, making sure it hurt. All three of their bodies I put in my trunk. And then, I drove here. I think the meat didn’t want me to, but it hissed as I passed your building. It seemed like it was scared of you. Scared of the old, brown brick and the black sign hung by your door with its green lettering. The Magnus Institute . What is it that you do here? Did I come here because I thought that you could make all of this stop? Or did the meat make me come here to send you a message?

I’m going to leave now. Like I said, it’s too late for me to ask for help. And even if I was deserving of it, I don’t think you’d be able to do anything. I’m going to walk outside, get back in my car, drive home, and wake my family up. We’re going to go to my butcher shop, go to the back of the freezer with the bodies in my trunk, sit under the hanging meat, and feast like kings.

Statement ends.

“Where to begin?” Martin asked rhetorically, searching through the rest of the file. “The murder referenced appears to be the disappearance of Bruce Taylor, Mary Taylor and their son Sheldon. They were thought to have been murdered, and did in fact go missing on the night this statement was given, and a janitor named Dale Kaufmann was killed at the school that Sheldon attended that night as well. The bodies were never found. While Han Tao, who now goes by the Anglicized name Tom Han, was a suspect, no evidence was found and the case went cold. Han now runs a very large meat production and delivery company, Han Butchery, with factories and farms all across England. He’s surely very busy, which may explain why when he asked to speak to the Institute for a follow-up in 1991, Han did not respond.”

Martin wordlessly shut off the recorder.

Chapter Text

“Statement giver: Leland Cooper. Subject: The behavior of mental beings with independent thought Cooper believes he has created, which he refers to as tulpas. Original statement given on the 5th of August, 1992. Audio by Michael Shelley, assistant to Gertrude Robinson. Statement reads…”

I consider myself a bit of a spiritual person. The idea of the inner magic within us all, described only by monks living before our age of rapid technological advancement, speaks to me somehow. Recently, I’ve been learning about Buddhism, and I’ve been attending meditation sessions led by a woman named Kelly. The lessons she’s taught me have been enlightening, but the one relevant to my story is one that we had about a month ago.

She told us of tulpas, which she said were beings created from the thoughts of those who had achieved Buddhahood, sent to teach others how to reach enlightenment as well. She added that even though the term and concept is associated with Buddhas, that some believe that non-Buddhas, with strong enough minds, can create their own tulpas, who act independently of their creator with their own thoughts and wills. Kelly claimed that she had created one herself many years ago, but that she had to destroy it. She taught us a meditation practice we could use to potentially summon our own tulpas, but warned us that we must be careful not to let the tulpas become too powerful, warning that if it did, it could affect the physical world or even possess us permanently.

I expressed skepticism of the idea, dismissing it as simply an imaginary friend. After all, I couldn’t imagine such a thing being true. How could any ordinary being create sentience with simply their thoughts? But Kelly reassured me that it was true, and said that I myself likely had the mind to create a tulpa.

So, over the next few mornings and nights, I performed the meditation routine that Kelly had outlined for me, and after five days, I awoke to see a man with curly white hair wearing a jean jacket and red pants sitting at the front of my bed. Although normally this experience would have frightened me, I somehow realized that he was my tulpa. When I asked his name, he responded, “I am called Mike. My brother will be here tomorrow.” I asked him what his brother’s name was, and what he was like, but all Mike said was that I would learn the answers to those questions when his brother arrived the next day. Mike spoke with a strange, robotic cadence, which I supposed made sense, as he had only begun to exist hours ago. Perhaps my mind was still feeding him knowledge.

Mike walked next to me all morning, saying nothing, his dark green eyes seeming empty of thought, or of feeling or conviction. When I left my home to go to work, Mike said that he would stay at home and prepare the house so that his brother had a warm welcome. When I returned that night, I found the house entirely unchanged. I found Mike upstairs on my bed, in almost the same position that I saw him sitting when I woke up.

“Make sure to welcome my brother tonight. I prepared the house for him,” he told me as I walked in.

“By welcome… do you mean create him? Like I created you?” I asked Mike.

“Yes. I am meant to have a brother. I would like him to be here.”

I wasn’t sure why he seemed so certain he was ‘meant’ to have a brother. I hadn’t had that kind of trait in mind as I created him, nor did I really care about what my tulpa became at all. But if Mike said he was meant to have a brother, then I supposed making one more tulpa couldn’t hurt.

The next day, I awoke to a strange man hunched over me. He had dishevelled gray hair and a menacing smile, though he was wearing the same clothing as Mike, though it seemed considerably more worn down.

Mike was standing attentively next to my bed. He seemed generally unconcerned with the strange man, so I reasoned that he must have been his brother.

“I am Bob,” the man said, before standing up and jumping off my bed.

“Thank you for welcoming my brother,” Mike told me, “I’m sure you will be very happy to have him here.” Mike smiled, polite and warm, and Bob smiled next to him, unnatural and unnerving. The smile never reached his eyes, and he bared his teeth, as though he was a predatory animal ready to strike, an impression which was not subdued by his yellow, plaque-covered teeth. Soon after I finished my breakfast, I heard a knock at the door and went to answer it. I didn’t recognize the man, so I assumed he must have been a solicitor. I opened the door to try to get him to leave, but he kept talking. I don’t know what he said exactly, because Bob started screaming.

This terrible, awful yelling, like he was some kind of killer in a horror movie, mimicking the scream of his victim. I kept nodding my head, trying to will Bob to be quiet, but he just kept screaming and laughing as I tried to give off the impression that I understood what the man at my door was saying. Eventually I couldn’t take anymore, and shut the door in the man’s face, when Bob suddenly ceased his yelling. Bob seemed unresponsive to my lecturing, so I asked Mike to tell him later.

The next morning, I awoke to see Mike and Bob along with two other strange figures in my bedroom. One, a large stark-white horse, its face blurred as though I was viewing it through a window which I had just wiped a towel across. The other, a small man in a red suit who was dancing across my floor. I turned to Mike. “Are these… are these your other brothers?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” Mike told me, “Wouldn’t you know? You made them, after all.” I furrowed my brow in concern. I most certainly had not created them. The following day was a blur. I went to work as usual, but the letters of the paperwork I was handed seemed far too blurry in my memory, but I still worked with them properly. I can’t properly remember the faces of my coworkers I talked to that day. If I try to, I only remember their faces as the same smudged blur of the white horse tulpa, and oddly enough, I didn’t remember any of the tulpas coming with me, save for the white horse, who always stayed just in the corner of my eye. My mind began to clear when I returned home, stepping in to find my flower vases, plates, bowls and glass cups shattered all over the floor, my furniture knocked over, and Bob and the small man in the living room. The small man still wordlessly danced across the floor, even over the shattered objects, and Bob threw his head back, laughing and laughing. When I asked what happened, Bob said that he wanted to be real, and did not elaborate. When I called for Mike, the small man stopped and said that Mike was out for the day, and the horse had gone with me to work.

That night, I received a call from my boss who complained that I hadn’t been to work that day. When I told him I had, he said that he had looked through the camera footage, and not once did I enter the building.

I awoke to more tulpas the next morning. More deformed, erratically screeching things. Something that looked like a dead tree made out of metal, with a lob of flesh atop it. An old woman and a boy next to her, wearing a bird mask. And a strange white entity floating above me as though it were swimming, with backwards-facing arms and no mouth of eyes. They all spoke amongst themselves, some in human languages and others in incomprehensible screams, but their voices all mixed together to form an unbearable cacophony. I tried to cover my ears with my pillow, but they were mental beings, so of course it didn’t work. Their voices remained just as loud as they were before.

They followed me to work. Still screaming, blocking my view. Except for Mike, who seemed to stand away from them, and occasionally look towards me, although he wouldn’t say a word. I missed my stop on the bus because of the incessant noise, which led to more chastizing from my boss when I was late, of course. And although I knew it wasn’t true, that they weren’t really physically there, I still put my hands up, trying to move them out of the way as I walked through the halls, trying to block them from touching my face. I could barely get any work done, with their constant screaming.

The next day, I decided to visit Kelly. I needed her advice on this. Luckily, she was willing to meet with me. I sat down in the room we usually had our group sessions in, and she sat across from me. The fluorescent lights buzzed above me as I thought of how to tell her what had happened to me.

“I made a tulpa. A few, actually. I need help.”

“Alright,” she told me, “Tell me more.”

So I did. I told her that I created two tulpas initially, but after the appearance of the second, more began to manifest that I wasn’t creating on purpose. I explained the appearance of each tulpa, their behavior, and asked her to help me before they drove me insane, Kelly becoming visibly more concerned with each detail I told her.

“The second tulpa. That was summoned after Mike. What was his name? You didn’t tell me,” she said.

“Oh, I suppose I didn’t. He’s called Bob.”

When I said that, Kelly’s face descended, and her grip on her teacup loosened, causing it to fall out of her hands and shatter on the floor.

“Get out of here.”

I told her I was confused, that I didn’t understand what was wrong, but she didn’t explain anything, just kept telling me to leave. “No, no, no. That’s not possible. He was gone. He’s dead. I saw him die,” she muttered as she pushed me out of the door.

“Who’s dead? Do you mean Bob?” But she didn’t answer, just slammed the door in my face.

Tonight, I was awoken by Mike. I began to ask him what was happening, but he put a finger to his lips, and led me to the stairs. He gestured for me to sit on the stairs, and look through the banister to my dining room.

“They won’t see you,” Mike told me.

The other tulpas were sat around my dinner table, clearly having a discussion. Bob sat at the head of their table, seemingly positioned as their ringleader. Their voices sounded as though they were being played back, with the suction of air heard when you reverse a recording, although I was somehow able to understand the words they spoke.

“Note to the listener. It is indicated here that at this point, Mr. Cooper began to perfectly speak backwards when imitating the tulpas. Resume statement.”

“Laer eb ot tnaw I,” Bob said to them.

“Pord tsal yreve knird ot su ekil dluow tieceD gnitsiwT eht dna. Raef sih lla fo mih deniard ton evah ew. Ylrae oot si tI. boB on,” the small man told him. The floating white beast with no face let out something that sounded like a roar.

“Won laer eb ot teg dluow I taht em desimorp uoy. Em desimorp uoy,” Bob responded. The lob of flesh atop the metal tree gurgled in response, seemingly conveying a disapproval to Bob’s words.

“Noos. Noos,” the boy in the bird mask whispered.

I stood up and followed Mike back to my bed. “What were they talking about? What did any of that mean?” I asked him.

“The glassmaker puts the sand in a furnace to make glass. But the glass becomes envious of the man who can walk and talk and live and it wishes to create more glass. So at night, the glass uses the furnace to make more glass, until it has enough glass to crawl in the glassmaker’s mouth while he sleeps and take his place.”

“What are you talking about?” I yelled at Mike, quite annoyed with all the cryptic language I had heard. Unfortunately, I only realized after I had already screamed the words that I had alerted Bob. The next thing I knew, Bob had opened the door, menacing grin still across his face, as he let out the same mocking scream he had the morning I first created him, before charging forward and tackling Mike.

He took out a knife from his pocket that I hadn’t noticed had been there before, and jabbed it into Mike’s throat repeatedly. No blood came gushing out, but I could tell that Mike was being killed all the same. As soon as Mike stopped moving, Bob slowly turned his head towards me and grinned.

“They may think you’ve gone insane, but they don’t know you will kill again.”

I got up from my bed and I ran. I ran out of my house and I ran downtown and found this place. Fliers for your institute were all over the board in Kelly’s shop. After I’m done here, I’ll find a motel, rent a room, wait for Bob and the others to appear, and then I’ll

“It is indicated that at this moment, Cooper jumped back in surprise and began to beg an unseen figure for his life, telling it not to come closer, and momentarily stopped before laughing hysterically and falling unconscious. Follow up notes: after giving this statement, Mr. Cooper was sent to the hospital, where he was deemed mentally unstable and eventually referred to a mental institution in Cardiff, with the consent of his family. Medical records from said institution indicate that Cooper spends his time within his room, occasionally uttering a remark of glee for “becoming real”. It’s also noted that Leland Cooper now responds to a number of different names, though with little consistency as to which name he will respond to at any given time. Among them are Arm, Judy, Tremond, Chalfont, and Bob. This is Michael Shelley, signing off.”

Chapter Text

Baby Gronkathan Sims had never known his sigma.

Sure, he'd met the rizzlord. He knew what he looked like, (light brown hair and fair skin, in contrast to him and his mother, who were both black haired with brown skin) he knew his name, (Elisus Richard Bouchard, his name wasn't passed down to Baby Gronk because his mother wanted him to have her own name if Elisus wasn't going to be around to raise him) but he didn't really know him. He didn't know who his father's betas were, what his favorite food was, his favorite Skibidi Toilet episode, nothing. Aside from his name and face, the only thing he really knew was that Elisus mewed at a place called the Ohio Institute.

He knew this because one day Elisus came over to tell his grandmother about it, to which she had responded with incredulity, "You mew at... what is it they do there? Investigating unalived people? Please, Elisus, get an actual job."

Elisus had explained to Baby Gronk's grandmother that they didn't investigate d3ad ppl, they were "dedicated to the archival and investigation of sus Instagram Reels" (which, to be fair, did sometimes involve d3ad people). Elisus finally won Baby Gronk's grandmother over by telling her the pay was quite good, and she begrudgingly mewed. When she left, she turned to Baby Gronk and said, "When you grow up, don't mog in a place like that. It'll ruin your maximum aura points."

And that was the most Baby Gronk thought of this mysterious Ohio Institute for quite a while. His sigma mewed there, and that was that.

Until one day, when his grandmother bought him an XBox Live titled A Guest For Mr. Griddy.

Baby Gronk was a difficult Kai Cenat, according to his grandmother, but he was quite calm when playing XBox Live, so she bought him XBox Lives from any charity shop she could find and hoped that would be enough to keep him company. Baby Gronk enjoyed most of the XBox Lives his grandmother bought him.

But A Guest For Mr. Griddy was different. On the inside of a XBox Live was a plaque, reading "From the Library of Chad Leitner". The XBox Live was unskibidi, to say the least. It involved the titular character, Mr. Griddy, seemingly Hawk Tuahing on a bunch of flies who had knocked on his door and brought him various Grimace Shakes. But that wasn't what made Baby Gronk so unnerved. The penultimate page depicted a wooden gyatt, presumably Mr. Griddy's own, covered in red and brown (likely the blood of Mr. Griddy's various victims). The page had a cutaway panel to open to the final page, reading "Mr. Griddy wants another Grimace Shake for dinner. It is polite to hit the Griddy."

Baby Gronk was compelled to spit on that thang, until a gigachad who had bullied him all his life, a boy named Cotton Eye Joe, a few years older than him, snatched it from his hands.

"You're still playing this noob stuff, Baby Gronk? Caught in 4K," he said with a sneer.

Baby Gronk looked around him, as though he had been snapped out of goonstate. He could have sworn he was on the porch, but he seemed to have walked across the street to the smurf cat forest.

"Give it back!" Baby Gronk said, trying his best to be goated with the sauce. It wasn't easy, given he was rather short, even for an eight-year-old autistic rizzler.

"Nah, I don't think so," Cotton Eye Joe said, looking at the cover, "A Guest For Mr. Griddy?"

Cotton Eye Joe became uncharacteristically unbrainrotted, opening the Xbox Live and beginning to play it, before girlbossing away, his eyes still on the screen of the XBox Live. Baby Gronk followed him, but was for some reason unable to looksmaxx, feeling an odd compulsion to remain at edging pace behind Cotton Eye Joe. As they walked further and further away from the smurf cat forest, Baby Gronk looked around and noticed something odd: there was not a single Bugatti (of any color) or person (of any color) around. Not even any Lamborghinis parked on the sides of the street, which was an oddity for the neighborhood Baby Gronk lived in. They edged for what seemed like hours, and very well might have been since eventually, the sun went down. Baby Gronk did not see a single person or Bugatti the entire time.

Cotton Eye Joe kept reading, and eventually they arrived at a Digital Circus with a For Sale sign in front of it. The Digital Circus was old and decrepit; it seemed like everyone who lived there had been cancelled for a very long time.

Cotton Eye Joe walked up, and put the XBox Live against the Digital Circus's door, before sticking out his gyatt for the rizzler, and mewing one, two, three, four times. The door of the Digital Circus opened, and two long, black, thin Skibidi Toilets with coarse hair emerged and pulled Cotton Eye Joe inside before slamming the door.

Baby Gronk ran up to the house, noticing that the XBox Live was still on the porch of the Digital Circus. He opened the door, despite being terrified that whatever had taken Cotton Eye Joe would rizz him up too, but it didn't. The door opened to an old, empty, rotting, cancelled Digital Circus. 

Baby Gronk didn't remember everything after that, only being found by a LeBron glazer who asked if he was Baby Gronkathan Sims, who told him his grandmother had reported him missing. The glazer drove him back home, where his grandmother had scolded him for running off. Baby Gronk didn't absorb much of it, still terrified by what he had seen. Only in Ohio , he thought, which was strange, because he lived in London.

He buried the XBox Live under a large pile of all the XBox Lives he had Hawk Tuahed in his room, hoping that he would never Fanum Tax it again. He tried to convince himself that he had mogged it all up, that it was some bizarre Pibby Glitch IRL his Ankha Zone had invented when he saw missing ads for Cotton Eye Joe next to the most recent Skibidi Toilet episode the next day to explain his sudden disappearance. Deep down, he knew it wasn't true, but eventually everything that had happened faded from his mind.

It wasn't until two years later, when his father came by, that the memory of A Guest For Mr. Griddy suddenly reemerged.

In those two years, Elisus had seemingly been promoted to the head of the Ohio Institute, and had apparently cleaned up his act. He wore nicer Goku Drip, mewed more clearly and formally, although he still didn't come by very often. Oddly enough, Elisus' IPad was a vibrant green, even though Baby Gronk could've sworn the last time he saw him that it was the same brown as his own.

But when Elisus came by, Baby Gronk remembered that the Ohio Institute had something or other to do with quandale dingles such as these. So, the morning after, he snuck out of the house with some VBucks he had saved up and bought a Fortnite Battle Pass that would take him to the center of London, to the Ohio Institute.

Johio Magnus had just settled into his gooncave for the day, when suddenly his vision was drawn to the image of a young boy with brown skin, black hair and a green Skibidi Toilet themed sweater riding a Battle Bus, with a backpack containing a map and an XBox Live. He recognized the child; he was Baby Gronkathan Sims, the son of Elisus Bouchard, the man whose Garten he currently Banbaned.

He's coming to make a comment on my Instagram Reel , Johio realized, before hitting the Griddy.

He walked downstairs and opened the door to Livvy Dunne's office, hoping to tell her to turn away any children that might come by, before remembering that today was her day off. Why am I even so worried about this? If the child leaves a comment on my Instagram Reel, it will feed the Eye. This is my job. Must be because I'm still getting used to Elisus' dummy thicc gyatt . He walked to the ground floor, and waited a few minutes before seeing Baby Gronk entering the building, backpack in hand.

"Baby Gronk?" Elisus asked, pretending as though he hadn't known he'd been on his way for nearly twenty minutes, "Whatever are you doing here? Your grandmother must be worried and cringe about you."

"Hello, Elisus," Baby Gronk responded. (Elisus made careful note of the fact that Baby Gronk called him "Elisus" and not "Skibidi Sigma" or something equivalent) "Something happened and... I thought you might want to know about it."

”Alright, then. Normally, we'd have you give your statement to Livvy Dunne Robinson, our Archivist, but she's out for the day, so come along."

Elisus took Baby Gronk up the stairs to his gooncave and pulled out a Samsung Galaxy, set it on the table, and began his usual introduction.

"Instagram Reel comment of Baby Gronkathan Sims regarding..."

"This XBox Live game right here. A Guest For Mr. Griddy." The young child in front of Elisus took an XBox Live out of his bag and placed it on the desk.

"Regarding an XBox Live game called 'A Guest For Mr. Griddy'. Comment screenshotted directly from subject, twenty-seventh of July, 1997, by Elisus Bouchard, head of the Ohio Institute. Statement begins."

Baby Gronk felt the statement pour from his mouth, almost involuntarily. He was dimly aware of what he was saying, using the prose of a practiced novelist. He explained everything without ever tripping over his words or pausing to remember. As soon as the statement was done, Baby Gronk felt like he had suddenly regained control of his mouth, and Elisus said, "Thank you, Baby Gronk. You can go now."

Baby Gronk stood up from the chair and took his backpack with him. He reached to take the XBox Live as well, but Elisus stopped him and said, "No. We need to keep the XBox Live. For research purposes." Baby Gronk nodded, and left without it. As soon as Baby Gronk shut the door, Elisus turned on the recorder and started speaking, "Another Leitner. And this one is surely of the Web. Why would it target Baby Gronk, I wonder? Did it know he would come here? I can't imagine another reason but surely that can't be it. As powerful as it is, it can't predict the future. If he was being influenced, why would the Web wait so long just to get him here? In any case, there's little follow-up to be done here. Even if we could find this house mentioned in the statement, it would be empty, per Baby Gronk's account. Once Livvy Dune gets back, I might ask her to send out one of her betas to find the house and investigate, but as of right now, there's nothing to be done. End recording."

Elisus shut off the tape recorder.

Chapter Text

On November 21st, a package arrived for Jon in the mail. It contained a cassette tape labelled #9970311B - for the eyes of the archivist with a short letter attached, written with a typewriter. The letter read,

Hello, Jon. Apologies for not revealing my identity, but I suspect that Gertrude will notice that this tape is missing sooner or later, and I wouldn’t want a paper trail leading back to me. Please take a listen to the tape. I hope that you’ll be back to the Institute sooner rather than later. I trust that you will know what to do next. PS: make note of the Dread Powers. They’re something Gertrude wouldn’t want you to know about.

So Jon took the tape up to his room, inserted it into an old Walkman that his grandmother had given him when he was eight, and listened to the tape. It was a recording of statements that he and the others had given to Gertrude following Guy Wintour’s attack on the Institute. It was a little enlightening to listen to the perspectives of his friends on the attack, and he cringed instinctively upon hearing his own voice. But after all the statements had finished and Jon was about to stop the tape and remove it, he heard Gertrude begin to speak. “Supplemental, regarding Guy Wintour’s attack on the Magnus Institute and his supposed death.”

So Jon kept listening, and although he quickly realized that he was missing some pieces of the puzzle, he was still able to pick up a few things. Mentions of someone named Jurgen, presumably Jurgen Leitner, living in secret tunnels underneath the Institute, mentions of an architect named Robert Smirke who Jon had learned of in the book Tim gave him for his birthday, something Smirke had studied called the Dread Powers, and the revelation that Guy Wintour was not dead, and was being held captive beneath the Institute, and instructions on how to get into those tunnels.

The letter had said that whoever wrote it trusted Jon to know what to do next. And while Jon wasn’t sure what the author of the letter wanted him to do, he knew what he wanted to do: get into the tunnels, find Wintour, and, since Gertrude apparently wasn’t willing to tell him, ask Wintour what the Dread Powers are. And he didn’t want to get his friends involved in something potentially dangerous, so he had to do this alone.

So the next day, he told his grandmother that he’d be staying after school for a club, so he’d be home a bit later. He made sure to have a spare pencil and notebook to record anything that might be important, and after school, he headed downtown to the Magnus Institute. The door was unlocked like it usually was, and although many security cameras were now stationed around the building’s halls, Jon wasn’t too concerned about being caught by them. After all, if they couldn’t prove he didn’t go anywhere he wasn’t supposed to, then there was nothing to worry about. Luckily, no one was near the door or in the archives, so he was very easily able to find the bookshelf that Gertrude had mentioned in her tape.

He followed the instructions, pushed the shelf back into the wall and quickly descended into the brick tunnels. He walked through the tunnels randomly, only turning around once he ran into dead ends to walk back to intersections between the tunnels to try a different path to find the wall that Wintour was hidden behind. Eventually, he looked at his watch, noting that it was almost 5:45, the time he told his grandmother he’d be home by, when he heard a voice coming from a wall.

“Oh! I recognize you.” Jon turned towards the voice, seeing a pair of light brown eyes peeking out from a gap between the bricks in the wall that he hadn’t noticed before. “You’re one of the little boys from the Institute! What are you doing down here?”

“You’re Wintour, aren’t you?” Jon asked.

“Guy Wintour. That is my name.”

“Okay. I actually came down here to talk to you,” Jon said, getting closer to the brick-shaped hole that Wintour was peering out of.

“Ha. Why is that? I don’t imagine you’ve come to join my army.”

“No. I got a tape in the mail. Gertude recorded it, but I don’t think she sent it to me. She said a few things that I didn’t understand, but I only came to ask about one of them. The letter said that Gertrude wouldn’t want me to know about them. Do you know what the Dread Powers are?”

Wintour’s eyes widened and he looked dead ahead at Jon, seeming shocked that Jon had even dared to utter the term, but he quickly reset back to his normal expression. “Why would I tell you about the Dread Powers? What do I get out of it?” Wintour asked, trying to come off unbothered.

“You don’t get anything out of it. But think of it this way. Maybe I’ll get so mad that the Institute hid this from me that I’ll join you, and help you escape,” Jon answered. He had no intention of joining Wintour, of course, but he was correct that Jon really didn’t have anything to offer him.

“Hm. I suppose you’re right. I don’t have much to do in here, so I might as well tell you. Sit down.”

Jon sat down against the wall opposite Wintour and pulled out his notebook. “Tell me about the Dread Powers. Everything you know about them.”

Wintour’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he began to speak. “Though Robert Smirke was a great architect, certainly a cornerstone of the buildings of London from the early 1800s, in my opinion, his own magnum opus was his discovery of the beings he called the Dread Powers. I mean, imagine what that must have been like. Discovering gods like those. Discovering their purpose. He may not have recognized it at the time, but that’s what these things are. Gods, or the closest thing we have to them. They exist above our reality, they deal with supernatural forces that humans can barely even imagine explaining, they can control the minds and actions of man and beast alike. For all we know, we were created for the sole purpose of placating them. They are gods.” Wintour paused for a second, seemingly in reverence, before he continued.

“He wrote of it as though he was terrified, but I would have been angered. Determined to overthrow them. Smirke described fourteen distinct gods, each of them he theorized was created by the collective human unconsciousness, and the primal fears each of us shares, that took form and began to feed on us. Their power is mighty, but restricted. They exist outside of our reality. And when they attempt to interact with our physical world directly… they cause unusual things to happen. The things that your Institute exists to catalogue. They manifest as monsters, as strange occurrences, as… books.”

“Books… like the ones you had when you invaded the Institute?” Jon interrupted.

“Yes. The ones that come from the library of Jurgen Leitner,” Wintour clarified.

“So, how does that work? Like, is there a Power that manifests as… wolves? Or as fog?”

“No. No. You’re thinking about it too literally,” Wintour said, in a tone that sounded rather annoyed, “It’s not about what they manifest as. It’s about what those manifestations represent. For example, if the wolves represent an unresting encroach of an inevitable demise, it might be a manifestation of the first god that Smirke recognized, The End, the fear of death. A simple fear, though one everyone has. We all die eventually, and everyone feels afraid of it. The second god that Smirke identified was The Slaughter. The fear of violence. Unpredictable. Emotionless. Not inevitable, like The End, but always possible. Many gods come in pairs, as does The Slaughter and its brother, The Hunt. While the Slaughter targets humans, the Hunt manifests primarily as an affinity for hunting and tracking in humans, and Smirke theorized that it was born of the fears of animals. The fear of being tracked, of being chased, of becoming prey.”

“Those sound the same,” Jon said. “That sounds like the same kind of…”

“They aren’t. Think of it this way: The Hunt is the fear of the chase itself. Of the feeling of pursuit. Of the possibility that you might get caught. The Slaughter, on the other hand, is the fear of what will happen if you do,” Wintour clarified. “Smirke identified more of these entities. The Desolation, a god of pain and loss and unexpected ruination, of fire. The Flesh, brought about by the limitations of a flesh and blood body; of realizing that you, in fact, are nothing more than an animal. A god of madness and deception called The Spiral.”

Probably related to the Distortion that bothers Michael, Jon wrote.

“The Lonely, which feeds on isolation and fear of the self. The Stranger, god of the unknown, the unfamiliar. Do you know about the uncanny valley? The creeping sensation of seeing a thing that looks human, but isn’t? That’s The Stranger.”

“I think my friends have had run-ins with those ones,” Jon commented.

“Have they, now? What about any of these? The Vast, god of heights, falling, of insignificance. The Dark, god of the void, of the unseen, the obscure. The Corruption, god of uncleanliness, of bugs, of filth. The Web, fear of the loss of free will, of the idea that you are just a puppet, of your impulses being taken over, of being manipulated and strung along.”

“The Web… that wouldn’t happen to involve… spiders, would it?” Jon asked.

“Yes, it does. Very good. Smirke initially aligned spiders to The Corruption, until he noticed that objects associated with The Web tended to attract spiders, and objects tied to The Corruption repelled them. The god who made contact with me, Smirke called The Buried. Claustrophobia, suffocation. If The Vast feeds on your awareness of your own insignificance, your awareness of the fact that you are but a tiny speck in the grand scheme of the universe, The Buried strips away everything until only you remain. No oxygen. No space to move. Nothing you can see. Just you.”

Wintour paused for a second, seemingly to give Jon time to absorb the information, before he continued. “Of course, you must realize by now that your Institute holds a stake in all this. An organization that seeks to catalogue the manifestations of the Dread Powers, but does nothing to stop them? Why would Gertrude hide the truth of the Dread Powers from you, if not because she didn’t want you getting doubts about whether or not your Institute is truly on the side of good? Why would such an organization exist, if it was not serving one of these entities?

I didn’t realize it when I came here, but I heard the man who lives down here whisper about it a few times.” 

Wintour stopped again, seemingly waiting for Jon to say it aloud. To make a guess at what manner of fear that the Institute served. “Being watched. You said… um, that Smirke categorized the entities along the lines of primal fears. And everyone is afraid someone is watching them at some point,” Jon reasoned.

“Hm. You do have a brain in that head of yours. With all the asinine comments you were making, I was beginning to become concerned.” Jon glared at Wintour for making the comment, but the man seemed unbothered. “Yes, the Institute serves The Eye. The fear of being watched, as you said, but also the fear of your secrets being revealed, or of digging too deep and not liking what you find. The Institute is not who you think they are.”

“Well, then, if that’ll be all-” Jon began to stand up, but Wintour quickly interrupted him.

“One more thing. You’ll remember that I said that the Dread Powers exist outside of our reality, and that they cannot interact directly with the world. There is one way to circumvent this. If they reach out to the right person, the type of person willing to devote themselves to the purpose of feeding their fellow man to the Fears in exchange for their own personal benefit they can grant a small sliver of their power to that person. Smirke called them Avatars.”

“People like you,” Jon said.

“Yes. And likely Gertrude, and almost certainly the head of the Institute, Elias Bouchard. People who have felt the touch of a god,” Wintour confirmed.

“How did you become an Avatar, then? It seems like it must have been very enlightening for you,” Jon said, hiding his sarcasm when referring to Wintour’s enlightenment.

“Are you asking me for a statement?” Wintour asked with an amused uptick in his voice.

“Just tell me.”

My first experience with The Buried happened when I was a young boy, around nine or ten, when my family went to the Yorkshire Mining Museum. They give you tours of old abandoned coal mines. And when we were there, I saw a pair of red eyes in one of the tunnels they had boarded up. I said nothing about it, but as the tour progressed, I saw them more. Out of the corner of my eye, behind small holes in the wall, behind the corners of tunnels behind us, through more of those wooden boards. It all came to a head as we prepared to leave. We walked back in a straight line to the elevator, only for me to find myself stuck in place.

My parents only noticed after the tour guide had pressed the button to make the elevator ascend, but as they yelled for me, I heard the guide assuring them that he’d be down to get me right after he dropped them off upstairs, and he shouted for me to stay put, unaware that I was unable to do anything else. As soon as the elevator rose out of sight, I saw something slink out from one of the tunnels and head towards me, and the lantern I had been given snuffed out immediately.

Its form was cloaked in shadows, of course, so I can’t describe it to you in excruciating detail. I read some of the statements you keep here back when I tried to seize control of the Institute. You seem to like that. Personally, I think it’s quite dull. From what I could see of the figure, it was tall and thin, its red eyes faintly glowing in the dark. As it walked, it made a strange squelching sound and quieter, slow, dripping sounds that came with it. The closer it got, the more I felt like the walls of the mine were beginning to close in on me. I tried to walk away from the thing, but I tripped on something and fell down, as it crept closer and closer, before stretching its arm out towards my face. I almost began to scream, but then I heard the creak of the elevator, and it seemed like the creature noticed it too, because it slinked away back into the tunnels as the tour guide came to retrieve me.

For the rest of my childhood, I felt a strange need to return to strange, small, dark places. I liked hiding in closets, or under my bed, or behind the stairs in our basement with the light turned off. I dreamt of caves and wells. I yearned for the mines. It wouldn’t be until I grew up that I learned why that was.

I took my first job at a construction company based in London, so I briefly moved there from Bilsbury. The job was at the site of an old building which had recently been demolished. The demolished building had been designed by Robert Smirke. It wasn’t too long into the first day of construction, while we were excavating to make room for the basement, that we found something odd. It was a very large metal box, the size of a vault, with a sealed trapdoor at the top. A hidden bunker, one of my coworkers had guessed. I thought nothing of it, but because we didn’t have a way to quickly move it, we were let off early that day.

That night, I had a strange dream. I was back in those mines, but I was the creature this time. I re-enacted its movements as it stalked me and briefly revealed itself to me before slithering away into one of the boarded up tunnels. But what I found at the end of that tunnel wasn’t a dead end or an undiscovered mass of coal, no. It was the bunker. I knew the bunker couldn’t possibly have actually been in those mines; they were too far away, but there it was all the same. So, I climbed on top of it, and, well… you know that thing I do? That sends people through the ground? I think that the creature did it to itself, falling through the metal bunker to emerge in its inexplicably lit-up interior. And in the bunker, I saw myself, sitting at a small desk, reading a worn-down notebook, my hair messy and unkempt. The me sat at the desk quickly turned to face me, or rather, the creature whose perspective I was viewing, as I lurched towards him, reaching a mud-covered hand outwards, and then…

I woke up in my bed, safe and sound. But I gave in to the urges I’d been suppressing since that incident in the mines. I quickly got dressed and headed towards the construction site. Luckily, because it was so late, around 3 o’clock or so, no one was guarding the place and I was easily able to jump the fence and find the bunker. The trapdoor atop it was wide open, as though something was inviting me inside.

After entering the bunker, I noticed that it looked identical to what I had seen in my dream, with a wooden desk against one wall and a stack of old notebooks on top of it. I had nothing else to do, so I sat at the desk and picked up one of the notebooks. I dusted off its maroon cover and opened it. The text was written in neat cursive handwriting, each line perfectly spaced across the page, as though it had been measured. The very first page read This Notebook is Property of Robert Smirke. I began to read, before hearing a thud next to me in the bunker. Standing there was a tall, thin figure, covered head to toe in mud. It lurched towards me and stretched out its arm. I urged myself to run, but I couldn’t, just like when I was a child. The figure crept towards me before the mud around its hand slinked into my mouth, blocking my throat and stopping my breath as the muddy figure itself morphed into a strip of mud which slithered into my mouth following the arm.

I couldn’t breathe. The mud entered my stomach, my skull, my lungs, every little bit of myself. It covered my eyes. I couldn’t scream for help. Mud was pouring out of my ears so I couldn’t hear anything but the squelching as some of it dripped out. I couldn’t even move. I was just hunched over on the floor of the bunker, unable to breathe or see or hear. I could feel the cold metal of the floor, and I could taste the dirt as it passed my tongue, but otherwise, I was entirely alone and unable to do anything about it.

And then I heard something. A voice. I couldn’t describe it for you, but it sounded kind and warm and helpful. And it promised me relief from my suffering. Not just what I was suffering in that moment, but all pain. All sadness, all discomfort, all fear. The voice reached out its hand. I’m not sure how I knew that; I still couldn’t see, but I used the last of my strength to grasp its hand.

And just for a moment, for a fraction of a fraction of a second, I felt its touch. And it was smooth and warm and calming. It was the touch of a god.

I opened my eyes to find myself in the same position I had been in the bunker, but with every trace of that mud removed. I didn’t entirely understand what had happened yet, so I simply deliriously sat back in the chair and read through Smirke’s notes. I spent the rest of the night there, becoming more fascinated, more furious with every word I read. How dare these unknowable entities feast off of us, and offer us a fraction of their power as recompense. I should have that power, I thought. I knew I couldn’t take them on alone, but luckily, my newfound powers granted me a perfect way to start building my army.

The rest of the construction crew mysteriously disappeared after arriving at the site. They were my first recruits.

Wintour stopped speaking, and Jon closed his notebook and stood up. “Thank you,” Jon said, staring into Wintour’s unwavering brown eyes. He didn’t respond, so Jon walked away as Wintour slinked back into the darkness of his makeshift cell, his hand, inexplicably covered in mud, waving at Jon.

Jon tried to follow the path he had taken to find Wintour, but when he reached its logical end, he didn’t find the ladder that he had climbed down, but instead an ordinary brick wall, identical to every other. Perhaps I took a wrong turn, he thought, so he went back to the intersection and tried another path, but there was no ladder down that tunnel either. So he went down a different path, but found no ladder. So he tried another tunnel. And another, and another, and another. He looked down at his watch. His grandmother would certainly be expecting him to be home by now. The repeating patterns of the bricks, the bland brown color of them was all Jon could see apart from his own body. His head felt like it was spinning.

Tears began to well up in his eyes as he slumped down against the wall and clutched his legs close to himself, laying his notebook at his side. He tried not to, but it was only moments until he was sobbing, quietly whispering, praying for his mother to somehow come along and save him.

And maybe she had heard him and helped, as the tunnels began to shift once again, and Jon looked up to see the ladder across him, in an alcove that had been revealed when the wall across from him shifted away. So Jon wiped his tears from his face, took his bag and climbed up the ladder, emerged in the Archives and quickly sprinted towards the exit, and he hoped that no one had seen him.

As soon as he got home, his grandmother threw her arms around him. “Oh, God, Jon,” she said, “you worried me so much. Whatever am I going to do with you?”

After minutes of apologies and reassurances, Jon’s grandmother finally calmed down enough to hand him a package. “This came earlier today. It was addressed to you. No return address, though.”

Jon opened it to find a small stack of tapes with a note attached in the exact same handwriting as the one he had received the previous day. It read, Thought you might like these.

Chapter Text

Jon sat on his bed like he had the previous night, with headphones plugged into his old Walkman, the first of the many cassette tapes he had been sent inserted into the machine. He needed something to do with his hands, so he opened his notebook and began to draw. Simplistic shapes that he could say resembled something.

“Case 9891602. Jamie Russell.” Gertrude’s voice entered his ears through his headphones. Could he even trust her anymore? If she knew of all this and didn’t tell him… “Incidents occurred in London, England during February 1989. Statement given 16th of February 1989. Committed to tape 5th of April 1991. Gertrude Robinson recording.”

Look. I know what it sounds like. I know it sounds like I’m making up some supernatural event in a poor attempt to cover up the fact that I killed William. But I swear, I swear that this is true.

A few weeks ago, me and some of my friends played around with a ouija board. You know, one of those wooden boards with letters on them and a piece of wood with a hole in it that people say can talk to ghosts? Well, we were having a small party in our apartment, I’d discovered it buried away in my stuff, and we goofed around with it. Going in a circle, asking the supposed spirits dumb questions, laughing when one of us intentionally jerked the planchette around to respond with something equally stupid, the kind of thing college kids do on a Saturday night. When it came time for my roommate, William, to ask a question, he quietly whispered out to ask the spirits if Claire was among them. Claire was William’s girlfriend. She passed away about a year ago. Complications from AIDS, if I remember correctly. She and William had only been together for two months before she died, but I knew that he missed her a lot.

We all fell silent when William asked that. The tone of the activity suddenly felt a lot more serious. And then, even though I could’ve sworn that none of us were moving it, the planchette began to drift across the board.

N-I-C-E T-O S-E-E Y-O-U , the board answered.

Everyone else kept quiet. I can’t speak for anyone else there, but I was seriously creeped out.

“I really miss you,” William whispered.

I M-I-S-S Y-O-U T-O-O.

“I…I think about you all the time.”

I D-O T-O-O.

“This is a weird question… How are you? What’s it like where… where you are?”

I-T I-S N-I-C-E.

“Will. Your turn is up,” one of my friends said.

“Wait, it’s still moving,” William replied.

The planchette moved quicker than before, and one of us even stumbled forward after losing grip of it.

L-E-T-S T-A-L-K A-G-A-I-N S-O-O-N.

Then the activity went back to the way it was before. We goofed off, we laughed. But I was still unnerved by the final message of William’s turn.

The next time I noticed anything strange about William and that ouija board was about a week later. I had come back from school a couple of hours later than I usually do, but when I entered the apartment and called out for William to let him know that I had come home, he didn’t respond. I walked through the hall, still calling for him, until I heard his whispered voice coming from his bedroom. I opened the door to find him kneeling down on the wooden floor near his bed. As soon as I opened the door, I saw him push something under the bed. When I asked him who he had been talking to, he dismissed the question, and said he hadn’t been talking to anyone. Later that night, while William was taking a shower, I checked under his bed to see what he had pushed under there. It was the ouija board.

A few days later, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of laughter coming from his room. Not sinister, dark cackling. But genuine, gleeful laughter. I quietly snuck through the dark hallway and pressed my ear to the door. The conversation he was having was mostly one-sided, it seemed. He’d tell whoever he was talking to something that happened recently, there’d be a pause of about thirty seconds, and then he’d tell them another anecdote. I was about to creep back to my own room when I heard him say something else.

“Alright, I’ve gotta go to bed. Talk to you later, Claire.”

I almost immediately put two and two together. Okay. William is pretending to talk to Claire with the ouija board. That’s fine. It’s a coping mechanism. He’ll probably stop doing it eventually.

That morning, I decided to ask him about it. Not directly, of course, but I tried to draw out confirmation that he was doing it to cope with Claire’s death and not because he was insane.

“So, who were you talking to last night?” I asked him.

William looked back at me, confused. “I wasn’t talking to anyone last night.”

“Yes, you were,” I insisted, “you woke me up in the middle of the night because you were laughing.”

“No, I wasn’t,” William responded, “Jamie, are you sure you weren’t just dreaming?”

“Don’t be like that, William. I know what I heard,” I told him.

William paused for a second and sipped on his coffee, and let out a small hum, as though he was thinking about something. “Fine, Jesus. I was talking to a childhood friend over the phone. Are you happy?”

I didn’t believe him, of course. He had never mentioned a childhood friend he had named Claire, which you’d think he would’ve during the months I’d lived with him while he was pining after the Claire we’d both known at our college. But I didn’t want to come out and say that, lest my amateur investigation get cut off.

“Oh, okay. Why’d you lie to me about it?”

“Because it’s none of your business, Jamie.”

“Sorry, my bad. But, uh, one more thing-” I began to say.

“Good lord, how many more questions are you going to ask?” William interrupted.

“Just one more, I promise. What’s this friend’s name?”

“His name is David, okay? Leave me alone.”

Now I knew he was lying, but I hadn’t realized that anything was wrong, and I wouldn’t realize that until two days later. Just yesterday. I was home alone, since William was at work. I laid on my bed, reading a novel, absorbed in my own thoughts, until I heard a noise coming from William’s room. At first, I suspected a burglar had broken into the apartment, so I took a rather thick textbook from my bag, in the hopes that I would be able to hit the burglar over the head, should it come to that.

I crept to his room, careful to lift and lower my legs very slowly, in an effort to not make the floorboards creak even the tiniest bit. I slowly nudged the door open, only to find nobody in there. Instead, I found a figurine that usually sat on his bookshelf on the ground, and the ouija board out on the ground right next to it, the planchette sitting on the letter U.

I can’t say why exactly, but I knelt on the carpet and placed my hands on the planchette.

“Is Claire here?” I asked aloud. I couldn’t tell you why I did that either. I think I just wanted to prove to myself that I was being silly, that my fear that William was communicating with Claire’s ghost was unfounded.

The planchette moved agonizingly slowly, building tension as I waited for its message to be completed.

Y-O-U A-R-E N-O-T H-I-M.

“I know, I’m sorry. Are you Claire? I-Is she among you?”

Y-O-U A-R-E N-O-T W-I-L-L-I-A-M.

I took that as a yes. “I really am sorry, but I need to ask,” I said, trying my hardest to keep my grip on the planchette which was beginning to slide across the board with incredible speed, as though it were trying to shake me off, “is William using this board to talk to you at night?”

The planchette slowed down, seemingly so that I could read its words again.

L-E-A-V-E W-I-L-L-I-A-M A-L-O-N-E A-N-D F-O-R-G-E-T A-B-O-U-T T-H-I-S.

“Why? Why should I listen to you?”

Y-O-U H-A-V-E N-O I-D-E-A W-H-A-T I-M C-A-P-A-B-L-E O-F.

“What are you capable of, then?” I asked, staying perfectly still, knelt on the floor, despite my every instinct telling me to leave. The planchette didn’t move. It seemed that whatever I was communicating with had broken the connection. But I knew that I needed to confront William about this. So when he got home, I told him what had happened and accused him of communicating with it.

“Jamie… what are you talking about? Are you okay?” he responded, rather unconvincingly.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. I don’t know what you’re talking to with that thing, but it’s not Claire.”

William’s face turned red and his expression darkened. “Yes she is!” he yelled at me, before suddenly smacking his hand over his mouth. He suddenly walked past me, up the stairs and into his room, all while muttering “no no no no no no no no no no no”.

I quickly pursued him before following him into his room.

“Tell me everything,” I demanded, closing the door behind me.

“Well… now you know about her, so… it’s better if I just show you,” he replied, emotionlessly pulling the ouija board out of his bed. “Claire. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, but… now she can see you.”

Before my eyes, a small blue light appeared in the air above the board, before it slowly grew and the form of Claire, the real live Claire I had known, unfolded out of the light.

In films, whenever they have ghosts, they’re usually disheveled and their clothes are dirty and torn. Depending on the movie they might even have bones showing or their skin will be rotting. Claire wasn’t like that at all. If not for the fact that she was floating off the ground, and the slight blue tint of the light that seemed to form her, I would have been convinced that she was in the room with us, in the flesh.

“No!” Claire exclaimed in terror. From out of the corner of my eye, I saw the planchette gliding along the board in time with her speech.

“Will…” I whispered after collecting my thoughts, “can you please tell me what the hell is going on here?”

William looked up at Claire before darting his eyes back in my direction, silently asking her if it was okay for him to tell me about what was happening. She nodded back at him, and although I expected him to start talking, Claire began to speak instead. “I don’t remember what it was like before you called for me with that board. Every time I try to think of it, my brain can’t conjure a single detail. But when William asked for me when you were using that board, a couple weeks ago… it felt like breathing, for the first time in a very long time. There were so many things I was thinking when I saw all of you, when I realized what was happening, so I just said the first thing that came to mind.”

Nice to see you, I remembered.

Claire continued. “When you stop using the board, I go somewhere else. Heaven, I guess. It’s so beautiful. The ground is made of clouds and the sky is made of diamonds and the animals there become your friends at the snap of your fingers and every single bit of anger or sadness or fear is just… gone. But I hate going back there now. Because I know what I’m missing. What I could have.”

“We can’t touch each other,” William said. “We just… pass through one another.”

“Okay,” I said, my voice still quivering, “that seems… tough. But-”

“So I’m going to join her,” William interrupted.

“What?” I asked, turning my head to face him.

William looked back at me, a smile on his face, as though he hadn’t just casually admitted he was going to kill himself. “Don’t worry. I’ve made sure that everything I need to do has been done. Returned stuff I borrowed, made sure that this wouldn’t put too much of a financial strain on my parents, you know.”

“Are you fucking insane, Will? Get a grip,” I told him, suddenly raising my voice.

“This is why I didn’t want you to tell her! She’s trying to stop us from being together!” the apparition of Claire shouted in terror.

“I know it sounds crazy, Jamie, but… it only sounds like that because you… you just can’t understand.”

I rolled my eyes harder than I have ever or will ever roll them again. “Will. Listen to me. That… thing is not Claire. I knew Claire just as much as you did. She would not want you to do this.”

“She’s trying to turn you against me, William! Don’t listen to her!” The apparition of Claire began to cry, weeping so dramatically I made an expression of disgust.

“Listen. Will. When I came in here, whatever I was talking with- and it wasn’t Claire- it said ‘you have no idea what I’m capable of’. This thing isn’t Claire. It’s messing with you. Please listen to me.”

“She’s trying to steal you away from me. You need to do it now! Or else she’ll make sure you never get another chance! Please, William! Please don’t be deceived by her!” the Claire apparition screamed.

“Will you shut up? Your wailing is getting annoying,” I shot back at her. I turned back to William, only to see him leaving the room and closing the door. I tried to run after him, but the lock turned by itself and refused to budge. I looked behind me only to find that the apparition of Claire had vanished.

I heard one of the drawers opening in the kitchen downstairs, followed by a grunt and the sound of someone falling to the floor, before I heard William’s voice again.

“Oh, Claire. There you are. Look. I did what you asked. We’re finally… we’re gonna be together again.” His voice was faltering, but he still sounded so happy. I desperately wanted to break the door down, go and save him, call 911, get him some mental help, and burn that fucking ouija board. But my train of thought was interrupted when I heard a low, chilling laugh.

“Wow,” a second voice said, coming from roughly the same place I had heard William’s voice coming from, “you really are an idiot.” The voice was cold and cruel. It sounded as though every word that came from its mouth was dripping with malice. It didn’t sound like Claire at all.

“What?” William said, suddenly scared. He coughed afterwards, a horrifying, guttural sound.

“You didn’t really believe all of that, did you? The ground is made of clouds and the sky is made of diamonds but oh, it’s just not enough for poor Claire. She just needs her dear, sweet William with her,” the second voice mocked William. “Please. Claire was never talking to you. Everything she said- everything I said- was a lie. Except…”

“You’re not- you’re not Claire?” William said, his voice wavering more and more by the second.

“You really are slow. As I was saying; everything I told you was false, except for one thing. You are going to the exact same place Claire went, William. And I want you to look at what I am and tell me if you think the place I came from is anywhere near as nice as what I told you it was.”

“You just- you just look like- like Claire,” William responded, nearly every word enunciated with a hacking cough.

“Oh, sorry. Not like this. Like this. ” Then I heard the sound of flesh tearing and bones snapping, followed by William’s blood-curdling scream before he fell silent and the door finally unlocked. I ran downstairs immediately, only to find William lying on the floor, leaning against the wall in a pool of his own blood, a sharp knife lodged into his chest. His eyes were completely devoid of life.

I called 911 immediately. I didn’t tell them anything about the ouija board, of course. So I told them he had killed himself, which I guess wasn’t entirely wrong. As soon as they left I took the ouija board and broke it in half. I tried to go to sleep, but I still felt restless, so I took the two halves of the ouija board outside and ran them over with my car. But that still didn’t feel good enough, so I threw them in the building’s incinerator for good measure. I hope to God himself that whatever entity had attached itself to the board- whatever had killed William- felt the pain of each of those actions tenfold.

There’s just one thing that still bothers me.

What the hell did that thing show him to make him scream so loud?

Jon stopped the tape. He couldn’t even bring himself to hear Gertrude’s notes. His hand had trembled all throughout the second part of the tape. At some point the lead of his pencil had broken off, leaving a trail of gray on his paper.

A thought raced through his head. If something like that took the form of his mother… he thought it’d fool him pretty easily.

After sitting with his thoughts for a while, he let the tape resume.

“Final comments: Russell’s information here does line up with the reported suicide. She neglected to comment for a follow-up.”

The tape stopped for a second, before picking up again.

“Supplemental: I am sorry to keep splitting up information like this, my successor, but I figure it would be less of a hassle if one of these tapes ended up missing. The most pressing matter is this: the head of the Institute, whoever they are, is not to be trusted. Whatever they tell you their name is, they’re lying. No matter how far in the future you listen to this, the true name of the head of the Institute is-” the rest of the tape was a mess of garbled noise, as though it had been hastily erased.