Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Nathan Watts, regarding an encounter on Old Fishmarket Close, Edinburgh.

Original statement giv–

[CLUNK]
[Inquiringly] Hello? [Pause] Hello?

…

This archive is off-limits.

[MUFFLED THUD]
Is anyone there?

…

Tim? Tim, is that you?

…

[CHAIR SCRAPES]
I swear, if he’s brought another dog in here, I’m going to stab him. [Voice fades as Archivist leaves]

[SILENCE, THEN…]
MYSTERIOUS VOICE
[Faint over static] Vigilo. Audio. Opperior.

[Getting louder, quicker and more staticky]

Vigilo. Audio. Opperior.

Vigilo. Audio. Opperior.

Vigilo. Audio. Opperior.

Vigilo. Audio. Opperior.

Vigilo. Audio. Opperior.

ARCHIVIST
[muttering impatiently to self] …piled so many files on a shelf. Don’t buy them from IKEA. Oh, it’s, uh, still running.

[CLEARS THROAT]
Let’s, uh, let’s try this again.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Test… Test… Test… 1, 2, 3… Right.

[Cough]
My name is Raphaella La Cognizi. I work for the Magnus Institute, London, an organisation dedicated to academic research into the esoteric and the paranormal. The head of the Institute, Director. Carmilla Yamazaki, has employed me to replace the previous Head Archivist, one Gertrude Robinson, who has recently died.

I have been working at Artefact Storage at the Institute for four years now and am familiar with most of our more significant contracts and projects. Most reach dead ends, disappointingly enough, as encounters with the supernatural, such as they are – and I with dissapointment emphasise there are very few genuine cases – tend to resist easy conclusions. When an investigation has gone as far as it can, it is transferred to the Archives.

Now, the Institute was founded in 1818, which means that the Archive contains almost 200 years of case files at this point. Combine that with the fact that most of the Institute prefers the ivory tower of pure academia to the complicated work of dealing with statements or recent experiences and you have the recipe for an impeccably organised library and an absolute mess of an archive. This isn’t necessarily a problem – modern filing and indexing systems are a real wonder, and all it would need is a half-decent archivist to keep it in order. Gertrude Robinson was apparently not that archivist.

From where I am sitting, I can see thousands of files. Many spread loosely around the place, others crushed into unmarked boxes. A few have dates on them or helpful labels such as 86-91 G/H. Not only that, but most of these appear to be handwritten or produced on a typewriter with no accompanying digital or audio versions of any sort. In fact, I believe the first computer to ever enter this room is the laptop that I brought in today. More importantly, it seems as though little of the actual investigations have been stored in the Archives, so the only thing in most of the files are the statements themselves.

It is going to take me a long, long time to organise this mess. I’ve managed to secure the services of two researchers to assist me. Well, technically three, but I don’t really count Tim as he’s not likely to contribute anything but delays. I plan to digitise the files as much as possible and record audio versions, though some will have to be on tape recorder, as my attempts to get them on my laptop have met with… significant audio distortions.

Alongside this Nastya, Jessica and, yes, I suppose, Tim will be doing some supplementary investigation to see what details may be missing from what we have. I’ll try to present these in as succinct a fashion as I can at the end of each statement. I can, unfortunately, promise no order in regards to date or theme of the statements that are recorded, and can only apologise to any future researcher attempting to use these files for their own investigations.

That’s probably enough time spent making my excuses for the state of this place, and I suppose we have to begin somewhere.

Statement of Nathan Watts, regarding an encounter on Old Fishmarket Close, Edinburgh. Original statement given April 22nd 2012. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
This all happened a couple of years ago, so I apologise if some of the details are a bit off. I mean, I feel like I remember it clearly but sometimes things are so weird that you start to doubt yourself. Still, I suppose weird is kind of what you guys do, right?

So I’m studying at the University of Edinburgh. Biochemistry, specifically, and I was in my second year at the time this happened. I wasn’t in any sort of university accommodation at this point, and was renting a student flat down in Southside with a few other second years.

To be honest, I didn’t hang out with them much. I took a gap year before matriculating, and my birthday’s in the wrong part of September, so I was nearly two years older than most of my peers when I started my course. I got on with them fine, you understand, but I tended to end up hanging out with some of the older students.

That’s why I was at the party in the first place. Michael MacAulay, a good friend of mine, had just been accepted to do a Master’s degree in Earth Sciences so we decided a celebration was in order. Well, maybe ‘party’ isn’t quite the right word, we just kind of invaded the Albanach down on the Royal Mile, and drank long enough and loud enough that eventually we had the back area to ourselves. Now, I don’t know how well you know the drinking holes of Edinburgh, but the Albanach has a wide selection of some excellent single malts, and I may have slightly overindulged. I have vague memories of Mike suggesting I slow down, to which I responded by roundly swearing at him for failing to properly celebrate his own good news. Or words to that effect.

Long story short, I was violently ill around midnight, and made the decision to walk the route home. It wasn’t far to my flat, maybe half an hour if I’d been sober, and the night was cool enough that I remember having a hope the chill would perk me up some. I headed for the Cowgate and the quickest way to get there from the Royal Mile is down Old Fishmarket Close. Now, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that there are some steep hills in Edinburgh but Old Fishmarket Close is exceptional, even by those standards. At times it must reach a thirty or forty degree angle, which is hard enough to navigate when you don’t have that much scotch inside you. As I have mentioned, I had quite a lot, so it probably wasn’t that surprising when I took a rather nasty tumble about halfway down the street.

In retrospect, the fall wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but at the time, it really shook me up, and left me with some nasty bruises. I picked myself up as best I could, checked I hadn’t seriously injured myself, no broken bones or anything, and decided to roll a cigarette to calm myself. That was when I heard it.

“Can I have a cigarette?”

I was startled out of my thoughts by the words as I thought I had been alone. Quickly trying to compose myself and looking around, I noticed a small alleyway on the opposite side of the street. It was very narrow and completely unlit with a short staircase leading up. I could see a light fixture a little way up the wall at its entrance, but it either wasn’t working or wasn’t turned on, meaning that beyond a few steps the alley was shrouded in total darkness. Stood there, a couple of stairs from the street, was a figure. It was hard to tell much about them as they were mostly in the shadows, though if I’d had to guess I would have said the voice sounded male. They seemed to sway, ever so slightly, as I watched, and I assumed that they, like me, were probably a little bit drunk.

I lit my own cigarette and held out my tobacco towards them, though I didn’t approach, and asked if they were ok with a roll-up. The figure didn’t move except to continue that gentle swaying. Writing it down now, it seems so obvious that something was wrong. If I hadn’t been so drunk, maybe I’d have noticed quicker, but even when the stranger asked the question again, “Can I have a cigarette?” utterly without intonation, still I didn’t understand why I was so uneasy.

I stared at the stranger and as my eyes began to adjust I could make out more details. I could see that their face appeared blank, expressionless, and their skin seemed damp and slightly sunken, like they had a bad fever. The swaying was more pronounced now, seeming to move from the waist, side to side, back and forth. By this point, I had finished rolling a second cigarette, and gingerly held it out towards them, but I didn’t get any closer. I had decided that if this weirdo wanted a cigarette, they were going to need to come out of the creepy alleyway. They didn’t come closer, didn’t make any movement at all except for that damn swaying. For some reason the thought of an anglerfish popped into my head, the single point of light dangled into the darkness, hiding the thing that lures you in.

“Can I have a cigarette?” It spoke again in the same flat voice and I realised exactly what was wrong. Its mouth was closed, had been the whole time. Whatever was repeating that question, it wasn’t the figure in the alleyway. I looked at their feet and saw that they weren’t quite touching the ground. The stranger’s form was being lifted, ever so slightly, and moved gently from side to side.

I dropped the cigarette and grabbed for my phone, trying to turn on the torch. I don’t know why I didn’t run or what I hoped to see in that alley, but I wanted to get a better look. As soon as I took out my phone, the figure disappeared. It sort of folded at the waist and vanished back into the darkness, as if a string had gone taut and pulled it back. I turned on the torch and stared into the alley, but I saw nothing. Just silence and darkness. I staggered back up to the Royal Mile, which still had lights and people, and found a taxi to take me home.

I slept late the next day. I’d made sure I didn’t have any lectures or classes, as I had intended to be sleeping off a heavy night of drinking, which I guess I was, although it was that bizarre encounter that kept playing in my mind. And so, after making my way through two litres of water, some painkillers and a very greasy breakfast, I felt human enough to leave my flat and go to investigate the place in daylight. The result was unenlightening. There were no marks, no bloodstains, nothing to indicate that the swaying figure had ever been there at all. The only thing I did find was an unsmoked Marlboro Red cigarette, lying just below the burned out light fixture.

Beyond that, I didn’t really know what to do. I did as much research as I could on the place, but couldn’t find anyone who’d had any experience similar to mine, and there didn’t seem to be any folklore or urban legends I could find out about Old Fishmarket Close. The few friends I told about what happened just assumed I’d been accosted by some stranger and the alcohol had made it seem much weirder than it was. I tried to explain that I’ve never had hallucinations while drunk, and that there was no way this guy had just been a normal person, but they always gave me one of those looks, halfway between pity and concern, and I’d shut up.

I never did find out anything else about it, but a few days later I saw some missing person appeals go up around campus. Another student had disappeared. John Fellowes, his name was, though I didn’t really know the guy and couldn’t tell you much about him, except for two things that struck me as very important: he had been at that same party and, as far as I remembered, had still been there when I left. The other was just that, well, on the photo they’d used for his missing persons appeal, I couldn’t help but notice that there was a pack of Marlboro Red cigarettes poking out of his pocket.

I haven’t quit smoking, but I do find that I take a lot more taxis now if I find myself out too late.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

The investigation at the time, and the follow-up we’ve done over the last couple of days, have found no evidence to corroborate Mr. Watts’ account of his experience. I was initially inclined to re-file this statement in the ‘Discredited’ section of the Archive, a new category I’ve created that will, I suspect, be housing the majority of these files.

However, Nastya did some digging into the police reports of the time and it turns out that between 2005 and 2010, when Mr. Watts’ encounter supposedly took place, there were six disappearances in and around the Old Fishmarket Close: Jessica McEwen in November 2005, Sarah Baldwin in August 2006, Daniel Rawlings in December of the same year, then Ashley Dobson and Megan Shaw in May and June of 2008. Then finally, as Mr. Watts mentioned, John Fellowes in March 2010. All six disappearances remain unsolved. Baldwin and Shaw were definitely smokers, but there’s no evidence either way about the others, if they’re even connected.

Nastya did find one other thing, specifically in the case of Ashley Dobson. It was a copy of the last photograph taken by her phone and sent to her sister Siobhan. The caption was “check out this drunk creeper lol”, but the picture is of a darkened, apparently empty, alleyway, with stairs leading up into it. It appears to be the same alleyway which Mr. Watts described in his statement, the one that, according to the maps of the area, leads to Tron Square, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone in the photograph at all.

Nastya took the liberty of running it through some editing programs, though, and increasing the contrast appears to reveal the outline of a long, thin hand, roughly at what would be waist level on a male of average height. I find it oddly hard to shake off the impression that it’s beckoning like a anglerfish.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Joshua Gillespie, regarding his time in possession of an apparently empty wooden casket. Original statement given November 22nd, 1998. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
It started when I was in Amsterdam for a holiday with a few of my friends. Everything you’re thinking right now, you’re right. We were all early twenties, just graduated and decided to spend a couple of weeks going crazy on the continent, so you can almost certainly fill in all the blanks yourself. There were very few points where I’d say that I was entirely sober and even fewer where I acted like it, though I wasn’t quite as bad as some of my friends who had a hard time handling themselves at times.

This may have been why I headed out alone that morning – no idea of the exact date but it was sometime in mid-May. The others were sleeping off their assorted hangovers and I decided to head out into the beautiful sunshine of that Netherlands morning and take a walk. Before graduating from Cardiff with the others, I had been studying Architecture, so was looking forward to spending a few hours by myself to wander, and really take in the buildings of central Amsterdam. I was not disappointed – it’s a beautiful city, but I realised too late that I hadn’t taken any map or guidebook with me, and an hour or two later I was thoroughly lost.

I wasn’t particularly worried, as it was still mid-afternoon at this point, and getting lost in the backstreets had kind of been what I was trying to do, but I still decided I’d better make an actual effort to find my way back to where my friends and I were staying off Elandsstraat. I managed it eventually, but my inability to speak Dutch meant I spent a good hour riding the wrong way on the various trams.

By the time I got back to Elandsstraat it was starting to get dark and I was feeling quite stressed, so I decided to pop into one of the cafés to relax before joining up with my friends. I couldn’t say for sure exactly how long I was in there, but I do know it had gotten fully dark by the time I noticed I wasn’t sat at my table alone.

I’ve tried to describe the man who now sat opposite me many times, but it’s difficult. He was short, very short, and felt like he had an odd density to him. His hair was brownish, I think, cut quite short, and he was clean shaven. His face and dress was utterly unremarkable, and the more I try to think of exactly what he looked like, the harder it is to picture him clearly. To be honest, though, I’m inclined to blame that on the drugs.

The man introduced himself as John, and asked how I was. I replied as best I could, and he nodded, saying he also was an Englishman inside a foreign land. I remember he used that exact phrase because it struck me at the time as very odd. He said he was from Liverpool, though I don’t recall him having any sort of accent, and that he was looking for a friend who he could rely on for a favour.

Now, high as I was, I got suspicious as soon as he said that last part and I started to shake my head. John said it was nothing too onerous, just looking after a package for him until he had some friends pick it up, and that he would pay well. I thought he was talking about smuggling, and was about to refuse again when he reached into his… jacket, I think? and pulled out an envelope. Inside was £10,000. I know; I counted it. I knew it was a stupid move but I kept remembering my friend Richard telling me how easy it had been to get a pound of hash through customs on his first trip to Holland, and holding that much cash in my hands…

I said yes. John smiled, thanked me, and said that he would be in touch. He left the coffee shop and I immediately started panicking about what I had agreed to. I wanted to chase after him and return the money, but something weighed me down, kept me locked into my seat. I just sat there for a long time.

I don’t remember much about the next few days except worrying about when I’d see John again. I was careful not to spend any of the money he’d given me, and had decided to return it as soon as he turned up. I’d say I had made a mistake and couldn’t take his money or look after anything from him. I tried to enjoy myself, but it was like this shadow hanging over me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I waited for days, right up until the end of our trip, but he never showed up. I obsessively checked my suitcase before boarding the plane home, just in case someone had snuck something into it, but there was nothing new in there. I flew back to England with my friends still high and £10,000 tucked into my coat pocket. It was surreal.

It wasn’t until almost a year later that I felt confident enough to actually spend any of the money. I’d moved down to work for a small architects’ firm in Bournemouth on the south coast. It was an entry level job and the pay wasn’t great, but it was the only offer I got in my chosen field, so I moved down there with the hopes of getting some experience and a better position in a year or two.

Bournemouth was a decent-size seaside town, though much less idyllic than I’d assumed it would have been, but rents for a place on my own were a little bit out of my price range, given my starting pay grade. I didn’t know anyone else down there, and wasn’t keen to share my space with strangers, so I decided to use some of the money I’d been given in Amsterdam the previous year. I reasoned they were unlikely to find me at this stage – I’d not given John any of my details when he spoke to me, not even my name, and if they hadn’t been able to find me over the course of the last year, it was doubtful they’d be able to track me here. Also, if it had been drug smuggling, as I suspected, £10,000 probably wasn’t so much money to them that they’d track me this far over it. Also, and looking back this sounds stupid, but I’d just grown a beard and thought it would be hard for anyone to recognise me as the same guy. So I spent a bit of John’s money on renting a nice one-bedroom flat in the Triangle, near the town centre, and moved in almost immediately.

About a week later, I was in my kitchen cutting up some fruit for breakfast, and I heard the doorbell ring. I answered it to see two red-faced delivery men. Between them they carried an immense package, which they’d clearly had to manoeuvre up the narrow stairs of the building I lived in. They asked if I was Joshua Gillespie, and when I said yes they said they had a delivery addressed to me and pushed past into the hall.

They didn’t seem to be from any delivery company I knew and they weren’t wearing any uniforms. I tried to ask them some questions, but as soon as they’d placed the box on the floor, they turned around and walked out. They were both well over six feet tall and very imposing, so there was little I could have done to stop them leaving even if I’d wanted to. The door slammed behind them, and I was left alone with this package.

It was about two metres long, maybe one metre wide and roughly the same deep. It was sealed with parcel tape and written on the top was my name and address in thick curving letters but there was no return address or postmark of any sort. I was starting to risk being late for work at this point, but I decided I couldn’t bring myself to leave without seeing what was inside, so I fetched the knife from my kitchen counter and cut the tape keeping the box closed.

Inside was a coffin. I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t that. My knife fell to the floor and I just stared at it in mute surprise. It was made of unvarnished, pale yellow wood and had a thick metal chain wrapped around it, which was closed at the top with a heavy iron padlock. The lock was closed but had the key sitting inside it. I started to reach for it, when I noticed two other things on the coffin lid. The first was a piece of paper, folded in half and tucked under the chain, which I took. The other was the presence of three words, scratched deep into the wood of the casket in letters three inches high. They read: DO NOT OPEN.

I withdrew my hand from the padlock slowly, unsure what I was supposed to do. At some point I must have sat down, as I found myself on the floor, propped up against the wall, staring at this bizarre thing that had inexplicably turned up at my home. I remembered the piece of paper at this point and unfolded it, but it simply read “Delivered with gratitude – J”. Strange as it sounds, it was only then I made the connection with the man I’d met in Amsterdam. He’d told me he wanted someone to look after a package for a while. Was this the package he was talking about? Was I to be looking after a corpse? Who was coming to pick it up? When?

I called in sick to work, and just sat there, watching the coffin for what might have been minutes or might have been hours. I just had no idea what to do. Eventually I steeled myself and moved towards it, until my face was just inches away from the lid. I took a deep breath, trying to see if I could smell anything from inside. Nothing. If there was a dead body in there, it hadn’t started to smell yet. Not that I really knew what a dead body smelled like. It was early summer at this point, which would mean they must have died recently. If there was a body in there at all. As I got up, my hand brushed the wood of the coffin and I realised it was warm. Very warm, like it had been lying in the sun for hours. Something about it made my flesh crawl slightly and I withdrew my hand quickly.

I decided to make a cup of tea. It was something of a relief, standing next to the kettle, as from that angle I couldn’t see the thing out in the hall. I could just ignore it. I didn’t move even after I’d filled my mug; I just stood there sipping my tea, not even noticing that it was still far too hot to drink comfortably. When I finally got the nerve to step back out into the hall, the coffin still lay there, unmoving.

I finally made a decision and, firmly gripping the padlock, I removed the key, and placed it on the hall table next to the door. I then took hold of the coffin and chain and started to pull it further into my flat. It was weird to touch it: the wood still had that unsettling warmth to it, but the chain was as cold as you’d expect from a thick piece of iron, and apparently hadn’t taken on any of the heat. I didn’t have any cupboards with enough space to hold the thing, so in the end I just dragged it into my living room and pushed it up against the wall, as out of the way as possible. I cut up the cardboard box it had been sealed in and put it with the rubbish outside. And just like that I had, apparently, started storing a coffin in my home.

At the time I think I assumed it was full of drugs, at least as far as I assumed anything about the situation. Why anyone would store something in such a noticeable way or with a total stranger like me, these weren’t questions I could even guess at an answer to, but I decided it was best to think about it as little as possible. For the next few days I avoided my living room, as I found being so close to the thing made me nervous. I was also staying alert for the smell of any sort of rot, which might indicate there was something dead inside the coffin after all. I never smelled anything, though, and as the days passed I found myself noticing my mysterious charge less and less.

About a week after it arrived, I finally started using my living room again. I’d watch TV, mostly, and keep half an eye on the unmoving casket. At one point I got so cocky as to actually use it as a table. I was drinking a glass of orange juice at the time and absent-mindedly placed it on top of the lid, not really realising exactly what I had done. At least not until I heard movement from underneath it. I froze, listening intently and staring, willing myself to have been imagining things. But then it came again – a soft but insistent scratching, just below where I had placed my glass. It was slow and deliberate and caused gentle ripples to spread across the surface of my juice.

Needless to say I was terrified. More than that, I was confused. The coffin had been lying in my living room, chained and unmoving, for well over a week at this point. If there had been anything living in there when it was delivered, it seemed unlikely it would still be alive. And why hadn’t it made any sound before if there was something in there capable of movement? I gently picked up my glass and immediately the scratching stopped. I waited for some time, considering my options, before I placed it back down on the other end of the lid. It took about four seconds for the scratching to start up again, now more insistently.

When I took the glass away this time, it didn’t stop for another five minutes. I decided against doing any further experiments, and instead made the very deliberate decision to ignore it. I felt at that point I either needed to use the heavy iron key to open it and see for myself what was in there, or follow the gouged instruction and resolve myself to never look inside. Some might call me a coward, but I decided on the latter, that I would interact with it as little as possible while it lived in my house. Well, I guess “lived” may be the wrong term.

I knew I’d made the right decision the next time it rained, and I heard the box begin to moan. It was a Saturday, and I was spending the day staying in and doing some light reading. I had few friends in Bournemouth, something about having a mysterious coffin lying in my living room made me reluctant to make the sort of connections that might lead to people coming round, and so I spent most of my free time alone.

I didn’t watch a lot of television even before my living room was taken over with storing this thing, and so I now found myself sat in my room reading quite a lot. I remember I had just started Michael Crichton’s The Lost World at the time, and it started raining outside. It was a hard, heavy rain, the sort that falls straight down with no wind to disturb it, until everything is dark and wet. It was barely past midday, but I remember the sky was so overcast and gloomy that I had to get up to turn on the light. And that was when I heard it.

It was a low, gentle sound. I’ve seen Dawn of the Dead, I know what the groans of the undead are meant to sound like, but it wasn’t that at all. It was almost… melodious. It sounded almost like singing, if it was muffled by twenty feet of hard-packed soil. At first I thought it might have been coming from one of the other flats in my building, but as it went on, and the hairs on my arms began to stand on end I knew, I just knew, where it was coming from. I walked to the living room and stood in the doorway, watching as the sealed wooden box continued to moan its soft, musical sound out at the rain.

There was nothing to be done. I’d made my decision not to open it, and this certainly did not make me want to reconsider that. So I just went back to my bedroom, put on some music and turned it up loud enough to drown out the sounds.

And so it continued for a few months. Whatever was in the casket would scratch at anything placed on top of it and moan whenever it rained, and that was that. I suppose it goes to show that you can get used to anything if you have to, no matter how bizarre. I occasionally considered trying to get rid of it, or finding people like you guys to investigate, but in the end I decided that I was actually more afraid of whoever was responsible for entrusting me with the coffin than I was of the actual coffin itself. So I kept it secret.

The only thing that worried me was sleeping. I think it gave me bad dreams. I don’t remember my dreams, never have, and if I was getting nightmares, they were no different – I didn’t remember them and I certainly don’t now. But I know I kept waking up in a panic, clutching at my throat and struggling to breathe. I also started sleepwalking. The first time that happened it was the cold that woke me up. It was the middle of winter and I tend not to keep the heating on when I’m asleep. It took me a few seconds to fully process where I was. I was standing in the dark, in my living room, over the coffin. What concerned me more about the situation was the fact that, when I awoke, I seemed to be holding the key to it in my hand.

Obviously this worried me. I even went to my GP about it, who referred me to the sleep clinic at the nearby hospital, but the problems never recurred in a clinical setting. I decided to hide the key in more and more difficult to access places, but still I kept waking up with it, and I was starting to panic. When I awoke one morning to find I’d actually placed the key within the lock and was, as far as I could tell, moments from opening it, I knew I had to find a solution.

In the end, what I took to doing was perhaps a bit elaborate, but it seemed to work: I would place the key within a bowl of water and then put it in the freezer, encasing it in a solid block of ice. I still sometimes found myself trying to get to the key in my sleep, but the chill of the ice always woke me up long before I could do anything with it. And in the end it just became yet another part of my routine.

I lived like that for almost a year and a half. It’s funny how fear can just become as routine as hunger – at a certain point I just accepted it. My first clue that my time keeping the coffin was coming to an end was when it began to rain and there was silence.

I didn’t notice at first, as my habit at that point had been to put on the music as soon as the weather began to turn, but after a few minutes, I realised that there wasn’t anything to drown out. I turned off my music and went to check. The living room was silent. Then came a knock at the door. The sound was light and unobtrusive but it rang out like thunder in the quiet flat. I knew what I’d see as soon as I opened the door, and I was right. John and the two delivery men stood there.

I wasn’t surprised to see them, as I say, but they actually seemed quite surprised to see me. John had to take a second to look me up and down, almost in disbelief, as I asked if they’d come to collect their coffin.

He said that they had, and he hoped it hadn’t been too much trouble. I told him where he could stick it, and he didn’t seem to have an answer for that. He did seem genuinely impressed, however, when I got the key out of the freezer. I didn’t even try to thaw it – I was so eager to have this thing out of my life that I just dropped the bowl of ice on the floor and shattered it. I watched as John picked the icy key off the floor and I told them it was in the living room.

I didn’t follow them. I didn’t want to see what they did with the coffin. I didn’t want to see if they opened it. And when the screaming started, I didn’t want to see who was screaming or why. I only left the kitchen when the two delivery men carried the coffin past the door. I followed them down the stairs, and watched in the pouring rain as they locked it into a small van marked “Breekon and Hope Deliveries”. Then they drove away. There was no sign of John.

That was the last I heard of it. I got a new job and moved to London shortly afterwards, and now I just try not to think about it too much.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

It’s always nice to hear that my hometown is not entirely devoid of odd occurrences and scary stories. Ice cream, beaches and boredom are all very well, but I’m glad to hear Bournemouth has at least a few apparitions to call its own. That said, the fact is Mr. Gillespie’s statement starts with drug use and continues on with the lack of corroborating witnesses being a central theme, which means that an eerie story is all that it is. When the Institute first investigated, it doesn’t look like they were able to find a single piece of evidence to support the existence of this scratched coffin, and to be honest I didn’t think it was worth wasting anyone’s time over now, nearly twenty years later.

That said, I did mention it to Jessica yesterday, and apparently she did some digging of his own. Breekon and Hope did, in fact, exist, and were a courier service that operated until 2009, when they went into liquidation. They were based in Nottingham, however, significantly north of Bournemouth, and if they kept records of their deliveries, they are no longer available.

What is interesting, however, is the address Mr. Gillespie provided for the flat this all took place in. The housing association that ran it does keep extensive records on the tenants that have lived in their buildings going back some forty or fifty years. From what Jessica could find, it appears that for the two years of his residence, Mr. Gillespie was the only person living in that entire building, with the other seven flats being utterly vacant. Nobody moved in following his departure, and the building was sold to a developer and demolished shortly after this statement was originally given.

Predictably, no-one who worked for that housing association in the 90s is still there, and despite Jessica’s best efforts, we could get no explanation for why, in a building of that size, Mr. Gillespie spent almost two years living alone, save for an old wooden coffin.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Amy Patel, regarding the alleged disappearance of her acquaintance Graham Folger. Original statement given July 1st, 2007. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I first met Graham two years ago, more or less. It’s hard to say exactly when we first met or even started talking, as we were taking a class together at the time. I’m sure there was plenty of discussion or interaction before we learned each other’s names, but I started my course in September of 2005, so yeah, about two years. I had decided to take a Criminology course at Birkbeck University as a way of getting out of the rut with my office job – I’m an Associate Compliance Analyst at Deloitte, and if you think that sounds boring, well… yeah. It is. I knew a night course in Criminology wasn’t going to go anywhere, of course, even if I’d finished it. I just had to do something to find a bit of interest in my life, and it was either that or become an alcoholic, so…

Sorry, I’m going off topic. I initially found Graham a bit off-putting, to be honest. He was a chain smoker and wore far too much deodorant to try and cover the smell. He was a bit older than me, maybe ten years or so. I never asked his age, I mean, we weren’t that close, but he was starting to grey at the edges of his hair, and you could see that the tiredness on his face wasn’t just from missing a single night’s sleep. That’s not to say he was bad looking – he had a round, open sort of face and quite deep blue eyes, but very much not my type. He was well-spoken in group work, at least when he did speak, and I think it came up once that he’d been to Oxford, though I don’t know what college.

I’d noticed earlier that during lectures he always seemed to be scribbling furiously in a notebook even when the lecturer wasn’t speaking. At first, I just thought he was thorough, but I swear I watched him fill a whole A5 notebook in one lecture. I remember it was a talk on youth and the justice system where the speaker was so slow that it wouldn’t have filled that book even if Graham had been writing down literally every word. Not to mention I asked to borrow his notes once for an essay, and he gave me this weird look and said he didn’t take any notes.

So yeah, point is, I wouldn’t have called him a friend, but we got on alright. It was about four months into my course that I first encountered Graham outside of the university. I was riding the night bus home, having gone for a couple of drinks and missed the regular service. I live in Clapham, so there’s a pretty regular night bus service headed there. Of course, regular also means drunken angry vomiters, so yeah, I generally try to be unobtrusive, sitting in a seat at the back of the top floor.

It was there that I saw Graham. He was sat right at the front, staring out of the window. People-watching is one of my guilty pleasures, so I decided not to say hello, at least not right away. I wasn’t disappointed, either – he was stranger alone than he had ever been during class.

It was the middle of winter at this point, so the windows were solid with condensation, but he almost obsessively wiped it away from the one in front of him the moment it started to obscure his view. He seemed to be intently scanning the street for something, except that at times he would crane his neck to stare at the roofs of the buildings passing by. He seemed nervous, as well, and was breathing way faster than normal, which fogged up his window even more. It was slightly alarming to watch, to be honest, and I finally made up my mind to tell him I was there.

He jumped a bit when I greeted him, and I asked him if he was alright. He told me he didn’t usually stay out so late and found nighttime public transport unsettling. I sat next to him, and he seemed to get much more relaxed, so I didn’t push the issue.

We talked for awhile about nothing in particular, until the bus started to approach my stop. As I rose, I noticed that Graham had stood up at the exact same time as I had, and I realised with some discomfort that we must live at the same stop. I liked the guy fine, don’t get me wrong, but I still didn’t really feel ok with him knowing where I lived. But yeah, it was obvious that I’d gotten up to get off the bus, so I couldn’t really ride on to the next stop, and it wasn’t even that I felt unsafe with Graham, I’m just a private person.

I decided to just walk back with him as far as necessary and make sure he didn’t see what building I went into. Maybe we weren’t even walking in the same direction. Yeah, we were walking in exactly the same direction. We even seemed to be heading to the same street.

It was at that point I felt a hand grab my shoulder and throw me into the road. I don’t know how else to describe it, one moment I was walking along, the next I was flying towards the ground. It can’t have been Graham – he was in front of me at the time, and I would have sworn there was nobody else on the street. There weren’t any cars coming, but I hit my head hard. I think I must have been unconscious for a few seconds, because the next thing I remember is a panicky Graham on the phone to an ambulance. I tried to tell him I was alright, but didn’t really manage to get the words out, which, yeah, probably meant I wasn’t alright.

The ambulance arrived in pretty good time, considering it was London on a Friday night, and the paramedics gave me a look over. I was told that the injury itself wasn’t serious – apparently head wounds always bleed that much and it’s nothing to panic about – but that I did have quite a nasty concussion and shouldn’t be left alone for the next few hours.

Even though we were within sight of my door, I had for some reason settled upon the idea of Graham never knowing where I lived. In retrospect this was likely the concussion talking, but the upshot was I agreed to go back to Graham’s flat to recover. He was quite awkward about the whole thing, and took great pains to assure me that there was nothing untoward about the situation; apparently he was a gay, which I’ll admit did actually reassure me a bit. Still, it was clear this wasn’t how either of us had hoped to be ending our nights.

As it turned out, Graham’s flat was directly across the street from mine, just a couple of floors lower. I wondered if I could see my window from his, and I remember I had the odd thought that, if I had to look out, I’d need to be careful of his window box, as I could see the hooks attaching it to the frame. I asked him what he grew, and he gave me a look, as though my concussion had stopped me making sense again. I mean, maybe it had, because when I looked back at the window the hooks were gone, and there was no sign of any window box. At the time I put it down to my head wound, and even now I’m not sure.

The flat itself was a simple affair, quite big by London standards. It had only a few pieces of furniture and a lot of bookshelves, each covered with rows and rows of identical notebooks, with no apparent marking system or indication of contents. I started to ask about them, but my head throbbed and I didn’t feel up to any answer that might have been forthcoming.

Graham led me to the sofa and disappeared to fetch me an icepack and a mug of sugary tea. I graciously accepted both, though I wasn’t in much of a mood to talk. Graham clearly felt awkward enough with the silence to do the talking for both of us, and I learned more about him over the next hour than I’d ever had a desire to know. Apparently his parents had died in a car accident a few years previously and had left a great deal of money and ownership of this flat. He didn’t need to work anymore and so had found himself somewhat adrift, taking night college courses to pass the time and broaden his mind – his words, not mine. He said he was trying to figure out what to actually do with his life.

He talked on like this for a while but I stopped listening about that point, as I’d become enraptured by the table on which he’d placed my tea. It was an ornate wooden thing, with a snaking pattern of lines weaving their way around towards the centre. The pattern was hypnotic and shifted as I watched it, like an optical illusion. I found my eyes following the lines towards the middle of the table, where there was nothing but a small square hole. Graham noticed me staring, and told me that interesting antique furniture was one of his few true passions. Apparently he’d found the table in a second-hand shop during his student days and fallen in love with it. It had been in pretty bad shape but he’d spent a long time and a lot of money restoring it, though he’d never been able to figure out what was supposed to go in the centre. He assumed it was a separate piece and couldn’t track it down.

And yeah, like most of his conversation, I’d have found it dull even if I wasn’t concussed. But by this time, I was beginning to feel well enough to leave, and started to make my excuses to Graham. He expressed his concern, said it hadn’t been as long enough, as the medics suggested, but if I had to… Well, you get the picture. In the end I did leave, as I kept getting lost in the lines of the table, and the pipes outside of the window made such a weird noise that I didn’t think staying was actually going to help me recover.

I went straight home, making sure Graham couldn’t see me from his window, and spent a few hours watching TV until I recovered enough to go to sleep. By the time I woke up the next morning I was feeling more or less ok, though I kept a plaster on the cut on my forehead, and tried not to think too much about the previous night.

One evening a few days later, though, I found myself staring out of my window, the one that faced the street, and I remembered how close Graham lived. I looked to see if I could figure out which window was his and, yeah, sure enough, there it was. It was actually a remarkably clear view of his flat, and I could see him sat on the sofa, reading one of the notebooks from his bookshelves. I realised that if I could see him so clearly, he could likely see me just as well if he chose to look up, and, with some remnant of my apprehension from that Friday, I decided to turn off the light in my flat, so he wouldn’t see me if he looked up. And then, I went back to watching him.

Yeah, I know that sounds creepy. It really wasn’t meant to be. I said earlier that I really enjoy people-watching and, regardless of how boring he may have been to speak to, Graham was weirdly compelling to watch. So that’s just what I did. And not just that night, either. Yeah, there’s no non-sinister way to say that watching Graham became my hobby. It was strange, I’ll admit it. But I just couldn’t stop myself. I reasoned I wasn’t watching him with any purpose or malice in mind. It was purely out of a detached interest in his life. And in my defence, I would have stopped a lot sooner if it hadn’t been for the bizarre things he would do. He would constantly reorder his journals, without any apparent system of organisation, most of the time without even opening them. Sometimes he would grab an apparently random notebook from the shelves and start scribbling in it, even though I could see that the page was already covered in writing.

Once, and I swear this is true, I saw him take one of his notebooks and start to tear out the pages one at a time. And then, slowly and deliberately, he ate them. It must have taken him three hours to get through the whole book, but he didn’t stop or pause, he just kept going.

Even when he wasn’t doing anything with the notebooks, there was an odd energy to him. From what I could see he was constantly on edge, and jumped every time any loud noise passed on the street below. A police siren, a breaking bottle, hell, I even saw him freak out over an ice-cream truck once. Each time he’d leap to his feet, run to the window and start looking out; wildly craning his neck from side to side. Sometimes he’d look up, but I’d learned his patterns well enough to avoid being spotted. Then, all at once, he’d decide that there was no problem and go back to whatever he was doing before.

And by “whatever he was doing before”, yeah, I mean nothing. He apparently didn’t have a television or a computer – the only books he seemed to own were his own notebooks, and I only ever saw him eat takeaway food. I don’t know how many times I watched him eat the same pizza – pepperoni with jalapeño peppers and anchovies. Yeah, I know. But the rest of the time he just sat there, smoking; sometimes looking into space, sometimes staring at that wooden table of his. And yeah, I remembered the pattern was kind of hypnotic and I spent more than a couple of minutes staring at it myself when I was there, but he did almost nothing else.

Who knows, perhaps he had a rich and fulfilling life outside of the flat. He certainly left it regularly enough, and yeah, I wasn’t so far gone as to actually follow him. In fact, I always waited a good long while before leaving my own building to make sure I didn’t bump into him. I still didn’t want him to know where I lived, although now for very different reasons. In the end, though, it was a hobby, not an obsession, and often days would pass when I wouldn’t see Graham at all. Maybe there was stuff I missed that would have explained his behaviour. I just wish I’d missed what happened on April 7th. Then maybe I’d have just thought he’d moved on or… I don’t know. I just wish I hadn’t seen it.

Work had been intense for a couple of months, with so many late nights I’d had to drop out of my course. It was just as well, really, as I hadn’t actually spoken to Graham since the night I suffered my head injury. I think he still felt awkward about it, and I’d seen him do so many weird things alone in his flat that I think I’d have struggled to have a normal conversation with him. Anyway, this week I’d barely had time to eat, let alone do much in the way of Graham-watching, so when I got home at about half ten at night, my first thought was just to fall into bed. But it was Friday, and I’d drunk a huge amount of coffee to keep going at work, so yeah, I was wired and looking forward to a long lie-in the next day. So when I saw Graham’s light was still on, I decided to spend a relaxing few minutes checking in on him.

His light may have been on, but I couldn’t see him, and I wondered if perhaps he’d gone to bed and simply forgotten to turn it off. More likely he was just in the bathroom, so I decided to wait a while longer. As I stared at that window, I realised there was something… I don’t know, off about it. It looked different somehow, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then I noticed it. At first, I’d just taken it to be a water pipe running down the side of the building, attached just below Graham’s open window. The light from the streetlamps didn’t reach up to his fourth floor flat, and the window ledge cast a shadow that stopped the light from the room illuminating it, but it was long, straight, dark, and from what I could see it just looked like a pipe, except I’d been watching that window for months now, and would have sworn that there had never been a pipe there before.

And as I stared at it, it moved. It started to bend, slowly, and I realised I was looking at an arm, a long, thin arm. As it bent the joint close to where the arm ended, I think I saw another joint further down, also moving, and bending what I can only assume were elbows; it hooked the end of the limb over through the window. When I say moved, that’s not quite right. It shifted. Like when you stare at one of those old magic eye paintings and you change from seeing one picture into seeing another.

I never saw anything I could actually call a hand, but still it pulled itself through his window. It took less than a second, and I didn’t get a good look at what it was, I just saw these… arms, legs? At least four of them, but there might have been more, and they kind of folded themselves through the window in a flash of mottled grey. I think that was the colour – it was mostly a silhouette, and if there was a body or head, it shifted inside faster than I could see it. The moment it was inside, the light in Graham’s flat went out, and the window slammed down behind it.

So yeah, I just kind of stood there for a long time, trying to process what I’d just seen. I could make out some vague movements from inside Graham’s flat, but couldn’t see anything clearly. I finally decided I had to phone the police, though I didn’t have any idea what to tell them. In the end I simply said I’d seen someone suspicious climbing in through a fourth floor window at his address and hung up before they could ask me who was calling. Then I waited and watched the darkened flat opposite. I couldn’t look away – I was convinced that if I stopped staring that… whatever the hell it was would fold itself back out, reach over and step into my home. Nothing came out.

About ten minutes later I saw a police car driving up the street. No sirens, no flashing lights, but they were here, and right away I started to feel better. Looking up, though, I saw the light had come on in Graham’s flat. There was no sign of the thing I’d seen climb in, but as the police pressed the buzzer outside his building, I saw someone walking towards the door to let them in. It wasn’t Graham.

I can’t stress enough how much this was not Graham. He looked completely different. He was maybe a few inches shorter and had a long, square face topped with curly blond hair, where Graham’s had been dark and cut short. He was dressed in Graham’s clothes, though; I recognised the shirt from my months of watching, but he was not Graham. I watched as Not-Graham walked to the door and let the two police officers in. They talked for a while, and Not-Graham looked concerned and together they started to search the flat. I watched, waiting for the thing to emerge, or for them to find the real Graham, but they didn’t.

At one point I saw one of the police pick up a dark red shape that I recognised as a passport. My heart beat faster as I saw her open it and look at Not-Graham, clearly comparing, waiting for the moment when she detected the impostor. But instead she just laughed, shook Not-Graham’s hand, and they left.

I watched the police car drive away, feeling a sense of helplessness, and when I looked up, he was standing at Graham’s window, looking back at me. I stood there frozen as his wide, staring eyes met mine and a cold, toothy smile spread across his face. Then in one swift motion he drew the curtains, and was gone.

I didn’t sleep that night, and I never saw Graham again. I saw this new person, though, all the time. For the next week I’d see him taking out large, heavy-looking rubbish bags several times a day. It took me a while to realise he was disposing of Graham’s old notebooks, but soon enough the flat was empty of them. I think he did other redecorating, but I never got a good look, as the only time he had his curtains open was when he was staring intently at my flat, which he now did every night. I tried to find evidence of the old Graham, but anything I could find online with a picture – it was always a picture of this new person. I even asked some of my old classmates, but none of them seemed to remember him at all.

Eventually I moved. I really liked my old place in Clapham, but yeah, it just got too much. The last straw was when I was leaving for work one morning, and didn’t realise until too late that Not-Graham had left his building at the same time. He greeted me by name, and his voice was nothing like it should have been. I started to make my excuses and hurry away, but he just stared at me, and smiled.

“Isn’t it funny, Amy, how you can live so near and never notice. I’ll need to return the visit someday.”

I moved out a week later, and I never saw him again.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

I’d be tempted to dismiss this as hallucination resulting from long-term head trauma complications, but Nastya came through with this one and managed to get hold of Ms. Patel’s medical records. God knows how she got them, but she’d better not be using Institute funds to woo filing clerks again. The records just don’t support the idea she was suffering those sorts of problems. Not to mention I usually trust co-worker testimony as far as I can burn it, but her job really doesn’t seem like the sort you could do with a compromised sense of reality. Ms. Patel has refused our request for a follow-up interview and seems to be trying to distance herself from these events.

Graham Folger definitely existed, and appears to match up with her story. According to coroner’s records, Desmond and Samantha Folger, his parents, died on the M1 near Sheffield on August 4th, 2001, and Graham Folger’s name appears on the register of several colleges and universities in and around London over the next few years. The flat she mentioned did belong to Mr. Folger, but was sold through an agency in early 2007. All the photographs we’ve been able to source seem to match the description of this “Not-Graham” that Ms. Patel described, except for a few Polaroids, enclosed, which appear to be from the late 80s, and show the two parents alongside a dark-haired teenager who doesn’t match the later photos at all.

There doesn’t seem to be much more to be done here. Ms. Patel, like so many of our subjects, seems to have been more interested in giving her statement as a form of personal closure, rather than as the start of a serious investigation. She wasn’t even interested when Nastya told her we’d managed to locate what we believed to be one of Graham Folger’s journals. Doubt it would have done much good. It just says the same thing on every page: the words “Keep Watching” over and over again.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Dominic Swain, regarding a book briefly in his possession in the winter of 2012. Original statement given June 28th, 2013. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I work as a theatre technician in various venues around the West End; I mainly deal with lights, but a lot of the smaller venues can’t afford large crews for their productions so you end up doing a little bit of everything. I guess that’s not directly relevant to my experience but I just want you to know that I’m not some crazy person wandering in off the street. I work, I do practical things with my hands and I am not prone to crazed flights of fancy.

That day, I was going to see a matinee performance of The Trojan Women at The Gate Theatre, up in Notting Hill. A friend of mine, Katherine Mendes, was in it and had been trying to get me to come to see it for a while. We’d worked together on a production of The Seagull a couple of years before and had had a bit of a thing going back then. At this point I had just become single, so was keen to meet up and see if any of the old spark remained. I ended up going along on the afternoon of Saturday the 10th of November – I remember the date exactly, as there had been a lot of back-and-forth about it, since we were both involved in separate shows at the time, making evenings difficult.

So, on Saturday afternoon I found myself in Notting Hill Gate, killing an hour or two before the show was due to start. Now, Notting Hill is not somewhere I go often, as it tends towards the pricey, even for London, and I’m not sure how much you know about theatre techs, but we’re not generally an overpaid profession. Still, I had some vague memories of their being an Oxfam charity shop somewhere nearby, as I’d previously bought quite a nice old military tunic there which remains one of my favourite jackets. I found it without any problems, and spent ten minutes or so looking over the clothes and knickknacks, but was a bit disappointed. It was smaller than I remembered and just seemed to contain the same tedious curios as every other charity shop. I still had some time to kill, though, so I decided to have a look through their books, something I rarely bother doing usually.

I found the book on the Science Fiction and Fantasy shelf. At first I assumed it was some sort of faux-leather special edition and I was sure whoever put it out for sale must have done the same, because the price on it was only four pounds. There was something about it that made me take another look, though, and picking it up I felt the binding and realised it might well have been bound in real leather, probably calf, given how soft it was. I’m not an expert on books, by any means, but it seemed old, and I thought it might have been hand-bound as the pages were slightly uneven.

There was no dust wrapper on it and the front had no title, but embossed on the spine in faded gold letters were the words Ex Altiora. I did some Latin in school when I was a child, but I haven’t had much cause to use it since, so you’ll have to forgive me if my translations don’t make much sense, but I believe it meant “From Higher” or “Out of the Heights”.

I was astounded, to say the least – the book was clearly worth far more than it was being sold for. If the shop clerk who put it out had been paying any attention it would have been in the glass case where they kept those things people donated that were actually valuable. I had a flick through but it seemed to be entirely written in Latin, so I didn’t have much luck discerning what it was about. The only English seemed to be a bookplate at the front that read “From the library of Jurgen Leitner,” although no author was listed.

There were also several black and white illustrations – woodcuts I think – each showing a mountain or a cliff or in one picture what appeared to be an empty night sky. I felt an odd sensation when I looked at that image as though, simple as it was, I was about to fall into it, and my stomach gave an odd jolt, almost causing me to drop the book in the middle of Oxfam.

I made up my mind to buy it. Even if I never figured out how to read the thing, it was clearly worth a lot more than they were selling it for. I felt like a bit of an arse for not letting them know how valuable it was, almost like I was stealing money from the charity, but in the end I realised that it wasn’t my job to set the prices in this shop and besides, this book absolutely fascinated me. The woman working the till didn’t even raise an eyebrow when I brought it over and paid my four pounds. I headed out, hoping to find a café where I could sit and have another look through, but it was then that I noticed the time. I had somehow managed to spend an hour in that shop, and now I was very nearly late for Katherine’s play. I made it in time, luckily, though I had to run a bit.

The show was fine. I’ve never been a particular fan of Greek plays, and this interpretation was not the one to win me round to them. Katherine was excellent, of course, but the rest of the show was quite frankly a bit pedestrian. Still, I’m not a theatre critic, and I wasn’t exactly paying it my full attention, as I was convinced there was a problem with the stage lights. Throughout the show I kept getting the faintest smell of ozone and was worried. The only other time I’d smelled that in the theatre was when one of my stage hands had accidentally ordered the wrong sort of light and we’d ended up installing a projector with a xenon-mercury lamp – the sort used to sterilise medical equipment with UV. I spotted the issue before anything happened, but I still remember that intense ozone smell. Still, no-one else seemed to notice it and I couldn’t see anything in their light set-up that would have caused the odour, so I tried my best to ignore it.

After the performance was finished, Katherine and I grabbed a quick dinner before heading to our respective evening shows. I was disappointed to discover that whatever attraction there had been between us seemed to have vanished completely, and while we spent a pleasant enough couple of hours together it was obvious that neither of us wanted to take it any further. I did show her the book, though. She knew even less Latin than I did, but was impressed. She said it looked valuable and that I should take it somewhere to be appraised, although she didn’t look through it in any detail, as the pictures triggered her vertigo for some reason.

Nothing of note occurred after I left. I did my show, a production of Much Ado About Nothing down at the Courtyard Theatre, with no problems. I returned home late, having gone for a drink with the stage manager and a couple of the actors, and felt far too awake to just go to bed, so I poured myself a small gin and tonic and decided to look through this book in more detail. Oddly enough, I somehow hadn’t learned any more Latin since I bought it twelve hours before, so reading it was still out of the question, but I went through and had a closer look at those woodcuts. There were about a dozen that I found, mostly mountains and cliffs but one appeared to be a tower, looming over the surrounding countryside at an odd angle, with tiny birds just visible circling the summit.

And then there was that picture of an empty sky. I’ve never had any fear of heights, but staring at that picture I felt… I don’t know, really. I just couldn’t look at it for too long. It seemed to open forever, nothing to do but fall into it. It was even stranger as there wasn’t much to the picture itself except for black ink and a few stylised stars, but something in the proportions just had that effect on me.

I decided that maybe Katherine had been right, and it might be valuable as an antique, so I did some research to try and find out more about it. Latin fell out of favour as a language for academic texts in the 18th Century and I really doubted the thing was that old. Since then it was only really used for religious texts but the book certainly didn’t look like it was full of prayers. Searching Ex Altiora online didn’t do much good – the phrase was used in a few old prayers, there was a company called Altiora and something in Italian about football, but nothing that looked even remotely like it related to my book.

Searching for Jurgen Leitner wasn’t much better. It brought up an entry for an Austrian musician and a few Facebook pages, although they all seemed to have umlauts in their names, unlike the one in the book, and none of them looked like the sorts to have a library full of strange Latin texts. The only thing I found that looked even remotely relevant was a listing on eBay from 2007. The auction was titled “Key of Solomon 1863 owned by MacGregor Mathers and Jurgen Leitner” and had been won for just over £1200 by a deactivated user – grbookworm1818. There was no picture or description – just the title and the winning bid. I decided to call it a night and go to bed. I think I had a nightmare, but I don’t remember the details.

I slept in very late the next day and by the time I awoke there wasn’t much daylight left, but I spent the hours until my show contacting book dealers that I’d looked up online. All of them put the book’s age between 100 and 150 years, and said it looked like it had been custom-bound. Most offered to buy it off me for a few hundred pounds, but at this point I was more interested in information about it. Unfortunately, none of them had heard of it before, or seemed at all familiar with its contents.

The last seller I went to did recognise the name Jurgen Leitner, though. She told me Leitner had been a big name in the literary scene during the 1990s; some rich Scandinavian recluse paying absurd amounts of money for whatever books took his fancy. It was said he’d often have books custom-bound after providing a manuscript, or even commission authors to produce works to his brief – although she didn’t actually know any writers who had worked with Leitner. He dropped from public view sometime around ‘95, but she recalled he used to have extensive dealings with Pinhole Books down in Morden, and gave me the details for Mary Keay, who owned it.

I went and I did my show after that, the last night of the run, in point of fact, but though I didn’t miss a single lighting cue, all through it I just couldn’t take my mind off the book. I felt as though there was something I was missing, just beyond my grasp. And all throughout I could detect that same faint smell of ozone. Or was it ozone? There was something else there, something I knew but could not remember. Every time I felt I was close, I was overcome with a dizziness and nausea that threatened to topple me over.

I skipped the cast party afterwards, instead going for a long walk to “clear my head” in the cold November air. I don’t know how long I walked for. It must have been hours, but it felt right, like it was all I could do. Walking felt as natural as falling. It was only when a man shouted at me for almost walking into him that I stopped and took stock of my surroundings. I had no idea where I was. I took out my phone to find the nearest station and saw that I was only a street away from Morden.

I felt dizzy all of a sudden, and when I looked at the building I was stood in front of, I was not in the least bit surprised to see a brass plaque reading “Pinhole Books – By Appointment Only” next to an unmarked door of dark-stained wood. I rang the doorbell and waited.

The woman who opened the door wasn’t at all what I was expecting. She was very old and painfully thin, but her head was completely clean shaven, and every square inch of skin I could see was tattooed over with closely-written words in a script I didn’t recognise. She stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and from the top I could hear the sound of death metal blaring out of some powerful speakers. I wondered for a moment if she got complaints from the neighbours, playing it so loudly at two o’clock in the morning, and realised with a start that it was actually two o’clock in the morning. I apologised for disturbing her so late and asked if she was Mary Keay. She just snorted and asked in a decidedly unfriendly manner if I had an appointment.

I reached into my bag and pulled out Ex Altiora, opening it to show Leitner’s name on the bookplate. At this her eyes seemed to light up, and she turned around to walk up the stairs. She didn’t shut the door behind her, so I took this as an invitation and followed her up.

We entered a cramped set of rooms, with books piled high in every conceivable corner, almost to a point where I had to be careful following her through the labyrinth, so as not to take a wrong turn. She was talking, I realised, and didn’t seem to care if I heard her over the music or not. She said it had been a long time since she’d found a Leitner, although “her Gerard” kept an eye out. She gave no elaboration as to who her Gerard might have been. This strange old woman didn’t seem interested in actually reading or looking at my book in depth, but asked instead if I wanted to see hers. I just nodded. I was out of my depth here, but I had no idea what in. I just knew that I hadn’t smelled ozone since I arrived.

I followed Mary Keay into a dingy study. It was small to begin with, but every wall was completely covered with packed bookshelves, crowding even further into the space. Immediately my host began to scan them intently, muttering to herself about where “he” would have put it. I stood there awkwardly, not wanting to stare at the old woman, but also hesitant to do anything else.

Aside from the bookshelves, there was little in the room other than a worn desk with a very old-looking chair behind it. The desk was covered with papers, as well as fishing wire and a safety razor. I think it says something about my state of mind at this point that I didn’t even give those items a second thought at the time.

Instead, my attention was fixed on a picture attached to the one small area of wall not covered by bookshelves. It was a painting of an eye. Very detailed, and at first I almost would have said almost photorealistic, but the more I looked at it, the more I saw the patterns and symmetries that formed into a single image, until I was so focused on them that I started to have difficulty seeing the eye itself.

Written below it were three lines, in fine green calligraphy: “Grant us the sight that we may not know. Grant us the scent that we may not catch. Grant us the sound that we may not call.”

At this point Mary Keay returned with two cups of tea. I hadn’t even noticed her leave nor had I requested the cup of black tea she pressed into my hand. She asked if I liked the painting and told me that her Gerard had done it. Said he was a very talented artist. I mumbled something approving, I don’t remember exactly what, and looked at the cup of tea in my hand. She hadn’t offered me any milk, and was now busily searching the shelves again, her own cup forgotten on the desk. I tried to drink the stuff out of politeness, but it tasted foul, like dust and smoke. I think it might have once been lapsang souchong, but if so it must have been years old.

Finally, Mary seemed to find the book she was looking for and took it from the shelf. She handed me a book that, at first glance, appeared to be almost identical to my copy of Ex Altiora, except that the leather was in slightly better condition. There was no title on this one, but opening it I could see that it was written in letters I didn’t recognise. There were no illustrations in this book, and the only English words I could find were on the bookplate: “From the library of Jurgen Leitner”. Just like mine. Mary told me that the writing was in Sanskrit, but when I asked her if she could read it she just started laughing.

She took the book back and walked over to the desk where the room’s single unshaded light bulb cast stark shadows across the floor. She very deliberately held the book in those shadows for a few seconds and then handed it back to me. I noticed for the first time that the heavy metal music was no longer playing, and the room was utterly silent.

I opened the book, and for a few seconds was confused to see that nothing seemed to have changed. The writing was still unintelligible to me and it felt no different. I lifted it to have a closer look, and as I did I heard something clatter lightly onto the floor. I looked down to see bones. Small animal bones, from what I can tell, but each one was slightly bent and warped into shapes that bones should not form.

As I stared at them, Mary Keay took the book back from me and passed it through the shadows once again. More bones fell. She did this several times, until there was a small pile formed at my feet.

I didn’t know what to say. By this point my head was pounding and the feel of this cramped, dark place with its old tea and ancient books was starting to overwhelm me. All I could think to ask was whether my book did that as well. Mary Keay laughed and told me to look for myself. I began to look through those pages. I hadn’t passed it through any shadows, but I knew something had changed. The woodcuts were starker, somehow, and in the background of each there were new lines, thick and dark, stretching down from the sky. And then I came to the picture of that empty night, but now it had a stark, branching pattern carving through it. A pattern I recognised. My stomach dropped, as though the floor was gone and I was falling.

Struggling to stay standing, I muttered some excuse and went to leave. The ozone smell was back now, stronger than ever, and I had to get out. I fell down the stairs as I fled, badly bruising my hip and twisting my ankle painfully, but I didn’t care. I limped from that place as quickly as I could and hailed a taxi to take me home, fingers still locked in a death-grip on my book.

The branching pattern I had seen in that picture is known as the Lichtenberg figure. It shows the diverging paths of electricity on an insulating material, such as glass or resin. I knew it from the pattern of scars on the back of my childhood friend, who had been struck by lightning because of me.

His name was Brian Drumbot, and we’d been 8 years old at the time, playing in a field near my grandmother’s house. When the storm hit, Brian had said that we should go inside, but I wanted to keep playing in the rain. I said that to him, and he just sighed and told me alright. It was as he said these words that he was struck.

The sound when it happened was so loud that it drowned out his screams completely, but it was the smell that really stayed with me: that powerful ozone smell, cut through with the scent of cooking meat. Brian survived, in the end, but the scar, that branching Lichtenberg scar, stayed with him for the rest of his life.

When I got home it took all of my concentration to get up the stairs, and when I finally made it onto my sofa I couldn’t shake that feeling as though I was falling. The smell was so strong I could hardly breathe. I didn’t look at the book, I just lay there. I felt as though I was waiting for something, but I had no idea what.

By the time the knock on the door finally came, I was almost feeling composed enough to answer. Almost. It still took me almost five minutes to work up the nerve to open it. The knock did not come again, but I was positive that whatever was on the other side had not gone away. I reached over, grasped the handle and pulled the door open.

Stood just over the threshold was a man in a long, dark leather coat. His hair was dyed an artificial black, and he had the unshaven look of someone who hadn’t slept in a couple of days. I asked him if he was Gerard Keay. He said that he was, and told me he’d like to see my book. I nodded silently and he followed me inside, closing the door behind him.

I took out the book and placed it on the table. Gerard studied it for some time, but did not touch it. Finally, he nodded and offered to buy it from me for five thousand pounds. I almost laughed when he said that. I would have sold it for a fraction of the amount. I might even have given it away, if it wasn’t for the feeling that that… wouldn’t count somehow. It’s hard to explain. I didn’t care what he planned to do with it, I just wanted to get rid of it, and so I agreed.

Gerard didn’t seem exactly happy at the news. He just nodded gravely and headed towards the door, saying he’d need to get the money and return. I didn’t try to stop him. He left, closing the door behind him and I was alone once again. The whole encounter lasted barely more than a minute.

I sat there, waiting in silence for him to return. It was awful, and I needed to find some way to distract myself from the creeping smell, so I decided to get out my computer and see what I could find out about Gerard and Mary Keay. Typing in their names I don’t know what sort of thing it was that I expected to find, but it certainly wasn’t a news article from 2008 about Mary Keay’s murder.

Police had broken in late September, after neighbours complained about the smell, and found her lying dead in the study. Cause of death was apparently determined to be an overdose of painkillers, but it was judged a murder due to “extensive post-mortem mutilation of the body”. Large pieces of her skin had been peeled away, and hung up to dry on fishing wire, all around the room.

The article had a picture of Mary Keay, and there was no question that it was the same old woman that I had met in Morden, although in the photograph she seemed to have a full head of hair and lacked any visible tattoos.

I frantically started searching for any other information I could find. Other news stories covered Gerard’s trial for his mother’s murder. Apparently he had been acquitted after a significant piece of evidence was deemed inadmissible, although none of the reports seemed to know what exactly that evidence was. It was at this moment the knocking came again. Gerard had returned.

I opened the door. I thought briefly about not letting him in, but I knew he’d wait there as long as he needed to, and I couldn’t think for the reek of ozone that penetrated every one of my senses. I could not hide the terror on my face as he entered, but if he noticed the change in my demeanour then he didn’t react to it. He simply handed me an envelope filled with cash. I didn’t even bother to count it before handing him the book. He looked at the title, then flicked through it very quickly, before laughing, just once and nodding, apparently to himself, as though he’d just come to some sort of decision.

I had expected Gerard to leave immediately, but instead he walked over to my metal waste paper basket and placed the book inside. He reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a bottle of lighter fluid and a box of matches. Within a few seconds the book was ablaze, and the smell vanished almost immediately. Even as my head began to clear, I felt like I had to ask him why, but he just shook his head.

“My mother doesn’t always know what’s best for our family.” That was all he said before picking up the waste paper bin, now full of gently smouldering ashes. I warned him it would be too hot to hold, but he shrugged and said he’d had worse. Then Gerard Keay left, and I never saw him or the book again.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

If I never hear the name Jurgen Leitner again it will be too soon. I suppose it was too much to hope that we’d finally dealt with all that remained of his library after the incident in 1994, but it would have been useful if Gertrude had at least thought to add this statement to the current project file. Who knows how many other statements are in here that might deal with his books, or other currently active Institute projects?

If my luck thus far is anything to go by, then I’d say it is unlikely this was an isolated example. The more I discover about this archive, the more it seems Gertrude simply took the written statements and threw them into these files without even reading them. Given that she was Head Archivist for over fifty years, then that is… This might be a bigger job than I originally thought.

Regardless, most of the verifiable details in Mr. Swain’s account seem to match up with our own researches. Tim couldn’t find any records of Ex Altiora as a title in existent catalogues of esoteric or similar literature, so I assigned Nastya to double-check. Still nothing. Is it possible Mr. Swain got the title wrong? It seems unlikely, given the simplicity of it, and the… occurrences he describes certainly sound like they could have been due to the proximity of a true Leitner tome. Still, all the other books from his library have been custom editions of known texts on dæmonology or the arcane. If there are Leitners out there that we haven’t even heard of, I fear that may be cause for some small alarm.

Useful details for follow-up are few and far between, however. Donation records at the Oxfam charity shop in Notting Hill Gate only have anonymous donations listed for books in October/November 2012, and obviously none of the staff recall the book. We’ve also been unable to locate Gerard Keay at all. Aside from this encounter, he seems to have almost entirely disappeared following the end of his trial.

The description Mr. Swain gives does appear to match file photos of Gerard and Mary Keay, and from his description it sounds like he did find his way to what used to be Pinhole Books in Morden, although it has been closed since 2008 for obvious reasons, and no new tenants moved in until 2014.

There was one interesting thing Tim found out, though, in the official police report on Mary Keay’s death – apparently, the drying sheets of skin had been written over in permanent marker. There was no transcription or translation of it in the report but the language was identified to be Sanskrit.

So it doesn’t appear that we have any concrete leads to go on. Still, I will be bringing this up with Carmilla and recommending that the search for any other missed books from the Leitner library be made this Institute’s highest priority. Jurgen Leitner has done the world enough harm and we must pursue all available avenues to ensure that he does no more.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Kieran Woodward, regarding items recovered from the refuse of 93 Lancaster Road, Walthamstow. Original statement given February 23rd, 2009. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I work as a bin man for Waltham Forest Council. It’s not a bad job, really, as long as you can handle the smell and the early mornings, not to mention that when winter really gets going it can be pretty unpleasant. I’ve had to chip ice off more than a few bins in my time, just to get them open. Still, the pay’s pretty decent; at least it is once you throw in the overtime and the bonuses, and once you’ve done the rounds you’re usually off for the day, so you’re working fewer hours than your average office monkey; it’s just that those hours tend to be a lot less pleasant than anything you’re likely to find staring at some accounting spreadsheet.

But I didn’t come here to talk about the benefits and problems of working in waste collection. At least, I guess I came to talk about one very specific problem that I encountered last year, when doing the rubbish collection for 93 Lancaster Road.

Now, you encounter weird things in this job all the time. People have an odd mental block – this idea that as soon as they put something in the bin it’s gone. It’s officially been made rubbish and no-one will ever see it again. The fact that someone had to take it from your bin to the landfill or the recycling centre doesn’t really enter their heads, and nobody ever seems to realise that up to a dozen people might be seeing what you throw away before it finally disappears forever. But no, as far as the rest of the world thinks about it, once it’s been thrown away, it’s gone, far beyond all human understanding.

This leaves those of us who work in waste collection seeing kind of a strange side to humanity, but an honest one at that. If you’re a bit of a boozer, there’s every chance that your bin men know how much you drink better than you do, because we empty all the bottles. And yes, we do remember, and we also get quite judgemental at times, although not about the things you might think – you can throw away a mountain of grotesque porn and, as long as you’ve tied it into neat bundles, we’re fine with it, but if you throw away cat litter without properly bagging that, you’d better believe that you’ve earned the hatred of every bin man that ever slung a sack. Still, I’m getting off topic.

Point is, the bag of dolls’ heads didn’t bother me. I mean, it was freaky, don’t get me wrong – hundreds of small plastic heads, staring out of the refuse sack at me, but aside from a slight rip on the side of the black bag, they were thrown away very neatly, and were easy enough to toss into the truck.

The bag was full of them, mind. It was placed next to the green recycling bin and at first I thought that it was just a single doll with its head positioned near the tear, but when I tossed the bag into the truck the rip split, spilling forth a whole bunch of the things. At a guess I’d say there were over a hundred in there. They were made of hard, rigid plastic with that infant doll face that you seem to find on every toy like that.

Several of them had different hair moulded or painted on, so it was clear that they weren’t simply from a hundred or so of the same doll. Someone had spent time acquiring a whole variety of different dolls, which they then beheaded and stuffed into the sack. They were very battered, but not with age – it looked as though someone had taken the brand new heads and dragged them over rough concrete, though I couldn’t say whether they’d have been attached to the rest of the doll at the time.

It was creepy, sure, but the sun was shining and there were four of us working the truck that day, so it was easy enough to laugh it off. It was the old crew – me, David Atayah, Matthew Wilkinson, and Alan Parfitt, who drives – drove – the truck.

What it did do, though, was mark out 93 Lancaster Road in our minds as “the Doll House”, since we spent the rest of the day making off-colour jokes about the sort of people who must live there. I said before that your bin man knows a lot about you. Now, that’s probably not actually true for most people – we service hundreds of homes each day and who can keep track of that many people? Who wants to?

You do have houses, though, that you learn to keep an eye on; the sort of places that throw out strange or sometimes even dangerous things. Like I said, we probably know if you’re an alcoholic, but it’s not because we watch you obsessively or care about your health. It’s because smashed bottles and broken glass are dangerous and you learn to keep an eye out around houses where you’re likely to find them. I read once that waste collection is the second most dangerous profession in England. Not sure I believe it – they said the first was farming – but you do see your fair share of injuries, so you learn to keep your eyes peeled and mark out in your mind which houses you want to stay wary of.

Now, after that, the Doll House became one of those houses for our crew. Not so much for any known danger, but when someone throws out a bin full of weird stuff like that, you never know what else they might decide to toss. Also, Alan, well, he had kind of a twisted sense of humour, and he loved the doll heads. When we told him, he insisted on stopping the truck and getting out to have a look, so after that, he always made a point to ask us to keep an eye on 93.

And we did. The next couple of weeks, when we pulled up to 93, I took an extra second or two just to check for anything strange in the bins, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Alan especially was disappointed by this but it was hardly something to dwell on, so we put it out of our minds and pressed on with the day’s work. This continued for what must have been a few months, and the whole doll heads incident hadn’t come up, except for a few interesting conversations at the recycling plant where, to be honest, I don’t think anyone believed us, or if they did they’d immediately try to top it with their own story of bizarre finds.

It was the start of spring when we got the next strange bag from 93 Lancaster Road. Again, it was an unmarked black refuse bag placed next to the recycling bin. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was another one. The shape of it was too regular to be full of the normal assortment of rubbish. As I picked it up, I realised it was far too light as well. It seemed to weigh almost nothing, but was bulging with what sounded like a whole load of paper inside.

I gave the others a look and told them I thought we had another odd bag. David and Matt started discussing whether we should open it, as this one didn’t seem to have a rip like the last one, and we were still talking it over when Alan came back to see what was taking us so long. He knew where we were, and you could see it in his eyes that he’d been hoping this was the reason for the delay. One look at his face and I knew that if we didn’t open it, he would.

I looked up towards the house, checking for anyone watching, but 93 was right near the start of our route, so it was still very early in the morning and all the lights were off. There was no sign of movement so, very carefully, I opened the bag.

Inside was paper, as I expected. It seemed to be a single strip of thick white writing paper, maybe an inch wide. The paper was long, so long that it seemed like the whole bag was filled solely with this one piece of it, wrapped and curled and crumpled to fit inside. There was writing on it in another language, I think Latin.

Matt, who was raised Catholic and never shut up about it, said he recognised it and claimed that it was the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, written over and over again. He seemed pretty rattled about it, especially at the fact that at certain points the edges of the paper seemed to be slightly singed, as though it had been passed over a candle or a lighter. He even seemed hesitant about throwing it in with the rest of the garbage, but we didn’t have anything else we could actually do with it, so into the truck it went.

Alan was smiling the rest of the shift, and there was a delight there that, quite frankly, had started to unsettle me a bit. As far as I was concerned this was a bit of a let-down after the dolls’ heads, but the way the others had reacted put me on edge.

The third bag was the one that really changed things. It was a fortnight after the one with the prayer paper in it. As we approached 93, I noticed there was another bag sitting next to the bin. The others clearly noticed as well, as everyone went very quiet. The first two had been the only times there had been rubbish bags at the house that weren’t in the actual bin itself, so there was little doubt in my mind that this was going to be more creepy trash. Alan turned the engine off as we pulled level with the house, and got out. Whatever was in this one, he was going to see it.

The bag bulged, just like the others, but had a bumpy sort of look to its surface. We all stared at it for several seconds, before I realised that the others were waiting for me to pick it up – I’d picked up the others, and apparently this was how it was done now. It almost felt like a ritual.

I walked over and lifted it off the ground. It was heavier than the last one, and as it moved it made a sound, like shifting sand or gravel, or maybe more of a rattle. I started to carry it towards my colleagues to open it, when I accidentally caught the bottom of it on the low brick wall at the end of the small front garden. Already filled almost to bursting, the bag tore open easily.

From the newly ripped hole, poured teeth. Hundreds, thousands of teeth; they came streaming down it a waterfall of white, cream and yellow, bouncing as they hit the pavement, and gradually forming a pile of astounding size. When the bag was finally empty, we just stood there in silence, staring at the mountain of teeth that now lay on the ground before us.

They looked like human teeth to me, but I wasn’t exactly an expert and I sure as hell didn’t want to check closer. Finally, David broke the silence by vomiting loudly into a nearby drain and I backed away from the grisly mound. Even Alan looked shaken by this – I suppose some things are disconcerting however grim your interests. We phoned the police.

That’s something else that people always forget about garbage men – we’re perfectly capable of calling the police if we see obviously illegal stuff being thrown away. Usually we don’t bother if it’s just something small, but this… for this we phoned the police. They came in surprisingly good time and I reckon they were even more freaked out than we were.

One of them took our statements, while the other went up to the house itself to check on the occupants, and see if they knew anything about the teeth. As the officer knocked on the door, we all strained to get a better look at what greeted her. There was no way after all this we were going to pass up a chance to actually get a look at the residents of 93 Lancaster Road.

Eventually the door opened, and an old woman stood there, blinking in the early morning sunlight and clearly slightly alarmed to see the police. Needless to say, the old lady and her husband had no idea about any of the weird bags that had been appearing in their rubbish, and seemed properly upset when they were given the details. The police spent a good ten minutes doing their best to collect up all the teeth, and we were sent on our way. I have no idea what, if anything, the investigation turned up. Certainly I was never contacted by them again, and if any of the rest were, they didn’t mention it.

And for a while, that was it. We kept an eye out whenever we were heading down Lancaster Road, but didn’t encounter any further ominous garbage bags. I thought maybe the involvement of the police had scared off whoever was leaving them. Maybe the police had caught the culprit and just hadn’t told us.

I did start to notice, though, that Alan wasn’t doing well. He was often late to his shift, and when he finally got there he’d be exhausted and grumpy, snapping at everyone and rudely brushing off anyone asking about his health or how he was doing. He seemed even worse whenever we approached the end of Lancaster Road, sometimes speeding up the truck slightly so that we had to run to keep up. Eventually, after I tripped over the curb while hurrying and twisted my ankle, I confronted him, told him that whatever was going on with him, he could talk about it or get over it, but that he clearly needed to deal with something. He got very quiet, and said he’d been watching number 93 some nights. Said he wanted to see whoever was dropping this stuff off. That he had to know.

I don’t know what I expected. Trouble at home, maybe, or depression, but this took me by surprise. I told him it was a really bad idea, that if the police were still investigating they were more than likely to pick him up as the culprit, and even if they didn’t the old couple at 93 could just as easily get him arrested for harassment or stalking. Alan nodded along and agreed with me as I spoke, but I could see he wasn’t listening. He just said again that he needed to know, told me he’d be careful, as though that was meant to reassure me. It didn’t, but I could see I wasn’t going to talk him out of it and we ended in an uncomfortable silence.

What I didn’t say, is that I’d almost done the same thing myself once or twice. There was something about this, beyond anything else I’d encountered, that… I don’t know. It drew me in almost as much as it disgusted me. Almost, but not enough to do anything, and if I needed any further convincing that leaving it alone was the right decision, I only needed to look at Alan. As time went on, the bags under his eyes deepened, and I’d watch him down half a dozen energy drinks over the course of a morning, just to get through his shift.

I could have said something to our manager, but even then Alan was still my friend, and I didn’t want to be the one to get him in any sort of trouble. Eventually, though, it came to a head anyway. Alan fell asleep at the wheel of the truck and drove it into a parked car. No-one was hurt and the truck was going too slowly to do any real damage but, at that point, it was enough to get him fired. We were sad to see him go, but to be honest, by the end of it he’d become quite unpleasant to be around and no-one shed any real tears over it. We got a new member on our crew, a kid named Guy Wardman, and life continued in relative peace. For a while, anyway.

Then, on the 8th of August last year, at nine minutes past two in the morning, I was woken up by a text message from Alan. It said “FOUND HIM”. I texted him back immediately – What had he found? Was it whoever was leaving the bags? Had he brought another one? No response. I texted Alan again to ask if he was ok. I sent that text a lot of times, but never heard back. I tried phoning him, but nobody answered. As the minutes stretched to hours, the worry that had been growing in my gut settled into a grim certainty, and I knew that Alan was gone. I also knew that I had to go to 93 Lancaster Road and see for myself. I got my coat and headed out into the night.

I walked slowly, with a kind of reluctance, so the sky was starting to get light by the time I arrived. I knew what I’d find when I got there, and I was right. There was no sign of Alan, or of whoever he might have seen. There was, however, a new rubbish bag sitting there in its usual place. It was full, and this time the top of it had been tied off with a dark green ribbon, arranged in a bow like an old-fashioned Christmas present. It bulged in much the same way as the last one.

I picked up the bag, which turned out to be quite light, and I took off the bow. Opening it, I saw shifting white and, for a second, I was sure it was more teeth. Looking closer, though, I saw the truth: packing peanuts. Polystyrene packing peanuts. Enough to fill the bag to capacity. I almost felt relieved until I realised there was something else in there, something making it heavier than a bag of polystyrene should be.

I closed my eyes and reached in, expecting to find something horrible inside. My hand closed instead around cold metal, and I drew out a fist-sized lump of… I think it must have been copper or bronze, and had been roughly carved into the shape of a heart, but like a real heart, not like a Valentine’s one. It was cold to the touch, like it had just come out of a freezer, and it almost stuck to my skin. Engraved on the side was the name “Alan Parfitt”, the letters carved in with machine-like precision. That was the last sign of Alan I ever found. As far as I’m aware he’s never been seen since.

I gave the lump of metal to a friend of mine who works the medical waste run and owes me a favour. I asked him to throw it in with a shipment, as the medical incinerators burn hotter than any I have access to, and I figured that was my best shot at getting rid of it properly. I still work the Lancaster Road route, but since then there haven’t been any more weird bags turning up at 93. Mostly I’ve just tried to forget about it.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

It’s nice to have a statement where most of the particulars are easily verifiable. It comes with shorter supporting statements from David Atayah and Matthew Wilkinson confirming the contents of the first three bags, as well as the details of Alan Parfitt’s behaviour prior to his termination from the employment of local government. In an uncharacteristic example of actually dealing with modern technology, my predecessor had the good sense to make a copy of the final text conversation between Alan Parfitt and Mr. Woodward.

I had Tim conduct a follow-up interview with Mr. Woodward last week, but it was unenlightening. Apparently there have been no further bags at number 93 and in the intervening years he has largely discounted many of the stranger aspects of his experience. I wasn’t expecting much, as time generally makes people inclined to forget what they would rather not believe, but at least it got Tim out of the Institute for an afternoon, which is always a welcome relief.

Nastya had more luck following up with the old police reports. Alan Parfitt was reported as a missing person by his brother Michael on the 20th of August 2009, and his location remains unknown. The bag of teeth is also corroborated by the police reports of Police Constables Suresh and Altman, though they can provide no further details, as they never made an arrest or even located any suspects.

The medical report on the teeth themselves does give one puzzling detail: the teeth were confirmed to be human, but more than that, as far as the examiner was able to determine… they were all in different stages of decay and didn’t match any available dental records, but all two thousand seven hundred and eighty of them were the exact same tooth.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Timothy Hodge, regarding his sexual encounter with one Harriet Lee and her subsequent death. Original statement given December 9th, 2014. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I don’t know what happened. I mean, I’m sure she’s dead, but I don’t…

Let me start from the beginning. I work as a designer. Mainly freelance, with a few more regular gigs with companies who like my work. I also have, well, had the luxury of a flat I’d managed to get set up so I could do most of my work there. This meant when I had a big job I spent quite a lot of time not leaving my home. Not the most stable of employment but I got quite good at balancing it so that after a big project I left myself a few days, or maybe even a week, before I had to get started on the next one. I find it’s important that I use this time to unwind and blow off a bit of steam, as when I’ve got work I often end up missing out on the regular weekend. Drinking and clubbing are my relaxation methods of choice, usually down Camden or Old Street, and while I’ll admit I’m not above the occasional party drug I swear that I was stone cold sober when this all took place.

That night in particular, it was about three weeks ago now, I’d just finished a big job for one of my more demanding clients and I wanted to get a bit wrecked. Unfortunately none of my friends were free to join me – not surprising as it was a Thursday in the middle of November – so it didn’t feel worth heading all the way into the city. Luckily I live in Brixton, which means I have a few decent options almost on my doorstep, and I happened to know that the Dogstar ran a pretty decent club night on Thursdays. I decided to go along and enjoy myself.

I did enjoy myself in the end. Despite the crowds and the music, I wasn’t feeling quite as wild as I expected but I drank a bit and danced plenty. Ok, maybe I wasn’t quite as sober as I said earlier but I certainly wouldn’t have called myself drunk. Now, I wasn’t particularly looking to get laid that night, but I know I’m not an unattractive guy and I live local, so I’m always alert, shall we say, for any possibility of finding myself a partner. It was closing in on midnight when I saw her. She was skinny and had that student look which could have put her age anywhere between nineteen and twenty-eight. Her hair was long, dyed a deep henna red, and she wore torn tights and too much eyeliner. Exactly the sort of girl I go for.

She was lurking on the dance floor and I wasted no time trying to catch her eye. It was harder than I’d guessed, though, as her attention seemed to be mainly focused on the doors. At first I thought she was waiting for someone but, the more I watched her the more I saw the nervousness in her eyes, maybe even fear? It was at that point she noticed me, and our eyes just locked, you know? She came over and we began to dance together. She was excellent, far better than me, and moved in a smooth, rolling sort of rhythm that made the word “writhe” leap suddenly to my mind.

I offered her a drink but she refused, gesturing instead for water, which I happily got. I couldn’t really hear her over the music but you don’t go to these nights for conversation. Besides, I heard her loud and clear when she leaned over and asked me if I wanted her. I said yes. Looking back it was stupid, of course it was, but she was beautiful and there was something in the way she moved that really got me. She smiled when I said yes, and for a moment it looked less like a smile of anticipation and more like a smile of relief.

Outside the Dogstar it was much quieter and we had a chance to talk. She told me her name was Harriet and she was very pleased to hear I lived locally, as it was a cold night. She held my arm tightly as we walked back towards my street. At first I thought this was for warmth as she didn’t have a coat and I doubted the light jacket she was wearing had much insulation. When I looked at her, though, I saw she was looking around the same way she’d been watching the door earlier. Her nervousness was even more obvious now and she was peering intently down every street we passed. I asked her if anything was wrong, and tried to tell her that I lived in a nice neighbourhood, she was perfectly safe, that sort of thing. She nodded and agreed but still seemed jumpy.

When we were about half way, she started scratching her arms. At first I thought she was just rubbing them for warmth, but after a few seconds it became clear that she was scratching them quite hard, leaving obvious red marks where her fingernails dug in. I was starting to suspect something was wrong, and asked Harriet if there was anything the matter, anything I should know. She just insisted we head back to my place as quickly as possible. I agreed since I figured that whatever the problem was, we could deal with it easier in my flat than on the cold streets at midnight.

By the time we reached my building, she was staring over her shoulder in near panic. I followed her gaze but couldn’t see anything, so quickly opened the front door and let her in. She seemed to relax a bit once we were both in the relatively warm corridor with the door shut firmly behind us. My flat was on the third floor and even though, as I said, I don’t live in a bad area, I did have an extra deadlock on my door. Harriet visibly relaxed when she saw it, and more so when it was closed. The skittish glances and scratching her arms stopped almost immediately.

I offered her a coffee or tea to warm up. She just asked for a glass of water, said she was feeling a bit unwell. We sat down and, once I’d fetched her water and fixed myself a coffee, we talked for a while. My instincts had been right – she was a student, studying art. She hadn’t been in London long, she said, was originally from Salisbury and had been finding it… difficult recently. When she left that pause, I saw in her eyes hints of that panic I’d seen on the street.

I asked her to tell me what was wrong, said something was clearly bothering her and I’d like to help. She got very quiet for a few moments and then nodded. She told me she’d been mugged the night before last, although the way she said the word “mugged” made it sound like she wasn’t sure. I just nodded and let her continue talking. She lived up in Archway, on a street named Elthorne Road, and had been walking home around midnight when she saw a woman lying face down on the pavement. This woman wore a long red dress and Harriet said she could see it shifting in the orange glow of the streetlamps, as though something was moving underneath it.

Harriet was close to her house, which she shared with several other students, so she said she was maybe less careful than she should have been and had approached, calling out and asking if the woman needed help. There was no response but all movement stopped and the red dress went very still.

Suddenly, far quicker than Harriet could have expected, the woman leapt to her feet and sprinted directly towards her, seizing her by the shoulders and pushing her back against a nearby wall. It happened so fast that Harriet said she had never really gotten a good look at the woman beyond her dress, a head of long, matted black hair and wide, staring eyes. The woman growled something at her, but Harriet couldn’t make it out. She tried to ask what the mugger wanted, but as she did she felt a sudden pain in her stomach, as though she’d been stabbed, which is exactly what she thought had happened. She told me that she had fallen to the ground and lost consciousness almost immediately.

When she awoke, the woman in the red dress was gone. Harriet had expected to find herself lying in a pool of blood from her stomach wound, but could instead find no trace of any injury anywhere, except for some scraped knees where she had fallen to the floor. She had staggered home and tried to sleep it off.

Since then, she said she’d been seeing that woman everywhere she went. She felt like she was being followed all the time and couldn’t stay in her own home, as whenever she did it was like this weight was dragging her down. Her skin became so itchy as to be nearly unbearable. Harriet had apparently tried to go to the police, but said as she approached the station she was overcome with such a powerful nausea that she threw up on the pavement. She had tried the hospital, but they just told her there was nothing obvious and to make an appointment with her doctor. She had been spending the last three days just wandering in cafés and bars and clubs, anywhere there were enough people that she felt safe. She just didn’t know what to do.

By now point Harriet was crying and I felt like a complete asshole for having brought the issue up. I mumbled some apologies. I don’t know what I said; I was just trying to make her feel better. Not sure what I expected to happen but I certainly didn’t expect her to kiss me at that moment. I know, I know, she was vulnerable and I feel like an a… But I swear I wasn’t trying to take advantage. I asked her again and again if she was sure, but she just kept nodding and dragged me to the bedroom. I mean, we had sex. There’s not much more to say about that, really. The important thing is what happened afterwards.

As we were lying there in bed, exhausted, I rested my head against her shoulder. I was about to say something or other, but before I could, I felt something move. It’s hard to describe exactly but it wasn’t her shoulder that moved, it was something inside it, under the skin. It squirmed ever so slightly against my cheek.

I shot up in bed, but the only indication that she’d noticed anything amiss was that she reached over and absentmindedly scratched where I’d been lying. I started to relax, lie down again; maybe I’d just imagined it. But at that moment she doubled over and groaned in sudden pain. Her eyes went wide and she clutched her stomach tightly. I tried to see what was wrong, asked if I could help, but she just pushed me away.

I had no idea what to do, so I ran out and towards the bathroom. My mind was going completely blank and I couldn’t remember whether I had any painkillers or indigestion medicine. Or should I be calling an ambulance? I wasn’t sure, and I ended up rooting through my medicine cabinet, looking for… I don’t know; anything that might have helped. I could still hear Harriet moaning in agony from the bedroom, and had just made up my mind to call for an ambulance, when I heard something that stopped me dead in my tracks.

It’s hard to really describe the sound that came from the bedroom. The closest I could come would be to say it sounded like… an egg being dropped onto a stone floor; a sort of wet, cracking thump. Then silence. Harriet was no longer making any noise at all. I slowly, very slowly, walked back towards the bedroom. The door was open, but I hadn’t turned the light on, so there was little to be seen inside except darkness. I could have turned on the light in the hall, I suppose, but something inside made me think that I didn’t want a good look inside that room. I stopped at the threshold. The only illumination at all came from a thin sliver of light coming in through the gap in the curtains from a streetlamp outside.

You’ll have to excuse me. What I saw is difficult to put down on paper, but it’s the only way to explain why I had to do it. Why setting my flat alight and standing naked in the winter streets until the fire brigade arrived was far better than spending another second in that place. And yes, I admit here I set the fire myself. Show it to the police for all I care, I just need someone to understand.

The room was unrecognisable when I returned. There was a shape on the bed, where Harriet had laid, but it wasn’t her anymore. I could barely make out anything even remotely human in the pile of pitted and warped flesh that now remained. The bed itself was slick and shiny with a dark fluid that dripped off the hanging sheets and onto the floor. But what truly repulsed me, what made me flee as I did, was what moved and squirmed on all of it. They covered every surface: the floor, the bed, what used to be Harriet, even the ceiling. A thick, moving carpet of pale, writhing worms.

The flat burned for a very long time.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

This story is concerning. Not because of Mr. Hodge’s experience, although I’m sure it was very upsetting. If it was true, of course. In fact, the police report that Ivy was able to acquire throws doubt on much of his story. While Mr. Hodges’ flat did indeed catch fire on November 20th of last year, there was apparently no evidence of arson, and no human remains found inside, despite the fact that the fire was brought under control long before any significant damage was done to the structure of the building. They did find some charred organic matter in the bedroom, but it was tested and apparently wasn’t human, though the report doesn’t list whether its source was ever determined.

I will say it does link up with the reported disappearance one Harriet Lee, a student at Roehampton who was reported missing shortly after this statement was originally given. She seems to match the description given here. Still, that’s not really what concerns me either, though obviously it’s a tragic loss of life, etcetera, etcetera.

No, what I find quite alarming is that if Mr. Hodge’s recollection of Harriet’s tale is correct and she was attacked by a woman in a red dress in Archway, then that matches the description and last known location of Jane Prentiss. I can’t find any evidence that my predecessor took follow-up action on this statement, so I’ve taken the step of reporting Mr. Hodge’s to the ECDC. We were unable to locate him to request a follow-up interview, and if he has had intercourse with one of Prentiss’ victims, then they’ll need to deal with him sooner rather than later. I just hope it’s not too late already.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Staff Sergeant Clarence Berry, regarding his time serving with Wilfred Owen in the Great War. Original statement given November 6th, 1922. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
A lot of people call me lucky, you know. Not many came through the entirety of the war in one piece. And if you discount the burns, then I did indeed do just that. Even fewer spent all four years at the front, like I did. I was never sent for treatment for shell shock or injury, and even my encounter with a German flamethrower only ended up with me in a front line hospital at Wipers. I was still in that field hospital when the fighting started at the Somme, so I suppose that was lucky, too.

Four years… I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who saw the whole damn show from start to finish, as though I alone know the Great War in all its awful glory. But deep down I know that honour, such as it is, has to go to Wilfred. You wouldn’t have thought it from his poems, but all told, his time at the front totalled not much over a year. Yet he got to know the war in a way I never did. He’s certainly the only person I know that ever saw The Piper.

I grew up poor on the streets of Salford, so I joined the army as soon as I was old enough. I know you’ve heard the stories of brave lads signing up at 14, but this was before the war started, so there wasn’t such a demand for manpower and the recruiters were much more scrupulous about making sure those enlisting were of age. Even so, I was almost too skinny for them to take me and barely made the required weight. But in the end I made it through and, after my training, was assigned to the Manchester Regiment, 2nd Battalion, and it wasn’t long before we were shipped off to France with the British Expeditionary Force. You seem like educated sorts, so I’m sure you read in the papers how that went. Soon enough, though, the trenches were dug and the boredom started to set in. Now, boredom is fine, understand, when the alternatives are bombs, snipers and gas attacks, but months at a time sitting in a waterlogged hole in the ground, hoping your foot doesn’t start swelling, well… it has a quiet terror all its own.

Wilfred came to us in July of 1916. I’m not intimately familiar with his history but he clearly came from stock good enough to be assigned as a probationary Second Lieutenant. I was a Sergeant at the time, so had the job of giving him the sort of advice and support that a new officer needs from a NCO with two years of mud under his nails. That notwithstanding, I will admit taking a dislike to the man when I first met him – he outranked me, and most of the others in the trench, in both military and social terms, and he seemed to treat the whole affair with an airy contempt. There’s a sort of numbness that you adopt after months or years of bombing, a deliberate blankness which I think offended him. He was unfailingly polite, far more so than I was accustomed to in the Flanders mud, where the conversations, such as they were, were coarse and bleak. Yet under this politeness I could feel him dismiss out of hand any suggestion that I gave him or report that I made. It came as no surprise to me when he mentioned he wrote poetry. To be perfectly honest I expected him to be dead within a week.

To Wilfred’s credit, he made it almost a year before anything horrendous happened to him, and by the following spring I’d venture to say that we might almost have been able to call each other friends. He had been composing poetry during this time, of course, and occasionally would read it out to some of the men. They generally enjoyed it, but personally I thought it was dreadful – there was an emptiness to it and every time he tried to put the war into words it just sounded trite, like there was no soul to what he had to say. He would often talk about his literary aspirations, and how he longed to be remembered, to take what this war truly was and immortalise it.

Were I prone to flights of fancy, I daresay I would call his words portentous. When he talked like that, he had an odd habit of trailing off in the middle of the conversation with a tilt of his head, as though his attention had been taken by a far-off sound.

The spring thaw had just recently passed when it happened, and we were on the offensive. Our battalion was near Savy Wood when the orders came down – we were to attack the Hindenburg Line. Our target was a trench on the west side of St. Quentin. It was a quiet march. Even at this stage there was often still some excitement when the orders came down for action, even if it was usually stifled by that choking fear that you got when waiting for the whistle. Yet that morning there was something different in the air, an oppressive dread. We’d made this attack before, and knew that the change from the valley exposed us to artillery fire. And artillery was always the scariest part of it for me. Bayonets you could dodge, bullets you could duck, even gas you could block out if you were lucky, but artillery? All you could do against artillery was pray.

Even Wilfred felt it, I could tell. He was usually quite talkative before combat. Morbid, but always talkative. That morning he didn’t say a word. I tried to talk with him and raise his spirits, as is a sergeant’s duty, but he just held up his hand to quiet me, and turned his head to listen. At the time I didn’t know what it was he was hearing but it kept him silent. Even when we crested the ridge, and the rest of us tried to drown out the deafening thrum of artillery with our own charging cry, even then he made no sound.

The ground shook with the impact of the mortar shells, and I ran from foxhole to crater to foxhole, keeping my head low to avoid the bullets. As I ran, I felt a shooting pain in my ankle and pitched forward into the mud. Looking down, I saw I’d been caught by a length of barbed wire, half-hidden by the damp upturned soil. I felt a surge of panic begin to overtake me, and frantically tried to remove the wire from my leg, but only succeeded in getting my hand scratched up quite badly.

I looked around desperately to see if there was anyone else nearby who could help. And there, not twenty yards in front of me, I saw Wilfred standing, his face blank and his head swaying to some unheard rhythm. And then I did hear it – gently riding over the pulse of mortars and the rattle of guns and the moans of dying men, a faint, piping melody. I could not have told you whether it was bagpipes or panpipes or some instrument I had never heard before, but its whistling tune was unmistakable, and struck me with a deepest sadness and a gentle creeping fear.

And in that moment I knew what was about to happen. I looked at Wilfred, and as our eyes met I saw that he knew as well. I heard a single gunshot, much louder than any of the others somehow, and I saw him go stiff, his eyes wide. And then the mortar blast hit him, and he was lost in an eruption of mud and earth.

I had plenty of time to mourn him, lying in that dreadful hole until nightfall, when I could free my leg as quietly and gently as possible before crawling back to our trench. It was slow going; every time a flare went up I could only lay motionless and pray, but the good Lord saw fit to let me reach our line relatively unscathed. I was quickly bundled off to the field hospital, which was overburdened as always. They didn’t have much in the way of medicine or staff to spare, and certainly no beds free, so they washed my wounds with iodine, bandaged them, and sent me on my way. Told me to come back if I got gangrene.

I did have a look around the place to see if I could find Wilfred, but there was no sign of him to be found anywhere. Asking around the trench, no-one had seen him return among the wounded, so I began to reconcile myself to the fact that he was dead. He wasn’t the first friend I’d lost to the Germans nor even the first I’d seen die in front of me, but something about that strange music that I heard in the moments before that explosion lingered in my mind and left me dwelling on Wilfred in many a quiet moment.

It was probably about a week and a half later I heard shouting from the end of the trench. It was a scouting party who had been reconnoitring the river that flowed near Savy Wood. Apparently, they had found a wounded officer lying in a shell hole there and brought him back. I made my way over, and was astounded to see that it was Wilfred. His uniform was torn and burned, he was covered with blood and his eyes had a distant, far off expression to them, but he was most definitely alive. I rode with him back up to the field hospital, along with the Corporal of the squad who had found him.

Apparently he had been lying in that hole for days, ever since the battle. They’d found him there, half-dead from dehydration and fatigue, covered in the gore of another soldier. Whatever shell had created the hole he’d ended up in had clearly annihilated some other poor soul, and it was in his gory remnants that Wilfred had lain for almost two weeks.

I waited outside the hospital tent while he was being treated. The doctor came out shortly, a grave look on his face. He told me the Lieutenant was physically unharmed – something I considered at the time nothing short of a miracle – but that he had one of the worst cases of shell shock the doctor had ever encountered, and would have to be shipped back to England for recuperation. I asked him if I could see him, and the doctor consented, though he warned me that Wilfred hadn’t said a word since he’d been brought in.

As soon as I stepped inside the medical tent I was overwhelmed by the sweet scent of decaying flesh and the moans of pain and despair. The sharp smell of the disinfectant brought back unpleasant memories of chlorine gas attacks. Still, I eventually found my way over to Wilfred’s bed and, sure enough, there he was, staring silently out at the world, though with an intensity that alarmed me. I followed his gaze to a bed nearby, and there I saw a private I didn’t recognise. His forehead was slick with sweat and his chest rose and fell quickly, then abruptly stopped. I realised with a start that a man had just died, and nobody had noticed except Wilfred.

I tried to engage him in conversation, rattled off a few meaningless pleasantries. “How are you doing, old man?” “Heard you had a bit of a close call.” “Glad you found yourself a crump-hole.” All that sort of nonsense. None of it seemed to produce any reaction in him, and instead he turned to me and after a long while he simply said: “I met the war.”

I told him that he certainly had, not many walk away from something like that and lying in that hole for so long, surrounded by all the death… Well, he had definitely met the war and it was rotten bloody business. But Wilfred just shook his head like I didn’t understand, and to be honest I was starting to feel like I didn’t, and he told me again that he “met the war”. He said it was no taller than I was.

It struck me that perhaps he was describing some dreadful mirage that had come upon him as he lay in that wretched place, and I asked him to tell me what the war looked like.

I remember exactly what he said. He told me it had three faces. One to play its pipes of scrimshawed bone, one to scream its dying battle cry and one that would not open its mouth, for when it did blood and sodden soil flowed out like a waterfall. Those arms that did not play the pipes were gripping blades and guns and spears, while others raised their hands in futile supplication of mercy, and one in a crisp salute. It wore a tattered coat of wool, olive green where it was not stained black, and beneath, nothing could be seen but a body beaten, slashed and shot and until nothing remained but the wounds themselves.

I had heard quite enough by this point, and said so to Wilfred, but if he heard me he gave no indication of it. He told me that the war, “the Piper”, had come to claim him, and he had begged to remain. The thing had paused its tune for but a moment, and with one of its arms it reached out and handed him a pen. He said he knew it would return for him someday, but now he too would live to play its tune. The way he looked at me at that moment was the same way he’d looked at me before the shell hit, and for a moment I could have sworn I once again heard that music on the breeze.

I left almost immediately after that, and was later told that he’d been shipped back to Britain, to recuperate at Craiglockhart. The other men grumbled about officers’ perks and a nice holiday for the Lieutenant, but they didn’t know what he’d been through, and I found it very hard to envy him myself. At one point I asked some of the squad who brought him back whether he’d been holding a pen when they found him, but they told me he hadn’t. The only thing they’d found nearby were the tags of the dead man among his remains. A man named Joseph Rayner.

And for a long while that was that. Wilfred was back at home recovering and taking on lighter duties, while I slogged on through the mud of Flanders. I had a few close calls myself – including the flamethrower that marked me so distinctively. Could have been worse, of course; if the rain hadn’t almost liquefied the mud of no man’s land I’d have gone up like a lucifer.

I did start to notice something among the troops, though. Every time we lined up to go over the top I would watch them, look into their faces. Most of them showed naught but the starkest fear, of course, but a few of them seemed distant. The whistle would startle them back to themselves and with wide eyes they would surge forward.

I had seen this before all that business with Wilfred, but had always assumed it was simply the mind trying to choke down the likelihood of its own death. Now when I watched, I found I could not help but notice the slight tilt of the head, as though gently straining their ears to hear a far-off tune. Those men never made it back to the trenches.

You know the phrase “to pay the piper”. I thought on it a lot through those many months – the debt of Hamelin, who for their greed had their children taken from them, never to be returned. Did you know Hamelin is a real place in Germany? Yes, not too far from Hanover as I recall. We had a prisoner once from there – I wanted to ask him about the old fairy tale and what, if anything, he knew of The Piper. The poor soul didn’t speak a word of English, though, and died from an infected shrapnel wound a few days later. He spent his last minutes humming a familiar tune. That night, as we scrambled through mud and broken metal in another futile attack, I began to wonder: were we the children stolen from their parents by The Piper’s tune? Or were we the rats that were led to the river and drowned because they ate too much of the wealthy’s grain?

Still, those are musings for poets, among whom I do not number. I did keep up with Wilfred’s work, though, and was startled to see how much it had changed since he left. Where once it could have been dismissed as frivolous, there was now a tragedy to it that flowed from the words. Even now, I can’t hear Exposure without being back in that damned trench at wintertime. And the public clearly felt similar, as one of the few newspapers we actually got through to the line had an extensive article praising his first collection. Despite all this, there was something about it that sat uneasily with me.

Wilfred returned to the 2nd Manchesters in July of 1918. He was clearly much changed from his time away, and seemed to be in good enough spirits, though we talked little any more, and when he looked at me, I saw in his eyes a fear that he was quick to hide. The war was grinding towards a close at this point. There was a fatigue that could be felt everywhere; even the enemy machine guns felt slower and more begrudging in their fire, but this charged our commanders to spur us on to more and more aggressive actions. Some desperate attempt to push Germany into a surrender, I suppose, and our attacks grew to a crescendo.

On the first day of October, we were ordered to storm the enemy position at Joncourt. I remember that the weather that day was beautiful – a last day of sunshine before autumn pressed in. We charged with some success, as I believe the German artillery hadn’t been lined up correctly, and for the first time since his return I found myself fighting alongside Wilfred. I can say without a word of a lie that across all the war I never saw a soldier fight with such ferocity as I saw in him that day. I hasten to add that that statement is not given in admiration – the savagery I saw in him as he tore into a man with his bayonet… I’d just as soon forget it. As he charged, he howled a terrible battle cry and, just for a moment, I could have sworn that I saw him cast a shadow that was not his own. I read in the paper he won the Military Cross for that attack.

It was a month later that I woke up to find him sitting next to my bed. He stared at me, not unkindly, though there was something in his eye that put my ill at ease. “Almost over now, Clarence,” he said to me. I said yes, it did seem to be all coming to an end. He smiled and shook his head. He sat there quietly for some time, at one point a flare burst in the sky outside, and enough of that stark red light came through the dugout’s makeshift doorway for me to see that Wilfred was crying. I knew he was listening to The Piper’s tune. He asked me if I heard it, and I told him no, I didn’t, and I wasn’t sure I ever really had. He nodded, and said he didn’t know which of us was the lucky one, and neither did I. Still don’t, really.

Wilfred Owen died crossing the canal at Sambre-Oise two days later. There wasn’t meant to be much, if any, resistance, but some of the soldiers stationed there returned fire. I found myself crouching behind him as the Captain, who had been shot in the hip, was pulled to safety.

As we prepared to charge, Wilfred stopped all at once and turned to me with a smile on his face. At that moment I saw a trickle of blood start to flow from an opening hole in his forehead. I feel like I should make this clear – I have seen many people get shot. I know what it looks like and how a bullet hole appears. But here, the bullet hole simply opened, like an eye, and he fell to the ground, dead.

It was told to me later that it was on that day the first overtures of peace were made between the nations, and the Armistice was signed almost exactly a week later. We were shipped home soon after.

I believe it was not merely on that day, but at that very moment, when Wilfred fell, that the peace was finally assured. No-one can convince me otherwise. Did The Piper spare him before? Did it simply use him, later to cast him aside? I don’t know, and I try not to think about it overmuch. I have a wife now, and a child on the way, but I still get nightmares sometimes. The parade for Armistice Day passed by my house last year, and I had to shut my window tight when the military band marched past. It wasn’t a tune I cared to hear.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Well, if further evidence was needed of my predecessor’s disorganisation, here we have it. A statement from 1922 filed among the mid-2000s. Obviously there’s not much research or further investigation to be done into a case almost a hundred years old, especially when it involves so well-documented a figure as Wilfred Owen.

Still, an interesting enough tale, and recognise the name ‘Joseph Rayner’ from cases about the people's church of the divine host, I’ve had the case returned to its proper location in the archives.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Ivo Lensik, regarding his experiences during construction of a house on Hill Top Road, Oxford. Original statement given March 13th, 2007. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I’ve worked in construction for almost twenty years now, mostly in and around the Oxford area. When my father passed away in 1996, I took over his contracting business and have been working steadily ever since.

I can do most anything I’m called on for but generally specialise in new builds, plumbing and wiring work specifically, and I’ve got something of a reputation for being available at short notice, so it’s not unusual for me to be called in part-way through a build to do some work. When I got the job working on a house down Hill Top Road in mid-November, nothing about the situation seemed strange to me. The guy they had doing the wiring had been called for jury duty and they’d lost him for a couple of weeks, so they asked me to step in. I was on another job during the day, but my fiancée Sam was at a conference in Hamburg for a while and we were saving up for the wedding, so I figured I could do it in the evenings.

Now, Hill Top Road is quite a secluded street around the Cowley area. There aren’t many student houses on it, so it’s actually quite a peaceful place, especially after all the kids living there have gone to bed. The house itself had only recently been started, as some dispute over ownership had kept the land locked for years, and when I turned up it was still mostly empty. It had two floors with a loft that was going to be another bedroom, to match the rest of the road. The doors had been fitted, although the locks had not, but the empty spaces where the windows were due to be still stood vacant, letting in the chill. That side of the road backed onto South Park with fences marking the bottom of each garden.

The garden of this particular house was mostly full of building materials and debris, but I remember that standing over it all was a tree. It was very large and very dead and not to put too fine a point on it, the thing creeped me right the hell out. It seemed to cast odd shadows, which were dark and clear on even the most overcast of days.

But it wasn’t the tree that started it, though. No, that happened my third night on the job. It must have been 8 or 9 in the evening, as it had been dark for a couple of hours. I was working on the ground floor wiring when I heard a knock at the front door. At first I thought it must have been one of the other builders who had forgotten something, but then I realised that there was no lock on the door; any of the others would have known that and just come right in. I began to feel slightly uneasy, when the knock came again. Over the years I’ve had a few altercations with punks that wanted to cause trouble on my sites, so I picked up a hammer as I approached. I did my best to hold it casually, as though I’d just been using it.

I opened the door to see an unassuming man in a tan coat. He was quite young, white, maybe mid-twenties, clean-shaven with shaggy, chestnut brown hair. His coat was quite an old cut; it seemed to me he looked like something out of an old Polaroid.

He said his name was Raymond Fielding and that he owned the house. As he spoke, I felt my grip on the hammer tightening although I have no idea why. I asked him if he had any ID or documents and he handed over to me what seemed, as far as I could tell, to be the deed to the house, as well as the land beneath, and did indeed list a man named Raymond Fielding as the owner. So I let him in.

I apologised for the draught and said the window panes were being put in over the next few days but until then it was going to be cold. He didn’t respond, just walked over to the empty frame of the back window and stared out into the garden. I tried to get on with my work, keeping one eye on this stranger. Nothing about the situation felt quite right, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything suspicious, just standings there, looking into the garden. So I returned my concentration to the wiring.

After a minute or two, I became conscious of a sharp, unpleasant smell. I thought maybe I had wired something up wrong, but no, it smelled like burning human hair. I looked over to where Raymond had been standing, but he was gone. Where he had been there was just a patch of scorched wooden floor, still apparently smouldering and giving off that dreadful stink.

I ran to get the fire extinguisher from an adjoining room. I was gone only a few seconds but when I returned the smell was gone and there was no longer any smoke or fire, just the burn mark on the wooden floor in front of that window. Touching it, I found that it was just as cold as the rest of the floor. I started to clean, and found that the wood below appeared to be undamaged, with just a coating of soot and ashes on top.

I had a look around for this Raymond Fielding, but if he was ever truly there, then he was gone now. It was only when I had finished cleaning up the mark that the true strangeness of the situation began to sink in and I started to panic.

I should probably explain my fear a bit, as it wasn’t because of ghosts, or phantom smells or anything like that. You see, there is quite a significant history of schizophrenia among the men in my family. My father had it, as did my great uncle, and in both of their cases it led to suicide. I didn’t know much about my great uncle, but I had seen my father’s decline first hand. It had started shortly after his divorce from my mother, although thinking about it, it was perhaps the early stages that had exacerbated the problems in their marriage.

Regardless, he began to spend a lot of time locked in his study doing “his work”. I was maybe 24 or 25 at the time, and still living at home. I was working with my dad, doing much the same job as I do now, and it was at this point I had to take on more and more of the actual running of the business, since my father was beginning to prioritise his “work” over his actual job.

His “work” turned out to be fractals. He became obsessed with them, seemed to spend all of his time drawing them, staring at them, measuring the patterns they created. He would talk to me for hours about the maths behind them and tell me that he was on the verge of a great truth. He was going to shake mathematics to its foundations once he figured out this truth, hidden in those cascading fractal patterns.

One day I returned home to find my father staring through the blinds in terror. He claimed that someone was following him, told me that they were planning to stop his work. I asked him who it was, but he shook his head violently and said I’d know him when I saw him because “all the bones are in his hands”.

I tried to get him help, of course I did, but he refused to take any medication, as he said it interfered with his work, and he wasn’t dangerous, so I couldn’t have him committed. I knew it was only a matter of time before he hurt himself, and sure enough, the day came when he wouldn’t answer the knocks on his study door. I broke in to find him lying dead in a pool of blood, with deep gouges along his wrists and arms. The walls were covered in fractal drawings, every surface was piled high with them and pencil shavings littered the floor. The inquest ruled his death a suicide, although the coroner wasn’t able to identify the tool that had made the cuts on his arms, or why he had such a look of fear on his face.

This is why the apparent disappearance of Raymond Fielding worried me so much. I was younger than my father had been, but still had that possibility within me. This train of thought was likely why I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been where I was stepping, and I slipped on the wet section of flooring that I had just cleaned. I fell forward, hitting my head badly.

I don’t think I was unconscious for more than a few seconds, but when I woke up I was bleeding from a deep cut on my temple. I tried to make it to my car, but I was so dizzy just standing up that it was clear driving was out of the question. So I called for an ambulance. It arrived quickly and it took me to the John Radcliffe Hospital.

When I got there, they were very responsive and quickly determined that I had quite a severe concussion, so I was kept overnight for observation. I told my doctor everything about my encounter with Raymond Fielding. If it was early signs of any developing schizophrenia, I wanted to know as soon as possible. The doctor listened closely and said it was unlikely, as it would be surprising if I developed full hallucinations so abruptly, but that they were keeping me under observation.

I noticed, as I was explaining my experience, the nurse taking my blood pressure seemed to be listening intently, though she left before I could ask her why.

I stayed in that hospital for another two days. Sam wanted to cut short her trip when she heard about my concussion, but I told her that any real danger had passed and I should be fine until the end of her conference, so I was mostly on my own for that time.

It was the morning before she was due to return that I saw the nurse again. I’d just had the news that the tests had all come back fine, so I was being discharged and she came in to give me a final check.

She asked me if I was sure the man who had come to the house on Hill Top Road had called himself Raymond Fielding. I told her yes, and that I’d even seen his signature on the deed to the land, but that I didn’t know any of the history of the place. She got very quiet and sat down.

This nurse was an older woman, Malaysian, I think, and I would have guessed in her fifties, though I didn’t ask. She said her family had lived on Hill Top Road for a long time now and she knew the place I was working. In the 1960s, the house that had stood there had belonged to a man named Raymond Fielding.

He was a devout churchgoer, and had used it as a halfway house on behalf of the local diocese, looking after teenage runaways and young people with mental problems. The neighbourhood apparently hadn’t liked it, as its residents often got into trouble and Hill Top Road had started to get something of a reputation for it. Nobody ever said a word against Raymond himself, though, who was by all accounts such a kind and gentle soul as to be almost universally beloved.

Nobody was sure exactly when Agnes moved in; some even said she was Raymond’s actual daughter, as the two of them looked something alike and she was younger than most of the other kids living there. She couldn’t have been more than eleven when she turned up, and didn’t really talk, other than to tell people her name if asked. Everyone just started to notice this child with mousey brown pigtails staring at them through the windows of Raymond’s house. As far as anyone could tell, that’s all she ever seemed to do – stare at people from the windows. It was unsettling, but no-one had any real problem with it.

Over the next few years, the kids at the halfway house stopped causing problems in the area around Hill Top Road. It wasn’t an obvious change, but gradually the people living there were seen less and less. Raymond was still there and still seemed perfectly cheery. If anyone asked him about a resident who hadn’t been around for a while, he’d explain that they’d moved on or found a place of their own, and no-one really cared enough to follow up on his information.

Soon, the only people living in that old house were Agnes and Raymond. Then Raymond disappeared as well. Agnes must have been 18 or 19 by this point, and still hardly ever talked. When she was questioned about what happened to Raymond, she simply said he had gone away and that the house was hers. People got a bit worried at that, and the police conducted a small investigation, but the house had been legally signed over to Agnes, and there was no sign of any foul play. No sign of Raymond either, for that matter.

And so the years passed and Agnes lived on in that old house. Hardly ever seemed to leave it, just watched from the windows. Folks in Hill Top Road learned it was best not to keep pets, as they tended to vanish. Then, in 1974, Henry White goes missing. Five years old, and the search turned up nothing.

People had always whispered about Agnes, but now the whispers got nasty. Nasty enough that when smoke was seen pouring out of the old Fielding house a week after little Henry disappeared, no-one did a thing. No-one phoned the fire brigade or tried to help. They just watched. Agnes must not have phoned for assistance either, as by the time the fire trucks arrived, there was nothing left to save.

Through it all, nobody saw any sign of life from within the building. No screaming, no movement, nothing but the roaring of the flames. When the fire was finally put out, they did find human remains, but it wasn’t Agnes, nor was it Henry White. The only body they found was that of Raymond Fielding. All that was left was a badly-charred skeleton, missing its right hand.

That was the history of the place, as the nurse told it to me. Once the rubble had been cleared away, the land had become tied up in legal complications relating to the ownership and had remained so until earlier last year. She asked me not to let anyone else know she’d been talking about it, as she didn’t want people to think she had been spreading stories. I told her I’d keep quiet and she left. I didn’t see her again and was discharged soon afterwards.

I rested at home for a couple of days, but I find forced inactivity very boring, and my head was feeling fine so I decided to go back to work. By all rights, I should probably have avoided returning to Hill Top Road, but I found myself resenting how the house made me feel. I didn’t believe in ghosts, to be honest I’m still not sure I do, and had been assured by the doctor that I wasn’t displaying any other symptoms of schizophrenia, so there was no reason for me to feel this gnawing apprehension. I convinced myself that the only way to banish the feeling was to return and finish the job that I started. So that’s what I did, although I was careful to work only in daylight now and tried to avoid being alone.

Even so, there were occasional moments when I would find myself the only one working in a room, or when silence fell across the building. And then I would smell it again, that whiff of burnt hair, or catch a glimpse of brown pigtails disappearing around a corner. As the job drew towards a close, it became harder to avoid working there after dark, until I lost track of time completely one afternoon, and looked up to see that not only had night fallen, but I was the only one left in the building.

Almost as soon as I realised this, I began to sweat. At first I thought it was nerves, or even a panic attack at finding myself alone, but it was the heat; this warmth that seemed to start in my bones and radiate out through me. I took off my hat and jacket, but I just got hotter and hotter until it felt like I was cooking from the inside. I tried to scream but I couldn’t find my breath, I couldn’t move. I was burning up.

There was a knock at the door, and the feeling abruptly vanished. I was cold again, lying on the bare floor. I struggled to my feet as the knock came again. My hand shook as I opened it. By now I didn’t know what to expect. Would it be Raymond again? Agnes? Or some other thing to announce the end of my sanity.

What I did not expect was a Catholic priest. He was short, and a bit portly, with close-cropped hair and deep smile lines around his mouth. He introduced himself as Father Edwin Burroughs and told me that “Annie” had asked him to pay the place a visit. I didn’t know any Annie and told him so, and he seemed slightly confused, said she worked as a nurse at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

This allayed my fears enough that I let him in, and I asked him if he was some sort of exorcist. Father Burroughs smiled and told me yes, that’s exactly what he was.

So I told him my story as he went around examining the house. He nodded as I went through what happened, occasionally asking a question about what had been said or how I had felt. Finally he seemed satisfied and said he’d do what he could. He explained that exorcism was really only for demons and it wasn’t something he could do to ghosts, at least not officially – whether or not ghosts actually existed was apparently just as divisive a question within the church as outside of it – but he would go through some blessings and see if he could help. He asked me to wait outside while he worked, so I headed into the back garden and waited.

As I stood there in the cold, my eyes fell on the tree. That creepy, damn tree. I don’t know why, but at that moment I felt an intense, maddening anger at that tree. I picked up a crowbar that lay on a nearby pile of wood and, drawing my arm back, I swung it at the trunk, burying it with all my might.

I felt something warm and wet spray out where I had hit it. Sap? No, it didn’t feel like sap. I turned on my torch to see blood flowing from the wounded tree. It ran down the crowbar and dripped onto the earth, running in rivulets. As it reached the roots I saw something else in my torch’s light, curling up from the base of the tree were old, black scorch marks.

At that moment I made my decision. It was easy, like destroying this tree was the only thing to do, the only path to follow. I found a long chain among the building materials in the garden and wrapped it around the still-bleeding trunk, then attached the ends to my car. It took me less than a minute to pull it down, and there was no more blood. When the tree lay on its side, uprooted and powerless, I gazed into the hole where it had sat and noticed something lying there in the dirt.

Climbing down, I retrieved what turned out to be a small wooden box, about six inches square, with an intricate pattern carved along the outside. Engraved lines covered it, warping and weaving together, making it hard to look away.

I opened the box and sitting inside was a single green apple. It looked fresh, shiny, with a coat of condensation like it had just been picked on a cool spring morning. I picked it up. I wasn’t going to eat it, I’m not that stupid, but more than bleeding trees or phantom burning, this confused me.

As I took it out of the box, though, it began to turn. The skin turned brown and bruised and started to shrivel in my hand. Then it split. And out came spiders. Dozens, hundreds of spiders erupting from this apple that was rotting right before my eyes. I shrieked and dropped it before any of them could touch my arm. The apple fell to the ground and burst in a cloud of dust. I backed away and waited until I was sure all the spiders had left before retrieving the box. I smashed it with a crowbar, and threw the remains into a skip.

Father Burroughs returned shortly afterwards. He told me he’d done his prayers and hoped that it would be some help. If he noticed the felled tree, he didn’t ask any questions about it, instead he just handed me his business card and told me to give him a call if there were any further problems. The house didn’t feel any different, but there was no smell of burned hair, no heat or ghosts or any weirdness I could see. I worked on that house for another week, and I don’t know if it was the father’s prayers or my uprooting the tree, but I didn’t encounter anything else unusual during my time there. After that, my part of the job was finished, and I haven’t been back to Hill Top Road since.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Ah, head trauma and latent schizophrenia – the ghost’s best friends. Aside from excessive indulgence in psychoactive drugs, it seems to me that there is simply no better way to make contact with the spirit world. Still, glibness aside, the history of 105 Hill Top Road does bear investigation. And while I trust Mr. Lensik’s testimony of his own experiences about as far as I can throw a bleeding tree, there is a note in the file mentioning that Father Edwin Burroughs put down his own version of these events in Statement 0218011. While I have yet to locate that particular file in the chaos that passed for Gertrude Robinson’s archive, the suggestion that there may be external corroboration does lend some potential credence to Mr. Lensik’s wild tale. No other workers on the building site at the time reported any disturbances like the ones reported by Mr. Lensik.

Tim was unable to find the exact date the original house was built but the earliest records he could find list it as being bought by Walter Fielding in 1891. It was inherited by his son Alfred Fielding in 1923, and then by his grandson, Raymond Fielding, in 1957. There was no record of it being used as a halfway house, certainly not one connected to the local Catholic diocese, although the Church of England records for the area that Ivy got access to were unfortunately incomplete. The older residents of Hill Top Road back up the account given by the nurse, Anna Kasuma, as related here.

Nastya managed to organise an interview with Mrs. Kasuma, but she apparently could provide no further information beyond what she told to Mr. Lensik. She did admit, though, to asking Father Burroughs to take a look at the house, as she was worried about it, and had seen him perform exorcisms before. There doesn’t seem to be any print evidence of what happened to the house; no news stories or similar regarding the fire. But one resident did provide a photograph of the house in flames.

Raymond Fielding’s obituary briefly reported his death as having been due to a house fire, and lauds his work with troubled youth, but gives no details about either. Agnes remains something of a mystery, as we have not been able to find any definitive proof that she even existed.

Except… We cannot prove any connection, but Jessica unearthed a report on an Agnes Montague, who was found dead in her Sheffield flat on the evening of November 23rd 2006, the same day Mr. Lensik claims to have uprooted the tree. She had hanged herself. Her age is given at 26, which doesn’t match up at all.

But tied by a chain to her waist was a severed human hand, a right hand. Its owner was never identified, but the coroner was apparently quite perplexed, as tissue decay would seem to indicate that the hand’s original owner must have died at almost the exact same time as Agnes.

Two families have lived in the house since this statement was originally made but no further manifestations have been reported on Hill Top Road.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Julia Montauk, regarding the actions and motivations of her father, the serial killer Robert Montauk. Original statement given December 3rd, 2002. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
My father was a murderer. There’s no way I can reasonably deny it at this point; the evidence provided by the police was overwhelming, and I saw his shed myself. I’m not here to try and clear his name. There wouldn’t be much point, anyway, as I’m sure you know he died in prison last year. Seven years isn’t much to have served out of a life sentence, but I doubt it was the early parole he’d have hoped for.

Sorry, maybe that wasn’t in the best taste. Still, his passing is why I feel like I can tell this story; something I’ve never really felt free to do before now. I always expected him to talk about it during the media frenzy that surrounded his trial, but for whatever reason, he kept quiet. I think I understand a bit more now why he never spoke about it, preferring people draw their own conclusions, but at the time, I couldn’t fathom why he just sat there silently, letting others talk for him.

I’d like to tell someone now, though, and I’ve only recently finished my court-appointed counselling sessions, so I’d rather not tell the tabloids and have ‘MY FATHER KILLED TO FUEL CULT MAGIC, SAYS DAUGHTER OF MONSTER’ splashed over page 7 of the weekend edition. So that leaves you guys. Respectable is hardly the word I’d use, but it’s better than nothing.

So yes, my father killed at least 40 people over the course of the five years prior to his arrest in 1995. I won’t recount the lurid details – if you’re interested you can look up Robert Montauk in the newspaper archive of any library. There’ll be plenty there: the papers clearly didn’t care much about the American bombing, because in April of that year they seemed to be talking about nothing but my father. There are also a couple of books on him, none of which I can really recommend, but I guess Ray Cowan’s No Bodies in the Shed is the closest to what I’d consider accurate, although it does imply that I was an accomplice, despite the fact that I was twelve years old at the time.

Honestly, I discovered most of the details from the newspapers and the court, just like everyone else. My father spent my formative years killing dozens of people and I had no idea. But the more I think back over my childhood, the more sure I am that there was something else going on. I don’t have any theories as to what any of this means, but I just need to get it down on paper somewhere. And this seems as good a place as any.

I’ve always lived in the same house on York Road in Dartford. Even now, after all that’s happened, and all I know about what went on there, I can’t bring myself to leave. As far as I know, the shed came with the house; it always sat in the garden: old, wooden and silent. I don’t recall it being used until after the night my mother disappeared. That’s when everything started to get strange.

My memory of early childhood is patchy – mostly isolated images and impressions – but I remember the night she vanished like it was yesterday. I was seven years old, and had been to the cinema that evening for the very first time in my life. We had been to see The Witches at what was back then the ABC, down on Shaftesbury Avenue. I had seen films before, of course, on our tiny living room television, but to see a movie on the big screen was awe-inspiring. The film itself was terrifying, though, and even now I’d say it’s far scarier than any “child’s film” has a right to be. I remember I spent a lot of it close to tears, but had been so proud of the fact that I hadn’t cried at all. When we got home, I lay awake for a long time. That scene where Luke is transformed into a mouse kept playing in my mind, and for some reason, it left me too afraid to go to sleep.

It was then that I heard a thump from downstairs, like something heavy falling over. I didn’t have a clock in my room, so I had no idea what the time was, but I recall looking out of the window and the world was dark and utterly silent. The thump came again, and I decided to go downstairs and see what it was.

The landing was almost pitch black, and I tried to be as quiet as possible so nobody would know I was there. The fourth stair down from the top of the staircase always creaked, and still does in fact, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it creak louder than it did that night as I crept down them so slowly. The lights downstairs were all turned off, except for the kitchen light, which I could see from the bottom of the stairway.

I walked into the kitchen to find it empty. The back door stood open, and a cool breeze blew through it that made me shiver in my pyjamas. I saw something shiny laying on the table. Reaching up, I found my mother’s pendant. The design had always struck me as beautiful: it was silver, an abstract shape of a hand with a symbol on it that I believe was meant to represent a closed eye. I had never seen her take it off. In my child’s mind, I assumed that she had just left it on the table, an accident, and that the open door meant nothing. I went back upstairs, necklace clutched firmly in my hand, to return it to her. She wasn’t in bed, of course. The space next to where my father lay fast asleep was empty.

I gently touched my sleeping father’s shoulder, and he awoke slowly. I asked him where mum was, and he started to say something when he saw the silver chain clutched in my hands. He quickly got out of bed and started to get dressed. As he pulled on a shirt, he asked me where I had found it, and I told him, on the kitchen table. Following me downstairs, his gaze was immediately locked on the open door, and he paused. Instead of going outside, he walked over to the kitchen sink and turned on one of the taps. Immediately there began to flow a dark, dirty-looking liquid and the sick, salty smell of brackish water hit my nose, though at the time I didn’t understand that’s what it was.

The light in the kitchen blew out at that moment and the room got very dark. My father told me everything was fine, that I should go back to bed. His hands shook slightly as he took the pendant from me, and I didn’t believe him, but I did what I was told anyway. I don’t know how long I lay there, waiting for my father to return that night, but I know it was getting light outside when I finally fell asleep.

Eventually I woke up. The house was quiet and empty. I had missed the start of school by hours, but that was fine, because I didn’t want to leave the house. I just sat in the living room, silent and still.

It was almost evening again by the time my father actually returned. His face was pale and he barely looked at me, just walked straight to the cupboard and poured himself a glass of scotch. He sat next to me, drained the glass, and told me that my mother was gone. I didn’t understand. Still don’t, really. But he said it with such finality that I started to cry, and I didn’t stop for a very long time.

My father was a policeman, as I’m sure you’ve read, so as a child I just assumed that the police had looked for my mother and failed to find her. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered they’d never even had a missing persons report filed on her. As far as I know, I never had any living grandparents, and apparently no-one noticed she was gone – which was strange, as I have vague memories of her having friends over a lot before she vanished. Everyone assumes she was one of my father’s first victims, but there was never enough evidence to add it to the official tally. It doesn’t really matter.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think he did it. I won’t deny it makes sense from the outside, but I remember how devastated he was when she disappeared. He started drinking a lot. I think he did try to look after me as best he could, but most nights he just ended up passed out in his chair.

That was also when he started spending a lot of time in the shed. I’d never really paid it much attention before. As far as I was concerned, the sturdy wooden structure was just the home of spiders’ nests and the rusted garden tools my parents would use once a year to attack the overgrown wilderness that was our back garden. But soon after my mother’s disappearance, a sturdy new padlock was placed on the door, and my father spent a lot of time inside.

He told me he was woodworking, and sometimes I’d hear the sounds of power tools from inside, and he’d present me with some small wooden token he had made, but mostly there was silence. It should probably have bothered me more than it did, the hours he spent in there, and that odd smell I sometimes noticed, like tinned meat. But I never really paid it much attention, and I had my own grief to deal with.

He was gone most nights as well. Often, I would wake up from one of my nightmares to find the house silent and empty. I would look for him and he would be gone. I never despaired at this, for some reason, not like I had when my mother vanished. I knew he would return eventually, when he was finished with what I had decided must be ‘police business’. Sometimes I’d lie awake until he returned.

Once, as I lay awake, I heard him come into my room. I pretended to be asleep. I don’t know why, but I thought I’d be in trouble if he found out I was awake. He walked over to me and gently stroked my face. His hands smelled strange. Back then I didn’t know the scent of blood, and mixed with that faint, saline smell of brackish water. He whispered to me then, when he thought I was asleep, promised to protect me, to make sure that “it wouldn’t get me too”.

There was a strangled sound to his words; I think he might have been crying. As he left, I opened my eyes just enough to see him. He stood by the door, his face in his hands, wearing light grey overalls that were stained with a thick, black substance. I often wish I’d asked him about that night. I wonder, if he’d known I was awake, if I had asked him in that moment of weakness… Well, it’s far too late for that now.

Over the next couple of years, I noticed that my father seemed to be injured quite a lot, and there was rarely a time when he didn’t have some sort of plaster, bandage or bruise visible. I’d also occasionally find small blood spots or smears on the floors or tables, especially in the hall. I got very good at cleaning them, and it never occurred to me to pay much attention to where they came from – I just assumed the blood was my father’s.

He started staying home during the day, and told me he’d been permanently assigned to the night shift. I believed him, of course, and it was only after his arrest that I discovered that had been the point he’d resigned his job on the police force. I don’t know where the money came from after that, but we always seemed to have enough.

Knowing what I know now, it sounds awful to say, but those were some of the happiest years of my childhood. I’d lost my mother, but my father doted on me, and together it seemed like we would get past our pain. I know I’ve made him sound like an alcoholic recluse who lived in the shed, but those were generally nocturnal activities for him. During the day was time he spent with me.

There was only one time I recall him going into the shed during the day. This was a couple of years after my mother’s disappearance, and I must have been about ten. The phone in the kitchen started ringing, and my father was upstairs. I had recently received permission from my father to answer the phone, so I was excited to take up my new responsibility. I picked up the handset and said my memorised phone script into the receiver: “Hello, Montauk residence!”

A man’s voice asked to speak with my father. It was a breathy voice, like that of an old man, and at the time I decided he had a German accent, though, when I was young, a lot of different nationalities and accents were lumped together in my mind under the label “German”. “What is this regarding?” I asked, as I had a whole phone conversation memorised and wanted to use as much of it as possible. The man sounded surprised at this and said hesitantly that he was from my father’s work. I asked him if he was from the Police and after a pause, he said “Yes”. He asked me to tell my father that it was Detective Rayner on the line, with a new case for him.

At this point my father had come down to the kitchen to see who was calling. I told him, and he visibly paled. He took the handset from me and placed it to his ear, not speaking but listening very intently. After a moment, he told me to go up to my room, as this was a “grown-up” conversation. I turned to leave, but as I was heading up the stairs, the light bulb in the landing blew.

The bulbs in our house broke often – my father said we had faulty wiring – so even at that age, I was quite adept at changing them. So I turned around and headed back downstairs to fetch a new bulb. As I approached the cabinet where we kept them, I heard my father’s voice from the kitchen. He was still on the phone and he sounded angry. I heard him say, “No, not already. Do it yourself.” Then he went very quiet and listened, before finally he said okay, that he’d do it as soon as possible. He put down the phone, then went over to the cupboard and poured himself a drink. He spent the rest of the day in the shed.

The one question they kept asking me over and over during the investigation into my father was whether I knew where the rest of the bodies were. I told them the truth, that I had no idea. They claimed they wanted to confirm the identities of the victims, which they couldn’t easily do with what was left.

I didn’t know where the bodies were, but I also didn’t tell them of the other way they might have identified the victims: my father’s photographs. I didn’t say anything, because I had no idea where he kept them, and I thought it would only make things worse if they couldn’t find them, but, yes, my father took photographs.

During those five years, I had gradually started to notice more and more canisters of photograph film left around the house. This puzzled me since, though my dad and I did sometimes go on short holidays, we never took a lot of pictures. Asking him about it, my father told me he had been trying to learn photography, but didn’t trust developers not to ruin his films, as he’d apparently had problems before.

I suggested he make himself a darkroom for developing them himself. I’d seen one in Ghostbusters 2 on TV the previous Christmas, and loved the idea of having a room like that. His face lit up, and he said he’d convert the guest bedroom. He then warned me that once it was done, I could never go in there without his supervision – there would be lots of dangerous chemicals. I didn’t care; I was just so glad that an idea of mine had made my father so happy.

That summer, my father converted the guest bedroom into a darkroom for developing photographs. Like the shed, it was locked almost all the time, but occasionally my father would take me inside and we’d develop photographs of cars or trees, or whatever else a ten- or eleven-year-old with a camera takes pictures of. Mostly, though, my father worked in there alone, and kept the door locked while he did. He seemed almost happy those last couple of years.

I didn’t have an unsupervised look inside until a few weeks before my father was caught. It was a Saturday evening in late autumn, and my father was out of the house. I spent the day watching TV and reading, but as it started to get dark, I found myself bored and alone. Passing by the door to what was now the darkroom, I noticed that the key was still in the lock.

I sometimes think back to that day, and wonder if my father left it deliberately. He’d been so careful for so many years, and then he just forgot? I knew about the dangers, but something inside me couldn’t resist going in.

There were no photos stored there. To this day, I don’t know where my father kept his developed pictures. But there were about a dozen images hung out to dry. They’re still vivid in my mind – black and white and washed in the deep red of the darkroom. Each photo was of a person’s face, close up and expressionless, their eyes were dull and glassy.

I had never seen corpses before, so didn’t really understand what I was looking at. On each face were thick black lines that formed these symbols that I didn’t recognise, but they were clearly drawn on the faces themselves, not just on the photographs. I don’t remember the symbols in any great detail, I’m afraid, just the faces that they were drawn onto, though they weren’t people I recognised. Nor did they match any of the photos the police showed me later.

I never went back in the darkroom after I closed and locked the door behind me that day. I spent the next weeks wondering if I should tell my father what I had seen. I didn’t know what I had seen – not really – but it felt like a bad secret, and I didn’t know what to do.

Finally, I decided to tell him. He was drinking on the sofa at the time, and he turned off the television as soon as I mentioned going into the darkroom. He didn’t say a word as I told him what I’d seen, just looked at me with an expression on his face I’d never seen before. When I was finished, he stood up and walked towards me, before taking me in his arms and giving me the last and longest hug I would ever get from him. He asked me not to hate him, and told me it would soon be over, then turned to go. I had no idea what he was talking about, but when I asked, he just said that I needed to stay in my room until he got back. Then he left.

I did what I was told. I went up to my room and lay in bed, trying to sleep. The air was heavy somehow, and in the end I spent the night staring out of the window at the street below. I was waiting for something, though I didn’t know what.

I remember it was 2:47 in the morning that it started. I finally had an alarm clock, and the image of it is still clear in my memory. I was thirsty, and went downstairs to get a glass of water. I turned on the tap, but what flowed out was a thick stream of muddy brown, brackish water. It smelled terrible, and I froze as I remembered the last time that had happened. My father still wasn’t home, and I went into the living room to watch desperately out of the window, looking down the street for his return. I was terrified.

As I stared down the road, I was struck by how small the puddles of light were from the streetlamps made, stretching far into the distance. But not as far as they should’ve gone. There were fewer lights than there should be, I was sure of it. Then I saw the light at the end of the road blink off. There was no moon out that night, and all the houses were quiet; when the streetlights stopped, there was nothing but black. The next closest streetlight failed. Then the next. And the next. A slow, rolling blanket of darkness, making its unhurried way towards me. The few lights still on in the houses along the road also disappeared as the tide approached. I just sat there, unable to look away. Finally, it reached our house, and all at once the lights were gone and the darkness was inside.

I heard a knock on the front door. Firm, unhurried and insistent. Silence. I did not move. The knocking came again, harder this time, and I heard the door rattle on its hinges. As it got louder it began to sound less and less like a person knocking and more like… wet meat being slammed into the sturdy wood of the front door.

I turned and ran towards the phone. Picking it up, I heard a dial tone, and would have cried with relief if I wasn’t already crying with fear. I dialled the police, and as soon as they picked up I started to babble about what was happening. The lady on the other end was patient with me, and kept on gently insisting I give her the address until finally I was composed enough. Almost as soon as I had told her where I was, I heard the door begin to splinter. I dropped the phone and ran towards the back of the house. As I did so, I heard the front door burst behind me and I heard a… growl – it was rumbling, deep and breathy like a wild animal, but had a strange tone to it that I’ve never been able to place. No matter where I turned, it sounded like it came out of the darkness right behind me. I didn’t have time to think about it as I ran into the back garden, and into a light that I did not expect. There in front of me was the shed. It glowed, a dull, pulsing blue from every crack and seam. I didn’t stop, though, as I heard again that growl behind me, and I ran towards it and pulled at the door.

The shed was not locked that night, and to this day I don’t know if I regret that fact. The first thing I saw when I opened that door was my father, bathed in the pale blue light. I couldn’t see any source for the glow, but it was so bright. He was knelt in the centre of an ornate chalk pattern scrawled on the rough wood of the floor. In front of him lay a man I didn’t know, but he was clearly dead – his chest had been cut open, and still gaped and bled feebly. In one hand my father held a wicked-looking knife, and in the other, he held the man’s heart.

My father was chanting, and as the song rose and fell, the heart in his hand beat to its rhythm, and the blue light brightened and dimmed in time. I looked at the walls, and noticed that they were covered in shelves, each of which contained glass jars, full of what I would later learn was formaldehyde containing a single heart – which also beat in time with the one that dripped in my father’s hand. It was an odd thing to notice at the time, but I remember that the dead man wore the same pendant as my mother – a silver hand with a closed eye design.

I don’t know how long I stood there staring. It might have been hours or it might have been only a moment or two. But then I heard that growl behind me and sensed a presence so close that I could feel the darkness on my back. Before I could react or move or scream, my father’s chant came to a crescendo and he plunged the dagger into the beating heart. All at once, the presence vanished, and the blue glow died. I could no longer hear the beating of the hearts. In the silence, I realised I could hear police sirens in the distance. I heard my dad tell me he was sorry, and then he started to run.

You know the rest. Manhunt, trial, prison, death. They say there were 40 hearts kept in that shed, not including his last victim, but of course the police didn’t arrive until all that was left of it was a grisly trophy cabinet. Whatever I had seen my father doing in there, its effects had long since vanished. I don’t know why my father did what he did, and I doubt I ever will, but the more I go over these events in my head, the more sure I am that he had his reasons.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

There’s not much more to be added here. The police reports on Robert Montauk are predictably thorough, and there are few details to be added. The vast majority of research into this case has already been done by the serial killer enthusiast community which, though weird and deeply unsettling, does often prove to be surprisingly useful in high-publicity cases like this.

In addition to the body of one Christopher Lorne, 40 preserved hearts were recovered from Robert Montauk’s shed. They were arranged on the walls on individual shelves forming patterns of eleven hearts on each inner wall and seven on the wall with the door. Photos of the patterns match up to the various formulae of sacred geometry but don’t appear to correspond exactly with any specific school. Of possible significance also is that fact that the rest of the bodies were never found.

The symbol on the two pendants is that of the Peoples’ Church of the Divine Host, a small cult that grew around the defrocked Pentecostal minister Maxwell Rayner in London during the late eighties and early nineties. I knew I was right but i am not sure if the name from Statement 1106922 though, currently, it just looks like a coincidence.

Christopher Lorne was a member of the church, and his family hadn’t heard from him in the six years prior to his murder. Mr. Rayner himself disappeared from public view sometime in 1994, and the group fragmented shortly afterwards. The police made many attempts to follow up on this lead in the Montauk case, but were never able to locate any members willing to make statements.

The house on York Road is still inhabited, though the current owners pulled down the shed over a decade ago and replaced it with a patio.

Robert Montauk died in Wakefield Prison on November 1st 2002. He was stabbed forty-seven times and bled out before anyone found him. After reading this statement, three points of interest occur: no culprit or weapon was ever found connected to the killing; he was apparently alone in his cell at the time, which was supposed to be locked; and at the time of his death the light bulb in his cell was found to have blown out, leaving him in darkness.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Trevor Herbert, regarding his life as a self-proclaimed vampire hunter. Original statement given July 10th, 2010. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Right then. Been almost 50 years I’ve been meaning to pay you people a visit and get this down on paper, but I finally got here. So where to start? My name is Trevor Herbert, like I put at the top of your form there, and I’ve been homeless for most of my life. In fact, if you lived in Manchester, there’s a good chance you’d have heard of me.

They call me “Trevor the Tramp”. I mean, I’m not exactly easy to miss, am I, and I’ve been living there in public view for so long I guess I’ve become kind of an institution. Helps that I’ve always had a kind of uncanny knack for guessing people’s ages. People will come up to me on the street and ask me to guess their age, and I’ll tell them and most of the time they’ll be shocked when I get it right. It’s fun. So everyone around Manchester knows about Trevor the Tramp, sure. I hear someone even made me a page on the Internet and it got a few thousand likes. I don’t know exactly what that means but it sounds nice.

Obviously that’s not why I’m here, though, is it? No, I’m here because I have also dedicated my life to finding and killing vampires.

I have killed five people that I know for sure as vampires, and there are two more that may or may not have been. There is one man I have killed, unfortunately, who I am now sure was human, but I also know he was a violent criminal so I try not to feel too badly about that. I’m sure it’s hard to accept for anyone, even an organisation such as yourselves, but I do not have proof to give you except for the vampire teeth that I will leave with this statement.

Do not feel bad about reporting me to the police for the murders, as I am sure you must, since I have recently received a diagnosis of late-stage lung cancer, and it is doubtful I will be living much longer anyway. That is the main reason for finally putting down on paper the details of the mission I have been secretly undertaking for the last half a century.

I killed my first vampire in 1959. At that point I was still living a mostly normal life, save perhaps for the abuse my family was subject to from my father. He was a vile man who ended up killing my mother in ‘56. It was a clear-cut case of drunken murder, but the courts ruled it as an accident, and my father stayed out of jail. Luckily, myself and my brother only had to endure four months of unpleasantness from him before he finally finished drinking himself to death. I was thirteen, when he finally died, and my brother was fifteen. Following his death, there were several attempts to rehome us as orphans, but they always split us up, and we couldn’t be doing with that, so we’d generally run away. After a while, it became so we were happier finding our way on the streets than in another stranger’s home.

It was in autumn of 1959 that we were taken in by Sylvia McDonald. It wasn’t any sort of official fostering agreement, but it was getting to be quite cold at the end of October, and it just saw us shivering in a side street next to the Kings Arms Hotel, as it was back then, on Tipping Street before the ring road took it over. Looking back, I believe it to have been visiting the pub for the purposes of locating down and outs for use as victims, and in my brother and myself, I must say, it successfully found some.

It looked like an older woman, a widow I assumed, from the way it dressed in black and had a strange manner, which I now know to be the mark of the vampire, but back then I paid no attention to it. Many of the older folks had lived through both wars, and it was not uncommon for them to be somewhat strange. I thought this was the case with Sylvia McDonald, and after a small amount of discussion, my brother and I agreed to the offer of food and shelter.

Let me say a little bit about the vampire’s manner, because once I taught myself to read, I read as much on the subject as I could, and it isn’t covered often or clearly in those books I have found. You see, from my own observations, I believe a vampire to be more like an animal than a man. That is not to be taken as merely a turn of phrase, but more to do with how they work. I do not believe vampires are human in anything more than their appearance, nor have I ever seen evidence that they create more of their kind through feeding.

One thing that should be noted is that they do not speak. In fact, they are in my experience totally silent, having no need for air and no room in their throats for a windpipe. They are able to make themselves understood, however, with absolute clarity, though the manner through which they do so has never been clear to me. When Sylvia McDonald came to us in the alleyway that day, we understood that was the name it gave itself and that we were being offered a meal and a bed, even though it never uttered a single sound.

More than that, I do not recall the fact that it never said a word as striking either of us as strange in the slightest. I have never fully understood how they are able to do this, and I doubt that I ever shall, but I can only assume it to be some instinctive form of hypnosis or mind control.

Another misconception I have always faced when trying to discuss vampires is that people think they cannot go out during the day. They can. While I have witnessed them avoid direct sunlight if possible, and wear generally more covering clothes when moving around during the daytime, they seem to have no significant problem doing so. I would describe them as weaker during the day, but whether this is scientifically due to the sunlight, or simply because evil has less power in the daylight hours is unclear to me. Sylvia McDonald came to us on an overcast afternoon, and enough of its pale flesh was uncovered that, were sunlight to truly harm a vampire, then it would likely have been destroyed.

On that afternoon, my brother Nigel and I agreed to go back to the house of Sylvia McDonald in the hopes of a roof over our heads for a little while. She lived on Loom Street, which is still there, though the house itself was torn down long ago, and there’s just a bit of scrubland now where it used to be. I sometimes go there to pay my respects, since my brother has no burial or grave I can visit.

The house was old, even when I went there in 1959, and entering it I was hit by a stale, coppery smell that I did not recognise as old blood at the time, since I was barely 16 and did not have then the experience I have now. The furniture and wallpaper had clearly not been changed in many decades, and a thick layer of dust covered everything.

Even the floor was pale with dust, except for a stark line where Sylvia McDonald moved, the train of its dress dragging behind it. I remember wondering whether Sylvia McDonald walked exactly the same route through the house always, as I saw other clear lines of passage in the rooms we passed through. None of the furniture looked used, and when I picked up a book from one of the shelves, the pages were solid with damp and mould. I began to feel very uneasy at this point, but whatever powers of persuasion the vampire had calmed me enough to continue following it with my brother.

We went up the stairs, and I was led to a small room with a bed in it. I was made to understand that this would be my room, and was left there as Sylvia McDonald led my brother away to the room next to it. When it returned, it brought a bowl of fruit and offered it to me. The fruit was clearly a few weeks old, and in various stages of rotting, but just to appease the thing I found an apple and a couple of grapes that seemed edible and I ate them. It watched me silently the whole time, and then turned and walked out towards Nigel’s room.

By this time, whatever the creature had done to make me compliant seemed to be starting to wear off, and I was realising just how wrong everything was. I was also realising that it didn’t look like there was any easy escape from the house. All the windows I had seen were barred, and I recalled Sylvia McDonald had locked the sturdy-looking front door behind it after we had all entered. So instead, I just laid down in the old musty bed and I waited.

Couldn’t rightly say what I was waiting for, but soon enough it got dark, and I assumed Sylvia McDonald had gone to sleep, not yet realising the manner of being that I was dealing with. I wanted some light to comfort me, but the old house seemed to have no electricity at all, so I used my cigarette lighter on a candle I found next to the bed and crept towards the door. It wasn’t locked, thankfully, and I left the room assigned to me and walked over to where I believed my brother was.

I went in and found him lying in his own bed, pretending to sleep. After a bit of talk, it became clear that Nigel was no happier with our situation than I was, and we both resolved that another night on the cold streets was better than staying with this strange woman. As we talked through possible ways to escape, however, we heard a rustling sound outside the door, and the handle began to turn. Not wanting to anger our strange host, I crawled under the bed to hide, while Nigel returned to pretending to sleep.

From my vantage point under the bed, I could see the door open, and the skirt of Sylvia McDonald enter and move towards the bed. I simply laid there and tried not to make a sound. I am not proud of this, and sometimes have a certainty that my inaction led directly to my brother’s death, but most of the time I accept that, if I had alerted the vampire to my presence, then I would also have died.

Either way, the fact of the matter is that I did nothing as I heard the sounds of a struggle overhead, and Nigel’s strangled cry. The creature turned quickly and hurled him down, something fell to the floor in front of me, but I didn’t look at it, my eyes locked on Sylvia McDonald as it pounced upon my brother. It opened its mouth for what I then realised was the first time since we met it, and I could see nothing inside save for a dozen long, thick, pointed teeth like a shark.

In one fluid movement, it plunged those teeth into my brother’s neck and tore out a great chunk of flesh. Blood started to spurt from Nigel’s spasming body, as Sylvia McDonald’s throat began to twitch. Its jaw detached and a long tubular tongue about the thickness of my forearm snaked out of its throat and clamped onto the gushing wound. There was an awful slurping sound, the first noise I’d ever really heard the creature make, as the tongue sucked the blood from my brother’s throat.

I just lay there watching as its stomach began to distend and swell, the now bulbous belly straining against the black dress it wore. After the longest ten minutes of my life, the vampire finished. Its tongue retracted back into its throat, still dripping blood onto the now-pale corpse of my brother, and it lay back upon the floor, apparently contented.

As this had been happening all my energy had gone towards not screaming or giving away my presence. But as the vampire lay satiated on the floor, I turned my attention to what had fallen from Nigel’s hand when he had been dragged out of the bed. It was his pocket knife. I had no idea what a small knife like that would do against a creature that seemed far stronger and faster than me, but I didn’t see any option other than to try.

I moved so slowly as I reached for the knife that at times it seemed like I wasn’t moving at all. I was worried that the creature would spot me and strike as it had with Nigel, although I now know that smell is in fact the vampire’s major sense and, with all the blood around, there was little chance of it detecting my scent.

Grasping the knife in my hands, I crept over towards the creature as it placidly digested my brother’s life, until I stood over it. I felt a sudden surge of rage and adrenaline come over me and with a speed and strength I never knew I had, I plunged the knife into Sylvia McDonald’s blood-bloated stomach.

It burst like a sick balloon, and blood began to pour out. The creature’s eyes shot open and it clutched at the wound desperately. Its throat was not capable of uttering a scream but its face displayed a silent pain and anger as it flailed on the floor. Stumbling back, trying to wipe the blood from my eyes, I felt an unexpected burning in my hand. I realised I’d touched the still-lit candle on the bedside table.

I don’t know what I expected to happen when I grabbed the candle and pressed it to the dry part of Sylvia McDonald’s dress. I was just trying to find anything else I could do to harm it before it could recover from its split belly. But I certainly didn’t expect it to catch like dry tinder. The fire spread quickly over its repulsive form, though it did slow somewhat where the clothing or flesh was still moist with blood. It struck me that the vampire must be a very dry creature when not fresh-fed and engorged. Perhaps I had struck before the liquid could spread throughout its body.

Whatever the reason, Sylvia McDonald was alight, and to such a degree that the rest of the room was starting to catch fire as well. I was distraught at the idea of leaving this house without my brother, but he was clearly dead, and I needed to escape.

I recalled the vampire had been carrying a handbag when we first met it, and had used a key from it to lock the front door. It did not have the handbag with it now, though, so I began to desperately search the other rooms of the house, trying to find it. I did find it in the end, in what I assume to be the vampire’s bedroom. I’ll not describe it in detail, except to say that it appears to be where the creature took most of its meals. Hopefully that makes the picture clear enough for you. I found the key, though, and escaped that house before the fire did me any serious damage. I was terrified of the police coming and thinking I was a murderer, so I didn’t stick around. I just fled into the night.

It was almost a decade before I encountered another vampire. I’d been living on the streets all that time, occasionally in and out of various institutions, and had just about managed to convince myself that Sylvia McDonald had just been a bad reaction to the stress of watching my brother’s murder. It was in the late 60s that I learned different.

It was 1968, I remember because that was the year United won the European Cup, and I did quite well out of it – people being generous to begging when they’re happy over a sports win. On a Friday night, I would generally spend my time around the Oasis Club in Lloyd Street, and hit up for change anyone who was slightly the worse for drink. Well, this night in particular I was doing quite well, as it was a warm June evening not too long after the Cup Final, and everyone was in a good mood.

Now, about half eleven that night, I spied a stranger all turned out for dancing, making his way from the club with a lady friend. I reckoned they might be good for a tanner, so I made my approach. I gave them the spiel and waited. The man looked at me and I understood he wouldn’t be giving me any money, and I stepped away. It was as he turned to leave I realised that he hadn’t opened his mouth, and memories of Sylvia McDonald came rushing back to me in a flash.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I followed behind them at a distance. I didn’t try to hide or disguise myself, as I had long since learned, and it’s true now as it was back then, that no-one pays any real attention to a tramp. As I watched, I saw the clearly drunken woman asking this stranger questions, and each time he’d just look at her, and she’d smile as though he’d given some reassuring answer, and stumble on behind him. All the while he never once opened his mouth.

I didn’t rightly know what to do about this. I had no weapon save my brother’s old pocket knife which I had kept sharp all these years, and while I was pretty sure of what I was seeing, I was still hesitant to attack with no provocation and no plan. As we walked, I kept an eye out for any discarded wood or timber and, sure enough, noticed a broken wooden palette partially sticking out of a bin. I grabbed a long shard and used my knife to quickly hack it to a point, ignoring the splinters. While I had not, at that time, done much research into the creatures I faced, believing as I did my experience as a youth to be the product of a disturbed mental state, I was still aware of their supposed weakness to wooden stakes.

I had now followed the vampire, who I would later find out called itself Robert Arden, and its victim back to the building where it apparently lived. It let itself in the front door and the woman followed. I wasn’t fast enough to get in before the front door closed and obviously didn’t have a key, so I went round the windows and, luckily, it seemed the vampire lived on the ground floor.

I watched through the window as it led its victim into a sparsely-furnished living room. I couldn’t see any obvious signs of previous slaughter, but I remembered how cleanly Sylvia McDonald had sucked up all the blood from my brother, so this did not strike me as odd. I gently tried the window, and found it locked, so searched the garden for the heaviest stone I could find, and watched what was happening inside. I had to be sure. Soon enough, Robert Arden moved smoothly behind its now-seated prey, and finally opened its mouth to reveal those rows of shark-like teeth I knew would be there.

I hurled the rock I held through the window, showering the room with broken glass, and causing the woman to scream in shock. Robert Arden raised its head in surprise and for one moment our eyes locked and I knew I had made a terrible mistake. The woman looked at her monstrous companion and, seeing his now open mouth, screamed her terror even louder.

In a single movement, far quicker than I expected, Robert Arden was through the window and on me. I struggled and fought, but it was far stronger than I was, and I could barely keep its jagged teeth from finding my throat. It was the first and last time I ever touched a vampire’s skin with my own. The flesh was cold and spongy, like the inside of a bruised apple, and I felt bile rise in my throat even as I fought for my life.

Finally, its teeth bit into my neck. Not enough to kill me outright but with enough force to cause the blood to flow. At that moment I saw a sort of frenzy enter the eyes of Robert Arden and with a spasm its leech’s tongue surged from its throat and I felt it attach to my neck. I do not know if you’ve ever felt your blood being sucked out of you, but I would not recommend it.

Now it is at this point I have something of an admission to make. For the three years preceding this event, as well as on and off through the years since, I have had a relationship with the drug heroin. I tried it for the first time shortly after Nigel’s death and since then I have periodically relapsed. I have always tried to keep this a secret, as I am aware that I have a certain reputation to uphold and I would not want it to be damaged with the revealing of my addiction. But it is important to this account, as I believe it was whatever heroin still remained in my system that night that caused the vampire Robert Arden to remove its tongue from my neck and start to shake, as though having a violent choking fit.

I lay there, trying to compose myself enough to fight back, when I became aware of the screaming. The woman, who had been brought in as a victim, was standing over the flailing Robert Arden, stabbing it repeatedly with a kitchen knife. Strong and quick as it was, the vampire didn’t seem to be able to cope with the sudden onslaught of violence, and was on the ground. This gave me the precious seconds I needed to get to my feet and locate my improvised wooden stake. I took aim, and plunged it into where I believed the thing’s heart should be. It was easier than I thought it would be – the chest was soft and yielding and there didn’t seem to be any ribcage to stop the blow. Robert Arden went rigid and froze, apparently unable to move its body, though I saw its eyes darting around wildly.

It was at that point the woman, whose name I never discovered, dropped the knife and ran. I never saw her again, but she had already saved my life. I took out my cigarette lighter and set Robert Arden alight. Like Sylvia McDonald before it, it caught fire in a matter of seconds and, by the time the police arrived, there was nothing left but a small patch of scorched tarmac. I was lucky that night, and nobody saw anything or called the police before I was finished and had made my way from the scene, but I was always more careful after that.

Following that night, though, I was never again worried that I might have been wrong about the existence of vampires. I always kept my eyes open for them, although sometimes I was too eager, as was the case of Alard Dupont, who I killed in 1982, and later discovered was a human. It is my belief that they are very rare, and feed only infrequently, as all evidence I have seen points to their feeding being fatal. If there were many vampires, or if they ate often, the number of disappearances would quickly become noticeable to the rest of society.

I do not know what they do with the bodies of their victims, and this has always perplexed me, as they do not have any mechanism for eating solid food, and I do not believe there are many, if any, cases of murder where the body is found completely without blood. I certainly do not think they rise as vampires themselves, as the vampire population seems far too small for this to be a possibility.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

According to Nastya, who was here when they took this statement, it was at this point in writing that Mr. Herbert announced he needed some sleep before continuing. He was shown to the break room where he went to sleep on the couch. He did not awaken; unfortunately succumbing to the lung cancer right there. Nastya says the staff had been aware of how serious Mr. Herbert’s condition was, and had advised him to seek medical aid prior to giving his statement, but were told rather bluntly by the old man that he would not wait another second to state his case. I can’t decide whether this lends more or less credibility to his tale.

Regardless, there is substantial evidence to support the version of events told by Mr. Herbert in all aspects except the vampirism. There is a news report of a 1959 fire that consumed a house on Loom Street and apparently claimed the life of an 18-year-old boy, although no mention is made of the homeowner. And a police report from 1968 confirms the disappearance of Robert Arden in Manchester amid circumstances of violence, including a broken window and signs of a fire, though no human remains were found.

There is also a murder report concerning one Alard Dupont, whose partially-burned corpse was found in his home on August 2nd, 1982. Unfortunately, Mr. Herbert was never able to give details of others, so we cannot corroborate further.

There was, however, a small bag left on top of this statement, which appears to contain six shark teeth of varying sizes. According to correspondence with the Zoology Department at King’s College, they didn’t match any currently known species.

Personally, I don’t know what to think. I certainly don’t believe in wild tales of vampirism, but I can’t help but notice that the statement above appears to be a photocopy of a photocopy, and can’t find these supposed vampire teeth anywhere in the Archives or the Secure Containment Room. I don’t know where the originals are, but the file number is listed among multiple information requests from the Institute’s government and law enforcement contracts. It may be that they take Mr. Herbert’s statement far more seriously than I do.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Antonio Blake, regarding his recent dreams about Gertrude Robinson, previous Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute. Original statement given March 14th, 2015. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, current Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
First off, I should admit that I lied to get in here. I know your criteria are very clear: “Any supernatural or unexplainable experience or encounter occurring within the realms of apparent reality. No out-of-body experiences, visions, hallucinations or dreams”. And this is about dreams, make no mistake, but I think you need to hear it anyway. Whether you believe it or not, well, that’s up to you. I just don’t feel like I could rightly go on my way without at least trying to explain myself.

You see, I had a dream about you.

I know how that sounds, and I can assure you we don’t know each other, but the Institute, the building, even this room… I saw them in my dream as clearly as I see them here before me now. So no, I don’t have any tale about a shambling horror in the dark. I ask you to read on, though, as this wasn’t the sort of dream you just ignore.

I should probably give a little bit of background about myself rather than just gibbering about dreams and prophecies. I’ve lived in London for almost a decade now. I came here to do my undergraduate degree at the London School of Economics. I ended up taking a position with Barclays shortly after graduating and did well enough there. It didn’t last long, though; I barely made it through a full year before the stress of my new job, not to mention some problems in my personal life, led to me having a full nervous breakdown. I’d broken up with Graham, my boyfriend of six years and had to leave the home we shared, going to stay with some of the few friends that had survived my year of stress-fuelled outbursts and constantly cancelled plans.

It was there, sleeping on my friend Anahita’s sofa, in the depths of my misery, that I first started to have the dreams. I found myself standing atop the very peak of Canary Wharf and overlooking the Barclays building where I had spent so many hateful hours. Behind me I could feel the pulsing beat of the light that stands atop that looming tower; it thrummed through me and I could see the glow pass across my skin like oil but, try as I might, I could not turn around to look at it.

It was then that I noticed that there was something wrong with the city below me. It was dark, lit by the sickly orange glow of the streetlamps and there too something pulsed oddly. Looking down I could see a web of dark tendrils criss-crossing the streets and crawling up the buildings. They were like blood vessels, thick and dark, some as wide as roads and some as thin as a telephone wire, and they all throbbed in time with the beat of light behind me. I needed to get closer.

Lucid dreaming has never been a skill I’ve possessed, and I generally get swept along in the current of whatever runs though my sleeping consciousness. So it came as something of a surprise when my wordless desire to get closer became manifest and I moved forward. Even more surprising was that my forward motion brought me over the edge of Canary Wharf’s roof and I fell. I plummeted, I don’t know how far, until I hit the ground with a crack. I would have expected this to wake me but instead I simply lay there, spasmed by dream-pain, you know, the knowledge of pain without the white heat of nerves. After some while – who can say how long in sleep – I became standing again, and started to move through that veined orange hellscape that I knew to be the City.

As I moved – I will not say walked, for that would not be quite correct – I saw people. Not many, and not moving, but they were there. They leered like photographs, overexposed and washed out, caught and immortalised in a single instant. Each had those tendrils wrapped around them, pulsing against their stillness.

One had a thin black vein that snaked around her arms and appeared to vanish into where her heart would sit. Another, an older gentleman in a dark blue suit, laid on the ground with a beating mass the size of a tree trunk crushing his legs. On the face of each and every person I saw was that same rictus of surprise, pain and terrified confusion. I had never dreamed like this before, and I knew there was something in it beyond my own reeling consciousness.

Eventually my wandered drifting led me back to the Barclays building. Something inside me wanted to go inside, to see what it was like in this rhythmic, fleshy dreamscape. The lights were on, but like they were a sodium-vapour orange like those outside, and as with all the other lights their brightness pulsed in and out in that beating world, which seemed to rule over all this place.

The desks were set up as I knew them to be but there were no people that I could see. I took the stairs, as something about the thought of riding the lift filled me with a cold dread. It was 23 floors to the office where I worked but if I even had legs in this place they were not what carried me up that stairwell. It was there I found my own desk, clear and empty as I had left it some weeks before.

I then knew all at once that there was something in the small office next to me. I felt it in the rhythm of my dream, and I carried myself across to see. It had been the office of my old line manager, John Uzel, and he was inside. One of the dark black veins had snaked in through the window and seemed to have suspended John two feet from the floor, wrapped lightly around his throat. Like all the others he was still, an image held in place, dangling and hanged by this pulsing mass of otherness.

I awoke at that point. Normally, a nightmare would leave me a sweating, wide-eyed mess, but that morning I felt invigorated. It came to me that, while the dream had in all ways appeared as nightmarish, I had never felt any true discomfort. Even my fall at the beginning had been curiously lacking in any true distress. I tried to put it from my mind as I searched through the jobsites, but something about the dream lingered, like a foul odour you only smell when you’ve stopped thinking about it.

I hadn’t seen John Uzel in several months – he had left the company some time before my breakdown, and I had never known him that well, but the image of his face in my dream wouldn’t leave me, so I resolved to find out why he had returned to my mind in such an odd manner. For whatever reason, the idea that there might be no cause for his appearance, that it may be entirely incidental, never occurred to me.

I had been offered the chance to return to Barclays after my rather dramatic departure, once my mental health was in a better state, but at that point I couldn’t even take the Docklands Light Railway, as I’d get a panic attack whenever the train hit Poplar and the looming figure of the Barclays building and Canary Wharf came into view. I had declined the offer, but I still kept in contact with some of my now ex-colleagues, so emailed a few of them to see if they knew how to get in touch with my old manager. It didn’t take long to find out the truth – John Uzel had apparently hanged himself following the loss of a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this shook me deeply. Again, there was no question to me that it may have been a coincidence. I knew, I still know, that what I saw in my dream deliberately mirrored his fate.

I don’t remember my dreams for the next few nights, but I do remember that I had that same dream again the following Saturday. It was the same in every detail, except there were different people. Some remained the same, but others were new or had disappeared, and those that I remembered had faded, like wallpaper left too long in the sun.

Again, I began atop Canary Wharf, with the light pulsing behind me, and once I was down I found myself able to traverse the city at will, watching all the figures wrapped in those throbbing veins. I returned to where John had been, and sure enough, there he remained, though faded to the point where if I didn’t know who he was already, I could not have identified him. The tendrils that wrapped his throat were as dark as they ever had been, though.

Knowing now what I did about John, I could see the deaths of each poor soul I saw as I wandered through the dream. The dark vines would clutch the head of the stroke victim, the lungs of a cancerous smoker and would bury the car crash victims under the vastness of their bulk. I did not go towards the hospital, as so many of those thick and rubbery lines led towards it that I could see no space within that was not choked with them.

These dreams have been a regular part of my sleeping for about eight years now. Even as life improved and I found a new job and place to live – believe it or not, I now work selling crystals and tarot cards in a “magic” shop – they continued to crop up a few times each month. If there’s one advantage to working where I do, it’s that I’ve been able to read every book on esoteric dreaming ever written, but none of them even come close to what I have experienced. I tried to make peace with the dreams for some time, reasoning that as long as they caused me no discomfort, they were harmless. This worked fine until I saw my father in the dream, walking down Oxford Street, the pulsing veins climbing up his leg and into his chest.

I tried to warn him of course – asked leading questions on his health and how he was feeling, whether he’d been tired recently. I even went so far as to book him a doctor’s appointment, much to his annoyance. It did no good, though – ten days later, the heart attack came for him, and despite the rapid response of the paramedics and how much of his medical history I had immediately to hand, there was nothing I could do to save him. He died on New Year’s Eve, and as 2014 ended, so did any hope I had of my dreams doing good in the world.

It took a month and a half for my father’s image to fade from the orange glow of the streetlamps in my dream London. And by my estimation he had appeared about ten days before his death. I tell you this because I feel you have a right to know the sort of timescales that we’re dealing with here. I haven’t had much of a chance to experiment or see anything more specific, I’m afraid. There are so many people who die in London, and I know so few of them.

But I recognise you. As I write these words I can see you in the other room, eyes locked on whatever book you’re diverting yourself with; I recognise you from my dreams. They said at the front desk that you review all the written statements, so I can only hope that you take the time to read through this one fully.

Allow me to explain in a bit more detail. It was the night before last that the dream came again. It started as it always did, with me on top of Canary Wharf, but almost immediately I could feel that something had changed. The dull orange glow that thrummed up from below seemed muffled somehow and there was an oppressive knowledge within me that something was deeply wrong. Looking down, I could see that the veins, whose domination of the dreamscape had only ever been partial before, had thickened and now seemed to cover almost the whole space of every street.

They still pulsed as before but rather than pumping their dark, unknown cargo invisibly, there would now sometimes be seen a dark red light that travelled along the inside of them. I thought I saw this red light illuminate faces and shadows within those tendrils but it moved too quickly for me to be sure of any details beyond the direction. This was not something I had ever seen happen before in these dreams, and I was aware that I had two choices: to follow the light to wherever it might lead or to turn and retreat into the waking world. I decided to follow the path of that scarlet glow, though I found I was floating some distance from the ground, so thick were the vines below.

I followed them for some time; how long exactly I couldn’t say. I never seemed to travel faster than walking speed in these dreams and yet the distances I covered as I passed through the orange twilight of this pulsating other-London seemed far further than the time it took to traverse. Such is the way of dreams, I suppose. All I know for sure is that I realised after some time that the red light was leading me towards Vauxhall and the Thames. There were fewer people visible here – did rich people die less? Or perhaps they just had greater control over where they died? Or maybe they just couldn’t be seen, fighting off death for so long that when it came at last its icy tendrils covered every inch of them.

I crossed the Thames, and the bridge was knotted high with the flashing vines. One or two of them seemed to pass through the river itself, and the occasional flash of red could be seen beneath the water, but most of them were laid across the bridge. Finally, I saw the destination of the blood-tinged glow. A small building, standing alone on the other side of the bridge near the Embankment. I couldn’t have told you what the street was called; the London of my dreams has no street signs. It was old, pillared and possessed of a quiet dignity. It was this building into which all the veins flowed: every door, every window was solid with them. When the bursts of red light passed into it, the whole building glowed crimson. I could see a bronze plaque next to the door, not quite covered. It read: The Magnus Institute, London. Founded 1818.

I entered, though I couldn’t tell you how. The veins blocked every possible entrance entirely and yet I found myself moving through them. I saw the corridors, these corridors, choked with that shadowed flesh, and passed through them, following that red light that would now pulse so bright that I knew were I to see it awake it would have blinded me. It led me to a room, the label of which was still visible, and read “Archive”. I entered to see walls covered with shelves and cabinets stretching off into the distance. These shelves were coated in a sticky black tar, which I knew at that moment was the thickened, pulpy blood that pumped through each and every one of those veins.

At the front of the room stood a desk, and the veins were wrapped around it so tightly and so thick that I knew that this must be where they ended. Getting closer I realised that there was a person sitting at that desk and it was them that all of this scarlet light was flowing into. I could see none of the figure’s body beneath the flesh that enclosed them, but as I moved around I saw the face was uncovered. It was your face and the expression upon it was far more fearful than any I had seen in eight years of wandering this twilight city. That was when I awoke.

I’m well aware that I don’t even know your name, and I have no responsibility to try and prevent whatever fate is coming for you. Based on my previous experience, such a thing is likely impossible anyway, but after what I saw I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try. I did as much research into your Institute as possible, and arranged an appointment to provide a statement about some spurious supernatural encounter. Even then I was told that the Archivist only reviews the written statements once they have been taken, so here I am, pouring out my lunatic story on paper in the hopes that you might eventually read it.

If you do see this in time and read this far, then to be honest I don’t know what else to tell you. Be careful. There is something coming for you and I don’t know what it is, but it is so much worse than anything I can imagine. At the very least, you should look into appointing a successor.

Good luck.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain how disquieting it was to find this statement tucked into the recent archives. I’m not… entirely sure whether to bring this up with Carmilla or not. When she hired me, she was vague on the point of what happened to my predecessor, Gertrude Robinson. I asked if she would be available to train me up for a handover, but he simply said she had passed away and not to worry about it overmuch. Actually, now I think about it, her exact phrase was that she “died in the line of duty”, which I had assumed meant having a stroke at her desk or something similar – she was quite elderly, I believe.

I mean, I don’t believe in the predictive power of dreams, obviously, but still, it’s a deeply unsettling thing to find. I had Nastya look into it, as I don’t entirely trust the others not to have written it as a practical joke and slipped it into the archives. Unsurprisingly, she came up with nothing. Antonio Blake is a fake name, and all of the contact details he provided were similarly fraudulent. It’s almost certainly a joke, a bit of hazing for the new boss, maybe? Best not to engage with it, I think.

Still, I might have a word with Rosie, to make sure I get a copy of any new statements as soon as they’re made, not just once the researchers are done with them. She seemed very open to the idea of recording them, so I’m hopeful she’ll be willing to do this, too. If this is genuine, well, I have no idea if Gertrude got the chance to read this statement before she passed away, but if anyone comes in ranting about dreaming my death, then I very much want to hear about it.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Lesere Saraki, regarding a nightshift at Saint Thomas Hospital, London. Original statement given February 11th, 2012. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I’m a nurse at Saint Thomas Hospital, down in Lambeth, near Waterloo Station. Technically these days I work at Guys and Saint Thomas NHS Foundation Trust, but Guys Hospital is at a completely different site the other side of London, so for the sake of clarity, I work at Saint Thomas.

Christmas is one of the worst periods to be working at a hospital, and in the Accident and Emergency department it’s even more unpleasant. Pensioners who can’t afford to properly heat their homes, drunken party-goers who overindulge and hurt themselves, even just people who didn’t look where they were going and slipped on a patch of ice. Christmas brings out the side of people that always seems to lead them to the hospital, so I was relieved last year when I got my shift pattern and learned my last A&E shift of the season was going to be on the 23rd, two full days before Christmas itself.

That was the good news. The bad news was the 23rd was also the Friday immediately before the big day, and that meant people finishing work for the holidays and going out for some celebration. When you work in Accident and Emergency, there are few words that fill your heart with such dread as the word “celebration”.

That night wasn’t as bad as some I’d seen, a few broken bones and a couple of drug-fuelled injuries, but no fights or angry drunks, which was a blessing. It must have been about half-past one in the morning that the ambulance arrives. They had radioed ahead and we knew that we had a pair of severe burn victims being brought in, so we were as ready as we could have been.

I was heading out to meet the ambulance, when I noticed that the A&E waiting room was totally silent. I looked around, and there were all the people there that I expected to see, some cradling obvious injuries, but none of them made a sound. They continued to stare at their phone, read books, comfort one another, but not one of them spoke. I didn’t have much time to really consider what I was seeing as, at that moment, I heard the ambulance pull up outside and ran off to see to the patient.

By the time I arrived, they were already wheeling him out and the doctor was assessing his burns. The doctor’s name was Kayleigh Grice, and she was a junior doctor at Saint Thomas. She started giving some instructions to myself and the EMTs, but I was struck by how quietly she was speaking to me. She didn’t whisper but every word was quiet, as though it was a real effort to get them out. Nobody else seemed to notice, so at the time I assumed the effect was due to my own lack of sleep. I’ve always had difficulty adjusting to the late nights and this time had been particularly bad.

We finished transferring him to a treatment room, the only available one we had that night, and the doctor and EMTs returned to get the other patient while I began dealing with the burns on the first one.

I’m forty-eight years old, and I have been a nurse for most of them, so I’ve seen a good number of burns in my time. I was prepared for some deeply unpleasant scenes when the call came in, as bad burns can be some of the nastiest injuries you see working in a hospital. These ones surprised me. They were second-degree, which is severe, but not usually such as to require hospitalisation, except that they appeared to cover his entire body. Every inch of exposed skin showed signs of this burning and, cutting away his clothes, it became apparent that the damage had spread there as well.

Anything hot enough to cause this sort of effect should have damaged his clothing, or even melted them onto the skin in places, but they were utterly unharmed, as though he had been dressed after he’d been burned, or the heat had passed right through his clothes without touching them.

He was a tall man, heavy-set, with the sort of build I associated with an athletic middle age. Any hair he might have had was gone, apparently burned off, and his clothes were a nondescript black suit and white shirt. He didn’t scream or cry or moan in pain, and in fact, the doctor had had to check his pulse when he’d come in to confirm he was still alive. He was, but as far as I could tell, he appeared to be sleeping peacefully.

I had just started treatment when the second patient was wheeled in. He was in almost identical shape to the first, except for the fact that the burns seemed to stop at his neck, along a clear line. It was as though he’d been wearing a choker that the damage couldn’t get above but his neck was bare. He was smaller than the first man, and younger, I’d guess in his mid-thirties. He was clean-shaven, but had long hair dyed completely black. He wore a similar suit to the older man, except that over the top he wore a long black leather coat, just as undamaged as the rest. It looked new, and I felt quite bad having to cut it off him, but we had to confirm how extensive his injuries were.

Like the first, he was completely covered in almost uniform second-degree burns, except for what at first I thought were small black scorch marks. Looking closer, I saw that they were eyes. Small, tattooed eyes on every one of his joints: his knees, his elbows and even his knuckles, as well as just over his heart. I would have expected the burns to have almost destroyed tattoos that small, but instead they were unblemished, and the skin about a centimetre around each one also didn’t seem to have been affected.

To say I was unsettled by this would have been something of an understatement. I barely noticed when Dr. Grice and the EMTs returned. They seemed to be talking normally now, and discussing who these two people were. Apparently, the fire brigade had responded to reports of a blaze in a building site near Saint Mary’s churchyard, and had turned up to find the two men lying unconscious. There had been no fire, although the ground they lay on showed several burn marks and a metal bar that had been lying nearby appeared to have bent slightly as if from great heat. The fire service had called out an ambulance, and they had brought the men here.

Apparently, the older one hadn’t had anything on him at all – no ID, no phone, no keys, nothing – while the younger man had only a Zippo lighter with an eye design on it, similar to the one tattooed all over him, and a old passport that identified him as Gerard Keay. I never got a look at the passport, but from the way the EMTs were talking about it, I gathered the man was well-travelled.

It was at this point that the EMTs had to head out on another call, and Dr. Grice and I got down to treating the two men, the weirdness temporarily forgotten. Medically speaking, there was nothing abnormal about the burns, and it didn’t take as long as I had feared to get them properly cleaned and bandaged. Throughout it all, the two of them didn’t stir, and I wondered if they were comatose, but that sort of diagnosis would require a lot more testing, which probably wasn’t going to happen that night.

So, having finished giving them what treatment we could, the men were moved to one of the few wards with bed space, and I returned to working A&E. And, for an hour or so, I forgot about the odd strangers that lay unconscious just a few doors away.

I only noticed them again when I had to pass through that ward heading towards the nearby stockroom for some more gauze. As I walked through, I became aware of a sound coming from the bed of the older burn victim. I never did find out his name. I walked towards him slowly, straining my ears to hear what he was saying.

It was so quiet as to be almost inaudible, but was definitely words, the same words over and over; the more I heard, the more it sounded like most of them weren’t in English. The first sounded like “Asak” or “Asag”, then “Veepalach” and finally in English “The lightless flame”. The last part was very clear, and I assumed he was talking about whatever burned him, but he said it with such intensity that the words made me feel quite uncomfortable. His eyes were still closed and his lips were barely moving.

I started to feel warm, like there was a fever quickly creeping out towards my skin. It wasn’t the first time I’d had a reaction like this, though, so I took a moment to centre myself and the feeling receded.

The burned man was still whispering; I might even have called it chanting, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do, so I checked his bandages to make sure they didn’t need changing and left to go and continue my shift. If I saw Doctor Grice, which was more than likely, then I could tell her that our mystery burn victim had started talking. Mostly I just wanted to get out of that room for as long as possible.

It was as I returned to the main Accident and Emergency reception that things started to get really strange. And by really strange, I mean that the reception was completely empty. I don’t care how late it gets, and at this point it was nearly three in the morning, the waiting room for A&E is always full, especially on a night like this. I mean, I’d been in there not five minutes before and there were upwards of thirty people but now it was utterly deserted. Even the staff at the admissions desk were gone.

I was freaked out, quite frankly, and started checking through all the examination rooms, the wards next door and the individual patient rooms. All empty, except for those patients physically too sick to move or hooked up to IVs. They lay there sleeping, and part of me wanted to wake them, just to hear the sound of another human being, to not be alone, but like I say it was three in the morning and, weird as this all was, I couldn’t justify waking up patients just to put my own mind at ease. I went as far as to make as much noise as possible directly outside their rooms, but they just slept on.

It was as I returned to the waiting room for the third time in as many minutes that I heard it. It sounded like the growl of an animal, a rolling, angry sound, and I realised that the floor was shaking, ever so slightly. I looked around for the source of the noise, I was getting more and more frantic by the second, and then I saw it.

Lined up against the wall of the waiting room were two vending machines. I rarely paid them any attention, as there were better options in the staffroom and one or both of them were usually out of order. But I now saw that the one on the left, a clear-fronted machine that stocked bottled soft drinks, was shaking violently.

As I got nearer, I saw why: in every bottle, in every row of the machine, the drinks appeared to be violently boiling. Cokes and lemonades and fruit juices shook and bubbled, before one by one, the bottles exploded, coating the inside of the clear plastic front with liquid that still kept steaming and hissing. It couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds for all of them to pop, and then the waiting room was silent once again.

At this point, I was just about ready to abandon my shift and leave the hospital. Whatever was going on there, I wanted no part of it. I ran towards the door leading from the A&E to the chill of the December night, not something I would ever have thought I’d look forward to. As I approached, though, I noticed that the plastic at each end of the metal handles was ever so slightly warped. I tentatively touched the back of my hand to them and withdrew it almost immediately – I didn’t even have to touch it to feel the intense heat radiating from the door. I almost wept. If I was getting out of there, it wasn’t going to be through that door.

I started to make my way back through the wards, heading towards another exit, but as I passed through I could hear the burned man still mumbling to himself, louder now, so that his weird chant was audible even outside of his room. It was starting to get to me. I went in; I don’t know what I was planning to do, I just needed to make him shut up somehow. His eyes were open now, bloodshot behind the bandages and staring blankly towards the ceiling.

At that moment, I decided that I was going to shut him up, even if I had to physically hold his mouth closed. I approached him slowly and reached towards his face.

The second before I could touch him, a hand shot out and grabbed me by the wrist. I turned to see the other burn victim, whose passport had identified him as Gerard Keay, on his feet and shaking his head. His grip on my wrist was far stronger than I would ever have expected from someone that injured, and I could feel a heat through his bandaged hand, like his skin was still burning somehow.

I screamed. Why not? I’d already established no-one was around to hear me. He immediately released my hand and apologised, said he’d only been trying to protect me. I asked him from what and he gestured to the burned man, still lying motionless in his bed, chanting his nonsense phrases. Sparing a glance at his own wrapped form, he said that touching the man would have been a “bad idea”. He seemed to be in tremendous pain as he spoke, but did his best to hide it.

I didn’t say anything then. I wanted to ask what was happening and it seemed like he was waiting for me to do just that, but something stopped me. Something told me that if there was a coherent explanation for everything that had happened since the ambulance arrived, then I would be no better off for knowing it.

After a few seconds of awkward silence, Gerard spoke. He asked me if the paramedics had brought any items in with them. Specifically, he was after a small book bound in red leather and a brass pendant he had been wearing. He didn’t say what design had been on the pendant but I guessed it had been an eye. I told him that neither of those things had been brought in with him, and he was quiet for a long time.

After the last ten minutes spent desperately wishing for another human being to talk to, I should have been relieved with Gerard’s company. But watching him, standing and walking despite the burns covering eighty percent of his body, despite the sheer quantity of painkillers we had given him, he just made me very afraid. Finally he nodded, as though dismissing me, and limped past into the corridor, towards the supply cupboard.

I followed him, asked what he was doing. I got no answer, but he seemed to know the code to the door immediately and strode right in, scanning the shelves for something. He saw what he was after and picked up a small object wrapped in paper and plastic. I recognised it immediately as a sterile scalpel. He was going to kill the chanting man; I could feel it in the way he stared past me as I stood in the doorway.

He started walking towards me. The storage room was not big, and it took him barely a second before he was in front of me, but it was the longest second I have ever experienced as I tried to decide whether to risk my own life for that of the burned stranger, blankly chanting his unsettling prayer.

Behind Gerard, I saw bottles of saline solution start to bubble and boil. I stepped aside. He nodded in appreciation, and said something that I remember very clearly, even though it still makes no sense. He said, “Yes. For you, better beholding than the lightless flame.”

I didn’t try to stop him as he walked back into the ward. I just stood there and watched as he took out the scalpel, muttered some words I couldn’t make out, and plunged the blade into the centre of the chanting man’s throat. At that moment, there was the sound of sizzling, and a smell like rotten meat on a grill. I watched as the flesh around that wound began to blacken and crack. The bandages curled and disintegrated, and the scorched skin spread over his body like water. There was no fire, and I felt no heat, but over the course of twenty seconds I watched this man’s body cremate itself to ash. Even the scalpel was gone.

Gerard Keay walked over to the bed and, picking up the empty bedpan beneath it, gently swept the ashes into the metal basin and handed it to me, asking me to dispose of it. I took it and numbly walked out, heading towards a medical waste bin.

As I walked the corridor, I noticed a figure at the other end. It was Doctor Grice. I’m not ashamed to admit that I wept in relief as I ran to the waiting room and saw it once again full of people complaining and moaning to themselves. By the time I was finished and got back to the room, Gerard was lying in his own bed, apparently sleeping. I considered asking him now what had happened, but at that moment another ambulance arrived with three members of a Christmas party that had gotten dangerously out of hand, and just like that, the rest of my shift was gone.

Gerard Keay was treated for a further four days in the hospital before being discharged into the care of his mother. I tried to talk to him about what happened, but he was on a lot of painkillers and never seemed to really register I was there. It may have been feigned, I suppose, but in the end the result was the same.

Since then, I’ve just tried not to think about it. I’ve managed to get almost thirty years of nursing under my belt before something like this happened, so with any luck, I’ll be long retired by the time anything like it happens again.

I worry sometimes, though. Over the last few months, when I’m alone on the wards, I get the feeling I’m being watched. Not threatened or judged, just watched. I avoid that storeroom, particularly.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

There’s obviously a lot to unpack here, so let’s start with what is provable. Nastya managed to get access to the hospital records for this period and they do list the admission of Gerard Keay and an unknown male for burn injuries similar to what Ms. Saraki described. Furthermore, there are only discharge papers for Gerard Keay, and a short police report on the disappearance of the second burn victim. No evidence of foul play was found, and no official missing persons case was ever opened.

As far as the mystery man’s chanting goes, if it was indeed “Asag” that he was saying, then that’s quite interesting. Asag is the name of a demon in Sumerian mythology associated with disease and corruption, which doesn’t really seem to have much relevance to this statement except that it was also fabled that Asag was able to boil fish alive in their rivers. Admittedly, in Sumerian myth this was because he was monstrously ugly, but a curious coincidence nonetheless.

“Veepalach” might also be a mishearing of the Polish word “wypalać”, according to Tim, which means to cauterize or brand. Admittedly, if Tim speaks Polish in the same way he “speaks Latin,” then he might be talking nonsense again, but I’ve looked it up and it appears to check out. I can’t find anything conclusive on the phrase “the lightless flame,” however. It crops up in a lot of different contexts throughout various esoteric literatures.

It has not escaped my notice that this is the second time Gerard Keay has turned up in this Archive. I’d be very keen to get his statement, but unfortunately it looks like he passed away from a brain tumour late last year. We’re doing further research into him, though, and if we’re lucky maybe we already have a statement from him tucked away somewhere in these damn files.

We contacted Ms. Saraki to see if she wanted to make a follow-up statement, but she declined. Apparently, she still gets the watched feeling occasionally, but aside from that there haven’t been any other abnormal occurrences in her professional or personal life.

One final note: Jessica has finally been able to access the hospital’s CCTV footage for the night of 23rd December 2011, and it shows something quite startling. I had assumed that there was a significant hallucinatory element to Ms. Saraki’s story, and indeed the ward where Gerard Keay was admitted didn’t have a camera, but the Accident and Emergency waiting room did. At 03:11:22, it shows everybody in that room, which I personally counted at twenty-eight people, standing up and calmly filing out of the doors. After this, Ms. Saraki can be seen entering and leaving three times, once taking a minute to stare at something beneath the camera, which I assume to be the vending machine. The rest of the staff and patients do not return until 03:27:12, over fifteen minutes after they left, when they walk back in through the same doors. The footage does not contain any sound, and no alarm of any sort was recorded, so I cannot offer any guess as to why they left, or what they were doing in the intervening time.

There is one other thing that Ivy highlighted, however. At 03:22:52, the feed cuts out for less than a second, and is replaced for a single frame by a close-up of a human eye, staring back through the video feed and i felt drawn to it i don't know why.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Right, let’s try this.

NAOMI
Really? Does that thing even work? It must be thirty years old.

ARCHIVIST
I know, but we have previously had some success using it to record statements that our… digital recording software struggles with.

NAOMI
Yeah, well, that’s one way to put it. You need to get some better equipment.

ARCHIVIST
Believe me, I have been trying. Still, the tape recorder seems to work fine as a backup, and I can have it transcribed later, so for now if you’d be so kind –

NAOMI
You’re serious? You actually want me to tell my story into that rattling piece of junk? I see why no-one takes you guys seriously.

ARCHIVIST
You’re under no obligation to speak to us.

NAOMI
No, I just… I guess I’m just desperate. The last paranormal investigator I went to laughed at me when I suggested talking to you. Still, I-I guess you have to believe me.

ARCHIVIST
[Not beliving her] Something like that.

NAOMI
[Sigh] Okay, from where we left off?

ARCHIVIST
Probably best to start over. Name, date, subject, et cetera. I’m not optimistic that any of the previous recording will be salvageable.

NAOMI
Fine. My name is Naomi Herne, and I’m making a statement about the events following the funeral of my fiancé, Evan Lukas. The date is the 13th of January, 2016.

To be honest I’m not even sure I should be here. What happened was weird and, alright, I can’t think of a rational explanation for it, but I was distraught. I still am. I should go. I probably just imagined the whole thing. He’s gone and that’s all there is to it.

ARCHIVIST
That’s certainly possible. It might all be in your head, though there is the matter of the stone.

NAOMI
That could be… I don’t know. I just don’t know what to think.

ARCHIVIST
Take your time.

NAOMI
Wait, where are you going?

ARCHIVIST
I was going to give you some privacy while you make your statement it seems like people do better when they are alone.

NAOMI
Okay, it’s just… could you stay please? I don’t want to be alone.

ARCHIVIST
[Annoyed] Fine. Let’s start from the beginning.

NAOMI (STATEMENT)
Alright. I guess the beginning would be when I met Evan. I’ve never really been the social type. I’ve always been more comfortable alone, you know? My father died when I was 5 years old, and my mother spent so much time working to keep us fed that I hardly ever saw her. I wasn’t bullied in school, or anything like that. I mean, to be bullied you need to be noticed, and I made sure that I wasn’t. It was the same in secondary school and even in uni up at Leeds. When everyone was moving out into shared houses for second year, I stayed in a nice cosy room for one in university accommodation. I’ve always just been happier alone.

Well, maybe happier isn’t quite the right word. I did get a bit lonely sometimes. I’d hear laughter coming from other rooms in my building, or see a group of friends talking in the sun outside, and maybe I’d wish I had something like that, but it never really bothered me. I knew my own company and was comfortable with it. I didn’t need other people and they certainly didn’t need me.

The only person who ever really seemed to worry about it was Pastor David. He worked in the Chaplaincy, and I saw him occasionally when work or stress was getting to me. My mum’s a Methodist, and I felt more comfortable talking to him than any of the secular counsellors. He used to tell me it wasn’t natural for people to live in isolation, that we were creatures of community by nature. I remember he always used to say that he was “worried I’d get lost”.

Back then, I didn’t know what he meant. I think I do now, though.

Anyway, the point is that when I graduated three years ago, I left Leeds with a first in Chemistry and no real friends to speak of. And that was fine by me.

I got a job as a science technician down in Woking. It didn’t pay well, and the children were a thick, entitled lot, but it was enough to live on, and kept me close enough to London that I could apply for the various lab jobs that I actually wanted. It was interviewing for one of these where I met Evan.

He was going for the same position as I was – lab assistant in one of the UCL Biochemistry departments. He got the job, in the end, but I didn’t care. He was so unlike anyone I’d ever met before. He started talking to me before the interview, and I amazed myself by actually talking back. When he asked me questions, I didn’t feel uneasy or worried about my answers, I just found myself telling this stranger all about myself, without any self-consciousness at all. When he was called in for his interview, I actually felt a pang of loss like nothing I’d known before. All for a stranger who I’d met barely ten minutes ago.

When I came out of the building after my own, somewhat disastrous, interview and saw him standing there waiting for me… I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than in that moment.

We went out, and dating gradually turned into living together. I’d had two boyfriends in the past – both short-lived relationships that ended abruptly. In both cases they said it was because they never really felt like I wanted them around and, looking back, that was kind of true.

With Evan, it was different. It never seemed like his being there stopped me being myself, or crossed into spaces that I saw as my own. Everything about being with him felt so natural that when he told me he loved me, it only came as a surprise to realise that we hadn’t said it already.

He had friends, as well, plenty of friends, how could he not? And he would take me out to meet them when I wanted to, and when I didn’t, he let me be. After a year with him, I actually had what could perhaps be called a social life and, more than that, I didn’t hate it. I always used to roll my eyes at people who said that their loved ones ‘completed them’, but I honestly can’t think of any other way to describe how it felt to be with Evan. I proposed to him after only two years, and he said yes.

I’ll skip over the bit where he dies. It’s only been a year, and I don’t want to spend an hour crying into your crappy tape player. Congenital, they said. Some problem with his heart. Always been there, but never diagnosed. No warning. One in a million chance. Blah. Blah. Blah. He was gone. Just gone. And I was alone again.

There was no-one I could talk to about it. All my friends had been his friends, and once he was gone it didn’t feel right to see them. I know, I’m sure they wouldn’t have minded, they would have said they were my friends too, but I could never bring myself to try. It felt more comfortable, more familiar, to be alone, as though Evan had just been some wonderful dream I was now waking up from.

I don’t remember the week between his death and the funeral. I’m sure it must have happened, but I don’t have any memory of it at all. After leaving the hospital, the next thing that is properly clear in my mind is walking into that big, austere house. I don’t remember where it was, somewhere in Kent, I think, and I must have been given the address by someone in Evan’s family who had organised the funeral.

It was strange. Evan never really talked about his family. He said he wasn’t on good terms with them because they were very religious, and he never had been. I’d never met or visited them, or even been told their names, as far as I remember. But they must have known me enough to invite me, as I somehow ended up at the right place. Just as well they took on the responsibility for the funeral. I was in no fit state to organise anything.

The house was very large, and very old. It had a high gate separating it from the main road, which has the name “Moorland House” carved into the stone of the gatepost. I drove there alone, my old, second-hand Vauxhall Astra complaining all the way. You remember that storm that hit at the end of last March? Well, I hardly noticed it. Thinking back, I really shouldn’t have been driving at all, but at the time, it barely registered. The trees were bending ominously when I finally parked at Moorland House, and I immediately lost the only respectful hat that I owned to the wind.

Evan had once told me that his family had a lot of money, and looking at this place I realised why the funeral was being held there. I could see ‘round the side what appeared to be a well-kept mausoleum. The last resting place of Evan’s ancestors, and soon, I guessed, of Evan himself. This thought set me crying again, and it was in that state, weeping, windswept and soaked through from the rain, that I saw the door open.

I don’t know what I expected from Evan’s father. I knew he couldn’t be anything like the easy, charming man I’d fallen in love with, but the hard-faced stranger that confronted me on the doorstep still came as a shock. It was like looking at Evan, but as if age had drained all the joy and affection from him. I started to introduce myself, but he just shook his head and pointed inside, to a door down the corridor behind him, and spoke the only words he ever said to me. He said, “My son is in there. He is dead.” And then he turned and walked away, leaving me shaken, with no option but to follow him inside.

The house was full of people I didn’t know. None of the lovely, welcoming faces I’d come to know from Evan’s friends could be seen among the dour figures of his family. Each wore the same hard expression as his father, and I might have been imagining it, but I could have sworn that when they looked at me, their eyes were full of something dark. Anger, maybe? Blame? God knows I felt guilty enough about his death, though I have no idea why. None of them spoke to me or to each other, and the house was so quiet and still that at times it seemed like I could hardly breathe under the weight of the silence.

Finally, I came to the room where he was laid out. Evan, the man I was going to marry, was lying there in a shining oak casket that seemed too big for him, somehow. The coffin was open, and I could see him, dressed in a perfectly tailored black suit. I realised I had never seen him wear a suit before. Like everything else in his death, it seemed utterly alien to the life that had he had created for himself.

I remember going to my father’s funeral when I was very young. I remember seeing him lying there, after the undertakers had done their business. My father had looked serene, peaceful, like he had calmly accepted the reality of his passing. It had comforted me, as a child, though it had done little to blunt the acute sense of loss I felt. There was none of that on Evan’s face. In death he seemed to have that same hardness and reproach that I saw on every one of the silent family that claimed him for their own.

I don’t know how long I stood there. It felt like seconds, but when I turned around I almost shrieked to see dozens of black-clad figures stood there, staring at me. The rest of the Lukas family were standing, waiting without a word, as though I was between them and their prey. Which I suppose, in some ways, I was. Finally, an old man walked forward. He was small and hunched with age, his black suit hanging off his body like sagging flaps of skin. He spoke, “It’s time for you to leave. The burial is a family affair. I’m sure you want to be alone.”

I tried to reply but the words stuck in my throat. They stood there, waiting for me to respond or to leave, and I realised the old man was right. I did want to leave, to be alone. I didn’t care where I went, but I had to go, to get away from that awful place with its strange quiet watchers. I ran past them and out into the storm. Inside my car, I just turned on the engine and began to drive. I didn’t know where I was going, and could barely see a thing through my tears and the driving rain, but it didn’t matter. Just as long as I kept going, as long as I didn’t have to stop and think about what had just happened. Looking back, the only thing that surprises me about the crash is that it wasn’t bad enough to kill me.

When I became aware of myself again, I realised I was in the middle of a field, quite a distance from the road. The tracks behind me showed where I had skidded into the dirt. Luckily I hadn’t hit anything or flipped over, but smoke billowed from the engine of my poor old Astra, and it was clear I wasn’t going anywhere. It was dark, and the time on my dashboard said twelve minutes past eleven. My phone said the same thing. I had arrived at Moorland House at 6 o’clock, as instructed. Had I been driving for hours, or had I spent even longer with Evan’s body than I thought? I hadn’t hit anything, so I couldn’t have been knocked unconscious. Had I just been sitting there in my smoking car all that time?

It didn’t matter. The rain was beating down hard, and I needed to get some help. I tried to call the emergency services or use the GPS on my phone, but the screen just said “NO SERVICE”. I took a deep breath, trying to stifle panic, and got out the car. I was soaked through in less than ten seconds, as I struggled through the downpour towards the road. I could hear no sound except for the howling wind, and there were no headlights anywhere to be seen.

Having no idea where I was, I made the decision to turn right and began to walk. I tried to use my phone again, but as I reached into my bag I realised how much of the rain had soaked through. Pressing the power button only confirmed what I already suspected – my phone wasn’t working. Anger washed over me, and all the bitterness and rage that had been building over the worst days of my life surged out of me, and I threw the useless lump of plastic at the ground. The corner shattered as it hit the road, then it bounced off the side and disappeared into the thick mud.

I suddenly felt very cold as I stood there in the road. Rain beating down, tears flowing freely, and utterly alone. I kept walking, desperately hoping to see headlights in the distance, but there was nothing but darkness and the steady pounding of the rain on miles of empty countryside in every direction. I didn’t have a watch, so without my phone I have no idea how long I walked. The cold bit into my soaked funeral clothes and I shivered, falling to my knees and just about giving up. No cars were coming, and I didn’t have the first clue where I was going.

It was then I noticed that the rain had stopped. Wiping the tears from my eyes I saw that a fog had gathered around me, and I could no longer see more than a few feet in front of me. I kept walking, though, as the clinging mist made me feel somehow even colder. The fog seemed to follow me as I went and seemed to swirl around with a strange, deliberate motion. You’ll probably think me an idiot, but it felt almost malicious. I don’t know what it wanted, but somehow I was sure it wanted something. There was no presence to it, though, it wasn’t as though another person was there, it was… It made me feel utterly forsaken. I started to run, following as much of the road as I could see in the hopes of getting to the other side, but there seemed to be end to it.

I don’t know exactly when the hard tarmac of the road became dirt and grass, but I realised after a few minutes that I had strayed off the path. I tried to backtrack, but it was gone. All that remained was the fog and the skeletal outlines of half-glimpsed trees. The dark lines of them bent away from me at harsh angles, but if I tried to approach them then, rather than becoming clearer, the trees would disappear back into the hazy night and I would lose them.

Kneeling down, I was surprised to realise that the ground I was now standing on was not wet. The hard-packed earth was damp from the creeping mist but it did not appear to have been rained on. The despair I felt was quickly turning into fear, and I kept moving forward, further into the fog.

I realised afterwards that the night should have been far too dark to see the fog. There were no lights there to show it, and the moon had been shrouded in storm clouds all night, but despite this I could clearly see it. Shifting, slate-grey and smelling of nothing at all. As I walked I saw more shapes nearby. Dark slabs of stone, sticking out of the ground, leaning and broken. Gravestones. They spread out in all directions, and the gentle blurring of the mist did nothing to soften the hard weight of their presence. I did not stop to read them.

I kept moving until I reached the centre of what I can only assume was a small cemetery, and there I found a chapel. The top of its steeple was lost in the gloom and the windows were dark. I started to feel relief, as though I might have found some sign of life at last. I began to circle it, moving around to where I assumed the front doors were. As I went I noticed that there was stained glass in the windows but, without any light from inside, I couldn’t make out the design. Finally, I came to the front of the building, and I almost lost hope. Wrapped around the handles of the entrance was a sturdy iron chain. I would find no sanctuary here.

I came very close to making a rash decision at that point. I started to shout, to scream for help, but the sound seemed muffled and disappeared almost as soon as it left my throat. No-one heard me, but I continued shouting for some time, just to hear the noise, even if it did seem to die as soon as it touched the fog. It was useless, though, and as I finished I felt the prickling damp flow in and out of my lungs. It was cloying and heavy and I decided I had to do something. I started to look around the ground for the heaviest rock I could find. I was going to get inside that church, even if I had to break a window to do it. Anything to get out of the fog. I was sure that eventually someone would find me.

I noticed that one of the graves had been slightly broken by age, and a small chunk of it could be seen on the ground. It had an engraving of a cross on it, and the weighty lump of stone now lay embedded in the graveyard soil. I bent down to lift it, but as I did so I saw something that froze me in place. The grave was open. And it was empty.

It wasn’t dug up, exactly. The hole was neat, square and deep, as though ready for a burial. At the bottom there was a coffin. It was open, and there was nothing inside. I backed away, and almost fell into another open grave behind me. I started to look around the cemetery with increasing panic. Every grave was open and they were all empty. Even here among the dead, I was alone.

As I stared, the fog began to weigh me down. It coiled about me, its formless damp clung to me and began to drag, pulling me gently, slowly, towards the waiting pit. I tried to back away, but the ground was slick with dew and I fell. My fingers dug into the soft cemetery dirt as I looked around desperately for anything I could use to save myself, and my hand closed upon that heavy piece of headstone. It took all my self-control to keep a grip on that anchor, as I slowly dragged myself away from the edge of my lonely grave. Flowing around me, the very air itself willed me inside, but I struggled to my feet. The image of Evan’s family suddenly came into my mind, and I vowed to myself that they would not be the last human contact I ever had.

I looked towards the chapel, and saw with a start that the door was now open, the heavy chain discarded on steps in front. I ran to it as quickly as I could, crying out for help, but when I reached the threshold I stopped, and could only stare in horror. Through that door, where the inside of the chapel should be, was a field. It was bathed in sickly moonlight, and the fog rolled close to the ground. It seemed to stretch for miles, and I knew that I could wander there for years, and never meet another. I turned away from that door, but as I looked behind me I could have wept – beyond the graveyard’s edge lay that same field. Stretching off into the distance.

I had to make a choice, and so I began to run from that chapel, into the field behind me. I nearly fell into a hungry grave but kept my balance well enough to get beyond them. The fog seemed to be getting thicker, and moving through it was getting harder. It was like I was running against the wind, except the air was completely still. I could hardly breathe as I inhaled it.

And then, as I found myself in the middle of that open, desolate field, I heard something. It was the strangest thing, but as I tried to run I could have sworn I heard Evan’s voice call to me. He said, “Turn left”. That’s it. That’s all he said. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s what he told me to do. And I did it. I turned sharply to the left and kept on running. And then… nothing.

ARCHIVIST
That’s when the car hit you?

NAOMI
Yes. I remember a second of headlights and then nothing until I woke up in the hospital.

ARCHIVIST
I see.

NAOMI
So what do you think? Was it real?

ARCHIVIST
Well, we’ll need to do some investigation into a few of the details that you raised, but at first impressions I’d say it was only real insofar as trauma can have a very real effect on the mind. Beyond that, it’s difficult to prove either way, but I would suggest you leave the stone with us, so we can study it. And it would likely help you move past this unpleasant incident. Some time with a more… qualified care professional might also prove helpful.

NAOMI
Right. I don’t know what I expected, really.

ARCHIVIST
We’ll let you know if we find anything.

NAOMI
Oh, this is ridiculous! I can’t believe I’ve wasted my time-

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Following Ms. Herne’s statement, we did as much follow-up as we were able, which admittedly wasn’t a lot. Evan Lukas did indeed pass away from heart failure on March the 22nd, 2015, and his body was taken by his family for burial. All requests to the Lukas family for information or interviews have been very firmly rebuffed.

At roughly one in the morning on the 31st of March, Ms. Herne was involved in a collision with one Michael Getty. She had apparently run out into the road in front of Mr. Getty’s car near Wormshill in the Kent Downs. She was quickly taken to a hospital and treated for concussion and dehydration. Her car was found abandoned in a field five miles away.

There are no cemeteries matching Ms. Herne’s description anywhere near the road she was found, nor could there have been any fog, given the incredibly high winds during the storm that night. I’d be tempted to chalk this one up to a hallucination from stress and trauma, if it wasn’t for the fact that when she was hit, Ms. Herne was found to be holding a piece of masonry. It appears to be a lump of carved granite with an engraved cross design. The size and style match what would conceivably be found atop a headstone, though we have been unable to trace its origin. Still attached to it is a small fragment of what we can assume would have been the marker itself. The only text that can be made out simply reads “forgotten”. I’ve arranged for it to be transferred to the Institute’s Artefact Storage.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Lee Rentoul, on the murder of his associate Paul Noriega. Original statement given May 29th, 2011. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Let’s get one thing straight right off – this is not a goddamn confession, alright? If you go to the police with this, I will deny every word, and I know enough about the law to know that even if I spill my guts to you about all the horrible things I’ve done, it will count for nothing in court. It’s not like you’ll even be able to help me, I just… My mate Hester said he came to you a few years back, been seeing ghosts and that, and you guys looked into it and told him it was some sort of noise messing with his head, ‘infasound’ or something, and he’s fine now. I need that. I need you to tell me that it’s just coincidence and my mind’s playing tricks, and I need to not lose any more bits of me.

So yeah, I killed that asshole Noriega. Stabbed him in the throat and left him to bleed out on the dockside. Maybe that shocks you a bit, maybe not, but trust me when I say he had it coming. Eight years we worked together, and it was him that got carried away kicking McMullen’s head in and moved it from assault to GBH, but sure enough, when we get picked up he turns on me and I get pinned for it. Five years I served because of him, while he walked free as you please. I’d say that I was due a bit of payback, and I certainly got it.

It wasn’t my first choice, though. I’m not stupid, and parole keeps you on a short enough chain that slitting Noriega’s throat was not my top priority. Don’t get me wrong, it was something I’d been itching to do for five goddamn years, but I wasn’t in a rush. I had plenty of time to arrange something nasty for him, and I wanted him hurt more than I felt I had to do the deed myself. So when I got out in June last year, I bided my time and kept my ear to the ground. Tried to get in touch with him, but was told by the few friends we had in common that he wasn’t interested in talking to me. He’d clearly done okay for himself in the years I’d been away, and could afford some muscle to make sure that I didn’t bother him. I ended up with a couple of bruised ribs when I finally got tired of the run-around and tried to have it out with him properly. It was laying there, some grim side street in Lewisham of all places that I came to the decision that if I was going to hurt this asshole, and I mean properly hurt him, I was going to have to think outside the box a bit.

I decided to pay McMullen a visit. Before Noriega had gone to work on him, Toby McMullen was just some street punk. These days he was just a street punk who had trouble turning his neck. I’ve met plenty of born losers in my time, I mean it’s kind of a given in this business, but I’ve never met someone so intent on being a screw-up as McMullen. When I saw him, he was high as a kite and barely knew I was there, but you bet his eyes lit up when I mentioned Paul Noriega.

It took hours to get anything useful out of that waste of skin, but eventually I pieced together his side of this sorry tale. Noriega had paid him a visit in the hospital, apparently, before the police had picked us up, and promised that if he fingered me for the assault, then he’d have all of the narcotics his little junkie heart could dream of. Only once he was out of hospital and my conviction had gone through, it wasn’t two days before McMullen was out on his arse again, and Noriega didn’t want to know. Any idiot could have seen it would play out that way, but not poor, stupid Toby. Still, he’d been itching to get the knife in for almost as long as I had, and he had had the freedom to plan it, so I asked him if he had anything I could use.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when he suggested magic. Toby had always been into all of that mystical crap, even before the drugs, and if there was some half-baked New Age fad going round you could bet you’d find it dribbling out of his mouth whenever he was coherent enough to actually talk. I punched him in the gut and turned to leave. He followed me, doubled over and struggling for breath, begging me to help him. He said he was serious, said it wasn’t like the other stuff, said he knew someone with real power, who could put the hurt on Noriega, but he just didn’t have the money.

I should have kept walking. I should have shaken him off. I should have beat him so bad he couldn’t turn his neck the other way either. But I didn’t. I stopped and I listened to what that piece of human garbage had to say. I was an idiot.

So Toby took me to see his friend Angela. He never gave me her second name. I asked him what it was: Wicca, voodoo, some crystal bull? But Toby said no, nothing like that. Said he didn’t really know how it was supposed to work, but had a girl a few months back, had told him about Angela; said she’d used her services on a particularly unpleasant ex-boyfriend. Apparently he’d disappeared, and they never found a body. So then I’m thinking maybe there’s no magic there, just a killer with a schtick, but hey, if that was the case it was fine by me, just as long as Noriega got done.

When I finally met Angela, it was all I could do not to cave McMullen’s head in. I’d just about convinced myself I was going to be meeting with a hardened killer, maybe one that kept a bunch of spooky Halloween crap around, but still someone who’d get the job done. I wasn’t even put off when we pulled up to a well-kept suburban house in Bexley. But when the door was answered by an old lady in a lilac dressing gown, I almost lost it. McMullen asked if she was Angela, speaking in a quiet voice like he was actually scared of the geriatric fool. The old woman said yes, she was Angela, and asked us to come in.

The house felt almost as old as its owner – faded floral print wallpaper, dark oak furniture and threadbare carpets. The walls were covered with framed portraits, the sort you’d get in any cheap antique store or charity shop, although as we went into the living room I noticed something that I didn’t expect: they weren’t paintings, they were jigsaw puzzles, each completed and framed. And sure enough, when we sat down on the worn cloth sofa, there in front of Angela was another jigsaw, half-finished. I’ve got no problem with the elderly, and if they want to throw away their last years putting together a damn picture, then I’m sure not going to stop them, but it wasn’t exactly going to kill Noriega, was it?

I was so angry at this massive waste of my time, that when she offered us a cup of coffee, I almost put McMullen face-first through the glass table in front of us. I grunted something which Angela apparently took as a “yes please”, and so a few minutes later there I was drinking instant coffee from a chipped mug that this doddering old ass clearly hadn’t thought to wipe the dust off of. When she asked if I wanted Paul Noriega dead, I nearly choked.

She asked it very matter-of-factly, like it was a question on some form she knew the answer to but had to fill it in anyway. I glanced at Toby, who nodded at me, and I thought what the hell, I might as well play along. So I said yes. Yes, I did want him dead. And more than that, I wanted him to suffer. Angela smiled when I said that, a warm smile that suited her round face, and said that that wouldn’t be a problem.

I started to explain the situation, but she waved it away and told me that Toby had filled her in on all the details, and that there was just one thing she needed from me, that he couldn’t provide. I started to tell her that I wasn’t paying for someone’s gran to take out a hard case like Noriega, but she said no, she wasn’t after money. She said that she was “well-compensated” for the service she provided, and that all she needed from me was an object, anything that I had taken from Noriega.

Not a gift, she said, staring into my eyes with a look that I recognised from years of working with very unpleasant people. It wouldn’t work if it was a gift.

At this point I was starting to feel uneasy. Not scared, alright, I wasn’t scared of this old woman, but being around her was… bad. I don’t know how else to say it, she was bad. You’ve got to understand, I know dangerous, I understand dangerous, hell, I am dangerous. This was something else. But I wanted Paul Noriega dead so badly.

Five years ago, just before we’d been picked up by the police I’d borrowed his lighter. It was a battered old Zippo, used to have a picture of a topless woman on it, but now that was almost worn away. After he turned on me in questioning, I didn’t feel much like returning it to the treacherous backstabber, so I held on to it. I hadn’t thought much of it, but here it was, still in the pocket of my jacket, all those years later. I handed it to Angela, and she gave me that look again, and told me that it would work just fine.

And then we left. Angela told us not to worry about it, that Paul Noriega wasn’t going to be bothering us for much longer; we just had to wait until she was finished. Finished with what exactly, she didn’t say, she didn’t need to. We knew whatever it was we were probably better off not knowing.

The waiting came hard, though. After he’d had me roughed up, it seemed like Noriega had decided I wasn’t worth worrying about. I’d see him walking those streets like he owned them, his pair of leg-breakers in tow, and I knew there was nothing that I could do about it. He knew it, too. So I waited. And I waited. I waited for the shot, or the knife, or the poison or the… whatever would end him for good. It never came. Days turned into weeks and there he still was, as cocksure as ever.

I was patient. God, I was patient, but after three weeks I had almost written off that useless old bag as a time-wasting con job. I was going to give her one more week, just one, but then something came up that I couldn’t ignore. Word came down that Noriega was meeting someone at the docks, some fence by the name of Salesa. The man dealt mainly in stolen art and curios, valuable stuff, and was paranoid as hell, which meant Noriega was going to be there alone. It might have been a trap, sure, but I’d been sitting on my ass waiting for him to magically drop dead for so long that if there was even a chance it was on the level, I had to take it.

Turns out it was true, and went off smoother than I could have hoped for. I found the warehouse a few hours before the meet, and staked out a good spot. Then I waited. Salesa turned up first, a big Samoan guy with close-cropped hair, flanked by four men in dark suits, who carried a square wooden crate between them. They went into the warehouse, and sure enough five minutes later there he is, that snake. He was alone, and seemed to be limping slightly. He headed inside through the same door, leaving it unlocked. Perfect. There was no point me going in yet. I wasn’t keen to get my head kicked in by Salesa’s goons, so I just watched, my hand gripping the hilt of the combat knife I’d bought at an army surplus store I know is happy to sell off-the-books.

It was almost an hour later that Salesa and his men left, still carrying that box. They didn’t look happy, but I could have given a damn. As soon as they were round the corner I headed inside, as quietly as I could, and there he was, leaning up against a pile of bricks, smoking. I started to move towards him, but as I got near he must have heard me, and turned around. He started to say something about reconsidering, and lowering the price, when he realised I was not Salesa. Then a look passed over the face of Paul Noriega that I will treasure forever. No matter what happens to me, the memory of that look of panicked terror will stay with me.

He turned to run, but whatever was wrong with his leg meant he tripped over the bricks instead. I grabbed him by the collar, my knife already out, and dragged him up. I had always been the stronger of the two of us, and he knew he couldn’t fight me. Holding up his hand, he begged me to wait, to listen. I noticed that his hand was missing a couple of fingers, old wounds that had long healed over, though I didn’t remember seeing them before. It didn’t matter; I could hear the blood pumping in my head and nothing was going to stop me taking my revenge. He begged for mercy, as I plunged the knife into him once, twice, three times. Again and again and again I stabbed that backstabber until, finally, I let him fall. He landed on the floor hard, dead weight, his head making a thick, cracking sound as it hit the bricks, and blood began to pool on the floor around his body.

As the rage started to fade and my breathing returned to normal, I took a second to look over poor dead Paul Noriega, and saw something seemed to have been knocked loose when his head hit the bricks. Picking it up, I saw it was a glass eye. I looked back at the corpse, and sure enough there was a gaping hole where his left eye should have been. When had that happened? He certainly had both eyes when we had worked together and all ten fingers as well. He’d also had all his teeth, where now I saw gaps all over that dead, smiling face. I shivered, though I don’t know why.

I won’t go into detail about how I went about disposing of the body. Just trust me when I say that even if the cops did find any piece of Noriega’s corpse, they wouldn’t be able to pin it on me. And life went on. His boys did come looking for me when their boss didn’t return, but I knew to lay low for a while, and soon enough they realised that if he was gone, they weren’t getting paid either way and moved on. And so I had my revenge, and that should have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t.

It was five days after I killed Noriega that I found the first package. I was on Tottenham Marshes, near the reservoir, on business you don’t need to know, and I came to a metal bridge over one of the streams there. Now, this wasn’t a place I went often, and I don’t think I’d ever crossed that bridge before in my life, but there, lying in the centre of it, was a small box. It was wrapped in brown paper and string, like an old-fashioned Christmas present, and had my name printed on it in clear letters: LEE RENTOUL, FOR IMMEDIATE CONSIDERATION.

Obviously, I was a little bit freaked out at this, but not as freaked out as when I opened it. Inside, lying was a black cardboard box, full of cotton wool and a single severed finger. It was obviously some sort of threat; some punk reckoned they could put a scare on me. No chance. I threw the finger into one of the canals and set the box on fire before throwing it in a bin. I headed home quickly, keeping my attention all around me and my hand on my knife. I was so busy looking behind me, I didn’t see the hole in front of me, and I tripped. As I fell forward, I felt a hot pain in the hand that had been on my knife. You guessed it. Falling had caused the blade to slice clean through my little finger.

I’m not too proud to admit that I screamed at this. I tore up my shirt, trying to make a bandage to stop the bleeding, at least until I could get to a hospital. But as I began to wrap it up, I noticed that it wasn’t actually bleeding. The wound was closed. It had healed, like it had happened years ago. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to do. So I just went home. I wasn’t getting my finger back, so I figured I could try to deal with it after a decent night’s sleep.

There was another box at my flat. Same as before. This one contained two toes. I tried to ignore it and keep my foot well away from any knives, but… I was trying to adjust the settings on my flatscreen when it fell off the wall. Hit my right foot and, well, have you figured it out yet? That was two weeks ago. Since then, I lost four more fingers to accidents, most of my toes, this eye I managed to put out on a goddamn fencepost. I’ve lost count of the number of teeth gone, and believe me when I say that you don’t want to know how I lost the hand. Each time, a box wrapped in brown paper: LEE RENTOUL, FOR IMMEDIATE CONSIDERATION.

I’ve tried everything. Once I thought I managed to outsmart it. Spent the day in my bedroom – nothing sharp, no edges. I’d taken out everything except the mattress. It didn’t matter, I woke the next morning with an agony in my foot far sharper than any knife could cut, and the big toe missing, just like the one I’d received the morning before.

I knew it was Angela. Of course I did, I’m not thick. Whatever curse she’d laid on Noriega must have passed to me. I went over there, you know. Went to confront that old… and you know what happened? She let me in. She was nice, civil. Offered me another cup of coffee! I told her where to stick it. Demanded, asked, begged her to stop whatever was happening to me. You know what she did? She shrugged. She just shrugged! Told me that “Some hungers are too strong to be denied”, whatever the hell that means. So I went for her. I was going to strangle the life out of that curse-flinging bag of bones. But as I reached for her, I… I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. I know that that’s how I lost the hand. I know I chewed it off.

Look, it doesn’t matter. I just need your help. I need this to stop. I don’t know how, but this is your area, right? This is what you do. You look into this weird ghost crap, right? Well this is the definition of weird ghost crap, and I need you to help me. I need you to save me from whatever is happening.

I don’t have much time. I got a box this morning, a few hours before I came here. It was a tongue.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

It doesn’t look like this case was ever properly followed up. According to the supplementary notes, shortly after making his statement, Mr. Rentoul became violent towards Institute staff and in the ensuing incident there was… an accident. No details are given, but it apparently required Mr. Rentoul’s hospitalisation. I’m reminded of a joke about loose tongues but i don't think i would be allowed to tell it. He did not return to the Institute afterwards, and his statement was archived.

According to the arrest records Ivy uncovered, Mr. Rentoul was telling the truth about the somewhat chequered past of himself and his associate Paul Noriega, with extensive files on both of them. The last listed interaction between the police and Mr. Noriega is two months before Mr. Rentoul’s statement, and since then no sign can be found of him in police records, or indeed anywhere else.

I sent Tim to look into this ‘Angela’ character – not that I want him to get chopped up, of course, but someone had to. Apparently, he spent three days looking into every woman named Angela in Bexley over the age of 50. He could not find anyone that matches the admittedly vague description given here, though he informs me that he had some very pleasant chats about jigsaws. Useless ass.

Nastya has done his best to try and hunt down Mr. Rentoul and see if we can contact him for a follow-up interview or evaluation, but it looks like he disappeared shortly after making this statement. We were able to find his old landlord, though, who said that Mr. Rentoul vanished in early April of 2011, leaving many unpaid bills and no forwarding address. He said that when he had gone to clear out the flat, he had been surprised to find that there was no furniture left. All that remained in the house, he said, were hundreds and hundreds of small cardboard boxes.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Laura Popham, regarding her experience exploring the Three Counties System of caves with her sister Alena Sanderson. Original statement given November the 9th, 2014. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Caving has always been one of my hobbies. My main hobby really – all the equipment can get quite costly after a while, and I don’t earn enough to have more than one expensive activity like that in my life. Alena, my sister, came along with me on a trip a few years back. She’d lost her job and her house in quick succession, and was staying with me. I thought it would cheer her up. It did, and we’ve been doing it ever since. Stupid idea, really. I wish I’d left her crying on the sofa. At least then she’d still be alive.

We didn’t really have the money to actually go potholing all that often, so I spent a lot of time reading and planning and just looking at stuff online. We averaged maybe a cave a year. Alena was never quite as into it as I was, though. Don’t get me wrong, she was no claustrophobe and I wasn’t forcing her to follow me into the darkness on threat of a family rift, but she mainly enjoyed the climbing, and I always ended up going a little bit deeper than she wanted.

I think, to be honest, she would have preferred to get her exercise under the open sky or, failing that, in an above-ground gym. Maybe we should have tried cliffs or a climbing wall, but caving was our thing. It had helped her when she was in a bad place, and she knew how much I loved it. She also wasn’t too keen on the scrapes and bruises you always get on expeditions. She used to joke that it felt like the earth itself was trying to kick her ass. If only she had known. We did have fun, though, and she always chose to come along. I never forced her to be there. I never did that.

We’d done some of the Three Counties cave system before – a short trip of only a couple of hours into the Rift Pot caves. The whole system is huge, though – I mean, there’s a reason it’s called the Three Counties System – so there was plenty more to explore, and we’d had so much fun the first time that I wanted to try it from a different angle. We were going to go in through the Death’s Head Hole, then travelling through Lost John’s Cave as far as Gavel Pot before heading back. The prospect of this excited me, as in order to travel between Lost John’s Cave and the Gavel Pot system we were going to have to do some cave diving. I had never done cave diving before, and neither had Alena, although she told me that the prospect spooked her less than some of the squeezes we’d had to do to get there.

We made all the arrangements, got our permits in order with the CNCC and had my husband Alistair note down all the details in case anything went wrong. You never go caving unless someone knows where you’re headed and what your plan is. I had also done as much research into our route as possible, as I had no intention of straying from the well-explored, thoroughly-charted caves. I was never much of a pioneer, if I’m being honest, and I was happy to stay to the main routes. No, what I used to love about caving was the feeling of being deep inside the earth; the cold, solid walls folding in around me. It always used to feel like they were keeping me safe, though it doesn’t feel like that anymore.

It was Saturday, June 14th we went. I had taken the Friday before off work to prepare, and was planning to spend Sunday nursing well-earned bruises. Alena and I drove up to Lancashire, towards Death’s Head Hole. I live in Manchester so it wasn’t too long a trip. We parked up at Leck Fell, the closest you could legally park. I was surprised to see that we were the only ones there when we arrived. It was a sunny day in late spring and the weather was meant to be clear for days, with no chance of rain making the caves too dangerous. It was a perfect day for caving but it seemed we were the only ones taking advantage of it.

Death’s Head Hole is not nearly as impressive or intimidating as its name suggests. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you might end up missing it entirely. When we went, much of it was covered in wild plants and bracken. It was barely larger than we were, and I remember at the time the phrase “a perfect fit” came into my head unbidden. Still, the resin anchors were in good condition, and we hooked up and descended our ropes without incident, despite a few unexpected twists in the pothole.

It was a bright day; it was almost noon when we went down, so the light filtered a lot further in than I would have expected. It was some time before we had to turn on our headlamps, but eventually we did so. By the time we hit the bottom, there was none of that sunshine left to be seen and the silent darkness of the cave swallowed us. Beneath our feet, the gentle waters of the underground stream ran their course, as they had for thousands of years, undisturbed by the rough tread of humanity, and we followed them. It was a much gentler descent than that which we had come in with, but it was very slippery, and I was glad I had invested in a waterproof map case, although it made it slightly harder to read at times.

Alena stood back to let me have my ritual. There was something I always did when I first entered a cave, and that was to take a moment to turn off all the lights, and place both my hands upon the cold, earthen walls. I remember once, when I was a child, we went on a school trip to White Scar Cave up in Yorkshire. It was a lovely, safe, accessible cave and was absolutely beautiful, which I suppose is why it was popular for such trips. After we’d been down there for a few minutes, the guide led us much deeper, and told us to stand very quietly. She turned off the lights, to show us children what true darkness is like. I’d never seen anything like it. It was such a pure black, so encompassing, and in the warmth of the underground I found myself full of a joy I’ve never forgotten. Even among a class of thirty schoolchildren, I felt like the only presence that mattered was the cave.

Ever since then, I would always take a moment on any potholing trip to do the same, and feel again that utter darkness, with no sound but the gently flowing river and my own breathing. I don’t think it’s an uncommon practice, actually, but I rarely went caving with anyone other than Alena, and, while she indulged me, I don’t think she really got anything out of it.

We turned our lights back on, and began to head deeper into the cave. I had a map, which we began to follow as closely as we could. I’m quite experienced in these things, but even I find it hard sometimes to match the irregular lines and angles of the underground passages to the often abstract shapes written into the map. There were several junctions that were significantly smaller than the map would seem to show, and the point of entry into Lost John’s Cave was what we would call a squeeze. It wasn’t on the map, but it seemed to be the only way through.

Now, most passages you find yourself travelling through when caving are much smaller than would normally be comfortable for people to move through. After all, they were eroded by often tiny streams of water and minor tectonic events, so accommodating humans was never high on their list of priorities.

A squeeze is something different, though. A squeeze can be a hole less than a foot wide, sometimes going on for a long way, the rock pressing in on all sides of you, and your helmet banging whenever you try to turn your head. In a particularly bad squeeze, there are parts where the walls and ceiling are so close that you can’t move your arms or bend your legs to push forward, and you just have to squirm your way to the other side like a worm. This was a particularly bad squeeze. Near the end, it got so bad that, if Alena hadn’t gone in first, I would have told her to go back and forget Lost John’s Cave.

About half way through, I realised that it was far tighter than I had imagined. I called ahead, to make sure Alena had made it out okay. She called back, told me it was a hard one, but she was fine. I wanted to answer her, but by that point the rock was so close around me it was stopping me from doing anything but holding my breath and willing myself forward.

A hand grasped me firmly on the shoulder and pulled me through. Just like that, I was out. Alena gave me a smirk, as if to comment on the fact that she had made it through unassisted, and I, the true cave aficionado, had needed a hand. I wanted to shoot back some pointed comment about her being more slender than me, but by the time I had got my breathing under control again, the anger had died down and I managed a weak smile.

We made our way through the cave until we came to the Cathedral. It’s a large, arching cave – quite breathtaking, though it requires a couple of sheer drops to access, one of about 40 feet. We had experience and equipment enough to make quite light work of it, though, and soon we were beneath the Cathedral, in what is imaginatively called the Crypt. We stopped here for a rest and a bite to eat, and Alena told me an interesting thing about Lost John’s Cave. While I had been concerned with finding maps and as much information as I could on getting through, she told me she had been looking into a history of the place.

She said everyone puts the apostrophe in the wrong place, when talking about Lost John’s Cave. As the stories go, it was two men, both named John, who were the first to delve deep into the cave. They went too far, though, and their candles had gone out. They lost their way together in the sprawling labyrinth of tunnels, and never emerged. Alena said she thought it was quite sweet, in a strange sort of way, and joked that if she ever got trapped underground, she’d want it to be with me.

I smiled and nodded, though secretly, the thought appalled me. It wasn’t at the thought of being entombed down there – at the time, it didn’t seem like such an awful fate – but the thought of having to spend my last days with Alena was a bit too much. I’m sorry, that’s a horrible thing to say about the dead. I loved my sister, and I loved spending time with her, but to be lost beneath the earth is such an intensely private thing. Maybe she realised that, at the end.

After our brief stop we made our way down through the Dome. It was beautiful, and this was the part that I had been dreading, as all the experienced cavers I had talked to had said that this was the hardest descent. It went easily. Very easily, actually, and at the time I remember getting a weird feeling, like I was being swallowed. Finally, we made it through the shale cavern and into the master cave. As we stood there, I felt anticipation and trepidation in equal measure. Before us lay the passage, filled with the still water of the sump. We were about to have our first cave dive.

I had always been told by experienced cave divers that you never judge the distance correctly. The first few times you try to surface, you will always hit your head on the stone above, so it’s best to try and not be too alarmed by it. I reminded Alena of this as we got our equipment ready, and she told me she remembered, and then surprised me by asking to be the first one to go through, saying something or other about conquering fears. I said yes, why not, and let her go through.

As I stood there alone, waiting, I began to feel something I had never before felt this far underground. I began to feel uneasy. It was as silent as it had ever been, but there was something else there, beneath the silence. Almost like a whisper.

I shook the feeling off when it came time to follow Alena, and dived into the pool. It wasn’t far to the junction which would lead us on to the Gavel Pot. I pressed myself through the narrow space, half swimming, half climbing, until I thought I had gone far enough, and attempted to surface. Clunk. My helmet hit lightly against the roof of the tunnel. Fine, that was as expected. I kept swimming another few meters and tried again. Clunk.

That gave me a nasty shock, as I should have been well past the end of this first tunnel. I kept going, until I reached the end of the subterranean waterway, and went towards the surface. Clunk. I started to panic. Was this a dead end? There was no further I could go. Where was Alena? She couldn’t have come back past me; the tunnel was far too narrow. In desperation I tried to come up one more time.

I broke the surface to see Alena laughing to herself, and holding a rock over the part of the water where I had been trying to emerge. I swore at her violently, not sure whether to hit her or join in her laughing. She apologised, but said she had seen the rock and couldn’t resist, as I was always going on about the helmet banging on the roof. I sat there, suddenly drained. The adrenaline of my panic seemed to have sapped much of my energy, and I think my sister could see that, as she didn’t press me to go on. We both knew that the passage through from this junction to the Gavel Pot itself was a much longer dive, and neither of us was really up to it. We just sat there for a while in silence.

It had taken longer to get this far than we had planned, so I suggested going back the way we came, rather than continuing to go deeper into the cave. Alena agreed but, as I turned away, she asked me how lost I was in a low, grating voice. I snapped back that we weren’t lost at all, that I’d followed the map exactly, and she just gave me this look, like she didn’t understand what I was talking about. I shrugged, and told her that I would go first on the way back, and she agreed. I was eager to get back and be above ground in a way that I had never been before. I got my equipment ready and dived back into the water, heading back towards Death’s Head Hole.

That’s when everything started to go really, really wrong.

To begin with, the water didn’t end. I tried to surface, as I had on my first time through, and again there was that clunk as my helmet hit the roof of the tunnel. I moved on and tried again, but still no luck. I began to fight down the rising alarm, told myself that the tunnel had a definite end and I just had to reach it, but it just kept going. No light, no surface, nothing but this cramped waterway, pressing on every side waiting to claim me. I don’t know how long I was desperately swimming forward, but I almost screamed with relief when I reached my hand and felt it break the surface of the water.

It wasn’t the cave I expected. What stretched before me was a tunnel even smaller than the waterlogged one I had left. I scrambled forward into it, not because I wanted to go on into that unknown passage, but because I was worried about Alena being able to get out of the water behind me. I must have taken a wrong turn, except that didn’t make sense. I hadn’t turned at all, and more than that, there weren’t any turns or junctions in this part of the cave. I had checked all the maps of this area over and over, and they all put it as a straight line. I waited, wanting to talk to my sister when she surfaced, and discuss where to go from here. She didn’t emerge. I don’t know how long I lay there; it was too cramped to check the time, but it felt like hours. I wanted to go back and check, but I couldn’t even turn around to see. I just waited for a splash that never came.

I decided to go on, press forward until I at least found somewhere wide enough that I could turn. As crawled on, I scraped against the jagged rocks until I felt them pressing into my bare skin where my clothes had ripped. I can deal with it when I’m out, I kept thinking, but the passage just got smaller and smaller, until at last I couldn’t move any further. I finally accepted that I was going to have to try and squeeze back the way I had come without even turning round. I started to shuffle backwards, and my feet touched against solid rock. The tunnel was gone. It was then that I screamed. And my light went out.

I said earlier that I enjoyed the pure dark of the cave. I was wrong. I had never truly known a darkness like this. Unable to move, barely with breathing space enough to cry for help. Even as I lay there it felt as though the walls pressed me further, and I knew that the stone I had always believed to be my friend and protector was going to entomb me here.

In the distance, I saw the faintest point of light. It looked like a candle flame, far down the tunnel, so weak that it lit nothing but itself. It grew closer, but any hope it might have given me quickly died as it grew. It was coming towards me so slowly, and deep down I knew that it was… of this place. It meant me harm.

As it got closer, I saw the pale hand that held it, and I heard something. It was Alena. It sounded far off and muffled, but I was sure she was calling for help. I shut my eyes, for all the good it did in that place, and tried desperately to will it all away. When I opened my eyes again, the light was still there, but it had changed somehow. It seemed brighter and, as I looked, I realised it was no longer coming from a candle. I could hardly believe it, but it looked like daylight.

With every last ounce of strength I possessed, I pushed myself forward. Had I been climbing this whole time? My clothes were ragged and torn, my skin scraped and bloody, but after nearly an hour I broke onto the surface through a small opening not on any of the maps. I breathed in fresh, cool air, and I screamed as long and loud as I could. That was how Alistair and the cave rescue team found me. Apparently I’d been underground for almost twenty-four hours, and he had called in the cave rescue service.

I was well cared for, as I waited for news of Alena. My wounds were treated and I was given food and water. It took another day before the rescue team told me what I think I already knew: there was no sign of her anywhere. I never saw her again, and she was added to the list of fatalities, so I suppose that’s an end of it. I haven’t been underground since, and I don’t intend to.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

This is a strange one. I have rarely come across a statement written with such conviction, yet where so many of the details are provably false. The CNCC have no record of Ms. Popham getting a permit for this expedition, and the number of other permits they issued for June 14th would indicate that they certainly weren’t the only ones in the cave that day. Beyond that, Death’s Head Hole and Lost John’s Cave are, as Ms. Popham pointed out, well-documented in layout, and according to Ivy’s reckoning, the route she described is borderline nonsensical.

What is true is that on 15th of June, the Yorkshire Dales Cave Rescue Organisation was contacted by Mr. Alistair Popham, who told them his wife and sister-in-law had gone caving the day before, and had not returned. I sent Jessica to check the details – Nastya declined to help with this investigation as he’s “a bit claustrophobic” – and he found some more bizarre discrepancies.

Ms. Popham was not found aboveground, as she claimed. She was found a few yards from the bottom of Death’s Head Hole, unresponsive and kneeling next to a small pile of burned out candles. Alistair Popham claims not to have seen any such things being packed. She only came out of this stupor when brought above ground, at which point she started shouting about her sister Alena, demanding they go and “save her”.

There is also the matter of the recording. She does not mention it in her statement at all, but Ms. Popham took a camera with her into the cave system. It was never claimed back from the CRO after her rescue, and Nastya managed to gain enough access to copy the footage. I not to ask how, I think.

Most of it is mundane footage of Ms. Popham and her sister cave climbing, which seemed to match her statement, but the last recording is… somewhat alarming. The timestamp puts it at just past two o’clock in the morning of June 15th. It is completely black, though whether this is because it was in a pitch dark cave or simply because the lens cap was still on is unclear. The audio is what concerns me, and here I will play a sample:

[CLICK]
[Sound of underground watery movement and the increasingly panicked voice of Laura Popham saying “Take her, not me.”]
[CLICK]
The video is 2 hours and 43 minutes long, and the audio remains consistent throughout.

No sign of Alena Sanderson has been found in the two years since her disappearance, and I have made the decision not to follow up our findings with Ms. Popham.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Carlos Vittery, regarding his arachnophobia and its manifestations. Original statement given April 9th, 2015. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I hate spiders. I know, I know, everyone hates spiders. Any time there’s any list of the top however many fears, they’re always up there, and whole horror franchises have been built on the basic premise that people hate spiders. But not like me. Not like this. It’s not the sight of a spider that gets me, not the legs or the eyes or even the webs they leave behind with only the drained corpse of their insect victims still inside. It’s the presence of a spider. The knowledge of its being, somewhere near, waiting to crawl on you, and all the warning you get that gentle tickle of its legs as it climbs upon you.

I’m not explaining myself very well. Let me try and phrase it in a different way: I can watch any number of films about the things. Documentary or horror, it doesn’t matter. I can read books on them. I can stare at close-up pictures of their weird spider faces all day long, and there’s hardly a shudder from me. But I had to move from my last house after discovering how many spiders made a home in my garden. I walked out there one day with the intention of smoking a cigarette, sat on the rusty garden furniture that had come with the place, and looked up.

There it was – stretched between two large branches, silhouetted against the sky it sat. Objectively speaking, the thing was tiny, couldn’t have been more than half an inch leg-to-leg, but up there, suspended high above me, its body black against the slate grey sky, it filled me with a sickening dread. I leapt up, and started to head back inside, but as I did, my eyes flicked wildly around the rest of the garden, and everywhere they came to rest, I saw more lurking spiders, more webs. There were dozens that I could see, which meant there must be hundreds more I could not.

There was no way I could live there after that. How could I sleep, knowing how many crawling horrors moved and twitched and spun their filth just a wall away? I’m not a fool; I know that all gardens contain spiders. Every single one is filled with them, nestled in any crevice or hiding spot they can find. But now I knew. I had seen them in their spindly multitudes, and I could not unknow how many were there. And I could not stop thinking of when winter would come, and they would seek to find a way into the warmth of my home. So I had to move.

Renting in London moves very quickly, which is a pain if you’re looking to find exactly the right place to live, but if you just need to get out and into a place as far away from a garden as possible and you aren’t choosy, it can be sorted out very fast indeed. I found a place in Boothby Road in Archway. While nearby Elthorne Road was full of houses and gardens – no doubt infested with spiders – my building was surrounded by concrete driveways and parking spaces, and the only vegetation were a few window boxes the other residents kept. The place was old, but had been kept clean enough that I didn’t need to worry about hidden webs, and the rooms, though small, were open enough that I could keep an eye on all corners. I was on the second floor, so any eight-legged intruder would have something of a climb to access it; although I was acutely aware of the distance a spider can shoot its web when it wants to get somewhere.

The building was also quite happy with pets, so I got a cat. I had heard from a friend who had a pair of them that they have a habit of catching spiders and eating them – slowly and torturously. This sounded good to me, so I invested in an older tabby, from a local shelter called Major Tom.

This is all a lot of superfluous information, I know, but you have to understand the lengths I went to; how little I would tolerate a spider to live in my presence, to fully grasp how unnatural it was, what happened to me. What still is happening to me.

I saw a spider about three months ago. Not unusual. Certainly not as unusual as I would like – even with all my precautions they still manage to get into my home once a month or so. My normal course of action is to immediately flee the room and leave Major Tom inside to deal with it, returning after a few hours. In all previous cases this had worked fine – I believe Major Tom definitely ate the majority of them, and those spiders that had simply fled back into the shadows, well, I can trick myself into believing they also suffered such a fate. It may be that my grey feline companion never actually ate any of them, but he was a fine enough placebo that such a thought didn’t concern me as much as it might.

I remember that month there had been a few of them. Our building had acquired something of an infestation of some sort of insect I didn’t recognise – small, silvery worms, almost like maggots, but slightly longer – and I assume that they provided a good meal for the eight-legged little monsters.

This spider was different. I felt it the moment I laid eyes on the thing, standing in the middle of the kitchen wall, displaying itself boldly, as though it wanted to be as visible as possible. I felt that familiar rushing fear, as though the floor had dropped away and a thousand tiny legs are crawling upon every inch of my skin. But there was something else there. I was aware of this spider in a way I had never had been of others that preceded it. It wasn’t the biggest, maybe an inch wide, but its abdomen was swelled grotesquely. I could feel every one of its void-black eyes focused upon me, see each hair on its fat, bulbous body, and smell the venom I knew dripped from its fangs. I hate spiders, as I have said, but I would have sworn that this one hated me back.

None of this was enough to make me think twice about gingerly pushing Major Tom towards the thing with my foot and fleeing the room. I made my way into the living room and closed the door behind me, leaving cat and spider to deal with each other. I sat there, watching the TV, some panel show re-run, trying not to think about the thing on my kitchen wall. An hour passed, then two, and finally I felt like I had enough stability of mind to open the door and confirm that the damned arachnid was gone.

The moment I opened the door I felt something furry brush against my leg. Choking down a sudden moment of panic, I looked and, sure enough, there was Major Tom, hurrying out of the room at a run. He didn’t seem hurt or upset, so I assumed his job was done. Then I turned back to my kitchen, and froze. The spider sat in that same spot. It wasn’t eaten, it hadn’t fled, from what I could tell it hadn’t even moved! The only way I was sure the thing was real and alive was that I swear to you I could see its mandibles twitching with anticipation. I stood there, unable to summon the will to close the kitchen door or enter into it fully and cursed Major Tom for a useless bag of fur.

It was another hour before I was finally able to move. The whole time I stood motionless in the doorway, watching the fat spider that paraded itself on my wall. Still it remained in place, and I couldn’t help but feel that it was daring me to do something, to take action, to kill it. I began to move. Slowly, ever so slowly, I approached it, reaching a hand over the table and taking the half-drunk mug of coffee, now long cold, in my hand. I gripped the handle so tight I was sure it would snap off in my fingers. Finally, I stood before the spider, preparing myself to calmly crush it against the wall. Then it moved without warning and I hurled the mug against the wall with all my might.

It hit the spider dead on and exploded in a shower of coffee and china. I stood there for a minute, breathing hard, but all that remained was a large stain on the wall and mug shards littering the floor. I should have cleaned it up immediately, but I was so tired, as though killing the spider had taken every ounce of wakefulness that I had within me. I simply turned around and went to bed. My dreams that night were many-legged but there’s not much unusual in that.

I spent the next morning cleaning up the detritus from my battle with the spider. I wished that I had gotten the coffee cleaned before it had dried, but by lunchtime the place was looking very much as it had before. As I swept up the smashed mug, I noticed that the largest shard, emblazoned with the design of a stylized blue owl, had a vivid smear on it. Brown, red and green were crushed onto it where it had hit the spider. It disgusted me, but looking at it I couldn’t help but feel a small surge of triumph, and I smiled as I threw it into the garbage bag. Major Tom watched, impassive as always.

The next few days passed without incident. Major Tom had never been much of an indoor cat, so I had installed a cat flap some time before to allow him to come and go as he pleased. After that first encounter he seemed to spend more time outside, and I saw him less and less as the week progressed. I didn’t think much of it; we’d had a particularly mild Christmas, so it made sense that he’d be enjoying the outside as much as possible before winter really set in.

It was the Friday after my first encounter that it happened. I came in from work, tired after a difficult week – I used to work as a data analyst at an online betting company – and decided to order takeout and relax in front of some TV. I eased myself back into my armchair and reached for the remote. I was aware that Major Tom wasn’t anywhere to be seen, which was odd, since he usually got fed shortly after I arrived home, and he was never one to miss a meal.

Still, I didn’t think of it, and turned on the television. I hadn’t turned the satellite box, so what showed at first was an empty blue screen. I reached to the other remote to turn it on, when I realised the blue screen wasn’t empty. There, sat upon it, black against the glowing background, was a spider. And not just any spider, but I swear to you, and here’s where you march me out of your little institute as a time-wasting lunatic, but I swear that it was the same damn spider.

It was the same size, the same shape, the same thick, pulsing abdomen. But more than that, I felt it. I felt it in that fear that hit me like I had been punched in the stomach, and I felt it in the way that the thing just sat there, unmoving, waiting for me to kill it again. I was stuck to my chair, just watching this spider as it stood there on the screen of my television. I called for Major Tom, but there was no response.

God knows how long I sat staring at the spider on my television. I don’t wear a watch, and I couldn’t move my arm to check my phone. If I hadn’t been sat down I would have run already, but standing up was more movement than I could bring myself to make while it watched me.

Finally, I got to my feet. It was less effort than I expected when I finally mustered the will to do it. Although that’s not really how it felt at the time – at that point it felt almost involuntary, as though some something were lifting me, hoisting me to my feet by unseen strings. I began to walk, but rather than fleeing the spider I found I moved towards it, until I stopped there, so close I could have touched it, though my mind recoils at the thought.

Before I realised exactly what I was doing, I lifted my leg, and kicked the television, instantly crushing the bulbous spider beneath the heel of my shoe, and, now I think about it, narrowly avoiding a nasty electrocution. I had had no inkling I was capable of such a thing, but once again the spider was dead, and I had a slimy stain on my shoe.

I threw the shattered remains of the television away, burned the shoe and tried, desperately, to return to something approaching my normal life, but it was no good. The spider that I had killed had come back, of that I had no doubt, and a deep paranoia began to set in as I waited for it to return again. I saw Major Tom only once in the weeks that followed. He came in, sniffed at the bowl of food I had continued to put out for him in the vain hope of luring him back, and turned around and walked away. As he left, he gave me a look that I could have sworn was one of pity.

I called in sick to my job, as I wasn’t really sleeping, and so much of the time was spent checking nooks and corners for the spider that I was a nervous wreck. More than once, I did find spiders, but they weren’t the one who was after me, so I killed them without a second thought. My life descended into the mess that it, well, it still remains today.

I was right, though. Two weeks after I kicked it to death on my TV, there it was. Over my bed. Standing on the wall, over the spot where my head lay each night as I tried in vain to sleep. It was that damned spider. And I recognised it. My bedroom is better lit than the kitchen, and it wasn’t silhouetted against a screen, so for the first time I got a really good look at my tormentor, and I realised that I had seen it before the kitchen.

I was not born with a fear of spiders. In fact, for the first six years of my life, I can only assume I existed in peaceful harmony with them. But that changed in the autumn of 1991. I didn’t live in London then, but with my parents in Southampton, and we would visit my grandparents every Sunday, out in the nearby New Forest. They lived on the edge of a suburb, and from the bottom of my grandmother’s garden you could see fields stretching away for a half a mile to the tree line. I used to spend a lot of time down there, and if you were lucky, sometimes there would be horses.

That day, there were no horses, just an overcast sky and wind that threatened to blow off my blue woollen hat. I was wandering through the scattered trees by the fence I wasn’t allowed to cross, and I noticed a fallen log. I had seen it before, of course, as there was little in that place that changed much between my weekly visits, but there was something different about it. In one of the hollows sat something that I did not recognise. It was a pale brown, and looked soft and lumpy, like a small sack. Knowing no better, I approached it, and saw, perched on its top, a small spider. It watched me, warily, its fat abdomen twitching, but it did not move.

In my childish ignorance, I thought it looked silly, and I reached over for it. But I tripped. My hand hit the spider, killing it instantly, and plunging into the egg sack below, causing it to tear open and explode. I was suddenly covered in thousands of small, white crawling things, those tiny, dripping, half-formed and unfinished spiders. They covered my hands, my face… my eyes.

I can never forget that feeling, and since then, the presence of spiders has filled me with the deepest dread. And that was the spider that sat before me on my bedroom wall. Though I remembered little of what the long-dead thing had looked like, I knew it was the same. Can you be haunted by the ghost of a spider that destroyed your childhood?

It sounds absurd. It sounds laughable. But there it was. I didn’t know why it was here. And I didn’t know why I was reaching for it. My mind screamed to stop, and I let out a terrible cry, but my hand kept moving towards it inexorably, as though willed by something else. This ghost spider felt real enough when I crushed it beneath my palm, legs splayed and body bursting warmly against my skin. Once I had control of my limb once again, I spent the rest of the night washing my hand.

I am moving out of that building. I officially gave Major Tom’s paperwork to the family on the ground floor he decided to move in with, and will be leaving the moment I find somewhere, anywhere, available for immediate rental. I can’t risk seeing the thing again. I’m also seeing doctors, trying to get a referral for psychiatric treatment or possibly some antipsychotic medication, but I felt I should probably give you a statement as well. I don’t expect you to believe me, but if “ghost spiders” falls under anyone’s remit, I suppose it’s yours.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

I think the most important lines in this statement come at the very end. Antipsychotic medication and disbelief are, I think, exactly what Mr. Vittery needed to get through his problem with, er, “ghost spiders”. There simply aren’t enough details given in this statement to actually investigate, short of Tim confirming that Mr. Vittery did indeed live at the addresses he provided.

I would have asked Jessica to follow up with Mr. Vittery himself, but he appears to have passed away shortly after giving his statement. He was found in his Boothby Road residence, after neighbours complained of the smell, and had apparently been dead for over a week. Coroner’s report lists asphyxiation as the cause of death, probably due to choking, though it doesn’t say what he choked on, simply lists “foreign organic material” blocking his throat.

If I were of a more alarmist nature, I might think the appearance of Mr. Vittery’s corpse lent some credibility to his tale. But as I told Tim earlier, he was there for over a week, so there is very likely a perfectly natural explanation for the fact that his body was completely encased in web i mean come on it was there for like 2 weeks.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Sebastian Adekoya, regarding a new acquisition at Chiswick Library. Original statement given June 10th, 1999. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Books are amazing, aren’t they? I mean, when you think about what they really are. People don’t give the actuality of language the weight it deserves, I feel. Words are a way of taking your thoughts, the very make-up of yourself, and giving them to another. Putting your thoughts in the mind of someone else. They are not a perfect method, of course, as there’s plenty of scope for mutation and corruption between your mind and that of the listener, but that doesn’t change the essence of what language is.

Spoken aloud, though, the thought dies quickly if not picked up. Simple vibrations that vanish almost as soon as they are created, though if they find a host, then they can lodge there, proliferate, and maybe spread further. Still, it is not a reliable method in terms of a thought’s endurance, as humans are fragile creatures, and rarely last a century.

A book, though, is another story. There are written texts that have outlived the civilisations that created them. Imagine, thoughts hundreds, thousands of years old, preserved and ready to be taken again. Corrupted, or translated, perhaps, by a culture that does not understand them, but still, ideas that have outlived by lifetimes the mind that first conceived them.

Will the thoughts that first ran through Shakespeare’s head ever stop being thought by someone, somewhere? And a book, so dense with a mind’s fossilised creations, is it any wonder they have been ascribed such power throughout the ages? Or that an old library, with heavy tomes covering every wall, seems to have such a weight to it, beyond the physical presence of the texts it holds?

I used to work at Chiswick Library. I didn’t have such ideas back then, though. I just knew I loved books, always had, and so when the opportunity arose to work in my local library I jumped at the chance. I had been a voracious reader ever since I was old enough to hold a book for myself, and even before that my mother tells me I would pester her constantly to read to me. I suppose you might say my mind has always been receptive to the thoughts that lurk in the written page.

Still, Chiswick Library is a long way from the cramped and austere libraries you’re probably imagining. It’s light and airy, with bookshelves and carpets that speak more of cash-strapped local councils than of the rich majesty of knowledge. It has an extensive children’s section and the vast majority of its stock are dog-eared paperbacks of true crime, literary fiction and reference books. It has a modest collection of books on tape and the atmosphere, though quiet, is far from oppressive. In a word, I would sum the place up as ‘unthreatening’.

It was three years ago when this happened. I had already been working there for about a year when the book first turned up. Now, we used to buy all of our books new, and I never did any of the acquisitions for the library, so I couldn’t say when or where it might have been bought from, but it looked old and pretty beaten up when I first noticed it. It was handed back with four other books at the front desk, and as I was scanning them through, I noticed that one of the barcodes didn’t seem to match up. The barcode and ISBN both registered as being that of Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh, but the book itself was an almost featureless black paperback, with a title on the front in a faded white serif font: The Boneturner’s Tale.

I was a bit confused, and called the librarian, Ruth Weaver, over to ask about it. She didn’t recall seeing it ever before, but stuck in the front was the ex-libris bookplate of Chiswick Library, as well as a lending label with a handful of stamps going back several years. Ruth shrugged and told me not to worry too much about it – we’d get it recorded and put on the system properly, but something about the situation bothered me, so I decided to check the record of the man who had returned it.

His name, at least according to his library card, was Brian Drumbot, and sure enough, three weeks ago he had borrowed four books from us. Specifically, the four others he had returned. I suggested to Ruth that perhaps he was a self-published author who was trying to trick his way onto our shelves, and she laughed, saying that was probably it, although why anyone would go to the trouble of faking it just to get on the shelves of Chiswick Library was beyond her. The book even looked worn, though, like it had seen decades of being read, with a line creased down the spine, and one half of the cover faded from the sun. Nor, from what I could see, did it list any author at all.

It was at that moment that Aurora Borealis came in, and I had to put the book to one side. Aurora and I had once been fast friends; growing up on the same road, attending the same schools, we had spent much of our early life as inseparable. But she had always been, well, not to put too fine a point on it, Not intrested in higher education, and when I went away to university, she stayed behind. I think she saw it as something of a betrayal, and when I finally returned, I knew immediately something had changed between us. She spent the time I was away becoming a bit of a crook, and upon my return, began what would eventually become a campaign of petty terror. She was always very careful to stop before she did anything that might get the police involved, and I guess there was enough leftover affection from a childhood spent together that I never really thought about reporting him. It wa–

ARCHIVIST
Oh, erm, hello Carmilla.

CARMILLA
Do you have a moment?

ARCHIVIST
Not really, I’m sort of in the middle of something.

CARMILLA
I understand, it’s just that Miss Herne has lodged a complaint.

ARCHIVIST
A complaint? I could just as easily complain about it wasting my time!

CERMILLA
That’s not how it works, Raphaella.

ARCHIVIST
I wouldn’t even have had to do the recording if Rosie kept her equipment in better condition.

CARMILLA
Regardless, I would prefer that you not antagonise anyone connected to the Lukas family. They are patrons of the Institute, after all. And if you stopped usiing air quotatins when referring to them as people to their faces.

ARCHIVIST
Fine, fine, I’ll be more lovely. Now, can I get back to work?

CARMILLA
Very well. By the way, have you Seen Tim?

ARCHIVIST
Oh, he’s off sick this week. Stomach problems, I think.

[Carmilla leaves]
Blessed relief if you ask me.

Statement resumes.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
It was worst when Aurora visited the library, because that inevitably meant that she was bored enough to seek me out for harassment. Sure enough, she started chatting with me, meaningless jibes that served to wait it out until Ruth, who didn’t know about Aurora’s problems with me, returned to her office and closed the door. As soon as she had done so, she turned, and, in a single movement, tipped over the metal returns cart, spilling the recently received books all over the floor. She smiled at me and apologised. I did my best not to show any irritation, or indeed any reaction at all as I slowly walked around and bent down to start collecting them. As I rose to my feet, I felt an impact on the back of my head, and staggered.

Behind me, Aurora stood holding the book I had put aside, The Boneturner’s Tale, and had apparently picked it up to hit me with. But rather than offering me a fake apology, or further violence, instead his eyes were locked on the book. We stood there in silence for a few seconds, until he said something about needing something new to read, turned around, and walked off.

I was, I will admit, a bit unsettled. As far as I could recall I had never seen Aurora read… well, anything, really. And the look in her eyes when she had left had something in it not entirely unlike fear. Still, it was a welcome relief to have her gone, and I quickly tidied up the rest of the books before Ruth noticed anything amiss.

There was nothing else I recall that happened that day at the library, but on the way home afterwards, I passed by Aurora’s house. I had moved back in with my parents while I got everything sorted out after university, and she had never moved out of her childhood home, so we still lived on the same street. It was late September at this point, so by the time I had walked back from the library it was dark, and I noticed a small shape moving in the pool of orange light below the streetlamp.

As I got closer, I realised with a slight start that it was a rat, and not a dirty, wild rat but a large, white one, quite well-kept and clearly once a pet. But there was something very wrong with it. It was dragging itself slowly, pulling from the front legs, and I saw that the back half of it was flat, as though deflated somehow. I thought it must have been run over, but there was no blood or sign of crushing, nor did it seem to be in any actual pain. It just had a back half that flopped and twitched obscenely as it made its gradual way across the lighted pavement and out into the darkness. I just stood there and watched, transfixed by it, until it disappeared from view. Thinking about it now, I remember its head was turned at a strange angle, far further round than it should have been, although I might be getting confused. Many of these experiences run together when I look back on them. There was no light on in Aurora's house, but I hurried home quickly after that.

I didn’t see Aurora again for some time. At first I was just happy for the space, but as the days turned into weeks I started to feel something I wouldn’t have expected to – worry. If it hadn’t been for the way she had left last time, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me, but she had looked so strange, and even without her coming to the library, it was rare I would go a week without seeing her. By now it had almost been a month. Still, I resisted the urge to go to his house and check. If it turned out he was fine, then I’d be inviting a whole world of unpleasantness, and besides that, I reminded myself, he wasn’t my problem anymore.

It was late October when Aurora’s mother came in. It was near the end of the day, and outside was already dark. I was putting up a display about good Hallowe’en reads before heading home, when I heard the door open. I turned around and there she was. It took me a few seconds to recognise her, if I’m honest. I hadn’t seen much of her in the years since Aurora and I had been close, and she had aged noticeably. Mrs. Borealis wore a bulky overcoat, though it wasn’t that cold yet, and her arm hung down in a sling. Something about the angle of the arm and how it hung there seemed faintly abnormal, and I wondered if she had broken it.

When I asked Mrs. Berealis if she was okay, she just stared at me, her eyes burning with hatred. With her good arm she reached into her coat and pulled out a small, black paperback. She threw it on the floor without saying a word and turned to leave. I couldn’t help myself, I asked her if Aurora was alright. She spun back and started to swear violently at me, told me I had no business with her daughter and that I, and my books, were to stay away from him. As she spoke, I couldn’t look away from her arm and the odd ways it twisted as she gestured. How her fingers seemed to bend the wrong way. I was glad that Ruth had gone home early, as I didn’t want her to witness the disturbing confrontation I had now apparently caused.

When she had finished, Mrs. Borealis spat towards me, though I noticed she was careful to avoid spitting at the book that now lay on the floor between us, and left. I put down the copy of Stephen King’s Misery that I now realised I’d been clutching, and approached the discarded volume that lay on the carpet. The battered black cover seemed the same as when I had first seen it weeks ago, with that faded white title on the front: The Boneturner’s Tale. I reached down to pick it up, but before I did so a thought flashed across my mind, a memory of the last time I had seen Aurora, and I grabbed some tissues from the desk before using them to pick up the book. Even then I felt my skin crawl as I held it.

I decided not to deal with it that night. I wasn’t entirely sure that reading it in the daytime would be that much better, but shadows cast from outside seemed to have gotten that much starker since the book had been brought back into my library, and it scared me. I placed it in the book returns cart and left, double-checking I had firmly locked the door behind me.

It rained heavily that night. My room is in a converted attic, and when the weather is bad, it’s as if I can hear every raindrop against the window that is just above my bed. It wasn’t a storm, there wasn’t the wind for it, it was just that heavy pounding rain that drummed and beat on the glass above me. I couldn’t sleep. There was a nagging apprehension in my mind, something that after three hours lying in bed had turned into almost a panic. How could I have just left the book? There was something wrong with it, that much was obvious. What if Ruth came in earlier than I did tomorrow and took it? What would happen to her? Should I have destroyed it?

That last thought was quickly pushed away. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to destroy a book, even one with such a strangeness to it. It surprised me just how easily I accepted that The Boneturner’s Tale had dark powers, but I suppose I’ve always felt that books have a sort of magic to them, so it was really just a confirmation of what I had suspected, deep down, for a long time.

It was two in the morning when I decided that I couldn’t just leave it there overnight. I got up, dressed, and quietly headed out into the rain towards the library, making sure to take my gloves. My coat was supposed to be water resistant, but still managed to soak in the twenty minutes it took me to walk there. I had the key from locking up that night, and deactivated the alarm as I entered.

It was almost pitch black inside, and part of me wanted to keep it that way, but I turned on as many of the lights as I could without it being immediately obvious outside the building. It wasn’t many, and I still had to half-feel my way through the foyer and into the library proper. As I approached the desk, and the book returns cart where I had left The Boneturner’s Tale, I began to step less cautiously. It was darker in that corner of the library, and I put a hand out to steady myself against the handle of the small metal cart. I’d taken my gloves off at that point, and my hand came away wet. I quickly fumbled for the torch I had snatched before heading out and turned it on. Red dripped and pulsed from the cart, soaking the pages and forming a small pool around it. The books were bleeding.

I laughed at that. It seemed so appropriate somehow, so utterly correct that those neighbouring books should suffer, should be contaminated by it. Just as it seemed right and proper that, when my torch found The Boneturner’s Tale, it was dry, unmarked by the gory scene around it.

I put my gloves back on, and carefully took out that sinister volume and placed it on the desk. Perhaps I should have fought harder against the temptation to look inside, but my curiosity was too strong. The thick gloves made turning individual pages almost impossible, and I still had enough good sense to keep them on, so I just opened it on a few random pages and started reading. Perhaps I was being paranoid. After all, I touched the book with my bare hands when it was first given in to the library, and had no problems, but the image of Aurora’s mother wouldn’t leave my head. How her arm had twisted when it moved. I decided to keep the gloves on.

It was written in prose, and certainly seemed to be a story of some kind. The part I read dealt with an unnamed man, at various points referred to as the Boneturner, the Bonesmith or just the Turner, watching an assembled group of people as they made their way into a small village. It’s unclear from what I read whether he is travelling with them, or simply following them, but I remember being unsettled by the details he observed in them: the way the parson would move his hand over his mouth whenever he stared too long at the nuns or how the cook looked at the meat he prepared with the same eyes that looked at the pardoner. It was only at that point that I realised the book was describing the pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales.

Now, this certainly wasn’t some lost section of a Chaucer classic. It was written in modern English, with none of the archaic spelling or pronunciation of the original, and besides that the writing itself was of questionable quality. There was something compelling about it, though. The debate about how finished The Canterbury Tales were… well, it’s a very real debate. In the Prologue, over a hundred tales are promised, but the most complete surviving version doesn’t even reach two dozen. The book just sort of ends, with Chaucer adding a short epilogue imploring God for forgiveness. A plea that is generally read as sarcastic or rhetorical.

I flicked ahead a few pages, and found the Bonesmith had apparently crept up to the Miller while he slept. It described him silently reaching inside him, and… it’s a bit hazy. All I remember clearly is the line “and from his rib a flute to play that merry tune of marrow took”. And as for the rest, I don’t recall in detail, but I know that I almost threw up, and that the Miller did not survive. This was on page sixteen, and it was a thick book.

I turned to the frontispiece, desperately curious as to how this book had ended up in our library. In the harsh light of the torch, I could see the creases and peeling edges of the Chiswick Library label, which usually meant it had been removed and re-stuck, or taken from another book entirely. I could even see the edges of another label underneath. Using a pair of scissors, I carefully peeled off the top one, but was disappointed. It was the label for another library, probably the last place it had been left, although I think it must have been in Scandinavia, because it was something like the library of Jergensburg or Jurgenleit or Jurgerlicht or something like that. It didn’t help me.

I was all set to return to reading the thing, when I heard the sound of breaking glass behind me. I turned around to see Aurora Borealis standing in front of the shattered window. Or at least, I assume it was Aurora, as it demanded the book from me in Aurora’s voice, but wore lose fitting trousers, and a thick coat with a hood that almost completely covered his face. Or its face.

She was longer than Aurora had been, and stood at a strange angle, as though her legs were too stiff to use. When she gestured for the book, I saw that her fingers looked… sharp, as though the skin at the ends were being pushed into a tight point by something inside. I told her that the library was closed, because at that moment I could think of nothing else to say. She ignored me, and demanded again that I give her the book. That was when I did something a little rash, which is to say I punched her.

I had never really thrown a punch in anger before, or even desperation, so it came as quite a shock to me when I managed to drive a single, solid fist into her solar plexus. But as I did this, and this is the part that still gives me nightmares, I felt her flesh give way and almost retract, drawing me in close. And then I felt her ribs shift, shut tight around my hand, as though her ribcage were trying to bite me. They were sharper then I would have thought possible, and at last, this was what actually started me screaming. Never before or since have I ever screamed like that, and I’m still a bit surprised I’m capable of making such a noise, but there you have it.

In my panic I dropped the copy of The Boneturner’s Tale and, in less than a second, Aurora was on it. She released my hand and grabbed it with a frantic desperation, before she turned to run back out the way he came in. I started to chase after him, until I saw how he was moving. How many limbs he had. He had… added some extras. That was the moment it finally all got too much for me; I stopped running. It wasn’t my book, it wasn’t my responsibility and I had no idea what I was dealing with, so I didn’t. I just stood there in a daze and watched the thing that was once Aurora disappear out into the rain. I never saw her again.

The police turned up soon after. Someone had apparently heard my screams and called in a report. I spun some tale about falling asleep at my desk and being woken up by an attempted robbery. God knows how I explained the bloody books, because it wasn’t some disappearing phantom. It took weeks to get out. Everyone seemed to believe me, though, and miraculously I kept my job. I haven’t seen Aurora in the years since, and I haven’t done any further research on the book. The best scenario I can possibly imagine is that this statement is the last I ever need to hear or speak about Aurora Borealis or The Boneturner’s Tale.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Well, this makes me… deeply unhappy. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the archives, and have already uncovered evidence of two separate surviving books from Jurgen Leitner’s library. Until he mentioned that, I was tempted to dismiss much of it out of hand, but as it stands now I believe every word. I’ve seen what Leitner’s work can do, and this news, even 17 years out of date, is still very concerning to me. I’m going to have a discussion with Carmilla as to what we can do to address the issue. I know she’ll just give me the old “record and study, not interfere or contain” speech again, but I at least need to make her aware of it.

Nastya and Tim have cross-referenced the events here with police reports, and sure enough, there was a warrant issued for the arrest of Aurora Borealis for breaking and entering, as well as assault. She was never found, though, and the crimes weren’t serious enough to keep the case active for very long. I’ve been doing as much research myself as possible, but the book seems to have vanished along with him.

I asked Jessica to try and hunt down Mr. Adekoya himself for a follow-up, but have been informed that he passed away in 2006. He was found lying dead in the middle of the road on the night of April 17th. Despite the fact that there were no crushing or trauma marks on the body, the inquest ruled it a hit-and-run car accident, due to the mangled position in which he was found. It was a closed casket funeral shame i am a bit curious about what it would look like.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Christof Rudenko, regarding his interactions with a first floor resident of Welbeck House, Wandsworth. Original statement given December 12th, 2008. Audio recording by Raphella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Never buy a ground floor flat. It may seem like a good idea, especially if, like me, you just spent a decade dragging shopping up three flights of stairs every week, but it’s noisier, always has a worse view, and is far more prone to break-ins and other… problems. And then there is the matter of upstairs neighbours. I know that higher floors will, more often than not, also have people living above you, and moving from living in a top floor flat to the ground floor like I did is not a common thing, but it’s still true. I never had any real concerns about it until I moved to the ground floor of Welbeck House. These days I keep a much closer eye on those I live near.

Welbeck House is a five-storey block of flats in Wandsworth town centre, a great area to live, actually. It’s close enough to London proper that you can commute in easily, and enough amenities that you don’t often need to, especially if, like me, you’re self-employed. It wasn’t cheap, but I’ve always been good with money, so when I decided to try and actually buy a place at age thirty four, I was able to afford a nice flat. After almost a year of searching, I settled on the ground floor at Welbeck. At the time, I hadn’t really given much thought to my neighbours – those I had encountered in the course of buying the place had seemed nice enough, and the previous owners of my flat hadn’t mentioned anything.

On the day I moved in – this would have been late 2002 – I saw a man smoking, leaning out of the window just above my own. It was a grey, overcast day and the forecast had said there would be rain later, so I was keen to move the last of my boxes inside and start unpacking, and didn’t really pay him much attention. I remember that he was wearing a hooded jacket, though, pulled up tight and obscuring most of his face. We locked eyes briefly – at least I assume we did – I couldn’t see his eyes but I felt him looking at me – and I could swear I smelled the weirdest odour. It’s hard to describe, halfway between the smell of a pavement after rain on a hot day and chicken that’s starting to turn. It was unpleasant, to say the least, but the wind changed, and it was gone as quickly as it came. The man in the upstairs window kept watching as I took my boxes inside, just continuing to smoke in silence, ‘til at one point I came outside to get the last bits, and noticed he was gone.

I was slightly spooked by the encounter. It’s hard to say exactly why, as aside from the smell, which could have come from anywhere, there was nothing outwardly upsetting about it, yet something in the man’s manner had shaken me. I didn’t even know at the time whether it was a man, that was just an assumption I made, but I certainly had no plans to check. I’m quite a private person, so the idea of going round and trying to meet my neighbours at all was not one that I gave a lot of consideration, let alone this one, who had spent the better part of half an hour staring at me. I decided to ignore the whole thing, and get on with the process of moving in.

I was very successful at ignoring the man upstairs, at least at first. It wasn’t difficult, as he was usually quiet and rarely came out of his flat as far as I could tell. In fact, as the time in my new home wore on I started to recognise the other residents of Welbeck House: the white family that lived across the hall, with their little girl – I sometimes heard her in the evening, loudly protesting her bedtime; the old spinster next door – Dianne, I think her name was, or Diana; the Asian guy on the first floor that worked nights and slammed the doors too much. I doubt I ever exchanged more than a dozen words with any of them but I began to know their sounds and their habits.

In all that time, though, I’m not sure I ever saw the man who lived above me. Not in the hallway, not out the window, it was like he didn’t exist, which was fine by me, except that I would still very occasionally catch a whiff of that smell. Rotten and earthy, it would catch me by surprise and I’d usually spend a minute trying to track it down before it vanished. Once, I swear that as I stopped to look around, I heard the door upstairs close quietly.

It seemed to me pretty obvious it was him. It wasn’t ideal, but his hygiene problem was nobody’s business but his own, and having figured out the source of the smell, it stopped bothering me quite so much, on those rare moments that I caught it in the air currents of our building. It didn’t enter my home, although I did take to lighting scented candles just in case – a habit I still keep up today. I decided all that was important to me was that he was quiet, which he was. At least, for the first couple of years.

The banging started on 5th July, 2004. I know because it was the day before my thirty-seventh birthday, and I was unpacking a crate of beer for the friends I had invited over. At first I assumed the man upstairs was just nailing something into the wall but after ten minutes it still hadn’t stopped. Instead, it just seemed to move. While at first it had sounded like something being nailed into his wall, the banging started to move downwards, until it seemed he was knocking things right into the floor. At one point he was hammering directly over the light, causing it to sway slightly with each blow.

This went on for almost an hour, and all I could do was try to ignore it, as there was nothing I wanted to do less than climb those stairs and knock on his door. Even so, by the time it finally finished I was on the verge of doing exactly that. It did stop, though, and after it became clear it wasn’t coming back any time soon, I tried to put it out of my mind and get back to my preparations.

Thankfully, there was no disturbance from upstairs during my small party the following night, just the family from across the hall at one point asking for the music to be turned down. In fact, I didn’t hear anything from him for another two weeks, when the banging started again. Again it was almost an hour of hammering, first into the walls, then moving down onto the floor, before stopping altogether.

I was not happy about this, as I’m sure you can imagine, but I was still reluctant to confront this nameless person who lived over me, so I let it slide. From that point on, every two weeks it came, the hammering, for an hour or thereabouts. I tried to find someone to complain to, but it seemed like whoever lived there owned the flat outright, so there was no landlord or housing association that I could report him to.

The final straw came about six months later; it was actually a very simple thing. I got a package delivered incorrectly to my flat. It was addressed to Mr. Toby Carlisle, and the flat number on it was not mine but that of my upstairs neighbour. The envelope was thick and soft, must have been mainly full of bubblewrap or other packing material. It wasn’t much, but it gave me another reason to go upstairs and, while delivering it, I could politely request that he stop his fortnightly hammering.

It was harder than I thought to walk up those stairs and I was surprised to find that my legs were shaking slightly as I reached the top. I got another whiff of that dank, rotten smell as I approached. The carpet immediately in front of the door was stained ever-so-slightly, a darker colour than it should have been, as though something had leaked out from underneath it. The wood was old and worn compared to the others in the building, which looked to have been replaced relatively recently. There was no number on it, or any indication that it was, in fact, Toby Carlisle who lived there. I knocked, trying to give the action a confidence that I frankly did not feel.

There was no answer, so I knocked again, louder this time, and I heard some movement from inside, gradually heading towards the door. The steps were muffled, like he was walking over thick carpet, until they stopped on the other side. There was no sound at all.

I waited for a minute, and was just about to knock again when the door opened, just a crack. There didn’t seem to be any lights on inside; it wasn’t open wide enough for me to get a good look or even see the man himself, but it was enough that I heard when a cracked, ragged voice spoke. It said, “What do you want?”

Through that crack I was hit by a sudden wave of that rancid air and reeled backwards, fighting back the urge to vomit. Through it, I just about managed to stammer out the question as to whether he was Toby Carlisle, that I’d had a delivery for him. There was silence for a second, then a hand shot out and grabbed the package I held, pulling it out of my grasp before I had a chance to fully realise what was happening. The hand was thin and pale, with long, filthy yellow fingernails. On the back I saw a single dark red mark, that might have been a cut or a lesion, but it was gone before I had a chance to see it in more detail.

The door slammed in my face, and I was left standing in the hall, nauseous and confused. As I turned to go, I noticed that there was a spot of viscous liquid on my jacket sleeve, where the hand had brushed me, thick and off-white. I had to throw the jacket out, in the end. I couldn’t rid of the smell.

And so that was it for a long time. The man upstairs was named Toby and he was a disgusting shut-in who smelled rancid and occasionally made hammering noises. It was a long way from ideal, but it was something I could understand and live with. Two years passed like this, and I had almost forgotten about him, to be honest. He had become just another part of my life and could be lived around.

It wasn’t until late 2007 I had cause to really think about him again. My mother’s health had taken a turn for the worst over the previous few months, and I had made the decision to move back up to Sheffield to be nearer to her. As I mentioned, I’m self-employed so the move wasn’t as much of a difficulty as it might have been, but it did leave me with the need to sell my flat. I don’t want to get bogged down with the details of my mother’s ailments; in the end, she actually passed away a few months later, from complications following an operation. I still ended up moving, though for a very different reason.

It was difficult to sell the place. Every time someone came round for a viewing it ended the same way, and I started to dread when the inevitable question would come: what’s that smell? It was the third time that the potential buyers, a nice professional couple who worked in the City, pointed out the stain on the living room ceiling. It was subtle at first, a slight discolouration that I had managed to overlook. They assumed it was a leak, and I did too, promising to have a plumber come over and check it out, though I didn’t hear back from them anyway.

I did call for a plumber, but for whatever reason was told that it would be another week before they could see me. I tried to have a couple more viewings in that time, but the stain on the ceiling was becoming more obvious, and the smell had begun to pervade my whole flat, to the point where I was thinking about staying in a hotel until the plumber arrived. I was starting to doubt it was a leaking water pipe. As it grew, it started to turn a dark yellow in colour, and glistened ever so slightly when the light hit it. I knew it was something to do with the flat upstairs, though when I went up to ask this time, my knocking went unanswered.

Finally, the plumber arrived. He wrinkled his nose when he entered, though didn’t make any comment about it. I assume unpleasant smells are just a part of his job. I pointed him towards the stain on the ceiling, and he looked momentarily confused, before telling me what I already knew – that this didn’t look like a problem with the pipes. Still, he said he’d need to knock through the ceiling to have a look, and I’d need a contractor to come and redo that bit of ceiling anyway. I stood back when he put up his stepladder and climbed up to have a look at it. He put on a pair of rubber gloves and gingerly touched the spot, testing it with his fingers. It collapsed almost immediately, buckling and tearing like wet cardboard, and the fluid that oozed out of it was a sickly yellow in colour, with viscous white lumps glistening in it. The plumber looked like he was going to throw up. I did throw up. He made his apologies, and said he’d have to call someone. I didn’t try to stop him leaving.

I was furious, and the anger that surged through me overcame any apprehension I might have felt from approaching the flat upstairs. I stormed up and began to hammer on the door, shouting and threatening that I’d call the police if he didn’t answer. On my third knock the door swung inwards ever-so-slightly, and I realised it was not locked. There is… little in my life that I regret quite as much as going inside.

I pushed the door open as much as I could but it didn’t open very wide, as there seemed to be some sort of resistance behind it. The smell would have been overpowering, but by this point I was almost used to it, and fought down the nausea. There was no light coming from inside, and I fumbled on the wall for a switch. I found it, and the instant before I flicked it on, I realised I felt something soft and wet on the wall next to it. Unfortunately, before I had a chance to fully comprehend what I was feeling, I had turned on the light and saw Toby Carlisle’s flat in its entirety.

The light that came on was weak and tinged with red, but it was enough to see by. I looked around, and saw that every surface, the walls, the floor, the tables, everything except the curtained windows, was covered in meat. Steaks, chunks of chicken, even a whole leg of what I assume was once lamb, had been nailed everywhere. There were layers of it, the newest additions simply stuck on top of the old, and a putrid yellow-white rot could be seen where the oldest pieces had long since turned to liquid. Flies buzzed thick in the air, and maggots carpeted the place. Looking up, I saw the light too, had been smeared with meat, causing the place to be bathed in that dull red light.

Lying there, in the centre of the hallway, was the body of Toby Carlisle. His hood was pulled back and I saw his face was covered in puckered, septic lesions and holes. I couldn’t tell which of them had once housed his eyes.

I was frozen in place by the raw horror of what I was seeing, and almost automatically my hand found its way to my phone and I dialled the police. It was only then that my eyes drifted numbly towards the kitchen. There, in the centre of the floor, was a pile of discarded meat and bone, stacked almost as high as a person. It seemed less decayed than the rest of it, though that foul yellow fluid oozed from it and – this is the reason I’m talking to your institute, you see.

Everything else could be put down to the problems of a very, very sick man, nothing supernatural about it, but… when I looked at that heaped pile of meat, it moved. I don’t know how… I don’t know quite how to explain it, other than to tell you that it opened its eyes. It opened all its eyes.

The next thing I remember is the police’s arrival, and a lot of questions from officers trying to hide the fact that they had just finished vomiting. The pile of meat was gone, though the bits that had been nailed to the walls and floors remained. I told the police everything that I just told you, although they dismissed the last bit out of hand. I believe they had to call in a hazmat team in the end.

There’s not much more to it, really. The rest of the story is largely arguing with insurance companies, and counting how many showers it took before I felt clean again. I did move out, in the end, and now live in a house in Clapham with some friends. People who are very clean, and don’t mind the fact that I have recently become a vegetarian.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Well, If i was weaker like Tim i would certainly glad I had my lunch before recording this statement but i am not. Looking into this one has proven a bit tricky, as police, hospital and even fire department records give wildly conflicting reports. What we can be sure of is that, on the evening of October the 22nd, 2007, there was an incident at a first floor flat in Welbeck House that involved hazardous biological material, and led to the recovery of the body of one Toby Carlisle, the legal owner of the property. The cause of death was listed as gangrene.

We contacted Mr. Rudenko, who confirmed that since moving he had had no further experiences he believed to be linked to these events, and after an extensive course of counselling was attempting to move past them. He did corroborate the existing statement, though, saying he still believed it to be a true account of what happened to him. I’m not entirely sure I agree, although obviously there’s little in the way of evidence to the contrary.

One thing puzzles me, however. Jessica managed to get access to some of Toby Carlisle’s old financial records and it didn’t appear like he had any real money coming in, and what he did have was largely going to pay council tax on the property. There are no records of transactions at any supermarkets or online delivery firms, and Nastya even asked round some of the local butchers, as Tim is still off sick. At the end of all this, we’ve still been unable to answer one question: where was he getting the meat? I don’t know why, but it bothers me.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Father Edwin Burroughs, regarding his claimed demonic possession. Original statement given May 30th, 2011. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Thank you for coming. I know that this can’t have been easy to arrange, and I appreciate the opportunity to make my statement. The Prison Service probably didn’t make it easy for you. They’re understandably hesitant to give anyone extended access to me, in case I get violent, but I’m very glad they made an exception for you. At least, assuming that you’re real. I hope you’re real, but maybe it’s that hope that’s being used against me in a cruel joke. Or maybe the joke would be that I would let that doubt cost me my only chance to tell my story. Either way, I choose to make my statement, and if you’re not real, then hopefully, no harm done.

We’ll get to the cannibalism, of course, but first I just want to provide some context. I don’t know how much you work with the Church in your Institute. You may be surprised that a man of the cloth such as myself, however far from grace I may have fallen, would enlist the aid of an organisation dedicated to studying the paranormal. Well, to be honest, it’s generally kept quiet, but the Catholic Church is not against belief in the supernatural outside of the official doctrine. Demons, ghosts, black magic… It’s generally up to the individual how much they believe in these things, and I believe that very much of what you research is real. Dangerous, but real. I’ve always seen the Devil’s work as a very tangible thing, and those priests who might speak of them as metaphor or symbol are, I fear, often placing themselves and their parishioners in a position of peril. Sorry, this is becoming a homily. It’s just been some time since I’ve had a chance to express myself like this; I almost don’t care if it is on one of Its phantasms.

So it was only natural, I suppose, that it was relatively early in my vocation as a priest that I trained as an exorcist. It’s not something all that special really, every diocese should have a trained exorcist available, or failing that a bishop can do it, but nine times out of ten the duties of an exorcist are to recommend a good psychiatrist, doctor or substance abuse program, and bishops don’t usually have time for that.

I was an exorcist for the Diocese of Oxford when this all happened. I trained as a Jesuit, so I was used to moving about a lot, but I was at Oxford from about 2005 right through to my arrest in 2009. There were two exorcists in the diocese, myself and an old Augustinian by the name of Father Harrogate. I would ask as a favour that you not follow up with him; he plays no part in what happened to me and would, I think, be upset by any reminder of my actions.

In my time I have performed just over one hundred exorcisms, with varying degrees of success. It was relatively rare that it felt like much more than a blessing or a prayer. It still helped in most cases, but as one of the most common types of possession is not The Exorcist-style of speaking in a demonic tongue and floating off the bed, but rather that of an unnatural depression, it was often hard to be sure. It is difficult to say how many were devout believers who came to us with a very natural depression, and simply preferred to look to the Church than to counselling or medicine. Even those were helped to some degree, I believe, even if only as a placebo. On a few occasions, though I did encounter things that served to firm up my belief in the Devil and my faith in my Lo- my L- I’m sorry, It won’t let me say the words. It won’t let me pray either, but I hope I will not be judged too harshly for it on the final day.

As I was saying, there were times when I felt things pushing back. I was once cursed at in Sumerian by a young man who was utterly illiterate, and had the names of my childhood pets thrown at me by an old Jamaican man. I will admit that there were times that I have been very afraid of what I was trying to remove, but I always had faith in Je- I always had faith. None of it prepared me for what happened on Bullingdon Road, though. That was something else entirely.

I was doing some work at the Catholic chaplaincy in Saint Aldates, generally trying to help the spiritual well-being of the students who came to us, when Father Singh, one of the other priests working there, came to me. He said he had a student from Saint Hugh’s asking after an exorcism, and wanted to refer her to me. I told him of course, and he set up a meeting between us. The student’s name was Bethany O’Connor, and much of what she told me was under the seal of confession, something I will not break even now, so suffice it to say she believed that she was no longer in control of her own mind.

Even as we talked, she spent much of her time looking around or staring into my eyes with what I can only describe as pointed suspicion. Bethany told me that her will was still her own but she could no longer trust her senses, and had found herself doing much that she did not understand.

I remember one moment very clearly, in our second meeting I believe. We were taking a walk around the botanical gardens, as she said it calmed her when talking of her problem. She reached into her bag, took out what appeared to be a small slab of stone, slate, I think, and started to lift it to her mouth as if to eat it. I asked her what she was doing, and she stopped, looked at the rock she held in her hand, and threw it away before bursting into tears. She told me that it felt like something was in her head, changing what she saw and felt and thought.

I asked when this had started, and she told me it was after she had moved out of her college halls and into a house on Bullingdon Road with her friends. I suggested that perhaps it had something to do with the stresses of entering second year, but she insisted it was something to do with the house. Finally, after several discussions, I agreed to look over the house and perform a small blessing in case there was anything wrong with the place, spiritually speaking.

It was a cold morning in December, near the end of Michaelmas term, when I visited 89 Bullingdon Road. It was an old house, though not so old as to be unusual in that part of Oxford, and had clearly once been a small family house, now partitioned by the lettings agency to house as many students as possible. Bethany told me that there were six of them living there at the time. I went around the house, looking for signs of anything amiss but found nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. Bethany kept asking me if I “felt any evil” in the house, and I tried to explain to her that priests unfortunately don’t have the power to simply sense the presence of evil.

I didn’t realise how unfortunate that was, at least not until we got her room. It was on the first floor at the back of the house, and was a long, thin bedroom, easily the biggest. It was adorned in typical student fashion with movie posters and flat-pack bookshelves, but my attention was immediately taken by a large patch of wall where the wallpaper had been crudely hacked away to reveal the bare brickwork underneath. Written there, in faded blue paint, was a single word: Mentis.

I’d been out of seminary for some years at this point, and had never been one for the Latin Mass, but I still knew the word for ‘mind’. My immediate assumption was that Bethany had painted it in some sort of mania, but looking closer, I saw that the paint was far too old to have been done since she moved in. It looked more as though it had been painted on the wall and then covered up with layers of wallpaper over the years, until finally being unearthed by stripping it away.

What was slightly more concerning, was that watching Bethany pace around the room, following my gaze with some confusion, was that she didn’t seem able to see it. When I asked her what the word on the wall meant to her, she looked at me as though I was talking nonsense.

I didn’t seem like there was much more to be gained there at that point, so I performed a short blessing over the place, took some photographs, and told Bethany that I would have to come back later once I’d looked into a few things. She seemed disappointed there wasn’t anything more immediate that I was doing, but didn’t try to argue. And so I left what would turn out to be my first visit to the house on Bullingdon Road, calling Father Singh to arrange a meeting the next day where we could discuss whether to attempt a full exorcism.

It was at that meeting that I got the call from the hospital. Bethany had been admitted with severe facial lacerations and was asking to see me immediately. I made my way to the John Radcliffe as soon as I was able and was surprised to see two police officers standing near her bed. I was met by Anne Willett, the nurse who Bethany had asked to call me. I knew Annie a bit already, as she’d attended the church where I ministered and I recognised her from the congregation. She explained to me that Bethany had apparently attempted to attack one of her housemates with a kitchen knife, and in the ensuing struggle ended up falling head first into a full-length mirror, cutting herself very badly.

I was, to put it mildly, somewhat taken aback. This was such an escalation from what Bethany had described before, and I was starting to fear that if I didn’t manage to do something the poor girl would most likely end up locked away somewhere. Annie was convinced that an exorcism was the only way, and so finally, I agreed to do so. I had already got permission from the Bishop, but that was before Bethany’s hospitalisation, and I would have preferred to discuss it with him. Still, it was clear she was getting worse and I decided to take a risk and try it anyway.

It was a stupid risk to take. I was cocky and complacent, full of spiritual pride and an eagerness to test my faith against whatever was inside of Bethany’s soul, not even considering that I might be risking it. Still, I have paid dearly for my hubris.

We waited until the police had taken their statements and left, and then I set up and began the exorcism. It went… unusually. There was no resistance from Bethany, almost no reaction at all, and in many parts of the ceremony where in my experience there was usually a response either from the demon, or at least the victim, there was instead just… silence, as she stared at me with a look, almost seemed like pity. Annie just stood in the corner, watching and clearly eager to help, despite the fear I saw in her eyes. At last, Bethany locked eyes with me and slowly shook her head. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “It wants your faith.”

Without warning she began to convulse. Thrashing in obvious pain. I tried to continue the ritual, but the doctors pushed past me, desperately trying to help Bethany as blood began to pour from her mouth where she had bitten into her tongue. In the end they couldn’t save her. Brain haemorrhage, they said, probably from the blow to head when she hit the mirror and they just hadn’t spotted it.

I was asked to leave in no uncertain terms, and the doctors made it very clear that I may not have been the one that hit her in the head, but they held me very much accountable for her death. I was also given a very thorough dressing down by my Bishop, who told me to take a step back and leave the exorcisms to Father Harrogate for some time. Annie almost got suspended over the matter, but in the end was spared further disciplinary action, as she had been simply passing on the wishes of the patient.

And for a couple of years that was it. I felt a great deal of guilt over my involvement with Bethany’s death, and I started to drink more than I had before. I was never, I think, in danger of becoming an alcoholic, as most of the priests I worked with had done work with substance abusers – not to mention the fact that priests are certainly not immune to alcoholism – and would have picked up on the warning signs. But they did express concern over the occasional disappearance of bottles of sacramental wine. At the time, I was sure it wasn’t me. I preferred scotch, and the Muscatel wine they bought had never really been to my taste, but looking back, I can’t really be sure what I was drinking. I know it’s something of a jump from unwittingly stealing holy wine to my later crimes, but I’m trying my best to fit this into a relatively coherent narrative.

Apart from that, the years passed uneventfully, and I was starting to feel like I’d put the whole affair behind me. Until I got a call from Annie. She said that a gentleman had been admitted to the John Radcliffe after having something of a scare in a house up on Hill Top Road. I explained to her that I wasn’t performing exorcisms at the moment, and said she should talk to Father Harrogate. She assured me it wouldn’t need a full exorcism, and if I did we could bring him in, but she didn’t know or trust Father Harrogate, but just wanted my opinion. Finally, after a lot of pestering, I agreed to pay a visit to the house.

It was late when I got there, and starting to get very cold. The whole affair was starting to bring back some less than pleasant memories of my arrival at Bullingdon Road all those years ago. I was also a bit annoyed at Annie for not mentioning that the house was still under construction, not only making it unlikely to be the haunt of demons or spirits, but also meaning that the coat I had brought along would be somewhat inadequate against the chill in a house without windows.

I knocked on the door and one of the builders opened it. I forget his name, I’m afraid, something Polish I think, or maybe Czech? He seemed confused at first as to why I was there, but I explained and it turned out he was the one that had been treated by Annie at the hospital. She had not mentioned the builder’s possible schizophrenia to me, but I began to fear that this may be a waste of time. Still, I had a look around and asked the builder questions about the place. He certainly did have an interesting story, but I was unsure of how much of it I believed.

Eventually, I decided that I’d seen enough and that there didn’t seem to be any malicious presence here. The builder was looking at me in such a way as to make me hesitant to tell him that, so I decided I would at least give the place a quick prayer or blessing. I asked him to wait outside, though. Something in his manner was a bit off-putting and I felt uncomfortable with him watching me like a hawk, as though I were about to vanish at any moment.

He headed into the back garden, and I was alone in the house. I moved into the hallway and began to pray, praying for protection and sprinkling holy water around from a flask I carry on me in these situations.

As I spoke the words I felt something… alarming. I was starting to grow very hot, as though the room was heating up very rapidly. I looked around for the source of the heat, but the radiators hadn’t been installed yet and I couldn’t see anything else that might be warming the room. It continued, though, and soon I was sweating through my shirt. I began to cough, and I could smell smoke, even though I couldn’t see any or any fire, for that matter.

I fell to one knee and choked back a scream as I felt my skin begin to crackle and burn. I began to pray again for protection, not for the place this time, but for me. As I did, I felt… something answer me. And yet, I cannot stress this enough: what answered was not G- God. It wasn’t Him. Something else answered my call for protection. I felt my lips move. They made no sound that I could hear, but I felt them form every syllable. “I am not for you. I am marked.”

The heat slowed in its increase but it did not stop. My mouth continued to speak for me, when I heard the sound of a car engine outside and a great crash. Instantly, the feeling was gone, as though it were never there, and looking out, I saw the builder had managed to uproot a tree from the back garden. I sat there for a while catching my breath, and when he came back inside, I told him I had completed the prayers and excused myself quickly. It was the first time I had experienced –

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Unfortunately, this statement as it stands is incomplete, and stops at this point. It does not appear to be the actual end of the document, so I have hopes that the rest is simply misfiled somewhere else in the archives. If this is the case, I will record and add that part when it is found, either by myself or, given the scale of the Archive’s mismanagement, by my successor when I pass away from old age.

With this in mind, all but the most preliminary of investigations into this statement are being put on hold until the rest is found. Most of the details do appear to be correct and match the statement given by Mr. Ivo Lensik in 2007. We did find Father Burroughs’ arrest record, though, and I am very curious to see how the events recounted here could have led to the incident in 2009, wherein he apparently murdered two first year university students following Sunday Mass, and then peeled off and ate most of their skin.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Continuation of the statement of Father Edwin Burroughs, regarding his claimed demonic possession. Original statement given May 30th, 2011. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement continues.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
It was the first time I had experienced anything like that. By this point, I was starting to suspect that I may have been having hallucinations of some sort, but I had never before felt a… a presence within myself, inside my being. It was a feeling so utterly awful it’s hard to put it into words. Like a reflex reaction, your muscles moving without any instruction from your mind, but rather than a quick twitch of the leg, it’s a slow movement of your jaw, your lips, forming your mouth into words. Worse things were to come, of course, but I don’t think any of them were so profoundly unsettling as that feeling.

I only got a few streets away from Hill Top Road before I was no longer able to maintain my equilibrium and fell to the floor, violently throwing up. I could not deny then that there was something inside me, and I believed that whatever it was had entered me from Bethany O’Connor. I tried to pray, tried to cast my mind to G- I couldn’t. As I tried, my throat closed and I struggled to breathe.

I lay on the side of the pavement, and I wept. Wiping my eyes, I took out my Bible, and looked desperately within it for comfort but when I opened it, though the page was within the Gospel of Luke, the words were from Genesis: “Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.”

Around that passage the writing morphed and swam before my eyes. And wherever there were words that might give me comfort, I found them obscured by dark stains. The bile began to rise within my throat again, and I desperately wanted to hurl the book away from me. I held it, though, for just a moment before I placed the small volume once again in my jacket. It took more willpower than I could have believed, but I kept it. I stood up shakily, and staggered back to the presbytery.

I slept for a long time, and missed morning Mass, saying I was feeling unwell. It wasn’t a lie, of course; I just lay there for hours. There seemed a safety in stillness, as though inaction could do no harm. It was the first good decision I had made, and there isn’t a day goes by I don’t curse myself for ever rising from that bed. Nobody bothered me – I think word had gotten round that I was having a difficult time and they were almost certainly trying to decide who would be best to talk to me, or even whether to ask the Bishop to intervene.

I decided that I needed to talk to Father Singh. I didn’t think that he would be able to help me, but he was at least familiar with Bethany O’Connor’s case. Perhaps he might have some insight into what was happening. I tried to find him quickly – the faces on each crucifix and painting I passed seemed to twist and sneer at me as I walked and my head was throbbing. The painted blood glistened as though still wet. I’m glad I didn’t encounter anyone, for I was staggering so much they would likely have thought I was drunk.

Finally I found Father Singh in the small chapel. He seemed surprised to see me and as I approached, his face fell and he backed away ever so slightly. I can’t imagine how bad I must have looked to get such a reaction from him, but I sat next to him anyway. I began to talk, to tell him everything that had happened. He remained silent as I spoke, until I began to talk about the exorcism I had tried to perform on Bethany. He held up his hand, and asked if I’d prefer to speak about it in confession. I was momentarily confused, and asked him what sin he felt I had committed. He looked at me, and I swear there was almost a smile on his face when he spoke. “Spiritual pride,” he said, “that has led to quite a fall.”

Unsettled though I was at his attitude, I could not deny that he was right. I agreed, and we left the chapel. Soon I was giving my account as a full confession, and I could not keep from crying as I described what happened when I attempted to lay a blessing upon that house on Hill Top Road. I finished my account, and waited for Father Singh to speak of my penance or absolution. Instead, he paused for a few moments, then said, “No, your sins are deeper than that.” And he began to list them.

Every transgression I had made since I was six years old. The disabled child I had bullied in primary school, the time I stole money from my mother’s purse to buy cigarettes, the indiscretions I had had at the seminary. All of them. I had confessed them each before and been absolved, but not to Father Singh, and to hear them thrown back in my face as such a stark list of wickedness rattled me deeply. I noticed something else as he spoke: Father Singh only emigrated from Jaipur a decade or so before I met him, and he had always had quite a strong accent, but the voice that spoke now to read my litany of wrongdoing had no trace of it. It was a clipped and crisp RP accent, though in tone it seemed to match that of my friend.

I leapt to my feet and ran from the room, and towards the front door. I needed to get out, to get somewhere I could breathe. In the hallway I ran past two other priests, who looked more worried than ever. One of them was Father Singh.

It was dark when I left the presbytery. I had no idea where I was going or why; I just had the desperate need to be somewhere else. The streets of Oxford should have been full of drunken students at that time on a Sunday night – at least, I thought it was Sunday – but they were almost deserted. Occasionally, I would see figures standing or walking at the end of the narrow streets, but they were shadowy, silhouetted against what little light there was, and were always gone when I approached. I tried once again to pray but the words died on my tongue. I have never felt despair on the sheer scale I did at that moment.

The streets of Oxford are winding, and speak to the age of the place, but I had lived there for no small amount of time and knew them well. That night, though, it was as though I had never walked them before. I saw roads that I had travelled a hundred times, but they seemed different, my eyes focusing on details I had never before marked, and at each turn I found I did not know where I was going or what place it would take me to. The world I knew had become alien to me, and I simply didn’t know what to do.

Finally, I found myself in front of The Oratory on Woodstock Road. The church’s large round window shifted as I watched, as though it were a tremendous eye that were turning to focus upon me. The door was open and from within, a warm light spilled out. Even in the depths of my – I suppose you could call it mania – there was something comforting about that light. A man appeared at the door. He was tall and pale, and dressed as an altar server.

I walked up to him. My vision was blurred, though I could not tell you whether it was my state of mind at the time or simply that I was crying. I should have known that something was wrong. I did know that something was wrong, but it didn’t matter. I had no fight left within me, so when he told me that it was time for Mass, I simply nodded and followed.

He led me through the church. It was bright, so bright. Candles covered every surface, each glowing so powerfully that I could barely look directly at them. The layout was how I remembered, but the pews were all empty, and I could see none of the statues or crosses that I expected. The man led me unresisting into the vestry, where I found my cassock and stole laid out in front of me. The stole was not green as I would have expected for a normal Sunday mass, nor was it violet or red or any other liturgical colour. Instead it was a pale, sickly yellow. I felt the eyes of the altar server upon my back, and dressed quickly.

At that moment, the bell rang to mark the start of the mass. It was a single, jarring tone that cut through the air and made me almost double over in pain, so badly did it pierce into my pounding skull. I regained myself, gripping the thin, bony arm of the altar server, and walked out into the church. The pews were full now. Row upon row of people, far more than had ever before attended a mass that I had said. Each was dressed in black from head to toe, and their skin was fevered, jaundiced yellow. The eyes of every man, woman and child stared blankly forward, and their mouths hung open, wide and smiling, like their jaws had locked in silent rictus.

I could have left. I know that now. I know that my will and my actions were my own, and even at the time I knew that what I was seeing was so wrong. So very wrong but… it didn’t feel like at the time I could have made any other choice. Even in that strange place, stared at by hellish parishioners I must have known weren’t really there. G-… Forgive me, even then, I thought to find some comfort in the liturgy. The odd-smelling incense swirled about me from the altar server’s brazier, and my head swam with a scent that felt so familiar, yet so foreign.

Finally, I stood before the altar and began the mass. I was surprised as I spoke, and the holy names slipped from my mouth without hesitation, but the congregation I addressed were quiet, and each pause for a response was met with only that oppressive, wide-mouthed silence, a jarring void that tightened the fear I felt gripping my soul. When the Liturgy of the Word began, I watched in silent dread as the altar server stepped to the pulpit to deliver the first reading. He stood there, dark eyes scanning the open bible, before he raised his head and looked up as though to speak, but all that came from his throat was the single tolling sound of that bell, and my head pulsed in pain. The same thing happened for the second reading, that long, drawn out chime.

Then came the reading of the Gospel. I walked to the pulpit myself, and saw the passage indicated was Mark, chapter 9, verses 14-19. I began to try and read it, but my voice was gone and from my own mouth came the sound of that bell. I fell to the floor, but no-one moved to help me.

Eventually, I was able to stand again, and a dull panic began to rise within me as I realised that next came the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The thought of these people, these things, taking the body of J- taking the sacrament of Holy Communion felt like the direst of blasphemies. I didn’t stop, though. I didn’t know what else to do, and my mind was swimming with the sound of the bell and the collective horror of all the things that I had seen and felt.

The altar server brought me the communion wafers and the wine, and I took them. My hands felt strange and clammy as I held them, but I brought them to the altar and began to speak. This time my words came out crisp and clear, and as I said them I noticed fewer and fewer of the parishioners seemed to be in the pews. Hope began to rise within me, as it seemed the words would work to banish these jaundiced watchers, and I pressed on. Finally, the pews were empty, and my heart soared as I turned towards the tabernacle to retrieve the rest of the Host.

It was strange, the rich cloth curtain that covered that ornate metal box seemed stuck, so I pulled and pulled and eventually it came free. I opened the door and retrieved the Host, returning it to the altar. Then I… I lifted it to my mouth, and I ate. It did not taste as I expected.

I’m sure you’ve guessed the reality of what it was I was eating. I don’t even know where I was, some dingy basement, from what it seemed when the light fell from my eyes and I returned to reality. At least, I assume this is reality. I dream, sometimes, that perhaps this is the illusion – my arrest and imprisonment merely a hallucination. That I’m not a murdering cannibal.

It doesn’t matter. At that moment, seeing those bound corpses before me, I made the decision to take no action ever again. I will not commit the further sin of ending my life, but I sat there until the police came. I pled guilty to all the charges they laid before me, and now here I am, doubting everything I see and hear. I do worry about the state of my soul, of course, but there is little to be done. My old colleagues have come by on occasion, and even the Bishop once, but it doesn’t help. Whatever they may be actually be saying, all I can hear is the sound of the bell.

Thank you for your time.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

As it turns out the second part of this statement was simply misfiled in the next folder, which was useful, although it does beg the question of who was reading it last? Tim is still absent, but Jessica and Nastya all swear they haven’t seen it before. Was my predecessor reading it at some point? That seems unlikely given the state of the place; I find it hard to credit the idea that Gertrude Robinson actually read any of these files. Still, it’s hardly our biggest concern.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with a statement like this. If the person giving their testimony is unable to distinguish the real and the unreal, that doesn’t usually bode well for anyone trying to find evidence. Let us begin with Bethany O’Connor. From what Nastya could find in the records of St Hugh’s College, she was indeed a student with them, studying archaeology, matriculating in 2008. Everything Father Burroughs says about her faith, her hospitalisation and her death appears to match up with official records. However, college records appear to list her as one of the students living in halls during her second year, rather than in an off-campus house, and it was a porter who she attacked with a kitchen knife, rather than a housemate. In fact, according to the letting agent, there was no-one living at 89 Bullingdon Road that year, so whatever Bethany was doing in that house, it wasn’t living there legally.

Father Burroughs’ old colleagues from the Church certainly remember his falling apart following the failed exorcism. They were apparently in the process of talking to the Bishop to get him some help when the ‘culminating incident’ occurred that led to his incarceration. Prior to meeting Bethany O’Connor, none of them had anything but the highest praise for the man.

As for the incident itself, Father Burroughs was found in one of the back rooms of 89 Bullingdon Road. He was wearing a butcher’s apron and sat in front of two students, Christopher Bilham and James Mann. They were both tied to chairs and quite dead. Cause of death was listed as blood loss from multiple lacerations all over their legs and torso, as well as removal of both their faces with a sharp blade, possibly a scalpel. The face of James Mann was found to have been partially eaten by Father Burroughs. He pled guilty to all charges brought before him and is currently serving two life sentences at Wakefield Prison, though HMPS refused our request for a follow-up interview.

What interests me is the paralleling of Father Burroughs’ climactic hallucination with reality, and the fact that at no point did he perform any actions that might be analogous with the binding and actual murder of the students. Also, it strikes me that the altar server he described seems out of place with most of his other delusions, in that he appeared to have active agency, which is uncharacteristic for these visions the priest describes. Finally, there is the small detail mentioned in the police report that none of the tools used to kill or mutilate the victims were found at the scene. This all leads me to believe that there may have been a second person there that night, although from talking with the police, I get the impression that there is little appetite for re-opening the case, considering how successful the initial prosecution was.

There’s one other detail Nastya uncovered that sticks out to me. It’s a name I recognise, though I have only a slight idea what it could mean. The Oratory was obviously not the actual scene of Father Burroughs’ crimes, but there was one strange thing that happened a few days prior. They received delivery of a pale yellow stole, which apparently vanished less than a day after they signed for it. This would be unusual, but not necessarily noteworthy, if it wasn’t for fact that one of the deacons recalled the package was handed to them by a company called Breekon and Hope Deliveries.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Moira Kelly, regarding the disappearance of her son Robert. Original statement given October 20th, 2002. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
You must forgive me if it takes a while to get this all down on paper. I’m not a fast writer and what I saw is… It’s all very well to say “write down what you saw”, but what if you don’t have the words? What I saw doesn’t make any sense, and it makes my head hurt awfully when I try to remember it well enough to describe.

Am I mad? What happened is mad. It can’t have happened. But it did. It took my Robert, and… now I can’t even think of how to put it down in a way that explains it. Maybe somewhere in your library are the words that explain what happened, what I saw, but I haven’t read your books, and knowing wouldn’t bring him back. I suppose I’ll just have to try.

My son, Robert, was always an adventurous boy. Even when he was a child he’d be running off and getting into scrapes every chance he got. We were living out in the country back then, Althorpe, a little village in Lincolnshire, and every chance he got Robert would be out in the woods with his friends, climbing trees and exploring deep into the forests. He had a few other children who would join him, but he always climbed higher than they did, always pushed further. I can’t even remember all the times he almost got himself lost out there when he was growing up.

As he got older, his interests changed, but that sense of danger never left him. I used to have to drive him half an hour every Wednesday, because that was the closest leisure centre with a climbing wall, and he was obsessed with reaching the top. After he went away to university, he’d come home every holiday with some new dangerous sport he’d taken up: wakeboarding, mountain-biking. He almost missed his father’s funeral because he was away on a scuba-diving trip to Cyprus, and only just managed to book a last minute flight home. It wasn’t his fault, of course, Stephen’s death came as a shock to us all; what I mean to say is… I wasn’t at all surprised when he told me a few years ago that he’d gotten very involved in skydiving.

It had started as a charity thing. His last year at Yarmouth he decided to do a skydive for a charity he’d been volunteering with. I went along to support him when he did it, and when he touched down, I could see it in his eyes, even before he’d removed his parachute, that he was in love. Since then, it was rare that a month went by without him throwing himself out of a plane, to the point where I wondered where he was getting the money, as from what I hear it’s not a cheap hobby, and he certainly wasn’t getting much from me.

Shortly after Robert graduated, he came to visit. He was the happiest I’d seen him since his father passed away, and when I asked him about it, he said he’d got a job with a company that ran skydiving all over the country. They were called Open Skydiving, and, his face was beaming when he said this, he was now a fully qualified skydiving instructor. I was happy for him of course, even though every time he described jumping it sounded quite dreadful to me. I had always made it clear that he was never going to get me up there, plummeting through the sky.

After that, I didn’t see him much. He was home for Christmas and Mother’s Day, if I was lucky, but aside from that, it was the occasional phone call, or even a postcard if he was running a dive at somewhere far away. I have a small stack of them back home, all I really have to remember him by. I remember he sent me one from Aberystwyth, of all places, not too far back, and he signed it “with love from your freefalling son”. I used to really like that, but now the phrase just makes shudder.

He was happy, though. He was doing what he loved. I try to hold on to that. There was no way for me to know that anything was wrong. I mean, nothing was wrong. I’m sure of it. Not until that last time.

He came to see me three months ago. I was surprised, as June is the height of the season and his last phone call had seemed to say that he was expecting to be busy right up until winter arrived. Still, here he was, standing on the doorstep and he looked to be in an awful state. He had deep bags under his eyes and it didn’t look as though he’d washed in some time. Before he’d said anything I took him inside, sat him down and started to run a hot bath. Whatever had happened, I told him, could wait until he’d gotten himself together. I think I had the right of it, as once he had cleaned himself up and had some hot food he seemed a lot more himself than he had been. Still, he spent a good ten minutes just sat there, staring into space.

I asked him what the matter was, whether he’d had an accident or lost his job or something. When I said that, he laughed an odd sort of laugh and said that he had lost his job. He’d quit, he said. I asked him why, after all he had always loved the whole business of skydiving, but as I said the word ‘sky’ I saw him flinch back like I had slapped him. So I quieted down and asked him to tell me what had happened.

They’d been running a dive up near Doncaster, he said. Some 85-year-old doing a tandem jump for charity in memory of his wife. He hadn’t been the one actually doing the jump with the old man, but it was a significant enough thing that his colleague had asked him to come up as well for support. He’d be coming down alone on a solo parachute. It all started well enough, the flight up was fine, and the old man, who said his name was Simon, appeared to be having a great time, making jokes, and quite frankly a lot more eager to throw himself out of a plane than almost anyone Robert had ever met before.

Finally the climb finished, and the door was opened to the rush of air. Harriet Fairchild, the instructor, readied herself to jump, with Simon strapped to her chest. It was at this moment, Robert said, that the old man turned to him, shouting something. He didn’t hear it clearly, but thought it had been “enjoy sky blue”. He’d felt dizzy all of a sudden, almost falling to the floor as Harriet hurled herself and her passenger out of the plane. It passed in a moment, though, and he pushed himself out of the door, and was greeted by that familiar plunging feeling in his stomach as he began his freefall.

He knew something was wrong almost immediately. He was jumping, he said, from about ten thousand feet, so should have been falling for almost thirty seconds before opening his parachute, but he was having trouble keeping count. The clear blue sky was so bright it seemed to blind him, and the numbers were all jumbled in his head. His balance seemed to be all turned around and he said he had had to shut his eyes tight against the brightness, concentrating to keep his count. Finally, he reached what he thought was thirty seconds, and went to pull his ripcord, but as he did, he said, he opened his eyes again and froze. The ground was gone.

I asked him what he meant, had he got turned around, maybe. He just shook his head, and told me again that the ground had gone. All that there was, he said, was that vast, empty blue sky, stretching off before him, but still he was falling into it. It was bright, he kept saying, it was so bright, although there was no sun in that sky and no clouds for it to hide behind. Just the empty, blue sky in all directions as he fell into it. He wanted to pull the ripcord, to unfurl his parachute, but his hand wouldn’t close over the grip. So he just fell.

Robert was shaking badly at this point, so I got him a blanket and made him another cup of tea. I wasn’t sure I believed all what he was saying, but he’d certainly been through something dreadful; I could see that. I asked him how long he’d been falling like that, and he said he didn’t know. His watch had stopped, but it had felt like hours. Days even. He had been so hungry, he said, but had just kept falling. He didn’t know which direction; there was just that empty sky all around, so it was impossible to tell.

Finally, he said, he saw the ground again. It didn’t feel like a change or a sudden difference, he just closed his eyes as he had so often in that place, and when he opened them it was there, green and sprawling and rushing up towards him. He’d been so relieved he’d almost forgotten to deploy his parachute. He did, though, and landed safely near the target area.

He was greeted by Harriet, who was surprised by how long it had taken him to get down. She told him it was almost fifteen minutes after when he should have hit the ground, and Simon, this old man, and his supporters had already left. It was obvious something was wrong, and Harriet asked Robert if he was alright. He repeated, “fifteen minutes, just fifteen”, and she told him “yes, what had been the problem?” Robert quit right there and then, and it was shortly after that he came to see me.

Now, obviously, I was a bit speechless at my son’s tale. It’s hard to say how much of it I thought to be true. I didn’t think he would ever have lied to me about something like this, but at the same time the sort of thing he described, well, I didn’t think it sounded like something from a healthy mind. Let’s just say I was thinking the sort of thing… you’ll be thinking in a few minutes. Point is, I tried to talk him through his problems and his feelings, but the more he talked about it, the more agitated he became, until at last I decided that we weren’t getting anywhere, and I got his old room ready for him. He slept soundly that night, as far as I remember.

The next morning was a beautiful day. The sun was streaming through the window, and the air was warm and still, without it being as hot as it had been the week before. When Robert finally woke up, I suggested that we go for a short walk to enjoy the day, and hopefully clear out any of that fear he felt that was still hovering about. He didn’t seem to want to go, at first, he kept glancing at the cloudless sky, but I promised him a picnic lunch and that seemed to convince him.

That last hour was one of the happiest I’d ever spent with my son. In the sunlight, the bags under his eyes seemed to disappear, and after a few minutes he even stopped glancing at the sky all the time. We walked along, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, and the world seemed to be alright.

There’s a hill near where I live. It’s a gentle, grassy slope but goes up quite high. You can see it from the kitchen window of my house. That’s one of the reasons I’m moving. It was that hill we were climbing when it happened. We had just reached the top, when Robert turned and to me with a sudden look of utter terror on his face. I asked him what was wrong; he just screamed and pushed me away. I fell hard onto the ground, and could do nothing but watch as my son ran off up the hill.

And then… And then… This is the part I can’t put into words. I’m going to try, but whatever you think of when you read this is not going to be what happened; it will just be the closest I can describe before thinking about it too much gives me a migraine. The closest I can say is this: the sky ate him.

He didn’t fall, or fly, or take-off. There wasn’t anything in the sky that took him. It wasn’t a hand that reached out and grabbed him, it was the sky itself, the whole sky, as far as the horizon I could see, that twisted around and moved like… like the shifting of sand. It ate Robert. That’s the only way I can describe it. Please don’t make me do so again.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Before I address the central point of this statement, namely the question of… whether the sky can eat people, there are a few other facts that need to be addressed. Firstly, the company that Ms. Kelly states Robert worked for, Open Skydiving, does not exist, and as far as Jessica’s research can determine, never has. It appears in no company register and has no entries within any of the bodies that deal with the immense number of licences a skydiving business would require. There were one or two news articles from late 2000 that reference events by Open Skydiving, or sometimes the Open Skydiving School, but whatever they were, they were not an officially licensed business, so either they were lying to Robert Kelly, or he was lying to his mother.

Not a lot of detail was given about the skydive where Robert Kelly claims to have been transported to an endless sky blue nothing, but Jessica really outdid herself here, and after spending almost a day combing through accident and incident reports for the Doncaster area in June 2002, found one that seems relevant. On the 3rd of June 2002, Joseph Puce reported hearing an impact in the field adjoining his house. Upon investigation, he found a parachute had hit the ground at high speed, partially burying itself in the earth. There was no sign of any body, or anyone who might have been wearing it, nor did it have any logo or label, and in Jessica’s follow-up interview, Mr. Puce vehemently denied there being any planes or skydiving taking place anywhere near his property. The parachute was unopened.

According to police reports, Ms. Kelly attempted to report Robert missing on 7th of June, but it proved difficult, due to an absence of any information on friends or residences. In fact, for the four years prior, it’s hard to find any evidence for Robert Kelly’s existence at all. It may just be that he moved around a lot, but it feels like more than that. Ms. Kelly declined our request for a follow-up interview, saying she had no desire to revisit the incident.

One other thing bothers me. If Ms. Kelly’s recollections are correct, regarding how Robert described his last skydive, Harriet Fairchild the instructor and an old man named Simon. I don't think this is a coincidence, I recall the name ‘Simon Fairchild’ was one of the ones used by –

[DOOR OPENS, CHAIR TUMBLES]
My god! Tim?!

[SOMETHING SQUELCHES]
What… What the hell is – ? What are these things?!

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Tim, are you sure about this?

TIM
I just want to make a statement about what happened to me. I mean, it… it’s what we do.

ARCHIVIST
No, what we do is research statements. Usually those made by liars and the mentally unwell.

TIM
Well, I need to tell someone what happened, and you can vouch for the soundness of my mind, can’t you?

ARCHIVIST
…

No i really can't.

TIM
If you’re that worried about it, it doesn’t need to be an official statement. I just need a record of it.

ARCHIVIST
Fine. You’re right. I suppose. Statement of Tim Gunpowder, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, London, regarding…

TIM
A close encounter with something I believe to have once been Jane… Prentiss.

ARCHIVIST
Recorded direct from subject, 12th March, 2016.

Statement begins.

TIM
Well, a couple of weeks ago, you were looking into that statement about the spider that wouldn’t go away. Carlos… Vittery I think his name was? I knew there was something not right about the whole thing from the off. I said it probably wasn’t natural, him dying and being encased in web when he was found, and I stand by that, though it wasn’t anything to do with spiders that ended up after me. Almost wish it had been. [Nervous laugh] I like spiders. Big ones, at least. Y’know, y’know the ones you can see some fur on; I actually think they’re sort of cute –

ARCHIVIST
Please stick to the statement, Tim.

TIM
Right. You asked me to investigate that flat that he lived in down in Boothby Road, and that’s what I do. I take the Northern Line up to Archway and walk the rest of the way down there. It’s still quite early then, and I find the building easily enough. It looks just like Mr. Vittery said it did in his statement, and there’s a big thick door on the front, that looks like it leads into the hall and then to the flats. Obviously it’s locked so I try the buzzers, but nobody’s answering and I figure they’re probably all out at work. I didn’t want to come back to you without due diligence, though – I’ve learned that lesson – so I have a look around the place to see if there’s another way I could go in and have a poke around. Sure enough, as I walk round, I spy a basement window that’s slightly ajar. It isn’t much, but I reckon I can squeeze through it if I try.

As I get… closer, though, I notice there’s something on the ground, nearby. The sunlight catches on it and at first I think it must be a screw or a little piece of metal that someone’s thrown away. I get closer and I see that it looks more like a worm of some sort. It’s maybe an inch long, with a silver segmented body that goes black at one end, almost like it’s been burned. It’s very… still, so I kneel down to have a look and as I get closer it begins to twitch. Its darkened head twists towards me and it starts to… writhe in this kind of eerie way, moving along the ground very fast and straight at me. Well, to be honest I… I freaked out a bit. I leapt to my feet and I just stamped on it before I had a chance to really think about what I was doing. I felt it pop beneath my shoe with a faint cracking sound, like stepping on an eggshell, and a thick, black slime started to ooze from where I stepped on it.

Now, obviously I was pretty disgusted by the whole thing, so I take a moment to scrape off what’s left of it and check around for any more. There’s none that I can see, so after composing myself for a couple of seconds, I continue on my way into the basement. The window was small. Quite a tight squeeze for me, I mean, I’m not exactly the smallest guy in the world, I know, and it’s only once I’m inside that I realise it’s only at ground level for the outside, so I take a bit of a tumble onto the basement floor. Luckily I get away without hurting myself and start to have a quick look around the room. It’s pretty big, and it looks like it goes under pretty much the whole building, but the light from the window doesn’t get very far inside so most of the place was very dark.

Then I realise that I don’t have any sort of torch with me, and I can’t see any light switch on the nearby wall, so I’ve no real way of looking round. I almost decided to turn around and try to climb out back the way I came, not least because the place had a really bad ‘feeling’ to it. Like, like there was this musty smell, and the air was dusty and thick. Also, you’re going to think I’m an idiot when I say this, but I didn’t like the way my… shadow moved. The light from the window behind me cast it pretty clearly on the floor, and looking at it I swear the edges seemed to move. It was like a… like a, like an undulation, like, like they were being shifted by something. I mean… look, I know you hate the word, but it was really… spooky.

Look, anyway, that was when I saw the bottom of the stairs leading up, and I, I didn’t waste any time heading up them. The door at the top wasn’t locked, so I find myself in the ground floor hall of the building and I’ll admit it was a real relief to get out of that place and into the well-lit main building.

I could have left at that point, probably should have, but I decided to try one more time to see if I could talk to the current occupants of Mr. Vittery’s old flat. Due diligence… and all that. So I, I head up to number four and give a few knocks on the door.

I didn’t expect anyone to be in, but the door’s opened by an old woman in a headscarf. I tried to ask her some questions, but it became clear she didn’t really speak much in the way of English. After a few seconds she just shook her head and pointed behind me, closing the door unceremoniously. Turning around, I see a large, dark-skinned man in a very nice-looking suit eyeing me with a bit of suspicion. He introduced himself as Yasir Kundi, and said he owned the building, and became slightly more co-operative after I lied to him and told him that one of the upstairs residents had buzzed me in.

I told him why I was there, although obviously I didn’t mention… breaking in or the Institute or what we do because I find people often don’t understand or respect that out in the real world. I just said that following Mr. Vittery’s death I was looking into some aspects of his history and did he remember anything about the time he was a tenant? Mr. Kundi was about as helpful as you might expect. Told me Carlos Vittery had lived there, seemed weird, always shut himself up, but was never a problem, paid his rent on time. Used to have a cat, but it now lived with the Sanderson couple in number two. He seemed genuinely surprised to hear about the death, but wasn’t able to shed any sort of light on it.

It wasn’t a lot, really. Still, about as much as I might have expected, so I headed back to the Institute and updated you on what I’d found. And, well, as I’m sure you’re aware that was the last time I saw you before I disappeared.

I was heading home when I got to thinking, and I was worried I hadn’t really done enough investigation for you, since I got so freaked out by the basement and all. And then I remembered that I’d seen quite a lot of spider webs in the brief time I was down there, and maybe I should check it out again. I mean, like I said, I’m not really afraid of spiders. So… I went back for another look.

It was dark when I got to Boothby Road, but I saw that the basement window was still open. I’d made sure to bring a torch this time, and after a quick check to make sure nobody was watching, I climbed inside. I knew right then that I’d made a huge… mistake. The air was just as musty as it had been before, but it seemed warmer than it had been, which was strange because outside it was a cold February night. I turned on my torch and shone it around, but was disappointed to see that all those spider webs that I remembered seemed old and unremarkable. If there were spiders there, none were easily seen, and… for a second I thought that the only interesting part of my return trip was that it would land me in prison if I wasn’t careful. Then, I heard movement. From the other side of the basement.

It was… faint, just a rustling, really. I didn’t want to check it out, I really didn’t. I’ve catalogued and looked into enough of these cases to know that following the noise is always a really, really bad idea, but… I mean… it’s my job, isn’t it? So, I slowly moved towards it, keeping my torch held in front of me like a… like a shield. The beam was so much weaker than I had thought it was, and it only lit up the stark outlines of the shelves and detritus that littered the basement. The movement had stopped, or at least I couldn’t hear it anymore, and I’d almost made up my mind to just turn around and leave, when my torch fell across what looked like a human figure.

It appeared to be… a woman. She was facing away from me, apparently staring at the corner of the wall. Her hair was long and black, though it was so twisted and dirty it was hard to tell if that was its original colour. She wore a threadbare grey overcoat, though beneath it her legs were bare, and covered with what I at first I thought were spots. In her right hand she held a stained, green handkerchief. She stood there, totally still, either not noticing the torchlight that was shining on her, or not caring. I didn’t move a muscle.

Then, with a quick, jerky movement she brought the handkerchief to her face and coughed. I mean, I call it a cough, because that’s what it looked like, but it didn’t sound like a cough. It was more like… like… you know in a nature documentary, w-when the lion’s caught something and it’s, it’s ripping it apart? That noise of wet meat…? Yeah, it was, was like that. I saw something drop from the handkerchief onto the floor. It was about an inch long, silver, and it wriggled as it fell.

I screamed. I’m not ashamed to admit it, though looking back I really wish I hadn’t. Her head snapped towards me and she locked eyes with me. Her pupils seemed ragged and collapsed, and when she smiled her teeth were chipped and blackened. I started to stagger backwards, expecting at any moment for her to lunge at me, but instead she slowly reached up and… let the overcoat fall to the floor.

Her skin was pale, almost grey, and full of… sorry, it still makes me sick to think about it. It was full of holes. Deep, black holes just honeycombing every bit of flesh like a… wasps’ nest. I could see those… thin, silver worms crawling in and out, and their black tips twitching as they squirmed through that… pitted… meat. I mean, it wasn’t human. It can’t have been. Sh-She… It took a step towards me and as it did so the worms began to writhe out of every hole and cavity, falling to the floor in a cascading… wave and starting to crawl towards me with… with alarming speed.

I had the oddest thought, then, and even as I backed away towards the stairs, I started to get my phone out. The daft thing is I wasn’t even going to call anyone for help, I just wanted to take a picture of the thing. To prove to you that it happened – you’re always so quick to dismiss these statements and I wanted proof for you. Except, well, I managed to drop it, of course. Just as I was bringing up the camera app, one of the worm-things reached at me and leapt at my face. That thing jumped literally 6 feet through the air at my face. It missed me, but I was so taken aback that I fell onto the stairs behind me, and dropped my phone to the ground. I-I didn’t stop to pick it up, I just fled up the stairs as fast as I could.

Obviously the door at the top wasn’t locked. If it had been… I’m sure I’d be dead. Or… worse. I ran faster than I ever have in my life – I’ve never been good at running – and every moment expected to feel something wriggling up my leg. I didn’t stop running until I was sat in the Underground and had checked every inch of my seat for worms. I live in Stockwell, right at the other end of the Northern Line, so by the time I got home I was… starting to feel a bit safer… though utterly exhausted. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to work the next day, but without my phone, I couldn’t let you know. I mean, I don’t have a landline – who does anymore – but couldn’t bring myself to stay awake long enough to send an email, so I just collapsed, fully clothed onto the bed.

I don’t know how long I slept for, but it was still dark when the knocking woke me up. I don’t know if it was the same night, or if I’d slept right through the day. Either way, I dragged myself up and, as I sat there, it all came back to me, what I’d seen, and I shuddered. I tried to tell myself I’d imagined it. Maybe I’d overreacted to finding a homeless woman sleeping in the basement. Maybe she was sick and needed an ambulance. Oh god, maybe I’d left her to die.

There was more knocking, and I reached up to flick the light on. But when I did so nothing happened. I tried the lamp next to my bed, but again, nothing. Looking around I saw that none of my electronics seemed to be on. There must have been some sort of power cut. Again, someone knocked at the door. Maybe it was one of my neighbours… coming to check whether I’d lost power? So I shuffle over towards the door and… reached for the handle.

As I was about to open it I got a sudden chill and stopped. What if she was outside, waiting? I mean th-the worms that made a hive of her body, eager, striving to make me one as well. I thought of that awful case you had us looking into where that woman… burst into worms, and I realised that this woman must be that Jane Prentiss you were telling us about. I never had one of those peepholes added, so I couldn’t see what was out there, but as I took a step back I saw something on the floor, crawling out from underneath the door. It was a small, silver-looking worm.

I think I might have… lost my mind a bit, then. It all… feels very… strange, blurry. I-I remember stamping and stamping as-as more made their way under my doorway. I-I remember grabbing every towel, sock, bit of fabric scrap that I could find, stuffing them under the door, into the cracks around the window. Anything where a slender worm might crawl I made airtight. And then I sat there and waited. I-I still had no power, no phone, no way to communicate with the outside.

This went on for thirteen days. Every time I thought it might be safe to try and leave I’d hear that knocking at my door come back. Luckily there was no problem with my water supply, so I had plenty to drink. I’m just glad none of them thought to come up through the pipes. I eat a lot of… ready meals, cans, that kind of thing, so… I had food, although after the first few days I had to start rationing.

If I ever see another can of peaches… [shudders]

But… I-I think the worst part was the boredom. No internet, no phone, no power. I read the handful of print books I own several times. I-I didn’t really sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I’d start to feel something was crawling… up my legs and I’d have to sit up and check. Other times I’d be awoken by that knocking. I spent a lot of time trying to remember what you told me about Jane Prentiss when we were working on Tim Hodge’s statement, but… all I remembered were that she called herself to be a practising witch and was believed to be infected by a-a dangerous, unknown parasite.

She never talked to me. I-I could have heard her clearly through the door, but she never made a sound apart from that knocking. From what I saw, maybe what was in her throat didn’t leave room for a voice. Strangely, she never tried to break down my door, either. Just knocked. She knocked… and knocked… and knocked.

Finally, I woke up this morning and she was gone. I don’t know exactly how I knew. I-I think she brought that musty smell with her, and this morning I-I couldn’t smell it. And there was no knocking. I mean, it still took me about four hours of checking and double-checking and listening at the letterbox before I got the nerve to actually open the door, but when I did… there was no-one there. And I ran… all the way here.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

You’re sure about all of this, Tim?

TIM
Look, I’m not going to lie to you about something like this, Raphaella. I… like my job. Most of the time.

ARCHIVIST
Very well. In which case there’s a room in the Archives I use to sleep when working late. I suggest you stay there for now. I’ll talk to Carmilla about whether we can get extra security, but the Archives have enough locks for now. It’s also supposed to be humidity controlled and, though it hasn’t been working for some time, it does mean it’s well-sealed. Nothing will be sneaking through any window cracks.

TIM
[Confused & flustered] Okay… thanks. To be honest I didn’t, didn’t expect you… to take it seriously.

ARCHIVIST
Don't make me regret it also you say you lost your phone two weeks ago?

TIM
Thereabouts. When I went back to the basement.

ARCHIVIST
Well, in that time I have received several text messages from your phone, saying you were ill with stomach problems. The last one said that you thought it “might be a parasite”, though my calls trying to follow up were never answered. So, if this does involve Jane Prentiss, then I take it deadly seri–

[PHONE BUZZES]
Hang on.

TIM
What?

ARCHIVIST
I just received another text message. From you. “Keep him. We have had our fun. He will want to see it when the Archivist’s crimson fate arrives.”

TIM
What does that mean?

ARCHIVIST
It means I ask Carmilla to hire some extra security. I should probably warn Nastya and Jessica as well. I’ll also have a look through the Archives, as I believe we should have a statement from Ms. Prentiss herself in here somewhere.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Albrecht von Closen, regarding a discovered tomb near his estate in the Black Forest. Original statement given as part of a letter to Maki Magnus, March 31st, 1816. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
My dearest Maki,

Forgive my writing you this letter so soon after the last. You must think me dreadful for not even giving you a chance at a reply, but I recall that during your visit last spring you mentioned your fascination with the macabre and strange, and pressed upon me as to whether there were any such lore or legends that I myself were familiar with. Wolfgang writes me that you are acquiring quite the collection, and I feel that I now have something that belongs with it, far more than any of the fairy stories or old maids’ tales that I told you before. Put quite simply, I have had a most terrifying encounter. Two encounters, really, I suppose, and I pray to the Lord that I shall have no more. For I honestly believe I should die, from fear if not from violence, were I forced to meet the thing again.

I’m sure you must think me the most dreadful bore, speaking around the thing so, but I feel that to understand all I must begin my tale some time before the apparition itself appeared, with my travels down to Württemberg. My family has a small estate there, in the heart of the Schwarzwald, what you would call the Black Forest, near a small town by the name of Schramberg. This estate belonged to my brother, Henrik, and when he passed away it descended to my nephew Wilhelm. He was barely in his fourteenth year when Henrik died, and his mother had passed while birthing him, so myself and Clara have since made every effort to provide him with guidance and such affection as he may have lost. This felt especially keen, as we have ourselves been unable to conceive a child, and so we felt it our duty to teach Wilhelm what we would have impressed upon a son of our own. The profligacy of youth is always a danger, and we felt it our duty to help guide him, where we could, along the path of virtue. We needn’t have worried ourselves overly: I have never met so sober and prudent a soul as seems to exist within young Wilhelm. Nonetheless, because of this we have remained close with my nephew through the years, despite the distance. When he took ill this last winter, naturally we made arrangements to travel to his home in the Schwarzwald and offer what comfort we could.

The journey was difficult, as I suppose is to be expected when travelling in winter, but Wilhelm’s condition brooked no delays. At first, the worst we had to contend with, coming from Bavaria, was the lack of provision in the inns where we took lodging, as we were told over and over again how rare guests were this time of year. Still, say what you will about the German Confederation – and I know you certainly have a lot of opinions on that, my friend – but it has made travelling a lot quicker and I was certainly grateful for that. When we entered Württemberg, however, our way was much harder. The snow fell thicker in the Schwarzwald, compelling us at last to trade the coach for a sleigh.

You have never known winter in the Black Forest, have you? I know that you will say you have snows and forests in England, but I have seen what you call forests and can tell you that there can be no comparison to the Schwarzwald, its trees covered in a dense canopy of untouched snow. There is such a silence there as I have never encountered anywhere else on earth, with every sound seeming to die the moment it touches that soft white blanket of virgin snow. By day, it is the most beautiful serenity, this calm stillness. But by night, oh my friend, by night it becomes something altogether else. The quiet of the forest, it becomes like the world is holding its breath, waiting to strike, and in those parts where the canopy clears enough that the moon shines down, it casts everything into the most ghostly shades. I lost count of the number of times I swore I saw figures in the shadows, briefly illuminated by the moonlit glow of that frozen land. At one point I even demanded the sleigh be stopped so I could make an examination of the area with a brace of pistols, but of course I found nothing. It was in such a state of mind that we arrived at Wilhelm’s estate near Schramberg.

We were greeted by Wilhelm’s servants and told of their master’s condition. The doctor had, apparently, braved the roads from Schramberg some few days ago and had given what medicine he could. Since then, the servants told us, he had been steadily improving, but was still very weak. I will confess at this news to feeling slightly unnecessary, but upon entering Wilhelm’s chamber, the happiness evident upon his face when he saw Clara and myself put all such thoughts to rest.

Wilhelm was in recovery, but I had no intention of travelling back through that silent, icy stillness unless absolutely necessary, and Clara agreed. We made plans to winter there with Wilhelm. There was room enough for us, though our chamber was more modest than what we would have been accustomed to. I will admit that I didn’t entirely relish the thought of staying in the Schwarzwald until the spring thaw, but of the courses of action we had at our disposal, it was the one I found to be the most agreeable.

And so began what was to be lengthy sojourn near Schramberg, and truly have I never wished more keenly that I had been able to bring my library with me. I had but a few books with me and Wilhelm, despite his not-inconsiderable intelligence, had even fewer. In the end, we played a lot of cribbage and listened to Clara play many a tune on the pianoforte. My wife has never had a singular voice, but her skills upon the keys more than make up for it. I myself would often take long walks through the surrounding woods during the early afternoon, when the cold was tolerable. Sometimes I would make my way the two miles to neighbouring Schramberg, but more often I would simply choose a direction and stroll into the trees for as long as my fancy held me and then simply follow my own trail of footprints back to what was, for the moment, my home.

It was on one of these walks, some months into our stay, that I came upon that ancient graveyard. It must have been sunken slightly into the ground itself, as all I could see of the grave markers themselves were the merest tip of worn and crumbled granite above the snow. I could not guess at the size of the place, as every few seconds, whichever way I walked, I would spot another small bud of memorial stone blossoming through the frosted earth. I dug some snow from in front of one of the headstones – it had a broken angel atop it, both wings snapped and fallen – but the inscription was far too worn to make out any of the words. I had all but made up my mind to leave, as I knew I had little over an hour before the light began to fail me. As I turned to do so, however, I spied something not far removed among the trees, far larger and more intriguing than the graves I had found thus far.

It stood about five feet proud above the snow, and the stone was far better quality than what I had seen so far. A small mausoleum. The door, once a sturdy iron grate, had long since rusted off of its hinges, leaving only a gaping black aperture that seemed to lead deeper than the dimensions of the mausoleum would allow. Over the top, barely readable, but still most definitely there, was the name ‘Johann von Württemberg’. I was fascinated – I knew my local history well enough and certainly was not aware of any noble of the Württemberg line named Johann. I was sure he had never been a count or a prince. More than that, there had never been, as far as I could recall, any town or settlement near this spot that could have supported a cemetery of such size. So who was Johann von Württemberg, and why had he built a mausoleum here, in the middle of the Schwarzwald, six miles or more from Schramberg?

I had no time to investigate any further, for I realised that I needed to leave immediately if I was to return to my wife and nephew before sundown. I turned away and followed my path back as quickly as I dared. While I would normally be satisfied forging a new path the next day, something in the thought of that silent tomb drew me back, and I found myself marking trees with my pocket knife, to make my finding my way back the following day that much easier.

I asked Wilhelm that evening over dinner whether he had ever heard of Johann von Württemberg, or was aware of the mausoleum a few north miles from his home. He told me no to both – he rarely spent time in the forest around save for hunting, and the hunting was usually poor in the north, as the trees were too close together to easily navigate with a horse. And he had never heard of this ‘Johann’. I made some inquiries as to where I could look further into the history of the area, but there was no library of a decent size within near distance of Schramberg, and as I mentioned, Wilhelm had little in the way of books, so I let the matter drop.

Nothing else of note occurred that night, and so, making my apologies the next morning, I headed out early towards the old cemetery. I made no secret of my destination, and even offered the opportunity to accompany me to both Wilhelm and Carla, but neither saw the trip as worth the cold hours it would take to reach. So it was alone that I once again made my way to that forgotten place. My marking the trees had proven unnecessary, as there had been no fresh snowfall the previous night, and my footprints from the day before were still clear and very easy to follow.

The mausoleum looked exactly as I had left it, its door still yawning, and the sunlight seemed to make it very little distance over the threshold before darkness once again swallowed it. I had foreseen this, and packed a lantern for the purpose of exploring the place. I was about to light it, when I noticed a figure watching me from the treeline. Perhaps this place was not so forgotten after all. I had heard tales of brigands using places such as this for assignations, and was suddenly glad I had also thought to pack a pistol and shot. I approached the man, but he didn’t move to flee. As I got closer, I saw him in more detail. He was short and squat, wearing an old-fashioned, black frock coat and knee breeches, though his head was shadowed by a wide-brimmed black hat. By his costume, I assumed him to be an old man, perhaps a groundskeeper for this place, or simply a recluse that lived nearby. When I greeted him, though, the voice that answered held no quiver of age within it. He asked me, in low, peasant German whether I was planning to explore the tomb. I said I was, and asked if he was the keeper of this place. He laughed at that, a sharp, guttural exclamation that surprised me, and told me that the crypt I sought was a dangerous place. I asked him what I had to fear from the dead, and he stared at me. I could not see his eyes beneath the brim of his hat, but I could still feel his gaze upon me. He laughed again, and told me, “No, sir, you have nothing to fear from the dead.”

At these words I began to back away, ensuring my hand was on my pistol, not taking my eyes off this strange man until I reached the edge of the mausoleum. Only then did I look down to make sure my lantern was where I left it, and when I returned my gaze to the trees, he was gone. To speak plainly, I was rather shaken by my encounter, and considered turning back and trying my luck another day, but something within me balked at having all my work and preparation be for naught because of a single farmer who couldn’t mind his business. I lit my lantern, and –

ARCHIVIST
Tim! Fuck's Sake, if you’re going to be staying in the Archives, at least have the decency to put some trousers on!

TIM
Oh god, sorry, sorry! I didn’t think you were in until later; it’s not even seven yet.

ARCHIVIST
I’ve been coming in early in the hopes of leaving this place before dark.

TIM
It’s been a week and we’ve seen nothing. Do you really think she’s still out there?

ARCHIVIST
I have no idea, but I don’t intend to take any chances.

TIM
[SIGH] No, I suppose not…

ARCHIVIST
Now, if you’ll excuse me.

TIM
Righto.

ARCHIVIST
Statement continues.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
At first I was confused, inside appeared to be empty. No monuments or coffins stood inside, and no plaques or sigils adorned the wall. Just a single slab of marble stood in the centre, like an altar. At first I thought that perhaps that was where the coffin should have sat, and someone had simply taken it, but as I walked around I saw what it was concealing. Behind the sharp-angled block was a staircase, descending deep into some unknown subterranean vault.

You will scoff at me, Maki, when next we meet, I am sure of it. You will laugh at my bravado and call an unthinking adventurer, but the plain fact of it is that I descended those stairs with hardly a qualm. Any fear I may have had was solely focused on the man I had met outside, and I foresaw no danger within the vault itself. So I hoisted my lantern and I descended the stairs.

They were old, of that there is no doubt, but they were not worn, and I would wager that I was the first soul to go down there in at least a century. They descended for some time, until I was quite certain that I was deep within the frozen earth of the Schwarzwald. At last, the steps ended in a short corridor, and I could see the bricks that formed the walls and arched ceiling had crumbled and shifted in places, allowing ingress to the thick roots of the trees above, which coiled and splayed across those parts of the passage in most need of repair. After about a minute of walking, the passage opened out into a large chamber. In the centre stood another block of marble, almost identical to the one I had seen upstairs, but atop this one was a sealed, stone coffin. The name ‘Johann von Württemberg’ was carved here too, though preserved in much clearer detail without the elements to wear it away.

As I gazed at it, I noticed that the walls of the room did not appear to be stone, as the passage or the mausoleum had been. I walked cautiously closer, until my lantern illuminated it clearly. The walls were covered with bookshelves. Packed in with such a density that it was impossible to tell if there was a real wall behind them, or if the books themselves formed the only bulwark against the soil. They were, unfortunately, terribly rotten. The centuries had not been kind to them, and as I tried to move one of them, I realised that the damp had, over time, caused them to merge into a single mass of paper and bookcloth. Predictable as this may have been, I still felt the most acute pang of loss. To see such a volume of knowledge, possibly unique in all the world, utterly destroyed, was incredibly painful to me. The actual shelves were formed of the same marble as the two blocks, and seemed to have fared better. As I looked at them, I noticed a small engraving, carved at regular intervals along the edge of each one. It was a small eye, open and staring.

For some reason, it was only at that moment that I began to feel afraid. Of what, I couldn’t tell you, but those small eyes filled me with a dread that I have trouble describing to you now. Certainly I backed away from the bookshelves, and was all set to depart, when my lantern caught on something in the corner of the room. Or more precisely, two things: the first was a small gold coin that glinted on the floor. The second was a book, perhaps fallen from the shelves long ago. It was in far better condition than the others, perhaps due to where it had lain, and I was able to very carefully open it. I was disappointed to see that it was not written in German, or even French or Latin, but appeared to be in Arabic. It seemed to be an illuminated manuscript of sorts, produced by hand and utterly beautiful, though I could not for the life of me have told you what it concerned.

I took the book and the coin to study later, and hastily left the vault, the lingering fear making me feel as though some unseen pursuer might come upon me if I hesitated. I drew my pistol as I left the mausoleum, just in case the strange short man from earlier were waiting to accost me, but there was no sign of anyone outside in that clear daylight.

I hurried back, though I still had many hours before dusk. As I went I noticed that the snow on the trees was beginning to thaw, and took comfort in the knowledge that Clara and myself would likely be able to return to Closen soon. Wilhelm was fully recovered from his fever, and by the time I was at dinner, all traces of my earlier fear had disappeared and I was in excellent spirits.

I retired afterwards to smoke a pipe or two and examine my finds at greater length. The book, though beautiful, stubbornly refused to offer up any clues to its contents. With your permission, I’ll bring it over for your expert eyes next time I have the pleasure of your company. The coin, on the other hand, was more interesting. On one side, it had an engraved profile of a sharp-faced young man with long, flowing hair. Over the top ran the letters JW, and at the bottom was the number 1279. If this was the date the coin was produced, then I don’t need to tell you how exciting a find this might be. The other side was blank, save for three words, very small and worn, but I could just about read them. They read “Für die Stille”.

I was about to retire to bed, when one of the serving girls, Hilda – or was it Helga, I forget – asked me for a moment of my time. I obliged and she said had I been asking about the old graveyard out in the forest? I told yes I had, and she paled ever so slightly. She told me that she never went near the place, that no-one in the town did.

You see, Maki, apparently there was an old man in Schramberg by the name of Tobias Kohler. He had lived nearly eighty years, and told tales of when he was a child and he and his friends would play a game they called “Johann’s Steps”. It was a game of bravery, where you had to creep down as many steps as you could into the tomb of Johann von Württemberg until you were seen, and then run back out as fast as you could. Tobias would never say who or what you were seen by, and always ignored the question. Well, apparently, the parents of these children found out about this game and one of them, the mother of Tobias’ friend Hans Winkler, decided to put an end to it. She stormed into the cemetery and, seeing Hans entering the mausoleum for his turn, she ran inside after him and down the steps. None of the children saw what happened, but they all heard the scream. They fled back to town, and when they told of what had happened, the town priest, whose name Tobias does not remember, simply nodded and, gathering up six strong, though deeply fearful, men, they headed out toward the cemetery. None of that party ever spoke of what they saw or found there, but Hans went to live with the Becker family out on their small farm. No-one played “Johann’s Steps” again, and the cemetery was once again left deserted.

The only other thing Tobias remembered was that he had once heard a great uncle refer to Johann von Württemberg as “Ulrich’s bastard”, which, if the date on the coin was correct, may be referring to Ulrich I or Ulrich II, but either way that place’s history must stretch back almost six hundred years.

But now, I feel I have talked around it long enough. I could fill a dozen more pages with preamble and research, yet none of that is why I have written to you as I have. No, I am writing to you to describe what I saw the last night I stayed at Wilhelm’s, the event that led to my and Carla leaving a week earlier than we had planned.

It was three days after I had heard Tobias’ story that it happened. I had packed the coin and the book away in a fit of superstition and had decided to take a short stroll as the sun was setting. It was beautiful, the crimsons of the darkening sky danced upon what snow was left, staining it deepest red. I walked around the house, smoking my pipe, until I came upon the tracks I had left when heading towards the old graveyard. As the snow melted it had formed my footprints into packed dirt and ice that almost seemed to glow in the waning daylight. I gazed at them, and froze. I had made two trips to the mausoleum that winter, and sure enough there were two stark sets of footprints heading north. But coming back towards the house, there were three sets of footprints. I felt the presence behind me, and I turned around.

It was the man from the cemetery. His wide brimmed hat was removed and he stared at me. His head was completely bald, and his eyes were missing. They were just empty sockets but they stared at me. They saw me. Believe or dismiss anything else in my letter as you wish Maki, but I swear to you that I stood face to face with a man with no eyes and he saw me.

I backed away too quickly and slipped, falling hard upon the ground. In a second he was above me, and he smiled. He said something to me, but my mind was aflame with panic and I didn’t hear what it was. He reached towards me slowly, insolently, as though he sought to savour this moment but would not be rushed. Then, quite without warning, he stopped. His head snapped up to stare at something, like a gundog that hears a shot. He stood there, hand poised as though in indecision. And then… And then, he vanished, as though he had never been there, and I simply lay upon the ground, winded and afraid.

Night had fallen by the time I finally pulled myself together enough to run back into the house and begin packing. I told Carla we had to leave as soon as possible, though was vague as to the reasons. I still haven’t told her why. How do you tell your wife something like that happened to you?

We took the first coach the following morning and haven’t stopped. I didn’t even realise the coin was missing until I checked my luggage later. Whether to a light-fingered servant or just my own carelessness, it is gone, so I must apologise that I will not be able to share that particular piece of history with you. I must also apologise for the handwriting; I have been committing this to paper as well as can be done on a long coach-journey. Still, I look forward to showing you the book I have acquired, and the revelations you will no doubt glean from it.

Yours in trust,

Albrecht

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Always a treat to find a piece of history tucked into the wrong section of the archive. Still, I can’t say I know much about Maki Magnus or the origins of the Institute, so this is a pleasing discovery in some ways. Obviously there isn’t much follow-up to be done here, but to slake my own interest I have done a little bit of digging myself, which I include here for completeness sake.

I’ve only found one reference to any ‘Johann von Württemberg’ in any of the German history reference material we have available. Jan Moira’s Cradle of Germany – Württemberg through the Centuries mentions rumours that Ulrich I, Count of Württemberg had a second son out of wedlock in 1255. No name is listed, but certain enemies of the count were known to spread rumours that this exiled son was “keeping the company of witches”. 1279 was also the year that Ulrich I’s successor, Ulrich II, died. This may simply have been coincidence, however, as he was succeeded by his half-brother Eberhard I.

Something else I stumbled across, quite by accident, during my research was in Grim Tales, H.T. Moncreef’s exploration of unexplained and macabre deaths in early 19th century Europe. It mentions a death that took place in Schramberg in 1816. The man, one Rudolph Ziegler, was found dead at his home on the outskirts of town. What is interesting is that it says he worked in service on an estate nearby. Shortly after his death, one Wilhelm von Closen was investigated for the crime, as it was discovered the dead man had been stealing jewellery from the estate. It was eventually dropped, however, after four doctors attested that the ferocity of the wounds inflicted on Herr Ziegler were, and I quote, “beyond the capability of human violence”. It was ruled an animal attack.

I did try to find out what happened to Albrecht von Closen and his book, but I can find no mention of him in any volume of history, nor anywhere online. Perhaps I might find out more if I spent months sifting through the historical statements in the Archives’ back rooms, but I simply don’t have time to indulge my own curiosity like that.

I have located a genealogy for Wilhelm von Closen, though. He married and had children, and the family remained located in and around Schramberg for almost another century, before one branch emigrated to England in 1908. They had a daughter, Elsa, who went on to marry a man by the name of Michael Keay in 1920. In 1924, they had one daughter, whose name was Mary Keay. This may be simple coincidence, but… it excites me.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Leanne Denikin, regarding an antique calliope organ she possessed briefly in August 2004. Original statement given January 17th, 2005. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Let me be clear: I’m not scared of clowns. I don’t find them funny, either. Just a bit baffling, really. I’ve never understood why people would find grown men in stupid make-up and wigs funny. Or scary. It’s the same with the dolls. People talk about their cold dead eyes, but they don’t seem to have any problem with statues. I suppose now I’ve got good reason to be scared of both. I just want you to understand, I wasn’t seeing things out of fear. This happened.

It didn’t come as a surprise when my grandfather died last August. I’d been living with him for almost two years at his home in Bootle, looking after him through his illness. My mother was having her own difficulties at the time, and my good-for-nothing father wanted nothing to do with any of it, so looking after my grandpa came down to me. It wasn’t so bad, really.

My grandpa was a strange man at times. He’d been a carnie for most of his life, working with travelling circuses and freak shows all over Europe, and was something of a recluse in his later years. He could also swear a blue streak a mile wide. Get him behind the keys of a piano, though, and I don’t know anyone who could play as beautifully as he could. Like I say, it wasn’t a surprise when he finally died, but I still found it difficult. As you may have guessed, I don’t have a great relationship with my parents, and have always had some problems making friends, so… when he went, it hit me hard.

I didn’t go out that week. Or the next. I saw Joshua, my… partner, I suppose you’d have called him, but aside from that, I didn’t see anybody between grandpa’s death and the funeral. It was just me, Josh and my mother. Grandpa had never been a churchgoer, but my mother had a lot of faith, so paid for a Methodist funeral, such as it was. It was a hot, muggy day, and I remember wondering whether the stinging in my eyes was from the tears or the sweat. As it turned out, grandpa had left me his house. It didn’t really sink in for a while – the house had been the most home I’d had for so long that I’d always felt it was mine in some ways.

Going through my grandpa’s old papers and possessions was harder than I had expected. It was only reading some of his own letters that I discovered his birth name was Nikolai – he’d always just gone by Nick. Eventually I sorted through everything. I had a small box of memories I wanted to keep, but… I just wasn’t up throwing the rest away yet. I decided to store them in the loft. I knew the house had one, although I had never been inside. It had always been locked. It wasn’t a mystery or anything, just that my grandpa hadn’t needed to get anything from up there while I was living with him. At least, I thought so.

It was only then I realised I had never been inside it. More annoyingly, I quickly discovered that none of the keys I’d been given for the place were for the padlock. No luck searching for it around the rest of the house, either. In the end I had to cut the lock off with a pair of bolt cutters I found in the garage.

There was also a ladder in the garage, so getting up through the small, square hole wasn’t a problem. I realised then that I didn’t have a torch, and it was very dark. Despite it being the middle of summer, the loft was cool, almost cold. I considered heading back down to get a torch and a jacket, but as I reached out my hand, it brushed against something which felt like a pull-cord. I gave it a tug, and a small, weak bulb came to life, and I saw what was inside.

When I had first remembered about the loft, I’d been annoyed. I thought there’d be so much more stuff up there, days more sorting to go through. But when I turned on the light, I saw that it was almost completely empty. The only things there were an old steamer trunk, a small stool and a bright red calliope organ. The ceiling was higher than I expected as well. I could stand at my full height without stooping.

I walked slowly towards the old steam organ. It was bright red, and in excellent condition, except for a thick layer of dust. There was a small brass plaque simply reading “The Calliaphone”. The brass pipes that stuck out from the top still shone faintly under the dust, and I noticed that there was writing, carved onto the cover of the keyboard. It read: “Be still, for there is strange music”.

I went to the steamer trunk next, and was surprised to find it unlocked. Opening it released a cloud of dust and I coughed a few times before I got the heavy lid up. Inside were dolls. Lots of them. They looked old, with ragged, limp cloth bodies topped with oversized round heads and large, painted eyes that stared up from their shadowed trunk. The hair on each was intricate and woollen, and while they certainly weren’t the sort of dolls a ventriloquist would use, the heads had similar mouths, wooden blocks that would have opened and closed to simulate speech. At least, they should have had. Almost all of them had had their jaw block roughly torn off, leaving nothing but jagged splinters between their cheeks.

There were 23 dolls I counted in total, and only one of them still had its jaw intact. It was the oldest-looking by far, and was a small clown doll. Its threadbare body was white and purple polka-dot, with three pompoms down the front, and a ruff just below the head. It had no woollen hair left, but instead had a tall, pointed white cap on top. Its face was painted a pure white, and its eyes were shut, with black lines drawn across them. The only colour was a splash of red across the hinged jaw. A smile.

Like I said, I’m not scared of clowns, and I’m not scared of dolls. The thing was ugly, though. I was kind of relieved, actually, to have found some of my grandpa’s old things that I would have no problem throwing away. Or maybe selling. They were definitely antiques, so they might have been worth something. In any case, I put the nasty-looking clown doll back in the box and closed the lid. I definitely closed the lid.

[DOOR OPENS]
I went back over to the calliope. There was-

JESSICA
I thought it was pronounced “Ka-lee-o-pee?”

ARCHIVIST
Jessica? You’re… back early – I thought you were trying to get hold of those police reports for the Harold Silvana case?

JESSICA
Tried and succeeded. They were actually quite helpful.

ARCHIVIST
Oh… well. Good work.

JESSICA
So, do we know if it’s pronounced “Ka-lee-o-pee” or “Kuh-ly-o-pee”?

ARCHIVIST
I have also heard it said as “Ka-lee-ope”.

JESSICA
Seriously? By who?

ARCHIVIST
Americans.

JESSICA
Ugh.

ARCHIVIST
As far as I can tell there isn’t a “correct” pronunciation. But they were originally named after the Greek muse Calliope, so…

JESSICA
Are people going to understand that it’s from Greek mythology?

ARCHIVIST
If they’re working for the Magnus Institute, then I would hope so.

JESSICA
I’ve just heard it more often as “ka-lee-o-pee”.

[DOOR CLOSES]
ARCHIVIST
Statement continues.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I went back to the calliope. There was no lock on the lid, or any switch that I could see on the outside. I opened it, and the keys inside shone as though they had just been polished. Now, at the time I didn’t know how a calliope worked. I just thought it was like a weird pipe piano. I didn’t know that there needed to be a blower working for the thing to play, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have known where to find one or how to use it. By rights, when I sat in front of it and pressed the first key down, nothing should have happened. The four tall rows of brass whistles should have remained silent. Instead, there came a loud, howling tone from one of the pipes and I almost fell off my seat in surprise. I remember once, hearing the sound of a steam organ could be heard from over a mile away, and when that shrill whistle sounded I could believe it.

I started to play a tune. My grandpa had had a piano once. It had broken years before and he’d never had the money to replace it, but he had taught me the basics. There was one tune that, when I was a child, I always insisted he play to me. He never told me its name, if it even had one. I always used to just call “Faster Faster”, by way of a description. A cheery, upbeat circus melody that started out almost unbearably slow and gathered in tempo, getting faster and faster until my grandpa’s fingers were a blur. He always indulged me when I asked him to play it, and now I played it for him. The wailing whistles were almost deafening in that cramped space. I knew I’d probably be hearing from the neighbours about it, but I didn’t care. I just played.

The tune got faster, more frantic, and I felt something building inside me. It was like final closure for the loss of my grandpa was just out of reach, and if I got faster, if I played with enough speed I could catch it. But my finger slipped, and the music abruptly became a discordant cacophony. I never was as good as Grandpa Nick. I sat there in silence for a minute. When I turned to leave, though, I saw that the old steamer trunk was open, and the clown doll lay on top of the pile. Even though its painted eyes were still shut, I felt like it was looking at me. Its smile seemed slightly wider than before. I shut the trunk and climbed down the ladder.

I didn’t really think about the weird things in the loft over the next week or so. I had too much else to do. It was only when Josh was next round, and asked me why the small hole into the attic was open, that I remembered. I told him I had something cool to show him, and got the ladder out. He was suitably impressed by the calliope, but freaked out a bit over the dolls. I didn’t realise he was scared of them. He made me shut the steamer trunk almost as soon as he saw them, and kept looking over to make sure it was closed. I decided not to tell him about the first time it had popped open.

He asked if I could play anything on the ancient steam organ, and so I sat down and began to play my grandpa’s old circus tune. Again I began to pick up speed, to play faster and faster as the whistles began to shriek. I felt a hand touch mine firmly, abruptly stopping the music. Josh stood there, shaking slightly, his face deathly pale. On impulse I looked over to the chest of dolls, but the lid was firmly shut. I asked him what was wrong and he said he didn’t know. He just wanted to leave. Now. So we did. Climbed back down out of the loft, and I lowered the wooden trapdoor behind us.

The next few weeks were… unpleasant. I don’t want to go into detail. Let’s just say I discovered that Josh was just another asshole after all. Our relationship was already going through a rocky patch. It didn’t help that in those last weeks he became moody, short-tempered, constantly on edge. When I finally found out that he had… It doesn’t matter. We broke up. It left me pretty much destroyed, coming so soon after my grandpa’s death. I just tuned everything out again.

Eventually, it was tripping over a box that did it. One of the ones I’d put all my grandpa’s stuff into, and never actually got round to putting in the loft. I decided to just get it over with. I guess I hoped a tidier house would give me more space to think. So, for the third time, I got out that ladder and climbed into the loft. It didn’t take as long to store all the boxes as I’d thought, and within an hour I was done. I had been so intent on packing away all my memories that I hadn’t even looked at the old steamer trunk. As I went to climb down I glanced over, and I froze.

The lid was open again, and the clown doll was on top. It wasn’t looking at me this time. Instead, it seemed to be facing a doll I hadn’t seen before. This one still had its jaw as well, and I swear it looked just like Josh. Same tatty brown jacket, same old jeans. Its black, woollen hair even did that flicky thing he always spent so long getting right. It was lying against the side of the box, and I swear it looked like the clown was reaching for it. I slammed the box lid down and got the hell out of there. I bought a padlock the next day.

Now, I’ve brought a copy of the police report I gave, because you have to believe me that I did not play that calliope again. I had nothing to do with what happened to Josh. I came home from the cinema about a week later to find that my grandpa – my house had been broken into. Here, it’s all in the report on the burglary I gave to the police. The front door lock was shattered and it swung gently to and fro. At first I ran into my living room, my bedroom, but nothing had been taken. The electronics, my jewellery, it was untouched. I felt my stomach drop as I realised, and ran towards the loft. Sure enough, it was open, the padlock torn from its hook. The calliope and the steamer trunk were gone.

They questioned my neighbours about it. None of them had seen anything, except for Mrs. Harlow next door, who said she noticed two people taking out pieces of red sheet metal and brass pipes. She didn’t remember any details, just said that they “looked legitimate” and she thought I was having some things moved. The police never found them.

I just need you to believe that. To know I didn’t play the thing again. It wasn’t my fault, what happened to Josh. God knows I hated him enough back then, but… I could never have called anything like that upon him. Not like that. I don’t suppose you need me to tell you how they found him. Four days later, dead in his room. His throat was crushed. And his jaw was torn clean off. The police never found it.

I wouldn’t have thought of it, really. Wouldn’t have… put it all together even then. Not if it hadn’t been for the fact that, in the last days of our relationship, Josh had broken down. He told me that he still heard that calliope music. Far off, when he was alone. And it had been getting gradually closer. I mean, they say you can hear one from almost a mile away.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

While I have what I would consider to be some natural reservations about a tale of murderous clown dolls, there are a few things that make me more inclined than usual to believe this statement. Firstly, as Ms. Denikin mentioned, she did provide a copy of the official police report into the burglary, which includes testimony from one Irene Harlow that appears to confirm Ms. Denikin did possess both a steamer trunk and calliope organ, so those at least existed.

The death of Joshua Drury is also at least as mysterious as she made it sound. In addition to his jaw being torn clean off his skull, residual evidence indicates that his throat was crushed with some sort of rope, apparently woven out of thick wool. There was no evidence of a struggle or of forced entry, no DNA evidence of anyone in the room aside from himself. No-one was ever arrested for the crime.

When discussing this case, Tim said it reminded him of some articles he’d read on travelling circuses in Russia and Poland during the early 20th century. On a whim, I hunted down a few of the volumes he mentioned in the Institute’s library, and sure enough, on page 43 of Gregory Petry’s Freaks and Followers: Circuses in the 1940s, I found a reproduction of an old black-and-white photograph. It shows a small group of carnival workers: a contortionist, a fire-eater, two strong-men, a ringmaster and an organist sitting behind a calliope.

The photograph is labelled as being from 1948 and taken in Minsk, Russia. Only the ringmaster and organist are named: Gregor Osinov and Nikolai Denikin. The name of the troupe was Цирк другого [[Tsirk druh-grova]] – the Circus of the Other. The name rings a bell, but I can’t find any other reference to it.

Ms. Denikin emigrated to South-East Asia two years ago, so was unavailable for any follow-up, but I’m sure there must be more on this somewhere in the Archives. Because I know for a fact that sitting in the Magnus Institute’s Artefact Storage, is a bright red Calliaphone steam organ.

When I asked Carmilla, she just told me that the record of its acquisition was “probably in the archive somewhere,” and no-one else knows anything beyond the fact that it was acquired somewhere in 2007. The keyboard cover is firmly locked, and scratched into the surface are the words: “Be still, for there is strange music.”

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Mark Bilham, regarding events culminating in his visit to Hither Green Chapel. Original statement given April 19th, 2015. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Let’s get one thing straight right now. I don’t think I should be here. What happened was really weird and I’m pretty sure it was illegal, but it can’t have been actually supernatural. Like ghosts and stuff. That’s not real. No offence, I guess. I’m just here because I told Kathy what happened, and she insisted that I tell your Institute. She’s more open to that kind of thing than me. Maybe that’s why she chose to live with Natalie.

Sorry, I should start at the beginning. Kathy’s my girlfriend. Katherine Harper. We’ve been dating about a year and a half now. She graduated last year but I’m doing a medical degree, so I’m not leaving London for another couple of years. She managed to get a job as a trainee teacher up in East Ham, so ended up staying as well. I’ve got to say I’m glad about it. I’m not sure how good I’d be at a long-distance relationship. Anyway, the original plan was to move in together sooner, but stuff didn’t match up properly and this was before she got the job, so she had to move back with her parents for a while. Long story short, I had to get a houseshare with some other med students, and she came up later, moving in with Natalie Ennis.

I don’t know where Kathy met her. They’ve always been friends, but I don’t think she was at uni with us. She never talked about it if she was. Kathy grew up in London, so maybe they were friends from school or something. She seemed nice, when I met her. Quiet, but nice. She was very serious, though. I don’t know if I ever actually heard her laugh. Maybe she just didn’t find my jokes funny. Who knows? She was religious, too. I’ve never had much time for God, myself, and Kathy didn’t either. That’s why I was kind of surprised the first time I visited her new place and found a framed Bible quote on the wall. Can’t remember what it was. Something about Jesus and faith, I don’t really know Bible stuff. Kathy said it was Natalie’s. She didn’t mind her putting it up there in the living room. Kathy’s nice like that, you know? Just letting people be themselves.

Me and Natalie… didn’t get on. I don’t know if you picked up on that. We didn’t hate each other or anything like that, we just… didn’t have anything in common. She didn’t really watch TV or movies, and I didn’t know anything about crochet, politics or God, which were pretty much her only interests. Kathy was always trying to get her to come out with us, and she’d just say no, which was fine by me. She always seemed happy enough, though, hooking yarn into whatever she was making at the time, reading some boring book on the political history of the bonnet or something.

That changed last October, when Natalie’s mum died. I don’t know how it happened, exactly. Heart failure, I think. It was sudden, I know that much, and it hit her hard. I mean, obviously it did, it was her mum, but I think… I think she lost her faith. The Bible quote wasn’t on the wall the next time I went over, and when I asked Kathy about it, she gave me a look like I shouldn’t bring it up. I didn’t see much of Natalie after that. She was still around, I’d sometimes see her heading into the kitchen to get some food or tea or something, but apart from that she just stayed in her room.

So far, so normal, right? You lose your mum and it messes you up. That month was sad, but it’s not what Kathy wanted us to talk to you about. No, it was what happened afterwards. It was after Natalie found her new church. It was Kathy who told me about it. This must have been about two months after Natalie’s mum died. I must have asked how she was doing, if she was feeling any better. Kathy said that, yeah she was. Apparently, she’d found a new congregation and seemed to be getting some comfort there. She hadn’t been crying so much at night, Kathy said, and hadn’t been quite as prickly when she tried to talk. I noticed that the Bible quote hadn’t gone back up, though.

I thought if she was doing better I’d probably see Natalie around more when I stayed with Kathy, but if anything she seemed to almost completely disappear. She never seemed to be there when I went over. I’d see her leave in the evening and come home early in the morning, just as the sky was starting to get light. She’d go straight into her room, ignoring us completely. When I asked her where she’d been one time, she just told me “church”. I asked her a few more questions, but she stared at me in this weird way until I got freaked out and left the room. I joked with Kathy that her flatmate was turning into a vampire, but instead of laughing she just got defensive and said that Natalie couldn’t be a vampire. Then she started listing times she’d seen her in the sunlight, before just kind of trailing off. I think we both realised how messed up it was if she could list the number of times she’d seen Natalie in daylight.

Other strange stuff began to happen around the flat as well. The light bulbs kept blowing, to begin with. Well, that’s not entirely true. It always seemed to be that when we got in after dark, we’d try to turn on the lights and, well, nothing would happen. At first, we just threw the old bulbs out and replaced them, but it kept happening. We checked the fuses, the sockets, Kathy even called the landlord to have someone check out the wiring, but it all seemed fine. The lights kept not working, though. Then I had a thought. The next time it happened, instead of changing the light bulb, I just tightened it. Just like that, it turned back on. The first time this happened, I was so surprised I nearly fell off the chair I was stood on. The bulbs hadn’t been breaking, someone had been unscrewing them. Not much, not enough that we could spot it, just enough for them to not work. I say ‘someone’ had been doing this, but there was only one person it could have been. For some reason, Natalie had been unscrewing all the lightbulbs in the flat, every chance she got.

That was also when Kathy started to look so tired. She kept nodding off when we went out for dinner and would often zone out when we were watching TV. I asked her about it, but she just brushed it off and said she hadn’t been sleeping well. It wasn’t until she was so tired she almost walked out in front of a car while she was crossing the road that I finally got her to tell me what was going on. She said that Natalie had started staying home at nights, but she was so loud that it stopped her sleeping. Natalie would wander through the living room and sing, in a language Kathy didn’t know, and the tune was so discordant that it set her teeth on edge. Natalie would stop singing if she came into the living room, but would then just move to her room and the song would start again.

Kathy even said that when Natalie did leave, always at night, there would still be the sound of movement from her room. Shuffling, thumping noises, and occasionally the sound of something being knocked onto the floor. She’d come close to opening the door so often, but could never bring herself to do so. It seemed to be louder when she was trying to sleep, and once she thought it had moved into the living room, but she didn’t go out to check. So no, Kathy wasn’t getting much sleep. She started staying over with me a lot, as she said she just couldn’t handle living alone with Natalie.

One night, she arrived at my house almost in tears. I took her up to my room, and sat her on the bed. She stared at me for a few seconds and I was about to ask what was wrong, when she started to speak. She said that Natalie had tried to ‘convert’ her. She had come to Kathy’s room earlier that night, knocked on the door, very polite. She’d seemed cheerier than she had since her mum’s death, and asked if Kathy wanted to have some dinner and talk. Now, obviously, Kathy had wanted to discuss moving out for months, but she’d never been in a fit state, so she jumped at the chance.

The dining room was dark. Natalie must have unscrewed the lightbulb again because the switch did nothing. Thin slivers of moonlight coming through the curtains gave just enough light to see the table, and two bowls at either end. Natalie sat at one end, and waved for Kathy to sit at the other. Kathy had wanted to run… but didn’t know quite how to do so. She said it would have felt… rude. So she sat down, and tried to eat what Natalie had prepared. She thought it might have been spinach, but if so it must have been boiled for far too long and all that remained was a stringy, limp mush. It was stone cold, and she could barely get through two forkfuls before she started to retch; it was so slimy. She pushed it away as gently as she could. She said Natalie just watched, not even glancing at her own bowl.

Finally, Kathy managed to get the nerve to speak, and told her she wanted to move out. There was silence for a long second, and then Natalie had said that she did as well. I’ll admit I sighed with relief when Kathy said that, but she shook her head and continued. Natalie had begun to speak, longer and in more detail than she had for a long time. She had said that she needed to move out, that she had a new home to be going to, a new family. She said that they were all going, that 300 years was a long time to wait, but she was lucky to have found it so close to the end. She said that it wasn’t long until they were collected by Mr. Pitch. She said that Kathy could come too, if she liked. She could be saved.

It was at this point Kathy realised Natalie was talking about her ‘church’. She became… very scared, and stood up, telling Natalie thanks, but she wasn’t really one for Christian worship. And Natalie laughed at this. Laughed long and hard, never breaking eye contact. She had said, “No, but you’re a natural for Them. You’re worshipping as we speak.” It was at that point Kathy ran, and came over to my house. Natalie hadn’t tried to stop her.

At this point I was angry as all hell. If Natalie wanted to join some weird cult, and by that point we were both sure that’s what it was, then that was her business, but she was scaring Kathy. There was no way I was going to let that stand. I told her that I was going over to her flat and was going to have it out with Natalie. I don’t know what I was going to do. I mean, I wasn’t going to hit her or anything; I just needed to make it clear that you couldn’t just screw with people’s lives like this. Kathy told me not to go, but she wasn’t in any fit state to stop me. I got in the car and started to drive.

It was an overcast night, and without the moon the streets were dark. The lamps on the road seemed… dull, and even my headlights didn’t reach as far as I thought they should. It wasn’t far to the small house. I didn’t expect any lights to be on, but the silent darkness of the place still sent a shiver down my spine. I had a key to the door, and let myself in. I’d taken a torch from my car, and sure enough, the lights weren’t turning on. The hallway was silent, but my nerves were on edge, and I started to look through each room in turn. Nothing. There was no sign of Natalie at all.

I stood there, in front of her room. It just had a normal, wooden fire door, but my hand still hesitated as I reached to open it. I knew it was empty, by now I was sure she wasn’t home. Still, I was starting to feel that fear that Kathy had described, and I saw that my hand was shaking. I tried to ignore it, grit my teeth, and I opened the door.

The room inside was empty, as I had thought. But it wasn’t just that Natalie was out; it was completely bare. No furniture, no possessions, nothing. The carpet had been torn up, leaving the bare floorboards exposed and the wallpaper had been stripped from the wall. All of it had been stuffed and nailed up against the room’s only window, leaving it completely covered. No light from outside got through, and the torch was the only reason I could see at all. I started to look around for any clue to what Natalie had been doing, or where she had been.

In the corner, half-slipped between the boards, I spotted a piece of paper. It was small and thick, and seemed to have something written on it. Picking it up, I saw it had three words on it: Hither Green Dissenters. The other side had a symbol of some kind, written in thick marker pen: a curved line, with four straight lines coming off one side of it. Like a closed eye. I kept the paper, and your Institute can have it if you want. It’s not like the police were interested in it.

I called Kathy to tell her what I’d found. She was worried about me, but also about Natalie. Whatever this weird church was that she’d joined, I think we both reckoned it might be bad for her. Really bad. Kathy wanted to phone the police, but I told her there just wasn’t enough for it to be a crime. Not yet. I told her I’d keep looking. I might have lied, to be honest, and said I was just going to look around the house more, but… well, I did a search for Hither Green Dissenters and it looked like there was an old abandoned chapel, the Hither Green Dissenters Chapel, in a graveyard near Lewisham. I had decided that I needed to check it out. No idea what I was hoping to find. Enough to call the police in, I guess.

By now it was just past midnight; the drive down wasn’t too difficult. There was still that thickness to the night, a heavy gloom that deadened all light. Like someone had turned the brightness down on London. I found a parking spot not too far away from Hither Green Cemetery, and started to walk towards it. The iron gates stood wide open, so I went in.

The graveyard itself wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. If anything it felt quite peaceful. The darkness seemed right for it, and the stones stood silent and firm. I walked along the path, until my light fell across a small building. The chapel. It was tiny, surrounded by temporary fencing that looked like it had been there long enough to become permanent. It had a single, pointed bell tower, and the windows were covered with old boards that looked like they’d seen the worst of the rain. There was only a single entrance, a pair of double doors set at the front. To my surprise, they stood open. I called out Natalie’s name, shouted and asked if anyone was in there, but there was only silence.

I shouldn’t have gone in. Of course I shouldn’t have gone in. I’m not that stupid. I’ve never been that stupid. But for some reason, standing there in that dark, empty cemetery, I made the decision to look inside.

It was easy to squeeze past the barriers. I still had my torch with me, but it didn’t shine very far in. I entered slowly, casting my light over everything, just in case there were some hooded cultist freaks waiting to jump me, but there were only old, broken pews, discarded bottles and cigarette ends. The normal detritus any abandoned building collects. I was just about to turn around and leave… when my torch died.

Immediately I was plunged into complete darkness. No light was coming in through the door. I couldn’t even see where the door was, everything around me was pitch black. I tried to get the torch to turn back on, turning the bulb and hitting it in a near panic. I tried to take the batteries out and put them back in, but I couldn’t see anything, and I ended up fumbling and dropping them. I knelt down and tried to feel where they were, but the ground felt… odd. I hadn’t paid much attention to it when I first came in, but the floor had been chipped, dusty and covered with a layer of junk. But… when I started to feel around for the batteries, it felt smooth and clean and very cold, like marble or something.

I called out for help, but my voice just echoed in the silence. Then the singing started. It seemed like there were dozens of voices, but they didn’t match together right. Some were singing really high and others so low it made my teeth hurt. The words were in some other language, but I remember they kept coming together for the words “Nee-allisand” or “allisunt”, I think. I was freaking out, so I got to my feet and started to walk forward as fast as I was able, my hands stretched out in front of me in case I hit anything. The chapel couldn’t have been more than thirty feet long, and maybe twenty wide, but I walked for well over a minute without hitting anything. I just staggered through the complete darkness, with that awful singing everywhere. At one point I honestly thought I might have died and gone to hell.

Finally, my fingers brushed against something. It was cold, like the floor, but rough. It felt like rusted metal. Thin strips of rusted metal in a criss-cross pattern, with small gaps between them. At least, that’s what it felt like. I didn’t hold on to them for very long, because as my hands rested there, I felt… fingers reach through the holes and try to grab me. I couldn’t see them, but they felt leathery as they brushed against my skin.

I screamed and leapt back, falling to the floor, and as I did so I felt something hard jab me in the hip. My phone. In all that had happened I had forgotten I had it. I reached in and pressed the button and the screen lit up, faint and barely visible, but I started crying like it was the first light I had seen in months. It didn’t light up anything else, but as the singing began to crescendo I desperately went to the torch function and turned it on. And it did turn on, in a sudden flash of brilliance, and the singing stopped.

In the silence I shone the makeshift torch in front of me and saw a broken pew. The floor was once again covered in junk and I could see the doorway behind me, leading out into the night. I ran, calling Kathy first, and then the police.

They didn’t find anything, of course. They gave me a telling off about trespassing and took down a missing person report about Natalie. Nothing was found, and as far as I know she’s still gone. I didn’t tell Kathy exactly what happened for a few weeks, but when I finally did, she made me come here and talk to you

I think that’s everything. Can I go now?

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

The last section, naturally, is the one that invites my scepticism, but let us disregard that for now and discuss the other aspects. Nastya has confirmed that Natalie Ennis was reported missing by Mr. Bilham on March the 11th, 2015. There were no leads regarding her location beyond the piece of paper mentioned in the statement, and no traces of any church or cult was found within the Hither Green Dissenters Chapel, or the graveyard surrounding it. When we contacted Mr. Bilham and Ms. Harper to follow up, neither of them had heard from her in the intervening year, nor did they have anything to add to the statement.

The symbol upon the piece of paper does indeed resemble a stylised, closed eye, and there are enough other parallels to statement 0020312 to make me suspect – and a suspicion is all that it is at present – that the People’s Church of the Divine Host may still be in existence. Also of note, the words “Ny Alesund”. I don’t know for sure if Mr. Bilham remembered them correctly, but Jessica pointed out that Ny-Ålesund is actually a small town in Norway. In fact, except for research installations, it is the most northerly human settlement on Earth, located at a latitude of North 78°55′30″. It is a company town, owned and operated by Outer Bay, but what it has to do with Mr. Bilham’s account is anyone’s guess. Assuming it isn’t all… coincidence. That far north… during the winter… nights can last for a very long time

Nastya found one other thing while combing through police reports for the Hither Green area. About a month after this statement was given, on May 15th, 2015, police were called out to once again investigate the chapel. Neighbours had apparently heard screams from inside, just after 11pm, but when officers arrived they found nothing to indicate any sort of incident or foul play. I’d be content enough to ignore this… if it wasn’t for the fact that, according to the official file, May 15th, 2015 was the day Gertrude Robinson, my predecessor, passed away.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Are you sure you’re all right to do this now? You can take a few days off to recover if you need.

JESSICA
No, it’s fine. Nastya’s getting me a coffee, and I’d rather get this down while it’s still fresh in my mind. Besides, you didn’t give Tim any time off when he had a bad experience.

ARCHIVIST
Tim had to start living in the archives. I mean, I could hardly give him a holiday in the office. Anyway, he wasn’t injured.

JESSICA
It’s just a scratch, Raph. I’ll be fine. Can we begin?

ARCHIVIST
Okay. Statement of Jessica Orsinov, assistant archivist at the Magnus Institute, London, regarding…

JESSICA
Let’s just call it ‘a series of paranormal sightings’.

ARCHIVIST
Statement recorded direct from subject, 2nd of April, 2016.

JESSICA
Right. Well, I’m sure you know I was sceptical about how dangerous this Jane Prentiss was when you first suggested Tim stay in the archive. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t believe him about what happened, it just seemed… Well, Tim is a great researcher, but his self-preservation instincts are not the strongest, and to be frank I thought that if this Prentiss were the danger everyone seemed to think, then he’d almost certainly be dead.

Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I’ve read the same statements and profiles as you, so I know how many people have died because of her. What was it, six hospital staff when she was first admitted?

ARCHIVIST
Six from colonisation and a seventh… with a broken neck from her escape.

JESSICA
But that was two years ago, and whatever she is now, it sounds like her condition is degenerating. I just wasn’t sure how much damage she’d still be capable of. So I guess… I didn’t take as much care as I should have when I was coming into the Institute yesterday. The thing is, I’m still not sure how much of a threat she is. I’ve seen plenty of those silver worm things squirming about outside, same as you, and I’ve made a point to step on them every time. What happened just made things more… complicated, I guess. I’m not really sure what to think.

I’ll start with the first thing I noticed. I live up near Finsbury Park, and my building is old. Victorian, I think, and though it’s been repaired and maintained quite well, it’s got all sorts of strange little quirks. One of these is the windows. The actual windows in the flats are fine, but the stairwells – they have slightly warped glass, where the windows have those little bubbles. Looking down on the street below can be a bit strange, as the glass bends the light and distorts whatever’s below it. I never really paid much attention to it until a few days ago, but it’s not a new thing.

It was the day before yesterday when I first saw it. When I’m heading down the stairs in the morning, I sometimes like to spend a few seconds looking out of the window at the people on the street below. I’ll move my head so that I see them through the warped glass, and they’ll distort like a funhouse mirror. It’s a bit daft, but I have a pretty dreary commute down to Victoria, so I take my fun where I can get it. Well, on that morning I paused before the window, and noticed one of the warped figures below was… off, slightly. It looked too tall, the limbs and body were very thin and almost wavy, like they didn’t have any structure or bones in them. I, I couldn’t make out a face, but it was the hands that were the most bizarre. They seemed to be stretched and inflated by the distorted light, until they were almost the size of the rest of the torso. The fingers were long and stiff, and seemed to end in sharp points. It stood completely motionless, and I could feel it staring at me.

Moving my head to the side, I saw that the actual person I had been looking at was a large man with long, blond hair. He was neither stood still nor facing me, instead moving around the display of the flower shop opposite my building. Nothing about the guy seemed especially out of place, but I made a mental note to keep a lookout for him. I checked again through the bubble of bended glass and again I saw that tall figure with its limp arms and huge hands.

Now, you know me Raph, I’m, I’m not exactly the bravest person in the world. I generally avoid horror and I tend to stay off rollercoasters in the rare situation I have a chance to ride them. So I was as surprised as anyone that this undeniably sinister figure wasn’t causing me more distress. I mean, I was a bit nervous, sure. I’ve never had any direct experience with the supernatural before, and the more I looked and checked and double-checked, the more sure I was that supernatural was exactly what it was. To be honest, I was surprised how quickly I accepted that. I’ve always considered myself a bit of a sceptic, and until recently I’d have said working at the Institute only made me more so.

Anyway, I watched it for about ten minutes, until the blond man bought a small bunch of lilies and walked away. Once he was gone, the distorted figure with the long hands disappeared as well. I headed down into the street and over to the flower shop. The woman working there gave me a bit of a confused look when I asked if there had just been a tall, blond man in her shop. She said yes there had, and no, she hadn’t noticed anything strange, and was I looking to buy some flowers. I was quite confused myself, and on a bit of an edge when I left. I was already late for work, though, so I decided to ignore it and just keep an eye out.

Sure enough, it wasn’t too long before I saw him again. There’s a small café I generally pop into when I head to work in the morning. I love the Institute’s building, of course, it’s beautiful, but from a money point of view, I really wish it wasn’t in Chelsea. Everything around here is so expensive. I generally walk down from Victoria Station. It’s a long walk, but quite pretty, and it gives me a chance to pick up a coffee on the way. As I said, I was running late that morning, so I was a bit conflicted about whether to get one, but as I looked in the window I saw a familiar figure at one of the corner tables. Again, the blond guy wasn’t looking in my direction, nor did he seem to give any indication that he was aware of my existence. He was there, though, and I was on the verge of walking in and confronting him when I noticed the time and decided getting to work was more important. Besides, what’s that old saying? “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”. I decided that if he turned up a third time, then I would ask him… something. I don’t really know what I was planning to ask him. “Are you secretly a monster?” probably would have been a great opener.

When I got here, I realised I needn’t have worried so much about the time. You were having some argument with Tim about… um, oh, who’s that architect he’s obsessed with?

ARCHIVIST
(slightly disgusted) Robert Smirke.

JESSICA
Yeah, that’s the one. So, I was starting to regret not getting a coffee and talking to tall, blond and monster, since it didn’t seem like I’d have missed much. I got on with my work, did some filing, cross-checked a few statements with police incident reports. I mean, I guess I don’t need to tell you what a day working in the archives entails. It was a quiet day, aside from when Tim thought he saw one of those silver worms and we spent (laugh) half an hour checking for it.

ARCHIVIST
(completely disgusted) Yes. I remember.

JESSICA
Come on, it’s not his fault he’s being stalked by some weird living hive.

ARCHIVIST
I know, but it would have to have been Tim, wouldn’t it? I mean, anything goes wrong around here, it always seems to happen to him. Anyway, we’re getting off topic. Why didn’t you report this?

JESSICA
Seriously? If a member of the public came in, you would have torn that statement to shreds. No, I, I figured I’d get more evidence or it wasn’t worth mentioning.

Nothing else had happened until I left work. It must have been about half past six, so the sun was just about starting to go down, and I headed back up towards Victoria. The first thing I noticed out of the ordinary was that the café was still open. Normally they shut up about six o’clock, but the lights were on and the door was open. I couldn’t see anyone behind the counter, though, and there was only one customer. He sat there in the exact same position he’d been in that morning, drinking what could easily have been the exact same coffee.

I looked around to see if there was anyone else who could confirm what I was seeing. The street was empty, but as I looked, a car drove past. In the curving glass of its tinted windows, I saw him there, the weird distorted body, rail-thin and limp, the hands huge and sharp. And then the car passed on and I turned back to see a normal-looking man. But now, for the first time, he was looking at me. He gestured to the chair across from him, clearly inviting me inside. I don’t know why I wasn’t more scared going in there, but I wasn’t. My curiosity apparently conquered my nervousness.

He didn’t speak when I sat down, and I saw his coffee cup was empty. Whatever was inside had dried up hours ago. He seemed to be waiting for me to ask him a question. So I asked him what he was. He laughed at this, the first sound I’d heard him make, and it sounded… unnatural. Like he was laughing very quietly, but someone had turned up the volume up so I could hear it. He said it didn’t matter what he was, that he couldn’t describe it even if he wanted to. What was the phrase he used… “How would a melody describe itself when asked?”

This put my back up a bit to be honest, and I told him if he was going to talk in cheap riddles I was just going to leave. He actually apologised, told me I could call him Michael. I didn’t want to call him Michael; it didn’t seem to fit somehow, and the way he said it made me think that it definitely was not his name. Still, it wasn’t like I had any other name for him. – no, not for him. For it.

It sat there, clearly waiting for me to ask another question – so I did. I asked it what it wanted, and was told that it wanted to help.

ARCHIVIST
Help? With… what?

JESSICA
That’s what I said. Did it want to stop Jane Prentiss? It laughed that weird laugh again and told me that I had no idea what was really going on. It didn’t sound like it had any intention of telling me, though, it just seemed like it was amused by my attempts to understand. Then it said it didn’t care if I or my companions lived or died, but that “the flesh-hive was always rash”. It said it wanted to be friends. When it said this it put its hand in mine, and it may have looked like a human hand, but it was heavy. It felt like a… wet leather bag full of heavy stones. Sharp stones.

I pulled my hand away quickly and got up to leave. By this point I was just about sick of this weird thing that looked like a person but was not a person and talked in riddles. It made no move to stop me as I headed towards the door. As I was about to exit, though, it called after me, and said if I was interested in saving your life it would be waiting at Hanwell Cemetery.

ARCHIVIST
Sorry, saving my life?

JESSICA
Yeah. It called you by name. You.. Nastya. And Tim.

ARCHIVIST
That’s… intresting.

JESSICA
It really was. At the time I just tried to ignore it. I went home and I got as much sleep as I could. I don’t know if you noticed how tired I was yesterday, what with Nastya’s April Fools’ joke and everything.

ARCHIVIST
Don’t remind me.

JESSICA
Well, I was a bit of a mess. I checked the cafe on the way in, and on the way home, I even went down there on my lunch, but ‘Michael’ wasn’t there. Part of me wanted to tell you about it immediately, to make a statement, but even if you believed me I knew you’d try and talk me out of going to Hanwell Cemetery, and I had just about made my mind up to go. I didn’t know if what ‘Michael’ had said was a threat or a warning or just a lie, but I decided I couldn’t take the chance. So I went to the cemetery.

The sun was starting to go down when I got there, and the gates of the graveyard were lit with the bright orange of the dying light. It had been raining earlier that day, and the pools of water reflected the vivid colours of the sky. Hanwell is an old cemetery, and past the walls I could see the weathered old gravestones standing silent. As it turned out, I didn’t have to go inside. Michael was waiting for me next to the tall iron gates when I arrived. I caught a glimpse of its reflection in one of the deep pools of rainwater, and shuddered as I saw again – the warped body and swollen, bony hands.

It didn’t say anything when I arrived, just nodded at me to follow. I have no idea how long it stood there waiting for me. I expected to go into the graveyard, but instead Michael started walking down the road towards a nearby row of houses. The sign on the road said Azalea Close. Most of the buildings were in good repair, but there was one at the end that looked abandoned. It might have been a pub at one point, but now all the windows were boarded with metal sheets, and covered with dirt and graffiti. The door, however, was open and swinging gently. Michael went inside, clearly expecting me to follow, so I did.

Inside was dark and dusty. I was annoyed with myself that I hadn’t thought to bring a torch, but just enough of the setting sun came through the door for me to see by. It clearly had once been a pub, and the bar appeared to be intact, though riddled with woodworm. Sitting on top of it was what looked like a builder’s kit, with a toolbox and a small fire extinguisher. I was just about to ask Michael why we were here, when I heard it. A low, wet groan coming from the far end of the room, where the light didn’t reach. It sounded like someone in a great deal of pain.

I walked towards the noise. As I got closer my eyes began to adjust, and I saw the floor was covered in pale, writhing shapes. I had a listen to Nastya’s statement after you recorded it, so I knew what to expect. But hearing about something doesn’t even come close to seeing it. To smelling it. I expected to see what Tim described – a squirming mass that was once Jane Prentiss – but the figure slumped against the wall looked like it was once a man. The worms wriggled out through the holes in his skin. The ‘flesh-hive’, Michael had called it, and the silver things formed clustered knots where his eyes used to be. I couldn’t help it. I gasped.

It wasn’t a loud sound, and given how sick the whole situation made me feel I think I actually was quite composed. It was loud enough, though. The head snapped around to face me, dislodging a small cascade of twisting shapes. The mouth opened as he tried to scream, but that wasn’t what came out of his mouth. The worms also seemed to have taken notice and began to move towards me at an alarming speed. I backed away, but slipped on a piece of loose wood and fell into the bar. I glanced desperately at Michael, but it just watched me, its face unreadable.

I started to try and stamp on the worms as they approached, but there was just too many of them. Staggering to my feet, I felt my hand come to rest on something cold and metal – the fire extinguisher. Without thinking, I pulled the pin out and squeezed the handle. A cloud of gas shot out and, to my surprise, the silver worms began to shudder and recoil, shrivelling and dying. I began to walk forward, catching every last one in the jet of gas. Finally, I found myself standing over the mass of pitted and hollow skin that was once a man. He shuddered violently as the gas engulfed him, and then lay still.

I was breathing heavily, and the CO2 from the fire extinguisher was making me feel light-headed. For some reason I felt like I should check his pockets. They were empty except for a wallet. It was stained with blood and other… substances, but the name on the driver’s licence was still readable: Timothy Hodge.

As I stood there, staring at the wallet, I felt a sharp pain in my right arm. I looked up to see Michael, reaching into my shoulder. Its fingers were long and distorted as they reached through my skin, cutting it like paper. I screamed. After a few seconds, it withdrew its hand. Held there was a single silver worm, wriggling pathetically in its grip. I hadn’t even felt the thing burrowing into my arm.

After that it’s all a bit of blur. I remember I was going to phone the police, but Timothy Hodge’s corpse was gone, and I was worried about trespassing, so I just sort of wandered away. Michael, or whatever it was, had gone as well. Eventually I found my way back to the Institute, where I must have woken up Tim and, well, here we are.

ARCHIVIST
Yes, I, uh, suppose we are.

JESSICA
(expectant) So. What do you think?

ARCHIVIST
I think it is very intresting. I am gonna look into it more later.

JESSICA
I should really quit, you know. We, we all should. I don’t think this is a normal job, I, I don’t think this is a safe job.

ARCHIVIST
You’re right.

Do you want to quit?

JESSICA
No. I’m just… I’m just too damned curious, I suppose.

You?

ARCHIVIST
No.

Whatever’s going on, I need to know.

Get some rest.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Statement ends.

Obviously there is little we can really do to follow up Jessica’s experience. If it was any of the others I might have cause to doubt, but she has always been the most… level-headed of the team, and if she says that this is what happened, then I believe her.

This does at least explain what happened to Timothy Hodge, whose disappearance shortly after making his statement in late 2014 has been something of a concern since I discovered it. It seems odd how different the effect of Prentiss’… infestation was on him and Harriet Lee, but without more information I don’t have a working theory on why that might have been.

The thing that most disquiets me about Jessica's statement is this ‘Michael’. She seems pretty convinced that he was not human, at least not in the conventional sense. Almost every statement I’ve catalogued has engaged with the paranormal in some form of antagonistic relationship. The idea that there are things out there like that that want to help us… For some reason, that makes me more curious than the worm-infested creature stalking the Institute.

Jessica has taken a few days off to recuperate, and I’m having a word with Carmilla about getting some extra CO2 fire extinguishers for the Archive.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Paul McKenzie, regarding repeated nocturnal intrusions into his home. Original statement given August 24th, 2003. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
It’s strange to live alone. Maybe not if you’re used to it, I suppose. If you’ve lived a solitary life then I’m sure it doesn’t feel so isolated or empty. Heck, I remember a time when I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at living on my own. But now I’m so used to having other people in the house that it’s a sad, lonely existence I’ve found myself living. Even before I started having my nightly visitor.

My son Marcus moved out about two years ago, and before that he’d spent a lot of time away at university or, later, moving around because of his work. So I’d grown accustomed to his absence. But when Diane, my wife, passed away four months ago it has… left the place so terribly hollow. I tell myself that it was a mercy, that by the end her condition meant she wasn’t able to live as she deserved to. And while I’m sure it’s true, the sentiment does little to make the bed seem anything other than far too large for just me. She’d hate me saying that. Diane never had any time for mopers or people who wallowed in self-pity, but after forty years of marriage I think I’ve earned it.

The thing about living in a house full of people is that you can just ignore any noises that you hear in the night. Is that a creak on the stairs? It’s probably just someone going down for a glass of water. What was that thump? Probably Marcus up too late, and accidentally knocking things off the table. I know it doesn’t actually make you less likely to be robbed or broken into, but you stop panicking about it every time you hear the slightest noise from outside your room. I think that’s normal, at least. I’ve never considered myself to have a nervous disposition, but maybe other people just get on with things and don’t worry so much.

Still, since Diane died my nights have become a constant vigil. No house is silent if you listen hard enough, and since ending up alone, I have been listening so hard that at points I have to remind myself to breathe. Now every soft groan of the settling house is the sound of some violent thug or burglar in my home, waiting to see if they need to kill me. Marcus has suggested I get a pet so the house doesn’t feel so empty, but I’ve never had a pet before, and I’m too old to learn now.

Given how alert and paranoid I generally am when trying to sleep in an empty house, I’m sure you can imagine my terror when I heard something outside my room one night about a month ago. I’ve lived in the same house since I married Diane, and I know every squeaky floorboard. It was the one just at the top of the stairs. I waited, desperately straining my ears to hear any other sound of movement. I had heard no windows break or doors open downstairs, and I definitely hadn’t heard anyone coming up the stairs, but I was convinced there was someone there. I could feel their presence waiting on the landing. Had they realised how loud the floorboard was? Were they stood there, motionless, listening for any movement from me just as keenly as I was listening for them?

Then the sound came again, and I was sure there was someone stood at the top of the stairs, but rather than staying there, I began to hear the heavy tread of what was unmistakably footsteps. At first I… simply lay there, paralysed with fear, thinking that I would just… stay, let them take anything they wanted from the house, and call the police once they had left. But from what I could make out they didn’t seem to be going into any of the other rooms. They were slowly, and deliberately, walking towards my bedroom.

The door does have a lock on it, but it’s been so long since I even thought to use it that, at the time, I couldn’t even think where the key might have been. My heart almost stopped when I heard the door handle rattle ever so gently as a hand was placed upon the other side. And slowly, so painfully slowly, the doorknob began to turn. In a burst of adrenaline I didn’t even know I was capable of, I sprang out of the bed and across the room. I seized the handle and twisted it back the other way, using both hands to try and match the strength of whoever was on the other side.

Still the handle tried to turn, with a slow, relentless effort that spoke of patience and determination, but sheer panic lent me equal strength. My hands began to grow wet with what I assumed, at the time, was sweat, and I worried about keeping my grip. I did, though. For twenty long minutes, I wrestled in the dark over the door handle of my room. I could have reached the light switch, but that would have meant having only one hand to keep on the door, so I stayed in the dark.

Then all at once the pressure vanished. The handle no longer tried to turn. I had heard no other sound from outside, though. No footsteps leading away, no sound of someone going down the stairs, the house was just silent. I stood there for the rest of the night, the handle gripped tight. And it wasn’t until the first rays of sun peeked through the windows that I found I had the courage to open my bedroom door and look outside.

Nothing.

I was so stiff that I could barely walk back to my bed and dial the number for the police. It was as I reached for the phone that I looked at my hands and saw that what was on them was not sweat. It was blood. I checked all over my hands and arms for cuts or injuries. Nothing. And the door handle was completely clean. I washed my hands thoroughly before I dialled 999.

The police came and they listened patiently to my story. They checked all around my house, but there were no signs of any intruder. All the windows and doors were still firmly locked and there was no sign of forced entry, nor had any of my possessions been taken or even moved. The officers assured me it was no problem, that they were happy to help, all in that tone that told me they thought I was just a senile old man hearing things in the night. I thanked them as they left, even though they had been of no help whatsoever, and spent the rest of the day searching for the key to my bedroom door. I found it in the end, and hoped that with it firmly locked I could sleep a bit easier that night. I was wrong.

When evening came, I tried to sleep. At least, I had convinced myself that I was trying to sleep. Actually, I was listening for any sign that the intruder had returned. Every creak of the house settling, every whine of the pipes sent me into a state of near terror. By two o’clock in the morning I had heard nothing, and had almost convinced myself that I would not be visited again, when there was that slow, ominous creak of the floorboard at the top of the stairs. As before, the footsteps approached my bedroom, heavy and methodical. I turned on my bedside lamp and watched as once again the handle of the door began to turn. I could see the pressure being put on the door by whoever was on the other side, but it was locked, and as the door failed to open, there was a long pause.

Then it began to turn violently back and forth, rattling and banging as it rotated with such force that I worried it might come off entirely. I let out a cry as the assault intensified, and phoned again for the police. It took them twelve minutes to reach me, and all the while my bedroom door shook with the relentless turning of the handle, but the lock held firm. As soon as the doorbell rang, it went immediately still and silent. I didn’t want to unlock and open the door, but if I didn’t the police officers might break down my front door or, even worse, leave.

What happened next was almost identical to what had happened the day before, except this time there was less gentle tolerance in their voices when they spoke to me. I got the clear impression that if I called them again without proof, there would be… undesirable consequences. One of the two muttered something about how difficult it must be for me to live on my own, a message I got loud and clear. I have no intention of being put in a home.

And so, for the last month I have lain awake almost every night, as whatever it is beyond the threshold of my bedroom tries with all its might to get in. I watch the doorknob obsessively, always waiting for the signs of that gentle turning. The first ones are always so slow.

I tried to get proof for the police. I got Marcus to stay over with me a few nights, in the hope of either scaring the intruder away or having a witness who could corroborate my story. Those were the only nights I got any peace. Nothing came up to my door when he was there. In some ways it was a relief, to have a way of ensuring I could sleep, but it gave me no evidence to convince anyone, and I know he didn’t believe me when I told him what was going on. He just looked… worried when I brought it up, and I didn’t mention it again.

Unfortunately, I can’t get Marcus to stay with me every night. He has his own life to lead and is living with his fiancée at the moment, so I can’t just ask him to move back in with his dad. I tried to set up some cameras in the upstairs hallway, at the top of the stairs and outside my room, but they show nothing. They don’t even pick up the door handle turning, even at times I know for certain that the thing was trying to get inside. There was only one moment, just a frame or two, I think, where the shadows the camera caught on the wall seemed almost to form a face. It seemed to be leering at me, the mouth wide open in a mock scream. It scared me so badly that I had to delete the footage. I have no evidence for the police. Or for you either, I suppose.

I guess that’s why I’m here. This is what you people do. You investigate these things. You know what to look for and can identify the signs of things that… aren’t right. You know, not of this world. I’m not saying it’s a ghost or anything like that, it’s just… that well, if it was a ghost, you’d be the ones to talk to, right? I just need it to stop. And I don’t want to be put in a home. I know they will, if I keep telling them about how my door handle rattles and turns every night, they’ll think I’m senile and useless and send me to a home, and I will not let that happen. It’s my house, and I don’t care how much it scares me, nothing is going to make me give it up. Maybe Marcus is right. Maybe I should get a dog.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

I want to believe Mr. McKenzie, I really do. I am not entirely made of stone, and am apt to be moved by the plea of a scared old man as much as anybody. I mean, dementia is, of course, the most likely explanation, and he admits himself that he has no proof of any of it. Yet part of me still wants to believe him. Perhaps this job is making me sentimental.

In any case it’s a moot point. Mr. McKenzie died of a stroke some two months after making this statement, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious connection between his passing and his statement to the Institute. When this was originally logged, apparently we did send a then-member of the research staff, one Sarah Carpenter, to take some readings of the house. Apparently, she felt there was little enough danger to justify an overnight vigil at the place, but like everyone else in Mr. McKenzie’s tale, she encountered no strangeness or intruders on the upstairs landing, or in any other part of the building.

Nastya, who has now returned after her brief convalescence, has confirmed the call outs against police reports and they appear to match, though obviously they’re rather light on detail. Tim made contact with the son, Marcus McKenzie, but he declined to talk to us, saying that he’d “already made his statement.” This leads me to believe that Marcus McKenzie may also have a statement lurking somewhere here in the archives, lost among the mess and misfiling.

The only other thing that stands out from this as strange is that Sarah Carpenter, the researcher originally sent to look into this back in 2003, took some rather detailed photographs of the interior and layout of the house. Looking through them now, it strikes me that the bedroom door, to which Mr. McKenzie refers so often, does not appear to have a keyhole, or any sort of lock.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Please state your name and the subject of your experience.

JONNY
Into that? You’re fucking with me.

ARCHIVIST
I can assure you this will record just fine.

JONNY
I knew you guys were a bit… Shit, but this is absurd.

ARCHIVIST
No doubt you’re used to a higher calibre of equipment when pretending to see ghosts in old churchyards and mental institutions.

JONNY
People like a show. People like our show. And, even if we do ham it up a bit, even if we do add a bit of sparkle, we’re still more respected and evidence-based paranormal investigators than you and your lot. [NERVOUS, DISPARAGING LAUGH]

ARCHIVIST
We are not ‘paranormal investigators’. We are researchers. Scholars.

JONNY
Whatever. The fact is, we may play it up a bit for the camera, but that’s because you can only look at temperature spikes and EMF readings for so long. We still only look into genuine, documented supernatural phenomena. You take any ridiculous story, from any drugged-up, dreaming, traumatised idiot off the street. Vampires, monsters under the bed, mind control – really! Who cares about evidence, who cares about scientific instruments when you can just tell a story to the Magnus Institute!

ARCHIVIST
And yet you’ve come to make a statement.

JONNY
Well, yeah… But…

ARCHIVIST
[Smug] Let me guess. None of your ‘respectable’, paranormal investigators would believe you? or am i wrong?

JONNY
[SIGH]

ARCHIVIST
Well, let me be quite clear. Chances are very strong that I won’t believe you either. But we will take your statement. And we will look into it for you. Now, please state your name and the subject of your experience.

JONNY
My name is Jonny D'ville. I’ve got a YouTube channel called Ghost Hunt UK.

ARCHIVIST
And your statement is regarding…

JONNY
What I saw at the abandoned Cambridge Military Hospital when we were filming there in January 2015.

ARCHIVIST
Recording date 17th April, 2016.

Hold on, the Cambridge Military Hospital? I was under the impression the hauntings there were very well-documented. Why would none of your ‘respectable’ colleagues believe you? I would have thought it would be right up their alley.

JONNY
Because what I saw had nothing to do with the hospital itself. At least, I don’t think it did.

ARCHIVIST
Go on.

JONNY
Well, we’d been angling to film there for months. The show is pretty standard stuff – we head to the location after dark, we explore a bit, we set up the equipment, and then, of course, we spend some time afterwards analysing the data and –

ARCHIVIST
Seeing ghosts?

JONNY
Well, yeah. Y’know what? Sometimes, sure. We do. We get evidence.

Anyway, we’d been angling to go into the CMH for months, er, but I couldn’t get permission. Apparently there’s asbestos in the walls; it makes it “too much of a health and safety hazard”. It was due to be pulled down and turned into a housing development in June, though, so we were on a bit of a deadline.

Luckily, we’re an independent show. I don’t have anyone breathing down my neck or checking my legals about this sort of thing. And it wouldn’t be the first time that we were going to do something…

ARCHIVIST
Illegal?

JONNY
Unorthodox! And hey, the worst that we’ve ever got before was a fine, so we figured it wasn’t going to be too much of a problem. The team going in was meant to be me, my co-host Andy…

ARCHIVIST
Full names, please.

JONNY (STATEMENT)
My co-host, Andy Caine, as well as Peter Warhol on sound and Antonia Farron, er, Toni, doing camera work. Thing is Pete got cold feet a few days before we were due to head out. Apparently he just wasn’t comfortable with the possibility of asbestos. I guess I can understand, but it meant we were down a sound guy, so I put out feelers to see if anyone had any contacts who could step in.

Well, Lyfrassir Edda, who hosts the “What the Ghost?” podcast, knew someone. She’d said she’d done a few location episodes of WTG with a sound engineer by the name of Sarah Baldwin, and could vouch for her reliability, although Lyfrassir warned she was “a little bit unsocial”. I reckoned we didn’t need her talkative as long as she knew her stuff, so I gave Sarah a call. She agreed to help us out, and I figured the episode was going to come out just fine.

So, the night of the twelfth rolled around, and Toni came round to pick us up. She’s the one with the van, so generally does the driving. Me and Andy live together, so the three of us headed over to pick up Sarah. Her address was listed as in Sydenham, down in South London, but when we pulled up the building seemed dark. I don’t think it was abandoned or anything like that, but it certainly didn’t seem like anyone was home. Andy hopped out and buzzed her number on the doorbell, and after a minute of waiting there, there was no reply.

We were all just getting a little bit antsy, because if we don’t have a sound tech, we don’t have a show. So I gave Sarah a ring. And it went straight through to voicemail. I was just about ready to scream in frustration, but almost as soon as I put the phone down I got a call from an unknown number. I answered it, and immediately I heard her voice, asking if we were outside. I said yeah, and she ended the call immediately. We all watched the door, but another two minutes passed, and still no-one came out. Then, out of nowhere we heard a knock on the back of the van.

I hopped out, and standing there was Sarah. She was short, really short, with dark brown hair cropped close. She was wearing black cargo trousers and a grey T-shirt, with a light black jacket over the top. I… I thought that was a bit off as it was the middle of January. I mean, sure, it was a mild winter, but it’s a long way from T-shirt weather.

I introduced myself, but she just nodded and lit a cigarette. I was about to say that we’d prefer she didn’t smoke in the van, but she’d already opened up the back door and climbed inside, puffing away. I remembered Lyfrassir’s warning that she was ‘a little bit unsocial’ and kicked myself for not asking more about it. Still, she was here now, we had a sound tech, so we were going to be able to have an episode.

It was about a two hour drive to the CMH. It’s down in Aldershot, in Hampshire, and I’ve got to say that was about the longest two hours of my life. Sarah didn’t talk much. If you asked her any questions, you’d just get a one word answer, and, I swear, she worked hard to find the shortest word she could. She smoked constantly, so we had to ride with the windows down and the van was freezing.

And there was also… I don’t know. The oddest smell. It was definitely Sarah. It smelled like a really bad perfume: sharp and faintly floral, but not like any scent I could place. I didn’t like it, but it was hardly noticeable through those damned cigarettes. I could tell Toni was having a hard time too. Andy seemed happy enough, but he’s one of the most laid-back people I’ve ever met, so no surprise there.

We got into Aldershot about 8pm and headed toward the old hospital. It took a bit of finding, but eventually we saw it standing there, dark and silent against the night sky. It’s a pretty imposing building, the sharp-tipped clocktower above the main hall.

We parked a little way away, just in case there was security that might have stumbled across the van, and walked towards it. As we got closer, I noticed that Sarah was hanging back. I asked her if she was okay, and she just looked at me and said, “You didn’t tell me about this place.”

There was real anger in that voice. I was surprised, not only because that was the most words I’d ever heard her strung together, but also because I’d been really quite detailed about where we were going and the history of the place when I first contacted her.

I said as much, but she just shook her head. I asked if there was going to be a problem, and she paused, lit another cigarette, and gave me a slow shrug. Then without a word she picked up her bag and started walking towards the main building.

Getting inside wasn’t a problem. The ground floor windows were large, and it looked like we weren’t the first trespassers wanting to get inside; a few of the boards covering them had been pried away already. So, we turned on our torches and headed inside.

Now, the particular ghost we were after that episode was a grey lady. There are grey ladies everywhere. I mean, it’s not like it’s an official ghost classification, but if you find somewhere haunted in England, there’s a good chance that one or more of the ghosts will be called “The Grey Lady”. Old hospitals, asylums, orphanages, they’re usually believed to be the ghost of a nurse or something, anywhere that women had a duty.

And the Cambridge Military Hospital was no exception to that. Various old tales of soldiers being visited by an apparition in the night while recuperating on the ward; a few members of the public as it was opened up to the civilian population after the Second World War. They are generally benign encounters, even kind, so we were arguing about whether to try and angle the episode for spookiness, or try and build up a more emotional tale.

Eventually we decided to shoot both sorts for the storytelling and investigation, and then see what happened in terms of phenomena so we could intercut as appropriate. Throughout all of this discussion Sarah was totally silent. She was chain-smoking, casting her torch around slowly and deliberately, as if she was looking for something, and we were constantly having to adjust our shots to avoid her clouds of smoke interfering with the filming. I tried to ignore her, but to be honest she was freaking me out a lot more than the place itself.

So, we started wandering round, recounting the history of the place to camera. We made sure to film any bits of the building that might be creepy enough twice – once with low light in the cold, stark torchlight, then switching out for the warmer bulbs in case we wanted to use the footage for a tragedy angle. The builders had clearly been in already, and marked various areas with spray paint. It was a bit disconcerting, as the shade of red they had used kept making me think that they were blood splashes, so I was leaning towards the ‘creepy old hospital’ angle.

There was also the normal, actual graffiti, of course. Mostly the standard collection of tags, names, but there was one that stood out. It was in what had eventually become the children’s ward; over a mural of Winnie the Pooh, someone had scrawled in black spraypaint the words “Silk will not stitch the butcher’s meat”. So… yeah, by the end we’d pretty much settled on going for the spooky angle.

We hadn’t had any encounters though, so once we’d got the main footage we needed, we headed into the main ward, now a huge, empty room, with only the metal skeleton of curtain runners around the top. We set up the detection equipment, and bedded down for the night. Each of us had a watch, so as to make sure that someone was awake for any contact. I was hesitant to give Sarah a shift, as she’d be acting so strangely the entire time, but when she volunteered for the 2am to 4am shift, y’know, no-one wants that one, I, I couldn’t easily say no.

I was on the shift before, and there didn’t seem anything much to report. A slight drop in temperature around 1 in the morning, which I filmed, even though in the end we decided not to use that footage. When 2am rolled around, I walked over to where Sarah lay sleeping. She hadn’t been smoking for a while, of course, and that weird floral perfume of hers was stronger than ever. I reached out to touch her on the shoulder and wake her up, when she rolled over and looked right at me.

There was no sign of fatigue in her eyes, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been asleep at all. Or maybe just lying very, very still. I tried not to think about it as I crawled into my sleeping bag on the cold hospital floor, and the last thing I heard before I drifted off was the click of Sarah Baldwin’s lighter.

I woke up about an hour later. I don’t know what woke me, but the others were all still asleep. I realised that I couldn’t smell cigarettes, and looking around it appeared Sarah had wandered off. It was almost pitch dark, with only a small amount of moonlight creeping in through the boarded windows. I turned on a torch and checked the readings. There were no spikes in EMF, but it looked like the temperature had dropped sharply about 10 minutes before. I waited for another five minutes, but when Sarah still hadn’t returned I started to get a bit worried.

I should have woken the others, but if it turned out she’d just gone to the bathroom, I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of everyone. In that case she should have got one of us up to take over watching, anyway, but she’d hardly been the most professional while she was working with us, so it wouldn’t have surprised me if she hadn’t. After another five minutes, I decided to go look for her.

Maybe the place was getting to me a bit, but all my suspicions about Sarah were making me paranoid. I decided not to take a torch. Instead, I took one of the cameras we weren’t using and turned on the night vision setting. Through the viewscreen I was able to see where I was going pretty well.

I started to check the ground floor. The night vision cast everything into stark shapes, and every time I turned the corner it seemed like there was something there, just beyond the range of the camera. I couldn’t see or hear anything, but it was just there. I could feel it.

There was a smell as well, growing stronger. It wasn’t cigarette smoke, though, or Sarah’s strange perfume. It smelled of copper, with another scent beneath it, acrid and sour, with the faintest hint of ammonia. I’ll, I’ll admit it, I was scared. Scared enough that I didn’t even think about how great the whole thing would have looked in our show. I didn’t look into the camera, or provide any commentary, or make any move except keeping a close watch on the display.

As I walked up the stairs towards the upper floor, I began to hear something. It sounded like someone was talking. It was low, quick and desperate, with an edge to it that sounded almost like pleading. It was coming from one of the smaller patient rooms off to the side. I slowly crept towards it, feeling absurd about how terrified I was about being seen.

I reached the door and, using the camera, I peered inside. Sarah was there, with her bag next to her. She was gesticulating wildly and talking, though I couldn’t see anyone else in the room with her. I couldn’t make out most of it, though I heard the words “trespass” and “unintended” several times, and whispered apologies.

I was almost about to call out to her, when she suddenly stood bolt upright. It seemed like she was struggling to breathe. Then I heard an impact, and Sarah seemed to be flung across the room by a heavy blow. She hit the wall hard, and I heard a crack as she slumped down, a smear of blood left on the wall.

I froze. I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wanted to run over and see if she was alright, but I just couldn’t bring myself to move. After a second or two, Sarah stirred. She shouted something into the room, this time in a language I didn’t understand, and dragged herself to her feet. She removed her jacket and I saw that there was something very wrong with her left arm. Bits of it seemed to be hanging off where it had hit the wall.

She gripped it with her right hand and, er… well, this is where my colleagues would laugh me out of the industry. She peeled off the skin of her left arm. As if she was taking off a glove. I saw it stretch and come away from whatever was beneath. In the camera’s small viewscreen I couldn’t see what was there, what was underneath, but it was dark and shiny. I will never forget the sound of the skin coming away from her arm.

Once she had taken it off, she stretched it, and then slipped it back over her hand, pulling it until it was tight. She reached into her bag and, from beneath the packets of cigarettes, she pulled out a staple gun. Around the edges of the skin, where it met the rest of her, she slowly and deliberately stapled the skin down.

I don’t know why that was the point I ran. I could have left at any time before that, but for some reason that was the thing that broke me, and I hurried back to the others as quietly as I could. Sarah returned about fifteen minutes later, and didn’t seem to suspect she’d been observed. I lay awake the rest of that night, smelling her cigarette smoke and the traces of her odd floral perfume.

I never asked her about it. I never brought it up with the others. We got whatever daylight shots of the Cambridge Military Hospital we needed almost in silence, though Andy kept trying to strike up a conversation. The journey back was no better. I kept trying to get a look at Sarah’s arm, but her jacket sleeves covered them completely. We dropped her off in Sydenham and I never saw her again.

In the end it was actually Toni that asked we not work with Sarah Baldwin again. Apparently she’d gotten “weird vibes” and didn’t feel comfortable around her. I agreed, though I didn’t share my reasons. The episode came out okay, in the end though, um, though I didn’t include anything about what I saw that night.

ARCHIVIST
Interesting. You say you recorded video of the event?

JONNY
Yeah, I’ve given your guys a copy, but watching it back, the recording is so distorted that you can’t really make anything out.

ARCHIVIST
Hmm. And you’re sure you weren’t… dreaming?

JONNY
Are you serious?

ARCHIVIST
Obviously working in your field, you must have quite a powerful imagination.

JONNY
Great! Great! I should have known this was a complete waste of my time.

ARCHIVIST
Probably. The only corroborating evidence you have is so badly corrupted as to become almost unusable. But, we will do what investigation we can.

JONNY
[Acidly] Well, thank you so much.

ARCHIVIST
We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.

Statement ends.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
As I mentioned to Mr. D'ville, there is little in this statement by way of information we can follow up. Cambridge Military Hospital is currently in the process of being turned into a housing development, so there is not much to be done in that regard. There are records of a ‘grey lady’ ghost appearing in the past, specifically in the form of a nurse, though none of them come even close to matching this statement in terms of manifestation.

We were unable to track down Sarah Baldwin. The address Mr. D'ville provided in Sydenham has not been occupied for the last six month, and does not list her as a previous tenant. We contacted Lyfrassir Edda, who confirmed that she had worked with Sarah Baldwin on two episodes of her “What the Ghost?” podcast, having previously met her at a networking event. She knew nothing about her personal life and has not seen her since the last episode they worked on.

Neither the phone number or email address received any answer or reply. Still, where do I know the name Sarah Baldwin from? If I have the time, I might go back over some earlier files. See what I can find.

The footage Mr. D'ville provided was just as corrupted as she said, being virtually unwatchable. Just static and distortion. There’s only one or two frames where the quality is sufficient that anything can be made out. It appears to be an empty hospital room, as described. The only point where it differs from Mr. D'ville’s story is that there appear to be two figures in the shot, rather than just the one. The first seems to be kneeling, and matches the description of Sarah Baldwin. The other figure is much taller, and appears to be pointing, though no features can be made out, it does not appear to be touching the ground.

Recording ends.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Nathaniel Thorp, regarding his own mortality. Original statement given June 4th, 1972. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Are you interested in folktales at all? I know I’m here to provide a statement of my own experience, and I will, but there’s something so revealing in the stories that grow up in a culture, wouldn’t you say? And I promise it will be relevant by the end. I can guarantee it’s not in your library, either, because as far as I know this story has never been written down. I’d do it myself, but there’s a reason you’re having to write this for me. One of these days I’ll get around to learning my letters. Probably.

But I’ll still wager, illiterate or not, that I can tell you a story you haven’t heard before, though the themes are some that dance their way through many of the oldest folklore you can find: death. And games of chance. Well, if you want to win, anyway. Unless you fancy your chances of beating it at chess. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Once there was a soldier. A bold soldier. The sort you could find in any army, in any war, at any time. Fond of drink, fond of dice, fond of whatever nocturnal pleasures might be offered. He was bold as brass, yet bold is not the same as brave, and rarely did he take to the field of battle without somehow finding himself at the rear of the charge, where cannon and musket ball were less likely to find him. As I say, he could have been fighting anywhere, but this story is in New England, during the time of the Revolutionary War. Whether he was British or American or even French, it means nothing. What matters, is that at the Battle of Bunker Hill he found himself alone.

The night before had been wasted hard carousing, and what money he had not lost betting on faro had quickly been spent on drinking and pleasant company. So it was that he took to the field of battle with his head already swimming and eyes a stinging red. He had neglected even to bring gunpowder enough to reload his rifle, having filled his pouch instead with playing cards, and with every boom of the cannon the soldier’s head pulsed in such pain that he thought himself shot.

The smoke was coiled thick around him and the acrid stench of gunpowder and blood made him retch. He fired his one and only shot and it disappeared into the roiling fog of war. He tried to advance, but he did not know which way was towards the enemy, nor could he see any others amidst the chaos of battle, enemy or comrade. For all the muskets and cannons he could hear, it seemed he was alone. As he stood there, the soldier saw that some of the blood that fell into the sodden soil was his own. When he had been shot, he had no idea, but the pain that surged through him as he touched his wounded chest left no doubt.

The bold soldier considered returning to his lines, to find a doctor, but he remembered all too clearly the mouldering filth of the medical tents, the ranks of infected fools wailing out their last doomed cries. He would not die like that. He would not choke out some feeble plea for his mother in some grime-encrusted infirmary. He turned, threw down his rifle, and began to run. He did not know in which direction he was going, and simply prayed that it was not towards the enemy or the sea. Blood flowed freely from the ragged wound in his chest, and his breathing was laboured, yet he pushed on. He ran until the mud turned to soil and the soil turned to grass, until the smoke turned to fog and the fog turned to rain, and dusk came upon him.

Despite the balmy warmth of that June day, the night was bitterly cold. Perhaps it was the rain that pounded upon his tunic, or maybe it was the beginnings of a fever, but when the soldier finally stopped running, he was so chilled that it took all the energy he had left in him not to collapse. He was soaked through, shivering violently, and very aware that if he did not find somewhere to take shelter from the elements, he was going to die. And not a quick, clean death from a pistol or a sabre. A miserable, shivering death in some barren field near Boston. The soldier, whose boldness seemed to seep out with his blood, did not want to die.

And here there is something to be said on death. Everyone fears death. Of course they do. Even the most devout must have some apprehension, for however confident they are in a life everlasting with their deity of choice, the concept of eternity is one that the mortal mind recoils from. Be it bliss, torment or the senseless void, none can actually imagine what it is to die, so it’s only right that all should have a healthy fear of it. There are some, though, for whom it is an enduring terror. Who cannot even consider the inevitable termination of life without a deepest panic, and can think of nothing in life that could be worse than its end. The soldier was of this cloth, and upon feeling his time drawing to a close, he began to cast about in fear.

He spied a farmhouse, dark and uninviting. The fighting nearby had likely scared off whoever lived there. Desperate to get out of the pouring rain, the soldier tried the doors, and found them locked tight. He broke a window, but with his wound he did not have the strength to climb inside. In despair, he looked around himself for another entrance and spied the cellar door. It was not locked, and lifted with surprising ease, given how heavy the wood appeared. He collapsed inside, half-crawling, half-falling down the rough earthen steps, until he found himself lying there in the dark, dry warmth of the basement.

The soldier lay there for some time, unmoving, eyes shut. Listening to the driving New England rain beating down outside. He breathed deeply, ignoring the pain from his wounded chest, and tried to gather his thoughts. What was important, he considered briefly, was that at that moment, he was not dead.

It was then he caught the scent of damp. Not the damp of wet earth after a hot day, but the cold damp of vaults and catacombs, slick with mould and glimmering nitre. You would have expected Death to smell of decay, of rotting flesh and maggot meat, but it did not. And the soldier knew what it was immediately. Even before his eyes adjusted to the dark and looked to the table. Before he saw the figure that sat there in a moth-eaten monk’s robe. There was no reason to assume that what he saw was Death, and not simply some forgotten corpse, but there was no doubt in the soldier’s mind when he gazed upon it that he saw his doom embodied. Then it turned to look at the soldier, and what little resolve remained fled from his heart. He tried to run, but he got barely two steps before he collapsed again. Death waited patiently.

To describe it as a skeleton would be to do Death a disservice. For though the robe that sat in that chair contained only bones, it was not the skeleton that moved. It was Death. The bones were old, so ancient and brittle that the slightest pressure or movement would have rendered them down to dust. They did move; Death was no more a skeleton than you are a woollen suit. Above all it was old. Older than you could possibly dream.

And the soldier began to weep. He cried and begged Death not to take him, but Death was silent.

Now, as long as there have been people and games, there have been tales of those who gambled with Death. Some as metaphor, some as myth, but the soldier had heard enough of these tales to make his own last, desperate gamble, and he challenged Death to a game. There was silence for several long minutes before it nodded its head.

Reaching into its robe, Death pulled out three things: a chess knight, a domino and a pair of dice, each scrimshawed out of old bone. The choice presented was clear, but the soldier had enough wit about him to shake his head and reach into his pouch. He laid the cards upon the table, and asked Death if he knew how to play faro. Death paused, as though considering, before it nodded. “Very well,” it said, “and if you win, you shall not die.”

He replaced his totems within the mouldering robe, and pulled out instead a small hexagonal faro token, likewise made of bone. The soldier, starting to feel bold again as the wood of the table warped and decayed into the thirteen cards of a faro board, pushed it to the side and told Death, with the faintest hint of a smile, that he had brought his own. From somewhere, Death produced a dealing box and, placing the playing cards within it, it began to deal.

Faro, or ‘Bucking the Tiger’ as the carnival hawkers would have it, is not a complicated game. Bets are placed upon the cards and the dealer draws one card for the players and one for themselves. Bets matching the player’s card are doubled, bets matching the dealer’s cards are lost. There are a few other rules, of course, but if played honestly, then there is no betting game with fairer odds. The soldier had never before encountered an honest game.

He had before him a small pile of ivory sticks, not unlike those used for betting in mah-jongg, though the soldier had no knowledge of such a game. He knew that if his pile was gone, then his life was forfeit.

The game was slow and deliberate, and the soldier could not have said if they played for hours, for days or for months. The night outside showed no sign of ending, nor did the rain cease its drumming out a rhythm on the still open cellar door. The cards were placed slowly and deliberately by Death, and the soldier became more and more amazed with the revelation that this was the least crooked game of faro he had ever played. Still, there was little scope to cheat, as there was none of the shouting or crowds that served as a distraction in every gambling parlour. The relentless hollow gaze of the collapsing holes of Death’s skull were enough to keep the soldier almost from pushing his luck too far.

Then at last it reached what looked to be the final play. The deck was almost exhausted, and all the soldier had was piled upon the number three. As his reserve had dwindled, the soldier felt the wound in his chest begin to pulse with a dull ache, as thick beads of sweat rolled down his shivering face. If the final three came up for the dealer, he had lost, but if it came up for him, then he would finish the game with a higher stack than Death. Perhaps that would be enough for him to win? The rules of the wager had not been clearly explained, but as the shivering began to overtake him, the soldier clutched to this faint hope. And as Death reached its hand for the final cards, he placed his copper upon his pile, the six-sided token that reversed the bet. Now it was, if Death drew the three as the dealer’s card, he would win.

Death turned the card to reveal… a King, and reached for the next one.

The soldier knew that he had made a mistake. When the three was turned, he would lose his bet and lose everything. He had only one chance, one thin sliver of hope, and even that would no doubt simply damn him further. But what else could he do? As Death turned its head towards the faro box to draw the next card, the soldier, in one practiced move, took the thin length of twine wrapped around his thumb and through the tiny, drilled hole in his copper, and pulled it taut. With an almost imperceptible flick of the wrist he pulled it back and into his hand, removing it from the board and leaving his bet to win when the three was drawn.

The terror that gripped him when Death returned its gaze to the board was deeper than any he had ever known. Every other time he had attempted that trick, the baying of the crowd and the heaving mass of patrons placing bets afforded him ample cover, yet in the stillness and dark, with just him and his endless opponent playing their game, there was surely no way such a move could go unnoticed. Death turned the card over: the Three of Spades.

It gazed at the card, then at the small pile of ivory in front of the soldier. It made no sound, and the soldier could not tell if what he heard was the rain falling outside or the beating of his own heart. Finally, Death nodded its head, and pushed its own pile of bone sticks towards the soldier.

“You win.”

Its tone was almost… happy. The soldier didn’t notice, as at these words a thrill went through his heart. He had beaten Death. He was going to live. He stood up, still giddy and feverish, but with such joy that he nigh on collapsed from the laughter that exploded from his lips. He staggered to the cellar door, expecting to see the sunrise after so long waiting in the dark, but the sky was still black. Behind him, Death waited.

The soldier noticed the pain in his chest was gone, and took in a lungful of air. It was cold, damp, and tinged with a faint whiff of something metallic. It was only then he really noticed the low, rumbling laugh that came from Death. He turned to see the figure still sat at the table, but now the old monk’s robes were soaked with blood. The bones of the figure were red and dripping, with patches of muscle appearing over them.

Then he felt it in himself. Something was very wrong. An itching, burning deep within him, then a flash of intense pain in his arm. He grabbed it instinctively, but where he touched it, the skin and flesh beneath it came away in his hand, like chunks of wet bread. Beneath it, he could see the yellow-white of bone. His bone. Old bone.

And the soldier began to scream.

As more of his body sloughed off of him into crimson piles upon the floor, he looked up at where Death had sat. In its place he saw an old monk, bloody but whole, smiling at him. The soldier held out a now bony hand towards him in supplication: “You said that if I won, then I’d live!”

The monk shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

The end, I suppose. Thank you for indulging me, you’ve been very patient. I’m well aware I came in to tell you my own story, and instead have rattled off some old folktale, which you’ve dutifully taken down. I do feel now, though, that I’m at a place where I can tell you of myself. But for one final bit of context, I need you to watch this. Pay attention.

ARCHIVIST
Archivist’s note: After this point the rest of the page is covered in what appears to be a large bloodstain. The statement resumes on the page afterwards, in a somewhat shakier hand.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Apologies for that. A bit dramatic, I know, but I always feel a demonstration is best in these situations. Are you feeling better now? Well, regardless, I think I should continue; best get this down before someone comes to check on your scream. I’ve no interest in becoming a resident medical marvel.

So yes, this is not a trick knife. You can check yourself if you want. Hell, stab me yourself if you care to. No? Fine. Perhaps I underestimated your curiosity.

After I won my game of faro, I spent almost two centuries in that unhallowed state. I remember little of that time. I was not the only one, nor was I the sole embodiment of Death. There were others, I think, in a similar state to me. I don’t know how many, but we didn’t come for everyone. I don’t know how we chose our victims, or whether we were at the whims of a higher power. I call them victims, as while we visited many a terminal or doomed soul, we did not only visit those whose time had come. Some of them we killed ourselves. I remember my bone-sharp hands reaching into the throats of the old, the young, those who deserved it, and those who brought nothing but love to the world.

Some would choose to gamble, of course. The foolish ones chose chess. I was a master of every game, knew every rule. To select the one game with no luck in it at all was always folly. In the end, it was roulette that released me. Luck bended in my favour when I played with victims, but with a game so pure in random chance as roulette, well, eventually, luck comes around, though I had to wait damn near two centuries for it to do so. I’ll never forget the look on that old man’s face when he won, and began to feel the change overtake him.

So now I’m here, and I cannot die. I can barely live, either. Food and drink make me sick, and I cannot sleep. There is an aching inside of me. A craving for something, but I don’t know what. I don’t seem to age, but I’ve only been flesh again for a few years, so can’t be sure of this. I have often wondered about whether I’m the only one like me in the world. I can’t be. It doesn’t make sense. I know there were others. But I don’t know where.

I can’t decide whether this existence I find myself in is better than the death I feared so long ago. I sometimes wonder, but have decided that it is. A living hell is, after all, still living.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

I’ve had the blood checked, and it appears to be real. O Negative. And that’s about as far as I can confirm anything about this statement, forty-four years after the fact. The details Mr. Thorp provided on his residence, occupation, et cetera, appear to have been accurate for the time, but we’ve been unable to track down any up-to-date information on him, if he even still lives.

Fiona Law, the research assistant who took the statement, passed away in 2003 from complications following a liver transplant, and with two exceptions no-one else working for the Institute at the time is still employed here. Gertrude Robinson was there, of course, but we can’t exactly ask her, and Carmilla was working as a filing clerk at the time. I followed up with him, and she does remember there being something of a commotion around that time about someone self-harming while giving a statement – rumours said they’d cut off their finger or something – but she wasn’t directly involved and didn’t know much more about it.

Aside from that, it’s almost a complete dead end. The only other thing in the file can’t really be considered a lead, especially as it’s now gone. It was a small, hexagonal token, about an inch in diameter. There were no markings on it, but it appeared to be made of very old bone. I was unable to determine anything further, as when I picked it up, it simply crumbled to dust in my hand. I don't like things in my archive getting destroyed.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of David Laylow, regarding his time working at an industrial abattoir near Dalston. Original statement given September the 1st, 2013. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I used to work at a slaughterhouse. A ‘meat processing plant’. I won’t say which one. I don’t want to get in any trouble. It was up near Dalston, though, so you can probably figure it out. Not so many around out there as to make it hard. Not so many around anywhere. It’s not something most folks want nearby. It smells awful if you’re not used to it and people tell me they get a weird vibe. I never did, at least not before all this happened. Maybe that says something about me, though.

There’s not so much difference between people and animals, you know? Not saying that I’d be keen to kill a person, or that humans are all stupid. No, I’m saying that animals are smarter than you give them credit for. They look dumb, sure, but I know what I’m talking about when I say that every damn animal in that place knew exactly why they were there. You don’t need to be smart to know when you’re surrounded by your own mutilation.

When I first started I did a lot of the driving, and right from loading them up, you can hear it in their whining. They know what’s going on, they know where they’re going. I’ve heard a lot of engineering and science types talk about “stressors”, “novelty” or “cortisol levels” when discussing how best to avoid “triggering fear or flight responses”. If it lets them keep enjoying their steak, they can use whatever words they want to, but every wide-eyed cow I’ve ever put into a squeeze chute knows exactly where that ride ends.

You hear grisly tales about the torment of animals in the slaughterhouse, and the things done to them by the cold, relentless machinery, but so often the casual human brutality is overlooked. A worker and an abattoir are rated on many things, and one of them is how cruel or distressing they are for the livestock passing through. If you’re abusive to your animals, you won’t get as high a rating, but that’s about it. You’re not going to lose your job unless you really overstep the line, and sometimes you have a bad day. The sort of day that it feels good to work out on a bit of pig flesh, as it goes towards its end.

I mean, I wouldn’t really have said that sort of cruelty was common beyond the occasional kick or sometimes using an electric prod when it wasn’t needed. It was just that, if you did see it, you didn’t care. And you knew that no-one would care if they saw you do it. For all the braying and whining and screaming, in the end it was all just noisy meat.

Weirdest thing is, you start to kind of see people as meat too. Not in a food sort of way, you know. I don’t wanna eat my co-workers. It’s just that, when you spend all day taking these living, breathing creatures – animals that move and cry and tremble in fear – and you turn them into lifeless blocks of dead flesh, it’s hard to believe in any special spark that makes us humans any different. We run and shout and file on through our lives as simply as any cow, and after a while you can’t help but realise that we could turn into a lifeless carcass just as easily. Easier, even, given how much smaller we are. I mean, I’m not some weird killer or anything, but after a while it’s hard not to see everyone as moving meat.

I used to work on the killing floor, you know? Not long. You’re not allowed to work on it for long. In your whole life, I mean. I don’t know what the exact amount of time you’re allowed to do it for is, but it’s pretty short. I only worked it for a few months, and now I can’t work on any killing floor anywhere. Ever. It’s actually a weight lifted, the knowledge you don’t have to do it anymore, but you’re still there, aren’t you? It’s not like you’ve left the slaughterhouse. I heard once that those rules came in after they did some research in America. This must have been sixty years back now, but they started to look into the crime and murder rates of abattoir workers who manned the killing floor. Of the people who’d worked the killing floor for over ten years, do you know what percentage went on to commit murder? One hundred percent.

I don’t know if that’s true. Tony Mulholland told it to me once, when he quit the place. Maybe he was just trying to mess with my head or make a point, but it feels right. I mean, I only did it for a few months, but you kill enough things that don’t want to be killed and you start to look at a person’s head and wonder where you’d need to place the bolt gun.

I’m sorry, I know this isn’t why I’m here, I just feel like I’ve got to try and make you understand what it’s like, killing things and butchering their flesh for a living. I mean, I don’t do it anymore, obviously. Still, you’ve got to understand where I’m coming from.

It all started on the killing floor. I was in charge of the bolt gun. Technically, the animals we slaughter are killed by bleeding them out, something about the meat quality, I think, but it’s the bolt gun that means they don’t notice. They call it “stunning”, but that’s never sat quite right with me. You drive a bolt right into the animal’s brain, destroying just the right part of it so that they can be bled without resistance, and apparently without pain. I’ve only ever done the stunning; I’ve never been on the bleed crew, so I guess in some ways you could say I’ve never actually killed any of the animals. And sure, maybe they might still have a bit of movement in them after the bolt, and maybe their heart still beats, but for all they talk about “stunning” or “irreversible brain damage”, pulling that trigger sure felt like killing to me.

There was another man who worked the floor, bleeding the animals. His name was Tom Haan, and I had never really spoken to him. For the longest time I wasn’t even sure how much English he spoke – he was from China, I think, and hardly ever said a word. The first time I really heard his voice was that day, the day it all started. I’d been feeling strange about work ever since I started on the killing floor, and had finally asked to be moved positions. Now, the official company policy was that any request to leave the killing floor has to be granted, but in practice no-one asks to be moved. It shows a weakness that most of the people working there aren’t comfortable with. I did it anyway, and had just received word that, from the following day, I was being moved to butchering the carcasses. I don’t remember how I felt. My feelings weren’t really working back then.

Anyway, it was as I was processing the last of the cows for that day that Tom Haan came over. I didn’t really pay him much attention, but he leaned close, gripped my shoulder and said to me in perfect English, “You cannot stop slaughter by closing the door.” I felt a chill pass through me, and I wanted to turn round and demand to know what he was talking about, but he’d already returned to the bleeding crew. I was a bit shaken for the rest of the day, and knowing that these were the last animals I’d need to actually kill made each pull of the trigger harder, not easier. I just turned off my mind and let my mechanical motions take over. Cow into the holding pen, lock its head in place, gun against temple, pull the trigger. Over and over again, until I felt like I was almost in a trance.

It was the silence that finally brought me back to myself. I was waiting for the next in the line of cattle to be herded into the room, and I noticed that I couldn’t hear anything. There wasn’t the scared lowing of the animals, the far-off whine of saws or the rumble of any one of the hundreds of machines that hum and churn to keep the abattoir running. I waited and waited, but no more cows came. Looking around I couldn’t see anyone. There was no clock in that room, nor did I wear a watch. A buzzer would usually sound when breaks rolled around, and I hadn’t heard anything.

No more cattle seemed to be coming, so I put down the bolt gun, and walked over towards the bleeding area. There was nobody there, and more than that, the place looked clean. Spotless. As though no blood had ever been spilled there. Had I stood there, passed out or something? Had the day ended and the place been cleaned and I hadn’t even noticed?

I headed towards the exit door, deciding that I’d either find someone to ask what was happening, or I’d just go home. The door opened onto a corridor that I didn’t recognise. It looked like any other corridor in the slaughterhouse, except that it wasn’t the one that led towards the exit. I went to try the other doors that led out of the killing floor, but none of them went to the places I remembered them going. Behind each was another hallway that seemed to lead deeper into the abattoir. I stood there for a few moments, and I genuinely pinched myself. I had to be dreaming or hallucinating or something. It wasn’t a dream, though, or a vision. Everything had changed, and I was somewhere new.

I surprised myself a bit with how quickly I accepted this situation. I went out the door I originally went towards, thinking that if I didn’t know the layout of this building, then I might as well start by trying to follow the old route out as much I could. The corridors just seemed to lead into each other, though, and soon I was completely lost. I did notice, though, that some of them appeared to have rails along the top, like those used to move the hanging carcasses. Some of them even had hooks on, shiny and clean. These rails would never normally follow the passages of the slaughterhouse like this, and that fact bothered me, though I’m not quite sure why.

I called out, at least at first, hoping that there was someone, somewhere in this maze, who might hear me and answer. There was nothing. Some doors led into empty rooms, containing only still clean machinery. Meat-bone separators, splitting saws, scald tanks, each standing there, shining and silent. Waiting. I didn’t hang around long in those rooms. As I said, I don’t wear a watch, so I don’t know how long I wandered. It felt like hours, though.

Eventually, I turned a corner to see a small, metal staircase spiralling upwards. I had no reason to think I was below ground level at all, but it was the first thing I had found that wasn’t just twisting corridors and silent rooms, so I went up. The stairs curved upwards for a very long time.

When I reached the next floor, my heart sank to see more corridors stretching away from me, though these ones all had the meat rails snaking along the ceilings, and many of them were unlit. I stayed out of the darker passages. One of them had a window looking out, and all I could see outside was a metal abattoir roof stretching away to the horizon. The sky was a dull pink – the colour of blood being washed into a drain. I left the window very quickly. Finally, by complete chance, I noticed a door I recognised. It was the dark green exit door that should lead out of the building. I didn’t even stop to consider that it might not lead outside; I just opened it and stepped through.

My feet didn’t land on the tarmac of the outside. They didn’t land on the concrete or metal or tile of the slaughterhouse floor, either. It was dark, so I didn’t immediately realise what I was treading on, except that it shifted slightly under my weight. I looked to either side, and saw the metal barriers penning me in, and the conveyor belt beneath me began to move. I realised where I was, where it would lead, and I screamed.

Turning to run, I almost expected a horde of cattle behind me, pressing me onwards as the runs are designed to make them, but there was nothing there, and I fled out the door. I slammed it behind me and… and I began to cry. It was like something numb within me had shattered, and I couldn’t… I just couldn’t.

It was as I sat there, collapsed against the wall, that I started to smell it. The coppery-sweet scent of blood. It had a strange sort of comfort to it, as it was the smell of the slaughterhouse as I had known it, before I found my way to wherever I was now. I began to follow it, just walking along, turning wherever the odour of blood was strongest. And it did get stronger, much stronger. As I turned corners and walked through dark rooms, the smell became thick, pungent, far more than it had ever been before. By the time I stood outside the dull steel door it came from, I could barely breath. From the other side came a loud, mechanical churning. I shouldn’t have opened it, but where else was I going to go?

It led to a small catwalk, around the edge of a large, circular room. No, large doesn’t do it justice. It was… immense. I could barely see the other side of it, far in the distance. All around the edges were the ends of conveyor belts, and I could see butchered carcasses rolling off them, feeding into the vast pit that took up the rest of the room. The pile of stinking, bloody bodies, more than I could count. Pigs, cattle, sheep, I think I even saw a few humans in the pile, though without heads or limbs it’s hard to tell the difference between them and pigs. The vast heap shifted and moved, as something mechanical far below chewed through it, but it was always being topped up, fed by those conveyor belts, carcasses falling limply on top of each other like dolls. I couldn’t see the bottom, though whatever was processing the pile was so loud as to almost drown out my thoughts.

What else could I do, but turn around once again, and run?

I don’t have the faintest idea how long I ran for. All I know is that eventually I fell to my knees in the dark and I lay there for a while. The sound and smell of the pit had faded away, and I began to hear another sound, the chunking thud of a bolt gun. At this point I was just about sick of following strange noises and smells around that goddamn place, so I turned around and started walking the other way. It didn’t help. Whichever way I went, the sound just seemed to get louder, echoing through the empty hallways.

When I opened the door back onto the killing floor, I just didn’t have any surprise left inside of me. Sitting there, in front of the stunning box, was Tom Haan. He was facing away from me, but I could see him, slowly and deliberately, placing the bolt gun against different parts of himself – his legs, his stomach, his shoulders – and pulling the trigger. By the time I reached him, he was little more than a mass of bleeding wounds. He mutely handed me the bolt gun and I took it. With his one working hand, he guided my arm until the gun rested against the centre of his forehead. But he didn’t make me fire it. I did that myself. He fell limp to the floor. I don’t know if he was dead, but I hope so. I’d hate it if that place had to bleed him.

The door behind him led to a corridor I recognised, and the next door I found marked ‘Exit’ opened to a sunny day so bright that I could barely see. There were people there, other workers, but no-one paid me any attention. I left the slaughterhouse, and didn’t go back. I kept expecting the police to call me about Tom, but I never heard his name mentioned again. Not even when I handed in my resignation. I wish I felt bad about his death, but I don’t. I don’t feel anything at all.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Hmm. More meat. Interesting. I had Nastya do some basic corroboration of the particulars of Mr. Laylow’s tale, and everything appears to be more or less accurate. He was employed by Aver Meats in Dalston from April 2010 to the 12th of July 2013, at which point left his post, which was confirmed to be the stunning the cattle for processing, in the middle of his shift, along with Thomas Haan, one of his colleagues. They left through the main entrance, ignoring the other workers, though no-one reported them acting strangely aside from that. Neither returned to the abattoir, and Tom Haan has not been seen since.

We contacted Mr. Laylow for a follow-up statement, which he gave readily enough, though it largely deals with his lingering problems eating meat, which I would say are symptoms of PTSD, but he has strongly declined to seek treatment.

Tim and Nastya had a bit more luck investigating Tom Haan, though only really enough to confirm that he seems to have completely vanished following his departure from Aver Meats on the 12th of July. No missing person report was filed, and he appears to have had no friends or family. The landlord of the house he rented in Walthamstow, claims that the last rent he received from Haan was at the beginning of July. This landlord was quite put out when he disappeared, as apparently he had been renting a house in Clarence Road for almost a decade, and it was in quite a state of disrepair when he left.

Immigration authorities are somewhat useless. They have informed us that he missed a meeting with his advisor later that year, but it wasn’t until October, so gives us little to go on. His bank account has also registered no activity since July the 6th. No official effort has been made to locate him, and the police were reluctant to open a new case, so we didn’t push it.

There’s little else to be looked into, as Mr. Laylow’s description of an endless slaughterhouse is, to put it generously, unverifiable. That said, there have recently been moves by Aver Meats to extend their Dalston plant. They have planning permission, but are apparently having trouble retaining builders, four of which have already quit. Only one of them, Darren Lacey, agreed to talk to us, but all he would say to Tim was that the building “already seemed to be way too big.” And he said he couldn’t get over the smell of blood.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Lawrence Mortimer, regarding his hunting trip to Blue Ridge, Viginia. Original statement given December 9th, 2010. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I always wanted to go hunting. It always seemed such a manly sort of pursuit. I mean, killing the deer or elk or whatever else was always beside the point; it was just the idea of setting off into the wild, surviving out there, cooking and eating what you kill – it all sounded like such an adventure. I mean, I’d thought about trying it in this country, but shooting pheasants with shotguns and riding down foxes all seemed too much the domain of, uh, nitwits in tweed. So, if I was going to go hunting, I would need to go to another country to do it. Somewhere where they had a few animals worth going after. Thinking about it, I suppose that is what happened in the end, in a perverse sort of way. And it did cost poor Arden his life.

Well, my desire to go hunting was always something of a ‘someday’ project. I’m sure you know what I mean: those ideas you have, holidays you plan to do ‘sometime in the future’, but they’re never time-dependent and usually you just keep putting them off for more pressing things. So when I turned fifty back in February, I thought, ‘dash it all, I’m going to go hunting before I drop dead!’ When I told my friends they all thought I’d gone loopy, but I just reminded them that it isn’t just the young that can be impetuous and daft.

Anyway, over the past few years I’d become great friends with an American. Arden Neeli was his name. We’d met on a sceptics message board and got on like a house on fire. When I mentioned I was looking into impetuous hunting trips, he asked how averse I was to hiking. I said not at all, I’ve always been a very active sort, and he told me that in Virginia, his home state, there were a lot of excellent places to go hunting, providing I didn’t mind waiting until October or November. I wasn’t exactly expecting the Grim Reaper to come knocking in the intervening months, so I told him it sounded lovely.

We spent a good long while discussing it, and finally decided to take a three day hike into Blue Ridge on the Appalachian Trail, and see if we could find a deer or an elk for me to shoot. Nature, seclusion and guns – to my ears it sounded just perfect.

So, early last month I packed my bags and caught a plane over to Virginia. The weather was cold but otherwise pleasant, and to be honest I was surprised how similar it felt to Torquay in November. I normally live in Torquay. I think I put that on your form there. If I did, it won’t hurt you to have it written down twice. I wasn’t, however, fully prepared to meet Arden in person. I’d never met an Internet friend in real life before, and he was far louder and more outgoing than I was prepared for, based on the well thought-out and considerate communications we had previously exchanged. He kept laughing at everything I said as though it was a joke, even when it wasn’t a joke, and would not stop going on about my accent.

Still, all was forgiven when he showed me his gun cabinet. They were beautiful, and while I’m a member of a few shooting clubs over here, you’ve always got to keep your rifles under lock and key, hidden away out of sight. To see a dozen, well-cared for weapons displayed proudly, well, it was just lovely.

We set out the following day, driving up to Blue Ridge from his home in Richmond. It took some time to get there, as everything is so much further apart in America, but we parked at Crabtree Falls shortly after midday. We had our tents and our supplies. I was very excited to don my hunters orange, and to take up my rifle. I was carrying a Winchester M70, which I had read was very good for beginners, while Arden carried a Remington Model 673, his preferred firearm, which he talked about to me at great length. And off we went up the trail.

Our first day was unsuccessful. I was something of a blundering presence, and though Arden was at pains to assure me that our failure was simply due to being too close to a road, I was sure that it was my own crashing footsteps scaring away the creatures. I mean, we hadn’t gone far compared to our proposed route, but we were already several miles from the nearest road.

As the day wore on, we began to look for somewhere to set up camp. We were attempting to “Leave No Trace”, as the Americans say, so we were likely going to set our tents up on the trail itself, but as we began to get them out I heard the strangest thing. It sounded like somebody whistling, a slow version of The Farmer in the Dell or, as I believe it’s more commonly known, A-Hunting We Shall Go.

I looked over, and by the expression of puzzlement on Arden’s face it was clear he heard it as well. I was just about to call out to whoever was whistling, when a figure wandered very casually through the treeline and onto the trail. He walked out of thick woodland as though he were strolling down a promenade. He was short and lean, with long, shaggy black hair and a slightly unkempt goatee. His clothes were the rugged, durable sort you’d expect to see on a hiker, but he had no jacket or coat. He carried no backpack or kit of any sort. In fact it seemed like he was just wandering through the woods with the clothes on his back.

Arden was quicker to pick up on this than I was and asked the man if he needed any help. The hiker stared at him for several long seconds, as though trying to deduce something, then smiled and said, “No”. I didn’t like that smile one bit. Far too many teeth to it, I’d say. He asked us where we were heading, how long we were on the trail for. There was something ever so slightly odd about his intonation, and he dragged the Rs somehow when he spoke. We answered as vaguely as we could without being rude, since neither of us felt comfortable near this man.

The hiker shrugged, and started to walk across the trail, between us. As he did so, he paused for a second, and took a deep breath, and it seemed for all the world like he was sniffing us. Then he said something, I forget exactly. “Tomorrow will be a good day for a run,” or something like that. And then he just started whistling again, and wandered off into the forest behind us. I think both myself and Arden wanted to stop him, it was so clear something wasn’t right with the situation, but we were both… astounded with his manner and I don’t think either of us could have thought of how to do so. And then he was gone.

I needn’t tell you that sleep came difficult. The sounds of the forest at night were far louder than I had ever heard them back home, and every cracking branch, every rustle of leaves, set my nerves on edge. It was an overcast night, and outside the tent was almost completely dark. Around two o’clock in the morning I could have sworn that I heard someone laugh, slow and softly, outside my tent. It sounded like it was right by my head, just the other side of the thin nylon wall. By the time I’d managed to get up the courage to check, of course, there was nobody there.

The next day we packed up the camp and set off hunting again, donning our lurid orange vests and rifles. I must admit, I felt ten times better with the weight of the gun in my arms, and was inclined to put the events of the night before behind me. In fact, after a morning spent walking and joking and, on two occasions, damn near bagging an elk, I thought we were both having a splendid time.

It was about four in the afternoon, the sun just starting to begin its descent towards an early autumn dusk, when I saw my elk. I don’t know why, but when I saw him through the trees I knew that he was mine. I told Arden and we started to creep towards it very slowly. He had been teaching me since yesterday, and it wasn’t long before I had my position, and raised my gun. I sighted it just below the ear, and there was a moment, when its head turned right towards me. I could have sworn it looked me in the eye as I prepared to pull the trigger.

A gunshot rang out, but it was not from my gun. The elk startled and ran, and I spun round, but Arden was nowhere to be seen. The shot still echoed through the trees, but he seemed to have vanished. I began to search frantically for him. Had he… Had he been lured away by an elk of his own? Had he been accidentally shot by some other hunters? I called out his name, but there was no reply.

Eventually, after several minutes of desperate searching, I came to a small clearing. There, slumped against one of the trees was Arden. He was dead. The tree behind him was painted in a spray of crimson and there was a messy hole in the centre of his throat, as though it had been torn out entirely. His rifle lay next to him on the ground, also coated in blood. It seems silly to say now, but my first thought was to check his pulse. So I put my gun down to do so. Obviously he didn’t have one, but I couldn’t understand what was happening. I’d been with him not three minutes before and he had been alive and unharmed. It didn’t make sense.

Then I heard that whistling. That infernal whistling from the treeline. I turned and there was the hiker. His right hand was coated in Arden’s blood, and he grinned at me. Then he began to sprint. His speed was incredible, and he loped from side to side with a sort of zigzag motion. I ran. I know I should have picked up my gun, but you can’t understand just how frightening it is to have something like that, a true predator, running at you full pelt. Your death charging towards you like a freight train. You can’t understand what it is to be prey. So I ran.

I turned tail, leaving my pack and my gun behind, and sprinted into the woods. I didn’t look back, I couldn’t. It took all my concentration to keep my footing, to not trip. I could hear him occasionally behind me, as he charged through a bush or scratched against a tree. I think he did it deliberately, you know. To let me know he was still there. There’s no way I could have won that footrace, but I think he must have been toying with me. After a while I could no longer hear him directly behind me, so I slowed to catch my breath. I’m in good shape, as I say, but I’m not a young man and I was dizzy with the exhaustion.

I sat there, so intent on listening out for any sign of danger, of this man, that I barely even noticed night fall. There were no clouds that night, and I was glad, since I had left my torch along with my pack. If I was to run at all during the night, I would need the moonlight to see by. Of course, any experienced hiker would tell you never to travel the woods at night, and certainly not to run through them, but I hardly had any choice if it came to it. And of course it did. The night was barely half an hour old when I heard it again, that… whistling, then the words floating through the trees, but with a low, bass tone to them. “A-hunting we shall go, A-hunting we shall go”.

And once again I ran. By all rights I should have broken my neck, charging off into the darkness like that. I should have tripped on a root or put my foot in a rabbit hole. I should have at least twisted my ankle. Somehow this didn’t happen, though; I ran and ran and, well, I just kept running. It didn’t seem to do me any good, of course. I was still far slower in the dark than I had been during the day, and it was obvious my pursuer could easily outpace me if he wanted to. So many times I’d hear that song coming from in front of me, and turned sharply to avoid it, until I was utterly lost.

Finally, I broke through the treeline. I thought at first I’d found another clearing, but looking down, I saw I was next to Arden’s mutilated body. The wretched thing had just sent me in a circle. For fun. For the chase. I was tired, scared, covered in scratches and bruises over my entire body, and for nothing. I was still going to die.

I turned to face my fate, and for the first time that night got a good look at my hunter. The moonlight shone on him in full and what I saw was not human. It’s hard to describe exactly, but everything about him was sharper. His fingers, his teeth, his face, his eyes. His skin.

As I looked at him, the strangest thing popped into my head. Have you ever read The Duchess of Malfi? I had to study it for my O-Levels, many years ago. Dreadful play, as I remember, the worst sort of old revenge tragedy, all incest and murder and madness. But there’s a line that stays with me, a doctor diagnosing the Duchess’ brother with lycanthropy. As I recall it goes, “Once met the duke, ‘bout midnight in a lane behind St. Mark’s church, with the leg of a man upon his shoulder. Said he was a wolf. Only difference was, a wolf’s skin is hairy on the outside, his on the inside”. Looking at this thing that wanted to kill me, it’s the only way it’s the only description that feels right.

He didn’t charge this time, but slowly stalked towards me. I was… acutely aware of the loaded guns by my feet, but I’d seen how fast it could move and I didn’t rate my chances. It got close. Close enough that I could smell the foetid breath. Close enough that I could see the most disturbing thing illuminated by the moonlight: the slick drool on its lips as it salivated in anticipation of a kill. Then it attacked me.

I am, in some ways, very proud of how I acted during that encounter. You see, as long as the thing didn’t think I was any sort of threat, I hoped it might get sloppy and clearly telegraph its strike. I was right; it drew back its arm and swung a clumsy, triumphant blow. I forget, did I mention my military background? Well, I used to be an officer in the Air Force. Now, it’s been a long time since the Gulf War, and I didn’t do much in the way of hand-to-hand fighting even then, but the training is something that stays with you. It certainly served me well for this one, desperate move, as I caught his arm and pitched his motion around. His claws dug into my shoulder, but missed my neck, and he fell to the floor, tripped by his own momentum. He began to get to his feet almost immediately, but it brought me the precious seconds to grab my rifle and press it to his chest. I didn’t hesitate.

The shot ripped through him and he jerked in pain. Not wanting to take any chances, I fired again and again and again until my rifle was empty. Then I picked up Arden’s rifle and emptied that one into him as well.

Even after all of that, he still wasn’t dead. He had three bullets in his heart, two in his head and many more through the rest of him, but still he writhed there, making weak noises. I didn’t know how long this would slow him down for, but I hoped it would give me enough time to escape properly. I looked back as I left the clearing to see him slowly and painfully pushing his claws into his chest, digging for the bullets.

It was luck that saved me, in the end. Some park rangers were driving past our trail on a road about two miles distant. They were coming to investigate the gunshots and I stumbled on to the road through sheer good fortune. I never saw that thing again, or Arden, unfortunately, though they managed to find and recover his body about a week later. I don’t think I’ll try hunting again. I know the thrill of power that comes with the ability to end the life of something weaker than you, but… I can’t forget what it’s like to be the hunted.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Hunted. Yes, I think I’m starting to know the feeling.

Arden Neeli was found dead half a mile off the Appalachian Trail in Virginia on 1st December 2010. His death was ruled a wild animal attack. Mr. Mortimer was treated for physical and mental trauma, but was not implicated in his death. Quite frankly that’s all the investigation I’m willing to do on this one. ‘Wolfmen in America’ is too far-fetched and too far away for me to care about.

It’s… been two months now since Tim returned and we became the ones being… hunted. Are we being hunted? Tim’s still living here, and I’m leaving less and less. The worms keep turning up. We kill them, but there are more each week. What is she waiting for?

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Jane Prentiss, regarding… a wasps’ nest in her attic. Original statement given February 23rd, 2014. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I itch all the time. Deep beneath my skin, where the bone sits, enshrined in flesh, I feel it. Something, not moving but that wants to move. Wants to be free. It itches, and I don’t think I want it. I don’t know what to do.

You can’t help me. I don’t think so, at least. But whatever it is that calls to me, that wants me for its own, it hates you. It hates what you are and what you do. And if it hates you, then maybe you can help me. If I wanted to be helped. I don’t know if I do. You must understand, it sings so sweetly, and I need it, but I am afraid. It isn’t right and I need help. I need it to be seen. To be seen in the cold light of knowledge is anathema to the things that crawl and slither and swarm in the corners and the cracks. In the pitted holes of the hive.

You can’t see it, of course. It isn’t real. Not like you or I are real. It’s more of an everywhere. A feeling. Are you familiar with trypophobia? That disgusted fear at holes, irregular, honeycombed holes. Makes you feel that itch in the back of your mind, like the holes are there too, in your own brain, rotten and hollow and swarming. Is that real?

I’m sorry, I know I’m meant to be telling you what happened. What brought me to this place. This place of books and learning, of sight and beholding. I’m sorry. I should. I will.

I… I haven’t slept in some time. I can’t sleep. My dreams are crawling and many-legged. Not just slithering and burrowing,. though it is the burrowing that draws me. They always sing that song of flesh. I hope you will forgive me for such a rambling story. I hope you will forgive me for a great many things, as it may be I do worse. I have that feeling, that instinct that squirms through your belly. There will be great violence done here. And I bleed into that violence.

Do you know, I wonder? As I watch you sitting there through the glass. Eating a sandwich. Do you know where you are? You called me “dear”. “Have a seat, dear.” “You can write it down, dear.” “Take as much time as you need, dear.” Can you truly know the danger you are in?

There is a wasps’ nest in my attic. A fat, sprawling thing that crouches in the shadowed corner. It thrums with life and malice. I could sit there for hours, watching the swirls of pulp and paper on its surface. I have done. It is not the patterns that enthral me, I’m not one of those fools chasing fractals; no, it’s what sings behind them. Sings that I am beautiful. Sings that I am a home. That I can be fully consumed by what loves me.

I don’t know how long the nest has been there. It’s not even my house, I just live there. Some sweaty old man thinks he owns it, taking money for my presence as though it will save him. I used to worry about it, you know. I remember, before the dreams, I would spend so long worrying about that money. About how I could afford to live there. Now I know that whatever the old man thinks, as he passes about the house with brow crinkled and mouth puckered in disapproval, it is not his. It has a thousand truer owners who shift and live and sing within the very walls of the building. He does not even know about the wasps’ nest. I wonder how long he has not known. How many years it has been there.

Have you ever heard of the filarial worm? Mosquitoes gift it with their kiss and it grows and grows. It stops water moving round the human body right, makes limbs and bellies swell and sag with fluid. Now, when I look at that fat, sweaty sack, I think about it, and the voice sings of showing him what a real parasite can do.

How many months has it been like this? Was there a time before? There must have been. I remember a life that was not itching, not fear, not nectar-sweet song. I had a job. I sold crystals. They were clean, and sharp and bright and they did not sing to me, though I sometimes said they did. We would sell the stones to smiling young couples with colour in their hair. I remember, before I found the nest, someone new came. His name was Oliver, and he would look at me so strangely. Not with lust or affection or contempt, but with sadness. Such a deep sadness. And once with fear. It didn’t matter, because no-one in the shop wanted to hear about the ants below it. I tried to tell them, to explain, but they did not care. The pretty young things complained and I left.

That was when I still called myself a witch. Wicca and paganism, I would spend my weekends at rituals by the Thames. I wanted something beyond myself, but could not stomach the priest or the imam or pujari of the churches. I knew better. I knew that it was not so simple as to call out to well-trodden gods. I never felt from my rituals anything except exhaustion and pride. I thought that those were my spiritual raptures.

I wish, deep inside, below the itch, that they were still my raptures. I have touched something now, though, that all my talk of ley lines and mother goddesses could never have prepared me for. It is not a god. Or if it is then it is a dead god, decayed and clammy corpse-flesh brimming with writhing graveworms.

When did I first hear it? It wasn’t the nest, I’m sure of that. I never went in the attic. It was locked and I didn’t have a key. I spent a day sawing through the padlock with an old hacksaw. My hands were blistered by the end. Why would I have done that if I didn’t know what I would find? The face of the one who sang to me dwelling within the hidden darkness above me. I had seen no wasps. I know I hadn’t. There are no wasps in the nest. So how else would I have known that I needed to be there, to be in the dark with it, if it had not already been singing to me?

No, that’s not right. The nest does not sing to me. It is simply the face. Not the whole face, for the whole of the hive is infinite. An unending plane of wriggling forms swarming in and out of the distended pores and honeycombed flesh. The nest is nothing but paper.

Was it the spiders? There were webs in the corners, around the entryway into the attic. I would watch them scurry and disappear in between the wooden boards. ‘Where are you going, little spiders?’ I would think. ‘What are you seeing in the dark? Is it food? Prey? Predators?’ I wondered if it was the spiders that made the gentle buzzing song. It was not. Webs have a song as well, of course, but it is not the song of the hive.

I used to pick at my skin. It was a compulsion. I would spend hours in the bathroom, staring as close as I could get to my face to the mirrors, searching for darkened pores to squeeze and watch the congealed oil worm its way out of my skin. Often I would end with swollen red marks where it had become inflamed with irritation or infection. Did I hear the song then?

Was it when I was a child, such a clear memory of a classmate telling me a blackhead was a hole in my face, and if I didn’t keep it clean it would grow and rot. Did I hear it then, as that image lodged in my mind forever? Or was it last year, passing by a strip of green they call a park near my house, after the rain, and watching a hundred worms crawl and squirm to the surface.

Perhaps I’ve always heard it. Perhaps the itch has always been the real me, and it was the happy, smiling Jane who called herself a witch and drank wine in the park when it was sunny. Maybe it was her who was the maddened illusion that hides the sick squirming reality of what I am. Of what we all are, when you strip away the pretence that there is more to a person than a warm, wet habitat for the billion crawling things that need a home. That love us in their way.

I need to think. To clear my head. To try and remember, but remember what? I was lonely before. I know that. I had friends, at least I used to, but I lost them. Or they lost me. Why was it? I remember shouting, recriminations, and I was abandoned. No idea why. The memories are a blur. I do remember that they called me “toxic”. I don’t think I really knew what that meant, except that it was the reason I was so very painfully lonely. Was that it? Was I swayed and drawn simply by the prospect of being genuinely loved? Not loved as you would understand it. A deeper, more primal love. A need as much as a feeling. Love that consumes you in all ways.

You can’t help me. I’m sure of that now. I have tried to write it down, to put it into terms and words you could understand. And now I stare at it and not a word of it is even enough to fully describe the fact that I itch. Because ‘itch’ is not the right word. There is no right word because for all your Institute and ignorance may laud the power of the word, it cannot even stretch to fully capture what I feel in my bones. What possible recourse could there be for me in your books and files and libraries except more useless ink and dying letters? I see now why the hive hates you. You can see it and log it and note it’s every detail but you can never understand it. You rob it of its fear even though your weak words have no right to do so.

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.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

This is… uh…

Excuse me, reading that was, um… hmm. While I am pleased that we have… found the statement that Prentiss gave the Institute, it answers far fewer of our questions than I expected, and gives us little new information about her than we had before, save for a snapshot of her mental condition before her hospital admission. We were already aware of her religious history, and her breakdown over an ant infestation that apparently led to her termination from her work at the Good Energies spiritual supplies shop in Archway.

The wasps’ nest is interesting. The paramedics report claims that when they and the police responded to reports of screaming at Miss Prentiss’ flat on Prospero Road, they found her in a loft space, passed out, with her forearm buried up to the elbow in “pulped organic matter”. This could indeed have been a wasps’ nest, I suppose, but no nearby residents reported to have seen any wasps in the area. Unfortunately, it could not be examined further, as later that night, there was a fire that completely destroyed the flat, and killed the landlord, Galahad Nolan. The fire service determined he had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette, due to the fact that he was found sitting in the remains of an armchair, with no sign he had made any attempt to escape.

Prentiss was taken to the Emergency Department at Whittington Hospital, but she was already showing signs of the… infestation that would characterise her later appearances. Six hospital staff were attempting to treat and sedate her, when many of the worms were violently expelled from her body. They quickly burrowed through the soft tissue of the medical personnel – eyes, tongue, et cetera – and into the brain, killing them after roughly a minute and a half. She then walked calmly out of the door to A&E. A nurse attempted to run, but in his panic he tripped on the stairs and broke his neck. Then she was gone. The Institute was consulted, as apparently during her admission she had claimed that she was being possessed, but it was decided the situation was medical in nature and our involvement was dropped in favour of, what I can only describe, as a cover-up. If we’d known about this statement, perhaps things might have been different, but here we are.

Still, anyone who’s familiarised themselves with her file could tell you this. We still don’t have any evidence that Prentiss is actually paranormal. It could just be an unknown, aggressive parasite. There are weird things out there that are perfectly natural. It’s not, though. I know it’s not natural. Somehow I… I feel it. I apoligies, my academic detachment seems to have fled me. Something in this statement has got to me a bit. I’m… I’m going to go lie down.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
(impatient) Look, Tim, I’d love to discuss this further, but as you can see, I have a recording to do.

TIM
(coaxing) Oh, come on. Look, it’s not a big deal. We just need to do a few of them again –

ARCHIVIST
Out of the question leave.

TIM
It’s just confusing if not. Er, like the garbageman’s statement –

ARCHIVIST
(overlapping) Mr. Woodward.

TIM
Yeah, so, you said that Alan Parfitt was reported missing… ah, in August 2009, which would actually be six months (laugh) after the statement had been given.

ARCHIVIST
(grumpy) Obviously it should have been 2008, I misspoke an ‘8’ as a ‘9,’ What does it matter? Timothy

TIM
Well, someone noticed.

ARCHIVIST
Who?

TIM
Er, Josh Cole – uh, great guy – he’s one of the students using our resources for a dissertation? Um… oh, and here, in Miss Montauk’s statement, about her father’s killings, you refer to case, um, 9220611 as case, um, 1106922.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the other case numbers around the Hill Top hauntings, they’re a mess –

ARCHIVIST
(Pissed) Alleged hauntings. And who honestly cares if I misspoke case 9220611 as 1106922? Another student?

TIM
(obstinately chipper) Uh, well, actually, yes. Um, Samantha Emery – she’s lovely – she’s actually doing a PhD in manifestations…

ARCHIVIST
I don’t care. If it’s not enough that Gertrude left us with such a pointlessly awkward filing system, half the time she doesn’t even stay consistent in her own records.

TIM
Um – to be honest with you, er, I don’t really understand the system.

ARCHIVIST
Of course you don't. Last three digits of the year, then the day, then the month. I don’t know why she did it like that, but I can’t change it now.

TIM
Ohhh… okay… Alright, so what happens if more than one statement is given on the same day?

ARCHIVIST
I… don’t know. It never came up. Was there anything else?

TIM
Oh yeah, just one.

ARCHIVIST
(overlapping mutter) Good lord…

TIM
So, in case 8163103, it isn’t clear if Albrecht’s wife is called ‘Clara’ or ‘Carla,’ ‘cause you keep switching back and forth…

ARCHIVIST
Well, I’m sorry if I found it hard to read a 200-year old letter, written in cursive by a native German speaker. Who complained about that one?

TIM
(cheery demeanor wearing thin) Oh, it’s, it’s not a complaint! I just noticed, actually.

Um, look, okay. I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure… it’s not a big deal, I just think it might be worth re-recording these statements.

ARCHIVIST
(boiling over) No. I don’t have time!. I still have a mountain of haphazard statements to get through, not to mention that I need to keep this wretched tape recorder on hand just in case I encounter one of the files too stubborn to work on anything else. And when I do, I have to actually read the damn thing, which is…

TIM
(background) Oh, woah, woah… woah!

ARCHIVIST
(snarl) …is fine. It’s… fine, I just haven’t been sleeping much these last few months, what with all this… worm business. Which reminds me, if you do see Carmilla, tell her thanks for the extra extinguishers.

TIM
Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Um…

It’s getting bad. I mean, Jessica keeps showing me her tongue (uncomfortable laugh) and asking if it “looks infested”. Um… so what do you want me to do about these errors?

ARCHIVIST
I really don’t care. Put a Post-It on the tapes or something. I’m not re-recording them. Now if you’ll excuse me…

TIM
Oh, yeah, sure, yep, I’ll let you get back to it.

[DOOR CLOSES]
ARCHIVIST
Right. Oh, still running? Okay.

Statement of Carlita Sloane, regarding her work on a container ship travelling to Southampton from Porto do Itaqui. Original statement given January the 2nd, 2011. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I’ve been working the shipping routes for years now, so I know there’s plenty of messed up things can happen out there. You remember the old saying ‘worse things happen at sea’? Well, let me tell you it’s just as true now as it ever was. But I’ve never seen weird like I saw when serving on the Tundra. I didn’t even want the job, really, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. We’d just hit Porto do Itaqui in Brazil in late November of last year when the ship I was on got stopped because of ‘cargo irregularities’. I don’t know what it was. Might have been drugs, human trafficking, might have just been a crooked harbour master looking for a kickback, but it didn’t really matter. Point was I had to jump ship.

This wasn’t an easy thing, though. A sailor’s union should be recognised anywhere in the world, but when it came down to it, my membership of Nautilus, a UK union, meant nothing when I was trying to get a place on a cargo run coming out of Brazil. Didn’t help that I’m a woman. A lot of people don’t think shipping is a job for women. Hell, a lot of people who work on ships don’t think it is. You don’t see a lot of us in the trade, and every ounce of respect I got, some dick-waving asshole probably bled for. But that’s fine, I can hold my own, and it hasn’t been such a problem since I shaved my head. It was enough to keep me on land for a good few days, though, as I tried to find another ship to take me on. Well, that and my bad Spanish.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how relieved I was when I heard that a British ship had made port. The Tundra. Now at that point I was starting to get a bit desperate, so I was keen to go to the captain and just about beg passage. Screw my qualifications, if needed I’d sign on as a workaway. I could find a better position once I was somewhere I spoke the language properly.

I eventually found the captain in a small bar in one of the seedier areas of the dockside. I’d been told his name was Peter Lukas, but to be honest I wouldn’t have needed his name – he was the only white guy in the place. Even by those standards he was very pale, weirdly so for someone who apparently lived their life on the sea. He sat there at a small table, completely alone, drinking a cup of black coffee. He was staring into the distance, and didn’t seem to notice anything going on around him. I sat down opposite and coughed.

His eyes only moved a fraction of an inch to focus on me, but it felt as though the movement had the weight of a heavy stone door. Like a tomb. Don’t know why that’s what popped into my head, but there you go. I asked if he was Peter Lukas, and he said, “Yes”. I’d gone blank on what to say next, and it was then that I noticed the silence. I looked around to see that the place was now completely empty. Even the bartender was nowhere to be seen, and the only sound was the whir of the ceiling fans above us. The captain was still staring at me, so I swallowed my unease and began to explain my situation to him. I left out the part about the criminal possibilities of my last ship, but was clear that I was in desperate need of a new post. When I had finished, he was quiet for a few minutes. Then he nodded.

“We have one space. Report tomorrow. At dawn.”

That was all he said. And it was all I needed. The Tundra wasn’t difficult to find when I headed to the docks the next day. It was big, already stacked high with an array of colourful shipping containers. I wondered if they’d loaded it up overnight, as there didn’t seem to be much activity from the crane. It was early, and I was glad I was leaving Brazil before the wet season really got going, as the sky was threatening to break. Making my way through the dock I asked around until I was finally pointed to the mate. He was a short man, heavyset with a thick, black beard. His warm, brown skin was stained darker by a life working in the sun, and he didn’t smile when he looked at me. Around his neck, I saw a chain ending in a small brass ball and stem. It looked like an old boatswain’s call, an antique sailor’s whistle.

I introduced myself, told him what I’d told the captain and gave my qualifications and experience. The bearded mate listened quietly until I finished. Then he shrugged, and said they were in need of an Ordinary Seaman, and I was welcome to the position if I wanted it. OS was a bit of a step down for me, as I’ve been pulling Able Seaman pay for these last few years, but it was a ticket out of Porto do Itaqui, so I jumped at the chance. The mate still didn’t smile, but he did offer his hand and introduced himself in a gentle Dutch accent as Tadeas Dahl, First Mate of the Tundra. I was surprised, as it seemed a bit abrupt to be leaving, and I hadn’t even had time to stow away the duffel bag that was my only luggage. Still, I wasn’t about to disobey the first order I’d been given on a new ship.

The Tundra was pretty normal. I’ve served on a half dozen ships almost identical to it, and I fell into my duties quickly. We set off almost as soon as I was on board, and it was only later I discovered we were heading across the Atlantic towards Southampton. I was very happy to find that out, as I had assumed we’d be making plenty more stops before crossing back to England. With any luck it wouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks before I was home, and those would be spent in maintenance, repainting and taking watches with ‘Iron Mike’ – er, the autopilot – so that was fine.

But I did start to notice a few things on board which didn’t really seem to add up. The first was the crew. They were quiet. Very quiet. I mean, I’ve been on ships where I was pretty much the only native English speaker, and plenty of people prefer to keep to themselves. Hell, not being too comfortable around people is a damn fine reason to go to sea.

This was different, though. It wasn’t just that they didn’t talk much, they seemed uncomfortable with me. They’d avoid eye contact, and only barely acknowledge me if we were on a shift together. As first, I thought it was because I was a woman, but then I saw that it wasn’t just me. They avoided each other just as much as they did me. Meals were always quiet, no matter how many people were eating, and there was no friendly game of cards or chat in living quarters. There was no real conversation in any language. It was like they were doing everything in their power not to think about each other. It took me less than a day of ignored hellos and grunted answers before I fell into line, becoming just as quiet as my crewmates.

The only person who spoke was Tadeas Dahl. The mate would walk among the crew, giving instructions and orders in a dozen different languages, as the crew scrambled to carry out his commands. He was just as composed as he had been when I met him, and it soon became clear that, if he had emotions, he kept a tight wrap on them. He would stride along the ship, his antique whistle swinging from his neck. He never actually blew the boatswain’s call, apparently preferring to summon the crew via the intercom or horn. It just hung there, its polished brass heavy around his neck.

I didn’t see Captain Lukas at all that first week. I only knew he was onboard because every meal time the cooks would hand a tray of food to the mate, who’d take it up to the captain’s cabin. We never saw the man himself, though.

There was one crewmember who did catch my eye. He was a young guy, white and, from what I could tell, Scottish. I never really got more than his name out of him: Sean Kelly. He had the bunk opposite me, and we were on different shifts, so I would often see him lying there when I returned from my night watch. He didn’t talk any more than the others, but he also didn’t go around with that blank look on his face. He looked scared.

There were other odd things about the ship, but hands down the weirdest thing, I didn’t notice until a few days out into the Atlantic. Now one of my duties was to check the deck containers were securely in place, none of the twistlocks or lashing rods had broken or come loose. It was usually just busywork – I’d never been on a ship that lost a container, though it does happen. This shift, though, I noticed something wrong. I saw that one of the lashing rods, towards the stern, had broken. And not at one of the ends, or the twistlock itself, but right in the middle of what should have been solid metal. From a distance it looked fine, new paint shining in the sun, but looking closer I saw that it had rusted all the way through. Not just that, but checking out where the rod connected to the container, it became clear that they had rusted together. Fresh paint covered up most of it, but once I knew what I was looking for, I saw it everywhere. The shipping containers, all of them, were rusted in place.

How could this have happened, though, if they were being changed over at port? How long had the Tundra been sailing with the same cargo?

I decided I had to look inside. Stupid, maybe. If it was something illegal, they might toss me overboard first and ask questions never, but only if I got caught. And I was just about sick of nasty surprises.

I did it on my next late shift. I kept an eye on the rest of the crew and waited for my moment. I’d already marked out a ground level container where the padlock had practically rusted off. It wouldn’t be difficult to get it open. It was about 3am when I had my chance. I was alone on deck and the wind was howling loud enough to muffle the groan of the container’s rusted hinges. It took three kicks from my steel toecaps to get it open, but finally I was able to get the door ajar. It was so stiff it took almost all my strength to get enough of a gap to walk through, but finally I could see inside.

It was completely empty. There was no sign of cargo, or any markings or debris on the floor that might have shown there had ever been anything inside. I couldn’t believe it – a transport ship with nothing to transport? It didn’t make any sense. I managed to bust two other containers open, but they were the same. As far as I could tell, every container on the ship was empty.

I was still trying to figure out what this could mean when I saw a couple of torches approaching. I almost panicked and ran, but where exactly was I going to escape to? The empty, uncaring ocean stretched out for hundreds of miles in every direction. So instead I swallowed my fear, and pushed the door carefully closed, trying my best to hide the broken lock before making my way onto the deck.

I was met by the mate and a half dozen other crewmen behind him. He looked at me for a second, then nodded and told me to follow. Then he continued walking. Confused, I headed after them as they made their way around the ship, silently collecting up or waking all the rest of the crew. I started to ask what was going on, but the glares I got shut me right up. Finally, when we had what looked like the whole crew together, we walked over to the lifeboat.

Now we definitely weren’t sinking, so I hadn’t really paid much attention to the lifeboat before, but now I looked at it, I realised it wasn’t what I’d have expected. Most modern container ships have a lifeboat that looks more like a lumpy orange blob than a boat. They’re designed to be quickly and safely dropped into the water and tough out whatever conditions the sea might throw at them. But this was an old-fashioned boat, with oars and a winch mechanism for lowering it into the water. It didn’t even look like it had any supplies in it. Standing there in front of it was Captain Lukas, as silent as the rest of his crew.

The Captain nodded, and one by one the crew of the Tundra got on board the lifeboat. I got on too. I mean, what else was I supposed to do? I didn’t know what was going on and no-one seemed to want to tell me, but I sure as hell wasn’t getting left alone on that big, empty ship. So I got in and sat down, as a couple of the crew began to lower the lifeboat into the sea. A few others took up the oars, and as soon as we hit the water, they began to row quietly away from the Tundra, which floated, motionless.

The sky was clear and the wind had died down, so the stars reflected perfectly on the still ocean surface. All the lights on the ship had been turned off, so the world and all the empty horizon was only lit by the moon. As we rowed, I looked around my companions on the lifeboat. Everyone I recognised was there, except for one. I checked each face in turn, but I could see no sign of Sean Kelly, my scared bunkmate. Had we left him behind? Was he still back on the ship, sleeping away ignorant of the fact that he was now utterly and completely alone?

Almost as though he knew I was about to speak, Tadeas gave me a warning glare. The mate reached down and took the old brass whistle from his neck. He pressed it to his lips, and blew.

I have never heard a whistle sound like that. It was shrill, so high and piercing that I felt my hair stand on end, but it also seemed… distant. Like I was hearing it from far, far away. I don’t know how long he blew that boatswain’s call for, but by the end, I realised we were surrounded by a thick sea smoke. We should have far too far south for it, but it rolled and billowed around the lifeboat, obscuring the Tundra. No-one said a word, but I could have sworn a few of my shipmates were crying.

I don’t know how long we floated there, sat in the dark water, but eventually the fog cleared, and the mate sounded the boatswain’s call again, this time a short, sharp whistle. We saw the Tundra, dark and still upon the water, and began to row back towards it. The lifeboat was painstakingly raised and the rest of the crew returned to their positions.

Sean Kelly was nowhere to be seen. And I never saw him again.

After that night, the atmosphere on board changed. People talked, and you’d occasionally hear actual laughter. Games were played, people drank, and there was this sense of relief to it all. I tried to join in, but got dark looks any time I asked about Sean. At one point the third mate, a man named Kim Duong, told me that I should shut up and be grateful, as it “hadn’t been an easy choice”.

I kept to myself the rest of the way, and left the ship as soon as we landed in Southampton. I didn’t even think about my pay until it came through a couple of days later: twenty-five thousand pounds. For barely two weeks work. I don’t mind telling you, it was almost enough to tempt me back.

Almost.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

An interesting statement, though difficult to investigate any potentially-paranormal activity, as there does not appear to have been anything explicitly supernatural occurring in this statement. A lot of strange happenings and implicit weirdness, but nothing that can be isolated as a ‘supernatural event’.

There’s also the fact that even a casual search of port authority records shows the Tundra is a currently-active cargo ship operating for Solus Shipping PLC, a company founded and majority-owned by Nathaniel Lukas. In addition to such business ventures, the Lukas family also provides funding to several academic and research organisations – including the Magnus Institute.

Much as I want to dig further into this, especially given certain parallels with case 0161301, Carmilla gets very twitchy when we look into anything that might conceivably have funding repercussions so i guess i have to look into them on my freetime.

It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to do any further investigations into this. Even though the official crew manifest for the Tundra has remained the same for the last ten years. Even though I can’t find any record of actual cargo being loaded or unloaded into it from any UK port. Even though Sean Kelly disappeared from the port of Felixstowe in October 2010, and his body washed up on the coast of Morocco in April 2011, six months later. According to the coroner, it had only been in the water for five days.

Maybe I’ll mention it to Carmilla. Just in case.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Apologies for the somewhat archaic –

DR. ELLIOTT
No need to worry, I understand. Some things you just can’t trust to computers. It’s like I always say about those robotic surgery machines. It’s just not the same. If I’m going to be operating on a man’s pancreas, I want to feel that pancreas. Fiddling with a joystick just won’t cut it. As it were.

ARCHIVIST
I didn’t think you still performed surgery?

DR. ELLIOTT
I keep up with the developments. And I remember the feel of a pancreas.

ARCHIVIST
Well… quite. Now, if you’d be so good as to –

DR. ELLIOTT
You know you have an infestation, don’t you?

ARCHIVIST
Excuse me? I’m not sure –

DR. ELLIOTT
Yes, little, grey, maggot things. I saw a few on the way in. Don’t recognise the species, but I’d say you need to get the exterminators in here. Gas the little blighters.

ARCHIVIST
[Curious] You saw them? You weren’t bitten were you?

DR. ELLIOTT
Bitten? They’re worms. Still, I’ll admit I don’t like the look of them. I reckon the sooner you get someone in to kill them dead, the better.

ARCHIVIST
We’ve tried, believe me. Now, shall we?

DR. ELLIOTT
Oh, certainly. Where, where do you want me to start? The bones? The blood? The… uh… the fruit?

ARCHIVIST
Right from the beginning. One second.

Statement of Dr. Lionel Elliott, regarding a series of events that took place during his class…

DR. ELLIOTT
Introduction to Human Anatomy and Physiology.

ARCHIVIST
At King’s College, London, in early 2016.

Statement recorded direct from subject 12th July, 2016. Statement begins.

DR. ELLIOTT
Now?

ARCHIVIST
Yes when else?... just start from the beginning.

DR. ELLIOTT (STATEMENT)
Right. Well, I shouldn’t even have been teaching the class, really. As far as I knew, I wasn’t going to be needed for any teaching on the Biomedical Engineering course this year. I can’t say I was particularly upset. The Human Anatomy module is where a lot of the engineers discover just how messy the human body is, and while the human heart is a phenomenal piece of machinery in terms of design and function, most of the students would be more comfortable holding a transistor. Not to put too fine a point on it, I get tired of… squeamish students, and was glad that I could avoid it this year.

You can perhaps imagine, then, that I was not best pleased when Elena Bower, the admissions officer, emailed me last November to say that there had been a mistake, and I was needed to take a ‘spillover class’. Apparently the system had accepted more students for the course than there were places, and they were trying to organise an additional class for the seven who were unassigned. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, Anatomy class wasn’t until the second term, so surely this mistake should have emerged earlier, but Elena just kept saying she didn’t know, she just had seven students who needed tutorials. I won’t pretend I took the news gracefully. I have a lot of research due shortly and, well, you know academia – never enough hours in the day. Still, I was the only staff member both qualified to teach the class and technically free when it had to be scheduled. So I agreed, although that really makes it sound like I had more of a choice than I actually did.

I didn’t meet the students until the module started this January. I wasn’t responsible for any of the lectures, so the first time I saw them was in our initial class tutorial. They all sat there, all seven, staring at me, and I felt… oddly uncomfortable. There, there was nothing wrong with them, of course, nothing strange to see or to look at, just… well, this is going to sound stupid to say out loud, but I don’t remember what they look like. Any of them. I remember that each wore blue jeans and a white shirt, though they were all different makes and styles; I think one of the girls had a skirt, instead. I must have noticed that they were wearing the same outfits, but it didn’t strike me as odd. They all just looked so… normal. Unremarkable. I remember their names, though, from the register. They stuck with me – maybe because they were such an international group. There was Erika Mustermann, Jan Novak, Piotr and Pavel Petrov, who I think were brothers, maybe twins, John Doe, Fulan al-Fulani and Juan Pérez.

I greeted them when I entered the room, and was met with silence. Not a malicious or angry silence, just silence. I’ve never been self-conscious when teaching, but walking to my seat with those fourteen eyes just… watching me… it made ever so slightly uncomfortable. I got the oddest feeling they were judging my walk. [Nervous laugh]

The class began, and we started going over some of the basics of anatomy and how the body works. They started to talk then, and some of my unease left me. I don’t remember exactly what was said, after doing it long enough most tutorials just kind of blur together a bit, but I recall being struck by just how basic some of their questions were. The composition of blood, where in the body the various organs sat, the sort of thing that anyone who’s done a science GCSE should know. I was almost tempted to ask where they went to school. At the time, I didn’t question the fact that they must have all gone to the same school.

Aside from that it was mostly normal, except… about halfway through the tutorial, we discussed the lungs and respiration. Inhalation, alveoli, et cetera. As I said, basic stuff, but I paused afterwards, just to have a think about where to go next, and I heard the sound of them breathing. That’s not abnormal, I know, but it seemed to fill the silence so suddenly, and all at once. I could… I could have sworn that I didn’t actually hear it before that moment. Like they’d only just then started breathing. [Nervous laugh] Which is, which is absurd, obviously. I was probably just listening out for it because we’d been discussing the lungs. Even so, it was disconcerting, and I don’t mind telling you that I breathed quite a sigh of relief myself when the tutorial was over and I could get out of there.

Now, I consider myself a conscientious worker, and in all my years at King’s I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve called in sick, but when the time came for the next tutorial with this class, I had to stay home with a migraine. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, the thought of sitting there for another two hours with those staring, placid eyes gave me such a spell of anxiety that my brain felt like it was being stabbed with a shard of ice. I did have to teach them eventually, of course. I couldn’t avoid it forever. Re-entering that room, though… All of them were sat in the exact same positions, in the exact same clothes, their breathing deliberate and almost pointed. When Erika Mustermann – or was it Jan Novak? – said ‘Good morning’, the others followed suit, one by one, and I had to fight the urge to run. It struck me then that, despite how diverse their names were, none of them seemed to have any noticeable accent. Not that it did anything to reassure me.

There was no-one else who could take the tutorials. Believe me, I did everything I could to try and find a replacement. Still, once I got used to their stares, their silence, and the fact that their questions were both specific and oddly basic – one of the Petrovs once asked me “How sharp are the knees meant to be” – I swear, it was just about tolerable. I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, but I came to terms with the fact that I didn’t care if they passed any exams, and that actually made the whole affair more manageable. I just did my best to stop caring.

And then came our first of two sessions in the dissection room. We were looking at the skeleton. I had been dreading this. Given exactly how creepy and unsettling the students were just sat in a classroom, the idea of what they could do when given access to human remains made me feel quite nauseous. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave them there alone, so I went.

It was even worse than I’d feared, seeing them stood there over the bits of cadaver. Their faces, normally so neutral, were alive with… what was it I saw? Excitement? Curiosity? Hunger? Whatever it was, it didn’t reach their eyes, still staring and blank. I went through the procedures with them and tried my best to keep the trembling out of my voice. When Fulan reached for a scalpel and started cutting into our samples, I felt faint.

I was trying to keep an eye on everyone, but the dissection tables were arranged in a semi-circle around the lab, and each time I turned to face one of the students, I began to hear this cracking sound from whichever tables I wasn’t looking at. Like a snapping bone, or a ribcage being forced open. I’d turn back and see nothing untoward, just John or Erika or Juan or whoever it was, looking at me quizzically over distinctly unbroken bones. But it kept happening. Whenever I wasn’t looking, I heard the crunch and the crack of bone. I couldn’t ask about it. I knew the dead-eyed, mute stare they’d give me if I did, and I just couldn’t face that.

Finally, I managed to position myself so that I could see what was happening behind me in the reflective edge of the metal table. It wasn’t much, but I could see a slightly warped image. It was Pavel, in this case. I saw him pick up a bone – a radius, I believe, from the forearm. He held it up next to his own arm, and then there came that snapping, crunching noise. I swear I saw his arm distend itself, the skin shifting as something inside changed and rearranged, until it matched the length of bone he was holding up to it.

I tried not to react, not to make a noise at this mad impossibility that I saw. I couldn’t help it, though, and my legs gave out. I collapsed on the floor with a whimpering cry. None of them looked at me, none of them offered to help me up, none of them gave any reaction at all. I shut my eyes tight as that cracking sound began to come from every direction, as all seven of them began to change themselves. It went on for almost half an hour, until our allotted time in the lab ended. And then they left, walking past me, still sat helpless on the floor. As they did, each of them thanked me for the lesson as though nothing had happened. And I swear that every single one of them was taller than when they started.

I started taking more sick leave after that. I avoided their tutorials as often as possible, and when I did go we largely just sat there in silence until one of them asked a question about human anatomy, which I would reluctantly answer. I know I should have just abandoned them entirely. If they were going to complain to anyone, they would have done it already. But even then, I was worried my colleagues might notice, and I really didn’t want to get a reputation as some absentee tutor. It didn’t help that a colleague of mine, Dr. Laura Gill, once expressed surprise on learning I’d been absent the day before, as apparently she’d passed by my teaching room and my anatomy class had just been sat there, waiting quietly. The thought of them politely filing into every tutorial, just sat there, blank and staring, whether I was there or not, just waiting… To be quite frank I think that bothered me almost more than being sat there with them.

Still, I managed to largely avoid them until the 21st of March, when they had their second lab dissection. Hearts. I’m not an idiot. I was well aware of the sort of sinister nonsense that was likely to happen if I went, but I also knew by now that they would attend whether or not I was there. And to leave them in the lab unsupervised would be the sort of thing that would get me actually fired from my position.

It was a rainy morning. I remember that, because I deliberately didn’t put up an umbrella. Something inside me was so dreading what was going to happen that the very act of opening umbrellas seemed pointless, as though my being dry couldn’t stop what was coming, then there was no reason not to get soaked. So I was dripping wet when I entered the lab, and my glasses had steamed up to the point where I could no longer see through them. When I wiped them clean, they revealed those seven blank faces, utterly unconcerned with my sodden state. Each had somehow got the heart laid out in from them on the dissection tray. I decided not to prolong it, and waved them to start.

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I thought they’d descend into some sort of feeding frenzy, but they didn’t. They just began to dissect the hearts, as any other class would, occasionally asking me polite questions. I was so taken aback at how normal the whole situation seemed to be that it took me some time to actually answer them. I did, though, and the first hour of the class almost put me at least a little bit at ease. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Maybe they were doing weird things to their insides, but if it was the heart, then I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t hear it. And I’d long since decided with this class, that if I couldn’t see or hear it, I didn’t care.

Then Erika Mustermann held up her heart and looked at me. I began to get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as she asked me “How does the heart pump blood?” I started to explain the biological mechanisms of the heart pumping, when she shook her head slowly and said, “What does it look like?” And then, when I didn’t answer, “Is it like this?”

The heart in her hand began to spasm. Not like the regular, rhythmic pulse of a heartbeat, but like a balloon being rapidly squeezed at one end. Bits of it swelled and stretched and distorted seemingly at random, and blood began to flow haphazardly from the ventricles, dripping down Erika’s forearm and dribbling onto the floor.

I stood there, speechless, staring at this horrible miracle, when from behind her I see Fulan raise his heart, saying, “That’s not what it’s like.” And blood starts to gush from all over his heart in tiny geysers, shooting in every direction. Soon each of them is holding a heart up, each pumping and throbbing differently, blood leaking, spurting out of them in a different way, a different nightmare. They wanted me to tell them which was right. [Nervous laugh] I don’t know how long I stared before I finally raised my hand to point at Jan Novak, who seemed to have the closest to an accurate impression of a regular human heartbeat. Then I turned and walked out of the lab.

I spent the rest of the day sat in the staffroom, waiting for someone to come running in, screaming about the lab being full of blood. I expected questions I couldn’t answer and immediate termination. But nothing happened. No-one came. When I returned to the lab several hours later, there was no sign of any blood, except for the tiniest speck, dried into a tile crack in the corner. Unless that, that had been there before? I don’t know. My shoes were still speckled with blood, though, so I know I wasn’t hallucinating it. I checked with Dr. Gill, who confirmed that she could see the spots, though I neglected to tell her it was blood. I had no intention of inviting further questions.

I missed the next three tutorials. I just stayed at home. But something wouldn’t let me just simply let it go. Finally, I made a decision. I wanted to see where they lived. I felt like I needed to, for some reason. Needed to see if they existed outside of my class, outside of my mind. I asked Elena and, irregular as it was, she gave me the address. It didn’t surprise me to find out they all lived in the same place. A semi-detached house on Kingsland Road in Newham. I’m afraid I don’t remember the number, and the details have disappeared from the college systems.

The house itself was run down, as might have been expected, and I must have spent a good fifteen minutes just stood in front of it, waiting for the courage to approach. Finally, I knocked on the door. The wood was old and dry, and some flaked off under my knuckles. It opened immediately, and there stood Jan Novak. When she saw me, her mouth twisted into something I think was meant to be a smile.

“Hello,” she said, “have you come to give us more lessons? We would like to learn about the liver.” Her eyes locked onto my abdomen.

I was about to reply when a muffled scream of pain came from somewhere deep inside the house. It sounded ragged, like whoever was crying out had been gagged. I looked to Jan Novak, who showed no indication she had heard it, still staring at where I had taught her my liver would be. I ran, and she watched me go without moving.

I did call the police, but they just told me that the house was currently unoccupied, and they’d found no evidence that there had been anyone present. I took great pains never to see the class again. I avoided all tutorials, and simply waited until the end of term. I haven’t seen them since.

ARCHIVIST
That’s it?

DR. ELLIOTT
Not… quite. There was one other thing. When I went to the classroom shortly after what should have been their final tutorial, I found… something on the desk.

It was an apple. Next to it was a handwritten note that said “Thank you for teaching us the insides”. I burned the note, just in case.

ARCHIVIST
And the apple, did you… eat it?

DR. ELLIOTT
(interrupting) Do I look like an idiot? Of course not! I cut it in half, first, to check if it was… off.

ARCHIVIST
And?

DR. ELLIOTT
Human teeth. Inside were human teeth arranged in a smile. Here, (cloth moving) I brought you the two halves to see for yourselves.

ARCHIVIST
[Very excited] Oh That’s…

DR. ELLIOTT
[Not catching on] Deeply unpleasant, yes. You can keep it, if you want. As proof.

ARCHIVIST
We do want it. but afraid it isn’t really proof.

Someone could have stuck those teeth in after the apple had been cut.

DR. ELLIOTT
[Somewhat distressed] You think I would do that?!

ARCHIVIST
I didn’t say you would, I just said it was enough of a possibility that I don’t think your… tooth apple has a place in our Artefact Storage.

But i can.

DR. ELLIOTT
Fine. I’ll give it to you. Now, is there anything else you want me?

ARCHIVIST
No, this should do. We’ll investigate and get back to you if we find anything.

Statement ends.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
The first thing about this statement that makes me dubious is that it comes from a fellow academic. Historic and prestigious as the Magnus Institute is, there are still many within the sphere of higher education that do not grant it the respect it deserves, and some have been known to make false statements as ill-conceived jokes.

Another mark against the veracity of the statement is the names of the students. A quick Internet search reveals ‘Erika Mustermann’ as the official German placeholder name, similar to the English, well, the English name ‘John Doe’. The same is true the other names, ‘Juan Pérez’ is the generic name of choice in most Spanish speaking countries, ‘Fulan al-Fulani’ in the Middle East, et cetera. It seems strange to me that Dr. Elliott would fail to take note of this.

Still, Tim made contact with Elena Bower in the King’s administration office, and while she couldn’t find any actual records of them in the system, she does remember them being there, and confirms that she assigned them to Dr. Elliott last year. She could be in on it, of course, but Tim seems to believe her.

There’s also the matter of the teeth. I stand by my assessment that there is no evidence they were placed there by supernatural means, but it does seem an awfully long way to go for a bad joke. In the end, we did send them off to a dental specialist, but they weren’t able to tell us much beyond the fact that they all seemed like healthy adult teeth, and most of them appeared to come from different people.

There’s not much more we can do to follow this up, without dedicating additional time we can’t afford. The only other lead was Jessica’s discovery that, early last year, Dr. Rashid Sadana took his own life. There’s no direct connection, except that he taught the Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology for Complementary Therapies course at St. Mary’s University, and the only note found near the body simply read “NOT TO BE USED FOR TEACHING”.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Harold Silvana, regarding discoveries made during the renovation of the Reform Club, Pall Mall. Original statement given June 4th, 2002. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I’m a builder. Sort of. I always find myself using the words ‘craftsman’ or ‘artisan’, but that’s mostly because of my client base. I specialise in renovation and alterations on listed buildings and those of historical or architectural significance. In simple terms it’s not much different to any other sort of construction work, except it takes about three times as long and costs ten times as much. That’s not to say I rip people off. You need to spend almost half the time just planning exactly how you’re going to tackle any given job, while preserving or recreating the original architecture as much as possible, and then you have to be incredibly careful when you’re doing the work. I’m quite serious when I say that if you’re not paying attention and keeping the alterations well-documented, you can get sued for millions over knocking out the wrong brick. Plus, the materials aren’t cheap. So, yes, my services are expensive, but me and my team are worth every penny. And the sort of people I deal with, or should I say the sort of people whose personal assistants I deal with, can afford it.

I don’t have a company, per se. People hire me for me, and I have a small team I trust to help out with the work itself. They’re technically freelance contractors, but the pay’s good enough and, in London at least, there’s enough work that they’re happy to wait on my call.

I’ve found plenty of interesting things in this job. I suppose that’s not unexpected when you’re digging around old buildings. We got kicked off a job once when we found some bones under a very venerable country house that will remain nameless, as the owners contacted the British Museum, who couldn’t take over fast enough. There have also been a few jewellery pieces that found their way to other museums, and once we found a box of 17th century erotic poems that I think are currently languishing in the storerooms of the V&A museum. But I never found anything like what was under 100 Pall Mall.

We’d been called in to do some work on the basement and ground floor of the Reform Club. It wasn’t anything major. Some upkeep on a few of the historic pieces, replace a few of the earlier renovations. The amount of actual work involved was minimal, but it was a Grade I listed building, so the amount of care we had to take stretched it into a week-long job. It didn’t help that we had to schedule around the fact that it’s still a very active social venue, so we could only actually come out of the basement when it wasn’t full of people too important to see builders. Grade I listing is a significant payday, though, so I certainly wasn’t going to rock the boat.

It was about two in the morning when the kid showed up. It was just me and Rachael Turley, who does most of our marble work, though we were mostly just doing surveying at that point. Alfred Bartlett was out getting coffee, though god knows where from at that time of night. We were mostly just kicking our heels really, since he’s the plumber and we needed his expertise. Now, Alf has been in the business for nearly 40 years, and there wasn’t a thing he didn’t know about water or sewage systems, but we often joke that it’s pushed everything else out of his head. I think he must have forgotten to lock the door when he headed out, and that’s how the kid got in. That said, this was still the first week in March and it was pretty cold, so I’m surprised we didn’t notice the draught.

In the end I suppose it doesn’t matter. The fact is that Rachel and me had been sat there chatting for maybe five minutes when we noticed we weren’t alone. In the doorway leading back to the stairwell stood a thin figure. He looked to be in his late teens, I’d guess. He was dressed all in black, with heavy looking boots and a T-shirt with the logo of some band emblazoned on it, Megadon or Mastodon, or something like that. His hair was long and greasy, almost down to his shoulders, and looked to be dyed almost the same black as his clothes. He did not look like he was supposed to be skulking round the Reform Club, but I’d encountered more than one member whose rich children were going through a ‘rebellious period’, so couldn’t be entirely sure. I decided to be gentle in my initial enquiries and asked him if he was lost, told him this part of the basement was off-limits due to renovations.

The kid shook his head and asked if we’d found anything yet. Any of “Leitner’s pages”. Now this took me aback a bit. I wondered how long he’d been standing there, because Rachel and I had just been talking about the man. Jurgen Leitner was a businessman from Norway, I believe, who used to have offices in the ground floor of the building next to the Reform Club, 100 Pall Mall. I don’t know what his business was, but when I was first getting started, back in ‘87, we got a call from Mr. Leitner, requesting a consultation in his Pall Mall office. Back then it was just me and Rachel, and we mostly did stone restoration and alteration, so we assumed Mr. Leitner wanted our opinion on a property outside of London. Our reputation back then was not sufficient to get us access to any of the sort of Central London buildings we now work on.

When we first met Jurgen Leitner, he looked very much like I had imagined him. Portly, middle-aged, short blond hair in the middle of going grey, well-tailored business suit. His office surprised me, though, as it was almost completely bare, save for a desk and two chairs in front of it. There were no tables or bookshelves or filing cabinets or anything like that. He asked us to sit down, and though he spoke with a very faint accent, his English was perfect. We made small talk, but he seemed impatient, eager to talk about whatever it was he wanted us to do.

I asked him what the job was, and he stopped and looked at us closely. Then he said he simply wanted us to dig a hole. An unusual request, but not an unreasonable one, so I asked him whereabouts this was going to be. He rose, walked over to the corner and pointed at the floor. He said he needed a hole put through the floor. I thought there would have been a basement under there, and he said no, the building’s basement didn’t go under these rooms. He smiled an odd little smile as he said it, which put me a bit on edge.

Now, there was no way we could do a job like that without the building owner’s permission and I told Leitner this. He began to get shifty, then, and tried to tell us that he already had that permission. When we told him we’d need to confirm it with the commercial landlord, he got very defensive, told us that it was fine and he’d need to discuss it with some other contractors first. When we told him we’d just need to have a quick phone call with the owner, he started screaming that we didn’t understand what we were talking about, that he didn’t need to explain himself to the likes of us, and there were some things that were too important, too powerful to be owned. Then he just started yelling at us in Norwegian until we left. We didn’t bother contacting the owners of 100 Pall Mall, in the end.

It was without a doubt the weirdest interview with a prospective client that we’d ever had, and being so close to the site of it had Rachel and I reminiscing when this teenage burnout turned up. I asked him if he’d been eavesdropping, and he shrugged, and again asked what we had found. I was just about done with this kid, and started to tell him that he was going to have to leave, when Rachel interrupted me and asked what there was to find. The kid laughed, as though he and Rachel were in on some private joke. “Can you smell it?” he said, and for a brief moment, I could smell something. Damp old stone and musty paper, just a faint whiff. It took me off guard, and I think that was why I just stood there as he walked past me and picked up the hammer. He strode over to one of the walls and, with a swing stronger than I would have thought possible from his age and skinny frame, he buried it into the wall. I heard a scream, high-pitched, but it definitely didn’t come from any of us.

This was enough to break me out of my stupor and I ran over and wrestled the hammer from the kid. He struggled and flailed, though he didn’t say anything. As I tried to calm him down, Rachel called over me, and I looked at where he’d hit the wall. In the centre of it was a neat hole; the other side was darkness. There shouldn’t have been anything behind the wall except foundation, but it didn’t look like this was a real basement wall. I let the kid go and walked over to get a closer look. Rachel started to examine it with her tools, before she confirmed what I’d already guessed – that it was a fake. It looked like someone had blocked off a passage, and then very carefully disguised it.

It was at this point Alf returned, and we had some considerable explaining to do. Through it all the kid, who said his name was Gerard, just sat their sullenly, listening to his CD player and waiting. When we asked him how he knew what was behind that wall he just shrugged, and told us that his mother knows all about this stuff. He didn’t elaborate as to what “this stuff” might have been.

We should have waited until morning and told the Reform Club staff what we’d found. We should have handed Gerard over to the police, but Alf was always too curious for his own good, and he suggested we have a look inside. Rachel and I half-heartedly tried to argue against it, but I think deep down we wanted to know just as much as he did. So in we went.

Knocking through the rest of the wall didn’t take long. It had been built to look like the rest of the basement, but hadn’t been constructed with the same skill. Ten minutes later our coffees lay forgotten on the floor and we stood before a passageway leading off into the musty darkness. A gentle breeze blew from this entrance, which didn’t make any sense at all. We had plenty of torches, as you often need them during night work, so we each took one large one and a smaller back-up in case the first had any problems. We tried to tell Gerard to stay outside, but I could see immediately that, short of tying him up, there was no way we were going to keep him out of there. Tying him up did feel like a step too far, so we settled for keeping a close eye on him as we went inside.

The passageway was cold, and the air thick with mildew, but the stone walls were in very good condition. Rachel said it looked to be from the mid-19th century, probably remains of the basement of the Carlton Club, which used to be located in what was now 100 Pall Mall. It was with a start I realised that she was right, based on where the corridor was going, we must have been underneath the building. Almost exactly where Jurgen Leitner had wanted us to dig almost fifteen years ago.

We walked for some time, longer than I would have expected, given how big I remembered the building above us being. Alf kept asking Rachel if the corridor was getting narrower, and every time, she would dutifully measure the width and inform him that, no, it was exactly five feet wide. I couldn’t blame him, really, I’ve never had any sort of claustrophobia, but I was finding it hard, at points to catch my breath, to dismiss the feeling that the walls were pressing on me. Gerard walked on ahead, seemingly unbothered by the place.

We came to a crossroads. Or, more precisely, a star. The chamber was small, round and featureless, but there were doorways leading out in a circle. I counted thirteen, not including the one we had come in from. Looking down some of them made me feel oddly queasy. There was one that, for all the world, it felt like I was going to fall into it. Another was so dark that our torches didn’t seem to reach more than a few feet inside. In the centre, there was a datestone. It read: “Robert Smirke, 1835. Balance and fear”.

I don’t know how much you know about famous London architects, but Robert Smirke was one of the foremost proponents of the Gothic Revival in the early 19th century. His work was some of the first to use concrete and cast iron, and often described as ‘theatrical’, a description that makes a lot of sense when you look at the grand columns of the British Museum – his most famous building. Later, I would look up a list of his buildings and discover that he had indeed built the Carlton Club building in that exact spot. It had been destroyed in the Second World War, during the Blitz, and the club itself had moved premises, but it looked like the underground foundations, or whatever this place was, had not been damaged.

We stood there for some time as I explained this to the others. It took some time to do so as, with the exception of Gerard, I got the impression that none of us were in any hurry to go down the other tunnels. A deep apprehension seemed to have settled itself in the pit of my stomach; everyone else also seemed to feel it. Then, without warning, Gerard started running full pelt into one of the passages. I’m not sure which one it was of the thirteen. I called for him to come back, but got no reply and Alf took off after him, running into the darkness and quickly turning a corner. Rachel and I looked at each other for a few seconds, but we both knew what we needed to be doing. I followed Alf into the passage, while she headed back down to the entrance to get help.

This tunnel wasn’t as dark as some of the others, but it was damper, and the walls seemed oddly slimy. After a few yards, the stone became so slick that I found it hard to keep my footing and I fell. I put my hand onto the floor to push myself up, and it came away faintly tinged with red. I heard Alf cry out from further down the corridor. He sounded utterly terrified, and I started on towards him again. I saw lights from up ahead, and was about to call out when Gerard came running back out of the darkness.

He was clutching a book in his hands, and clearly wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. He barrelled right into me, knocking me to the floor again. He was only a skinny kid, but he was so strong, and kept his footing, disappearing back into the darkness, towards the entrance. As he passed, I heard a small clattering sound, as though something were falling behind him. I reached out slowly, to try and raise myself off the ground, and felt something small and oddly smooth lying there. I shined my light on it, and saw a small bone. From a bird, I think, or maybe a rat. I looked around and there were a few more scattered about the corridor.

I’d fallen harder this time, and had managed to hurt my knee quite badly. I was just about able to limp to the end of the corridor, and there I found a small, round room. Against the walls were old bookshelves, decayed and empty, save for a few mouldering pages. They were stained and rotten, and one of them looked like it had a mummified hand laying on it. In front of it, in almost the centre of the room, lay Alf. He was dead. I couldn’t see any injuries on him. He didn’t even seem hurt. But looking at how still he lay there, the terrified, awful expression frozen on his face, there was no chance he was alive. On his motionless chest, and around the base of the bookshelf, I saw more of those tiny bones.

That’s where my memory begins to blur. I know I made it back to the basement of the Reform Club, where Rachel was waiting with the police. But I think I got some of the wrong passageways first. I have the vaguest memories: flashes of a pile of paper, completely covered in cobweb; a figure stood in the darkness, a stranger I didn’t know but was sure meant me harm; my skin burning, hot, choking on smoke down there in the dark.

When I was out, I was questioned by the police, who followed Rachel in to retrieve Alf’s body and were successful, though they came back out pale and shaking. There was no sign of Gerard, nor had Rachel seen him. I was then questioned again by the staff of the Reform Club, who instructed us in no uncertain terms to rebuild the wall and finish our original job. We were given to understand that the police were handling the matter, and if we pursued it closer then we would not be getting any further work from members of the club. As this covers almost everybody who can afford our services, we complied. It makes me feel sick, though, like we’re just abandoning Alf, dishonouring his memory. It’s not even like he had any family to miss him, it just feels wrong. I guess, maybe, that’s why I’m talking to you. Do try to keep my name out of it if you follow it up though, okay?

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

On the one hand, this statement represents a complete dead end, as no-one involved is both able and willing to talk to us. Over the last three months Nastya has attempted to contact Mr. Silvana, Rachel Turley, the management of the Reform Club and any of the police officers involved. All of them flatly deny any of this ever took place. Alfred Bartlett’s death was listed as a heart attack suffered during routine maintenance work, and none of the coroner’s reports provide any details out of the ordinary. The “kid”, who I think it is reasonable to assume is none other than Gerard Keay, remains just as impossible to contact as he ever was. From an evidence standpoint, this case is a complete bust.

However, too many of the names and features match with other statements for me to dismiss it, not to mention the fact that business records do list Jurgen Leitner as having hired out an office on the ground floor of 100 Pall Mall between 1985 and 1994. He was apparently one of the premier worldwide dealers in rare and antique books at the time, with items selling for the sort of sums where an office in Pall Mall doesn’t raise any eyebrows. If this strange basement is really there, then perhaps his choice of location was not simply a display of status. Clearly some of his books were there, and I can’t help but wonder whether that was where they were found, or just where they were stored.

The other major point of interest is the fact that this complex appears to have been designed by Robert Smirke. You should have seen Jessica’s face when I told her. Architecture is one of her specialist areas, and she has always talked of Smirke as one that fascinates her. How did she phrase it? “A master of subtle stability.” From a professional standpoint, it also interests her that Smirke’s buildings have higher percentages of reported paranormal sightings than any other architect of similar profile. She hasn’t been able to find much out about the Carlton Club specifically, at least not anything relevant to this statement. In his later years, following Smirke’s official retirement in 1845, there were all sorts of rumours about his interests and religious preferences. If there was a scandalous sect or bizarre cult, his name would always be seen mentioned among those meeting with them. He also started putting his name forward to design churches, despite his claimed retirement. He was never taken up on these offers. Interesting, but fundamentally not that useful for the case in hand, especially since we have been unable to get permission to physically investigate whether this place even exists. It seems we’ve reached something of a dead end. Pun intended.

End recor – Urgh! Goddamn it!

[SOUND OF METAL CANISTER BEING KNOCKED]
Tim!

[DOOR OPENS]
Tim, where did you put the rest of the extinguishers? you usless piece os shit Tim!

[SOUND DISAPPEARS INTO DISTANCE]
[SILENCE, FOLLOWED BY HEAVY FOOTFALLS]
TIM
Raphaella, did you call fo–

BREEKON
‘scuse us.

HOPE
Looking for the Archivist.

TIM
I’m sorry, are you two meant –

BREEKON
Won’t take up your time.

HOPE
Just got a delivery.

TIM
Look, you really can’t actually –

BREEKON
Package for Raphaella La Cognizi.

HOPE
Says right here.

TIM
Well, I don’t really know where She –

HOPE
We’ll just leave it with you.

BREEKON
Be sure she gets it.

TIM
Okay, I will, but you really have to actually –

BREEKON
‘course. Much obliged.

HOPE
Stay safe.

TIM
…I’ll try?

BREEKON
Your recorder’s on, by the way.

HOPE
Might want to change that.

TIM
Oh… so it is. Thanks.

BREEKON
No problem.

HOPE
At all.

[HEAVY FOOTSTEPS RECEDE]
[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Nicole Baxter, regarding visits culminating in the fire that consumed Ivy Meadows Care Home in Woodley, Greater Manchester. Original statement given November 19th, 2012. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Fear is a strange thing, isn’t it? What you’re afraid of. For most people, a corpse is at the least unnerving and, for some, outright terrifying. Or maybe it’s disgust. They are two very different feelings, aren’t they? Though they often bleed into each other, if you’ll pardon the pun. I work as a funeral director, so as you can imagine, how I feel about death and the body is a bit more… complicated and more immediately relevant than it is for most people. Dealing with cadavers day in, day out forces you to confront all manner of things about yourself.

Simply put, I have found that I do not believe in any sort of afterlife. I have seen people cold and lifeless upon the mortician’s table who I knew, who I remembered as vibrant and lively. There was no soul that had departed, no special spark that passed on to something else. Simply a body that no longer moved or spoke or thought. It feels odd to consider the fact that you will no longer exist some day, but you didn’t exist for billions of years before your birth, so, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that you will not exist afterwards in much the same way. I try to see life as a pleasant holiday from non-existence. It provides some comfort when the truth of my own mortality stares me in the face every day.

There is one thing about dead bodies that does bother me, though. One thing that… eats at me, as it were, and does give me that sick tightness of fear deep in my gut. It is rot. I don’t know why it gets to me so; perhaps it’s precisely because I don’t think there is anything beyond the body, and even dead and unaware, seeing a person’s form begin to putrefy and fester – becoming just a home for the crawling, feasting things – is too much for me. Perhaps it’s just an unaccountable phobia. Regardless of the reason, the fact is that to see the corpses decaying, to see their flesh corrupted, it is… the one part of this job that I find uncomfortable. So much so that I would describe reconstruction and preservation as my favourite part of the process. Making sure the cadaver looks as peaceful and lifelike as possible. Make them the person they were, or as close as they can be while cold and senseless. Fighting off the rot. The insects. The disease.

I don’t know why I wrote disease just then. They’re dead, so they can’t be diseased in the normal sense, can they? I suppose it’s just thinking about what happened at the Ivy Meadows Care Home links them in my head. But it’s not just that, is it? That… the fear, the feeling. That tingling, squirming fear at the back of my mind – it feels the same when thinking of the germs that corrupt and twist our bodies, lurking invisibly on any table or surface, or when I saw those swarming flies. How many more moved and buzzed just out of sight? I’ve never had any mental health issues before, but perhaps after my experience I should consult someone. I read once that OCD can come on later in life, if a severe experience sets it off.

I’m rambling. Disregard this first page, I’ll start again.

I work as a mortician at Baxter and Gordon Funeral Directors in Woodley. By rights it should now just be Baxter Funeral Directors, as William Gordon passed away himself about 5 years ago, leaving my uncle George running the place on his own. He kept the name though, as he always said it was one of the most respected in all of Manchester. God knows there was no sentimental reason to keep it. From the way he talked, he and William Gordon hated each other by the end, to the point where the will expressly stated that the body of William Gordon was to be handled and prepared by Fenchurch and Sons, one of my uncle’s great rivals. Maybe that’s why Uncle George is so keen to keep it in the family. He hired me and my cousin Josh to help, and now Baxter and Gordon Funeral Directors is entirely run by Baxters.

I’ve been there for almost four years now and have taken over most of the client-side arrangements of the business. My uncle has gotten somewhat brusque in his old age and is now more suited to organising things with churches and crematoria, rather than handling the recently bereaved. As such, I’ve gotten to know the various nursing and care homes around Woodley rather well. We generally get a few removals from any given one each year. Maybe as many as a half dozen if the winter is bad. It’s certainly our most reliable source of business.

Of them all, Ivy Meadows was my favourite. For a funeral director to say she has a favourite nursing home probably sounds a bit like the Grim Reaper talking about his favourite hospital, but it’s true. Ivy Meadows Care Home was on the outskirts of Woodley, where the suburbs gave way to pockets of green countryside. It wasn’t remote, exactly, but it was removed enough from the main road that it stood alone, surrounded by rather lovely gardens on three sides, and a long, open field behind it. It had been a country house once, I believe, but not much of the original structure remains, having been modified and expanded to provide accessible accommodation for about thirty residents. It was an odd building, with modern glass and concrete sections sprouting from old turreted brickwork, like blocky stone tumours.

The look of the place wasn’t why I liked it, though. No, that was the residents. Ivy Meadows was almost entirely populated by those elderly who were entirely supported by the state. Most pensioners have some savings or property or family to support them, which means if they’re unable to live alone they can at least afford to pay for their own care or some of it. It’s rare for a person to reach that age and have literally nothing to pay for their care, but it does happen. In these cases, the state pays for them, but they have little choice in where they end up. Ivy Meadows was almost entirely populated by these. Old people without money or family, sent to be looked after by strangers. You’d have expected the atmosphere to be unpleasant, some morbid combination of prison and hospice, but it was quite the opposite. Something about the mutual loneliness seemed to lead them to create a real sense of community. It was the only place I ever went where the residents still gave me a smile. Hannah Ramirez, who ran the place, would always tell me a bit about the deceased and their time there, and I was inevitably shocked by tales of drugs, sexual escapades and other gossip that sounded more like a high school than a nursing home. I think Hannah enjoyed trying to get a reaction out of me when I was trying to be solemn. It was just a happy place, even if I was only there to do a sad duty.

It all started to change about three months ago, after Hannah left. I don’t know exactly when she left her post or why; we hadn’t had a call from Ivy Meadows for a couple of months, so it must have happened during that period. I don’t know where she moved to, either. It certainly wasn’t any of the other care homes around Woodley, and it wasn’t like I knew her personally. I’d gotten a call from one of the nurses, Alenka Kozel, who said that one of their residents had taken ill and passed away, a man by the name of Bertrand Miller. I asked her for a few more details; she started to say something else, but the call was cut off almost abruptly. I didn’t really think too much about it, most of the details could be worked out when we arrived, so I called Josh and loaded up the car for a removal.

It was a hot mid-August day, and the air was thick and humid, making everything feel sticky, like the whole world was running a fever. The sky was overcast, though, an orangey-grey that cast muted shadows and seemed to muffle the world. It was about a ten minute drive to Ivy Meadows, and neither of us said a word. I don’t know why, at that point we had no idea that there was anything wrong, but looking back it seems like we both felt there was something off about it. Or maybe we were just too hot for conversation and hindsight is colouring my memories.

When we arrived the place was silent. There were no cars in the parking area, which was not unusual, but I couldn’t see a soul anywhere on the grounds. Maybe they were simply staying out of the heat. Josh and I got out of the car and approached the door. I pressed the buzzer, as I had done so many times before, expecting the cheery voice of one of the receptionists. Instead there was just dead air, followed by the clunk of the door being remotely unlocked. I looked at Josh, who shrugged, and we went inside.

Ivy Meadows Care Home was usually much as you would find any other – air conditioned, and smelling faintly of cleaning products and cheap potpourri. This time it was different. The smell now was just as faint, but seemed… rancid, while the air itself was close and damp. The beige walls seemed dirtier than before, with dark marks at roughly hand-height. There was a faint buzzing, like a fly, but I couldn’t see any source for it.

None of it was so bad as to make us turn back, however, and we headed towards the reception desk. There was nobody behind it, and I rang the bell. I always wore gloves when on a removal, and was glad of that fact now, as I noticed a greasy residue on top of the small brass bell. The door to the reception opened, and a tall man stepped out. He was rail thin and wore a faded brown suit that seemed to have been cut for a much fatter man. His eyes were a watery blue and his dark hair stood on top of his head in an unruly mess. He must have been around forty, but had a nervous sort of energy to him. He was quite a surprise, to say the least.

Josh recovered faster than I did and asked the man, a bit rudely, who he was, where we could find Hannah. The man shook his head at this and said that Ms. Ramirez had left the position, and he was now Director of Ivy Meadows. He introduced himself as John Amherst, and held a hand out for Josh to shake. My cousin stood there for some time, staring at the thick, sweaty hand of this strange man, clearly not wanting to shake it. Mr. Amherst just stood there, arm outstretched, apparently unconcerned. A fly landed on his face, and if he noticed, he didn’t give any sign of it, not even when it walked across his eye. Eventually, the now clearly shaken Josh stuttered out some semi-polite excuse and backed away.

At this John Amherst lowered his hand and turned to me. He asked why we were here. This took me rather by surprise, as there’s generally only one reason undertakers show up in such a place. We told him we had received a call and been told Mr. Miller had passed away. Amherst asked who had called us, but with such a sharpness in his voice that I lied and said the caller hadn’t given their name. He paused, clearly considering what to say next very carefully. Finally, he nodded, and said that yes, Bertrand Miller was dead. And we could have him. Then he gestured for us to follow and began to walk back into the main building.

As we walked, he began listing the details for Mr. Miller’s funeral, such as they were. No family or friends, no savings or insurance, simple cremation, as soon as possible. No service to be held at the crematorium. Ashes to be returned to Ivy Meadows in whatever the cheapest option was for an urn made of brass. At this I asked what he wanted the ashes for, and he simply waved his hand in a vague dismissal and said they’d be wanting to have a “private remembrance service”.

By now, we’d been walking for a few minutes, and I hadn’t seen another soul in the corridors. I thought I spotted one of the nurses at one point, but they had turned and walked away as soon as they saw us. We arrived at a room bearing a small plaque. It read ‘Bertrand Miller’. John Amherst opened it without hesitation and went inside.

The smell was what hit me first. I’ve smelled plenty of corpses in my time. I’d almost say I’m used to the smell. This was different, there was some deeper taint there than simply putrefying flesh, and it made me gag. By the look on his face, Josh smelled it as well. Then I got a good look at the body on the bed, and almost turned and ran.

Based on the colour of those sections of skin still whole and unblemished, Mr. Miller couldn’t have been dead for more than a few hours, half a day at most. You wouldn’t have known, though. Large sections of his body were covered in a wet, creamy yellow rash, which… I’m not a doctor, so describing exactly what it did to the flesh it touched would serve no purpose except to start me having the nightmares again. Let us just say that it gave a plentiful home for the flies that swarmed around his body.

We looked at John Amherst, utterly appalled. He said not to worry, that the disease that had claimed poor Mr. Miller wasn’t contagious. Even produced the recently signed death certificate, though it was stained with some dark grey fluid, so I did not examine it too closely. He then apologised that their air conditioning had broken. “I’m sure you know all about what heat does to cadavers,” he said.

I just wanted to get out of there, and have never been more grateful to whoever designed care home beds so that we could remove the body with as little contact as possible. Even then, on the way out I felt a sudden tickling pain on the back of my left hand, and looked down to see the thick leather glove in contact with one of the patches of yellow. I nearly screamed and dropped the body, but did neither. Ivy Meadows did not feel then like a safe place to do either of those things. In fact, I kept my composure through the whole of the drive home.

As soon as we arrived, I ran into the bathroom, throwing my gloves into the medical waste bin. I scrubbed the patch of skin that still felt like it was crawling. I could see nothing wrong with it, but I kept scrubbing until it was bloody, then poured disinfectant over it until it went numb.

When I finally left the bathroom, I found Josh arguing loudly with his father. Apparently Uncle George was not satisfied with the explanation given for the state of Mr. Miller’s body. He turned to me, and asked what had happened. I told him the same thing Josh had, the same thing I’ve told you. We went over it slowly, point by point until finally he stood there silently, looking worried, but determined. He had us tell it to him one more time, before he nodded, told us to stay away from the corpse of Bertrand Miller, and left, telling us he had to make a few calls. I have never seen a cremation done with such a quick turnaround, and he was burned before the end of the day. I asked Uncle George about returning the ashes in a brass urn, but he shook his head, and said he’d already had them disposed of.

I knew my uncle wasn’t one to share his thoughts when he didn’t want to, and that seemed to be the end of it, save for those times throughout the day I would feel that tickling in my hand and run to scrub it away. I went on a couple of other jobs, and it seemed like we were expected to forget it. Josh didn’t talk about what happened, and I got the impression he was trying to ignore what he had seen. He always was a practical soul.

I… couldn’t let it go, though. It just kept playing in my mind. So when the phone rang two weeks later and I heard Alenka’s voice on the other end, my heart skipped several beats. What she said did nothing to allay my fears. The line was bad, very bad, but I could have sworn she said, “Come quickly. We’ve taken ill. We’ve passed away.” The words repeated, as though on a recorded loop, though they were no easier to make out than the first time. Finally, I put the phone down. I was technically off duty at that point, having just finished my shift, so I could have ignored it. I could have walked away. Instead, I put on my normal clothes, grabbed three pairs of gloves and got in my car.

The drive there was dreadful. Still hot, I kept looking at turnings and junctions, and imagining where I would go if I turned away from Ivy Meadows and just drove off. But I didn’t. I kept taking those old familiar turnings, moving inevitably towards that sick, old building.

When I arrived, it was quiet. The whole building looked filthy now, even from the outside, and the plants that bordered it had started to take on an unhealthy whitish colour. There was one other car in the parking area, a faded white Transit van I didn’t recognise. I got out and started to walk towards the front door. The smell was noticeable even from out here, and by the time I got close enough to reach the buzzer, it had become so strong as to be unbearable. I tried to bring myself to press the button. But instead I turned and half-sprinted back to my car, desperate to breath clean air again.

I stood there, torn between wanting to flee and needing to know. Then in the silence, I heard it. Tap, tap, tap. Someone banging rhythmically on a window. I scanned all the ones I could see, but they were dark.

Tap, tap, tap.

It showed no sign of stopping. I began to make a wide circuit of the building. It was on the other side that I saw it. A large, ground floor window showed what I think would once have been the lounge. The walls were dark, stained and smeared to almost black, but the windows were clear. Stood the other side of the glass, weakly banging her fist against it, was Alenka Kozel. Her skin was mottled, covered with that leaking yellow rash. She saw me, and as her eyes locked with mine she opened her mouth, and the buzzing of the flies that spewed out was almost as loud as her scream.

I turned and began to sprint back towards my car. I had to get away, to get out. Then, without warning, I felt something heavy hit me in the side and I lost my footing, falling to the ground. I looked up to see an old man pinning me to the ground, his long, white beard matted and filthy. I screamed and tried to escape, but his age seemed to have done nothing to diminish his strength, and he kept his grip easily.

Then he spoke in a thick Mancunian accent and told me to keep my voice down. I noticed that his skin was unblemished pink, and behind him stood a young woman, tall and lean with close-cropped hair and a deep scar over her right eye. She carried a large canvas bag, and was shaking her head, telling the old man to leave me alone. After a few suspicious glances, he got up. I could swear I recognised him from somewhere, but when I asked the two of them who they were, they just shook their heads and told me to leave. I asked them what was going on, and the old man looked at his companion, as if asking permission, said something about knowledge being a good defence here. She shook her head and said that leaving quickly was a better one. I didn’t need to be told a third time.

I got in my car, and I left them to their work. I didn’t turn around even when I saw the smoke start to rise behind me. And that was the last time I went there. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go wash my hands.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

The Ivy Meadows Care Home in Woodley was officially decommissioned in July 2011, a month before the first of these alleged calls came in. It burned down on the 4th of September that same year after a leaking gas main caught fire. If the gas was already leaking, this might have resulted in hallucinations or other problems during their initial visit. There is no record of the body of Bertrand Miller being processed, or cremated, by Baxter and Gordon Funeral Directors, but based on this statement that’s not necessarily a point of incredulity. Bertrand Miller was a resident at Ivy Meadows, but according to his death certificate he passed away on 19th July, a week before the home was decommissioned. There’s no record of any funeral arrangements or disposal of the body.

In fact, it seems the records from the closure of Ivy Meadows are… well, according to Ivy, calling them ‘patchy’ would be very generous. There are only transfer records for seven residents, whereas at last official count the home held twenty-nine. The others seem to have been lost in the system somewhere. The majority of the workforce also appears to be undocumented, and I can find no record of any ‘Alenka Kozel’ on the system. Nastya’s research would seem to indicate the place employed a reasonable number of international staff they preferred to keep off the books, but it doesn’t explain why none of the officially-listed staff can be located for follow-up, except for Hannah Ramirez, whose brief interview simply established she moved to Brighton shortly before the closure of Ivy Meadows and hadn’t heard anything about it since. John Amherst, as best we can tell, doesn’t exist. We’re unable to locate anyone fitting that description anywhere within the care or medical sector, and he certainly never ran any nursing homes.

Another tale full of dead ends. We did contact the Baxters. Joshua Baxter repeated the first part of the above statement. George Baxter told us not to listen to tall tales. Nicole Baxter said she stands by her account, but aside from losing her left hand in what she calls “a workplace accident”, there have been no further developments.

Still, there’s a lot here that puts me in mind of other statements. Something in the way Ms. Baxter talks about fear. I can’t help but be reminded of statement 0142302, how Jane Prentiss talks about her own fears. And the old man and his companion… who does that remind me of? If he wasn’t dead, I’d think it might have been Trevor –

[DOOR OPENS]
Oh, er, yes?

JESSICA
Are you free?

ARCHIVIST
Yes… Yes, I’m just about finished here, what is it?

JESSICA
Oh, ah, nothing urgent, um, it’s just Carmilla was asking a couple questions about the delivery.

ARCHIVIST
Delivery? What delivery?

JESSICA
Ah well, that’s actually what she was asking, huh! Um, apparently Tim, uh, took delivery of a couple of items last week addressed to you. Did he not mention it?

ARCHIVIST
No, he… Oh, yes, actually. I completely forgot. He said he put it in my desk drawer, hold on.

[SOUND OF PACKAGE BEING RETRIEVED AND OPENED]
JESSICA
Er, what is it?

ARCHIVIST
A lighter. An old Zippo.

JESSICA
You smoke?

ARCHIVIST
No. And I don’t allow ignition sources in my archive!

JESSICA
Okay. Is there anything unusual about it?

ARCHIVIST
Not really. Just a sort of spider web design on the front. Doesn’t mean anything to me. You?

JESSICA
Ah no. No.

ARCHIVIST
Well… show it to the others, see what they think. You said there was something else as well?

JESSICA
Oh, ah yes, yeah, it was sent straight to the Artefact Storage, a table of some sort. Ah, looks old. Quite pretty, though. Fascinating design on it.

ARCHIVIST
[Excited almost hungry?] Jessica… Jessica, it doesn’t have a hole in it, does it? About six inches square?

JESSICA
Ah… I don’t know. Maybe? Um, I’ll be honest I didn’t really notice. It was quite –

ARCHIVIST
Hypnotic, yes. Do you know who made the delivery? Did they sign in?

JESSICA
Um… ah no, ah, sorry, no, I don’t know.

ARCHIVIST
I need to talk to Tim now!. Uh, end recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Tell me again.

TIM
Again?

ARCHIVIST
I want it on tape.

TIM
What? Why?

ARCHIVIST
Are you questioning me Timothy?.

TIM
Okay, fine. There were two delivery men. They were big, and they spoke with cockney accents that might have been fake, and they delivered a package for you. I don’t remember anything else about what they looked like.

ARCHIVIST
Nothing at all?

TIM
[Exasperated] They looked normal. Like you’d expect. They looked like two, huge, cockney delivery men. I don’t know what else you want?

ARCHIVIST
What about the table?

TIM
I didn’t see the table. I guess Rosie must have signed for it. I mean, it’s her office on the way to Artefact Storage, that makes sense.

ARCHIVIST
She says the same as you. Two men, doesn’t know how they got in, too intimidated to ask, looked “exactly like you’d expect”. Useless…

TIM
Sorry… Look, Raphealla, I do think we should destroy the table, though. I mean, if it’s the one from Amy Patel’s statement. Just in case.

ARCHIVIST
Caemlilla told me the same thing. Luckily she phrased it as advice rather than an instruction, so for now I’m more inclined to keep studying it. We’re not in the business of destroying knowledge.

TIM
I suppose. Can I go now?

ARCHIVIST
Yes, go on.

TIM
Thank you.

[DOOR OPENS]
Look, you need to get some sleep.

…

I’ll see you later.

[DOOR CLOSES]
ARCHIVIST
Waste of tape, really. He’s right. Might as well get some use out of it.

Statement of Jason North, regarding the discovery of an alleged ritual site found near Loch Glass in Scotland. Original statement given August 6th, 2009. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I just need to know if you can save my son. I’ve asked and asked and your people only ever tell me to write my statement. Put it down on paper for investigation. Is that going to help? No. Of course it isn’t. Even if you had the power to do something, would you? Or would you rather watch my son burn so you can take notes.

I’ve been drinking. You can probably tell from the stains. Well, I don’t plan to apologise for ruining your precious paper, and I don’t plan to stop. Only way to keep the fear from settling in. If I’m scared I’m going to lose Ethan like I lost everything else, then I’ll curl into a ball and never get up. I won’t be able to do anything to stop it. I won’t let my son burn, even if you cowards don’t have the guts to step up and do something.

I’m sorry. I know. There’s no-one to blame by my own stupid self. Blundering in where I had no right to go. But yes, I know, you want the whole goddamn story, don’t you? So you can look over it in ten years and go “Hmm, interesting” long after Ethan and me are dead. Well, fine. There’s not much to it, really. For everything it’s done to me, I didn’t really do anything at all. Just messed around in the wrong clearing.

I’m an ecologist. Was an ecologist. Working for the Forestry Commission up in Scotland. It was a great job. For me, at least. I suppose if you don’t like hiking or being alone you’d have a hard time with it, but for me it was a great fit. Now, up in the north of Scotland, the bit without all the people, there are plantations of evergreen trees. Huge ones. And their job is the same as pretty much any other tree – to get cut down for wood. Trouble is, a lot of animals make their homes in and around those trees. Badgers, red squirrels, even pine martens. Do you know what a pine marten is? It’s a wee bear. An adorable wee bear that needs to be protected. Because the pine marten, like a lot of other species that live in those areas, is protected by conservation laws; can’t be legally killed without the sort of special permissions logging companies rarely have. So it was my job to walk through all these plantations with a clipboard and note down what animals had made their homes where.

You don’t need me to tell you that the job can take me a long way from civilisation at times. Some of these plantations are… off the beaten track. Everyone gets so caught up on how small Scotland is compared to other countries, but it’s still huge compared to a single idiot wandering through the forests. And there aren’t so many people, so you have large areas all but devoid of human life. It wasn’t uncommon for me to find myself an hour or more away from a town or main road or any other human life at all. I didn’t mind being alone, though, because I knew I had my little boy Ethan waiting for me back at home. Four years old and already sharp as anything. And my wife Lucy. She used to be waiting for me as well.

You see… plenty of strange things out here. That far from anywhere, a lot of folks use it as their own personal dumping grounds. Fridges, microwaves, barbed wire, all sorts. Occasionally strewn throughout the forests and over the hills. I even found a corpse once. Not as exciting as it sounds – they were far too decomposed for me to tell anything about the death. Could have been a mafia hit or could have been a hiker having a heart attack. Result was the same for me: radio it in and then lose two hours of light babysitting a dead guy while I wait for someone to get up and take charge of it.

So when I saw the clearing in the trees near Loch Glass I wasn’t worried. I figured I’d seen everything messed up the forest had to offer. Heck, I even saw a friend of mine get impaled on a falling tree once. I reckoned there was nothing left to shock me. It didn’t matter that the hairs on my arm began to stand up, or that I started sweating through my coat in the middle of February, or that that dry acrid taste at the back of my throat made me want to gag. I still headed on over to investigate this odd-looking clearing.

It wasn’t man made, or at least nobody had cut trees down to make it. It looked as though the trees had been deliberately planted in a circle. If that was the case, judging by their growth they must have been planted like that almost fifty years ago. In the centre was a large piece of stone, crudely hacked into what looked like a small seat or… maybe an altar. As I stood there on the edge, I realised the trees around me were completely silent, and after a few seconds of examination saw that it didn’t look like there were any animals at all around this clearing. It was… unsettling, sure, but it also meant that I had all the information I needed for my survey of that area. I could tick the boxes and move on. I didn’t need to enter the clearing. But I did.

The moment I crossed that threshold I knew I had made a mistake. It was like an electric shock rushing through my body, and my already warm skin began to prickle and burn. I stripped off my jacket with sweat dripping from my fingers, and reached for my water to try and get rid of that foul taste in my throat. I pulled the cap off and took a long swig… half a second before I realised the water was boiling hot. I screamed; well, it was more a gurgle, really, and fell to the floor in agony.

I lay there for almost half an hour, collecting myself and just breathing in the cold winter air of the Highlands, waiting for the pain to die down. Eventually, I managed to compose myself and stagger to my feet. The strange sensations were still there, but I was able to mostly choke them down, at least until I had a proper look around the clearing. The altar was the focus of the whole thing, but in many ways it was the least interesting part. Clean, smooth stone. No markings of any sort, nothing on top. Just… a rock. Around it, though, on the ground, were scorch marks. They didn’t seem to radiate out from any one angle, they just covered areas of the forest floor. There was no ash, though, or debris, or anything that might have meant a fire, just the burn marks.

It was following these scorches that led me to the really messed up stuff, because what I saw around the edges of the clearing put them to shame. See, it looked like there were animals in that place once, but now each one lay just beyond the edge. On all of them, the fur or feathers had been burned away, and all that was left was their skin, scalded a vivid, angry red, like they’d been badly sunburned. They were dead, every one of them, though none seemed to have decayed any more than their compatriots. Either they had all died together, or something in that place was keeping them fresh. Neither option sounded grand to me.

Finally, I looked at the trees. There was nothing wrong with the trees themselves, not exactly. Driven into the trunk of each one was a heavy-looking iron nail. I didn’t count how many there were in total, maybe a couple dozen. Each suspended a worn and dirt-caked glass milk bottle that had clearly seen better days. My eyes fell on the string used to suspend them, and I couldn’t help but notice it seemed far cleaner and newer than the bottles or their contents.

What was inside each one seemed to vary, some had pine needles and twigs, some were full of dirt, and one or two even held what appeared to be rainwater, though looking closer I could see that it bubbled very gently inside those bottles in an endless simmer. In each I could also see a small photograph, half-buried in dirt or almost boiled clean. They all looked to be the same photograph, though it was hard to tell for sure. An old woman, probably in her fifties or sixties, wearing reading glasses and grey hair curled into a tight bun. She stared out disapprovingly from every bottle.

Weirdest of all, on the bottom of each was tied a lock of hair. It was long and grey, in poor condition, and I reckon it must have belonged to the woman in the photograph. It was tied up with the same new string as held the bottles, except for the fact that it was burned, ever so slightly, at the ends.

I was still in quite a lot of pain from the water earlier, but I’ve always been too curious for my own stupid good. I took a few pictures on my phone, but I wanted some clear shots of the photograph inside to show my friends. God knows I should have just left; it’s not like there weren’t plenty of warning signs. I just chose not to pay attention. I picked up one of the jars filled with twigs and took it off the nail, trying to angle it in my hand to get a better shot of the contents.

Then my fingers slipped and I dropped it. I watched it plummet towards the hard winter ground, willing it not to shatter, not to break. It was falling so slowly, but I was even slower. It exploded into a thousand glass shards and instantly I knew that I had meddled with something I should have left alone. I turned tail and ran, stopping only to reach down and pick up the photograph. I don’t know why, I suppose it felt so weird all of a sudden that I didn’t think I could get any more cursed. And I wanted a copy of that picture just to prove to myself that what I had found was real. It was real. You can have the damn thing now, though. I’ll leave it with my statement. I know in my heart getting rid of it will make no difference, but I have to try.

Because from that moment on, everything I love and value has burned or been destroyed. My car overheated on the way back to the Forestry Commission, and I barely got out before the engine caught fire. My house was a smouldering heap of blackened rubble before the end of the week. Electrical failure. I don’t want to talk about what happened to Lucy. I don’t want to think about her face at the end.

Now there’s only one thing I have left that I value. That I love. And I cannot lose him. I can’t lose Ethan. I shouldn’t be in this mess. It’s absurd. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just dropped a bottle. That’s all! I don’t deserve this. I don’t.

I asked about who might have gone to the area, but aside from some middle-aged businessmen on a hiking trip, no-one’s been anywhere near that clearing for years. There is no reason this is happening, but I’m still going to lose everything. I am so scared.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

He didn’t, in the end. Lose Ethan, that is. Ethan North is currently a healthy eleven-year-old boy living with a loving foster family in Inverness. They declined to give an interview. I can’t say I blame them. The rest is a standard muddle – Tim couldn’t find evidence of the clearing, Ivy established all the accidents that befell Mr. North and his loved ones appeared mundane in nature. The set-up of the clearing matches rituals or spells in both voodoo and Wicca, but nothing definitive, and there is no hard evidence of anything supernatural occurring.

There’s no reason to believe that when Jason North doused himself in petrol on August the 10th, 2009, then lit himself on fire, he was doing anything other than acting out the delusions of a paranoid alcoholic. Paramedics took him to Raigmore Hospital, where he died three days later. He never regained consciousness.

I suppose there is one piece of evidence. Mr. North did include with his statement the picture he found in the bottle. It is a photograph of Gertrude Robinson, my predecessor at the Magnus Institute, circa 2002, as best I can tell. I have no idea what this means. I have no idea what any of this means. I’m very tired.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Andre Ramao, regarding a series of misplaced objects lost over the course of three months. Original statement given June 6th 2012. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Thank you for lending me your pen. I thanked you when you handed it to me, but I don’t know if you’ll remember. I wonder, will you… forget you lent it to me and believe that it was my pen all along? Maybe instead you’ll forget that I ever had one to begin with, and think of me as an idiot who turned up to give a statement without a pen, so you had to lend me yours. My own fault for putting it down, really. Assuming I did ever have one. I’ll try to keep a slightly closer hold on this one.

I’ve been in the antiques business for a long time. It’s not what it used to be. [Nervous chuckle] I’m sorry, I know. I always did that, try to make myself feel more comfortable with jokes. There’s a follow up to that one, you know. Something along the lines of the joke being so old only an antiques dealer would be able to sell it. I love that one; I think it’s clever, but in my whole life it’s only ever gotten a laugh once. That’s why I remember buying the vase so clearly. I remember that the seller laughed.

In the old days, I never would have considered buying wares from the likes of Mikaele Salesa. He has a good reputation for quality, but a… bad reputation for legality, as it were. I’ve had more than one acquaintance sell on a particularly valuable find they got from him, only to discover that it didn’t have proper import papers, or that it had been reported stolen years before. Charlie Miller even did some jail time over a Georgian brooch he bought off him, so as a general rule I’d have given Salesa’s stuff a wide berth, but… Well, the antiques business isn’t what it used to be. That isn’t a joke. I had to close up my shop a few years ago, you see. Actual antiques don’t sell to the mass market anymore. Oh, young people will snap up vintage clothes or have any number of cheap faux-antique replicas strewn about their living rooms, but as soon as they get a look at the price tag for the real thing? They’re out of there like a shot.

So I went the same way as a lot of my peers. Lose the premises, start selling only high-margin goods direct to specific clients who can afford them, or shift a few guaranteed sellers on the auction. It’s the only real way to stay afloat in the business nowadays, but the competition is intense, and getting the calibre of artefact you need has become a more cutthroat affair. I’m not the only one in the business to recently soften their attitude towards buying from people like Mikaele Salesa.

It was my first meeting with him, back in March, and I was nervous, so I told my joke. Just off-hand, almost a reflex. I didn’t expect any reaction, really, I… I certainly didn’t expect him to laugh. But he did, this sudden, deep, throaty laugh that seemed to come out of nowhere. He didn’t say anything afterwards, just continued discussing business. But it stayed with me. There was nothing particularly strange about the laugh, not really. Why do I remember it so clearly?

Salesa was taking me through his ‘showroom’. There was a fancy-looking sign above the door, but it didn’t do much to hide the fact that it was basically a warehouse. More of the antiques were still in their packing crates, and I couldn’t help making a note of how quick and easy it would be for him to pack everything down and disappear if he needed to. Still, I’d made a few good purchases already and was cautiously optimistic. I’d bought a pair of cavalry sabres from the Revolutionary War, absolutely excellent condition, and a British artilleryman’s tunic from World War I, a few other bits and pieces as well. I recall I felt a moment of relief that I didn’t deal in books, as I caught sight of several crates packed to the brim with heavy-looking volumes. I was looking for something big, though. Something that would make an actual dent in the mountain of debt I’d been piling up.

I found it in that old Chinese pot. From the Jiajing period, so Salesa said, and the construction seemed to back him up. The glaze and the workmanship fitted with mid-to-late Ming dynasty, but there was something… off about the actual design. Instead of the pictures or scenes common to the ceramics of the period, the blue glaze was painted on in crisp, thin geometric lines. They repeated perfectly and seemed to get smaller and more intricate the closer I looked, but the shapes they formed never lost any of the precision, seeming to continue on however closely I looked. The effect was disorientating, and made the vase seem smaller than it actually was. It made my head hurt a bit when I looked at it for too long. It was amazing.

When he saw me staring, Salesa clapped me on the back and named a price that almost made me choke. We haggled a bit, and eventually reached a price I considered only a little bit unreasonable. I hurried my purchases home, feeling slightly soiled by my visit to the warehouse, and very much hoping it would be a good few months, if not years, before I was in such dire straits that I needed to go again. I got home, had a shower and some food and immediately started to look into finding a buyer for my latest acquisitions. I remember I was planning to make a few calls, but my headache got so bad that I had to have an early night.

The problems started soon after. It was little things at first. Like my shoes. I’m not a particularly fashion-conscious man at the best of times, so I have three pairs of shoes. Comfortable loafers for everyday use, a pair of walking boots for hiking, and some well-shined, polished, leather brogues for fancier events. Well, I had a rather upmarket auction that I needed to attend, so I went to put on my nice shoes, but they were nowhere to be found. Not the shoes, not the box I kept them in. Instead there was a bag containing two shirts that I know for a fact I threw away the year before. When I asked my husband, David, about it, he told me point blank that I had never had any such shoes. Claimed I always wore my loafers when I went to auctions or parties.

I know that compared to some of the ghost stories you must hear in this place, a pair of misplaced shoes seems perfectly trivial, but something felt so… wrong about the whole situation. In the end I did go in my loafers. I don’t remember if anyone at the auction noticed.

It was about a week later that I got the invoice from Salesa. It was a pleasant surprise, far less than I thought we’d agreed on. That feeling lasted until I looked through the itemised list and realised why the cost was so low. He hadn’t charged me for the Ming. I’ll admit that I was somewhat conflicted over whether to raise the issue, but in the end I decided that even if Mikaele Salesa did work with thieves, I was not going to be counted among them. So I phoned him to try and explain the mistake.

He seemed to be in a fine mood when he answered the phone, and asked me if I’d had a chance to try out the sabres yet, which I’m pretty sure was a joke. I told him that there was an item he’d missed off the invoice, and he said that no, everything had been double-checked and was correct. I was getting suspicious at this point, and thought he might be trying to pull a fast one of some sort with me, maybe get me to take the blame for some illicit scheme gone wrong. I told him so in no uncertain terms, and described our encounter and the vase in minute detail. He was quiet for a few seconds, and then asked me if I could send him a photo of the pot. His tone was different, and he sounded oddly wary when he made the request. I was very on edge by this point, but could come up with no good reason not to agree, so I took a few pictures with my phone and sent them through to him.

It was a long time before he spoke again, and when he did he sounded… different. Almost scared, I thought. He told me that I could keep it. No charge. I began to protest again, but he ignored it. I remember his exact words: “I do not remember having that thing, which means it belongs to you.” Then he hung up.

This was all very strange, of course, but even then I wasn’t worried. Not like I should have been.

It was my book next. A signed copy of Catch-22, my favourite book. Vanished from its place on my bookshelf, leaving only an empty space behind. David just gave me another blank stare when I asked him about it. I admit I almost lost it at him then. Shoes were one thing, but that book meant a lot to me. I accused him of playing some stupid joke, and tried to remind him what I’d gone through to get it, flying over to America for Joseph Heller’s last book tour, queuing for hours and then that dreadful evening I thought that sudden rainstorm had ruined it all. By the end he was looking… very alarmed indeed and started to ask me how I was feeling. He wanted to know if I’d been under a lot of stress at work, if there was anything I wanted to talk about. I left.

Maybe he was right. Maybe I am crazy. It makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it? It would make it neat. Except no. No, I would need to have gone mad a long, long time before this for the idea of it being in my head to hold up. My perceptions are the only ones I can trust. Maybe. I don’t know.

This went on for months. The tie I got for my last birthday, my grandfather’s teapot, the tunic I bought from Salesa, things just kept going missing, and every time David would tell me that whatever it was didn’t exist. Or it wasn’t mine. Or I was misremembering. For a while I thought he was actually trying to gaslight me, make me think I was losing my mind, but when the tunic went missing, I called Salesa again. This time he laughed when he told me that he didn’t remember selling any World War I items to me on my visit. I checked the invoice, and it was no longer listed there. Just empty, accusing paper where the words had been.

I know these things were real. I know they existed. Why won’t anyone just believe me?

This is where I started to come undone a bit. To be honest, I don’t think anyone would do much better in my situation. I hadn’t made any connection between the old Chinese pot and the disappearances. I mean, why would I? But I also hadn’t been able to sell it. Whenever I tried, something would get in the way. The other person would forget to send through a crucial email, or they’d stop responding. Once I managed to get it as far as posting it out to a buyer, but it was returned immediately with a note asking why it had been sent to her. Gradually, I began to get suspicious of the thing. Sitting there, with its cascading, maddening patterns in that vile cobalt blue. Trying to tell me that I things didn’t exist, that they hadn’t vanished when I know they have.

I took to watching it. I wasn’t getting much sleep and David was worried sick about me. I know he was talking to various doctors about getting me help. There were certainly a couple of points I was worried about him having me sectioned. None of it helps in the end.

It was about a month ago. I had placed the vase in the centre of the table, and was sat staring at it. Keeping an eye on it. Checking for… god knows what. This had been my ritual for the previous week, keeping my vigil into the small hours, but that night… that night I fell asleep in front of it. I don’t remember my dream. Running, maybe? I know I woke with a start sometime around 2 in the morning.

As I tried to rub the sleep from my eyes, I heard a sound from the table in front of me. It was the dull thump of a heavy book hitting the tabletop. I looked and, sure enough, there was my copy of Catch-22, just lying there in front of that strange ceramic thing. And not just my book, there was a small pile of objects around the base. My shoes, a tie, things I don’t even remember losing. One by one they rose up out of the mouth of the vase and tumbled to the table. It didn’t matter how big they were, they all seemed to fit.

And then came the moment when everything had been disgorged. I saw all the things that I had lost, and I thought it must be over. It must be done. What else could possibly come of there? And I saw the pale shapes of long, thin fingertips begin to creep above the lip of the pot. I remember thinking that it couldn’t be a normal person living in that pot, because the fingernails were too dirty. Isn’t that an odd thing to think at a time like that?

I ran, of course. Turned around and sprinted out of the door and into the street and didn’t return until morning. Maybe I should have called the police, but I was in no state to do much of anything except shiver under a tree for hours. David was gone. I allowed myself some brief hope that maybe he’d just left me, maybe he’d escape with just a divorce. But no. One call to the housing association confirmed that, as far as they were concerned, I’d always lived alone.

I want to smash that thing. I want to dash its maddening patterns to the ground and stomp on it until there is nothing left but powder. But it’s also disappeared, of course. I can’t find it anywhere. It’s still taking things, though. Sorry about your pen.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Before I dig too deeply into the background of this statement, I feel I should mention something that puts much of it in a slightly different light. Tim actually managed to find a copy of Mr. Ramao’s marriage licence. It exists, is signed, dated and official, and half of it is blank. Only Mr. Ramao’s details are on the document, and if it wasn’t for the context of this statement, it would appear he was married to nobody. But he was married.

This is not the first time Mikaele Salesa’s name has come to the attention of the Institute. Even discounting the incidental role he played in case #0112905, he appears to have something of a knack for locating objects displaying more… disconcerting phenomena. I believe some of the more bizarre things in the Artefact Storage area were purchased from him. It has been something of a –

Urgh. Urgh.

[SOUND OF CHAIR SCRAPING]
I see you…

[THUMP… THEN SOUND OF COLLAPSING SHELVES]
[NOISES OF EXCLAMATION]
[DOOR OPENS]
JESSICA
Alright?

ARCHIVIST
Ah… Yeah. A… spider.

JESSICA
A spider?

ARCHIVIST
Yeah. I tried to kill it…. the shelf collapsed.

JESSICA
I swear, cheap shelves are… Did you get it?

ARCHIVIST
Ah… I hope so. Think so. Nasty, bulbous-looking thing.

JESSICA
[Chuckles] Well, I won’t tell Tim.

ARCHIVIST
Oh, god. I don’t think I could stand another lecture on their importance to the ecosystem.

[SHUFFLING NOISES]
What?

JESSICA
Look.

ARCHIVIST
Oh… uh… Got dented when the shelf collapsed, I guess.

JESSICA
No, it, it goes right through. I, I thought this was an exterior wall?

ARCHIVIST
It should be.

JESSICA
Hmm. I, I think it’s just plasterboard.

[LOW NOISES OF DEBRIS]
Do you see anything?

[QUIET, BUILDING SOUND OF WET WRIGGLING]
ARCHIVIST
No, I don’t think so, it…

[WORM SOUND INTENSIFIES]
Jessica, run. RU–

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
[WRITHING WORM SOUNDS]
JESSICA
What are you doing?!

ARCHIVIST
Almost…

JESSICA
Leave it, it’s not –

ARCHIVIST
I got it!

[PULLS SOMETHING FROM THE MORASS]
TIM
Guys? Is everyth– OH CHRIST!

ARCHIVIST
Shut up tim and get the extinguishers!

TIM
What?

ARCHIVIST
The CO2! Get the goddamn CO2!

TMI
Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, yep.

ARCHIVIST
NOW!

[WRITHING CONTINUES AS EXTINGUISHER SPRAYS]
TIM
There’s too many…

JESSICA
Just keep spraying!

ARCHIVIST
We need to go!

JESSICA
Where?

ARCHIVIST
Uh… Uh…

JESSICA
Damn!

ARCHIVIST
I just… uh… let, let me think!

JESSICA
Do you see Prentiss? If we could get her –

TIM
I, I, I don’t see her! I don’t see her! I don’t see her! I don’t see her!

ARCHIVIST
Uhhh…

JESSICA
Raphealla?

Raphaella!?

TIM
This way!

Come on! Come this way! This way, this way!

[RUNNING, PURSUED BY WORMS]
ARCHIVIST
Erm…

LOOK OUT!

[CRASH]
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
[SOUND CUTS IN MIDWAY THROUGH THE ARCHIVIST SCREAMING]
TIM
And… there we go. Recording again.

Did you get it?

[PAINED CRY FROM ARCHIVIST AS NASTYA EXTRACTS WORM WITH A SQUELCH]
JESSICA
There. And I just want to point out that I didn’t make this much of a fuss.

ARCHIVIST
[Breathing heavily, aggrieved tone] I think your removal was substantially cleaner.

JESSICA
I’m still not sure why you have this. Drinking in the archives?

TIM
What? No, no, it’s for worms.

ARCHIVIST
What?

TIM
For pulling the worms out of people. Like now.

NASTYA
You, er… what?

TIM
I used to carry around a knife, but I started thinking that, well, cutting into someone laterally wasn’t really the most efficient way to get them out, and besides which, they seem to be quite slow burrowing in a straight line so, given their size, th-the corkscrew just seemed to be the better option.

…

Look, you guys got to go home every day, okay. I didn’t! I’ve been thinking for a long time about what to do when… well, y’know, this happens.

ARCHIVIST
[Snidly] Well… thank you.

JESSICA
That’s why we’re here?

TIM
Yeah. The room’s sealed, I checked it myself when I moved in.

ARCHIVIST
Climate controlled, as well. Strong door. Soundproof. [Sigh] These old files are far better protected than we ever were. Alright, I’ll grant you it’s a good place to lay low, but –

JESSICA
They could still come in through the air con.

ARCHIVIST
Not easily. And… not en masse. It is actually safe.

TIM
Ha!

ARCHIVIST
Except, of course, that we’re trapped.

TIM
Ah… yeah.

Sorry.

…

JESSICA
Why record it?

ARCHIVIST
What?

JESSICA
Before, in the office. It, it was stupid going for the tape recorder like that, and then when you dropped it out there –

ARCHIVIST
I said I was sorry. If I’d known Tim had another one stashed in here, I never would have…

JESSICA
No, it’s, it’s fine, just… I just don’t understand. I thought you hated the damn thing. You’re always going on about it.

ARCHIVIST
I do! I did. I just… I don’t want to become a mystery. I refuse to become another goddamn mystery.

JESSICA
What?

ARCHIVIST
Look, even if you ignore the walking soil-sack out there, and the fact that we are probably minutes from death, there is still so much more happening here.

TIM
I’m not sure we can really ignore the –

ARCHIVIST
[As she speaks a smile grown on her] Every real statement just leads… deeper into something I don’t even know the shape of yet. And to top it all, I still don’t know what happened to Gertrude. Officially she’s still missing, but Carmilla is no help and the police were pretty clear that the wait to call her dead is just a formality. If I die, wormfood or… something else, whatever, I’m going to make damn sure the same doesn’t happen to me. Whoever takes over from me is going to know exactly what happened.

JESSICA
You don’t think that would… put them off?

ARCHIVIST
[Bitter laugh] I hope so. Only an idiot would stay in this job.

TIM
[Chuckles] Wouldn’t that make you an idiot?

ARCHIVIST
Yes, Tim, that was my point.

…

JESSICA
Can you see what’s going on out there?

TIM
Ish. When did we last clean these doors?

ARCHIVIST
What can you see?

TIM
Worms seem to have backed off a bit. There’s a few lurking in the corners. Ooh, ooh hey, there’s the other tape recorder!

JESSICA
Any sign of Prentiss?

TIM
No. No, it looks like they’re… waiting, I think.

ARCHIVIST
For what?

TIM
I don’t know. Nastya, maybe?

JESSICA
Oh god!

TIM
I think She was out at lunch.

JESSICA
Quick, someone call her. Tell her not to come back inside.

ARCHIVIST
There’s no signal in here. We just have to hope she heard the noises.

…

JESSICA
Raphaella, what did you mean by “real statements”?

ARCHIVIST
You know what I mean. The ones that have weird wrinkles, or that just seem to have something solid to them. They all have one thing in common.

JESSICA
They don’t record digitally.

ARCHIVIST
And we have to use the tape recorder. At this stage, if it records to my laptop I almost don’t bother. I don’t –

TIM
There! There, there, there! I see Her!

ARCHIVIST
What?

TIM
Nastya. Nastya’s outside.

JESSICA
Oh god, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t see them.

[JESSICA AND TIM BOTH START CALLING OUT TO NASTYA]
NASTYA, LOOK OUT!

ARCHIVIST
It’s soundproofed. She can’t hear you!

JESSICA
What is she doing? No, Jess, just run! Leave it alone!

TIM
Oh no, no, no, no…

JESSICA
Turn around. Just turn around.

TIM
Oh god. There she is, there she is.

ARCHIVIST
[Calm] There’s nothing we can do.

JESSICA
Ah, screw this.

ARCHIVIST
What, Jessica, NO!

[DOOR OPENS]
JESSICA
Nastya, look out!

ARCHIVIST
Watch out for the tape –

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
NASTYA
…still working? Ah, okay. Test, test. What are you doing on the floor? Huh. [Imitates Archivist voice] Statement of Joe Spooky, regarding sinister happenings in the downtown old –

[DOOR OPENS]
JESSICA
Nastya, look out!

[WORM SOUND INTENSIFIES]
NASTYA
Jessica?

JESSICA
Behind you! Run!

NASTYA
Oh…

PRENTISS
[Slowly intoning over worm sound] Do you hear their song?

JESSICA
Nastya!

[IMPACT, WORMS AND SCUFFLING]
[NASTYA BREATHING HEAVILY AS SHE STUMBLES THROUGH DOORS]
NASTYA
Damn it!

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Right. There we go. Tim, what do you see?

TIM
Hm? What?

ARCHIVIST
I can’t really stand up yet. I need you to describe what’s going on. For the record.

TIM
Ah, yeah. Sure. So, um, Nastya tackled Jessica and there was kind of a struggle, but she made it out of the Archives. That, that was about two minutes ago and she’s gone to get help. P-Probably. I mean, she, she couldn’t… she wouldn’t just run so…

ARCHIVIST
Did it look like any of the worms… got her before she left?

NASTYA
No. I don’t think so. Jessica neither, I think. It was hard to tell after she tackled her. There was just a lot of movement and, and shouting and, and wriggling…

ARCHIVIST
Stay with it, Tim. Nastya. What happened to Nastya?

TIM
They got split up and he ran into the office. You said that’s where you made the hole. When you were recording. And they all came through, so… she’s dead. She’s dead in there and she’s covered in worms and that’s it.

ARCHIVIST
We don’t know that.

TIM
…Maybe.

Maybe, maybe she found the spare CO2.

ARCHIVIST
Spare? What? Where? I never saw any.

TIM
Oh, I, er… I, I hid them in old casefile boxes.

ARCHIVIST
What, why?

TIM
Well, so the worms didn’t know they were there!

Look, I know it’s stupid.

ARCHIVIST
Yes. Yes it is so stupid. They’re just… they’re just unclassified parasites. They don’t have consciousness, they can’t plan, they’re just an unthinking infection.

TIM
Seriously?!

ARCHIVIST
What?

TIM
Why do you do that?

ARCHIVIST
Do what?

TIM
Push the sceptic thing so hard!? I mean, it made sense at first, but now? After everything we’ve seen, after everything you’ve read! I hear you recording statements and y-you just dismiss them. You tear them to pieces like they’re wasting your time, but half of the “rational” explanations you give are actually more far-fetched than just accepting it was a, a ghost or something. I mean for god’s sake Raphaella, we’re literally hiding from some kind of worm… queen… thing, how, how could you possibly still not believe!?

ARCHIVIST
Of course, I believe. Of course I do. Have you ever taken a look at the stuff we have in Artefact Storage? That’s enough to convince anyone. But, but even before that… Why do you think I started working here? It’s not exactly glamorous. I have… I’ve always believed in the supernatural. Within reason. I mean. I still think most of the statements down here aren’t real. Of the hundreds I’ve recorded, we’ve had maybe… thirty, forty that are… that go on tape. Now, those, I believe, at least for the most part.

TIM
Then why do you –

ARCHIVIST
Because I’m scared, Tim!. Because when I record these statements it feels… it feels like I’m being watched. I… I lose myself a bit. And then when I come back, it’s like… like if I admit there may be any truth to it, whatever’s watching will… know somehow. The scepticism, feigning ignorance. It just felt safer.

TIM
Well… It wasn’t.

ARCHIVIST
Wow you say.

Still, it’s not my fault we’re going to be eaten by worms. Speaking of, can you see anything?

TIM
Not much. They’re just… there.

ARCHIVIST
How many?

TIM
Too many. And more keep coming up through the floor. I didn’t think they could get through.

ARCHIVIST
Prentiss?

TIM
No, I can’t s… Oh, there she is.

ARCHIVIST
What’s she doing?

TIM
I don’t know. She’s messing with the boxes. She’s holding one up and… ahh!

ARCHIVIST
What?

TIM
She’s… She’s destroying them. Sort of.

ARCHIVIST
Sort of?

TIM
Well, I don’t really know what that stuff coming out of her mouth is, but I think we should probably burn them.

ARCHIVIST
That Fucker.

Right.

…

Why are you here Tim?

TIM
Well, well, Prentiss is out there and you can’t run so –

ARCHIVIST
I mean at the Archive in general. Why haven’t you quit yet?

TIM
Are you giving me my review now?

ARCHIVIST
No… We’re clearly doing a whole heart-to-heart thing and, truth be told, the question’s been bothering me. You’ve been living in the Archives for four months, constant threat of… this. Sleeping with a fire extinguisher and a corkscrew. Even you must be aware that that’s not normal for an archiving job? Why are you still here?

TIM
[Considering] Don’t really know. I just am. It didn’t feel right to just leave. I’ve typed up a few resignation letters, but I just couldn’t bring myself to hand them in.

I’m trapped here. It’s like I can’t… move on and the more I struggle, the more I’m stuck.

ARCHIVIST
TIM…You’re not, uh… You didn’t die here, did you?

TIM
What? What? N-No… what?!

ARCHIVIST
No, I just… No, just the way you phrased that…

TIM
Made you think I was a ghost?

ARCHIVIST
Yes is it so unrea–

TIM
No, no… it’s just that whatever web these statements have caught you in, well, I’m there too. We all are, I think. [Sigh]

…

A ghost? Really?

ARCHIVIST
[Glaring] Shut up, Tim.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
[FIRE ALARM IS SOUNDING]
CARMILLA
Right, tell me again, please.

JESSICA
You’re kidding.

CARMILLA
You did bring a tape recorder. I just thought Raphaella would appreciate as many supplementary recordings as possible. For the record.

JESSICA
Well, for the record, if we don’t do something now, it won’t matter either way.

CARMILLA
So… these are the worms She and Tim have been going on about?

JESSICA
The ones terrorising us for months? Yeah!

CARMILLA
To be honest I always thought they were just… overreacting. Other staff have seen them around, but no-one’s reported any aggressive behaviour or anything like that. You know how those two are… Raphaella puts on a good show, but sometimes I swear she’s worse than Tim.

JESSICA
Look, Carmilla. I don’t know what you think is going on, but I have just seen thousands of… fleshworms pouring out of the wall! God knows how long they’ve been hiding! Nastya might be dead, and the others…

CARMILLA
Of course. The fire alarm was a good move, but it does mean most staff have evacuated, so we’ll have to deal with them ourselves.

JESSICA
There are thousands of them, Carmilla.

CARMILLA
Not quite what I meant. On Raphaella’s insistence I recently changed the Archive’s fire suppression system to use carbon dioxide. Should have done it years ago, really –

JESSICA
So why hasn’t it gone off?

CARMILLA
Because there isn’t an actual fire.

JESSICA
Right, right. Can we set it off manually? I think Raphaella’s got a lighter somewhere.

CARMILLA
She’s not smoking again, is she? Anyway, it shouldn’t be necessary. There is a manual release, a few floors down.

JESSICA
Wait. Wait. Will it hurt Tim or Raphaella?

CARMILLA
Certainly. Er, I’m a former doctor, I know dumping a lot of CO2 on people isn’t generally considered a good idea. I really don’t want to have to find another Archivist so quickly after Gertrude, but from what you say… it might be a mercy. You know the situation best, so…?

JESSICA
Let’s go.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
[FIRE ALARM CAN BE HEARD… AS CAN SOUND OF BANGING ON WALL]

TIM thought that wall was meant to be solid?!

ARCHIVIST
So did I. We don’t have any sort of weapon, do we?

TIM
I mean… I mean, I suppose we could use –

ARCHIVIST
Don’t say the corkscrew!

TIM
Okay.

ARCHIVIST
How many of them are outside of the door?

TIM
I don’t know. I can’t see because the window is covered in worms.

ARCHIVIST
Right. Right. Damn. Well, Tim I guess this is –

[SOUND OF PLASTERBOARD AND TILE BREAKING]
NASTYA
Hi guys!

TIM
Nastya!

ARCHIVIST
Nastya?! What the hell? I thought… how did you…?

TIM
You made it!

NASTYA
Funny story really. I ran into the office, worms everywhere, horrible death and everything, tripped and fell in some boxes and there were like 20 cans of gas in there.

TIM
Are, are you alright? You seem a bit…

NASTYA
Fine! Fine! Gas… bit light-headed. Not a lot of ventilation in the tunnels. Come on!

ARCHIVIST
In-Into the tunnels?

NASTYA
Yeah! Actually, not that many worms in there anymore. I think they’ve mostly gone into the Archive. Although the ones down here are faster for some reason. And quieter.

ARCHIVIST
You’re not bitten, are you?

NASTYA
No, I don’t think so! Have a look!

ARCHIVIST
Yes, alright Nastya, you look fine. Put them back on, please.

TIM
Can you walk, Raphaella?

ARCHIVIST
No, I can limp.

NASTYA
Then let’s go!

ARCHIVIST
Tim, could you pass me the tape recorder?

TIM
Sure. I think it’s running out, though.

ARCHIVIST
Fine. I suppose I can turn it back on when we’re being eaten alive.

NASTYA
Why do you have a second tape recorder, Tim?

TIM
Oh, um… well, I’ve been using it to record myself. I write poetry and I think the tapes have a sort of… low-fi charm.

ARCHIVIST
…

I see.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
JESSICA
[SPEECH IS ECHOED FROM THE ROOM AS SHE WALKS]
[With some despondency in tone] Okay, Raphealla. I know you’ll want to know what’s been happening. If you’re still alive after this. The worms are on the upper floor. Not as many as down in the Archive, but enough.

I set the fire alarm off, so everyone’s evacuated except me and Carmilla. I didn’t see any signs of the fire brigade, but I haven’t been near a window in a while. There was a… I guess you’d call it a… a wave of worms. I got cut off from Carmilla. I hope she made it to the fire system, but who knows. Maybe everyone’s dead already.

I’ve had to retreat into Artefact Storage. That should tell you something about how bad it is out there.

God, I hate this place.

Did I ever tell you I first joined the Institute as a practical researcher? I had to analyse and investigate all the stuff in here. Take notes after sleeping in the rusted chair, write in the memory book, all that sort of thing. I transferred after three months. Would’ve quit, but couldn’t afford to back then.

Never understood why they keep this stuff secret. I mean, we’ve, we’ve enough here to send any sceptic packing, but it’s just locked away. I… I asked Carmilla about it once, but she just muttered something about funding and mission statements. She’s good at changing the subject, isn’t she?

Sorry. I’m rambling. No worms, though, so that’s good.

Oh, hey. I’ve found… I’ve found that table you were talking about. Don’t really see what all the fuss is about. Just a… basic… optical illusion. Nothing special… just… just a… wait…

[Hushed and panicked] Raphaella! Raphaella, I think there’s someone here. Hello? I see you. Show yourself.

[DISTORTION INTENSIFIES]
[JESSICA SCREAMS, TAPE RECORDER DROPS]
[DISTORTION FADES TO A CRACKLE]
NOT!JESSICA
[Words warped] Hello?

I see you.

[FOOTSTEPS]
[Clearly] I see you.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
[WATER DRIPS]
ARCHIVIST
Update. I don’t know how long we’ve been down here. These tunnels are a maze, and we don’t know where we are. We have four of the –

NASTYA
Tim’s gone.

ARCHIVIST
I’m getting to that. Tim has disappeared. Nastya was right about there being fewer worms down here, but they are much faster. More aggressive. None of us have been hit yet but… during one of the more alarming encounters, Tim ran off that coward.

NASTYA
He thought we were behind him, I think.

ARCHIVIST
He didn’t think at all. Tim was with me, and my leg slowed me down. He must have taken a turn we didn’t see or something. We lost him. But, Tim has managed to find what looks to be an actual trapdoor, so… we won’t need to bludgeon our way through any more drywall. I’m recording this in case –

NASTYA
In case the trapdoor opens back into the Archives and Prentiss is there to kill us.

ARCHIVIST
In as many words, yes. Nastya?

NASTYA
Alright.

[TRAPDOOR IS PUSHED OPEN TO SOUND OF FIRE ALARM AND LOTS OF WRITHING]
PRENTISS
Archivist.

TIM
Ah.

ARCHIVIST
Shit.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
[Weary] Statement of, uh…

CARMILLA
Raphaella… as your boss, I’m telling you to go home.

ARCHIVIST
I’m fine.

CARMILLA
Look. You look like a mummy. You need rest.

ARCHIVIST
Our friends in the hazmat suits gave me a clean bill of health, bloody holes notwithstanding. And they seemed quite keen to quarantine anyone showing even the slightest sign of infection. It’s just pain.

CARMILLA
The paramedics said your lungs need fresh air. Tim’s as well.

ARCHIVIST
It’s fresh enough down here.

CARMILLA
A basement filled with a thousand rotting worm carcasses? Surely we could do this in my office?

ARCHIVIST
No. I need to be here. Keep watch. I need to be sure…

CARMILLA
Raphaella! She’s gone. I went with the ECDC people when they took her away. I watched her body burn. Jane Prentiss is dead. You can relax.

ARCHIVIST
You know why I can’t. When Tim found…

CARMILLA
That’s a matter for the police.

ARCHIVIST
Fine! Fine. I’ll go home as soon as I have everyone’s statements.

CARMILLA
Very well.

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Carmilla Yamazaki, Head of the Magnus Institute, regarding the… infestation by the entity formerly known as Jane Prentiss. Statement recorded direct from subject, 29th July, 2016. Whenever you’re ready.

CARMILLA
There isn’t a lot to tell for my part. This afternoon, just after lunch, I was going over some budgets in my office, as I normally do on a Tuesday, when the fire alarm started going off. It was annoying, but not too worrying at first. I packed my work away, and began to calmly head towards the evacuation point, when Jessica came barrelling through the door, babbling about worms, and clutching a tape recorder.

I told her that whatever was wrong should wait until we were out of the building, as there may be a fire. She told me she had set off the fire alarm to get everyone out, and that you and Nastya and Tim were currently trapped by Jane Prentiss.

Obviously this got my attention, and I suggested she turn the tape recorder on, largely so this sort of debrief wouldn’t be necessary. Did you not get the tape?

ARCHIVIST
No. There was… some sort of problem. Jessica tells me the tape was lost.

CARMILLA
Hmm. Well, I explained to her about the recently installed fire suppression system, and said that, as there was no actual fire, we’d need to activate it manually. We hurried down, and it was clear everyone else had already evacuated. We… had reached the ground floor when… well…

I… know I have often seemed dismissive of your concerns before, and in fact I was getting ready to raise the issue of Tim’s continuing to live in the Institute’s basement, especially as I believe he’s been stealing fire extinguishers. But… honestly, I didn’t fully appreciate what you’d been talking about until I turned that corner and we saw what I can only describe as a… a tidal wave of filth rushing towards us. I feel somewhat ashamed to admit I didn’t really pay any attention to Jessica as I ran, and must have lost her at some point. We became separated.

I composed myself, and decided on a more roundabout route to the boiler room. Luckily, it seemed the things were mainly concentrated in that one mass, leaving the other corridors largely vacant. It took me ten minutes, maybe fifteen, but I made it with only one close call. The sight of rows and rows of huge, red CO2 canisters was certainly something of a comfort. I do apologise that it took me quite so long to figure out how to actually work the system. If I’d been quicker…

ARCHIVIST
It’s fine.

We’re alive.

CARMILLA
Yes. Well. I turned on the fire suppression system. And… that’s when I heard the scream. I can’t really describe it but… well, I’m sure I don’t need to, you were a lot closer to it than I was.

ARCHIVIST
It’s the last thing I remember before blacking out. Tens of thousands of… things without mouths screaming as one.

CARMILLA
…

Yes. Horrible sound. Anyway, I called the fire department, ambulance and a contact at the ECDC who had previously been involved in the Prentiss investigation. Once I was sure most of the gas would have dissipated, I headed down to the Archives to see what had happened. Jessica was already there, but you and Nastya were in bad shape. It looked like a few dozen worms had been going into each of you when the carbon dioxide killed them. Was like bloody Swiss che–

ARCHIVIST
Yes… thank you. I remember everything from when the ambulance arrived. Quarantine, bandaging, et cetera. When did Tim get back?

CARMILLA
It was about an hour after they’d taken you and Nastya away. They were prepping Prentiss’ corpse for disposal, when Tim burst out of that trapdoor you found, screaming that he’d found a body. So we called the police.

ARCHIVIST [Slight static]
Tell me what happened to Gertrude Robinson.

CARMILLA
Raphaella, how many times do we need to go over this?

ARCHIVIST
We’ve never got it on tape.

CARMILLA
You can barely stand. Just… why don’t we just do this tomorrow?

…

Fine.

On the 15th of March last year, I had a query about a statement one of our researchers was after and went down to the Archives. Gertrude wasn’t there, but her desk was covered in blood. I called the police, and there was a huge search, but there was no sign was found of Gertrude, alive or dead. She didn’t have any assistants, so there were no witnesses, and no-one saw or heard anything.

The police tested the blood and confirmed the DNA matched to Gertrude, though I don’t know why they had her on file. They judged there to be almost a gallon of blood spilled, far more than the human body can lose and survive, so I assumed she was dead and left the investigation to the police, for all that good it did me. And I appointed another archivist.

Nastya finding her body in the tunnels is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.

ARCHIVIST
Right. Right. Thank you, Carmilla. Statement ends.

Can you send in Nastya?

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
NASTYA
[Tired] Do you need much? I’d really like to go home.

ARCHIVIST
I sympathise. It won’t take more than a few minutes. I just… I need the parts that weren’t on tape at the time.

NASTYA
Sure. Just… quarantine, y’know? Not as much fun as it sounds.

ARCHIVIST
You were certainly in there longer than I was.

Everything alright?

NASTYA
Yeah, I just made some joke about itching and suddenly they were doing a whole bunch more tests.

ARCHIVIST
Well, itching is one of –

NASTYA
I know! I know. I was trying to lighten the mood.

I’m fine, though. Except for the holes. And the pain. And the blood and the nightmares. Could’ve been worse though, eh? Another couple of minutes and –

ARCHIVIST
Yes. Yes. It was…

Anyway, statement of Nastya Rasputina, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, regarding the infestation by the entity formerly known as Jane Prentiss. Statement recorded direct from subject, 29th July 2016. Just take it from when you got back from lunch.

NASTYA
Well, I could tell something was wrong as soon as I got back. It was quiet. I mean, it’s normally quiet, but it was dead quiet. I spotted the tape recorder lying on the ground, and went over to, er, see if it was damaged, and as I was checking it I heard Jessica shouting. It’s a bit of blur, to be honest, ‘cause when I turned around, there she was. Prentiss. Her face so full of holes it’s like, “my eyes are up here”, but they’re not, you know? They’re just… She tried to say something, but I don’t know, I couldn’t really understand her through all the…

So, I could see the worms were coming through the floor, the walls, everywhere. The whole “we’re safe inside the Archive” thing” Not so much. I don’t know what I was going to do, I think I was going to try and hit her, but that’s when Jessica knocked me to the floor. It, it was a good move, actually. Prentiss didn’t seem to expect it, and we crushed a lot of worms when we fell. They were slow to react, and we were running before they really went for us. I mean, all this happened in the space of a few seconds, so I’m not exactly certain.

Jessica had to basically drag me behind her. I saw the shelf in front of us was about to topple. There were so many worms on it so, being the hero I am, I let go of her hand and told her to get help. She made it out the main door. I turned to run into the office. I was just trying to get a door between me and Prentiss. I didn’t know that’s where you made the first hole.

There were loads of them. Some jumped at me as I ran inside so I dodged out the way, but ended up sprawling into this pile of boxes that I thought were case files. Instead, I found myself lying on top of a whole bunch of CO2 canisters, which are damn hard by the way. The worms were still coming, so I used them. I mean, I went full Gas-Rambo.

After that… my memory gets a bit fuzzy. I think the paramedic called it ‘respiratory acidosis’… from breathing in all the carbon dioxide, rather than your more traditional oxygen. I remember finishing the first few extinguishers killing the things, but they kept coming, so I grabbed a few more, and saw the massive hole in the wall. There didn’t seem much point staying, so I went into the tunnels. They were cold, dry. You know that worm smell? That earthy rotten smell?

ARCHIVIST
Oh yes.

NASTYA
Well, yeah. There weren’t so many down there. I think they were almost all in the Archives. I have a theory, actually. I think they weren’t ready to attack when you found the tunnels. It’s like, something in the Institute slows them down, and makes them, um, heh, sluggish.

And that noise they make? That squirming sound? They don’t make it when they’re in the tunnels. I don’t know why. It was only when they came into the Institute. Maybe the light, or the aircon, or something? I’m not sure, but I think it made them weaker, and they’ve been down there for months, breeding, building up their numbers until there were enough to properly bury us. Except you found that hidden passage, and they had to act.

ARCHIVIST
Maybe. Could you… describe the tunnels?

NASTYA
You were there.

ARCHIVIST
Humour me.

NASTYA
I remember they sloped down and up and around. I couldn’t keep track of where I was. I did see some more worms, though. They were fast. I only saw a couple, but it was still proper jumpscare territory. I got them, though. It was really surreal. I only had my phone’s torch, and it was hard to keep an eye out, I was so light headed.

I wandered for, I don’t know, maybe ten minutes before I found a wall that seemed different. It looked like someone had just put some plasterboard over an entrance, and I could hear you and Tim on the other side. I broke through and, well, you were there for the rest.

ARCHIVIST
Quite. You… you weren’t there when Tim found the body, though, were you?

NASTYA
No. I was quarantined, same as you.

ARCHIVIST
And you didn’t see it in the tunnels when you were first exploring?

NASTYA
No. I did see… uh, I mean, maybe…

ARCHIVIST
What?

NASTYA
No, it’s just… I think I was still gassed, and it was dark, but… I found a room.

ARCHIVIST
Go on.

NASTYA
I didn’t stay long, ‘cause it had a lot of worms in, and they weren’t acting like the others. They were sort of… wrapping around each other, like they were trying to form a… thing, like a structure or something. A ring.

I was probably still out of my skull, and half-hallucinated the whole thing, but it looked like they were trying to make a doorway.

ARCHIVIST
A doorway? Is it still there?

NASTYA
No. I pumped two full extinguishers into that room. Nothing was getting out.

ARCHIVIST
Good. Good. Go home, Nastya. Get some sleep.

NASTYA
Heh. Yeah. Sure.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Jessica Orsinov, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, regarding the invasion by the entity formerly known as Jane Prentiss. Statement recorded direct from subject, 29th July, 2016. In your own time.

NOT!JESSICA
Yes… Where do you want me to begin? I was with you until I ran out to save Nastya. Then we were separated, and I fled into the Institute proper. I pulled a fire alarm, because the worms were following me, and I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. I went to Carmilla. We talked. We were going to save you, but the worms came, and I fled into the Artefact Storage room. You know I hate the Artefact Storage room, so it must have been bad.

ARCHIVIST
You used to work there, didn’t you?

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, for three months. It was dreadful. I used to think that it was the most dangerous place in the Institute.

ARCHIVIST
Not anymore.

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, not anymore. It was safe enough. The worms didn’t get in, and I stayed there until the fire system deployed, then I ran out to get to a window. I saw the worms in the main Institute. They shrivelled and died. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that scream, though. I could hear Prentiss screaming even from there.

ARCHIVIST
Well, it’s thanks to you, to be honest. If you hadn’t met that ‘Michael’ thing…

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, Michael… With the bones in his hands. We still don’t know much about him, do we?

ARCHIVIST
No, we don't. Sorry, getting… distracted. You got as far as Jane Prentiss’ death.

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, I returned to the Archives, and all the worms were dead. You and Nastya were lying there, but you weren’t moving. You just lay there, the dead worms still half inside of you. The trapdoor was open next to you, and more were inside. I went over to check, and you were alive, so I pulled you back to where there was more air, and began to remove the worms.

Are you alright?

ARCHIVIST
Of course i am.

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, I understand. That was when Carmilla arrived with the fire brigade and doctors and the hazmat people. They talked to me for a long time, and I did my best to explain the situation. They checked me for worm-marks, but I was fine. They took you away, so I waited with Carmilla. She was looking at me strangely, but we were both quiet. It had been a very strange day.

After an hour or so, we heard cries from the trapdoor. It was Tim. He was shouting about a body. We got him out, and Carmilla tried to get him to calm down and explain. He said he’d found the body of the previous Archivist, Gertrude Robinson, and that was when Carmilla called the police. I tried to calm him down, but he was in bad shape. The police arrived, and I gave them pretty much this same statement.

ARCHIVIST
Right… Right. What about the tape? You had the tape recorder, the one I’d just recorded Mr. Ramao’s statement on, but when you gave it back, it was empty.

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, I dropped it a few times. The eject button must have been hit. I didn’t notice until you pointed it out. It’s probably around somewhere. Is it that important?

ARCHIVIST
[very unhappy] It’s important to me Jessica. Are you feeling alright? You seem a bit out of it.

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, I’m very tired. It’s hard to keep track of things sometimes.

ARCHIVIST
Right. Go get some rest, Jessica and don't drop any more tapes.

NOT!JESSICA
Yes. I will.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
TIM
[Tired] I mean, I already told the police.

ARCHIVIST
Well, now tell me. I need to hear it. I need to record it.

TIM
I… alright. Are you okay?

ARCHIVIST
Fine. Painkillers are starting to wear off, but… It’s fine. Statement of Timothy Gunpowder, archival assistant, etcetera, etcetera. Go.

TIM
Right. Well, I was doing some background checks for case 0081709, when you and Jessica started screaming, so I went to ch–

ARCHIVIST
Yes, yes, I was there! I was with you for almost the whole time, and that tape survived just fine.

TIM
Sorry.

ARCHIVIST
Just to better. I just… I only need from when you got separated. From when you got lost in the tunnels.

TIM
No, I mean… I’m sorry I left you.

ARCHIVIST
…

Tim.

TIM
[Tearful] It was an accident. I thought you two were with me! I mean, the worms came at us, and they were so much faster, and then there was the gas, and the running, and I just… I, I thought you were right behind me. But when I turned round you were gone. You were both gone. It was an accident.

ARCHIVIST
I know. It’s fine, Tim. Everybody’s… [sigh] Everyone’s fine… I just need you to tell me what happened next, and then it’s finished.

TIM
Alright. So, um, yeah, we got separated so I, I tried shouting, but you didn’t answer. The walls seemed to kill the sound dead and there wasn’t any echo. They were old stone, like, really old, and there was no light except my torch. I, I always keep my torch on me, ever since I moved into the Archives, so I had that, at least.

I wandered for a while. It’s a, it’s a maze down there, Raphaella. I don’t know how far the passages go. Maybe miles. I think it must be the old Millbank Prison, like Nastya was saying before. I even found some stairs at one point, but I really didn’t want to go down them.

I hadn’t seen any worms for a few minutes, and weirdly enough that actually started to worry me, like, if there weren’t any worms then I’d gone too far from the Institute. And there was more dust in those corridors too, and dead rats, even some discarded wine bottles. At one point there was an empty packet of mint imperials –

ARCHIVIST
Timothy…

TIM
Sorry. Yeah. Um. I was trying to go back, not that I knew what back even meant down there, when I heard the scream. I don’t even know how to go about describing it, but I thought… well I hoped… Well, when I started to find the shrivelled bodies of worms all over the place, I knew she was dead.

So I wanted to get out of there. I was looking for a way up, but it felt more and more like I was trapped. Every turn just led me to another empty corridor. When I finally found a door, I thought it might actually get out, but instead…

It was a small room. Square. There was dust on everything. Cardboard boxes were piled around. They were full of old cassette tapes.

ARCHIVIST
That’s where you found her?

TIM
Yes. She was sat in a wooden chair in the middle of the room. No worms. No cobwebs. Just… an old corpse. Gertrude Robinson. She was slumped forward, but I could see her mouth hanging open. So I ran, and I found the trapdoor soon afterwards.

ARCHIVIST
Could you find the room again?

TIM
I don’t know. Maybe. The police certainly expect me to, although I got the feeling they’re not too keen to explore the tunnels either.

ARCHIVIST
Tim, how did Gertrude Robinson die?

TIM
I don’t know. Not for sure. It was so dark, and I only saw the body for a few seconds. The police were quite clear that the cause of death could be absolutely any–

ARCHIVIST [Static]
TIM! How did she die?

TIM
She was shot! Three times, that I could see. Three shots to the chest.

ARCHIVIST
Right. Right. Thank you Tim.

TIM
…

Sure.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Gertrude Robinson, the last Archivist at the Magnus Institute, and my predecessor, was murdered. There were no worms to infest her, no strange, ghostly apparitions to warp her mind, or caves to entomb her. She was killed, in the Archives, by someone who used a gun, and that scares me far more than any spectre or twisted creature. Because that means someone here is a killer.

The police will investigate thoroughly, I have no doubt, but… given their track record in this matter I am not optimistic.

There is something in these files, in these statements. I know that now, some deeper mystery. I think Gertrude Robinson found it, and I think that is why they killed her.

Some of my tapes are missing. Maybe it was Prentiss, but she seemed more interested in the written files, and the other tapes seem fine. There’s no sign of debris, or anything that would indicate they’ve been destroyed, but, in addition to the tape Jessica lost earlier, the tapes for cases 0051701 and 0160204 are gone. I don’t know why these two specifically, but I cannot trust anyone.

I’m going to figure this out, and I’m not going to stop. They’ll have to kill me first.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[SOUND OF PAPERS BEING SHUFFLED, DRAWERS BEING OPENED, GENERAL SEARCHING]
ARCHIVIST
[Distant] Tim?

[FAINT FOOTSTEPS, MORE SEARCHING]
[DOOR OPENS]
Tim, is that…?

[FOOTSTEPS]
Tim?

[DOOR OPENS]
TIM
Yes?

ARCHIVIST
[Startled] Ah! What? I thought… Is the trapdoor open?

TIM
No… It’s been locked for weeks. Why?

ARCHIVIST
No reason, just seemed, uh…

Tim, you’ve left the recorder running again!

TIM
No, no I didn–

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, regarding exploration of the tunnels recently discovered below the archive. Statement given direct, 2nd September, 2016. Statement, uh… Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I’ve been going into the tunnels. Jane Prentiss is dead. I know this. I have a small jar on my desk of what are supposed to be her ashes, though I don’t believe it for a second. I think Tim just gave me a jar of dust to try and calm me down. Give me something to focus on for closure. I hate to say it, but it does appear to be working. A victory for the placebo effect, it would seem. But that’s beside the point. The worms have been cleared and incinerated, the floors and walls repaired, and the archive looks remarkably like it was never attacked at all.

Unlike me. I’ve healed enough in the last month to return to work, but I’m told it’s unlikely the scars will ever truly fade. Nastya is still signed off. Truth be told, I could have stayed away longer, probably should have, but I don’t think the boredom was good for me. I tried to come back earlier, but Tim wouldn’t hear of it. Almost threw me out of the archive. Is he hiding something?.

Why do I still feel like I’m being watched? i mean it feels kinda nice I’d just about convinced myself it was Prentiss, watching me in secret while she filled the walls with her writhing hordes, but no. She is dead and gone, and still whenever I talk into this… damn thing, I feel this… I’m being watched. I know I am. I’d think it was some aspect of the recorder itself, but it still happens even when I’m just reading these files. Not as strongly as when I’m… recording them, perhaps, but still there. Is it…

Huh. You know, I always despised those witnesses who rambled on, unable to stay on topic, couldn’t give as concise a statement. Yet here I am, mumbling my vague suspicions of being watched, and completely ignoring the reason I’m making a statement of my own.

I have been exploring the tunnels.

It’s been a couple of weeks now. From before I was officially back. If you listen to this, Tim, I am not sorry. I’ve gone behind your back to explore the tunnels on several occasions. I took the key from Carmilla’ desk some time ago. I don’t think he noticed. Since Tim finally stopped living in the Archives, I’ve had ample opportunities for exploration by night. Part of me still wonders if going down there after dark was more dangerous, but the pitch black of those tunnels would be no different in the daytime. The only light down there is what you bring yourself.

The first time I attempted to explore them, I had no idea. I brought one torch and that was it. The lights in the archive were off when I arrived at the Institute. I hadn’t been down here since it was full of worm carcasses. I’d never explored down here by torchlight, and the shadows were… starker than I had anticipated. Every time I walked between the shelves, I swear I would see movement out the corner of my eye. But when I turned, there was nothing. Obviously there was nothing. Then I came to the trapdoor.

If Jessica hadn’t thought to clearly mark it with hazard tape, I’m not sure I would ever have found it again, but there it was. It took several minutes of fumbling before I was able to figure out how to lift the concealed handle and expose the lock, but I managed it. The key turned with a click that I found oddly satisfying, and I pulled it open. When I had thought about that moment before, I had always imagined it groaning open with a tortured, ominous creak, but it was almost silent. It glided open as though on freshly oiled hinges, with only the faintest puff of stagnant air being released from beneath it.

The opening was utterly black, with the faintest hint of decay in the cold, clammy air that rushed out of it. The stairs down it were steep, far steeper than I remembered them from when I had first climbed out, but those memories are… unreliable, and tinged with other, more potent, experiences. I turned the torch on, and was pleased by how easily it penetrated the darkness, illuminating the rough, grey stone below. I was expecting my torch to be met by hundreds of decaying worm husks, but the passage seemed to be empty. I headed down into the tunnel, closing the trapdoor behind me.

It is hard to put into words how it felt to be down there, in the cool, mouldering air of the tunnels. Have you ever left a crowded room, and literally felt the silence as you walked out into the night? It was something like that, a sudden, quiet absence. Not in itself a fearful thing, but unsettling in a way I hadn’t noticed through the fear and adrenaline of my first time in the tunnels. I took a moment to examine the feeling, but couldn’t trace it anything obvious, so I began to explore.

It was almost unreal how quickly I became lost. I generally consider myself to have an excellent sense of direction, but within minutes I became unsure of exactly which passages I had come from. I didn’t even have the excuse of the corridors all looking the same, as they varied significantly in height and construction. Some were built of sturdy brick, some seemed almost as though they had formed naturally, though in all cases it was the same dull, grey stone.

To call it a maze wouldn’t quite be accurate, as a maze is designed. It is set out with an obvious goal, even if that goal is to confuse and disorientate. This place, it felt more organic in its unpredictability, as though it had been intended to be used, to be travelled, but had gotten twisted somehow.

I found spaces that seemed intended as rooms, but without doors. Elsewhere, there were doors that seemed simply attached to the walls. Most of these were firmly shut, though some opened to reveal the flat grey stone behind. Only a handful I opened had actual rooms behind them, and in every case, I found myself wondering whether that was where Tim had found her.

There was no way to tell. Even when the police finally found Gertrude’s body, they took it, chair and all, as well as all the tapes. Evidence, they said, and they might be right, though I don’t envy them the task of going through all of them. There must have been hundreds.

No. I suppose in some way I do envy them. They are an insight into my predecessor’s time here; something I desperately want to know more about. Whatever’s on them, it must be important, because… either she chose to hide them down here, or whoever killed her did. Either way, I have a feeling it isn’t something the police are going to understand. I half-hoped to stumble across a lone cassette lying in one of the corridors, dropped or overlooked, but there was nothing. Just dark and empty tunnels, silent and unwelcoming.

I foolishly didn’t think to make a note of the time I entered the tunnels, so it was hard to say how long I had been down there, or how far I had gone, when I found the first of the worms, but it can’t have been more than a half hour. They were long dead by then. Shrivelled, stringy things, like discarded sausage casing, and it was odd to see how clear a line there was between the wormless tunnels and those where they still lay rotting. A clear line beyond which the cleaning crews had decided not to advance. When I crossed that line, I half-expected the corpses to spring to life, turning their squirming heads towards me with a predatory lunge, but they were still.

Nonetheless, I went slower through those deeper passages, picking my footing carefully so as not to touch them. The air was colder here, suffused with the faint tang of rot, and I began to wonder how much battery I had in my torch. I had put a fresh one in before my expedition, I’m not stupid, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I don’t actually know how long batteries last for continuous use in a heavy-duty torch.

I hadn’t even been down there an hour, but already it felt like the light it cast was weaker, somehow, and I realised how unsure I was of my exact route back. I decided I would rather cut my first trip unnecessarily short than risk being trapped down there without light. So I turned back.

It was almost impossible to retrace my steps. I tried to remember my route using what vague oddities I could remember as landmarks: a burned door, a particularly warped corridor. But trying to find them again was useless in the winding passages. In my increasing panic to find the way out, I almost forgot the things I had originally gone down there to look for. Then I found the circle of worms.

When Nastya had first described it, I had only half-believed her. I’m sorry, Nastya i guess, if you’re listening, but the CO2 had done some strange things to you at that point. He had the right of it, though. By the time I found it, there was little left but a thick carpet of dead worms, but a few were still embedded in the wall providing the clear outline of a circle. The ceiling was higher here, and all told it must have been about… ten feet in diameter.

Its size was not the most disconcerting thing, though. Inside the circle, the stone was… wrong somehow. Solid, but oddly wavy, like chocolate that’s melted and then rehardened. It took me a minute or two to work up the courage to wade through that shallow sea of filth, but I did, and when I touched the warped wall, it felt soft and porous. But stable. I turned and left, but not before noting that another path also appeared to have been pushed through the worms on the floor, though when it had happened or who had made it I couldn’t say.

It took me almost another hour to find the trapdoor again. My torch showed no signs of giving up, but I was still on the verge of panic. My hands were so slick with sweat that I fumbled several times with the handle before finally pushing it open bodily, and falling through onto the floor of the Archives. It was about three in the morning by that time. I had managed to reopen a few of my partially healed wounds, so I headed home to rest.

It turned out the trip had taken far more out of me than I thought; it was almost a week before I felt like I might be up for another excursion. This time, however, I decided that I was not going to take any chances: I packed three torches, with enough replacement batteries to last for days, food and water, in case I was down there longer than expected, a box of white chalk to clearly mark my way, and the largest knife I was able to buy at short notice.

The first time down there I had, on more than one occasion, been almost certain that I could hear sounds of movement from further into the tunnels. At the time I had convinced myself it was simply a combination of echo and my mind playing on my fears, but on the chance there was something down there…

Well, I had my doubts how effective a knife would be, but it certainly eased my mind. Beyond that, I made sure to take one of the smaller CO2 fire extinguishers from the Archives. I was determined that any surviving worms would not be so for long.

Again, I waited until nightfall before letting myself into the Archives, and heading down into the tunnels below. Almost as soon as I got down there I started marking the walls and intersections with white, chalk arrows. They pointed the direction I had come from, the direction I’d need to follow when I wanted to leave. If there was anything down here and I had to flee, then I reasoned all I would need to do was follow the chalk arrows back to the entrance.

For a while this worked. Once or twice I discovered I had inadvertently made a loop or gotten turned around and was facing one of my earlier arrows, but it was a relatively simple matter to correct it. I also set up my watch so I had a clear idea of how long I had been down there. After a half hour I had gotten far deeper than I had in my entire first expedition, and gotten past the empty area, into the tunnels still lined with dead worms, and then beyond them, to those tunnels wholly empty and, apparently, undisturbed since the days of Millbank Prison.

I had done what research I could on Millbank. First proposed and designed in 1799 by Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher who wished to test his theories of the panopticon prison, where cells would be arranged in a circle around a single, central, guard tower, so all cells were observable at once. It was to have six such areas, arranged in hexagons, giving it from the air the shape of a vast, angular flower.

It’s not clear why that original plan was abandoned, but from 1812 onwards, a succession of other architects were brought in to try and finish the project. Finally, three years later, they brought in Robert Smirke. He saw the project to completion in 1821, with a design remarkably similar to Bentham’s original. However, whereas Bentham’s would have been geometric, and easy to navigate, Millbank Penitentiary as it was built was more often described as an eccentric maze: twisting corridors, doors at strange angles, and narrow passages so poorly lit inmates would need to feel their way along.

Throughout much of the 19th century, it was where prisoners were kept before transportation to Australia, and the brutality of the jailors was said to be second to none. Its position on what was then marshlands hardly helped, with sickness and disease rife within their walls.

It was a huge complex, covering much of what we now call Chelsea, but when it was finally closed in 1890, it was demolished. Flattened. Which meant that what I was in now couldn’t be the old prison itself. It had to be something built below it. And it was this that gave me such pause when I found the first set of steps leading even further down.

They were stone, spiralling into the darkness at an angle so steep it made my legs weaken slightly. The steps led higher as well, but after a few metres disappeared into the solid stone of the ceiling. I made a note of their location and carried on, keen to explore as much of the first level as possible before going any deeper.

It was becoming very apparent that these tunnels must have covered the entire area of Millbank, or even further, and there was every possibility they continued for miles. I had seen little down there of note thus far, something I will admit gave me a pang of both disappointment and relief, and took a short break to drink some water and compose myself.

It was shortly after this I found the next staircase. It was identical to the first in material, in construction and look. It was the same in all but one detail: the large chalk arrow pointing downwards. I’m sure I don’t need to say that I had not drawn it. My own arrows were jagged, workmanlike things. This was curled and neat, pointing the way with a flourish.

That was when I heard the noises again. They could have been footsteps, I suppose, but if so they were soft, quiet. Was someone running around those tunnels barefoot? I froze in place and listened, but the noises did not return, and I gripped my knife.

I am not a brave man. I believe I am starting to come to terms with that fact, but I am, in certain circumstances, a very stubborn one. And there was something inside me that made the decision that I would rather die at the hands of some tunnel-dwelling beast than work above without knowing what it was. Maybe I’d be lucky, and find a crazed gun-wielding madman, a convenient killer for Gertrude.

I can almost hear my assistants chiding me for not turning tail and running then and there, but it’s hard to fully explain the borderline mania that gripped me when I saw that arrow. Mocking and inviting all at one. I was not so foolish as to run down the stairs, but I descended them quicker than was safe. Down and down and down they went, each rotation revealing more tunnels and doors, but I saw no sign of reaching the bottom. I had gone down about four levels when my torch caught what I thought was movement in the corridors beyond.

I left the stairs in pursuit, but was unable to find any sign of life. Or death, I suppose. Only an empty wine bottle, the label all but rotted away, but the year was still legible as 2003. The passages here were more pronounced in their difference than the ones further up, some being so irregular and seamless as to almost seem organic, while others were almost unnervingly square and regular, with sharp angles and precisely laid bricks.

It was in one of these that it happened. I had continued to mark my route with chalk, and was scratching an arrow into a particularly flat wall, when I looked up to see the turning ahead of me was no longer there. Instead, there was simply a dead end. I could find no sign that there had been any movement, nor had I heard anything.

I turned back, and immediately noticed that the wall opposite me was closer than it had been before. I took a step back in shock, and my feet hit the wall behind me. The passage was getting narrower, though I could not see any movement. I stood completely still and for several seconds there was silence. Then, from somewhere in the darkness, I heard a single word, clear as day: “Leave.”

It was spoken simply, without intonation or threat. Just a command.

So I did. I began to shuffle back as quickly as possible the way I had come, keeping my eyes open as long as I could, as every time I closed them the wall seemed to get even closer. By the time I reached the stairs back up, it had almost pinned me. I fled back up the stairs, followed the arrows I had left back to the trapdoor. It took me barely ten minutes, but I was moving faster than I would have thought possible in those… cramped tunnels. I locked the trapdoor behind me, and placed the heaviest objects I could find on it.

I have not been below the Institute since then. It took no small amount of consideration to decide I should officially make a statement. I did not think to bring the tape recorder with me. I suppose I’ve gotten out of the habit during my recuperation.

I am no closer to determining what is lurking down there than I was when I started. If anything I have more questions. Why point me downwards, only to then demand I run back? Was it some sort of trap? A test? I don’t know, but right now, finding whatever secrets might be lurking in those tunnels is my primary concern.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

My strongest motive is to learn more about the tunnels, or the secrets they might hide.

That’s not strictly true, I suppose but my other primary focus must be on who killed Gertrude Robinson, and I do not believe for a moment that it was a wall-moving spectre from the depths of the earth. No, far more likely it’s one of my colleagues. Carmilla is a prime suspect, but it could have been any of them.

I have told Tim the second tape recorder was lost in the attack. Having two means I can make two tapes from each recording. One containing the main statement and notes, which will be stored in the archive, and the other containing the statement, notes, and… this supplement, which will chronicle my own investigations. These tapes will be hidden. If you’re hearing this, I assume you’re my replacement, following my death or disappearance, and have received instructions on where to find them.

I have little more to add to this initial account, as I have only recently returned to my position in full, and haven’t had time to begin personal investigations. My statement was, of course, completely true, though I have deliberately overstated my interest in the tunnels. If my colleagues believe that to be my main focus, they may let their guard down. This level of paranoia is new to me, but I’m learning fast. Trust can get you killed.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Jennifer Ling, regarding a live musical performance she attended in Soho. Original statement given November 3rd, 2013. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Anyone who’s written about music long enough has at least heard of Grifter’s Bone. An urban legend, I guess you could call it. Not quite a ghost story, not quite a joke, not quite a real thing. Sometimes they’re a band, sometimes it’s just the one guy. If the story has them as a band, then the only one whose name the old timer knows – because it’s always the old timers telling these stories – is a guy named Alfred Grifter. Some will swear blind it’s his real name, others will just give you a knowing look and ask if it sounds real. Fact is, no-one knows a damn thing about him except the name he goes by, so it’s all just story and gossip, but there’s still plenty to go around.

Story goes of a mediocre musician with a hunger for more, who turns to the dark arts, usually devil worship or witchcraft, but gets it wrong. I’ve heard it told as a curse, a badly worded wish or even a devil that just gets mad at being summoned and beats him ‘til his hands don’t work. The end is always the same, though: his music is so grating, so gut-churningly awful, that he, or sometimes his band, have to sneak into gigs to play unannounced to any audience they can find. And the music is dreadful, a grim cacophony of discord and noise, too much to bear. You can always tell when Grifter’s Bone has been on, they’ll tell you, because of all the torn-off ears. They’re not entirely wrong.

I’ve been writing for Earful for a while. Used to just be me, firing my music thoughts onto a blog, but a few years back my then-friend, now-boss Tommy Moncreef said he was starting up a music site, and would I write for it? I said of course I would, and now here I am running video content for it. Earful.com’s only been around three years or so, but to be honest in the world of music sites, that gives us a pretty decent pedigree. Tommy’s from the old school – used to write for dozens of music magazines, back in the dead tree days, before print became an embarrassing older relative that just wouldn’t die. Point is, he knew a lot of older contacts and writers, most of which he brought on board for Earful. That means I was quickly brought up to speed on decades worth of London music scene gossip by middle-aged white men who only ever wore T-shirts for bands that ended tragically. And that’s when I started to hear about Grifter’s Bone.

Whenever someone was listening to some sub-par submission, or even just some music of their own that wasn’t well regarded, one of the old timers, usually Mike Baker, would shout over, “I see you got the new Grifter’s Bone album!” or “I didn’t know Grifter’s Bone reformed!” or something like that. It was annoying as hell, but I never really brought it up. And after hearing every possible variation of the story from a half-dozen drunken writers at our Christmas do, I just kind of decided to let it go.

I didn’t think much more about it until earlier this year. There’s a guy who works for Earful by the name of Lee Kipple. His official title is ‘Submissions Editor’, though we call it something a little more vulgar, and it’s his job to listen through all the music we’re sent unsolicited. CDs, MP3s; recently there’s even been a weird fad for sending in music on novelty USB drives. He listens to all of it. As you can imagine, most of it’s awful. Still, Lee is pretty much the nicest guy I’ve ever met, and I don’t think I’ve ever once heard him complain. He’s tall, a bit lanky, with long blond hair that covers his ears. And his eyes if he’s not careful.

Because of his job, Lee obviously gets a lot of comments about listening to crappy music, and if it’s one of the older folk you can bet they’ll mention Grifter’s Bone. It took me a while to notice how weird his reaction was when this happened. Whereas most of the staff would fake laugh, sigh or maybe swear a little, Lee would go very still. He’d nod gently, and reach up to scratch his ears, still mostly covered by hair. No-one seemed to notice.

I kept watching him, and the pattern repeated whenever the band was mentioned. I don’t know when I decided that he must have seen Grifter’s Bone perform live, but I did. And more than that, I decided he must have fake ears, having torn his own off when he saw the show, and that’s why he wore his hair so long to cover them. I didn’t really believe it, obviously. It was just a fun little theory I liked to play around with. But the more I watched Lee, the more it seemed that he did deliberately try to keep his ears covered.

Finally, about a month ago, I decided to just ask him. We’d all gone out for drinks, and I’ll admit I may have had a few more vodka tonics than would have been wise, but when the others had headed home and it was just Lee left, I decided now was the time. I asked him if they were as bad as everyone said. He looked puzzled, and I leaned in closer. “Grifter’s Bone”, I said. He froze, completely still. I waited for him to touch his ears, but instead he just stared at me, unmoving. He began to stutter something about not knowing what I was talking about, but I cut him off. It was written all over his panicked face; he had seen them.

I watched as he decided whether or not to try and run. There was a moment I was sure he was going to literally bolt for the door, but instead he sighed and nodded his head. It was four years ago, he told me, at The Good Ship in Kilburn. Lee had been watching an up-and-coming metal band whose name he could no longer recall – they’d been fine, a bit disappointing, so he was in a mood to finish his drink and leave. The rest of the audience seemed to be of a similar mind, so nobody noticed when a man climbed onto the stage, and set up a small keyboard.

The man was short, so Lee said, and painfully thin, wearing a ratty, old brown suit that draped around him like, in Lee’s words, “flaps of ill-fitting skin”. His thinning black hair was slicked back, and his face had a strange look of cruelty to it. As he placed his fingers on his instrument, they left behind dark red spots on the bright white keys. Lee said he had never heard of Grifter’s Bone before that moment, but somehow he knew that’s what he was looking at. And then the music started.

After he said this, Lee went very quiet. It was clear he was concentrating very hard. I waited, not wanting to interrupt, but in the end he just shook his head. He couldn’t remember the music, he said. He’d tried, but it was just blank. He’d come back to himself wandering the streets of Kilburn almost two hours later, his shirt soaked in blood. Mostly his blood. At this, Lee unbuttoned his shirt and showed me a series of vivid scars slashed onto his chest. The hospital had said it was likely a box cutter of some sort, but he had no memory of it.

By then it looked like he was on the verge of tears, but I couldn’t leave it alone. I asked about his ears. He actually laughed at this and said no, he hadn’t torn them off. Reaching up, Lee pulled back his long, blond hair to reveal an ear that, at first glance, appeared normal. Looking closer, though, I saw that he was wearing earplugs, flesh-coloured, so as not to be obvious, and caked around the edges of them was a ring of dried blood. He said it was the only way he’d found to stop it dripping down and ruining his shirts.

I was a bit freaked out at this. Understandably, I think, though it was entirely my own fault, and I had told him he needed to see a doctor if his ears wouldn’t stop bleeding. Lee just shook his head, said he’d seen enough doctors to know they couldn’t help, and that he had learned to cope with it. We drank the rest of the night in silence, before heading our separate ways.

I know I should have left it alone after that, and I certainly didn’t bother Lee again. But I found I, I just couldn’t let it go. Either Lee was mad, or Grifter’s Bone was real. I started doing research online. There were a few sites that referenced it as an urban legend. There was a punk duo in Oregon who proudly announced that they had named themselves Grifter’s Bone after what they described as “Britain’s musical Jack the Ripper”. There were a lot of posts on music forums from newbies to the scene asking what Grifter’s Bone was. But nowhere had anything even remotely like Lee’s story.

Finally, having kinda run out of steam, I threw my findings together into a short feature article, and sent it to Tommy, who dutifully approved it. I figured I’d wasted enough time on the subject that I could at least put it towards something decent for the site. It did alright, though it wasn’t enough of a hit to justify the time spent on it. Lee didn’t mention it when we next talked – I had asked if I could write up his experience after thoroughly anonymising it, and he’d shrugged and said fine. All in all, it felt like whatever it was that had hooked me, it was over, and I wasn’t too broken up about it.

Then someone left a comment on my article. It just read, “Tonight. Soho.” I wouldn’t have paid it any attention if it hadn’t been for the second line: “No earplugs required”. Lee’s earplugs, and the reason behind them, had been the only thing he requested I leave out of the article. I mentioned it to Tommy, and he just said something about time-wasters, and how I had better things to do than spend an evening wandering around Soho, randomly walking into music venues.

It probably says something really depressing about my personal life that, actually, I didn’t have anything better to do. So that afternoon I was doing exactly that. Wandering around the streets of Soho, making a note of all the performers listed as playing that night. As expected, none of them listed Grifter’s Bone as playing, but I made a note of them anyway. It wasn’t that late, but it was already dark, the world illuminated by the colourful glow of the Soho signs and shop fronts. The wind was slow in the narrow streets, but still cut through my thin, woollen coat as I wandered, looking for a small, cruel-looking man in a ragged brown suit.

I’d kept my watch maybe an hour when I saw someone staring at me from the doorway of a small shop. The sign above didn’t have an obvious name, simply reading “Crystals. Books. Tarot”. He was tall, black and careworn, deep lines of worry etched into an otherwise handsome face. When he saw me looking at him, he began to walk up to me, still with that intense look. I took a couple of steps back, and asked if I could help him. He shook his head as if unsure what to say, then asked me what I was listening to. A chill ran over me as I realised he was staring at my ears.

I said I wasn’t listening to anything, as I wasn’t wearing headphones, and asked him what he wanted. He shook his head again, and mumbled something about protecting my hearing. He turned away then, and started walking back into the shop. I was about to follow him when I saw a small group of people turning the corner.

Their features were hard to be sure of in the dark, but walking at the front, dragging a rolling keyboard case, was a short, thin man in an oversized brown suit. The three figures behind him were all much taller than him, but each was stick thin, and moved with a jerkiness to their motions. I looked back to where the strange, staring man had been, but he had retreated inside his shop, and the lights were now off, so I began to follow the man I thought to be Alfred Grifter, as he and his companions moved down the street. The others all carried instrument cases as well, and no one else on the street seemed to pay them any notice at all, not even when the tallest physically shoved a man out of his path.

Finally, they turned down a flight of stairs, into a basement jazz bar I didn’t recognise. After a few seconds I followed them. The bar was dimly lit and quiet, with red and orange lights giving it a warm, smoky feel. Patrons stood around drinking and chatting. I counted eleven in total. I remember I made a note of the number because of how empty the place was. Most seemed to be dressed for an evening of jazz, but I noticed a few of them seemed to be wearing thick coats or jackets, and one, an older white man with a shock of silver hair, appeared to be wearing a silk bathrobe. Behind them, on the stage, Grifter’s Bone were setting up their instruments.

Now, despite everything that happened thus far appearing to show the contrary, I am not an idiot. I remembered Lee’s story very clearly indeed, and had no intention of staying for the show. Instead, I took out my phone, set it recording video, and placed it in a small alcove near the entrance with a good view of the stage. I checked to make sure the microphone was working, and then I left. I stood at the top of the stairs into that dingy jazz club and I waited.

After a few minutes of shivering in the cold, I thought I had made a mistake. The streets were deserted, and the previously mild November night had taken on a bone-deep chill. Then I heard it. Muffled through the walls, but still rising distinctly to where I stood, a note. A single, clear note, from what sounded like a cello. It was joined by others, a keyboard, a guitar, and over them all the pure piping sound of a flute. It was beautiful. It was some of the most achingly beautiful music I had ever heard. Then the screams began.

There was no build-up to the screams; no lead-up to explain the sudden eruption of sounds of agony. There were crashes as well, noises of impact and, once or twice, something that sounded like tearing. Through it all, in the background, played that beautiful music. I stood there, frozen in place, not wanting to go down there, but not feeling able to flee, as below all I could hear was haunting music and butchery.

I went to pull out my mobile to phone the police, but I realised I had left it down there, recording in the jazz club. I finally made the decision to run for help, when the noises ceased abruptly, and there was silence. I looked around for anyone who might have heard the cries of pain and panic, and be coming to help, but there was no-one. Just me. I began to slowly, carefully, make my way down towards the basement. If whoever was down there wanted to kill me, I would be easy enough to find with the information on my phone. One way or another, I was at their mercy.

When I opened the door, it was hard to know exactly what I was looking at. In the dull red light, the torn and mangled remains of the people I had seen alive not half an hour ago were almost indistinguishable from the carpet and furnishings. On stage, the musicians calmly packed away their instruments. They did not have a spot of blood on them. The one in the brown suit, who I assumed to be Alfred Grifter, looked up. He gazed straight into my eyes and said, “Encore?” I grabbed my phone and ran.

I didn’t phone the police. I was too scared of what might happen. I watched the news obsessively, waiting to see anything on the massacre, but there was nothing. It’s been almost a week now, and I’ve heard nothing. I haven’t been able to access the footage from that night. My phone says it’s incorrectly formatted somehow, but I’ll keep trying. I did go back to the jazz club, but I can find no sign of violence, no sign of Grifter’s Bone, and no sign of the eleven people who died that night.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Our own investigations into the band “Grifter’s Bone” yielded little that Ms. Ling did not include in her own, remarkably comprehensive article “Spooks and solos: the slim pickings of Grifter’s Bone”. Certainly her statement appears to be easily the most detailed account of any encounter with the band, assuming it is to be trusted. The Dean Street Jazz Club strenuously denies any violence took place on its premises during the dates in question, and there are no police reports that seem to match up with Ms. Ling’s description.

Well, I suppose that’s not quite true. According to police reports, in the month of October 2013, there were a total of eleven deaths by violence in the Greater London area. It’s impossible to match the details of all of them based on the information in Ms. Ling’s statement, but one of the victims, Mr. Albert Sands, 67 years old, and beaten to death in his own home. Although it happened two weeks before the events of this statement, according to the police he was wearing a silk dressing gown when he was brutally murdered.

We are unfortunately unable to follow up with Ms. Ling; it seems roughly two weeks after giving this statement she assaulted Agatha Norrell, her elderly neighbour, with a claw hammer. Ms. Norrell was left in a coma from which she did not recover, while Ms. Ling turned the hammer upon herself. By the time the police arrived, she had done so much damage to her head that… there was no hope of saving her. I have an uncomfortable feeling she might have finally gotten that video to work.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplement. I’ve been watching Tim. He’s been very attentive to my needs and recovery since I returned to work, almost to the exclusion of his own tasks. Previously I might have ascribed such ministrations to his own lax work ethic, but in the stress of Prentiss’ attack, I am sure I glanced moments of competence, or even cunning, that are beyond what his previous work would indicate. Is he playing the fool? Purposefully failing in his tasks to delay or hinder my investigations? It’s possible. He has also shown remarkable interest in my own theories as to who killed Gertrude. I have thus far diverted him by saying I believe it to be whatever is lurking in the tunnels below, but he seems… unsatisfied by that response.

I’m glad he’s moved out of the Archives, as it gives me a chance to work here without his constant presence. Also because he managed to leave some of his possessions behind, for the most part it’s just a few books of relatively awful poetry. Also i found somethings that Nastya owned there are a few pieces I feel could almost have been affecting if her style wasn’t so obviously enamoured with Keats, but there is an unfinished letter addressed to her mother in Devon, in which she mentions that she is worried about “the others finding out I’ve been lying”.

It may be nothing, some inconsequential deception or other – after all, it is ostensibly written to her mother – but if it was actually to be sent to someone else… I will keep my eye on Nastya.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
IVY
I really shouldn’t be talking about it on tape.

ARCHIVIST
That’s entirely up to you. You came to us.

IVY
Yeah… Just wanna talk about it with someone, you know?

ARCHIVIST
Very much so.

IVY
I’m breaking the law by talking to you. You understand that?

ARCHIVIST
Yes. Some sort of non-disclosure agreement, I believe?

IVY
Pretty much. D-Do you need my real name?

ARCHIVIST
Technically no, but from what I understand of your situation, you’d be rather identifiable even without it. This is not the first time we’ve had statements from witnesses in sensitive positions. I’ll mark the tape and file it for internal use only, which means it comes under the Institute’s own, very strict, NDA policy and cannot be referenced or requested by external agencies or authorities.

Such as the police.

IVY
[Pointedly] That’s the best you can offer?

ARCHIVIST
I’m afraid so, though I remind you again you are under no obligation to make a statement if it makes you uncomfortable. Or, if you’re worried about your voice being recognised, you could always write it down. I’ll make an audio copy later.

IVY
I’m not really big on writing. I’m more of a talker.

ARCHIVIST
Odd choice of career, then; [attempting levity] I hear there are lots of forms to fill in.

IVY
Not much since I became Section 31.

ARCHIVIST
Yes, you mentioned. This Section Thirty– you know what, we will cover it in the statement.

Statement of Police Constable Ivy Alexandria regarding her time investigating… strange occurrences as part of Section 31. Statement taken direct from subject, September 19th 2016. Statement begins.

IVY
…

Now?

ARCHIVIST
Yes.

IVY
Right, well, first off, I’m not ‘part’ of Section 31. It’s not like a unit or a division within the police force or anything like that. It’s a form you have to sign. Section 31 of the Freedom of Information Act covers exclusions for information pertaining to law enforcement. It just means that any information that could interfere with the prevention or detection of a crime can’t be given out as part of an FOI request. So what happens is, when you stumble across something a bit… weird, then after it’s over you’re taken to one side, and told to sign a form officially declaring what you saw and experienced was directly related to a crime. Then it’s covered by Section 31 and can’t be revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. There’s a whole bunch of other NDA stuff in there as well, but it basically means you have to keep quiet about it.

Thing is, signing your first Section 31 really marks you out. Word spreads fast in a station, and once they see you’ve signed one, people start to push you in that direction. They call you ‘sectioned’, which I guess is kind of appropriate? You’re generally assigned to head out with others who’ve signed, and if any officers get a whiff of something weird from a scene, they’ll wait ‘til you arrive, rather than going in themselves and risk getting sectioned themselves. I suppose in some ways it’s kind of a unit, but not one with any funding or training or official power. Just a bunch of burned out cops with a retirement rate five times the average.

That’s why it took so long to get a car here when your friend found Miss Robinson’s body. I was on a burglary call-out with Carver, the only other sectioned officer on shift, and you can bet no-one else was responding to a call from the Magnus Institute. No offence.

ARCHIVIST
Only slightly taken. And full names, please.

IVY
What? Oh, PC Richard Carver.

ARCHIVIST
Thank you.

I did notice you seemed less… taken aback by the large number of shrivelled silver worm corpses than I would have expected.

IVY
Yeah. I mean, that was easily one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen on the job, but not the weirdest.

ARCHIVIST
Shall we start at the beginning, then?

IVY
Okay, well, the first time I got hit with a Section 31 was five years ago, August 2011. I’d got my badge the year before that, and was still getting used to some of the more stressful bits of the job. The week before this happened, I’d heard an officer get his leg shattered by some arsehole with a cricket bat. We were speeding towards the scene, but couldn’t do anything but listen to it over the radio. That sort of thing it, it does something to your brain; that mix of adrenaline and helplessness, so… so I was still a bit rattled when the call came in.

There was a fire out near Clapham – a residential home had gone up, and the fire brigade were calling for some police back-up. Apparently the homeowner was getting violent, and there were suspicions of arson. I was riding with John Spencer back then. We didn’t really get on – let’s just say I wasn’t a fan of the tone he always used when he said the word “diversity”, though I never had enough to bring any real grievance about it. Even so, he didn’t deserve what happened to him.

So we arrive at the smoking ruin of a house, and the firefighters have got it pretty much locked down, just a lot of smoke and damp rubble, except for where we see a couple of firefighters struggling to keep a guy restrained. He was a Hispanic male, probably mid-to-late 40s, heavy set with a completely shaved head. Another of the firefighters, this one with a fresh black eye, comes over to brief us. Apparently the guy had burst out of the house shortly after they arrived, not a single burn mark on him. The fire brigade had approached to see what help he needed, but instead he just started throwing punches and trying to run.

That was an assault charge, sure, but why the arson? The fireman just sort of nods to him, and I realise for the first time the bald guy’s saying something. Not loud, but intensely. I mean, this was years ago, so I don’t remember exactly what he was saying, but it definitely involved the words “cleansing fire”, “all shall be ash” and the name Asag, which I later learned is some kind ofSumarian demon. So that’s fun. I reckoned suspicion of arson was probably about right, and Spencer agreed.

So he went to arrest the guy, maybe calm him down some, while I got the handcuffs on. There’s still part of me that feels guilty it was that way around. As I was cuffing him, there was this sudden intense pain in my hand. It was just as I touched the metal to close them; it was incredibly hot. I once took a welding class, ages back, just kind of on a whim, and made the mistake of forgetting that just because metal isn’t glowing red doesn’t mean it isn’t scorching hot. It was that same burn, too intense for your mind to process for a second, then all your nerves fire at once.

It hurt, is what I’m saying.

If I hadn’t managed to get the cuffs closed before the pain really hit, I don’t know what would have happened. As it was I ended up with some badly blistered fingers, while in front of me the guy leaned over to Spencer and whispered something right in his ear. I didn’t hear what he said, but Spencer went completely pale. He was shaking slightly as we shoved the guy in the back of the car, and I had to drive us back to the station. He… refused to tell me what the guy had said.

Our arsonist’s name was Diego Molina. He was assistant curator at some Mexican museum, come over with a loan to the Natural History Museum, but they hadn’t heard from him for a few weeks. He didn’t say much in questioning, though his English was clearly fine. Unfortunately, the arson case collapsed pretty quickly, so… we just had to slap him with assault and let him walk with a hefty fine. Spencer didn’t exactly help matters by getting himself suspended. The only thing Diego Molina had on him when we brought him in, was a small book bound in red leather. They caught Spencer in Storage, trying to destroy it with a Zippo lighter. I never saw him again.

They told me he killed himself when he got home. Apparently he’d somehow filled the bath full of boiling water and just… just got in. Official story was he’d somehow done it using a kettle, which… that, that’s just about the weakest cover-up I’ve ever heard.

[HEAVY SIGH]
Anyway, after that happened, and I’d explained my burned fingers, they gave me my very first Section 31.

ARCHIVIST
I see… I-I see. How many, uh, potentially paranormal events do you generally investigate – a-as a police officer?

IVY
None. No-one says the P-word. Not ‘paranormal’, not ‘supernatural’, not even ‘spooky’. The words you learn to look out for are “weird”, “odd”, “strange” and if you hear the phrase “I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at”, then yeah, you’re not getting much back-up.

Almost all of them are false alarms. We get called to a lot of bad drug trips, animal attacks and folks with genuine mental health issues. Those are the ones that have the potential to sound weirdest during initial contact. I didn’t get another genuine Section 31 case for… almost three years.

July 18th 2014. I remember because it was the hottest day of the year, and the air con in the car was out, so we were really suffering. It was me and Alice Tonner, who… everyone calls her “Daisy”, but I can never get her to tell me why. Anyway, Daisy was sectioned years before I was even on the force. She’s never been that forthcoming about any of her own experience; takes Section 31 very seriously. The most I could get out of her was that she was originally sectioned for something she referred to as “spider husks”. The way she described it, it sounded like she’d found a bunch of shells, the sort crabs leave behind when they grow, but I could never figure out if it was meant to be the husks of people-sized spiders, or the spider-like husks of people. And Daisy never seemed like she wanted to clarify. I’m sure she mentioned vampires once as well, but… I think she was joking. Probably. Maybe.

Anyway, we were headed towards Kensington. This one had originally been called in for the ambulance, but then neighbours had reported gunshots, and we had a very strange call with the paramedics. They had specifically refused to confirm there was a gun on the scene so we didn’t send an armed unit. They were still on standby, but something in the paramedics’ report made the other responders decide they should wait for us to get there.

The building was pretty run-down for Kensington. Still nicer than my house, but, you know. The paramedics met us at the door and showed us up. The lift was out, so we headed up the stairs. On each floor I saw faces peering out of the cracks in front doors. They must have been the neighbours who heard gunshots. We, we carried on up, [heavy exhalation] until we reached a door that was already open. The lights inside were off; paramedics said they’ve all been smashed. The windows had all been painted over, and it was like a boiler room in there. But, even in the gloom, it was… it was clear there was a lot of blood around. A lot of blood.

We found the ‘victim’ in the living room, sat on a large armchair. His face was a mess. We got a torch on him, and it was clear he’d been shot in the head multiple times at close range. He was male, white, youngish. Age was hard to guess from what was left of his face. His clothes were new, and there were a lot of expensive-looking trinkets about the place. A lot of old-looking domino sets in glass cases.

Daisy spotted the gun lying next to him, and went over to retrieve it while I-I checked the place for any other signs of life. I’d just turned around when I heard Daisy scream. The guy was moving, trying to gurgle something through what was left of his jaw. He was reaching for the gun. Daisy leapt for it, but it was right next to him and she missed. The man who… he should have been a corpse already… raised the gun, and pointed it into this… mass of flesh that was his head. Daisy grabbed the gun before he could pull the trigger again, and managed to wrestle the gun away from him. Then he made a, he made a noise, just… just a really horrible sound. I think he was trying to cry.

The paramedics took him after that. They didn’t really want to, but it was clearly more in their domain than ours. I assume hospitals probably have their own version of a Section 31 those poor idiots had to sign later. Daisy and I told them we’d clear it up on the police side. Just a standard suicide, and the body was taken by the ambulance. It cut down on the forms, and neither of us wanted to sign another goddamn Section 31.

ARCHIVIST
Fascinating. What other cases have fallen under this classification?

IVY
Officially, I’ve only had one other, and that was yours.

ARCHIVIST
Officially?

IVY
You get a few dozen calls a year from people who have strange experiences, but they don’t have any evidence. I mean, if what they say is true, then it would be a Section 31, but… there’s nothing that can be investigated or proven, so there’s nothing to report. I always feel bad for them; they’re always so sincere, so sure you can help, but unless they can point to the ghost or the spooky clown doll or whatever, there’s not really a lot we can do.

I’ve also been quite lucky, to be honest. I’ve dodged quite a few of the nastier Section 31s over the years. I remember Harry used to get wasted and tell all sorts of grim stories.

ARCHIVIST
Ah, full names, please.

IVY
Sorry, Sergeant Harry Altman. Worked with him a few years back, before he retired.

ARCHIVIST
Right. So… just to return to, er, Gertrude’s body. That’s currently considered a para– a weird case?

IVY
I mean, we’re investigating it as a murder because that’s what it is, but you guys are basically an automatic Section 31, so I’ve got almost no help on it. Maybe that’s why I wanted to make a statement, you know? I can’t talk to anybody about this stuff, and then I come here, and you’ve got all this… all these people’s experiences listened to and filed away. It’s… I don’t know. I’ve been meaning to come in ever since that callout.

ARCHIVIST
Mm. Yes. S-So um… so no-one is helping you with Gertrude’s case? No oversight?

IVY
Not really. I tried making the argument that the murder didn’t seem to connect to any of your ‘paranormal business’, at least not directly, but nope. I’ve got a shot corpse, three boxes of cassettes, and Daisy, who’s CID now, which I suppose means it’s technically her problem, but she’s now the only detective who’s already sectioned so she’s always way too busy. As far as I know, neither of us have even had a chance to actually start listening to the tapes.

ARCHIVIST
Interesting. Uh, listen–

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Obviously further investigation of the police cases to which Ms Alexandria refers is out of the question. Ensuring that the breach of non-disclosure and spreading of confidential information remains hidden is our top priority in this instance. Further investigation, however subtle, could put that in significant danger. Beyond that, Ms Alexandria did not appear to expect any such investigation. I can’t say I blame her. Much as I value the deductive powers of my team, they are not trained detectives with the force of the Metropolitan Police behind them, so I imagine there would be little more they could unearth. Certainly nothing worth the risk.

If nothing else, it appears we now have a name for our mystery burn victim from Case #0121102. Diego Molina. And I have a suspicion I know where he got that book. It’s a shame he’s dead, of course, but a piece of the puzzle is not something to be ignored.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental. I have convinced Ivy to give me access to the tapes. It won’t be many or often, as they are currently police evidence and thus hard to subtly remove, and she can’t necessarily guarantee the ones I get will be the most pertinent to the case, but it is still a significant victory. I only ever spoke to Gertrude once or twice during her time as archivist. I-I was very new. I don’t remember what her voice sounded like. Part of me worries about what I might find on these tapes, but a bigger part of me worries I will find nothing. This uncertainty is wearing on me, and I don’t know how much more I can take.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
GERTRUDE
Case 9790302. Yuri Utkin. Incident occurred in the village of Algasovo, central Russia, November 1952. Statement given 2nd of March 1979. Committed to tape 15th of April 1997.

Gertrude Robinson recording.

GERTRUDE (STATEMENT)
As a child, I always loved the circus. I grew up in the little village of Algasovo, deep in the forest steppes. We were tiny, far below the notice of the district’s райсовет 1, and as such we were quite a poor community, with little hope of being added to the circus routes as anything but a waystation. Every year he would take my brother Ivan and me, and we would make the journey down to Morshansk to see the circus as soon as it arrived.

Jugglers, acrobats, wild animals… it took my breath away every time. My favourites were the clowns. Not as you would think of them; I’ve seen what you call clowns in this country, but back then clowns would actually tell jokes, not simply hit each other and fall over. I didn’t always understand the jokes they told, but there was something intoxicating about sitting there, surrounded by people all laughing and cheering. Even if I didn’t always share their amusement, I always shared in their joy.

I never liked the acrobats, though. I would watch them swinging from the top of the tents, leaping between the trapeze or walking their tightropes, and my chest would tighten, and all I could see in my mind would be the image of them falling to the sand-covered floor. I’ve never been afraid of heights myself, you understand; I used to spend half my summers at the top of the tallest trees I could find. When I was six, my best friend Piotr fell when we were climbing together. He survived, but broke his leg so badly that he still walks with a limp today. From that moment, that long terrible moment when I watched him fall, whenever I would watch the acrobats fly through the air it was all I could do not to close my eyes. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that my visit to the circus in Morshansk remains some of the happiest memories I have of my childhood.

One day in early November, the circus came to Algasovo. To say this was strange is to put it very mildly. As I’ve said, we were a small village, and far below the notice of the troupes that travelled the region. More than that, winter was beginning to set in, and it should have been many months before the touring season began again.

Then, as now, all circuses were owned and run by the government, something that is taken very seriously, so the idea that it might be an independent company that had simply found itself in Algasovo was unthinkable. There were always rumours of vagrants or travellers who would set up their own shows, but these would be small things, always half-ready to move on if someone reported them to the local сельсовет 2. This circus was huge, easily as big as the ones I would see at Morshansk. The trucks rolled through the village shortly before dawn, and by the evening there it stood in the field to the east of town. Over the entrance stood a brightly painted wooden sign that read “Другой Цирк” 3, “Another Circus”.

I begged my father to go. He was weary, but it became clear that almost everyone in the village was planning to visit, even if only so they knew what to report to the сельсовет later. Soon a mob of us were heading through the icy November evening towards the colourful tents and bright lights. As we approached I heard a shrill, piping sound. I’d never before heard a steam organ – they had not been used in the other circuses I had visited, and I found the noise invigorating. There was something in its shriek that thrilled me, though it was the last time I would be able to hear such a sound without being filled with the deepest dread.

There was no fence around the outside, but instead the gate stood alone before the circus, with the name illuminated by gaslights either side. It was not a surprise that such a place would not have electricity like the ones in Morshansk, but still it seemed as though the flickering shadows cast by those lamps were starker than I was used to. Next to the gate stood a short woman in a leotard, seemingly oblivious to the cold. As the group of us approached, she began to wave with a slow, languid motion and called over for us to come in. The circus was open, she said, and all were welcome. Her voice was strange. The Russian she spoke was perfect, but her accent, her intonation were all wrong; each time she spoke it was abrupt and repetitive, like a scratched record.

If my father and his friends noticed, they didn’t show any sign of it, though they were suspicious enough already. I didn’t care. I was too excited about the circus. Ivan was even keener than I was, and upon hearing this invitation, he burst out of the crowd and ran eagerly through the gate. And then it was as though some spell were broken, and the wariness seemed to disappear all at once. My father took my hand and led me through under that bright sign, paying the five roubles for entry.

Beyond it there were more gaslights casting their pallid glow on tents and wagons. That whistling steam organ still played, giving the place a feeling of life and energy, while the air was full of sweet smells. From behind the tent came the roar of a big cat, and I let go of my father’s hand as I ran ahead to see. Sure enough, there, sat behind thick iron bars, was the vivid, orange face of a tiger. It regarded me with narrowed eyes, though it remained still. I was entranced. Its fur was shiny and thick, and its mouth curled open to reveal long teeth of brilliant white. I had seen bears and lions before, and once even an elephant, but I’d never seen a real-life tiger before. I leant closer, until all that was between us were six inches and some rusty iron bars.

As I stared at this beautiful creature in front of me, it moved its head. It was the strangest thing to watch. It seemed to shift its position slowly, like a doll having its joints twisted, but its face remained completely still. The mouth stayed curled to reveal its teeth, the ears stayed alert and pointed forward, and the eyes still stared out, though where they had at first seemed brilliant, they now had an almost glassy look to them. Without warning it roared, the same powerful cry of violence that I had heard before, but as it did so I fell back in surprise. The tiger’s mouth had not moved.

As I scrambled back, I felt a large hand on my shoulder, and looked up to see two huge men in overalls. They lifted me easily, so my feet hung almost two feet from the ground. They talked fast, crude Russian, and their words seemed to shift back and forth between them, telling me that behind the tent was off limits, and that I should leave the tiger alone as it wasn’t ready to perform yet. At least, that’s what I thought they’d said at the time. It was only later that it struck me their exact phrase had been that the tiger “wasn’t finished”. They carried me back to my father and placed me down next to him. He thanked them, and asked me if I’d seen my brother.

Ivan had not returned after he ran off through the gate, and my father was growing concerned. He was standing talking to a pale man in a flamboyant red coat, whom I took to be the ringmaster. This brightly-dressed man said there was no reason to be alarmed, that he would ask his people to be on the lookout, and that Ivan would no doubt return when the show was about to start. There was much to explore in the circus, he told my father patiently, and children often let their excitement get the better of them in this strange new place, but they had never lost one yet. This last part he said with a smile that I think was supposed to be reassuring, but reminded me too much of the tiger with its shiny, unmoving teeth.

I left them arguing there and went off to find Ivan. In my ten-year-old’s mind I was sure that I would be able to figure out where my younger brother had wandered to. I would return triumphant, and my father would tell all the village of how well I had done. As I walked, I became fascinated by the flickering gaslights, some clear and bright, others behind coloured glass, and decided that Ivan would also have been drawn to them. So I followed them round the tent, and through the wagons and trucks, until I found myself standing before a smaller tent, set off to the side of the big top. There was another wooden sign across the top. This one appeared to be written in English; I did not then understand what it said. Knowing what I know now, I believe it said, “Freak Show”.

Now you must understand that the freak show was not part of a Soviet circus. Indeed, I believe even in America the practice has been out of fashion for many, many years, so I did not have any idea what to expect when I went in looking for Ivan. What I saw inside is one of the main reasons that I am so sure that my experience deserves to be in your library. It’s the reason I went to Moscow to study medicine, for the people, if such they can be called, that I saw in there were of such grotesque proportion and bodily forms that I became obsessed with learning how it was they might still live.

It was only when I was many years into my medical training that I finally accepted that, scientifically, such things were not possible. A mouth cannot function if it’s located anywhere other than the face. Limbs cannot bend like rubber. A man cannot walk and talk and stare without a head. You will, I hope, forgive my lack of precise descriptions. It has been 27 years since that night, and I can no longer clearly distinguish between what is memory and what is nightmare.

I walked along the row of cages. Those few other patrons who had found their way to this tent turned around quickly, leaving with pale faces and shaking legs, but I was determined to find Ivan. I closed my eyes as I walked, opening them only momentarily every few steps to check if he was there. I called out, but there was no reply, either from my brother, or from the silent things in their cages. Finally, I reached the end of the tent. The last cage was empty, save for a large hessian sack. It was tied by thick rope, wrapped around so tightly that it bulged through the gaps in its binding. I took momentary comfort in the fact that it was far too big to be Ivan. Still, I found myself approaching it, curiosity momentarily overcoming my growing sense of dread. Then, in the distance, the steam organ began to play, announcing the start of the show, and the bag began to move.

It contorted itself, pulsing and throbbing like a wounded animal’s stomach, and fell heavily forward. I screamed and fled out into the frozen night. It was only when I was about to pass back out through the wooden gates that I stopped, remembering that, even if Ivan had fled like me, my father was still in this terrible place. I resolved to rescue him, and turned back towards the main tent. Light spilled out of the open entrance, as the steam organ kept playing.

I entered to see two clowns fighting. Not the slapstick routines of the clowns I’d been used to, rife with wordplay and satire, but a crunching violence I had never seen before. One of them, huge and scowling in white and purple polka-dots, pinned down its smaller companion, whose bright yellow shirt was now streaked with red. With each blow from the big clown, the crowd, among whom I could clearly see my father, howled with laughter and cheers. The laughter didn’t sound right. None of it was right. It was as though I was looking at a tent full of vicious strangers, every one of whom wore a face I had known since birth.

Then my gaze drifted upwards, to the tightrope stretched between the towering tent poles, and my heart stopped. Halfway across, tottering on legs too short to balance properly, was Ivan. Everything else was forgotten as I watched him there, and the sounds of the world around me faded away. The question of how he had got up there, or made it halfway along that thin metal wire, didn’t even enter my mind. I could think of nothing but that next step that would send him tumbling to a floor caked in sand, greasepaint and blood.

No-one else in the audience or the ring seemed to have noticed him up there, and my throat had closed too tight to call to them. I could do nothing but watch as Ivan took another step along the tightrope. He swayed to one side, then the other, and I could see he was crying, tears falling to the floor like single drops of rain. He took another step. And then another. He did not fall. I watched in amazement as my seven-year-old brother walked and walked. My heart was still clenched in fear, and I could not breathe. Ivan took his final step, lifted his right foot, and placed it upon the platform on the opposite tent pole. He had made it. He gripped the pole and moved around it and out of sight.

I do not know how long I had stood there watching, but it seemed like only a moment later I felt my father’s hand grip me by the shoulder. I turned to see him standing there with Ivan by his side. He had a look on his face as though he had eaten something that had spoiled, and without a word he led us out of the circus and back to our home. The field was empty by the next morning.

No-one in our village ever spoke of that night, and when the state circus came to Morshansk the next year, my father did not offer to take us, and we did not ask.

For many years, I thought that it might have been some strange dream or distorted memory, as no-one ever acknowledged that it had happened. But I asked Ivan about it when we were older, and he hesitantly said that he remembered the circus coming, but everything after running through the gate was a blur. I pressed him further on the subject, and he just shook his head. He didn’t remember what happened, he said, but he still got terrible nightmares. Every November, around when the circus had come to Algasovo, he would dream that he was there again. He could smell the sawdust and hear the steam-organ playing, but he could not move. In the dream he would find himself tightly bound with coarse rope and trapped inside a thick hessian sack. I remembered those nights. He always woke up screaming.

GERTRUDE
Final comments: sounds, from what I can tell, like Yuri Utkin and his brother were rather lucky in their encounter with the circus, as both escaped with only significant mental trauma. A decidedly tame result for a run-in with Gregor Orsinov’s troupe, especially as this would have been during the height of their tour. If it was in the 70s, after Denikin had left, then maybe it would come as less of a surprise, but as it stands, I think it somewhat amazing that the whole town appears to have made it through in one piece. Obviously it’s a good thing the children survived, but it does pique my interest in Ivan Utkin. Unfortunately, he appears to have passed away in 1984, but he must have been something rather special.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental. This is the first of the tapes I have received from Ivy.

Luckily it appears that Gertrude was not as lax in properly marking these tapes as she has been the rest of the archive. While it provides some interesting context for Leanne Denikin’s statement, and this strange circus, I will admit to some disappointment it doesn’t address any of my more pressing questions about Gertrude’s tapes.

Why did she begin recording them? And why stop? If she’d been doing so right up until her death, she would’ve likely gotten through much of the archive, and… moreover I wouldn’t have had to find this tape player tucked away in the storage room, covered in dust and cobwebs.

Moreover, she clearly knows a lot more about what is going on than I had previously assumed. This is far from the first time she has encountered ‘The Other Circus’, or ‘The Circus of the Other’, or however it translates. I suppose I’ll have to return the tape to Ivy, and wait until she can get me another one. It is infuriating to have to simply… wait like this, but there is little else I can do.

Additionally, I think someone may have found these… secret tapes. They do not appear to have been disturbed, but the drawer in which I kept them is slightly more open than I left it. I have not mentioned it to the others, as if any of them did open my drawer for innocent reasons, then I don’t want to let them know there is anything significant about the tapes inside. I have prised up one of the floorboards, and will be hiding them beneath there from now on.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Thomas Neill regarding his experiences working in malarial research during the spring of 2010. Original statement given February the 9th, 2011. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I hope you’ll forgive the handwriting. The shaking has gotten better over the last few months, but it’s… still quite hard to read. Also my therapist has recently changed up my medication, so if I get a bit muddled, that’s why. Just to be clear, my medication and treatment have been in response to the events I’m describing here. I was not taking any drugs before or during the event I’m setting down. I only started my treatment course after Neil’s death.

I’ve been working as a research assistant for about six years now. Anyone who tries to sell you the career with promises of money, fulfilment or grand discoveries is a liar. The work is long and repetitive, the discoveries will be credited to the fellows, at least until they’re disproved or irrelevant five years down the line, and the money is… uh, well… the money is actually not too bad, at least not until the grant dries up halfway through the project.

I guess what I mean to say is that, when I finally managed to get on a project doing something I really believed in, I was prepared to overlook a lot. It was malaria research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I was working under Dr. Neil Thompson. I’m pretty sure he hired me just because of how similar our names are: Thomas Neill and Neil Thompson. There was always a little moment of confusion whenever anyone asked for ‘Neil’. I think he got a kick out of it. That’s the sort of person he was, not mean-spirited or nasty, he just liked a bit of harmless chaos now and again. Balanced out his precision in the lab, I suppose, because in there he was the sort of rigorous, meticulous scientist I didn’t think existed outside of fictional medical dramas. Put it like this, he wore a white lab coat, and it was always immaculate. I don’t know if you realise how genuinely impressive that is working in a lab, especially given as our work was messy. Very messy.

We weren’t working on malaria directly, you understand. Our work was on the anopheline mosquitoes themselves, transmission capable but… not infected, though you’d hardly know by the reaction if one got loose. We’re talking panicked fleeing, lockdown, and trained staff coming in to kill the thing. I always used to think that level of caution was ridiculous, given our mozzies didn’t actually have malaria. Not so much anymore.

We were trying to synthesise a sort of ‘blood substitute’, a combination of the sugars and proteins that the mozzies need to survive, but one that was more enticing than a human full of blood. The idea was to create a, a lure of sorts, which would keep the mosquitoes concentrated away from people, and could potentially be used to poison them, though that bit was some ways in the future. At this point most of the research was spent trying to perfect the ‘taste’ of the thing, for lack of a better term.

The smell was also a big factor, as we needed the mozzies to choose it as a source of protein over a human, and as it progressed, it turned out that the texture and composition of the feeding bag itself helped attract them, so it ended up getting more and more like, er… human skin. The later bags even had little bits of human hair embedded into them, which made the whole thing several shades too grotesque for me, but the mozzies went mad for it, and as far as Neil was concerned, that’s all that mattered.

After about six months we had pretty much perfected it, to be honest. We had a lure bag that the mozzies preferred over a human sample in 98 per cent of cases, in which they consistently demonstrated a willingness to return to over alternatives. The issue was the cost. Our synthesised blood substitute, which we liked to call ‘haemoglobish’, was simply not cheap enough for mass production, especially considering the bag requirements, and as we were dealing in prevention rather than cure, we were always going to be compared to the cost effectiveness of just buying a boatload of mosquito nets. And that wasn’t going to be a comparison where we came out on top. We kept going though, trying to recreate the effect with cheaper, more easily available materials, but that was when Neil first started muttering darkly about funding.

Here’s where I should probably say a bit about Neil’s syringe. Now, our Dr. Thompson claimed to be descended from the 19th-century physician, John Snow, a great-great-nephew or a great-great-great-grandson, or something like that. I’m not sure how much you know about epidemiology in the 1850s, and it’s certainly a common enough name, but Snow was pivotal in laying the groundwork for the germ theory of disease transmission, and is widely credited with helping end the cholera outbreak of 1854. I only bring this up because Neil had… well, I suppose you could call it something of a totem. It was an old Victorian syringe, which he claimed had belonged to this illustrious ancestor of his.

I don’t know if it was true or not, but Neil certainly treated the thing like a relic. He kept it in excellent condition, with glass shining and brass polished, and would carry it around in a small case tucked into his lab coat pocket. Whenever he was called upon to do any calculations or look over results, his hand would slip into that pocket, and he’d gently clutch that case. So, you can imagine that it came as something of a surprise when he came to me, and asked for my help in selling it.

Now, according to Neil, our project’s grant money had run out, and without alternative sources of funding, we weren’t going to be able to continue the work. I’m not sure how much I believed him, as the word around the lab was Neil had something of a gambling habit. In fairness to him, I’d heard all sorts of baseless gossip flying around about everybody, and honestly don’t know how the money worked for our project. I’d just signed the contract and took the pay cheques, it never occurred to me to investigate our funding myself, so he might have been telling the truth. He might have been trying to save the project. It didn’t really matter, as by this point Neil and I were quite close, so… if he asked me to do him a favour, I wasn’t exactly going to refuse.

When I say he asked for my help selling it, that’s not exactly accurate. He’d already found a buyer, some antiques dealer who Neil said had offered him six figures for it. That sounded mad to me. I mean, it was a valuable trinket, sure, but… that’s all that it was. Neil didn’t seem entirely convinced the guy was on the level either, which was why he asked me to come along.

I’m a big guy, six foot seven, fourteen-and-a-half stone, so I can cut a pretty intimidating figure if I need to, especially if you don’t know that I’ve never thrown a punch in my life. That’s what Neil wanted me to do, just be there, have his back while he went to meet this guy, so he’d know not to try anything. I don’t remember the name, I’m afraid, but he was foreign; Indonesian, I think, or Samoan.

I expected the meeting to be after dark in some dingy dockyard, but as it turned out they’d arranged to meet at The Three Greyhounds pub in Soho the following afternoon. I wanted to dress to intimidate, but I didn’t really have any appropriate clothes, so I just wore a suit. As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered – this overly generous antiques dealer was almost as big as I was, and unlike me, he looked like he could handle himself.

He didn’t even look at me when he entered the pub, almost deserted at that time on a Tuesday afternoon. He sat opposite Neil, while I stood awkwardly just outside their booth. They talked hurriedly and quietly to each other, and I couldn’t make out many of the words, though it seemed like they were just discussing the price for the syringe. Eventually I saw a couple of briefcases exchange hands, and that was it. The dealer got up and walked out, holding a suitcase that seemed much lighter than the one he’d come in with. Neil gave me a relieved nod, and headed back to the laboratory with his own suitcase, that I can only assume was full of cash.

This is when things… started to go wrong. When things started to get weird. I don’t know if it had anything to do with Neil selling that syringe. I mean, I don’t know how it… could have, but that’s when the trouble started.

The first thing I noticed was the heat. Now mozzies need to be kept at a temperature of around 23 to 24 degrees Celsius, which might not sound too hot, but at this point it was late May and we were started to head towards summer, so on a sunny day the room where we kept the cages felt… stifling. But as the days wore on, the heat started to seep out into the rest of the lab, until we were all coated with sweat for most of the day.

We called the building manager to get the heating checked, and he told us everything was working fine. He even agreed to turn on the air conditioning for us, but it made no difference. The lab was warm and humid, everything felt sticky, and I took to bringing in a change of shirt for when I left at the end of the day. Luckily none of the chemicals we were mixing into the faux blood bags were particularly temperature sensitive, or God knows how much work we might have lost.

That was unpleasant, of course, but there was no real evidence of it being paranormal. No, that didn’t come until a couple of weeks later. The mozzies started acting unusually. We kept them in metal mesh cages so they’re viewable at all times. There’s a hole in the front which is lined with gauze that can be gathered up to make a seal or allow you access to the cage. Normally they’re happy enough to flit about their cages. But then, without warning, they stopped. They landed on the cage and just stayed there. They were distributed almost completely evenly over the inside, to the point where it almost looked regimented, and then they would stay like that for hours. It was unsettling, and more than once the researchers retrieved some for testing, looking for any change that might have resulted in this altered behaviour, but everything came back normal.

Sometimes though, when I was working late, I’d look into that room, and I swear I would see a mass of mosquitoes in each cage, crowded in a thick clump around the gauze covering the entrance. I should have told somebody, but at the time I didn’t know what I was seeing.

The mosquitoes’ attitudes towards the fake blood bags changed as well. Instead of meandering round, landing, feeding, flying off, feeding again, a few times, now as soon as the bag was placed inside, every mozzie in there would descend on it immediately, all at once, until the bag was completely covered in needle mouths and flitting wings. It genuinely started to scare me.

What really scared me, though, and everyone else on the team, was what came out of the blood bag afterwards. Shortly after they began exhibiting this behaviour, one of the other research assistants, George Larson, was retrieving one of the empty bags and returning it for disposal in the lab, when he stumbled, and it fell to the floor. When it hit the ground with a moist thud, it became immediately clear that the bag was not as empty as it had first appeared.

The blood substitute, the ‘haemoglobish’, was a clear, syrupy orange, almost like dark honey, but slightly thinner. What oozed out of the bag now was a deep, cloudy red. At this point nobody objected to calling in a biohazard. They took samples of the substance, and put us through a basic decontamination, and then I went home. Odd to think now that my thoughts back then were full more of curiosity than of fear.

The tests came back, and were as alarming as they were impossible. It was blood. Real blood. O Negative and infected with malaria. Not just malaria though, but yellow fever, hepatitis B and signs of cholera. There were other substances in the sample as well, that they were unable to identify. We were all told that we were to be quarantined immediately, and that our project was shut down until further notice. I remember standing there in the lab as they said this. I heard a strangled cry from behind me, and turned around to see Neil, shaking his head over and over, his face a mask of rage and hatred. He wasn’t looking at the people who had come to quarantine us though. No, he was looking at the room full of mosquitoes, as though they had planned this, as though it was purely through their malicious intent that he was watching his career burn to nothing.

Before anyone could stop him, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran into the mosquito room. God knows what he was hoping to achieve. Spray a few cages to death in some petty act of revenge, maybe? He never got the chance.

As he fumbled with the release mechanism, a tremendous buzzing filled the air, and suddenly I realised what they had been doing clustered around the gauze those nights. There was no time to pull Neil out, so I did the only thing I could. I shut the door.

Thousands of mosquitoes erupted from those cages, far more, I thought, that we could possibly have had on site. There was no way to count them though as they swarmed onto poor Neil; first his hands and his face, then beneath his clothes, until there was no part of him not covered with the things. He swatted at them, killing some, but there were just too many, and after a few seconds it was clear he was going into shock. He tried to scream, but that just gave them more places to drink from.

That was when I turned away. There hadn’t been a single drop of blood spilled, but we all knew that Dr. Neil Thompson was dead. I don’t remember much after that. There was a lot of shouting and a lot of noise, then tests. Confused and worried academics asking me questions that, of course, I couldn’t answer. It was almost a month before the world was in focus again.

The faculty have been all right to me actually, so I should probably be thankful. They were so keen to get this swept neatly under the rug that they just let me go, with such a glowing reference I just walked into a lab tech position at King’s College. It’s mostly helping students, but that’s all right. I think I’m done with research.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Can’t stand mosquitoes. Horrible things. Any solution to the issue of malaria that doesn’t concentrate on wiping them out is not one that I have much care for. Still, this grotesque account doesn’t give us many leads to follow. Obviously there’s the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine itself, but Tim’s investigation yielded little significant information. Apparently those staff who’ve been around long enough to remember the event, either didn’t know the details or have been well briefed to keep their mouths shut.

Aside from the fact that Dr. Neil Thompson died in a lab accident on the 30th May 2010, there’s little more to be found. Jessica managed to get a copy of the inquest report, which is… infuriatingly vague, but does list the cause of death as blood loss, and the official verdict as ‘death by misadventure’.

I don’t think there can be much doubt that the antiques dealer is the curious Mr. Salesa. He’s now turned up enough that I can no longer write it off as a coincidence, and have been having a word with Rosie about whether we can make contact with him. Apparently he hasn’t been seen for almost two years now, with rumours in the trade running to everything from ‘he had a quiet retirement’ to ‘he’s trying to dodge a jail sentence’, or even ‘he was shot dead in Colombia for stealing a priceless artefact from a drug lord’. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t look like he’ll be answering questions any time soon, though I have urged Rosie to keep trying.

Aside from that, there’s little more we can do with this statement. Mr. Neill himself passed away last year. Nastya hasn’t been able to get a hold of the official cause of death, but judging by the number of antibiotics the police report list as being at his home at the time, it must have been something very nasty indeed.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

I’ve been doing some digging into Tim, watching he. He’s certainly doing his job, far better than I’d have expected, given his recent experiences. There’s just one thing I don’t understand: why is he working for the Institute? A First in Anthropology from Trinity College, five successful years spent climbing the ladder at a major publishing house, and then, out of the blue, he decides to come work for us.

Why? I can’t find any other indication of an interest in the paranormal, nothing to indicate this area of study appealed to him. And why stay after everything that happened with Prentiss? Is it just loyalty or could it be something –

[DOOR OPENS]
TIM
Hey, I just wanted to check if you wanted a cup of tea?

ARCHIVIST
Uh…

TIM
Oh, oh, sorry, are you recording? I, I thought you were done for the day?

ARCHIVIST
I-I was. I am. It’s…

TIM
Why do you have pictures of Me?

ARCHIVIST
It… it’s a performance review thing, going over some files for it.

TIM
But that looks like a picture of my house?!

[RUSTLING OF PAPERS]
ARCHIVIST
[Abruptly] Confidential files that you… legally you shouldn’t really be looking at them. leave Tim.

TIM
Right, right. Right, right…

Did you want that tea?

ARCHIVIST
No. Tim.

[DOOR CLOSES]
I need to find a better place to do these recordings.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Herbert Knox, regarding a repeat customer to his bookshop in Chichester. Original statement given December 21st, 1998. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
It’s hard to know exactly where to begin when explaining to you what exactly it was that I experienced. There were many things that happened, each strange and inexplicable in and of itself, but I’ll be damned if I can see how they connect to each other, except that they’ve all ended up involving the same student from the university.

His name was Brian Drumbot, though he normally went by Drumbot, at least to me. I’m not usually one to pay much attention to the students that come into my shop, especially during the start of a new school year. I have something of a soft spot for the antique when it comes to my furnishings, and that, combined with the age of my stock, means that when new students arrive at the university, they generally regard the discovery of Lion Street Books as something of a curiosity. I’ve heard more than one comparison to that shop in Stephen King’s Needful Things, whatever it was called.

Anyway, as I deal mostly in rare books and antiquities, they generally get one look at the prices and suddenly their interest dries up. Of course, there are always a couple of rich kids whose parents weren’t able to buy their way into Oxbridge, so it’s not a complete waste.

So it’s rare that I have any cause to remember the face of my student customers. But Brian struck me the moment he walked into my shop. This would have been last September – I don’t remember the exact date, though I’m sure if I looked up my receipts, I could tell you. He was short, barely over five feet, and very thin. Underfed, I remember thinking. It hadn’t yet turned cold, but he wore a high-collared brown coat, and a thick scarf wrapped around his neck.

Now, I’m getting on in years, and much as I love my shop, the building can get a bit drafty come autumn, so I generally have the heating up quite high. It was clearly enough for him to become uncomfortable, wrapped up like that, and he removed the scarf to reveal a branching pattern of white scar tissue arcing up the side of his neck.

That was interesting, certainly, but it wasn’t what actually caught my eye. No, what struck me most was that, rather than wonder or curiosity, as I would see in the faces of the other students who found their way into Lion Street Books, this young man began scanning the shelves with an expression that seemed more like impatience.

He was clearly looking for something specific, so after a few minutes I asked him if I could help. Without looking up, he said he was after a copy of de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal – the older, the better. I only had a 1908 translation in stock, but I said I would make enquiries if he wished for an older edition. He didn’t reply to this, nor to my casual inquiry as to whether he was studying demonology, or the occult.

He took it to my desk to buy it, and I started rooting around for the credit card machine, when I smelled the strangest thing. It was like just before a storm breaks – that sharp smell in the air. But looking outside, the sky was clear and the sun was shining.

Brian seemed to smell it, too, and he went very still. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a wad of cash. He quickly counted it out, grabbed the book, and was through the door before I even had a chance to ring him up a receipt. The smell faded as soon as he was out of sight.

I didn’t know his name at that point, but it was far from the last time I saw him. He became something of a regular. Maybe once every three weeks or so he’d come in and check any new stock I had. He was interested in spiritualism, history of witchcraft, anything mystical, especially from before 1850. He also bought a few books on meteorology, especially pre-enlightenment, and once a book on the work of Gottfried Leibniz – though I don’t remember the title.

I have no idea where he was getting his money, but he had a lot of it. He was able to pay five figures for a copy of a 1559 printing of the Malleus Maleficarum without breaking a sweat. At some point, I learned his name. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t have described him as a friend, or even close, but over the last year he’d easily been my most-regular customer.

That wasn’t the only time I smelled that acrid tang in the air, though. Sometimes when he was in there, it would come again all at once. It never seemed to be coming from Brian, exactly, but when he was around the smell would just suddenly be there. It was the only time I would ever smell it inside, and when I did, Brian would just stop whatever he was doing and leave immediately. He wouldn’t run. He’d just leave.

There was another thing, too. Whenever he was in, the lightbulbs in my shop would burn brighter. I didn’t even realize this until he’d been coming for several months, as it was usually in daylight when he went shopping. But when winter made its presence known, his late afternoon visits began to take place after dark, and I noticed that whenever he came in, the shop got brighter. The bulbs would start to buzz very softly, and the filaments within them would glow with a surprising intensity. There was this strange electric crackling, and once I even got a shock when I turned a lamp on.

I never brought it up with Brian, though. I don’t even know how I would have gone about bringing it up.

It was February when I got the Leitner book. I’d heard of him before, of course, though I’d never met the man. The rare book trade is a comparatively small world, at least within the UK, and his name would often come up whenever I was gossiping with my peers. Sometimes it was about which valuable piece he’d snatched for a fraction of its true value, or the ridiculous amount he’d paid for a book that everyone else was sure was a fake. Occasionally, there were more-unsavory rumors about his personal life.

So, even though I’d never personally made his acquaintance, I was well-aware of Jurgen Leitner and his collection. And when he disappeared in 1994, I was one of the many that heard whispers on the grapevine that a few of his books were back in circulation. I never thought I’d actually get my hands on one, though. Not until I heard about Kirsten’s death.

Kirstin Bowman was a book dealer friend of mine down in Salisbury. I suppose you could call her a rival, in some ways, but we’d always been very friendly. In fact, there were a few years back in the 80s when we were very friendly, indeed. But we hadn’t spoken much in the last year or two.

Well, in January of this year, she passed away. Lost balance on the stairs and broke her neck. To be honest, I wasn’t as surprised by her death as I might have been – though it was rather alarming. Over the last few years the landscape of the UK rare books trade has changed significantly. A lot of the big names in the old guard have gone missing or retired – or, sometimes, even been found dead.

The police even got involved for a while, as there was talk of maybe someone out there targeting booksellers. But they never found anything to indicate it was anything other than a coincidence. I suppose it’s just an example of how one generation inevitably makes way for the next, but Kirsten was the first time it had affected someone I knew well.

What surprised me more than her death, however, was that she had made me her literary executor, and left me the vast majority of her stock. So it was that I came into the possession of a Leitner.

It was a strange one, all right. Ex Altiora or “From the Heights,” was the name. It was custom-bound, in the late 1800s, from what I could see, though the pages looked to be significantly older than that. 17th-century, I would have said. It was written in Latin, and seemed to be a long poem in the style of Virgil, illustrated with some quite-striking woodcuts.

It told the tale of a small, unnamed town high on a clifftop, that sees a monstrous creature begin to approach. The poem is unclear whether it is a beast, a demon, or a god, as it uses the words interchangeably, but it is seen far-off, its head and body lost among the clouds.

The majority of the story details the villagers’ attempts to prepare to do battle against this creature, but each time they devise a countermeasure, the thing gets closer, and is shown to be far larger than previously-suspected, rendering their preparations insignificant. At last, when it is almost upon them, its impossible vastness undeniable, the villagers surrender to despair, and hurl themselves from the clifftop onto the rocks far below.

It was a strange book, and made all the stranger by the fact that it appeared to be utterly unique. I could find no record of it in any catalogue I had available, and after a few calls to a couple of museums and archives I knew dealt with similar texts, I was convinced that this may well have been a completely unique book.

This didn’t please me as much as you might imagine, because what it meant was that I had an artefact on my hands: one that belonged far more in a museum than it did in a library. I’d only had a museum-worthy book come once before, and the process of authentication, and the work involved in selling it, had, quite frankly, not been worth the amount that I sold it for. Museums are not as well-funded as private collectors.

Beyond that, there was something about the book itself that unsettled me. Reading it was… disorientating in a way that I can’t easily put into words. Especially the woodcuts, although they were just the village, or the cliffs, or empty forests, or mountains. They were quite crude in many ways, but certainly not unsettling. And yet twice when reading it, and observing the woodcuts, I fell off my chair.

Over the week I possessed it, I had enough dizzy spells that I had to book an appointment with my doctor, although at the time I didn’t make any direct connection between them and the book. I had bad dreams, as well. I don’t recall them with any clarity, but I’m rather sure they were dreams of falling.

Brian came in at the end of that week. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was expecting him, but I’d put a half dozen books to one side for his consideration, as I assumed he’d be in at some point soon. As was his habit, he said almost nothing, and the cold February air was enough that he didn’t even feel the need to remove his scarf, so only the faintest hints of that branching scar could be seen creeping out from below it. The bulbs crackled and brightened in his presence, and I presented the books I had chosen to him. He spent some minutes looking through them before pushing them back with a shake of the head. This was not unusual for him, and I took it as no insult.

I turned to put them back on the shelf, when I was almost overcome by a wave of dizziness. I gripped the back of my chair and steadied myself. When I looked back at Brian, he was staring at the Leitner book with a wild expression I had never seen on his face before. He pointed at Ex Altiora and asked me how much it was.

I started to tell him it wasn’t for sale, but he had this look in his eyes – this furious desperation. It scared me, to be honest, and I had a sudden sense that this man was willing to kill me for that book. All this, combined with the discomfort I felt with the thing anyway, was just a bit too much for me. I named a figure that I thought was maybe double what it was actually worth, and Brian wrote me out a cheque so fast that I thought his pen would go clean through the paper. For this, I insisted on ringing him up a receipt, and without another word, he was out into the rainy February afternoon.

And that would have been it. Given what happened next, I don’t think I would ever have seen Brian Drumbot again, if it wasn’t for the simple fact that his cheque bounced.

I didn’t quite believe it at first. He had always been so willing to drop huge amounts of money on books that the idea of him not being able to afford something had never quite registered. But there was no mistake. After no small amount of consideration, I decided that the only decent thing to do was to actually go to him and discuss the matter. Maybe I could get the book back, maybe I could make alternate arrangements. Either way, I felt like I owed it to Brian.

I had his address on file from a delivery he had requested a couple of months back, so it was a simple matter to close up the shop early and make the short walk across Chichester to his flat – rather lavish by student standards, but easy enough to find. The sky was a bruised gray as I walked across town, and I was glad I had thought to bring my umbrella, as it was promising to be a storm. I recognized the smell from Brian’s previous visits – though even then I didn’t realize what it meant.

I reached his door and knocked. I was careful to be firm, but not aggressive, in my knocking, as I had an odd conviction that an overly confrontational knock would have made it much harder to retrieve the book. I needn’t have given it any thought at all. The door opened before I had even finished knocking, and I had the oddest feeling in my stomach, as though I was standing on the edge of a great drop, and I took an instinctive step back.

Brian stood there, looking terrible. From inside came the odor of a man who has not left the room or opened a window for some days. Strewn across the floor were pages and pages of scrawled Latin text, which alarmed me, until I saw the unharmed and whole book clutched in his arms. I started to explain what had happened and why I was there, but he didn’t seem to be registering my words – just staring blankly at the space I occupied, as though he didn’t notice I was standing there.

I remember I had just about reached the point of repeating the word “cheque” over and over, in the hopes he acknowledged it, when the first droplets of rain began to hit his window. Without warning, Brian’s eyes went wide, in what might have been realization, or maybe just fear, and his face got so pale his branching scar seemed almost to vanish. Then the first peal of thunder rolled over us, and that smell hit me with such an intensity I could barely breathe.

I was on the floor before I knew what was happening, and turned to see Brian running full-pelt down the corridor, clutching the Leitner book. I must have hit my head, and my thinking was very muddled: I was convinced he was trying to escape with the book. With a determination that, quite frankly, I never would have expected from myself, I decided that I had to stop it. I had to stop Brian Drumbot from stealing my Leitner. So I got up, umbrella forgotten, and chased him out into the pouring rain. We weaved our way through Chichester, lightning arcing through the sky in a way I’d only seen a handful of times in the 40 years I lived there.

I could just about make out the fleeing figure of Brian in front of me, and sometimes – when the lightning lit the sky – I could have sworn I saw someone else chasing him. It was hard to make out, as it only seemed to appear for those momentary flashes, but it seemed tall, thin, its limbs angular and branching. Like Brian’s scar.

I don’t know how he got into the bell tower for Chichester Cathedral. It stands separate from the main building, tall, imposing, and square, starkly-illuminated by the flashing sky. One of the doors at the base stood open, and I didn’t stop to think how it had been opened before dashing inside and starting up the stairs.

The smell was so thick inside I gagged on the acrid stench. In my determination to chase a young man stealing a book, I had apparently completely forgotten my age, which returned all at once, and I collapsed slightly on the stairs. I began to climb then, slowly, towards the top of the bell tower. I have never been afraid of heights, but as I got higher and higher up those stairs, my head started to swim, and my heart was beating so fast I was honestly worried that I was in danger of a heart attack.

Finally, I reached the top flight of stairs. I could hear shouting from the bell room. It was Brian – he was screaming something that sounded like a chant, or a prayer. Most of it was in languages I didn’t know, but I could make out the words “altiora,” “vertigo,” and “the vast.”

I reached the top, and there I saw Brian, standing before an open window. He held the book before him like a protective ward, and in front of him was a strange, branching figure. It crackled and fizzed, lit by a strobing white light, as though the lightning was within the room itself.

It was just standing there, like it couldn’t approach. As Brian reached the crescendo of his invocation, with a cry of “I am yours,” he leapt through the open window, and – presumably – to his death.

The strange figure cried out, a sound like tearing sandpaper, and seemed to be dragged through the window with him. The sharp smell vanished instantly, and I was alone in the dark.

I say “presumably” about his jumping almost a hundred feet to his death because, when I went out, I could find no body at the base of the tower. Neither could the police, who obviously treated me like a lunatic. When the sky cleared shortly afterwards, it became apparent that all the windows to the bell chamber were closed and sealed.

I never saw Brian Drumbot or the Leitner book again.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Brian Drumbot. Another name that seems to crop up more than once in relation to Leitners, and twice regarding this particular volume.

The events here seem to have taken place a couple of years after those of statement 9991006. Could his exposure to The Boneturner’s Tale have catalyzed an interest in Jurgen Leitner? Or perhaps an early experiment? It seems as though he was attempting to use the book as protection against whatever was chasing him. Did The Boneturner’s Tale not work in that regard…? And what was it that chased him, bringing that smell with it?

It is a shame that Ex Altiora was burned in the end. I would have been fascinated to read it – especially as there is one feature that I’m surprised Mr. Knox did not mention, comparing his statement to that of Dominic Swain in 0132806.

The book which Mr. Knox received did not seem to have a woodcut of the dark night sky, with the branching, arching design of the Lichtenberg figure.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

Someone else has been going down into the tunnels. When I came in yesterday, I noticed the trapdoor appeared to have been disturbed. It was unlocked. I confronted the others, but they all deny it, of course.

Someone must think there is more down there of value – unless they’re trying to hide something. Searching or hiding, it could be either. I might try to set up a camera to watch the trapdoor, if I can find somewhere effective to hide it.

I did go down there to see if I could find anything, but it seems much as it did last time. The only difference now is… all the spiderwebs. They seem to have spread down there. I think I saw some of the larger specimens actually eating the remains of the worms. It was a… disconcerting sight, and I left almost immediately.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
[SOUND OF PEN SCRATCHING AGAINST PAPER IN SHARP, FRUSTRATED MOVEMENTS]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Helen Richardson, regarding, uh… how would you describe it?

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]
ARCHIVIST
…Miss Richardson?

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]
HELEN
– uh, what?

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]
ARCHIVIST
Your experience, how would you summarize it?

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]
HELEN
Um, well, I’ve been, I’ve been trying to draw you a map, but, it doesn’t, it doesn’t work.

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES; HELEN CAN NOW BE HEARD BREATHING HARD AS THE ARCHIVIST SPEAKS]
ARCHIVIST
– Right. Statement of Helen Richardson, regarding a new door in the house she was selling. Statement recorded direct from subject, 2nd October, 2016. Statement begins.

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]
ARCHIVIST
…

Miss Richardson?

[PEN SCRATCHING STOPS]
HELEN
There’s no left turns. Look, [paper rustles] look, none, it just, it just turns right, it doesn’t make any sense [paper rustles] no, it wasn’t a spiral because you could, you could always go forward, I mean, I –

ARCHIVIST
[overlapping] [sigh]

HELEN
– I, I did mostly, just forward, and the paths never got shorter, like you were coming to a center, they just – kept going – it doesn’t, doesn’t make any sense! [paper rustles] Look at it –

ARCHIVIST
Ah, Miss Richardson –

[PAPER RUSTLES]
HELEN
Look at it!

ARCHIVIST
…You’re right. This map doesn’t make any sense –

HELEN
[overlapping] After a few turns –

ARCHIVIST
[overlapping] – it becomes a mess of impossible lines, yes. But it will be very useful for our investigation if you could start at the beginning, give us some context.

Tell me how it got started.

HELEN
What do you want to know? There wasn’t a door. And then there was.

HELEN (STATEMENT)
I worked for Wolverton Kendrick. I still do, I suppose, I haven’t officially quit, but I haven’t been back there since this happened. We mostly sell properties around the Wimbledon area, sometimes as far as Collier’s Wood. We specialize in well-appointed family homes for successful professionals looking to move further out of London. We’ve had a lot of success, and these days usually have anything up to two hundred properties on the market, most of them detached family homes or big well-appointed flats.

I’ve been with the agency for about eight years now, and I’ve done thousands of viewings for them, so believe me when I say there was nothing unusual about that house on Saint Albans Avenue. I mean – maybe the fact the owner was selling it for less than two million? Even then, it still wasn’t suspiciously cheap, it was just a lovely house in a good area, like every other house I sell.

But I think back to driving there, the trees seem darker than they should have been. The other houses sit there, sinister, behind their tall gates and empty driveways. But I think, oh, that’s just my memory changing to fit what I know now. At the time, I don’t think I felt anything except annoyance that I was going to be two minutes late to the viewing.

You know, what’s funny, even after everything that happened, I actually have trouble picturing the house in my mind. It was so much like all the others. So… unremarkable.

And it’s not like I’ve been back.

For most of the morning viewings, it was business as usual. I had the usual stream of bankers and executives asking the standard questions, occasionally livened up by a private dentist or a barrister. I walked around that house for the better part of five hours, and by the end I’d been in every room, and opened every cupboard, dozens of times. And I promise you, I swear to you: that door was not there.

He… came… at the end of the viewings. It was the last appointment, and although he didn’t give his name, I am absolutely sure he was not Mr. and Mrs. Adrian Lombardi.

He was tall, maybe six and a half feet? And he had long, straw-coloured hair that fell onto his shoulders in loose ringlets. His face was round and unthreatening, although he stood so still when I answered the door that it did rather unnerve me.

I asked him if he was Mr. Lombardi, and he said no, but that Mr. Lombardi wouldn’t be coming, so he was here instead. It’s not unheard of for some of our clients to send their people to viewings in their place, so it didn’t seem like an unreasonable statement, even if it would normally, you know, be arranged ahead of time. I just, I just thought I’d missed an email.

I held up my arm for a handshake, but he just looked at it, and laughed, keeping his hands firmly by his side. That was when I first started to think that something might be wrong, because his laugh didn’t… sound right? I, I don’t know how to describe it, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t a human laugh.

I should have stopped there, and left, or called the police, but he’d already walked past me and into the house, and I started to give him the sales pitch, almost as a reflex. I decided that, since he didn’t seem to be actively threatening, I’d just give him a quick rundown of the house and get out of there as soon as possible. He was strange, but I felt that if he did work for the Lombardis, then I didn’t want to be rude, and have to deal with a complaint later? So I took him ‘round the place.

He followed me. His, his eyes were always looking where I pointed, but he never seemed to take anything in, and he didn’t ask any questions at all. At least, not ‘till we reached the second floor.

We’d just climbed up the stairs to the top of the house. I went into the first bedroom, and I started talking about its potential as a child’s room or a study. The ceiling was quite low, and I thought I’d better warn him to be careful – but when I looked back, he wasn’t there. I stepped back out onto the landing to find him looking at a new door. He asked me what was behind it, and I just stood there, staring.

It was a small, unremarkable door, painted dark yellow, with a matte-black handle. And it wasn’t there before.

I had been up on that landing dozens of times already, and I definitely did not remember it being there. It wasn’t, wasn’t just that I hadn’t noticed it, you have to understand that, it wasn’t there. It couldn’t have been there, I checked the floor plan I had with me, and obviously [anxious laugh] there was no door shown on it, it was an exterior wall on the second floor, there can’t have been anything beyond it but empty air [anxious laugh] and a significant drop, except that I had made several circuits of the outside while showing off the garden, [tearful] and there was absolutely no door visible there, it was just a dark yellow door that couldn’t be there.

The man asked me again what was inside, and I just stood there, staring at it with my mouth hanging open in shock. I honestly don’t know how long I stood there looking at it. My strange client said nothing, and I’d almost forgotten he was there by the time I finally made up my mind.

I reached out and gripped the handle. It was warm. I turned it, and as soon as I did so the door swung open. I didn’t need to pull it at all. It opened slowly, but deliberately, like… it was keen for me to go inside. And beyond that threshold, where there should have been empty air over the garden, there was a long, windowless corridor.

It was lit by electric lamps attached to the walls every ten feet or so, and the walls were papered over in a swirling green pattern. Running down the middle of the faded yellow carpet was a rug, black and thick, that disappeared off as the path very gradually curved to the left.

On the walls were what at first looked like mirrors, but I, I soon realized that, while a few of them were mirrors, most of them were paintings or photographs of that same corridor from various odd angles.

Here’s the thing: I don’t remember going through that door. I remember standing there, looking down it with this… feeling of dread. And then I remember feeling a surge of terror as I heard the door close behind me with a click. I spun ‘round, but there was no handle on this side, just a huge, smooth mirror. I saw myself stood in that strange corridor, and it looked like I’d been crying for hours. I hammered, shouted, I threw myself against the uncaring face of that mirror, and nothing happened. It didn’t even crack.

I took out my phone. My mind was muddy, but… I don’t know exactly what I was hoping to do, call the police, maybe? My colleagues? I, I think I might have wanted just to check the time. I had no idea how long I’d been in there.

When I opened the phone, all that was on the screen was another picture of the corridor, just like the paintings on the walls.

So I started walking down the corridor. Like… I mean, there was, there was nothing else I could do. It dragged on and on, bending almost imperceptibly to the left. Well, every once in a while there would be another corridor turning off to the right at a sharp angle. At first, I, I avoided these branching paths, thinking if I walked along the corridor far enough, it would have to lead somewhere. But after what felt like miles, I finally decided that taking one of the turns… it, it couldn’t make things worse.

The branching corridors were identical. Mirrors, and paintings that mirrored them, were everywhere, and when I turned back, I think I must have gotten turned around? Because the left turn, that would have led back towards the door, wasn’t, it wasn’t there anymore. It was another long corridor, with paths off to the right.

The wallpaper was a different colour, though, I think. It definitely changed, but I never noticed it switching, I’d simply realize that it hadn’t been red when I’d been walking – or, blue, or purple, whatever colour it was at the time. All the colours seemed to shift in that place. Even the yellow of the carpet, the black of the rug, it… felt like I couldn’t trust my eyes.

Based… on the date of my appointment, and the newspaper I found later, I think I was in there for three days. It was, it was impossible to tell from inside, though I don’t remember sleeping, or even feeling tired? I did spend a lot of time just… slumped in despair, though, so maybe I slept then. I had no food or water, I got very delirious by the end. It didn’t help it was so warm in there, although it often seemed like I couldn’t stop shivering, like I was cold.

I was almost passed out from misery when I saw it. It was stood way off in the distance, a long way down the corridor. It seemed almost human, from a distance, but as it got closer, I saw that it was anything but.

Its body was thin and limp, and when it moved, it shifted, like I was watching it through rippling water. Its hands were swollen, and bits of them jutted out at annoying angles. It was, it was moving towards me fast, and as I looked I saw that all the pictures on the wall now showed this thing – although each distorted it differently, like a selection of funhouse mirrors – but all of them, all of them showed the hands as bulbous and sharp.

I looked around in desperation, trying to find any hope of escape. The thing was getting closer and closer, and I could hear that weird laugh again. And then I saw it. A mirrored frame that did not contain the creature.

I had no reason to think it would help, but I could see no other choice but waiting for death. So I threw myself at this empty mirror.

And just like that, I was out. I felt the cold night air on my face and, and wet tarmac under my hands and knees. It was raining. I turned up in Dulwich, of all places. I screamed for about five minutes before someone came to help me.

I don’t really know what else to tell you. I was hospitalized for a short while, until they were satisfied my dehydration wasn’t going to cause any complications. And I spent a long time at home. Not opening any doors.

Finally, [suppressing tears] after the latest bout of nightmares, I decided to come to you and tell you my story. Maybe you can make some sense of this.

ARCHIVIST
…Perhaps. Leave it with us. We’ll… do some digging and see what we can find.

HELEN
[tearful] You believe me, then?

ARCHIVIST
I… yes. Yes, I think I do.

One thing, though. You say you don’t remember the man’s name…

HELEN
I… I think he told me, but I just, I…

ARCHIVIST
[Almost Excited] it wasn’t “Michael,” was it?

HELEN
…Yes! Michael! That was it…! [vengeful] Do you know him?

ARCHIVIST
Uh no…

We’ll make some enquiries and get back to you, Miss Richardson. Thank you for your time.

HELEN
Right, well… I’ll just leave you to it, then.

[SOUND OF DOOR OPENING SLOWLY AND SQUEAKILY, THEN CLOSING MORE-SLOWLY AND MORE-SQUEAKILY]
ARCHIVIST
…

Jessica!

[SOUND OF DOOR OPENING NOTICEABLY FASTER AND LESS-SQUEAKILY]
NOT!JESSICA
Sorry, did you call?

ARCHIVIST
I, I’ve just had a statement from someone claims they met your Michael.

NOT!JESSICA
Michael? The distorted Michael?

ARCHIVIST
The who else?. I don’t think we re-recorded your statement on him, did we?

NOT!JESSICA
Did we need to?

ARCHIVIST
Yes it was one of the tapes that vanished during the attack.

NOT!JESSICA
Oh. Well, I can give it again, if you’d like, but I haven’t seen him since.

ARCHIVIST
And you can’t think of any further insights? Nothing you forgot to mention last time?

NOT!JESSICA
I don’t think so, no.

ARCHIVIST
Hmm. What are you doing at the moment?

NOT!JESSICA
Reorganizing your “discredited” section. It’s a bit of a mess. If I may say so, John, I feel you’ve been a bit less conscientious about it, since you got back.

ARCHIVIST
Don't question my fucking system!, And can you continue working i’d very much like you on this case.

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, will do.

[MICHAEL SPEAKS OVER DOOR CLOSING SQUEAKLESSLY AND RISING SQUEALING STATIC]
MICHAEL
Do you even know they’re lying to you?

ARCHIVIST
[overlapping] This place is off-limits.

MICHAEL
I disagree.

ARCHIVIST
Who let you in here?

MICHAEL
“Let?”

[Michael laughs. The sound is nearly-imperceptibly doubled, as if he is laughing from more than one throat, a fraction of a second out-of-sync with himself.]
MICHAEL
I’m afraid that isn’t how this works.

ARCHIVIST
You’re him.

MICHAEL
Yes.

ARCHIVIST
Michael.

MICHAEL
…

That is a real name.

ARCHIVIST
Are you here to kill me?

MICHAEL
No.

ARCHIVIST
Yes!…

Why are you here?

MICHAEL
I am simply collecting what is mine, Archivist. The one who entered my domain.

ARCHIVIST
…Miss Rich-ard-son? You own those hallways?

MICHAEL
What a fffascinating question. Does your hand in any way own your stomach?

ARCHIVIST
[overlapping] [muted] Ah –

MICHAEL
In any case, it doesn’t matter: the Wanderer had a brief respite, but it’s over now.

ARCHIVIST
Well, you’re too late, she’s gone!

MICHAEL
[laugh] …yes… ah… did you notice which door she left through? [continues laughing quietly]

ARCHIVIST
[overlapping] Yes… wait… no, there was, there –

MICHAEL
[overlapping] There has never been a door there, Archivist, your mind plays tricks on you…

ARCHIVIST
Shit! can you let her go?

MICHAEL
[laugh] No?

ARCHIVIST
Get her back here!

MICHAEL
[laugh] Are you going to attack me?

[ARCHIVIST REACHES FOR A KNIFE IN HER DRAWER AND THEN YELLS IN PAIN AS MICHAEL CONTINUES LAUGHING QUIETLY]
ARCHIVIST
– who the hell are you!?

MICHAEL
I am not a “who,” Archivist, I am a “what.” A “who” requires a degree of identity I can’t ever retain.

ARCHIVIST
So… Michael isn’t your real name, what?

MICHAEL
There is no such thing as a real name.

ARCHIVIST
What the hell you talking about?

MICHAEL
I am talking about myself. It’s not something I’m used to doing, so I’m sorry if I’m not very good at it.

ARCHIVIST
You decided to appear down here and… stab me anyway! rude!

MICHAEL
I wanted to talk to you. I intervened, to save you before. I, I’m interested in what happens now.

ARCHIVIST
Yes, well, thank you for that, I suppose… And you still haven’t told me why you “intervened” at all. [huff]

MICHAEL
I’m normally neutral, yes. But the loss of this place would have unbalanced the struggle too early. I’m keen to see how it progresses.

ARCHIVIST
You make it sound like there’s a… war.

MICHAEL
[heh] Then I will say nothing further. I wouldn’t wish to tarnish your ignorance prematurely. [giggle] Goodbye, Archivist.

ARCHIVIST
This – wait –

[SOUND OF CHAIR OR TABLE SCRAPING AGAINST FLOOR; ARCHIVIST YELLS IN PAIN AGAIN, POSSIBLY FROM MOVING TOO QUICKLY]
ARCHIVIST
Ah… owww…

M-Michael? Michael…!?

Ah. End recording.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement about Andrea Nunis regarding a series of encounters in the streets of Genoa, Italy. Original statement given 25th March, 2010, audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Travel has always been my passion. I remember as a kid my parents used to take us on trips to this small cabin in Wales. I was very young at the time, maybe four or five, and the cabin wasn’t anything special, just cheap self-catering. It was all the holiday that our parents could afford, and I had to share a bunk-bed with my brat of an older brother, but I remember that every time we drove across that huge bridge from England into Wales, I got this rush of discovery, of exploration. Seeing new places, going further, travelling.

I’ve never looked back since.

As I said, my parents didn’t have much money, so the first chance I really had to go beyond the U.K. was when I took a gap year. I’d saved for years to afford that trip, helped by an inheritance from a distant grandmother, and I bought a bunch of interrail train tickets and spent almost four months rolling across Europe, never staying more than a few days in any one place, and heading on as soon as I got bored. There were nights that I was unable to find a hostel and ended up having to sleep on the streets and I even slept in a graveyard once.

I’d pick up travelling companions for a few days here and there, but for the most part I would spend weeks without speaking my own language. I had adventures and saw wonders, and got into more than a bit of trouble on occasion. It was the happiest I’d ever been.

Since then, travel has always been my main joy in life. I got out of university with a good maths degree, and got a job as a programmer. It’s a life of well-paid drudgery, but I don’t care. Because it means once or twice a year, I can drop everything for a month and disappear somewhere new. The Grand Canyon, the Forbidden City, the Great Barrier Reef. That’s my life. Everything in-between is just the intermission.

I suppose that’s one of the reasons I’ve always had such trouble with romance or even close friendships. I can never take them seriously because they aren’t a part of my “real” life. And in my real life, I travel alone.

I know it’s a lot more dangerous, and people always tell me how lonely it must be, but it really isn’t. There’s a purity to being alone when you travel. You can absorb the places you find yourself in so much better, take in the sights and the smells and the vibrations of a place in a way you just can’t if you have to be mindful of another person’s presence.

It isn’t that I don’t like other people, I do. I just can’t travel properly if I’m with them. My 25th birthday last year, I decided to treat myself to another go at Europe. Obviously, I couldn’t do another four months, but I figured that just the one would let me revisit my favorite spots in the south – Slovenia, Switzerland, Bavaria, Italy, maybe Monaco or bits of southern France.

I’m lucky, as a September birthday makes it pretty much the perfect time for European travel, and for the first weeks I was having a wonderful time. Heading down into Italy and revisiting Venice, Rome, and the beautiful views of San Marino. I avoided going as far south as Naples, which I recall as being a horrible place full of ugly smells and rude people, and instead started travelling north again via Florence.

It was in a Florence hostel that I met Ethan Taylor. Ethan was every inch the Australian traveler, tall and tan with slightly curly dirty blonde hair and a carefree attitude. I’d met literally hundreds just like him in every hostel across the globe. But for some reason, I really hit it off with Ethan in a way I hadn’t with any others of his kind. I think it’s because, when he talked about travelling, he talked about it the same way I did. He wasn’t going around for fun, or because that’s what every Australian does when they reach that age. He travelled because he had to. And like me, he said, he always travelled alone.

We spent a few nights together in the hostel, much to the irritation of the other guests. But as much as I enjoyed his company, I didn’t have any interest in travelling with him for long, and it seemed he felt the same way. It was with a sort of mutual unspoken discomfort that we found ourselves ending up on the same train heading north. It seemed like it would’ve been rude not to at least not acknowledge each other, so we sat in the same compartment and stared out the window.

It was alright, actually. Each lost in our thoughts as the Italian countryside rolled past. We’d been travelling for about two hours when Ethan looked over and asked me if I was planning to stop in Genoa. I said no, it wasn’t a place I’d really considered visiting, and Ethan began to tell me about it. He’d been there a few years before, he said, and the coastline was beautiful, all clear blue ocean and narrow, winding lanes. I didn’t have any other plans, so I said sure. And you know what? He was right. It was beautiful. The colorful houses climbing up the steep streets from the coast and the paths beside the sea.

The first day we stepped off the train I fell a little bit in love with Genoa. We checked into a hostel and for once decided to get a private room and dropped our backpacks from tired shoulders. We didn’t need to say anything to know we’d be exploring the city on our own. Ethan would be revisiting cherished memories, and I would be discovering new ones. But neither of us wanted to do so in company. Most of our time together was spent at night, dining, talking, or… otherwise engaged.

The first morning, I went for a long walk along the coast. The sea air was invigorating. And when the salt-tinged air sent cool fingers running through my hair, I felt so alive I nearly wept. I put all thoughts of returning to my dull, English life from my mind and relished my freedom.

There were a few others walking near me, but Italian is one of the few languages I’ve never managed to pick up even a small amount of, so their conversation was alien to me, and did not intrude on my precious isolation. As Ethan and I talked that night, I tried to put it into words, but without any real success. Even here, with the time to compose it properly, I’m still not sure I’ve caught the essence of what I felt.

Ethan, for his part, had told me of his explorations of the back streets of Genoa. He’d found himself in a small section of town that seemed older than the rest, he said, and unlike the rest of it, it was bustling. He suspected there might’ve been an out-of-the-way street market there, and was hoping to find it again tomorrow. Then we went to bed, and I got what may have been my last restful night.

The next day, I decided to find a nice local cafe and spend some time reading. It wasn’t difficult to do, as, if there’s one thing it’s easy to find in Italy, it’s coffee. This one was well-hidden and warmer than outside, even though the day was very hot for the time of year. I took a seat and ordered a coffee. I tried to read, but it was so warm that even with the strong coffee in my hand, I found it hard to keep my eyes open and kept nodding off. It was after one such accidental nap that I saw him.

He was pale, scrawny almost, and looked utterly out of place. His loose, bright shirt was in stark contrast to his long, black hair. He was staring at me in a way I found quite uncomfortable. I mean, I know I’m not unattractive and I’m used to creepy guys staring at me sometimes, but this was different. He was staring at me with an air of concentration. Like he was trying to read something written very small on my forehead.

After about a minute of this, he got up and walked over to me. He took the seat opposite and sat down. He was still staring at me, and it became clear that I was going to have to start the conversation. So I asked him who the hell he was and what the hell he wanted.

He ignored the first question completely and said, in English, what he wanted was to have a nice holiday in peace. He said it in a really accusatory way, like I was ruining his holiday somehow, and I said so. He sighed and said that he wasn’t in the business of helping strays and, well, I didn’t know what help he was offering and I certainly didn’t ask for it, so I got up to leave.

He apologized grudgingly and said that as he was here, he thought he should at least let me know that I was marked. He didn’t know what by, but that it was close.

Was I married? Did I have a fiance, partner, friends? I told him no, not really. I was just about sick of his stupid questions, but he sounded oddly desperate. Siblings? No. Mother? Of course I had a mother. Were we close, did I love her? I gave him a look and he again asked if we were close. I said yes, we were very close. And then I got up to leave.

As I left, I heard him call after me, telling me to remember my mother, to keep her face in my mind. I didn’t reply.

Ethan didn’t return to the hostel that night. At first, I assumed he was simply out drinking late, but as evening turned into night and that night turned into morning, I started to get a little worried. It was none of my business, of course, but Genoa wasn’t an all-night party sort of town. I would’ve assumed he’d maybe just headed on without me, but his backpack was still in our room, untouched.

I wanted to dismiss it as paranoia, but my encounter with the weirdo in the cafe had left me a bit rattled. When the sun came up on the third day in Genoa without any sign of Ethan, I decided to go out and look for him.

My first move was to try and locate that street market he’d mentioned. Perhaps it wasn’t just hidden away, perhaps it had been actually illegal, and he’d gotten caught up in something he shouldn’t have. He’d given me a good idea of the rough area of Genoa it’d been in, so I started my search there. I found nothing. Asking around just yielded a barrage of confused Italian from passers-by who I couldn’t talk to.

So, I just kept walking. Morning turned into afternoon and the previously sunny day became overcast and oppressive. I would occasionally half-heartedly shout out Ethan’s name, though I don’t know what I was expecting.

At first this got me annoyed shouts from nearby windows, then glares, and eventually they got no response at all. The streets I was walking were narrower and narrower, and the houses and buildings next to me seemed to get taller with each turning I made, their previously vibrant colors muted under the cloudy sky. The afternoon was completely silent.

I began to think ‘how long has it been since I saw another person?’ Twenty minutes? An hour? Two hours? I hadn’t checked my watch, and my mind was foggy- it was hard to think in all the humidity. I went to take a drink from my water bottle to find it empty – had I finished it? I couldn’t have been searching that long.

Then I heard it from up ahead. The dull murmuring of a crowd of people, that rolling babble of incomprehensible noise that only comes from dozens of voices talking at once. Relief washed over me and I headed towards the noise.

The street I was heading towards was wider than those that I’d just been walking and seemed better lit somehow. Best of all I could see a constant flow of people travelling down it in both directions. Perhaps this was the street market Ethan had mentioned. I stumbled out into it and began to look around. I couldn’t see any stalls or shops, or anything that might explain the presence of so many people, but I didn’t have time to really think about it before they started bumping into me.

It didn’t seem deliberate, but there were so many people, far more than I had thought at first, and they couldn’t move without jostling or pushing me. The flow of people dragged me this way and that and I was surrounded by that noise, that mumbling noise of the crowd.

Now I was inside, though, I realized it wasn’t Italian being spoken, or English, or any other language I recognized. The more I listened, the more I realized it wasn’t a language. There were no words, it was just noise. Just a noise being made by the people around me. And I started to focus on those people. And that’s when I began to scream.

Their faces were a blur, each and every one of them. It was like someone had recorded them screaming or having a seizure, and then played it back at a hundred times the speed on their face. None of them had hair or any distinguishing marks, and though their clothes were different, they were all different versions of the same clothes.

I tried to talk to them or to shout, to scream at them, but there was no reaction. I tried to push, to punch, or kick them, but they were pressed in too tight, and I couldn’t do anything except get buffeted this way and that by them.

This crowd of people, they weren’t people. It was just a crowd. A crowd without any people in it, and I was still completely alone. It was then that, as I felt my grip begin to slide, and I worried that I would lose myself to the crowd forever, that the words of that strange man in the coffee shop came to my mind.

Think of your mother. And I did. I thought of her face, the smell of her perfume, the long rambling phone calls made whenever we got the chance. I closed my eyes and remembered in as much detail and with as much love as I could muster in my despair.

I didn’t notice when the bodies around me stopped pushing, or when the droning sound of the crowd stopped. Eventually, I opened my eyes again. It was night and I was on a street I didn’t recognize, with an old Italian couple staring at me like I had gone mad. It took me another hour to find my way back to the hostel. And I made sure I was always in sight of at least one other person.

I didn’t search for Ethan any further. I had as much of an answer as I was going to get, and left his backpack in the hostel in case he ever made it back to collect. I doubt he did.

I cut my travels short after that, came back by as direct a route as I could, and spent some time at my mother’s house. I haven’t been travelling since, but I have some time off coming up and would like to head out again. I might see if I can find a friend to come with me, though. I think it might be awhile before I’m ready to travel on my own again.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

An interesting encounter, though difficult to follow up given its location. Jessica arranged a supplementary interview with Ms. Nunis, who reports she has recently started travelling alone again and has not had any further problems. Nastya has confirmed that over the last decade, there have been several travellers reported missing in Genoa, but averaged out, no more than is normal for a city of its size. I don’t quite know whether this means that few travellers go missing in Genoa, or that a lot of travellers go missing everywhere else.

I’m curious about this coffee shop stranger Ms. Nunis met. His description puts me in mind of Gerard Keay, though there isn’t much to it. If it is him, then he must’ve taken this trip shortly after he was acquitted of his mother’s murder. Fleeing the country for a while, perhaps? Maybe there were rumors of a Leitner in Genoa. Maybe he was genuinely on holiday. No way to tell without more detail.

I am sure of the accuracy of this statement in one area, however. Tim managed to get in contact with the Manina hostel in Genoa, and they confirmed that just over six years ago, they had a backpack logged in the lost-and-found under the name E. Taylor. It was never claimed.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Supplemental.

Michael’s visit last week has been playing on my mind. What struggle is he talking about, and if there is one, what’s his stake in it? What even is he?

Listening back over his visit, I am also struck by something that in the confusion of his arrival completely passed me by the first time. His words were a warning that I cannot trust Jessica. That she was lying about something. Of course it has become rapidly apparent in my investigation that I can trust nobody.

But of all of them, Jessica seemed the least suspicious. I can’t find any evidence she ever even met Gertrude. And her working here seems the natural progression of a lifelong interest in the paranormal. She’s been doing her work with the same diligence as before the Prentiss incident, and indeed, of all of them, seemed to have been the least affected.

That said, she did lose the tape documenting her experience. Or is she lying about her meeting with Michael, leaving things out? Or is Michael simply messing with my head, as indeed seemed to be the entire purpose of his visit?

On another note, I need to be subtler in my inquiries. Here follows a recording I managed to make of a short meeting Carmilla requested –

CARMILLA (RECORDED)
I don’t enjoy having to have these meetings, Raphaella, you know I don’t.

ARCHIVIST (RECORDED)
Well, I’m sorry you’re compelled to. I assume you’ve had another complaint.

CARMILLA (RECORDED)
Yes.

ARCHIVIST (RECORDED)
Who from this time? Was Dr. Elliot offended I to take his apple for myself? Was I too rude to Michael?

CARMILLA (RECORDED)
Who’s Michael? No, it’s from your team.

ARCHIVIST (RECORDED)
What?

CARMILLA (RECORDED)
Tim and Nastya both approached me. Apparently you’ve been spying on them.

ARCHIVIST (RECORDED)
Spying on them? Of course not – No, it’s just… I’ve been… worried about their mental health following Prentiss’ attack, so I’ve been keeping a closer eye on them than usual.

CARMILLA (RECORDED)
Tim says you were watching his house.

ARCHIVIST (RECORDED)
I needed to know what was going on with him isen't our motto "i listen i wait i watch.

CARMILLA (RECORDED)
Well, what matters is your team thinks that it could be. Look, I – I know finding Gertrude’s body hit you hard, I understand, but you need to leave this alone. It isn’t their mental health that’s under scrutiny right now.

ARCHIVIST (RECORDED)
Fine. Is that all?

CARMILLA (RECORDED)
Yes.

ARCHIVIST
I need to be more careful about the others noticing my investigations. Especially if I’ve further cause to watch their homes. More importantly, though, I think Carmilla just moved to the top of my suspect list. I wonder what she’s hiding.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Gregory Pryor regarding his investigations into one Hector Laredo during the summer of 2007. Original statement given March the 11th, 2008. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
You don’t mind me drinking in here, do you? No – of course you don’t. Bet half the guys who roll in here are leaking Scotch all over your precious paperwork. I’m sober enough to write it down – for now, at least – and that’s all the matters to you, isn’t it?

I’m a private investigator. It used to be police, but not anymore. None of your business why – you can draw your own conclusions, if you want, but it’s not something I care to talk about.

Anyway, last June I got a job from one Nicola Laredo. She was the wife of a lowlife by the name of Hector Laredo, and was keen to change that to ex-wife – except that there was some kind of prenup in the mix, and she was looking to catch him cheating, which is where I came in. Standard stuff, pretty boring really but it keeps the wolf from the door.

My first investigations didn’t turn up much. Checking Hector online was pointless – if he owned a computer it wasn’t for hooking up or making friends. Impersonating him to the phone company was also a waste of time – only numbers he called regularly were his brother, his wife, and the Chinese takeaway at the end of his road. Lazy ass.

I reckoned he had a second mobile, but couldn’t find any obvious paper trail for it, so I decided to take my investigation to the next stage. I began to tail him.

Hector was exactly the kind of guy I always end up following: heading into middle-age with nothing to show for it but half a head of hair and a beer belly straining against work shirts that always have some kind of food or sweat stain proudly on display. A loser. I know I’m not one to talk, but I couldn’t help sympathizing with the wife, and not just because she was the one paying me.

Hector worked IT for some shipping and delivery company with its admin center down in Liverpool Street. I say he “worked” there, but that could easily be a lie. Even though I wasn’t able to get past the front desk, the sheer number of smoke breaks Hector took out front cast some serious doubts on whether he was doing his job at all.

According to wife Nicola, Hector had recently had a sudden series of “working late” nights, and based on what I was seeing of him at the day job, she was right on the money with her suspicions. There was no way this guy was staying a minute past closing.

Sure enough, hanging around his office, I saw him shuffling out the building shortly after six. I started shadowing him carefully, although after a few minutes, it became clear that I [heh] really didn’t need to be cautious as all that: the man was completely oblivious to anything that wasn’t inside his own head, or in front of his face, and after a while I found I could walk literally fifteen feet behind him the whole way, and he had no idea.

I knew I was in luck when I saw him head into the underground. His route home should have taken him down the Central line, but instead he headed on to the Hammersmith & City, riding east. Whatever, or whoever, his illicit liaisons involved, I was pretty sure that me and my camera were following him right to it.

He got off the train at Barking, which was promising. It was exactly the sort of place I would have expected the lover of someone like Hector to live: residential, depressing, and cheap. For London, at least.

It was almost seven o’clock by this point, and it was late June so there was still a while before nightfall, and I got more careful about my pursuit. There were less people here, so blending into a crowd was no longer an option, and I made sure to keep a bit more distance as he walked down streets of terraced houses.

We’d been walking for about twenty minutes when I began to realize that he wasn’t going into any of the houses. Instead, he made his way south until he reached the A13. He made his way over the motorway, now choked with commuter traffic, and headed down into what looked like a warehouse or industrial estate on River Road.

I was becoming less and less convinced that this was a simple screwing-around job, which made me uneasy, but it was still a long way from scaring me off. Besides, I was curious, so I followed Hector over the A13 and down River Road. I was going very slowly now, as I was the only one walking down that road except for Hector, and if he turned around, well, idiot that he was, I don’t think even he could have failed to spot me.

So I stayed close to the buildings, and ducked behind them whenever I could. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not as fit as I was back when I was on the force, but I was still quick enough to keep up with Hector’s slow, meandering pace. After another five minutes, he reached a warehouse with a “For Sale” sign on it. There was nothing else notable or distinctive about the place, and the sign looked like it’d been up for years.

I spotted a small hole in the decaying concrete wall that divided it from the adjacent lot, and made for it. Through the hole I watched as Hector stopped and – for the first time – looked behind him. When he saw nobody, and nodded like he was congratulating himself on a job well done [heh], I almost laughed so hard I gave myself away.

Hector checked his watch, clearly waiting for someone, and put down his briefcase. It was only then I realized how odd it was that an IT tech would carry an old-fashioned leather briefcase to work.

Still, I didn’t have much time to wonder about it before a red SUV pulled up, and two white guys in tracksuits got out and started heading towards Hector. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I was snapping pictures anyway. I had a pretty good idea as to what was going on, and I was not at all surprised when they handed Hector a brown envelope obviously full of money. In return, he opened the briefcase to show a tight white brick, before snapping it closed again and handing it over.

I took plenty more pictures before slipping away unnoticed. Drugs complicated matters, but not necessarily in a bad way. Theoretically, pictures of the crime could get Nicola out of her doomed marriage just as quick as any sleazy snapshots. And if I played my cards right, I could even make a good bonus out of him myself, in the form of some hush money.

“Blackmail” is an ugly word, but it does pay the bills. And given how bad Hector was at spotting me, it was only a matter of time before he was behind bars, so I might as well get some use out of that sweet drug money before it was taken by the courts. I mean, he took the briefcase to work for God’s sake.

The trick was going to be making sure that Hector wasn’t connected in a way that would make this difficult. From what I could see, he was pretty low-rung, and expendable enough that a bit of blackmail wouldn’t piss off any of the bigger fish trafficking what looked to be heroin.

Still, drug dealers and their bosses can be unpredictable, so I decided to keep watching the poor slob for a while to make sure I wasn’t going to be stepping on the wrong toes.

So, for the next week I watched Hector all day, every day, and I can confidently say that he was the worst drug mule I’ve ever come across. I knew some real screw-ups back in my police days, but nothing that even came close to Hector Laredo. I genuinely had no idea how he ended up working for these guys, who I eventually pegged as Ukrainian mafia.

I suppose he did look like the last person you’d suspect of running drugs, but [heh] that was the only thing he had going for him. In addition to being unbelievably oblivious, he was also sloppy and forgetful. I once watched him leave the suitcase, drugs and all, on his front porch for three hours in broad daylight before he remembered and came back for it.

Ironically, I didn’t actually see him lose the drugs. I needed to use the bathroom in a coffee shop I’d followed him to, and when I got out he’d moved on. Sometime in the two hours it took me to find him again, he’d managed to put the suitcase down and forget it. It was gone.

I saw realization cross his face as he began to panic. This was bad news for both of us – worse for him, of course – but it did mean that I wouldn’t be making my bonus. I followed him a while longer out of morbid curiosity, and watched as he tried to explain himself to the Ukrainians.

I expected anger, a beating, maybe even a murder right then and there. But instead they just exchanged a look, mumbled a few words to Hector, and handed him a small slip of paper. Then they drove away,

Hector looked at the paper, typed something into his phone and threw it away as he walked off. It was an address in Stockwell and an instruction: “Ask for Aurora.”

I didn’t follow him that time. I was pretty sure they’d just handed the poor idiot a death sentence, and when Nicola called the next day to say Hector hadn’t come home, I was sure. At this point I came clean to her about her husband’s activities, although I did lie about the timings to make it seem like I’d only just discovered about the drugs. No need for her to know why I’d kept it to myself. When I told her about the loss and the note, she sat down, clearly trying to process everything.

She didn’t seem particularly broken up over the fact that her husband was most likely dead, something that was quickly confirmed when she started moving on to talking about savings and life insurance.

That’s when I should have taken my payment and gone. If I hadn’t gotten greedy, I’d still have my arm.

So I was all set to leave when Nicola asked me how long I thought it was going to be before they found a body. Stupidly, I said that if the Ukrainians were any good, there probably wouldn’t be a body to find. At this, Nicola seemed to panic slightly, asking a lot of questions about missing persons and being declared legally dead without a body, which is a long, drawn-out headache. She clearly didn’t want to wait, and asked me to try and find some evidence that Hector was dead.

I said no, of course. Then she named a price that – well, let’s just say Hector Laredo’s life insurance policy must have been a hell of a thing. Even at the time I knew I was making the wrong decision, but… that much money… I said yes.

So the next day I found myself in Stockwell, at the address listed on the note, staring at a butcher’s shop. No name was written over the front, but the display of chilled carcasses and slabs of meat in the window made it perfectly clear what it was.

I started to wonder if the Ukrainian mafia was involved in some full-on Sweeney Todd body disposal, but quickly reminded myself that even if – and it was a big “if” – they were killing and disposing of bodies there, it didn’t mean they were selling the meat to the public. That would be a massive and unnecessary risk, and organized crime wasn’t big on unnecessary risk.

It was a sunny day, and the smell of the hot tarmac mixed with the odor of raw meat that drifted from the door. It had a “Closed” sign displayed prominently despite the time of morning, and there were no interior lights on.

I couldn’t see anything inside except the old, poorly-refrigerated meat hanging in the window, dripping silently onto the trays below. I reminded myself how much money was on the line, and tried the handle.

To my surprise it was unlocked. I slipped inside the shadowed storefront before anyone spotted me. The smell was rancid, but not as strong as I had expected. A quick glance around the place told me why. Aside from the window display, the room was devoid of meat. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much there at all, aside from a refrigerated counter and drinks cooler. Both sat empty.

I waited and listened, prepared to bolt through the door at the slightest sound, but it was quiet. I gathered myself and made my way around the counter to open the door into the back.

I was keeping an eye out for anything that might have given a hint as to Hector’s fate. As soon as I had proof, I was gone.

The door to the back opened with a puff of air, like there was a change of pressure, and I noticed how thick the steel door was. Even the glass porthole at the top seemed a few inches. It was only later I realized it must have been soundproofed.

The room behind it was lit by several bright fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling and walls and – much as I suspected – looked closer to a morgue or an operating theater than a butcher’s shop, despite the well-kept and razor-sharp tools hanging on a nearby rack. There were several large lockers along one wall, a steel chair in the corner, and, though there were no stainless steel drawers, the tarpaulin-covered shape that lay awkwardly on the central table was disconcertingly familiar.

I took a breath and pulled back the plastic sheet. Hector Laredo lay there on the table. He was naked, utterly still, and though he seemed to be in one piece, his skin had the sickly pallor of a corpse. I sighed, relieved at this discovery which – from my perspective – was about the best result I could have hoped for.

I spent a minute or two taking pictures for Nicola and headed back towards the door. And that’s when everything started to go horribly wrong.

When I reached the doorway back into the shop front, I took a second to glance through the window, and I froze. In the entrance to the shop stood a huge hulking, silhouette. It reached to push it open, and I staggered back into the room looking for another way out.

There was only one other door, apparently into the rest of the building, but it was firmly locked, and I didn’t have time to try and get through.

Without any other options, I covered Hector back over with the tarpaulin, opened one of the lockers, and squeezed myself inside. Luckily for me, they were large, and didn’t seem to have any shelves. I stepped on something soft and, looking down, saw a rough pile of clothes at my feet.

I didn’t have time to consider this before I saw the door begin to open; I had to shut myself in. I stood there in the dark, trying not to make a sound, as I heard heavy footfalls approach, and the door to the room slammed shut. From my position I could just about see out through the vents in the locker, and I very much hoped the huge girl now strapping on an apron could not see in.

She was immense, almost seven feet tall, with croked limbs that looked like they had been badly-carved out of lumpy bone. Even her head was crocked but there, like everywhere, her skin was on show. It bulged slightly when she moved, hard bumps forming and stretching her skin in odd places. Was this the “Aurora” mentioned in the note?

She pulled back the tarpaulin covering Hector’s body, and cracked her knuckles. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sound of her doing that.

Then, she reached into Hector. No cutting, no saws, she just – reached in. And I realized why the room was soundproofed. Because it turned out Hector wasn’t dead. And it was going to be a while before Aurora got around to his lungs or throat.

Aurora pulled out what appeared to be a handful of ribs. She considered them for a few moments before she began to twist them like warm putty, making them into some sort of braid. She considered her handiwork silently, as Hector lay screaming on the table, before she shook her head and walked towards my locker.

For a terrible moment, I was sure she was gonna wrench open the locker and pull me out. But instead, she grabbed a crowbar that had been resting against the wall and levered up one of the metal floor tiles. From where I was standing, I could see there was a hole underneath that seemed to disappear deep into the ground.

There was something… not right about that hole. The texture of the walls was too smooth to be earth, and it seemed to… glisten wetly. It was when I saw the teeth that studded the inside of the fleshy throat that I realized what I was looking at, and I choked back a scream.

Aurora casually tossed the bones he had been twisting inside, and they disappeared into the dark opening without a sound.

And so it went on, for four grueling hours. After the first Hector wasn’t conscious enough to scream anymore, but Aurora continued to bend and warp him, occasionally pulling bits out and throwing them into the pit. Once I even saw her take one of Hector’s femurs and, after twisting it into a corkscrew spiral, she reached into her own torso, and left it there with a sigh of contentment.

At last, Hector died, and I [shudder] almost wept with relief. Aurora sighed in what sounded like disappointment, and then fetched the butcher tools from the wall. It took her another half-hour to fully dismember the corpse, tossing each piece into the pit when it was small enough, and hosing the blood down into it.

She removed her apron, walked to the chair, and sat down. Her movements were sluggish now, uncoordinated, almost like she was drunk.

Once in the chair, her huge frame slumped forward, and her eyes closed. It looked like she was asleep. I should have waited longer, should have made sure she was fast asleep, but I was close to breaking point at this stage, and I could think of nothing but escape.

I opened the locker and walked quickly, silently over to the door and opened it. As I did so, the gentle sounds of the street at night filtered through from the shop front. Compared to the grim silence of the butcher’s workshop, it was beautiful. At least, it was until an ambulance roared past, siren blaring at full volume. I heard a roar from behind me, and turned to see Aurora charging towards me.

It was like a strange, lumpy freight train bearing down on me. I tried to close the door but I was too slow. Just before it slammed shut, she grabbed my arm, and tried to pull me back.

There is no way to describe what it feels like to have bone pulled out of you through your unbroken skin. If you’ve ever been stabbed, or had a decent sized object embedded in you, maybe you can remember how it felt to have it removed, but even then the pain is of a different quality. The nerves aren’t being torn or cut, they’re being pushed aside like water. Imagine the feeling of removing a rubber glove from your hand, but you’re the glove, not the hand. And it hurts like the worst toothache you can imagine, it, it – that’s as close as I can get to putting it into words.

I slammed the door shut and ran into the street, through the people still wandering Stockwell in the evening, and away, my now-empty left arm hanging limply by my side. I didn’t stop running for a very long time.

I guess in many ways it was a happy ending. The photos, combined with what the police found when they raided the butcher’s shop, were enough to declare Hector dead, even without the body, and I got my payday from Nicola Laredo.

They never did find Aurora though. She was long gone when they arrived. The doctors amputated the arm in the end, and I’m getting used to the prosthetic, but I can still feel it sometimes, like it’s still there.

I know it’s just phantom limb syndrome, but sometimes I swear it feels like my bone’s still out there, twisting in someone else’s arm.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume this butcher to be Aurora Borealis. It seems that, if Mr. Adekoya’s account from statement 9991006 is accurate, then Borealis has found new ways to profit from her abilities in the eight years since her acquisition of The Boneturner’s Tale. The book itself is conspicuously absent from this account, though it may simply mean Borealis no longer needs to keep it with her.

No idea about the pit, though. That’s new. Its description puts me in mind of some of the more… meaty statements, but there isn’t enough evidence to make any direct connections. Mr. Pryor was unavailable for a follow-up interview, as he emigrated to New Zealand in 2013, following a four-year jail term for tax evasion. He seems to have largely dropped off the map.

Nicola Laredo confirmed the basic details of the job she had given to Mr. Pryor, although she was unaware of any of the more… gruesome aspects of her husband’s murder.

At least, she was until Tim interviewed her. I should warn Carmilla to expect another complaint.

The police aspect of this statement has been the hardest to follow up. Jessica has recently been having problems with her normal backdoor access to police records, as, despite IT’s best efforts, her computer has broken yet again, making this the third time in the last two months. Until we can source some more reliable equipment, we may have to rely on other methods.

Ivy has refused to compromise her position any further, so we’re having to rely on Nastya’s involvement with certain staff at the police records office. Apparently, she is involved both with one of the young ladies there, as well as the gentleman who manages the other shift. This is useful for acquiring information, but I am… uncomfortable with how easily discovered this arrangement might be. The last thing I want is for the Archives to become involved in pointless personal drama.

Still, she has managed to get copies of the appropriate files. The police did raid the butcher shop following Mr. Pryor’s report, but found no one there. It had apparently been abandoned shortly before. They found articles of clothing belonging to roughly fourteen people, five of whom could be tied to active missing persons cases.

They did tear up the floor in the end, but rather than any sort of pit, they found the body of one Harry Gough, the registered owner of the business. He had apparently been dead for six months.

Aurora Borealis remains at large.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

Carmilla Yamazaki is a difficult woman to pin down. Certainly since she became head of the Institute in 1996, taking over from James Wright, who ran the place from ‘73 until he passed away.

It was a remarkably fast climb to the top, as from what I can find, it looks like she only joined the Institute five years before in 1991, working in the Artefact Storage. Perhaps she was simply that impressive. Certainly the Carmilla I know now is almost unmatched in terms of paranormal knowledge. Well, theoretical knowledge, at least.

And yet, everything I found out about her life before the Institute seems… an ill fit with the austere woman I know. She apparently graduated with a Third from Christchurch College in PPE, and I found [incredulous laugh] an old gossip column in the student newspaper, the Cherwell, that mentioned her. If I’m not reading too much into it, the implication seems to be that she was… ah, something of a pothead.

Was she like that when he first came to work here? The difficulty comes from the fact that the only person in the Institute who worked here before he took over… was Gertrude. Did she kill her because she knew something about her past? And if so, how can I prove it?

[long exhale]

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Sampson Kempthorne, regarding the workhouse architecture of George Gilbert Scott. Original statement given June 12th, 1841. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST
Dear Maki,

It is my fondest wish that this message should find you in good health, as I have heard more than one mutual acquaintance remark on your current state of overwork. While I earnestly hope it is merely idle gossip, my knowledge of your character leads me to entreat that you allow yourself some respite, or at the very least take some further secretarial staff into your employ. Certain uncharitable quarters would have it that your life consists of little but rattling around an Edinburgh townhouse, surrounded by piles of ghostly accounts and lunatic documentation. Piles, I am afraid to say, to which I am about to make an addition.

I would suggest you come visit with myself and Marianne as a diversion, but if you were of a mind to do so, you must travel swiftly. You see, we are shortly to depart for New Zealand, there to start a new life, far from London and its workhouses. And it is this imminent departure that has had such a freeing effect upon my pen. For there are things I have seen which I feel deserve a place among your asylum of letters.

They regard the works of my former assistant, George Gilbert Scott, whose own architectural practice is now most respected. I have been fearful that accusations of slander might dog me, were my tale to be set down, but with a boat to the new world beckoning, and your sterling reputation for discretion, I feel it may at last be time to divest myself of the disquieting scenes I have witnessed.

George came to me in 1834 from his engagement with the office of Henry Roberts, where he was completing his training. Henry himself I have the greatest respect for, as he trained under Sir Robert Smirke, who had received his knighthood not two years previous. Henry was very effusive about the talents and prospects of young Mr. Scott, and was at great pains to inform me that his young protege also received certain architectural tutelages from Sir Robert himself.

He said this with the oddest of looks, as though there was some jolly secret between us. I rather just nodded, as if to say I took his meaning, and he left well enough alone. He even showed me George’s work on drafting his plans for the Fishmonger’s Hall near London Bridge, which had opened to great acclaim. It certainly seemed clear to me that he would make a fine assistant, at least for as long as I were able to keep him.

And so we began our brief collaboration, the subject of which was the workhouse, a topic – as I’m sure you recall – very close to my heart. The plight of the poor and destitute has been a national disgrace for far too long, and when I was handed the task of designing them by the Poor Law Commissioners, it was an undertaking I embarked on with no small amount of zeal.

My original designs were intended to assist in the easy segregation of inmates by sex, age, or infirmity, with capacity and utility foremost in my mind. I know many look on the workhouse with disdain, calling it “the Pauper’s Bastille,” and seeing very little distinction between the workhouse and the prison, but this is a deeply myopic view to take. The prison keeps its population for the safety and improvement of society at large, while the workhouse exists for the improvement of the inmates themselves. To criticize the conditions as harsh is to overlook the basic moral imperative of work itself, and I firmly believe that to dismiss the punitive as a valid form of moral improvement is to consign many a poor soul to perdition… but I digress, Maki. I am so used to penning defenses of my designs that it seems I can write little which does not do so.

It was in his assistance with these designs that George first began to show those peculiarities of character that I would become so ill-at-ease with. His process redrafting was… deeply unsettling. He would spend hours in the office simply staring at the drawings, saying nothing, taking no food or drink, ignoring any inquiry or interruption. Then, in a single move, he would gather up all the papers and retire to his private office, locking the door behind him.

Then from the other side that firm oak door, I would hear the strangest sounds, muttering and shouting. It was always in George’s voice alone. I could never quite discern the words. It often sounded as though he were in some great distress, and on more than one occasion I was within minutes of summoning a constable to assist in breaking through the door, when he would emerge, glistening from exertion and holding completely redone drawings. I’m sure I even saw blood on his collar once.

The designs themselves were little better. He would take the solid functionality of my original plans, and remake them in all sorts of odd symmetries, which, while architecturally intriguing, generally sacrificed many practical considerations.

He also, without fail, made everything closer. Passageways would be narrowed, and sleeping quarters shrunk, until a building designed to hold 300 paupers would be remade to house almost twice that number.

As I mentioned before, I have no objection to harsh conditions within the workhouse, to dissuade the idle from taking residence there, but the cramped plans that George would present me bordered upon the claustrophobic, and I was generally unable to use them.

Each time I told him so, his face would tighten in momentary anger, and his lips would go white. Then I would watch as he took that rage and discarded it, once again becoming the genial, if somewhat serious, young man I had first met. It was an odd sight.

When his father died in 1834, it came as no great surprise to me that he chose to resign from my service. He told me he considered it necessary to become the provider for his family, though I have my suspicions he was also eager to no longer have his designs subject to my scrutiny. I wished him well, naturally, but could not honestly say I was not somewhat relieved by his departure.

It was shortly after this I received an invitation to a small social gathering hosted by Henry Roberts. It was there that I met Sir Robert Smirke. He was a tall man, with sharp, almost saturnine features, and eyes that seemed to regard you in ratios, and pounds of raw material. He was polite and gregarious, but I found him difficult to talk to at length, as he seemed to be forever further ahead in the conversation than I was. I could never be sure whether or not I was boring him.

When I realized that George was not present, and there was no sign of his imminent arrival, I resolved to raise the matter with Sir Robert, regarding what exactly his tutelage had entailed. At the mention of the name “George Gilbert Scott,” Sir Robert’s face flushed suddenly with anger, in a manner not entirely unlike that of his protege.

He asked me what my interest was in Mr. Scott, and I told him that he had, until recently, been engaged as my assistant. At this, Robert gave a small laugh of satisfaction, and told me I did not realize exactly how lucky an escape I may have had. I asked again what exactly his training had entailed, and Sir Robert stared at me for a silent minute before he finally nodded his head.

“Balance,” he told me. “Equilibrium. The hardest thing for an architect to achieve. Symmetry is easy, but does not, in and of itself, result in balance. To stir the feelings of man, to create a small place of being divorced from the rest of the world, while still retaining that balance, is the true goal of the architect.”

I had never heard my profession talked off with such conviction and fire before, and I will not lie to you, Maki: the look in his eyes when he spoke scared me.

Without prompting, his tirade continued, and he began to talk about George, about shortcuts and symmetry, and a patron that the young fool did not understand.

I could follow very little of it, and it seemed to be decidedly removed from anything that I would consider architecture, but whatever it was that Sir Robert had been teaching George, it appeared the lessons had been put to less-noble use than he had intended.

It was at this point that Henry noticed Sir Robert’s agitation from across the room, and came over to gently usher him away to the smoking-room. He sent me a glance of mild reproach as he led his mentor away, and I was left standing there in the middle of the room, utterly confused, and rather shaken.

I resolved to avoid where possible having anything further to do with George, and continued with my own works. I heard he had set himself up with construction of workhouses according to his own designs. He had taken on a partner by the name of William Bonython Moffatt, a builder’s son with no moral character to recommend him of any sort. They vigorously canvassed several district guardians, and managed to acquire several commissions that had previously been mine.

Needless to say, I was rather taken aback by this utter lack of professional etiquette. But I was not without other projects, so I endeavored to ignore it, and leave him to whatever squalid internments he cared to build.

It was in September of ‘36 that it happened, shortly after George and Moffat had finally opened the first of their workhouses. I didn’t realize that was what had happened until afterwards, ensconced as I had been in my own work.

Darkness had fallen, and still I was busy, lit by the reassuring glow of a dozen candles. There was no clock in the workshop, a deliberate choice, to stop the lateness of the hour disturbing me, but I suspect it to been somewhere past midnight when I heard them.

Footsteps. Heavy, thudding footsteps, and the click-clack of a sturdy cane. My assistants had locked all the doors when they left for the evening, and through the silence of my study, I could not have missed the sound of them opening again. To my dying day, Maki, I will aver that no one entered the building before I heard the footsteps approach.

As their heavy tread grew closer, and the clack of that cane struck louder, with a quiet malice, I heard another sound beneath them: the jangle of keys.

I have never in all of my life been possessed by such a fear as I was then. The walls and floor seemed to rise towards me, stealing the air from my lungs until I swear that I could feel the splinters from the ceiling digging into the soft skin of my face. I couldn’t move as the thudding boot tread came to a halt outside the door, and the cane came to rest with a final clack.

I waited. I waited to have the last vestiges of life squeezed from me by whatever this was. I don’t know how much time passed. And then, as though suddenly sloughing off a heavy cloak, the weight fell from me. The room returned to its natural proportions, which is to say, it… never truly changed. I think. It is hard to describe exactly, Maki, so you will forgive my vagaries.

I rose to my feet and, in a moment of foolhardy bravery that I doubt I shall ever truly understand, I grabbed a candle and ran to the door, flinging it open. I saw a figure walking away, through the door to one of the clerks’ offices. It was short and wide, and I could see the wood of the floor bow beneath its huge boots. It wore a tall black hat, and only the thinnest wisps of gray hair were visible below. In its coarse, ruddy hand it held a hard-worn black cane, tipped with iron.

Then the door closed behind it, and it was gone. I followed into the room behind it, but it was empty. There was no sign of the man, or whatever it was, that had gone in before me. The window was sealed, and there was nowhere for someone of that size to hide. Still, I searched. I wasn’t sure what else to do. Even the heavy bootprints seemed to have vanished.

What I did manage to find, however, fallen behind one of the writing desks, was one of George Gilbert Scott’s workhouse designs. There is, of course, no way to be certain of any connection between the two events, but that did little to quell the scalding rage in my breast as I strode out of my door the next morning. I took a cab to George’s office, where I was informed that he was at his workhouse site with Moffat, and took another cab.

I found the site in a state of some commotion, with my former assistant standing next to a high stone wall, arguing with a labourer, who seemed quite distraught. He was gesturing wildly at an area of the wall, while another man, who I assumed to be Moffat, tried to calm him down.

As I approached, I began to make out what the labourer was saying. He was asking after someone he referred to as “the governor.” While Moffat was trying very patiently to explain that no governor had yet been appointed to the workhouse, the labourer didn’t seem to be paying this point much mind. However, he kept repeating that the governor had come to see Harry. He did not say who Harry was, but I assume an acquaintance of his.

He said he knew it was the governor because of the jangle of his keys. He said that the governor had called Harry “idle.” It was at this point I was finally close enough to see the wall he was pointing at with such excitement. At first, I thought they were worms, small and pale against the brickwork. But as I got closer I saw them clearly. Extending from the unblemished solid stone of the workhouse wall were four fingertips.

The labourer repeated it again: the governor had called Harry “idle.”

I returned George’s documents and left.

I trust you will understand now, Maki, why I have been avoiding the company of my fellows these last few years. I have always been reluctant to make any notation of my story, but now that I finally have everything prepared for my move to New Zealand, I would feel like I had slighted you, had I left without sharing my tale. Do with it as you will; I am done with it.

Sincerely yours,

Sampson Kempthorne.

ARCHIVIST
End statement.

Obviously, trying to trace disappearances and deaths in Victorian workhouses is an exercise in futility, so I’m loathe to even try.

More importantly, who is Robert Smirke? I have read every book I can find on the man, which is, admittedly, not many, and none of them show any sign of this other side to him, apparently at the heart of strange buildings and architecture all over London.

And now what? Students, apprentices? If Henry Roberts was a student of some sort of paranormal construction methods, it doesn’t appear to show up in any of his buildings – save perhaps for Fishmongers’ Hall, which he designed along with Sir George Gilbert Scott for the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers in 1834. It is reportedly a hotbed for low-key hauntings, but nothing of the magnitude we’ve heard from others.

Scott is concerning, however. While Smirke seems to have built a handful of notable buildings around London, Sir George Gilbert Scott is responsible for landmarks such as Saint Pancras Station, the Albert Memorial and the restoration of Westminster Abbey. If his buildings have similar quirks, then… let’s be honest, I don’t know what that would mean. But I doubt it would be good.

That said, there have been no reports of any sort of paranormal or supernatural disturbance in any still-standing building designed by Scott. That should made me feel better, but somehow it doesn’t.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
– I, I’m sorry?

NASTYA
Are you in trouble?

ARCHIVIST
I’m not sure what you mean.

NASTYA
Well, there was a policewoman asking after you. You know, the one who came to look into Gertrude.

ARCHIVIST
Ivy. when was this?

NASTYA
Uh, yesterday. You were physical therapy.

ARCHIVIST
Did she say why?

NASTYA
No. It was a bit weird, really. I’ve seen her around here a few times before actually. I, um. I don’t trust her.

ARCHIVIST
Sorry, what?

NASTYA
Well, I asked if she had anything new to report on Gertrude, and she just said no, and then mumbled a question about when you’d be back. Then she left. It was weird. She’s weird.

ARCHIVIST
You don’t have a problem with the police, do you, Nastya?

NASTYA
Well, you do know I’m the finest cat burglar in all of Bromley.

ARCHIVIST
Nastya.

NASTYA
Okay, so seriously, I don’t get why she keeps coming back ‘round here outside of the investigation.

ARCHIVIST
She’s, uhhh. I’m, I’m helping her with some of the investigation. Off the record.

NASTYA
Oh.

Ohhh.

Say no more!

ARCHIVIST
Nastya, wh-what are you –

NASTYA
Don’t worry, I’m cool. Good work, boss.

ARCHIVIST
Oh! No, Nastya, that’s not what I – it’s really not like that –

NASTYA
[speaking over her] I’ll go see if I can dig anything else out on Scott, and I’ll let you know if she comes back.

[DOOR CLOSES]
ARCHIVIST
That really isn’t what –

[sigh] End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Antonia Haley, regarding a deep dive that took place near Sable Island, Nova Scotia in August 2006. Original statement given January 7th, 2008. Audio recording by Raphaelal La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I should be dead, really. It’s a weird feeling. You ever had a near-death experience? I’ve had a few. They’re not uncommon in my line of work, but this… it feels different. It’s not that I put myself in danger and managed not to die – I should be dead. Decompression sickness that severe is almost never survivable, and I should have had an embolism. The fact that I didn’t? Blind luck. It’s hard to reconcile yourself with avoiding a death that you feel should have been yours. If there’d been others with me who didn’t make it, if I could write it off as survivor’s guilt, but… I was alone.

Do you ever get that? Of course you don’t, sorry.

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about the bends. I’m a diver, both by nature and by trade. I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was swimming almost before I was walking. I did my first scuba dive at eight years old. It was barely deeper than a swimming pool, but it was enough to instill a lifelong passion for it. I got fully qualified as soon as I was legally able, and almost flunked out of college because I was always running off to some dive or other. I must have missed more classes than I went to by the end. I scraped by, but as it turned out, even if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered too much, as it wasn’t my psychology major that got me my first job after graduation. It was diving.

I worked at a marine salvage company based off the coast of Nova Scotia. You’ll forgive me if I don’t give their name; I still hold out hope I might go back to work there someday, and I’d feel like an asshole dragging their name through the mud, even if it is just to you and your “strict confidentiality procedures.” If you’re desperate, they shouldn’t be hard to identify, but it’s not really relevant to what happened.

You ever heard of “the Graveyard of the Atlantic?” Probably not, and it’s a confusing name anyway, since it actually refers to two distinct locations along the eastern coast of North America, both notorious hotspots for shipwrecks. In this case, I’m talking about the one off Sable Island, in Nova Scotia. The waters there are some of the roughest, where the Gulf Stream hits the Labrador Current, and depending on which historical records you believe, there could be anything from four- to six-hundred shipwrecks down there. And that’s only from when the European settlers first arrived.

Normally, it’s not the sort of place where we would accept jobs. It’s too dangerous to send a salvage crew in when the water’s that unpredictable. But this time was different. Maybe the old man was just a real sweet talker – or maybe he swept the captain, a leathery old cuss by the name of Morten Kemp, just enough extra under the table that he fudged the location on the release forms. Either way, word came down that we were doing a dive off Sable Island.

None of that was to say the captain was stupid about it. We kept a very close eye on the meteorological reports, and only headed into the Graveyard when we were certain we’d have a window of relatively calm seas to do it. It helped that the job was relatively simple. The old man, Simon Fairchild, had come to us claiming that he had pinpointed the location he believed his great-grandfather’s sailing yacht had been sunk almost a hundred and twenty years ago, and he was keen to retrieve any heirlooms or curios he could from it. The only thing interesting or unusual about his story was the amount of money he was willing to throw around to back it up. It was certainly enough to get us dropping anchor a hundred miles from the coast on a hot sunny morning at the end of August.

The journey out had been a bit subdued. Normally, me and Julio Hernandez, the other diver on the crew, would spend our time chatting, playing cards, and once even screwing, though we generally don’t talk about that. This time, we had to babysit Mr. Fairchild, who had stubbornly insisted that he make the journey with us.

Again, this wouldn’t normally have been an option, but the guy was not shy about throwing his money around. He must have been pushing a hundred years old, just a tiny pink skeleton of a man, sat in the corner watching us the whole trip. It was hard to get any sort of friendly chat going with him perched there like some sort of vulture. I tried to talk to him a few times, but he only seemed interested in discussing this shipwreck and how preserved I thought everything might be. I told him I had no idea, as it really wasn’t my area – I was just the diver. He didn’t say much to me after that.

When we hit the graveyard, the sea was almost completely still, far more so than I would have expected, even given the weather predictions we’d been working on. It didn’t strike me as odd at the time, just an unexpected bit of help with the job. Initial checks managed to locate a wreck that seemed to match the old man’s description, a steam yacht circa 1890. It seemed to be in surprisingly good shape, and, in the camera’s torchlight, we could just about make out the name: the Maria Fairchild. The old man was practically dancing with joy, and I was genuinely concerned he might give himself a heart attack.

We suited up and prepared to go under. The wreck was at a depth of a hundred and sixty feet, which meant we’d be in a high-pressure environment, but we shouldn’t need hypoxic gas or full-pressure suits, which was something of a relief. Julio made his prayers, Captain Kemp gave us a stern nod, and into the water we went.

As I went in I thought I heard Simon, the old man, shout after me, but I couldn’t make it out.

And then the world was nothing but silent blue. I had expected the water to be warmer, given the temperature on the surface, but the chill hit me all at once, and it took a moment to get to grips with it. I saw Julio next to me, a few yards away, and with a thumbs up we began to dive down towards the sunken boat.

Most people don’t appreciate how quickly it gets dark underwater. You don’t need to be nearly as deep as you think before the sun is just the faintest change in the water hues. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to forget which way is up, and become lost in the murky depths. But Julio and I were a well-practiced team, and we weren’t going so far down us to face any darkness that our torches couldn’t handle.

It was during that descent, when I saw that our two points of light were the only signs of movement down there, that I noticed the absence of life. I wasn’t particularly worried by this – if anything I was rather relieved. Anyone who’s been diving more than a few years will be able to tell you of at least one close call with a shark, and I’d had two so far, so the less movement the better, as far as I was concerned. Still, it was a surprise that we haven’t seen even a single school of fish on our journey to the sea floor, and once we were down there it was just as lifeless. I gestured my confusion to Julio, but he just shrugged, and started over towards the wreck.

Down there, deep below the surface, I find myself sometimes entering an almost… meditative state. You can feel the weight of the world, a world you were never meant to be part of, pressing in on you from all directions; and the constant overpowering awareness of your own breathing, of how little there is between you and the very space around you that is completely hostile to your existence. The danger is real, as is the faint, hardened fear in your gut, but I’ve always found that it sometimes put me in a state not too unlike how it feels staring into the flames of a fire – hypnotic. My mind cleared of all thoughts but the dull, pulsing rush of adrenaline.

That feeling was so strong here that I almost swam past the Maria Fairchild completely. Julio was already inside, and I quickly located a large enough tear in the hull and made my own entrance. The yacht was bigger than I had thought when viewing it from the boat, but the layout was not complicated, and we already had quite a good idea about where would be best to look for the sort of antiques and sentimental treasures that Simon wanted. Julio had taken the bedroom, so I started on the bridge.

It was certainly an impressive sight – a late 19th century steam yacht, slightly decayed from its time on the ocean floor but, all-in-all, astoundingly well-preserved. I looked over the chair and the various panels and controls, but could find nothing which could be classed as an easily-removable heirloom – although I did make a mental note of which bits of the bridge were well-enough preserved they might be worth removing. It would need more equipment than we had with us, but I could suggest it to Simon if we returned empty-handed.

I checked in on Julio, but he was still busy ransacking the bedroom, so I decided to do a sweep at the engine room. It was there I found the hole.

It was large, maybe seven feet in diameter, not unlike the one I had used to get into the wreck in the first place. There was something about it that immediately put me on edge. The shape was too regular somehow, the water outside it was… too dark. And it took me a few seconds to notice this, but the direction of the tearing seemed to indicate it had been made from the inside out.

I dropped the rusted wrench I had been examining and let it float slowly towards the floor as I made my way to the hole. I gripped to the side, and looked through.

As soon as I put my head through, I felt a change wash over me. The pressure increased all at once, becoming so intense that I screamed in surprise and pain, as my head erupted in agony. The pressure was upon my whole body now, and I was finding it hard to move with the crushing weight on every part of me. My eyes bulged as I stared forward, and I saw two things.

The first was that below the hole there was no seafloor, just a deep and endless expanse of empty water, as though the boat were on a cliff edge.

The second was that it was far, far too dark. The deepest that humans can survive in the ocean is the mesopelagic zone, which begins roughly six hundred and fifty feet below the surface. It is colloquially known, among oceanographers, as the Twilight Zone, as it is the level where only the faintest of light penetrates from the sun, and the water can only be seen in the many shades of darkness. Down that far, any glow that makes it is so diffused as to be utterly useless in determining which way is up. But as I stared out in terror, I was absolutely sure that there was no up. That I could swim as far as I liked – there would never be anything but water.

Then I saw it.

It was only a shadow in the dark, but it was there. And it was huge. It stretched from one side of my vision to the other, and as I fought against the pressure to turn my aching head, I still couldn’t see the end of it. Only its blurred outline was slightly better-contrasted against the lighter shade of the twilight water that surrounded it.

I could not see the ends of it. It was so big it made me lightheaded to think about it, to try and place myself in some believable scale against it.

I think it was a hand, but I could not see enough to be sure. Then it moved, slowly but clearly, and I realized how far away it still was, as it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and I could see nothing else, and I screamed.

It was the jagged metal of the hole itself that saved me in the end. As I cried out in horror, I felt the sharp edges of it digging into my hands as they gripped it, and the unexpected burst of pain snapped me out of whatever it was that held me in place. With a surge of strength, I pushed myself back into the boat, and I felt the pressure lift all at once.

Of course, this brought its own set of problems, but I didn’t care. The lightheadedness was already setting in, and my vision was blurry when I swam out of the sunken ship and headed towards the surface at full speed, ignoring all decompression procedures. I blacked out thirty feet from the surface.

I have vague memories of the trip back: fading in and out of consciousness, feeling the worst I have ever felt in my life. Then I recall a helicopter, shouting, and finally waking up fully in a hospital bed. Captain Kemp was there, and he immediately laid into me, calling me all sorts of horrendous names before informing me exactly how serious my condition had been, and how lucky I was to be alive. I should be dead, he told me. And I know he was right.

I left the company soon afterwards. I still plan to go back someday, but it’ll be a while longer before I’m comfortable in the water again.

Julio never came to visit me in-hospital, and I was unable to get in contact with him after I was discharged. I hope he’s all right.

I did ask Captain Kemp what happened to the job after I left, as I also hadn’t seen the old man since that morning. The captain got a strange look in his eyes then, and gazed out of the window with a scowl I had never seen on his face before.

“The sea is a dangerous place,” he said, and walked away.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

No real follow-up can be made to this statement, as it all took place in Canadian territory. We don’t have the contacts over there that we do here. Not to mention that what little I could glean appears to be a mass of overlapping and conflicting police, coast guard, and port authority reports. We could spend years trying to unravel this one case, if we had a mind to – and I for one do not.

We weren’t even able to glean sufficient information to track down any of those mentioned in the statement aside from Captain Morten Kemp, who now runs boat tours near Winnipeg, and declined to comment on it in the strongest possible terms.

Instead, I will focus on Simon Fairchild, who I recall may have come up in Case 0022010, along with a young woman. I may have encountered Fairchild before, or it may just be a coincidence of names. One of my first cases as a researcher for the Institute in 2012 was looking into the history of a jewelers’ in Hackney that had reported cases becoming cracked in the night. Nothing was ever taken, but each morning it would be like a heavy weight had been dropped upon them. Looking into it, it turned out that the jewels had, in the 1930s, belonged to a con artist and fence who had attracted the displeasure of the local population. When one particularly irate customer threw him out of a fourth floor window into a crowded street at midday, no one claimed to have seen anything.

A minor possible haunting, with a decidedly pedestrian backstory, but notable because, while I was never able to discover the original name of the con artist, one of his many, many aliases was Simon Fairchild, and it appeared on several business listings around the time.

Whether it’s a coincidence or not is something of a moot point at this stage, however. A cursory bit of research reveals the Fairchilds in question to be an exceptionally wealthy family based down in Cornwall. No real business to speak of, but it appears they’ve invested very wisely in aerospace technology, shipping logistics, and underwater drilling and construction.

Whatever their origin, I will be keeping an eye on them.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

I had a strange conversation with Jessica earlier today. I have been… doing some research into her, but there’s little to go on, save that she worked in Artefact Storage.

I decided to pay it a short visit to acquaint myself with any new acquisitions. Not much worth reporting, really: a new oak wardrobe that light is apparently unable to penetrate; a carved rock eye they keep in a black velvet bag – apparently it interferes with the video cameras otherwise – and a rather nasty-looking scalpel that is supposedly rife with the disease no matter what they used to sterilize or disinfect it. That one’s kept in a hermetically sealed plastic box.

I stumbled across Jessica staring at that damn table again. Luckily, I had the wherewithal to bring my tape recorder, and managed to turn it on unnoticed.

Recording follows.

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
[recorded] It’s… fascinating, isn’t it? In the literal sense, I mean.

NOT!JESSICA
[recorded] Yes. Sometimes I – can’t pull myself away from it.

ARCHIVIST
Given recent events, I… I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s a fractal.

NOT!JESSICA
No… no, it isn’t, I’ve always seen it more… like a web?

ARCHIVIST
– I, I guess it has caught us, in its own way.

NOT!JESSICA
I don’t think we’re the first to be caught.

ARCHIVIST
No?

NOT!JESSICA
I believe it caught Graham as well.

ARCHIVIST
I thought that was… I… whatever crawled through his window. Unless you think they’re linked, somehow?

NOT!JESSICA
I doubt it. It didn’t sound like the sort of thing that would want to be bound to an object.

ARCHIVIST
I suppose. And we haven’t seen any long-limbed stalkers, so… let’s concentrate on the table.

NOT!JESSICA
Agreed. If you’ll excuse me?

ARCHIVIST
Fine.

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Odd, but not alarming, though I think I may discuss restricting her access to the table with Carmilla.

Oh – and I found out where she’s been going when she takes extra-long lunch breaks. It seems harmless enough, but I admit I am a bit baffled. Every few days, she travels up to Baker Street, to spend anywhere from ten minutes to a full hour in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Philip Brown, regarding his time working at HMP Wakefield between 1990 and 2002. Original statement given April 9, 2004. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
How much do you know about the prison service?

Not much, I’d bet.

Maybe you’ve seen a few prison movies, think you know a bit about how it is in there. You’ve got to keep face and watch your back, right? After all, you never know who’s got a shiv with your name on it.

Well for a start, you’re probably thinking of American movies about American prisons, and I can’t speak to that. Maybe it is non-stop gang warfare over there. But in my experience, the biggest danger in a prison is, and always will be, boredom.

I say that like it’s some glib observation, but we work hard to keep it as boring as possible. The first hint of violence among the inmates gets smacked down. I worked as a prison officer in Her Majesty’s Prison Wakefield, or “The Monster Mansion”, as the press insists on calling it. It houses the real scum of this country. Class-A dangers, the lot of them, and it was always a point of pride to me that we kept that place quiet.

I mean, I say it like I had any real power, but I was just a grunt keeping an eye on a cage full of wild animals. I won’t even pretend I was proportional in my use of force. I mean, Prison Inspector would have been over that with me already, but the sort of things you have to have done to end up in Wakefield – well.

Let’s just say the suicide attempts far outnumbered the murder attempts. And I never lost any sleep over that fact. Not at any of the inmates, I made sure of that.

After lockup at 7:00 p.m. sharp, I made a point of keeping my wing dark and quiet. It helped that they were single cells, of course – no worries about conversational violence between cellmates. But even then, I was careful to make it very clear that drawing my attention after lights-out was something they would regret. I’ll admit, I was a real bastard when I worked there. Sometimes you need a bastard to keep an eye on the monsters. And back then, I really thought that the murderous filth we were looking after were the closest thing this world had to real monsters.

I was wrong, of course.

I’d been working there for almost five years when Robert Montauk came to us. Now, don’t get me wrong, we’ve had plenty of celebrity criminals passed through Wakefield over the years, but I can’t say it didn’t give me a slight chill to know that we were going to be keeping watch over the most prolific British serial killer of all time. I mean, he killed forty people, that’s a ridiculous number. I mean, maybe not in America, where you have so many places to hide, but his nearest competition in this country barely reached half that, and he used to be a policeman. All told, you had the ingredients for a cocktail of posturing, unrest, and violence among certain quarters of the inmates. He wouldn’t normally have gone to Wakefield, as his crimes had no sexual element to them, but we were the only ones that had space for a prisoner needing that level of security and scrutiny.

He was a big guy. I wasn’t expecting that, to be honest. Usually, with that kind of prisoner, they’ve got your “you’d never know, to look at them” sort of feeling, but Montauk looked like a killer. He must have been almost six foot six and built like a barge. His dark hair was cropped close to his scalp, showing off a flat, angular face. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the man was terrifying. When he entered the rec room for the first time, I could almost hear the deflating egos as a dozen would-be hoodlums thought better of trying to make a reputation by standing up to Robert Montauk.

Of course, there’s always one, and in this case, it was Ivan Ilich, an aspiring Serbian gangster who decided to go after him, jumping him from the side. Me and the other wardens had been waiting for something like this, but we were too slow to get there in time. Well, maybe we could have gone faster, but forty murders… sometimes you want a look at what you’re up against.

Ilich was not a small man, and nearly matched Montauk in height, if not in weight, but there was an energy to Montauk – a tightness, like a rubber band about to snap. Ilich leapt forward with a shout and delivered a solid punch right into the other man’s kidneys, but it was as though he’d hit the pressure pad on a bear trap. With terrifying speed the hands snapped round, gripping the Serbian’s right arm.

There was a half moment of complete silence as everyone seemed to be holding their breath to see what Robert Montauk did next. He brought his hands around with a violent twist, cleanly dislocating his assailant’s arm with a nasty pop, replacing the silence with a scream and a string of Slavic curse words. At this point, me and the other screws broke it up. I got the unenviable task of taking the still-cursing Ivan Ilich own to get his arm treated.

I didn’t see Montauk again for some time. After that little incident, he was immediately transferred over to F-block, where he wasn’t going to be a danger to anyone but himself. I’d occasionally hear rumors about him filtering through the other inmates, and there wasn’t a spooky story in Wakefield that didn’t have him at the center of it. Barely a week went by without some loudmouth nobody spreading word that he’d killed the guard, or escaped, or been found dead in his cell with his heart ripped out. It was never true, of course. Not at that point. I think most of it came from Dave Harrington on F-wing. He always loved to drop the fake gossip on new inmates, and the old hands knew not to trust a word he said.

It was 1998 when –

[DOOR OPENS]
ARCHIVIST
Hello?

IVY
Hey, I just wanted to –

ARCHIVIST
Oh, hold on.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Sorry, can’t be too careful. Accidentally mentioned you won one of my earlier official recordings, and had to go back over it.

IVY
Oh, sure. I’ve got another tape for you.

ARCHIVIST
Fantastic. Here’s the other one.

IVY
Was there anything on it?

ARCHIVIST
Oh, very much so. A Russian circus that – oh. But, uh, nothing relevant to Gertrude’s murder if that’s what you mean.

IVY
That is what I mean.

ARCHIVIST
Right.

Have you had a chance to listen to any of them yourself?

IVY
Well the precinct has exactly one tape player, and it exploded when I tried to put batteries in it. Put in a requisition for a new one, but that’s lost somewhere in the Met, and I haven’t had a chance to chase it up, so no.

ARCHIVIST
Well, if you keep bringing them to me –

IVY
It’s better than nothing, yeah. Anyway, I thought you could try this one next.

ARCHIVIST
Alexandria is it Your?

IVY
No, at least this one actually has a label. I figured you’re probably into old libraries and stuff –

ARCHIVIST
No, you’re right. Thank you, Ivy. Honest.

IVY
Yeah. Oh, what’s the name of that helper of yours?

ARCHIVIST
Uh, Tim.

IVY
No, no – the hot one. She has scars like you, but kind of manages to pull them off –

ARCHIVIST
Yes, Nastya.

IVY
Yeah, what’s his deal? He gave me the weirdest grin when I came in just now and like… the thumbs up?

ARCHIVIST
I… I wouldn’t worry about it.

IVY
No?

ARCHIVIST
[sigh] …he thinks we’re sort of… together?

IVY
Oh – Oh. Oh, no. You know I’m alrea–

ARCHIVIST
Yeah I know, me neither, she just got it in his head –

IVY
– I mean you’re nice and all –

ARCHIVIST
– yes – yes, no, I feel the same way.

IVY
Right. I mean, I suppose it’s better she think that?

ARCHIVIST
[sigh] I won’t tell if you want.

IVY
Right. I’m… gonna go then.

ARCHIVIST
Yes. Yes.

[DOOR SHUTS]
Right. [clears throat] Statement resumes.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
It was in 1998 that I next came into regular contact with Robert Montauk. The government had commissioned the construction of Close Supervision Centers in prisons all over the country, and Wakefield was one of the flagship initiatives. A good portion of F-wing was given over to our own CSC, soon to be known as the Exceptional Risk Unit. It could only hold eight prisoners, but they were to be the worst of the worst, kept under constant scrutiny and given no chance to harm anyone.

I was picked to be one of the officers transferred into the new unit. I don’t know if it was specifically because I had more inmate altercations on my record than any other prison officer at Wakefield, but given the intensity of the setup, I’m sure it didn’t hurt my application.

Robert Montauk was an obvious choice for the Exceptional Risk Unit. During his time in Wakefield, he had been involved in several further violent incidents, and though he hadn’t yet killed anyone inside the prison, the higher-ups reckoned it was only a matter of time, so in he went.

The CSC was not a nice place. Wakefield had had the budget to make it secure, but not to make it anything less than starkly-utilitarian. The individual cells were cramped and claustrophobic, with almost no natural light filtering in from the outside. Oh, they still got their exercise, but it was in bare metal cages.

We kept them separated from each other almost as much as we kept them from the rest of the prison. You must never underestimate how violent and desperate a trapped animal can become.

We were cruel to them – I’m not ashamed of that. If I were to tell you all the crimes of those monsters we kept in the ERU, you’d probably lose your lunch before I was halfway through the list. Keeping them beat down was the only way to make sure they behaved. And besides, atonement is important.

I’ll admit though, I always had a soft spot for Robert Montauk. He never gave us any trouble. Away from the other prisoners he seemed too docile, almost eerily so sometimes.

Also – and it’s a small thing – but he never denied his crimes. Wakefield is one of those prisons where everyone is innocent, and it gets so dull to hear their whining protestations day after day. Anyone who fully owned their crimes always went up in my estimation. I mean, we still beat him down on occasion, but not as bad as the others. After a year or two, I kind of started to forget who he was, you know? The mystique of being Britain’s most successful serial killer just didn’t hold up when you have someone in your power like that. You forget any respect you might have had for them. And he never gave us any trouble.

In 2001 he started to get visitors – his daughter, mostly. Given that she hadn’t visited before, I’d guess she’d just turned 18. You get that a lot. Unaccompanied visits aren’t allowed under that age, and plenty of inmates have kids living with overprotective guardians who refused to take them. So I assumed she was similar.

The visitor rooms in the main prison are quite nice – not so much in the Exceptional Risk Unit. The dark, bare room, like all of them, cut down the middle with a reinforced window. There were plenty of lights in there, but somehow it always seemed gloomy. I was on observation for a few of their father-daughter visits. She would talk about her life like her dad wasn’t a murderer, he would lie about how it wasn’t too bad in the prison. It was all very touching, I’m sure.

Aside from his daughter, there was only one other time that he had a visitor. It was six months before he died, late March 2002. He was an older guy, I’d guess late fifties, wearing a well-tailored black suit and an expression of disgust. When I brought Montauk in, his face fell and he went very pale. I’d helped folks beat Robert Montauk a dozen times or more, but I had never seen him look scared.

He sat down opposite the old man, and they looked each other in the eye through the thick glass. I think the visitor might have been blind. His eyes were cloudy, but he had no cane or dog, and it didn’t seem to affect how he looked at Montauk.

Neither of them spoke.

The seconds turned into minutes and still they didn’t say a word. They just sat there, staring. Given where I work, it’s really something to be able to say that I’ve never seen two people who hated each other as much as Robert Montauk and that old man.

After a few minutes, I was all but ready to drag him out, but as I stepped forward, the lights blew, all of them at once, leaving us in the dark.

I heard Pete Gordo, the warden with me on visitor duty, fumbling for the handle on the door, to get help or torches.

I was tense, ready to fight off Montauk if he decided to make a move, but instead a soft voice came from out of the darkness. I didn’t recognize it, but I thought it sounded like it came from the old man. I don’t think he was talking to me.

“You didn’t think you could kill it for long, did you?”

That’s what it said.

Then Pete got the door open, and a shaft of light poured in from the corridor.

I could once again see Montauk and the old man, sat there, motionless. It didn’t seem like they’d moved an inch. Though, as I went to take Montauk back to his cell, I noticed that he was crying. I didn’t mention it. I’ll be honest, I was kind of freaked out by the whole thing.

The next few months were quiet. Montauk seemed even more subdued than normal, and often had to be goaded into exercising during his allotted time. The only point where he seemed normal was when his daughter came for her visits, and maybe that was just because he was already so used to lying to her.

That was the summer we had all the plumbing problems in the ERU, and the water kept going foul, so we were all kind of on edge. But nothing really happened until it turned to autumn and November rolled around. It was November the 1st. I remember because the date was read out so many damn times at the assorted disciplinaries that followed.

The worst part of it is, I wasn’t even doing anything wrong that day. I was working the late shift with Pete, and we were having coffee in the break room. At least, I was having coffee. Pete was swearing at the taps, because the plumbing problem we had all had been assured was fixed was back and worse than ever. The taps were disgorging a jet of foul-smelling, stagnant water. I was laughing at him, sipping my own perfectly adequate drink, when all the lights went off.

It was more widespread than last time, though. It seemed like the electricity had gone off altogether. We stood there in the pitch-black, waiting for the generator to kick in, or for whatever power problem this was to be fixed. But after a few minutes of silence and darkness, it became clear that that wasn’t happening anytime soon.

In the distance, we could hear the prisoners of the Exceptional Risk Unit start to shout and holler. Their cells were locked, of course – there was nothing a power cut could do about that. But it was still up to us to keep order until the lights came back.

I had hoped that the other prison officers on shift would have come by to pick us up, but they were clearly busy elsewhere. I called out to Pete, making sure he was still nearby as I fumbled in the locker for my torch. I finally found it and turned it on. The beam was so bright in the oppressive darkness that I had to blink away tears. Using the light from mine, Pete found his own flashlight, and together we headed out into the CSC.

We checked each cell in turn, lying to the prisoners inside about when the power would be back and sending them back to their beds with threats of violence. I didn’t see any of the other wardens around, and was starting to get really nervous. When we had checked all the other cells, we went towards Robert Montauk’s.

The torch beams shot out in front of us, but as they fell upon the door to his cell, something was wrong. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at for a second, and then I realized that his cell door was open, but the torch light wasn’t reaching the inside. As it hit the threshold, it just stopped, a clear and distinct line of darkness beyond which nothing could be seen.

From inside there came the wet sound of tearing and a low moan of pain.

I wanted to run, but instead I took a step forward. My torch died. Pete’s went off as well, and we just stood there, terrified, unable to see a thing. The sounds were no longer coming from inside the cell, and that didn’t really as much as it might have.

About fifteen feet behind me, I heard Pete fumbling around, calling out my name. I was about to reply, tell him to stay where he was, when I heard something that froze my blood.

Pete said, “There you are.” He was not touching me.

Almost immediately, there was a growl from the darkness. It was throaty in a roar, but at the same time sounded almost musical. He screamed. I heard him fall to the floor.

It was at that moment that the lights came back on. We were alone.

I ran to do a quick circuit of the CSC that the other prison officers arrived, but there was no one else there. Apparently, there’d been some problems with the doors, and they hadn’t been able to get to the main ERU cells. Pete was on the ground when I returned, though he seemed physically unharmed. It was one of the other wardens that found what was left of Robert Montauk.

I took the fall for it. They didn’t try to make out like I had killed him, just that it had happened on my watch and due to my negligence. They’d been trying to push me out ever since the Prison Inspector had written the CSC up for excessive use of force the year before. They really threw the book at me. “Gross incompetence.” It’s a bitter phrase to say out loud. What was I supposed to tell them, a monster made of darkness murdered him?

Pete was no help. He handed in his notice two hours after the lights came back on. I didn’t even get a chance to speak to him, ask what had happened – he was just gone.

I don’t really have anything more to say about it. It was a clearly-paranormal incident that led to the end of my career and it’s not fair.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Prison records are very hard to acquire for the Close Supervision Center, due to the small number of inmates held there. Most information could be considered “identifying,” so the prison service tends to hide behind data protection laws when asked about them. Beyond that, many of the prison records from before the mid-2000s have still not been digitized, making followup on this hard.

Nastya hit something of a dead end trying to look up Pete Gordo, though Jessica did manage to track down the 2002 visitor logs for the whole of Wakefield prison. It took some searching, but I managed to find what I believe to be the entry for the visit from Mr. Brown’s mysterious old man. The name given is “Maxwell Rayner.”

Tim hasn’t had much luck tracking down Mr. Brown himself. According to Caroline Brodie, his ex-wife, she left him in 2004 after his dismissal from the prison service pushed him further into alcoholism and he became abusive. She says she got a single letter from him in 2009, asking for reconciliation, but she never replied. Tim says the letter was postmarked from Waterford in Ireland, but he’s been unable to track Mr. Brown any further.

So, what is this thing, if it seems to obstruct Robert Montauk through so much of his life, and what’s its connection to Rayner? Were they summoning it, containing it, worshipping it? Whatever the case, it seems as though Montauk earned its anger.

I feel it might be worthwhile getting a few more torches for the Archive.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

I confronted Jessica about the wax museum. It was just too strange to not mention. I tried to pass it off like I had spotted her accidentally while in the area for other reasons. I doubt she bought it, but she did at least give me an answer. She has a new boyfriend, or so she claims, who works there, and she likes to get lunch with him. It is plausible, and at this stage I feel challenging her to produce said boyfriend would potentially damage what trust remains between us.

No luck with any of my other leads yet, but at least I have another of Gertrude’s tapes. It’s always going to be a shot in the dark with them, but hopefully an informative one. I know the secret to her death is on one of them. It must be.

I just… I hope I don’t have to hear it firsthand.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
GERTRUDE
Are you quite recovered?

WALTER
Yes, I, I think so. Well enough to tell my story, at least.

GERTRUDE
Oh, good.

Sergeant Walter Heller recording, regarding a discovery made near Alexandria during Operation Crusader in November of 1941. Recording date 5th of September, 1997.

Anytime you’re ready.

WALTER
Right. Where do you want me to start?

GERTRUDE
Well, you say you were serving in North Africa when it happened?

WALTER
Yes, I was with the Second Royal Gloucestershire Hussars. We weren’t even meant to be down in Libya, originally, but when the pushback against Rommel started, the whole brigade was reassigned. We were going to help with Operation Crusader. Well, that was fine by me, my brother Frances had died at Arras when the Germans had pushed through the year before. Rommel has been in command there, as well, and I hated him for it. I knew I’d never get to do anything about it, but I always used to carry an old picture of him I’d clipped from the newspaper, and I made sure to keep it in my pack so I’d know him if ever I saw him again, or just in case.

Well, there were four of us on the tank crew: Frank Malloy was in command, Ralph McCulloch did the driving, and we had a loader by the name of Dicky. I, well, I’m afraid I don’t remember his second name; he wasn’t with us very long. I was the gunner. I’ve always had good eyes, you see, and you really need that for the gun. It’s all very well for Frank to point at a speck on horizon and give us the order to fire, but I’m the one that needs to line up the shot close to a mile away, and turn a Nazi tank into a smouldering brick before they can do the same to us.

I was good at it. Though I managed to get three M13/40s when the fighting started. I would have liked to have a crack at the Panzer, but it was the Italians who caught up with us at Bir el Gubi, so I never had a chance. Maybe it was just as well, by all accounts, the Germans had a lot more training, so maybe it would have gone even worse for us. But I still hated having to waste time on the Italians, when I knew Rommel and his Panzers were out there in the desert somewhere.

It was all a bit of a mess, to be honest, that battle. Our air support were meant to have bombed their airfields to rubble, but weather had kept them grounded, so we were hounded by German planes the whole time. The Italians had unsurprisingly taken a page out of Rommel’s handbook, and they backed up their tanks with heavier infantry support, while we were left almost entirely on our own.

Frank took to the machine-gun when he could keep it pinned down, but it was hard enough to keep our eyes on the enemy tanks without constantly having to worry about a Panzerfaust coming out of you from nowhere. We were still in the Crusader Mark 1s back then, so we had the speed to keep ahead of them, but I was basically useless when we were driving. Any time we stopped long enough for me to get an eye on an Italian tank, we ended up a sitting duck for their infantry. All told, I think taking down three of them was a pretty good effort.

You know, it was hot that day. I hadn’t been in the desert more than a couple of weeks by then, and the sheer heat of the place was still something of a shock. I’m from Cheltenham, you see, so not exactly used to the blazing sun of a Libyan desert. And a Crusader – well, for all its advantages, it didn’t have very much in the way of ventilation, so we were spending a lot of time trapped in what was more or less a mobile oven. Even then, I could just about stand it, but once the fighting got going and the guns started firing, well. It was only a 2-pounder, but still, the heat was almost unbearable.

It was about two hours into the battle that it happened. The gun was now so hot I couldn’t touch it, and I was having to wipe a steady stream of sweat from my eyes every few seconds. The whole desert seemed to swell and sway in the heat haze, but I clearly heard Frank call an order to fire on a tank from the east.

Ralph brought the Crusader to a stop, and I heard poor Dicky call from inside that we were clear to fire, swearing all the time over his burnt fingers. I could see the dark shape of an Italian gun in the distance, and was trying to get the angle right, but my vision was so hazy from the intense heat that it was hard to focus my binoculars properly.

Then I saw it: a flash of light, a twinkling glint of sun from the enemy tank. In the back of my mind, I knew what it meant: the sun reflecting off their own binoculars, which were trained on us, but my head was so foggy that for all the world it seemed as though they were winking at me. I tried to say something to the rest of the crew, but my mouth was too dry, and all that came out was a dull croak. It was strange, but even with the intense sunlight reflecting off that endless expanse of bright desert, I still remember seeing the flash of their gun. I didn’t hear it, though. They always say that don’t they? That you never hear the shot that gets you. Well, I certainly didn’t.

Then I was on the ground with Frank and Ralph standing over me. Ralph was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear it over the intense ringing in my ears. There was the smell of burning metal, and below it, another scent I couldn’t quite place. I tried to sit up, but there was such an intense shooting pain in my left leg as I did so that did I collapsed again.

A few yards away I could hear our Crusader, smoke pouring from the cracked armor. It surprised me how intact she seemed, until I saw the flames creeping up from the hatch. It was then the ringing in my ears faded enough for me to hear it: the screaming from inside the tank. Dicky was still in there. I looked at my companions, and saw in their faces that they heard it too. There was nothing they could have done to save the poor fool, of course. If, if they had trapped him in there, then, then getting to him would have been impossible, and trying would only have got them killed. So I had to lie there and listen to Dicky roast to death. I don’t know how long it took, but it felt like hours.

At some point, there must have been a retreat ordered, as I saw the rest of the Crusaders pulling back. Frank managed to catch the attention of one of them, and the commander agreed to take me back somewhere the medics could get a look at my leg, although there wasn’t room for us all, so they literally strapped me to the top of the tank, and we drove off, leaving Ralph and Frank to make their own way back.

It wasn’t until I tracked Ralph down almost 10 years later that I found they had been captured soon afterwards, and spent the rest of the war in an Italian POW camp. Oh, the way they described it, it had been quite comfortable, but as far as I knew at the time, we were leaving them to their death. If, if I hadn’t been so delirious in the heat and pain, I might have cried. My memory of the trip back is fragmented, and I have only faint impressions of the pain which every vibration of the tank’s engines sent through my injured leg as I passed in and out of consciousness.

Then there was stillness; shouting. I remember a faint prick in my arm, and then a different sort of haze settled over my mind as numbness and sleep spread through my veins. The next thing I recall with any clarity is my hospital bed. I’d been taken over the border, back to Egypt, and had ended up in the British military hospital in Alexandria. When I awoke, it was so quiet that for a minute I had the sudden, panicked thought that I might be deaf. But it was just that after 70 days of hearing the roar of one engine or another, the peace of an almost empty hospital was so deep and serene that I couldn’t understand it.

When she came round, the nurse was kind enough to inform me that I was one of the first wounded to have returned from Bir el Gubi, but they expected more. Sure enough, over the next few days the ward filled up and my peace slipped away beneath the steady stream of injured soldiers. I didn’t mind too much, as it was still a damn sight better than rolling over the boiling desert in an iron coffin. Not to mention the fact that it turned out I wasn’t going to lose the leg, which is the sort of news to put you in a very good mood. The doctors told me I’d probably always have a limp, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, but it wasn’t infected, and there wasn’t the nerve damage they had been afraid of, so all told it was a pretty good wound to get.

After a few weeks, I was walking on without too much pain, and the nurses advised me to start taking the occasional walk around Alexandria. I did so, but between the locals and the army, it was a crowded noisy place, even at night. I took to taking my walks further and further from the hospital and the city centre, and occasionally I’d find myself wondering some way beyond the city limits – at least, as far as my leg would allow. It was still hot, even in late December, but beyond the edge of the city there was a peaceful quiet that I just couldn’t find anywhere else.

It was two days before I was due to return to active duty that it happened. I’d been restless all week, and I couldn’t seem to settle down or focus on anything. Once I got out near Pompey’s Pillar, the crowd seemed to disperse and my mind finally cleared a bit.

I kept walking, though not paying any real attention to my surroundings, until I found myself rather lost. After several hours my leg was starting to ache badly and I took a moment or two to rest against a nearby door. The wood of the door was old and dry, and creaked as I put my weight against it. I didn’t even notice it buckling ‘till it was too late. The next thing I knew I was lying face down a dingy basement, my leg screaming in fresh pain.

It wasn’t broken again, which was a relief, but I still had to sit there for a while recovering from my fall. And nobody seemed to have noticed what had happened, or at least they didn’t care, and I took a few moments to look exactly where I was.

The basement looked old, really old. I’m not an expert on Egyptian architecture, but it didn’t look much like the rest of Alexandria. More than that, aside from the now-broken door, there didn’t seem to be any entrance of the place or anything connecting it to the building above. It was dry and cool, and there didn’t seem to be anything else of note, except for an old grate made of brass, or maybe bronze, that I assumed led to the city’s sewer system.

It was as I finally, painfully dragged myself to my feet that I saw it. From somewhere far beyond the grate, as the setting sun fell on it, came the glint of something round and white. It was only for a second, and if I hadn’t spent so long training to spot objects that distance I probably wouldn’t have noticed it, but there was definitely something there.

I approached the metal grate expecting to smell the sewer beyond, but instead there came the scent of something else. All that, at that point I had no idea what it was but I would have described it as not unlike wood. I tested the grate and found it came away easily from the floor, leaving a hole large enough to climb through without any problems.

I had taken to keeping a torch on me on my walks, as I sometimes had a tendency to wander too far, and so I’d be walking back in the dark. Shining it into the now-open hole revealed what looked like an old tunnel. Whether it was man-made, a naturally-occurring cave, or somewhere in between I couldn’t say, but it was easily big enough for me to walk down. And once again I saw that glint of pale white a long way down, so I went in.

It was slow going, as my leg was still weak and the floor of the tunnel was not level. I had to crouch at points and place my hands upon the dusty walls for support. After a few minutes I was deep enough that my torch was the only source of light, and the passage began to open up into what seemed to be a large room.

It was there, in a small alcove carved into the wall, that I saw what had caught the light. It was an old papyrus scroll lying amongst the shattered remnants of this case. I cast my torch around and saw more shelves carved into the walls of the chamber, each of which housed a scroll of its own. They were written in a language I didn’t recognize, but they were old and they smelled of age and dry decay.

It wasn’t the only room like that, there were dozens of chambers like it, all of different shapes and sizes connected like a warren. Some were empty, others still had a handful of old scrolls left in alcoves or fallen to the floor. It looked like the place had been looted long, long a time ago.

After checking through few rooms I was sure that whatever this was, it must have been a huge archeological find. I really didn’t know who to tell about it, but I knew I needed to tell somebody. As I turned to head back towards the entrance, my torch beam fell upon something dark in an adjoining room.

It was a body. From the looks of it, the corpse had endured a long, long time and the dry air had almost mummified it, leaving a desiccated skin stretched tight over the bony frame. It wore what looked to be the remains of chainmail and a black Karloff Tabard with a pointed white cross emblazoned on the chest. A broken sword lay nearby, now rusted almost into nothing, and as I gazed at the dead man’s face I couldn’t stop a chill running down my spine. I tried to tell myself that it was just the way the skull had warped over the years that made him look like he was screaming. His eyes were gone, but rather than simply decaying into nothingness, there were ragged scratches around the edge of the socket, leaving messy, hollow pits.

I was feeling very afraid now and had just turned around to leave when my torch abruptly turned off. It was the strangest thing. It should have been pitch dark. Though there was no light at all filtering through into those underground caverns, but it still – I could see everything. Every detail of the shriveled corpse before me was as clear as day. There was no light to see it, I can’t explain it, even really describe how it felt, but it was absolute darkness and I could still see. At the same time I suddenly got the most intense feeling of being watched, like a thousand eyes turned to me at once.

I froze. From somewhere deeper within that strange, ancient library there was a sound of movement. The rustling of cloth, and a slow rhythmic step coming toward me. I started to back away towards the tunnel that had brought me there, but it was hard. The sense of being watched was getting stronger, an almost physical weight that seemed to drag me down.

I reached the mouth of the tunnel just as a figure came into view. It wore what looked like the remains of an ancient robe, and in the darkness I could see long spindly fingers stretching, probing toward me. From within its huge, flowing hood I could see nothing except a single lidless eye. I don’t know at what point I started screaming, but I know I didn’t stop until I was restrained by military police fleeing through the streets of Alexandria in the early hours of the morning. I spent another month there undergoing psychiatric evaluation before being discharged.

GERTRUDE
I see. Did you ever locate that basement again?

WALTER
Well, I wanted to, but I was supervised the rest of my time in Alexandria.

GERTRUDE
Did you tell any of your superiors about it?

WALTER
No. I was half convinced I’d dreamt the whole thing up.

GERTRUDE
And did you replace the grate?

WALTER
[stammering] The what?

GERTRUDE
The bronze grate over the entrance to the archive. Did you replace it when you fled?

WALTER
Oh yeah, yes – yes, I think I did.

GERTRUDE
One other thing. That feeling of being watched. Have you ever had it since?

WALTER
Well, I wasn’t sure when to say anything, but yes. I have just now. That funny turn I took on the way down the stairs, I felt it again. All those eyes watching me.

GERTRUDE
Thank you, Walter. Now, I –I need to check some maps with you, but I don’t think we need that on tape. Are you all right here for now?

WALTER
I should be.

GERTRUDE
It’s unlikely to happen, but if anyone else comes down here–

WALTER
I’ll tell them I’m an old friend of yours paying you a visit.

GERTRUDE
Thank you. This statement is off the record and I don’t want anyone to bother you about it further. Let’s keep it between us.

GERTRUDE
Well, that was certainly useful.

It’s taken a long time to track down someone still living who found the Serapeum of Alexandria. It’s not a full confirmation of my theory about ancient iterations of the archive, but I’m certainly feeling validated for pursuing it.

I had been working on the assumption that the great library itself would have fulfilled the function, but it makes a lot more sense that it would have been the Serapeum offshoot. The ruins of the main Serapeum itself near Pompey’s pillar are quite well researched, so this could be the secret caves mentioned in certain accounts of its destruction.

According to Eunapius, the destruction of the Serapeum in 391 AD was conducted by a Christian mob, emboldened by the reforms of Pope Theodosius the First, attempting to drive the worship of other gods from Alexandria. There are other accounts, however, that claimed the scholars barricaded themselves inside with prisoners and retreated to hidden caverns deep below. Some even go so far as to claim the captives were tortured into the worship of pagan deities or offered as blood sacrifices. There’s even one unnamed contemporary historian that describes the mob attacking the Serapeum not as Christians, but using a phrase which roughly translates as “those who sing the night”.

The corpse found by Mr. Heller would seem to be the remains of a hospitaller knight of the order of St. John, at least based on his description of the Tabard, most likely from the sack of Alexandria in 1365 by Peter the First of Cyprus. While generally grouped in with the rest of the Crusades, it’s generally considered to be one of the few such attacks with no religious motivation. Given this discovery, however, I do wonder if there might have been… other reasons.

Regardless, I have further follow-up of my own to do. My biggest concern right now is whatever creature Mr. Heller encountered down there. It was 56 years ago, but if it’s still alive, I should be careful. What was it? A guardian of some sort? Or perhaps… perhaps… it too was once an archivist.

ARCHIVIST
Well, only two tapes so far and already I… I don’t know what to think.

Another archive, an earlier version. Am I just part of a chain? A long, unending string of people who call themselves “the archivist” stretching back to no i am not like them i am important

Are we all destined to end up like Gertrude, just following the same path? I need to find out more about her. One thing’s becoming clear, though. She did not trust the Magnus Institute. Something that I can certainly sympathize–

[DOOR OPENS]
TIM
Was just going down to the cafe, did you want a sandwich?

ARCHIVIST
Er, that depends. Are you are you going to keep hovering around me if I go to the canteen?

TIM
I just worry. You needed five stitches after you “accidentally” stabbed yourself with the bread knife. If you’re still claiming that’s what happened–

ARCHIVIST
I am are you questioning me?.

TIM
– No and then you’ll forgive me for worrying when you use sharp knives.

ARCHIVIST
Fine. I’ll come with. Just give me a second to grab my coat.

TIM
Sure.

[DOOR CLOSES]
ARCHIVIST
Mr. Heller died from a stroke in 2004, making followup on this tape difficult. But I’ve found a news article from March 1998, six months after the statement was taken. It reports an explosion in Alexandria which destroyed several buildings in the vicinity of Pompey’s Pillar and killed 17 people. Official investigation determined it to be a gas mains explosion, but… I wonder.

Gertrude Robinson is not who I thought she was and i somehow dislike her more.

End supplement.

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Alexander Scaplehorn, regarding his evaluation of “The Trophy Room” taxidermists in Barnet.

Original statement given June 23rd, 2013. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I try not to judge on appearances.

I have a certain sympathy with those who find themselves instinctively reviled by those about them. Not simply because I myself am what you might generously describe as “odd-looking”, but because my career has taken me down the path of working for the Inland Revenue, and you should see the way people recoil from you when they find out you work for the taxman.

So I try to have a little bit more depth than that and give everyone a chance, so was with what could be described as an aggressively open mind that I made my way to undertake an inspection of The Trophy Room – a taxidermist’s shop near Woodside Park in Barnet.

I have never been in any way attracted to the idea of taxidermy aside from a few interesting examples in the Natural History Museum, but I was quite certain it didn’t deserve its ghoulish reputation. Of course, I was inspecting it to ensure it wasn’t being used for money laundering purposes, so if it turned out it was involved in criminal activity I would be quite justified in any bad opinion, I might care to indulge, but I didn’t want to be premature

You see, the Trophy Room had been a staple of Woodside Park for some thirty years, but like many niche interest shops, seemed to see little real business. Its taxes were all in order, but there were very few regular customers and most of the money that kept it in the black came from occasional large transactions that seemed somewhat excessive for the items being purchased – all hallmarks of money laundering.

You’d be surprised how many businesses that you pass every day on the street are being used in a similar manner. Those shops that never seem to be open, or who cater to such a specific market you wonder how they can break even. Well, often they can’t without some illicit assistance.

Now I’m not the police, I have no power to arrest anyone revoke any licenses or even issue a fine without a good deal of hassle, that all comes later and from other people. My job is just to discuss their compliances and policies to prevent money laundering and examine their transactions to confirm that they’re not too suspect. I find it fascinating but I am keenly aware that the majority of the people I inspect do not share my opinion.

As soon as I arrived at The Trophy Room I could tell that it was going to take some time.

The shop had that layer of grime that only accumulates after a business has been in place for decades without change, the painted golden letters were now a dirty brown and the edges of the olive green awning were streaked with muck. The stuffed tiger in the window was so faded by the sun that I had to do a double-take to check it wasn’t a lion, so faint with the stripes. Its eyes were glassy and one of its teeth seemed to have broken off.

Even so, there was something about the curve of its mouth that drew me in, and I got so lost looking at it that I quite jumped when the bell above the door sounded its jarring clang.

I looked up to see a surprisingly young man standing there. I had expected some crusty old gamekeeper type judging by the look of the place, but instead this fresh-faced 20-something held out his hand for me to shake. I did so. The hand was firm and very dry.

I asked him if he was the owner, and he said he was, introducing himself as Daniel Rawlings. Apparently the place had belonged to an old friend of his father’s, who didn’t have much in the way of family, and when he passed away a few years before Daniel had inherited it.

I asked him if he was even interested in taxidermy and he just shrugged and gestured me inside.

The smell hit me as soon as I crossed the threshold. It was so thick you could almost taste it, like something had murdered a lily and it was rotting under the floorboards. Dreadful smell. I turned to see Daniel lighting a cigarette as if in acknowledgment of the odor. He just shrugged again and said it was chemicals, casting an eye over the assembled collection of taxidermied wildlife.

It was then that I became aware of them. Hundreds of glassy dead eyes staring at me from all directions. A huge moose in front of me, a shelf full of squirrels along the wall, unmoving ravens attached to an old electric chandelier, and dozens and dozens of fish mounted on plaques or sealed in fake tanks.

Fur, feathers, scales, every manner and type of dead skin surrounded me, each frozen in uncanny stillness as though they were trapped in a world where time had simply stopped. Everything except their eyes of course. Their eyes had never been alive and they all seemed to stare in my direction, so that to look too close at any of them was to gaze into that unseeing glass.

I took a moment to compose myself and try to remember that I had made a decision to not judge the shop or its owner based on the fact that many consider taxidermy unsettling. I could see myself becoming one of these people and I fought very hard against the feeling of wrongness that seemed to be trying to worm itself into my mind.

I forced myself to pay Daniel some vague compliment about the variety of his pieces as he lit another cigarette. I considered mentioning the smoking ban but that wasn’t really why I was there, so I just started talking about money laundering instead.

He nodded and said he’d had the letter announcing the inspection and had got all the accounts and transactions for the past few years ready for me, he explained that as he’d only taken over the business very recently he wasn’t aware of much in the way of anti-money laundering policies or procedures. This was music to my ears, as there’s very little I enjoy more than taking an engaged new business owner through the basics and in a few minutes I’d forgotten all the glassy eyes that seemed to follow me around the room. (At least mostly.)

Daniel seemed remarkably interested when I outlined basic checks in due diligence, but it wasn’t the first time. People, especially new business owners, tend to sit up and take notice when HMRC turns up for a visit. I mean, I try not to exploit my position, but people take a visit from the taxman very seriously and it can produce some wonderfully attentive audiences.

Daniel didn’t seem panicked or worried though, simply intrigued. He asked all the right questions and was always ready with a good example for any of the more abstract aspects of the discussion. All in all he was a real pleasure to discuss money laundering with. I’d even stopped noticing the smell after a while, though I’d become aware of it again whenever he started another cigarette, something that usually happened almost immediately after he finished his last one. I can’t even imagine what his lungs must have looked like.

The only thing there was a touch awkward was that he seemed determined to avoid eye contact, looking at the floor, or the taxidermied animals, but never directly at me. It was a little bit disconcerting, but I have a cousin with autism so it wasn’t an entirely new situation to me.

Eventually the discussion ended and Daniel talked through some of the potential policies he was going to put in place. They actually seemed a bit excessive given that he was the only person currently employed at the Trophy Room, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell him to be less careful.

I then asked if I could have a look at his books, and he nodded again and took me through to the backroom.

The office behind the main shop was small and very clean. Most of the space was taken up by a large oak desk, and I could see another door leading through to what seemed to be a workshop judging by the tables and bags of sawdust.

Daniel handed me his account books, bank records, and receipts and left me to it. None of it had been digitized and I could tell it was going to take me a long time to get through it all. The smell was fainter here though, so it wasn’t quite as dreadful as it might have been.

There was taxidermy in this room as well, though different to the ones out front. Hung along the back walls were pelts and treated animal skins. They looked very old. Some I recognised as a Native American or African in origin, and one seemed so old I was worried to even breathe near it in case it collapsed into dust.

On top of the desk, pressed up against the wall was a mounted hare in a small waistcoat. It reminded me of the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, although its fur was faded and now stained a faint yellow. I found its face a bit more unsettling than the others though I couldn’t tell you why, and I tried not to look too closely at it as I went through the shop’s records.

It didn’t look like there was any money-laundering going on, which was a relief. The prices that people were occasionally paying for the stuffed creatures were very high, but I’m by no means an expert on the industry and there didn’t seem to be anything else suspicious in the books.

I did wonder the sort of people he was selling to though.

From the back room I watched four customers enter over the course of the day. In each case I watched as they got more and more unnerved before finally fleeing back out the door, trying to rationalize their fear. I sympathized.

It was almost closing time when Daniel came back to check on me. I gave him the good news. He didn’t seem particularly relieved but told me he was glad to hear it. Then he laughed and asked if I knew how honored I was. I didn’t understand.

He told me that I was sat here among some of the oldest skin in the world. That was how he phrased it. It put me a bit on edge and I cast a nervous glance towards the workshop before reminding myself that I was keeping an open mind about his strange profession.

Daniel started to go through the pieces on display. Buffalo skin from North America, jaguar from the South, a wolf pelt from the early Middle Ages. The hare, he said, had been part of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and it helped drive Victorian England mad for the craft.

I didn’t like the emphasis he put on “mad” when he said that.

Finally he pointed to the oldest of the pelts. He told me it was gorilla skin from Carthage, brought by Hanno in the 5th century BC, and it might just be the oldest piece of taxidermy in the world.

To be honest I didn’t believe him. Even if a gorilla’s hide could be preserved for more than two millennia, it seemed an unlikely thing to be found in the back of a shop in Barnet. It was clearly very old though, and I didn’t challenge him on it.

I was just about to make my excuses and go when the bell rang out at the front of the shop, and a pair of obnoxious Cockney voices started to call out for Daniel. His face went blank at this and he asked me to excuse him one second, abruptly leaving me in the back room alone.

I heard the men say something about unloading a van and then the bell rang again, taking Daniel with it. I was alone.

I was just packing up and making some final notes for my report when I heard something. It was muffled but definitely seemed to be words. It sounded like it was coming from beneath the floor. I looked and saw a ring pull connected to a small door I hadn’t noticed, which I assumed led to a basement.

The sound came again. I cast a look into the main shop to see if Daniel had returned, but it was quiet.

I knew opening the door was a stupid thing to do. I can’t imagine a single scenario where it would have ended well for me, but the whole place was so strange that part of me couldn’t resist seeing how deep the rabbit-hole went, if you’ll pardon the joke.

So I opened the door.

It did indeed have a flight of stairs disappearing down into what seemed to be a basement. If there was a light switch I couldn’t see it. It was impossible to see anything beyond the first dozen steps or so. The light that filtered through from the dim bulb behind me did illuminate one thing though.

A face.

I couldn’t make out any details but it was pale and swayed ever so slightly from side to side. The body below it was shadowed and hidden but it seemed to stare up at me as it moved.

It spoke, the cadence identical to what I had heard through the wooden door.

“We’ve got one down here. Come on, I’ll show you.”

It was so flat, almost mechanical. It felt about as much like genuine speech as the wind flowing through a cracked rock sounds like a flute being played. Which is to say they may sound almost identical, but only one of them is made by a living human. I started to say something, to call out, but my voice died in my throat slightly as the face retreated back into the basement.

“We’ve got one down here. Come on, I’ll show you.”

I turned and walked very briskly into the main shop. I was now fully terrified and could feel the cold sweat dripping off my forehead. In the doorway stood Daniel. He asked if I was alright with a smile that made my stomach drop, and at last he looked me in the eyes.

I recognized the glassy stare. The same eyes that gazed at me from a hundred sawdust filled sockets around the room.

When they all began to move I nearly broke down. If I had, I have no doubt that I would be dead or maybe far worse. Instead I had a sudden rush of adrenaline and charged into Daniel, knocking him sprawling to the floor in surprise. It was like hitting a sandbag.

His two Cockney friends were too slow to grab me before I was off down the road. I may not look it, but I can move it a fair pace when I need to, and I did so for almost an hour before I finally felt safe enough to stop.

I was very lucky, you know. I had the foresight to gather all my notes before I opened the basement door. It meant I didn’t have to return, I could simply write them up a glowing report and never think about it again.

Save for giving you my statement of course. And that’s exactly what I did. After all, whatever all that other stuff was, they weren’t laundering money.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

It was with some trepidation that I made the discovery that the Trophy Room is still in business and still under proprietorship of Daniel Rawlings. It’s the sort of lead we never get in these cases, still active and available for investigation. However, given the events detailed here, I had some very serious reservations about sending anyone to investigate. I may not entirely trust my assistants but I won’t lose them.

Eventually Jessica volunteered. I warned her it might be dangerous but she did seem very keen. It turned out to be rather a letdown in the end.

Sinister as the taxidermy was, there was apparently no figure in the basement, which Rawlings was happy to let her investigate, nor any obvious weirdness to any other aspect of the shop. Rawlings denies any memory of specifically Cockney deliverymen, but I’m sure I don’t need to spell out my suspicions there.

There’s nothing we can prove and if he doesn’t want to talk there’s precious little we can do to change his mind. He also denies being the same Daniel Rawlings who disappeared from Edinburgh in 2006.

He allowed Jessica to take a photograph of him and I’ve been comparing the pictures available for the Daniel Rawlings who disappeared. It’s the strangest thing. They’re different heights, different builds, different shapes to the face, but their hair is identical.

Their eyes on the other hand are not, and I find it hard to credit that they could be the same person. Another dead end.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Supplemental.

I broke into Gertrude’s flat.

I was doing some digging when I discovered that her home had not yet been relet. A quick discussion with the agent confirmed that there were some legal delays due to the manner of her disappearance and death, and she was paid up for the next six months, so they hadn’t yet cleared it out.

So I broke in. It wasn’t easy and the window meant that I didn’t get a lot of time before I heard sirens but I think I got away with it.

I learned a few things from this. Firstly, Gertrude lived a very pathethic existence. There was nothing in the kitchen except teabags, a pot, kettle, and a single mug. Her bed was neatly made and she had a single bookshelf filled with an array of volumes, mostly on history. Judging by the bag I found nearby, I think she must have gotten rid of books once she had read them.

She didn’t own a television, but I did find something that piqued my interest: a laptop charger. There was no sign of the computer that went with it, but the indication that she might have owned one has inserted itself rather high on my priorities list.

Still, her home has given me little information in of itself, though it continues to prove that my impressions of Gertrude could hardly have been less accurate. I’m starting to feel like the only correct assumption I made about her was that she probably liked tea.

Oh, and I looked through a handful of books on her shelf. They were very well taken care of, with the exception that anytime a person’s face was featured on the cover, their eyes had been cut out and very carefully removed.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Say it again, please.

JORDAN
Excuse me?

ARCHIVIST
What you just said, can you say it again, so I have it on tape?

JORDAN
Oh, okay.

“Jane Prentiss is dead.”

ARCHIVIST
You’re sure. Completely.

JORDAN
Yeah. I watched the incineration.

ARCHIVIST
And there were no… complications?

JORDAN
Like… what?

ARCHIVIST
Surviving worms that escaped, uh, movement from the body during incineration, noises from it, like screams or chanting, weird feelings, like a thousand tiny crawling things are moving across your skin?

JORDAN
Wow! No, nothing like that. Just the smell, but, I mean, I’ll get to that.

It went well. Nothing left but the ashes I gave to your friend. Which I shouldn’t have, by the way, so keep it to yourself.

ARCHIVIST
Of course. And thank you.

JORDAN
Sure.

ARCHIVIST
It’s been months, though. Why are you just looking to make your statement now?

JORDAN
It’s not really… it’s not just burning her body. I was also the one that was first called in to deal with the nest in her old apartment.

ARCHIVIST
Oh…

JORDAN
Yeah! But there are a few things I’ve been thinking about, putting some pieces together, and I thought, well, you guys should probably know.

ARCHIVIST
Right. Well, start from the beginning, wherever you feel comfortable. Statement of Jordan Kennedy regarding…?

JORDAN
Several weird things I’ve found while working in pest control.

ARCHIVIST
Statement taken direct from subject, 3rd November, 2016.

Statement begins.

JORDAN (STATEMENT)
I’ve worked as an exterminator for the better part of 10 years now. I should say pest controller, really – the BPCA generally advise against using the e-word. They feel it sounds a bit too unpleasant, harms our public image. I’ve never really minded. I mean, I guess I could say killing things is sort of exerting control over them, but I’ve always felt that trying to sanitize my job is somehow a bit dishonest. Like trying to help people forget that what they’re actually doing is commissioning the deaths of creatures which we’ve deemed too disgusting or unhealthy to live. It needs doing, don’t get me wrong, and I’m happy enough to do it, but it isn’t my job to hold people’s hands and make them feel better about it.

I’ve done places all over London – mainly big commercial buildings where I have to work at night, while all the bankers and the like have gone home. Setting traps, putting down poison boxes, the usual. Residential homes don’t call me out quite as much for rats and mice, especially if it’s a rental place. Most landlords don’t bother paying out for that sort of thing, or try to deal with it themselves.

Get a lot of calls about bedbugs, though. Those little bastards the devil to get rid of, and of course come summer we have to deal with plenty of wasps nests. Sprinkle in a generous handful of cockroaches, ants, and occasionally even birds or foxes, and you have a pretty good idea of what my working life consists of. Pretty normal.

Got my first weird call about five years ago. It was ants – or, so I was told. Down in Bromley. The house itself looked like a pretty standard suburban home. Maybe a bit more rundown than its neighbours, but nothing particularly unusual about that, especially if they were calling me in. There was no car in the driveway, and the blinds were all drawn despite the summer sun. It didn’t look like there was anyone home.

I found out later that it had actually been one of the neighbors that called me in, a woman named Laura Star, but at that point I was still expecting to be met by someone at the house. I knocked on the door, but obviously there was no answer.

Now, I always wear gloves when I’m on the job and when I noticed my hand, I noticed a very faint sheen where the thin leather had touched the wood. It seemed to be some sort of oily residue. I was feeling less comfortable with the job by the second. I couldn’t hear anything from inside, so I knocked again. The woman who hired me had said to let myself in, but I didn’t want to just waltz in unannounced.

After a few seconds of silence, I tried the handle, and sure enough, the door opened. There were no lights on inside, and the place seemed almost completely empty of furniture. I could see faint movement on the wooden floor as I looked around for the light switch. I found it quickly enough, and flicked it on to reveal exactly what I’d expected. Ants. I just hadn’t expected that many. And there were so very many of them. To this day I have never seen more ants inside a building at once. There must have been thousands carpeting the floor and swarming over the walls.

I drew my hand back from the light switch as I noticed dozens of them crawling around it. Even the bulb seemed to be covered with them, causing the light in the room to be covered with twitching shadow. The house itself didn’t look much better. Wherever there was a gap in the ants I could see that same oily rot, and I couldn’t escape the idea that the building was somehow sick.

Now, I’ve seen plenty of disgusting things in this job, but I reckon that moment was one of the most intense. I fled briefly back to my van to decide on my next move. Normally, I’d leave out some poison bait for them to take back to their colony, eliminating the problem at its source, but an infestation that bad, well, that doesn’t come from nothing.

I needed to get a sense of exactly what I was dealing with. Even from the road I could see a steady stream flowing out the open door and over the step. I kitted up with pesticide spray and headed in for a closer look. I wouldn’t normally bother using spray on ants, but this wasn’t normal, and the formula I was using works on ants just fine. That said, I didn’t actually see any of them die. I wouldn’t have expected to immediately, anyway, and what was important is that wherever I sprayed, they fled, clearing a path of discolored floor for me to walk.

It was slow going, but I got through most of the ground floor like that, and didn’t see anything except more ants. No people, no furniture, nothing. At least until I reached the kitchen and saw the fridge.

There was nothing else in that kitchen. Even the sink had been removed, leaving just the water pipes sticking out of the wall, like rusty, diseased bones. But up against the far wall stood an old fridge. Its once white-skin was now a jaundiced yellow, and I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it was pulsing ever-so-gently. Thick, black, massive ants swarmed from the crack in its door and I had no doubt that whatever was at the heart of this incredibly unpleasant situation, it was going to be in that fridge.

So, I decided it was probably a good idea to step outside for a cigarette before I opened it. The air outside seemed much fresher as I left the house. I walked a few yards away from the door, so that I wasn’t too close, and then I lit up. It was as I took the first drag that I saw a car pull up to the driveway. It was a small red compact, and the license plate seemed to indicate that it had only been bought the year before. But even so, I could see the rust starting bubble the paint near the edges of the paneling.

I watched as the door opened and a man stepped out. He was tall, maybe six-and-a-half feet, but it was hard to be sure of his shape inside the huge, brown suit he was wearing. He took one look at me, then the sign on the side of my van that read “Kennedy Pest Control,” and his face began to crease with rage.

I took another drag on my cigarette. I was… uneasy about the whole situation, and was waiting to see what the strange-looking man would do. He walked up to me, great strides that brought him close enough that I could see the unhealthy gloss of sweat on his skin. Was everything here sick?

He leaned in far closer than I was comfortable with and demanded to know what I was doing. I told him that the homeowner had hired me to take care of an ant infestation, and I’d been doing a preliminary sweep. He started to shake his head violently, saying that he was the homeowner, that this was his house, and I had no business being there. Well, those weren’t his exact words. What he actually said was that I had no business “applying my vile trade on his property.”

I was about to get out my phone and call the woman who hired me when his hand shot out without warning and grabbed me by the throat. He lifted me off my feet with a strength that terrified me, and I was very glad that, even with the hood down, my protective suit kept my neck covered. I could feel his hand through the thick plastic. It was hot, like he was running some incredibly high fever, and I started to panic.

He held me there, almost a foot off the ground, and my vision began to swim as he squeezed my throat. As I struggled for breath, I flailed for something to fight him off with, and realized I was still holding my lighter. With a the degree of composure that, looking back on it now, still surprises me, I flicked the lighter on, and raised it to just below his arm.

The result was a lot more dramatic than I expected. His loose brown suit sleeve caught almost immediately, and within a few moments, his whole arm was alight. He yelped and dropped me onto the ground. As he began to flail about, trying to stop the fire spreading further across his body I staggered to my van. By then, it didn’t matter who the rightful owner of that house was, I was done with that job.

It was as I was climbing into the van that I smelled it. It is the most disgusting thing I have ever encountered, halfway between sun-cured roadkill, stale sweat, and rotten eggs, with just a hint of burning rubber. And underneath it all is that undefinable scent of sickness. You know, that smell you get when you enter a room where someone’s been ill for several days. No matter what else it smells like, beneath it all there’s that vague but undeniable whiff of disease. That’s what this man smelt like as he desperately tried to extinguish his burning flesh.

I drove away, trying not to gag, and I didn’t look back. I didn’t call the police, either as I felt they might not look too kindly on me setting a man alight, even if he did attack me. I assume he didn’t file a report, either, as no one ever turned up to question me about it.

So, that was the first time I encountered that smell.

ARCHIVIST
I see. And the other time was when you burned Jane Prentiss?

JORDAN (STATEMENT)
Not… just.

I mean, I didn’t actually see her. The incineration was the first time I ever saw her in person. But a couple of years ago, I was called in to deal with the wasp’s nest.

That’s what the landlord had called it on the phone, at least – apparently, it had injured one of his tenants earlier that day, and I was the first pest control service he had called that was free immediately. He didn’t tell me the name of the tenant, though obviously I now know who it was. He didn’t give me any real details on the phone, but he seemed happy to pay the emergency call-out charge, so I bundled up my wasp gear and headed out to Prospero Road.

It was a bit strange to get a call about wasps at that time of year. It was late February or early March, I think, and still quite cold. Still, if it was a warm enough building, they could easily be getting active. Regardless, I made sure to check over the thick suit I used for that sort of job, to make sure there was no weakness or damage. If they were aggressive enough to injure someone, I wasn’t gonna take any chances.

The landlord’s name was Galahad Nolan. He was a tall man with a constant scowl, long brown hair, and a well-chewed cigar. It looked like his denim shirt had once contained quite an athletic build, but it had long since sailed. He looked me up and down as I left my van, and I saw his mouth twist briefly in irritation. Clearly, he wasn’t impressed.

I gave him the usual talk through what was gonna happen, and he nodded absently before pressing the keys to flat four into my hands and pointing me towards it. If I needed anything, he said, he’d be in flat one, where he lived. I advised him and the other tenants to stay out the building while I was dealing with the wasps, but he just grunted and told me again that he’d be in flat one. The other tenants had apparently already left.

I loaded up on insecticide and headed in. It was a lot quieter than I expected. By the time I was outside flat four, I would normally have expected to be hearing the buzzing sound of wasps, but the evening was quiet. I opened the door slowly – no sudden movements that might alarm anything on the other side – but again the flat seemed to be empty.

It looked like there’d been some chaos, though, with books and clothes strewn across the floor, and a shattered TV screen in the corner. I found the ladder up into the loftspace in the center of the bedroom. It was quite small, and climbing in my bulky suit was tricky, but I got up there. Still no wasps, but it was very dark, so I rooted around again until I found the switch to a single bare bulb. The light was very faint, but enough to make out a thick, pulpy lump up against the far wall.

It certainly didn’t look like any wasp’s nest I’d seen before. I mean, the shape was familiar enough, but the texture of the surface was way off. It seemed a lot less papery than would have been normal, and the walls were less… regular, going off at odd angles and making it kind of hard to look away. The whole thing was spongy, pocked with tiny holes, and generally looking very unhealthy indeed. And most disconcerting of all, there were still no wasps.

None of this changed the job I had to do, so I figured I’d start off like any other wasp’s nest and see if it worked. I reached forward, staying as far from this thing as the nozzle would let me, and I pushed it into one of the larger holes. It sank in with almost no resistance at all. I took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger, spraying the insecticide dust deep into the mass.

The effect was immediate. The whole thing started to pulse and spasm, the spongy flesh of it throbbing and bubbling like some sort of vile putty. It began to grow in size, blossoming out and covering the rest of the nozzle, reaching out for me. And then it began to… scream. Not the sound of air escaping, or a buzzing that sounded like screaming, the weird nest thing was letting out a long, warbling cry of anger and pain.

I dropped the pump and was down the ladder so fast I almost fell into the flat below. I could still hear it as I reached the door to the corridor. I threw it open only to be confronted by the face of Galahad Nolan, the landlord, staring at me with a look of disappointment.

He nodded and began to walk down the hall. I followed him, desperate for answers, but he just ignored my questions about what the hell was going on, about what that thing was, and kept walking down the stairs to his own flat. At one point he shook his head and mumbled something about hoping it wouldn’t get this far, but he didn’t seem to be saying it to me.

As soon as the door opened I became aware of how uncomfortably warm flat one was. The air was thick and dry, and made my throat feel a bit scratchy. The landlord continued to ignore my presence, and walked over to an old armchair in the center of the room. As he did so, he started to unbutton his denim shirt.

Moreso than anything else that happened, that was the thing that finally stopped me in confusion. I couldn’t understand what he was doing. As he sat down, his shirt flapped open, and I saw what looked to be an intricate scar on his chest. If I had to guess what it was, I’d have said it looked like a stylized flame, but it also made me think of a face contorted in pain.

Time seemed to move slowly as he reached for the ashtray on the arm of the chair, and picked up a pack of matches. He struck one, and without even looking at me, he gently pressed the small flame to the center of the scar.

His flesh caught fire immediately. The flames spread across his body like rippling water. The armchair caught, then the floor, and then I was running out of the building before the roiling inferno covered me as well. This time, I didn’t drive away. I stood there and I watched it burn until the fire brigade arrived.

It was when the fire hit that attic space at the top floor, where I knew that awful nest still sat. That was when I smelled it: the same grotesque stench that had come from that oily, fevered man three years before.

At the time, I didn’t really connect the two. I was too busy trying to comprehend what had just happened. And when trucks from the ECDC showed up to put me in quarantine, it slipped my mind entirely.

They were surprisingly forthcoming about Jane Prentiss and what had happened, and after an extensive debriefing, they actually offered me a job. Apparently, disease control and pest control often go hand in hand, and I’ve been working for them since. Most of the job’s been mundane – a couple slightly weird, but nothing like those two.

ARCHIVIST
So why make your statement now?

JORDAN
When I helped incinerate her body, I smelled it again. Like before. Took me awhile to piece the two together, but I thought you should know.

ARCHIVIST
Are you saying there might be more out there like her?

JORDAN
God, I hope not. I don’t know. The man from the ant house, he wasn’t like her, not at all.

But that smell when they burned… I think they’re connected, somehow. And that scares me.

ARCHIVIST
Yes… i think it scares me too.

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Mr. Kennedy’s statement has left me somewhat rattled. While I am always glad of any further closure to the case of Jane Prentiss, this seems to come with the rather serious caveat that she might not have been working alone.

No, that, that doesn’t sound right. Jane Prentiss – or whatever this “flesh hive” was that took her – does not seem like the sort of being that would work well with others.

The house in Bromley was torn down last year, but Tim managed to locate the ownership records. It was listed as belonging to John Amherst. The dates aren’t entirely clear as to whether this was just before or just after he apparently took charge of Ivy Meadows Nursing Home, but there can be no doubt that it was the same person. All the ownership records from the ant house lead to dead ends or deactivated bank accounts.

It doesn’t sound like he’s another flesh hive… and yet… No connection, except disease, and insects, and a foul smell when they burn.

Jane Prentiss is dead. But this is a long way from over.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Supplemental.

I… I don’t have much to report, actually. It’s been Halloween week, which means the research department is always inundated with statements. Most of them are patently false, but the volume means that they’ve called in the archive to assist with the overflow.

It’s… been nice, actually. Disproving piles of nonsense felt good, like real work, not just driving myself to distraction with conspiracy theories and paranoia. I even got a good night’s sleep. I don't think i miss those days.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Continued statement of Trevor Herbery, regarding the latter years of his career as a vampire hunter.

Original statement given July 10th, 2010.

Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Note: several pages are missing from the file around the time that he apparently did not die of lung cancer in the institute.

Statement resumes.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
She died in the end.

Sad old thing but she didn’t deserve that. Always wondered what would have happened if I’d gotten there a bit sooner.

Trouble is, once they’ve really got their teeth into you you’re as good as dead even if they don’t drain you. Gushing on the floor or bloating a vampire’s belly doesn’t make much difference to the poor fool bleeding out.

I often wondered if I was mad, you know. I mean, no one else seems to have seen these things, and I found plenty across my life. Perhaps I just got the smell of them.

Like, no one else ever really got away and my early escape from Sylvia MacDonald gave me a sense that could pick them out.

There’s a sharpness to them. They’re hunters. But over the years I’ve become a hunter as well and maybe predators recognize each other. All I know is, these days I can almost smell the blood coming off them.

That’s not to say I can’t be wrong though. I can be very wrong indeed.

I found Alard Dupont in the summer of 1982 and murdered him shortly afterwards. I used the word murder here, where I have not before, because he was the only one I’ve killed I know to have been human.

In most ways I regret his death, but there is a certain comfort to it. If I was just a serial killer with a hallucination I don’t see why my mind wouldn’t have made Dupont vampire as well.

The fact that I was able to kill normal people reassures me that the creatures I hunt are real. Do you understand?

That’s not to say that the death of Alard Dupont wasn’t the result of several extremely bad decisions on my part. In the early 80s, I was deep in the grip of my twin addictions. As I mentioned, after a while the hunt became an addiction of its own. Of the two I have always found heroin the easier one to quit.

Heroin is calm. It’s a small chunk of peace in a world that’s full of nothing but hard edges. It’s hard to put that down permanently, but the hunt…

The hunt is a purpose. It’s not just a way to get through the day, it’s a reason for there to be a day at all.

I tried to give it up for a while after Dupont but it burned in me far deeper than any hitch I got when I was clocking.

Back in ‘82 though those addictions were running pretty much unchecked. It had been several years since I’d last found a vampire and every waking moment I wasn’t high was spent in keen lookout for anything suspicious.

I was in bad shape physically. I’d acquired an infection from injecting between my toes, which would eventually hospitalized me and lead to my losing two of them, though I luckily kept the foot. At that point though it just slowed me to a limp and caused me a reasonable amount of pain.

Perhaps if I’d been faster, able to keep up with Dupont more easily, I would have realized my mistake. Perhaps if my mind hadn’t been so fogged with brown I might have beaten it out, or perhaps if I hadn’t been so dead eager to kill another vampire any of these might have saved him. Maybe even if he’d had a name that didn’t make me think of Dracula.

But none of those things were the case, so dwelling on them is pointless.

I don’t know if Dupont was technically a mute or not. I’ve had no real experience with the condition and he didn’t seem to have any problems with his hearing.

Either way I never saw him speak, which by now I’m sure you know is what I would consider a significant warning sign for vampirism.

A friend of mine I shared a shelter with some weeks before, and who shared a similar weakness for narcotics, had mentioned how amazing it was that his dealer was always able to know exactly what he was after without either of them saying.

In retrospect I should have realized that it didn’t exactly match the vampires I’d met before, who’d never displayed any sort of mind-reading, but I was aching for a killer.

The kid who told me this was a weird one. Must have been about nineteen years old, told everyone his name was Stanley Kubrick. He was always making references to his film career, and I was never able to figure out if it was actually his real name that he happened to share with the director, or if it was just some weird joke he was really committed to.

What struck me about him more than that, though, were the scars on his neck.

I later discovered they were from a dog attack when he was younger, but at the time I was convinced they were connected to Dupont so I found were allowed Dupont made his handovers at Piccadilly Gardens and I started to watch.

He was surprisingly brazen about it – sat there on a park bench for hours smoking or reading some magazine or other. I’ve never seen a vampire read a magazine before, but I had seen them pantomime watching television or reading a book to better blend in, so it didn’t raise any suspicions for me.

Then came the moment that fully convinced me I had to kill Dupont.

As he sat there on the bench two policemen walked past me heading towards him. They took no notice of me, nobody notices a tramp.

But as they walked up the path towards the figure on the bench one of the police nudged his partner and gestured towards him. They clearly considered him suspicious and began to walk over.

As they got close though Dupont looked up and made eye contact with them.

They stopped just for a moment and he nodded gently. The policeman looked at each other, turned, and walked away.

That was all I needed to be sure of what he was.

The idea I have come to since then, that the two police officers were simply on the take and hadn’t immediately recognized him, didn’t occur to me until much later.

It was an overcast day and it seems to me that Dupont was keeping in the shadows just as I thought he would. I kept watching as he made a few more transactions.

I was craving a hit of my own by that point. There was a much more intense rush I was chasing just then and it pushed all thoughts of junk to the back of my mind.

Eventually evening fell and I watched Dupont rise from his bench and make his way down to the town center, keeping downwind of him and sticking to the shadows. Obviously the darkness would be no impediment to him spotting me but I’d learned that, inconspicuous as a homeless man might be, it’s still always best to be seen by as few witnesses as possible.

I figured he was heading towards a nightclub or dance, a favorite haunt of the vampire since the loud music makes their lack of speech that much easier to hide. I was right in as far as he headed towards the Hacienda, one of the loudest clubs in Manchester. It wasn’t as notorious then as it would later become, in fact I think it had only recently opened when all this happened. But even at its worst it would probably have drawn the line at allowing me entrance given the state I was in.

So I watched Dupont head inside, adopting my camouflage of softly asking passersby for change and waited.

It was about two hours later that he emerged, another man following close behind him. I didn’t recognize them, I mean there’s no reason I should have, but Dupont’s new friend was almost as big as he was.

Vampires tend to go for the smaller victims, those less able to defend themselves, should the initial surprise of their attack not be enough. This one really looked like he could take care of himself. Still, as far as I was concerned he had no idea what was about to happen to him. As Mr. Dupont led him down a nearby alley, I hurried after them.

I was quiet as I limped through the rubbish that covered the alleyway and I silently drew my trusty hammer. After a minute they turned in to a doorway and took out a key. The door opened and they both stepped inside.

I had a sudden alarm at the thought of getting locked out and being unable to reach him. Forgetting stealth, I grabbed the door and flung it open. They turned to face me.

I charged him with a cry, slamming the hammer into Dupont’s shoulder and knocking him to the ground with a sickening crack.

I will never forget the moment I heard Alard Dupont scream.

There was such a piercing sound and something I’d never expected. In a moment everything I’d built up in my head over the past couple of days shattered and I felt a sudden panic at what I’d done. What I was doing.

His friend screamed as well and started to run back out the door. I don’t know if he got a good look at me. Given the police never came around to question me I guess not.

Dupont was still screaming, that horrid sound overriding all other thoughts. Blood was streaming from his face where it had hit the ground and I didn’t know what to do. I had to get out of there, but that noise was too much.

I couldn’t focus, couldn’t do anything, so I hit him again. Hard. In the head. And then he was quiet, and everything was horribly still.

He just lay there.

I have never felt anything like the shame and disgust I felt at that moment.

I tried to burn his body more out of habit than anything else, but it didn’t really take and I fled out into the street before the police arrived.

After that I spent over a decade in a very serious spiral. I don’t remember much of it, except that I spent most of it so high that looking back I’m genuinely astounded I never OD’d. I only snapped out of it in ‘96 when a chance encounter with a creature that called itself Hannah Edwards led to my saving a young woman from becoming its dinner.

I won’t bother with details. It was very similar to my hunt for Jane Lewis except that the victim made it out alive this time.

I wonder why it is that I only ever seemed to find them just before they attack. It can’t be that they spent every night feeding, the world would be a bloodbath.

Maybe they just blend in better when they’re not on the hunt and I don’t spot them. Or maybe they hibernate. It’s not a question I think I’ll ever be able to answer, but it does mean that there is always an urgency to the hunts that has for the most part stopped me doing much investigation into them.

Hannah was my fifth confirmed vampire and the last one, assuming I don’t find another before the cancer takes me.

I really considered myself retired, resting after a life spent defending the world from the darkness. Because that’s what I thought it was, you know. Vampires were what lurked in the dark. The only thing that lurked in the dark.

Last year though, just before my diagnosis, I met something that made me rethink this.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that winter is a hard time to be homeless. Doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it, when that first cold wind blows through you it’s like some awful debt coming due.

The last one was really bad. A bunch of the shelters I normally hit up had closed up shop and those that were left tended to fill up fast.

I do pretty okay given I’m a well-known face and all that but I still felt the pressure to scrape enough cash together to secure my spot early. Even then there’d be a couple of times a week that I still ended up in the cold.

My old bones don’t do so well at that these days, so I was keeping quite a close eye on the comings and goings around the night shelters of Manchester, and after a few weeks I started to notice something strange.

Several times at a couple of different shelters I watched one of the sleepers get up in the middle of the night, gather their possessions, and walk out into the freezing streets of the city. To see it happen once would have been strange but to see it happen several times was surreal. I was sober at the time so I couldn’t even pass it off as a trick of the mind.

Even stranger, every time it happened, within 10 minutes a woman would walk in and take their place. It was the same one every time. She must have been about 40, and slender, though her clothes bulged a bit in odd places. Her face was lined from what I could recognize as a hard life and a thin layer of grime matted her hair.

She looked pretty normal for the place, and I could even write off the distant, neutral expression as the sort of trauma all too common among my people. That’s why I didn’t pay her any mind the first time it happened, or the second.

When I noticed it happening a third time I finally started to pay attention, though I didn’t approach her immediately.

I did ask about her the following morning but even the staff didn’t seem to know anything. I decided to keep a lookout and if she turned up again I would confront her.

Well, she did.

It was late January when it happened, about 2:00 in the morning. Just when the night was at its coldest. I saw one of my fellow sleepers get slowly out of bed. His name was Craig, I think. I didn’t know him well, he was a seasonal drifter and we’d only occasionally crossed paths.

Well, he walked out without a sound gathering up his belongings quietly and leaving an empty bed.

I waited wide awake, hand on my knife, breathing steady. Sure enough, a few minutes later, in she walks, no backpack or gear of any sort, and sat on Craig’s bed.

I stood up and walked towards her. As soon as she saw me her posture changed and she became defensive, although the expression on her face and never changed from that blankness.

I started to introduce myself and ask how come she was taking over Craig’s bed when she locked eyes with me, and the weirdest sensation began to flow through me. I wanted to leave. It wasn’t like with a vampire where I would feel like I’d been spoken to, this was just a sudden awareness of my own desire.

I’ve been sober for three years at that point but I felt like I desperately wanted to get high, and I knew that the best place to get some was out in the night.

Looking back I think it might have been my own mind rationalizing the way I felt my will being tugged out of the room, but it was still very powerful. If I hadn’t had a lifetime’s experience identifying and fighting off the effect of the vampire’s gaze I probably would have done it too. But I did, so I stood my ground.

There was a long pause as that woman gazed levelly at me.

Then she broke into a run through the door and out. I followed. Didn’t matter to me whether she was a vampire or not, there was something wrong and I wanted to find out what was going on.

I chased her out into the road. It was cold and still and if anyone saw us they didn’t make a sound.

She ran strangely, more like a spasm, smooth steps, and her arms shifted in weird ways as she moved. I’m not as spry as I once was and my lungs were obviously shot but I managed to keep pace with her.

I could feel it in my blood. It was a hunt and I always felt stronger on a hunt.

Finally I got close enough to grab her by the arm. My fingers locked around her elbow, and then they sort of sunk inside. They didn’t go through the skin or anything but it sort of shifted beneath my fingers like when you squeeze an uncooked sausage.

I could feel movement from inside the arm itself. It wasn’t a vampire but it definitely wasn’t human.

With this other arm it took a wide sweeping swing at me, but I was prepared and ducked below the flailing punch.

I got my knife to try and threaten the thing, maybe get it to answer some questions, but I misjudged the draw and ended up slashing it slightly across its stomach. It wasn’t a deep cut or a long one but apparently it was enough.

A whole body began to shudder as tiny shapes began to stream out of the wound.

Spiders.

Thousands and thousands of spiders.

She opened her mouth at last, as if to scream and more poured out. Tens of thousands of skittering legs and evil little eyes. I screamed and started to back up as the dark shapes pooled around her feet and spread out in a twitching circle.

For a second I was worried they were coming for me but then they just scurried off into the shadows and crevices of nearby buildings, until the street was empty of everything except this woman.

She was still standing upright, but from the open mouth, I could see that her body was completely hollow, save for a few cobwebs that I could just make out under the streetlights.

I ran the hell away and that’s the last creature I encountered.

That’s my whole story. You’re welcome to it.

When I thought it was just vampires about, I might have given you people as miss as a bunch of kooks. But if there’s other stuff around out there… maybe you know more about it than me.

And maybe you could use a bit more information on vampires.

It’s a shame I’m on the way out.

I will miss the hunt.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

[agitated] Well, this is certainly a surprise. Nastya informed me that Mr. Herbert passed away after making his initial statement, so it is rather a shock to find this misfiled addition to his original, even if it is partially incomplete.

What’s more, actually checking the hospital and death records for both London and Manchester, I can’t find any record of Mr. Herbert’s death. Then again, I could find no record of him alive, either, after the date of the statement.

The idea that he could survive six years with untreated late-stage lung cancer is implausible, to say the least, and yet Alard Dupont’s death appears to match the statement in most of the particulars. He had a half dozen convictions against him for various drug charges or violent misdemeanors, but nothing exceptional.

I can’t find any indication of muteness, but aside from that, everything checks out.

As for the spider person, the only proof of its existence seems to be that I am far too unlucky for it to simply be an old tramp hallucination.

I need to have some words with Nastya.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Sit down.

NASTYA
What is–?

ARCHIVIST
Sit!. Why did you lie to me about Trevor?

NASTYA
What?

ARCHIVIST
[agitated] Why did you tell me he was dead?

NASTYA
Sorry, who’s… who’s Trev–

ARCHIVIST
Trevor Herbert. The tramp? The vampire hunter. You told me he died.

NASTYA
[nervously] But I mean he… did. Didn’t he?

ARCHIVIST
Apparently not.

NASTYA
Oh! Sorry.

ARCHIVIST
Sorry?

NASTYA
I mean, I–I didn’t ever actually meet him. I just heard some of the other researchers mentioning it.

ARCHIVIST
[whispered] *What?

NASTYA
Yeah, well, I could’ve sworn they said he died. I mean… maybe they just said he looks like death or something –

ARCHIVIST
[scoffs]

NASTYA
I really thought they said he was dead.

ARCHIVIST
[venomously] So that’s it. Just a misunderstanding.

NASTYA
[stammering] Yes. You seem to be taking this kind of personal–

ARCHIVIST
Because everyone keeps lying to me, Nastya!

[sigh] I need to be more careful.

NASTYA
About what?!

ARCHIVIST
I don’t know. But people are.

[RUSTLING PAPER]

NASTYA
Where did you get that? Have you been going through the bin?

ARCHIVIST
It was in the old document room, just next to where you used to sleep. Your handwriting. “If the others find out I’ve been lying” – lying about what, Nastya?

NASTYA
Look, just forget about it, okay?.

ARCHIVIST
I can’t forget it. Everyone in this place has so many goddamn secrets and I can’t trust a word you say. Not about this and not about Trevor –

NASTYA
Raphaella, just–

[ARCHIVIST SLAMS ON DESK]
ARCHIVIST
[shouting] Nastya!

NASTYA
Okay! Okay! Okay. Just… just… promise you won’t… fire me.

ARCHIVIST
[scoffing] Fire you – fine.

[NASTYA TAKES DEEP BREATH]
NASTYA
I lied on my CV.

ARCHIVIST
…what.

NASTYA
I don’t have a master’s in mechanics. I don’t even have a degree.

I was 17, my mom, She had – She had gone ill and I ended up dropping out of school trying to support her. I tried everything but nowhere was hiring, so I just kind of started to lie on my application, sending them out to just about anywhere.

For some reason my lie about parapsychology got me an interview with Carmilla and – and then a job here. But most of my employment details are made up. I’m only 29.

ARCHIVIST
[slight laugh] Right, I–I… uh… I believe you.

NASTYA
…why are you looking at me like that?

ARCHIVIST
[audibly smiling] Yes, um, I jus… I won’t mention it to Carmilla. Just between us.

NASTYA
[hesitant] So you don’t mind?

ARCHIVIST
I will talk to you later leave.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Carter Chilcott, regarding his time spent in isolation aboard the space station Daedalus in September 2007.

Original statement given April 4, 2009. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
We’re all alone out there.

I know the statistics. How big the universe is, the probabilities and proximities and the promises of other beings out there among the stars, but I’ve been there. There’s nothing. Nothing but empty, uncaring void, lacing dead worlds and dead stars all together like a tapestry of lonely meaninglessness.

Humans have existed for the smallest sliver of a fraction of a moment in the existence of the universe, and we will be extinguished just as quickly. And when we are at last gone forever into the quiet emptiness of death, there will be nothing left but the cold universe.

And nothing shall mark our passing because there is nothing to do so.

Dismiss me if you wish to. Take comfort in your escapist fantasies of aliens and visitors from other worlds, but there’s no proof I can give you beyond the testimony of one who has spent so very long staring into that black and empty infinity and knowing, truly knowing, what it means to be floating and forsaken in an empty universe.

I knew isolation experiments could be rough when I signed up. I’m not some naive fool who thought he’d endure a few quirky side effects for science. No, I’m an astronaut, so I do my research. When I was picked for the project, a long-term isolation study set in conditions of low Earth orbit, I read up on as many previous cases and similar experiments from the past 30 years, familiarizing myself with side effects and likely psychological hurdles.

It was daunting to say the least. I wasn’t keen to experience some of what the previous tests seemed to promise what happened to my mind, but I didn’t feel like I had much choice. I’d had my application to the International Space Station floating in limbo for so long that when a private consortium approached me telling me they’d recently launched Daedalus, a small manned satellite of their own, and needed qualified crew members, I jumped at the chance to go to space at last.

I should have realized that what they meant by “crew member” was “lab monkey”. But to be honest, even after I found this out it didn’t do a lot to dampen my enthusiasm for the project. I was going to space.

There were two other people technically on the crew. I say technically as I never spent any time with them beyond the trip up to the Daedalus. Their names were Yan Kilbride and Manuela Dominguez. I’m sure that they probably did a lot more looking after the station than I ever did, but as far as I was concerned I was the only one up there.

From the chatter I heard before the mission began, each of us had an experiment of our own to be concerned with. But they were also there as a backup in case something went horribly wrong with mine, since the observing scientist simply didn’t have the option of intervening themselves.

I remember the man in charge of my particular project, Conrad Lukas, made a face of rather overstated disgust when he told me I wouldn’t be up there entirely on my own. I got the distinct impression he was one of those people who feel that ethical restrictions do nothing but bind the hands of the true scientist and leave them at the mercy of their subjects’ limitations.

My section of the tiny space station was completely self-contained. There was food, sleeping arrangements, and zero-gravity exercise equipment, all for my personal use. The single entrance to the rest of the satellite was locked and sealed. It could be opened from either side but on my side it required a code. I did have access to the code in case of emergency, but I had way too much riding on the mission to even think about being responsible for its early termination.

I also had one large domed window. It allowed me a decent view of the Earth below, as well as plenty of chance to stare off into space, which I did quite a lot in those early days.

I was told the other astronauts would do their best to avoid that window while doing maintenance or repair work outside. Mission Control had also supplied me with a lot of books and films and other entertainment as, like Conrad had told me at the first briefing, the experiment was into isolation, not boredom. So when I locked that door for the first time, I was feeling in pretty good spirits about the whole thing, to be honest.

I knew I was being monitored. There was a little camera mounted on the wall that kept a beady eye on me. It wasn’t so invasive that I couldn’t get away from it when I wanted to, but for the most part I was happy enough to eat and read and exercise in front of the watchful lens.

Obviously those assessing my progress would never communicate with me directly and they might not even be watching a live feed, so if they had opinions on how I was undertaking my task, I never heard them. Even if my task was just sitting around in a room in space waiting for my mind to break.

I tried not to take too much comfort in the knowledge that there were people watching my every move, as I felt that to find that reassuring would go quite strongly against the spirit of the experiment. I had to really feel alone. That at least it didn’t take too long to set in. I can’t honestly see how strapping yourself in to sleep or drinking your juice with a space foil pack on the straw can have much effect on isolation, but I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up.

I believe some people would have been more disturbed than others by its location orbiting Earth, but it didn’t feel markedly different to me from any of the other isolation studies they conducted over the last few decades. If anything the silent, rolling green and blue of the Earth far below was another source of comfort, in the sure knowledge of the billions of other people making their way through life who had no idea what was right above their heads.

Both of these comforts lasted me almost six weeks. That was when I was aware I should start to experience some of the more distressing side effects.

I’d already passed through listlessness and a bout of insomnia. And I hadn’t been using my exercise machine properly for almost a fortnight, but I still didn’t expect the severity of the hallucinations when they began.

Twice I was woken up by the sound of the door opening, only to find it as tight as it had ever been. Throughout the daytime I would occasionally hear footsteps, which shouldn’t even have been possible in zero gravity. There was also a blackout for about 20 minutes at one point that may or may not have been real. Certainly we didn’t seem to lose power in any other systems except the lights.

So this was all reasonably distressing, but at least it had the advantage of not being unexpected. No, the first warning I got about how bad things were going to get was the spacesuit.

The clocks read it as 14:30 UTC and I was rewatching 28 Days Later, one of the better films that had been provided for my entertainment, when a movement in the window caught my eye. At first I thought it might have been some orbital debris moving past, but then I spotted it, still at the edge of the domed window.

It was a hand. The white bulky gloved hand of someone wearing an EVA suit. It started to float slowly across the window, followed by the rest of the arm, then the torso, ‘till almost the whole suit slowly floating across.

I was excited by the idea of seeing another human being at first, even if it was only brief or might compromise some of the work, but as the suit made its painstaking drift across the space outside, it rotated enough that I could see clearly through the suit’s visor.

There was nobody inside. The floating suit was completely empty.

And I started to suddenly get very scared.

At last it had passed right across and off into the night, the other side, and I stopped to try and calm myself in the face of what had been a deeply strange thing to watch. I managed to do so, but only until I looked again out of that window.

There were no more empty, floating clothes, but I noticed something that for some reason hadn’t dawned on me when watching the empty suit. It was, to put it quite simply, impossible, and I must have approached it from a hundred different angles trying to make sense of it.

The Earth was gone.

At first I assumed it must have been an orientation change, but that didn’t make any sense. The planet below had never been hidden from my position before and if we shifted that radically I would have felt it, I was sure.

But still the fact remained that where the Earth should have been, there was empty, dark space. I must have watched for hours waiting to see the sun. We were definitely still moving, and from what I could tell we still seemed to be moving in some sort of orbit, but without a planet below I have no idea why we kept the same pattern. Regardless, the sun should have been visible sooner or later.

After two days of waiting, I finally accepted the sun and the moon had gone as well.

It wasn’t completely empty out there. Far off in the distance I could still see stars twinkling. Probably long dead, but I knew that there was nothing they could do to save me.

At some point on the first day, I remembered the camera. I focused my attention on it and began to scream and shout for help, in the vain hope that someone might be watching a feed of it and be able to make contact. I cried and begged and pleaded with that camera for almost four hours before I was suddenly struck by a terrifying thought.

I floated over to it and gently took hold of the cables that were fed out from the back into the wall. I followed them along, looking for where they connected the power or broadcasting apparatus. What I found instead were a pair of neatly severed wires.

Transmitting nothing. Powering nothing. Connected to nothing.

The camera had never even been turned on, and had certainly not been transmitting anything to Earth. So what data had they been collecting?

I still have no idea the answer to that question, but I did feel like I gained some small sliver of control back after spending an all-too-brief hour smashing up the camera.

After that, it was time to break out the code and get the door to the rest of the satellite open. I had decided that even if this somehow was simply a really elaborate and convincing trick to examine reactions to certain stimulus in a test environment, it was still far beyond what I had signed up for. One way or another I decided I was getting out of this damned experiment.

I opened the small safe that contained the passcode document and easily broke the seal on its container. I was desperate to get out of that door as soon as possible and took a few moments to memorize it.

E109GHT8.

I can still remember it vividly as I entered that code over and over in an attempt to get that locked door to open. Each time I painstakingly entered it with as much precision as I still had within me, and each time the password field read out what I had apparently typed in:

“No one is coming”

and the door remained closed.

And that was it. I was trapped alone in a tiny room floating in space deserted empty space. I had plenty of food and water so starvation wasn’t a danger, but sometime in the first week the clock stopped working.

With no timepiece and nothing left outside of the sun or moon keeping any sort of time at all became utterly impossible. If I had to guess how long I spent in that strange exile, I would say somewhere between three and six months. But that is based solely on my eating and sleeping patterns, which were largely fueled by despair and that quiet aching terror of being utterly forsaken. I couldn’t even read my books or watch anything as characters seemed dead and lifeless, the emptiness of their artificial existence made plain to me.

The hallucinations stopped. I did not even get the comfort of company in my delusions, though at some point the line between dreaming and reality seemed to blur. I’d be sleeping, strapped into my bed in the middle of the void, or at the same time floating through ancient graveyards, or the open empty sea. They weren’t hallucinations, though they were dreams, even if the cold did seem to seep out of them and into the bones of me.

I spent so long trying to get that door open, but nothing worked. The mechanisms and electronics were not accessible from my side. When I finally stopped trying it was the final abandoning of my hope. That was also when I noticed something else that alarmed me in a very different way.

I did some calculations and realized that my food and water levels did not seem to be depleting. For all the time I had been there, in what I could now only think of as my imprisonment, it did not seem like there had been any significant change in my supplies. No one could be restocking me, because there was no one but me there. The food remained static, then did that mean I could remain trapped in this place for the rest of my life, assuming I even still aged?

I began to very seriously consider the idea that I had died, and this was Hell. Given that worry, the way I finally escaped it could be considered ironic. I starved myself to death. Well, not to death, I suppose, given I’m alive enough to talk to you, but close enough.

I don’t know how long I just floated there strapped into my lonely cocoon of a bed, refusing to eat or drink, waiting for the end. After everything else, I had no guarantee it was even possible for me to die but I had to try. When I finally faded from consciousness for what I hoped was the last time, it was the greatest relief I have ever felt.

I don’t know exactly when I realized I wasn’t dead. There were various moments I faded back into consciousness and I know that I felt the re-entry very hard. But it is difficult to pin down clear thoughts before the hospital.

No one’s really given me an official account of what happened, aside from that it became known I was in serious danger of death, and my colleagues on the Daedalus retrieved me, and managed to keep me alive until the next opportunity to send me back down.

I’m not pushing to know more, not really. I know what happened. And no rational cover story that they could feed me is going to change it.

I haven’t followed up with Conrad and as far as I’m aware he hasn’t made any attempt to contact me. I was paid in full though, which was a surprise.

I wanted to tell someone what really happened for almost a year before I found your Institute. There’s nothing really to be done about it, I wanted to get it off my chest.

So thank you for letting me get it down on paper.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

While there’s plenty of media coverage of the launch of the Daedalus satellite in early 2007 by Stratosphere Group, a consortium of various scientific and aerospace companies, it seems the actual operation of the facility is guarded with a great deal more secrecy by the various organizations involved.

Tim was able to confirm that during its two years of operation it did have a total of three staff on board: Yan Kilbride, Manuela Dominguez, and Mr. Chilcott.

Beyond that, however, there’s little that can be retrieved from beyond the wall of corporate bureaucracy. Nastya was, however, able to get a list of the businesses involved in the venture.

Three names stand out: Pinnacle Aerospace, majority owned by the Fairchild family; a large private investment by Nathaniel Lukas; and Optic Solutions Limited, a relatively benign-seeming company manufacturing specialist cameras for research and industrial application, who are nonetheless notable for having their business address listed as being in Ny Alesund in Norway.

I fear, however, that’s as much digging as I can do at the moment without drawing attention, so it may be wise to let the matter drop.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
NOT!JESSICA
Raphealla?

ARCHIVIST
Yes…

NOT!JESSICA
What are you doing?

ARCHIVIST
Jess – um, I can’t seem to find a new file for the Hill Top Road case. I thought I gave it to you to follow up on the children?

NOT!JESSICA
You did and I gave it back.

ARCHIVIST
Ah, right.

NOT!JESSICA
Even if I hadn’t, I would very much prefer it if you stay out of my desk.

ARCHIVIST
Oh, of course, sorry. I didn’t realize you were still here or I would have asked.

NOT!JESSICA
Of course.

ARCHIVIST
I’ll see if it’s with Nastya then.

NOT!JESSICA
Also, Raphaella. I have asked before.

ARCHIVIST
What?

NOT!JESSICA
Please don’t record our conversations.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Stupid. I thought Jessica had left for the evening. I wanted to have a look in her desk for anything that might shed light on her recent weird behavior. I didn’t get much of a chance, but it all looked normal, except there are a few scraps of torn paper. They could be from files or just torn scrap paper, it’s hard to tell.

I’m at a loss. Why she would want to destroy files, though? Still I think I probably need to back off from Jessica for a while after this. I’ll just keep an eye from a distance for now.

I did find several pictures of her and her new boyfriend, though, which puts my mind somewhat at ease.

Well, mostly. There’s something about him that doesn’t seem quite right. Something about the smile, maybe.

I, I mean they’re all pictures of Jessica and Tom, as I’m told his name is, having fun together, but – it’s hard to put into words, exactly, but every one of them looks somehow like a stock photo a very badly edited stock photo.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Unsigned statement regarding potential cannibalism while attempting to travel the Oregon Trail. Original letter dated November the 10th, 1845. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I have accepted I shall not survive this. The cold bites through my skin and feels as though it cuts into my very soul, and I am so hungry that I can barely stand. But I shall not give in. I can hear him taunting me still. Tempting me. But I shall choose to die rather than take part in such an unholy meal. Nor shall I take my own life, whatever extremity my suffering may reach. I am certain my final reward will come soon, and I shall face my savior with a clear conscience and a heart full of faith. Pastor Lawrence once told me that there are no empty bellies in heaven, and I am sure that he is right.

I wonder if I shall see Benjamin there. I should hope so, for all his faults and his incessant chatter. And together with all those we have lost, I am sure we shall look down upon perdition, and watch Eustace Wick writhing in agony among the well-earned flames.

Speaking of flames, I must apologize about the state of the paper to whoever may be discovering this message. I’m having to write this close to what fire there is, both for light and to stop the ink from freezing. There will likely be some scorching but I should hope it remains legible.

We should never have attempted the Oregon Trail. I see that now. I should have stayed in Savannah and built what life I could, maybe accepted the proposal of Adam Hawthorne. He was a decade my senior, but I heard no complaints from his previous wife while she lived, and it would have been a better fate than to freeze to death in these mountains, listening to Benjamin’s incessant taunting.

But my life before had been hardship and travel, and there was a part of my soul that felt that such a thing was simply my lot. So when my father joined my mother in Heaven not three years after moving us to the small town of Savannah, Missouri, it felt as though moving again was what the good Lord intended for me.

It was then, as I had to choose between trying to scrape a living from 20 acres of Missouri soil that my father had left me, or forge out on my own, that Benjamin Carlisle kindly asked permission to repair his wagon on my land. I will not deny he was a handsome man. Even now, the cold has preserved that pleasing cast of his face, gaunt though he may be. I was somewhat taken with him, but had no further thoughts about it, being somewhat plain in my own appearance. It took me quite aback when I brought a jug of water to his fire that evening, and he asked me directly if there was anywhere in the town of Savannah where he might find a wife.

Well, this seemed to me something of a strange request, though I myself knew little of courting. Benjamin explained that he was set to be travelling up out of some joseph along the Oregon trail towards Willamette Valley, a lush paradise of the frontier. The settlers of Oregon country, he said, had offered land to those who might follow. 320 acres of land for the unmarried, he said, but a married settler could claim 640 acres. That, and the prospect of another pair of hands to help with the work of farming, was a great incentive.

All told, he said, if he was able to find himself a wife before he reached Oregon country, he very much intended to do so. Well, after he told me this, I explained my situation to him, and we were married by Pastor Lawrence the following day. Even now I can’t fully bring myself to regret that part of the events that led me here, and had we reached the Willamette Valley as planned, I believe we would have been far happier than most.

I had few real possessions to pack and little food left, but I took what I could into Benjamin’s wagon. It was late May when we began our trip, and had I known more about the route we were to take, I might have known that this was dangerously late to be starting such an expedition. But I did not.

In many ways, Benjamin was as impulsive in his travel plans as he was in choosing a wife, and it was only after we had been on the road for some time that I realized how ill-prepared he for many of the hardships of the trail. I never asked him exactly where he was from, or why he wished to settle in Oregon. Those few times I broached the subject, he would talk all sorts of circles around it, and I had some inkling that he might have been fleeing trouble back east. I never pressed the matter. I had a lot of gratitude to him for taking me along, sharing his food and his bed with me, and rescuing me, as I saw it, from a life of grief and Missouri dirt.

It became apparent as we traveled the blessings were not entirely one-sided. It turned out I was far more suited to the hardships of the trail than him, and far more skilled at keeping the wagon moving than he was. I nursed him through a fever as we crossed through Colorado, and more than once I even managed to avoid an attack by natives, securing the wagon in small ravine until the war party had passed by. All told, I feel I more than earned my bacon.

I still remember the first time Benjamin saw skulls near our campsite, those travelers before us who had not fared as well as we had. Poor man almost fainted. And I could not help but reflect that, were it not for me, he would likely have joined those poor departed souls. I decided not to share that particular reflection.

We reached the Laramie River and Fort John in October. It was a squalid little fur trading post in Wyoming, with thick wooden walls that were solid enough to keep out any war-minded natives, and there were all the signs that a great many people had recently passed through the place.

The manager, an officious man, who introduced himself as Bruce, told us that we had missed the chance to safely cross the Rockies, that the passes would be snowed up within the month. He said we could winter at Fort John if we had the food and money for it or we could turn round and leave. From his tone of voice, it sounded like he had not much care for which of the options we chose.

We were of course devastated and spent several days discussing our options and trying to make a decision as to the wisest course of action, though we knew that for every hour we spent in such conference our choices became fewer and the consequences sharper.

It was at that point we were approached by a man who introduced himself as Eustace Wick. He was a short, squat figure, broad of shoulder and with the rough, dark skin of one who has spent most of his life under the sun’s unforgiving glare. His long, shaggy beard was shot through with gray, but his eyes sparkled with a cunning and intelligence I would not have expected to see from such an unkempt face. He also possessed one other attribute which surprised me, though in hindsight it takes on a somewhat sinister light – he had in his mouth a full and healthy set of teeth.

Now, Mr. Eustace Wick inquired as to our purpose in Fort John and, speaking far more candidly than I was truly comfortable with, Benjamin explained to him our journey and our dilemma. But at the mention of the words Willamette Valley, the short man’s eyes lit up and a smile practically split his face in two for he was, so he said, the best guide since Sacagawea and could get us through the Rockies long before the snows hit with any force… for a price.

When he said this, he smiled and all the square and shining teeth in his mouth seemed to catch the light.

I was hesitant as I’d met plenty of hucksters and bandits who were keen to pass themselves off as guides and as Benjamin haggled the price my misgivings grew, for Eustace Wick seemed offer little in the way of resistance and we secured his services for only twenty dollars. Plenty of money to be sure, but for the services he was offering and the dangers involved it was practically nothing.

Unfortunately for all my consternation it soon became clear that Benjamin had made up his mind to hire the man. To be fair to him, we did not have the resources to winter in Fort John, and were we to try and make our way back, there was every possibility the weather would still turn deadly on us. We were caught between the devil and the sea, and Benjamin had determined that, guided by Eustace Wick, we were going to try and swim. The poor fool had no idea the devil was the one leading us into the water.

Nobody tried to stop us leaving, though it was clear from the looks upon them they believed us to be dead already. My own hopes were scarce higher, but the little man who now rode with the scaffold and joked as we traveled, keeping Benjamin in higher spirits than I had seen him in months. This began to fade as the cold air began to hit us and the paths through the rockies became steeper and narrower. The journey was hard but we pushed on for almost a week.

Eustace Wick seemed to be as good as his word, keeping us on those trails that the wagon could use without too much danger. The cold robbed us of sleep, though, and after those first days, the once beautiful vistas and rolling peaks of the mountains seemed to become jagged and vile ribs jutting from the carcass of the world and picked clean by vultures.

Benjamin became quiet. I became sullen. Eustace Wick became more aggravatingly jovial than before, and by the time the first snowflakes began to fall he was practically hooting with joy. My suspicions about his motives had begun to freeze into an icicle within my chest, hard and focused.

When we woke up one morning a week and a half into the journey to find one of our wagons wheels smashed and destroyed beyond repair, I could not find it in myself to be surprised. The snow was falling thickly by this point. We had already used all our replacement wheels over the many months of the journey. We were trapped there and we would surely die.

It was then that Eustace Wick appeared standing on a nearby rock that same big grin on his face. He told us that there looked to be a snowstorm coming but he had found a nearby cave where we could wait it out. He didn’t even pretend dismay of the state of the wagon. Benjamin and I followed him, and sure enough, there in the side of the mountain was a shallow but well hidden cave.

It’s hard to say at exactly what point I realized specifically that Eustace Wick was planning to eat us. It may have been that he made no mention of retrieving any food from the wagon when he led us to his den. It could have been the piles of firewood already neatly stacked up against the far wall cut into logs. It might just have been the way he looked at Benjamin with his square white teeth bared an unearthly smile.

But somewhere between the wagon and the cave I became convinced that our so-called guide but lured us up here with no intention short of killing us and eating our flesh. I had no time to communicate this thought to my husband however who still seemed woefully oblivious of the situation, and once we were inside the small cave there was no privacy in which to discuss it.

So I just had to sit there, watching Eustace Wick building a fire as Benjamin tried to suppress his shivers and make conversation with the man who he still did not realize had turned from our guide into our captor. I simply watched and waited as the storm began to descend outside, and the warmth of the fire was quickly overcome by the icy chill of the wind.

Night began to fall. The fire was the only light casting along dancing shadows upon the walls behind us. I could feel hunger gnawing at me and was sure that I was not the only one, but I had a strange thought that the bearded man squatting on the other side of the flames was waiting for someone to mention it, so I refused to do so. My husband of course had no such reservations, and began to bemoan our forgetfulness at leaving what little food we still had in the wagon.

Of this Eustace Wick’s smile, if it were even possible, got wider and he said that we had all the food we needed. He stared into the fire and began to mutter something. It sounded like a prayer. I think he was in his own demented way saying grace.

I remember the words exactly. He locked eyes with Benjamin and said, “Come, meat. Be my guest. And let thy gifts to me be blessed.”

As he said this, a silence fell across the cave. The wind died and the shadows on the wall stopped moving, as though they were watching the scene in rapt attention. Eustace Wick withdrew a long, sharp knife and stalked over to Benjamin, who made no move to defend himself. His eyes were wide, staring at the mad cannibal approaching him with a look of both fear and rapture. The whole scene was so utterly unreal that it took me almost a full second to remember and draw my gun.

All through this journey I had kept my father’s camp locked pistol hidden tucked inside my crinoline. Benjamin knew about it of course, but had obviously never mentioned it to Eustace. Had I had a possibility of reloading it I might have drawn it earlier but with only a single shot, and I a barely passable shooter, I knew that I needed to be sure of my moment.

As it turned out, I left it too late, for even as I placed the barrel to the temple of the foul murderer and pulled the trigger he drew the blade across my husband’s throat. There was a terrific bang, a splash of brain, and a spray of blood. The two men fell dead upon the floor and I found myself alone in the silence of the icy night. I’m sure I need not tell you the tears that I shed that night. Tears that were ice even before they touched the ground. I wept for my beautiful, stupid Benjamin and I wept for my own life, now most certainly lost at the cold and snow, and to hunger.

It was as this last thought passed unbidden through my mind that I heard it. Very faint, calling softly. The sound of Benjamin’s voice.

I called over to him, for a second overjoyed that he might be alive, but as soon as I touched his ice-cold skin already beginning to turn blue I knew that it could not be so. Despite this, his head began to turn towards me and his frozen eyes opened. His lips parted above the gaping red slash across his throat and he spoke.

“Eat me,” he said.

I leapt back, shaking my head, praying the Lord to rid me of these terrible visions, but his voice came again clearer and louder, this time begging me attend to eat him. He told me how good he would taste, better than any salted pork. I could cook him over the fire, he said, and the cold would keep him fresh for as long as I needed. I yelled at him, screamed at him to be quiet, for whatever devil had taken up inside to go back to hell, but it made no difference. Still he pleaded to be eaten.

It has been five days now and Benjamin still entreats me. He taunts and curses me by turns, calls me a coward who would rather die than be part of something greater than myself. The entrance to the cave has all but blocked with snow and even if I were to dig my way out there is nowhere for me to go. I don’t even know where whatever’s left of the wagon would be. I think I might try, though, now I have finished this account of the events that led up to my fate.

I hope whoever finds this does not judge us too harshly. We were simply seeking a better life. I leave this here in the oilskins of Eustace Wick in the hopes it may be protected from the depredations of winter. As for myself, I will try to dig my way out and get as far as I can.

I will not survive, but I hope the Lord understands it is not suicide. It is simply that I can no longer stand to be trapped here, where the corpse of my husband begs me to make it meat.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Certainly a grotesque tale, but I don’t have access to the sort of information required to verify any of the details provided by the unnamed Mrs. Carlisle. There is no record of any Eustace Wick that I could find. There is a Benjamin Carlisle mentioned in the 1838 census of Burke County, North Carolina, but that’s about it.

The prayer apparently spoken by Mr. Wick is a perversion of the old Lutheran grace: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let thy gifts to us be blessed”. There was a noted Lutheran preacher by the name of Horatio Wick that is mentioned briefly in several histories of Massachusetts as rather violently falling out with his colleagues in the church, the Sacrament of the Eucharist, but he apparently drowned in 1832.

What interests me most is how this unsigned letter, if it is to be believed, made its way from an icebound cave in Wyoming or Idaho all the way to the personal collection of Maki Magnus.

End recording.

[MUFFLED VOICES FROM A HALLWAY]
TIM
Look, I tried talking to Carmilla about it. It doesn’t seem to be doing good.

NASTYA
She’s under a lot of pressure. You know how messed up she’s been since Prentiss.

TIM
How messed up she’s been!?

NASTYA
Of course, I’m sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean that you weren’t, just

TIM
No! Because I didn’t start stalking my coworkers.

NASTYA
Maybe we should try talking to her.

TIM
Sure, like she doesn’t already look at me like I’m a murderer.

NASTYA
Look, we just gotta let her work through this. I suggested therapy but she just says no.

TIM
Well, we need to do something.

ARCHIVIST
Yeah, maybe.

The preceding conversation was overheard on the 19th of November, 2016. It reaffirms my current worries about Tim, though does go some way to reassure me that Nastya is unlikely to be the culprit, especially following our earlier conversation.

[sigh] I need to be more careful.

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Ronald Sinclair, regarding his years spent in a teenage halfway house on Hill Top Road, Oxford. Original statement given November 29th, 2005. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I should have come in to tell you people about this before, really. I heard about your institute back in the 80s, and I thought, “should I tell them?” But I didn’t. Thought you’d be all about old castles and ancient cairns, not have any time for weird goings-on in a suburban house in Oxford. And you’re academics as well so probably have more rigorous standards than one crackpot’s horror story.

Still, I saw last week that they were planning to build on that land again. Another house where the old Fielding place used to be. I don’t know, it’s not like you’d have any power to stop the construction, but I just… I needed to tell someone about it. And you were less likely to throw me out on my ear than the Planning Department of Oxford City Council.

You see, I lived with Raymond Fielding for almost three years, and believe me when I say that there is nothing good that can come from disturbing that dreadful place.

I was a bad kid. I’ve cleaned up my act in the 40-odd years since, but back then I was a little thug. Wasn’t entirely my fault – I came from a bad family. My father left before I was born, and I’m not sure how much you know about single motherhood in the late 40s, but it was clearly hard enough that my mother ended up with a serious alcohol problem.

I won’t go into the gory details of my childhood, but let’s just say it’s no surprise I was out of school and in the system before my 13th birthday. They tried a few places to set me straight. Back then these sort of places weren’t quite as enlightened, and the only life lesson I learned worth a damn was how to take a beating.

Finally, when I was 15, after the justice system was finished with me for the third time, I was given the chance to reenter society, and offered a place at a halfway house on Hill Top Road.

It’s weird. I’ve tried to get information on it so many times in the years since, but there’s nothing there. It’s like it never existed. I mean, this was a long way pre-digital, and files got lost plenty, but it still bothers me. The most traumatic thing that ever happened to me, and as far as any official record is concerned, I couldn’t have even been there.

Raymond Fielding was younger than I expected. Every other place, the people in charge had been old, leathery moralists with scowls on their faces and calluses on their knuckles. A lot of ex-military types who would lecture for hours on how their wasted life had been saved by the discipline of the army, and did their best to impose it on us.

Ray, as he insisted we call him, was different. He couldn’t have been much older than 30, and he let his brown hair grow long – not by today’s standards, I suppose, but it would have sent any of the crew-cut authoritarians into a red-faced rage. He was friendly and approachable, but didn’t seem like he was trying to be our friend. He was easygoing and smiled a lot. But there was something in his eyes that made me wary of trying to take advantage of him.

I didn’t like him from the start. The other adults I’d met on my journey through delinquency had been awful, and they’d run the spectrum from drippy, patronizing do-gooders to abusive thugs, but I’d always known. I would know what they were and where I stood with them. Ray was a mystery, and that unsettled me. Still, he wasn’t too strict with our comings and goings, and the other kids staying there seemed all right.

The one thing that surprised me was how rare it was to see anyone come back. Most other halfway houses I’d stayed in, you always had some of the older residents, those who had fallen into even worse criminal company, coming back occasionally, usually to sell drugs or do some recruiting.

Amphetamines were the thing back in the early 60s, so I was surprised when I moved into Hill Top Road and there wasn’t a purple Heart or a black bomber to be found. It didn’t seem like any alumni of Ray’s little family came back for a visit.

At the time, I just assumed it was a pretty nice neighborhood, so probably wasn’t the sort of place my kind – as I thought of it then – made a habit of visiting. I wasn’t wrong. The local residents hated us. We never really got into any proper trouble, but the sort of glares we got just for smoking on the street made me want to break a window sometimes.

I never did, though. I’m… not quite sure why I didn’t. To be honest, before I met Ray, I would have. There were plenty of broken windows in my past. There was something about living there, though, that dulled the urge.

My memories of a lot of my time there are, well, not exactly foggy, but feel almost like I’m watching someone else’s memories. I remember that it sometimes felt like I’d do things without actually deciding to do them. Like it was just muscle memory moving me, or a string gently guiding me.

It was never bad or dangerous stuff, just… things I wouldn’t normally have done, like brushing my teeth. I’m glad for it now I’ve passed 60, and teeth have stopped being something I take for granted. But at 15 the thought never even crossed my mind. But when I lived on Hill Top Road, I cleaned them every night, up and down and side to side, my arm moving like I didn’t even need to think about it.

The other kids living there were the same. At least, I think they were. I remember them being kind of dull – not that they were boring, exactly; we’d spend time together, and smoke and play games and the like. But there was something about them. As though there were some things that they said and did without anything behind them.

Occasionally, there’d be flashes of something. Like the time me and Dick Barrowdale snuck out after dark and set Mr. Hainsley’s bins on fire. But mostly they were quiet, almost placid. I’m sure they’d have said the same things about me, but at the time, nothing seemed amiss. I did what I did because it was what I was supposed to do. It never struck me to question it. I’m not sure I really recognize who I became while living at that house.

I did take up reading, though. There was a shop down in Kerry that kept a bucket of old pulp magazines marked down to 6 pence because they weren’t the latest issue. I used to spend whatever money I had down there, and then I’d sit under the tree in the back garden and read them cover to cover, over and over again. They were daft, really, but I loved them. In the summer, with the leaves giving you just enough shade to keep cool, I’d say I was happier than I’d ever been before then.

For the most part, Ray seemed content to stay out of our hair and leave us to our own devices. He had his own study in the basement, where he spent almost all his time, and usually trusted one of us to go to the grocer’s for food and sundries. Aside from church, which he made us attend with him every Sunday, he rarely went out at all. Occasionally, one of the other residents of the neighborhood would overcome their distaste for us long enough to ask how Ray was keeping, and whether he was well.

I gradually got the sense that, with the exception of the teenagers staying at his house, Raymond Fielding was something of a recluse. A well-liked recluse, certainly, but to see him leave the house on any day other than a Sunday was quite a remarkable thing.

Aside from church, there was one other regular activity that he always insisted we take part in. We generally ate our meals in the dining room – which was a bit cramped sometimes, as, when full, there were eight of us in the house aside from Ray, and the table was barely big enough.

On Sunday evenings, however, we’d all gather for the evening meal, and before we sat down to eat, he would remove the bright white tablecloth that covered it, and we’d gather around the dark wood. I remember it was carved in all sorts of strange swirling designs and patterns. It felt like if you picked a line, any line, you could follow it through to the center, to some deep truth, if only your eye could keep track of the strands that had caught it.

The center of the table looked, at first, like it was simply part of the wooden top, but if you looked closely, as I did so often, you could see an outline marking the very middle as a small, square box, carved with patterns just like the ones that laced their way over the rest of the table. I don’t remember how long we sat around the table those evenings, nor do I have any memory of what we might have eaten.

So I passed a couple of years in relative peace. I actually studied, stayed mostly out of trouble, and, as my 18th birthday approached, it looked like I might be able to find someone to teach me a decent trade. At that point, I was the oldest there by a few months, the others having left the house as they each turned 18 in turn. A suited man would come around – though, rarely the same one twice – Ray would sign some papers, and my former house sibling would head out the door and into the wide world. I didn’t see them after that, but at the time I didn’t really think anything of it. I assumed they were too busy trying to survive in a world that I had always considered deeply hostile.

Agnes came to the house two months before my birthday, in the middle of winter. Ray had never mentioned her, never held one of his little meetings to introduce her. She was just suddenly in the house one day, and no one really thought to question it. She was younger than the other kids, maybe ten or eleven years old. Didn’t talk much. She had a small, sharp face, and long brown hair, always braided into two tight pigtails, which she would twirl around her fingers whenever you tried to talk to her. I’ll admit, she was a bit spooky, looking back on it, but to be honest at the time I never really questioned it, the same way I never really questioned any of it.

She never came to church, though. Never sat around the dinner table when it was uncovered. Whenever Ray came in the room and she was in there, he would often just turn around and leave. And once, I could have sworn that he looked at her with something in his eyes that, even in my dull state, I recognized as fear.

I was so focused on my upcoming emancipation that I didn’t pay much attention to these developments, and I can’t tell you much more about Agnes, or what she did with her time in the house. All I know is that, when the man from the Children’s Committee came with the papers for Ray to sign, she was standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching me with an expression that looked almost playful.

Ray signed the documents to remand me fully back to state custody. The age of majority back then was twenty-one, but from eighteen I was expected to be finding work and accommodation on my own. It was all a bit surreal, watching pens sign my life into its different stages without holding any of them myself.

As the man in the suit told me to follow him in a clipped BBC accent, Agnes walked over, and gestured for me to lean down and listen to her. I did so, but instead of a conspiratorial whisper, she just gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then ran off down the hall. I stood there for a moment, confused, before my temporary guardian once again instructed me to follow him.

I did so, and the cold air of the outside hit me like a slap across the face. We walked for a few minutes to the end of the road, and I felt as though my meager suitcase was almost frozen to my hand. He told me to wait there while he brought his car around, then disappeared down a side street.

I stood there as the bitter wind cut through my thin coat. The sun was out, but it didn’t do much to soften the sharpness of the February air as I waited.

Then, without warning, I wasn’t waiting anymore. I had turned around, put down my suitcase, and started walking back toward Raymond Fielding’s house. I didn’t want to go back. I had no reason to go back, but I had apparently decided to, anyway, because I knew that’s where I was going.

After two and a half years, I was rather used to this feeling, but there was something else there this time. Something in the back of my mind, a frantic, scuttling terror. It didn’t do any good, though. I was returning to Hill Top Road, no matter what I might feel about it. Choice didn’t even come into it.

The door was unlocked when I returned, and the house was quiet. My eyes darted around, looking for anyone who might be able to tell me what was going on, why the fine threads that pulled me through my life had dragged me back here. But I was alone. I walked over to the door that led down into the basement, into Ray’s study, and I was suddenly struck by the realization that nobody other than him had ever gone inside. At least, not to my knowledge.

Nonetheless, I reached up and turned the handle, twisted silently, and the door swung open, revealing a set of stairs leading down. Lightbulbs in spherical lampshades lit the way, and the thought struck me that, given how much time Ray spent down here, it was surprising how many cobwebs there were. They covered every corner, and lightly coated part of the walls. As I headed down the stairs, closing the door behind me, I saw even more, and came to the unsettling realization that what covered the bare bulbs were not in fact lampshades, but were instead thick clumps of cobweb.

The sight that greeted me when I finally reached the bottom of the stairs was about as far from what I had expected as it could possibly have been. Rather than a study filled with books, papers, desks, or the like, the room was large, and almost empty. The walls and ceiling were bare earth, and it looked more like a burrow than anything else.

In the center of the room stood that strange hypnotic table, though how he had gotten the heavy wooden thing down here was beyond me. The whole place was covered with a thick gossamer of spider’s web, and in the thick clumps around the edges of the chamber I saw shapes I recognised.

Doris Hardy. Dick Barrowdale. Greg Montgomery. The older ones who had left the house before I had.

They lay still now, wrapped in their sticky cocoons. Their bodies seemed warped and bloated in a way I didn’t recognize. But that’s only because at that point in my life, I had never before seen a spider egg sac.

In the chair sat Raymond Fielding. He looked the same as ever, that placid, unreadable smile still on his face. His brown leather coat seemed to shift around his body. The texture in the dim light seemed more like coarse fur.

He didn’t say anything, just watched as I continued to make my way towards the table. For all the terror strangling my heart at that moment at the discovery of the grotesque fate of my friends, I could still feel the bland, uncaring expression on my face, and found myself stood in front of the table as though nothing whatsoever was wrong.

I reached over and pulled the wooden square from the center of the table. On its own, it appeared to be a small wooden box, and the lid opened smoothly, as my hands moved in a practiced motion. Inside was an apple, green and fresh and still wet with morning dew.

I knew I was going to eat it. I could feel tears desperately trying to push themselves out of my eyes, but I instead decided not to cry. I placed the box down on the table, reached over, and picked up the apple.

All at once, my cheek erupted in pain. It was like someone had pressed a hot branding iron into my face, and I could swear that I heard the flesh sizzle as I let out a scream and fell to my knees.

I raised my hands to my face and realized in that moment two very important things. The first is that my face seemed to be untouched; I could feel no injury or burn. The second was that raising my hand had been a truly voluntary act. I had willed it myself, and whatever power had been gripping me, tugging me into its web, I was free of it.

I looked at Raymond Fielding, whose face finally had a real expression on it – one of confusion and anger. As he stood up, I saw small, twitching shapes tumbling out of his jacket, and I ran. I ran up those stairs, out the door, and away into the night. I didn’t look back, and to this day, I pray every night that the others down in the basement were already dead.

That’s it, really. Within two hours, I was out of Oxford, on the first train I could jump onto. I jumped off at Birmingham to avoid a ticket inspector. And that’s where I spent the next several years. Given my start in life, I’ve done very well for myself. I now have comfort, education, and money. I try to think that I’ve left my past behind, but that sort of denial doesn’t help me sleep. I only had my first truly restful night since that day after reading about the fire that burned the house to the ground.

But now they’re building there. They’re breaking ground that should be left burned and empty. And I’ve started to dream again.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Mr. Sinclair was not exaggerating when he described the difficulties of tracking down information on any youth halfway house in Hill Top Road. Or Raymond Fielding more generally.

While I am naturally inclined to suspect conspiracy, Nastya informs me that the nature of the gaps look like lost or damaged files. There are whole swathes of records missing from that period, not only related to Fielding, but many other similar institutions in the area. There’s no attempt to cover up or redirect it, either. It just looks like whichever cabinet housed those records got lost or damaged in the years since.

I have done my best to prevent Tim reading this statement in too much detail. I have no interest in having another argument about spiders. In fact, after reading this statement, I have no interest in thinking about spiders any more than is professionally required.

It raises further questions about the relationship between Raymond Fielding and this Agnes. I can only hope some answers lie elsewhere in the Archives. I wouldn’t be surprised. Between Ronald Sinclair, Ivo Lensik, and Father Burroughs, it appears there’s still much to learn about Hill Top Road.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

Everyone’s avoiding me for some reason. They’ve taken to working farther away from me than normal, and when I call them for any reason, they’re always keen to leave as soon as possible. They share furtive glances when they think I’m not looking. I don’t like it. I feel like they’re planning something.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Rosa Meyer, concerning a persistent feeling of being watched. Original statement given July 12, 1972. Audio recording by Raphaella Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
It’s still there, still watching me. There’s nowhere I can go, a place I can hide that it doesn’t keep looking at me. I don’t know why. No idea what it wants from me, or if it ever had any plans beyond just staring from wherever it is hiding. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, it’s been months now, and it’s still there.

You can’t see it, I know. I can’t see it either, but that doesn’t matter, because it can see me. That’s what matters. I can feel its gaze burrowing into the back of my neck. Does it hate me? Does it just want me to keep living in fear? I don’t know why this is happening to me.

At first, I thought it was a person, some stalker who just kept hiding. I had this thought that if I kept feeling something was watching me, then it must be a person doing it. There must be someone following me. It’s not like I haven’t had stalkers before.

I started to scan the faces of everyone I passed, looking to see if I recognized them, if I’d seen them before anywhere. Did I recognize the man in the green overcoat from the bus this morning? Did that bike messenger loop around the road and pass me again? No. They never did. Never. No one was following me. But something was watching. It still is.

A strange thing is, it’s a feeling I should be used to. I’ve been watched by people for years. I present the Look East segment for BBC News almost every day – well, I used to. And on the other end of that camera, there were tens of thousands of people, but I never felt it from them. Sometimes, as I kept my eyes locked on that camera, reeling off the latest string of burglaries, I tried to feel it, tried to imagine all the people seeing me, watching me. Even then, even when I was trying, it was never more than a dead, empty lens. Maybe it’s just as well that I never felt it before.

I lost my job within two weeks. This feeling coming over me, I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t look at the camera, I couldn’t read the dead, empty words on the page. I ended up having something of an on-air breakdown. I guess it’s lucky you’re based in London, so you couldn’t have seen it.

I know the moment it started. Looking back, it all seems so arbitrary, like a switch suddenly being clicked on, and all at once my life is destroyed. It was three months ago, in April. I was doing inventory for some of my brother’s estate, it was largely up to me to take care of it after his death. My parents were taking it very hard, and weren’t well enough themselves to make the journey down to his small house in Southampton to try and organize his meager possessions.

I suppose I wasn’t in a good place to begin with. You’re not meant to die of a stroke that young. I mean, he was only 38, and he wasn’t exactly the healthiest, but it just seemed so unprovoked. I’ve always been quite religious, and believed that things happened for a reason, blessings ultimately came to the virtuous and misfortune to the wicked, but now I don’t know.

Perhaps you could say that my curiosity was the fault that brought this on me? But I didn’t open the box because I was curious, I opened it because I had to in order to fully inventory my dead brother’s possessions. I honestly don’t think that’s a transgression. It wasn’t even marked as special – no oak chests or triple-locked brass boxes, just another brown cardboard box like any other.

I don’t think that anything about it struck me as special? Looking back, I feel like it marked itself, that it drew my eye, and I would stare at it for longer than the other boxes piled up around his house. The place was so quiet, a lonely testament to Christopher’s isolation. He’d never married, and there seemed to be nothing in that dingy home that said he had any friends to speak of.

In a lot of ways, it reminded me of my own life. I have friends enough in Norwich, but no family except Christopher and my parents, though I do have my reasons. Still, looking through my late brother’s things led to the sort of reflection that makes me uncomfortable, and I was drinking more than I normally would.

It was my second day down there when I opened the box. I’d been going through all his old document boxes, and there were a lot. Christopher had worked for the history department at the University of Southampton. I don’t know what he specialized in – we never really talked about his work – but based on what I found in his study, he’d written a few books on the subject of ancient myths and fetishes, those objects that were believed by various cultures to have supernatural or religious power imbued within them.

His first book was on the holy cross of Christianity, and how it operates as a fetish within our culture. This offended me a little bit – I was worried he was trivializing a faith that, as far as I knew, he shared with me. Still, I tried to read a chapter of it on the use of the cross in the vampire myth, but it was very dry and, quite frankly, a bit dull. Most of the boxes were similar, full of notes and clippings and bits of research that meant absolutely nothing to me. I put these aside to check with Angus Cartwright, one of Christopher’s colleagues who I had contacted to have a look at what papers of his I couldn’t understand.

Some of the boxes, however, contained what I can only assume was practical research: fetish objects and totems from all around the world, small animal figures carved from bones, strings of glass beads tied together in intricate knotted patterns, grotesque quasi-human statuettes made of wood and old leather. Some of them were more than a little bit unsettling, but only one managed to send me spiraling into the place I am now.

As I said, it was one of the last boxes I opened on the second day. It was late, and I had already made my way through most of a bottle of wine. The more I think about it, the more I think that opening that box felt no different to any of the others. No hard feelings, no smells, nothing. It was just a box empty of everything except a single typewritten note and an old hand mirror.

It lay inside, utterly innocuous. If it was a trap, there was no way to tell.

I picked up the note first. The typing was neat, managed to be completely centered, even though the paper seemed to be a scrap that had been torn from a larger piece. It read, in all capitals:

“BEHIND YOU.”

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how unsettling that was. I turned and looked almost before I fully understood what I had read. There was a window behind me, with the view of the street below my brother’s study and the darkening sky above it. There was nothing there though, nobody walking along the street, no cars driving down it, nothing that seemed in any way out of place.

I looked back at the note, shrugged, and reached down for the mirror. It was a bit heavier than I’d expected, and under a thick layer of tarnish the frame seemed to be gold, or at least gold-plated. The glass itself was a bit grimy, but still seemed to be intact. I have no idea how old it was, or what period it might have been made in. Though I searched the box thoroughly, I couldn’t find anything that might explain where Christopher got it.

I looked in the mirror. I was a mess. Hair unwashed, eyes red from crying, lips patchy, stained a bruised purple from the wine. I hadn’t really had any time to take care of or even look at myself since I got to Christopher’s house, and this ancient hand mirror really showed it.

I sighed, shook my head, and prepared to check the next box when the angle on the mirror shifted in my hand slightly, and I screamed. It now reflected the window behind me, and I could see a face staring in. It was dark outside, and it was almost entirely in shadow, so I couldn’t tell you much about the features, but he was huge, seeming to take up most of the window behind me. The only thing about it that I could see with any real clarity were the eyes – bright, shining, bulging eyes, with pupils so dark it made me feel sick, drinking everything in, watching with a greedy intensity. I could feel its gaze burning into the back of my neck, feel its unblinking eyes.

My muscles locked in sudden terror, and the mirror tumbled out of my hand, spinning only once before it hit the floor and shattered into a thousand tiny shards.

Seven years’ bad luck, isn’t it? Maybe that’s it. Maybe I have to feel this horrid, aching panic of the eyes I know are following me for seven years before they finally leave. I hope not. But maybe even that’s wishful thinking. Maybe this is now my life forever, and it will never, ever stop.

I’ve tried to think whether I’d be able to go on if that was the case. I think I’d try, at least until my parents passed away. I couldn’t stand for them to lose both children.

Obviously, that was when my real problems began. I could write the face off as a brief but horrid hallucination, but the feeling of being under constant scrutiny and observation isn’t something I can explain away so easily. I’ve considered the possibility that I’m just going insane. Being watched is not an uncommon symptom of psychosis or schizophrenia, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for the other symptoms, but in all other ways I feel fine. It’s true I’m finding it hard to concentrate, but that’s only because I can’t sleep because they’re watching me. Those unseen eyes that hover everywhere and won’t let me rest.

I’m not mad, I’m sure I’m not mad. I still have what’s left of the mirror. It’s just a bent gold frame now. I tried to have new glass put in, but the only eyes it showed were mine.

I did talk to Angus, though. He seemed a little bit unnerved by the line of questioning I was pursuing – or maybe just by how intensely I was asking the questions – but he answered me. He didn’t recognize the mirror, but a few years ago, Christopher was looking into writing a book on the totems of what he called “outer cults”, small organized groups of worshippers whose beliefs weren’t simply deviations from paganism or other major religions, but seemed to focus on holy beings or concepts completely apart from what would be considered normal religious practice. Some seemed to have more in common with ancient shamanism than with organized hierarchical worship, and all were highly secretive.

Christopher had apparently collected several artefacts considered holy by certain of these sects, though I could find no details among his documents. Angus couldn’t be sure, but he believed that the mirror might have been one such object. Christopher had apparently abandoned the project about a year before his death, choosing instead to pursue a line of research into Inuit ceremonial carvings.

And here’s where we finally come to why I’m here. Because Angus told me that my brother wasn’t researching alone.

He had apparently logged several trips to London in order to consult with your Institute. I don’t know why or what about, and no one here seems to be able or willing to help me find out, but he was here. I’m not going to rest until I find out why. Not that I could rest anyway.

Those eyes still haunt my dreams and follow me through the waking world, even here. Especially here.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

A bit of an odd one, this. The mid-to-late twentieth century seems marginally better-filed than most of the archives, so we haven’t seen as many rogue statements cropping up from that period.

Most of the details from Miss Meyer’s statement seem to check out – Jessica got a confirmation from the BBC that she had indeed been one of the anchors for the Look East Evening News between 1970 and 72, until she suffered a nervous breakdown and damaged several cameras in their Norwich studio.

Nastya’s checking with the University of Southampton also seems to confirm the details of Christopher Meyer’s life and death. I even tried to read one or two of his books, but they were a bit dry even for me, and didn’t appear to have any particular relevance to the case.

I’ve been unable to locate any evidence that he made use of the Institute’s library or consultation services, but even these days those records aren’t kept in as much detail as they really should be, so that doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t here.

What’s most interesting is what Tim found out about the final two decades of Miss Meyer’s life, before she died in prison in 1993. Following the statement, she apparently spent almost 12 years working low-level service jobs, until both her mother and father passed away of cancer and heart disease respectively.

There’s nothing notable about this period in any official records, but on October the 24th, 1984 she murdered a delivery van driver named Danilo Costich.

She unloaded the van’s normal cargo of filing paper and envelopes before filling it with several barrels of petrol. She was apprehended just south of Vauxhall Bridge after she jumped a red light and collided with another car. Luckily, the petrol did not ignite and she was picked up by police as she tried to flee the scene.

Originally charged with reckless driving, it didn’t take long for them to connect her to the murder of Mr. Costich, and she was given a sentence of 17 years in HMP Holloway. She died of pneumonia nine years later.

A bizarre and apparently motiveless crime. The one detail that still nags at me is that the company the Danilo Costich worked for, Paper Run Limited, is the same company that at the time supplied most of the stationery to the Magnus Institute. I have a nasty feeling about exactly where she was taking that petrol.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
You don’t mind if I record this, I trust?

CARMILLA
Well to be honest–

TIM
–that’s kind of one of the things we wanted to talk about.

NASTYA
This is an intervention.

ARCHIVIST
Excuse me?!

CARMILLA
If you’d rather it was an official disciplinary hearing, Raphaella, we can arrange it.

ARCHIVIST
Fine. Say your piece.

NOT!JESSICA
We care about you, Raphaella, and you’ve been rather erratic since the Prentiss incident.

NASTYA
And we’d really like –

CARMILLA
To not have to fire you.

NASTYA
To make sure that you’re doing okay.

ARCHIVIST
Look, I understand I’ve been a bit… distant recently.

TIM
You were watching my house.

NOT!JESSICA
You followed me on my lunch break and searched my desk.

NASTYA
You said was I lying about a murder.

ARCHIVIST
I – that is to say – I –

NOT!JESSICA
Do you think we killed Gertrude?

ARCHIVIST
No, it’s…

…maybe. Maybe you did, How should i know none of you di–

CARMILLA
Raphaella, this is absurd. This goes far beyond an unhealthy work environment. I’ll admit it’s partly my fault for letting it get this bad, I should have started earlier.

TIM
You still don’t believe us, do you?

ARCHIVIST
It’s not that I don’t believe you it’s just – I mean, you could have done it!

TIM
Seriously, listen to yourself.

NASTYA
You’re not right.

ARCHIVIST
We’ve gone a long way beyond right, Nastya, there are monsters out there, and I don’t know who or where they are or if any of you – if you want me to trust you, then I’m sorry, but I need evidence.

CARMILLA
[sigh] Here.

ARCHIVIST
And this is?

CARMILLA
A copy of all the CCTV from the week Gertrude disappeared. The police finally finished cleaning it up and examining it, and returned a copy.

ARCHIVIST
[laughing] There aren’t any cameras in the Archive.

CARMILLA
But there are everywhere else. Including all of the entrances into the Archive.

And across all of the feeds, it provides a remarkably detailed account of all of our movements over that week. Even yours.

ARCHIVIST
And you think this gives everyone an alibi?

CARMILLA
The police certainly do, but feel free to check it yourself.

ARCHIVIST
[forcefully] Thank you. I will.

NOT!JESSICA
And let’s have no more of this paranoia.

[CLICK]
I’ve been examining the CCTV feeds Carmilla gave me. It… it does seem to provide everyone with a solid alibi, and no one is seen entering or exiting the archives except Gertrude. At least not before Carmilla goes down and discovers the blood.

Gertrude’s own movements are somewhat erratic, and she seems to be in and out of the Archives at all hours of the day and night, at some points looking rather disheveled.

That could stand closer scrutiny later but for now I… I can’t quite figure out whether this decreased likelyhood of my colleagues killing gertrude is more of a relief or a frustration.

At the very least it seems I have been… I have been rather obvious.

I just hope they haven’t entirely lost respect for me i may nned them later.

One thing that does nothing to ease my mind, though, is the renewed significance this puts on the tunnels beneath the Archive, as it seems more and more likely that whoever or whatever is living down there is the same thing that killed Gertrude.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
You don’t mind if I record this, do you?

DAISY
Knock yourself out.

ARCHIVIST
Right.

DAISY
‘course, if anyone else ever hears it…

ARCHIVIST
You’ll arrest me.

DAISY
[heh] No.

ARCHIVIST
…Right. Um, so, you came to deliver one of the tapes.

From Ivy?

The uh, the, the audio tapes.

…

So… can I have it? Please?

DAISY
I’m thinking.

ARCHIVIST
Right. Um, I thought you needed me to check them?

DAISY
You don’t get it, do you?

ARCHIVIST
I-I’m not sure I follow.

DAISY
The tapes. Why she was giving them to you.

ARCHIVIST
She, uh. She wanted my help.

DAISY
[small, exasperated laugh/huff] You really have a big ego.

ARCHIVIST
You, uh, you didn’t have a tape player at your station.

DAISY
She thought you did it.

ARCHIVIST
What?!

DAISY
We both did.

ARCHIVIST
Wait, you thought I killed Gertrude?!

DAISY
Yes.

ARCHIVIST
Whuh – uh – I – why?

DAISY
[exasperated laugh/sigh] Look at you: you’re obsessed with it, jumpy as hell, and the only person who benefited from her death.

ARCHIVIST
Well uh, I… I mean. I didn’t.

DAISY
Yeah. I know.

ARCHIVIST
[stressed, exasperated exhalation]

DAISY
Finally got IT to clean up the CCTV for the week she disappeared. No cameras in the archive, but we got plenty of footage of you. Watched your movements that whole week. You didn’t kill her.

ARCHIVIST
I don’t – what does this have to do with the tapes?

DAISY
Didn’t have enough to hold you. Ivy was worried you were going to run.

ARCHIVIST
So, what – you fed me a couple of tapes to keep me around?

DAISY
Yeah.

ARCHIVIST
And, now you know I’m innocent…?

DAISY
Hm. I reckon we should cut you off, but Ivy’s soft. She likes you. [heh] No idea why. Maybe she keeps feeding you tapes, doesn’t involve me, I don’t plan on seeing or hearing anything about it.

ARCHIVIST
Well… thank you, Detective Tonner –

DAISY
Daisy.

ARCHIVIST
Thank you, Daisy.

DAISY
Sure.

ARCHIVIST
…If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been sectioned, now –

DAISY
[angrily] I do mind –

…

[quickly] 14 years.

ARCHIVIST
…I don’t suppose you’d like to make a statement?

DAISY
[sullen] ‘bout what?

ARCHIVIST
Whatever you like. 14 years – you must have seen a number of paranormal things.

DAISY
And you want me to tell you about them.

ARCHIVIST
Uh – IIIIII –

DAISY
Okay.

ARCHIVIST
[stammering] What?

DAISY
Okay. I’ll give you a statement about – how I got my first Section 31.

…You look surprised.

ARCHIVIST
I mean, I was largely asking as a formality, Ivy didn’t give the impression you were the sharing sort.

DAISY
Maybe you caught me in a good mood.

ARCHIVIST
Right, well… good. Do you need me to go over our non-disclosure policy –

DAISY
Not as long as you understand my policy: if it gets out, I’ll break every bone in your body.

ARCHIVIST
[sigh, muttering] There are worse things that could happen to them…

DAISY
[confused, possibly offended] What?

ARCHIVIST
Uh, nothing. Uh, statement of Detective Alice “Daisy” Tonner of the London Metropolitan Police. What’s the subject?

DAISY
Traffic stop of a delivery van on the M6 near Preston, afternoon of… 24th July, 2002.

ARCHIVIST
Recorded live from subject, 1st December, 2016.

Statement begins.

DAISY (STATEMENT)
This was a long time ago. I’d been police for two years. I wasn’t even with the Met back then. I was based up in Lancashire with a road policing unit. This is before the Highways Agency took most of the grunt work, so there was plenty to do. None of it much fun, but it needed doing. Booking drunk drivers were my favorite. I always hoped they’d refuse the breathalyzer, maybe even took a swing at me. Nothing funnier than a drunk asshole trying to avoid being arrested.

I usually rode with Isaac Masters. He’d been working with the RPU a lot longer than I had, and was even harsher than me. I know why, though. He tried to be a good police, give everyone a fair shot, but you see a lot of accidents – not much worse in the world than a really bad car crash. It gets to you. You get hard on people who don’t respect the road, and there are plenty of them out there.

It was raining that night, that heavy, thumping rain that means you can’t hear a damn thing. It crashes onto the roof like someone’s jumpin’ on it. Me and Zack was sitting in a lay-by, watching traffic and trying to drink coffee. We’d picked it up from a service station a few miles back, but it was one of those open-topped styrofoam cups. By the time we’d got back to the car, the rain had got in and left us with two cups of cold sludge.

So we were both in a pretty bad mood. It was maybe 1:00 in the afternoon, but you wouldn’t have known it. The clouds weren’t letting any sun through, and everything looked grey, wet and lifeless. Couldn’t even talk over the sound of rain on the roof, so we just sat there in silence, drinking lukewarm sludge.

The motorway was quieter than normal. A Wednesday afternoon doesn’t see a lot of traffic, but the rain usually brings out more cars. That day it was pretty empty. Everyone seemed to be driving careful on account of the rain, which was also not normal, and I was torn. Part of me wanted to spot some idiot who I could take my bad mood out on, when the other part of me didn’t want to get any wetter than I already was.

It looked like I wasn’t gonna get a choice, anyway – at least not until I saw the van. It was a beaten up old Citroën C15. There was some writing on the side, but I couldn’t see it clearly through the rain. It was either very dirty, or painted a nasty shade of off-white.

Most importantly, it was driving about 25 miles an hour. The limit is 70. There’s technically no minimum speed on a motorway, but the van didn’t show any signs of speeding up, and it was kind of strange. We had enough cause to stop it if we wanted. I wasn’t sure whether to let it go or not, but Zack had clearly made his decision already. He was in the driving seat and fired up the lights as we drove up behind it.

[FAINT STATIC/VIBRATION BEGINS TO RISE IN BACKGROUND, INITIALLY BARELY-PERCEPTIBLE]
The van glided to a stop on the hard shoulder at the side of the road and sat there. The headlights, which had been turned on for the rain, died. Then it just waited.

Zack was out first. The rain was so thick that he had to take his torch to see properly. The light passed over the van, and I could see rust creeping around the edges of the paneling.

We walked up to the driver’s side. I could see dark shapes from inside, but they weren’t moving. Up close, I could read the name on the side: “Breekon and Hope Deliveries.” It was covered in a thick layer of dirt that the rain couldn’t quite wash off.

[OMINOUS MUSICAL TONE. STATIC/VIBRATIONS NOW VERY AUDIBLE.]
Zack knocked on the door and it opened. The man who got out looked normal – so normal that these days I can’t really picture his face. Said his name was “Tom.” I wasn’t the one looking over his driving licence so I don’t know about second names.

From the other side two men climbed out. They were huge. Hard faces, like a pair of old stone statues, dressed in overalls and flat caps. They asked what was going on, speaking back and forth in Cockney accents so broad and fake-sounding that I thought they were putting them on for a laugh. I was about to lay into them for it when a sound cut me short.

Zack had been talking to “Tom,” who was making some bland explanation for his slow driving – caution, heavy rain, empty road, all that crap. They heard it, too, and he stopped mid-sentence to look at me.

[DEEP, INTENSE BACKGROUND VIBRATIONS CONTINUE]
From the back of the van, there was a sound of moaning. It sounded kind of like a moan of pain, but long and drawn-out. It went on for almost a full minute, and was almost, I don’t know, kind of musical. I looked at Tom and the fake Cockney passengers, but their faces were unreadable.

Zack gripped Tom firmly by the arm and led him to the rear doors of the van, demanding that he open it. He didn’t resist, just nodded, and got out a set of keys. He put one of them in the door, turned it, and the van opened.

I saw that the two big guys had walked up next to us, so I was gettin’ ready for trouble, but there’s no way I would have guessed what was in there.

It was a coffin. An old, wooden coffin. Rough, unvarnished. I could see splinters where the nails had been hammered in badly. Wrapped all around it was a thick metal chain ending in a heavy padlock. That weird moaning was coming from inside it. It was the only sound that cut through pounding rain.

I tensed up, reaching for my baton – if these people were kidnappers or worse, we would be in big trouble. I was ready for a fight, but they just stood there, not moving, staring at us. Everything about the situation felt wrong.

I looked over at Zack, and he seemed to be thinking the same thing. He looked over at the two men in overalls and told them to take it out, then looked over to Tom asking if he had a key to the padlock. Reaching into his jacket, the man who called himself Tom pulled out a large iron key and handed it to my partner. Didn’t look like the other keys.

I wanted to head back to the car and call in some backup, but Zack was a senior officer, and if he thought we should open it first, [inhale] I was gonna back his play.

Zack took the key and walked towards the coffin, which now lay on the wet tarmac, lit only by the headlights of our car. The moaning was louder now, almost drowning out the sound of the hammering rain. Water had begun to flow off the wood, but everything else about it was still.

As we got closer, I could see the words “Do Not Open” scratched into the surface of the wood. It didn’t look like my partner was paying them any attention, though. He gently placed the key into the lock, wincing slightly as he touched the metal, and turned it.

[BACKGROUND VIBRATIONS INTENSIFY FURTHER, WITH SOMEWHAT-CAVERNOUS WAVERING/SIGHING SOUNDS]
The chains snapped off like they were spring-loaded. They whipped around violently, and Zack jumped back, slipping and falling on his back. I brought my baton up, just in case the strangers made a move, but they were… motionless.

The moaning had stopped. The only sound was the creaking of hinges as the lid of the coffin began to move. It was slow, the gap appearing first as just a crack, before finally opening completely. It was too dark to see what was inside at first, but when I shone my torch inside, I heard Zack gasp. I think I did as well.

Inside of that wooden coffin, there was a staircase. It went down, apparently into the ground below, and seemed to go on as deep as I could see. They were steep, carved out of what looked like solid stone, and the rock that made up the walls didn’t match the wet tarmac around us, all the earth that would have been underneath it. It was completely impossible.

I tried to ask Tom or his companions about it, I yelled at them to explain what the hell was going on, but they just stood there, staring at it. So I hit one of them with my baton.

[ADDITION OF WOBBLY, HIGHER-PITCHED VIBRATIONS]
It was one of the large men in overalls, though I’m not sure which one. It was like hitting solid wood, and the blow jarred my arm badly, making me drop the only weapon I had. Even then he just stood there, staring at the casket. There was a sound of movement from behind me. I turned to see Isaac walking into the coffin, his torch shining into the hollow below. He’d already disappeared up to his waist, and there was this look on his face that I have never seen before – relaxed, like he was asleep.

I shouted for him, started to run but I felt a huge hand grip my shoulder. I grabbed it with my good arm, tried to escape it, but the grip was too strong. The texture of the flesh was like hard rubber. All I could do was watch as my partner kept walking into the earth, on stairs that couldn’t be there. After a few seconds, he was completely out of sight.

I expected to hear something – shouting, a, a scream, something – but it was still just the rain. The lid closed very slowly, and then he was gone. Just a coffin sitting on the hard shoulder of the M6.

The hand released my shoulder as the two men in overalls began to walk over and calmly wrap the chains back around it.

I felt a sudden burst of anger and picked up my baton. I lunged at them, but the one closest to me moved quicker than I would have thought possible. His fist slammed into my chest like a cannonball, and I felt a couple of ribs break. I collapsed to the floor, just lay there, as Tom and the two men locked the coffin back up, loaded it into the van, and drove off. I never saw Isaac Masters again.

[STATIC/VIBRATIONS DIE DOWN]
When I called it in, I was expecting a manhunt, an investigation, some kind of justice. It wasn’t like we didn’t have plenty of leads. Instead, I was handed a form I didn’t recognize, told to sign it, and then reassigned to the Met. Since then, it’s been one spook story after another.

ARCHIVIST
Right. Thank you. Um… are you quite all right?

DAISY
[angry] No. I never told that story to anyone except my old sergeant.

ARCHIVIST
I’m… not sure, I, er, uh –

DAISY
I should go.

ARCHIVIST
Yes, of course, I’ll see you out. Uh, there is one other thing – I’ve been meaning to ask Ivy, but you might know better –

DAISY
I’m done.

ARCHIVIST
Oh – yes, it’s just, j– [quickly] do you know anything about vampires?

DAISY
Yeah.

ARCHIVIST
Oh!

Uh, it’s just – that –

DAISY
A while back, there were some problems. Arrest irregularities around a few missing-person cases. Suspects being released without proper interrogation. Recordings of the interviews showed the subject wouldn’t say a word, but the officers doing the interview would let them go anyway.

[STATIC/VIBRATIONS BEGIN]
I don’t know the details of the investigation, but there’s a new operating procedure now.

ARCHIVIST
Which would be…?

DAISY
Cases matching certain parameters have to be monitored by another officer outside the room by video. In the very specific circumstance where the suspect says nothing, but the interrogating officer acts as though they have, they’re immediately removed from the room. Then, they call me.

ARCHIVIST
Just you…?

DAISY
There are a few others around who do it, but I take care of a dozen or so precincts. I cuff the suspect’s hands and legs, drive them out into the middle of Epping Forest, and burn them to ashes. There’s never enough left to be a problem.

[ARCHIVIST CAN BE HEARD EXHALING IN HORROR]
I don’t know if they’re vampires, exactly, but that’s what we call them.

ARCHIVIST
H-how many have you… taken care of?

DAISY
Mm… five in the last nine years.

ARCHIVIST
I see…

DAISY
[anxious, drawn] Don’t tell Ivy. She doesn’t know about that procedure. I, I’m not sure how much she’d understand, she – she’s not – cut out for that kind of work.

ARCHIVIST
Of, of course I won’t –

DAISY
Don’t tell her any of this, okay? I was never here. If she wants to get you more tapes, that’s her business, but you keep this visit to yourself! Got that?!

ARCHIVIST
Uh, uh, uh, of course!

DAISY
Good.

[HARD, ABRUPT CLICK; DAISY TURNED IT OFF HERSELF]
[CLICK]
Supplemental.

That was… an interesting interview. It seems we’re not done with sinister coffins just yet. The contents were surprising, to say the least, but don’t give any real clues as to its origin, purpose, or even its relationship with Breekon and Hope. Are they simply… couriers? Guardians? Hostages?

At least I also have confirmation that the vampires Trevor Herbert described are not purely figments of a drug-addled mind. I probably shouldn’t be too pleased to discover that there are even more violent hunters stalking us through the night, but there it is.

I’ll… admit to feeling a bit hurt by Ivy’s true motivations. I suppose it’s hardly surprising, I have not been appearing… stable over these last few months. Either way, I’ll not be bringing it up.

Even if I wasn’t genuinely somewhat afraid of Detective Tonner [nervous laugh] such a revelation would only harm our relationship, and I need those tapes. I can’t afford to have Gertrude’s time at the Institute disappear back into obscurity.

I’ll check the one I have, and then wait to hear from Ivy. Or perhaps I should try to make contact…? I should really have got a, number or something. Well, that’s a matter for later. I need to go home. Try to get some sleep.

I just wish it wasn’t raining.

End supplemental.

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
GERTRUDE
Well?

MARY
No need to rush me, Gertrude. I’m sure we’ve got all the time in the world. Besides, look at this dusty old thing. ‘spect it needs time to warm up. You don’t use it much anymore, do you?

GERTRUDE
Tea?

MARY
God, no. Hate the stuff.

GERTRUDE
Why are you here?

MARY
To make my statement, of course. I know the Institute and me haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, as it were, but I thought it was the least I could do.

GERTRUDE
Why now?

MARY
Why not? Big changes are coming, Gertrude! And I have to think about leaving something for posterity.

GERTRUDE
Fine. Subject is Mary Keay, recorded 3rd of July, 2008. What is it regarding?

MARY
What a question. I wonder? Plenty to choose from, I suppose.

GERTRUDE
Take your time.

MARY
Did I ever tell you about my first Leitner? Of course, this was before he was collecting them, so back then it was just a strange book. To think there was a time before he’d stamped them with his mark. I feel we must have called them something. Did we even know how many there were? Or did we just think of each as a thing all its own?

GERTRUDE
No. I don’t recall.

MARY
I met him a few times, you know. Must have been about fifteen years ago. Not long before his library burned down. He wasn’t all that impressive, to be honest. Shorter than I expected, and slower, somehow. I expected a whirlwind of intense energy, but he was gentle, methodical, perfectly pleasant to talk to.

Jurgen Leitner bored me. Whenever he came to look through my stuff, he’d spend almost a full minute on each book, just staring at it, examining the pages, and half the time leave without buying anything. Good riddance, if you ask me!

GERTRUDE
I wouldn’t know. I can’t say we ever crossed paths

MARY
I suppose not. You… don’t really go out and look for yourself, do you? Just wait here for the researchers’ leftovers.

GERTRUDE
[snort] It’s not that bad. Sometimes, someone will insist on giving me a statement directly. Though I rarely see the point.

MARY
Well. They don’t understand up there. They don’t know what this place is. You do, though, don’t you? We’re on the same side, really. Even if Carmilla disagrees.

GERTRUDE
If you say so. I believe you were giving me an account of your first encounter with one of the books.

MARY
Oh, of course. I was very young but I still remember it clear as day.

MARY (STATEMENT)
I was nine years old at the time, so it would have been… 1955? It was shortly after my idiot father had gotten himself killed, and my mother was still working for your Institute. We were living in Whitechapel back then, just off Turner Street. It wasn’t much, just a couple of rooms and a stove, but it was enough for us.

My mother worked long hours, as even back then the Institute didn’t pay their researchers well. And she supplemented our meagre income by working late at a factory on Grove Road. It made dressing gowns. Most of the time, I was left to my own devices. If she’d had any sense, my mother would have shocked your lot and gone to work at the factory full time. She would have learned a damn sight more.

Still, she believed in the work. And the one thing she was never neglectful of was what she called my “true studies.” I’m grateful to her, of course. I just wish that she’d got over a slavish devotion to you and your patron.

GERTRUDE
Well, you make a lot of assumptions, Mary. And I thought we were supposed to be on “the same side.”

MARY
Mm, yes. I suppose you’re right. I just like to diversify my portfolio a bit, as it were.

MARY (STATEMENT)
Often, during my studies, my mother would talk to me of the amazing arcane relics at your Institute. I’m sure you can imagine my disappointment when I finally got a look at the collection of mediocrity that you call your “Artefact Storage.”

But long before that, the idea of dark and fearful items of power had taken root in my young mind. I used to spend afternoons hunting through antique and junk shops. There were plenty to choose from, back then. Searching for anything strange, hunting for that thing that would call to me in a dark, secret voice. I never found it, of course. Not back then.

But when I saw Dr. Margaret Tellison moving in across the street, I knew immediately that there was something different about her. She was tall and thin, with long dark hair pulled into a severe bun. She wore a deep blue woolen dress, and carried an old leather briefcase, that seemed constantly on the verge of buckling, although she carried it with ease. I don’t know what exactly it was about her that stuck out to me, but as soon as I saw her, I knew she was what my mother had always talked about. She was touched by powers like those that watched over our family.

She had a small GP practice on Nelson Street, not far from the Royal London Hospital. Back then, Whitechapel was a heavily Jewish neighborhood, and there weren’t many Gentile doctors around, so it didn’t take Dr. Tellison long to build up a healthy client list.

I started to watch her. Whenever my mother was at work, I would sit myself on the steps opposite her practice, and watch the steady stream of patients.

Over the weeks, I started to notice something. The first time an ambulance was called to take one of her patients to the hospital, I didn’t think much of it. But when another one came the day afterwards, and another three days later, it started to occur to me that there was something more within those walls than I knew. I decided that I had to see for myself.

It had not gone unnoticed to me that many of Dr. Tellison’s clients did not bother to knock on her front door, simply entering with a soft call to announce themselves. Leaving the front door of her practice unlocked was no doubt good for her clients, but also provided me with easy access, when I finally overcame my trepidation.

I had paid great attention to how loud the door was, and timed my entry to the passing of a butcher’s truck, the roar of the engine covering the sound of the door. And then, just like that, I was inside. I cursed myself for not having spent more time trying to get a sense of the interior of the building, as I had not expected the waiting room to be so sparse. There were three uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs, several bookshelves filled with worn-looking paperbacks, and a dim bulb in a wire cage. There was only a single door leading further into the building, with a peeling coat of plain white paint. My plan had been to find somewhere to hide, but it didn’t look like there was anywhere actually to do so.

I remember I was stood there, still wondering what to do, when I heard heavy footsteps approaching from behind the door. I froze, looking around desperately for anywhere to hide myself, as the steps grew closer. I had just made the decision to flee the way I had come when the door opened. A short man with a bristling moustache walked out clutching a slip of paper that looked to be a prescription. He nodded to me curtly as he walked past, and left through the front door without saying a word.

I breathed a sigh of relief, and looked down the corridor he had come from. It was darker than I expected. The light bulb had either blown or been turned off, and there didn’t seem to be any windows to let in the faint glow of daylight. There was a staircase on one side, opposite a door labeled with Dr. Tellison’s name, which I assumed to be her office.

As I approached, I noticed a sizable crack in the wood below the staircase, and looking closer, saw a small door to an under-stairs storage area. Opening it as quietly as I could, I saw it was empty, and judging by the dust, didn’t look like it was ever used. I crawled inside and closed the door behind me, delighted to find my suspicions had been correct. Through the crack in the wood, I had a clear view of the doctor’s door, and, I hoped, what was behind it.

I didn’t have to wait long to find out. A few minutes after I’d settled in my hiding place, I saw the office door open and Dr. Tellison stepped out. She walked briskly into the waiting room, and, after a few seconds of muffled conversation, led an elderly man back into her office. She entered first, leaving her patient to close the door behind him. He did not, and I was treated to a good view of her workplace. It was tiled, clean and shining, with a large brown leather examination table, upon which the old man perched as she hovered around him, poking, measuring, and asking questions I couldn’t quite hear.

There was a small, sparse desk in one corner, a cabinet affixed to the wall that I assumed contained her medicines and equipment, and on the floor I could see a squat iron safe. I immediately knew that whatever fearful secrets drew me towards this doctor, they would be bound within that safe.

I saw nothing of importance that day, or the day after that, when I snuck back into the same space. I haunted the cramped shadows beneath that staircase for almost a week before it happened.

I was always careful to be home when my mother would be there, but that wasn’t difficult, and Dr. Tellison never seemed to lock the door to her practice. I remember it was Sunday, and the summer had made my hiding place almost intolerably hot. It must have been almost as warm in the office, as the doctor took to leaving the door open almost all day, allowing whatever draught might come to blow through the building. I saw her inspect and treat almost a dozen strangers over the course of the morning, but still there was no hint of anything untoward.

But shortly before she was due to close for the day, a short, matronly woman arrived. She had curly brown hair, seemed to be in perfect health, and smiled like a fool as she made her way into Dr. Tellison’s office. The doctor greeted her pleasantly enough, but as the check-up began I caught the quickest glimpse of something cruel in her eyes. A certain predatory look.

About ten minutes into the appointment, Dr. Tellison walked over to a cabinet and retrieved a small syringe. She talked amiably to her patient as she sterilized the vein and pushed the needle inside. She kept chatting away as the plunger went down. She even kept talking in that loud, friendly manner as the woman with the curly brown hair began to convulse violently.

Once. Twice. And then she was dead.

As I watched this, my heart was racing. I could lie and say that what I saw made me afraid, but I think we both know the thrill of watching that murder inspired a very different feeling within me. A dark, vicious thing that to this day I can’t fully name. But it was beautiful, and strange.

Though what happened next was even stranger. Dr. Tellison lifted the still warm-body of her patient fully onto the table, before cutting through the fabric of the dress with a pair of shears, exposing an expanse of skin on the woman’s back.

Then she opened the safe. 24-18-3-50, and then the key. I only had to watch her do it once. Inside, I saw two books, one small and bound in leather, the other large and misshapen.

As she retrieved the larger of the two, she brushed away what looked like to be a small pile of animal bones, and picked up a wickedly sharp-looking fountain pen. She leaned over the still form on the table and began to write, not in the book, but on the flesh of the woman she had killed. I could see even from my hiding place her handwriting was cramped and messy, leaving some of the blue ink flowing off her subject like blood.

After almost twenty minutes of hurried writing, she stepped back, apparently waiting for the ink to dry. She then retrieved a clean scalpel from her cabinet, and, with a care she had not given the writing, she began to cut through the dead woman’s back, peeling away the skin upon which she had written and leaving behind a small patch of flayed flesh. She hung it, still dripping, upon a hook that I hadn’t noticed on the wall, then stepped over to the phone, and made a call.

The ambulance arrived so quickly I wondered if they’d been waiting for her. Three men in the uniform of the London Ambulance Service entered. They wore sullen, bitter expressions, and exchanged no words with Dr. Tellison as they wrapped the woman in a body bag and took her outside.

The doctor handed the oldest of them an envelope that I can only assume contained a large amount of money, and they left. I’m quite certain they never even went near the hospital.

It was now dark outside, and I knew my mother would be worried, but I could not leave unnoticed. Nor did I want to, while there was still a chance to watch more of this strange ritual.

As the skin dried upon its hook, the doctor opened the large book, and I saw its thick pages were roughly stitched to the spine with coarse thread. As she turned those pages, they plopped with an unmistakable softness.

She stopped at one page, seemingly at random, near the end of the book, and began to read aloud, her thin finger tracing the lines of text I could not see.

As she spoke, I felt the air grow thick and heavy, a scent like wet dirt rolling through the building and settling in my chest. I don’t know exactly when he appeared. In fact, even now, I’m still not able to pinpoint the moment they arrive – like falling asleep, it has simply happened already.

The old man who now stood before Dr. Tellison was familiar to me, even though I didn’t know his name. One of her patients, I remembered, who’d been taken away in an ambulance some three weeks before. There he stood, hunched and cowering. He spoke in a cracked voice, begging her to release him, demanding to know what was happening. In return, she was questioning him about his will, about his bank details, or where he had hidden money.

I couldn’t believe it – a power like this, and she was using it to try and make money. It sickened me. It still does.

I knew then that she didn’t deserve the book.

After she dismissed the old man, she collapsed into her desk chair, exhausted, and fell asleep.

I took my father’s straight razor from my pocket. It was my most prized possession, and all I had left of him after he used it to cut his own throat. The only sensible decision he ever made.

I crawled from my hiding place so slowly, so quietly, she barely even stirred as the blade glided through her windpipe. I’d never killed anyone before. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. My inclinations, predictably, were more toward watching than doing the deed myself.

Still, there was some satisfaction in the end. I did try to bind her, but it didn’t go quite right, and her page was a dreadful mess. I can’t imagine she enjoys it there at all. It took a lot more practice to get it right – not to mention learning Sanskrit – but I got there, in the end.

After a lifetime, I know all its secrets, save one. And I have a pretty good idea about how to find that.

GERTRUDE
That does explain why you broke with the Institute. Who does the book come from?

MARY
The End, of course. I could never truly serve it – I just don’t find death that interesting. But I’ve always found a singular devotion far too restrictive. Just ask Eric. Or what’s left of him.

GERTRUDE
What about the other book? The smaller one.

MARY
Just a bit of viscera. Poems about dying animals, also in Sanskrit. Drops a lot of bones. I don’t even think it has a real title. Pointless, really. I eventually sold it to Leitner – though it came back to me after the attack.

GERTRUDE
I should really tell Carmilla about this.

MARY
By all means! She’s not exactly big on action though, is she. She’ll just be happy I gave a statement.

GERTRUDE
And do you have any proof of this? Your “magic book.”

MARY
Here, you can keep this page. I made sure it was in English.

GERTRUDE
…

Who… Who is it?

MARY
A surprise, dear! Just make sure you’re alone when you read it.

Goodbye, Gertrude. Wish me luck.

[DOOR OPENS AND CLOSES]
GERTRUDE
Well. I, I don’t really know what to add to that. If what she says is true, I should think carefully before reading this page aloud. I should probably destroy it… though, I do rather hate the smell of burning skin.

Anyway, that’s a decision for another day.

[SOUND OF WOOD CREAKING]
I could rather do with a cup of tea, I think.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
There’s a lot here. In many ways, the context this gives Mary Keay’s odd relationship with death is the least interesting part of it. I knew that her family was connected to Maki Magnus and the Institute somehow, but I had no idea that Gertrude was involved. Even if they didn’t like each other. Maybe I should have known.

Carmilla might not have killed her, but there is a lot she’s not telling me. I’m afraid to ask, though. The Magnus Institute is not what it appears to be, and until I know what it is, and what it’s for, there’s no way I’m letting Carmilla know how much I’m aware of.

But in spite of all that, I’m strangely excited. Because what sticks out to me, more than anything else in that tape, is the very distinctive floorboard at the end. One that hasn’t changed in the eight years since this statement was given. There’s never been any reason to look closely at a random section of floor. This bit wasn’t even breached by any of the worms… because it had Gertrude’s hidden compartment beneath it.

[SOUND OF WOOD CREAKING]
Hm. No strange skin page. But there is a laptop, and a key. I wonder what it opens.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Erin Gallagher-Nelson, regarding an urban exploration trip beneath Saint Paul’s Church, West Hackney. Original statement given March 31st, 2014. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I’m sure you know what urban exploring is. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of amateur yahoos in here who stumble across a ghost in some old factory, so I’ll spare you the breakdown of how it works. And if you don’t know what it is, well, the Internet’s a thing. Look it up.

I’m about as close to a professional as you can get out of what’s basically trespass as a sport. I work as a photographer, and if I play my cards right, I can get more money from an abandoned pump station than from shooting some spoiled human Barbie for “Self-Hate Monthly,” or whatever. It’s always been me and Luke Nelson. He was my wife’s brother, and did all the lighting for our shoots. At least, until he was eaten by the darkness last week.

That’s why I’m here: because I didn’t dream that. It happened. I don’t care what Steph says, I don’t need to talk to a shrink, I need to talk to you.

We were underneath Saint Paul’s Church in West Hackney. Horrid, boxy building, really makes you wonder about God’s housing standards? I mean, I’m just saying, if it was my house, I’d be pretty pissed. Still, I guess if He didn’t want it, he should have protected its predecessor from Nazi bombs, because Saint Paul’s used to be St. James before it got blitzed all the way to rubble.

Everyone always forgets how much London is under London. I mean, it’s not as bad as somewhere like Edinburgh, where they literally buried half the city and built a new one on top – but some places it’s not too far from it. And I’d been doing a lot of research into Saint Paul’s-That-Used-To-Be-Saint James, because it looked like it might be exactly one such a place.

Plans of the drainage and underground of the neighbourhood seemed to indicate that there was a large subterranean area directly beneath Saint Paul’s that appeared to be avoided by all public works – yet the plans for the modern church didn’t indicate anything below ground level.

What this told me was that the old church of Saint James probably had quite a sizable underground presence, which hadn’t been completely destroyed by the bombs. And which its inheritor didn’t use.

Early- to mid-19th-century Victorian vaults, undisturbed for 70 years? It was exactly the sort of thing that’s in vogue at the moment with a certain section of art-y magazines, and I was sure I could sell a few to Getty and a handful of other stock photo sites. And hey, it wasn’t like I hadn’t broken into a church before.

Luckily, Saint Paul’s West Hackney was Church of England, meaning they didn’t lock up as tight as some places. Catholic churches can be a real pain, as they actually have some valuables inside that need to be protected? But this, like most C-of-E, was plain and unadorned inside. So while they took plenty of care with the offices, they weren’t so conscientious about locking up the main church building, ‘cause quite frankly, there was nothing to steal – unless you like hymn books.

It took me and Luke less than a minute to get inside. It was last Tuesday, the 25th. I suppose, technically, it was Wednesday the 26th, as it was well past midnight when we made our move. Once we were in, we kept our torches low, stowed our equipment, and went looking for anything that might get us deeper inside.

At first it looked like we might have been mistaken, and there was no way beneath. But then Luke spotted what looked like a removable panel in the floor just off to the right of what passed for a podium. It was heavier than it looked, but after a bit of work with the crowbar, it came off.

It didn’t look like it had been removed in decades – maybe not since the new church was built. But what surprised me was the air that came out when it shifted. It hissed, like a long-held breath, and the air that rose up from that hole was icy cold, and damp. Not unexpected, but what did surprise me was how clean it smelled. Like an autumn night after the rain.

[LOW BACKGROUND VIBRATIONS BECOME NOTICEABLE]
There was no ladder or stairs down, but we’d brought plenty of rope, so in we went. The gloom seemed to swallow us. I would have sworn that at times I could feel it physically pressing against me.

As it turned out, it was only a couple of metres down to the floor of the underground tunnel, and our flashlights showed exactly what I had hoped for: old Victorian brickwork.

The passage stretching away from us in both directions was absolutely perfect, and I wasted no time in setting up a few shots, while Luke placed the lighting rigs. Down there, the flashes seemed almost blinding, but I was sure I was getting some excellent shots. It was only when I had a quick glance through them on the screen of my SLR that I began to get irritated. Clearly, Luke had been standing in front of the light when I had started to shoot.

In every single image, where the far wall was lit by the bright lights, you could see the clear shape of a person’s shadow.

I got into quite an argument with Luke about it. He insisted that he’d never make such a rookie move. I told him that he could argue with me, but not with the camera. Eventually, he stormed off to go exploring further on.

I took another picture before I followed him. The shadow was still there, and it seemed to be ever so slightly closer.

I don’t know why I ignored it. The human mind is amazingly adept at ignoring things that don’t make sense, that it doesn’t want to see. I convinced myself it was a quirk of the angles of that location. I didn’t even let myself entertain the thought that it could be a problem with my extremely-expensive camera, so I definitely didn’t consider the possibility of a supernatural explanation.

I followed Luke further on until, after about 20 minutes, we came to the ruins of a chamber of some sort. The roof had collapsed, probably from the bombing that had destroyed Saint James Church, and the rubble blocked off most of it. It looked like it had once been a circular room, and either side of the entrance, I could see doorways blocked with fallen stone.

There was no way we’d be able to shift enough debris to access them, but it was strange: as the torch beams played across them, even with most of them completely covered in collapsed masonry, they still didn’t seem as dark as the corridor we’d come from.

I took some photos. The composition of the place was excellent, and the blocked doorways had an odd sort of stark grandeur to them. They were certainly well-made, if they managed to survive what looked to be a direct hit by a German bomb. I checked the photos, and there were no shadows, which was something of a relief.

We headed back the other way. When we reached our ropes hanging down from the hole above us, Luke started to have some concerns. Well, I say concerns: he wanted out of there. He wanted us to pack up and climb out and leave, telling me he was getting weird vibes from the place, and was trying to convince me we’d seen enough. Looking up at that bright square, lit invitingly with the moon shining from church windows, I was half-tempted to agree with him.

The trouble was that, due to the problems with the first shoot, I had one, maybe two pictures of the quality I could do anything with, and that wasn’t nearly enough. I told him bluntly that I didn’t have enough, and if I didn’t get paid, he didn’t get paid. I saw the conflict on his face: he wanted to get out of there, sure, but apparently not as much as he wanted to make rent.

So: on we went, further into the tunnel. I don’t know how far we went. I stopped every 10 meters or so to set up and try to get a good picture, but the shadows were back, and worse than before. Now there’d be two or three of them in some pictures. It wasn’t quite as clearly a human silhouette, so I managed to tell myself that it must be a quirk of how the tunnel reflected the light – even though, looking back, that makes no sense whatsoever.

Still, I kept going, hoping to find somewhere where I could get some shots of the stark, gloomy tunnel, with bricks so black they almost looked like coal. We’d move, set up, shoot, check, and then I’d swear at my camera. I don’t know how many times we did this. Luke got jumpier and jumpier the whole way.

Didn’t feel like much more than 10 minutes we’d been doing it, but when I checked my watch, we’d been down there for almost two hours. We had finally come to the end of the path, and it was just that: an end. A blank wall of bricks indicating the stopping of the tunnel that seemed to go under a good deal of Hackney.

At this point, I at last decided to write the whole thing off and head back. It was as I turned to Luke to tell him this, that my torch died. There was no fanfare: it just fizzled for a second, then turned off with a faint pop. I looked over to Luke about to ask him to pass me the spare batteries – when I saw his face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as scared as he was at that moment. Then his torch went out as well, and there was nothing but darkness.

I could hear him fumbling for something that I assumed was the camera lights, and a second later I heard the click… click… click of him trying to turn them on. Nothing happened. He kept clicking the switches, on and on, and I could feel his desperation, but we were still trapped in the pitch-black.

Eventually, he stopped, and we just stood there. I wanted to say something reassuring, to reach out and let him know I was still there, but I was terrified of breaking the silence. There was just his breathing, labored and scared. I became aware of my own breath: quick, and betraying the panic I was trying to pretend I wasn’t feeling.

And then I heard it: the third set of breathing. It was quiet, at first, long and slow, and very deliberate. The more I listened, the louder it seemed to become, as though whoever was down here with us was making sure we could hear it. And then another set of breaths joined it, deep and throaty. And a fifth – a sixth – then more. We were surrounded on all sides by the sound of breathing, getting louder, getting closer.

Luke let out a small whimper, and all together, they stopped. In their place, there came a scraping sound, something metal, that sounded like being dragged across the bricks, far away behind us, but getting closer, and fast. It was joined by a heavy, thumping tread: footsteps coming towards us, rhythmic and unhurried.

I almost thought it could be my heartbeat, pounding in my ears – but the echo assured me it was coming from down the tunnel. Then the scraping came again, now from the other direction, and I sank to the floor, clutching my camera to my chest like some sort of protective talisman.

It was silent, once again.

The noise that broke the stillness this time is the one that is still ringing in my ears. It was far more dreadful than the others because of how familiar it was – though I had never heard it in such a manner before. It was Luke’s voice, and it was screaming in agony, a shrill, gut-wrenching screech of pain and fear that wiped away all thought in a second and replaced it with blind panic. I wanted to run, but my legs had locked up.

Somewhere in my mind, I remembered the flash on my camera, and my fingers instinctively flicked the switch.

As I pressed the button, the screaming stopped, with a wet snap, and for the worst moment of my life, an explosion of light shot through the darkness.

I saw Luke hanging in the air. There was nobody around him, but on the wall, in stark, black outlines, I saw two long, thin shadows standing beside him. On each, I saw one spindly arm gripping his shadow by the shoulders, while the other held up the shadow of his torn-off head.

In front of me, the real one just hung there, dangling as if by some invisible thread, blood dripping onto the body below it. His eyes were staring at me as though pleading for my feeble, flashing camera to save him. I screamed.

The next thing I remember was the painfully-bright light of a dozen torches on my face. It was the rector of Saint Paul’s, and a small group of what I assumed to be parishioners. He didn’t say a word as he gently led me back towards the entrance. I looked around to see if Luke’s body was there, but I knew deep down that the darkness had eaten him. He was gone.

The rector was very understanding, though I wasn’t making much sense. He spoke soft words of reassurance, brought me out into the sick pale blue of dawn, and called an ambulance to look me over. I didn’t get his name, and it was only after I’d reached the hospital, I realized he had taken my camera.

Since then, I’ve been under observation in the hospital. Nobody listens to my story, and Luke has been officially listed as missing. Steph has been very supportive, but I can see the pain in her eyes. She knows I was the last one to see her brother, and it eats at her. I don’t really know what to do now – except to keep the lights on.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

It should come as no surprise to me by now that the foundation stone of the original Church of Saint James in West Hackney was laid on the 17th November, 1821 by Sir Robert Smirke. Even so, I was very much hoping to find at least one architectural oddity lurking beneath the streets of London that did not bear the mark of him or his students.

This particular encounter doesn’t seem to have much in common with manifestations from similar buildings. We’ve had something of a spectrum from him and his ilk: cobwebs entombing, difficulty in navigation, and now a violent, murderous dark.

My first thought was the People’s Church of the Divine Host, as they seem to have some affinity to the darkness, but I can find a no connection of any sort between them and West Hackney Church.

Not that any of the staff there were very helpful. Every one of them claims to have no memory of encountering Miss Gallagher-Nelson, despite hospital admission records clearly stating she was picked up from there on the morning of the 26th March, 2014. Tim is convinced that at least some of them are lying, but there’s little we can do to gain any information they don’t wish to volunteer.

We’ve been unable to follow up with Miss Gallagher-Nelson. All attempts to contact her have been prevented by her wife, Stephanie Gallagher-Nelson, who has made it abundantly clear that we are not welcome, and are to attempt no further contact.

Luke Nelson remains missing.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Supplemental.

[frustrated, speaking quickly] I have been attempting to access Gertrude’s laptop, but have thus far had no luck. None of the obvious passwords I’ve tried have been successful, and I am unsure who can provide both assistance and discretion. There may be further clues on the other tapes, but so far I’ve had no word from Ivy! I’m so close to finding something, maybe I should just go down there –

[DOOR OPENS]
JONNY
Excuse me, do you have a moment?

ARCHIVIST
Mr D'villle – uh – how did you, how did you get in here…?

JONNY
The new girl let me in. Are you all right?

ARCHIVIST
Hm? Sorry?

JONNY
You look like hell.

ARCHIVIST
It’s been a hard few months. Look, can I help you, because if you’re just after another shouting match –

JONNY
No! I, um – I actually do need your help.

ARCHIVIST
…

Hm. Interesting.

JONNY
All right, can you not be an arsehole about it? I just need access to your library.

ARCHIVIST
So talk to Diana, she runs the place.

JONNY
Yes, I don’t exactly have the academic credentials you guys demand, so I apparently need someone to vouch for me –

[ARCHIVIST SIGHS]
– and you’re basically the closest thing I have to a friend here.

ARCHIVIST
[heh] We’ve spoken once, and we ended up screaming at each other –

JONNY
Yes! And that’s more than I have with anyone else here. Also, uh, Lyf actually has some nice things to say about you. That came as a surprise. You didn’t even tell me you knew her.

ARCHIVIST
I – it was a long time ago. Before she started doing “What the Ghost.”

[JONNY GOES ‘HM’]
It’s a surprise to me as well, to be honest. We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms…

[JONNY GOES ‘HM’ MORE EMPHATICALLY]
What exactly do you need from us, anyway? Can’t your showbiz friends help you?

JONNY
No, I’m, uh – most of, most of them won’t talk to me anymore.

ARCHIVIST
What happened? Did word get out that you’ve given a statement to us, what was it, “credulous idiots?”

JONNY
Not exactly. Look, in my business, your reputation is all that you have. The industry is mainly full of skeptics pretending to be believers pretending to be skeptics –

ARCHIVIST
I think the word you’re looking for is “charlatans” –

JONNY
Can you not? Please? I’m trying to –

[distressed] …look, Ghost Hunt UK split up. I mean, not formally, but well, you know, Pete was always a flake to begin with, and the others just drifted away…

ARCHIVIST
[more gently] I’m sorry to hear that. I noticed you weren’t updating anymore.

JONNY
I tried to get a new crew together – but it was tough. I took to going on expeditions solo, but I don’t really have the skills to get usable footage. I saw a few weird things… then I, then I got arrested.

ARCHIVIST
…Go on.

JONNY
Yes, I… broke into the train graveyard up near Rotherham. Got picked up by his security, and I – I wasn’t doing well. When I was being thrown out, some late-night dog walker got a video of me screaming at them about ghosts. [humorless laugh] When it went online…

ARCHIVIST
Your all-important professional reputation went with it.

JONNY
Yes. Look, I have leads that I really need to follow up, but as far as my colleagues are concerned, these days, I’m the ghost.

ARCHIVIST
Well, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I do know what it’s like to lack the respect of your peers. I’ll have a word with Diana, see if I can get you into the library.

JONNY
Thank you. Seriously. Now, uh, how do I get out of this place?

ARCHIVIST
Oh. Jessica can show you out.

JONNY
Jessica…?

ARCHIVIST
Yes. She should be around here somewhere.

JONNY
Oh. Right…

Well, let me know about the library, okay?

[DOOR OPENS]
ARCHIVIST
Will do.

[DOOR CLOSES]
…What a strange little man.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Donna Gwynne, regarding an unlicensed archaeological dig near the Red Sea in Egypt. Original statement given May 20th, 2015. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
You’ll forgive me if I’m vague on the details – I have to be. The job I was on at the time was a long way from legal, and even if the courts could never prove it, let’s just say the people I worked for take privacy very seriously indeed. All names I give here, aside from my own, are aliases.

It’s hard to get a job in archaeology these days. I mean, I guess it always was? But education funding is being squeezed across the board, and the fact is, most higher-up positions in the field tend to only open up once the previous occupant dies.

It’s sad, but if you look at a full lecture hall on the archaeology course of any major university, you can be pretty sure that none of the people you’re looking at are going to end up doing it for a living. A few might get assistant positions on a project or two, but the long, thankless hours and endless grind to climb a ladder already full up with old, posh men will probably change their minds.

I suppose what I’m saying is, I was never going to be a real archaeologist. So when I got a chance to do some… unlicensed work, I figured it was either that, or train to be a teacher. And I hate children.

See, the thing is that there’s a lot of very valuable stuff in the ground. Ancient artefacts, forgotten knowledge, all that good stuff… but acquiring it takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of fiddly licenses and permissions. Not to mention that governments can get very grabby when it comes to the prizes of antiquity. You can’t take three steps in this field without some wannabe-Indiana Jones declaring something or other “belongs in a museum.” But museums have very limited budgets, and the private market has a never-ending appetite for valuable ancient treasures.

So you have my industry, which is like normal archaeology but a bit more… free-form. I like to think of myself as a rogue archaeologist, but I think most people would just call me a grave robber. Which is daft, because half the time it isn’t even graves we’re dealing with. But that makes surprisingly little difference in terms of legality.

I worked for a man named Stavo. I still might, I’m not sure. He doesn’t really make contact when we don’t have a job, and this one ended badly enough that I’m not sure whether or not I’m getting another call. I hope so. I really don’t want to be a teacher…

He first contacted me three years ago, after funding fell through for my second PhD, and some professional disputes meant that the chances of my career continuing were… somewhere between “zero” and “no.”

He was very to-the-point with me, explaining right away that he organized rapid-turnaround illegal digs, taking whatever high-value finds were transportable, and selling them to private collectors. He had plenty of labour, security, and organizational support, but he needed someone on staff to identify and quickly appraise artefacts or other discoveries. He had previously had a disgraced anthropology professor from Harvard, but he’d apparently been busted smuggling a few extras through customs in China, and was no longer available.

Stavo said I was just the right choice to fill the position. I agreed on the spot. I never did do great with the ethical aspects of my field. I love the hunt, the research, and the discovery – but, to be honest, expanding the body of mankind’s knowledge, or helping a culture connect with its roots, has never been high on my priority list. Certainly not as high as money.

So for the next few years, I traveled the globe with Stavo and his team. There was a geologist I’ll call Grigori; Norman, who was the middleman to various antiques dealers, auction houses, and less-respectable museums; and a pair of quiet Albanians, Barry and Paul, who acted as the muscle. Well, they did the majority of it, but Stavo didn’t like it when people put their feet up on a job, so me, Grigori, and Norman spent most of the time working a spade alongside them, as our expertise generally came in useful in the latter half of the dig.

I like to think I earned my keep. Certainly there were plenty of times Barry was all set to toss out some priceless treasure because he took it for dusty trash. And Stavo never complained.

This last dig was high-risk. Stavo and Norman had ears in the appropriate offices of most universities and museums, so he got word that the Egyptian government had denied permission for the University of Pennsylvania to look into a possible tomb complex located between Cairo and the Red Sea. Again, I won’t go into specifics, but it was right in the middle of the Eastern Desert, a good thirty or forty miles from the closest known explored pyramid or tomb. If the university researchers were right, this place could be both a significant find and – more importantly for us – completely untouched.

It was dangerous, though. When a government denied permission like this, you could never be sure that they weren’t going to send people of their own instead, and Stavo had plenty of stories of ex-colleagues that had got themselves inadvertently-arrested when military abruptly turned up to secure a dig site.

Still, the opportunity was too good to pass up, and Stavo had some contacts within the Cairo police force, and so was able to get us a pair of well-bribed policemen to stick around and give us at least a passing air of respectability for any civilian who might stumble across us.

So, off I went to Egypt, dreaming of finding a new pyramid. I know that sounds daft, but most pyramids are not as huge, obvious, or intact as those at Giza. After four or five thousand years, most just look like hills, or sometimes dunes, and there could be any number of them waiting undiscovered beneath the Egyptian earth.

I was surprised by how easily we found it. Stavo had gotten a location from the university’s application, and Grigori quickly located a likely-looking geological formation on the satellite images. Less than fourteen hours after I got the call, I was standing, shovel-in-hand, in the middle of the Eastern Desert, breaking ground over a tomb that had been unopened for millennia. It was exhilarating.

Grigori had done some work to make sure we were digging over what he believed to be the entrance, and it only took a day to unearth the slab of limestone that covered it. I could see hieroglyphics etched onto the surface, but they were far too worn to read. Large upon the stone was carved the closed loop of a shen ring, the symbol of infinity.

This struck me as odd, since just based on the entrance, I was pretty sure this tomb was at least Fourth Dynasty, and the shen ring was usually used to designate a royal burial place. But there were no cartouches among the hieroglyphics on the entrance, which I would have expected if the tomb contained royalty.

It was a subterranean pyramid, I was now quite certain, but if it had the remains of a pharaoh, their name had not been protected upon death.

Barry and Paul wasted no time in hoisting the limestone slab off the entrance, revealing a dark, yawning passage. In the heat of the sun, I was acutely aware of the cold draft seeping out of the opening.

Stavo gave it a lookover, and asked if there was anything we could salvage from the hieroglyphics. I gave him directions to chip off the Shen ring, and take photos of the rest for later study. Before you ask, I don’t have access to those photos – Stavo still has the camera.

You know, in my haste to make sure everything was going smoothly, it hadn’t really hit me what we had found until that moment, as I stood on the threshold and breathed air four thousand years old. It was dry, and smelt faintly of cedarwood. I had just helped discover an untouched tomb of the Fourth Dynasty.

We collected our bags, picks, and torches, and headed into the dark. Two things struck me as soon as we were inside. The first was how big the place was. The passages were far wider than I would have assumed, based on my research on comparable tombs. The other was that there was also significantly less ornamentation. And by less, I mean none. The walls were bare, unpainted, and for a horrible moment I thought it might already have been ransacked.

Stavo had the same thought, but Grigori assured us that the condition of the entrance indicated it hadn’t been opened since it was originally sealed. The tomb hadn’t been robbed – it was just empty.

As we headed deeper, I began to notice passages branching off our path. In each case, they seemed to be heading, more or less, back the way we came.

I called a halt, and Stavo and I took a few minutes to explore one of them. At first, they seemed to be heading back towards the surface, but further corridors branched off, until we finally reached a dead end. Then another, and another.

It took longer than I was comfortable with to find the others again.

It was a labyrinth, not entirely unlike the one found at Hawara. But crucially, it seemed to only assume its deceptive, maze-like form when heading back towards the entrance. When walking deeper in, it was rather straightforward.

I made these observations to Stavo, and he immediately headed back out, and returned carrying the end of the Jeep’s winch. It was a hundred and fifty feet in total, and he figured if the tomb ended up going deeper than that, we should probably reconsider our approach entirely.

I could see he was getting irritated by these delays and the lack of obviously-bankable artefacts. I couldn’t blame him. I was starting to feel quite on-edge myself.

As it turned out, the winch finished just within sight of the central chamber. So we tied a torch to the end and headed inside.

Like the rest, this room was simple and plain, built out of rough limestone. It was completely empty, save for a raised dais at the centre, about three feet off the floor. Lying there were the remains of an unpainted wooden sarcophagus. It had long since rotted away, though the uncharacteristic copper bands that wrapped it still seemed in good condition.

Among the debris, I could see the pale wrapping of the corpse, tight around in a way that reminded me disconcertingly of a straitjacket. It had worn away in many places, with even the flesh of the mummy itself on show, dark black, and almost shiny in the torchlight.

There was nothing else there at all. No treasures, and no other exits.

It was at that point that Stavo lost it a bit. He’d spent a lot of money on this expedition, and to find that there was nothing there except an old corpse and some shards of wood was a significant problem for him. I mean, the architectural implications of the place in terms of mid-to-late-Fourth Dynasty construction practices were kind of amazing. But I didn’t think that was something he wanted to hear just then, so I kept quiet. We all did. When Stavo got angry, it was best to just let it run its course rather than trying to talk him down from it and draw his anger your way.

I busied myself making another loop of the room, in case there were any secret entrances that I’d missed, while behind me he stood there, swearing.

I did notice something in the corner, though: about a half-dozen small bones, with carvings on each face. Dice. I knew that dice games predated the Old Kingdom by some time, and these were excellent quality.

I decided to wait until Stavo had finished ranting before I drew his attention to them. I turned to see him leaning over the corpse, rage on his face, like it was somehow this dead Egyptian’s fault that the trip had been a bust. I had to stop myself laughing, until I saw that he might actually punch the thing. The mummy was the only thing in that place aside from the dice that we had any hope of selling, and I couldn’t let him damage it.

I shouted at him to stop, and his eyes fixed on me with hatred burning behind them. I explained to him, calmly, and reasonably, that the mummified body before him might be worth a lot of money. This did seem to calm him down a bit, and he was just starting to apologize for his outburst when he went completely still.

His eyes were wide, and he had gone deathly pale. I stepped a bit closer, and, as my torch traveled down from his face and along his arm, I saw it. A blackened, desiccated hand gripping his wrist, the thin fingers clenched tight.

It was moving.

It was alive.

It opened its eyes, but beneath those brittle eyelids were empty crevices where they had long since rotted away. It opened its mouth as though to scream, but no sound came out at all.

I remember thinking, “of course it can’t scream – it doesn’t have any lungs.” Lack of jars meant this would have been a cheaper mummification, and they would have liquefied all the organs over the course of seventy days.

Was this thing alive when that had happened?

Was it buried in salt for seventy days, feeling the cedar oil slowly melting its insides?

These thoughts ran rapidly through my mind as I stood there, frozen in terror.

The sound of Stavo’s pistol shocked me out of my stupor. He always carried a gun when he went on a dangerous job, and he was emptying it into the glossy flesh of the mummy before him. Each shot sent shards of dry skin and dusty bone flying off it.

But it didn’t stop moving, not even when he shoved the gun in the corpse’s mouth and blew off the back of its skull.

It had released him now, and Stavo turned to see the others had already fled back from the chamber, heading towards the surface following the cable back. The strange half-dead creature had spasmed its way off the raised platform now, onto the floor, and lay between me and Stavo and the door.

He gave me an apologetic look, and then ran, leaving me alone with the thing.

The broken, juddering mummy began to drag itself towards me. It was still partially bound in the tight burial cloth, but that didn’t stop it making its painstaking way over the dusty ground. There was plenty of room to run around it – it wasn’t even that fast – but my legs just wouldn’t work as it got closer and closer. Its mouth opened and closed stiffly, dark brown dust falling from it in a steady stream.

I have no idea how it knew I was there. It had no eyes, no nose. There’s no way it should have been able to detect me, but it knew, and crawled directly towards me.

I managed to reach to my hip and pull out my own weapon, a large hunting knife I’d picked up on our last trip to North America – more because its weight had given me a sense of security than because I knew how to use it. I waved it at the approaching corpse, but there was no reaction.

When I felt its cold, leathery fingers grip my shin, it was like the panic pushed my mind so far that it suddenly snapped back into place. I gripped the knife in both hands, leaned forward, and plunged it into the thing’s throat.

The blade sank in with a dry, creaking sound, and the mummy’s arms shot up to grip it. I almost threw up from the feeling of its blackened, dead hands on mine, but it was astoundingly strong. Twitching, it pulled my hands away, dragging the knife out of its throat and moving my arm down lower, positioning the point of the blade on its chest, where the heart should be. Then it made me push the knife in.

The poor creature hung there for a second, then pulled the knife out and made me stab it again. Over and over it made me do it, while its torso racked and convulsed.

It almost seemed like it was crying But without tear ducts or lungs, there was no way to know.

After the fifth time it had made me stab it, it loosened its grip on my hand enough that I could release the knife. With a burst of adrenaline, I took to my feet and fled.

Luckily, Stavo hadn’t withdrawn the Jeep’s winch cable yet, or else God knows how long I’d have been trapped down there. Especially since when I emerged into the intense sunlight of the desert, I found Paul and Barry arguing over the best way to replace the slab over the entrance.

It took many hours to rebury it completely, but when we were done, it was like no one had ever been there.

Stavo didn’t say a word as we drove away.

In ancient Egypt, dying was the most important thing a person would ever do. Your whole life was preparation for it: readying yourself, and acquiring what you would need for the journey. Back when the Nile was the source of all that kept you alive – the land of the living. But as you got further from it, the very earth itself became hostile to you, unable to support any sort of life at all. It was there, at the outskirts – the edge of life itself – that they built their tombs and pyramids.

I cannot imagine what they would have thought of a person who could not die.

I can imagine what they would have done to them.

ARCHIVIST
End statement.

If there’s one thing I hate more than statements that can only be followed up by making contact with uncooperative foreign agencies, it is statements where everyone involved is a criminal, who either cannot be tracked down, or is unwilling to discuss their business in any way. This statement manages to neatly combine the two in such a way that any verification or follow-up has proven utterly impossible.

The only thing I have found is that Miss Gwynne is now training to become a teacher. I can’t deny I find a certain… cruel satisfaction in that fact. I feel anyone who brings me a statement about mummies deserves everything they get.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
IVY
You can’t just come down to the station asking to –

ARCHIVIST
I am sorry, I didn’t think –

IVY
No. You didn’t. Now I’ve got a whole bunch of questions being asked. They’re keeping tabs on me at work.

ARCHIVIST
I just wanted to see –

IVY
Your next tape. Yeah, I get it, but right now I can’t do anything about that, because I feel like they’re watching me all the time.

ARCHIVIST
I – I mean, if that’s the case, should you even have come down here?

IVY
It’s fine, it’s – it’s just work.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you and me? We suck at this whole spy thing.

ARCHIVIST
[sigh]

IVY
I need to wait until things calm down a bit.

ARCHIVIST
Well… Keep me updated, I suppose.

IVY
Yeah, if I can.

[DOOR OPENS]
Stay safe.

[DOOR CLOSES]
ARCHIVIST
[whispering] Damn.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Are you doing all right?

TESSA
Yeah, just… your tape recorder. It’s old.

ARCHIVIST
I get that a lot.

TESSA
I just mean, I’ve been thinking about “analog” and “digital,” what we mean by them?

ARCHIVIST
In terms of information…?

TESSA
Yeah. We use the word “digital” to refer to one specific way of storing information – discrete signal values interpreted at pre-established levels. “Analog” is just a fancy way of saying “everything else.”

ARCHIVIST
I, uh –

TESSA
[speaking over her Rude] Almost everything in the world is analog, but we’re obsessed with digital. We try to surrender everything into it, break the world down and turn it into as much binary as it takes. But it’s not the same.

I used to work on OCR programs, teaching computers to read, to take the messy physicality of the written word and convert it into something that a computer can understand in a digital format.

ARCHIVIST
I’m not sure what this has to do with my tape recorder.

TESSA
Magnetic tape. Everyone thinks it’s analog, but it’s digital. A lower-tech version than what we use now, but people forget that it was used to store computerized data for decades. Maybe it reminds people of a film reel, or, or maybe nostalgia turns everything analog.

Although people always think of digital as not really there, but the thing is, information is always physically present. It doesn’t exist as some formless nothing. Even within the tiniest, most advanced storage systems, physical memory cells change and alter themselves to render that information in a language all of their own.

I suppose it isn’t language, not really, because, because language as we use it is about as far from digital as you can get. We may call them words, but, the units of data that a computer works with are by their nature discrete and definite, while the words we use are clumsy, vague things, always at the whim of interpretation and decay.

It’s the obvious thing to say, that a computer cannot feel, but it’s true. No sequence of distinct ones and zeros can replicate the swirling cocktail of chemicals and, and, you know, nerves that is a human being. Or any other animal for that matter. Nothing about humanity is binary.

ARCHIVIST
…r-right. So, you work in computers, then.

TESSA
Sorry, I, um… it’s been a while since I talked to someone in person? Been spending a lot of time in my own head, you know. Used to just dumping information when I get the chance. I have a blog, actually, but I haven’t posted for almost a year. Almost too embarrassed to, now… Assuming I’m not losing my mind, of course!

ARCHIVIST
Yes, I hear that a lot, too.

TESSA
Well, that’s what’s terrifying, isn’t it? Your mind is all you are, there’s no backup, or you know, reset, If it goes. I’m not just talking about madness as it appears, but what it is from inside. The way people talk about it, it’s like you have to think you’re saying that our mind is everything we perceive, everything we are. That means you can never know when your grasp might be slipping. I’m not convinced that’s it, though.

Or maybe deep down somewhere inside, you understand what’s happening to you and – no. I am, I don’t know which scares me more.

ARCHIVIST
Uh, look, I don’t want to rush you –

TESSA
I’ve got a lot of friends whose retirement plans basically come down to uploading their minds into a computer and living forever in a virtual world. They’re so sure it’s just around the corner. I’ve never had the heart to tell them it’s impossible – that the human brain is a wet mess of analog signal interpretation that is as far removed from the clean logics of digital processing as it’s possible to be.

We’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that computers and people have anything in common? But no matter how good we may program them to be at pretending to think like us, that’s all we’ll ever be. Crossing the line from meat and chemicals into pure digital systems is impossible. And everything else is just sophisticated programming and, and illusion.

ARCHIVIST
I mean, that’s fascinating, Miss Winters, but I must politely ask you to start your statement.

TESSA
What do you think I’ve been doing?

ARCHIVIST
…traditionally, our concerns are with the particulars of the supernatural incident, its origins and manifestations.

TESSA
I’m giving you context.

ARCHIVIST
Right…

In that case, I still need to make the official notations.

Statement of Tessa Winters, regarding a strange computer program she downloaded from the Deep Web three months ago.

Is that accurate?

TESSA
[heh] Well, first off, I didn’t find it on “the Deep Web” – god, it’s like talking to my grandpa! Let me explain something quickly: any time someone tries to give you a line about the “the Deep Web,” or even better, “the darknet,” chances are they wouldn’t know a VPN from their own ass. There’s not some secret, sinister underbelly of the internet where, with the right passwords and double-talk, you can hack your way into a black market of assassins, drug lords, and secret forums.

It’s just that some websites, well, we need to be a bit more security-minded, and need you to use the right, you know, software, so you’re not monitored. – I mean, yes, there’s drug stuff on there, but it’s mostly just paranoid geeks who don’t want to be caught pirating Photoshop.

ARCHIVIST
Noted.

Statement recorded direct from subject 7th January, 2017. Statement begins.

TESSA (STATEMENT)
Have you ever heard of Sergey Ushanka? I’d guess not. He’s one of the less well-known online spook stories, and you don’t look like you’re a regular presence in the chatbot or neural net communities.

The story goes back to about 1983, during the first home computer boom. There was this programmer by the name of Sergey Ushanka – I don’t know if that’s his real name, probably not… but, since a “ushanka” is a type of furry Russian hat, and he probably never actually existed… but, he was supposed to have been a real digital guru.

Well, according to the story, he, he got sick. In most versions it’s, uh, it’s brain cancer, but some say early-onset Alzheimer’s, or some sort of undiagnosed brain infection. Point is, it was killing him, and it affected his brain.

Now, Sergey didn’t want to die, the idea of death terrified him, and whatever was eating his mind gave him the idea to try and save his consciousness, to, um, to upload his brain.

Well, the next bit, it, um, depends on how ghoulish a version of the story you’re told.

In some, he spends a fortune and every last hour of his last months trying desperately to code his own mind into his system, and he ends up lying dead at the keyboard, decomposing fingers still tapping away the last slivers of himself.

Other versions get a bit more grotesque. Handwritten code in his own blood feeding into the machine. I even heard one where he took the direct approach, removed the casing of his computer, carved off the top of his skull, and used the last ounces of his strength to impossibly shove his own deceased brain right into the circuitry.

Whatever version you’re told, the story goes that it actually worked, and the police found a pile of floppy disks full of impossible code next to the mutilated body of Sergey Ushanka.

I’m sure you can guess the next bit. First on floppy disks, then later on CD, and eventually downloaded directly. Sergei Ushanka has been a running prank for people who like to code text parsers and chatbots. They’re not unlike screamer videos, just a lot slower and, ideally, subtler.

You create a program which appears to be a chat window with a stranger who identifies themselves as Sergey. The responses should be as naturalistic as possible to begin with, and in the best ones it’s hard to tell if you’re talking to a bot for the first minute or two.

But then the responses start to break down, become more sinister, and keep referring to how much pain Sergey is in. Eventually, the only response the bot gives you is screaming and pleas to be released. The idea is that the chat bot is Sergey Ushanka’s mind, and he doesn’t like being in a computer nearly as much as he’d hoped. If it’s well-executed, it can be genuinely quite unsettling.

But the only two consistent details across all of them are a particular image of a heavily-pixelated screaming face, and the phrase “the angles cut me when I try to think,” which marks the start of the bot’s descent into madness. Well, as far as I know these two things have been consistent right back to the earliest versions of Sergey Ushanka.

Like I say, it’s quite a niche legend, but within certain communities, everyone’s tried their hand at making a Sergey Ushanka at least once. Well, even I looked into it once or twice, and I’m on the fringes. I’ve done a few projects with basic neural nets, but I’ve never really tried my hand at a chatbot, and gave up after a couple of hours. I used to love them. The whole thing really hit my sweet spot between creepy and nerdy, and if I found myself up at 4:00 in the morning after watching too many YouTube ghost videos, I’d often go on the hunt for a new one.

So, when I got a notification from the bot group I’m part of, and it was just a link to a file named your “Ushanka’s Despair.exe”, I didn’t hesitate. I downloaded it almost immediately. It was a bit disappointing to see it was a tiny file, barely over a megabyte. That didn’t bode well for the experience, but I was still keen to give it a go later that night, when the ambience was better.

I looked back at the post, and saw that underneath it was comment after comment telling the OP that they’d posted a broken link. I shrugged it off at the time, but looking back I think I was probably the first person to click it, and the only one it worked for. Just unlucky, I guess.

I forgot about it for a while, but I didn’t have anything scheduled for the next day, so I spent most of the evening drinking and messing about online. It was about two in the morning when I remembered what I had waiting in my downloads. I looked out the dark, empty street below, and a pleasing shiver run up my spine. I decided I was in the perfect mood to have a chat with Sergey Ushanka.

Opening the program brought up a chat window. It wasn’t like most of the others I’d seen; it looked closer to an old-school text adventure, with just a flashing line to indicate where to type your text, white on back. Aside from that, the window was empty.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, as usually, the bot would make the first move, so I decided to go with a generic hello. There was no way the bots didn’t have a response programmed for that.

I waited, but there didn’t seem to be any response. That was fine. Often these things were programmed with waiting times to give the impression of thinking or composing a response. After about 15 seconds, I’m about to give it up as non-functional and close it, when the answer comes.

It’s gibberish – just a mess of symbols and letters, like it was using the wrong characters. Some of them weren’t even ASCII. I didn’t have time to really process it, though, as they were generating quickly, and soon filled the whole screen.

They weren’t static, either, but changing and scrolling, and um, and it’s gonna sound weird and it was only for a moment, but I could have sworn I saw some of the symbols twitch? Like they were in pain?

It was making my eyes hurt to watch, and I started to feel dizzy… but I couldn’t bring myself to look away.

Even then, I thought I was just looking at a very well-done horror set piece, especially when I started to notice a handful of English words popping into the wall of shifting text, for a second or two at a time. One of them read “helphelphelp”, all run together, and another, “it peels my mind like knives.”

My mouth was dry, and my hands were shaking, but even then all I could think was [laugh] how good this was. I was genuinely impressed by how unsettled it was making me.

It was the laptop’s fan that finally got me. I gradually realized that it wasn’t making its normal whirring sounds anymore. It had changed to something harsher, less healthy-sounding, like it was desperately trying to expel air? It sounded like someone breathing out diseased lungs, pushing and straining and, and never stopping to take anything back in.

It was only at that point that the possibility of malware really occurred to me. I didn’t know how it would make my laptop fans sound like that, but my computer wasn’t acting right. I tried to exit the program, and predictably enough, it wouldn’t close. So I crashed it, planning to have a look through in safe mode.

Sure enough, the lights went dark, and the groaning sounds of the fan died, but the white text on the screen wasn’t going anywhere.

Now, that, I knew was impossible. Or maybe there might have been some way to keep it frozen on the screen when the computer turned off, but to have it keep changing and morphing, when there was clearly no power running through it? Well, if it’s possible I don’t know how you do it.

More words popped in and out of existence: “you wanted to talk” and “hihihihihi” over and over again.

Then all at once, the screen was filled with an image. It was grainy, like a very early webcam, and the camera appeared to be lying on a table looking up at a balding man. He appeared to be in his late 30s, I thought, and was shirtless, with a face frozen in pain or distress. Then he moved, and I realized that I must be watching a video file.

The man was crying. There was no sound, but I could see great heaving sobs that sent his whole body shuddering. He stared into a computer monitor, the edge of which I could just about see. He seemed to be sat in the dark, and his face was solely illuminated by the screen in front of him. I watched with mounting dread as the video continued. He reached down, to what I assumed would have been the keyboard, but he didn’t seem to be typing.

Instead, there was a sudden jerking motion, and he raised his hand to reveal one of the keys, that he had apparently torn off. He brought it to his mouth, and began to eat it. I could just about make out the snap of his jaw, as the hard plastic shattered between his teeth. And as he reached for the next one, I could see a trickle of blood from his lips.

Well, that was more than enough for me. I slammed the laptop shut, and pushed it away. I decided that whatever was ha-happening could wait until daylight. I turned on all the lights in my room and sat in an armchair drinking until I passed out, trying not to think about Sergey Ushanka.

I don’t know how long I slept for, but it can’t have been more than an hour or two, since it was still fully dark when I was woken by a snapping, crunching noise. I opened my eyes to see my TV screen on. It was showing that same video, the washed-out grainy blue making details almost impossible to distinguish, but there was noise now, coming through my speakers. I heard him crunching and eating the keys as he snapped them off, one by one.

I tried to figure out how the program could have jumped from my laptop to my TV, which wasn’t plugged in or networked to it. The only thing they had in common was the router and, and that didn’t make any sense, not unless someone was playing a really elaborate, really horrible prank on me, specifically. And I’m not the nicest person, but… I’ve never pissed anyone off that much.

All the time I was trying to figure this out, the video kept playing. The man’s breathing was labored and painful, and he was talking, muttering to himself, or maybe to me. There was no way to tell.

I couldn’t make out much through the mess he’d made of his mouth, and what I could hear, I didn’t understand. He was talking about how “it feels like thinking through cheese wire,” and “there’s no feeling, but the no feeling hurts,” and that “it’s cold without blood.”

He said that a lot. “It’s cold” and “it hurts.”

He spoke with a Russian accent. At one point, he stopped pulling at the keyboard, and reached out in front of him to where the monitor would be. There was a sound of breaking, and he pulled back a shard of glass. I don’t need to tell you what he did with it. The worst thing was, even though this meant the screen must have been shattered, somehow it was still illuminating his face.

I unplugged everything – the TV, the router, the speakers, everything. Well, that seemed to stop it, at least, at least for a while. I was in a bad way by this point, and I just left and wandered the streets until the sun came up. I didn’t take my phone, just… well, just in case.

That video was 17 hours long. I know this because it followed me until I watched all of it.

Any time I used a computer, watched TV, or looked too long at a screen, there it was. Didn’t matter if it was my own or someone else’s. After a few minutes, whatever I was looking at would melt away, and he’d be back, continuing to slowly, painfully eat his computer.

I tried to show it to a friend once, but he just looked at me like I was playing some weird joke. Only I could see it, apparently. I don’t want to be mad. I don’t think I am. But there’s no way really to know, is there?

After a month of this, I finally sat down and watched it through to the end. It was the longest day of my life, and by the end, I felt so very sick, I almost threw up when he smiled. Finally, he laid down in front of the camera and said:

“The maze is sharp on my mind.”

“The angles cut me when I try to think.”

Then he stopped moving. I could see the top of his head then, and the back of it seemed to be missing.

The picture stayed like that for about half an hour, and then the video ended. I haven’t seen it since.

I keep thinking about the idea of uploading your mind into a computer. I said it was impossible. I still think it’s impossible, in the way we want it to be. But I can’t stop wondering what it must be like to try and have thoughts, messy human thoughts, trapped in the rigid digital processes of a computer.

It must hurt. Though not a sort of pain that we can understand.

Is that enough? Do you have what you need?

ARCHIVIST
I think… uh, yes. I think we do.

TESSA
The way you’re looking at me, I’m going to assume you don’t know anything more about this than I do.

ARCHIVIST
Not really, I’m afraid. I can talk you through some other encounters we’ve recorded with supposedly haunted computers, and I think one of our post-grad students is working on something about supernatural manifestations in technology, but I don’t think we have anything else like this.

TESSA
Yeah, I figured. I just saw your post and thought, why not? And it does feel good to talk about it. You know?

ARCHIVIST
Yes, I very much understand.

Oh! While I have you –

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

It looks like my posting on a few of the more tech-savvy boards appealing for statements has worked.

While the incident itself seems ultimately inconsequential, I was able to convince Tessa to have a look at Gertrude’s laptop, claiming to have locked myself out. I don’t know what she did – something about “command lines” and “administrative privileges” – but I now. Have. Access.

[slow exhale] I’m almost afraid –

[DOOR CREAKS]
TIM
Hey, where did you put the –

Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb you while you were being suspicious –

ARCHIVIST
It’s fine Timothy.

TIM
No, no, I’ll – catch you when you’re not scheming.

[FOOTSTEPS WALKING AWAY]
ARCHIVIST
[quietly] No need to take that tone –

TIM
What?

ARCHIVIST
Nothing. I’ll see you later –

TIM
No.

[SMALL CLUNK LIKE A CHAIR MOVING]
What did you say?

ARCHIVIST
I said there’s no need for the attitude, I know things have been difficult, but –

TIM
Oh, they have, have they? “Things have been difficult?” You’ve spent a month staring at that footage – double-checking every moment, timing every tea break, looking at me like I somehow staged it – but no! You’re right: “Things have been difficult.”

ARCHIVIST
It just seems a little too convenient! can you blame me?

TIM
Excuse me!?

ARCHIVIST
I mean, the CCTV is so corrupted that the police can’t just use it immediately, and then they happen to finish restoring it just when I start really digging into the murder!? And if it was an option, why not clean it up when she first disappeared!?

And don’t get me started on the lack of cameras in the Archives – I know, I know Carmilla’s whole spiel about “signal degradation” and “installation issues,” but I don’t buy it. I mean, she got the CO2 system put in easily enough –

TIM
Shut. Up.

ARCHIVIST
What –

TIM
Shut up. Just stop talking. I’m sick of this. I’m sick of you! We didn’t kill Gertrude, and no one wants to kill you, you pompous idiot!

ARCHIVIST
Now, listen here you litt–

TIM
No. No. You listen, for once. I was fine in research. Happy. Then you asked me to be transferred here and suddenly it’s all monsters and killers and secret passages, oh my!

And the worst thing – the actual worst thing – is that no one here has my back. With any of it! Carmilla doesn’t care, Nastya just wants a tea party, and Jessica – ugh – and you! – you’re treating me like I’m somehow to blame for it all, like I didn’t suffer the worst right alongside you!

ARCHIVIST
Well, excuse me if my experiences have made me –

TIM
Your experiences? Fuck you, I got eaten by worms because of you!

ARCHIVIST
Well, what do you want? You want sympathy?

TIM
You know what, yeah! Little bit of basic sympathy would have been nice!

ARCHIVIST
Jane Prentiss was not my fault, I did not bring her to the Archives you did

TIM
Oh, but you went off the deep end afterwards, didn’t you!? Everything went to hell – and when you actually needed to be in charge, you just hid down here and played with your tape recorder –

ARCHIVIST
Well, what would you have me do!?

TIM
Anything! Anything that wasn’t turning into a paranoid lunatic would have been fine! Anything that showed you could actually do your job!

ARCHIVIST
Well, [nervous faux-laugh] Carmilla clearly thinks –

TIM
Carmilla should’ve fired you weeks ago!

ARCHIVIST
What!?

TIM
After everything you’ve pulled, you should be gone. But no! Instead, we all get to talk about how you’re feeling, because we’re worried about our stalker boss. I, I can’t do this anymore!

ARCHIVIST
Then quit.

If you hate it so much, leave your post in the Archives. Permanently.

TIM
Are you firing me?

ARCHIVIST
…I’m offering you a chance to quit. No notice period, I’ll even make sure you get the rest of the month’s paycheck.

Just say the words.

[PAUSE]
TIM
I want to…

ARCHIVIST
So do it.

TIM
I…

Can’t.

ARCHIVIST
Why not?

TIM
I, I can’t! I don’t know – why can’t I quit!?

ARCHIVIST
I-I don’t know. But I don’t think I can fire you either…

TIM
What?

ARCHIVIST
It’s this place.

TIM
…I don’t understand.

ARCHIVIST
Neither do I. I’m trying to figure it out, I-I’ve got the shape of it, but…

I’m not sorry, Tim. Truly I am not. And I cannot and will not trust you. This place isn’t right – you see that now. I don’t know how or why, but there is something very wrong with the Archives. And I don’t know who here is a victim of it – and who is an agent.

TIM
So… What do we do?

ARCHIVIST
For now…? I suppose we just… do our jobs.

TIM
I don’t want to.

ARCHIVIST
Of course you don't.

TIM
…I, um, suppose I’ll see you later.

ARCHIVIST
I suppose so.

[DOOR CREAKS]
End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Vincent Yang regarding his claimed imprisonment by Mikaele Salesa.

Original statement given February 22nd, 2000. Recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
He drugged me. Obviously he drugged me, that’s the only explanation that makes sense. It was the only way he could get me in there, and drugs can affect how you see all sorts of things, even time.

It’s just, it felt so real. I felt every second, and I checked my watch, and – but I’ve taken all sorts of drugs in my life, I experimented plenty with psychedelics in my youth, and this didn’t feel like being drugged. It felt like being eaten. No, not eaten, entombed.

It was his own damned fault. I’ve been working customs long enough and we all know the drill, he should too. You bust the sloppy ones, you bust the ones you think might involve whatever the higher-ups are coming down on hard that month, but most smugglers are small fry. You keep your paperwork in order and we’ll keep out of your way as long as you give us the same courtesy.

I knew that Mikhail shipped through Portsmouth all the time. I never dealt with the man directly, but he should have made sure to keep his documents clean. As it was, I had to hold his shipment. Not enough grounds for an immediate full search, I made that clear to him – but if he didn’t get his papers in order quickly, we’d have no choice.

I still remember how he stared at me, stood in that shipping container surrounded by flight cases and sealed metal boxes. That level, even stare. He was appraising me like some sort of antique. Like he was curious what my value might be at auction. Then his face turned to a scowl of irritation, and he gestured widely to his cargo, offering me the chance to examine it if I thought him a criminal.

His voice was deep, calm, and measured, but his eyes had an anger in them that scared me. I looked around the container, not so much to look at the contents, but just to avoid his gaze.

Truth be told, I hated my job. It wears you down to be someone whom nobody wants to see. Smugglers and traffickers hate me because I threatened to disrupt their business, I understand that, but legitimate operators look at me in the exact same way, because they know that an error on the manifest can be far more important than whether they’ve got 2 kilos of heroin hidden in the boot of an imported car.

I began to walk around, giving a cursory examination to the assortment of mismatched boxes surrounding Salesa. I didn’t open anything, I didn’t want to. I just wanted to make a small show of the fact that I could. It was the 18th of January, about a month ago, and the container was ice-cold. Fiddling around with locks and fastenings would have needed me to take my gloves off, and that wasn’t happening.

Salesa stood there in a tank top and unbuttoned shirt, seemingly oblivious to the chill. If he was trying to make some show of toughness or bravado, then to be honest, it was working. I had no interest in crossing this man.

More important though, was the fact that smuggled antiques was so far down the list of priorities at that point that from a career point of view, bending down to stare at some flight case full of incorrectly declared pottery was a complete waste of my time.

I sighed, got my feet, and as I did so I grabbed the edge of an old wooden crate to the support. I felt the lid shift slightly under my weight. I looked at it a bit closer and couldn’t help but notice it didn’t seem to have any bolts or locks on it and the lid clearly hadn’t been nailed shut.

I reached over to try and slide it back into place, but my gloved hand slipped and as I tried to grip it I swear I barely touched the thing, but the wooden top slid further off, releasing a dusty cloud of air that sent me into a coughing fit. The air was dry and hot in a way that seemed rather alarming in the frigid shipping container. The inside was dark, the light from the entrance not reaching this far back. I shined my light in and to my surprise the crate appeared to be completely empty. I didn’t remember it listed on the manifest but if it didn’t contain anything there wasn’t necessarily a reason for it to be.

I turned back to face Salesa with a shrug. He no longer looked angry. Instead, his face now had a look of concern. I assumed he was worried I’d found something suspicious, but I shook my head and told him that if he got his documents in order by tomorrow he could be on his way no problem. Otherwise it was going to get more complicated. The look on his face didn’t change.

I began to walk out, I had to plenty more work to do that day, when he grabbed my arm. His grip was just as strong as I would have guessed and for a second I was suddenly afraid he was going to kill me. Instead, he looked me in the eyes for a long moment before he said very softly, “don’t go to sleep”.

I shook my head, assuming that was meant to be some sort of threat, and gave him a look that tried to tell him I wasn’t scared. Of course I was, but either way he didn’t seem to notice he just looked at me and repeated himself.

I was understandably nervous after that little encounter but I live in a ground-floor flat in a rather rough area, so I have several locks, a sturdy door, and bars on the window, all of which I triple-checked before turning in that night. Everything seemed to be an order so I had a few shots of vodka to calm my nerves and, well, I turned in.

Looking back on it now, the thing I find hardest to believe is how well I slept. It was a restful night’s sleep and I didn’t dream. The pain in my legs was what woke me. The dull cramp dragged me slowly from unconsciousness, and I tried to shift them into a more comfortable position under the covers.

As I tried I gradually realized that I couldn’t. They were pressed right up against a hard surface. My eyes began to flutter open and I realized that instead of my pillow, my cheek was pressed against something coarse and rigid, something that, when I tried, to move greeted me with the needling sharpness of splinters.

It was dark. Opening my eyes didn’t do much to change what I could see. My hands pressed against unvarnished wood and I felt a rising panic in the back of my mind. I think deep down I already knew exactly where I was but I still tried, steadily, one at a time, to move every limb and part of my body, hoping desperately that one of them would pass out into open air and reassure me that I wasn’t trapped within that small wooden cube. But I could barely move any of them and it soon became apparent that my prison was indeed a sturdy wooden crate.

I started to shout for help then. The sound was jarring the echo muted by the close confines of the walls, and my cries seemed incredibly loud to me. I called out again and again but nobody came. After a few minutes I suddenly had the horrid thought that maybe I had been buried alive, and I might have limited air. That shut me up very quickly, and instead I started to listen closely for any sound of movement. Nothing.

You know it’s strange, it took me a long time to make the connection with the crate I’d stopped at the cross and Salesa’s shipping container. I was so disorientated by my awakening that the idea that this was his doing took a surprisingly long time to come. Once it did, though, I began to feel rage building. I had the memory of the lid that hadn’t been secured and taking a moment to orientate myself, I began to push up on the wood directly above me.

It didn’t budge a millimeter. Either it had been nailed down or someone had placed a heavy weight on top of it, or both. I started to thrash around at that point, desperate to escape but this only earned me more splinters.

I suppose I was lucky that it was winter. The thick pajamas I slept in, that I was apparently still wearing, protected me from a lot of it. At the thought of winter I began to notice the heat. It was hot in that tiny cell, a closed humid heat that caused sweat to trickle gently down my neck and my throat to gradually turn ragged and raw.

I could do nothing but sit there, cramped and desperate, and feel that stifling oppressive heat thrum around me.

Everything about it was stifling and oppressive. I have never suffered from claustrophobia before but it didn’t take long for it to set in and for a while I gave in to blind panic, muttering to myself and hyperventilating in shallow gasping breaths of hot, sticky air.

The thing that finally brought me out of it was the realization that if I’d been breathing so hard and for so long but was still conscious, that must mean there was airflow and that I wasn’t completely buried alive. That sudden moment of relief ended abruptly though, when I swear I felt the box get smaller.

It was a slight movement, barely a centimeter, but I felt it in a jolt of pain along my leg. That the crate had decided to punish me for my moment of hope. After a while, the cramps that had been so agonizing to begin with began to fade in and out. It’s not that it stopped hurting, far from it, but it became such a constant pain that I could ignore it for long periods of time before it washed back over me in a wave of screaming muscles.

It was in such a window of normality, but I realized I was able to see my arms. There was light. It seemed to be seeping through the small gaps in the wood, barely enough to see by normally, but my eyes had grown very accustomed to the dark. It looked like sunlight. I must have been outside but I had no idea where I might be.

Near my head, a slightly larger space between the wooden slats let in a thin beam of sunlight near my head. I shifted, my neck protesting the movement, but for a single moment I felt it on my face. That sunlight, the dream of freedom. Then the box closed the gap with a shudder and squeezed me a bit tighter for daring to do so.

Still, I knew I was outside, and I knew I had air, so I tried once again to scream for help. I pleaded, I shouted, I felt my dry lips crack from the force of my screams. I kept going until my voice was nothing but a hoarse whisper and then I collapsed back into despair and terror.

At 11:56 I realized I could see my watch. I wasn’t in a habit of taking it off at bed, and the position I had been forced into left it just about visible in the dim light. It was surprisingly little comfort, as the hours that had passed by in a hazy blur of pain and fear now ticked by with an awful slowness.

Even so, it grounded me, kept me focused on something real. The minutes and hours passed same as they would have outside the box, and this more than anything convinced me that I was neither dreaming or mad.

At 9:45, the light began to disappear and I was once again in darkness. I slept then, fitfully and in great pain, and when I woke back up to find myself still trapped there, I cried. Even as I did so, in the back of my mind I hated myself for wasting what water I might have left in me.

Four days I was in there, at least if the darkness and light really was night and day. I used to be religious and I tried to pray several times, but the words felt hollow on my dry, desperate lips. I called out to God, then later to the devil, and finally to Salesa himself. None of them answered.

I knew that that was where I was going to die, trapped and alone. I wondered if they would ever find me. Was I somewhere where the stench of my rot might bring some poor soul to investigate? Probably not if my screams couldn’t be heard but maybe someone would find me. Maybe they would join me if the box was still hungry.

It was thoughts like these that played endlessly through my mind, round and round like a feverish thirsty carousel. Then all at once it was over. I awoke to hear the sounds of wood shifting above me. I barely had time to register what was happening before frigid, icy air washed over me and the torchlight was shining in my face.

I blinked hard as I started to make out two figures above me. One was Salesa, staring at me with an expression of curiosity, the other I didn’t know though I vaguely recognized him as one of the captains that made port here occasionally. Captain Larell, maybe, or Lukas? I don’t really remember.

He looked at me then over to Salesa, shrugged, and handed him a 20 pound note before turning around and walking out of the shipping container, which I saw I was once again inside.

Salesa lifted me gently out of the box being careful, I noted, not to touch the sides. Moving my legs was like walking on knives, but I managed to stumble out, overjoyed at my freedom. I felt Salesa push some papers into my hands. An updated manifest he told me, and sent me on my way.

I spent that day trying to get some life back into my tortured, atrophied muscles and slowly drinking water. I ignored my work completely and ended the day by handing in my notice.

Do you know what date was on my letter of resignation? The 19th of January, the day after I had first seen Salesa. My watch no longer matched the clock in the break room. I don’t know why the night was so much longer for me, or why it boiled me with the sun in the middle of winter.

I must have been drugged. Salesa must have drugged me. It’s the only rational explanation. But I know that he didn’t.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Another tale of the elusive Mikaele Salesa dealing in all sorts of artefacts without any decent safety measures. Unless that’s the point, of course.

And if I’m not mistaken, it would appear he’s at least acquainted with Captain Peter Lukas of the Tundra. Whatever this grand game is, Salesa is definitely involved. I just wish I knew whether he was a player, or a pawn, or something else entirely.

Surprisingly, it seems comprehensive shipping records are harder for Nastya to flirt her way into than police reports, and Jessica has had her own issues with trying to access the electronic records. If there is official documentation of this particular shipment that might verify Mr. Yang’s story, we’re not able to obtain them.

Tim encountered a different problem tracking down Mr. Yang himself. Apparently, he’s retired now and living with his children, who were surprisingly cooperative in allowing Tim to see him. He’s also in the later stages of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He could provide no new useful information, and Tim left after Mr. Yang became acutely distressed at the mention of boxes.

All in all, a dead end. If this was the first time Mikaele Salesa turned up in our files, I would definitely agree with Mr. Yang’s own assessment, but by now there are far too many cases to chalk them all up to drugs.

Whatever Salesa deals in is, I suspect, infinitely more dangerous.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

Gertrude’s laptop has been rather interesting. Unfortunately, nothing along the lines of “My Murderer.avi”. She didn’t keep any sort of diary from what I can see. In fact, it doesn’t look like she kept many documents at all. A few budget spreadsheets and work forms, but I get the feeling she wasn’t much of a note-taker.

The thing that is interesting in the budget spreadsheet is the rather large amount she requested for travel. What’s even stranger is that it seems the budget was approved.

Her internet history and emails reveals some more pertinent information. It looks like she did do a lot of travel, all over the world, far further than the single basement one would expect an archivist to keep to. And in these cases, at least, she kept the receipts and the booking information. Nairobi, Wichita, Budapest, Shanghai – the list goes on. No records as far back as ‘98, of course, but given the pattern, I don’t think a trip to Alexandria is at all out of the question.

There’s also the matter of the products she was ordering. There are several online orders of petrol, lighter fluid, pesticides, and high-powered torches. They are sporadic, but notable in that she did not drive, smoke, or work in pest control. The torches would make sense if it wasn’t for the quantities in which she ordered them. She also sent orders for a staggering array of filing tabs, labels, and index markers, all different makes, formats, and systems, most of which I have encountered in various forms around the archives.

Given that the doddering old lady image is now dispelled in its entirety, I cannot help but wonder if there is a reason she was keeping the files in disarray. I’m not convinced she would approve of my efforts to organize them.

Part of me is tempted to follow her lead and suspend my explorations, but the more I find out about Gertrude, the less I am inclined to trust her, and I am not sure emulating her is the wisest course of action. Especially given the three most alarming purchases I found in her history.

Gertrude Robinson was trying to buy Leitners. Seeing the account name grbookworm1818 gave me a particularly hollow laughs. Obvious when you’re looking for it, I suppose.

It looks like she managed to get hold of three books: a special printing of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, by John Ruskin; that rather dubious copy of The Key of Solomon, and a 1910 pamphlet simply entitled A Disappearance. I am quite sure none of them are in the archives, and they weren’t in her flat, either. I rather hope she destroyed them, especially as The Key of Solomon is something of an almanac on demonology, but my luck isn’t that good.

All told, the laptop has given me much cause for concern, and little in the way of hard evidence. The more I learn about Gertrude, the more I despise her, and the more I worry about her motives.

Perhaps I’ve been focusing on the wrong question, and the most important thing isn’t who killed her, but why.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Jack Barnabas, regarding a short-lived courtship with Agnes Montague in the autumn of 2006. Original statement given March 18, 2007. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I knew she wasn’t normal. I think that’s what originally drew me to her. I thought she was just like me, another weirdo cast off from the world. I mean, there was no way I could have known she wasn’t human. At least, I don’t see how she can have been human – not the way we think of it.

But she was so beautiful. She, she was tall, with long, straight, auburn hair and these eyes that, when they looked at you, it didn’t feel like she was seeing you so much as was trapping you. I never understood the phrase “like a deer in the headlights” until she looked me in the eyes for the first time. I don’t know – maybe something in my fight-or-flight reflex is screwed up, because those weren’t the instincts I felt when it happened.

I should have run, of course. I don’t know if you normally leave people alone in a room when they write their statements, but I can understand you doing so in my case. I’m getting used to people making polite excuses not to look at me.

Deliah tried to warn me off. Deliah Aconjo had worked in the Canyon Cafe ever since it opened in 1991, and as soon as I headed back into the kitchen after I saw Agnes Montague for the first time, she spotted the look in my eyes and shook her head. She told me she was trouble, that there was something not right about her. I asked for more details and Deliah just shrugged. Said that she’d been coming into the cafe ever since it opened, and that there was something off.

At the time, I assumed that she meant Agnes had been coming in ever since she was a child, as she looked about my age. But looking back, I’m not so sure.

It wasn’t as though we would have made any difference. I was drawn to her in a way I can’t even explain. I could never bring myself to say anything, or even make a sound, when her eyes fell on me.

I barely had enough wherewithal to confirm her order, even though it was always the same: a large cup of black coffee with enough room for milk. She never actually put any milk in it. She never even drank it. She’d just take it over and sit there, staring out the window into the street for an hour or so. It wasn’t like there was much of a view, just a normal street, and outside Sheffield city centre, that’s not much of a view at all.

Still, she’d sit there, staring, alone with her thoughts, for about an hour, then stand up and leave. I’d go over to clear away her coffee. It was always scalding hot.

It was such a strange little routine, and I would spend time wondering to myself what she could possibly be thinking about. What was her life, that every Tuesday at 3:00 in the afternoon, she came into the same cafe and didn’t drink a black coffee? The way she always used to order the coffee, it always sounded like she was enjoying it. The order, I mean. Like the phrase “one black coffee with room for milk” was a delightfully novel thing for her to say.

In the year and a bit leading up to my finally talking to her, I only ever saw two occasions when she wasn’t sitting alone.

The first was when another man attempted to chat her up. At least, I assume that’s what he was doing. I didn’t recognize him, but you can always tell when someone starts a conversation with a motive like that. He walked over and started saying something or other, cocky as anything. Agnes – though I didn’t know her name back then – just looked up and met his eyes. I could see him start to falter. Sweat began to roll down his forehead, but he kept talking. Then Agnes went to stand up.

It was only a very small movement, but the man started as though a gun had gone off, knocking into the table and spilling coffee all over his hand. It had been sat there almost 40 minutes, but I could see his flesh start to redden with burns where the liquid had touched it. He screamed, and suddenly all eyes were on him. His face went almost the same color as his burned hand, and he shouted something vague at us, about suing us over the temperature, and ran out the door in pain and embarrassment. Suffice it to say we did not hear from his lawyers.

That was the day I noticed the slight scorch marks on the chair Agnes had been sat on – though at the time I didn’t connect the two.

The other time was about near the end of October last year. I remember because Deliah had been ranting at me about how impossible it was to get a decent woman’s Halloween costume that didn’t, as she put it, show a mile of skin. I was making some weak joke about going as a bedsheet ghost, and telling everyone it was sexy because the ghost was technically naked, when I looked over and saw someone else sat at the table with Agnes.

She was a short woman, with long hair and a thick, muscular frame. I remember being a bit surprised that she seemed to be just wearing a think coat, given how cold it was starting to get.

Weirder than all that, though, was the fact that Agnes appeared to be talking to her. Actually saying words that weren’t in order for coffee or a thank you. Her voice was soft, and I couldn’t make out any of the words. I mean, I know I shouldn’t have been trying to listen, I know it’s a creepy thing to do, but you don’t understand how momentous an occasion this was: to see this beautiful woman whose name I didn’t know finally talking to another human being. It was incredible.

The shorter woman’s voice was loud, though, and she made no attempt at subtlety in her conversation. She was talking about some sort of job, and whether Agnes was going to be able to do it. At first, I thought it was a job interview, and then she started talking about Agnes being “released” from something.

Agnes just said something softly, and shook her head. She looked sad, an expression I’d never seen on her face before.

The other woman sighed, clearly unhappy with the answer, and stood up to leave. Before she went, she took out a brown paper envelope and handed it over. Said that she’d give it to her now, so she didn’t forget later. She called it “a collection.” It looked like the envelope might have been full of money.

Agnes put it in her jacket and returned to staring out the window, as her intimidating companion left with a frustrated expression. That was the moment I decided to try and talk to Agnes. Seeing her interact with someone else, even in such a weird way, unblocked something in my mind.

The following Tuesday, when she came in and ordered her coffee, I asked her name. She looked at me in surprise, and for a second I felt like I’d made a terrible mistake. But then she told me, very matter-of-factly. And then I asked her out on a date. I don’t know how it happened, it just tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop it.

There was a moment of absolute silence, like everyone in the place had stopped breathing – though nobody had looked up. Then Agnes’S face twisted into something I think was a smile, and she said yes. A wave of giddy joy just washed right over me, and she took her coffee and went to her normal table.

I could feel Deliah staring at me from the kitchen, and I didn’t want to turn around, because I knew exactly the face she’d be making. I was too happy to let her ruin it with her muttered predictions of disaster. It was only after Agnes had left her undrunk coffee and headed out to wherever she went that I realized we’d never made any actual arrangements.

I spent the next day in a funk, kicking myself for having been so stupid. I have Wednesdays off work, so there was plenty of time to mope around the house feeling sorry for myself. About 3:00 in the afternoon, though, there was a knock on the door.

Standing on the other side was Agnes. She was dressed in a dark woolen coat and gray scarf, and had that same sort-of-smile on her face. She asked if I was ready to go.

I was very much not. I asked her to wait a minute, as I ran back to my room to put on some deodorant and a clean shirt. It was as I was doing this that I noticed kind of an odd smell, like when you turn on an electric heater for the first time in a while, and you get a whiff of all the burning dust. I looked up and noticed within the corner of the room, where there had been a spider’s web this morning, there was just a faint wisp of smoke. It was weird, but I had more important things on my mind. As soon as I was ready, I headed out.

I asked her what she wanted to do, and she looked at me like I was stupid. We were going to walk in the park, she said. Like it was the only possible thing to do. Of course, I agreed. She was the strangest person I had ever met, but something about it just charmed me. So we went down to Bolehill Park, the nearest one to my flat, and we walked.

I did most of the talking, as you might have expected. I don’t even remember half the things I said now, just a meaningless babble of thoughts, personal details, anecdotes. I worried I was boring her, but every time I looked over, she had that same expression on, which by then I was pretty sure was a smile. I’d catch her eye, and that feeling would flood through me. I still don’t know quite how to describe it, but whatever it was, it was powerful.

We sat on a bench as the sun went down, watching the sky redden, and Agnes asked me a question. It was the first time she’d said anything more than a few words since we left my flat. She asked me if I had a destiny.

I don’t need to tell you the question caught me off guard. I don’t know if I’ve given the impression clearly enough yet, being a single guy in my early thirties still working the till at a Sheffield cafe, but I don’t really see myself as having much of a destiny. Hell, I’m not even sure I believe in destiny. I certainly don’t believe in God, and I feel that’s kind of linked.

So I told her this. She looked at me, with the same sadness I’d seen on her face before. “That must be nice,” she said and went back to staring into the sunset.

We went out several times after that. Each time, she’d show up at my door unannounced and tell me what we were going to do. We went to the park a couple more times, had a meal in an Italian restaurant where she didn’t eat anything. We even went to see a film. I remember it was The Prestige, and when I asked her her thoughts on it, she just told me she hadn’t been watching. God, she was so bizarre. [laugh]

The last date was November the 23rd, 2006. It was a Thursday, and the chill had really hit. It was too cold to spend an evening in the park, to be honest, but Agnes had decided that’s what we had to do, so that’s what we did. She never seemed to feel the cold.

We’d walked in silence for about an hour, and it had gotten dark. I was about to suggest we leave, as they usually closed the park after nightfall. I heard Agnes gasp. I turned to see her gripping her chest, as though in sudden pain, and she told me we had to go. I followed her as she staggered out of the park and over to a phone booth, where she made a panicked call.

She said something about a tree falling, and that they had to finish something. Then she hung up. She leaned on my arm as we walked back to her flat. I’d never been there before, but it was clear she couldn’t make it unassisted.

The building was old, and the wallpaper of the corridor was a faded green lily pattern, occasionally scarred with a vivid hole burnt into it. As we approached her door, I saw a small group of people gathered around it, waiting. I recognized the woman she had been talking to several weeks before, but the others were strangers to me. They were all dressed in rough work clothes and wore severe expressions.

One of them, a big guy with a shaved head, was holding an unlit lantern, and speaking to the others in a language that I think was Spanish or Portuguese. Another held a bag that seemed to be full of candles, while a third had a clear plastic container filled with hundreds of tiny spiders. None of them paid me any attention, and I was rapidly feeling like I was falling into something that I really didn’t want to.

Agnes turned to me and apologized. Told me “goodbye,” and “thank you.” There was such a sense of finality to it that I felt like my heart stopped.

I should have left. I should have turned around and walked back the way I’d come and accepted that I’d never see her again. Instead, I did the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. There, caught up in a series of events that I didn’t understand but that terrified me, and drowning in emotions that I still can’t explain, I asked if I could kiss her.

Without warning, she put her hands either side of my head. I realized it was the first time our skin had ever touched, and I could feel the intense, hellish heat that radiated from inside her. But it was too late. She leaned in and kissed me.

There are no words to describe the pain. My face erupted in boiling agony as I felt my skin start to crack and peel, and the heat washed over me, erasing all thoughts in blistering white. I felt the fat in my cheeks liquefy and bubble as I tried to scream, but my lips wouldn’t work.

I fell to the floor. The last memory I have, before waking up in the hospital, was a single tear dropping onto my hand. A tiny, sizzling pang of torment that still somehow managed to cut through.

When I awoke three days later in the hospital, Agnes was dead. The police came and took my statement, but they had already decided it was a suicide, and when I tried to tell them what had happened, they looked at me like I was making it all up. At least, when they could stand to look at me at all.

The doctors did their best, and repeatedly told me that actually, I was very lucky, as whatever fire I had put my face in should by rights have blinded me as well. It wasn’t exactly a comfort.

I lost almost everything after that. I never had much to begin with, and after I was let go at the cafe, I couldn’t afford to keep my home. They didn’t even try to pretend it wasn’t because my burned face would scare away customers. I’ve ended up living with my father again, who has been… understanding about the situation, though even he can’t bring himself to meet my eye most days.

The worst part is, looking back, I’m still not sure what I would have done differently, or if I’d do it all again. Even after everything the police told me about her death, and the hand, I, I don’t know if I would have had it in me to resist. I just couldn’t avoid being drawn in, like a moth to the flame.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

A rather different perspective on the woman known as Agnes Montague, or Agnes Fielding, depending on who you ask. Although hardly a reliable account, steeped as it is in messy obsessions and confusion.

Still, if the bald man with the lantern is, as I suspect, Diego Malina, it would indicate a link between his notable obsession with burning, and Agnes, who apparently had not-inconsiderable abilities in that area.

I can’t help but wonder if Galahad Nolan, the Hive’s landlord, was one of the other members of that little group. I do not know if they have a name, as such, but given the evidence of organization and the indications of worship, I have started to refer to them in my notes as the Cult of the Lightless Flame. And I believe they may also be connected to the ritual circle found in Scotland by Jason North.

I’ve been, as yet, unable to find any other details on them with the information I have.

Most of the information here has already been covered, following the account of Agnes’s time in Hill Top Road, but Nastya has been able to make contact with Mr. Barnabas by email. He’s apparently been doing much better in the years since his statement, having received some reasonably-successful plastic surgery. He was unable to provide much more information than the above, but upon Nastya’s asking if Agnes had mentioned her childhood at all, he did recall her briefly alluding to being adopted.

Tim also got in contact with Deliah Aconjo, who confirmed what we had suspected: the woman known as Agnes Montague had visited the Canyon Cafe for a decade and a half, apparently without aging a day.

I’m now convinced this is the same Agnes who grew up in Hill Top Road, though exactly what she is, or why she seemed to retain her youth remains a mystery. Like everything else around here. Still, she is dead, as is Diego Malina. I can only hope that prevents them from causing further problems.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
CARMILLA
Raphaella, there’s nothing down there.

ARCHIVIST
No, that’s not true, I told you what happened.

CARMILLA
You told me you wandered around in the dark for hours at a time, shortly after suffering an incredibly traumatic experience.

ARCHIVIST
So you’re saying I imagined it.

CARMILLA
It’s a possibility. The other possibility is there’s something very dangerous down there. Neither makes me particularly inclined to unlock it.

ARCHIVIST
So what do you plan to do about it, send someone else?

CARMILLA
We really don’t have the budget for that –

ARCHIVIST
So, nothing. You’re just going to leave it.

CARMILLA
For now, I think that’s for the best.

ARCHIVIST
Please, Carmilla I need to know.

CARMILLA
[sigh] You really think that this will help?

ARCHIVIST
Yes. Yes, it’s getting harder and harder to work down there without being sure… what’s underneath me. So either give me the key, or find a new Archivist.

CARMILLA
Oh, good lord, don’t be so dramatic, Raphaella. You know how hard it would be to replace you.

ARCHIVIST
I, I don’t actually? But… thank you, I suppose.

CARMILLA
I’ll have a copy made for you on one condition: be careful. No more impetuous subterranean adventures. Understand?

ARCHIVIST
Of course, of course. Understood.

CARMILLA
And for God’s sake, get some sleep.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Joseph Russo regarding a book allegedly authored by Sir Frederick Treeves. Original statement given June 3rd, 2003. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Thanks for letting me do this. I mean, I know you let anyone record a statement. That’s why you’re the Magnus Institute! So I could have just made something up, I guess. But I don’t want to waste your time or irritate you guys. I mean, I’m a big fan of your work. Never had the academic chops to get access to your library or anything, but when all those statements were leaked back in ‘99… I know all the letters pages called you crackpots, but I know. Yeah? I get it. I read them all, start to finish, and sure there’s a lot of nonsense in there, a lot of bad acid trips and liars, but in the middle, at the core of them, there was something there. There are things that go bump in the night and now I think I’ve got one to share with you.

So I’m kind of an artist. I like to use the detritus of mankind’s time on this planet to craft its own reflection back at itself, yeah? So I take what others consider garbage and use it to send a message to the puppetmasters and fat cats who hold our lives in the palm of their hand and play with our society like a chess game. A message of art. You know what I’m talking about. I bet you have a ton in your archive about the Illuminati. That’s why they smeared you so hard. I’m not asking to look at them or anything; I’m just letting you know that I get it. Yeah? I get it.

So, anyway, I spend a lot of time at the dump. Not so much those huge iron skips or the bottle bank – I mean, like I don’t have enough bottles in my studio already – but you know the bit in the middle where they sell stuff. All the stuff that really skirts the line between trash and treasure. Mirrors that are tarnished but still good. Old furniture just a bit too scuffed for the charity shop. You can get amazing things there for almost nothing if you look hard and aren’t too picky.

And when you’re making art, you don’t need to be picky. If something’s not perfect, you can make it perfect. You use the beauty inside of you to reach in and pull the beauty out of the object. Sometimes by breaking it more; sometimes by repairing it just enough. And, once, by setting it on fire. So the people at the dump around my area they know me and generally when I turn up they key me in to any of the good stuff that’s come in.

So, I was checking out the tip near Wood Green two days ago and they don’t usually have a lot of good stuff. I mean, I’ve been there sometimes when there’s literally no stuff out for sale but this time they had a few furniture pieces and a cutlery set, but nothing I could use. But one of the guys who works there, I think his name’s Gus. Or Al. He looks like a Gus or an Al.

Anyway, he pointed me to the only thing that really caught my attention. It was a wicker basket full of old books. Now this I was interested in. I’m working on a piece at the moment, it’s called ‘Pageviews’ and it’s about the death of print media at the dawn of the digital age. Point is, I’m filling a bunch of computer monitors with shredded books, so cheap books, especially a bit old and a bit yellowed, were exactly what I needed.

I discarded a few of them, as the texture or page tone wasn’t quite right, but there were plenty in there I could use. Then I spotted a book that looked a bit older than the others, right at the bottom. It was large, and the pages looked thick and loose. It was titled The Tale of a Field Hospital, by Frederick Treeves.

So clearly I’m buying it, right? I mean, obviously you know Frederick Treeves, the surgeon who was best friends with Joseph Merrick, AKA the Elephant Man, AKA my all-time favourite Victorian medical curiosity. And not just because he shares my name, though I guess that doesn’t hurt.

I mean, I knew about the book; Treeves’ account of his time working in a field hospital during the Second Boer War. I’d read it before, of course, but my copy had gone missing about the time Sandra moved out. She wasn’t exactly a fan, and I think she threw away a whole bunch of my stuff out of spite. Thing is, this one looked old. Like, 19th century old, which, since that’s when he was writing meant there was a good chance it was a first edition and that sort of thing can be very valuable. Meaning I get a good read and a payday. Win-win, right?

So I buy it, for like 50p and head off, but it’s weird. Don’t know who owned it before, might have even have been a library copy but the sticker was mostly torn off. It didn’t have a frontispiece, though, and a lot of the pages had different ink weights or layouts, and it kind of looks like they were printed at different times.

It’s only when I get home that I remember The Tale of a Field Hospital was actually based on a series of short columns he wrote for the British Medical Journal during the war itself. So I reckon what I’ve got here might just be some kind of proofing or draft copy, or maybe some custom-bound collection of those articles, and I get really excited.

As I started reading through it, though, there was something kind of weird. Bits of some of the chapters that I really don’t remember from the version I read before. The book’s old and dirty and kind of tricky to just read, so I copied down a few passages for you.

So, almost halfway through, Chapter Thirteen, he talks about “The Men with the Spades” – the soldiers who came up every day to dig the graves for those who had died in the hospital. He describes them as “unkempt and uncaring, their devil-may-care attitude hiding the deep sadness within them at their solemn duty”. Except, in the version I have, it goes like this:

Archivist’s note: attached to this statement at various points are handwritten versions of passages allegedly from the book in question.

“The graves at Frere were dug by our own men, or rather, by a small fatigue party from a regiment nearby. Nearly every morning they came, the men with the spades. There were seven of them, with a corporal, and they came up jauntily, with their spades on their shoulders and their pipes in their mouths. They were in their shirt-sleeves, and there was much display of belt and of unbuttoned neck. Their helmets were apt to be stuck on their heads in informal attitudes. They were inexpressibly untidy, and they made in their march a loose, shambling suggestion of a procession.

There was only one man who kept in his conduct a sense of decorum, yet I cannot recall it with any fondness. He wore his uniform precisely about him, and though perspiration assailed his face as he worked on his maudlin task not a drop of it ever touched his jacket. He would gaze at me levelly when I watched him work. I fancied the flies flew thicker over whatever grave he worked upon.

I asked the corporal for his name, and was told that that was Private Amherst. Fitting enough, I remarked, that he should be named for a dealer in smallpox, when he himself seemed almost taken by fever. I regretted my remark the following day, as he stood in his open grave, saluted me, and died on the spot of typhoid.”

Weird, right? That’s not in the original. Well, the first bit is, I think, but the bit about the guy dying of fever while digging a grave, definitely not. So I reckon it must be a version with all the bits they cut out for publishing in the book or the BMJ. Still, not specifically supernatural, right?

Well, later in the book there’s Chapter Nineteen, “The Story of the Restless Man”. In the version I read before, it’s a nice little story about a soldier with a wounded leg who’s given a bed, but keeps giving up his bed for other soldiers he reckons need it more. But it keeps damaging his leg more, and in the end they have to fully order him to stay in the bed. It’s meant to illustrate the unselfishness of a soldier to his comrades.

Well, in this weird edition, it goes a bit differently.

“Among the wounded who came down from Spion Kop was a private whom I recognised, though I scarce can bring myself to believe it. Private Amherst, who was two months buried in the grave he himself had dug, was carried in on a stretcher. The thigh-bone was broken, and the fracture had been much disturbed by the journey to the hospital. He did not respond to my questions about his supposed death, save a sly smile, and he was given a bedstead in one of the marquees. The limb was adjusted temporarily, and he was told to keep very quiet and not to move off his back.

Next morning, however, he was found lying upon his face, with his limb out of position and his splints, as he said, staring me again in the eye, ‘all anyhow.’ I asked him why he had moved. He told me, with flies buzzing around his fevered head, ‘You see, doctor, I am such a restless man.’

The limb was more elaborately adjusted and everything was left in excellent position. Next morning, however, the restless man was found lying upon the floor of the marquee, and in his bed was a man who had been shot through the chest. The marquee was crowded and the number of beds were few; those who could not be accommodated on beds had to lie on stretchers on the ground. The man who was shot in the chest had come in during the night, and had been placed on the only available stretcher.

Amherst proceeded to tell me that he was happy to share what little he had with those in need. I… I will grant I was uncertain of how to proceed, when the man who was shot in the chest died unexpectedly, his wound turning septic with great rapidity, and in due course the restless man was back in his own bed once more.

It was not, however, for long, for on another morning visit Amherst was found on the floor again, and again beamed forth an explanation that one of the wounded on the ground, who had come in late, seemed to be very bad and so he had changed over. The present occupant also died of an infected wound within hours of my noticing.

I was deeply shaken by this odd harbinger of sickness and fatality, but could think of no immediate redress for the matter. However, the moving of a man with a broken thigh from bed to ground and back again means not only such disordering of splints and bandages, but no little danger to the damaged limb. So I felt almost a relief when the wound turned gangrenous with such alarming speed that amputation was simply impossible. As he passed away, the second time, I implored him to stay that way. He just looked at me: ‘But you see, doctor, I am such a restless man.’”

Pretty spooky, right? You can see why I wanted to bring this to you guys. I mean, I know it’s not exactly having my own statement, my own brush with the darkness that lurks behind the shadowy veil and preys on the unwary mankind, but it’s the next best thing, right?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really read it fully before bringing it over here, I thought you’re probably in a better position to do that, with your researchers and that, but there was one other bit I wrote out. It was in a worse state than the others, but it was the final chapter, Chapter Thirty. In the original, it recounts the rather miserable death of a soldier as contrasted with battlefield heroics, and is titled “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi”. In this version, it doesn’t have a title, and it goes like this:

“I remember at Chieveley one morning before breakfast, watching a solitary man approach the hospital lines. I knew it was him long before my vision became clear. He was now staggering towards the hospital, a ragged, broken-down, khaki-coloured spectre of a man. He dragged his rifle along with him, his belt was gone, his helmet was poised at the back of his head, his tunic was thrown over his shoulders; he was literally black with flies.

He told me he had come from the concentration camps, that there were many among the Boers that shared his state, and that he longed to touch me with all that we had visited upon them. He talked of disease, putrefaction and the writhing creatures of filth. He breathlessly talked of his revelation. Then he died, as did the man who came to bury him.”

So yeah, I reckoned it might be right up your street.

Consider the book a donation. It’s not quite as cool as having a real close encounter of my own but it’s the next best thing. Be careful carrying it, though, those old pages are kind of sharp.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Mr. Russo was found dead in his home on June 5th 2003, two days after his statement. Cause of death was found to be blood poisoning from a wound in his hand. Given that the medical records Jessica dug up seem to indicate the putrefaction was far more advanced than the timeframe would reasonably allow, I have a suspicion that Mr. Russo may have gotten a far closer encounter than he realised with a very dangerous book.

A Leitner, I would guess, though some slight charring around the edges of this statement leads me to believe that Gertrude may have made a somewhat unilateral decision about disposing of it, rather than committing it to storage.

Beyond that, all the details seem more or less accurate. Sir Frederick Treeves did indeed work in a field hospital during the Second Boer War, and did write a book about it titled The Tale of a Field Hospital, published in 1900. Tim hunted down an online version of the text, and it certainly doesn’t match up with what Mr. Russo reproduced here.

Interestingly, the official text makes no mention whatsoever of the concentration camps used to imprison Boer civilians during the conflict, where sickness and hunger killed tens of thousands and, indeed, it is perfectly possible it was not part of the war Treeves encountered or engaged with. Odd, then, that whatever thing it was that haunted him would choose that as its final message.

Amherst is rapidly becoming one of an uncomfortably long list of names that I dread seeing in a statement. Could this be an ancestor of John Amherst? Or, given the many apparent deaths of the soldier in the book, might it be the same being, well over a hundred years old? If so, I wonder how many times it has died of sickness and disease.

Another point is a link that Treeves brings up which I had not considered, that of Jeffrey Amherst, an 18th century baronet who is most remembered for deliberately providing blankets infected with smallpox to Native American tribes during the so-called French and Indian Wars, leading to a devastating epidemic. A connection to a very different sort of monster, but still one that has the trappings of disease.

I had assumed that Amherst was something similar to Prentiss in his connection to insects, but that may not be all. Insects and disease. No clear connection, other than the fact that they somehow feel similar. They both make one feel distinctly unclean.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

I’m in the tunnels. I was exploring and I got lost. I haven’t gone down any of the stairs and I – I think I’m still under the Institute. There were a couple of spiders, so I changed routes and found, I think it’s a gas main. Must be for the whole building. But there’s someone coming and I – I don’t know who else would be down here, except… I mean, whatever’s down here. It was… it was just checking on the upper levels, I didn’t prepare for –

NOT!JESSICA
Raphaella?

[ARCHIVIST CRIES OUT, STARTLED]
Raphaella, is that you?

ARCHIVIST
Oh, Jessica, thank god. I thought you – I thought you were a… I don’t know. What are you doing down here?

NOT!JESSICA
Forgot my coat. I noticed the trap door was open and wanted to make sure you were ok. Did Carmilla give you the key?

ARCHIVIST
Yes, she… she thought it might help put a stop to some of my “wilder imaginings”. Are you okay?

NOT!JESSICA
Yes, I’m okay… I don’t really like it down here. Hard to focus.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Jessica managed to successfully navigate us out of the tunnels. Might defer future exploration for a while, at least until my heart rate settles down sometime in about a year. The place plays odd tricks with your mind. When I saw Jessica down there, for a moment it was like I didn’t recognise her. She seemed… far too tall somehow. I’ve locked it back up for now. I think I need some fresh air.

End supplemental
[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
NASTYA
Here you go. Jessica in today?

ARCHIVIST
Oh… she’s got the day off. Said she was spending the day with this Tom of hers.

NASTYA
Anything nice?

ARCHIVIST
Didn’t say.

NASTYA
Have you ever actually met him?

ARCHIVIST
Why would I have? We’re don’t exactly hold socials. He sounds nice enough, I suppose. In a Kensington sort of way. You ever met him?

NASTYA
No but she’s pretty private with that stuff. Not like Tim.

ARCHIVIST
Hm.

NASTYA
Just talk to him, please.

ARCHIVIST
I think we’ve said more than enough. I doubt there’s much more words can do for us.

NASTYA
You can’t work together like this.

ARCHIVIST
Ironically, I think working is all Tim and I can do together.

NASTYA
Look. Raphaella… when was the last time we all just talked? Just talked, without all of this –

ARCHIVIST
Thank you for the tea, Nastya.

NASTYA
Okay. Fine.

[DOOR OPENS]
He’s not wrong, you know.

[DOOR CLOSES]
ARCHIVIST
Excuse Me?.

Statement of Darren Harlow… [SIGH]

Statement of Darren Harlow regarding a failed psychology experiment at the University of Surrey. Original statement given 18th November, 2010. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
Things always seem so obvious in retrospect. That experiment was always a terrible idea. Even at the time, I remember thinking it sounded like something out of a horror movie. I mean, every time I heard a new detail about it I’d go home and tell my wife and we’d speculate over dinner about how it was going to go wrong in some grotesque and horrific way. We’d laugh and suggest the ways it could turn those poor grad students into crazed killers or mutated monsters.

And when I started to see more and more spiders around the lab, I turned the very real sense of unease into the… the fun sort of fear, like I was just playing at being scared. It’s so strange, even when you’re really looking for horror, it’s impossible to actually believe it. It always feels like something you made up. Just having a bit of fun scaring yourself. Because those things don’t happen. Not in the real world.

But you think sometimes about what the real world is. Just what your brain mixes together from what your senses tell you. We create the world in a lot of ways. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that, when we’re not being careful, we can change it.

Before you ask any in-depth questions about the methodologies or structure of the experiment, I should make it clear – I’m just one of the cleaners. I have no idea how or why they started it or, god knows, where the funding came from. I find it hard to believe the Psych Department okayed it, but I’m not an academic, and those decisions are way over my head.

I mainly take care of the science labs. Most of the cleaning crews at the university get shifted around a lot, working in different buildings or departments one month to the next, but there’s a lot of stuff in the labs that requires additional training to clean safely, so we’re a bit more specialised than the rest. I mean, they still didn’t let us within spitting distance of the really expensive equipment; that was all taken care of by the lab techs, but the point is, I’m a much more familiar face around the science departments than a cleaner would otherwise be.

There’s also the fact that the science lot actually talked to me on occasion. I don’t want to say it’s ‘cause I’m white and the rest of the cleaning crew isn’t, but they always talked to me in a way they didn’t talk to the others, so I became the de facto point of contact between the cleaners and the rest of the staff. Long story short, I generally knew roughly what the deal was with most of the experiments being run at any point.

So when Dr. Elizabeth Bates told me about the latest study by her psychology postgrads, I thought she was pulling my leg. The Psych Department is generally one of the least demanding from my perspective as it’s almost entirely people sitting at computers or in interview rooms. Once or twice I think they were given use of an MRI machine at some hospital or other, but that’s more a neuroscience thing and, more importantly, didn’t happen in the buildings I cleaned.

Since I’ve been there, which is a good seven years now, they’ve never crossed over into parapsychology, nothing even remotely less than respectable research, so when Liz explained the experiment, and I realised they were basically doing ESP research, I got a bit excited. I mean, she dressed it up with all sorts of science jargon and sent my head spinning plenty, but it still basically boiled down to seeing if the thoughts and feelings of a group of people in one room had any effect on the experience of a subject in a separate, sealed room. I mean she could talk about “group dynamics” and call it “proximity intuition” or whatever it was she said, but I know ESP research when I’m mopping its floors.

Not that I minded, of course; I love that crap. I’m a horror nut but I generally tend toward the more sci-fi end. Demons and ghosts have never really got me but give me aliens or the sinister powers of the human mind and I am there.

I didn’t tell any of this to Liz, of course, I got the impression that it was a bit of a sore spot, and I’ve no reason to piss off the people I work with. But you can be damn sure I was keeping a much closer eye on this experiment than I was the others. Especially when she told me a bit more about how they were doing it.

The basic premise was pretty similar to most of these studies. There was a room with a one-way mirror where the subject would sit, and they’d be strapped up to measure physical responses. The other side of the glass was anywhere between one and twenty participants, who would be receiving stimulus for a certain response or feeling. Those feelings would be incited while their attention was on the subject through the mirror.

Then they simply measured what, if any, response the subject had to something they couldn’t see, hear or otherwise be aware of. Sometimes the subject was told there were people on the other side of the glass when there weren’t, in order to get a control group and weed out any placebo responses. The subject’s name was Marius Von Raum.

What really got me, though, was what Liz told me about the specific nature of the feelings they were trying to project. They were planning to work with fear. Specifically, they had selected as projectors a group of people who self-identified as arachnophobes, and at certain points of their watching Marius, videos of spiders crawling, eating and spawning would be randomly projected over the glass, inciting an acute fear response.

The reasoning was that fear was both an extremely powerful emotion and one that would be quite easy to distinguish in Marius’s responses. They wanted to see if they could use ESP to scare her.

I told you it sounded like a set-up to a horror movie, right? I don’t know how they didn’t see that. I mean, maybe they did. Maybe they went ahead with it for the same reason I joked with Laura about it instead of requesting a transfer. You come to relish the ghoulishness of it, because deep down you know it’s safe. The worst that might happen would a few upset students. It should have just been an idle flight of fancy.

Now, I can’t really speak to what happened for the majority of the study. For obvious reasons, I wasn’t cleaning the rooms in question while they were doing the tests, but heard a few bits and pieces about it from Liz and some of the other researchers. It seemed to be going well to begin with. Marius was displaying some subtle but statistically significant signs of distress and unease while the spiders were being shown. Signs that were noticeably absent during the control periods.

I know that the fear reactions were certainly serious enough for the poor souls that had unwittingly signed up as projectors: I had to clean up when one of them was sick during the first round of testing. He had to leave the experiment, if I remember. Lucky sod.

I’m sure you can guess what I ended up cleaning more and more of over the course of the study. Cobwebs. I mean, you can’t avoid them in buildings with high ceilings and inviting corners, but even so, there were more and more of them each day. I’d brush or hoover them away in an evening only to find them returned the next morning, thicker than ever.

I never got a good look at the spiders behind them. Unlike most of the ones I’ve seen, sitting fat and proud in the centre of their web, the most I ever saw of these ones would be a quick scuttle of dark legs disappearing into a hole in the plaster or behind a wall installation.

It creeped me out plenty, but in a good way, I thought. I knew that, logically, they were just escaping the winter. I mean, you know how cold it’s been these last few weeks. I’d try to spook Liz, telling her how her dark experiments were summoning up an army of spiders. I had no idea.

The tests were progressing, and they had started introducing multiple projectors at once to see how it affected the intensity of the feelings Marius was receiving. Liz was very excited by the results. I can still remember her face as she told me that Marius had apparently reported having several unsettling dreams about spiders.

Notably, at no point in the experiment had she been informed that it was spiders being used. Liz was excited, telling me how the dreams seemed to map very well to the physiological responses they had been recording; how Marius had dreamed of “tiny legs running along her veins like a web”.

It was then they started to have problems, though. While adding additional projectors had at first increased the severity of the responses, it seemed this had very quickly tapered off, and soon the measurements had changed significantly. They were still getting noticeable responses, but they weren’t like the ones they had gotten before. They didn’t appear to be fear.

Liz was irritated by this as. Even though the results still looked good for a general ESP study, the variation in response tone would apparently muddy the research in ways she wasn’t keen on.

I only saw Marius Von Raum once during this period. He wasn’t hard to pick out. He dressed like a steampunk clothing store exploded on him,. The first time I saw him I’d liked her. He looked like the kind of student who occasionally talked to cleaners like we were people. Not that we ever actually spoke, but he had that air about him.

This time, though, it was just as he was leaving the mirror room. He was walking strangely, like his trousers didn’t fit him right. He kept bending his knees at kind of odd angles, holding himself with this stiffness. His arm was extended, and he ran his hand along the wall as he went, moving his fingers rapidly so it scuttled like… well, like a spider with its legs missing.

Even then I didn’t really start to consider what might be happening. No, I didn’t take it seriously until what happened last Thursday. I’d pulled a late shift and had just finished my first sweep of the labs. I’d made a start on mopping the corridors leading up to the rooms Liz had been using, when I noticed the lights were still on. Now, she’d mentioned that that afternoon they were trying the first sessions with all nineteen of the remaining projectors – they’d had a predictably high dropout rate.

Now, I know that the more people you have involved in a test, the longer it tends to take and the more potential there is for delays, so it might well have overrun, but it was half nine in the evening by that point, so it seemed very unlikely it would have gone on that long. I thought maybe they’d just left the lights on by accident. These things happen. I did my best to forget that the lights in those rooms were normally motion activated.

I hope someday I’ll forget what I saw when I opened that door, but I won’t. All the arachnophobes, Liz’s “projectors”, were stood in two circles, the one inside of the other. Their hands and arms were locked together in a complex, interlocking pattern and they walked around, rotating the whole thing slowly but surely.

Liz wasn’t there, but in the corner I could see one of her postgrad students, I think his was Mark, standing there, staring like he was in some sort of trance. I mean, they all looked like they were in a trance.

The other side of the glass, I could see Marius Von Raum stood there, staring at them. His body was hunched over and contorted in a way that was definitely not natural, and I really want it to have been a trick of the light, but for a second it looked like he had more than two eyes.

Almost as soon as I opened the room, the movement of the circle stopped abruptly and their heads snapped to face me all at once. I froze in panic. They dropped their arms to the side, and for a moment I was sure they were going to attack me, but instead they turned back towards the window, towards Marius, and walked up to it, lining close in front of the glass.

With a sudden, jerky motion, they drew their heads back, then slammed them into the mirrored window, shattering it all at once. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t will my body to move. I just stood there, watching the blood run down from the cuts in their foreheads, as Marius began to climb through the broken window, his limbs moving and reaching, slowly and deliberately. The others didn’t move a muscle as he crawled over them, then over the floor towards me.

When he was about a foot away from me, he drew herself up to her full height. I don’t know exactly how tall he had been before, but now he loomed over me by almost a full foot. His eyes locked on mine, and I began to feel something. It was like a hundred tiny, scurrying legs inside my skull, moving and scampering through my mind.

I felt my hands, which had dropped to the side of my body, begin to raise. They gripped my legs and then, apparently of their own accord, they began to crawl up me, climbing slowly over my stomach, my chest, my shoulders, until, finally, they came to rest upon my throat. I’ve never been a strong man but that didn’t seem to matter as my own fingers began to close around my neck like a vice.

Panic was making me breathe fast and shallow, but within seconds I couldn’t even do that. I don’t know if you’ve ever been strangled, but it takes a lot longer than you think it does. I’ve no idea exactly how long it was before the edges of my vision began to go dark, but it felt like forever.

Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw Mark, the researcher, move. I don’t know how he’d broken whatever spell Marius had put him under but he’d apparently managed to. With a sudden, unexpected motion, he charged at him and slammed his full weight into his side.

The attack took him completely off guard and he fell hard against the edge of the broken window, the side of her head making a god awful crunching sound as it hit. All at once the others collapsed onto the floor, like their strings had been cut. My hands dropped as well, and I took a long, painful gasp of air.

I collapsed, taking a few moments to try and regain myself. Mark already had his phone out and was trying to call the police. I was groggy and my brain felt like someone had taken a belt-sander to it, but I managed to struggle to my feet. I looked at the crumpled form of Marius Von Raum just as it started to get back up. I could see the side of his skull had been caved in, and beneath the wet mess of blood and bone, I saw a mass of dull white cobweb.

I ran. I’m not proud of it. I ran out of that building, back to my car and I just drove away. I drove for almost an hour before I finally pulled into a side road and started crying. I never saw any of them again.

The University administration contacted me before the police did. They told me in no uncertain terms that if I valued my job, I had officially not been in the building that night. I didn’t really know what I’d have told the cops anyway, and I needed that job, so when I was questioned I told them I’d been home sick with a stomach bug. I think the fact that I looked like death helped convince them, and I wore a high-necked shirt to the interview.

Official line was that Marius had suffered a psychotic break and broken the window, injuring a lot of people with broken glass before beating Mark half to death and fleeing the building. The others in that room don’t seem to remember anything, and I don’t know if Mark ever mentioned me in his testimony. He and Liz still haven’t returned to the University, and I’ve not made any efforts to contact them.

As far as I know, Marius Von Raum is still out there. I’m keeping my distance from anything even remotely spider-related, though. I somehow managed to live through one horror movie. I have no intention of going looking for another.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

More spiders. Mr. Harlow’s testimony does at least have the decency to be widely corroborated. The story of the psychology student who went mad during an ESP study is still widely discussed in certain quarters of Surrey University, and there are multiple newspaper articles covering the events in depth, though none of them mention the, uh, arachnid angle, or indeed Mr. Harlow’s involvement.

Both Mark Voight and Dr. Elizabeth Bates left the University almost immediately following the incident under something of a cloud. Dr. Bates has refused our request for an interview point-blank, while Nastya informs me that Mr. Voight’s testimony was disjointed and borderline incomprehensible. Apparently, biologically, his account of the spiders doesn’t make any sense according to Nastya. Also, apparently, he cried a lot. He did, however, at least confirm the presence of Mr. Harlow at the event, and the rest of the conversation was a mess of rambling about legs and scuttling.

Despite his recent issues, Tim came through on this one. Police reports do support the official story of a student who suffered a violent episode and attacked other people involved in a research study. It was ascribed to a psychotic attack, though Marius Von Ruam’s parents have repeatedly stated he had no history of mental illness or violence. Indeed, I’ve rarely seen so blatant a use of the image of a frothing lunatic outside the pages of lurid fiction. I do not think he went mad.

Marius Von Raum has never been apprehended and appears to all intents and purposes to have disappeared. What is equally, if not more concerning, is that in the years since that statement, every one of the other participants in that study, Dr. Bates’ so-called “projectors”, have also disappeared. I cannot help but wonder how many cobwebs might be found in their old homes.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

I, uh, I’ve not been back in the tunnels. I find myself… let’s call it what it is – I’m scared. Especially after last week’s abortive exploration.

And yet, every other lead seems to have dried up or given more questions without resolving anything, and short of confronting Carmilla with what I’ve found, or waiting in the unlikely hope of more tapes from Ivy, I am struggling to settle on any plan that doesn’t take me down into those tunnels. Down to find something that has made very clear that it does not want to be found.

I should ask the others for help but I… I can’t. At best, they’d just try to talk me out of it. At worst… No, I… if I’m going down there, I go alone.

I should just leave it. They’re right. But I can’t not know.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Masato Murray, regarding an unusual inheritance and the causes thereof. Original Statement given 9th December, 2003. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I did wonder why he left me anything in the first place. Philip Doah and I always kind of hated each other. You know those friends you have who aren’t really your friends, but you go to the same parties and it’s not enough of a thing that you’d actually avoid each other, so everyone just assumes you’re friends, and you kind of absorb that and even start picturing them there when you think about “your friends” as a group, but deep down you both know you don’t actually like each other, it’s just that it’s actually more effort to not be friends? Well, Phil was one of those.

He was fine if you were discussing a movie and he was picking apart the dialogue or the casting choices, but whenever he started drinking, he got political, and let’s just say he was the sort of guy who thought that minimum wage was a bad idea. I don’t have particularly strong opinions myself, but it really wasn’t a rant you want to hear when you’re four beers in. Especially when you’ve heard it plenty already. It was like, yeah Phil, we know you got where you are through sheer hard work and determination, and the fact your parents gave you their second house as a 21st birthday present didn’t help at all. Asshole. Not that I want to speak ill of the dead.

Anyway, as far as I knew, my distaste for him was always mutual, so it came as a real surprise to learn he’d left me something in his will. I’d love to make some flippant remark and say the only gift I needed was him falling under that train, but truth be told his death actually hit me pretty hard. All of us felt it. I mean, 37 years old. It’s an odd time to go. It’s not really in the realms of “tragic loss of a young life so full of potential”, but it’s still a long way from “I guess it was his time”.

I guess it just hit all of us that we were entering the period of our lives where sometimes people die. Life was no longer a given, and it wouldn’t actually be as long as all that before funerals were starting to outnumber the weddings. This was back in February, and I’d just turned 34, but it played on my mind. Mortality.

I just kept thinking to myself: the moment I die will feel just the same as this one. It’s not a thing forever in the future; I will be in that present just as surely as I am in this one. And I will end. I’ve never been a religious man, and I always say I take comfort in the idea of a peaceful oblivion but that’s a lie. I’m terrified.

The inheritance I received from Phil didn’t exactly do anything to calm my mind. It was listed in the inventory as his journal, but looking at it that didn’t seem right at all. It was clearly older than 37 years, with the black bookcloth faded and worn away at the corners. For a second I wondered if maybe it was some sort of family journal, passed down between generations, but then leaving it to me made even less sense.

I still took it. I mean, what else are you going to do in a situation like that? It was larger than it had looked lying on the table, and heavier, like one of those old family bibles you sometimes see in museums. I did have the decency to wait until the end of proceedings before I carried it home and started to look on the Internet to try and see how much it might be worth.

This was actually the first time I took a proper look at it. I don’t know, really, the whole thing felt so surreal that actually examining the thing hadn’t quite felt right when they first gave it to me. There wasn’t any obvious name on the cover, and I wondered if it might have had a dust wrapper that had been lost, but it seemed far too large for anything like that to fit. Opening it up at the beginning, it seemed to lack a proper title page as well, or any other form of identification. Instead, printed there was a quote, though there wasn’t any attribution for it. It read:

“Life is a current which cannot be fought. It is a march with one destination. You cannot cease your step, nor move your course, to one that skirts the journey’s termination.”

And below it, in a faded blue ink was a handwritten message:

“YOU HAVE ALREADY READ TOO MUCH”

I laughed at this. I was starting to think that maybe Phil was finding one final way to be an asshole from beyond the grave. I’d never thought he’d actually had much imagination, but a gruesome practical joke did seem the most likely explanation at that point. So I turned the page to see what was next.

The next page was in Latin, but not printed Latin. It looked handmade, like those old medieval books that monks used to write out. The ornate Gothic script cascaded down the page, rigid and sharp. Obviously I couldn’t read it. Even if I had the first clue about Latin, which I do not, I could barely make out which letter was which. The next page was similar, and the one after that. It was almost twenty pages before the writing became something close to what I recognised.

It was English, but not like modern English. I’m not sure if it was Old- or Middle- or whatever, but they tried to make me study The Canterbury Tales once for English class, and it looked kind of like that. Close enough to real words that you knew it was the same language, but it was spelt all wrong and didn’t actually make much sense when you tried to read it.

There were a couple of words that stuck out, though. It seemed to be about someone called Julian, and “Deeth” cropped up a few times, which I assumed was “Death” and even one instance of the word “Homycide”, which I didn’t even know was a word back then.

The next pages were more of the same, though I did gradually get more and more so I could understand it, each was in a very different hand, until it reached the entry on Christopher. This was one of the first with printed type, and like the others, had no real heading or formatting, just a solid block of text that covered the page. It was an account of the death of somebody named Christopher, which apparently took place in the Year of our Lord Fifteen Ninety-Two. He was dragged through the streets of Norwich by a horse, scraping off a good deal of skin on the jagged, frozen ground. After about ten minutes of leaving this bloody trail, the horse proceeds to stop, turn around and slam its hooves into his head until it caves in. Christopher does not lose consciousness until the third impact. This whole scenario was described in vivid, graphic detail. I felt a bit unwell, reading the account of how it felt for him to hear his own skull breaking.

It soon became clear that all the accounts were similar. Each detailed a death, often violent, always unpleasant. They were in chronological order, with what looked like five to ten years between each one, though sometimes they came much quicker, one after the other. I also started to notice, on some of the pages, a faint scorching around the edges, though it would be some time before my own attempts to burn it proved how resilient it really was.

As it went through the ages, the style and the manners of death updated with it, though no-one found in those pages seemed to die naturally. I wasn’t reading them very closely at that point, one gruesome death being very much like another, when I reached the last two pages before the book’s contents became blank. The penultimate was for Philip Doah, and the last one, as I’m sure you might have guessed, was for me.

It was hard, reading the book’s description of Phil’s death. It lingered on his terror as he felt himself falling off the platform, the screech of the train’s wheels as they rumbled unstoppably towards him. It said that though his legs were severed and his body crushed, it had taken him almost two minutes to die as he watched his blood flowing out along the rails.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was sick. Could someone have put this in the book after his death? Why would they do something like that? Or could it be that Phil’s accident had been more deliberate than everyone thought? Maybe it was suicide? But even then, I mean, I respect anyone’s right to end their own life, but even if that was the case, writing gory fiction about it beforehand is well beyond anything that Phil was capable of.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I tell someone? And tell them what? The book was old, and these pages look newer than the old handwritten bits, sure, but they still did look like part of the book. If this was some elaborate hoax or morbid joke, whoever did it had a whole book deliberately written, printed and very convincingly aged, just to play it on me, whose only significance was that I kind of didn’t like a man who died. None of it made any sense.

Finally, I turned to the last page before they turned blank. It was my death. It was to occur, so it said, in 2014. Eleven years in the future. I was apparently to be walking along an isolated country road in Lancashire, of all places, when a passing car would lose control and run me down. The impact would drive me into the wooded barrier, impaling me on a fallen tree branch. The driver was killed in the crash, and no-one else would pass by as I lay there, alone and screaming for help, until my body finally gave up. It was quite particular about how the jagged wood was going to feel as it passed through my torso.

I closed the book and tried to understand what I had just read. It was a joke. It had to be. A sick prank by someone who had clearly hated me far more than I had expected. Phil had decided to kill himself, and had this made to harass me afterwards. It was the only explanation that made any sense. Besides, even if it was somehow true and this thing could genuinely tell the future, my end was still well over a decade away. Too far to be of any immediate worry. I simply wouldn’t go to Lancashire. Maybe ever. Certainly not in 2014. I had no idea what would even cause me to go there in the first place. So I did my best to ignore it. For a while.

It played on my mind, though. I mean, how could it not? So I started to look into some of the other deaths it detailed. Not obsessively, at least not at that point, but I took the time to search online for a few of the names and how they died. It wasn’t easy, as the book only ever gave first names, and most of them pre-dated online records by a long time. Eventually, though, I found one. Alexander, so the book claimed, had died in 1983, after his home was broken into. He was stabbed seven times in his bed before his throat was sliced open. The entry went so far as to assure me that the murderer was never identified or caught.

Well, after a little bit of digging, I found him. Alexander Willard. It was an article on the history of the small town of Alcester, near Stratford-upon-Avon. It was focused on the darker aspects of the area’s history, and detailed the few ghosts that supposedly haunted the area. Tucked at the end of the piece was the mention of a strange unsolved murder that had taken place in 1983, where a local mechanic named Alexander Willard had been killed in his bed. No culprit was ever found, and no motive for the crime was ever determined.

Of course, that didn’t prove anything. Not really. Only that whoever had written the book had really done their research. There was nothing to it but a lot of time and energy that had, for some reason, gone towards the sole purpose of scaring me. If it was true, if it was real, and Phil had it in his possession, surely he could have read of his own demise and taken steps to avoid it. I turned back to the page for my own death, the sickening desire to re-read the details gnawing at me. And that was when everything I thought I knew crumbled. Because the page had changed.

The words were as solid and unmoving as they always had been, but now it told me that I died in London. In 2012. I was apparently renting a flat in Bethnal Green with a faulty gas main. The gas had built up undetected, and when I tried to light the oven to cook a piece of salmon, it exploded and set the whole place alight. I was to be admitted to the Royal London Hospital Emergency Department with third degree burns over seventy percent of my body, where I died nineteen hours later.

My whole body was shaking at this point. I threw the book across the room and left. I walked for hours, no idea in which direction. It wasn’t possible. I was losing it. It was the only explanation. But I knew that I was as sane as I ever had been. When did it change? Was it when I turned back to read it again? Or perhaps when I had made the decision to never visit Lancashire? If the book knew the future, then how much did it know me? My decisions and choices were my own, so was it responding to them or simply to the fact that I opened the book again? Perhaps it changed every time I opened it, even if I didn’t read the page, every interaction changing my fate, though none, it seemed, made it less horrible.

I went to stay with a friend of mine, John Kendrick, for a few days. He could see something was wrong, and thankfully didn’t ask me about it, instead just trying to cheer me up. I tried to forget it, to ignore what I had read but it’s not the sort of thing that ever truly leaves your mind, and eventually I found myself back in that lonely house, staring at that damned book. Had it changed? Were the words now within that raggedy black covering already describing a new, more painful end for me? Or had it shown mercy, and granted me a quicker death?

I tried to destroy it, of course. It wouldn’t burn, and water didn’t seem to damage the pages. Spilled ink didn’t mark them, and though I considered burying it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that those who came before me must have tried all the same things. I read my death again, as it told me how I was to be partially decapitated by a falling piece of masonry on New Years Eve, 2011.

I try not to read it, of course. But sometimes it just gets too much. Every time the date gets closer, and the manner of my death stays just as awful. When I close the book I wonder, are those same words still there, squatting and biding their time, or have they already changed into some new unknown terror that I can neither know nor avoid, waiting to spring on me.

I haven’t brought the book with me to show you, and I am not planning to write up a will. I don’t know whether it’s ownership of the thing that makes it write your fate or just reading it. Either way, I will keep it as long as it will let me. Until I reach an end that may be more gruesome, but is fundamentally no different than that which awaits us all.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Mr. Murray disappeared shortly after making this statement. As far as we can determine, it was a voluntary disappearance, as the lease on his flat was cancelled shortly beforehand, and he resigned from his post as an administrator with Birmingham City Council. Since then, he has apparently been successful in changing or hiding his identity, and neither Jessica nor Tim have had any luck locating him, though Tim was able to confirm that one Philip Doah passed away after falling under a train at Birmingham New Street Station on the 1st of August, 2003. There are also no accident reports we were able to find that matched any of his supposed predicted deaths.

I’ve discouraged further attempts to locate Mr. Murray, as even the latest of his possible ends was some years ago now, and if he was in any way correct about the book, he is most likely long dead.

Notable in his account, however, is the absence of any indication that this book was ever possessed by Jurgen Leitner. It seems to support the theory that, whatever these books are, Leitner is not entirely responsible for them.

One other slightly encouraging piece of news is apparently IT have finally figured out what’s wrong with Jessica’s computer – it’s been getting authentication errors when attempting to connect with external devices or networks. I can’t say I’m fully familiar with exactly what that means, but hopefully now the problem has been isolated, they can come up with some sort of workaround, and future investigations will be able to once again fully utilise her technical skills.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

Books. Again and again it always seems to come back to those books. There are other artefacts that hold sinister power, certainly, but none of them seem to be quite so prevalent or insidious as those damn books. But why? I had always assumed that Leitner had created them somehow, leasing parts of his own damned soul give them power, or some similar nonsense. But no. I’ve heard enough now to be sure that these books existed long before he managed to hunt them down. Not all of them, though, it would seem.

I found something in the tunnels. I have now thoroughly explored the upper level, at least as far as I’m able. Further in, some of the passageways are blocked off or ruined by infrastructure works. Pipes and drainage, that sort of thing. It may be that the lower levels would have a route underneath and back up the other side, though I’ve yet to make much headway down there.

But, shortly after I started exploring the second level, I found something. It was a room, empty except for three wooden chairs. It looked like there had previously been more, but they had been smashed. Based on the scorch marks in the corner, I think I know what they were used for. The ashes were old, impossible to tell what they might have been before they were burned, except for the small scraps of old paper dotted around the floor. I think someone tore up a book and then burned it.

There was only one scrap large enough to decipher anything legible: “They have for adversaries the Satariel, or concealers, the Demons of absurdity, of intellectual inertia, and of Mystery.”

That answers the question of what happened to the copy of The Key of Solomon that Gertrude bought. But if she only bought it to destroy it, why down there? There seemed no especial significance to the room, except that it contained some old wooden furniture. No sign of the other Leitners, though. I’ll need to keep looking.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

CLICK]
KAROLINA
Okay?

ARCHIVIST
One second. Statement of Karolina Górka, regarding a brief period trapped on the London Underground. Statement taken direct from subject 25th January, 2017.

KAROLINA
Thank you. On the night of the 6th of January, 2017, I left the Star of Kings and walked down to the tube station at King’s Cross Saint Pancras. For reasons I’m not interested in discussing here, I have for some years now maintained a tradition of celebrating a personal New Year’s Eve with a handful of close friends, a week or so after the actual event. The last two of these celebrations have taken place at the Star, a pub which I have grown fond of for its choice of beer and the open fireplaces that it keeps lit during the winter. I find it a very comforting place.

It was exactly one in the morning when I left, as that was when the pub closed on a Friday, and the only guests still remaining were a colleague of mine named Andrew Barnet, my friend Leanne Hilliard and her husband Mark. All of them will confirm my presence and the time of my leaving. I had originally planned to go home shortly after midnight, and my housemate, Tamara Simpkin, had gone back at that time, but I had been in a rather heated discussion with Andrew, and had stayed until last orders. On my way to the station, I stopped into Crystal Kebab and bought a box of chips which I ate there. I ate slowly, as the wind had picked up and I was not keen to go back out into the cold.

By the time I arrived at the station, I had missed what would have previously been the last Tube. It was with some relief that I realised the Victoria line, which would take me up to my home near Seven Sisters, had recently started running an all-night service on Fridays and Saturdays. I was somewhat reluctant to share my ride home with a carriage full of drunks, but that was always the danger of drinking on a Saturday. So I made my way down the escalators and through the tunnels to the northbound Victoria Line platform.

It was deserted; not a single person was there beside myself. Looking down to the other end, I did see another figure, just one, but they were walking away and out into the rest of the station. It was hard to tell from a distance, but I believe he was holding a shovel of some sort. There hadn’t been a train for almost ten minutes, but at the time I didn’t think much of it.

It was eerie, waiting there, and maybe I should have taken it as a warning sign, but there had been a lot of noise around me all night and now I was relishing the quiet. I hoped that if the platform was this deserted, maybe the train would be quiet as well. Perhaps I could even get a carriage to myself.

The train pulled up as normal. Maybe the brakes squealed a bit more than they should have, but there was nothing that stood out to me as odd. Looking back, maybe the train car was older than it should have been, or dustier, but I wasn’t paying that much attention and I didn’t get a good look at it afterwards. So when the doors opened, I stepped inside and took a seat. I turned out I’d been right, there wasn’t anybody else in the carriage at all. It was just me.

My phone had died two hours before, so I couldn’t listen to my music, and I just sat there in silence as the doors closed and the train began to move forward. At some point the silence stopped being comforting and began to feel as though it were pressing down on me. Even the rumble of the train’s movement seemed to be muted, like it was being muffled somehow.

I tried to take my mind off it. I scanned the adverts pasted above the row of chairs opposite me but they were blank. At least, they seemed blank when I first looked at them. Moving a bit closer I could see that there was something behind the clear plastic. It was dirt. It looked as though each of the adverts had been covered in a layer of dry, tight-packed soil. I turned to the ones behind me, above my own chair, and saw the same thing. I reached up to touch one of them, and was greeted with a small shower of grit, but still couldn’t see anything behind it.

Now that I was looking for it, I could see that it wasn’t only these signs that seemed to be covered in dirt. When I had first got in, I had assumed the carriage was just grimy from a full day of commuters, but everywhere I looked, I saw now that it was a thin dusting of dry earth. It was on the chairs, the floor, even the edge of the windows. Where I had been walking, I could see my footprints clearly on the muddy floor. They were the only pair.

I decided that I was going to get off at the next station. When I reached Highbury and Islington I knew there was a night bus that I could take to get home. It would be slower, but it would get me off this train and that was now making me feel very uncomfortable. So I waited.

I had been travelling for about three minutes at that point and I checked my watch impatiently. Five minutes passed. Eight minutes passed. I was sure we should have arrived at the next station by that point, but the train just kept moving. We hadn’t gone through the next station; I was sure I would have seen it through the windows, and it certainly seemed to be going as fast as it normally would. Faster, maybe, I don’t really know how to measure something like that.

Ten minutes went by, then fifteen, and there was no sign that the train was stopping, or even approaching another station. It shouldn’t have been possible, but it was. I just stood there, trying to keep my balance, not wanting to sit on the seats or hold on to the dusty handrail. The air had become thick, and I could smell the cold damp, like an old basement or a cave.

After almost twenty minutes I walked over and pulled the emergency lever in the hopes that it might have some effect. I had to dig out several handfuls of sticky mud from around the handle before I could even reach it. I gripped it firmly and pulled. It snapped off in my hands and I could see the point where it joined the wall had been eaten away by rust.

That was when I finally decided to sit down and wait it out. Either it would arrive somewhere or it wouldn’t, and if I had managed to wander into some grubby ghost train then there wasn’t much I was going to be able to do about it. I stopped checking my watch and just sat there.

At some point I felt the train beginning to slow. There was no indication of where we were, and the automatic station announcements were silent. I stayed in my seat. It was one of the few times in my life I have regretted being an atheist, as I think I would have valued having a god to pray to. By the end we were going so slowly that I didn’t even notice when we finally stopped for almost twenty seconds. I looked at the doors, but they showed no sign of opening, and the other side was still just the bare wall of the underground tunnel. We were not at a station.

I had already decided that, whatever might be out there, not being in the train was better than staying put, so I did my best to force the doors open. It was surprisingly easy, and once I had gotten them an inch or two apart, something must have tripped and they slid the rest of the way on their own.

The other side was the wall of the tunnel. But rather than the normal cables and construction you would expect from the Underground, this was bare earth. It was slick with damp, and instead of the two-foot gap you would expect to be between the door and the wall, it came right up to the lip of it. There was no clearance at all: the doors seemed to be completely flush with this solid barrier of soil.

As it became clear to me that there was no way I was going to be able to get out of any of the side exits, I was faced, to my mind, with three choices. I could sit there and wait, at the mercy of whatever situation I had found myself in. I could head through the other carriages leading towards the rear of the train and hope I could get off there and walk back along the tunnel. Or I could do the same thing heading towards the front of the train, hoping that there was someone in the driver’s compartment that could explain what was going on. I picked the third option. It was, of course, a mistake.

The doors between the carriages were tiny, and each bore several bright warning signs promising death or prosecution if they were used incorrectly. I ignored these and opened the one leading towards the front of the train. The gap between the cars was slick with mud and a thin rain of dirt trickled down from the roof of the tunnel. I opened the next door and stepped inside.

It was even dirtier in this carriage than in the one I had left, with a distinct layer of muddy soil over everything that I could see. The silence had been replaced by a new noise, a sort of creaking groan that sounded like it was coming from the train itself. It was only later I learned that this is what metal sounds like when under immense strain. I walked briskly through this car, seeing nothing that caught my attention, and opened the next door at the other end, continuing my journey towards the driver.

I hadn’t really seen how long the train was when I got in, but I had been in the middle of the platform so I didn’t think it could be more than four or five carriages to the front. This door seemed wedged quite firmly shut, and it was only with a great deal of effort that I was able to pull it open. I almost fell into the space between them while trying to force the next one open. I am sure that if I had done so I would be dead.

When I got into this one the first thing I noticed was the ceiling. In certain places it seemed to have buckled slightly with large dents in the material pushing down. Many of the lights and windows were broken and the whole of the carriage seemed to be bent and twisted slightly, like it was being crushed.

The sound of metal fatigue was stronger here, and I realised with a start that this was exactly what was happening. If it got worse the further through I went, there was a good chance the driver, if there was one, had already been crushed, or at the very least trapped beyond my reach. I turned to go back the way I had come, but the door had swung shut, and in the few seconds it had taken me to understand what was happening, the pressure had already warped the frame too much. It was jammed shut, and no amount of kicking was going to move it.

I was becoming desperate, and looked around for anything I could see that might be a way out. What I saw instead, right at the other end, was a person. It was hard to make out any details, as all the lights in that section were already shattered, but they were sat very still. I called out but there was no response. I made my way over to them, though by the time I reached that part of the carriage I was having to bend down to avoid parts of the ceiling.

It appeared to be a man, probably late fifties, early sixties, with a scraggly grey beard and what had once been a nice jacket. He had sunken blue eyes, and the seat around him had twisted so much it was now holding him in place at an angle that looked very painful. The armrests were digging hard into the flesh of his leg, and his back was crooked. Despite this, he seemed to be breathing.

When he didn’t respond to my voice, I touched him lightly on the shoulder. His eyes opened slowly, and locked on mine. The look on his face was one of incredible sadness, as though all the fear had been sucked out of him and now all that was left was some unspeakable misery. I asked him if I could help, whether we could get out there, but he just shook his head, his neck making horrid cracking noises as he did so.

I felt his hand close around my wrist, gripping it with an unexpected strength. I tried to push him away but his fingernails dug into my skin, drawing blood. A ragged voice hissed out of him, despairing and full of pain. He said to me, “Not enough space to move. Never enough to breathe.” Then he let me go.

By then, the ceiling was almost on top of me and the walls looked like they were close to giving way. I thought about what options I had and, after a few seconds, I lay down on the floor and closed my eyes. Being crushed to death would be horrible, yes, but I have never been afraid of dying, and it didn’t appear that there would be any point to further escape attempts. Better to accept my fate and hope it was all some awful dream.

I kept my eyes shut and tried to relax, as the sound of twisting metal filled my ears and I could feel the floor begin to shift beneath me. It bent up, either side, and slowly began to press inwards. Far away, under the smothering blanket of earth, I could hear the old man screaming.

When I awoke, I was on the platform at Walthamstow Central, with one of the station assistants leaning over me, trying to see if I was alright. I was feeling very groggy and I didn’t want to be answering questions, so I played drunk, ignored his offers to help and stumbled out into the cold night air. There were a few blissful minutes where I thought it had all just been a dream, but then I noticed that I was covered head to toe in mud and dirt. And my wrist ached where five deep red marks made the shape of a clutching hand.

That’s it.

ARCHIVIST
Well, that certainly sounds like an… unpleasant experience. I’m not sure I understand, though. Did you fall asleep, somehow, or…

KAROLINA
I must have done.

ARCHIVIST
That’s… that’s impressive. Do you still take the Tube?

KAROLINA
Of course. I live in London.

ARCHIVIST
That's intresting…

KAROLINA
Is there anything else? I’ve told you what happened, so I’m done here, correct?

ARCHIVIST
I suppose so, yes. We’ll look into it, and if we find anything we’ll let you know.

KAROLINA
Don’t bother. I’m done with it. Thank you for your time.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Well, that was brusque. Ms. Górka may not be interested in the follow-up, but I am. Since the Night Tube opened there have been a handful of disappearances that occurred where the individuals in question were reported as intending to travel on the late-night London Underground service, mostly on the Victoria and Northern lines. All of them were travelling alone.

The reason none of this has been followed up as related is that CCTV from the appropriate stations does not show the disappeared ever actually arriving. Well, Jessica managed to follow this up, and it would seem that there’s no record of Ms. Górka ever entering King’s Cross Saint Pancras, even though Nastya made contact with Leanne Hilliard and confirmed the rest of her story. TFL have been understandably reluctant to comment.

Interestingly, one of the missing, a man named Nicholas Lekman, has a picture that seems to match the description Ms. Górka gave: age 63, slightly unkempt grey beard, blue eyes. He was last seen heading towards Moorgate station at 2:30 on the morning of Saturday the 17th December 2016, following a fight with his son, who does not believe he ever entered the station. Apparently, Nicholas Lekman hated taking the Underground alone as he was a severe claustrophobe.

I should probably mention this to Jessica. I believe she takes the Victoria line to work and has a tendency to stay later than she should. Aside from that, all that’s left to do is sweep up after Ms. Górka. She left the place rather dusty i think i will call her later.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

Someone is living down there. In the tunnels. I’m sure of it now. I haven’t found any more pages or detritus that might indicate the presence of further books, but the more I explore the lower levels, the more normal rubbish I find. Food wrappers, empty bottles, even a newspaper dated last year. They are normally quite meticulous, it seems, as those things I have found tended to be tucked away in places that might have escaped the notice of someone cleaning up after themselves. But they do miss things.

I find it oddly comforting that who- or whatever is down there needs to eat, as it offers some reassurance that they are at least broadly human. But why? And for how long? And how are they getting their supplies? If Ivy was taking my calls I would ask for some police assistance, in case it’s some (nervous laugh) unhinged murderer. Especially as there is every likelihood they were the one that killed Gertrude. Assuming it is only one. Yes, on second thoughts, I might well suspend my explorations until I can talk to Ivy and get some assistance.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Could you say that again? I’ve put you on speaker.

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
Maxwell Rayner. Have you heard of him?

ARCHIVIST
Yes. Why?

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
Who is he?

ARCHIVIST
He was a cult leader back in the Nineties. I don’t know about now.

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
The Church of the People?

ARCHIVIST
The People’s Church of the Divine Host actually.

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
Right.

ARCHIVIST
Is he involved in a case or something?

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
We’re on our way to arrest him.

(pause)

Hello?

ARCHIVIST
Really? you found him

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
Not me, but I’m one of the ones going in. There’s a lot of sectioned guys here, so I thought I’d give you a call. Any advice?

ARCHIVIST
Bring torches.

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
Torches?

ARCHIVIST
Are you questi-Never mind tes torches. As many as you can get your hands on. How many do you have?

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
Um, there’s a firearms team here, so we should have plenty of tactical lights. So you reckon it’s going to get dark?

[CALL STARTS DISTORTING AND CRACKLING]
ARCHIVIST
Ivy? Hello?

IVY (ON SPEAKER)
(Almost too distorted to make out) Raphaella? Raphaella? Can you hear me?

[PHONE BEEPS AND CUTS OFF]
ARCHIVIST
Oh… damn. [SIGH]

Statement of Craig Goodall, regarding his explorations of an abandoned chicken and kebab shop in Walthamstow. Original statement given 20th October 2009. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cogniz, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I feel like I should be upfront with this right at the beginning. I’m probably a cannibal. I don’t know for sure, but the likelihood is high. You ever hear of Han Yong? Otherwise known as John Haan? I guess it depends on what corners of the Internet you lurk in or what tabloids you were reading in 2004. If you haven’t, let me explain. John Haan ran a small takeaway on Higham Hill Road in Walthamstow.

Weirdly enough, it wasn’t a Chinese; it just served kebab, chicken, burgers… the usual. Well, it went out of business in May 2004 when Mr. Haan was arrested for murdering his wife, Lanying. So far, so mundane, right? Except for the fact that over the previous two weeks John Haan had been disposing of the body the way only a takeaway owner can. He went full-on Sweeney Todd.

Now, the thing is, I live just off Higham Hill Road, and I used to go to that takeaway all the time. I definitely went there a few times in May 2004. I haven’t been able to find out from any of the news reports exactly what he was selling the meat as, but over the course of the month I definitely had chicken wings, doner kebab, chicken kebab and a burger, so there’s a very good chance I ate some of her.

It’s weird, though, everything I’ve found online says that human meat is meant to be very similar to pork, but nothing I was served was like that. I mean, pork is pretty different from beef or lamb or chicken, and I can’t see how it was being easily passed off as any of them. But he must have managed it somehow. Maybe the doner? It was so heavily spiced it would have disguised the flavour, I guess. I don’t know how he would have made it look like doner meat, though. It’s very distinctive and I was always under the impression that you needed to order those huge rotating columns of things specially.

Regardless, the fact of the matter is that I am almost certainly a cannibal. You know the weirdest part, though? The bit I regret most is that I don’t know which of the meals it was. I feel like, if I’ve been tricked into eating a person, I might at least have learned what a human being tastes like. And I don’t really have a problem with the idea, in any sort of moral sense, at least.

I know how that sounds, and I’m certainly not okay with murder, not to mention the issue with prion diseases, but the actual act of eating meat that comes from a human? I’m fine with it. I can’t help but feel that anyone happy to eat other meats is something of a hypocrite if they’re not at least theoretically fine with eating human. There’s nothing inherently special about us. We feel as much pain, see the world with the same eyes as a real pig. Meat is meat. That’s what John Haan said when they arrested him. The only thing he said. Meat is meat.

None of this really changes anything. Whether or not I’ve eaten chicken wing made of person doesn’t actually factor into this, I guess, except that it’s the reason I always kept an eye on the old takeaway. After John Haan was arrested, it was never sold on. Not surprising. It’s the sort of history that people tend not to want in their property investments.

I didn’t move away, though. I kept right on living there, and walked past the old boarded-up shop almost every day. As far as I’m aware it never actually had a name. I mean, it must have, but it wasn’t clear from the front. Over the door was a large, hand-painted sign that simply read ‘FOOD’ in bright white capital letters, while a neon sign that protruded from it glowed with the word ‘GRILL’ on both sides in bright red. As the months of its closure started to turn into years, the old green paint on the window panes gradually started to fade and the large metal sheets that covered the windows and door were almost lost beneath a sea of posters and flyers advertising club nights and escorts.

Sometimes, if the light hit it just right, I could lean in and see inside through the tiny holes in the steel. I could see the bright shine of the fryer, the glass of the heating drawer, the tall column of metal that would have rotated the kebab. It all seemed somehow too clean for it to be so abandoned, and I was sure I could even see the vivid colours of soft drink cans in the clear-fronted fridge.

It was a grey, dull afternoon when I heard it. There was a miserable rain; the sort that doesn’t even fall, it just seems to hang in the air, speckling your face with a fine, soaking mist. There wasn’t a single patch of sky that disrupted the uniform gloom as I walked past the old takeaway. I stopped for a second, staring at the broken old building as I so often did, when I heard a sound from inside. It wasn’t a loud sound, like something small and light falling to the floor.

I went closer, listening, but the sound didn’t come again. Leaning in, I tried to see through to the inside of the building, but the overcast day didn’t give enough light to see by. I stood up, trying to convince myself that I had imagined it, when a cold breeze blew down, cutting through my coat, and I heard laughter. It was so quiet. I could have imagined it. Or maybe it came from one of the houses nearby, but I looked around and the windows were as dark and empty as the sky.

I turned back towards the shop, and noticed for the first time the missing bolts along the edge of the panel that covered the side window. It was ever so slightly ajar. The sound of movement came again, soft and furtive from inside. Someone was in there. I knew that much at least. So I left and called the police.

I walked to the pub across the road, bought a pint of pale ale and sat outside on the wooden benches. The drizzling rain diluted my beer slightly, but I didn’t mind. I waited. Twenty minutes later a police car pulled up, and I sipped my drink as I watched them open up the door and head into the old takeaway.

Through the now-opened entrance I could still see the faded remnants of crime scene tape flapping gently in the wind. There was the sound of shouting, and I saw them pulling out a teenage white boy holding a can of red spray paint. Kid couldn’t have been more than fourteen with a ratty old hoodie, and brand new sneakers the same colour as his paint can. The cops must have talked to the kid for a good ten minutes before they finally took the paint and let him go with a warning, like I knew they would the second I saw him. Figures.

The cops locked the old takeaway back up and went back to get in their car. The rain was coming down heavily now, and the one holding the spray can lost his grip on it. It wasn’t a long drop from his hand to the pavement, but it must have hit a sharp stone or something, because when it clattered onto the ground part of it split open. The red seeped out of it, mixing with the flowing rainwater in a river of colour that made me very uneasy. The cops didn’t seem to care; they just got back in their car and drove away.

I watched the place until I finished my drink. I wanted to see if they’d realise they’d still left the window panel partially open, where the kid had probably got in. If they did, they didn’t come back to fix it. I was soaked to the bone by that point and decided to head home and get dry. My sleep that night wasn’t great. I kept dreaming of a paint can impaled on a rotary kebab skewer. The liquid dripping from it bubbled and boiled in the heat, but it wasn’t paint.

I woke up the next day bleary-eyed and exhausted, but my mind was still on that open window. I just couldn’t shake it, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax until I’d got to see the inside of that place. So I called a friend of mine, Leroy Yates, and told him what was going on. His hobby was somewhere in between urban exploration and housebreaking, so I wanted to talk it through with him.

He was over in Homerton, and offered to come help me out. I told him I reckoned I could handle it, but that if I didn’t check in with him in an hour or so, he should come down, in case I had trouble of any kind. I grabbed a quick bite of cold sausage for breakfast, got my big torch and a small prybar, then headed out into the morning.

The rain had stopped but the sun still hadn’t come out and the wet shine seemed to weigh heavily on everything. There was nobody on the street. Most were probably at work already. The old takeaway sat there, the letters of ‘FOOD’ now grey and lifeless. For a second I thought I saw the red neon ‘GRILL’ sign flicker, but I’m pretty sure that was just my imagination, as I know the tubes were busted. I slipped around the side and found the metal panel covering the window was still ajar. I’m a bit bigger than a scrawny teen vandal, but it didn’t take much coaxing before there was a gap wide enough for me to squeeze my way inside.

The air was cold and clean. I was in what must have been the storeroom and food prep area. There wasn’t much light filtering through the tiny holes over the windows, so I turned my torch on and cast it about. It looked like anything perishable had been removed from the place, but other than that it seemed untouched. Sealed cans of pickled vegetables, vats of oil, rows and rows of clean, shining equipment. There wasn’t a speck of dust on any of it, though it certainly didn’t seem like it was in use.

My torch moved over the rest of the room until it fell upon the huge freezer. There were letters sprayed onto it, several inches high. It looked like this was what the kid had been doing. He’d been spraying the phrase ‘MEAT IS MEAT’ onto the door of the freezer, but the cops must have gotten him before he’s finished, so what was actually written upon the matt silver surface were the words ‘MEAT IS ME’.

I’m not going to pretend that a shiver didn’t run right through me. It made me feel ever so faintly ill. In a fit of stubbornness, I decided that the only way to dispel this fear was to open the freezer. To know for sure that there was nothing inside. No meat of any sort. I walked over with a confidence I didn’t really feel and gripped the handle. I took a breath and pulled. Inside the freezer… was absolutely nothing. No meat, no ice, not even a chill. It hadn’t been on in years. I let out a sigh of relief. Which is when I heard a very quiet laughter from next to my feet.

I shined my light down and saw a face looking up at me from underneath the counter behind me. The face belonged to a gaunt, pale Chinese man, who looked up at me with a terrifying glee. In his spindly hands he held a pair of bolt cutters, with the blades positioned either side of my ankle. I barely had time to register this when he pulled them closed, cutting through my Achilles tendon. There was an intense spike of agony and I fell forward hard, smacking my head on the side of the counter. And… everything went dark.

When my eyes snapped open, I was laid out on a wooden floor. I couldn’t move and, by the plastic I could feel digging into my flesh, I assumed I had been bound with cable ties. My ankle throbbed with pain, though not as sharply as I would have expected. The room was small and mostly bare, and looking at the windows I guessed I was on the upper floor of the old takeaway. A few shreds of fading sunlight were filtering in through the covered windows, but most of the light in the room came from a trio of oddly textured candles a few feet from my head.

I strained my neck to look around the room. It seemed devoid of furniture but dotted around seemed to be small piles of bric-a-brac. I saw chipped teacups, a stack of what looked like old bibles and then something that made my breath catch in my throat. A small pile of human fingers. I could feel a despairing moan escape my chest before I could do anything to stop it.

At this, there was movement behind me and the man I had seen earlier stepped into view. He was shirtless, and the glow of the candles seemed to illuminate in stark shadow how painfully thin he seemed. He was chewing thoughtfully on something, though I couldn’t see what, and held a long, sharp butcher’s knife in his hand.

I tried to say something, but the words caught in my throat. What the hell are you supposed to say in that sort of situation? After a minute or two, he swallowed whatever he had been eating in a swift gulping motion, like an owl consuming a mouse. He smiled a smile of both satisfaction and expectation, and asked me if I was awake. He spoke with a crisp RP accent, which surprised me. You know what’s messed up? Here was this guy clearly about to kill me and carve me up for meat, and I still somehow felt bad about making the assumption that he couldn’t speak English, like I didn’t want my last thoughts on Earth to be low-key racist.

I tried to ask him who he was, but again my breath caught in my throat. He seemed to notice, though, and walked over to me slowly. He crouched down on his haunches, lowering his face to me, and asked me to speak up. I finally managed to croak out a question, asking who he was, but he just laughed that soft, disorientating laughter.

In a single, smooth motion the knife lashed out, cutting through my bound hands and neatly severing three of my fingers in a sudden burst of white-hot pain. I screamed, both from the injury and the hopes that someone might hear, but my captor didn’t seem to notice or care. Instead he picked up my fingers one by one and tossed them off-handedly onto the pile behind him.

Walking over to the pile of old bibles he picked one up and started to distractedly leaf through it. He started talking again, asking if I knew that one of the reasons the Romans persecuted early Christians was because they believed them to be cannibals. Most people, he told me, assumed it was due to the Romans being confused over the nature of the “body and blood of Christ” that the early Christians were consuming, but that Octavius of Minucius Felix listed all sorts of grotesque accusations, including initiation rites that involved the murdering of an infant and drinking its blood.

He looked over to see if I was listening, which I was, though mostly in the hopes he wouldn’t cut me again. I asked him if he was a Christian, and a look of irritation crossed his face. He shook his head and threw the bible back onto the pile, telling me that I wasn’t listening, that I didn’t understand, that the accusations were obviously false, like any iteration of the old blood libel, so of course he wasn’t a Christian, as they both honour and disregard the body, and then something about their view of the soul.

I was getting really lost at this point; he was rambling on about meat and souls and blood and I just lay there, waiting for him to kill me. I wanted to scream again, try to attract someone’s attention from outside, but I didn’t know what this thin, jagged man would do. He stopped his speech mid-sentence, as though he could tell I was no longer listening, and looked into my eyes with a grin. He started to walk towards me, the knife held loosely at his waist, a wetness on his lips, and in that moment I was a hundred percent sure I was going to die.

All at once a huge, dark shape barrelled into my captor, knocking him to the floor and sending the knife clattering to the ground. It was Leroy. He must have gotten worried waiting and come to find me. He stood over the thin, winded form and kicked it in the ribs, hard enough that I could hear something snap. Then he picked up the knife, walked over to me and cut through the cable ties keeping me in place.

He started to pull me to my feet before I could protest about my ankle, but surprisingly, it seemed to bear my weight without any problems. I looked down and, although I could plainly see dried blood all around it, my ankle was… fine. I stared in disbelief, then looked at my right hand, which still seemed to have all five fingers. It didn’t make any sense. I could still see the ones he had cut-off on the pile. One of them bore my heavy silver ring, while the same finger on my hand did not.

I started to say something about this to Leroy, but as I did there was a sudden heat from behind me. We turned to see one of the candles had been pushed onto the pile of bibles, setting them almost instantly ablaze. I looked around quickly for anything to douse the flames, but I could see nothing, and the fire was already starting to spread up the wall. Leroy and I ran, keen to get away before the fire brigade or police arrived. I didn’t see what happened to the man who had been cutting me, and we didn’t stay to watch the old takeaway go up in flames.

It’s still there, you know. Now a gutted, empty shell, smoke-blackened through the windows. I wonder if they’ll ever get around to tearing it down. It doesn’t really matter, though. I’ve decided to move.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Meat again. Not quite in the volumes of some previous statements, but still, a theme that continues to disconcert. First point to make is that I believe Mr. Goodall gave us a fake name and details when making his statement, as neither myself nor Jessica have been able to find any record of him to follow up, certainly none that match Nastya’s admittedly vague recollections about the man. Tim has confirmed the 27th of September 2009 as the date of the fire that destroyed the takeaway in question, which was registered as “Waltham Express Grill”, but can find no record of anything out of the ordinary about the fire, which was put down to unknown local vandals. We’ve also been unable to find anything on a teenager being picked up for trespass on that property, though that’s not a particular surprise.

I’ve had Nastya looking into the case of John Haan, though it’s slow going, as whenever there’s a picture he ends up needing to take a breath of fresh air. Apparently, Haan was second-generation British Chinese, marrying his wife Lanying shortly after she arrived in the country, and setting up Waltham Express Grill. He seems to have been utterly normal, according to the testimony of his former employees.

What Nastya did find, is that according to the coroner there was a noticeable lack of defensive wounds on what remained of Lanying’s body, and some of the injuries seemed like they might have been self-inflicted. From my perspective, however, what is more interesting is that six months before his arrest, John Haan let the last of his staff go and replaced them with a nephew of his who had recently moved over from China.

The nephew’s name was Haan Tao, although upon moving to this country he took the name ‘Tom Haan’. I’ve checked, and this is the same Tom Haan who was employed at the Dalston meat processing plant from late 2009 until his disappearance in 2013.

I doubt this is the last we hear of him and his strange relationship with meat.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

I still haven’t been back down in the tunnels, though my earlier conversation with Ivy puts me in some hopes that I may be able to request help with it sooner rather than later. Only to wait and see what comes of this operation of hers. I rather hope that she… I hope she’s okay.

And part of me hopes Daisy isn’t there.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Here.

IVY
Thanks.

ARCHIVIST
I assume it didn’t go well, then?

IVY
[Swallows drink] We lost Altman. Just… wasn’t… paying attention. Don’t know what they’re going to tell his family. Guess it could have been worse, though, if I hadn’t talked to you first. So, thanks.

ARCHIVIST
I’m surprised you’re here. Surely you have a lot of paperwork after something like that? A lot of forms to sign?

IVY
They’ve given us a few days ‘compassionate leave’. I think they just want us out of the way while they figure out the official version of what happened.

ARCHIVIST
Well, I’d like to hear the real one, if you’re ready?

IVY
Yeah. How much context do you need?

ARCHIVIST
You said it started with a kidnapping case?

IVT
Yeah. Callum Brodie. Twelve… twelve years old. Disappeared from his home in Dalston three weeks ago. Sitter was asleep when the mother came home, the front door was open, there was no sign of him. There was no forced entry, so it started out as a missing persons case, but they got a witness claiming he’d seen three unknown figures entering the Brodies’ home that night, so it was kicked up to Serious Crime. There was some back and forth with Kidnap Squad since no ransom demand had been made, but not much progress in terms of finding the kid.

I only found out about all this when we were suiting up yesterday. The Brodie case had nothing to do with my department or my borough. When me and Daisy got the call that we were being brought in for an operation to recover the kid, it was… it was totally out of the blue. The sergeant in charge had to brief us in the van.

I had no idea why we’d been called in until I looked at the other officers involved and saw a good few of them… they were fellow signees of a Section 31. Whatever we were heading towards, it was going to be weird. I think the sergeant in charge must have been sectioned as well, but I didn’t know him. It’s not too surprising, though. I mean, it’s not like any of us have a full list of sectioned officers, but one must exist somewhere.

It looked like most of the others had made the same connection, and none of us were feeling right about it. I mean, we had a counter-terrorist firearms squad with us, which didn’t exactly put my mind at ease.

That said, I wasn’t exactly sad we might be getting some sectioned firearms officers, but it was just a lot, you know? The briefing was pretty short. We were told that Callum Brodie had been found and it was suspected he was being held by a man named Maxwell Rayner, with an unknown number of accomplices. There were suspicions that there might be cult involvement. That’s when I phoned you.

ARCHIVIST
And did the lights help at all?

IVY
Oh, I’m… I’m getting to that. I told the sergeant, and he didn’t even ask me where I’d gotten the information. He just nodded and told everyone to load up on torches. The firearms team wasn’t short on tactical gear so, by the time we headed inside, we had two or three heavy duty flashlights each. I had four.

The building was in an industrial complex up in Harringay. It was a two-storey brick building with a weathered sign claiming it belonged to Outer Bay Shipping. We were instructed to go inside in teams of two, with one armed officer paired with one sectioned. You… you have to understand, that was massively against protocol, but I guess they wanted to be sure that none of the firearms team encountered anything weird without being accompanied by anyone experienced. I looked around to see if the others were going to make anything of it, but no-one made a peep. I think everyone knew that this was about as far from a normal operation as they came.

I was paired with an older guy. Goodman, I think his name was, though we didn’t really talk. The way he carried his weapon in the van, I could tell he’d been handling it awhile, but I couldn’t help but notice his hands were shaking slightly as we made our way around the building.

We were going in through the loading dock at the rear, and as we approached the security lights that lit the rest of the estate seemed to get dimmer. Well, not dimmer, really, they just didn’t illuminate the place as much as they should have. Aside from a small pool of white light directly below, the darkness around them didn’t seem to be affected. I didn’t have much time to think about it before the order came down and we were going in.

I cut the padlock on the metal gate and slid it up while Goodman gave me some cover. The inside seemed normal. Pallets of boxes were neatly lined up on shelves around the loading bay, and the heavy lamps overhead gave us plenty of light. We started to make a sweep of the area, eyes peeled for anything that looked out of place. I took a second to check a few of the larger boxes but they didn’t contain anything remarkable. Mostly sheets of plastic for manufacturing, although some were full of copper piping or paint. And that’s when I heard the scream.

It came from behind one of the shelves to my left and it didn’t sound like a cry of fear or pain. It was a scream of rage, almost animal-like, and when I turned I saw a figure moving behind me. It was only for a second, but it seemed to be dressed head to toe in black, like a leotard or one of those morphsuits. It was hard to say for sure, as it was less than a second before it darted back behind the shelves and Goodman opened fire.

I hadn’t prepared myself for it, and the sudden gunshot sent a jolt of pain shooting through my head as my eardrums rang with the noise. Goodman called something to me but I couldn’t make out a word of it. I just followed him as he ran around to where the figure had disappeared to. There was no sign of it, although a small spray of fresh blood told me that my jumpy new partner’s aim had been too wide of the mark.

We… we started to hear sporadic gunfire from the rest of the building. I mean, it was basically all I could hear at that point as everything else was still a muffled, high-pitched whine. I was worried Goodman might panic at this, but to his credit he seemed to have pulled himself together and we finished the sweep of the loading bay before heading through to the rest of the building.

I saw a handful of armed officers heading up the stairs to the upper floor, and I was going to follow them when I felt a tug on my arm. Goodman was… he was saying something and pointing towards the other direction. I saw a pair of uniforms and a face I recognised. Leo Altman, one of the sectioned officers from up in Waltham Forest. I had met him once before, when Daisy took me out for some very quiet drinks with a few other sectioned cops she knew. I remembered him being one of the friendlier ones, though he still stopped short of telling any stories.

Leo was stood with an armed officer that I didn’t know. From her lack of trigger discipline it looked like she was either very new or seriously rattled. They were staring down a long metal staircase that seemed to lead into what must have been the building’s basement. The briefing hadn’t mentioned anything about a basement, and it was clear they weren’t entirely sure how to proceed.

When me and Goodman joined them it seemed to make up their minds and, with a quick nod to us, Leo and his partner started to head down. I didn’t want to follow, and I could see that Goodman wasn’t too keen either, but we weren’t just going to leave them without backup, so down we went.

At the bottom of the stairs was a door. It was old and made of steel that had started to rust around the edges. But… it wasn’t right. You know how when the lights are turned on in a room and you can see it from outside? Like, a thin line of light leaking under the doorway? Well, it was like that, except what seemed to seep out from underneath it wasn’t light.

It was shadow. Like, if darkness was somehow shining from behind it. As I got closer I started to hear something. I couldn’t really tell what it was under the buzzing in my ears, but the best way I could describe it is that it sounded like a waterfall, but slowed right down. A steady, flowing crash and churn, but deep and drawn out. I wanted to ask the others if they heard it as well, but Leo was already moving to open the door. I barely had time to get my torch out.

I’m glad I did, though, because as the door opened, every light in the building went dark.

That moment I was in complete darkness had to be one of the longest seconds of my life. I felt like I’d gone blind. Not just my eyes but everything. Like every sense I had was severed and the only thing I could feel was a wave of nausea. It seemed like, for that second, I wasn’t anywhere that light had ever reached. Then, I clicked the button on my torch and the beam cut right through it.

The flashlight was weak, nothing like the power I would have expected from the heavy bulb, but the faint glow was enough to bring me back to myself. I shone it behind me, over the pale, panicked faces of the others and, as it touched each of them, I saw them start and reach for their own torches. Soon four pale beams were struggling out into the thick, aggressive gloom.

I turned around, trying to shine the light on the wall or even the door we came in from, anything that would give me a sense of the room we were standing in, but it just disappeared into the pitch dark in all directions. Thinking about it now, I realise, we never actually walked through the door.

Small flecks of black dust floated in the air, like… like inky snow. They moved gently through the torchlight and they never seemed to settle on the ground, and I began to realise how cold it was. Everything was so still, and the only sound was the same dull roar from up ahead of us. I don’t know how long we stood there, but when my torch sputtered and died, I knew we didn’t have long.

I took out another and turned it on. The light seemed even fainter than the first one. Still, it was something, and we started to walk forward, or at least what we assumed was forward. If anyone said anything I didn’t hear it. The black dust danced in front of us, but it never seemed to actually touch us or land on our clothing. There was no smell at all here. The building above us had smelt of sawdust, old metal and industrial cleaner, but down here there was nothing. I didn’t… I didn’t shine my torch upwards. I didn’t want to see if there was a roof over our heads.

By this point we had easily walked the whole length of the building several times and still hadn’t seen anything. The roar was getting louder and louder, until it was all that was in my head. The four of us were all on our second or third torches by that point, and I could feel that I was starting to panic. There was a scream building up inside of me, clawing its way up my throat. Actually, you know what? I might have been screaming. I don’t know. It was… it was impossible to tell over the noise and the thick, choking darkness. Then Goodman’s flashlight beam hit something ahead of us and it… it all went to hell.

I think it took about five seconds. Everything seemed to happen at once, and only going over it in the reports afterwards was I able to process what I saw. Five seconds and everything was over, but I’ll try and describe it in as much detail as I can.

Goodman’s torch beam had landed on an old man. He was tall, but I couldn’t say much more than that. His body was hidden in the folds of a robe of some sort. It was the same colour as the dust that had filled the air and seemed to move and shift in the same way. His white hair was thin and wild, covering an unkempt face and a scraggly beard. His eyes were milky white. I think he was blind. From the description the sergeant had given us, I was sure this was Maxwell Rayner.

Next to him was an old chair that looked like it could have come from a dinner table. The wood was stained, covered in dark mould, and tied to it with thin metal wire was Callum Brodie. The kid’s eyes were blank, though not clouded like the old man’s, and his face was locked in a silent scream.

Rayner was facing him, thin, bony hands raised to his face. Something was… something was flowing out of his mouth. It looked like ink, but it flowed more like a heavy fog than any sort of liquid. It drips down his forearms and onto the floor, where it… it rolled towards Callum, climbing up the chair and oozing across the boy’s body towards his face. It was moving slowly, and had just reached his chest. The roaring sound seemed to come as it convulsed out of the old man’s mouth.

Then Goodman opened fire. The muzzle flash seemed impossibly bright as it cut through the dark and… I could swear that, for a second, the room it lit up was not a basement but a cathedral. He let off three shots in a quick burst, and every one of them hit Rayner square in the chest. His robe twitched violently as he staggered backwards, and all the dark liquid suddenly washed down onto the floor in a single movement, leaving Callum untouched. It still gushed from his mouth, though, and as the shots tore through him he spun about and an arc of the dark substance flew through the air.

Altman had started running towards them as soon as he had seen the kid, and was almost at the chair when the wave of it spewed out. A few droplets hit him on the cheek and he started to howl and claw at his face. Goodman fired again at Rayner, dropping him to the ground, and the horrendous noise stopped suddenly, leaving only Leo’s cries of pain.

The lights came on all at once, and in the sudden painful brightness none of us had time to do anything as a woman who hadn’t been there a moment ago ran up to Leo. She wore a robe similar to the old man’s, and by the time any of us had seen the knife in her hand she had buried it in Altman’s throat. More gunshots, this time from the officer who had partnered with Leo, but she was too slow. By the time the woman with the knife had been dropped, he was already bleeding out on the floor.

Five seconds. Two dead kidnappers, one dead police officer… and silence. We were standing in a small basement room lit by dingy fluorescent bulbs, no sign of the black liquid or any sort of dust. The kid seemed fine. I mean, I’m sure he’ll need a lot of counselling, but he didn’t seem physically any worse for wear.

Goodman went to untie him while I ran to check on Altman. It was too late, of course, but as I looked at his still, cold face, I saw his eyes were a milky white.

The rest of the squad arrived a few seconds later and helped to take us back out to the van. After that it was all questions, debrief cups of coffee I never quite got around to drinking. And Section 31 forms. Lots of them.

All in all there were five people killed in that building, including Leo Altman. Aside from Rayner and the woman, who was identified from an old report as Natalie Ennis, two more were shot and killed when they attacked some of the other officers. Three more were subdued and arrested, but as far as I know they still haven’t said a word. God knows how they’re going to process them with all the secrecy around the operation, but thankfully that’s not my problem. I think they were connected to that cult group from way back, the Church of the Divine whatever.

ARCHIVIST
The People’s Church of the Divine Host. Rayner was their leader back in the early Nineties. I have a few statements related to them if you’re interested. Natalie Ennis was actually one of the…

IVY
No. I’m not interested. Not even a little. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days, and I’m done. With the police, with Section 31, all of it. I wanted to tell you in person. And give you the statement. It seemed the least I could do.

ARCHIVIST
You’re really quitting?

IVY
Yeah. And you should too. This place… It’s not right. Goodbye, Raphaella.

[Door opens]
ARCHIVIST
[Desperatly] Ivy, wait. What about the tapes?

IVY
What?

ARCHIVIST
The tapes. Fr… from Gertrude’s case. Is there any way I can –

[Door closes]
No, I suppose not.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Well, that seems to close the book on Maxwell Rayner. Maybe the whole People’s Church of the Divine Host. I can’t help but feel I’ve got the last chapter of a story and I don’t even know the title. At least I hope it’s the last chapter. I still can’t find much about the company Outer Bay Shipping. Looks like a shell corporation, but tracking corporate ownership is not something I’m skilled at.

I’m pissed with Ms. Alexandria’s decision. It’s not exactly a surprise, though. I’ve… thought about quitting myself. It’s not an option, of course. I’m in far too deep now. I get the impression that to quit would be giving up whatever small protection I seem to have here. I just wished… I don’t know.

Oddly enough, all I can think about is: how did the police know where Rayner was keeping the boy? Ivy didn’t seem to know, and the Church clearly wasn’t expecting the police to arrive. With a few exceptions, Rayner managed to stay off the grid for two decades. How did they find him now? Someone must have known what was happening and tipped them off. And I don’t think it was anyone inside that building.

End supplement.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Lydia Halligan regarding her insomnia. Original statement given 8th June, 2015. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I don’t know when I last slept. It’s not that I can’t remember, it’s just that I can’t really tell. When I manage to steal an hour or so, if that’s even happened, my dreams seem so vivid and my waking so disjointed, that they blur together. Like all I have are scenes and images, devoid of context, and no true way to tell what is real and what is not.

I’m lying in my bed. It’s hot. I know the central heating is off but the air still has that dry warmth that scratches your throat. I want to get up, to move, but my body is too tired, all the strength in it gone. I just lie there, watching the ceiling fan spin round and around and around, a dull whirring that grinds against my brain. It is dark outside, and the only light is the glow from my small bedside lamp. As I watch it, my eyes adjusting to the motion, the fan slows. It loses its momentum gradually, until at last it is completely still and there is silence. I wait, and it begins to turn again in the other direction. Now spinning anticlockwise, it accelerates until the blades are once again a blur. I do not remember my flat having a ceiling fan when I moved in.

I’ve always had problems sleeping. Even as a child, my mother would always check my room to find me reading well into the night. If I heard her coming up the stairs, I would turn off my light and dive beneath the covers to try and convince her I was sound asleep. If it worked, I would listen to her walk off to her room, and then bring out my book once again. At the time I thought it was because I loved reading, but looking back I think it must have been the first stirrings of insomnia.

There is a billboard outside my flat. It overlooks a small roundabout and used to have adverts for whatever the latest TV drama was. The metal that holds it up is old and rusted, and sometimes I think I can hear it groaning ever so quietly as I walk past. Now it has an advert for coffee. I assume that is what it’s advertising. It’s a woman, bright and cheerful, with a sky-blue blouse and shining white smile. She holds a cup of coffee, the steam rising and curling in front of her eyes. There is no brand name or information, just the words, “Sleep is overrated” in a tall, thin font. I don’t know how long it has been there. Her eyes seem to look in through my window.

I work as a freelance writer. It’s not a good job. Very little of it actually involves writing, the rest is chasing up invoices, desperately firing off pitches and worrying over a budget spreadsheet that doesn’t add up. I always thought it suited my schedule, allowing me to be flexible, but it has in many ways just robbed me of any connection to the way the rest of the world organises itself. I never know what day of the week it is. When I don’t sleep the days and nights just bleed together. Sometimes it feels that even my clock is lying to me, telling me that an hour lasts so much longer than it should, then stealing an entire morning in the blink of an eye.

There is a man in my living room. He is tall, with sandy blond hair that twists into unruly curls. I must have invited him in. He sits in my armchair, drumming his fingers together. They make an odd, clacking sound when they touch. I know him, though I have no idea where we might have met. His smile is friendly but I don’t like it. I apologise, tell him I’ve forgotten his name and he waves it away, saying that names are overrated, then asks how my day has been. I tell him I don’t know which day he means, and he laughs and laughs and laughs until my nose begins to bleed. I see the blood dripping onto the patterns I have been drawing. How long have I been drawing? It isn’t my pen.

What’s the longest you’ve ever stayed awake? As a student I liked to push myself, conduct little experiments on my own capacity for fatigue, time how many hours and then try to beat my record. After a while I stopped counting, though for some reason I never really stopped thinking of them as experiments. At first I tried to convince friends to stay up with me. Sometimes they would but they never lasted more than forty hours, and I always felt too awkward to stay up after they had crashed. Eventually, I began just doing it alone, relishing the feeling that I had somehow seen beyond what they were able to.

I’m sitting in a cafe. It’s open all night and I go there when I’m feeling restless late at night. I try to imagine I’m sitting in Hopper’s “Nighthawks at the Diner”, but there is a thin layer of grease on the plastic tables that dispels any romanticism about the place. I’m drinking a cup of coffee. The coffee is awful, the cheapest instant that money can buy wholesale. I don’t care. It is black and opaque and when I drink it, I can feel the tiniest bit of life seep through me as the caffeine enters my blood. I take a long sip and stop. The coffee has something in it. Smooth and hard. I spit it onto the table. It’s a tooth. I check, but I am not missing any. It’s small, like a child’s milk tooth, and it just sits there. The waitress comes over to see if I want food, even though I never do. Her name tag reads “Vanessa”. I point to the shiny white lump now lying on the table. I don’t think she sees it, and if she does, she does not react. She goes to get me more coffee.

Your vision goes strange when you don’t sleep for a long time. I think it’s something to do with changing pressure on your eyeballs. You start to detect faint movements on the edges, on the periphery, and if you stare too long at a flat surface it starts to gently pulse and move. I wrote a short story once where it was things trying to push through into our dimension, strange ghostly creatures that could only be seen by those who had so deprived themselves of rest that their mind opened itself. In the end the protagonist finally saw them fully, and they blinded her. But maybe it’s just the mind becoming too tired to properly process the signals your eyes send. So much of what we see and hear are just useful lies that our brain tells us, filtering out the useless bits and adding in what it expects to see. No-one ever knows what they’re really seeing or hearing.

The billboard is damp. A sudden rainstorm has soaked it through and the paper peels away at the corner. The sky-blue blouse is now mottled and mouldy; the smile has warped into a sneer. The coffee is still steaming, the swirls of the steam unaffected by the rain, though the brightness in her eyes has turned into a vicious glare. I can see the rust in the metal supports more clearly now, and they seem to bend ever so slightly when they groan. The text now reads: “Sleep is for the weak”.

When you don’t sleep, your energy goes in cycles. Your body will go through phases where it seems to be trying to completely shut itself down, and keeping your eyes open is quite literally a physical struggle. Then all at once you’ll enter a period of manic energy, a second, third or fourth wind that leaves you giddy and nauseous, struggling to find an outlet for your sudden rush. Sometimes there is a euphoria with this; other times it’s more like desperation. As you get further and further into it, these cycles get closer and closer together, until your entire self seems to change hour by hour. Of course, when you have insomnia, it doesn’t matter how much your body tries to send you to sleep in the lulls, it simply doesn’t have the ability to do so. Like your whole self is trying to push you into bed, but it is covered by a solid granite block.

The man is back. This time I am on a bench in the park. The clouds roll and curl gently in the pale sky of dawn. He is twisting long blades of grass into strange spirals, but his fingers keep cutting through them instead. Is this when we met? He looks at me, his face impassive… if I even see a face. He tells me that I look terrible. I try to focus, but his body shifts and undulates like so much else when I try to focus. I tell him I haven’t slept, and he nods and tells me that’s ok. He is lying, and it makes me very afraid.

They say that sleep is the most important factor in long-term health. Night workers are apparently at risk for all sorts of problems but not nearly so much as shift workers who are never able to settle into a proper long-term sleep schedule. The body needs time to rest and repair itself. Caffeine and drugs and adrenaline can give you all the energy you need, but they can’t give you the rest that keeps you healthy. I don’t like to think about what this might be doing to my insides, what it might lead to in the future, but it doesn’t really matter. Time is not exactly as firm a concept to me now as it perhaps once was. My head is too heavy to give much thought to a clock.

I am running through the city. The alleyways are narrow and winding and do not turn all the directions that they should. The smell chokes me and my body is heavy as stone. I lean against a wall and, for a second, I am unsure if I will ever be able to stand myself up again. I stagger through another street then I stop. I lie down on the tarmac and it is warm and soft under me. I feel sleep begin to overtake me, but I am wrong. It is dawn, and all that comes over me is faint and sickly sunlight. I can hear his laugh again, and my mouth tastes like burnt coffee.

I do not know why I am here. I know this place and what you want, but I have no proof to give you. I have nothing that cannot be waved away as a bad dream. By you, at least. I cannot wave, for my arms are too heavy and my hands are busy drawing those strange, familiar curves. What do you want? To find a child’s tooth and hold it up triumphant, a talisman to conjure those things that you should fear. To photograph and analyse a billboard that has never once advertised coffee. To talk to a person who is not a person and whose strange laugh you should be fleeing? I am here, and I give you my words. They are all I have, and all you want, and perhaps when I am free of them then I will be allowed to sleep.

I am standing before the billboard. It is night, though a nasty ray of daylight makes it glow a dying pink. The roundabout is empty and will never see a car again. It just goes around and around and around with no way on and no end to be had. The woman is baring her teeth in a triumphant snarl, her blouse now stained with the same rust that laces through the bars that support her. Her eyes slough off her face, revealing the twisted shapes of whatever the poster is that sits behind her. The steam that rises from the coffee is the same. Always the same, always undisturbed, curling in on itself. The words that stand stark above it: “Sleep no more”. I walk toward the billboard, and my sobs are drowned out by the screaming of rusted struts as they bend. The scream of the metal, buckling under the fatigue, the scream of the woman as she bears down upon me. It collapses on top of me, and I collapse with it.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

This is a difficult statement. I am forced to agree with Ms. Halligan regarding how verifiable what she says is. There’s no way to confirm it isn’t a series of bad dreams. It sounds like a series of bad dreams. A cry for help from a woman with a very severe problem. There are no details to follow up, save for Ms. Halligan herself, who passed away from a heart attack less than a month after giving this statement. She was 29.

This time last year I would have dismissed her as a kook, wasting our time. But a year changes a lot, and I now recognise the description of a tall man with curly blond hair and an unnerving laugh all too well. Michael, did you drive her to this? Another victim of your warped games? Or were you simply drawn like a vulture? Or maybe a shark sensing blood. What do you want from your victims?

I’m not sure if i should continue to drink coffee but i will take my chanses.

End recording.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Supplemental.

I know who’s living in the tunnels. Well, that’s not exactly true. I don’t know their identity, but I’ve seen them. Shortly after Ivy came to see me, I decided not to request her help with the tunnels. It has become clear she has her own concerns to be dealing with, and I am becoming less and less convinced that further police involvement won’t result in more issues down the road. So, shortly after she left, I decided to get somewhat more proactive and purchased a small motion-sensor camera, which I hid in view of the trapdoor. After a week, I reviewed the footage.

It is remarkably poor quality, far below what the specifications of the setup should yield. It may be I was unfair to Carmilla about her difficulties setting up CCTV in the Archives. Nonetheless, I was able to make out enough. For a start, I saw Jessica, on two separate occasions, entering and leaving the tunnels. I assume she must have gotten a copy of the key from somewhere, but it seems that when I met her down there earlier she probably wasn’t simply following me out of concern.

It’s not enough to confront her with yet; if she’s working against us I don’t want to tip my hand too early, but I’ll keep a closer eye on her. There’s definitely something she’s hiding. It may even be she knows the other individual I saw emerging from the trapdoor.

As I said, I do not recognise them. They appear to be a man, or at least male-presenting. Middle-aged or older judging from the frame, but hard to be sure. They emerge around three in the morning, holding what appears to be an attaché case. Then, they spend about half an hour rifling through archives, and retreat back down after stuffing a handful of files into the case.

On the one hand, this does reassure me that whatever’s down there is human, but what worries me is the manner they leave the trapdoor. Rather than picking the lock or forcing their way through, they seem to move the floor itself out of their way somehow, and replace it when they return. I’ve triple checked, and the area surrounding the trapdoor is completely solid. Human or not, that worries me.

I will leave the camera set up for now and, hopefully, gather some further information, maybe get a clearer picture of their face. Whatever this individual may be, I do not want to confront them unprepared.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Stephen Walker, regarding his brother’s disappearance from the top of Tour Montparnasse in October 2006. Original statement given November 7th, 2006. Audio recording by Raphaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I hope my brother is dead. He must be dead. I would love to believe that this is all some elaborate prank, some bizarre attempt to fake his own disappearance, but deep down I know that’s not my brother. So he is dead. If not, I can’t even begin to comprehend how dreadful a fate that would be. Some fears can only be endured for so long.

My brother Grant was always afraid of heights. I remember we used to climb trees as children. He would always get scared halfway up, and it would be an hour of coaxing and reassurance before he managed to climb down. He still tried to climb them, though. That was my brother: always full of bravery and optimism until the moment the terror set kicked in. He never did have the strongest survival instinct.

Generally he was fine with tall buildings, if they had a lift. Stairs were often more of a problem, especially if there were windows from which he could see the ground getting further away. Still, the majority of his phobia, strangely enough, was focused on ladders.

That’s not to say he fainted with horror just being in the same room as one, just that climbing up and down ladders was a particular sort of torture for Grant. Those few occasions when I saw him do so, the stark white terror I saw etched on his face with every slight rattle or shift of the thing, was enough to convince me that this wasn’t some quirk to be gently mocked over Christmas dinner; it was a real and intense manifestation of his phobia.

For the most part it didn’t affect our lives that much. We shared a small house in Jarrow, up near Newcastle, and it took more than a second floor to freak Grant out, although he pointedly never climbed the small stepladder that led up to the attic. The living arrangements were less than ideal, as Grant had been abruptly fired from his admin position with Deloitte in January so he didn’t contribute much to the house except for an indentation on the sofa. I hadn’t really wanted to take him in. I mean, it’s not that I don’t love him or anything, he’s my brother, it’s just that we’d always got on best when we spent most of our time apart. Familiarity does breed some sorts of contempt better than others, and I knew that we were unlikely to be domestically suited to each other, as I am by nature quite fastidious in ways that I know my brother is not. However, I had recently gone through a break-up, and there were only so many well-meaning hints from my parents about what to do with the newly-spare room that, in the end, I caved and invited him to live with me.

Work had been slow coming for Grant. By the time he lost the job with Deloitte, his knowledge of database administration had been so specific and specialist, that he was struggling to find jobs that fit his skillset. Which meant more time for him to spend making our living room look like a bombsite.

I’m sorry. I know how this must sound, but I feel it’s important you understand why I took him up to Tour Montparnasse in the first place. I couldn’t have known what would happen. Deep down, though, in the hidden corners of my scepticism, I know it’s not my fault. I know it’s because of the man with the lightning scar. He did this. I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but he took my brother away from me, and if I ever see him again, I’m going to kill him.

The first time we saw him was when I broke my arm. It was about a year ago, just after Halloween. We’d both been out to a party the night before; I had managed to lose my keys, and it was only as we approached our front door that Grant decided it was the right time to announce he’d left his keys in the house, assuming I’d have mine. I was quite upset by this, and we had something of a row out there in the front garden, both of us yelling through blistering hangovers. We couldn’t get a locksmith, as that would take hours and cost us a lot of money that, with Grant unemployed and living with me, I did not have. After another few minutes of recriminations, I spotted that Grant had left his window ever so slightly ajar. Normally I would have reminded him that leaving a window open invites burglars, but in this case that was almost exactly what we wanted.

I knocked on the door of the house next to ours. Jim Hancock was not the best of neighbours. He was the closest thing to a cartoon Cockney that I’ve ever met, and had a habit of blasting music loud enough to bleed through the walls of our terraced house. He was, however, a builder, which meant that he would have a ladder. He did and, after having a nice abrasive laugh at our situation, he went and fetched it. He wasn’t interested in helping with the actual entrance to our home, and told us to leave the ladder in front of his garden, apparently unconcerned by the prospect of thieves.

Obviously I was the one going up the ladder. We placed it in the garden, trying to get the end nestled in the crook of the window, and I started to climb. It was less stable than I had anticipated. Grant was gripping it at the bottom, but the ground was softer than I thought, and as I reached for the window, I felt my stomach drop as the ladder pitched slowly to the side. I’d love to say that next thing I knew I was on the ground with a broken arm, but I remember every second of that fall. Like it was happening in slow motion. The rush of cold autumn air as I fell. The impact of my arm against the low brick wall. The sickening crunch.

I lay there, my arm in absolute agony, as Grant ran over to check on me. It was clear that the bone was broken and we needed to call an ambulance. My phone had been smashed in the fall, and when I asked Grant to use his, he got very quiet and told me sheepishly that it, like his keys, was still inside the house. Grant started knocking on people’s doors but no-one answered. Maybe they weren’t home, or maybe they had heard our blazing row and didn’t want to help us. Even Jim didn’t seem inclined to open his door a second time. It was becoming more and more clear that our only option was for Grant to climb in and get his phone, and I could see from his pale, frightened face that he had come to the same conclusion.

To his credit, I didn’t have to talk him into it. My obvious agony seemed to do that for me. He hoisted the ladder off the ground and pushed it close to the window. Then he stood there at the bottom, droplets of sweat visible on his face, and looked at me. He placed his foot on the lowest rung and began to climb. It was slow and watching it was almost as painful as my shattered bone. His neck was rigid, stiff with the will not to look down. He was barely ten feet off the ground, and every time the ladder shifted slightly he made a small sound of terror. He kept his face away from me but I think he might have been crying.

It was as Grant was making his gradual ascent that I saw the man with the scar. He was stood there, just across the street, watching us. He was short, and wore an old brown suit, faded with age, that didn’t seem to match his relatively youthful face. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a jagged array of pale white scar tissue that seemed to climb up the side of his neck like a flash of lightning. His pale eyes were entirely focused on Grant making his excruciating way up the ladder. If he noticed me watching him, he gave no sign of it. When I looked at him, I had the strangest feeling, like a wave of dizziness washing over me, and my stomach dropped again, like it had when I fell. I tried to tell myself it was just from the pain in my arm making me feel ill, but it faded every time I looked away from that strange, scarred man who watched my brother.

I looked back to Grant, who was nearly at the top and clearly struggling. His hands were so slick with sweat he was having trouble holding on to the metal rungs, and he was swaying dangerously. I was certain I was about to watch him fall like I had, but just as I was sure he was about to lose his grip he reached out and got his arm into the open window. He grabbed hold of something inside, and started to pull himself through.

Soon his torso had disappeared into the window, then his legs. Everything was quiet; I suddenly felt very alone. I turned to look at the man with the scar but it seemed like he had decided to move on. I could see him a little way down the street, walking away faster than I would have expected. I just lay there, with nothing to keep me company but the pain of my injury.

Then I heard the sound of the latch, cutting through the silence, and the front door opened to reveal Grant, still soaked in sweat, triumphantly clutching his phone. I congratulated him on overcoming his fear before gently reminding him that the reason we needed the phone was to call an ambulance. He nodded like he hadn’t forgotten, and made the call.

The ambulance and hospital did pass in a bit of a blur. There was an X-ray, and a lot more detail about the specifics of the break than I really thought was necessary for the treatment instructions of “keep it in a cast and try not to move it”. It was irritating, but it wasn’t as if it was the first time I had broken a bone. Time passed, I healed, and I forgot about the strange man who had watched my brother almost fall.

My brother finally got another job shortly before Christmas, with Deloitte again, though a different department, but he didn’t seem inclined to move out of the room in my house. He did offer to cover the rent for a few months, which I did appreciate, as paying it solo had wiped out a good deal of my savings. It wasn’t like I had other housemates lining up to join me, so I resolved to make the best of it and live with his irritating habits. It was fine, you know. We didn’t get on any better than we had when he was unemployed, but without the lingering resentment of money I could just about tolerate his occasional hygiene issues. And life rolled on.

It was about two months ago that I started planning for Paris. There was a conference I was due to speak at, and I hadn’t had a holiday since I broke up with Carly, so I decided to take a full week there to really relax. I did not invite Grant, which you would have thought would make him think twice about coming with me, but you’d be wrong. As soon as I mentioned it to him, he was online checking if there were any more seats on my flight. There were. Then he kept bugging me to change my hotel booking to a twin room until I finally relented and did so. Every time I mentioned something I was planning to do he would invite himself along, generally getting me to arrange it and saying he’d pay me back. I’m sure he intended to, and was just excited to spend some time hanging out in Paris, but at the start of October he lost his job again.

He had been caught smoking weed on company property. It hadn’t been on the clock at the time, and he managed to talk them out of actually calling the police, but he was dismissed on the spot and told in no uncertain terms that he was not welcome to apply for any further vacancies. I imagine he wasn’t going to get a reference, either. He was devastated, of course, and I will admit that I wasn’t as sympathetic as I could have been. From my point of view, it was his own damn fault; because of it I was suddenly on the hook for a reasonable amount of money. It was clear that when we went to Paris I was going to have to pay for him, and he was so despondent that I didn’t have the heart to tell him he couldn’t come.

So that’s why, when we went to Paris three weeks ago, I was both seriously pissed at Grant, and in almost complete control of where we went while we were there. I think that’s why I decided to take him up Tour Montparnasse. There was no way I was going to get him up the Eiffel Tower, but I reckoned, correctly, that he wouldn’t have heard of the Tour Montparnasse, the actual highest point in Paris accessible by the public. It just looked like a normal skyscraper, so I reckoned it probably wouldn’t ring any alarm bells for him until we were actually in the lift.

You’ve got to understand I just wanted to freak him out a little bit. He’d have a bit of a panic, I’d pretend to have forgotten about his phobia, and we’d head back down with me feeling slightly avenged. I couldn’t have known.

At first it was all going exactly according to plan. I was vague about the attraction we were going to see, and he clearly hadn’t heard of the Tour Montparnasse, so he didn’t make any fuss when we went inside, even when we first got into the elevator. As it started to rise, though, I saw the apprehension start to creep across his face and he asked where the lift was taking us. I had to fight to suppress a smile as I told him we were heading up to the best view in Paris and his face started to drain of colour. By the time we reached the top his legs were shaking so badly he was finding it hard to stand. I feigned concern, though inside I was savouring his discomfort more than was probably healthy.

I helped him out of the lift, and he turned around almost immediately, about to get back in, but something about the idea of going back down again so soon clearly caused him to hesitate. He mumbled something about sitting down and collecting his thoughts, and staggered over to a seat a good distance away from the barriers that surrounded the building’s rooftop observation terrace.

I left him to collect his thoughts and walked over to the edge. The view was breathtaking. I could see all of Paris stretching out before me, including the Eiffel Tower. And in the mid-morning sun it was one of the most beautiful and serene things I had ever seen.

It was as I gazed at the majestic city below me that I felt a lurch in my stomach, like I was falling, and I pitched forward into the barrier, bruising my arm and sending an agonising echo of my broken bone shooting up my body. I braced myself on my hands and knees, trying to overcome the sudden swimming nausea in my head. Finally, I managed to centre my vision enough to look up and there he was. There was an icy breeze that high up, but he seemed not to notice as his loose, thin shirt billowed around that sprawling white scar. He stared at me, and I felt again like I was falling right through the floor. I tried to speak, say anything, but my breath seemed caught in my chest. The worst part, though, was his expression. He looked bored.

At some point I felt hands gripping me and I was pulled gently from the floor. It was a pair of tourists from New Zealand who had come over to see if I was alright. I mumbled something about vertigo, though the feeling had faded now. I looked around, but there was no sign of the scarred man. I looked again, and realised with mounting alarm that there was also no sign of Grant. I checked, but the terrace wasn’t huge and there was nowhere for him to be hiding. I thought he must have taken the lift back down, but he wasn’t in the lobby, or outside, or anywhere. He was gone.

I didn’t realise my phone was dead until several hours into the search. When I finally charged it, I had dozens of missed calls from Grant and almost four hundred text messages. Most were too scrambled to read, but those that weren’t were asking where I was. Where anybody was. Where the elevators were.

There was one picture that seemed to have come through without too much corruption: it seemed to show the terrace, but where the barrier should have been was just a sheer drop, with the top of a ladder reaching up and over it. I couldn’t make out the city below it. I tried to call his phone so many times, but whenever it actually connected, all I heard was the sound of rushing wind.

I know that man with the scar took my brother. I don’t know how he took him, or where, but I know he’s gone. I haven’t seen either of them since, and I don’t think I will. It never felt like I was what he wanted. I really hope Grant is dead. Because, if not, I have a horrible feeling deep inside that he’s still on that ladder.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

Brian Drumbot. The man with the lightning scar. A fractal pattern burned into his flesh, chased by the manifestation of that pattern and then jumped out a window. So what is he now?

It strikes me that whenever a person gains any sort of power from these books, often they change, not just their actions, but who they are. It almost seems as though the power uses them, rather than the other way round. Did Leitner’s book do something to Brian Drumbot? Others who encountered it reported similar feelings of vertigo to those reported by Mr. Walker, but it also puts me in mind of the fate of Robert Kelly, the skydiver who fell for far longer than he…

[Door opens]
Hello? Ivy, what are you doing here? I thought…

IVY
Here.

[Sound of a box hitting a table]
ARCHIVIST
Are those the tapes?

IVY
As many of them as I could get.

ARCHIVIST
I don’t understand. You said we were done.

IVY
[Sound of exasperation]
They’re covering it up. Altman’s death. Saying he was dirty. That he got stabbed in a botched drug deal.

ARCHIVIST
Wait. So the operation you went on…

IVY
Doesn’t exist. I mean, I didn’t know Leo well, but… it’s not right. And they seemed happy enough to get me out the door.

ARCHIVIST
I still don’t understand why this leads to me getting the tapes. I mean, not that I’m ungrateful.

IVY
Well, they’re sure as hell not going to solve Gertrude’s murder, so you might as well have them. Before… I don’t know, maybe I still had enough police in me not to just steal from Evidence, but now…

ARCHIVIST
They’ve rather lost your loyalty. I thought they were watching you?

IVY
No, not since the Brodie op. Everyone’s been too busy. Daisy knows, and she’s fine with it. There shouldn’t be any problem until next inventory, and even then it’s only if they can be bothered with the sectioned stuff. You should be in the clear.

ARCHIVIST
I… I don’t know how to thank you.

IVY
Well, if I never see you again, or hear about any of this… that’ll be thanks enough. Take care.

[Door closes]
ARCHIVIST
[Excited] Right. where to start…

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Fine. Say your piece, but make it fast. I have more pressing business.

JONNY
Come on, I thought we were past that.

ARCHIVIST
Past what?

JONNY
The attitude. I know I was kind of snotty when I first came in, but… come on, you were no better. I can admit I misjudged this place. Can you at least give me a chance?

ARCHIVIST
Fine. I’m glad your opinion of us has changed.

JONNY
My opinion of your Institute. I still think you’re a pompous ass.

ARCHIVIST
Well, this ‘pompous ass’ has some very urgent work to do, so if your statement is just going to be insults, you can go back to the damn library.

JONNY
It’s not. Look, I… I think I’ve found something.

ARCHIVIST
About, what was it? Grey ladies?

JONNY
No… well, sort of, I suppose… um, but that’s just it. Grey ladies are just the beginning. They’re the safe ones, I think. There are others.

ARCHIVIST
More ‘active’ ghosts?

JONNY
Yes.

[Sound of cloth rustling]
ARCHIVIST
Oh good lord. Are you okay?

JONNY
Yes, it’s not as bad as it looks.

ARCHIVIST
What did that? When?

JONNY
Just before I came in last time. And, er, best I can tell it was a 1940s surgical scalpel.

ARCHIVIST
A scalpel?

JONNY
So, can I make my statement now?

ARCHIVIST
I think that might be for the best. Statement of Jonny D'vile, regarding her further researches into…

JONNY
I’m just calling them war ghosts.

ARCHIVIST
Recorded direct from subject, 13th February, 2017. Statement begins.

JONNY
Ghost Hunt UK struggled after Aldershot. Sarah Baldwin disappeared. I spent a while trying to track her down but nothing led anywhere. I’m sure you found the same. The thing is, even though her peeling and stapling her own skin was the weirdest part of what I saw, it wasn’t what I got really hung up on. Fact is, there was a presence in that place. A genuine, unseen presence that physically attacked her. I’ve got no real reference point for who or what Sarah Baldwin might be, but I sure as hell know what a ghost is and how to look into one.

The others were dealing with their own stuff. We struggled through another year, but it wasn’t the same. Toni was the worst. She just got harder and harder to pin down for shoots, and then I struggled to reach her by phone or email. When she moved down to Bristol in March, she didn’t even tell me. I had to hear it from Pete; in the exact same call he said that he was thinking about leaving the team as well. I think that’s kind of why I came to you guys. I knew it was what happened at the CMH that was breaking us apart, but I couldn’t actually talk to them about it. Then Andy decided to take what he called “a bit of a holiday” from the show, and I wasn’t sure if he was coming back. If he did, I thought maybe we could find a new team and keep the show going. But he didn’t. As far as Ghost Hunt UK is concerned, he’s still on holiday, and it’s just me.

I actually went back to the Cambridge Military Hospital. It was being torn down, but I hopped the fence after dark and just waited. There was nothing. Just dust and rubble and silence. If I closed my eyes I could trick myself into thinking that the wind was some sort of howl of pain, but that’s all it was, really. The wind. So I started looking into similar buildings, military hospitals specifically, but anywhere with a reputation for being haunted and connected to historical conflicts.

It was then that I started noticing something about the paranormal investigator community. We all look in the same places. There’s a surprisingly small number of hauntings and cryptids that we all, sort of, swap between, repeating each other’s research and coming to similar conclusions. That’s why so many of us tend to go over to America. It’s so much bigger that there’s a lot more supposedly haunted locations on the circuit. Even then, it’s not as many as you think. I mean, we get plenty of tips from the public about other stuff – they don’t all come to see you, you know – but if they’re not reporting something that we’re already at least a bit familiar with, we tend to dismiss them out of hand. I used to assume this was to protect us from drunks and weirdos who ate the wrong kind of mushroom. I don’t think that’s it, though. I think it’s to protect us from the stuff that might be real. Make sure we only go looking after encounters that others have already confirmed as safe. I mean, I don’t know what it was about Sarah Baldwin that mixed so badly with the presence in the CMH, but that was the first I’d ever heard of a significant encounter there. Somewhere, somehow, the community had deemed it as not dangerous. Asbestos notwithstanding.

So the more I looked, the more I realised that there was this huge list of places that my colleagues steered completely clear of without even realising it, and a handful of stories to go with them. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Even back then, I could feel all my old friends starting to distance themselves from me. Like they sensed I was crossing some unspoken line about what we were allowed to investigate. Everyone had a story about the friend who’d gone to the wrong place alone and disappeared or had quit the paranormal scene without explanation. I’d heard them all before, but now they weren’t just pub chatter spook stories, they were not-so-subtle warnings about straying from the path. I couldn’t go back, though. It was like once I had seen that there was a path to stray from, I couldn’t unsee it. And I couldn’t ignore the call from the woods all around. I stopped asking the others for help, and I kept my research to myself. I talked to them less and less. By the time I was arrested, I think a lot of them had already given up on me.

I’d been looking into a bunch of online stuff, the forums and the sites without the right sort of reputation for most of my lot. The sort of places with twenty made-up ghost stories for every one that might have some meat to it. After a while, you start to get a feel for the ones that are real or, at least, that the writer thinks are real. They tend to be the messy ones. The ones that don’t really have any sense or resolution, no narrative flow. Where there isn’t even a guess at an explanation, and often you end up just thinking, “Is that it?”

There was one, though, that caught my eye. It was some anonymous worker at the C.F. Booth scrap metal and recycling yard. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s in Rotherham, and it’s one of the biggest train graveyards in the UK.

The guy said he worked there scrapping trains, but there was one metal rail car that had been there since he got the job, and it never seemed to be on the queue for recycling. He’d asked his supervisor, but they just shrugged and told him if it wasn’t queued it didn’t get scrapped, and he couldn’t get a straight answer out of anybody as to why it had just been sat there for years. He said it was old, like 1950s old, or even earlier maybe. More than that, he said that anytime he passed it while working late, he got a really strong, metallic odour that cut through all the other smells of the junkyard. He said he’d never been inside the carriage, but that it smelled like old blood.

The same post was on a couple of different forums, and each time told slightly differently. It wasn’t copy-pasted, and it seemed like the posts had been made over the course of a couple of years. There was nothing really to separate it from the hundreds of horror story liars that surrounded it, but it stuck with me. It kept playing on my mind, something about the way he had described the old rolling stock felt real to me. So I decided to check it out.

I have family up in Sheffield that I hadn’t seen in way too long, so I made arrangements to go and stay with them for a week. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to head out and check the yard at night, since Rotherham’s only a few miles away. I was right about how easy it was to get there, but not about getting in. I always forget how big a target places like that are for thieves, and how hard they work to keep them out. High walls, sturdy gates and security guards all stood between me and this supposedly haunted train.

I should have turned back, really, but by then I was kind of obsessed with finding anything to reassure me that I hadn’t been seeing things back in Aldershot.

ARCHIVIST
I understand the feeling.

JONNT
I’m sure you do.

I got over the wall on my third night of watching. I’d managed to figure out enough about how the cameras and security guards covered the place that I could take a full minute to get over quietly. The forum poster whose lead I was following hadn’t given much away about his own identity, but he had been very detailed in describing what I was looking for. An almost featureless steel boxcar, with a slightly curved roof, large windowless sliding door, and a few flecks of olive green paint still visible.

Even so, finding it was tricky. There was almost no light inside the yard except for the security lights that I was trying not to trip. I had brought a torch of course, but I was reluctant to turn it on in case I was spotted. After about ten minutes, I began to realise that my eyes weren’t actually going to be the best way to find it. Because there, on the wind, was the smell of blood. It was faint at first, but as I felt my way past old, discarded trains, it got stronger. My eyes had adjusted now, and I could see the rusted ancient skeletons of freight and passenger cars. They stood empty and still, silhouetted against that dull orange of a cloudy sky that glowed with light pollution. As I got closer I started to get jumpy, and I swear more than once I saw figures sat in the broken windows of those old trains. They were never there when I looked again.

Finally I saw it, the stark, angular shape clear even in the dark. It was far enough from the security stations that I finally dared to turn on my torch. The light hit the dull steel, casting long shadows into its crevices, and it somehow seemed heavier than it should have been. It was old, really old, but there was no rust on its edges. The smell of blood was almost choking.

I began to walk towards the large sliding door, but as I did so my torchlight caught on something tucked in the corner of the panelling. It seemed to be a serial number, stencilled in black paint. It was clear and legible, despite its age, and surrounded by patches of still-unpeeled green paint. The colour of it made me think of the army. I took a few seconds to jot it down for checking later, then reached up and slid the large metal door to the side, shining my light inside.

At first it still seemed dark, and I couldn’t see much. My light hit the opposite wall, but it was the same featureless steel as the outside. Then my torch beam drifted downwards, and I caught sight of the thick red stream dripping from the now-open side of the car. The floor of the carriage was about chest height for me, and as I looked I could see it was streaked with trails of blood that led down to the doorway. I traced my light up and along the shallow red stream and it hit what looked like an old metal hospital gurney. The fabric that covered it was that same military green as outside, and the body that lay on it was covered in a white cotton bag, stained black near the bottom. It wasn’t lying still, either, but it twitched and writhed as though in pain.

I wanted to run, but without warning a shape ran out of the darkness to my left. There was a glint of shining metal in its hand as it charged over to the twitching white body bag, and began to plunge the scalpel into it again and again and again. It looked like a man. He was maybe mid-twenties, dressed in army fatigues and wearing a white armband with a red cross on it. His eyes, though, they… they weren’t human. I mean, they were, but everything in them that makes us people was gone. The only thing in those eyes was violence. Carnage.

ARCHIVIST
Blood.

JONNY
Yeah… blood. I was so fixed on those eyes I didn’t even notice him run at me. I was only when I felt the scalpel slice into my shoulder that I realised what was happening and thought to scream. Next thing I knew, I was being carried away by security guards. They were shouting at me, while I ranted at them about blood and ghosts. I only had a chance to look back at the carriage once. It was too dark inside to be sure, but I… I think it was empty.

They couldn’t decide whether to call the police or the ambulance, so split the difference and called both. The cut was nasty, but not deep enough to do any real damage; as you saw, I’m getting quite a scar from it. Still, it meant that even though I was technically arrested, I got to go in the ambulance rather than the police car. The guys from the scrapyard told them I’d cut myself in the dark on a sharp piece of metal. I started screaming at them, trying to tell them what actually happened. That must have been when that dog-walker, or whoever the hell it was, started filming. I was actually a meme for a day or two.

You do know what that is, don’t you?

ARCHIVIST
How old do you think i am? nevermind. You were saying?

JONNY
Well, that’s it, really. After I recovered they dropped the charges, and I came to you, looking to use your library. You see, I still had the serial number, and I looked up the carriage afterwards. It was from World War II. The 11th US Army Hospital train, operating in the European theatre from August 1944. The train crew was actually commended for their service.

ARCHIVIST
But…?

JONNY
It crashed in April 1945. Derailed, killed 5 crew and seriously injured 14 more. There weren’t any patients on board at the time. At least, not officially. There was only one steel train car that avoided derailment.

ARCHIVIST
I see.

JONNY
Exactly. There’s not a lot more information on it, though, and I’ve no idea how it ended up in Rotherham. So I came here to dig a bit deeper.

ARCHIVIST
Really? Our… our library is extensive, but it’s hardly focused on the Second World War.

JONNY
No, but the most detailed description of the crash that I could find came from the report of a man called William W. Hay. And later in life William Hay…

ARCHIVIST
Became a noted occultist, whose memoirs and researches were only ever published in a heavily edited form. And we have unexpurgated copies.

JONNY
Exactly.

ARCHIVIST
Did you find anything?

JONNT
Plenty. He served on the 11th Hospital Train as engineer, and there was a lot he had to say about it. They even let me make a photocopy.

ARCHIVIST (READING)
On the subject of savagery, I have myself seen the long-term effects upon the psyche of witnessing the violence men may inflict upon one another. A dulling of the senses is merely the first step, though one that few progress beyond. In more acute cases, there comes a strange mania, a fascination with the mechanisms of this violence, the tactility of injury and the sensations that accompany it. The smell of blood especially appears to incite in a certain sort of mind, numbed by the horrors of war, the urge to commit unspeakable violence. I saw it once in the eyes of a young medic near Merey, a thing so grotesque that I have some sympathy with those who decided to crash, rather than risk his rampage. But even that pales to insignificance compared to what I saw in the infirmary at Amritsar. Two dozen Ghurkhas tearing each other to pieces, consumed by the terrible butchery they had inflicted. Such things are not to be dwelt on, but serve to illustrate my proposition that violence, inflicted, received or even just witnessed, can not only deal injury to the body or the mind, but to the soul itself.

ARCHIVIST
I see. So does this mean…?

JONNY
Yes. And I’ve got my plane to India already booked.

ARCHIVIST
Even after your experience with the hospital train? It sounds like this could be far more dangerous…

JONNY
Oh thank you but I don’t need your fake concern.

I’ve heard them talking upstairs. You know this obsession even better than I do. I just wanted to make my statement…

ARCHIVIST
In case you get murdered by ghosts.

JONNY
Yes.

ARCHIVIST
I understand. Thank you, Jonny.

JONNY
Sure. Where’s Jessica, by the way? I wanted to say goodbye.

ARCHIVIST
I’m sorry?

JONNY
Jessica. Your assistant. I haven’t seen her in a while.

You didn’t fire her, did you?

ARCHIVIST
I’m not sure I understand, she brought you down here.

JONNY
Oh… No, is that another Jessica? Are you collecting them?

ARCHIVIST
No, no, there’s just… there’s just Jessica.

JONNY
You know who I mean. Tall, long hair, glasses… She was here when I first came in. Back last April? We had a long conversation about haunted pubs.

ARCHIVIST
No, I… I remember. But that is Jessica.

JONNY
Right, okay, um… are you trying to gaslight me or something?

ARCHIVIST
What? No!

JONNY
Is this a joke to you?

ARCHIVIST
No! No… I… I…

JONNY
Because I am not crazy. And that is not the same woman I met before!

ARCHIVIST
Yes it is! I mean… What?

JONNY
There is something very wrong with you.

ARCHIVIST
No… what?

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
I… um… I haven’t followed up on Jonny’s statement. I just keep thinking about what he said about Jessica. He was so certain. I mean, it’s Jessica. Obviously it’s Jessica. But… something… There’s more than one thing in the files that can trick you. I can’t just ignore it. So many stories about things that aren’t as they appear to be. Why Jonny, though? If… Why…

It doesn’t matter. I need to do more research. When Jonny came in, I was looking through the box of tapes Ivy gave me, trying to decide where to start. Now I think… I think I have an idea.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
GERTRUDE
Case 9941509 – Lucy Cooper. Incident occurred in Draycott, Somerset, August 1994. Victim’s name given as Rose Cooper. Statement given 15th of September 1994. Committed to tape 4th of November 1996. Gertrude Robinson recording.

GERTRUDE (STATEMENT)
There is a stranger claiming to be my mother. I don’t know who she is. Everyone else says that she’s my mother, and gives me looks of alarm when I tell them she’s an impostor. I don’t know what to do.

My mother and I have always had our differences. To be honest, it’s only been in the last five years or so that we really began speaking again. She was always a strong-willed woman, never one to blunt her opinions, and throughout my childhood it gradually got worse. Nothing I ever did was quite good enough, and any hint of pride I might have taken in myself or my achievements was always undercut by some cutting little critique.

Even on those rare occasions that I succeeded at something highly enough to actually warrant her praise, it was always appended with doubt. I remember when I was fifteen I came first in an inter-school athletics competition. I was two seconds ahead in the hundred metre sprint, and all she could say was, “Make sure being the best runner doesn’t distract you from your exams”.

It didn’t really come to a head until I got engaged to Laurence, though. We’d been dating on and off through university, and I’d sat through enough awkward family dinners to know that my mother didn’t like him, but her disapproval was nothing new, so I ignored it. When he proposed to me after our graduation, I’d assumed she would simply tolerate it as she had every other one of my decisions.

I was wrong. When I told her, she got angry. Not the chill, disapproving anger I was used to from, but a genuine shouting rage. She accused me of throwing my life away, told me I’d regret it, and that Laurence was good-for-nothing scum who’d drag me down and stop me achieving anything. I answered her in kind, and the argument that we had that night was the last time I saw her for almost ten years. I’d try to convince myself that our differences were just that: we were simply two very different people. But sometimes I worry that the reason we could never get on was that we were far too much alike.

For instance, we were both far too stubborn for our own good. Maybe that’s why I stayed with Laurence through two affairs, as if accepting that I’d made a mistake would be letting her win. In the end I only left him when he was jailed for embezzlement, eight years into our marriage. Even then, I didn’t want to speak to her. Didn’t want to tell her she’d been right. It wasn’t until my father had his accident that I finally decided to try and make amends.

My father is a gentle man. To this day I couldn’t really tell you anything about his thoughts or opinions on anything, as they were invariably bulldozed by my mother. He was a benign, ineffectual presence, always in the shadow. For all that, I did love him; so when he fell from a ladder and ended up in a wheelchair, I made the decision to try and reconnect with my parents.

It wasn’t easy. Beyond the greying of her hair, my mother hadn’t changed, and the reconciliation I’d hoped for never really came. I spent my visits biting my tongue, or getting into vicious fights whenever I wasn’t able to. But I could always see on my father’s face how much he liked to see me, how happy he was to have our small family together again, so I persevered. I think she saw it too, to be honest, and whenever he wheeled himself painfully into the room, she would try her best not to antagonise me. After a while we came to an uneasy peace.

There were practical issues as well. They’d retired to the small village of Draycott in the Somerset countryside, and as I lived in London and didn’t have a car, it was two trains and a long bus ride anytime I wanted to see them. But I made the effort.

I even conceived a reason to go more often – I’ve been doing some freelance work this summer for the British Library, recording and compiling oral histories on various topics, and it so happened that during her time as an academic, my mother had been something of an authority on English and Welsh folklore. In fact, one of the reasons she always gave for retiring out there was how many myths and legends made their home in the area.

So I proposed that I make some recordings of her, telling and discussing them for the project. She agreed, though not before telling me how pointless the whole thing sounded, and over the last few months I saw them several times. My father was happy, the recordings I got were surprisingly usable, and everything seemed to be getting better.

Two weeks ago I went to see them, and someone else opened the door. Someone I didn’t recognise. She wore my mother’s clothes, but they shouldn’t have fitted her. My mother is tall, rail thin and always keeps her hair cut short, but the woman who answered my knocking was shorter, rounded about the middle and wore her curly white hair down almost to her shoulders. I had definitely never seen her before.

I asked if my parents were home, and she laughed. It was a soft, joyful sound that was so unlike anything I expected to hear in that house that I had to take a step back to collect my thoughts. My father wheeled round the corner and shouted a greeting as though everything was perfectly normal. He moved up beside the plump old woman standing in the doorway and looked at me, smiling. The image made me feel queasy. I’m not even sure why, at this point I had no reason to think this person was anything other than a friend of my parents, but something wasn’t right.

I asked where my mother was, and they both got very quiet. I repeated the question with more force, and my father looked up to this strange woman in confusion. She smiled sadly and stepped towards me, opening her arms as if to hug me, but I yelled at her to get back, demanding to see my mother. My father’s face grew dark, and he told me that my joke wasn’t funny. With the most force I’d ever heard from him, he told me that however angry I was, this wasn’t the right way to deal with it. I looked back at this woman, standing there with open arms, and she smiled at me.

“Come, give your mother a hug,” she said.

The hour or two after that are a bit of a blur. I have vague memories of being numbly taken through into the living room, sat on the sofa and handed a cup of tea. I tried to drink it as they talked on at me, but it was ice cold, so I must have been sitting there a long time. I nodded once or twice, I think. My dad clearly thought I was having some sort of breakdown, and was just talking about whatever came into his head in the hopes of calming me down. The woman who was not my mother just talked cheerily, as though there was nothing at all amiss.

She had a kind voice, and her words were warm and friendly. She was nothing like my mother, and I was very quickly becoming deeply afraid. Had she done something to my real mother, and somehow convinced my father she was her? It seemed a ridiculous thought. My father may have been disabled but his mind was still sharp, and he’d never showed any signs of the sort of dementia that would let a stranger pose as his wife. Was he her prisoner? Maybe, but he didn’t seem to be acting as though anything was wrong, and if that was the case why bother trying to convince me of so obvious a lie?

I excused myself, and moved quickly out towards the back garden. Neither of them made a move to stop me. I saw a phone near the back porch and grabbed it, intending to call the police, when something caught my eye. It was a series of photographs on the wall, showing our family in happier times. It had been there for as long as I’d been to the house, and likely a lot longer. I had spent a long time staring at it my first visit there, lost in pleasant nostalgia, remembering days at the beach or the trip we took to Hanover when I was eight.

But now, in every one of them there stood this new woman where my mother should have been. She looked younger in these pictures, just like my father, and across the dozen pictures on the wall I could see a timeline of this woman growing old alongside him. There was no way these photos could have been staged, and I could even see a small crease on the bottom corner of the Hanover picture. I remembered I’d sat on the pictures by accident on the journey home, bending the corner out of place. I’d got a nasty talking to after that, and certainly not from the kindly fraud currently putting the kettle on in the kitchen.

It didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t make any sense. After dinner I insisted that we get out the photo albums, spouting some nonsense about catching up on memories. My father and the woman who was not my mother agreed readily enough, and so out came the albums and I began to look through them. I must have looked at well over five hundred photographs that evening, and not a single one was out of place or failed to feature this stranger where my mother should have been.

As my turning of the pages became more and more frantic, I spotted a look on the face of this new mother. It was amused, almost mocking, and I became sure that she knew. Whoever this woman that called herself Rose Cooper was, she knew it was a lie as much as I did, and my confusion and fear delighted her.

For all that, though, I was at a complete loss to explain any of it. Every piece of photographic evidence I can find supported this woman’s claim to be my mother. My father’s memories agreed, as did the memories of the two neighbours I was able to talk to the following day – Tom Harrison and Joanne Fisher. Both of them told me that they’d known George and Rose Cooper since they’d moved in, and when I asked them to describe Rose, they said she was medium height with a kind, round face and long, curly white hair.

I even took a walk up to the Church of St. Peter’s, where I knew my mother occasionally visited, to ask the vicar, a polite man named Neil Angus. He told me the same thing as the others, though he did ask after my mother’s health. Apparently she’d had a bit of a fall the week before outside the church, and the vicar had come out to help after hearing her cry out. He turned a bit pale when he said this. I pressed him further, and he told me that, although she’d seemed fine when he had reached her, the scream was like nothing he’d ever heard.

I asked the woman who is not my mother about her ‘fall’ near the church. She looked me right in the eyes, smiled, and said it was nothing. She’d just had a “bit of a funny turn”.

That’s it, really. I left immediately and haven’t been back. I’ve never been a believer in the supernatural before, but it seems clear to me that something attacked my mother near St. Peter’s church, killed her and somehow replaced her completely. The only piece of evidence I can find is the recordings I’d made of her beforehand. The tapes still have her real voice on. I have a few, so you can have one for whatever tests you might want to do. I’m going to go back to my father and play him the others. Maybe it’ll jog a memory, or maybe he’ll try to have me put away. Either way, I have to try.

I used to think I hated my mother; I really did. But now I can’t stop listening to those tapes, now I know they’re the only way I’ll ever hear her voice again. All of them except the tape we recorded on the old myths of the fae, of changelings. I’m not ready to listen to that one yet.

GERTRUDE
Final comments: Unfortunately for Ms. Cooper’s attempts to convince her father, it appears George Cooper died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a gas leak two days after this statement was recorded, before her next visit. No other bodies were found, and there has been no sign of anyone identifying themselves as Rose Cooper since.

Based on the interactions and effects, I suspect this to be the creature that Adelard Dekker refers to as the “NotThem” in statement 9910607. If the pattern of behaviour is consistent with what he establishes, then further follow-up on this case is pointless: the thing has finished with the Cooper family, and will not be revisiting them. It rarely seems to stay in the same place or with the same people for long, though it’s hard to guess at its motives. Personally, I suspect it to be an aspect of The Stranger, though that’s entirely conjecture at this point.

What puzzles me more is why one or two people can always see through it. The sheer power that it must be able to call upon to be able to rewrite so much of reality, seemingly as a reflex, is staggering. So why does it always miss a few witnesses?

It is at least reassuring to know that magnetic tape seems to escape being overwritten, so if I get changed, you can be sure this is my real voice. Based on Dekker’s statement, it would seem Polaroids are also relatively stable. Beyond that, I find it comforting that this creature appears content to travel freely sowing random terror. I dread to think the damage it could inflict if it had a purpose.

I have destroyed the tape Ms. Cooper provided us as a precaution – I have no interest in attracting this thing’s attention.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
I found this tape while rifling through the boxes Ivy provided me. It was labelled “Changeling / Imposter,” and given Jonny’s outburst last week, I thought it a prudent place to start listening. It is, uh…

The tapes that went missing after the Prentiss attack all had Jessica’s voice on them. I hadn’t put it together until listening to this. I don’t know what this… I know exactly what this means. But I don’t know what to do about it. I can’t tell the others. Even if I could get them to believe me, they’d find out about Gertrude’s tapes. I can’t risk that. I need to deal with this myself. And that means I need more information on this thing. How it works. How it k…

I need to know how to stop it. I’m going to start by tracking down the statement by this “Adelard Dekker”. I… I think the statements from the Nineties are marginally more organised now. If it’s here, if Jessica… I’m going to find out how to kill it.

[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
I… er…

We… we didn’t…

Statement of Lawrence Moore. Regarding something that was not his cousin. Original statement given June 12th, 2001. Audio recording by Rahaella La Cognizi, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I used to have a cousin. His name was Carl. We weren’t close. I saw him plenty growing up – his family lived in Peterborough and mine lived in Leicester, so it wasn’t too far. We’d go over occasionally, or we’d all be left together at our grandmothers if our parents were doing something together. They never came over to our house, though; at least I don’t remember them doing so. My memories of childhood are a bit hazy, so I can’t be completely sure. Putting it down on paper now, though, I realise that, given how close we lived, it’s odd that we didn’t see each other more. I wonder how well our parents really got on. Thinking about it, I suppose they never had much in common.

Either way we got on fine, me and Carl. I think. I was a few years younger than him, and when you’re a kid that makes a lot of difference. I suspect he saw me as a bit of an annoyance, a bit of a tag-along, but I don’t remember us ever getting into fights or anything like that. We’d spend most of the time exploring my grandmother’s wide country garden, or sitting awkwardly together pretending to do something while our parents talked about whatever grown-up topics needed their attention.

Since I grew up and moved out, though, I hardly ever saw Carl. A family dinner at Christmas some years or the occasional big family birthday, but if you totalled up all the hours we spent together since I turned eighteen, I doubt we’d be very far into double digits. And if you only count the time we’d actually spent talking to each other… I’m not sure you could even piece together a full hour.

It didn’t really bother me, and it certainly didn’t bother him. I remember, shortly after I moved down to London I actually bumped into him shopping in Covent Garden. Turned out he lived about twenty minutes bus ride from me. I half-heartedly suggested we should go for a drink or hang out or something. And he said, “Yeah”, in a flat tone that told me he had absolutely no interest whatsoever in doing so.

I wonder if I ever did anything as a child to set him against me? Or in that tiny sliver of time we actually interacted as adults. It’s weird to think about people who knew you as a child. You change so much, and when you talk to them again, they’re not talking to you. They’re talking to someone else, someone you used to be. The person they think they’re seeing has been dead for years, but they didn’t see the change. They’re looking at a complete stranger, and they have no idea.

I went to my brother’s wedding recently, and there was something pretending to be my cousin Carl. Adam, my brother, had always gotten along slightly better with him than I had, being closer in age, and during the ceremony I had been surprised not to see Carl among the guests. It was only later, at the reception, when I was being introduced to a number of my brother’s friends I’d never met before, that I offered my hand to a dark-haired stranger and asked his name. He looked at me for a long, off-putting second as a wide smile crept across his face. “I know it’s been a long time, Lawrence,” he said, “but surely you haven’t forgotten your cousin Carl?”

What are you supposed to say to that? I just sort of stammered and wandered off. I didn’t realise exactly what was happening until I asked my brother who the stranger was, and he gave me a puzzled look and told me, yes, that was Carl, my cousin. I assumed he must be playing some sort of joke, but the whole thing had really kind of unsettled me, so I asked my father, and he said the same thing. Now, my father is not somebody who jokes. He’s never been one for humour and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever heard him properly laugh. There was no way he would play along in any sort of prank Adam might try to arrange. I looked over, and the person who claimed to be my cousin was staring at me, smiling wide enough to show off rows of yellow-stained teeth.

I could feel panic beginning to rise in my chest, and I started asking everyone who might know Carl, and all of them told me the same thing. When my aunt gave me a withering glare for asking who her son was, I had to leave. I just walked out of the hall, got in my car and drove back to London. I don’t drink, so it definitely wasn’t that. I thought maybe I was having some sort of dissociative episode. That must have been it. I’d been under a lot of stress at work, and my own marriage had recently ended, so perhaps that had affected me more than I thought. Maybe it had done something to my memory. I even managed to half-convince myself that if I was having a nervous breakdown and all that meant was I misremembered a cousin I never see, I’d gotten off quite lightly.

But I couldn’t let it go. It nagged at me. As I lay awake in my too-empty bed, it twisted in my mind. I wasn’t just remembering Carl wrong. I did not know the person who was using his name. It wasn’t Carl. It just wasn’t.

I was signed off work at the time, and mostly spent my days just kicking around the house, but a about a week after the wedding it occurred to me that, when my grandmother passed away a few years before, my parents had asked me to go through her old photos, see which ones we might like to keep. I’d taken them, but had never actually gotten around to going through them, and they should still be in the loft. Not having anything better to do, and still a little bit off-balance after Adam’s wedding, I pulled down the ladder, and went to fetch them.

The attic space was warm and dry, with that thin film of dust in the air that isn’t quite enough to set you coughing but leaves your mouth feeling dry and sticky. I pushed away a few plastic crates of old comics, until I found the brittle cardboard box that held the pictures. My grandmother had loved her camera, and I remember her shelves were always full of tiny canisters of film, but it wasn’t until I started to look through them that I realised quite how many pictures she’d actually taken.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands, in there, and going through them I watched myself grow from a squash-faced toddler to a chubby little boy and a spotty, scowling teenager. And alongside me was my brother Adam, and another child, who I did not recognise, but whose dark hair seemed to match the man I had met at the wedding.

By the end, my whole body was shaking. Not because of all those pictures of a strange child playing in the garden with us, but because of the two – only two – pictures I found of Carl. The Carl I remembered, with light brown hair cut short and an almost piggish nose. The second of those photos looked like it had only been taken moments after a different picture of us playing tag, but that one showed the other child where Carl should have been. Where I knew he had been. I stared at those photographs for what must have been an hour or more, completely unable to make any sense of what I was looking at.

At some point, I was roused by a knock on the front door. It wasn’t hard, or impatient, just a light series of taps. As though whoever was on the other side had no doubt that was in, and was politely trying to attract my attention. I put the pictures back quickly, and hurried down to answer it.

Standing on the other side was my new cousin Carl. He smiled that same yellow smile, and said that he’d been sad to see me leave Adam’s wedding so soon, and that since we lived so close together, it seemed rude not to drop by. I tried to tell him to leave, to demand to know where Carl was, but my heart was beating so fast and I was just too scared. He walked calmly past me, into the house, and I closed the door behind him.

What followed was the longest afternoon of my life. I sat in an armchair and he took the sofa opposite, sitting stiffly in a way that seemed far too still. Neither of us said a word. He just stared at me, smile still wide and something twinkling in his eyes that might have been amusement. Or triumph. He showed no desire to make any sort of conversation, and I was too terrified to say anything at all.

I just kept thinking, what had this man done to Carl, and could he do it to me? I tried to look at him, to really look, but the more I attempted to focus on him properly, the more my eyes seemed to slide off him. Like one of those optical illusions that only comes into focus when you’re looking at a different part of the picture.

At one point, it almost seemed like his neck was too long, but when I looked again it was normal. The only two things I knew for sure was that I had never been as scared as I was just then, and that I did not know this man.

When evening finally came, he stood up. He nodded at me and told me how much he had enjoyed his visit. “We must do this again,” he said, “and soon.” Then he left. I stayed sat in that chair and I cried.

It was full dark when I was broken out of my despair by another knock on the door. This one was harsh and jarring, and I could hear the doorframe rattle slightly at the impact. Standing there was another man I’d never seen before. He was black, dressed in a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a thin necktie.

For a moment, I had the idea he might be a Jehovah’s Witness, but one look at his face dispelled that idea immediately. It was hard and stern, set in look of determination, and his short hair was iron grey. He was very thin, with aging skin stretched tight over wiry, corded muscle, and though he was slightly shorter than I was, it seemed like he towered over me. He asked if I knew the man who had left my house earlier that evening.

I laughed at that; a harsh laugh that surprised even me. I said I did not know him, no matter how many pictures might tell me I did. At this, the old man’s eyes lit up with excitement, and I took an involuntary step back. If he noticed, he didn’t show it, walking past me into the house and ordering me to get any photos that hadn’t changed. I don’t know if it was the certainty in his voice or my own feeling of helplessness, but it didn’t even occur to me not to do what he said.

I returned from the loft with the box of photographs to find him sat on the sofa, exactly where my impostor cousin had sat not two hours before, and I finally got up the courage to ask him who he was. He told me his name was Adelard Dekker, and that he was an exorcist, of sorts. I asked him if he thought my cousin was somehow possessed, but he was already looking through the box, and ignored me. He pulled out the same two photographs I had found, the ones that hadn’t changed, and his mouth twisted into a wry smile.

He told me to follow him, and I did. We walked over to an unmarked blue Transit van parked on the other side of the road, and he opened the back doors. Inside was a large wooden box with a hinged lid.

The man who called himself Adelard Dekker climbed in and picked up the back of it, commanding me to take the other end. I did, and together we carried it into my house. It was heavy and barely fit through the front door, but any objections I might have had were silenced by one look from Dekker. We placed it down in the middle of the living room, and I instinctively went to lift the lid. I caught a brief glimpse of dark, varnished wood before he slammed it down, almost trapping my hand, and shook his head once. “It’s not for you,” he said.

Then he instructed me to go to my bedroom, and not to leave until he told me it was safe. I did protest at that, and I asked him how my locking myself upstairs would help save Carl. There was no sympathy in his voice when he told me my cousin was dead, that nothing would bring him back, and that my best chance to not join him was to stay in the bedroom until everything was over. He did not seem inclined to tell me what he meant by “everything”.

So I did what he said. I suppose I could have called the police, but this strange, old man spoke with such certainty that I felt like following his instructions was the only hope I had. I lay in my bed and I tried to sleep. I did, though not well. The image of this new Carl kept intruding in my dreams and jolting me awake. The sun came up, and there was no word from Dekker, so I stayed there, waiting for something to happen, though I had no idea what. I lay in bed all morning and then into the afternoon.

Finally, at about three o’clock, I heard the soft knock at the door. It was the exact same knock at the exact same time, and I felt my body seize up with fear. There was the sound of the door opening, but nothing else. I just lay there, straining my ears to hear any sound. The air grew close and heavy, like a thunderstorm about to break, but still I heard nothing. Ten minutes passed. Then an hour. And then the air was split by the most unnatural scream I have ever heard. I cannot even begin to describe it, except to say that there was nothing in it but the purest rage.

Panic surged through me. I had to get out of that house. I threw open the bedroom door and charged down the stairs towards the front. And as I did so, I passed by the living room, and I instinctively turned my head to see inside.

Adelard Dekker stood in the corner. He was straight and motionless, his lips moving rapidly, though no sound came out of them. In the centre of the room, next to the empty box, stood a table carved from dark wood and wrapped all over with a sprawling, intricate pattern. And in front of that table was the thing that had said it was my cousin. It was long and thin, the tops of it bent against the ceiling and its stick-like limbs flailed from too many joints and elbows. Wrapped around it were thick strands of what I think was spider’s web, stretching back into the table, which I now saw pulsed along its carved channels with a sickly light. The face at the top of that gangly frame was like nothing on earth.

That was all I saw, because the second after I had taken it in, I was out of the door and down the street, running as fast as I could away from that house. I kept running until I collapsed, and lay there on the street until a passer-by asked if I needed help.

I didn’t return to my house until the next morning. Dekker’s blue van was gone, and in its place was another one, dirty white. There was something printed on the side, but I couldn’t make it out under the grime. I watched two men in overalls carry that same box out of my house, load it up, and drive away. That was about two months ago, and it was the last time I saw them, the table, Adelard Dekker, or the thing that wasn’t my cousin.

My aunt and uncle have reported Carl missing. The police did come round and asked me if I knew anything but I told them nothing. I just said we weren’t very close.

ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.

I found this in the folder marked 9910602, where Gertrude’s tape had indicated I would find the statement of Dekker himself. There is nothing else in there, but I think it tells me what I need to know. This thing, this “Not Jessica”, it’s tied to the table. It…

I found the tapes.

[TAPE NOISES]
JESSICA (RECORDING)
I thought it was pronounced “Kah-lee-o-pee?

ARCHIVIST
They were in her desk. Well hidden, but… If I’d been a bit more thorough, if I…

[TAPE NOISES]
JESSICA (RECORDING)
It’s just a scratch, Raphaella. I’ll be fine. Can we begin?

ARCHIVIST
Was there anything I could have done? Could I have…

[TAPE NOISES]
JESSICA (RECORDING)
Hello? I see you. Show yourself.

[TAPE NOISES]
NOT!JESSICA (RECORDING)
Hello?

[TAPE NOISES]
I see you.

[TAPE NOISES]
I see you.

ARCHIVIST
And now I see you.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
TIM
You wanted to see us.

NASTYA
Are you ok? You look awful.

ARCHIVIST
I’m… I’m coming down with something, I think.

Listen, you should take the rest of the day off.

Tomorrow as well.

NASTYA
Are you sure you –

ARCHIVIST
Don’t want to infect anyone else. Best you stay home.

TIM
Wouldn’t it make more sense if you went home, then?

NASTYA
Are you feverish? We should probably get you to a doctor. Look, there’s a walk-in centre nearby I can –

ARCHIVIST
No!. [Calimng her self down]
No, I have things I still need to take care of here.

And, besides, I know you’ve both been under a lot of… pressure lately. I think we could all do with a bit of break.

NATSYA
Well… well, yeah but…

ARCHIVIST
I know, I know, a lot of i have been involved with it. with a part of it of it. I’m sorry. Tim, I know things have been… fraught.

TIM
I guess that’s a word for it.

ARCHIVIST
Yes, well, I think some time off could only help.

TIM
Because you’re ill.

ARCHIVIST
Yes…. Yes. And I’m… I’m sorry. About everything.

NASTYA
R-Raphaella… look, are you –

TIM
Ok. Right you are, Raphaella. We’ll be going.

NASTYA
Wait, what?

TIM
Come on, Nastya. We could do with a break. Er… do you need us to tell Jessica?

ARCHIVIST
Oh, no, no. I’ll be seeing her later.

NASTYA (BACKGROUND)
Tim… Wait…

TIM
Great. See you Monday.

NASTYA (BACKGROUND)
No, no…

ARCHIVIST
Yes, see you then.

NASTYA
Hang on, Tim, we should probably –

[DOOR CLOSES]
ARCHIVIST
If either of you hear this, I’m… sorry. You deserve the truth. I wish… I’m not losing anyone else.

[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
[Whispered] It is remarkably easy to buy an axe in Central London. Harder to sneak it into Artefact Storage, but not impossible. I don’t know if destroying this is going to kill that thing… but I am damn sure it’s going to hurt.

[NOISE OF AXE HITTING & SPLINTERING WOOD AND THE GRUNTS OF THE ARCHIVIST AS A STRANGE MUSIC BEGINS TO BUILD AND INTENSIFY]
[SOUND OF SHATTERING WOOD AND THE STRANGE MUSIC DISAPPEARS]
Hollow. Just cobwebs and dust.

[FAMILIAR EERIE LAUGHTER]
MICHAEL
That was very stupid.

ARCHIVIST
What do you want?

MICHAEL
There’s no other way out of this room, you know.

ARCHIVIST
What?

MICHAEL
You don’t have time to escape before they get here.

ARCHIVIST
The… the… the “Not Jessica”? No, but the table…

MICHAEL
Was binding it quite effectively.

ARCHIVIST
Oh. Oh no.

MICHAEL
Even with all the protections you have on, I doubt you can survive them now.

[IN THE BACKGROUND, THE ARCHIVIST IS WORRIEDLY MUTTERING ‘NO’ OVER AND OVER]
NOT!JESSICA
[Heavily distorted, distant] Raaaaaphella….

ARCHIVIST
Er… I…

[SOUND OF A CREAKY DOOR OPENING]
MICHAEL
You. Need. A door.

ARCHIVIST
NO. No, I… I just… I need…

[DISTORTED VOICE FROM THE NOT!JESSICA CALLING OUT HIS NAME AGAIN]
ARCHIVIST
Shit!

[MICHAEL LAUGHS AND LAUGHS]
[STRANGE SOUND ALMOST LIKE SOMETHING ROARING OPEN AS MICHAEL’S LAUGH ECHOES]
[CLICK]

Chapter Text

[CLICK]
NASTYA

Streets. By Nastya A. Rasputina.
The streets are hard in London.
Paved in old secrets, the hot smell after the rains.
The threads of people walking, living, lovi–

[CLICK]
[FOOTSTEPS]
NASTYA
You’re sure about this? She did tell us to go home…
TIM
Yeah, and then she said, “Sorry for everything”. Something’s up.
NASTYA
You don’t think she’s going to… y’know…
TIM
No i think she has a far too big ego for that. But she’s going to do something, and it’s going to be bad. And I don’t mean like ‘sneaking a cigarette’ bad. Like properly bad.
NASTYA
So we need to help her?
TIM
We need to stop her.
NASTYA
And… we needed my tape recorder because…
TIM
Because something tells me we’re going to need evidence by the end of today. I don’t want to wind up in court without something to back me up.
NASTYA
Court?
TIM
Yeah. Er, tribunal if we’re lucky, inquest if we’re not.
NASTYA
You did use a new tape, didn’t you?
TIM
Yeah, I took one off the pile.
NASTYA
Was it blank or… Tim?
TIM
It was blank.
NASTYA
She’s never going to speak to us again.
TIM
Don’t get my hopes up.
[DOOR OPENS]
NASTYA
Raphaella?
TIM
Aaaaaand she’s gone. Thought so.
NASTYA
You don’t thinks he’s going to…
TIM
I don’t know, Nastya! I think she’s going fully off the deep end, is what I think. If she hasn’t already.
[DOOR CLOSES]
[FOOTSTEPS]
NASTYA
Look, I know you don’t like her…
TIM
Got that, did you?
NASTYA
But I’m not going to help you get her fired.
TIM
Nastya! What do you think is happening here? This isn’t office politics. It’s not like she’s had one too many at the Christmas party and started ranting about the Greeks. Whatever is happening here it’s literally supernatural.
NASTYA
Really? Isn’t that a little… y’know?
TIM
No, it isn’t “a little y’know”. There is something in this place, and it’s messing up our heads. It watches us all the time. It stops me quitting. I’m pretty sure it would stop Carmilla firing Raphaella even if she decided to try actually running the place for once.
NASTYA
You’re sure you don’t just want to stay?
TIM
I’m sure.
NASTYA
But, like, deep down –
TIM
No.
NASTYA
Oh.
…
So you really think the Institute is, what, haunted?
TIM
I used to. Now I think it’s worse.
NASTYA
Worse how?
[CRASH OF DOOR BREAKING]
NOT!JESSICA
[Heavily distorted] Raaaaaaaaphaella!
[SOUNDS OF TIM & NASTYA BEING SURPRISED]
TIM
Oh god! What the hell was that?!
NASTYA (BACKGROUND)
Oh no nonononono!
[A ROAR, SOUNDS OF FRANTIC BREATHING, RUNNING FOOTSTEPS AND SCUTTLING MOVEMENT]
[TRAPDOOR OPENS]
[RAPID, SINISTER SCUTTLING MOVEMENT RECEDES]
[SILENCE, AS TIM AND NASTYA TRY TO REGAIN THEIR BREATH]
TIM
What the hell was that?
NASTYA
It… er… It looked… It kinda looked…
TIM
Oh don’t say it.
NASTYA
It did, though, didn’t it?
TIM
That wasn’t Jessica.
NASTYA
No. No, no, it wasn’t.
You don’t… you don’t think –
TIM
She told her to go home. Like us!
NASTYA
Yeah.
TIM
And she did.
NASTYA
Yeah.
…
It went into the tunnels.
TIM
Nope. No. Not happening.
NASTYA
We can’t just leave her.
TIM
Yeah, we can.
NASTYA
I’m going.
[FOOTSTEPS]
TIM
Nastya!
Nas… I’m not coming down there with…
Damn it. Fine.
[CLICK]

[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Damn. Damn damn damn damn DAMN!
[HAND SLAPS STONE]
I… I took Michael’s door. It was that or face Je… the thing that was pretending to be Jessica. It opened into the tunnels. The tunnels. Not exactly the escape I was hoping for. I’m hardly surprised, must be its idea of a joke. Still, it is… it is a head start I suppose. I have no idea where in the tunnels I am. Or how far down.
At least it didn’t leave me trapped in some corridor hellmaze… a different corridor hellmaze, at least.
So I suppose I just… I just wait for now. I don’t think it’s going to just give up, and I can’t risk attracting its attention. It might already be down here with me. Just stay quiet.
Stay hidden.
…
God, I’m an idiot. Smash the table, kill the monster, stupid! Lazy, sloppy assumption. Of course the table was binding it. The table is webs and spiders. Spiders are something else. They don’t help each other, they oppose, they… they weaken. It was caught in a web, and I… All the pieces were there. And I just… I couldn’t see it.
…
I don’t know how much tape I have left. I’m going to stop recording. To conserve it. If –
NOT!JESSICA
[DISTANT] Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaphaella…
ARCHIVIST
Oh Fuck.
[CLICK]

[CLICK]
NASTYA
What now? We need to hurry.
TIM
Shhh!
…
I thought I heard something up ahead.
NASTYA
I didn’t hear anything. Why, do you think it was the Jessica-thing?
TIM
Will you shut up about that. It wasn’t anything like her.
NASTYA
No, I know, but I mean… like, if you really stretched her out…
TIM
We’re never going to find him down here.
NASTYA
So go get some help.
TIM
Er… Carmilla is probably still in his office.
NASTYA
I thought you said she was a waste of a suit.
TIM
Yeah, well she’s better than nothing.
NASTYA
If you want to go, I understand.
TIM
I… I’m not just going to leave you down here.
NASTYA
You were all about quitting.
TIM
Oh, for God’s sake, this isn’t about you.
NASTYA
It never is.
TIM
Alright, fine. Fine. What do you want? What’s your light at the end of these spooky damn tunnels? And don’t say ‘everyone happy forever’, because that’s not happening.
…
Well?
NASTYA
I don’t know. I don’t know! I want to find out what’s going on. I want to save Raphaella. I want everyone to be fine, and, you know what? If we were all happy that wouldn’t actually be the end of the world.
TIM
Fine.
NASTYA
No, no it’s not “fine”. You’ve been going on and on and on about how alone you feel because Raphaella’s not taking your feelings into account while she’s having her breakdown, but you’re just doing the same thing. We’ve all been going through this, Tim, but you’re the only one who’s been running away.
TIM
Okay, okay. Look, let’s keep going. There’s nobody here.
MICHAEL
Yes there is.
TIM
Stay back!
MICHAEL
No.
NASTYA
Who are you?
MICHAEL
I’m Michael. Did the Archivist not tell you about me?
NASTYA
No?
MICHAEL
Good. Surprises are better.
TIM
What are you doing down here?
MICHAEL
Probably watching the Archivist die. Maybe not. Either way is amusing. I… I think it’s called ‘a sport’.
TIM
What?
MICHAEL
I think I might also kill you. It would be easier than killing the Archivist. None of you are protected down here.
NASTYA
No, no, now hang on…
MICHAEL
You are going to try and help him. And I want to see what happens without you there.
TIM
Nastya…
NASTYA
No, no, okay, because there’s two of us and there’s one of you, okay. He’s not killing anyone!
TIM
Nastya, look at his hands!
NASTYA
Oh lord.
TIM
Go!
[SINISTER DOOR OPENS]
[FOOTSTEPS]
[MICHAEL LAUGHS]
[SINISTER DOOR SHUTS]
[HEAVY BREATHING]
[Distorted] Where the hell are we?
[CLICK]

[CLICK]
[HEAVY BREATHING AND SOFTLY CREEPING FOOTSTEPS]
ARCHIVIST
I have no idea where I am. There were stairs. I, I, I kept going lower. No arrows pointing down, though, which is… good? I don’t know. I found a weapon. Of sorts.
[RINGING OF A METAL PIPE AGAINST A WALL]
I don’t know if it’ll help. I mean, it’s not going to help. I can’t fight it with a pipe. I’m tired just carrying it. But it does make me feel a bit better, so… so that’s something.
I keep thinking I might have gotten away, but I think it can sense me… uh, at least a bit. I can hide for now, I think, but I don’t know for how long. I can’t kill it. I heard the tape. It erased Jessica, just like that. Deleted her from the world. I just hope this tape works the same, that my voice remains intact. Even if I’m gone, even if it wears a face that people think is mine, pulls me apart, becomes me. Listen, it’s not me! Whoever hears this: it is not me.
I don’t even remember what she looks like. Even now that I know, now I’ve seen it twisted and… I still don’t remember her. The only face I can picture is…
NOT!JESSICA
[Distant] Raaaaaaphaela… Raaaaaaphaela… Come out, come out, wherever you are.
[SCARED BREATHING]
It’s okay Raphaella; it’s Jessica. Reliable old Jessica.
Nothing to be afraid of.
…
You seem stressed, Raphaella. You’ve been under a lot of pressure. You should talk about it. Have a real good chat. You like talking, don’t you, Raphaella?
…
I’m going to wear you, Raphaella. I’m going to wear everything you are. Like you never existed. No-one will even know. And it will hurt. Oh, yes, it will hurt. It hurt Jessica.
ARCHIVIST
Shut up!
NOT!JESSICA
[Close and distorted] There you are.
[HEAVY BREATHING AS IF RUNNING]
[WEIRD SCUTTLING MOVEMENT]
[CLICK]

[CLICK]
[Dialogue is very distorted until next CLICK]
TIM
Where the hell are we?
NASTYA
I don’t know. I thought… I thought the door led further down.
TIM
I don’t think we’re under the Institute anymore.
NASTYA
What was that thing?
TIM
I’m trying not to think about it. It makes my head feel weird.
NASTYA
Well? Wh… which way do you think?
TIM
Er… Right. Let’s go right.
NASTYA
[SIGH] Fine. I don’t think this thing’s working properly. It k-keeps making this weird noise.
[CLICK]