tired_flamingo

Interesting title...

Oh, it's about a woman who was in a cult...

"the Divine Chain cult", what kind of name is that...

"Everyone thinks they’re too smart to get involved in a cult. I’m sure you do." And that's the trap. You think you'll be stronger than the brainwashing. You won't. They're very good at this.

"Trouble is, that misunderstands how it works. I mean, when I was with the Divine Chain, some of the smartest people there were also the most committed. Intelligence doesn’t make you less prone to taking on bad ideas, it just makes you better at defending them to other people and to yourself." Exactly!

"Smart people can believe some truly ridiculous things, and then deploy all the reason and logic at their disposal to justify them, because a belief doesn’t begin in your mind. It begins in your feelings. Cults are very good at finding you when you’re at your lowest point, when you’re your most emotionally vulnerable." Yes! That's exactly the point! They target vulnerable people!

"And when you’re at that point it’s astounding what can crawl into your heart and start to fester there." It's gonna be about the Corruption.

"I hit my lowest point when I turned 41. That’s when my life came crashing down, at least on the inside. From the outside I’m sure everything looked pretty much okay. I was getting gigs, I had a job, I had plenty of friends and a supportive family. " It can look like that, yeah...

"But that was when I started to properly look at my life, and I really didn’t like what was looking back." Oh?

"I was a stand-up comedian you see, and a really good one. That’s not boasting, that’s just the truth. And I’d always assumed that that was enough to eventually have real success, and for the first 10 years it seemed like I was right. I worked my way up, performed for basically nothing basically every night and got to be pretty successful. And then I stayed that way for the next 10 years. Trouble is - do you know how much a “pretty successful” comedian makes? Let’s just say I had a full-time office job and was still barely making rent." Yeah, that sucks, even if you're successful at stuff you actually like to do, it doesn't pay the rent...

"I made it through turning 40 with my self-image intact, but for some reason at 41, I just cracked. I realized I’ve spent most of my life with nothing to show for it, but a few awards no one cares about, a string of awful comedian exes who broke up with me for being funnier than them, and a dreadful office job I was going to be working until I died because I’d never bothered to build a stable career. I was never going to own a home, I was never going to have kids, never going to have the life I’d spent my entire youth sacrificing for. And yes, I know that 41 isn’t actually too late for most of that, but try telling that to someone who’d just decided they’ve wasted their life." That poor lady, I feel so bad for her...

"I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. My friends were all comedians who really didn’t want to hear it, my family were blandly supportive to the point of uselessness. Oh, they had plenty of soothing platitudes, but platitudes wouldn’t get me back 20 years. I was in a really bad place." Feeling isolated in her sadness. Exactly the kind of targets those cults look for.

"Then a friend recommended a meditation course to me. I thought I’d give it a shot." So that's where it started...

"I had no idea it was anything other than a standard evening class, and it had exactly the right level of pseudo-mystical nonsense to it to get me comfortable. A little bit of tarot imagery here, some misinterpretation of chakras there, a touch of sweet-smelling incense to tie it all together and you have a meditation class that is exactly my level." I see...

"I mean, let’s put it like this - I don’t believe in the power of crystals but I still have plenty dotted around my bedroom. I don’t believe in astrology but I do have my birth chart on my wall, and like to check my horoscope, sun sign and ascendant every day. Just for fun, of course." Denial. Also, this is like starting to ship something ironically...It's all fun and games until you realise it's not a joke anymore.

"I’d never had much luck silencing my mind, but Joyce - the lady running it - was really good at bringing you to that space. It was surprisingly freeing. I started attending regularly. One thing she insisted on was the start of each session, we would all sit in a circle and tell the others what we liked about each other. Only compliments, only truth. The first few sessions, no one really knew the others well enough to offer anything more than general niceties, but as it went on and we became closer the affirmations became more personal. More meaningful." It starts with positivity, something that really feels genuine and true, and then it grows into something else...

"And it felt really good just to have all that positivity, that affection uncritically directed at you. I thought it would be cheesy, but it was just this incredible feeling of being wanted and appreciated." That's what they're doing...

"You know, every comedian goes on about how they love the business, how great everyone is. Every one of them is lying. It’s horrible and everyone in it is horrible," oh

"and being there, having people be genuinely lovely to me, I didn’t know what to do with those feelings. Apparently in organizations that monitor cults, this method is called love bombing. I think I’d even heard of it somewhere before, but that didn’t make it any less effective." Yeah! Knowing how it works doesn't undo it. You may know the full process, how they give you a lot of sudden love and affection to get you to get used to this so that when they take it away, you're kinda addicted and you wanna get it back, so you do everything to please them, you may know about that. But it still works.

"I went to the meditation group for about three months, before Joyce mentioned a spiritual retreat she wanted us all to go on. It was in America, a small community out in rural Arkansas, and all our expenses would be taken care of. That should have sent alarm bells ringing, but by that point I trusted her so implicitly that I was just excited I wouldn’t have to buy my own ticket." Of course it should have been suspicious. America, for a spiritual retreat??? It doesn't sound like the destination for that purpose.

"I won’t bore you with the details of the rest of my indoctrination, once I got to the Divine Chains community - or compound, to use the classic term, though there weren’t any fences or watchtowers. Suffice to say that there was more friendliness, support, meditation, and you know what? Really good food." Also a great way to manipulate people. Offer free good food.

"I also met the leader of the organization, Claude Vilakazi, and he was so nice. People talk about charismatic dictators or cults of personality, but honestly you don’t even know what charisma is until you meet someone like Claude. Everything you say is valid and important, you are always worthy of his time, and you know what? Deep down, you just think the same way. I mean, even now, after everything I still miss listening to him talk." Those people are so dangerous...

"The Divine Chains philosophy was pretty simple. Throughout history there have been ten great links, holy figures of divine wisdom who were the manifested will of humanity to understand and better itself. All the heavy hitters you’d expect on the list: Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Ramakrishna - you get the idea. They weren’t reincarnations, per se, but the same divine impulse for human elevation manifested in different people." This is already insane...

"Claude Vilakazi was definitely not claiming to be the Eleventh Link, oh no. But he had had a vision that the Eleventh was soon to be born, and that he was to be their herald and guardian." Of course he doesn't! It would be suspicious if he was the chosen one, wouldn't it? No, instead, he's the mentor figure, the guardian who's looking out for said chosen one. And when he finds a chosen one, it's gonna be someone that he will manipulate at his will, but that's all because of his duty, of the vision!

"Honestly I don’t know how much I actually believed any of it, but I felt like I belonged there. I sold what little I had in order to fully earn my place in the community and I stayed. I had shelter, food, all the companionship I could ask for. I spent my days working in the field. We actually produced one of the only American rounds of rice-wine, which was how the cult made most of its money." That's orginal.

"When the whole thing collapsed the papers made all sorts of awful claims about the place, but I don’t know if they were wholly made-up, or if they happened the whole time and I just didn’t notice." Oh?

"Or if they came about after things started to change. Started to go rotten." It was rotten from the beginning, honey...

"I wasn’t there when they found the dog." Please tell me that the dog doesn't die.

"It was actually Joyce and a few others who stumbled across it while working the fields. The way they told it, it was thin and emaciated, barely able to walk and clearly suffering from some sort of sickness, but there was something in it that drew them closer. (static builds) As Joyce put it, we couldn’t help but love it." Oh. Interesting... It really is linked to the Corruption. It's like the embodiment of what cults represent...

"They took it to Claude, who was just as taken with the thing, and decided to adopt it. He named the dog Agape in front of everyone and took it into his private room to be cared for. That was the last I saw of the thing and… honestly, I kind of forgot about it for the next few weeks. But that was the moment when things started to get really weird." He's gonna have a taste of his own medecine...

"Claude announced at evening meal a few days later that he had been dreaming of the Eleventh, and there were going to be some changes to help spiritually prepare us for their arrival. We needed to achieve a state of pure love. And to begin with, what that meant was that whenever we would meet one another or pass each other in the corridor or fields, we were to tell each other that we loved them." Okay...

"And, Claude said solemnly, you have to mean it. At the time it didn’t seem so sinister and we all began to do it without question, until a week later when I bumped into Mary outside the showers. I told her I loved her and began to walk on, when her arm shot out and grabbed me by the shoulder. She spun me to face her and looked me dead in the eye. “I don’t believe you,” she said." Awkward...

"I mean, she was right. She and I had never really got on, just two different personalities, but in that moment I was suddenly terrified of what might happen if she thought I was lying about it. So I said it again, and I tried very hard to mean it. Her eyes bored into me and I noticed that they were yellow and sickly, like she had really bad jaundice. And she nodded once, turned, and left." Yellow eyes? Like in Supernatural???

"It was about that time that the rice wine started to go bad." Ah.

"When we raised it with Claude or any of the others in the inner circle they would nod understandingly, then tell us it didn’t matter, that it was no longer our concern now that the Eleventh was so close." That is... a reasoning.

"All the others seemed to accept this without question, and I didn’t feel I could press the matter without drawing negative attention, something I was desperate to avoid doing." I feel bad for her...

"So I just sat there as it grew bitter, cloudy, and rancid. Nobody bothered to get rid of the wine and the smell gradually began to permeate through the building." Ew...

"Those closest to Claude began to change as well. Everyone in the community had always been very touchy-feely, but now it seemed like they were always touching each other, or holding hands or in some way, pressing their skin to each other even at mealtimes or in situations where it seemed really awkward." Oh.

"A few times they touched me, hugged me or shook my hand, and each time I could feel myself struggling not to recoil. They’d stare at me with their yellowing eyes and their skin was dry and somehow sticky when I pressed it. It yielded ever so slightly like there wasn’t anything solid inside." Ew ew ew

I already have a complicated relationship with physical contact, I would hate that kind of situation...

"Even then, I didn’t think to leave. I couldn’t figure out what was going on but I trusted Claude so completely I couldn’t imagine it was truly harmful." And that's what it's like to be trapped...

"Then came the day when he announced that the Eleventh had arrived. I expected cheers, excitement, but instead there were just murmurings of resolve and determination as though a difficult task lay ahead." This is gonna be weird...

"Claude asked who was going to be the first to meet them. Everyone went quiet, awed by the sudden opportunity for divine benediction. He walked up and gently touched Joyce on the cheek, and she smiled with a happiness more pure than I’d ever seen on a human face." Poor Joyce, I can feel something horrible's gonna happen to her...

"We formed into a long line, a chain holding hands with Joyce at the very end of it. It stretched from one end of the building to the other. I was at the other end so didn’t see what happened when she walked to Claude’s private chambers, but as she did, something passed down the line." Oh?

"Did you ever do that experiment in science class, where you held hands in a line and the teacher passed a very gentle electric shock down through the students, feeling of a charge going through you?" We... never did that.

"It was like that but what passed through us was warm and slick, and seemed to flow through my body like oil and out into the ground. Everyone felt it. Their blissful smiles made me feel even more nauseated than the sensation itself. I never saw Joyce again." Oh no...

"Each day after evening meal, Claude chose someone else to meet the Eleventh." And every day, that someone disappaered?

Yeah, that's what happened.

"A fear fell over the others and at first I thought it was the same fear that I had, but when I heard them talk of it, what they feared was that they wouldn’t get chosen. That somehow this chance for pure, divine love would pass them by. And I suddenly came to the realization that perhaps I didn’t belong here like I thought I did." At least she noticed it!

"So one night I decided to see for myself. I waited until after lights-out and slipped from the dormitory through the empty corridors towards Claude’s private rooms." She's not gonna like what she's gonna see.

"As I got close, I began to smell it. It wasn’t rancid, not like the wine, but sweet like overripe fruit or sugar that’s cooked too long." Okay...

"My hand reached slowly for the handle, when I heard someone moving behind it." Oh?

"No, it wasn’t someone moving. It was many people, I’m sure of it. The sounds of dozens of limbs moving and stepping and shuffling in unison. Then laughter. Then weeping. Then movement again. I looked down at my shaking hand, and saw that seeping under the door was something slick and colorless, a greasy residue that smelled overpoweringly of that sickly sweet odor." Oh no, this is gonna be disgusting....

"I took a step back, suddenly nauseated and almost fell into the arms of Claude, who had silently come up behind me. He held me for a moment, looking with such intensity that I felt like he was weighing my soul, his expression unreadable. Then he sighed and shook his head. “You do not belong here. You are not worthy of its love. Leave.” " This is so unsettling...

"Even after everything I’d seen I can’t tell you how deeply those words hurt me. I turned and I ran out of the building, out of the compound, out into the night. I ran until I reached a road, then sat there shaking until a passing car took pity on me and took me down to the local sheriff’s office." At least she got out...

"Eventually my case got passed up the line; apparently a few different government agencies were interested in the Divine Chain, mainly for possible tax fraud, and my testimony was pretty much exactly what they needed to go in there and check it out." That's often what happens. I remember hearing a similar story on the news a few weeks ago. It's always about making money...

"They didn’t tell me what they found until after I’d had a few sessions with a psychiatrist who specialized in cult deprogramming, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to find out most of the details online." What is it???

"There is one thing, however, that I think they lied about. The reports detailed a mass grave in the rooms of Claude Vilakazi with bodies mutilated and mixed together, some who’d been dead for weeks, but I don’t believe that." Ew, this is already... ew.

"Whatever was in that room, I am absolutely sure that when the authorities arrived it was still alive." OH NO EW-

This is so disgusting and gross, ew-

"I just don’t know what alive means when it comes to something like that. It doesn’t matter though. The compound was destroyed in an ‘accidental generator explosion’, and everything was gone." Maybe for the best. I still feel bad for all those people though.

"There’s a part of me that’s glad, a sick little part that’s happy, that whatever love was there, whatever I couldn’t be a part of, is gone from the world. And no one else gets it either." That poor lady...

It was so messed up...

"This, well… the Corruption at work if I had to guess, though with unsettling echoes of uh, Fleshliness." Yeah.

Oh, what's going on?

Sudden urge to make a phone call? Who are you calling, Jon?

WHAT WAS THAT LOUD NOISE

TREVOR AND JULIA, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE???

"Sit. Down."

"Or we check if you’re still human enough to bleed."

Okay, they're kinda terrifying like that.

"You’ve got something of ours."

"Someone."

"Took him right from under our noses." Ah, so they finally found out...

"Gerry wasn’t yours. You had no right --"

"You hear that, Julia? “Gerry”! "

"Sounds like you’ve got pretty chummy. Where is he?"

"Gone."

"What do you mean, gone?"

"Not gonna ask you again, son."

"I burned the page. Released him." Oh they're not gonna like that...

"So. Let me get this straight. We take you in, protect you from the thing that’s huntin’ you -"

"Spare your life even though you’re no help -"

"- help you, give you access to one of our most valuable resources, and you steal it from us, piss off back to England, and then burn it? That’s just inconsiderate." Not letting Gerry move on and treating what remained of him as a tool was just as considerate.

"He asked me to."

"Oh really? You always do what evil books tell you to, do you?" "Gotta say I’m disappointed. Genuinely thought you were different… but you’re just another monster. Not even worth the chase." OUCH-

HEY NO DON'T KILL HIM

"Get away from him." DAISY, I'VE NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY TO HEAR YOU

Wait... Isn't it gonna be dangerous for her to be so close to Hunters?

"Oh, who’s this? You got yourself a watchdog?"

"More of a lapdog. Scrawny, isn’t she?

"I said get back." This is gonna get ugly... "Malnourished, I’d say. How long since you last tasted blood?

"You think you can take us both?"

"I’d enjoy it. I’ll start with you, old bastard, he’s slower and doesn’t guard his neck. And you worry about him too much, don’t you? I go for him, you get sloppy. Predictable." Let's all calm down, please...

"Sure. Or I slit your little bookworm’s throat."

"Do it. It’ll give me a chance to finish off your dad."

"I’m not her father."

" Not by blood maybe." JON, THIS ISN'T THE MOMENT TO TALK ABOUT FOUND FAMILY (AND THAT'S SOMETHING I'M PRETTY SURE I NEVER SAID BEFORE AS THIS IS MY FAVORITE TROPE)

"Come on, Julia."

"What??" "There’s no rush. We’ve got all the time in the world. Besides, this place is just full of monsters. She can’t guard ‘em all."

What, so that's it? They're just... giving up?

Okay...

Daisy, was that a growl-

Oh no she's not okay

"Are you alright?"

"Don’t touch me."

"Christ, he was right, I didn’t - didn’t - when did you get so thin?"

"I’m not, it’s fine."

"It’s the Hunt, isn’t it? Without it-"

"I’m fine. Just haven’t been hungry. I’m strong enough." To hold on for so long, yeah, you're strong.

"Clearly." "They’re not gone yet. We could still get them -"

"Daisy, no. It’s like you say. Don’t listen to the blood."

"Listen to the quiet." Yeah.

"Even so, if it’s having this much of an effect -"

"I’m not going back. I can’t let it in again."

"But it… what if it kills you?" Oh, the parallel...

"Heh. Always said I was dedicated to justice." Can you all stop with the whole being ready to die thing please

"Daisy. It’s not - you can’t think like that." "Jon. Do you have any idea how much damage you can do if you’re a police officer who wants to hurt people? How much the system will protect you?" THAT'S THE PROBLEM, YEAH

"I managed to keep most of it from Basira, but-"

"It wasn’t you. That was the Hunt." Jon, please.

"We were the same."

"You’d never known anything different."

"Because I never wanted to. All that time trapped was good for one thing. Thinking. And I did a lot of it. I’ve made my choice." Wow...

"Okay. So what do we do when they come back?" Let's just hope that they don't come back soon. I wanted to hear more of them, but not like that.

"I don’t know."

"Come on. We’d better tell Basira." Yeah, maybe.

Wow.

This was intense. The statement was very interesting. The Corruption is not only about insects, filth and disease. It's also about that twisted, rotten love.

I wasn't expecting Julia and Trevor to just, be there without a warning. I mean, I like them, but come on😭

Also, I love how Jon was like "what about found family though" while they were threatening to kill him. You should watch Supernatural just for the "family don't end with blood" (which is one of my favourite quotes btw)

Jon... He's really trying to figure it out. He's trying to understand how the other avatars feel about being avatars and he projects a lot, he doesn't want to hurt people but he also doesn't want to stop cause he's hungry and he tries to feed of written statements, and he's somewhat still in denial about the whole "what the fears influence the avatars to do vs the choices they make", because he doesn't wanna become a monster, but he knows he's kinda already, and he's so desperate to hold on to what remains of his humanity...

I just want him to be okay...

And Daisy's not doing well either. She managed to stay away from the Hunt very efficiently, but she's far from alright. I'm afraid she might relapse. And I don't want her to, but if she doesn't, she'll die, and I don't want her to die.

It's about a gravedigger. So, the buried?

Hezekiah Wakely, what a name.

"Compiled from a series of letters to Nathaniel Beale between 1837 and 1839." Finally, letters that aren't adressed to Jonah Magnus!

"August, 1837 I’ll thank you again for your endeavors on my behalf, Nathaniel. I’m sure you can always rely on having a true friend in me." 🎵You've got a friend in me🎵 (I am really tired)

"I’ve been installed here some weeks now, and I’m finding myself well-contented, my sexton duties keeping my time employed such as I scarce have a chance to allow myself those dark thoughts that so concerned you when last we visited." Dark thoughts?

"My troubled sleep, on the other hand, has not, of yet, resolved itself in any way to my satisfaction." Oh, he also has sleep issues!

"I work myself to exhaustion, cleaning, polishing and looking after the church proper, and I tell you, when I lie abed I can scarce rise again for the weakness I leave myself in. And yet, sleep still eludes me." Oh, I get that feeling. Friday night, after a whole day of walking around (I think I got almost 11km?) on barely 2 to 3 hours of sleep from the previous night, I couldn't fall asleep. And it isn't the first time it happened.

"You need not despair, Nathaniel, I know the bottle will no longer help, and my other labors keep the nights from bothering me as once they did, but I do find myself longing for a true and proper sleep." I hope he did got some proper sleep. I'm pretty sure I will tonight.

"I tell a lie. There are some nights I find myself easily slipping to dreamless respite, though you’ll think me a morbid soul for it. Those days I spent digging graves in the churchyard – on those nights I sleep, if you’ll forgive the joke, the sleep of the dead." So that's the advice to make sure you can sleep at night? Dig graves all day long?

"I’ve never quite known a rest like it. Perhaps it is the harder, more physical aspect of the task, or perhaps the quiet rhythm of it. There’s no echo as there is in the church, just the sound of pick and shovel hitting dirt. And when it’s deep enough, when you stand at the bottom, the noise of the world just… fades away to nothing. It is the sort of quiet that makes you feel as though the commotion and hubbub of life were but a terrible dream, and in sleeping you were waking up to peace." Okay...

"You’ll laugh, Nathaniel, but I almost wrote that I hope I have a chance to dig more graves. What a thought." Yeah, an odd thought indeed...

Okay, that was the first letter! Second letter now, in February 1838.

"Nathaniel, something has happened to me. And I felt it only right to send a letter and let you know of it, being as your last letter expressed such a kind curiosity towards my sleeplessness, and – what I mentioned to you in my earlier letters." Oh?

"My nights have indeed been easier of late, something I may partially ascribe to the recent outbreak of fever in the town – taking more of my time for the grim business of grave digging – and the rest to my gradual settling into my position as sexton." So he got to dig more graves...

"There is such peace in the churchyard, you see: to walk atop the soil knowing that, deep below my feet, those blessed souls wait happy and silent in the cool, damp earth, counting the days until the Resurrection. It gives me such warmth to think of that I have taken to spending much of my unoccupied time wandering the graves, and, where the mood allows me, taking my sleep there." Not the best idea...

"I hope such talk does not upset you, and you may rest assured I am no suicide. It is simply the serenity of the dead I envy, not their lifelessness."

"But I do long for that rest. I tell myself I wake each day renewed, but I am never as truly satisfied as when I’m in my slumber, and insensible to the world." Okay, I get it, I really do, sleeping feels great, especially when you know what sleepless nights are like. But it's a bit... extreme.

"I do find, however, that when I dig my graves, I have been going deeper. And at times, I worry I might dig so far as I can no longer get out with my meager ladder." Oh?

"Now, those moments – you must not cast judgment on me for this, Nathaniel, for it is simply a passing fancy – but I will often lie myself down on that soft earth, and I will sleep. And I swear to you that the sleep I find there is more blissful than any I have ever found." He's like "Okay bro, I know this sounds insane but trust the process."

"It was there, not a week ago, that it happened." What, that he took a nap in a grave?

Okay, so he had to dig what sounds like a premium grave...

"It was cold that day, and bitter windy, and cracking the ground had been as hard as ice. At least until a few feet down. But by the end of it… oh, I tell you there was warmth in that grave. Whether by my own body or the heat of the soil, I couldn’t say, but it was as comfortable as the fireplace of a public house, and the wind could not reach me in the hole that I had made. So, as is my late habit, I lay down. And I had no sooner done this than a powerful sleep overtook me." Yeah, I'm not doing that to get some sleep.

"I had a dream, then. I dreamt a rain had come. A terrible bitter rain that chilled my bones and turned the soil around me dark and sodden. The walls grew damp and slippery, their firm shape lost as they began to slip and crumble. And then all at once they collapsed, the grave filling in a moment with a wave of mud and wet dirt. In a single terrible moment of utter terror, it was atop and around me, covering my face and filling my lungs with its awful choking sod." Being buried alive...

"And the strangest thing was that it was wonderful. I had never felt such safety as within the crushing weight of earth all around me, the pressing embrace of the buried. In that instant I knew what it was tobbe dead, and I ached with envy for them." Bro is gonna speedrun the whole "becoming an avatar of the buried"

And he actually caught a cold from his nap...

Third letter, in June 1838!

"I must tell you I’ve been in some distress these last few weeks, due in no small part of the agitation of the Reverend, who has, of late, succumbed to a very specific, though understandable, mania." Oh?

"It was the funeral of young Nellie Cooper that did it, which was a most upsetting affair. I’ll say I have much sympathy with his plight, as I had a chance to view the body myself, and if you’d asked me if I concurred with Doctor Grant’s judgments of death by drowning, I would have agreed without hesitation. She had that peace to her that I’ve spoken of to you before, and I knew how happy she must be to soon be returning to the earth." I'm pretty sure you're projecting...

"But that day, as they carried the slim coffin down towards the hole that I had dug, and so recently enjoyed my own calm repose, there was a commotion among the pallbearers. Little Nellie’s coffin began shaking and rocking back and forth, such as they were unable to keep their footing and dropped it. The crash of the wooden casket hitting the earth is a sound I’ll not forget in a hurry, nor the shriek that came from inside the splintered wood as it burst open." What-

"As you may well have surmised, Nellie was not, after all, dead, and had shaken off the stupor mere minutes before she was due to be placed below ground. She’s unharmed, at least in body, though I can scarce imagine the maddening strain must have put on her to see her own tombstone carved and waiting above the dark silence of her open grave." OH NO, ALMOST BEING BURIED ALIVE BECAUSE PEOPLE ASSUME YOU'RE DEAD, THAT'S ACTUALLY SCARY

"To be honest, I suspect the worst effect is upon the Reverend. To be so near responsible for burying a person alive has shaken him deep, and he stopped all funeral services for a time." Understandable.

"To my mind there are far worse fates. But he has in his head an idea to begin fitting the graves I dig with these new “safety bells” that he has heard of, so that any as might be alive below ground might signal us above for rescue." We should still have those.

"I dread the idea. If it had been me in that coffin, destined for the peace below ground, I can think of little that I would hate more than the jarring, clanging of a bell pulling me from my rest." Obvi...

"My dreams have been strange, of late." I can imagine...

Fourth letter, December 1838!

"I’ve worked so long, so hard. Do I not deserve a rest in the mud from which I came? Commit my body to the earth and let it stay there." Buddy,I don't think that's a great idea...

"I’ve been trying to sleep, but that bell kept ringing, the one over Jacob the baker’s grave. That nonsense safety valve the Reverend insisted on putting there, ringing and ringing, and disturbing the sleep of everyone in the churchyard. I’ve no doubt it disturbed Jacob as well, who worked so hard all his life and never thought to complain of his lot." That poor guy, he's not going to get help...

"He deserved to rest. So I cut the cord. And now he is quiet." That's awful...

And this is only 1838. He's going to get even more insane about it...

Fifth letter, January 1839!

"I am disappointed, Nathaniel, I’ll not deny it. More than that, I am hurt. My letters to you have always been a comfort to my soul, a place where I may lay my heart bare and tell the truths of what I think and feel without fear of judgment or reproach. That you chose to share what last I wrote you with the magistrates has wounded me sore." You didn't help a man that was buried alive while you knew he was still alive, I'm pretty sure that can count as a murder, you can't just be offended that your friend talked to magistrates about it!

"They came and asked their questions, as I’m sure you hoped they would, but could of course prove nothing. Jacob is long dead, and I was very careful how I stopped the bell." That definitely counts as murder.

"But such suspicions eat away at peace, and of course the Reverend dismissed me." Ah. So what is he gonna do now?

"It was my own fault, of course – I should never have told you these things assuming you would understand. But how could you? You’ve never felt the close embrace of peaceful soil. You’ve never truly slept in the bosom of the earth. These things are not such as can be shared in words, and it was my foolishness to think that they could." He's missing the point.

"But worry not, Nathaniel. The love I bear you will not let me leave you ignorant. As I did with the Reverend, I will come and I will show you, once and forever, the true and glorious peace of the Buried." Okay, fully an avatar now.

But... he basically starts his letter saying "I shouldn't have told you about that person I let die, cause I got in trouble" and then goes "I'm mad at you, here's my written confession on how I commited a murder and plan to commit another one"?

And it ends like that. Okay.

"Nathaniel Beale is buried on the grounds of St. Peter’s Church in his hometown of Dunstable. And I am only the third person to know that in almost 200 years, after Nathaniel Beale himself, and Mr. Wakeley, the person who buried him." Well. Great.

"I cannot tell how much of the change that comes over someone when they are taken by one of the Fears is a direct product of their influence, and how much is their own mind, desperately contorting itself to accept and justify the awful things they find themselves drawn to doing." That would be very interesting to study!

"I have read many statements now by those who are changing, who are becoming –something else, and few if any of them seem… entirely rational. Entirely the people that they were before. But how can I tell, I suppose. My job is to view people at their lowest, their most fearful and unstable moments. Perhaps there is less change there than I imagine." Maybe...

"Certainly, I don’t feel different. I have no desire for pseudo-religious philosophizing, or delighting in the suffering of those I harm." And that's good!

"Then again, I suppose I’m hardly in the best position to judge. Perhaps to anyone listening to these tapes I sound remarkably similar to Hezekiah. Or to Manuela. Or to Jane." No, I don't think so... I mean, it's... different.

Oh, he went to talk to Helen!

"Hello, Jon. Been a while since you’ve been down here."

"I didn’t come here to see you." Oh. "Oh, come now! I’m sure I’m more interesting company than the late Jane Prentiss." "It’s all that’s left of her now – apart from a jar of ashes in my desk. Just a circle of rotten stone on an otherwise-unremarkable wall." Oh, right! That was never explained, yeah!

Wait, was it an attempt at a ritual for the Corruption?

"There was going to be a gate, I think. A hole that she rotted into the Corruption itself. Maybe the start of a ritual?" Ah! "Hmm. Not exactly impressive, is it?" Not really, no.

"… But I think that’s the thing about – what did Elias call it? – Filth. I don’t think it really plans much. It just starts to grow wherever it can get a foothold, and, if no one stamps it out in time… game over." Yeah...

"I’ve been wondering what they were doing down here. The worms must have been down here for – weeks, months maybe, spreading… growing. They could have spread all the way through these tunnels, but they didn’t. They didn’t find Leitner down here, didn’t find Getrude’s body, didn’t find… whatever else is here."

"It is a maze. One of the reasons I like it." Yeah, I guess so...

"I can’t See things properly here. I thought it was just me, something interfering with my connection to the Eye, but… I’m wondering: maybe it affects everything else? Like this place is some kind of – universal blind spot." Good. Neutral ground for everyone.

"Everyone gets lost down here."

"What a fascinating idea. Although – some of us are always lost, in a sense."

"Wait, are you saying you can navigate it?" "Not exactly, but my door has been part of these tunnels for some time now." Are the tunnels starting to become part of the Spiral?

"– what’s it hiding, wh-what’s in the middle?" "A delightful surprise…!" I wanted to know :(

"Ah… But that’s not why you’re here, is it?"

"Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane. She was the first, you know. The first I actually encountered like… like us. She seemed so… inhuman. Like everything she used to be was stripped away." Yeah... And to be fair, beside what she said in her statement, we don't know much about her.

"And now…?"

"I wonder how much of her was still in there. How much did she choose to be what she was? I read her statement, she was… she was scared. I assumed she’d been possessed completely against her will, but now I’m not even sure that’s possible." Yeah, I remember, it was... Part of her was scared, but another part wanted to embrace that call.

"It is astounding the sort of thing you’re willing to choose – given an unpleasant enough alternative – isn’t it?

"How much of willpower is just – safety? “Comfort” by another name. The option to choose and be fine." Good question...

"Hungry, are we?"

"That’s not – – I haven’t done anything – I feel like if I don’t… I might die. Fade away into nothing." And obviously we don't want that.

"Do you… Know that?"

"No. But I… I can’t die. They need me." Jon...

"Come on, Jon, no excuses. They don’t need your protection."

"What, are you going to look after them?" "And how would I do that?"

"You eat things as well." Activating PacMan mode to protect the archives crew "They have to open the door, Archivist. I can’t just push them in." Hm.

"Oh, you’ve got hands." "Sharp enough to pull out worms, kill a few old men – maybe stab an overeager Archivist – but my physicality is as much an illusion as everything else about me. Think of me as… a bear trap. Not a sword." Hm, I see.

"But we’re not talking about me, are we?" Nope... "When does it stop?"

"What?" "The guilt. The misery. All the others I’ve met, they’ve been – cold, cruel. They’ve enjoyed what they do. When does the Eye make me monstrous?" Oh, Jon...

"What – why would it ever do that?"

"I don’t…"

"When has your guilt, or your sadness, or your handwringing ever actually stopped you from doing what it wants?"

"I-I – I have not been taking statements –"

"You’ve sworn of other people’s trauma for now because you’re caught. Because continuing would endanger you. But other than that, when has your discomfort ever actually stopped you walking the path of the Beholding?" Oh...

"I… I don’t know…"

"Even if it were capable of doing so, what possible reason would the Eye have to change how you feel, when it makes no difference to your actions? Helen was like you, at first. She felt such guilt over taking people. Until one day she realized she wasn’t going to stop doing it. So she chose to stop feeling guilty." Oh... This is a difficult choice to make...

"Fine. I get it. My feelings mean nothing to it."

"Mh, not true! They carry a certain flavor, a… seasoning." Welp.

"Well, you know my advice already. Cheerio, Jon. Enjoy your brooding."

Welp...

This was very interesting.

And now Jon's gonna have another existential crisis. Which is very understandable.

I haven't listened to a new episode since thursday and I missed it.

Who's that???

Okay, whoever that is, Martin's gonna have to deal with him...

"Um, excuse me sir, sorry - you can’t actually be here."

"Oh, not to worry! I seem to be doing alright so far."

"No, I mean - this area is actually off limits to the public, so -"

"And quite right to! Goodness, the things they could learn here turn your hair white, eh? Best to keep them out, I say."

Alright, that's someone who is familiar with what the Institute is...

"…who are you? did Peter send you?"

"You must be Martin. Goodness, he was not exaggerating."

"What’s that supposed to mean?"

"Oh come now, don’t be like that. Let’s start over." Bro-

WAIT THAT'S SIMON FAIRCHILD

WE FINALLY MEET HIM

"Peter asked me to look in on you and have a small chat. Well, a big chat, really. Answer all those nagging questions." Oh. So, he knows Peter Lukas pretty well.

Is he actually going to answer a lot of questions though?

"Simon Fairchild? Wait, Simon Fairchild as in-"

"As in, all those people who said I did horrible things to them and their loved ones? Yes. They have been in, haven’t they? I’d hate to think I’m underrepresented in here, not when Peter tells me that that bone fellow has at least half a dozen -" THIS ISNT A CONTEST

"No, no, not at all. you’ve sent plenty of people our way."

"Brilliant! So shall we get started?" No, this isn't brilliant at all!

But yeah, go on, explain stuff.

"So you’ve been working with Peter for a while now, correct?"

"Sure."

"And he’s been promising you answers to all those difficult questions?"

"I mean, sort of."

"Well, that’s me."

"What?"

"Yes, well you have to understand how it is with Peter. He finds talking to people directly very difficult, especially explaining the more, um - esoteric side of things? Charming chap, I’m sure you agree, absolutely lovely, but even if you can convince him to actually give you a straight answer, he’s just not that good at actually putting these things into words." I get that it's difficult for an avatar of the Lonely to actually talk to people, alright. However, he doesn't have a problem manipulating them!

"Something to do with his upbringing, I think. I’m pretty sure he was home-schooled, you know." THE WAY HE SAID THAT-

I LAUGHED SO LOUD I'M SURPRISED MY MOM DIDN'T HEAR ME FROM THE LIVING ROOM

"So what, he sends you to answer questions because he doesn’t want to?"

"Precisely!" Hm.

"And you do it? Why?"

"Is that your first question?"

"Is there a limit?" "Only until I get bored, and that does tend to come more quickly these days."

That guy is a menace. I know, flashnews, but still.

"Why are you helping Peter?"

"Don’t you serve different, you know, fears?"

"Well, now see… that’s actually two questions. The answer to the first is simple. I lost a bet, and this is how the good captain chooses to use that." WHY ALWAYS BETS???

" The second is… sort of? I mean yes, if you want to get technical, he serves the One Alone and I serve the Falling Titan, but those two are a lot closer than you might imagine. After all, the larger the space you find yourself alone in, the more isolated you feel." Okay, that makes sense.

Also, "the One Alone" for the Lonely and "the Falling Titan" for the Vast? I was just talking about different names for the fears with my friend just a few hours ago!

"And being aware of how lonely you are can make anywhere feel more empty." Oh, yeah, also! "Exactly. I’ve actually been toying with the idea of trying to do something with the scale of humanity itself, you know, emphasize all that overpopulation nonsense. But honestly it just doesn’t ring true for me. We’re all just so tiny and pointless, you see, it’s hard to really get past it. Also, I worry it might be straying into territory that emboldens our potential new rival." Okay... So no attempt at a ritual for the Vast?

"The Extinction." "The very same. Peter said you’d have a lot of questions about that one." Well, duh.

"I do. How are new powers born?" That is a very good question.

"Hmm… don’t know." Disappointing.

"How soon could it attempt this ritual?"

"No clue."

"How do we stop it?"

"Can’t help you."

ARE YOU KIDDING-

Look, I'm very tired, I just had three pretty bad nights in a row (I slept maybe 10 hours-ish in the last three days), my patience is paper thin.

"Could you at least try?" Martin is so done, and rightfully so.

"No, no, no, you’re right, of course. The thing you have to remember is that no one actually knows how these things work, not really. There’s always been plenty of theories of course, and over a century or two you do start to get an intuitive feel for it, but… there’s really no hard and fast rules." Okay, but there's gotta be something???

"The powers, or entities, or fears, or whatever you want to call them, are bound up in emotion. In feeling. How they exist, what they can do, how they interact with the world, it all makes about as much logical sense as a nightmare; which is to say there is a certain sort of emotional logic to it all. Things feel like they flow together in a way that makes sense, but if you try to stop and do the maths then it all comes apart, at least in my experience." Alright, I get it. But I guess that it's good that I'm bad at math and way better at emotional logic.

"When is a new power born? Well, when does it feel like its birth would be right? When enough creatures suffer a terror of it that feels distinct, that feels truly its own? Then it would probably feel right for it to emerge into its own. Or perhaps there’s a ritual. If it feels right to enact some sort of birthing ceremony, some apocalyptic -" Up to debate, alright...

"And how close is it, do you think?"

"Hard to be sure. Peter thinks very close indeed, what with all the current hubbub, I’m inclined to agree." What is that even supposed to mean?

"That’s because we disagree on exactly how bad it will be. Peter seems convinced that the Extinction is different, that its actual birth will be as bad or worse as another power fully manifesting. He believes its advent will be heralded by all sorts of disasters and catastrophes and global upheavals, and whatnot. That kind of thing."

"Sounds like a rich feeding ground."

"Well, exactly. Peter, however, seems to think that it will upset the balance that we all have an awful lot invested in, and he’s not at all certain the world as we understand will come out the other side." Hm. Those concerns sound pretty reasonable, but... I don't know...

"And let me guess. You think he can’t see the big picture."

"I see why he likes you. It’s all a matter of perspective, you see. My patron has gifted me with, quite frankly, an absurdly long life. An appropriate gift and one that serves to provide a certain distance from things. Of course, a paltry few centuries is nothing really, but it’s more than most get." Centuries???

"And even in that brief time, I’ve seen all sorts of ebbs and flows to the balance of things. Do you know when the last ritual I attempted was?"

"I - I don’t know, that space station?" "Oh goodness no, that’s the future, my boy! No. It was 1853, the height of the aquarium mania. All over the empire, people were starting to understand the depths of the terrible unknown below the ocean, and I thought that was a rich vein to be tapped. Even bothered old Harley into helping me design a special diving bell for the ritual. I called it the Awful Deep, and between you and me I was rather proud of myself." Oh.

"So why didn’t it work?" "Because it wasn’t a very good idea." lol

"The fear wasn’t out there, not like I hoped it was. All sort of fizzled. Also, a Hunter broke in and destroyed the mechanism, sent me and all my sacrifices plummeting to the bottom of the ocean." The way he says it like it's barely an inconvenience...

"I don’t see your point."

"My point is… …you know, I’ve quite forgotten"

He's both hilarious and incredibly frustrating.

"honestly I’m pinning most of my long-term hopes on space, but that’s at least a hundred years away."

"Assuming the Extinction doesn’t derail everything."

'"Which is why I’m happy helping Peter. But if it does, then I’ll either be dead, which will be fine, or I’ll adjust." That is a point of view, I guess.

"It doesn’t scare you?"

"Martin. Taken on a cosmic scale we’ve never even been alive, not in any way that might register. I mean, if this dreadful little planet had a fractionally different orbit and life had never even started here, then ultimately nothing of any real importance would have changed." That's certainly a perspective...

"I think our experience of the universe has value. Even if it disappears forever." YOU'RE RIGHT IT DOES. THIS IS NOW ONE OF MY FAVORITE QUOTES OF THIS ENTIRE PODCAST

"What a lonely way to look at things. Which makes sense I suppose." Oh, shut it.

"So what do you do then, if - if the world is pointless and your god is so weak right now?"

"I have a good time, and do my best to avoid the drama." Tbh, this is a pretty good way to live.

"It’s all been getting a bit much over the last few decades, I blame the number of people. from our own numbers point of view it’s getting very busy. more Minds equals more fear after all."

"I thought you said that the maths doesn’t work."

"Oh, you are a quick one! So maybe I’m wrong. But crucially I suspect a lot of the other servants and creatures out there have a similar idea. probably while they’re all in such a rush to make their own attempts."

So, this is like a race.

But... This is all meant to fail, right? Until now, there were many attempts at the rituals, from pretty much every fear. But it always fails.

"You make it sound like the entities don’t even know what they’re doing."

"I have no idea if they’re doing anything at all. if they’re even capable of ‘doing’ things. I know that most of their servants are simply doing their best to interpret and serve something that is almost definitively inconceivable." So the rituals might not even be a real thing at all????

"You can’t be serious."

"All right. Let’s try one of those analogies Peter finds so annoying. Erm… imagine you are deaf, but every night you hear the most beautiful music in your dreams, and your every waking thought is consumed by trying to reproduce that music. Oh, you’re mute as well in this analogy, or at least you can’t sing. And you need to invent the idea of a musical instrument from scratch. Everyone else is also deaf and mute, and --" Alright, pretty much impossible. Something... abstract.

"Yes, I think I get it."

"Yes, well the point is, most of us are trying so desperately to recreate our own dream symphony that we bring an awful lot of our own baggage into the mix." Oh...Interesting...

"What about the monsters?"

"What monsters?"

"Things like M-- erm, uh, the Distortion. I thought they were part of the entities themselves, extensions. Surely they know what’s going on."

"Honestly, I think they have it a lot worse than we do. Imagine being a hand that can conceive of itself, having impulses shot through you, being moved and clinched by some unseen mind, but never knowing the reasoning behind your own actions, or even if you’re just some thoughtless reflex. Sounds horrid." Yeah, it does...

"So if no one’s ever actually communicated with their patron, how do you know they even want rituals? How - how does anyone know if they could ever even work?"

"We don’t!" So, it means that it all never meant to work. Like, really.

"And honestly? The idea that this is all some grand cosmic joke, thousands of us running around spreading horror and sabotaging each other pointlessly while these impossible unknowable things just lurk out there, feeding off the misery we caused? I find that interpretation quite appealing. But, I still hear the music in my dreams."

So it means that everything and everyone sacrificed to stop those rituals...

It was all for nothing???

"Who are you? No, no - who were you?"

"Originally? No one you would have heard of. No great historical figure or atrocity monger. I’ve been Simon Fairchild about, erm, 80 or 90 years maybe. For business purposes mainly, by which I mean I was bored at not being wealthy, so I made some arrangements and sent Mr. Fairchild on a very long fall. I could go into details but without a certain amount of knowledge of 1930s tax practices it wouldn’t mean very much to you." Why are you like this- "I was bored at not being wealthy", seriously???

"And how did you get started with it all? Did you -- did - did you just look up at the sky one day and fall head-over-heels in love?"

"Sort of, actually. Except it wasn’t the actual sky, it was a painting. I was apprenticed, you see, under Tintoretto. Dreadful man, but a decent artist. He was fascinated, you see, with the human figure. He found most of the rest of the work dreadfully dull so he’d always delegated the lot of it to us. He had a particular distaste for painting the sky, and I was always the one he called on to do them. Days, weeks I would spend, focusing so intently on these patches of clear sky or swirling cloud at the top of his latest self-proclaimed masterpiece, and gradually it sort of, erm, drew me in until it seemed to dwarf the rest of the work. Every stroke of the brush felt larger than my entire existence." Hm.

"And when I finally lost my footing, well…. I should have of course fallen to the floor of the church, broken my neck, but that blue painted sky welcomed me with open arms and I never looked back." Okay...

"I tried to share it with others, not just as sacrifices, but they often find it difficult to keep up with the, um, velocity I tend to live at. They tend to get left behind, and I suppose it doesn’t help that I can’t bring myself to see any of them as anything other than trivial." Alright...

"No wonder I’m so sympathetic to the Lonely! You know, this really is a place for self-discovery, isn’t it? Statement ends I suppose."

"Er, I’m sorry?"

"Oh nothing, just my own hubris. I should have known. When I came here, I said to myself, “Simon,” I said, “you’re going to answer this young man’s questions, but you’re not going to give the Watcher a statement. You’re better than that.” But it’s a hard one to resist, isn’t it? You get in the flow of talking about yourself and it all just… tumbles out." It feels like breaking the fourth wall.

"Well, this has been fun. Now, if we’re about done--"

"We’re not. Sit back down." LET'S GO!

"Bold! I like it."

"You said you were here to answer my questions for Peter, but so far you’ve told me basically nothing of any use." Exactly!

"The big answers are rarely helpful." It doesn't matter. It's been almost a whole season, WE WANT TO KNOW "Then let’s try some smaller ones. Is Peter attempting a ritual?"

"Not in the sense that you’re used to. Him and his family made their play a few years ago and they failed. I’m sure he’d like me to explain it but I think he can do that one himself." Oh I can't wait to hear about that.

"How honest has he been with me?"

"About which part?"

"Protecting the others."

"I think he tried. I suspect he may have slightly exaggerated his abilities when you first made the deal, but he certainly expended a reasonable amount of influence and resources to follow through." Hm...

"But that was never the endgame was it? He just wanted me on side long enough to rope me into his - his plans for the Extinction."

"Do you really need me to answer that one?" He's got a point.

"Fine. So why me? What’s his plan? Why not get the others involved?"

"He is what he is, Martin. For a creature of the Lonely, the urge is always to isolate, never to communicate or connect. I suspect that’s why he’s so keen on wagers, it allows him a framework for cooperation that doesn’t risk any sort of intimacy." Makes sense.

"As for his plan… I don’t know the details. But I believe there’s something in the Institute that he thinks can help his cause." WHAT IS IT

"And he needs me to use it?"

"Presumably, from what he said it must be powerfully aligned to the Watcher. If he wishes to use it, it would need someone already touched by the Eye. And if he wants to control that someone…"

"They need to serve the Lonely."

"Quite right. Anything else?" Okay...

"How do you feel about this?"

"You might need to be a tad more specific."

"All of it. Peter’s plan, the extinction, me."

"I think… I think Peter is taking a rather large but calculated gamble. Not just on you, but on a lot of things. If it works, he’ll be in a very strong position. And if he fails it won’t be all that bad." So he's not risking that much is he?

"You don’t think it’ll be the end of the world?"

"Oh, it very well might be, but life has continued through dozens of apocalypse is already. Ice ages, pandemics, calamities, extinctions. The only reason this one feels special is because, well, it’s happening to you." He's not entierly wrong.

"And that’s the sort of solipsism that tends to come with loneliness, in my experience. So my feeling is that I’ll help out where I can, but ultimately if this Armageddon comes off, then so be it. Either billions suffer and life goes on, or billions suffer and life doesn’t. In the grand scheme of things it’s all much of a muchness."

"Right."

"Sorry. Too big picture? I get that a lot."

"No, it’s… thank you. This has actually been quite helpful." Yeah, kinda.

"I’d say any time, but honestly, if you see me again I may just throw you off something for a joke. How do you feel about roller coasters?"

"Um… neutral." Smart answer.

"Oh. You’re no fun."

And he's gone. Well.

Basira's here!

"Who was that?"

"Basira, please, I don’t have time."

"I know you don’t."

"Basira, let go."

"I don’t think so. Three weeks I’ve been waiting to catch sight of you, and now I find you chatting with Simon Fairchild. No, you’re not pulling your little vanishing act on me." Oh...

"How did you know about-"

"Yeah, Jon’s not the only one who listens to statements." Smart move.

"It’s none of your business."

"No? because it seems to me like you’re panning around are two very dangerous people right around the time you’re cutting all of us out. That makes me worried. It makes me suspicious. Tell me I’m wrong." I get her point. I'm worried too, and if I were in her shoes, I gotta admit I'd be suspicious as well.

"You’re wrong."

"So what’s going on then? Talk to me."

"It’s. Complicated."

"What, they’re just here out of the goodness of their hearts helping you save the world from Extinction?" Of course not...

"You know about that?"

"Yeah, Jon found the tapes you made for him -"

"Shh, shh!"

"Found a stash of them a while ago. I made sure he shared with the club."

See, there's still hope. He made at least several tapes for Jon. That still counts as an attempt at communication!

"Jon may be going through the whole “we have to trust Martin” thing, but I’m not. As far as I can see you’re either compromised or you’re being played, and I want to know which."

"I didn’t know Jon had listened to them already."

"Well, he has. He seems to think you’ll come to him when you need him. I think you’re feeding him what he needs to hear so he doesn’t bother you." She's not wrong.

"Look, I don’t have time for this. I don’t like that I have to work with Peter any more than you do, and I didn’t know that Simon was involved until today. But I would hope that you and Jon understood the importance of preventing an apocalypse." It's not only about that...

"I guess I’m just a bit burned out on the end of the world."

"Yeah, well, that’s your problem."

"And if you really think this whole Extinction thing is it, why not come to us for help?"

"I can’t. Peter’s the one with the plan, and… it needs me to be alone.

"And you don’t see anything suspicious about that?" Of course he does but...

" ‘course I do, but it might be the only way and… so far at least he’s been honest with me. Awful, but honest." Yes, what he's been saying may be the truth. But all the things that he didn't say...

And Martin knows about that. But it's easier to just ignore that...

"I need to do this. For everyone." Martin...

"You’re not expecting to come out of this, are you?"

"I’ll do what I have to. If I’m right, no one else needs to get hurt." YOU BETTER NOT-

Oh, everything is blurry cause I have tears in my eyes, great

YOU BETTER NOT SACRIFICE YOURSELF, IS THAT CLEAR

"Okay. You want to do whatever grand sacrifice you think is going to save everyone, go ahead. But you’d best be sure you’re not just playing their game."

"I know what I’m doing." AND THIS IS WHAT MAKES IT ALL SO TRAGIC

"We’ll see. Don’t make me regret this."

"Yeah. Don’t tell Jon. Please." OBVIOUSLY HE DOESN'T WANT JON TO KNOW AAAAH

"Fine. I can’t promise you he won’t just Know it, though."

"How is he?"

"Hungry. But he’s keeping it together."

"that’s good. Can I go now?"

"Sure."

Well

AAAAAAAAAAAAAH-

*repeatedly hits head against the desk* Why. do. all. my. favourite. characters. have. self sacrificing. tendencies.

Jon and Martin are both so really to sacrifice themselves, but they also wouldn't let each other do so. Which is why they need to talk.

Okay, we got quite a few answers. I mean, not exactly what I hoped for, but it's better than nothing I guess.

Simon Fairchild... He's funny, but also. A menace.

Also, I only have 9 episodes to finish the season, I'm SCARED.

I plan to listen to episodes 159 and 160 next Sunday, for my birthday. Depending on what happens in episode 159, maybe I won't listen to episode 159. Cause I don't want too much angst for my birthday, you know? I don't know what's gonna happen, but I don't wanna risk it.

(I MEANT TO POST THIS YESTERDAY AND I GOT VERY BUSY AND THEN TOO TIRED, MY BAD)

"Statement of Herman Gorgoli, regarding his period trapped alone in a suburban area of Cheadle." Alone? So, this one is gonna be about the Lonely??? Doesn't that remind you of a certain someone????

"Life is hard. I don’t want to bum you out or anything, but yeah. You’re all alone, trying to connect with people, trying to find your place in the world, but in the end the only person you really know is yourself, and even then, not all that well." What a joyous start...

"There’s plenty of things I’ve done I couldn’t explain to you. I mean, I’m constantly, constantly looking back at my past self and thinking, “What an idiot! How the hell could he have done such an obviously stupid thing? How was I surprised it went so badly?What a relief I’m now so much older and wiser.” Except that last part never really turns out to be true, does it? The line of when you were your dumb younger self seems to keep moving forward with you, until each more mature and reasonable version of you eventually falls foul of it and becomes a young idiot." Wait, I thought that this was the case for everyone? I mean, I'm turning 22 next week so obvi when looking back on my past, I see how young and dumb I was, cause I was young and dumb sometimes. And in a few years, what I do will probably feel at least a little bit dumb to my future self.

"And when you add in another person, you reach a whole other level. You can love them, marry them, dedicate your life to them, but that’s not the same as actually understanding them." See this? This right here? It would be a great summary for an angst fanfic.

"I was with Alberto for fifteen years, and I tell you what, I could always anticipate him. He always used to get annoyed at how predictable I found his mood sometimes, but damn if I ever really knew why. Of course, it doesn’t help that when you’re that close to someone everything starts to reflect on each other, one bad mood feeds into another and stress just bounces back and forth between you. It can get real bad if you’re not careful. And we weren’t careful." Don't hit me with the angst...

"The thing is, when we both found ourselves in positions to be working from home, we actually thought it was going to be really good for our relationship. The two of us, spending all our time together; we reckoned it was going to be real romantic." Tbh, that's probably what a lot of people thought during lockdown in 2020.

Now that I think about it, the Lonely must have hit so many people at that time...

"And when Alberto’s parents offered to sell us their second home in Cheadle, we thought it was a great investment: nice and quiet, good neighbourhood, just a real nice home for the two of us, and so much bigger than anything we could afford in the city. And before you think Cheadle the suburb of Manchester, that’s not the one I’m talking about. I’m talking about Cheadle, the suburb of Stoke-on-Trent" Well, maybe it's still a nice place!

"Hell, technically it’s not even a suburb. It’s just a village that looks so much like a suburb that you could pull it up drop it on the edge of any dull town in England and it would look the same. Just street after street of identical, blandly pleasant houses, all winding around each other in dead ends and cul-de-sacs and one-way streets, making sure every house has plenty of inoffensive garden. I’ve never seen people happily living in a place so obviously dead." It was that boring?

"Two years we lived there : two years imprisoned in that beige, comfortable house with the man I loved, watching our relationship turn to sniping and snapping and bitter passive aggression." Ouch... A relationship deteriorating slowly...

"I’d say that cheating on him was a foolish act of past me, but honestly, it’s one of the few decisions I’ve ever made that I completely understand." CHEATING???? I can excuse the tragic, poetic angst of a relationship slowly turning bitter and people falling out of love, but CHEATING???

"I didn’t even try to hide it, not really, and when he found out and it all ended, I kind of hated myself for just how relieved I was that I’d finally be able to leave that place, to get in my car and drive awayvfrom that gentle suburban nightmare." This is sad cause it's realistic. A lot of people see that their relationship isn't what it used to be, that the loved has faded and is gone, and they still stay. They could leave, but they stay, they need something big to actually break up, some actual damage.

"I mean, I’d lived there for two years and I still got lost trying to leave. I thought that was the worst that place would ever make me feel. Wish I’d been right." Oh?

"I got a cheap apartment in Liverpool and tried to tell myself I was happier. The single life, footloose and … sitting at home binging bad TV. I tried to get back into the club scene, but honestly, I think I’m just too old now. The music wasvtoo loud, the drinks were too expensive and the sort of thing I used to take to be dancing all night now hit me with a comedown so hard that I had to write off almost the entire week." Okay, I get it. I don't really like clubs (or bars) for the very same reason. (The music being too loud, not the substance abuse part. Call me a goody two shoes if you want, but that's not really for me)

"It didn’t help that, over the course of a ten-year relationship, “my friends” had become “our friends” and there weren’t any of them siding with me in this situation." Ouch, yeah, that tends to happen... But tbh, I'm not sure I would side with my friend if their relationship has ended because they cheated on their partner...

"It was miserable, but every time I thought about going back, I felt nauseous. The idea of returning to those eggshell walls that we never got around to repainting, and the living room that expected me to sit there and watch Midsomer Murders until I passed away peacefully in my sleep … It made me want to throw up." But you don't have to go back. It's okay to just... try and live the life you actually want. Just like it was okay to find the courage to break up without hurting your partner like that.

'I’d probably have stayed away forever if it hadn’t been for the moose." The what

Sam Winchester, what are you doing here?

"There was a carved wooden moose, you see, something Alberto’s grandfather had carved, apparently, and a real family heirloom. It was an ugly old thing, with this weird angular face that always made my skin crawl a bit. I’d never let him display it in our house, so it had lived in one of the suitcases under the stairs, the suitcases I pulled out and filled in a tearful rage when I was leaving. So yeah, I’d kind of accidentally stolen the moose" Okay...

"When he finally realised and texted me, demanding it back, I should probably just have sent it by post, but no, for some reason I decided I was going to drive all the way down there and give it back in person. Maybe I was hoping for a fight, or just to see him again. I don’t know." If this was a fanfic, I would have clicked off right there. Cause no matter what happens next, it's gonna be frustrating. Wait, no, I would have clicked off at the cheating mention.

(Okay, maybe I have a problem with cheating, but I hate that trope)

"It was late when I got to what I thought was his street, driving through the one way signs and well-maintained gardens that bordered that snaking road" He's gonna get lost, isn't he?

"My satnav had decided to start sending me around in a circle and I was apparently no closer to finding our— Alberto’s house. The roads weren’t like I remembered them. Or rather, they were exactly like I remembered them: bland, interchangeable and impossible to navigate." Oh, it really reminds me of episode 013, Alone...

"I must have driven around for almost half an hour before I finally decided that, if the internet and GPS couldn’t help me, I’d have a proper look at the actual paper map that I kept in the boot. I spent a few minutes scanning the Cheadle area until I found the road I was looking for: Ash Tree Hill. Then I drove on until I found a street sign at the next turning, hoping to compare it to what was on the map. And then I stopped, because the sign said: “Road” – no name, just “Road”. And it wasn’t as though the actual name of the street had been defaced or removed. The sign was complete; it just didn’t say anything else." Odd...

"So, I drove on until I found the next one. “Street.” I tried to compare it to the map –maybe this place just had some really bland road names and somehow I’d never noticed in the two years I’d lived there – but no, the places on the map all had the names I remembered: Chapel Street, Meadow Drive, Station Road. Bland, sure, generic … but not literally placeholder. I pressed on, looking for more. “Avenue,” “Close,” “Way,” “Lane.” Only ever the suffix, never with a name attached." This is really weird...

"By this point, I was starting to feel a little bit freaked out, and I decided to just get out of there." Finally a good decision. But it's probably too late already...

"But as you might imagine, getting out of there proved even more difficult than finding the house I was looking for." Obviously.

"Every time I thought I’d found a main road that led out of this weird looping suburbia, a one-way sign seemed to spring up, directing me back into the sprawl. I did U-turn after U-turn as I was channelled into one dead-end cul-de-sac after another, until eventually I decided to simply disregard the one way signs completely. I cruised past the one that seemed to be blocking my most likely exit, and almost breathed a sigh of relief, as I found myself leaving the suburban maze I’d been trapped in. Until it led me into an entirely different maze of unremarkable residential neighbourhoods."

This is Spiral coded...

"It wasn’t that there was anything abnormal about the whole situation. It was just that the normal seemed to go on forever. At some point, I got out of the car and started hammering on random doors. I mean, I tried the doorbells at first, but they were silent, so I started knocking and knocking until my hand hurt. There was no answer at any of them. There were no lights on behind the drawn curtains, and all the house numbers were zero." This is even creepier... It reminds me of those pictures of liminal spaces you can see online, you know?

"I got back into my car and started driving again, going on and on until finally I ran out of petrol, and it rolled to a sputtering stop at the end of one of the indistinguishable dead ends. It had been full dark for hours by this point, and my dashboard claimed it was 3am. My phone had died about an hour ago, and once the last of the power went in the car, I was left with no way to tell the time at all." Lost in an endless suburban maze at 3 am. This is a situation that I do not envy at all.

"There were no lights on in any of the houses, but the identical lampposts bathed the place in a sickly orange as far as I could see. I decided that the roads must be the problem – they were what was keeping me trapped in this place, constantly turning and bending and confusing me. If I just picked a direction and kept to it, eventually I had to get to the edge of what, by now, I had decided was a newly built neighbourhood that apparently no-one had moved into yet." That's totally not the explanation but alright

"So, I started walking, going around houses and through gardens, trying at all times to keep my direction straight and consistent." That might be a solution, yeah.

"I don’t know how long I went on like this, but it felt like hours. At the start, I was counting how many houses I passed, but when I got to a hundred, I stopped." Okay, maybe that's not the solution.

"Eventually my legs started to go, and I decided I needed some rest. I was about to sit on the street, when a thought occurred. I marched up to a nearby front door, prepared to kick in the flimsy-looking wood, but trying the handle revealed it was unlocked." At this point, entering a random house is the only thing you can do.

"The lights worked, which was a relief, and the inside looked exactly how I expected it to. And I mean, exactly how I expected it to: from the blank IKEA furniture, to the subtly-patterned cream wallpaper, to the picture frames lining the wall containing what were clearly stock photos, each of a different family pantomiming a scene of domestic bliss." This is so creepy...

"I headed into the living room and sat down on one of the almost-comfortable armchairs. My body was aching, and my eyes were heavy, and I had the thought that maybe I should head up to the bedroom. In the back of my mind, though, I knew that was a trap. I had somehow become convinced that if I went to sleep here, then I would never leave." Yeah, it feels like a trap.

"My hand drifted down and brushed a plastic remote control. Almost on instinct, I picked it up and turned the TV on; a cooking show, a woman I almost recognised fussing over a turkey. She was talking, or at least, it sounded like she was. The cadence and the sounds were so much like English that it took me almost a full minute to realise that she wasn’t actually saying words. She never looked at the camera, and there seemed to be something wrong with her eyes, though I couldn’t say what. Her hands moved over the pale skin of the turkey, poking it and prodding it as though preparing it, though she wasn’t actually doing anything to it. Eventually, she gripped a part of it between finger and thumb and tore off a long strip of dry-looking meat, before tossing it over her shoulder and returning to her strange mimicry of cooking." That feels like the Stranger...

"I hit the remote again. A shopping channel. The host was a tall, clean-shaven man with close-cropped hair. He was holding a brick and talking about it in that same flow of non-words, that still had a familiar salesman’s patter. The screen scrolled the message “buy now!”, though there was neither price nor contact details, as this man, who wouldn’t look at the camera, earnestly pretended to sell me a brick."

The fake aspect kinda reminds me of Don't Worry Darling...

"I leaned back in the chair, trying to think clearly about what was happening, and my eyes found themselves focusing on the ceiling, on a small spot of red that seemed to have seeped through from above." Oh?

"As I climbed those stairs, I desperately tried to tell myself I didn’t know what was going to be up there. And to be fair, I was surprised by some of the details." What is there? Blood? A dead body?

"But as soon as I saw the spot, I just knew that someone else was up there and that they were dead. The only questions were how and who. I think I’d given up on why." Oh.

"I didn’t know them, as it turned out. A young woman, conservatively dressed –her face was bloody, but I was sure I didn’t recognise her. She had a bag with her, and her ID read ‘Yetunde Uthman’ – not a name I’d ever encountered before. Just another victim of this place. It looked as though she had forced her head through the mirror on the dressing table, the shards cutting her n face and neck to ribbons, a particularly large piece piercing her jugular, spilling blood all down the unremarkable white table and onto the light brown carpet below." Oh no, that poor lady...

"I turned and ran, all my tiredness gone in a sudden rush of adrenaline, down the stairs, out the door and into the night and the rows upon rows of bland, empty houses" Run. This isn't gonna do much, but run anyway.

"And then, all at once, I wasn’t running anymore. I was lying on the ground, collapsed, the tarmac rough and cool against my cheek, wet from my tears. I was going to die – I knew that now – just as she had, just as anyone else who came here had. How many corpses lay waiting behind the placid facade of this endless false suburbia?" This is really terrifying.

"And that was when I heard it. It was quiet, and my mind took a few moments to accept it could be real, but sure enough, there it was: the sound of my phone’s ringtone." The phone that's out of battery??

"I looked up, and not three doors down was my car, the door still open where I had left it. I stumbled over, my legs still weak, and grabbed the handset, which should have been long out of battery, and I stared at the glowing screen. It was Alberto. He was calling me; I don’t know how." Oh!

"But the tears came even faster now, as I answered, sobbing with relief to hear him yelling at me for taking so long. Had I forgotten? Was I even planning to bother? I tried to reply, to explain, but all I could manage to say, to get through the shaking sobs, was, “I love you.” " I don't know if this is wholesome or awful... I mean, yeah, I get it that on the moment there is such a relief, but that won't fix the relationship on a long term...

"He went very quiet, and then he hung up. It didn’t matter, though, because when I looked around, the windows of the houses were lit, and a woman was coming down from her front door to ask if I needed help with my car." Things are back to normal...

"We’re working on it, the two of us. We’re not exactly back together yet, but I think it’s going well. He’s reluctant to sell the house, but I’ve made it quite clear that I’m never going back to the suburbs, even if I can’t really tell him why." As long as it works for the two of them...

"I checked to see if I could find anything about Yetunde Uthman, and I did find a few old social media profiles, but I wasn’t able to get through to any family or friends. As far as I can tell, she disappeared a year ago. And nobody noticed." Okay, this is probably the scariest part. Being so alone that nobody notices when you're not there.

Well, that certainly wasn't a parallel at all.

Jon, please, go talk to Martin, now.

"The Lonely is possibly the most insidious of the powers, I believe. Certainly, it is the one that most delights in having you do its work for it. Even the spiders seem to have a hard time matching it for sheer seductiveness. Time to yourself, self-care, putting yourself first, not being a burden on those you care about. It doesn’t even need to tell you any lies. It just waits for the lies you tell yourself." Yeah...

"We’re all well aware that, with Peter Lukas in charge of the Institute, it’s a very real danger to all of us. We are trying. Daisy, Basira and I, we don’t leave the Institute much anymore, so we do spend a lot of time together. It’s not that easy though. When everyone has so many walls, so many defences, sometimes you can feel lonely even when you’re all in the same room." It can be rough, yeah... With everything that happened, how else could it be?

"But it’s better than the alternative, and at least none of us are suffering alone. Martin’s got it the worst of course, but it still seems to be his choice, and I have to trust that he knows what he’s doing." I like that he respects his choice and trust him about it.

But they still need to talk.

Melanie's there, hi!

"Jon, have you got a moment?"

"Uh, course, I was just, um, having a statement."

"Oh … A-an old one?"

"Wha— Yes, an old one! I’m not— I’m doing my best." And this is a good thing!

"Uh, I just wanted to talk to you about, well, um, my… ‘career,’ I guess? My position in the Archives."

"I see …" "Look, I’m not going to do my job anymore." What do you mean? You can't exactly quit... "I’m not sure I follow. You know we can’t quit. We’ve all tried."

"I didn’t say I was going to quit. I said I’m not going to do my job: no researching, no filing, no field trips, nothing that is going to help the Institute in any way. I’ll still be around, I just … I can’t be a part of this anymore. If I get sick, I get sick, and if I die…" Please, don't die. Don't put yourself in danger like that...

"Why?"

"Because this place is evil, Jon. And so, doing this job, helping it out, even in small ways, is in some ways evil tool. Every time we try to use it to do good, it just seems to make everything worse. And … And I will not be a part of that anymore." Okay, I get it. She's not wrong...

"What about the Unknowing? W-we saved the world."

"Did we? I-I mean, I think it was the right thing to do, but how many people were killed to do it? W-we weren’t even a neutral party. We did it as agents of The Eye, because Elias told us to."

"A-and then you put him in jail." "Martin put him there. A-and he’s still doing harm! You ever think that maybe this whole ritual business is just an excuse, and that we’re all just part of some huge, miserable fear machine?" This is probably what's happening. It was only a step in one of his plans.... and he's still scheming...

"I’ve… considered the possibility." "Right, well, if I’m just another cog, maybe I can’t leave the machine, but from this moment, I’m not turning. I’m jammed." I get her point. I really do. But please don't die.

"Did your therapist suggest this?"

"N-not exactly. She’s just helped me work through some things I’ve been thinking for a while. She doesn’t know the details, just that I’m in a bad contract situation working somewhere pretty awful. She thinks I work for the Tories." lol. Obviously, she can't tell her the truth...

"Melanie, could you … Could you describe your therapist for me?"

"What? You think I wouldn’t notice if she had cobwebs down her face?" "No." "That’s it, isn’t it? You really think I’m so stupid I wouldn’t have noticed if my therapist was some kind of monster?"

"I just… It was a worry." Jon, come on...

"Right, right, okay. I know. That is why I ruined my first four sessions and almost torpedoed the chance at a genuinely really good therapist, because I was so paranoid that she was going to turn out to be some … something trying to manipulate me. But no. She’s not full of spiders, or made of wax, or wearing the therapist’s skin or whatever. She’s just a well-trained professional, who I am paying to help me." Good. Tbh, now that I think about it, maybe it's a good thing that she can't tell her therapist all the weird truth. Because a normal therapist means a... break from all the horrors, kinda. And it's helping her.

"Okay. It’s just, The Web can be subtle, you understand?" Jon, stop pushing it.

"And? For all you know, its plan is to paralyse you with indecision, leaving you sitting here, terrified that everything you do is somehow all part of its grand plan. And who do you think that fear’s going to feed?" She's not wrong.

"Yes, well, you are not the first to make that point."

"Look, I didn’t come here for a fight. I just wanted to let you know what was going on. If you need me, I’ll be trying to get Daisy drunk."

"Good luck. It’s only ever happened once, in 2006. She drank a—Sorry. Didn’t mean to."

"Sure. See you around."

That was almost funny...

Well. It was angsty.

The JonMartin parallels are... Well, they were definitely there.

You know what, I choose to see it as something... hopeful. Yeah, it was angsty and scary. But it was somewhat of a happy ending. I mean, those two guys manage to work it out. I choose to see it as a good omen.

Martin's recording a statement! Is it going to be about the Extinction again?

"It’s weird the things that land you a job sometimes. I mean, a first from Corpus Christi, Cambridge, a masters in Biological Sciences – you’d think that would be enough to get a decent science job. But as it turns out, the competition these days is legitimately ridiculous, and trying to get a position based on my academic record seemed to be a complete waste of time." I FEEL YOU

"Then I applied to the Anglo Brazilian Amazon Trust, and do you know what actually got me the job? I had a half blue in modern pentathlon and another in orienteering from my undergrad days. Apparently, most of the science positions were generally applied to by the sort of people who pursued academia specifically to avoid ever having to climb up a hill, and the job required a certain degree of outdoorsmanship." Oh.

"It was enough that I had the knowledge, fitness and, most importantly, was willing to basically chuck in my entire life in England with no notice to fly off to Brazil for who knows how long. Strange how things work out sometimes, isn’t it?" Almost too strange...

"For a start, there wasn’t a lab, not really. They’d built this facility just on the edge of the Caracaraí Ecological Station and, from a distance, you’d think it was just this big wooden hut, and it kind of was, just full of incredibly high-tech kit." Okay...

"Basically, everything on-site was designed for quick storage and processing any specimens for travel. Keeping a lab environment up and running in the middle of the Amazon was never really an option, so most of our job was focused on retrieving whatever they wanted testing and making sure that it got to the actual lab intact, wherever that might have been." So, your job is basically side quests.

"My specific job was to head out into the jungle, usually babysitting some weedy wannabe explorers who insisted on coming along, and then snag whatever they needed to retrieve." It sounds kinda annoying but I guess it could be worse?

"And we’re very careful to stick to the bits of jungle we’ve been assigned, as we’re right next to the Yanomami Indigenous Territory and accidentally crossing into it ends up being a bit politically complicated, and even pretty dangerous if you cross paths with the wrong group. The Yanomami can get pretty territorial. I mean, I guess you would be too if you had that many companies trying to illegally strip-mine your land." Oh, I see.

"The worst part is the number of dickhead scientists who turn up with the same played-out Cannibal Holocaust jokes. It’s like, sure, technically they practice endocannibalism, but it’s just the bone-ash of their relatives and loved ones, so, you know, calm down Dr Livingstone, there’s no way they’d respect your sweaty ass enough to even consider eating you." Oh, I remember hearing something about endocannibalism back in october when my algorithm clearly knew I was watching Hannibal...

"I usually head out with the other Specimen Tech, Fernanda Machado, a local. And by local, I mean she’s from Manaus, about 200 miles away. Brazil’s pretty big." It is. Never been there, but from what I've heard, it's a very vast country.

"And if there’s one thing she’s really good on that I’m not, it’s the weather. I’m pretty hopeless at figuring out what any given day’s going to be like, and just have to rely on whatever weather site I’m currently losing faith in. It doesn’t help that the weather in the Amazon is just plain weird, with rains coming out of nowhere months before the winds should actually be bringing in the clouds, and no one knows why. But Fernanda, she might not know why, but somehow she always knew when, to the point where if she said it might be bad, I would just cancel the expedition, no further evidence needed." That's so cool!

"No, that day we had the world's pushiest climate scientist breathing down our necks. Dr Nikos Anastas. I mean, I’d read his studies and he did good work, sure, but the way he acted, you’d have thought that the oceans were going to drown us all tomorrow if we didn’t get out there." Oh? Why in such a hurry, huh?

"I mean, Fernanda and I were no strangers to patronising scientists explaining our jobs back to us, but Dr Anastas was a whole other level. He talked to us like we were five-year-olds who’d just asked him what recycling was. Fernanda was certain it was going to rain, but he’d “checked online” and it apparently said it was going to be fine. Besides, he had some real big money backing him, so we couldn’t really push the issue." Ugh, he's already annoying me...

"In the end, we went out into the jungle, and even I could tell that the colour of the sky through the canopy was bad news." Well, let's see how it goes... (bad, probably)

"Dr Anastas was looking to measure pollutant and plastic levels in some of the nearby rivers. The various ecological protection laws should mean that they had virtually none of either, and he was looking into something to do with pollutant transmission and chemical spread from industrial sites. If it hadn’t been for the standard NDAs they were always getting us to sign, I could have already told him the sort of results he was going to get – he wasn’t the first to come here for this kind of work – but my hands were tied. If you’re wondering, by the way, the answer is pretty damn polluted, largely due to various illegal mining and logging operations and land seizure in the area" Not surprising. Also, this is definitely going to be about the Extinction.

"The point is, we were barely an hour into the trek, when the skies opened. The rain came down thick, thick in that way that I’ve only ever found in the jungle, where there aren’t really droplets, it’s more like the air just turns to water." I heard about it, it must be pretty impressive.

"The rain was bad, but we’d handled worse and we were perfectly calm. Not so much Dr Anastas, who was clearly panicking. He shouted at us, yelling over the sounds of the rain-soaked jungle that we had to go back, before immediately charging off in the wrong direction." They told you, why are you surprised?

"Obviously, we wanted to leave him to his own stupidity and let the Amazon deal with him, but we both knew that it just wouldn’t be worth the paperwork." lol

"So, we followed him, trying to slow his pace long enough to let him know that he was going the wrong way, but either he couldn’t hear us or, more likely, he wasn’t inclined to listen." He's very stubborn....

"Finally, I grabbed his arm, pulling him to a stop. He said something I couldn't make out and pulled back, trying to throw off my grip. Clearly, he hadn’t considered I’d be the stronger, and when my grip held firm, he unbalanced himself. He shifted his leg, trying to keep his footing, but slipped on the now muddy ground, falling and pulling me with him. I instinctively grabbed Fernanda for support, but ended up pulling her down as well, the three of us tumbling down a short, muddy decline and landing hard in the foliage." Collective fall, yay

"It wasn’t a huge fall, but I felt strangely disorientated, as I clambered to my feet, shaking my head in an attempt to dispel some of the fuzziness that had settled over it. The others clearly felt it too, although checking ourselves over it seemed we’d been lucky: all we had broken was our equipment, although Dr Anastas whined about that almost as much as if it had been a bone." Okay, could be worse.

"I was finding it really hard to get a solid idea on where we were. I couldn’t figure out exactly which way we had come, and I couldn’t get a clear read on the sun through the canopy and clouds. Fernanda wasn’t having any better luck with the compasses, as they were either broken or something magnetic in the area was messing with them. They just gently span around and around." Okay, that's weird...

"There was at least something resembling a trail, though not one I recognised. Honestly, we should have just waited it out until we were overdue at the facility and they sent out a retrieval team, but that would take almost a full day, and I could see in Dr Anastas’ eyes that there was no way he was going to wait that long. So, we picked a direction and started walking the trail." You know the jungle like the back of your hand and you see an unknown trail? Sure, following that trail won't lead to anything negative happening.

"When I first saw the structures, my instinct was to turn around and go back. From a distance, they looked like shabono, the huge ring of thatched roofs the Yanomami place around their settlements for shelter." Oh. Yeah, leave.

"It didn’t make sense, though. There was no way we’d gone so wildly off course as to end up in the Indigenous Territory, absolutely no way. But there was something else. Something about their construction seemed off, wrong somehow. So much so that when Fernanda grabbed my arm and urgently whispered that we had to leave, I shrugged her off and headed forward for a better look." Listen to her and leave!!!

"That was when I noticed how quiet it was. Aside from the rain, the jungle cacophony had simply stopped. As I got closer to the shabono, it became clear what was" It's never good when a forest or jungle is quiet.

"As I got closer to the shabono, it became clear what was wrong with it. Although each roof was thatched like normal, the stands weren’t made of leaves, but all kinds of different materials instead: long strands of plastic, shards of rusted metal, even oddly shaped hunks of cement. They wrapped through and around each other like any other thatch, but the texture, the colour, everything about it was different in a way that made my stomach churn, though I wasn’t exactly sure why." This is very odd...

"I shared a look with Fernanda. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. We both knew how isolationist the Yanomami tended to be, how resistant they were to any outside influences. The idea that they would have the desire to build, or even the equipment to build, something like this was ridiculous." Yeah, they're probably not the ones who built that, so why and how is it here?

"Dr Anastas, though, didn’t know enough about the Yanomami or their buildings to be unsettled, and instead voiced his irritation that we were standing around chatting rather than going for help. He walked around to one of the gaps in the shabono and headed inside." Bro had literally every day to be a dimwit and he chose that one.

"Fernanda and I scrambled after him, desperately hoping that we were good enough communicators to be able to convey apologies to whoever was in there." I don't think that's gonna be a problem...

"But the inside was just like the outside, and in the worst possible way. There were no people in there, but that’s not the same thing as it being empty. Instead there were … figures." Oh?

"From a distance, they looked like human beings standing impossibly still, but getting closer quickly revealed the lie. They were just the rough shapes, cobbled together out of a hundred different pieces of garbage: a broken metal clothes horse for a ribcage, a plastic chair leg for an arm, rusted screws for teeth. In some cases, it looked like someone had gone to a lot of effort to match anatomy with construction. I saw one with a broken water cooler where its stomach would be, and another had a pair of old oxygen tanks standing in for lungs." This is so unsettling...

"They were completely still, but there was something about them that made my mouth dry up and my mind scream to run. It didn’t feel like they were statues. It felt like they were choosing not to move." I got chills.

"Dr Anastas didn’t seem to have the same unease with the situation as me and Fernanda, as he examined and prodded the figures with apparent delight. Maybe he thought avant-garde jungle art was just something that happened out there, I don’t know." Welp.

"I never got a chance to ask him, because suddenly he was cooing with delight at something he’d picked up off the ground. The ground, I could now see, was simply a half inch of loose dirt over the top of a massive plastic tarpaulin." I had to look up what a tarpaulin is, I didn't know that word.

"He came over to show us his discovery. It was a chunk of concrete that appeared to be the exact size and shape of a tiny pit viper, even down to the detail on its head." Leave it alone.

"The doctor seemed quite taken with it, but Fernanda immediately sensed something was wrong and stepped back, pulling me with her." Fernanda's got something called self preservation instinct.

"The lifeless concrete viper spun around, opened its mouth, and bit Dr Anastas on the wrist." Ouch, that was bound to happen...

"He screamed, but only for a second, because after that his throat was full. He started convulsing, as grey, liquid concrete began to pour from his mouth, from his nose and his eyes. His limbs went rigid and I could see his body starting to swell with it" Ew...

"I don’t know if it was me or Fernanda screaming, maybe it was both of us, but I know it was her that first spotted that the detritus figures were no longer choosing to stand still. That was the last I ever saw of Dr Nikos Anastas. There was never any question of trying to save him." Yeah, run, you couldn't have saved him.

"I don’t know how long we ran, but it was hours before we felt even remotely safe. The jungle looked normal again, and more importantly, it sounded normal." Okay, you're safe now.

"In the end, we crossed paths with a group of real Yanomami tribesmen. They were really friendly and, once they figured out that we were lost, they were very happy to return us to a part of the jungle we knew, near our facility." That's cool!

"Of course, we didn’t have a good explanation for what happened to Dr Anastas, so we lost our jobs pretty much immediately. But you know what? That’s fine. I’m done with the jungle." Understandable.

"There’s something in there, and I don’t know which scares me more: the thought that it’s more than just the things we left behind; or that that’s all it is, and we can’t escape the ruins of our own future." Wow.

Well. That was... something?

"There’s, um, a note here as well. Looks like Gertrude’s handwriting? Start of a letter to Dekker, thanking him for sending Judith to her, though it doesn’t look like it was ever finished or sent." Okay...

"I assume this is another one he was trying to use to prove the Extinction. It certainly has something in it. Mankind's trash giving rise to something terrible. Then again, fear of the other, inanimate humanoid figures… That’s all very Stranger, isn’t it?" I kinda thought about that too, yeah!

"Sort of surprised Peter hasn’t rocked up with some more “insights”. Haven’t seen him around for a while, actually. I mean, it’s not like I miss him, but at least he was someone to—Ah." Someone to talk to. That's what he wanted to say, right? He's really alone, FREE HIM. Even Peter Lukas isn't talking to him anymore, that's on purpose to get him to really become an avatar of the Lonely...

"Yeah, that makes sense. Alright, fine, just me on my lonesome for a while, then. Could be worse. Peaceful, at least." Nooo, don't get too used to it...

Oh, there's someone?

Oh, that's Georgie, hi!

"Oh, sorry. Um, Melanie told me to wait for her here?"

"Oh, you’re here for Melanie?

"Yeah. Georgie."

"Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t realise. I’m sure she’s around here somewhere."

"You must be Martin."

"Yeah. Has Melanie been talking about me? "Oh, um… Jon used to go on about you a lot." Of course he did haha

"Oh. Ah. So, you and Jon…"

"Aren’t really talking anymore."

"Right. … Why not?"

"Excuse me?"

"Why aren’t you talking?" You want to know, hm? Wait till you get asked the same question...

"Oh… Because I think he’s going to destroy himself and anyone who lets him get too close. And I don’t want that to include me. Or Melanie." Fair.

"Maybe he just needs some help." MAYBE YOU COULD HELP HIM "I did help him, as much as I safely could, but he just carried on anyway—

"Yeah, he’ll do that …"

"—and I realised if I kept trying it was going to hurt me more than I was willing to accept." That's totally understandable. I don't blame her for setting her boundaries.

"Well, sometimes helping people hurts."

"Sure, but that doesn’t mean everything painful helps. Sometimes people have problems that will wreck you long before you can make a dent in them. And some people don’t want help; they just want other people suffering with them." She's right. It's a good thing to want to help other people, but sometimes you can't do anything to actually help because they don't want help. It's okay to leave if it hurts too much for little to no result. It's okay to put yourself first in those cases! "Jon doesn’t want that."

"He doesn’t know what he wants. And from the sound of things, he’s run out of time to figure it out." Yeah, she's not wrong... "It’s easy to pass judgement from the outside."

"One more reason to stay on the outside."

"A-a-and wh-what, you think Melanie’s worth saving?"

"It’s not about worth, but yeah, she’s actually trying to get well, so I’m going to help her." Yeah!

Martin is trying so hard to defend Jon...

"This place isn’t a sickness."

"No, I think it’s worse."

"Look, we’re all just trying to do the right thing."

"Maybe. Look, life forces you to make hard decisions, but I can never trust someone who goes around looking for hard decisions to make."

"And what do you mean by that?"

"Jumping on a grenade is only heroic if you weren’t the one who actually threw it." I kinda get her point...kinda

"That’s not what’s happening."

"Okay. It’s still not something I want any part of." Once again, fair.

Ah, Melanie's there!

"Hey, you ready?"

"Oh, yeah, whenever you are."

"Who were you talking to?"

"Oh, I was, um… …Huh. No-one, apparently."

WAIT

WHAT

DID MARTIN JUST DISAPPEARED????

HE'S GETTING POWERS FROM THE LONELY

HE REALLY IS AN AVATAR NOW, HUH????

Oh no...

WHY ARE WE STARTING WITH ELIAS AGAIN-

WAIT HE GOT PUNCHED LOL

THAT WAS FANTASTIC

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR PUNCHING HIM, BASIRA, YOU ABSOLUTE QUEEN

"Useless, scheming piece of shit." I can't disagree.

She keeps hitting him hahaha

YES, GO ON, BEAT HIM UP!

He sounds scared, I like that

"I’m sorry."

"Oh yeah? For which part?"

"All of it?" Hit him again.

"You sent us to the North fucking Pole for no goddamn reason."

"A miscalculation."

"No. No, I’m done with your games." Yeah! Tell him!

"And when, exactly, were you planning to tell us he’s been feeding on innocents?

"I’ve always thought that a man’s eating habits were his own private business." PUNCH HIM AGAIN

"Or that we were being stalked by some freaky spider woman? Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that."

"Ah, yes. Well, to be honest, I’d advise you to leave that one well alone." No kidding.

"Look, I’ve been doing this a long time now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about The Web, it’s that it plays its own game. All you can really do is hope it doesn’t get in the way of whatever your plan is, because the Spider usually wins. Assuming you have a plan. Do you have a plan, Detective?" He's being way too smug...

"Why do you do that? What is that?"

"Do what?"

"You always call me Detective. Is that supposed to mean something?" "Honestly? I just like the way it sounds." You little-

"So, why’d you agree to see me?"

"I missed you." As if.

"Right. That’s why you’ve been refusing my visits since we got back?"

"I thought it might have been an idea to give you some space."

"Oh, and how’d that work out for you?" "Not ideally." Duh.

"So, what now? Another wild goose chase? More gloating about Jon’s ‘destiny’? Because right now, I’m having a real hard time figuring out why I shouldn’t just tell them to throw your little deal right out the window, and see how you do in here without special treatment." YEAH!

"I mean, you have plenty of reasons to do that, of course, but I’m not sure that they have any reason to listen to you."

"I’ll make them listen." "Will you? You’re not police anymore. You’ve done them some favours, but they’ve done you some as well, and I think you’ll find that the information that I’ve been giving to them has been far more consistently useful. You want to issue them an ultimatum? Go right ahead. I’m just not sure it’ll go quite how you hope." Destroy him.

"And, um, no more violence, Detective, or I may have to call in the guards." Punch him in the throat so that he can't.

"So that’s it, then."

"As far as I can tell, you have no interest in anything I have to say and mainly came here to let off steam. So yes, that’s probably it." YOU DESERVED IT. AND OBVI SHE'S NOT GONNA LISTEN TO YOU ANYMORE.

"Surprised you didn’t foresee it." "Well, that’s always been my problem: ever the optimist." He's way too annoying.

"You know, when you have no more useful information, and they’re done with you … "You’ll kill me, yes. I’m sorry to say, Detective, but you’re becoming predictable." Just shut it already...

"Goodbye, Detective. I shall miss our little chats." Punch him one last time. For good measure.

Well, at least I had quite a good laugh.

Okay, conversation between Jon and Basira...

"Just useless gloating, like I said he would."

"You should have let me come with." "No. Besides, he wouldn’t have seen me if I had."

"Can’t believe you’ve been seeing him all this time."

"Oh yeah, that’s the terrible secret sabotaging the trust between us." Well, that certainly didn't made it any better...

"Did he mention it at all? My, uh …"

"Oh, your new diet? Nothing useful. Didn’t seem too phased by it." Yeah...

"I don’t know. I mean, we still don’t really know what Elias actually is. I thought maybe if he was more like me than we realised …"

"He might have some advice?"

"Stupid, I know." Obvi.

"Yeah. Jon, we’ve been over this. The key is to not force people to feed you their trauma. You know, just don’t do it."

"It’s not that simple." Of course it isn't... But maybe there's another way?

"No, it is. Or I put you down." Wow. Can we stop with such threats already??? It's very unfair!

"Did he say anything about Annabelle?"

"Not really. Sounds like he’s not too worried, though. Says to just ignore it."

"Yeah, good luck with that."

"Any luck finding her?

"Haven’t really been trying. Doing that sort of thing consciously … makes me hungry." Ah. "Oh, well then, find a statement to your tastes and read it." Yeah, get a snack.

"I've been meaning to ask. The tape, the one of the, uh… my victim. You said Martin gave it to you?"

"Yeah."

"How was he? H-how did he look? Was he, uh …?" HE'S WORRIED ABOUT HIM

"I don’t know. I didn’t see him. He just left it on my desk with a note." Oh...

"Can I ask what it said?"

"Um, yeah. It said, “Talk to him.” " OH.

CANT THOSE TWO JUST TALK TO EACH OTHER???

Alright, statement time!

Oh, it's about a security guard! That must be quite a rough job, they must see some messed up things....

And his coworker disappeared?

"So, I lost my job last week. I mean, I quit –they didn’t fire me or nothing – but you know how, like, sometimes you quit because you want to and sometimes you quit because you’ve got to? Well, this was the second, although I’m not going to pretend that I’m not glad to see the back of the place." I don't know what happened, but good for him if he quit.

"It’s cos I kept asking about Samson, you know? And what I saw. And they really, really don’t want me to make a stink about that. Because if he just disappeared one day, didn’t come into work, that’s fine. I mean, not fine for his family, obviously, or for the police who have to find him, but fine for the company. If he disappeared at work, though, if what I think happened is even close to what actually happened, then that’s real bad news for them, and opens them up to all sorts of lawsuits and liability." That's what's messed up with capitalism and companies. You work hard for them, for so long, and if something happens to you, they're not sorry for you, they're just annoyed because that's an inconvenience for them.

"So, I work security, right? Used to be that a company or shop would have its own little security force they put together that did all the in-store and CCTV vigilance stuff." Yeah, it's very useful especially if you work at night...

"These days, it’s all centralised, though. You tend to have a building, or a shopping centre, that will contract all the security work out to a single company, who’ll then cover all the businesses or shops." Oh. That's interesting to know.

"If you’re lucky, you’ll be assigned to a post and stay there for years, getting to know the place, the systems and your co-workers. If you’re unlucky or there’re contract difficulties, you could easily end up moving through two or three different places in as many months." That sucks...

"That was kind of the case for me and Samson." Okay...

"Point is, they’d hired us for a job that no longer existed." Oh?

"I expected they’d just get rid of us, but I mean, to their credit, they did try to do right. They did their best to fit us in with other security teams. Over the last two years, we did a couple of data centres, a “digital marketing hub”, whatever that is, and three different office buildings near Kings Cross. Trouble was, every time, almost as soon as we got there, there’d be some personnel changes or expiring contracts or some other trouble, and generally, as the last in the door, we were the first to get reassigned. Started to feel a bit like we were cursed, you know?" Cursed probably isn't the right word...

"Samson took it harder than I did. I mean, I’m young, my mum’s got a flat in Hackney, and, to be honest, most of my evenings are out with friends or in with Black Ops, so the moving around was pretty much fine with me. Sam had a three-year-old, though, and lived way down in Morden, so being thrown from one post to another all the time was really kind of getting to him." Yeah, that's terrible if you wanna have a good schedule...

"Now, I’m not sure I can legally name the shopping centre I was working in to you guys, but let’s just say it wasn’t the Westfield. It was old, clearly been around decades, and the security systems really showed it. I mean, one of the shops still had the original alarms from the late seventies, and plenty of them still had cameras that recorded to VHS for God's sake. The security office was a mess." It's already gloomy...

"Flatscreens next to banks of the old CRT monitors that some of the cameras had to feed into, next to racks of channel banks and a few actual, honest-to-God, computers that tried their best to wrestle everything into something that was almost useable." It's gonna be complicated to work with that...

"I found it properly overwhelming, didn’t like the place at all, but Sam actually seemed to get on with it pretty well, almost from the get-go. He’d apparently been an engineer back in the day, and something about all these old surveillance systems all tied together, all wrapping into and around each other like some weird nest of cameras, seemed to really appeal to him." Good for him. Well, no, cause that's probably what caused his demise.

"He really did seem to get the place in a bit of a better order. I mean, some of it only he really understood, but soon enough, it actually made sense what we were watching and when, and he’d managed toget rid of some of the delay so that we even managed to catch a couple of shoplifters." At least it worked.

"There was only one piece of equipment that seemed to give him any trouble. It was this old Tecton multi-camera recorder, from the late 80s, that managed the feeds for one of the various budget shoe shops that lined the promenade. It didn’t seem all that complicated when you just looked at it, but trying to use it was an absolute nightmare. None of the buttons seemed to do exactly what you wanted them to do, and there were all sorts of sequences, where pressing a button, holding a button, pressing it three times and all that, they’d all do really different things." That thing was probably sentient...

"Sam spent almost a whole month wrestling with it, before he finally cracked and he asked Dave, the bearded old guy who we all sort of assumed had been there the longest, whether they still had any of the old operating manuals. I remember the smell of dust when Dave went and cracked open the filing cabinet in the back room, before waving his arms in the direction of the drawer and shrugging." Yeah, maybe it's gonna be easier with the instruction manual... if he finds it.

He found it!

"More of a pamphlet, really – can’t have been more than ten pages of A5 in the whole thing, yellowed and water-damaged. Well used, though. Someone had even put their name in the front, like they were afraid people were going to steal their manky instruction book." Wait... no, nobody would put their name on an instruction manual... DON'T TELL ME IT'S A LEITNER?????

"Still, Sam just couldn’t put it down. I mean, it was like ten in the morning when he finally found it, and when I went in at two to see if he’d taken his lunch break yet, he was still sat there, just staring at it."Oh no, that poor guy... He's already trapped...

"Ok, so this is the part that you’re definitely going to think I’m having a joke with you, but I’m honestly not. I’m dead serious. Cos I saw some of the pages over his shoulder, and on one of them, there was … There was a picture of me, like a black and white photo of my face." Oh no that's so creepy...

"Then Samson turned and looked at me and, I don’t know, I got real spooked. His eyes were all messed up, like weird and glassy. It was really, really freaky, and I just turned and I got out of there." I would have ran too.

"from that point on, Samson just gets creepier. For a start, he’s always at work. I mean, we’re not always on the same shift, so it takes me a while to notice, but when I ask him about it, he just says that our schedules must have synced up weird. But whenever I arrived, there he was, staring at the monitors, watching all the people come and go, his eyes wide like he was drinking it all in." That book was clearly linked to the Eye. I mean, obviously, but that's the first Leitner that's linked to the Eye that we know of!

"And whenever I was there late and it was my turn to close up, he’d always say that he was happy to do it, say I could head off a few minutes early, so I never actually saw him leave. I tried to stay once, said I needed to do it myself, but he just got real quiet, like, real quiet, and stared at me." That must have been so unsettling...

"The bank of monitors was behind him, and I’m just trying to come up with something to say, to get him to talk to me, and one by one, they begin to just wink off, turning dark." Oh no

"And I got this feeling, deep in my gut, that if that last monitor turned off, then something really bad was going to happen to me. It was one of the old CRT sets, big and bulky, and the picture on it was never that clear, but for a moment, it looked like it was me on there, staring right back at myself as the screens slowly went black, getting closer and closer." RUN. JUST RUN.

"The face on the monitor looked absolutely terrified, and I was starting to feel it myself. So, I just tried to smile, told him not to worry about it, and I headed out as quick as I could." Good, get out of here.

"Then there were the actual cameras. I mean, you work in a shopping centre, obviously you do a bunch of shopping there. I used to get my lunch, for one, and usually pick up any of the essentials I needed." The cameras were staring at you during your shopping?

"And obviously, because I work security, I know where all the cameras are, where they cover, even how they move. A lot of them are completely static, just pointing at one place, but gradually I start to notice something when I’m shopping. It’s like a tickling, creeping sensation all over the back of my neck. Like I’m being watched. And so, I start to keep an eye on the cameras when I’m in the shops and, you know what, I’m right. They’re following me. Whenever I look at them, doesn’t matter where it was they were meant to be aimed, they’re always focused right on me." Creepy...

"One time, when no-one in the store was looking, I threw a can of deodorant at one of them, hit it square on. Samson wore sunglasses for the next two days, and when I caught a glimpse of him without them, there was a crack, right down the centre of his eye." That's so weird... His eye became the camera, something like that?

"I wasn’t in work the week he disappeared. I’d called in with a bullshit stomach thing." Keeping some distance helps a lot sometimes.

"Then I got the call from Dave." Oh no

"I had no idea what he was talking about, but he kept screaming at me. He kept saying I must know; he must have told me what was going on. He kept saying, “What do we do with his eyes?” " What-

"I just went quiet, listening to Dave as he started sobbing down the phone. “He won’t stop,” he said. “We can’t get rid of his face.” I hung up." WHAT DOES IT MEAN?????

"Dave was gone when I went back in, a bunch of them were – all quit suddenly." Understandable

"I never saw Samson again either, though I did find his old work shirt in the back. It was torn to shreds and wrapped around that old instruction manual. I put it back in the filing cabinet and I threw the shirt away." Burn this instruction manual.

"I tried to stick around, to do my job, but I was asking too many questions for the folks upstairs, I think. I wanted to know why Samson hadn’t signed out of the building before he disappeared, why no matter who tried to reset the system, it always logged back in as him. Or why, whenever I was watching the monitors alone, I’d see him on that old CRT screen, staring right back at me, quietly calling for me to join him." This is so creepy!

The next guy working there is definitely gonna feel like playing FNaF...

That was so creepy!

"Better. Does reading a statement of the Ceaseless Watcher count as a sort of auto-cannibalism, I wonder?" Good question????

"Or some sort of bird-like regurgitation of fear, re-consuming second-hand terror? Whatever the analogy, I’m finding it harder and harder to ignore the diminishing returns, how much less satisfaction each one gives me." Ah... It doesn't hit the spot...

"My desire for follow-up, for verification, for proper digestion of the experience, it grows less and less. I honestly don’t care if Mr Maraj was chased down and consumed by his voyeuristic former friend, or if he has forgotten the whole affair, living in blissful ignorance. I just find my mind already wandering to the next statement, and the hopes that it won’t be quite as stale." Okay... That's quite concerning. He can just record more statements, cause they are a lot of those, but... if it has less and less effect, he might eat all of the statements in the archives within the month.

That hint of terror in his voice as he says the last sentence...

I'm worried about him...

Alright, let's get started!

Exploring Hill Top Road, yayyyyy

"Something’s here."

"No shit. Look at this place." Melanie, I love you so much.

"When did you say they finished rebuilding?"

"2008. Doesn't look like anyone ever moved in though."

"So, this is ten years of cobwebs?"

"More than that."

"No, I’m sure this is just the normal number of webs that grow up organically." Lol, that reminds me of what Jon said in episode 016...

"So, where are all the spiders?"

"I mean, they hide. You know, it’s a thing they do, spiders. They hide." Yeah, they do. Sometimes.

"Perhaps they bugged out." Okay, that actually made me laugh.

"Was that a joke?" Yes, and it was funny.

"Jon, focus. Are you getting any sense of anything? Can you See anything?"

"No, I’m just seeing what you’re seeing. Still a bit weak from our trip North, to be honest."

"Sorry we couldn’t stop for a snack." That was funny too

"Here, Mel."

"What even are these?" "Magnesium flares. Technically not legal anymore. If you need more, just shout." Cool.

"I'm fine. Uh, a-and please don't call me Mel.'

'What? Since when?"

"Always. I’m trying to be more open about this stuff."

"Roger wilco, Ms King."

"Better."

Okay, I absolutely love this whole conversation, but... I can't fully appreciate it cause I can just feel that things are gonna go sour.

"These flares going to work?"

"No idea, but Jon said The Web doesn't get on great with fire, and we don't exactly have a flamethrower, so…" That would be awesome

"I mean, at least until we find the one Gertrude stockpiled, right next to the nukes." tbh at this point it wouldn't be surprising

"I'm sure the flares will work fine. I mean, unless it's all some elaborate plot to have us burn this place down again." Could be, could be.

"So what if it is?"

"I don’t follow."

"I mean, anything we do could be part of the grand master plan. So, what, we do nothing? Just sit on our hands and hope that's not what the spiders want?" Hey, you're the one who suggested going there in the first place!

"Right, sure, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a bit more of a plan of our own, would it?"

"Exactly." YES!

"You want to come back later?"

"Yes! That's what I said, isn't it?" Melanie is the voice of reason about this whole thing.

"Well, we're here now. Might as well push on." Jon, no-

"Famous last words." LOL

Melanie, you absolute queen

"What about the basement?"

"Can’t see one." But there is one... Or at least there was in that parallel universe or something.

What's that noise?

WAIT, THAT'S THE RECORDING OF THE VERY FIRST EPISODE, WHAT

This is so creepy...

"Something underneath it."

"I see it. Hand me that brush."

"Is that what I think it is?"

"Yep. Official Institute paper and everything."

"Goddamn it!"

"Statement of Annabelle Cane. She left it for us." Oh.

"Honestly don’t know what else you guys were expecting." Fair. "Well, that’s it then. Come on, let's finish up and get out of here." Excellent idea "I-I mean, a-are we burning it?"

"The statement or the building?" Both.

"Both?" LOL

Okay, let's see what the statement is about!

"Statement of Annabelle Cane, regarding her history and her observations of the Magnus Institute, London. Original Statement written 20th July 2018." Alright...

"Free will is a funny old thing, isn’t it, Jon? Can I call you Jon? I’m going to call you Jon." I'M GETTING FLASHBACK FROM EPISODE 101

"Such a strange concept, woven together from a thousand different experiences and ignorances, a faculty we only ever truly ascribe to ourselves and, I suppose, to our gods. With any other animal, we talk about instinct, we talk about training. Perhaps, if we have spent enough time with them, we talk about personality. But we never talk about choice. We never look at a dog racing wildly after a thrown ball and think, ‘What an odd decision that dog has made.’ We talk about the workings of its mind and its instincts. If it doesn’t chase the ball, we wonder why. Is it sick? Is it tired? Perhaps something in the nature of this particular breed, this particular dog, makes it prone to ignoring a game a fetch? The idea of a dog simply choosing not to chase feels deeply unnatural. Is it even capable of legitimately making a decision? Some would say no." This is very interesting.

Choices, instinct, free will... A very relevant topic, huh?

"Of course, people are so very different from dogs. Our brains are larger, more complex; so many more little factors and wrinkles to push us and pull us. But does any of it actually constitute free will? Free of what? We all have forces that drive us, circumstances that direct us, and even if we choose to ignore these and act against all logic just to prove that we can, is that not simply allowing the existential terror of our own powerlessness to control us instead?" And one existential crisis coming up, one!

"Scans show that decisions are made by your brain long before your conscious mind even has a chance to register them. Most of one's life is simply spent looking back and convincing yourself that you chose deliberately to act like you did." Or rather, that you didn't choose, in a very specific situation...

"Have you ever read War and Peace, Jon? I know, I know. I had to read an extract from it for a literature class once, ended up reading the whole thing." Isn't that, like... a very long book? Not that it's a bad thing of course.

"It’s not actually as boring as people say, and its central thesis is that the tiniest most insignificant factors can control the destiny of the world." I'm probably gonna want to read it by the end of this episode.

"In his postscript, Tolstoy muses on the concept of free will, on whether or not he really believes in it. He ultimately decides that, if all the millions upon millions of factors and influences that weigh upon our choices were fully and completely known, then all could be foreseen and predetermined. But, he argues, it is quite impossible for the human mind to comprehend even a fraction of these, and in that vast, dark space of ignorance lies ‘free will’. " Okay, I'll write that down, that can be useful if I ever study this book in litterature class...

"Free will is simply ignorance. It’s just the name we give to the fact that no-one can ever really see everything that controls them." Hm. I don't really agree, but that's an interesting point of view.

"Of course, that’s not the real crux of the free will question that’s bothering you at the moment, is it? I think that one probably comes down to whether or not you’re choosing to continue reading this statement out loud. You didn’t mean to, did you? No, I’m sure you told Basira and Melanie that you were going to glance it over and report back. Perhaps they asked you if you were going to record it and you shook your head. “Maybe later.” That sounds like the sort of thing you’d say." Oh...

"But think about it, Jon, when’s the last time you were able to read a statement quietly to yourself without instinctively hitting record and speaking it aloud? Is it just instinct, habit? Or is it a compulsion, a string pulled by the Ceaseless Watcher or the Mother-of-Puppets? Or both? " Oh, by the end of this he's gonna have more questions than answers...

"I know the summaries have started to confuse you. Where do they come from when you read a statement afresh? How do you just sort of know what it’s about before you even start to read it?" I... hadn't even considered that.

"I’m afraid I don’t actually have these answers for you. I’ve simply been watching. I’m sure you understand that." haha, how funny

"Maybe I’ve occasionally been nudging something here and there to keep you safe, to keep everything on track." Like sending that one spider in episode 038?

"But I know you’ve been more worried about your choices, about whether you’re being controlled by me or by the Mother." AH! We're finally getting to that topic!

"So, I thought perhaps I should leave a little something to reassure you that, yes, your actions and your choices have all been your own." Knew it.

"Have they been controlled? No more than gravity controls you when you walk, or hunger controls you when you choose your meal. There are certainly new forces, new instincts and desires that influence you and shape your actions. Perhaps you’re unprepared for them, but if you choose to believe in free will, then yes, all you have done has been of your own free will. They have all been your choices." That's what I've been saying!

"Now, I believe the tradition is to tell you the story of my life, the sinister path that led me inevitably to the sorry state in which I now find myself? Well, let it never be said I do not dance the steps I am assigned." I can't tell whether it's supposed to be a joke or not...

"I was born into what most would consider a large family. My father worked constantly, and my mother was overwhelmed, leaving some of the older children to watch over the younger ones. Some rose to this responsibility; others deeply resented it and took no pains to hide the fact." And that's understandable. Children shouldn't be parentified. If parents make the choice to have a lot of kids, they shouldn't expect the older ones to raise the youngest. Cause the parents make the choice to have kids. The kids don't. It isn't their responsibility. And I say that as an eldest sister (who wasn't parentified but feels a strong sense of responsibility towards the siblings)

"I was one of the youngest, and it soon became clear to my infant mind that, in order to get anywhere, the key was to navigate the baroque family politics in which I found myself. I became very good at it. I would instigate fights between siblings if I needed them in trouble. If I required sympathy, I would bite myself until I drew blood and then blame it on my sister Lizzy." Navigating the family politics can be... quite a difficult task.

"I discovered a deep and enduring talent inside myself for lying. My manipulations were not intricate, but they were far beyond what was expected of a child my age, and I have always believed that the key to controlling people is to ensure they always under- or overestimate you. Never reveal your true abilities or plans." I agree that having people to under or overestimate you is sometimes very useful, especially in school.

"Of course, I learned many of my skills from my mother, who could wield guilt like a rapier and anger like a scalpel. She never simply screamed at you. She was always aware of exactly what kind of fury or disappointment was needed to make sure you regretted ever catching her attention." Oh... I know that type of people...

"She had eight children, yet weaved that life around herself in such a way that she always seemed both the victim of it, yet curiously divorced from any responsibility." Oh, I see...

"In many ways, she was the victim, at least of my father, whose pathological absence spoke of a man who had no interest whatsoever in engaging with the life where he had trapped his family." This is just sad...

"However well I had learned my lessons, it was clear that happiness was not something I could have within that family. There was simply too much there that I couldn’t control." Sometimes it's just better to go no contact. You can't change them anyway.

"My biggest attempt to assert some form of influence over my family was when I decided to run away. In my childish mind, I was certain that my disappearance would destabilise the entire family unit, allowing me to take my rightful place as the most important child upon my return." This is both funny and sad

"I intended to stay away for two days and two nights. I took a backpack and filled it with as much food as I could carry, which was barely enough for a decent lunch, my favourite blanket and the only book I could say belonged to only me: Five Go Down to the Sea. And then I left." I know that a lot of kids did, but I never actually tried to "run away" like that. (And that's a good thing, cause I would have taken just a bunch of toys in a backpack, probably not even food or a change of clothes lol)

"We lived in Hunstanton, in Norfolk, about twenty minutes’ walk from the beach, and it was late spring, so I wasn’t at all worried about the temperature. I had chosen where I was to spend the two days I had decided to disappear some weeks before." The beach doesn't seem like a bad place, yeah.

"If you walked down the short hill from Hunstanton town centre towards the beach, and took a right just before you reached it, you could find yourself on a small stretch of sand that seemed oddly quiet. Most days it was completely deserted, and even in those summer holidays where the number of sunbathers was so high no part of the beach could fully escape them, it would only have a handful of dedicated loungers lying around, quietly reading and studiously ignoring their own unease." Oh, I would love to see that place...

"And sitting on the side of the road above it, casting a thick, angular shadow, was the squat, brick structure of the old chip shop. I’d never seen it open. No-one had, as far as I could tell. It was painted a dark blue that never quite matched any colour of sky that was behind it, and had a hand-lettered sign that could still be seen covering much of the bare left-hand wall in curling, faded typeface: ‘Chips’. The old chip shop had been there as long as I’d been alive, probably much longer, and its silent one-storey silhouette had always unsettled me." What an odd thing...

"It was only looking back that I realised how few windows it had, just one tiny panel of glass either side of the big doors. The rest of the structure was just plain, unadorned brickwork. I don’t really know why I decided to hide there, but assuming you’ve been paying attention, then I’m sure by now you understand how little that means." I mean, it is a good place to hide.

"A light rain began to patter down and I, not having had the foresight to pack an umbrella, ran to it and opened the door as quickly and as quietly as I could. Inside, it was warm and dry. Dust coated everything and I struggled more than once not to sneeze, something I was convinced would somehow alert my family to where I was. So, I crawled under one of the counters, and soon enough sleep had come for me." Okay...

"I awoke to the sound of rhythmic clattering, the noise of wood striking wood in a complex, intricate pattern." Oh?

"The sound seemed to be coming from one of the back rooms and, seeing how light seeped from below only one of the doors, it seemed to me pretty obvious which room contained my answers. So, I went inside, another action which, looking back after the fact, I find myself pleasingly baffled by." What was it?

"Inside was a young woman I did not recognise, sat at what I would later learn was an old-fashioned wooden loom. Her eyes and face were sunken, her hands and arms a blur as the machine pressed on. They arced over and through the loom, and I could see much of her inside forearms and upper legs were covered in tiny holes: small red pinpricks, like insect bites." How odd...

"Looking back, of course, and remembering the crunch of used syringes beneath my feet, I realise that addiction is one of the strongest vectors of control there is." Oh.

"The woman looked up at me, disinterested, and I saw that the threads of the loom were laced into her skin, all through her track marks, and that dozens of tiny spiders ran up and down those weaving threads and scurried in and out of the holes in her skin." Ew ew ew

"Her eyes met mine, then travelled upwards, towards the ceiling. I followed her gaze for barely five seconds before I fled home and abandoned my plans to run away entirely." Yeah, run

"I decided not to describe what I saw up there. I will only say that it is what engendered in me that terror of spiders which eventually led to my volunteering at Surrey University. I will simply say that when a spider reaches a certain size, it is often not entirely made up of spider anymore." WHAT DO YOU EVEN MEAN BY THAT-

"So, how much free will was involved in that story? What could I have chosen to change? Would a different path have been possible? I felt no loss of control –no puppet strings guided me – and yet the Mother got exactly the result she no doubt wanted, one that would lead to a fear of spiders so acute that I would later have that horror focused and refined into a silk-spun apotheosis." Oh...

"Unless, of course, none of it was intentional, none of it was planned. The Mother is the fear of manipulation and lost control made manifest, so perhaps it is our fear that projects her influence on everything that happens, like the mind retrospectively assigning reason to our actions, so we fit whatever occurs into the neatest pattern we can and declare her web both intricate and complete. Perhaps she is no more active than Terminus, simply sitting and revelling in the inevitable cascade of paranoia, as those who hold her in special terror cocoon themselves in red string and theory." I... I doubt that? I think?

"Or perhaps I am simply telling you what you need to hear in order to behave exactly as the Mother wishes you to. Perhaps I have never even seen a beach." Moral of the story: DOUBT EVERYTHING.

"Don’t go to Hill Top Road again." That part was crystal clear, at least. Unless it's some sort of reverse psychology trick. I don't know...

Well, that was disturbing. But fascinating!

"That was, uh … I d-didn’t like that. I couldn’t …" Couldn't what? Stop reading???

"So, she is watching the Institute, interfering with things. Is that reassuring or really, really bad?" Probably a mix of both.

"I can’t say I’m sad to have another ally allegedly on our side, but I don’t like the idea of being important to The Web. That’s a really bad place to be." Can't disagree.

"Annabelle’s right, though. I mean, I can’t trust anything she says to not be another lie to further manipulate and manoeuvre us, but deep down, I think she’s right." Ah, you're finally getting to the right conclusion!

"What I’ve been doing to these people, it hasn’t been because I was puppeted or controlled or possessed. I wanted to do it. It felt good." Admitting it is already a first step.

"But at least I know I can stop. I just …don’t know how." You can learn to!

"I don’t want to stop." You... should. Want to stop.

"this one really took it out of me. I need to go lie down." Yeah, do that, and think about it. Cause you have to find a way to stop hurting people, mate.

Alright. That was fascinating.

Honestly, it went so much better than I thought it would go. So, I'm glad about it.

I'm a bit disappointed that we didn't get to hear Annabelle Cane directly, though. She's such a fascinating character and her statement kinda made my head spin, but like, in a good way, you know?

Questioning everything, a great hobby. Especially past 11pm.

I went to my uncle's house today and I got all of my mom's old tapes since I'll have a tape recorder soon! There's a lot of cool music: The Cure, The Police, Michael Jackson...

"Statement of Marcus MacKenzie, regarding a series of unexplored entryways." Oh, this is so gonna be about the Spiral...

Marcus MacKenzie, that name feels familiar, let me check my notes...

Oh, that's the son of that guy in episode 027, A Sturdy Lock! It was mentioned that he had made a statement too, we're finally gonna hear about it!

"So, my dad tells me he’s been bothering you with his nonsense? I just wanted to come over and set things straight, apologise for any of your time that he might have wasted. He’s just a lonely old man looking for attention and trying to manipulate me into moving back in with him, even though I’ve told him so many times that that’s just not going to happen." That's a harsh start. Nobody believed that poor man, not even his son... But I guess that's what happens when you get targeted by the Spiral.

"The doors thing isn’t even his, you know? That’s what he talked to you about, right? Some magically appearing door? Yeah, well, he’s just trying to send me a message, which has been received loud and clear." Oh?

"I’d been living with my parents a while. I kept moving out, but it never seemed to stick. First was uni; fine, moving back in after a degree is normal. Then there was my divorce back in ’93 – that landed me back in my old room for a while. Then my company went bust about four years ago and wiped out all my savings." A series of unfortunate events, huh? Well, I can't judge, I'm not planning on moving out anytime soon (moving out when I don't need to cause my uni is close enough to home? In this economy? Not happening.)

"All told, I must have spent most of my twenties, and not a small amount of my thirties, living in that house, with my mum and dad. It was alright, but each time the vibe was worse." Ah.

"My mum was always happy to have me, but she wanted me to move on with my life. But Dad was weirdly protective of me, kept trying to keep me around, like he was terrified that the world outside was going to hurt me." Oh, I see.

"I was quite depressed back then and his attitude put me in a really weird headspace. I think it comes back to the doors, you know? I think he always secretly thought that I had some deep-seated mental illness, even though they did so many tests and the doors were the only things that it ever was. Aside from the depression, obviously. But they were just specific, weird little hallucinations that have long-since stopped." I mean, there was definitely a link between those "hallucinations" and his mental state... It didn't necessarily caused it, but it probably made it worse.

"But my dad always thought it was a sign of something deeper, something that was …something that was going to destroy me one day." Technically, he wasn't wrong.

"Don’t you see? That’s what this whole thing is all about. He’s been so lonely since Mum died and he is trying to get me to move back in with him. He’s pretending that he is starting to see the doors. He thinks if he pretends to share in my “madness”, as he always called it, then I’ll be worried about him, I’ll stick around. But I’m not mad and he’s not seeing any doors." The Spiral first targeted him and then his father... The father was trying so hard to protect his son that he got targeted himself...

"The first door I remember seeing that shouldn’t have been there must have been when I was five or six. I had this skipping rope, bright green, old and ratty." I remember always seeing the same ad for that kind of toy on TV when I was a kid. Never got one, though.

"So, one night – it was in the Christmas holiday, so I must have been six – I wake up. There’s a noise in my room, like something being dragged along the floor. Well, I look over and, in the weak orange glow of my nightlight, I can see the heavy wooden handle of my skipping rope moving slowly across the floorboards and out my bedroom door." Oh no

"I don’t remember panicking. I’m not even sure I was scared, not at that point, but I didn’t like anyone else except my friends touching my toys, so I got up and hurried to follow. I chased it sleepily out of my bedroom and down the hall, past the stairs and towards … a doorway I didn’t recognise. I was sure that when I’d gone to bed it had been a patch of wall with a painting of an old sailboat on it, but now it was an open doorway." You know what this is reminding me of? That one scene in the movie It, I think that's the opening scene? With the kid's paper boat falling in the sewer, and the terrifying clown using it as a way to lure the kid, to get him to get close enough to attack...

"I could see the wooden handle of my skipping rope lying in the corridor, with its heavy green cord stretching out and into the door, until it disappeared in the darkness. I realised I was shaking. I didn’t want to go through that door. So, I picked up the handle and started to gently pull on the rope, trying to drag it back out again. Instead of moving, the line went taught. Something was holding the other end, and itwas trying to pull me." Yeah, this is exactly what's happening... It's already not cool when all those horrible stuff in those stories happen to adult, but I really don't like it when children are targeted. It's even more cruel.

"But I was six, and I felt myself starting to lose my footing and fall towards it, so I did the only thing I could. I let go and I watched my most treasured possession disappear forever as the door closed behind it, and I ran back to bed." That was for the best.

"I told my parents, of course, but they didn’t believe me. They just thought I’d lost it and was making up wild stories to cover it up." Of course, parents never believe you!

"The next time, I was eleven, and that time the door wasn’t really there. Well, it was, but it was covered in concrete." Okay, difficult to access, then...

"It was in this old alley about five minutes’ walk from my house, and one of the buildings was this abandoned warehouse. At least, I think it was a warehouse. The wooden signs were rotted away and the windows had all been broken, and the main door had been covered in a layer of perfectly smooth, grey concrete. I passed it on the way home from school almost every day, and something about that blank grey space, where a door should have been, always gave me a slight shiver of unease." Oh, I can picture it very clearly...

"Then one day, I was walking past, and the door that stole my skipping rope was there. The thing was, though, I couldn’t see it, because it was still covered in that concrete. But I knew it was there." Well, at least it's gonna be difficult to open it, right?

"Before, there’d been nothing behind it, but now, I was certain. Now, in the centre of the concrete, were five clear marks, as though someone had pressed their fingers into the mixture when it had still been wet." Hm...

"I stood there, staring at it like I had all those years ago. It was playing with me again, but this time, it wasn’t looking to play with a skipping rope. This time, it was a dare. It was daring me to put my own hand on that rough concrete, to fit my fingers into the hollow spaces it had made for me, and open it." Don't.

"I could feel the muscles in my arm tensing, preparing to stretch towards it, to accept the dare from a door that had hidden itself so sneakily under all that concrete. Then my friend Luke yelled at me from the end of the street. The fear was gone in a second, and I ran to catch up with him." You friend Luke unknowingly saved your life.

"I did, however, make the mistake of telling my parents about it, and reminding them of the other time it had happened, when I was six. This time, they didn’t dismiss it so quickly. First, they checked the alleyway and took some pictures of the solid, unmarked concrete of the covered entry. Then they began to make appointments and send me to specialists." Alright...

"I was tested and poked and quizzed and prodded all through my teenage years. I never believed I was delusional, not like that, no matter what my father said. And neither, it seemed, did the doctors. At least, not in any way they could prove. Every test, every examination, seemed to reinforce the fact that there was nothing medically unusual about me or my mind. The only evidence to the contrary was the fact that I kept seeing the door." Welp.

"When I was thirteen, it was underneath a railway bridge. It was huge and metal this time, with solid iron bolts sealing it shut and a thick chain stretched across it. The warning stickers had long since peeled off, and someone had scrawled in chalk: ‘Warning: Danger of death.’ " Using reverse psychology, to lure him in, huh?

"As I passed, something heavy began to bang on the other side, sending the chain dancing. It pounded again and again, and I didn’t know if it was trying to force its way out, or politely knocking, hoping to be let in." That's a good question...

"When I was fifteen, I pressed the doorbell to Sandra’s house, picking her up for our first date, and I realised that it sounded wrong, like the doorbell was echoing through a hundred empty corridors, bouncing back and forth and lingering in the air." Oh, yeah, that's a problem. Right before a first date, that's not cool!

"I looked again at their front door and realised it didn’t lead to their house. I heard footsteps approaching on the other side from the far distance, fast and steady but getting closer. I turned and ran just as I heard the door open behind me." Yeah, best to run. Then call you date to say you had an emergency (the emergency being not getting trapped into the corridors)

"When I was sixteen, I was stumbling home drunk from a house party and I found it lying open in the ground in front of me." Targetting a drunk teenager, that's so low...

"It was wide, waiting, and I could see a long corridor stretching down and away, at a right angle to the world as I knew it, turning off into an angular labyrinth. I was trying so hard to walk carefully, to seem like I wasn’t drunk, that I almost didn’t notice it until it was too late. I stared into it for a long time, my eyes hazy from cheap vodka, and I saw a shape walking calmly along the vertical floor." The incarnation of the Spiral standing there like "So, you getting in or what"

"When I was eighteen, I was driving a group of friends to a concert in Leeds, when we pulled into a service station to get some lunch. They didn’t hear the scream coming from the small stone structure just next to where all the coaches parked. They didn’t see the drag marks that led across the tarmac and under the door. I didn’t eat lunch that day." Oh.

"The last time was the worst. It hadn’t happened for almost fifteen years and when I saw it I almost wept. It was when I was living in Oxford, up Cowley way. A few streets over, there was an empty plot of land, just scrubby plants and junk. If there’d ever been a house there, it was long gone. A few of the older residents said it burned down in the seventies, but they were always real weird about it." If you tell me that there's gonna be just a door standing in that empty space where the house used to be...

"And as I passed that empty space of grass, there it was: a pale-yellow door, stood all alone, like the entrance to a house that I just couldn’t see. It had no frame around it, but I was sure that if I grasped its handle and twisted, it would still swing open, silent and inviting." I KNEW IT.

"This wasn’t like before. There was no playfulness here, none of that malicious joy that I had always felt coming off it. Now there was just a cold hunger, a deep anger, as though I had no right to just stand there looking at it. The street was silent, but I could feel it screaming at me to open it. I just about managed not to. I was just about able to walk away." Is it different because it was after the Sannikov Land events?

"I’m not mad, I know that, it’s just this door is something else, and my father knows that. It’s why he used it as a cornerstone of his little story, but it’s just pretend. He just wants me to move back in with him, and I can’t. I just can’t. Sometimes, you just have to leave, even if what’s on the other side scares you." Hm...

Well, that was... pretty sad.

"So, it seems we did have Marcus MacKenzie’s statement after all. I spent so long looking for it, back when I found his father’s, and no luck, but now I decide to start looking properly into Hill Top Road, and all of a sudden, I’m drawn to rearrange a filing cabinet, and what do I find behind it." It always happens like that! To find something, you gotta stop looking for it, for some reason!

"I never thought I’d miss those days, when I could throw out some half-baked speculation about drug abuse or mental illness and, woosh, away all the statements went." The good old days of pretending to be a skeptic...

"There is nothing in the world more reassuring than ignorance which we can mistake for certainty. But no, almost every one of those statements, those people …That poor old man. Like I can talk. Like I’m in any position to mourn the suffering of the innocent." You did some bad stuff, like getting those people to give you their statements recently, but that doesn't mean you can't be sorry for the misery of other people!

"But there is one thing I know an awful lot better now than I did when I read his father’s statement. I know an awful lot more about doors." Yeah... Also, the fact that A Sturdy Episode was right after episode 026, A Distortion, the first episode mentioning Michael...

Oh, he's going to talk to Helen!

"Marcus MacKenzie. Why didn’t you tell me?"

"Is that name supposed to mean something to me?" Fair.

"No, I suppose it wouldn’t, would it? Just an old man and his son for you to terrorise and feast on."

"Ah, well, the son I was pursuing long before I was even Michael. And technically, I didn’t eat the old man. He passed away from terror before I even got a chance to open properly." A sad end either way!

"And his son? Marcus? He was fine when I found his father’s statement two years ago, but now, suddenly, I can’t get through to him."

"No, I imagine not. I decided it was time to finish that game a few months ago." Oh. I was hoping he was alright... Should have known it was wishful thinking...

"You… Why?"

"Not sure. I suppose Helen didn’t have quite the same attachment to him as a project. I’m not quite as much for decades-long campaigns of subtle terror these days." I see...

"That’s horrible."

"Is it? We do what we need to do when it comes to feeding, don’t we? …Don’t we, Archivist?" She's not wrong... And Jon knows that...

"Yes." He sounds so distraught and tired at the same time...

"It would be better if you embraced it."

"That’s not… Look, why were you trying to lure him into Hill Top Road?" GOOD QUESTION

"That? Oh, well, that was just curiosity. I wanted to see what would happen." Just curiosity...

"There is something wrong with Hill Top Road – you know it as well as I do –some strange scar in reality at the centre of whatever it is the spider is spinning." Yeah, there's something about the Web...

"When young Mr MacKenzie passed, it seemed like a good opportunity for an experiment, to see what would happen if I lured him inside. But it seems I just don’t have The Web’s gift for manipulation or persuasion." Poor guy was just an experiment...

"Were you controlled?"

What a delightful thought. I don’t believe so, no, but the Spider’s strings are subtle, so I suppose it’s not impossible. Why?" Very interesting... As I was saying to a friend yesterday, I'm getting more and more worried about the actual influence that the Web has over everything that's happening...

Like, even in the season 1 finale, you know? The attack started after that thing, I think it was a shelf? collapsed and made a dent in the wall, revealing the worms. And that happened because Jon tried to kill a spider. That spider was there on purpose...

"I want to know. Can The Web control another avatar, one that serves a different power? Make them do things they don’t want to. Make them find victims, feed." Jon, you're trying to justify your actions... But in those specific cases, you weren't controled, you made choices...

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. Would that make life easier for you? Are you so sure you didn’t want to?" She's got a point.

*one existential crisis later*

Oh, team meeting!

"Been a while since you’ve all come to see me together. I assume it’s not good news."

"No." Welp.

"What the hell have you been doing, Jon?"

"Martin left a tape for us" Ah... Probably episode 142, Scrutiny...

"How many?"

"Basira, I—"

"How many?"

"Four." Ouch. Four...

"Including the one on the boat?"

"What one on the boat?"

"Including Floyd, five."

Five people who really miss the time when they had nice dreams...

"Jess Tirrell, the woman on the tape, she was the fourth. I’d just tried to… I was weak, ravenous. I didn’t feel… The first was a supermarket cleaner, ended up lost for a week in an endless warehouse. I didn’t even… I just went in for some shopping and he was there and I just… asked. The second was… It was after Igot stabbed by Melanie."

"You are not putting this on me." hm.

"No, that’s not what I meant. I was walking the streets; I thought I was trying to clear my head."

"But you were hunting." Exactly.

He's probably been lying to himself...

"Apparently. And I found a woman who, every year on her birthday, wakes up in a fresh grave, just for her. And the third was after the coffin. A man rejected by all who knew him, searching ever darker places for love. When he told me his story, he started weeping maggots." Ew

"Why didn’t you record them?:

"Why do you think? Because he was ashamed."

Yeah. Trying to ignore the guilt and push it away...

"No, I don’t … I mean, I don’t record anything anymore, not really. I just assume they’ll turn on if it’s important.

"Well, they didn’t."

"No, I suppose not." It's unfair, cause those poor people still matter...

"You’re a danger, Jon, a monster. You’re hurting innocent people." I gotta admit, she's not wrong. He is hurting people. And he's still my favourite character, I don't wanna use the word "monster", but... I think that if we didn't know him, if as an audience, we didn't follow him, his thoughts and his feelings... If we only heard of him through outsiders pov, like that poor Jess Tirrell... We would sympatise way less. And that's the point, I guess, but still... "So did Daisy." "Shut up! It’s not the same thing at all!" I mean...

"Basira, he has a point." "You didn’t know what you were doing, and since you did, you’ve spent every waking hour resisting. He knows exactly what he’s doing." It's a bit more complex, I think. Yes, there is the influence of the Hunt. But that's not only that. Daisy knew what she was doing when she was killing people. She said it herself a few episodes earlier, that though she doesn't like it, it doesn't mean that it wasn't her. But Basira doesn't want to accept that...

"I don’t … It’s not that simple. It feels … I don’t know if I can control it. I don’t know if it’s even me doing it."

"So, you say you’re being controlled?" "I don’t know. Maybe. The Web.." It's not only that. It would be too easy.

"What was the name you said before?Annabelle Cane?"

"Yes. She’s been watching us; I’m pretty sure of it." Yeah, that's pretty much a fact at this point, but...

"Jon, I’m not sure that it’s actua—" yes! Tell them, Daisy, tell them that they're focusing on a far fetched explanation just to avoid facing the truth!

"No. No, if he is being controlled, we need to know, and we need to know now. Do you know where she is?"

"N-not properly. I think she has some connection to Hill Top Road?" "Then we go, now. Unless anyone has any objections?" Wow wow wow. Let's all calm down, it feels very rushed! You can't just go there, like that, somewhere linked to the Web! It's like throwing yourselves into a trap!

"Not from me."

"You don’t get a vote."

"Okay, seriously, I’m going to have to be the one to point out that this is a terrible idea." THANK YOU MELANIE

"Daisy?"

"Be better if we could prepare." Yeah. Right now, none of you is prepared for whatever is going on there.

"I just think that we shouldn’t be exposing ourselves like this until we have a little bit more than a hunch."

"She does have a point." Indeed.

"I didn’t ask you." Ouch-

"Okay, fine, I’ll go then. I’ll do some recon on my own and update you." I don't think that's a good idea...

"Wait, hang on."

"Basira."

"I’ll tell you all what I find. Don’t let him eat anyone’s brain while I’m gone."

"That’s not what I do." Jon, that's not the moment for those comments.

"Well, that was—"

"Shut up." The way Melanie and Daisy said that in synchronisation haha

"So, we’re going with her?"

"Come on, Mel, I’ll see if I’ve got a stab vest in your size." "Yeah, sure." You know what? They're gonna fall into a trap, but hey, at least they'll be together, so maybe they have a chance to make it out alive!

Does it mean that we're actually gonna hear Annabelle Cane soon? I can't wait to discover how she sounds!

Oh, and I'm sure she's gonna say that she didn't control Jon into getting people to make statements.

Well. This is gonna be intense. My bunch of smart traumatised idiots, throwing themselves into another trap.

Oh, this is one of Gertrude's tapes!

"You don’t mind, do you?"

"Of course, I do."

"Well, that’s a shame." lol

That guy's voice... I feel like I heard a similar one somewhere...

"If I really wanted to kill you, that thing couldn’t stop me."

"If that were a possibility, Arthur, I should hardly have agreed to meet you." Oh, that guy is Arthur Nolan? That guy from the lightless flame, who owned the flat in which Jane Prentiss lived?

"Yeah, you would. You’d have set up something up, tried to get me first." "If I wanted you dead, Arthur, there are much simpler ways to do it." So many threats in barely a minute of conversation...

"Look, Arthur, I need you to understand that this isn’t simple posturing. I don’t see a way we can meaningfully progress this conversation while you’re under the impression that your threats mean anything to me."

She did bad things, and made questionable choices but she was badass, ngl.

"Big talk. But Agnes is dead, and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but your little woodland circle’s been broken. So, I don’t really see anything getting in my way if I wanted to burn the flesh off your snarky bones." So this was after Agnes' death...

"I assume you haven’t checked on Eugene, then?" The guy who made a statement about Agnes in episode 139?

"Well, he hasn’t been at your little meetings the last two weeks, has he? I suppose no-one’s looked into it yet. Not surprising, he seemed a thoroughly unpleasant little man." She's effortlessly ominous by saying that and honestly, good for her, that's pretty cool

"Are you— Did—" "Tell you what, why don’t you make a few calls, check it out, and then we can continue our little discussion. Alright?"

That's creepy but also very impressive.

"How’d you do it?

"You don’t need to know that. What you do need to know, is I can do it again if I need to, to you or any of your lackeys, if I need to." I want to know too!

"Not mine anymore."

"Oh no, I forgot your authority isn’t what it used to be these days." He may be an avatar of the Desolation, but he's the one getting ROASTED

"Well, if a warning from you isn't going to convince them, let me know. I’d be happy to provide a further example." Iconic.

"Eugene… It, it hurt him?"

"Oh yes. I’m sure your master was delighted with how awful his death was."

"Don’t push it."

"You know, thinking about it, the amount of pain and loss and legitimate devastation I’ve cause among your little cult over the last, what, forty years? I think The Desolation is probably very fond of me." lol, that would kinda make sense

"That’s blasphemy, that is."

"Is it? Or maybe you just picked a bad god." Roasted.

"The way I see it, you came here believing that whatever defences or assurances I might have had died with Agnes or were broken along with the circle and, whether or not you actually killed me, you were really hoping to use me to restore your standing with the Lightless Flame – murder, kidnap, torture, something to impress the church group. Unluckily for you, I have had almost four decades to prepare for this, and now … Ha, well, you just don’t know if killing Eugene was the end of it, or maybe I have something special prepared for you as well."

That attitude, that's how I aspire to be when I'm much older. Without actually killing anyone of course, but the attitude! the confidence! Maybe she's bluffing, maybe she's not, who knows, but you won't risk it!

"You’re so goddamn smug."

"And you’re all lazy fools, so used to it being easy, to picking off the vulnerable and the unprepared, you can barely conceive of anyone actively working against you, of being ready. You honestly thought when she died, I’d just be struck dumb with terror, just waiting for one of you to finally get around to revenge, paralysed with fear. Because that’s all you’ve ever known." She isn't wrong about that.

"And do you?"

"Do I what? "Have something for me, so I end up like Eugene?"

"Why don’t you try to leave and find out?" He's not gonna try, I can tell

"Good. Now we can have a proper conversation."

"You mean, you ask me questions and I spill my guts?" Pretty much, yeah

"If it would make you feel better, you could ask me a question first. "Alright. Agnes – how’d you do it? Never did understand it, not really."

"Ah, that’s a fair enough question. It was The Web." Oh, I wasn't expecting that!

"I was very new to it all, of course. I mean, I was, what? Can’t have been older than twenty-five." That's barely three years older than I am... How old was she when she starting working for the Institute?

"Would you believe that you were the first proper ritual attempt I’d encountered? Ha! I really thought you were unique, special. An infernal cult raising their demon messiah to bring about hell on earth? You can imagine all the heroic fantasies that that played into. So, I began researching what I thought was a counter ritual, of sorts." Okay...

"Like I said, I was young, naive. I somehow found just the right books, made just the right connections, and even got what I thought was a piece of blind good luck when I found a tin box in the ashes of Hill Top Road containing some perfectly preserved cuttings of her hair." Oh?

"Of course, what I thought was a ‘banishment ritual’ turned out to not be. The circle I had constructed was more of an invitation. It let the Mother-of-Puppets bind me to Agnes, interweave our existences at some metaphysical level, as it had with Fielding and the house. It was the most painful experience of my life. I mean, I’m sure it’s nothing to you, but I’d never had my lungs try to burn me alive from the inside out before." Must have hurt indeed...

"I’m not sure exactly how it manifested on your end, but you certainly seemed to get the message. I kept the circle over the years, laced it through with signs and symbology of The Desolation to ward off the worst of the side effects and keep its attentions elsewhere." Oh, that's that thing in episode 037, Burnt Offering... Well, that's a twist I wasn't expecting when I first heard that episode.

"Don’t envy whoever broke it."

"Yes. It went very badly for them indeed." Oh, that poor guy in episode 037...

"So, your turn."

"Go on."

"What was Agnes like?"

"What?"

"Well, for all The Web bound us together, I never actually met her. What was she like?" She never met her? Interesting...

"I… I don’t know, not really. You got as many answers to that as folks who met her. Never really knew what she felt about any of it, not really, not in her own words. Guess that’s the thing about being the chosen one. I mean, Agnes was always quiet, but even if you spend all day every day throwing out commandments and laying down parables, at the end of it you’re always just the point of someone else’s story – everyone clamouring to say what you were, what you meant, and your thoughts on it all don’t mean nothing." It's sad...

"That’s the thing about a fall from grace, isn’t it? Makes you look at things from a new angle. I miss her; I’ll tell you that for nothing. Wish I’d … I don’t know, actually known her when she was alive. Maybe that coffee shop twit did have a point after all. I can tell you what I saw, at least."

"Which was?" "I saw the sun – so much power and fire and rage inside of her, enough to burn the world and leave it nothing but desert. But to look at her, oh, it was too much for most, but it seemed so still, so stable. But it wasn’t calm; it was just distant. She never told us how she felt about being bound to you, never even called you by name, just called you her anchor, the thing weighing her down and tying her to this world, stopping her destiny." Wow... It's poetic, in a way...

"I’m surprised you didn’t come for me immediately."

"Come for you? We ended up protecting you more often than not! Diego was convinced if you died a violent death it would be catastrophic for Agnes. He even talked me round, and I spent decades convincing the others to wait it out – you couldn’t outrun age forever, and we had time. But it didn’t need to be forever, did it? Just long enough for a messiah to doubt. The sort of doubts that spreads to her disciples." Hm. I can see the logic.

"You’ve never really had to bother with it, have you? You’ve got him upstairs to point the way as often as not, and the rest of the time you’re just figuring out people, or things that used to be people. You’ve never tried to talk with that Eye of yours." I mean, it would be difficult to talk to the Eye, cause, you know, it's the Eye. Not the Mouth. (Alright, that wasn't funny)

"Cos that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? We feel its joy and its anger. It warps us and changes us and feeds on us, though not in the ways we expect. The one thing it never does is just tell us what to do. It seeds us with this aching, impossible desire to change the world, to bring it to us, and then it leaves us to guess and bicker and fight over how the hell you can actually do it." In a way, that's sad. I'd almost pity them.

"Sometimes I think they understand us as little as we understand them. We don’t think like they do."

"I'm not actually convinced they ‘think’ at all." I had a conversation about that with a friend a few days ago and I said something extremely close to that.

"You might be right, but Agnes did. That’s the thing about an incarnation, isn’t it? She was a child and person as much as she was a god. And we messed that right up." Yeah, you did.

"I still remember when Diego bought us a book on childcare. Roger’s body was still in her room, blackened and smoking from when he tried to feed her. I thought for a moment he’d brought another one of his damn Leitners, but no, it was just a regular old book on looking after children" I don't know if I should laugh or just sigh

"But I was an idiot, saw it as attacking my leadership. Burned the thing." *deep sigh*

"Diego wasn’t happy. Well, he’s in charge now, of all of us that are left, at least. He can look for the answers in whatever books he likes, no skin off my bones." So that was recorded before the events of episode 012, First Aid...

"Figured if you’re gonna pull this stuff out of me, I might as well get some of it off my chest anyway. Not like I can vent to the others about what a prat Diego is." lol

"Got a lot of funny ideas, still calls the Lightless Flame ‘Asag’ like when he was first researching it. I just want to tell him to get over it. I mean, Asag was traditionally a force of destruction, sure, but as a church, we’ve very much settled on burning in terms of the face we worship, so some fish-boiling Sumerian demon doesn’t really match up, does it? Plus, there’s a lot of disease imagery with Asag that I reckon is way too close to Filth for my tastes. But no, he read it in some ancient tome, so that’s that."

"Well, I can’t say I know—"

"Reckons he always knows best cos he’s read a few books. Well, big deal." He really had beef with that guy lol

"That’s the trouble with overthinking any of this: you ignore your gut, and to mind, that’s the only part any of them beyond actually care about. They don’t give a toss about your rules or systems. They only care about what feels right, what freezes your belly with terror."

"I rather like to think I’ve managed."

"Yeah, but you don’t actually care about them, do you? Not really. You forget, we’ve been watching you a long time, and I know you, Gertrude. You don’t actually care about the fears; you’re too practical. All your energy is focused down here, on monsters and murderers and all the things doing the dirty work for them beyond. You know plenty, sure, but you don’t have that obsession, that stupid urge to try and understand and classify things that use logic and reality like weapons." Tbh, that's probably how she managed to stay alive for so long.

"Always respected you for that. It takes a strong stomach to not give a shit."

"You’ll forgive me if I’m not overjoyed at the compliment." lol

"So, now Diego has taken over, where does that leave you?"

"Huh. Slum-lording over a nest."

"A nest of what?" Wasps...

"You’d be surprised the misery and pain you can cause when you have control over someone’s home. If you’re careful, if you’re smart, you can burn their life to ashes as thoroughly as any fire, and worst comes to worst, you can still do it the old-fashioned way." I can imagine...

"Had an elderly tenant last year. Oh, she was in a terrible state. I had her trapped, too poor and immobile to do anything but sit there, then I broke her boiler so the cold started to get her. Not exactly my usual, but agony is agony." That's awful!

"But then her son and his wife moved in with her to help her out. Not much I could do against that, so I just waited until all three were home and set the place ablaze. They went up nicely, screaming all the way as the flames started to reach them. The doors were locked and the handles too hot, so they didn’t have a hope of escape." Those poor people...

"I think we’re just about done here."

"All your burning questions answered?"

"I’m certainly convinced you don’t know anything else useful." Probably, yeah.

"You tell the others. Make sure they know what happened to Eugene."

"Sure. Can’t make any promises, though, especially for Jude. She really hates you." "Tell her she’s welcome to try. Oh, and tell them I’m extending my protection to young Mr Barnabas. They hurt him anymore, then what happened to Eugene will seem like a mercy." That's... kind.

"You’re really pushing it, you know that?"

"Feel free to push back. But until then, get out of my archives."

That was really cool, not gonna lie.

"The more I listen and learn, the more it seems to me we’re all just groping about, trying desperately to find out what we’re actually meant to be doing. These things that loom so large over our lives, trap us and push us and sometimes kill us, but never actually tell us what we’re supposed to be doing. So, we scheme and we plot. We lash out at each other without ever really knowing why." Jon is having his 5th existential crisis of the week...

"But I’m really starting to worry there aren’t any answers, not like I want there to be. There aren’t any answers at Ny-Ålesund. There aren’t answers in the past. I’ve been inside the Buried, and there were no answers there. Elias always seemed to know what was going on, to have a plan, but I sometimes wonder just how orchestrated some of it really was." That's the thing, it's all about plans! It always involves a plan... BUT DON'T YOU THINK ABOUT VISITING HIM IN PRISON TO ASK HIM DIRECTLY, HE WOULD BE TOO HAPPY ABOUT IT.

"We’ve been back in London for just over a week now. I’m more or less recovered physically. It’s just this nagging sense of unease that won’t leave me. I was so sure I’d find something up there, but instead it was just another broken person trying to come to terms with the wreckage of their life. And here, I reached out, took another tape, hoping for a bit of guidance, but to be honest, this hasn’t helped." I mean, there was so little there that there wasn't much else to do.

"I did some more digging into Eugene Vanderstock. I thought he was still alive and working at the steel plant, but it looks like he’s just listed on one of the directory pages on their website." Oh.

"I really miss having people who know their way around a computer better than I do." Me too. We lost so many people since season 1...

"Apparently, he disappeared in late 2009, leaving behind only one thing: a life-sized statue of himself, crafted from candle wax and sawdust, missing its head." Oh.

"I wish I didn’t know how painful it must be to be alive while your whole being is infused with agonising grit, but as I was investigating, it came to me. Eugene is still alive, frozen in place by the razor-sharp particles that are mixed up into what he chose instead of flesh. I don’t know where Gertrude stored his head, but I do know it desperately wants to scream." Oh wow. That's... I don't even have words. But yeah, no wonder why Arthur Nolan or anyone else in the lightless flame didn't take the risk...

Knock on the door!

It's Georgie, hi! I missed her!

She wants to see Melanie...

"Why are you, uh, well, here? If it’s not too personal a question." "It is a bit. It’s not really my place to discuss it."

"Therapy! You’re taking her to therapy?" Oh, right. That's nice!

"Well, you don’t need to sound quite so psyched about it. She gets nervous travelling there alone." Which is understandable.

"So, how are you doing?" "I’m … I’m alright. I’m trying to, uh, rest up a bit, take it easy."

"Really? Cos I’m pretty sure I heard you talking about a screaming headless corpse just now." That's just part of the job, nothing to worry about!

"Fine. I’m deep in it. Had some close calls."

"I’m sorry to hear that. You should probably get some therapy too." YES. COULDN'T AGREE MORE.

"Would you go with me as well?"

"No." Welp.

Well, that was a very interesting episode! Tbh, Arthur Nolan hadn't much to say that was that interesting, but his interaction was Gertrude was... He tried to threatened her at first, but he was afraid of her, and rightfully so. I would have been scared too.

Really, that was so cool. And really fun to listen to. And at least we learned more about Agnes.

Martin is recording a statement!

"statement of Gary Boylan, given October 3rd 2009." On october 3rd, he asked me what day it was.

"It was grey – I remember that so clearly – and hot, but no sun. No sun at all. The sky had that thick layer of cloud that catches the heat and it choked me on in. Fields and fields of yellow grass that went on forever, with rusted pylons looming over all of it. It was that appalling sort of summer you only get in the middle of England, with all the joy of the season stripped away, leaving endless fields of dry soil and emptiness." Well, that's already not joyous.

"Have you ever been driving along a motorway, passing through the middle of some rural nothing place, when you spot, in the distance, on some tiny road you have no idea how to reach, a row of three or four terraced suburban houses? Just sitting there, no town or village for miles, just a weird, unattached little street – that’s where I live." I can picture that, yeah... I'll probably see those when I go on holiday, I'll think about that...

Oh, his father is a vet, we have that in common!

"I think all those years hanging around farmers must have rubbed off on him. He hated doctors, for instance, something I always pointed out was absurd given his own job. I’d say he was a vet, and he’d say, yeah, he was, and start talking about how many animals he’d put down in his career." Welp

"Something kept me rooted there, sleeping in a bedroom that hadn’t changed since I was fifteen and caring for a man who I’d rather just shut up. We were both trapped there, I think, bound together in a sort of wordless misery. I would look at him and see a grim sort of destiny for myself, trapped here until I became him, any future I might have had sacrificed to his." This is pretty depressing...

"I always used to go for long walks through the fields to try and escape for a bit." A nice walk, fresh air, it always helps. Doesn't fix eveyrthing of course, but it sure feels nice.

"We were a long way from any real trails, and the most scenic things to see were rusted tractors, piles of discarded tyres, or the huge metal skeleton of an old disconnected power pylon. It was a bleak and empty rural wasteland, and when the summer heat hit, without shade or shelter, it was almost as relentlessly oppressive as that old man." Oh. Well.

"It was this last August that it happened. I was about an hour into my walk, having had a row with him about his failing eyesight, a subject that made him even more defensive than usual, and was passing by an old sheet metal barn when I heard it. I’d been listening to music as I walked, when my iPod abruptly cut out." Something's messing with the technology...

"I stopped where I was and took it out of my pocket, assuming I’d knocked it or somehow turned it off, but the screen was on, apparently playing music, though I didn’t immediately recognise the song. I’ve got a pretty sizable music collection, but I feel like I do know it pretty well. This one had no artist, no album, just the track name: “Numbers”. " STOP, THAT REMINDS ME OF SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED TO ME IN HIGHSCHOOL

I had my headphones connected to my phone. Just old headphones, that weren't working that well. I remember, I was outside, probably waiting for my next class to start or something. And I don't remember if I was clicked on a song or if I clicked the return button to stop the music, but there was some... glitch? Cause I heard something that sounded like a halloween song, you know, the kind that you could play at a kids halloween party, with "spooky" cliche witch or little creatures laughs. The thing is, there was no song on my phone that was even near that kind of music. And I think my phone was... normal, there was just that music for a few seconds. I quickly unplugged my headphones and locked them in my locker. (There was little packets of salt I was taking at the cafeteria because of Supernatural) When I went to get them back, one side wasn't working anymore. I bought new headphones. I don't know what happened.

"As I stared at it, I began to hear something from my headphones. It was a faint and tinny tone, like it was far off or produced by a low-tech synthesiser or something. The tone began to shift, and I realised that it was playing a tune. It seemed to be a crude rendering of the opening lines of “The Skye Boat Song”. It only got through about a line and a half of the old folk melody before it abruptly cut off." Weird...

"There was a moment of silence before it was replaced by a voice, a man, but his voice was so distorted and pitch-shifted that it could have been anyone. It barely even sounded human as it spoke in its strange monotone. “Five. Nine. Three. Seven. Five. Six.” " What is that supposed to mean???

"I’ve heard about numbers stations, and I know all about the Lincolnshire Poacher and the Russian Man. I know they’ve all got perfectly logical explanations and real world uses for espionage and that." Oh, yeah, makes sense.

"It seemed to be coming from my music player, though I had a look through my library and couldn’t find anything that matched it." I feel you, buddy.

“Three. Zero. Five. Eight. Three. Nine. Two. Eight. Four. Six.” " But what does those numbers mean???

"Eventually I staggered to my feet and began to make my way home." Might be for the best, yeah.

"Do you know that one of the symptoms of a heart attack is literally “a sense of impending doom”? Well, I wasn’t having a heart attack, but I think I know what they mean." I didn't know about that!

"What settled over me wasn’t dread, there wasn’t enough uncertainty for that. No, it was doom. I was certain that some sort of disaster was on the horizon. I’d walked less than a hundred yards when the numbers stopped coming, and ‘London Calling’ started playing again." I'm already more familiar with that.

"I did do a bit of research into numbers stations, but I didn’t find anything new. I did find a couple of clips online, though, which were enough to convince me that what I’d been hearing had been a numbers station, or at least a passable imitation, although the voices on the proper recordings sounded neutral, almost mechanical – very different to the grating distorted mess I had heard." I think I watched a video about that...

"What did it mean? What did any of it mean?" GOOD QUESTION

"It took about a week of searching to find it again. To be honest, at the time I didn’t even realise I was looking for it. I just found myself going further and further afield, retracing old routes for the sake of it, always with my music cranked up so loud I couldn’t hear the insects buzzing everywhere." Oh, so it's only when he's on one of those long walks?

"It was fainter than it had been before, though, harder to pick out the exact numbers in the distortion and the quiet. So, I began to walk again, this time paying close attention to the volume and clarity of the sound. “One. Six.” Fainter to the North. “Two. Eight.” Unchanged going South. “Three. Zero.” Southeast was stronger. “One. Six.” But began to weaken again after a mile or so. “Five. Zero.” Much stronger around the eastern hill. “Four. Nine.” There, the pylon, that was it." Okay...

"Except obviously that wasn’t it. It wasn’t a broadcast tower and there was nothing in or around it that could possibly have been sending out any signal. It was just a collection of old and twisted metal bars rising up into the half collapsed power tower. It must have been decades since it had been anything other than a decaying steel obelisk. Even if that hadn’t been the case, this wasn’t a broadcast, this was … This was inside my iPod." Yeah, it can't be that...

"Nonetheless, when I stood in the centre of the hollow beneath that pylon’s rusted corpse, the numbers came through crystal clear. “Five. Six. Four. Eight. Four. Six. Four. Seven. Four. Eight. Two. Seven.” " But why??? Why that pylon???

"I had actually brought a notebook and pen, I now realised, just to write down the numbers. And so, I did. Four hours I spent, patiently jotting down the numbers. ‘The Skye Boat Song’ repeated every hour and a half, but I went through the sequence a few times just to assure myself it didn’t change and I hadn’t missed any." Smart thing to do.

"When I finally took out my headphones, the sudden rush of summer evening sounds hit me like a wave, leaving me reeling and dizzy. It took me a moment to realize how late it was, and how sunburned I had gotten in the process." Ouch

"I’d been out easily twice as long as any time before, but my dad didn’t say a word about it, just sat in front of the TV, laughing at some crappy panel show, smoking that pipe that left the wallpaper yellow and peeling. I remember thinking he wasn’t content to just destroy himself; he seemed to have to take everything out around him." That's sad...

"I didn’t return to the pylon for a long time, except to confirm that the numbers weren’t changing between days." Alright...

"Realistically, it would be impossible to decode it without whatever key the cypher might have been using, and honestly, for the longest time, it seemed to be. I did as much reading as I could on cryptography and codebreaking, and all of it seemed to point me towards one simple conclusion: breaking this code by myself was simply impossible. But I still tried." That's the spirit!

"So, I worked myself into exhaustion instead, staring at those meaningless strings of numbers until I almost collapsed and my eyes couldn’t focus on anything. And that was when I realised, it wasn’t the numbers. It wasn’t the code. It’s what was behind the numbers, shifting and waiting and coming towards me like a tidal wave." Oh?

"And I knew what the message was, the urgent and terrible message about the destruction that was coming on the heels of mankind, about the cold and cruel warmongers who play their games of code and conspiracy, hidden behind the endless streams of numbers. And within those numbers are all of our dooms, if you know how to read them." Oh. You mean, capitalism, and the few who have enough power to reverse it but choose to embrace it for more numbers.

"I fled the house. I ran, as fast as I could, to the pylon, the ruined place that knew all of the numbers, and I fell to my knees and wept. I begged it to spare us, to spare me, as I stared at the flesh I knew would redden and bubble and blister away to the bone beneath. I didn’t need headphones to hear the numbers now. They were pouring from the air around me and threaded through my mind, and no matter how I begged, they would not stop." I feel so bad for him...

"When I returned, the house was in ruins, the windows shattered and broken, glass strewn across the floor." Oh no

"There was nothing left of my dad, save a charred shadow on the wall, scorched through the plaster and into the now exposed brick." That's horrible...

"There are terrible things coming, things that if we knew of them would leave us weak and trembling with shuddering terror at the knowledge that they are coming for all of us. We all made them, and their course is already plotted. You can see them in the numbers, if you only learn how to read them." That's so ominous, but I see his point.

Well, it clearly was about the Extinction...

"Another statement, another side to Peter’s “Extinction”, I think. I, uh, I couldn’t follow some of his reasoning, but I think it was about nuclear weapons, or maybe- doomsday weapons? In keeping with the theme, I suppose." Yeah, that also.

"I just wish Peter would spend less time trying to convince me his new power is real and more time telling me what he plans to do about it." I love how passive agressive he is right there lol

Knock on the door!

Hi Daisy!

"They’re back. Thought you might want to know. Seems like it went smooth. Too smooth for Basira, it sounds like. Keeps looking at Jon like she can’t believe he made it back." Well, it could have gone so much worse...

The silence is so awkward...

"I, uh, I mentioned our conversation to him. He asked me to check on—"

"Just leave."

"Sorry?"

"Get out."

"Oh. Right. Sorry, I didn’t…"

"It’s not difficult. Just get out.

"Fine." Wow, that's very harsh! ...It means that Peter Lukas is around, right? It's only pretending, right?

"Fine. Just thought—"

"No, no you didn’t. We’re not friends, Daisy. None of us are. We’re all just trapped together here and kidding ourselves that we don’t hate it. Christ, there are more important things than feelings right now, so just leave me alone. For good." Yeah, there's gotta be something. Not that he's wrong about that, but the way he says it is so harsh all of a sudden... It's not just the influence of the Lonely, wanting to be alone at all cost.

Of course Daisy doesn't know about that... Not cool for her. After that, she definitely won't want to go talk to him again, and he'll feel even more alone.

THAT AWFUL NOISE AGAIN

I KNEW HE WAS AROUND

"Well?"

"I’m impressed. And grateful."

"I didn’t do it for you."

"Even better."

"Easier this way. I’m sure you’d have had no problem sending her away."

"I hadn’t really thought about it, and now, thanks to you, I don’t need to."

Yeah, it was to avoid her to get into big trouble.

"Yeah, well. It seems to be your 'go-to’ move for dealing with anyone."

"I’m just not big on confrontation. You understand, I’m sure." Manipulation is easier, feels less dirty, huh?

"We are not the same."

"Of course." THAT TONE THAT SAYS "Sure, whatever comforts you", WHILE HE KNOWS HIS PLAN IS WORKING IT'S SO ANNOYING

"Did you read it?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

"I believe you."

"You don’t still think I’m trying to trick you into a grand ritual?"

"I mean, I’m not about to start chanting stuff for you, but… the details you’ve given me all seem to check out. So far." Yeah, cause just because that's part of his plan, maybe of some ritual doesn't mean it's not true...

"So, what’s our next step?"

"For you, keep researching. I’m sure we haven’t found all the statements in here that deal with The Extinction yet. One of the downsides of not serving the Ceaseless Watcher is that we have to actually look things up, not to mention the fact that Gertrude was distressingly good at obfuscation. The more you know about our enemy, the better."

"And you?

"I have my own explorations I need to attend to. And a, um, meeting to arrange. For you." WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN

"For me?"

"I’m absolutely delighted with your progress, and I feel you’ve earned some straight answers."

"But not from you?"

"Oh no, that sort of conversation makes me very uncomfortable." YOU'RE COMFORTABLE WITH TWISTING THE TRUTH TO YOUR ADVANTAGE BUT NOT WITH JUST SAYING IT AS IT IS.

"No, I’m owed a favour by a friend of mine. I’ve asked him to stop by when he’s back in the country." WHO EVEN IS THAT

"You’re not just going to tell me, maybe?"

"When have I ever?" It's frustrating. Because he may be planning, scheming and manipulating, but I gotta hand it to him, he's played by all the same rules.

"What would life be without the occasional twist? Oh, speaking of which, I’ve had a report of a workplace dispute in the Library, and I would value your input. I’m trying to get out of the habit of, what did you call it, “sending them away?” " FLASH NEWS, MAKING PEOPLE VANISH ISN'T APPRORIATE WORKPLACE BEHAVIOUR

The way he's saying that, it feels like he's saying "okay, here's a little reward for following my plan", and it sickens me.

I don't know what to think about the Extinction. I mean, sure, it's the fifteen Dread Power, why not. But does it have to be stopped, I mean... I'm starting to wonder about all the rituals, what if they are all... destined to fail in some way? Because yeah, stopping the world from coming to a terrible end, sure, but it just feels... like a decoy. It can't be just that, it's part of some plan....

Alright, let's stop the ritual!

'You’re sure it’s this one?

'Yeah. Tape recorder thinks so too." That's a sign that danger's near.

'We still alone?"

"I never said we were. Just said I couldn’t see anybody." Makes sense. You can't see in the dark...

"What are you doing?

"Closing the door?"

"Leave it open. We want as much light as possible, and I’m not seeing any bulbs." Fair enough, but tbh closing doors whenever I walk in or out of a place is such a reflex for me, I would have done the same

"Any clue where everyone is?

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"Well, my guess is an ambush." Yayyyy

Okay, the place has been empty for a year or so...

"I think it’s here. I can feel it, like a hole in my mind." "They just left it here?"

"I … Maybe. Kind of wish Daisy was here." Ouch, this is gonna take an angsty turn...

WOW WOW WOW THERE'S SOMEONE

FIRESHOT

She didn't miss. But without killing, which means we're gonna get answers!

"Who are you?"

" Manuela. Manuela Dominguez." Oooooh we finally meet her!

"Where is everybody?"

"Go to hell."

"Answer her."

"They’re dead, because of you." What???

"Me?"

"What did you do?"

"Nothing, I don’t think!" Yeah, not he's not responsible for this.

"Your Institute. So, she sent you to finish the job?"

"Who?"

"Your Archivist, Gertrude Robinson." Oh. Wait, how long has she been there not to know that Gertrude is dead?

"What happened?"

"Don’t … Don’t make me. Please."

"Tell me." See, in that very specific case, I don't really mind the compelling. But it's all about circumstances and context!

"It was to be a week of night and horror, culminating in the eclipse that passed over Ny Ålesund on the 20th March 2015, almost 300 years after Halley’s eclipse passed over London. We had hundreds of sacrifices prepared and ready, plunged into darkness and terror for days on end, all prepared to culminate in the unveiling of that point of purest night at the moment of the eclipse’s height. It would open the door to a world of true and holy darkness, extinguish the sun and take us to a place where we would be redeemed of our base and corrupt need for light and warmth." But it failed. Why?

"Hither Green was, I believe, where your institute was watching, but Natalie’s efforts were a small and meagre part of the greater effort. When they collapsed, it was as nothing to the grand ritual, though perhaps we should have seen it as the first sign of what was happening." Ooooh, Hither Green, everything that happened in episode 025, Growing Dark!

"To begin our seven-day feast, we slew the still and lightless beast and drank of its stagnant blood, submerging the first of the sacrifices in the brackish water it had blessed with its stillness." Brackish water mention again. Also, "the still and ligthless beast"???

"We believed it far too late for anyone to stop us, and the crude methods of your Archivist least of all. The death of a few have never been more than an inconvenience, and that’s all she was ever really capable of." Well....

"But not for long. That’s the thing about darkness, isn’t it? You try your hardest to eradicate, flood your surroundings with light, but it’s always there at the edges, waiting for the glow to weaken, to return and cover you forever. Robert Montauk discovered that the hard way, and someday, so will your Gertrude." Robert Montauk mention! The last time he was mentioned was in episode 109, Nightfall, wasn't it?

"There is another world, a world of still and quiet darkness, where no heat touches and death cannot find you. You might wander beneath that empty sky of void forever and never see a light to guide your way. No left, no right, no up or down, only forward into the crowded, shivering gloom. For that night is not empty, far from it. Things move there: the sounds of shuffling, scuttling, crawling. A scream. The fall of gentle stagnant raindrops that chills you as you try desperately to know if that is the sound of the storm or something out there?" Tbh, yeah, that's not really the darkness we're scared of. We're afraid of what could hide in it.

"We were to slice a hole in the world, and this paradise would flow through the wound like ink, smothering the sun and all its children. Maxwell had always had the visions, the drive. Whatever was inside him pulled him to this end, to this great undertaking, like a magnet, and I was so very honoured to be his right hand. Natalie and the others followed, but they did not truly understand, with their talk of peace and unity and “Mr Pitch” – a friendly name to try and hide from a concept they couldn't grasp." Friendly, more like ridiculous. It's the name of the villain in Rise of the Guardians!

"Vardan Darvish had an inkling, I thought, but he crossed a Montauk, which has, traditionally, gone poorly for us." Yeah, it only ends bloody for them.

"I don’t know exactly when it all started to come undone. I think Maxwell first felt the ripples four days before the eclipse was due. It was strange, like a pause in the hysterical whimpering and fruitless prayers of the sacrifices and a ripple that was felt through the waters and the stagnant blood that bound us. A disruption. We would later learn that this was the collapse of the ritual at Hither Green, but it was only the first. Our congregation in Alaska disappeared the next day, and Russia as well. One by one, it seemed our scattered whisperers of night were falling, and holding it together, keeping the lightless world anchored to our star, bringing it closer, was becoming an almost unbearable strain on Maxwell." A series of failure...

"Until at last, we felt it: the eclipse. We had been worshipping in the deepest dark, and yet when it crossed the sun, I felt it roll over us like a cooling balm on a summer's day, plunging us into a deep, black void far more complete than I can ever convey with mere words." To read that while being exactly two weeks away from an eclipse is disturbing....

"the sacrifices who remained screamed and fell in holy agonies, and the world of endless night we had been promised began to pour in, shining out and all around us. It touched and caressed our souls with the soothing fears of night, and I heard Maxwell weeping with joy at what we had done." This is gonna be short lived...

"And then … it stopped. It just stopped. All at once, that loving embrace was stripped from us, and it began to retreat, to recede back into the place that it had come from." Too bad for ya.

"I heard Maxwell cry out, scrambling desperately to the Dark Sun, stopping just short of touching it, but it was too late. Whatever it was that you and your Archivist did, it clearly worked." I really wonder what happened though

"We left, half of us dead and the other half destroyed by coming so close to the true essence and being denied." Existential crisis yay

"I don’t know how long we waited after that. It was weeks before anyone spoke. And then, when they did, the arguments began, the recriminations, the desperate resolutions to try again, to find what went wrong. But I could see in his eyes that Maxwell was so very tired, and all the words fell to nothing. Instead we began the search for his successor, a new host for his continuation. He would regain his strength and we would plan our next move." This isn't gonna do anything...

"Finally, about 18 months ago, we found one – a child whose father had, by coincidence, been directly marked by the dark." So, what happened in 073, Police Lights... The kid's father has been marked by the dark???

"But it didn’t work, did it? I can only assume we were too weak to hide from you and you struck when Maxwell was vulnerable." It didn't work but he still got a new vessel, didn't he?

"For the first six months, I let myself hope that my suspicions were unfounded, that the silence I felt was simply him lying low, recovering before returning to his abandoned disciple. But no. Soon enough, I could no longer fool myself. He had been slain and I was alone, and here I have remained." Okay, so maybe I was wrong about the new vessel thing.

"There. Now you can kill me like the others." Well, it's not probably not gonna be exactly like the others, but-

"She telling the truth?" "Yeah, I mean, unless she can lie to me somehow. You said it wasn’t the eclipse."

"It’s not the time." Okay, answers for later...

"Well, where is she? Afraid to face what she’s done?"

"Just shut up."

"Hm, coward. So, how did she do it? It’s been three years, waiting, guarding this place without hope. At least do me the courtesy of telling me how she collapsed our moment of triumph." First: she's dead. Second: how she did that? GOOD QUESTION.

"You really don’t know, do you?"

"Know what?"

"Gertrude’s dead. She died right around the time of your ritual."

"Ha, so stopping us took everything she had."

"You wish. She was murdered. Unrelated, as far as we can tell." Yep.

"That’s … I … Then why are you here? Maxwell is dead. The ritual failed. What’s left?"

"A good question. Basira?"

"You said the Dark Sun was still here." Oh, right, there's that thing.

"Fine. If you’re so keen to take everything, undo the work of centuries, it’s just through that door." ...It feels like a trap.

"How dangerous is it?"

"Only myself, Maxwell and Natalie could even look upon it. It will annihilate you both in an instant." Okay, leave that thing here.

"Ask her how we can destroy it."

"I know how. I just need to see it."

"See, as in …"

"As in, actually see it." I really hope that you're gonna be protected by the Eye...

"Go ahead. Just try."

"Look, it’s alright, Jon. No-one else knows it’s here, and if we just leave it, no one will know."

"No, I’m doing this. Get out." This is gonna go bad. I can feel it.

WHAT'S GOING ON

Oh, okay, Manuella ran away, and Basira went to catch her...

The silence is scary...

"Did you catch her?

"Yes." Oh, hi Helen!

"She needed a door."

"H-how did you—"

"Oh, finding this place was easy without the darkness."

"Will she be coming back?"

"No. Uh, this one I think I’ll keep." Okay. Maybe it's for the best.

"Why are you here?"

"I told you, I’ve decided to help. I thought you might like a way home."

"Another door?"

"If you want it." Eh, it's gonna be quicker than the boat.

"How was it, looking upon The Dark?"

"I thought I was going to die."

"You seem to think that a lot. I remember when you thought you were going to die at my threshold." This is depressing because it's true...

"Go find your Basira, then let’s get you both home." Well, thank you Helen.

Alright. Well.

I knew that the fact I didn't feel that sense of emergency I felt about the Unknowing was for a reason.

There was no ritual to stop, it had already failed. That's... kinda funny, in a way. Gertrude, I don't know what you did, but it was efficient.

Well. The only dangerous thing in there was that Dark Sun stuff. And of course Jon had to take a look at it. But even though he thought he was going to, he didn't die, yay!

I assume this is going to be about the Eye...

Oh, Martin is recording a statement directly from subject! Hasn't happened since... episode 100 I think?

"I’d like to, to talk to you about one of your staff." Oh.

"Would you mind telling me what happened? What they did?"

"He."

"Ah, alright. Um, did he… Did he look like he hadn’t slept in like a week?" He immediately knew who she is talking about.. "Mmmhmm. Yep. Uh, he’s been— Yeah, I think he’s been, uh, following me. Kind of." Are you feeling... watched?

"Yeah, I see. Well he’s not here at the moment so… I mean— Yeah, why don’t you tell me what happened."

"Look, it’s, uh… I don’t know. I-It’s just kind of weird."

"Well, you know… Weird is what we do!

"Okay." "Just, just tell me what happened? Um, please? I won’t judge." He's trying so hard to be as helpful as possible...

"I work for Thames Water, uh, mainly pipes and stuff. Like, I mean, I mean, I’m a qualified engineer, but, you know, mostly it’s, it’s just manual stuff, like digging and replacing pipe. Sometimes I’ve got to— You know, there are actual sewers involved." Sounds like a tough job.

That poor lady sounds distraught...

"About five years ago, we were doing some work under Kentish Town. It was pretty nasty. Do you know what a fatberg is? No, uh, it— Don’t worry. Don’t look it up, seriously. Don’t." I'm very tempted to look it up...

"Maybe it was rotten or, or unstable or the place kind of— The place kind of collapsed on me. You know, just one moment I’m stood there torch in hand, and the next I’ve got a shooting pain all up my arm and I can feel god knows how much rubble on top of me and it’s absolutely pitch dark." Oh no, that must have been so awful...

"Well, I don’t know how long I was down there. Well, well, I do, it was three hours, they told me." Which is already an awfully long time in itself. Being under the rubbls and not knowing if help is on the way, if you're actually gonna be able to get out? Yeah, it must have felt like eternity!

"But I was lying there, panicking, screaming, just trying to make any noise, any movement that didn’t hurt like hell." I feel so bad for her...

"And I… Okay. I felt something. No, I felt someone, grab my ankle. At first it was great, I had this, this huge wave of relief, right? Someone had found me, they were getting me out." She must have felt so much hope, and she lost it right away, I'm sure of that...

"But no, it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t— It was cold, right? Like… like old stone, or wet sand. It felt, like, rough, and, and like the fingers weren’t… I don’t know, it felt like they, they weren’t in the right places." Creepy...

"I realised something. The way it w— it was grabbing me, holding my leg, there was— it had to have been coming upwards. From below me. And there was no-one else down there when that tunnel collapsed. Absolutely no-one. I’m sure." Oh no

"So then I start screaming again. And kicking, thrashing about. It hurts but, I mean, I’m scared out of my mind," Very understandable reaction

"but the, the hand, it just grips tighter and I can feel its fingernails just… It-It-It started pulling. It was pulling down, dragging me down. Into the earth." Oh no no no

"and then this slab of stone came away in front of me and there was daylight, and, and Abby, one of the work crew, was staring at me. And, and, yeah, just like that it was… gone." It was this close, wow...

"But the bruise stuck around. Horrid, muddy bruises where the fingers had grabbed me." Ew.

"So, it, it took a long time to get over that. I mean, that’s not weird, right? I me— It was a bad time. You know, it, it stays with you. Was signed off, what, I think about six months with the injuries. Had pretty bad, uh, nightmares, claustrophobia, I mean, obviously, right?" Of course, that was traumatising!

"You know, once the bruises were gone I— Well, it’s easy to blame memory, right? You know, ha-hallucination, coincidence, all the classic shite you tell yourself. Life went back to normal. I— I was fine." Until she wasn't...

"Until about two weeks ago." Very recent...

"That’s when he showed up. Y-You know the coffee shop, uh, just next to Pimlico? Uh, the, the nice one. Well, I a— I actually had a date there. You know, cute guy I met online. Seemed sporty, which, I kind of like and— Look, it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter." Imagine just trying to move on with your life, you go on a date, unaware that you're gonna come back home with even more trauma-

"Anyway, I get a latte and sit down waiting for, uh, Grant? I wanna say Grant. Or Ga-re… Gareth? Gary? Anyway, look, he’s running late, and, and, and I’m just reading." The fact that she doesn't even remember the name of the guy already shows how it went: not far.

"There’s this creep in, in the corner. Your guy. He just… keeps staring at me, like, like properly staring. Like, it is super intense and, and real weird. Like he knows me, but I sure as hell do not know him. I— I try to ignore him, look, I just, I just read my book, and every time I look up there he is, watching me." Jon, you can't do that to people, it's creepy!

"You know, I’m about to say something, you know, like, when in comes Gary? Gareth? Gavin? and suddenly, hey, it’s a date. And I really didn’t want his first impression of me to be, you know, me yelling at some creeper in the corner. So I just swap chairs so that I’ve got my back to your ‘colleague’, and get on with it." Honestly, you could have yelled at him.

"Didn’t really matter, you know, in the end, Gareth was a, was a bust. You know, not like, you know, I mean… He, he was fine, I guess, it’s just there was nothing really there between us. You know? Just a nice, boring coffee with a kinda dull man." Ouch. Well, that was predictable.

"Took about an hour and he clearly wasn’t feeling it either, so we, you know, we just called it. I mean, we actually shook hands when he left, which… I mean, tells you something, right?" Yeah.

"Look, I’m packing up, all done and, and I just, I just sorta turn, you know, just, just to check if he’s still there and he is standing right behind— Like, like a few inches from my face. Look, it’s messed up!" It is!

"And I start to ask him, you know, what the hell, man, you know? Like— But he just starts talking. Slowly. But real intense. He says, he works here, at the, the Magnus Institute, and I say, what even is that and he says, he wants my story. He says he needs to hear what happened to me." Jon, you need to find a better way to approach people to ask for their statement, please...

"And I— I want to tell him to j-just go away. I want to, to, to kick him and run. But I— (long sigh) I sit down. And I start to tell him everything. About the job, about the collapse, a-about the hand. More than I told you, even, and, and as I do— it’s like I’m there nagain. Like I can feel it grab my ankle, th-th-that cold, dead hand and I just… I just can’t stop talking." I'm so sorry for her... Having to relive it is awful...

"It felt like, like I was throwing up all those feelings again, and I wanted to, to scream but instead I just sat and calmly told him my life story. And he just watched me, his eyes like… His eyes were, were like drinking in every fragment of my misery. I can’t— It— And then it was over. And he looked— He looked at me like he’d just eaten, like a perfectly cooked steak." Well, that's kinda how it feels to him, tbh

" You know what he said? He said, “Thank you.” “Thank you.” Just like that. Like, like reliving the worst parts of my whole life were just a bit of a… a favour that I’d done him." I feel so bad for her...

"That wasn’t the end."

"You… You’ve seen him since?"

"No. Not— Kind of? I feel like I do." Nightmares and feeling watched?

"Nightmares where the, where the hand keeps pulling and I go deeper and deeper and, and deeper into… It takes me places I do not want to go. And he’s there the whole time, just… watching me. Watching me scream and thrash and… He’s all eyes. He’s all eyes." Yeah, it's terrifying...

"But I feel like I’m seeing him when I’m awake as well. I’ve been… I’ve been having a lot of problems since he talked to me. Since I talked to him. Since I told him my story. The, the claustrophobia, it’s back, worse than it ever was and I can’t do my job. I have these, these screaming panic attacks every time I try and—" Does... giving a live statement, directly, makes you afraid, like... keeps the fear alive inside you? So that it... feeds the dread power it's linked to? Like, here, the Buried. Does the Buried still feeds of her fear? And the Eye, of course, somehow.

"What am I supposed to do? Like, feels like, like every time I’m even slightly underground I— Can’t even go into a shop basement more without feeling that… hand. Every time I do, every time I get that panic just rising up my throat, I see him. He’s there. Not when I look properly, but just at the edge. The corner of my eye. Then he’s gone." It must be so mentally exhausting to live that...

"So I want to put in a complaint. Like a proper complaint. I don't want to go to the police. I mean, I doubt that they would— They wouldn’t even, you know, let me get this far, would they? But— Sorry. So thanks, I guess." Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything to do...

"Well, firstly I’m, I’m really sorry that this happened. Um, in, in terms of next steps—"

"Just— I just— I don’t know. You know? Talk to him, I guess, just tell him— Look, I mean that’s not okay! You know, right? I’m not— I don’t know what he did, but it’s— You know, he can’t just go around and well— y’know, just keep doing—" Yeah! Somebody has to tell him!

She left without even giving her name... But this place is so... I understand that she wanted to leave so quick.

"What the hell do I do with that? I mean, Christ John, that’s not okay! Oh, that can’t, that can’t… I mean it’s not him, is it? Not, not really. Is it… what, addiction? Instinct? Maybe mind control, something like that. I can’t believe he’d choose to do something like that." He can, very much. You need to talk to him about that, maybe he'll listen to you

"No, no. I can’t think like that though. I can’t let myself, cos I mean, if, if he’s already gone then all of this is just—" Oh...

"The, the worst part is I don’t even want to talk to him about it." Because it's gonna be a difficult conversation, right? Right????

"I’m just— I suppose I’m just getting comfortable with the distance. Cut off. Lonely." NOOOOOOOOO

It's actually working, NO!

"Mind you, Peter’s not wrong. It really is easier than actually just trying to communicate with people." NO NO NO DON'T LISTEN TO HIM, THE EASY WAY ISN'T ALWAYS THE RIGHT WAY

"I should probably try to get him this tape. Let him know what happened, that someone came in to— But then, heh heh, would that just come across as an accusation? Like, cos I don’t want to— And then, then I guess… he’d hear this bit as well so—" GOOD. Because he would know that you're slowly tuning into an avatar of the Lonely, and he would probably try and help you!

"What do I do?" TALK TO HIM

Oh, Daisy is there!

"I, I saw someone come out, so I, I thought that, you know…"

"Do you want something?"

"No, I’m ju— Just ignore me. Continue with… whatever." She just doesn't want to be alone...

"Melanie’s out, and John and Basira are still off. Bit worried, but they can take care of themselves, you know?"

"Again not really. No-one really talks to me anymore." Ouch-

"Cos they reckon you’re working for the bad guy?"

"Pretty much. Don’t you?" "Oh, I mean, you’re definitely working for something evil. But so are we." That's... not wrong.

'It doesn’t bother you?"

"Didn’t used to."

"And now?"

"Bothers me less than trying to go alone. At least now it’s on my terms. Better than being blackmailed into it." I see her point.

"They told you about Elias, right?"

"Yeah. Basira said. Don’t like him being alive. Trying not to think about it too much. Don’t want to get too angry, start to hear the blood." Understandable.

"I thought you believed him? You were doing all of his dirty work."

"Well, wasn’t willing to call his bluff. Not the same thing as believing. Just too big a risk."

"Not for Melanie."

"Well, maybe she was the only one with any sense. Even if he was telling the truth, if we all… died… There are worse things." First, that's depressing to say that. Then... I don't think that Elias lied about everyone dying too if he gets killed. I wonder how it works, though. I mean, it made sense cause he was Head of the Institute, you know (or the "beating heart" of it, as he likes to say), but now, he's technically not, but the "everyone kicks the bucket" rule still applies. Why? How does it work?

"How was it?"

"Don’t want to talk about it." Of course.

"I listened to your old statement. Wasn't your partner down there?"

"Yeah. Didn't find him."

"You don't want to get him?"

"I'm not going back." "Huh. I’d have thought you’d’ve at least tried—

""I said I don’t want to talk about it." And that's the point. I see what he's doing here. He keeps asking questions about a sensitive topic she doesn't want to talk about, so that she gets uncomfortable and leaves.

"I know. Not nice being interrogated, is it?" Oh, and it's also a petty revenge. (I probably would have done the same...)

"I’m sorry, Martin."

"It’s alright. It wasn’t you. Not really." "No, it was. I hate a lot of what I did back then. Doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for it. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t me." This is already making me like her more. Actually apologising, and taking accountabilty of what she did though she was under the influence of the Hunt. I appreciate the character development.

"So what’s this field trip they’re on?"

"They, uh, they didn’t tell you?" Oh he's not gonna like that...

"No, I— What? Daisy, where have they gone?"

"You know that town in Norway?"

"What? No… Wai— Wh-What? You don’t mean Ny-Ålesund?"

"Yeah. They reckon there’s a ritual they need to… you know."

"Yeah, but Peter didn’t even — I don’t believe this." OF COURSE HE DIDN'T TELL YOU

"For god’s sake, can he not just stay safe for like, like ten minutes?!"

"I don’t think that’s an option for him anymore."

"Yeah, I mean, sure. But he just… he doesn’t think! He always just immediately charges straight off into danger with whatever, whatever half-arsed plan oc occurs to him at the time! I don’t get it!" He's so done about his favourite idiot getting in a dangerous situation again lol

"I, I mean, it’s pretty standard stuff."

"What?"

"Used to see it all the time back in the force, especially with the sectioned. Not like there’s ‘normal’ trauma, you know, but it’s pretty common. The most important thing becomes control, engaging on your own terms. Even when it’s stupid or dangerous. Anything to not feel helpless." Oh...

"And of course for Jon’s there’s survivor’s guilt in there too. He thinks he’s not human. Makes him very… self-destructive." Yes! Exactly!

"Yeah, well, we’ve all had trauma." Which made you all do very stupid and dangerous things- "And everyone’s changed." Indeed...

"You’re… You’re pretty observant, you know."

"Detective, remember."

"Yeah, you did mention. Would have thought Basira would have had more sense, though." lol

"When Basira and I were partners, I’d see this happen sometimes. She can read a situation like no-one I know, always seems to know the right move, but for all her research she never wants to put a plan together. I think she just hates all the unknowns, the variables, contingencies… If she spots an advantage she’ll grab it and trust herself to figure out the details as she goes. It’s worked so far." I get the logic. After all, if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

"I mean, I guess. It still sounds really dangerous." Duh. But dangerous is you all do now.

"Yeah. Wanted to go with them. Protect them, but… Life’s always more complicated than that, isn’t it?

"Not really." Huh?

Okay...

It was interesting to have an outsider pov. To actually realise how scary it is. I feel so bad for that lady...

It's so sad, that most people go to the Magnus Institute to make statement for closure, to move on, and they just end up with more trauma. But she didn't even go to the Institute, she didn't wanna talk about it at all, and she still got traumatised. It's not fair.

I just imagine Jon staring from a distance like a cat does when it notices you're about to open a can of tuna. You know that weird way the light hit a cat's eyes and it looks like they glow? Yeah, with the same eyes.

Please stop doing that to random people just so that you can have a snack. At least pick people who willingly come to the Institute!

*sighs*

Also... Martin said that he's lonely. And getting comfortable with that. He really is becoming an avatar of the Lonely... I'm worried about him. I really am, cause while it was obviously going to happen, I still don't like that, and it's only gonna get worse...

Peter Lukas' plan is working and I don't like this at all.

Jon and Martin really need to talk to each other. So that they can help each other. Cause they're both like "ugh, he's doing something stupid and dangerous, how do I stop that" about the other. JUST TALK. PLEASE.

I'm so normal and totally not insane about them. I'm getting keychains of them for my birthday if I play my cards right.

It was nice to hear Daisy. Which is a sentence I wouldn't even have believed barely a season ago. I like her character development.

Oh, they're actually on a boat! So we get to hear how Jon is doing on the only (for now) boat trip (except for the return trip obvi), but we can't hear even a glimpse of one of the many flights he went on during season 3. Not fair.

Poor Basira, she's not doing okay...

And they still have two days to go...

Oh, yeah, the tape recorder turned on by itself. Again.

"Get ready. Any idea what’s coming?"

"N-No… No, I-I don’t think that’s it.

"It’s not recording for nothing." Exactly. So, what is going to happen?

Oh, that one shiphand worked for Salesa?

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Mikaele Salesa. You used to work on his ship."

"I don’t know you."

"But I know you."

"Jon…"

"Floyd Matharu. Served on the Dorian from 2011 to 2014. With Salesa."

"Jon, I’m not sure about this."

Yeah, tell him! Jon, you can't just do that to random people, it's creepy! That poor guy wasn't even mean or rude or anything, leave him alone

"Tell me what happened."

"Wh-What is this?"

"Whenever you’re ready." Compelling, now. Great.

Did you really need a statement that bad? That's really not cool.

*sighs* let's hear it, then.

"I worked for him for three years, and… treated us well. He never lied to us about the sort of thing he was into. He didn’t exactly volunteer specifics, but we all knew what we were doing wasn’t legal, and we trusted him because he knew what he was doing." Okay...

"It was a weird ship to be on, though, and not just because everyone was always gossiping about whatever the latest haunted cargo was. A lot of it was because we had a-a captain, a man named Gaultier, but he reported to Salesa." That's a French name!

"Always felt a bit uncomfortable when the captain was giving orders and he was there. I could sometimes feel Captain Gaultier looking to him for support or confirmation, and that always slightly undermined our confidence in him. It wasn’t a problem, not really, and Salesa never threw his weight around, never contradicted the captain in front of us or anything. It was a weird dynamic." I see how it can feel a bit weird, yeah.

"He was the only one ever allowed in the cargo bay during a voyage. I only saw one person try to break that rule, Jésus, a nasty piece of work we picked up in Colombia, and who clearly thought he smelled an opening. Salesa was a big guy, you know, but he never really made anything of it. He always used to say he needed a crew to follow him out of trust, not fear." That's a pretty good way to lead, tbh

"But he didn’t have a problem using his size against Jésus when he found him. He threw the little rat overboard without a second’s hesitation, and there was nobody on that ship unhappy he did it. They’d all seen what could happen when someone else got in the cargo bay." Wow. Okay... Not very cool, murder.

"My last voyage with him was the one that killed him. Seven years ago; I still have nightmares sometimes." Oh. I hadn't even considered the fact that he might be dead...

"I don’t know exactly what was different but the whole mood of the ship was off. Kind of sour, somehow." Hm...

"He was tired. Everyone could tell. The man had been doing this job non-stop as long as any of us could remember, and he was clearly starting to feel it." Well, that's what happens after a while...

"Once found him pouring over an old photo album. The ship was there in the pictures, but a different captain, different crew. I asked him who they were, and he just looked at me, eyes sunken like hadn’t slept, and for a second I felt like he was seeing someone else, not me. But then he just shrugged. “Dead now,” he said, “doesn’t really matter.” " I wonder what happened...

"That was about a month before Gantulga died." I'm guessing that there were more people who died that day...

"It should have been a nice simple job. I helped load the box under Salesa’s supervision, and it was barely a few metres across. Dantez told me it was a carpet that he’d bought from an old Burmese beggar woman who fed lost children to a crocodile head, but I never paid any attention." who fed WHAT to WHAT-

"He liked to make up wild stories about whatever it was that Salesa had bought." Oh. It was a joke, okay.

"I don’t know what went wrong. He was always so careful. I didn’t even usually think about the cargo during the trip itself, but this time I didn’t have much choice." Oh no...

"I was woken up by the sound of Gantulga screaming his lungs out. I ran over to him, trying to see what was going on. And he was being attacked, that much was clear, but there wasn’t anyone there." That's already weird...

"The thing that was grabbing him, trying to reach down his throat and pull him apart… it was a pattern. Diamonds and swirls and colours that seemed to imprint itself upon his skin even as it pushed itself messily into his nose and mouth. What it was made of, I couldn’t say; the way it moved and shifted made my head throb with pain." The Spiral?

"I screamed, staggered back and fell, hitting my head on the table. I can’t have been out for more than a few seconds, but when I opened my eyes he was there, dragging the thrashing body of Gantulga through the door and up onto the deck. I followed slowly, unsteadily, but got there just in time to see Salesa throw both him and what looked like a blank rug over the side and into the ocean." Welp. That won't fix the problem, but at least there won't be more victims. Not because of the rug, at least.

"He was drunk for the next two days, and we kept sailing on towards Cape Town. We no longer had anything to deliver there, but no-one was really sure what else to do. Whenever there’d been similar disasters before, Salesa was quick to make a new plan, let know Captain Gaultier know what the next steps were. It was one of the reasons the crew trusted him so much. He just always seemed to know what we needed to do next. This time, though… felt different. He was distant, quiet. His words, when he spoke to you at all, were blurred with alcohol and regret. Nobody knew what the plan was, so we just kept going." If this happens somewhat often, why is he so affected? There was already the thing with the photo album, but why so much melancholia all of a sudden?

"When we hit port, he disappeared for a while, nobody was sure where, and even when he showed back up he was spending his time on the phone. We all assumed he was trying to arrange the next job, but he had this… wild energy I’d never seen in him before, and it scared me. Whatever he was planning, it wasn’t going to be like the others. We were sure about that." Oh no...

"Finally, he calls us all together. The captain’s there, but he doesn’t look happy. Salesa starts talking, says he’s been doing this too long, he’s getting slow. Says he’s retiring." Okay...

"Then he says he wants to send us off with a proper payday, that there’s one last job he wants us to do. Very dangerous, very illegal." What is it?

"Salesa says anyone who doesn’t want to be a part of it, they can stay in port with a decent severance and find another job. A few take him up on that, and the rest of us decide to stay, though the captain’s clearly not happy this is costing him experienced crew. Still, he doesn’t speak up. I can see in his eyes the greed’s got him, like it’s got the rest of us. It’s not like we were underpaid on the Dorian, but there were rumours about how much money Salesa was making out of all this." Hm... Rumours can be dangerous sometimes...

"All I knew about what we going on were as follows: we were on our way to the Maldives, to a tiny island about a hundred kilometers south of Malé. No-one would tell me the name of the island, but in that area of the world any islands that small are usually private, though I had no idea who the owner might have been." An island, you say?

"Once there, Salesa and the four crewmembers he trusted most were going to take the small boat over to the island. We were to wait, and prepare to depart as quickly as possible as soon as they returned. He didn’t say exactly what he was expecting to happen on the island, but it wasn’t hard to guess that whatever he was retrieving, it wasn’t something he was purchasing legally" It wasn't only about a purchase, wasn't it....

"It was night, of course, and we had no lights showing, nothing that would give us away. The island was completely dark as well, and if it hadn’t been for the bright moon shining down on the dense trees and sandy beach, I might not have been able to see it at all." A very unsettling atmosphere...

"When they returned, only two of the four crewmembers Salesa had taken were still with him." Oh...

"And then Salesa closed and locked the metal box, and carried it down into the hold as we started to sail away." What's in the box?

"As he did so, I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye. I was on watch, so I hurried to the stern to see what was happening. There was a storm over the island. I don’t know where it came from, it can’t have been more than a minute since I’d last looked at it, an-and the skies were completely clear. But now it was covered in lightning, the rolling clouds above it dark and angry." Sudden thunderstorm? That's odd...

In the light of the flashing storm I could clearly see the waters around the island, and there was something there. A huge shape, a shadow surrounding it on all sides; getting darker, getting closer, coming up from deep, deep below the surface." Oh no

"Something began to break the surface as I realised the deep rumble was no longer the thunder, and I closed my eyes and fell to the deck, gripping the rail with all my might as a wave hit us from behind, propelling us away from it." Well, at least you don't even have to run.

"When it had finally subsided, and I could bring myself to look back, the island was gone and ocean was still." As if it had never existed...

"Our journey back was a long one, but Salesa was in a far better mood than I had ever seen him." He didn't know that the worst was to come...

"He didn’t talk about what had happened on the island, nor of Christoph or Adreas, the two who had not returned. When we finally arrived at Southampton, he insisted on throwing a ridiculous party to celebrate our good fortune. The drinks flowed freely, and he walked around and shook each of us by the hand, telling us how much he would miss us in retirement and hiding his insincerity well. I do not believe there was a sober person on the Dorian when the night was over, and we slept easily." Awesome, but it feels weird cause this is gonna go wrong...

"Well, the others slept easily, but they had not seen what I had seen." What was it...

"I didn’t hear the explosion myself. Dantez told me about it, as it had apparently woken him and a few others of the crew. A big explosion, they said, further into the port." An explosion???

"We staggered onto the deck and, sure enough, smoke could be seen a little way off, its source hidden behind a wall of shipping containers. There was no reason at that point to suspect it had anything to do with us, but I think somehow we all knew what it meant. That something had gone terribly wrong." Yeah, that usually means trouble...

"Nobody could find Salesa or the captain." Oh no...

"We were still stood there, arguing amongst ourselves about what to do, when Captain Gaultier made his dramatic reappearance. His clothes were torn and his hair matted with blood." I wanna say that he killed him, but that would be too simple...

"Before any of us could speak he commanded us to leave, to take up anchor and get out there. We did as we were ordered, and left immediately. Some tried to ask the captain about Salesa, but he just shook his head. He wasn’t making much sense." Yeah, there's something about that... I don't know...

"We managed to gather the two of them had left early to deliver the artefact, but something had gone wrong. There had been an argument. They had been betrayed. Salesa was dead." Oh...

A betrayal...

"The captain died soon after; the shrapnel trapped in his skull finally getting the better of him." Ouch.

"The crew fragmented after that. I think a few of them managed to retain ownership of the Dorian, but they weren’t people I was close to. So I jumped ship the next chance I got. And I have tried ever since then to leave those memories behind me." Until a certain Archivist forced you to talk about that out of nowhere...

I feel bad for that poor guy...

"Thank you Floyd. You’ve been… very helpful." He sound SO creepy...

"It’s alright, Floyd. You just… need a break."

"Yeah… Sure."

You probably just traumatised him, he's gonna need more than a break!

"What the hell was that?"

"He had information about Salesa. I thought it would help." Help for what? It was unlikely to be something related to the Dark! "Is that why you were so keen on this ship?"

"I wasn’t sure. Just had a hunch there was something here." Come on...

"And what, you thought the best way to find it was by… slurping it out of his brain?"

"He didn’t exactly seem inclined to volunteer the information." AND RIGHTFULLY SO

"Besides, you said I needed to be ready for Ny-Alesund. “Full power” I believe were your words. The statement helped."

Elias is probably very glad to watch that...

"And now he’s going to see you in his dreams as he relives that for the rest of his life. Because… because a tape recorder told you to do it?" Exactly. Not cool! "Yes, Basira, he is. And I am sorry about that. But we needed it." So the end justify the mean, huh?

"Anyway you’re the one who wants to be like Gertrude. You think she’d give a damn about a few bad dreams?

"No."

"No. She got the job done, and didn’t care about the cost." Doesn't mean that you have to do the same thing.

"But I thought you did." EXACTLY. THANK YOU.

"I had to know, Basira."

It wasn’t right." *nods*

"You could have stopped me." How?

"But you wanted to know as well, didn’t you?" Ouch....

Wow, alright...

That was... weird.

But here's one thing: efficiency, especially the proper kind to actually get things done, has a cost. A real cost. And Basira seeing it, how it actually affect people... I think she needed that. Cause she's been saying that Gertrude was a more efficient Archivist and got things done, and that Jon should do the same. But when he actually does, all of a sudden, she's not okay with that.

She's realising what it actually means to use that kind of power on people. And yeah, it stings.

Still, I feel bad for that poor guy. I don't like it when Jon does that to people who aren't evil or anything.