#catdesk

I’m pretty much certain this is exactly what happened.  More than that, I have a suspicion that he might have been one of the few colleagues Gertrude liked.  Her loathing of Mary and her conflicted feelings about Gerard make so much more sense this way.  On the one hand, Gerard was a big part of the reason her colleague died.  On the other hand, he was an infant at the time, and Mary was the murderer.  Gerard was raised knowing his mother murdered his father for the hell of it, and was taught to see this as the way things went.  And he still wanted to find his father.  He was still disappointed when he didn’t get to meet him in the book.

Which makes me wonder why, if this is true, Gertrude never gave him that page.  Did it really fail, and she didn’t want to just show him his father’s skin and the lack of any meaningful interaction?  Was she keeping that page for something else?  Did she already burn the page, having realized her former colleague was trapped and suffering?  We don’t know.

We do know that the way Gertrude treated Gerard is the very definition of conflict.  She took him on and helped him at his worst, but she also kept things from him and bound him to the very book his mother was trapped in as well.  She left him as essentially a hint system for the next archivist, denying him his humanity and his dignity.  She abandoned him, and that was what hurt him the most.

I don’t know if Mary served any master, in the end.  We know the book got her, but I get the feeling that her entire life was spent trying to get away from masters and chains.  Maybe that was the side that she was referencing?  She was talking about Gertude’s desire to be free of the Beholding, even though it might have been deeply suppressed at that time.  

The thing is that we don’t know Gertrude’s timeline for her decisions.  When did she decide to start hunting and burning the books?  When did she lose her last assistant?  Or her first?  When did she decide that enough was enough and that she had to destroy the archives once and for all?  Did she confront Elias?  If not, how did he find out about it?  

Gertrude is really a mystery, and the more we find out about her, the deeper she goes.  Mary, on the other hand, is defined by a rebellion against the notion of being kept.  Elias, I would argue, revels in it.  He found a purpose and a power in the Beholding that he could have never dreamed of before, and he is totally devoted to it.  Mary is devoted to herself, first and foremost.  She is devoted to her whims and her pleasures, and maybe also to her son, though their relationship is complicated.

Never fear about askbox spams.  These are fun!

Wow!  Interesting thought!  I’m not 100% sure, as Lucy’s statement was given in 1994, and Lawrence’s in 2001, and I’d have to relisten to Lawrence’s to be certain if he could be old enough to be divorced seven years prior to this statement, but you’re right that it’s a weird coincidence.  

I’m not entirely convinced that there are any alliances at play right now, though I could definitely be wrong.  Rather, I think Sims is caught in conflicts between a dozen different factions that have been going on since potentially before humanity existed.  And right now he’s involved in something that consists of only the smallest and most human of those factions.

I could see Michael ‘rescuing’ Sims, although that begs the question of how.  Walking through that door means that Sims ends up in Michael’s endless halls.  Is that what Michael wants, or does he have some other motive?  Are his motives at all comprehensible to us?  He’s said before that he wants to maintain the balance that currently exists, and intervened to help against Jane Prentiss last year.  Now he’s offering Sims more help, but I don’t doubt that his help comes with a hefty price tag.

Interesting!  I hadn’t considered the chair that Gertrude was placed in as one of the chairs, but you may have a very good point, and she may well have had three people working with her.  

I lean against Trevor’s involvement, mostly because whoever he was involved with in ‘Taken Ill’ didn’t seem focused on books so much as monsters.  I’m not saying that they never ran across one another, but I think it’s more likely that Trevor’s group are monster hunters, while the Book Burning Party are working parallel to them, but not with them.

Of course, I may be entirely wrong on that.  Still, Daisy, Gerard and someone else … again, the possibility of Elias presents itself, but he would need to have some serious hidden depths to not only sanction but approve of Gertrude’s extracurricular activities.  

Then again, it’s possible that we’ve met two of the three, and the third party hasn’t been introduced yet, and will arrive with new information at some point.

I’ve been pondering Mary’s appearance in ‘Page Turner’ as well.  We know that the people who go into the book go ... somewhere.  A place created by the writer by making the page, it seems.  We know Mary was skinned and written and potentially bound.

My current theory is that Mary stopped by the archives to give a statement before she went to her death.  What killed her?  I don’t know.  It may have been Gerard, but I don’t think it was.  Rather, I think something else caught up to her finally, and Gerard was either fulfilling her last wish or dishing out some vicious irony by doing to her what she’d done to others before.  Either way, Mary got properly bound.  Properly.  After all, Gerard only needed one page of her to bind her into the book, but according to ‘Page Turner’ she’d been mostly flayed and a ton of her was hung up to dry.  Maybe he wasn’t sure what he was doing, so it required multiple attempts?

Anyway, I think Mary is in the book, and Gerard does still call her up on occasion, either as a consultation service or due to whatever twisted familial bond they have going (I really, really want to know more about their relationship, and I REALLY want Gerard to give a statement).  For whatever reason, she had been called up the day Dominic Swain came by.

Either that, or her long-standing relationship with the book and the End allows her some ability to manifest at will.

Either way?  I’m fairly certain that Mary is 100% accounted for in the book and elsewhere.  I also think she’s 100% dead, but that’s not really stopping her.  Those who were in the book are also still in there, as they’ve been claimed by the End, and Gerard hasn’t figured out a way to set them free.  And as for the skin page given to Gertrude?

Oh, this is a very interesting thought!  I’ve wondered more and more about the schism between Gertrude and the Archives, which I have begun to think is likely what happened.  She found out something or realized something about the very nature of the Archives and did not like it.  So she started trying to break herself away, perhaps even reshape her role in the Archives to something else.

It would be very interesting if part of that separation was the removal of the eyes, of staying away from any of the trappings of the Archivist.  My questions, of course, are what she found, and more importantly what her goal was.  Did she simply want to break away, and this is the sort of job you’re not allowed to leave?  Or was she trying to change the Archives and the role of the Archivist on a fundamental level.  If that was the case, who stood to benefit the most from her death?  Because at that point, it would have been about preserving the status quo in the Institute and the Archives, and maintaining whatever position or balance point that the Archives have managed to hold since Alexandria (at least).