The Magnus Archives Season Two / Recap

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Trailer

The tape starts to the sound of files and drawers being rifled through. Jon calls from another room, assuming Martin is the source of the noise, which stops before Jon enters the room. Jon is confused to find the room empty, and more so when Martin enters from a different door. Jon asks if the trap door into the tunnels is still locked, then notices the tape player is running and blames Martin. Martin begins to protest that he didn't turn it on as the recording ends.

41: Too Deep

Case #0160902. Statement of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, regarding exploration of the tunnels recently discovered below the archive. Statement given direct, 2nd September 2016.

Story

Even though Jane Prentiss is dead and her body and all the worms incinerated, Jonathan is still paranoid and still feels himself being watched when he reads the records. Jonathan takes a few opportunities to explore the tunnels at night since Martin always stops him otherwise. The first time he enters, he quickly becomes lost even though the passages are varied, and Jonathan thinks the tunnels feel more organic than a man-made maze. He finds empty rooms and some doors that open directly to wall. Jonathan remembers that Gertrude Robinson's body and all the cassette tapes with it were taken by the police, and he somewhat wishes he could listen to those tapes since they were important enough to hide either by Gertrude or by her killer. Eventually Jonathan finds dead worms, at a clear point where the cleanup crew chose to stop. Jonathan advances, being careful not to touch the worms, and realizes he doesn't know how long his flashlight's battery will last. Jonathan finds the room with the "doorway" of worms that Tim had mentioned in his report. The room's floor is thickly covered in dead worms, and the "doorway" is still there, composed of dead worms embedded in the wall. Jonathan feels the wall within the "doorway" and finds it to be soft but stable. Jonathan notices that there is a second track of someone pushing through the worms on the floor. Jonathan finds the way out of the tunnels after a hour of wandering. A week later Jonathan decides to explore the tunnels again, bringing more preparations in case he gets lost for days as well as chalk to mark his path, a knife to defend himself from anything he might encounter, and a small fire extinguisher in case any worms survived. Marking the way back proves effective and Jonathan gets much deeper to tunnels that were once below Millbank Prison. Millbank was designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1799 to test the effectiveness of a prison where all cells were observable at all times from guard towers. The project was eventually finished by Robert Smirke in 1821, and he made it more maze-like and poorly lit. The prisoners kept there were those scheduled to be shipped to Australia, the guards were exceedingly brutal, and people were often sick since it was built in marshlands. Millbank was closed and demolished in 1890, and since it was flattened the tunnels must have been separate from it. Jonathan finds a staircase leading down, but decides not to go down until he explores more, and while the tunnels go far he finds nothing which both disappoints and relieves him. Jonathan finds another staircase with a chalk arrow pointing towards it which he didn't draw. Against his better judgement, Jonathan decides to go down. After passing four landings, Jonathan thinks he sees movement down a tunnel and follows but only finds an empty wine bottle. As Jonathan is drawing another arrow, he sees that the way he wanted to go is no longer there. As Jonathan looks around, the walls come closer though he never sees them move. Jonathan then hears a voice say "Leave." Jonathan obeys, going back the way he came as the walls close in further. After getting back into the archive, Jonathan covers the trapdoor with the heaviest things he can find. Jonathan wonders why whatever was in the tunnels would point him down the stairs only to tell him to leave, but he decides that finding out the truth about the tunnels is most important at the time.

Post-Statement

Jonthan doesn't actually care about the tunnels aside from curiosity, but his real top priority is finding the killer of Gertrude Robinson since it's almost certainly someone at the Institute. Jonathan told Martin that the second tape recorder was lost, allowing him to secretly make a second tape for each record which includes his own personal investigations which will only be found by Jonathan's successor who will be given instructions to find it. Jonathan hopes to trick the others into thinking that he's focused on the tunnels so that "they may let their guard down".

Dug Too Deep: Played With We partially explore the labyrinthine tunnels under the Magnus Institute (Although the tunnels have not been created by the explorer.). Before something politely asks our hero to leave.
The Paranoiac: Jon becomes this after the discovery of Gertrude's body in the tunnels below the archive. He becomes increasingly suspicious of his co-workers and irrational, to the point of alienating them. By the end of the season, it turns out that he wasn't entirely wrong about all of them.

42: Grifter's Bone

Case #0131103. Statement of Jennifer Ling, regarding a live musical performance she attended in Soho. Original statement given November 3rd 2013.

Story

Jennifer writes articles for Earful.com, a music blog. Shortly after joining the website's staff she hears the legend of Grifter's Bone, an artist (ambiguously a solo worker who goes by Alfred Grifter or a full band that he leads) who wanted to become a hit and botched a curse or spell to help them, leaving themselves able to play only the most terrible music so that they have to sneak into venues and play unannounced to get an audience, resulting in those that hear them tearing their ears off. Jennifer gets used to hearing Grifter's Bone used as a joke to mock colleagues' taste in music and as such doesn't think much of the legend until noticing the strange behavior of Lee Kipple, one of her coworkers whose job is to listen to all the music submitted to the website by wannabe musicians. Since most of the music Lee reviews is pretty bad he gets the Grifter's Bone joke told to him many times, and Jennifer notices that every time this happens he doesn't laugh but instead nods and scratches at his ears, which are covered by his long hair. Jennifer jokingly concludes that Lee has actually seen a performace by Grifter's Bone and has false ears because he tore the original ones off. One night after the website staff go out for drinks, Jennifer is eventually left alone with Lee. Jennifer asks what seeing Grifter's Bone live was like, and although Lee tries to deny it his panic gives him away. Lee tells Jennifer the story of the night he saw Grifter's Bone. After a concert for a metal band had concluded, a cruel-looking man in an old brown suit entered the stage and set up a keyboard. Lee saw that the man left red spots where he touched the instrument. The next thing Lee could remember was walking in the street two hours later and covered in blood. Lee shows Jennifer his scarred chest, which the hospital had attributed to a box cutter. Jennifer asks Lee about his ears, and he pulls back his hair to show her that his ears are real but he's put in flesh-colored earplugs. Jennifer sees that the earplugs are stained with blood, and Lee explains that it was the only way he could stop the blood flowing from his ears, since no doctor could solve it. Jennifer spends some time researching Grifter's Bone but can't find anything like Lee's story. She decides to write a blog post about Grifter's Bone so that her research won't have been a waste of time and gets permission from Lee to use an anonymized version of his story. Jennifer's obsession with Grifter's Bone ends until she gets a comment on her article reading "Tonight. Soho. No earplugs required.", which startles Jennifer since she hadn't included the part about the earplugs per Lee's request. Jennifer decides to go to Soho and do a sweep of all the music venues and clubs there, though none have Grifter's Bone on the agenda so Jennifer decides to just keep an eye out for a man matching Lee's description. She eventually sees a different man watching her from a tarot shop. He comes over to her and asks what she's listening to, staring at her ears. Jennifer's not listening to anything and tells him as much before asking what he wants. He mutters about protecting her hearing and goes back to the shop, and Jennifer almost follows before seeing a group of people led by a man who matches the one from Lee's story with a keyboard case. Jennifer follows them instead, noticing that no one else on the street seems to notice the group. They reach a jazz bar, and once inside Jennifer sees only eleven people inside, some with heavy coats and one old man in a silk bathrobe. Seeing that Grifter's Bone is setting up onstage, Jennifer places her phone in a corner, sets it to record a video of what's about to happen, and goes to wait outside. After a few minutes, Jennifer hears the most beautiful music coming from inside the bar, then starts to hear screaming and destruction. Jennifer moves to call the police but can't because her phone is inside. As she's about to run for help, the noise suddenly stops. Jennifer slowly makes her way back into the bar where she sees carnage and unidentifiable remains strewn about as Grifter's Bone packs up. Alfred Grifter sees Jennifer and says "Encore?" at which Jennifer grabs her phone and bails. A week later, Jennifer has heard nothing about the mass murder, even at the same jazz bar where it happened. Jennifer hasn't been able to get the video recording to work, as apparently it's incorrectly formatted.

Post-Statement

The jazz club Jennifer visited denies that violence occured on its premises. The only police reports that could match are of eleven deaths by violence in October 2013, and one of the victims matches the description of the man in the silk bathrobe, who was beaten to death in his home two weeks before the story's events. Two weeks after giving her statement, Jennifer attacked her elderly neighbor with a hammer before killing herself with it, implying to Jonathan that she finally got the video of Grifter's Bone to work.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan has become more suspicious of Martin since he's been very invested in Jonathan's recovery from the attack, to the point of prioritizing him over his work, and has also taken great interest in Jonathan's mission to find Gertrude's killer, not being satisfied when Jonathan lied and said that he thinks that the entity in the tunnels killed her. Since Martin has moved out of the archives, Jonathan has taken a look at some of his left items and found an unfinished letter to his mother where he mentions that he's been lying to the others about something, though it's unclear what.

Brown Note: The effect of the music the titular band play, even a corrupted recording from a phone can, tragically, induce a homicidal and suicidal rage in the Victim of the Week.
Dreadful Musician: According to urban legend, Grifter's Bone is this, and that's why they have to sneak into venues and people tear their ears off after listening. Averted as it turns out this isn't true; their music is utterly beautiful, but it makes people kill each other.
Schmuck Bait: The comment left on Jennifer's article with cryptic directions to a Grifter's Bone show. She does try to avert this by leaving her phone to record the music rather than actually staying to listen herself, but it still ends badly.
Too Dumb to Live: Jennifer keeps trying to access her phone's video of Grifter's Bone's performance and the carnage that ensued, even though she has ample proof that listening to the music in close proximity is dangerous. When she does get it to work again, it drives her into a murderous rage and she ends up killing her neighbour and then herself.
Wound That Will Not Heal: Although Jennifer's coworker escaped a Grifter's Bone show, his ears have never stopped bleeding since; no doctor can help him.

43: Section 31

Case #0160919. Statement of Police Constable Basira Hussain regarding her time investigating strange occurrences as part of Section 31. Statement taken direct from subject September 19th 2016.

Story

Basira explains Section 31 of the Freedom of Information Act, which prevents police officers like her from revealing sensitive details of crime investigations and is applied to all "weird" cases. Basira mentions that she was one of the officers on the scene of the Hive's attack on the Institute but it wasn't the weirdest thing she had witnessed. She then recounts the first case she had to sign a Section 31 for in August of 2011, a house fire suspected for arson. Upon arrival, Basira and her partner John find the homeowner fighting the firefighters and saying "cleansing fire" "all shall be ash" and "Asag", the name of a Sumerian demon. As Basira handcuffs the man, the metal becomes hot and burns her hands. The man whispers something to John that frightens him and he refuses to repeat. The suspect is found to be Diego Molina, an assistant curator overseeing a loan from a museum in Mexico. There isn't enough evidence to charge him with arson so he's only fined for assaulting the firefighters and let go. The only item confiscated from him was a red leather-bound book which John had secretly tried to burn but was caught. Basira later hears that John committed suicide after getting home, having boiled himself alive in his bathtub though it's unclear how he was able to get that much water boiling, after which Basira is given her first Section 31 to sign. Basira has her next Section 31 case in July 2014 when she and her partner Daisy go to take care of a report of gunshots where paramedics had also been called. Basira and Daisy search the building in question and find a room with the windows painted over and blood everywhere. They find the victim shot several times in the head. Daisy goes to collect the gun from beside him but is surprised when the victim suddenly regains consciousness. Daisy stops him from shooting himself again and they hand him over to the paramedics. The third and latest Section 31 case covered by Basira was the Hive's siege on the Institute. Basira explains that there are many more reports that could become Section 31 cases if there could be actual investigations involved.

Post-Statement

Due to the confidentiality of official police investigations and the need to keep Basira's report a secret since it breaks her Section 31 agreements, not much if any investigation can be done. Jonathan also deduces that Diego Molina was the unnamed burn victim from case 0121102 (#12: First Aid).

Supplemental Notes

Basira agrees to smuggle as many tapes as she can from evidence to Jonathan to listen to. Jonathan is afraid of what he may discover (or not) on them.

The Men in Black: Averted. While only Sectioned officers will be asked to deal with strange occurrences, to the point that non-Sectioned police will actually refuse to enter a scene if it looks weird enough, "Section 31" is not actually an official unit, just the form. This means that they get no extra training, no special resources, and no real backup, because other cops are so scared of getting Sectioned they refuse to help.
Pun: A dark one. Getting ordered to sign Section 31 under "strange" circumstances is called being Sectioned, which is slang for being confined under an involuntary mental health hold.
Shout-Out: Zig-Zagged The title could be a reference to the mysterious wetwork unit of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine but is also the name of the British Police Force's regulations concerning withholding information from the public to protect ongoing investigations.

44: Tightrope

Case #9790302. Yuri Utkin. Incident occurred in the village of Algasovo, central Russia, November 1952. Statement given 2nd March, 1979. Committed to tape 15th April, 1997. Gertrude Robinson Recording.

Story

Yuri loves to go to the circus, the only part of which he dislikes are the acrobats since he gets scared that he will see them fall and die. In November 1952 a circus called "Another Circus" or "Circus of the Other" comes to Yuri's hometown of Algasova, Russia, which is odd both in it's timing in the year and that it's very large despite not being a government-owned circus. Yuri convinces his father to take him and his brother Ivan to the circus. As they approach, Yuri notices that the woman greeting people has a strange way of speaking, despite being fluent in Russian. Ivan quickly vanishes into the crowd as he excitedly runs in, and Yuri too leaves his father's side when he hears a roar and follows the sound to a caged tiger. Yuri looks closely at the tiger in fascination, having never seen one before, but becomes confused by its unnatural-looking movements and how it roars without moving its mouth. A pair of strongmen accost Yuri and tell him that he's in an off-limits area and that the tiger isn't ready for the public, (though looking back Yuri realizes that their exact words were that the tiger "wasn't finished") and take him back to his father, who is speaking with the circus ringmaster about finding Ivan, who assures him that he'll have the circus staff watch for Ivan and that the boy wouldn't find any danger in the meantime. Yuri decides to be a hero and find Ivan himself, leaving his father once more. Yuri finds his way to a tent labelled "Freak Show", which Russian circuses don't normally have. Inside, Yuri sees horrific beings that could not humanly exist. Yuri closes his eyes as he moves through the tent, finally reaching the end where the last cage contains only a large hessian bag which begins to move violently as the steam organ starts up again in the distance. Yuri panics and runs from the tent, deciding that Ivan must have also seen the monsters and run home. Yuri realizes that his father is still at the circus and goes to find him. He enters the main tent and sees his father in a crowd of people watching and laughing at two clowns having a brutal fistfight. Yuri then looks up and sees Ivan halfway across the tightrope, sending him into a frozen terror as he imagines his brother falling to his death. As Ivan slowy walks over the tightrope, Yuri sees that he's crying. Eventually Ivan makes it safely to the platform at the end of the rope. The next thing Yuri knows, his father arrives with Ivan and a sickened look and takes the two boys home. The Circus of the Other is gone the next day and Yuri never hears anyone so much as mention it. Years later, Yuri asks Ivan if he remembers the Circus of the Other, Ivan admits that he does but everything after entering is a blur, though he would have a recurring nightmare every November in which he is trapped inside of a hessian bag with the sounds and smells of the circus around him.

Post-Statement

Gertrude is impressed that the town of Algasova came away from the Circus of the Other without bodily harm or death. She would want to talk with Ivan if he hadn't died in 1984.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan explains that this story and it's subsequent investigation came from the first tape that Basira Hussain was able to get for him from police evidence, and expresses his disappointment that it doesn't really answer any questions about her apart from the fact that she wasn't as lazy an archivist as he previously thought, as she clearly had prior knowledge of the Circus of the Other. Jonathan mentions that he thinks someone found his tapes with the supplemental notes since the drawer he keeps them in was slightly more open than he left it. He has selected a new hiding place under a floorboard and has decided to not ask anyone about it in case whoever opened the drawer didn't know what they had found.

The Ace:Gertrude Robinson of all people turns out to be this.
Badass Normal: The narrator's brother somehow manages to survive being forced to perform in the Other Circus, which Gertrude notes is extremely unusual.
Body Horror: The freaks in The Freakshow include men without heads, and men with mouths not on their faces.
Circus of Fear: "Another Circus," first mentioned in "Strange Music," is the subject of this episode.
Uncanny Valley: In-universe, the tigers at the circus. They look almost right, but something is off that Yuri just can't put his finger on. Eventually he figures out that while he heard the iconic tiger roar, they don't actually seem to be able to open their mouths.

45: Blood Bag

Case #0110209. Statement of Thomas Neill, regarding his experiences working in malarial research during the spring of 2010. Original statement given February 9th 2011.

Story

Thomas gets a job as a research assistant at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, working under Dr. Neil Thompson on malaria research and trying to create a type of synthetic blood to lure mosquitoes away from humans. The synthetic blood, dubbed "haemoglobish", is effective at drawing in mosquitoes but too expensive to be a reasonable solution, leading to a decrease in funding for the project. Neil asks for Thomas' help in selling an antique syringe that supposedly belonged to his supposed ancestor John Snow, which confuses Thomas since the syringe is a prized possesion and something of a lucky charm to Neil. Thomas agrees and ends up being a tough-looking guy to back Neil up at the meeting with the buyer, however things go smoothly and a transaction is made. After this, strange things begin to happen at the lab. The temperature rises considerably despite the HVAC being in perfect working order and the cooling turned on, and the mosquitoes which normally buzz around in their cages sit still on the sides of it in an even carpet. The mosquitoes also become much more ravenous when presented with the haemoglobish bags, descending upon them all at once. One day a research assistant drops a haemoglobish bag after feeding the mosquitoes and it breaks open to reveal that the liquid inside has changed colors, and tests show that the synthetic blood has somehow become real blood infected with many diseases including malaria. Because of this the project is suspended until further notice. Neil is infuriated and goes into the mosquito room with a fire extinguisher to take revenge on them, but the mosquitoes break out of their cages and all Thomas can do is shut the door as Neil is swarmed by the mosquitoes, completely covering and quickly killing him. The rest of the research assistants are let go and given references so good that Thomas quickly gets a new job as a lab tech at King's College, which he's happy with as he no longer wants to do research.

Post-Statement

Tim investigates the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine but can't find anything, which Jonathan attributes to an effective coverup. He's also certain that the buyer of Neil's syringe was Mikaele Salesa and wants to contact him, but he's been missing for two years. Thomas died five years after the events of his story, and although Martin can't find a cause of death Jonathan thinks it was "something very nasty indeed" due to how many antibiotics were at his house.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan is confused by how well Tim has recovered from the events of the Hive's attack on the Institute, and can't discern why he would even be working there in the first place since it was a major step down from his previous career path. Martin interrupts Jonathan's secret recording and is quickly kicked out, prompting Jonathan to seek out a better place to record.

Devoured by the Horde: The fate of Dr. Thompson.
Famous Ancestor: Dr. Thompson claims to be a descendant of the 19th century physician John Snow, an early pioneer in the field of epidemiology, and owns a syringe from that time period said to have belonged to Snow.
Fluffy the Terrible: Thomas works with mosquitoes. Despite the creepiness of being surrounded by endless swarms of the things, and being there to study the deadly diseases they carry, he regularly refers to them cutely as "mozzies".
Gentle Giant: Dr. Neill describes himself as being 6 foot 7 and 14½ stone^note and is brought along by Dr. Thompson for this reason when he goes to make some sort of deal, even though Neill, according to his statement, has never ever been in a fight.
The Swarm: Thomas and Dr. Neil Thompson are working with mosquitos as part of their research. A lot of mosquitos. They end up killing Dr. Thompson.

46: Literary Heights

Case #9981221. Statement of Herbert Knox, regarding a repeat customer to his bookshop in Chichester. Original statement given December 21st 1998.

Story

Herbert owns and operates a bookstore. In September 1997, a customer who Herbert later learns is named Michael "Mike" Crew comes in and asks if he has a copy of Dictionnaire Infernal, the older the better. Herbert sells him one from 1908, and starts to smell ozone despite there not being a storm brewing that day. The smell disappears when Mike leaves. Mike regularly returns to the store every few weeks to look for more old books on strange topics and pays good money for them, as much as five figures. He is always accompanied by the smell of ozone and seems to always take his leave once Herbert notices the smell. In the winter, Herbert also notices that the lightbulbs in the bookstore burn brighter when Mike is there. In January 1998, a fellow bookseller and friend of Herbert's dies and leaves him most of her stock, among which is Ex Altiora, a book from the collection of Jurgen Leitner. The book is written in Latin and tells the story of a small clifftop village which sees a huge creature coming for them, and every time they come up with a plan to deal with it they see that the creature is significantly bigger than they thought and they have to make a new plan. Eventually the villagers come to the conclusion that the creature is too big for them to take on and they throw themselves off the cliff in despair. Herbert can't find any record of another copy of Ex Altiora in existence. Herbert gets dizzy spells and nightmares from reading Ex Altiora, though he doesn't connect the dots at the time. After having Ex Altiora for a week, Mike comes into the shop. Herbert offers him some books that he thinks would interest him, but Mike spots Ex Altiora and asks Herbert to name a price for it. Herbert doesn't want to sell it but he can see in Mike's eyes that he's determined to have the book and might even kill him for it. Herbert sells Ex Altiora to Mike for twice its estimated value and Mike quickly leaves after the transaction. To Herbert's surprise, Mike's check bounces. Since Herbert knows Mike's address from arranging a delivery for him, he decides to go talk to Mike about it as a storm brews. Mike answers his door immediately, looking disheveled with Ex Altiora in his hand and pages of Latin scattered over the floor. Mike doesn't seem to hear what Herbert says to him, only reacting when raindrops start to fall outside. Mike runs off and Herbert gives chase to try to get Ex Altiora back from him. As they run throughout Chichester, lightning flashes across the sky and Herbert momentarily sees something tall and branching chasing after Mike as well, a similar shape to a branching scar Mike has. The chase leads to the Chichester Cathedral's belltower. Herbert is almost overpowered by the smell of ozone when he enters the tower, and as he nears the top he can hear Mike yelling strange words in various languages, including "altiora", "vertigo" and "the vast". Herbert reaches the top of the tower and sees Mike standing before the being he saw earlier, which seems to be made of lightning. Mike yells "I am yours" and jumps out the window, and the being of lightning screeches and flies out the window after him. The smell of ozone disappears and Herbert calls the police, though no trace of Mike is ever found and the tower windows appear to be sealed.

Post-Statement

Jonathan remembers Michael Crew's name from case 9991006 (#17: The Boneturner's Tale), where he was the one responsible for The Boneturner's Tale appearing at the Chiswick Library. Jonathan wonders if The Boneturner's Tale was what started Crew's interest in Leitner's books or if he already knew what they were and was trying to utilize them, as he seemed to be using Ex Altiora to protect himself from the lightning creature. Jonathan also notes that Herbert's descriptions of Ex Altiora's illustrations didn't include one of the night sky and a Lichtenberg figure, which it was later stated to have by Dominic Swain (#4: Page Turner).

Supplemental Notes

Jonthan has discovered that someone has been entering the tunnels, though no one admits responsibility. Jonthan thinks about setting up a hidden camera to watch the trapdoor if he can find a good spot to hide it. When Jonathan checked inside the tunnel for clues, he saw that there were many more spiderwebs than before, and thought he saw a larger spider eating one of the decaying worms.

Call-Back: To Episode 4, which centers around Ex Altiora, and includes a mention of Michael Crew.
Deadly Book: Ex Altiora, which induces a feeling of vertigo in the reader.
Death by Falling Over: Herbert comes into possession of Ex Altiora when another antique book dealer dies when she fell off a staircase. Fortunately Michael Crew takes it off Knox's hands before anything similar happens to him.
Distinguishing Mark: Michael has a branching scar on his neck in the shape of a Lichtenberg figure.
Foreshadowing: Herbert at one point mentions that since Jurgen Leitner's death or disappearance, numerous book and antique dealers had been disappearing or dying under mysterious circumstances. Though it isn't explored in detail, later events reveal that this is almost certainly because all of the Deadly Books that Leitner had locked away placed themselves back in circulation en masse after their 'breakout'.
- Michael also namedrops the Vast over 60 episodes before it would be officially introduced in MAG 111.
Signature Scent: According to Herbert, the odor that followed Michael is similar to the smell in the air just before a storm.

47: The New Door

Case #0161002. Statement of Helen Richardson, regarding a new door in a house she was selling. Statement recorded direct from subject, 2nd October 2016.

Story

Helen conducts real estate viewings for expensive family homes. One day, a tall man with long blond hair comes claiming to be there on behalf of her last clients of the day. He refuses to shake her hand and laughs, which Helen can only describe as inhuman. Helen is uneasy but decides to give the man a quick tour, and on the second floor the man looks at a door that wasn't there before and asks what was behind it. Helen opens the door to see a long hallway. Although she can't remember entering, Helen finds herself inside the hallway as the door closes and disappears. Helen tries to use her phone but it only displays a photo of the hallway. Helen makes her way through the hallway for what feels like miles, going down branching corridors and realizing that the wallpaper shifts colors, though she never notices when it happens. Helen falls further and further into despair. Eventually she sees a distorted figure which now appears in every painting in the hallway and although every painting looks different the hands are always sharp. Helen looks around for an escape and sees a mirror not reflecting the figure. Out of other ideas, Helen jumps at the mirror and finds herself outside in Dulwich. After some time in the hospital, Helen stays at her house for a long time and doesn't open any doors.

Post-Statement

Jonathan tells Helen that he believes her story, and asks her if the strange man she met was named Michael, which she confirms. After Helen leaves, Jonathan calls Sasha and asks her about Michael, since her statement about it was lost, though she doesn't have any new information to add about it. Sasha leaves and suddenly Michael is there. Michael tells Jonathan that "they're lying to you" and that it came to reclaim Helen into the hallways, which it implies are an extension of itself or vice-versa. Jonathan realizes that he can't remember which door Helen left through, meaning that she's already been reclaimed by Michael. Jonathan demands that Michael release Helen but it stabs him. Michael explains that it is "normally neutral", but had helped Sasha before to prevent the Institute being destroyed by the Hive as that would have "unbalanced the struggle too early". Michael disappears as Jonathan demands more information.

Affably Evil: When Michael meets Jon he seems, if not friendly, then at least not outwardly hostile. However, he also says that he's there to return Helen to his domain, which, based on her past experience there, seems like a Fate Worse than Death.
Badass Normal: When faced with a being of immeasurable power that has, right in front of him, just abducted an innocent young woman to make into its plaything for an eternity or two, what's the first thing Jon does? Demand her release. Not ask, not beg, demand.
Beast in the Maze: After three days in the corridor maze, Helen sees a distorted humanoid figure with long pointy hands approaching her.
Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: How else would you describe surviving a conversation with an Eldritch Abomination like Michael?
Dimension Lord: Michael, which doesn't even view itself as having an identity and sounds more like a sentient dimension that consumes people seems a likely candidate.
Eldritch Location: The corridor maze Helen finds herself trapped in.
The Lonely Door: Helen encounters a door in a suburban home that had not been there before. When she opens it, she sees an Endless Corridor behind it.
Oh, Crap!: When Helen realizes that she's trapped in the corridor.
Vagueness Is Coming: Michael hints to Jon that there's a struggle going on, and that he intervened to protect the Archive because its destruction too early on would have unbalanced things.

48: Lost in the Crowd

Case #0100325. Statement of Andrea Nunis, regarding a series of encounters in the streets of Genoa, Italy Original statement given 25th March, 2010.

Story

Andrea has always loved travelling the world and her job as a programmer allows her to take a month off for it every year, and she usually travels alone. She decides to take a trip through her favorite places in Europe for her twenty-fifth birthday, and while passing through Florence, Italy she meets Ethan Taylor, an Australian who has her same passion for travel. Although they become good friends, they both have the innate desire to travel alone. By chance they end up on the same train and decide to share a compartment, where Ethan asks Andrea if Genoa was on her roadmap, and convinces her to stop there with him. They get a hostel room together but continue to explore the city separately. Andrea falls in love with everything there in a way she fails to put into words. At the end of their first day in Genoa, Ethan tells Andrea that he found an older section of the town that was more crowded than the rest and planned to explore it further. Andrea spends the next day reading at a cafe, where she ends up falling into a nap for some time before seeing a pale man with long black hair staring at her, who tells her that he just wants to have his holiday in peace, and that he "wasn't in the business of helping strays", and as Andrea starts to leave he tells her that she is marked and to keep her mother in mind. Back at the hostel, Andrea grows worried when Ethan hasn't returned by the next morning, as she knows he hasn't left the city since his bag is still there. Andrea decides to look for him, which is difficult for her since she doesn't speak Italian. As the day goes on, the sky becomes overcast and the streets start to look more oppressive with fewer and fewer people until there are none at all, not even any voices in the distance. Andrea begins to lose track of time and starts to panic until she suddenly hears sounds of a crowd. Andrea makes her way onto the street and starts to get pushed around in the crowd, and soon she realizes that the noise isn't speech, but just noise. Andrea notices that the people's faces are blurring with how fast they're moving, and tries in vain to fight her way out of the crowd before suddenly remembering the man at the cafe and what he told her. Andrea closes her eyes and thinks of her mother, focusing on all the memories she has of her, until eventually she realizes that night has fallen and the crowd is gone. Andrea makes her way back to the hostel, being sure to stay in places where there are people until she gets back. Andrea leaves Ethan's bag in the hostel in case he ever comes back, though she doubts he will. Andrea ends her trip and goes straight to her mother's house, and though she still wants to travel she decides to take a friend with her next time.

Post-Statement

Sasha reaches out to Andrea, who says that she is travelling alone again and hasn't had any more encounters like in her story. Jonathan wonders if the man Andrea met in the cafe was Gerard Keay based on his description. Tim contacts the hostel who confirm that Ethan's bag was left there and never reclaimed.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan realizes that Michael had warned him against trusting Sasha, which surprises him since he had suspected her the least and doesn't think she ever met Gertrude. Elias lets Jonathan know that Tim and Martin both know that he's been spying on them, and tells him to back off from them. This leads Jonathan to place Elias as his prime suspect in Gertrude's murder.

Continuity Nod: Michael's visit is mentioned, as well as the wound that Jon sustained during the encounter.
Demonic Head Shake: Andrea describes the faces of the not-people in the crowd as looking like someone had filmed them screaming or having a seizure and then played the video back at a hundred times the speed.
The Faceless: Andrea finds herself surrounded by a crowd of faceless people making sounds similar to distant chatter she'd heard while walking the streets, except it's just murmuring noise of no language to give it meaning.
Good Is Not Nice: While he acts a bit dickishly towards Andrea, the unknown man, suspected by Jon to be Gerard Keay, gives her some advice that apparently saves her life at the end.

49: The Butcher's Window

Case #0081103. Statement of Gregory Pryor regarding his investigations into one Hector Lerado during the summer of 2007.

Story

Gregory is a private investigator who is hired by Nicola Laredo, a woman who wants to divorce her husband Hector but wants to catch him cheating first. After failing to find any evidence online or in phone records, Gregory starts to follow Hector around. Gregory follows Hector after he leaves work, thinking he's going to meet up with a lover, but Hector instead goes to an empty warehouse and waits for someone there. A pair of men arrive and talk with Hector as Gregory takes pictures from the shadows, and Hector gives them what appears to be a brick of drugs in exchange for an envelope of cash. Gregory thinks that in addition to his payout from Nicola, he could use his photos of the deal to blackmail Hector for a cut of the drug money and so decides to watch Hector a little longer before reporting his findings to Nicola. The longer Gregory watches Hector, however, the more surprising he finds it that Hector found work in the drug business due to how sloppy he is, even leaving a briefcase of drugs out on his porch for three hours. Hector ends up losing the briefcase when Gregory isn't looking, and the next time he meets with his associates they hand him a slip of paper before leaving. Gregory recovers the paper after Hector throws it away, and finds it to have an address and the words "Ask for Jared". Gregory thinks that Hector has just been sent to his death and so stops following him. Nicola calls Gregory the next day to tell him that Hector didn't come home, prompting Gregory to tell her about Hector's drug trades (tweaking the truth to make it seem like he had only just found out). Nicola becomes uneasy when Gregory says that Hector's body probably won't be found, and she offers a hefty price to hire him to find evidence of Hector's death. Gregory goes to the address that Hector was given, which turns out to be a butcher's shop. Gregory goes inside and finds it to be seemingly abandoned, with no products aside from those in the window. Gregory quietly creeps into the back of the store where he finds a room that looks like an operating theater, with a body under a sheet on the table which Gregory discovers to be Hector. Gregory takes some pictures and starts to leave but sees a huge person coming into the shop. Gregory hides in a locker and watches as the huge, misshapen man enters and reaches into Hector's body without any tools. Hector turns out to still be alive and screams as the man, who Gregory decides is the aforementioned Jared, extracts some ribs and twists them around, then pulls up a floorboard and drops the bones into a fleshy throat beneath. This goes on for four hours, with Jared twisting Hector's body parts and tossing pieces into the pit. At one point he puts a twisted femur into his own chest. When Hector finally dies, Jared dismembers his corpse with the butcher tools and sends all of it down the pit before going to sleep in a chair. Gregory sneaks out but once he's outside Jared reappears and grabs his arm, trying to pull him back inside. Gregory escapes as Jared pulls his arm bones out. Jared sends his evidence to the police who raid the butcher shop, and even though no body is found Hector is declared dead, causing Gregory to get his payment from Nicola. Jared is never found and Gregory gets a prosthetic arm, but still feels like his bones are still out there, twisting.

Post-Statement

Jonathan thinks that Jared is none other than Jared Hopworth (#17: The Boneturner's Tale). As for the pit, it reminds Jonathan of previous "meaty" stories though there's no direct connection. Gregory is unable to have a followup interview since he moved to New Zealand. Nicola was interviewed but had nothing to add. Sasha's computer breaks for the third time in two months, limiting the team's ability to access police records, and since Barisa Hussain refuses to do anything else that could land her in trouble the only way into the police records left is through Tim being "involved" with some of the staff there, though Jonathan worries that he could be easily found out. Tim was successful in getting record pertaining to the story, which revealed that the butcher shop was abandoned shortly before the story's events but clothes of fourteen people were found, five of which were part of ongoing missing persons cases. The police also tore up the floor, finding no fleshy pit but rather the corpse of the butcher shop's owner, who was six months dead.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan has investigated Elias, finding that he became head of the Institute only five years after being hired in Artefact Storage and before coming to the Institute was seemingly a much different person, having graduated from Christchurch College and being known as a pothead. Jonathan mentions that Gertrude was the only Institute employee who worked there before and after Elias took over as head, making Jonathan wonder if Elias killed her to hide a secret of his past.

An Arm and a Leg: Jared Hopworth pulls the bones out of Gregory's arm. His arm is later amputated.
Body Horror: Jared pulls the bones out Hector's body and molds them like they were putty into new shapes. He throws most of them into a tooth-lined hole in the floor, but he inserts one of Hector's femurs into his own body.
Cruel and Unusual Death: Hector is still alive when Jared begins pulling his bones out of his body; and Jared keeps him alive for a further four hours.
Foreshadowing: In the supplemental recording, Jon shares the results of his investigation into Elias, which showed that he had a surprisingly swift rise in the Institute hierarchy despite having had an unremarkable academic record and been something of a pothead while in university, hinting that there is much more to Elias than meets the eye.
Nothing Is Scarier: Gregory doesn't go into the precise details of what Jared does to Hector other than removing his bones, only that it lasts for four hours and Hector isn't conscious enough to scream after the first hour.

50: Foundation

Case #8141206. Statement of Sampson Kempthrone, regarding the workhouse architecture of George Gilbert Scott. Original statement given June 12th 1841.

Story

Sampson is an architect. In 1834, Sampson gains an assistant in the form of George Scott, who had previously worked for Sampson's friend Henry Roberts, who tells Sampson that George had previously trained under his own teacher, Robert Smirke. They work together designing a workhouse, and Sampson notices George's strange way of working: he stares at designs for hours on end before locking himself in his office to revise them. Sampson can hear George talking and yelling to himself inside the office before he emerges exhausted with the new designs. George's designs are far more compact than Sampson's, with narrower hallways and smaller bedrooms. When Sampson tells George that he can't use such things, George briefly becomes quietly enraged before letting it go. George quits Sampson's service later that year after his father dies. Henry soon thereafter invites Sampson to a party where he meets Robert Smirke for the first time, who shows the same quiet rage as George when Sampson brings him up. Robert says that Sampson was lucky to escape, and explains that his teachings are about balance between the world and a place outside it. George goes on to get projects, some of which were taken away from Sampson. In September 1836, George's first workhouse opens. Sampson stays late at his office one night when he hears heavy footsteps and a cane, which unsettles Sampson as he knows all of his assistants have left the building. As the footsteps approach, Sampson hears the sound of keys accompanying them. The room seems to close in on Sampson as the footsteps stop just outside his office door, and when things seem to return to normal Sampson opens the door and sees a short, wide figure walking into a clerk's office where it disappears, and in the room Sampson finds one of George's designs. Enraged, Sampson goes to see George the next day, finding him at his latest worksite. George is arguing with a panicked worker who gestures at a wall. As Sampson gets closer, he hears the worker say that "the governor had come to see Harry", and he knew it was the governor because of his jangling keys. Sampson then sees four fingertips poking out of the smooth stone wall as the worker says that the governor had called Harry "idle". Sampson returns George's design to him and quickly leaves. Sampson avoids architects for some time after this encounter. He eventually prepares to move to New Zealand and decides to write to his friend, Jonah Magnus, about his experience.

Post-Statement

Jonathan is hard-pressed to find any information about Robert Smirke. George has built many prominent buildings and landmarks, which concerns Jonathan, though there haven't been any paranormal reports from them.

Supplemental Notes

Tim tells Jonathan that Basira had come to see him again, and asks if he's in trouble. Jonathan makes an excuse that he's helping her with an investigation off the record, which Tim takes to mean that they're romantically involved, to Jonathan's displeasure.

Deliberate Values Dissonance: Since Kempthrone is a Victorian-era architect, he sees nothing wrong with the idea of workhouses, and even thinks it's good for conditions to be harsh because it will "discourage the idle".
Everyone Has Standards: While, as mentioned, Kempthrone is about as classist you'd expect from someone of his social standing and time, he thinks Scott's designs are far too cramped to house anybody in.
Mistaken for Romance: When Jon explains Basira was looking for him because he's helping with an investigation off the record, Tim takes this to mean they're in a relationship.
Victorian London: The events related in the statement occur in London during the Victorian era.

51: High Pressure

Case #0080701. Statement of Antonia Hayley, regarding a deep dive that took place near Sable Island, Nova Scotia in August 2006.

Story

Antonia is a diver who works for a marine salvage company in Nova Scotia. Antonia's captain accepts a job at the "Graveyard of the Atlantic", a region of the ocean with hundreds of shipwrecks. The job is for an elderly man named Simon Fairchild who believes that he's located his great-grandfather's yacht in the Graveyard and wants to retrieve any valuables from it. Unusually, Fairchild insists on being on the divers' boat when they go out to complete his mission. They locate the wreck, which isn't deep enough to require full-pressure suits, and as Antonia and her diving partner Julio drop into the water, Antonia hears Fairchild shout something to her which she can't make out. As they descend, Antonia notices the unusual absence of any living creatures. Antonia and Julio reach Fairchild's shipwreck and split up to search it for potential valuables. Antonia makes her way to the engine room, where she finds a strange hole that appears to have been made from the inside of the ship, with the water on the other side appearing "too dark". Antonia pokes her head through and instantly feels a massive increase in pressure. She can't see any seafloor below and feels that "up" no longer exists and she's trapped in an endless void of water. The darkness of the water is greater than that of the twilight zone, the deepest point at which humans can survive in the ocean. Antonia sees a colossal shadow, so large that she can't see all of it at once despite how far away it is. Antonia realizes that the shadow is approaching and screams, and suddenly feels the edges of the hole in the ship cutting into her hands as she grips it, pulling her out of her terror enough to push herself back into the engine room where the massive pressure dissipates. Antonia swims for the surface as quick as she can and blacks out just before she reaches it. She wakes up in the hospital where the captain gets mad at her and tells her how bad a state she was in and that she should have died. Antonia doesn't hear from Julio or Fairchild, and when she asks the Captain how the job ended, all he can say is "The sea is a dangerous place."

Post-Statement

There's not much investigation that can be done since the story happened in Canada and all the reports they find conflict. The only person from the story they reach is the captain, who refuses to comment. Jonathan restates that Simon Fairchild may have been the old man from case 0022010 (#21: Freefall). Jonathan explains that his first encounter with the name "Simon Fairchild" was an alias of a con man from the '30s. The present-day Fairchild family is extremely rich from their investments, and Jonathan decides to keep them on the Institute's radar.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan has investigated Sasha, but he really only knows that she used to work in Artefact Storage. While exploring there, Jonathan found Sasha staring at the hypnotic table, where she stated that she believed it was responsible for Graham Folger's disappearance and replacement by Not-Graham, rather than the long-limbed creature Amy Patel saw enter his flat. Jonathan also found out that Sasha likes to go to a local wax museum on her lunch breaks.

Call-Back: To episode 21, Simon Fairchild again makes his way into an archive account.
Deadly Euphemism: Kemp's comment of "the sea is a dangerous place" implies that he threw Simon Fairchild overboard when one of his divers nearly died. Too bad Simon is too tough to die so easily.
Giant Hands of Doom: In the dark, lifeless ocean, Antonia makes out the outline of a hand so colossal that just trying to imagine its full size makes her head spin.
Nothing Is Scarier: As she dives down to the ship, Antonia and her partner Julio are surprised to see absolutely no fish or other ocean life in the water. When she enters the wreck and looks through a hole in the engine room, she sees nothing but an infinite, lifeless ocean - until the giant hand reveals itself.
Uncertain Doom: There is no sign of Julio after the dive, so one interpretation is that he was not as lucky as Antonia in escaping the Vast.

52: Exceptional Risk

Case #0040904. Statement of Phillip Brown, regarding his time working at HMP Wakefield between 1990 and 2002.

Story

Philip works as a prison guard at Wakefield Prison, which houses the worst criminals in the United Kingdom, and they are treated with brutality. Robert Montauk (#9: A Father's Love) is admitted to the prison, and both Philip and the other inmates are frightened of him. One inmate tries to fight Montauk, who dislocates his attacker's arm immediately after the first punch. Philip doesn't see much of Montauk for the next few years as Montauk was transferred to another block of the prison, though he becomes an urban legend among the rest of the inmates. In 1998, a Close Supervision Center is built and Philip is transferred to work there while Montauk is one of eight inmates to be kept in it. The new prison, known as the Exceptional Risk Unit, is far worse than the first prison, though Philip doesn't feel guilty about the cruelty due to just how terrible the prisoners are. Philip notices that Montauk never causes trouble and never denies his crimes. In 2001, Montauk's daughter starts to visit him as she's just turned eighteen and it's now legal for her to visit without a guardian. The only other person who visits Montauk is an old man in March 2002, who Montauk seems terrified to see. After Montauk and the man stare silently at each other, all the lights go out at once. Philip hears the old man say "You didn't think you could kill it for long, did you?" before another guard gets the door open and light comes into the room. As Philip escorts Montauk back to his cell, he sees that Montauk is crying. Montauk becomes more quiet in the following months, and during the summer the water turns foul. On the night of November 1st, all the lights in the prison go out. Philip and another guard, Pete, find their flashlights and check all the cells. When they reach Montauk's cell, they find it open, but their lights don't seem to enter. They hear flesh rending and sounds of pain from inside the cell just before their flashlights burn out. Philip hears Pete a ways away calling for him before saying "There you are", which chills Philip as whatever Pete found is certainly not him. There is a loud growl and Pete screams and collapses. The lights come back on and there is nothing there, and Pete is uninjured. Other guards soon arrive and one finds the remains of Montauk. Philip accepts responsibility since the higher-ups are accusing him for negligence rather than the murder proper. Philip doesn't get a chance to talk to Pete again as he quits on the spot two hours after the incident.

Post-Statement

Partway through the recording, Basira arrives with another of Gertrude's tapes for Jonathan, and seems disappointed that the last one (#44: Tightrope) didn't contain any clues to her murder.

Accessing prison records prove extremely difficult, though Sasha finds out that the old man who visited Montauk was named Maxwell Rayner. Phillip is unable to be found. Jonathan speculates on the entity that killed Montauk and what Rayner's relationship with it was.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan asked Sasha about her wax museum visits, and she claimed that she has a new boyfriend who works there. Jonathan decided not to press the subject further to maintain her trust. Jonathan knows that one of Gertrude's tapes has answers, but hopes that the answer isn't an actual recording of the murder.

Darkness Equals Death: When the power goes out at the prison, the guards go to check on Robert Montauk's cell. They find it filled with a darkness that their torches can't penetrate, and hear a wet tearing sound from within. When the power comes back on, they find that Robert is dead, with 47 stab wounds to his chest.
Sequel Episode: To Episode 9, which detailed Robert Montauk's crimes and arrest.

53: Crusader

Case #9970509. Sergeant Walter Heller recording. Regarding a discovery made near Alexandria during Operation Crusader in November of 1941.

Story

Walter is part of a team that drives and operates a Crusader tank in northern Africa. They are reassigned to Operation Crusader in Libya where they fight the Axis forces in tank warfare, first encountering the Italian forces. One hotter-than-normal day while searching the desert for enemy tanks, the team spots a tank but the enemy fires before they can. The tank is hit and Walter's leg is injured, and although the tank's driver and commander get him out, the last member of their team, named Dicky, is trapped inside the burning tank and they can only sit and listen to his screams as his burns to death. Seeing the other Crusader tanks retreating, Walter's commander is able to get one to take Walter with them. Walter passes in and out of consciousness before finding himself in a military hospital in Alexandria, Egypt. As Walter's leg heals and more wounded soldiers are admitted into the hospital, he starts taking walks in the city in search of peace and quiet. Two days before Walter is to return to the battlefield, he walks out near Pompey's Pillar and gets lost. Walter's leg starts to hurt, so he leans against a door which gives way, causing him to fall into the building's basement. Walter's attention is caught by a reflective object in a space beyond a brazen sewer grate. Walter moves the grate away and enters the tunnels on the other side. Walter follows the tunnel and reaches a large room where he finds shelves of papyrus scrolls, written in a language he doesn't recognize. Searching further, Walter finds more rooms of scrolls, some of which look to be looted. Deciding he needs to let someone know about the catacombs, Walter starts to leave before suddenly finding a mummified corpse wearing chainmail with a sword nearby. Looking at the dead man's face, Walter is frightened to see that it has a screaming expression and the eye sockets are scratched up. Walter's light goes out but although there is no other light source he can still see everything clearly. Walter suddenly feels as though he's being watched by a thousand eyes. Walter hears movement and tries to retrace his steps, and at the tunnel he entered from he sees a robed figure with spindly fingers and a single lidless eye within its hood. Walter suddenly finds himself screaming in the streets in the early morning being taken in by the police. Walter is discharged after a month of psychiatric evaluation.

Post-Statement

Gertrude interrogates Walter some more about the basement, which he was unable to return to. He uncertainly states that he replaced the grate after leaving the tunnels and mentions that he felt the sensation of being watched just before giving his statement.In private, Gertrude mentions that the place Walter found is called the Serapeum of Alexandria, which she believes to be an ancient predecessor to her own archive. She recalls stories of rituals performed there during the fourth century, and mentions a theory that the Serapeum was destroyed not by Christian crusaders but be a group described as "those who sing the night". The corpse Walter found was a knight of the order of St. John, and would have been part of an attack on Alexandria in 1365, which was one of the few crusades to not be religiously charged. Gertrude wonders if something in the Serapeum was the reason for it. Gertrude wonders what the entity Walter saw was, and entertains the idea that could have used to be the Serapeum's archivist."

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan contemplates that archivists like Gertrude are doomed to horrible fates. Martin interrupts the recording, mentioning that Jonathan has claimed his stab wound was the result of an accident. Jonathan explains that Walter died in 2004 and six months after he gave his statement to Gertrude, there was a huge explosion near Pompey's Pillar in Alexandria which killed seventeen people. Although it was officially deemed a gas explosion, Jonathan wonders if it was something else. He ends by simply stating "Gertrude Robinson is not who I thought she was."

Bait-and-Switch: The statement beginning on a World War II battlefield seems to be setting up for an appearance of the Slaughter, before taking a hard turn into the Eye's territory.
Double-Meaning Title: A quadruple whammy for this one. 'Crusader' refers to Operation Crusader, the military operation Heller was taking part in; the Crusader tank Heller was crewing, whose destruction landed him in Alexandria; the corpse of the Hospitaller knight who died horribly in a raid on the proto-Archives; and finally, Gertrude herself, who is demonstrated to be driven and ruthless in accomplishing her goal.
Faceless Eye: His description is vague, but the only feature Heller mentions on the face of the creature he encounters in the chamber is a single staring eye.
Good Is Not Soft: Gertrude's ruthless streak is first alluded to here; she blows up the ancient Archives and whatever creature was lurking there, but seventeen presumably innocent people die in the explosion.
Spooky Silent Library: The chambers Walter finds beneath the streets of Alexandria appear to be part of an ancient library.
Stock Unsolved Mysteries: A lost annex of the Great Library of Alexandria.

54: Still Life

Case #0132306 Statement of Alexander Scaplehorn regarding his evaluation of The Trophy Room taxidermists in Barnet. Original statement given June 23rd, 2013.

Story

Alexander works for the Inland Revenue and is sent to inspect The Trophy Room, a taxidermy shop suspected of money laundering. Arriving at the shop, Alexander notices its rundown and grimy look, and becomes entranced by a taxidermied tiger in the shop window until the shop's owner comes out to meet him. Alexander is surprised to see that the owner is only in his twenties. He introduces himself as Daniel Rawlings and explains that he inherited the shop from a friend of his father. The inside of the shop smells like something rotting, which Daniel excuses as a result of the chemicals they use before he lights a cigarette. Alexander looks over the numerous taxidermied animals, whose glass eyes all seem to be looking at him. Though unsettled, Alexander is determined not to let the uncanniness of the shop's wares affect the results of his inspection. He starts talking to Daniel, who has gotten the shops financial records ready but doesn't really know about money laundering laws, so Alexander explains. Daniel is very interested and attentive, to Alexander's pleasure. Alexander notices that Daniel is continually chainsmoking and never makes eye contact with him. Daniel then takes Alexander into the shop's back office to look through more records, where there are also taxidermied skins as well as a taxidermied hare in a waistcoat, reminding Alexander of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alexander finds no evidence of money laundering as he searches the records, and as time goes by he sees a few customers come into the shop before becoming disturbed by the taxidermied animals and quickly leaving again. At the end of the day, Alexander tells Daniel that the shop has passed the inspection. Daniel then asks Alexander if he feels honored to be in a room with some of the oldest skin in the world, and begins to explain the history of each piece. When he gets to an ancient-looking pelt that Alexander had previously worried could fall apart at any moment, he explains that it's a gorilla's skin dating back to the 5th century BCE, which Alexander doesn't believe. They then hear the front bell ring and two voices with Cockney accents calling for Daniel. Daniel goes to meet them as Alexander packs up. Alexander suddenly hears what he thinks are muffled words coming from beneath the floor, and finds a trapdoor he hadn't noticed earlier. Aganist his better judgment, Alexander opens the trapdoor and sees a staircase leading to the darkened basement. The light from the office illuminates a pale face at the bottom of the stairs, repeating "We've got one down here. Come on, I'll show you." before moving back into the darkness. Alexander doesn't think that the voice came from a "living human" and decides not to accept its offer. Alexander grabs his things and heads out into the shop proper, where Daniel stands between him and the exit. Daniel asks if Alexander is all right with a Slasher Smile as he finally looks him in the eyes. Alexander is horrified to see that Daniel's eyes are identical to the hundreds of glass eyes staring at him from the taxidermied animals, which start to move. In full fight-or-flight instinct, Alexander runs at Daniel and knocks him to the floor, noting that it felt "like hitting a sandbag". Alexander gets outside and runs for an hour before he feels safe. Alexander's considers himself lucky to have packed up his things before opening the trapdoor, and after giving his statement to the Institute decides to never worry about what he saw again.

Post-Statement

Jonathan discovers that The Trophy Room is still open and run by Daniel. Sasha volunteered to go investigate, though she found nothing in the basement and Daniel doesn't remember the Cockney deliverymen. He also denies being the same Daniel Rawlings that disappeared in 2006 (#1: Angler Fish). Comparing photographs of the two, Jonathan finds that their hair is identical but otherwise they are different in every way.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan broke into Gertrude's apartment after learning that it hadn't been cleared out due to the lease not having expired yet. He found the apartment to be quite barebones. In her bedroom was a bookshelf filled with history books, though Jonathan also found evidence that she didn't keep books that she had finished reading. He notices that on every book with a person's face depicted on the cover had the eyes cut out of it. Jonathan was also intrigued by the presence of a laptop charger, leading him to place high priority on finding Gertrude's computer.

Call-Back: The anglerfish from the very first episode is back, and we get some idea of what happened to Sarah Baldwin in episode 28.
Dramatic Irony: Jon has no idea that Sasha is anything but trustworthy, and consequently writes off much of this statement when her follow-up investigation reveals nothing out of the ordinary.
Hollywood Autism: Alexander notices that the taxidermist, Daniel Rawlings, avoids looking at him, and recognises it as similar behaviour to his cousin, who is autistic. Daniel is probably not autistic.
Taxidermy Is Creepy: Discussed. Alexander figures everyone's interests look weird to outsiders and withholds judgement.
Taxidermy Terror: When Daniel finally looks Alexander in the eye, so does every animal in the shop.
"Uh-Oh" Eyes: When Daniel finally looks Alexander in the eyes, Alexander sees that his eyes are glassy and empty, like the taxidermied animals in the shop.
Uncanny Valley: The taxidermy people.

55: Pest Control

Case #0160311. Statement of Jordan Kennedy, regarding several encounters while working in pest control. Statement taken direct from subject 3rd November, 2016.

Story

Before telling his story, Jonathan has Jordan confirm on tape that Jane Prentiss is dead and there were no anomalies, supernatural or otherwise, during her corpse's incineration apart from the smell, which is a major part of his story. Jordan explains that he decided to come forward with his story since he's connected some dots between strange happenings on his pest control jobs, including his encounter with the wasp nest in Jane Prentiss' attic (#32: Hive).

In 2011, Jordan is called to take care of an ant infestation in a home in Bromley. Although he didn't know it at the time, Jordan had been called not by the homeowner but by a neighbor, Laura Star. As such, Jordan doesn't find anyone at the house and notices an oily residue left on his glove from where he knocked on the door. Remembering that the woman on the phone had told Jordan to let himself in, Jordan tries the door and finds it to be unlocked. The house is dark and devoid of furniture, and when Jordan turns on a light he sees far more ants than he was expecting, covering every surface. Underneath them he can see the same rotten oily residue that was on the door, and gets the impression that the house itself is sick. Jordan decides that conventional ant elimination methods are insufficient for this and opts for pesticide spray instead. As he starts to spray, Jordan notices that though the ants run away from the pesticide he doesn't see any actually die. Jordan makes his way through the ground floor of the house, eventually reaching the kitchen which is also empty aside from an old refrigerator hemorrhaging ants. Afraid of what he'll find inside, Jordan decides to take a smoke break first to gather his courage. Outside, a car arrives which despite being relatively new is beginning to rust. A tall man in a brown suit gets out and becomes enraged to see pest control at his house. Jordan tries to call the woman who had called him but is assaulted by the man, who lifts him by the throat. The man's hand feels overly hot. After some struggling, Jordan flicks on his cigarette lighter and holds it to the man's arm, which immediately bursts into flames. The man drops Jordan and tries to put the fire out, and Jordan decides he's done here and runs for his van. As he gets away, Jordan gets a smell of the burning man, which is of decay and disease, the worst smell Jordan has ever experienced. Jordan doesn't report the incident so he won't get in trouble for setting someone on fire, and he never hears anything about it.

In 2014, Jordan is called to remove a wasp's nest in an apartment's attic, which had apparently injured a tenant. Jordan meets the landlord, Arthur Nolan, who gives him the keys to the apartment in question. Once inside, Jordan is surprised at how quiet it is, since he would have expected to hear wasps buzzing at that point. Jordan gets to the attic and finds the nest, which has a texture unlike any he's seen before and surprisingly no wasps crawling about that he can see. Jordan inserts the spray nozzle into one of the many holes in the nest and sprays, and to his horror the nest begins to convulse and expand, and then lets out a scream. Jordan drops his tools and runs, meeting Nolan in the hallway. Disappointed and refusing to answer questions, Nolan goes downstairs to his own apartment, saying that he "[hoped] it wouldn't get this far". Jordan follows Nolan into his unusually warm apartment, where Nolan sits in an armchair and unbuttons his shirt to reveal a strange scar, which Jordan describes as looking like a "stylized flame" or a "face contorted in pain". Nolan strikes a match and touches it to the scar, and he is quickly engulfed in flame which spreads away from him alarmingly fast. Jordan manages to escape the building and watches it go up in flames. When the fire reaches the top where the nest is, Jordan smells the same stench from when he set the man on fire. The fire brigade and ECDC arrive and take Jordan into quarantine, where they explain what had happened with Jane Prentiss and end up hiring him on, after which he doesn't have another strange encounter until Jane Prentiss' attack on the Institute. After Jordan connects the events related to the terrible smell, he decides to let the Institute know in case there are more Flesh Hives like Jane Prentiss out there.

Post-Statement

Jonathan is disturbed by the idea of other Flesh Hives, even though it seems to him that the one that infested Jane Prentiss worked alone. The ant-infested house was torn down in 2015 but records show it was owned by John Amherst, the new director of Ivy Meadows Nursing Home in case 0121911 (#36: Taken Ill). Although descriptions of him from the two stories don't point to him being a Flesh Hive, there are the connecting elements of "disease, and insects, and a foul smell when they burn". Jonathan ends, stating: "Jane Prentiss is dead. But this is a long way from over."

Supplemental Notes

No new developments have been made in Jonathan's investigation, but he mentions how the Institute had a large influx of reports the week of Halloween that the Archive was needed to help with, which he was grateful for as a distraction from the very real horror he faces.

Breather Episode: Not for us, but Jon notes in the supplemental that he has been dealing with the annual rush of bogus Halloween statements and finds it a rather relaxing change of pace.
Evil Is Burning Hot: When the owner of the house grabs Jordan by the throat, Jordan notices how hot his hand is.
Evil Smells Bad: When Jordan sets the house's owner on fire, he describes the odor like a combination of burning flesh and rubber, with an underlying smell of sickness.
Neck Lift: When the owner of the ant house (John Amherst, but the characters don't know that yet) finds Jordan spraying poison on the ants, his reaction is to grab him by the neck and hold him a foot off the ground. If Jordan hadn't been holding his lighter he would have likely been strangled to death; and if he hadn't been wearing a hazmat suit that protected his neck, death would probably have been preferable.
Nothing Is Scarier: When trying to exterminate the ants, Jordan sees that they're seeping out of an old fridge. We never get to find out what's inside.
The Swarm: Jordan enters a house to find thousands of ants covering the walls and floor.

56: Children of the Night

Case #0100710-B. Continued statement Trevor Herbert, regarding the latter years of his career as a vampire hunter. Original statement given July 10th 2010.

Story

In 1982, Trevor is addicted to heroin and the thrill of hunting vampires, itching to find and kill one after several years without an encounter. He hears a fellow drug addict talk about his dealer, Alard Dupont, who always knows what he wants without having to exchange words. This causes Trevor to think that Dupont is a vampire, using its nonverbal communication with its buyers. He starts stalking Dupont at the park where he does his transactions. At one point, a pair of police officers approach Dupont but leave after he nods to them, which Trevor takes to be Dupont using his nonverbal communication again. After dark, Trevor follows Dupont to a club, another indicator of vampirism as they often seek prey in loud locations where their inability to speak verbally is less noticable. After two hours, Trevor sees Dupont come out with a man and he follows them down an alley where they enter a doorway. Trevor takes out his hammer and charges in after them, striking Dupont on the shoulder. Dupont screams and falls while his companion panics and flees, and Trevor realizes that he was wrong and Dupont isn't a vampire. Panicking and stressed by Dupont's screams, Trevor strikes him again, this time in the head, which is enough to kill him. By force of habit, Trevor tries to burn Dupont's body but it doesn't catch as easily as a vampire's corpse. Trevor runs away into the night and spends the next few years stuck in depression and drugs, which he is only able to break out of in 1996 when he finds and kills a real vampire.

In the winter of 2009 while staying in a few different homeless shelters, Trevor notices that sometimes another homeless will get up in the middle of the night, pack their things and leave shortly before a woman comes and takes their place, the same woman every time. After the third time this happens, Trevor asks the shelter staff about this woman but they don't know anything, so he decides to talk to the woman the next time he sees her. When the strange phenomenon happens again, Trevor approaches the woman who takes a defensive stance, and Trevor suddenly feels the urge to leave and get high despite being three years clean. Although Trevor knows that this isn't the nonverbal communication of a vampire, his experience with it allows him to resist and stand fast. The woman runs from the building and Trevor chases her, since even though she isn't a vampire he can feel the thrill of hunting coming back to him. Trevor catches up to the woman and grabs her arm, feeling it move in a way that's distinctly nonhuman and nonvampire. The woman tries to fight Trevor off, so he pulls a knife to threaten her into submission. Trevor accidentally cuts the woman's abdomen and thousands of spiders pour from the wound and her mouth. As the spiders disperse, Trevor sees in the woman's mouth that she's now just a hollow shell and so he runs away. Now knowing that there are more dark creatures in the world than just vampires, Trevor decides to give his knowledge to the Institute.

Post-Statement

Jonathan explains that Trevor evidently did not die in the Institute like Martin said, and in fact apart from his statements to the Institute there are no records of him, dead or otherwise. Jonathan accepts the existence of the spider-filled woman solely because "I am far too unlucky for it to simply be an old tramp hallucination".

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan angrily confronts Martin about why he lied about Trevor's death, and he claims to have really thought that Trevor died. Jonathan demands to know what Martin was hiding from everyone according to the letter he wrote to his mother, and Martin admits that his secret is that he lied on his job application and that he doesn't have any kind of qualifications, he was just trying to get a job to help support himself and his mother. Jonathan is relieved to hear this.

Call-Back: It turns out Trevor didn't suddenly die after giving his statement in episode 10, because this one is part of the same interview. (There might be some missing conversation between the two.)
My God, What Have I Done?: Trevor was so distraught and disgusted with himself over Alard Dupont's murder that he went into a years-long self destructive drug spree, to the degree that he's astounded he didn't die of an overdose.
The Worm That Walks: The homeless woman whom Trevor initially thought was a vampire turned out to be full of spiders.

57: Personal Space

Case #0090404. Statement of Carter Chilcott, regarding their time spent in isolation aboard the Space Station Daedalus in September 2007.

Story

Carter, an astronaut, signs up to be part of an isolation experiment in space despite knowing that it will be very difficult and taxing based on his research of previous experiments like it, because he desperately wants to go to space and his application to the ISS isn't going anywhere. Carter is to spend time on a privately-owned satellite named the Daedalus along with two other astronauts, though he never sees them after arriving at the satellite. Carter's quarters of the satellite contains all the supplies and equipment he needs to live in space without ever leaving, as well as a cache of books and films for passing the time. After six weeks of total isolation, Carter starts to experience hallucinations including the sound of the locked door opening and footsteps. One day while watching a movie, Carter sees a space suit drift past his window. Carter is excited to see another person after so long, until he gets a look inside the visor and sees that the suit is empty. The suit floats away as Carter tries to calm himself down from the shock, but then he looks out the window again and sees that the Earth, sun and moon have all disappeared. Panicking further, Carter turns to the observational camera in the room and begs for help, until he follows the camera's cords and finds them cut. Frustrated and more scared than ever, Carter destroys the camera and decides to leave, having been supplied with the code to the door in case of emergencies. However, the door doesn't open as Carter enters the code again and again, while the keypad screen reads "No one is coming". Eventually, Carter resigns himself to being trapped in the room. Within a week of this event Carter's clock stops working, and with the only thing visible outside being the distant stars Carter no longer has an accurate way to keep track of how long he's been in there, though his best estimations place it at a few months. The books and films no longer comfort Carter, his hallucinations stop, and his dreams fail to bring him fully out of his new reality. When Carter finally gives up on opening the door for good, he realizes that his food and water supply haven't run out at all, and he begins to think that he is dead and in Hell. This pushes him into enough despair to stay in his sleeping bag full-time, consuming nothing, waiting for consciousness to fade. After finally passing out, Carter remembers feeling re-entry before waking up in a hospital back on Earth. Carter doesn't learn any details about what really happened to him apart from that he almost died and the other two astronauts had to get him out of his room and keep him alive until he could be sent back to Earth.

Post-Statement

Tim is able to get a roster of all he companies involved in Stratosphere Group, the organization that ran the Daedalus project. Two of them are owned by the Fairchild family and Nathaniel Lukas, respectively, and a third has it's business address in Ny Alesund, Norway.

Supplemental Notes

Sasha caught Jonathan going through her desk when he thought she had left, he covered by pretending to look for a case file she was assigned. She also made him stop recording her. In reality, Jonathan was searching for clues regarding her strange new behaviors, and had found some torn scraps of paper indicating that she could be destroying records. He also found photos of her and her new boyfriend, Tom, and can't shake the feeling that they look like stock photos.

Call-Back: The Daedalus Station was built and funded through the combined efforts of companies owned by the Fairchild and Lukas families, as well as a company based in Ny-Alesund, first mentioned in Growing Dark. Also doubles as an example of a Big Bad Triumvirate— The Vast, the Lonely, and the Dark are working on the station together for unknown reasons.
Go Mad from the Isolation: Carter's mind begins to deteriorate under the strain of long-term isolation. He mentions that the line between dreaming and reality seemed to blur.
I'm Not Hungry: Carter stops eating, hoping to starve himself to death as a means of escaping his situation.
Space Isolation Horror: After several weeks of isolation, Carter looks out of his window to find that the earth, sun, and moon have all vanished, and that he's completely unable to contact anyone or get out of his area of the space station.

58: Trail Rations

Case #8450512. Unsigned statement regarding potential cannibalism while attempting to travel the Oregon Trail. Original letter dated December 4th 1845.

Story

Three years after moving to Savannah, Missouri, the writer's father passes away and leaves his land to her. While deciding whether to try to make a living from the land or move again, the writer meets Benjamin Carlisle, who is passing through on his way to Willamette Valley, Oregon, and is hoping to find a wife on the way. Seeing an opportunity, the writer joins Benjamin on his venture, marrying him the very next day before packing up and moving west. The writer soon learns that they are underprepared for such a journey, and can't get Benjamin to tell her where he's actually from or why he's going to Oregon. In October, the two reach a trading post in Wyoming whose manager tells him that it's too late to travel through the Rocky Mountains due to the oncoming winter and that they can either stay at the trading post if they can afford to or they can go back the way they came. After they try to make a plan for a few days, a man named Eustace Wick eagerly offers his services as a guide to get them through the mountains, and the writer notices his unusually healthy teeth. The writer is mistrustful but Benjamin decides to hire Wick since they can't afford to spend the winter at the trading post. As they travel, the writer becomes more suspicious of Wick, who becomes happier as conditions grow worse. One day they find their wagon to be mysteriously damaged, stranding them. Wick tells them that there's a cave nearby they can use to wait out the coming snowstorm, and leads them there. On the way there, the writer realizes that Wick intends to kill and eat them, though she can't alert her husband in front of Wick. Wick builds a fire in the cave and they wait for a while before Benjamin brings up the topic of food. Wick smiles wide and speaks a kind of twisted prayer: "Come, meat. Be my guest. And let thy gifts to me be blessed." Wick takes out a knife and walks up to Benjamin. Through the writer's stunned stupor she suddenly remembers her father's gun, which she has kept concealed on her. The writer is just barely too slow, shooting Wick through the head in the same moment he cuts Benjamin's throat. Left alone in a frozen wasteland cave with the two dead men, the writer mourns the loss of her husband's life as well as her own impending death by freezing or starvation. She then hears Benjamin calling to her and rushes to his side. Though she soon finds him to still be quite dead, he turns to look at her and tells her to eat him. Horrified, the writer prays to God for this terrible sight to end, but Benjamin continues to try to tempt her. Five days later, Benjamin still talks to her, now angrily berating her for refusing to "be part of something greater than myself". The writer writes her account of the events and leaves it in the cave before making her way out into the snow, knowing that while she won't survive, she at least won't have to hear her husband telling her to eat him any longer.

Post-Statement

The only records of the people in the story Jonathan can find is Benjamin appearing in an 1838 census in North Carolina, as well as a Lutheran minister named Horatio Wick from Massachusetts, who apparently drowned in 1832. Jonathan wonders how this letter, left in a cave in the western American wilderness, ended up in the possession of Jonah Magnus.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan overhears Tim angrily discussing him with Martin, who tries to give Jonathan the benefit of the doubt.

Apocalyptic Log: This statement takes the form of a letter written by a woman after she's been stranded in a snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains. The author knows she isn't going to survive.
Dead Person Conversation: The author claims that, for five days, her dead husband whispered "eat me.''
No Party Like a Donner Party: Despite it being late in the season, a guide offers to take a couple through the Rockies. Predictably, they get snowed in. However, it turns out the guide knew this would happen, and deliberately led them into the mountains so he could eat them.
Snowed-In: The author, her husband, and their Guide get caught in a snowstorm when they try to cross the Rockies, forcing them to take shelter in a cave.
Vehicular Sabotage: Eustace purposely smashes the wagon wheel in order to strand the couple he's guiding in the mountains.

59: Recluse

Case #0052911. Statement of Ronald Sinclair regarding his years spent in a teenage half way house on Hill Top Road, Oxford. Original statement given November 29th 2005.

Story

At fifteen years old, Ronald is sent to live at Raymond Fielding's halfway house on Hill Top Road. Raymond is friendly and easygoing, but Ronald doesn't trust him since he's nothing like the horrible people he's dealt with in the system before. Ronald notices that none of the kids who move out of the halfway house ever come back, something unusual for most halfway houses. As Ronald spends more time on Hill Top Road, he notices that his impulses are becoming dulled and that he would "do things without actually deciding to do them", as though some external force is guiding his actions. He notices that the other kids seem to be the same way. Raymond isn't too imposing on the kids, and spends most of his time in his basement study. In fact, the only time he leaves the house is to go to church on Sunday, which he makes all the kids go to with him. The only other thing he makes the kids do is a kind of ritual on Sunday night where he removes the tablecloth from the dinner table, which reveals it to be carved with entrancing designs and patterns, at the center of which is a wooden box set into the table. Ronald can't remember how long they would look at the table or what they would have for dinner. After a few years at Hill Top Road, Ronald is approaching his eighteenth birthday which means he has to move out soon. Two months before his birthday, a girl named Agnes moves into the house, though Raymond never holds a meeting to introduce her like he does for everyone else and she never comes to church or participates in the table ritual. Raymond seems to be afraid of her. After the papers are signed for Ronald to move on, Agnes beckons Ronald over and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Ronald is then taken outside by the committee agent who instructs him to wait while he gets the car. After a few minutes, Ronald puts down his suitcase and walks back to the halfway house without even thinking about it. Ronald walks through the quiet house and to the basement door, which he realizes he's never seen anyone but Raymond enter. Ronald walks down the stairs and sees that every surface is coated in cobwebs, even the light bulbs. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Ronald finds himself in an almost empty room with the walls and ceiling being of dirt. In the middle of the room is the hypnotic table, and around the room Ronald sees the bodies of the older kids who had moved out before him, wrapped in webs with spider egg sacs. Raymond sits in a chair, smiling at Ronald as he walks closer. Ronald takes the box out of the table and opens it, taking out a fresh green apple which he knows he is about to eat. As Ronald picks up the apple, he suddenly feels an intense burning in his cheek which snaps him out of whatever controlled his movements. Now enraged, Raymond stands up and "small, twitching shapes" fall from his jacket. Ronald escapes the house and runs, eventually ending up in Birmingham where he settles down and starts a new life, but never rests easy until hearing that the halfway house burned down. In 2005, Ronald hears that something new is being built on the plot where the halfway house was, and he knows that that land is best left undisturbed.

Post-Statement

Jonathan still cannot find any records surrounding Raymond and the halfway house. According to Martin, lots of records from the time period are missing, indicating the place where they were stored was destroyed or hidden. Jonathan is sick of hearing about spiders, and has "no interest in thinking about spiders any more than is professionally required." He wonders if the Archives contain more information on Raymond's relationship with Agnes.

Supplemental Notes

All of Jonathan's assistants have started avoiding him at the Institute. He wonders if they are planning something together.

All Webbed Up: When Ronald goes into the basement, he finds it covered in spiderwebs, and several of the former residents of the halfway house, wrapped in cocoons, their bodies warped and bloated with spider egg sacs.
Creepy Basement: The basement at the halfway house, which no one except Raymond Fielding ever goes into.
Department of Child Disservices: Raymond, the man running the halfway house does something that makes the teenagers he takes in more responsible and mindful, but at the same time, after they leave the house, they're used as living nurseries for spider eggs.
Magic Kiss: Agnes Montague gives Ronald a kiss on the cheek before he leaves the house. His cheek burns in this exact spot shortly after, breaking him out of the enchantment Raymond had on him and allowing him to flee the house.

60: The Observer Effect

Case #9721207. Statement of Rosa Meyer, concerning a persistent feeling of being watched. Original statement given July 12th 1972.

Story

Rosa's brother Christopher dies in April 1972 and she takes some time to clean out his house. While going through the study, she finds that he wrote books about ancient myths and fetishes, and finds some of said fetishes: totems, carvings, beads and more. In one of the last boxes she opens on the second day of cleaning, she finds only a hand mirror and a typewritten note reading "BEHIND YOU". Rosa looks back and sees only the window with an empty street beyond. Rosa examines the mirror, and as she's putting it down she suddenly sees a face in the window, reflected in the mirror, with bulging eyes. Rosa screams and drops the mirror which shatters, and from that point forward she feels as though she's being watched with a greedy intensity. Because of this she is unable to sleep. Rosa gets in contact with Angus Cartwright, a colleague of Christopher's, and although he's never seen the mirror he explains that Christopher was writing about "outer cults", completely unique belief systems from any major religion or paganism, and had collected some artifacts from them. Angus tells Rosa that Christopher had consulted several times with the Magnus Institute, so she goes to tell her story in the hopes of finding out why.

Post-Statement

Sasha finds that Rosa was a news anchor on Look East Evening News until 1972 when she had a breakdown on the set and destroyed cameras, resulting in her being fired. Jonathan finds and reads some of Christopher's books but couldn't find anything relevant. He can't find any records of Christopher's consultations but admits that the record-keeping isn't the best. Tim learns that after Rosa told her story in 1972, she worked low-level jobs for twelve years until her parents died, after which she murdered a delivery van driver and stole his van, filling it with barrels of petrol and later crashing on Vauxhall bridge, where the petrol did not explode and she was arrested. Rosa died of pneumonia in prison in 1993. Given that the driver she murdered worked for a company that supplied stationary to the Magnus Institute at the time, Jonathan suspects that she may have been trying to destroy the Institute.

Supplemental Notes

Elias and Jonathan's assistants stage an intervention to make him stop his stalking and mistrust of them, and he demands hard evidence before he does so. Elias gives Jonathan a copy of the Institute's CCTV footage from the day Gertrude disappeared, and although there are no cameras in the Archives, the rest of the footage gives everyone an alibi, as aside from Gertrude herself, no one enters or exits the Archives until Elias discovers the murder. Jonathan notices that Gertrude was in and out all day and night. Jonathan thinks it is now more likely that Gertrude was killed by the thing in the tunnels.

Being Watched: Rosa is convinced that someone or something is constantly watching her.
Foreshadowing: In the end, Rosa was arrested for killing a delivery van driver, then filling his delivery van with barrels of gasoline. However, she was stopped when she ran a red light. Jon notes that the company the delivery driver worked for supplied the Institute with stationery at the time of the incident, and she may have been targeting the Institute. This provides one of the first major hints that the Institute is connected to a supernatural fear of being watched.
Magic Mirror: Rosa's feeling of being watched starts when she looks into an old hand mirror. When she sees the reflection of a window behind her, she sees a face with bulging, bloodshot eyes staring at her.
Staging an Intervention: Martin, Tim, Elias and Not-Sasha hold an intervention for Jon about his paranoid behavior to get him to quit stalking them. To aid this, Elias gives him a copy of the CCTV footage from the week that Gertrude disappeared.

61: Hard Shoulder

Case #0160112. Statement of Detective Alice “Daisy” Tonner, regarding the traffic stop of a delivery van on the M6 near Preston on the afternoon of 24th July 2002.

Pre-Statement

Before telling her story, Daisy drops off another of Gertrude's tapes on Basira's behalf and explains that before the CCTV footage was recovered, Jonathan himself was the police's prime suspect in her murder and they had been giving him tapes to try to dissuade him from skipping town while they collected more evidence.

Story

Daisy and her partner Zack pull over a van going 25 in a 70. As they approach the cab, Daisy sees the name "Breekon and Hope Deliveries" printed on the side of the van. The driver, introducing himself as Tom, comes out alongside two huge men. As they start to argue, a moaning sound starts from inside the van. Zack orders Tom to open the back of the van, and inside is an old coffin wrapped in chains with a padlock which the moaning is coming from. The large men come closer and Daisy prepares to defend herself, but Zack has them unload the coffin and gets the key from Tom. As Zack unlocks the padlock, Daisy notices the words "Do Not Open" etched into the wood. When the lock opens, the chains fly off of the coffin and the lid slowly opens, revealing a stone staircase going down, not matching the ground around them. Daisy yells at Tom and the large men, demanding an explanation, but they are still and silent as they watch the coffin. Daisy strikes one of the large men with her baton but to her shock it feels like hitting wood and hurts her arm, and yet the man doesn't react. Daisy hears movement and turns to see Zack descending the stairs inside the coffin with a relaxed expression. Daisy moves to stop him but is held back by one of the men, whose hand feels like "hard rubber". Zack disappears into the coffin and the lid slowly closes without a sound. The men start to chain up the coffin again. Enraged, Daisy tries to attack them but is punched in the chest, breaking her ribs and leaving her on the ground as they load the coffin back into the van and drive away. When Daisy reports the incident to her superiors, she is made to sign her first Section 31 form.

Post-Statement

After she finishes, Jonathan asks if she knows anything about vampires, and she reveals that they used to have problems with suspects being released even though they never spoke during interrogations, and now whenever that happens the suspect is to be bound, taken out to a forest and burned. Daisy states that they've had five such cases in the last nine years.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan wants to know more about the coffin's origins and its relationship with Breekon and Hope, and is somewhat glad to have confirmation of the existence of vampires. He decides to not make a fuss about being suspected of the murder so as to get more tapes.

Bigger on the Inside: When the coffin is opened, Daisy sees a set of stairs descending into the earth as far as she can see.
Call-Back:
- To Episode 2. We finally learn what's in the coffin.
- And to Episodes 10 and 56; on a whim, Jon asks Daisy if she knows anything about vampires, and to his surprise, she instantly responds in the affirmative; she's the one personally responsible for killing any vampires discovered, and while she's not as knowledgeable about how they work as Trevor Herbert is, the details she gives are enough to confirm for Jon that Herbert's story is legitimate.

62: First Edition

Case #0080307. Statement of Mary Keay, recorded 3rd July 2008. Regarding her first Leitner. Statement recorded live.

Story

As a young girl, Mary spends most of her time on her own while her mother works at the Magnus Institute. Her mother teaches her about the dark things out there in the world, and Mary searches many different shops looking for a dark artefact that calls to her. Eventually a doctor's office is set up by Dr. Margaret Tellison, who Mary instantly knows possesses dark power. Mary takes to watching Tellison's office from across the street, and takes notice of how frequently ambulances come to pick up a patient from her. Mary decides she needs to watch from the inside to learn just what Dr. Tellison is doing with her patients. Mary sneaks into the waiting room and finds no place to hide before a patient comes out to leave, though he only nods to her without a word. Mary looks down the hall he came from and finds it to be darkened. She sneaks down the hall and finds a closet beneath the stairs from which she has a clear view of Dr. Tellison's office through a crack in the wooden floor. Shortly after entering the closet, Dr. Tellison's next patient arrives and while watching the checkup, Mary notices a safe in the office which she knows contains Dr. Tellison's dark secrets. Mary spies on Dr. Tellison's appointments for a week this way. Near the end of Dr. Tellison's work day on Sunday, a healthy-looking woman comes in for a checkup and Mary sees a "certain predatory look" in Dr. Tellison's eyes. During the checkup, Dr. Tellison casually gives the woman an injection which causes her to quickly convulse and die. Pulling the woman's body onto the table, Dr. Tellison cuts open the back of her dress and uncovers her skin, then opens the safe. Inside, Mary sees two books, animal bones, and a sharp fountain pen. Taking the larger book and the pen, Dr. Tellison writes on the dead woman's back for twenty minutes, then with a scalpel cuts the inked skin off and hangs it on a hook, after which she calls the ambulance. With no words exchanged, the ambulance staff collect the woman's body and an envelope of money from Dr. Tellison before they leave, giving Mary the impression that they aren't going to the hospital. Once the ambulance is gone, Dr. Tellison opens the book and reads a page aloud. The air becomes thick and heavy, and before Mary knows it a man has appeared before Dr. Tellison. Mary recognizes the man as a previous patient of Dr. Tellison's who had been picked up by an ambulance three weeks earlier. The man begs Dr. Tellison to free him, but she demands information about his will and finances. Mary is disgusted that Dr. Tellison would use such powers only to get rich, and after the man is gone and Dr. Tellison falls asleep in her office chair, Mary quietly sneaks into the office and cuts her throat with her late father's razor. Mary claims the book, which is written in Sanskrit, and performs the ritual using Dr. Tellison's body, though it doesn't go well as it's her first time.

Mary: After a lifetime, I know all its secrets save one. And I have a pretty good idea about how to find that.

Post-Statement

Mary tells Gertrude that the book comes from "The End" and that the second book from Dr. Tellison's safe was also written in Sanskrit and contained "poems about dying animals". Mary eventually sold the book to Jurgen Leitner, but got it back following the destruction of his library. Mary leaves Gertrude with a page from the first book, which she wrote in English, telling her that the person it was made from is "a surprise" and to "make sure you're alone when you read it". Gertrude wonders if she should destroy the page, and hides it under a floorboard in the meantime.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan hadn't known that Mary knew Gertrude, though he knew the Keay family had been involved with Jonah Magnus and the Institute before. Jonathan wants more information from Elias but decides to keep his own knowledge to himself until he learns more about the Institute's true purpose. Jonathan then opens up the floorboard hiding Gertrude's secret compartment, and though the page is no longer there it contains Gertrude's laptop and a key.

Early-Bird Cameo: Mary claims that the book belongs to The End, and alludes to the other Powers, long before they would be named or even described in the story proper.
Evil Old Folks: Mary Keay gives this off in spades.
Only in It for the Money: Dr. Tillison is using a Leitner book that grants incredible necromantic abilities to get the dead to give her banking information, with no apparent interest in doing anything more noteworthy with it than padding her own bank account. Mary is disgusted that something so powerful is being used for such an insignificant purpose.
Necromancer: What Dr. Tillison appears to be doing with the Leitner. Mary Keay ends up taking the book for herself.
Wham Episode: Gertrude Robinson knew Mary Keay, and was introduced beforehand to the skin book that would kill her.
Wham Line:
Gertrude: Subject is Mary Keay, recorded 3rd of July, 2008

63: The End of the Tunnel

Case #0143103. Statement of Erin Gallagher-Nelson, regarding an urban exploration trip beneath St Paul’s Church West Hackney. Original statement given March 31st 2014.

Story

Erin is a photographer who gets her material from urban exploration alongside her brother-in-law Luke. They figure out that there are some underground spaces underneath Saint Paul's Church not used by it. They break into the church after midnight and after some searching find a removable panel. After sliding it aside, the air underneath hisses out and Erin is surprised at how clean it smells. They climb down into the tunnel below and Erin starts taking photos while Luke sets up lighting. Erin looks at some of the photos and sees a shadow in them, so gets mad at Luke for ruining the photos though he claims that it wasn't him. Erin takes one more photo after Luke heads off down the tunnel and the shadow is still there, but she ignores it, not entertaining any thought of the supernatural. After a while, Erin and Luke reach a partially destroyed room, likely due to WWII Blitz bombing. Since all other doorways are blocked, they start to head back the way they came. Once back under the church, Luke nervously suggests that they leave but Erin insists that they need more usable photos to make the trip financially worth it. As they go the other way down the tunnel, Erin still gets shadows in her photos. They eventually reach a dead end and Erin gives up on the expedition, when their flashlights burn out. Erin listens to Luke try desperately to get a light on with no success, then they both stand silently, listening to their own breathing. Suddenly they begin to hear more sets of breathing from all around them, growing closer. The breathing stops and is replaced with the sound of something metal being dragged across the floor. Erin sinks to the floor as the scraping sound stops, then after a moment of silence she hears Luke scream in absolute pain and terror. Erin suddenly remembers her camera's flash and clicks it just as Luke's screams stop with a snapping sound. As the flash lights up the cavern, she sees Luke standing with his head detached and floating above his body, and on the wall behind him she sees two bodiless shadows holding the shadows of Luke's body and head. Erin screams before finding herself back in the church surrounded by its staff. They get her to the hospital, after which she realizes that they took her camera. Luke is listed as missing, and no one believes Erin's story that the darkness ate him. Erin now keeps lights on at all times.

Post-Statement

The Church of Saint James, which was destroyed in the Blitz and had Saint Paul's Church built in its place, had its foundation stone laid by Robert Smirke, linking this story to others about dark tunnels. Jonathan suspected the People's Church of the Divine Host as well but found no connections. The church staff deny meeting Erin though are likely lying since the hospital records corroborate her story. Steph Gallagher-Nelson, Erin's wife and Luke's sister, has prevented the Institute from contacting Erin again.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan hasn't been able to guess Gertrude's laptop password yet. As he thinks about going to the police to talk to Basira, Melanie King arrives to ask for Jonathan's help in getting access to the Institute's library, since Ghost Hunt UK split up and her attempts at solo field work didn't go well, culminating in a video of her getting arrested while yelling about ghosts being published online and destroying her reputation.

Darkness Equals Death: Erin and Luke's torches stop working, leaving them in total darkness. Luke is killed shortly thereafter.
Foreshadowing: Melanie mentions that "The new girl" let her in. There hasn't been any new employees that the audience has been made aware of, hinting that Melanie is not affected by NotSasha.
Living Shadow: Trapped in total darkness, Erin activates the flash on her camera. She sees Luke suspended in mid-air before her. On the wall behind him, she sees two thin shadows holding up Luke's shadow and ripping its head off.

64: Burial Rites

#0152005. Statement of Donna Gwynne, regarding an unlicensed archaeological dig near the Red Sea in Egypt. Original statement given May 20th 2015.

Story

Donna wants to be an archaeologist but her chances are slim since most positions only open once the person holding them dies. Donna is approached by an unlicensed archaeology group looking to replace a member that was arrested in China, and since her only other option is to learn to be a teacher (and she hates kids) she accepts. In the group, Donna's job is to identify and appraise recovered artifacts from their digs. Eventually the team hears that the Egyptian government refused an American university permission to dig at a region of the Eastern Desert suspected to have undiscovered tombs. After pinpointing a likely location from satellite imagery, the team sneaks in and starts a dig. At the end of the day they find a slab carved with hieroglyphs which marks the entrance to the tomb. Donna recognizes a shen ring symbol which normally denotes a royal tomb, but she sees no other evidence confirming it or even the entombed's name. The stronger team members move the slab away and everyone heads down into the tomb, which to their shock is completely empty, and not from robbers seeing as the tomb was sealed until this point. Following the passages deeper, Donna notices more passages branching off and back towards the entrance. After exploring them, the team finds that it's like a maze, but would only be so to those inside trying to find the way out. The team leader decides to use their Jeep's winch as a guide to help them get back out. They explore further and find the tomb's central chamber which is also empty apart from the sarcophagus in the center, which was wooden and has mostly rotten away. Donna sees copper loops that would have held the sarcophagus shut, an oddity for ancient Egyptian tombs. Among the remains of the sarcophagus lies the mummy, wrapped tighter than normal and with blackened flesh visible where the wrappings have decayed. The team leader throws a tantrum over the lack of artifacts, and Donna decides to let him blow off his steam while she examines the perimeter of the room. She finds some ancient dice in a corner and turns to tell the leader, who is now standing above the mummy as though he's about to take his anger out on it. Donna talks him down, saying that the mummy itself has some value and he should leave it intact, when suddenly he freezes in terror and Donna sees that the mummy has grabbed his wrist. The mummy opens its desiccated eyes and mouth, and Donna wonders if this mummy was still alive when it had gone through the mummification process, which would have involved the liquification of its organs. The team leader unloads his gun into the mummy, even putting the barrel into its mouth at one point, but it is unaffected. The leader gets out of the mummy's grip and runs away, the rest of the team having taken off earlier. The mummy slowly crawls towards Donna, who is rooted to the spot in terror. Donna pulls out a hunting knife and tries to drive the mummy back, but it doesn't work and the mummy grabs her leg. Donna stabs the mummy in the throat and it grabs the knife and her hands. The mummy forces Donna to pull the knife out of its throat, and then stab it in the chest where its heart would have been over and over. Eventually Donna pulls free and runs, following the winch cable to the entrance where she finds her colleagues preparing to rebury the tomb. Donna ends her statement by explaining the ancient Egyptian culture in regards to death, how life was mainly about preparing for burial and how tombs were built at "the edge of life itself" where the distance from the Nile river was too great for things to survive.

Donna: I cannot imagine what they would have thought of a person who could not die. I can imagine what they would have done to them.

Post-Statement

No investigation could be done since everyone involved, whether government or criminal, refuses to cooperate or implicate themselves, not to mention Donna only used aliases in her story. All Jonathan can find is that Donna is now a teacher.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan goes to see Basira at the police station but she gets mad since her supervisors are already suspicious of her and Jonathan and tells him to wait for another tape until she's out of the heat.

Ancient Tomb: The setting for this episode.
And I Must Scream: Donna goes into detail about the mummification processes of the era the mummy came from - being buried in salt for more than a month while its organs slowly dissolved - before being bound, placed in a sarcophagus, and buried in a maze below the earth for more than four thousand years. And throughout this whole process, the poor sap was fully aware of everything happening to them.
Continuity Nod: The set of dice that Donna finds in the tomb (notable to her since dice games predate the time the tomb would have been sealed) might be one to Episode 29 ("Cheating Death"), which established that people can challenge Grim Reapers to a game for an opportunity to be spared, though if they won, they became Grim Reapers in their place. If it is, it's possible that the mummy was another unlucky winner.
Grave Robbing: The type of archaeology they're doing isn't exactly legal.
Laser-Guided Karma: Donna chose to work with Starvo because "it was either that or become a teacher — and I hate children." After finishing the statement, Jonathan notes that the only thing they've been able to learn during follow up is that Donna is training to be a teacher, which he takes some grim satisfaction in.
I Cannot Self-Terminate: The mummy, who grabs Gwynne's hand and forces her to stab it in the chest multiple times in an effort to finally die. While crying. Alas, even that doesn't work, and with Donna's escape to the exit the mummy is sealed once more in its prison.

65: Binary

#0170701. Statement of Tessa Winters, regarding a strange computer program she downloaded from the deep web three months ago. Statement recorded direct from subject, 7th January 2017.

Story

Tessa tells the legend of a computer programmer in the '80s named Sergey Ushanka who contracted an incurable and lethal brain disease (differs between versions of the story, some say it was brain cancer, others Alzheimer's) and his fear of death prompted him to spend all of his time and money on finding a way to digitize his consciousness. Although different stories have different ways of how he did it, the legend ends with police finding Ushanka's mutilated corpse surrounded by floppy disks with "impossible code". Internet pranksters like to create chatbots that act as though they are the digitized Ushanka and eventually devolve into mad ramblings and begging the user to free it. Tessa notes that all versions of this have the same image of a pixelated screaming face and the words "the angles cut me when I try to think".

One day, Tessa gets a notification from a bot community which is a link to a file called "ushankas_despair.exe". Since she's already encountered and even sought out various Ushanka bots, Tessa downloads it and sees it's very small. Tessa looks back at the post she clicked and sees that all the comments are about the link being broken. Tessa would later suspect that she was the first person to click the link and as a result it didn't work for people who clicked it after her. Tessa forgets about the download until the next night at 2AM, when she opens it for some creepy fun. She's surprised to be met with an "old-school text adventure" with only a flashing line waiting for her to enter text. Tessa enters "hello" and waits for a few seconds until getting a gibberish response that fills the window, the characters scrolling through various symbols, and Tessa thinks she can see some of them twitch as if in pain. Eventually Tessa sees English words start to appear in the mess of characters: "helphelphelp" and "it peels my mind like knives". Tessa is impressed at how effective the bot is at creeping her out, until her laptop's fan starts to make unusual sounds, as though "it was desperately trying to expel air" "like someone breathing out diseased lungs, pushing and straining and never stopping to take anything back in". Tessa worries that the bot is malware and tries to close the program, then powers off the laptop when that doesn't work. To her shock, the text onscreen doesn't disappear and in fact continues to change: "you wanted to talk" "hihihihihi" before a grainy video takes over the screen. The video seems to be taken from a camera lying faceup on a desk between a computer and a man in his thirties, who sobs as he starts to break keys off the computer keyboard and eat them, hurting his mouth as he does so. Tessa shuts her laptop, turns on all the lights and drinks herself to sleep. She wakes up later in the night to see the video playing on her TV screen, now with audio playing through the speakers. As Tessa tries to figure out how the malware could have gotten to the TV, she hears the man continue to crunch on the keyboard keys and muttering, saying "it feels like thinking through cheese wire", "there's no feeling but the no feeling hurts", "it's cold without blood" with a Russian accent. Eventually, the man pulls a shard of glass from the computer screen and starts to eat it. Tessa unplugs everything and goes outside until sunrise. Tessa starts to see the video appear on every screen she looks at, picking up from where she last left off with it. She soon discovers that she's the only one who can see it after trying to show it to a friend and confusing him. After a month, Tessa decides to just watch the video until it ends, which turns out to be seventeen hours of the man slowly eating his computer. At the end, the man smiles and lays down before the camera, saying "The maze is sharp on my mind. The angles cut me when I try to think." before going still. Tessa can see that the back of his head is gone. The video finally disappears after staying on this image for thirty minutes.

Tessa: I keep thinking about the idea of uploading your mind into a computer. I said it was impossible. I still think it's impossible, in the way we want it to be. But I can't stop wondering what it must be like to try and have thoughts, messy human thoughts, trapped in the rigid digital processes of a computer. It must hurt. Though not a sort of pain that we can understand.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan explains that Tessa came to the Institute in response to an ad he made on some internet forums with the ulterior motive of getting a computer expert to hack into Gertrude's laptop for him.

Tim interrupts Jonathan and they get into an argument about how crazy Jonathan has become since the Prentiss incident, what with the distrust and the stalking. Ultimately, Tim finds he cannot quit his job in the Archive as much as he wants to, nor can Jonathan fire him, because as Jonathan says "there is something very wrong with the Archives. I don't know who here is a victim of it, and who is an agent."

Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Tessa's interpretation of her experiences, both supernatural and mundane.
Nothing about humanity is binary.
Do Not Adjust Your Set: The Sergei video does this to Tessa. Just her, specifically; he manages to follow her through even through display sets in store windows, using whatever screen she's looking at to force her to watch.
Early-Bird Cameo: It's heavily implied that this statement marks the first hint toward the existence of the Extinction, more than a season and a half before it would be properly introduced.
Memetic Mutation: In-universe, the "Sergei" chatbots. It's a popular hobby among some coders to make bots that eventually "go mad" and beg to be saved, based on an urban legend about a coder named Sergei who supposedly uploaded his own mind. The idea is that the bot is Sergei and he really regrets it. Tessa used to download them for fun. After she got stuck with the real deal, though, she doesn't think this anymore.
Motor Mouth: Tessa spends about five minutes rambling about digital and analogue data storage and the incompatibility of organic and mechanical systems, with Jon barely able to get a word in edgewise before he can convince her to actually tell him about what happened to her.
Shut Up, Hannibal!: Tim's "The Reason You Suck" Speech, while not wrong, loses its momentum when Jon offers him the chance to resign, and Tim realizes something is stopping him from quitting, even though he badly wants to at this point.
What the Hell, Hero?: Once again, Tim is not pleased with Jon treating him like a suspect, although he relents a little when he realizes he and Jon share the same opinion on how shady the Archives are.

66: Held in Customs

#0002202. Statement of Vincent Yang regarding his claimed imprisonment by Mikaele Salesa. Original statement given 22nd February 2000.

Story

Vincent is a customs officer in Portsmouth, and one person he sees come through a lot is Mikaele Salesa. One day, Salesa gets caught in customs for not having his documents in order and Vincent has to examine his shipment for anything illegal. Vincent does this mainly for show, partly because Salesa intimidates him and partly because he doesn't care enough. At one point, Vincent uses a crate to help himself stand from a crouching position and it slides open, not being fastened in any way, and he sees it to be empty. As Vincent leaves, Salesa catches him and tells him in a very serious manner to not go to sleep. Vincent ignores him and goes to bed as normal that night. Vincent wakes up in the night and finds himself not in his bed but inside a wooden crate. He panics, screaming and trying to break out to no avail. Eventually he remembers the empty crate in Salesa's shipment and decides that Salesa is responsible. Vincent starts to notice the box is quite hot, and starts to hyperventilate as claustrophobia sets in. Vincent becomes relieved when he realizes that all his panicked breathing hasn't expended the air, meaning he's not buried alive, but as if to punish him for this the box suddenly gets smaller. At one point, sunlight starts to come in through a crack in the box, which abruptly closes once Vincent becomes hopeful for it. Defiant and knowing that he's outside somewhere, Vincent screams until his voice gives out but no one comes to rescue him. Vincent gets a view of his watch in the now-dimmed light and watches hour after hour go by until it is night again. Based on the light and darkness cycle, Vincent estimates that he was in the box for four days. He cries out to God, the devil, and Salesa without an answer before accepting that he will die in the box. After thinking about this for some time, the crate's lid slides away and Vincent sees Salesa and another regular to Portsmouth standing over him, who gives Salesa twenty pounds before leaving. Salesa helps Vincent out of the crate and hands him the updated documentation for his shipment. Vincent hands in his resignation later that day, finding it to be the day after he had searched Salesa's shipment, and his watch is no longer accurate.

Vincent: I must have been drugged. Salesa must have drugged me. It's the only rational explanation. But I know that he didn't.

Post-Statement

The other man Salesa was with was Captain Peter Lukas (#33: Boatswains's Call); Jonathan wonders what kind of a relationship Salesa has with him and his maritime rituals. Security around shipment records have proved as yet impossible to obtain. As for Vincent, Martin was able to interview him again but he is now suffering from Alzheimer's and couldn't add anything useful.

Supplemental Notes

Gertrude's laptop is almost as barebones as her flat, but Jonathan finds some interesting things. Firstly, she was approved for a surprisingly large amount of the Institute's budget for international travel, and though the records don't go far enough back, Jonathan suspects that she could have gone to Alexandria to investigate the Serapeum (#53: Crusader). Secondly, she purchased large amounts of petrol, lighter fluid, pesticides, flashlights, and filing equipment, and Jonathan thinks that the disordered state of the Archive he inherited may have been intentional. Jonathan is trusting Gertrude less and less, especially when he finds that she was trying to buy Leitner volumes under the username grbookworm1818 and had acquired The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Key of Solomon, and A Disappearance. Since Jonathan has found none of those volumes in the Archives or Gertrude's flat, he hopes she destroyed them.

Jonathan: Perhaps I've been focusing on the wrong question, and the most important thing isn't who killed her, but why.

The Bet: It's implied that Salesa and Peter Lukas had a bet over Vincent's situation in the crate, as they're seen exchanging a bill after his retrieval.
Enclosed Space: Vincent finds himself trapped in a crate. Whenever something happens to alleviate his fear or give him hope, the crate gets smaller.
Even Evil Has Standards: Salesa may have been a ruthless figure, but when Vincent accidentally exposed himself to the cursed crate, Salesa looked concerned and tried to warn Vincent not to sleep that night.
Exposed to the Elements: Vincent notes that although it's the middle of January, Salesa is wearing a tank top and unbuttoned shirt.
Recurring Character: Mikaele Salesa, who was previously mentioned in episodes 14, 38, and 45.
Sealed Evil in a Can: Vincent accidentally nudges upon the lid of a crate. When he next awakens after going to bed, he's trapped in the crate.

67: Burning Desire

Case #0071803. Statement of Jack Barnabas regarding a short-lived courtship with Agnes Montague in the Autumn of 2006. Original statement given March 18th 2007.

Story

Jack starts working at the Canyon Cafe where he sees a young woman he later learns to be named Agnes Montague. Jack's boss, Deliah, warns him that Agnes is nothing but trouble, but he is infatuated with her. Jack notices that Agnes always orders a "large black coffee with enough room for milk", but doesn't actually put milk in or even drink the coffee, instead sitting with it for an hour before leaving. Jack finds her undrunk coffee to be scalding hot. Over the next year, Jack only sees two times when she isn't alone. The first is when a man tries to hit on her, but when she meets his eyes he starts sweating and jumps when she stands, spilling her coffee onto his hand. Though the coffee is forty minutes old, it burns his hand and he runs away in a panic. Later that day, Jack finds scorch marks on Agnes' chair but doesn't make the connection. The second time, in October 2006, Agnes is seated across from a muscular Asian woman with a back tattoo of a man burning in Hell. The woman tells Agnes about a job, mentioning that Agnes would be "released", but Agnes sadly declines and the woman hands over an envelope that looks to be full of money before leaving. Seeing Agnes look frustrated, Jack decides to talk to her the next time she comes in. After she makes her order, Jack asks her name and then asks her on a date, which she accepts. After Agnes leaves the store, Jack realizes that they never actually made plans and spends the next day upset with himself, until Agnes arrives at his apartment at 3PM. As Jack gets ready, he detects a smell "like when you turn on an electric heater for the first time in a while and you get a whiff of all the burning dust" and he sees a wisp of smoke where a spiderweb had once been. Once Jack's ready, Agnes tells him that they're going to walk in the park. During this time Jack does most of the talking, but near the end of the day Agnes asks him if he has a destiny. He doesn't believe so and tells her as much and she replies "That must be nice." before going quiet again. They go on several more dates, including going out to dinner where she doesn't eat anything and going to a movie which she doesn't watch. The final date, on November 23rd, is another walk in the park, and Jack notices that Agnes never seems to feel cold. Shortly after dark, Agnes gasps and clutches her chest before telling Jack they need to leave. On the way out of the park Agnes stops at a phone booth and makes a call, telling the person on the other end that a tree had fallen and that "they had to finish something". Agnes now feels unwell and so Jack helps her back to her flat, which he hasn't been to before. When they arrive there are several people gathered around Agnes' door, including the Asian woman from earlier, a bald man with an unlit lantern and speaking Spanish or Portuguese, a person with a bag of candles and a person with a plastic container full of spiders. Agnes apologizes to Jack, says "goodbye" and thanks him. In a rush of emotion Jack asks Agnes to kiss him, and with out a word she takes his face in her hands and does so. Jack's face burns and he feels skin disintegrating and fat melting. Jack collapses and just before passing out feels a single burning teardrop fall onto his hand. Jack wakes up in the hospital three days later and learns that Agnes is dead, ruled a suicide. Although "the doctors did their best", Jack's face is still horrifically scarred and as a result he loses his job and has to move in with his father. Even so, Jack doesn't think he could have done anything differently.

Jack: I just couldn't avoid being drawn in, like a moth to the flame.

Post-Statement

Jonathan refers to the group of people at Agnes' apartment as the Cult of the Lightless Flame, as the bald man with the lantern is likely Diego Molina (#12: First Aid, #43: Section 31). He suspects that Arthur Nolan (#32: Hive, #55: Pest Control) could be another member and that they have something to do with the woodland ritual space described in case 0090608 (#37: Burnt Offering). Martin gets in contact with Jack who, when asked if Agnes ever talked about her childhood, recalled that she mentioned being adopted. Tim contacts Jack's former boss at the Canyon Cafe who confirms that Agnes had come in every week for fifteen years without aging, causing Jonathan to conclude that Agnes Montague is indeed the same Agnes who lived at Hill Top Road.

Supplemental Notes

Elias and Jonathan argue over access to the tunnels beneath the Archives, and Elias begrudgingly agrees to allow Jonathan access so long as he stays safe about it.

Double-Meaning Title: Refers both to the strength of Jack's attraction to Agnes, and the fact that getting too close to her literally burns.
Facial Horror: Jack's face is severely burned after he receives a kiss from Agnes.
Foregone Conclusion: Once Agnes mentions the tree, it becomes pretty clear where this is going, since earlier episodes have already established that she dies after its destruction.
Last Kiss: When Agnes goes into the battle that's going to kill her, Jack asks to kiss her, and she agrees. It is possibly also her first kiss with anybody, not just him.
Mugging the Monster: A man flirts with Agnes at the diner, and unwisely decides to get angry and start harassing her when she tells him to buzz off. Cue her superheating her coffee and letting him spill it on himself.

68: The Tale of a Field Hospital

#0030306. Statement of Joseph Russo regarding a book allegedly authored by Sir Frederick Treves. Original statement given June 3rd 2003.

Story

An artist, Joseph often goes to the dump to find things he can use in his creations. One day he takes interest in a basket of books and finds a copy of The Tale of a Field Hospital by Frederick Treeves, a nonfiction book detailing his experiences working in a field hospital during the Second Boer War. Examining the book shows it to be the oldest copy of the book Joseph has ever seen, and he thinks it could be a first edition and so very valuable. After taking it home, Joseph finds that many of the book's pages have different layouts and remembers that The Tale of a Field Hospital is based on some columns Treeves wrote for the British Medical Journal during the war, so this new book could be a prerelease proof draft. Excited, Joseph starts to read through it and finds that there are parts he doesn't remember. Joseph includes some of the differing passages in his statement. The first tells about a man named Private Amherst who is part of the "men with the spades" who dig graves for those that die in the hospital every day. Amherst digs a grave, then salutes Treeves before falling dead into it of typhoid. This leads Joseph to suspect that maybe the book is a kind of unedited version. The next different section, normally about a soldier who keeps giving up his hospital bed to others and hurting his broken leg more in the process, is now about Private Amherst, inexplicably alive again, who keeps moving his injured leg and giving his bed to another wounded soldier whose wound rapidly becomes gangrenous and kills him the next day, with Amherst's only excuse being that "I am such a restless man". Eventually Amherst's own wound becomes rapidly gangrenous and when Treeves tells him to stay dead, he answers again "I am such a restless man". The third and final differing section of the book, its last chapter, talks about a civilian who comes from a concentration camp covered in flies, telling everyone that other civilians there are like him and talking about "disease, putrefaction and the writing creatures of filth" before dying. His gravedigger also quickly dies. Though not having a supernatural experience for himself, Joseph thinks that the book would be interesting to the Magnus Institute and gives it to them along with his statement, warning them that the pages are sharp.

Post-Statement

Joseph died two days after giving his statement, the cause being a wound on his hand that became rapidly gangrenous. Jonathan suspects that The Tale of a Field Hospital was a Leitner due to the way it killed Joseph and the charring around the statement's paper which suggested that Gertrude burned the book. Tim tracks down a regular copy of the book and finds that it indeed doesn't match the passages Joseph copied into his statement, and never mentions the civilian concentration camps. Jonathan wonders if Private Amherst was an ancestor of John Amherst, or maybe even was him based on how he died and came back to life. Jonathan also notes that Treeves, after hearing Private Amherst's name for the first time, is reminded of Jeffery Amherst who delibrately gave smallpox-carrying blankets to Native Americans during the French and Indian War and caused an epidemic among them. Jonathan thinks it less likely that John Amherst is a Flesh Hive like Jane Prentiss, but there is still something about him and his association with bugs and disease.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan gets lost in the tunnels and is followed by something which turns out to be Sasha, having followed him after noticing the open trapdoor and wanting to make sure he stayed safe. She leads him back to the Archive and Jonathan decides to wait a while before going down again. Jonathan mentions that he didn't recognize Sasha at first, and that she seemed "far too tall".

Admiring the Abomination: A disturbing inversion. John Amherst seemed content with killing soldiers one at a time with fast acting diseases, but when he returns from a British concentration camp for Boer civilians, he excitedly speaks of the "revelation" of it, describing in detail all the unique forms of death and suffering to Frederick Treves. The Amherst we see in modern day seems to have taken it to heart, and prefers tormenting populations of people rather than individuals, while also drawing out their suffering.
Conspiracy Theorist: Joseph believes the Illuminati to be real and thinks the Institute has files about them on record.
Deadly Book: The Tale of a Field Hospital, a sinister version of a real-life book of the same title also written by Sir Frederick Treves based on his own experiences of The Second Boer War.
Down in the Dumps: Joseph spends a lot of time at the dump looking for junk he can use in his art.
Fan Boy: Joseph tells the archivist that he's a big fan of The Magnus Institute.
Five-Second Foreshadowing: In the end of his statement, Joseph warns the listener about the pages being sharp. Immediately after, in the statement notes, Jon says that Joseph died just two days after giving the statement from blood poisoning presumably inflicted by a paper cut.
Flies Equals Evil: The first time Frederick Treeves encounters Private Amherst, he notes that the flies seemed to fly thicker over the grave he was digging than the graves the other soldiers were digging. In subsequent encounters with Amherst, the swarm of flies surrounding him get thicker each time.
Noodle Incident: Apparently, the Magnus Institute had some sort of leak in 1999; Joseph read all of the statements that were leaked.
Resurrective Immortality: Frederick Treves sees Private Amherst die, only to encounter him two months later and see him die again. He later meets him again, and sees him die for a third time.
Walking Wasteland: Private Amherst twice gives up his bed in the field hospital for soldiers who are more badly wounded than he. Both die of infected wounds shortly thereafter. Amherst himself dies when his wound becomes suddenly gangrenous. Later, we learn that Joseph Russo also dies after making his statement from an infected wound as well.

69: Thought for the Day

#0101811. Statement of Darren Harlow, regarding a failed psychology experiment at the University of Surrey. Original statement given 18th November 2010.

Story

Darren is a janitor at the University of Surrey's Psych Department. One day a professor tells him about an upcoming experiment her postgrads are doing, which he realizes is crossing over into parapsychology: the idea is to see if one group's thoughts and feelings can affect another group without any kind of interaction between the two. An individual subject is placed in a room with a one-way mirror and hooked up to machinery that measures responses. On the other side is a "projector", someone watching the subject who would get a stimulus for a certain feeling while staring at them. The goal is to see if the projector can get the subject, Annabelle Cane, to feel fear by only accepting arachnophobic volunteers to be projectors and randomly showing videos of spiders in front of them on the glass they watch Annabelle through. Darren doesn't get to observe the experiment but he hears about it from other staff and how it seems to be working: Annabelle becomes slightly uneasy when the spider videos are playing, and not during control periods when there is no projectors but she thinks there is. Darren starts finding more and more cobwebs to clean up, reappearing the morning after he clears them away. The most he sees of their creators is a flash of their legs disappearing into a hiding spot. Darren jokingly tells the professor that the experiment is manifesting spiders. The experiment starts to test with multiple projectors at once, and the professor tells Darren that Annabelle has started to have dreams about spiders, which is incredible as she had never been informed that spiders were being used for the projectors' fear stimulus. The experiment starts to go wrong when Annabelle starts to only have non-fear responses in the tests. Darren sees Annabelle once after a test, and notices her strange way of walking and how she moves her hand across the wall, scuttling her fingers like a spider's legs. Darren is cleaning late one night when he sees that the lights in the experiment rooms are still on, and remembers that the latest iteration of the experiment is using nineteen projectors, so the test is likely to run longer, but due to just how late it is he decides to check in to be sure. Inside the room, the nineteen projectors stand in two circles, one inside the other, interlocking arms and rotating together. In a corner is Mark, one of the postgrads, standing as if in a trance. Behind the one-way glass is Annabelle, body twisted in an unnatural way and staring at the projectors she shouldn't be able to see. Darren thinks he can see Extra Eyes on Annabelle's face. As soon as Darren enters, the projectors stop rotating and instantly look at him, then leave their circles and walk towards the one-way glass. In unison, the projectors headbutt the glass and shatter it, allowing Annabelle to crawl through and up to Darren. She stands up, now taller than she was before, and looks into his eyes. Darren starts to feel a sensation like tiny legs running around in his head. His hands then start to move of their own accord, climbing up his body to his throat and strangling him. As Darren starts to black out, he sees Mark break out of the trance and charge into Annabelle, knocking her into the ledge of the broken one-way glass window. There is a crunching sound as her head hits and the projectors collapse to the floor while Darren regains control of his hands and also collapses. Mark calls the police while Darren recovers, then Annabelle slowly gets up and Darren sees cobweb through the shattered side of her head. Darren runs and drives away for an hour. Soon the University calls Darren and instructs him to tell the police that he wasn't there or he would be fired, and he obeys. The official report is that Annabelle had a psychotic break and caused the damage and injuries before going on the run.

Darren: I'm keeping my distance from anything remotely spider-related, though. I somehow managed to live through one horror movie. I have no intention of going looking for another.

Post-Statement

There is documentation of a psychology student at Surrey University who went mad during an ESP study, though no mention of the use of spiders. Mark and the professor both left the University shortly after the story's events. The professor won't say anything about it, while Mark's account is pretty incomprehensible though he does confirm that Darren was there. Annabelle's parents attest that she was never mentally ill or violent. She is still missing, and Jonathan doesn't think that she went mad. All of the projectors from the study have since disappeared.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan is scared of going back into the tunnels, but he's can't think of many more other ways to progress his investigation. Although he wants to ask the assistants to help him, he still cannot bring himself to trust them.

Gone Horribly Wrong: The University Psychology Department conducts an experiment in which students in one room try to project feelings of fear into a subject in another room through ESP. While it seems to go well at first, it ends in a way that that is both completely unexpected and horrifying.
Marionette Motion: Darren describes seeing Annabelle walking strangely, bending her knees at odd angles while holding herself stiffly.
People Puppets: Annabelle takes control of Darren's body and forces him to strangle himself.
Science Is Bad: Darren notes that he thought the experiment sounded like something out of a horror movie. In fact, he's initially interested in the experiment because he's a fan of horror with a sci-fi bent.
Spiders Are Scary: After the experiment is underway, Darren notes that cobwebs start appearing in the science labs on a nightly basis, although he never gets a good look at the spiders that make them. Annabelle later moves like a scuttling spider, and after her skull is caved in, Darren sees that her head is filled with a mass of cobweb.
This Is Reality: The university's official explanation for this episode's events is "Annabelle went crazy and killed everyone". Jon doesn't believe it and notes that it's a textbook stereotype from "lurid fiction", not something that happens in real life.

70: Book of the Dead

#0030912 Statement of Masato Murray, regarding an unusual inheritance and the causes thereof. Original Statement given 9th December 2003.

Story

Masato never considered Phil Doah to really be a friend, just an acquaintance with mutual dislike. Phil dies after being run over by a train, which causes Masato to think more about death and his fear of it. Masato is surprised when Phil leaves him something in his will: an old book that the will said was his journal, but clearly isn't. It's visibly far older than Phil was, and has no name or anything else to indicate it as a journal. Masato decides to look inside the book, and the first page reads "Life is a current which cannot be fought. It is a march with one destination. You cannot cease your step nor move your course to one that skirts the journey's termination." below which is handwritten "you have already read too much". Thinking that this could be some weird prank from beyond the grave, Masato reads further. The next page appears ancient and handwritten in Latin, which Masato doesn't understand. He flips through pages until he reaches one that he can read, one in old English, though he can't make sense of it apart from the name "Julian" and the words "deeth"(death) and "homicide". Gradually the pages become more and more comprehensible to Masato until he finds the first printed page, which details the death of a man named Christopher in 1592. He was dragged by a horse for ten minutes, mutilating his body, before the horse stomped on and crushed his head. Masato is sickened to see the detail of how Christopher could hear the sound of his skull breaking. As Masato reads on, he finds that every page details a terrible and unnatural death, in chronological order. Eventually Masato finds a page detailing Phil's death by train, how his body was torn apart and yet he stayed alive for two more minutes, bleeding out in agony. Masato is confused by this, wondering how someone could have added the story of Phil's death into the book before Masato got it, especially since Masato knows Phil himself couldn't have written something so terrible. Masato turns to the next page, the last one before the rest of the book is blank, and finds an account of his own future death in 2014, struck by a car in the middle of nowhere and impaled onto a fallen tree branch. Masato's only explaination is that Phil hated him more than he thought and had this book made before killing himself just to frighten him, and he decides that he shouldn't worry about the prediction for his death since it is over ten years into the future and he can always just not go to the place where he will supposedly die. Unfortunately, the book occupies more and more of Masato's mind and he starts to research the other deaths in the book and finds a record of one of them, a brutal murder in 1983 whose perpetrator had never been identified. Masato concludes that either the person who made the book really did their research, or the book really predicts how its owner will die. Masato becomes confused as to why Phil wouldn't have tried to avoid his predicted fate if he owned the book and could read it at any time, until he goes back to read the prediction of his own death and finds that it has changed: burned to death by a gas explosion in 2012. Terrified out of his mind, Masato obsesses over how the book changes, when the book changes, why the book changes. He tries to destroy the book but nothing he does affects it, and he eventually gives up after remembering that hundreds of people have owned the book before him and surely everything has been tried on it by now. Masato reads the book again to see his updated death prediction, decapitation by a falling roof tile in 2011. Masato tries to not read the book again because every time he does, the date becomes earlier and the method stays just as bad. He decides to try to spare anyone else from his fate by keeping the book "as long as it will let me" and not drafting a will so as to not pass on ownership of the book.

Post-Statement

Masato dropped off the grid shortly after giving his statement, seemingly on purpose. Tim is able to confirm Phil's death as accounted in the story. Jonathan decides to not continue trying to find Masato as the latest predicted death date from the book had already long passed. Jonathan is intrigued that there is no indication that Jurgen Leitner ever owned the book, which means that he may not have been responsible for his terrible books' creation, and rather was simply a collector. Additionally, Sasha's computer has been giving authentication errors, but IT is making progress on it.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan muses on how these books seem to be the most evil artefacts he knows off, and though Leitner tried to collect as many as he could he didn't get them all. He has also finished exploring the first level of the tunnels, aside from some blocked-off passages, and on the second level he found a room with evidence that Gertrude used it to destroy The Key of Solomon, though it's unclear why she chose to do it there as it was largely unremarkable. Jonathan keeps an eye out for the other two Leitner books she acquired.

Artifact of Death: The book mentioned in the title of the episode (although the book itself is untitled).
Deadly Book: The book is a collection of detailed accounts of the deaths of various people throughout history. It's strongly implied that all the people described in the book were people who read and/or owned the book, and that the book accurately predicted when and how they would die. However, each time Masato re-reads the description of his death, the time, place, and manner of his demise changes, which at least suggests that the book may be causing the deaths it describes, rather than just predicting them.
Is This a Joke?: After Masato reads the book, he reasons that someone must be playing a sick joke on him, since it's the only explanation that makes any sense.
Made of Indestructium: Masato is unable to destroy the book, and he notes evidence which suggests that previous owners had tried as well.
Portent of Doom: The text of the book is this to anyone who reads it.
The Reveal: Even though the book featured in the episode is a typical Jurgen Leitner book, according to the statement notes, there's no evidence that it's ever been in Leitner's possession, indicating that the books are at least not entirely his doing.
Tomes of Prophecy and Fate: The book not only fortells the death of its reader, re-reading the book changes the details of that death, and makes it happen sooner as well.
With Friends Like These...: Masato says that since he and Phil had the same group of friends, they would often end up hanging out together, and so everyone just assumed they were friends, even though they didn't actually like each other.

71: Underground

#0172501. Statement of Karolina Górka, regarding a brief period trapped on the London Underground. Statement taken direct from subject 25th January 2017.

Story

Karolina ends up staying out late into the night with friends and misses what normally would have been the last subway train home, but realizes that there is a new all-night service she can use. Entering the platform, Karloina finds it empty and quiet apart from a man carrying a shovel walking to another part of the station. An old train pulls up after a few minutes and she gets on, and finds it too to be empty and quiet. Bored since her phone died earlier, Karolina looks to read the advertisements but finds them to be blank until looking closer and finding there to be a layer of dirt between the poster and the plastic over it. Karolina looks around and sees that the whole train carriage is coated in a thin layer of dirt, and the only footprints in the dirty floor are her own. She decides to get off at the next stop, but though enough time passes to have reached the station already the train hasn't passed it. Karolina starts to smell the damp of a basement or a cave. She pulls the emergency stop cord but it breaks away in her hand. Karolina then accepts that if she's really on a ghost train, she won't be able to escape on her own and sits back down to wait until the train stops. When it stops, the doors don't open so she forces them only to find that the train has not stopped at a station but at some random stretch of tunnel, with the doors close up to a wall of bare earth. Karolina then decides to make her way to the front of the train to try to find the train's driver. Forcing the doors between the carriages open, Karolina finds each carriage to be dirtier than the last and hears a creaking sound that she later learns is the sound of metal warping under pressure. Eventually, she finds a carriage that looks to have been slightly crushed inwards. Karolina thinks that if the crushing gets worse towards the front of the train, then the driver has probably been killed by it and so she decides to go back but the door behind her is now crushed closed. As the carriage continues to crush, she looks for another way out and sees a person seated at the front of the carriage. She approaches and finds it to be an old man whose seat has warped around him in a painful way. Karolina touches his shoulder to get his attention and he looks at her with an expression of misery and grabs her wrist, saying "Not enough space to move. Never enough to breathe." before letting her go. Accepting her fate, Karolina lays down on the floor and waits to be crushed, hearing the old man start to scream. She wakes up on a train platform with an employee trying to help her. As she walks out into the night, she wonders if she was just dreaming until realizing that she is covered in dirt and has a mark on her arm where the old man grabbed her.

Post-Statement

Jonathan finds that since the all-night service has started there have been disappearances of people who were last known to be taking the train alone, and none of them appear on the security footage on the stations they would have gone to. One of the missing people matches the description of the old man Karolina met. Jonathan also mentions that Karolina was still trailing dust when she came to the Institute.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan has found food and drink packaging in the tunnels, proving that someone is living down there. Since they're likely the one who murdered Gertrude, Jonathan decides to stop investigation until he can get ahold of Basira and arrange a police investigation.

Afterlife Express: The train in this story doesn't take riders to the afterlife, but rather to a place - probably outside our reality - where it's completely surrounded by earth, which begins to close in on the train cars, slowly crushing them.
Buried Alive: This appears to be Karolina's fate, as the earth surrounding the car causes the ceiling to buckle and sink. Rather than panicking, Karolina chooses to lie down and accept her fate. This may be what ends up saving her.
Unfazed Everyman: Karolina seems remarkably uneffected by her experience, and seems to be making a statement out of a sense of duty. She requests that she not be contacted with the results of research into her case.

72: Takeaway

Statement of Craig Goodall, regarding his explorations of an abandoned chicken and kebab shop in Walthamstow. Original statement given 20th October 2009.

Pre-Statement

Before the statement, Jonathan receives a phone call from Basira who explains that she and other Section 31 officers are en route to arrest Maxwell Rayner, and he advises them to bring as many lights as they can before the call drops.

Story

Craig recounts the story of a local chicken and kebab takeaway owner, John Haan, who murdered his wife in May 2004 and had been disposing of her body by making food products from her flesh until he was caught and arrested, shortly after which the takeaway closed down. Since Craig got food from this takeaway during that time, he's pretty sure that he inadvertently ate human meat though he's not sure which product it would have been, and is somewhat disappointed in that since if he ate human meat he wants to at least know what it tastes like. Craig doesn't really think there's anything morally wrong about eating human flesh apart from murder, as at the end of the day we're just another animal and "meat is meat", which Craig also explains is the only thing John Haan said during his arrest. Since no one wanted to buy the takeaway after it closed, it was abandoned instead. Craig walks past it every day and peeks inside from time to time, and thinks the interior looks "too clean to be abandoned". One day when Craig is walking past the takeaway, he hears a soft sound from inside. Craig gets closer and listens but doesn't hear the sound again, and as he starts to walk away he hears quiet laughter. Looking around, Craig sees the panel over the side window has been unbolted and is slightly open, and he hears more movement inside the takeaway. Craig calls the police and goes to a pub across the street to watch what goes down. The police go into the takeaway, then drag a teenage vandal out and confiscate his paint before letting him go with a warning. The officer drops the paint can and it cracks, red paint flowing down the rainwater-filled gutter. Craig notices that the window panel is still unsealed. Disappointed and unnerved by the red flowing down the drain, Craig goes home. In the night, Craig dreams of the paint can cooking on a kebab skewer, dripping blood instead of red paint. In the morning, Craig can't stop thinking of the unsealed takeaway window and decides to call up Leroy, an urban explorer friend, to discuss a plan and to tell him to come looking for him if he's in the shop for longer than an hour. Craig climbs through the unsealed window and finds himself in the kitchen. Though everything perishable was taken out, all the equipment and non-perishable food is still there and spotless. Looking around, Craig sees the freezer which is marked with the vandal's red paint. The police had caught the vandal mid-work, leaving it to say "MEAT IS ME". Craig is shaken by this but decides that to get past his fear he needs to know for sure what's inside the freezer. He pulls open the door to find it completely empty and turned off. Craig is relieved until he hears laughter and sees a sickly, crazed-looking Chinese man who immediately cuts Craig's Achilles tendon with bolt cutters. Craig falls and hits his head on the counter, passing out. Craig wakes up bound on the upper floor of the takeaway. Looking around the room, he sees some chipped teacups, old bibles and human fingers before the man comes in with a butcher's knife and asks if Craig is awake. Craig asks the man who he is, but he just laughs and strikes Craig's hand with the knife, cutting off three fingers which he puts with the others. The man starts to flip through a bible and tells Craig that ancient Romans once thought Christians to be cannibals, mainly because of mistaking communion for being literal flesh and blood, but they had also been accused of a initiation rite of killing a baby and drinking its blood. Trying to keep the man happy, Craig asks if he is a Christian which he vehemently denies "as they both honor and disregard the body". Craig stops following the man's rant as he goes on about meat and souls, and eventually the man notices that Craig is no longer listening and walks towards him with a smile. Suddenly, Leroy bursts in and shoves the man down, then kicks him hard enough to break something and takes his knife to free Craig. As Leroy helps Craig up, Craig finds that all his injuries have somehow healed, including his fingers regrowing even though he can still see the originals with the other severed fingers. A fallen candle then causes the stack of bibles to catch fire which quickly spreads up the wall. Craig and Leroy escape and the takeaway burns down. Craig decides to move away.

Post-Statement

Jonathan believes that "Craig Goodall" is a pseudonym since no records have been found with that name. Tim confirms that the takeaway burned on September 27th, 2009, and was ruled as arson by unidentified vandals. The coroner's report for John Haan's murdered wife stated that there were no defensive injuries and in fact some injuries appeared self-inflicted. Additionally, John Haan let go all of his staff six month before his arrest and hired on his nephew, Tom Haan, who went on to work at the Dalston meat processing plant until he disappeared in 2013 (#30: Killing Floor). Jonthan expects to learn more about Tom Haan in future meat-related statements.

Supplemental Notes

The phone call from Basira makes Jonathan hopeful that he can get police to help with the tunnels soon, and hopes the arrest of Rayner goes well and that Daisy Tonner isn't there.

Big Damn Heroes: Leroy, who, as agreed earlier, rescues Craig from Thomas when he doesn't hear from him in a while.
Call-Back: The cannibal shopkeeper was the uncle of Tom Haan, who was mentioned in Episode 30.
Fingore: Thomas Han cuts off a couple of Craig's fingers, and we later see him chewing on a bunch of severed fingers.
Gorn: Probably the most explicit and nauseating description on the show so far comes from the narrator describing the sensation of his Achilles' tendon being severed with bolt cutters.
The Secret of Long Pork Pies: Craig opens the statement by saying that he's 'probably a cannibal', though not by choice— the titular takeaway served human meat for a period before the owner's arrest and its closure, and he ate there during that time.
Skewed Priorities: Craig remarks on how ridiculous it is that he briefly felt bad for having assumed the Chinese-British man who was about to kill him would speak poor English.

73: Police Lights

#0171102 You said it started with a kidnapping case?

Story

Three weeks previous, twelve-year-old Callum Brodie disappears from his home, which is ruled a kidnapping after reports of three people entering the home during the night. On February 10th, Basira and Daisy are called on a mission to rescue Callum. Basira is confused as to why they were assigned to the case until she recognizes the other officers joining them as some of those that have signed a Section 31. The sergeant tells them that Callum is being held by Maxwell Rayner and some others and there is likely cult activity, which prompts Basira to call Jonathan who tells her to make sure they have as many lights as they can carry. Basira passes this information on to the sergeant who obeys without question. The squad arrives at an industrial building whose signage indicates it belongs to Outer Bay Shipping. Each sectioned officer is paired with a gunman before they head inside, and Basira ends up with an officer named Goodman. As they enter the loading dock, Basira notices that the security lights, while working fine, don't seem to affect the darkness as much as they should. They start to sweep the area, and after a few minutes Basira hears a scream of rage and turns to see someone in a black bodysuit disappear behind a shelf. Goodman sees them as well and opens fire but the person gets away. They hear gunfire from the other units elsewhere in the building. After finishing the sweep of the loading dock, Basira and Goodman go inside and see some other units going upstairs. Basira starts to follow but Goodman pulls her towards another unit consisting of sectioned officer Leo Altman and his armed companion, who are standing at the top of a staircase heading towards a basement, which the briefing hadn't mentioned. Basira sees that the door at the bottom seems to have darkness emanating from it. The two units go down the stairs and Basira hears a sound like a slowed down waterfall. Leo opens the door and all the light goes out. Basira is briefly disoriented before she gets a flashlight turned on and though it's weaker than it should be, it's enough to continue moving. Basira looks around and can't find the door they came through, and remembers that they never actually stepped through it. The units go through several flashlights as they search. Basira realizes that this basement has no smell to it, unlike the rest of the building above them. As the crashing sounds become louder and louder, they find Maxwell Rayner, an elderly man with white eyes standing over Callum, who is tied to a chair. Something like a black fog pours from Rayner's mouth to the ground, which then creeps up Callum's body towards his face. Goodman shoots Rayner three times and the black fog drops to the ground as a liquid. The flashing of the guns seems to illuminate the room as being the interior of a catheral. As Rayner falls and the crashing sound stops, some of the black liquid is flung towards the officers and hits Leo in the face. Leo screams for a few seconds until a woman runs out of the darkness and stabs him in the throat before the other armed officer shoots and kills her. The darkness recedes and they all find themselves in an ordinary basement, with no trace of the black liquid. Basira runs to Leo's side and finds his eyes to have turned white. The other units arrive soon to help and they go to the debrief. Along with Rayner, Leo and the cultist woman who was identified as Natalie Ennis (#25: Growing Dark), two other cultists were shot and killed by the other units and three were arrested.

Post-Statement

Basira tells Jonathan that she's decided to quit the police force and came to give him her second and final statement as a courtesy. She advises Jonathan to quit as well, saying that the Institute is "not right".

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan hopes that Rayner's death means that this is the end of the People's Church of the Divine Host. Outer Bay Shipping appears to be a shell corporation but Jonathan has had no luck finding who the true owners are. Jonathan admits that he has wanted to quit but knows he can't as he knows so much and to leave would be unsafe. Jonathan also wonders how the police found Maxwell Rayner, since he was able to stay hidden for twenty years, and suspects that they got a tipoff from someone else.

Call-Back:
- To Episode 25. We find out what happened to Natalie Ennis.
- Callum Brodie is implied to be the son of Phillip Brown from episode 52, who witnessed the Still and Lighless Beast killing Robert Montauk, via his estranged wife, Caroline Brodie.
Casting a Shadow: The darkness the officers encounter when they go down the stairs is clearly not natural. Their torches barely penetrate it, and Basira describes flecks of black dust like "inky snow" hovering in air, never seeming to settle to the ground. When they encounter Raynor, a substance like black fog is spilling out of his mouth and onto the floor, where it rolls toward Callum and is oozing up and over his body toward his mouth.
Dark Is Evil: Maxwell Raynor, his cult, and his powers are all associated with darkness.
Darkness Equals Death: Subverted: None of the officers are killed while wandering around in the darkness. When the lights suddenly come back on, a woman suddenly appears and stabs one of the officers.
Evil Is Not Well-Lit: Basira says that as the officers approached the industrial complex, the security lights actually seemed to get dimmer.
Muzzle Flashlight: When Goodman fires his weapon, the muzzle flash cuts through the darkness and momentarily lights up the room.
Nothing Is Scarier: The officers move through a supernaturally dark area, with a dull roaring sound coming from somewhere up ahead. Basira says that by the time their second or third torches began to die, she could feel herself starting to panic.
Screw This, I'm Outta Here: At the end of the episode, Basira quits the police force, half because a shadow cult was too much and half because of the lack of support.
Shell-Shock Silence: When Goodman fires his weapon the first time, Basira isn't prepared, and as a result she can't hear much for a while thereafter.
Ten-Second Flashlight: The unnatural darkness drains the batteries of the officers' torches. In less than an hour, each officer is onto their second or third torch (having been forewarned, each had brought several of them).

74: Fatigue

Case #0150806. Statement of Lydia Halligan regarding her insomnia. Original statement given 8th June 2015.

Story

Lydia lives with severe insomnia and her vivid dreams make it difficult to distinguish them from real life, so she never knows when the last time she actually slept was. She mentions a billboard outside her apartment, whose rusty metal she can hear the groaning of when she walks past it, which currently bears an ad for coffee with the tagline "Sleep is overrated". Lydia has lost the concept of time, since without sleeping all the days and nights blur together and some hours seem to last an eternity while others pass in the blink of an eye. She mentions seeing a tall man with curly blond hair in her living room, who she thinks she knows but cannot remember meeting nor does she know his name, and his laugh is unnerving. At a diner, Lydia drinks coffee late at night and finds a small tooth in it, though the waitress doesn't acknowledge it when Lydia tries to show her. The billboard decays in the rain, the woman in the coffee ad now has her face twisted into a cruel sneer and the tagline has changed to "Sleep is for the weak" while Lydia can see the rusty supports start to bend. Lydia then describes how the body seems to get random bursts of energy after a long time without sleep after which it becomes harder to stay awake. Lydia meets the blond man in a park and his body distorts, which Lydia attributes to her vision deteriorating from her lack of sleep. Lydia decides to tell the Magnus Institute about the strange things she has seen: the tooth, the blond man, the billboard which never really had an ad for coffee. Even though she has no proof of them being anything more than hallucinations, she thinks that maybe if she lets this things out of her head she may finally be able to sleep. She ends her statement by describing the now-crumbling billboard, tagline reading "Sleep no more", finally collapsing and crushing her beneath it.

Post-Statement

Lydia died from a heart attack less than a month after giving her statement. Although Jonathan would normally be inclined to dismiss her statement as mad, sleep-deprived ravings, he recognizes the description of Michael from her statement, and wonders if he was the cause of her insanity or rather was drawn to her because of it.

Supplemental Notes

Jonthan decided to forgo getting police help with the tunnels and instead set up a hidden camera over the trapdoor. The quality is poorer than it should be, leading Jonathan to be sympathetic to Elias for not putting regular CCTV in the Archives. Caught on camera is Sasha entering and leaving the tunnels, as well as an unidentifiable individual who is the one living in the tunnels. They look to be a middle-aged man and come out at around 3AM and steal some files from the Archives before going back down. Jonathan notices that they seem to move the whole floor away instead of just the trapdoor, which concerns him as the floor is solid.

The Insomniac: Lydia is a pretty severe case of this.
Mushroom Samba: Reflecting the Victim of the Week's descent into madness from sleep deprivation.
Write What You Know: Jonathan Sims (the writer, not the character) has claimed that this episode was inspired by his own experiences with sleep deprivation.

75: A Long Way Down

Case #0060711. Statement of Stephen Walker, regarding his brother's disappearance from the top of Tour Montparnasse in October 2006. Original statement given November 7th 2006.

Story

Stephen's brother Grant is severely acrophobic, especially when it comes to climbing ladders. Grant moves in with Stephen after losing his job after their parents pressure Stephen, which annoys him since he is a neat freak while Grant certainly is not. In November 2005 Stephen and Grant get home after a party only to find that Stephen lost his keys and Grant left his inside the house. They eventually find that Grant left his bedroom window open and so borrow a ladder from a neighbor. Stephen climbs the ladder but a gust of wind shakes it when he reaches the top and he falls and breaks his arm and his phone. Since Grant's phone is inside with the keys, he is forced to climb the ladder to the window. Stephen watches as Grant slowly climbs, dripping with sweat and probably crying. Stephen spots a man across the street also watching, and notices a branching, lightning-like scar on his neck. Looking at the man makes Stephen dizzy so he looks back at Grant who has reached the top of the ladder and is swaying dangerously, but he manages to not fall and climb into the window. As Grant grabs the phone and comes out the front door, Stephen notices the strange man walking away down the street. The next month, Grant gets a new job with his old company and though he doesn't move out he does cover rent for the next few months. In September 2006 Stephen starts planning a vacation to Paris to relax but when he mentions it to Grant, Grant invites himself and gets Stephen to change all his plans to accomodate two people. Stephen is annoyed by this, and even more so when Grant is fired for smoking weed on company property meaning he can no longer cover his half of the expenses. When the brothers are in Paris, Stephen decides to take his revenge on Grant by taking him to the Tour Montparnasse, the highest point in the city, which Grant doesn't know about due to it not being as famous as the Eiffel Tower. Grant doesn't ask any questions until they are in the elevator heading up, and Stephen takes pleasure in his growing terror. At the top, Grant finds a bench far away from the observation deck while Stephen goes to see the view. Looking down, Stephen is hit with a sudden wave of dizziness and falls to the floor. When his vision returns, he sees the man with the lightning scar standing over him with a bored expression. Stephen is suddenly helped up by some other tourists and sees that the scarred man and Grant are both gone. Stephen searches the platform, the tower lobby and several other places but cannot find Grant. Stephen notices that his phone died and after charging it finds many missed calls and texts from Grant, asking where everyone is and where the elevators are. There is also one uncorrupted picture from Grant, which shows the tower platform without the barriers, and with the top of a ladder poking up at the edge. The cityscape is not visible beyond. Stephen tries calling Grant but only ever hears the sound of the wind.

Stephen: I know that man with the scar took my brother. I don't know how he took him or where, but I know he's gone. I haven't seen either of them since and I don't think I will. It never felt like I was what he wanted. I really hope Grant is dead, because if not, I have a horrible feeling deep inside that he's still on that ladder.

Post-Statement

The scarred man is of course Michael Crew, having survived in some way from jumping out the window in 1998 (#46: Literary Heights). Jonathan notices that people who gain powers from Leitner books seem to change fundamentally, "as though the power uses them, rather than the other way round". Jonathan likens the ladder down with no visible bottom to the experience of Robert Kelly falling through an endless sky (#21: Freefall). At this point, Basira enters and gives Jonathan a box of Gertrude's tapes. She explains that the police are covering Leo Altman's death by framing him as a dirty cop who died in a drug deal gone wrong, and she doesn't think that's okay. Seeing as the police weren't going to solve Gertrude's murder, she decided to take justice into her own hands and steal as many tapes as she could for Jonathan.

Face Your Fears:
- The Victim of the Week tries to make his brother do this (the fear being heights) as part of a prank. It doesn't go according to plan.
- He does do it successfully earlier in the episode, having climbed a ladder to get through a second story window so he could get his phone and call the ambulance for his brother.
Fate Worse than Death: Stephen says at the start of his statement that he hopes his brother is dead, because he can't comprehend how awful the alternative would be.

76: The Smell of Blood

Case #0171302. Statement of Melanie King, regarding her further researches into... "war ghosts." Statement given direct, 13th February 2017.

Story

Following the events at the Cambridge Military Hospital (#28: Skintight), Ghost Hunt UK has fallen apart as the other team members have moved away and cut ties with Melanie. Melanie eventually goes back to Cambridge Military Hospital by herself but nothing happens. Melanie starts to research military hospitals "with a reputation for being haunted and connected to historical conflicts" and learns that paranormal investigators really only "investigate" cases that are already known about, and if they get a report of something unfamiliar it is disregarded. Melanie realizes this is to keep themselves safe from real paranormal threats, and yet Cambridge Military Hospital had been one of these "safe" places when she witnessed Sarah Baldwin get attacked by the entity there. As she researches more, she finds it easier to identify reports of real paranormality as they are "messy" with no satisfying conclusions or narrative flow. She takes an interest in one from a train scrapyard, about an old railcar from the 1950s that never gets put on the queue to be scrapped, and no one really knows why. The person telling the story describes a metallic smell emanating from it, like "old blood". Melanie decides to investigate the trainyard, and even the high security can't deter her from needing to know the truth about that railcar. After three days of observing the security, Melanie finds a suitable time and place to climb over the wall and begins to look for the old railcar, eventually catching the smell of blood and following it. As she moves through the trainyard, she thinks she sees figures sitting in the derelict trains around her, though they disappear when she tries to get a close look. Melanine soon reaches the old railcar as the smell of blood is stronger than ever. As she approaches the door, Melanie spots the railcar's serial number and writes it down for future research. Melanie slides the door open and although the railcar seems empty at first, she soon spots a trail of blood and follows it with her flashlight beam to an old gurney bearing a bodybag whose occupant moves around in pain. A man suddenly comes out of nowhere, wearing a military uniform and a medical armband, and repeatedly stabs the thrashing body bag with a scalpel. Melanie sees that his eyes are devoid of humanity and have only violence. Melanie stands transfixed as the man runs at her and cuts her upper arm. She screams and security guards quickly arrive and carry her away. As she and the guards yell at each other, Melanie looks back and sees that the railcar is empty. Melanie is arrested and taken away by an ambulance, to whom the guards say that Melanie was cut on sharp scrap metal. Melanie tries to say what really happened which is when a passerby films the video that goes on to end her reputation.

Post-Statement

After Melanie gained permission to use the Institute's library, she learned that the railcar was from a World War II hospital train belonging to the U.S. army which derailed in April 1945, and the railcar was the only one that stayed on the tracks. The most detailed account of the crash came from its engineer, William Hay, who went on to become an occultist whose books had to be "heavily edited" for publication. According to his account, the train was intentionally crashed in order to stop a medic who became crazed and bloodthirsty after enduring so much of the horrors of war and the smell of blood. He also mentions an incident in an infirmary in Amritsar, in which two dozen people slaughtered each other. Melanie has already made plans to go there and investigate further, and wanted to leave a second statement and inform Jonathan of everything in case it goes bad. Melanie and Jonathan then get into an argument when Melanie doesn't recognize Sasha and demands to know where the real Sasha is.

Supplemental Notes

Jonathan wonders how Melanie didn't recognize Sasha and thinks about all the statements about things not being as they seem, then mentions he thinks he knows where to start with the box of Gertrude's tapes.

Amnesia Missed a Spot: Melanie King can see that Not-Sasha isn't Sasha. However, no one else can, and Melanie doesn't know this. When she asks to see Sasha, and Jon says she already has, she accuses him of trying to Gaslight her.
Internal Reveal: Jon finally becomes aware of what the audience knew since the end of the first season: that something has replaced Sasha and tricked him into believing it's her.

77: The Kind Mother

Case #9941509. Statement of Lucy Cooper. Incident occurred in Draycott, Somerset, August 1994. Victim’s name given as Rose Cooper. Statement given 15th September, 1994. Committed to tape 4th November, 1996.

Story

Lucy has never been good enough for her mother, Rose. Anything she does to make her proud only gets compared to another area where she is failing. When Lucy starts dating a man named Laurence, Rose disapproves and when they become engaged Rose becomes angry with Lucy, telling her that she will regret it and is throwing her life away. After fighting, Lucy leaves and doesn't see her mother again for almost ten years, even when she turns out to have been right about Laurence who cheats on Lucy and gets arrested for embezzlement. Eventually Lucy's father George has an accident and has to start using a wheelchair, prompting her to reconnect. Lucy goes to her parents' home but things haven't changed with Rose and they get into more fights, but try to keep themselves civil for George's sake. One day when going to visit her parents again, Lucy is greeted at the door by a woman she has never met, but the woman and George both seem to think that she is Rose. Lucy is unnerved by this woman who while claiming to be Rose is absolutely nothing like her, from her appearance to her kind and cheerful disposition. Lucy sees some old photographs she recognizes and is stunned to see the woman in all of them in place of her mother, even at different ages which means the photos couldn't have been staged. Lucy proposes to her parents that they look through some old photo albums, and Lucy cannot find a single photo where Rose has not been replaced by this woman. Lucy sees the woman with an entertained expression and realizes that she knows she isn't Rose. The next day, Lucy asks some neighbors to describe Rose and they all describe the strange woman instead. Eventually Lucy asks the vicar at a local church, and although he gives the same description he also mentions that Rose had apparently fallen outside the church, as he had heard a scream "like nothing he'd ever heard" before finding her outside, though she seemed fine. Lucy asks the woman about this and she answers that she had a "bit of a funny turn". Lucy leaves and doesn't go back. She now knows that something killed and somehow replaced her mother, and she knows she isn't crazy because she recorded the real Rose's voice on tape for a project and that hasn't changed to the thing's voice. She leaves one of these tapes to the Magnus Institute before deciding to use the others to try to get George to recognize that this thing isn't his wife.

Lucy: I used to think I hated my mother. I really did. But now I can't stop listening to those tapes, now I know they're the only way I'll ever hear her voice again. All of them except the tape we recorded on the old myths of the fae, of changelings. I'm not ready to listen to that one yet.

Post-Statement

George died from carbon monoxide poisoning two days after Lucy left her statement and no trace of Rose or her replacement were found. Gertrude believes this to be a creature called the Not-Them, which appeared in statement 9910607 by Adelard Dekker and which Gertrude refers to as "an aspect of the Stranger". She wonders why a few people can see through the Not-Them's deceit if it has such power to affect most everything and everyone else. Gertrude is glad to know that it cannot change magnetic recordings, and according to Dekker it cannot change Polaroid photos either. The Not-Them seems to just be wandering and scaring people, but Gertrude worries it could be much more terrible if it had a goal.

Supplemental Notes

This tape was labelled "Changeling/Imposter" by Gertrude, which Jonathan thought would be relevant to his and Melanie's confusion regarding Sasha. Jonathan has since figured out that the tapes that disappeared after the Hive's siege on the Institute had the common element of the real Sasha's voice, and he now knows that she has been replaced by the Not-Them. Since Jonathan can't explain this to Elias, Tim and Martin without letting them know that he has some of Gertrude's tapes, he resolves to find Adelard Dekker's statement to learn more about the Not-Them, swearing that he will kill it.

Changeling Tale
Dramatic Irony: In the final comments of her recording, Gertrude notes that one of the few bright spots about the Not-Them is that they rarely stay in one place for long stretches of time and seem content with just spreading the occasional bit of random terror, because if such a powerful creature had an actual agenda, it could be extremely dangerous. If only she'd known that it would one day make it into the Institute.
Invisible to Normals: Only Lucy Cooper can see that her mother has been replaced by something else.
Jerkass Has a Point: Lucy's mother told her she'd be throwing her life away by marrying her on-off boyfriend Laurence and was incredibly against the whole thing. Given that Laurence wound up cheating on Lucy twice before getting arrested for embezzlements, she was right on the money; Lucy acknowledges this, and wonders if maybe she stayed in her marriage for as long as she did because she didn't want to admit her mother had been right.
We Want Our Jerk Back!: Played for Drama. Lucy's actual mother verged on verbally abusive. The Not-Them which replaced her acts much nicer, but that does not mean Lucy likes the change.
Wham Episode: Jon finally realizes what the being calling herself "Sasha James" actually is. He's not pleased.

78: Distant Cousin

Case #0011206. Statement of Lawrence Moore, regarding something that was not his cousin. Original statement given June 12th 2001.

Story

Growing up, Lawrence never really got to know his cousin Carl, only seeing him at family gatherings and spending very little time talking to him, and not seeing him at all after moving out of the family home. One day in London, he runs into Carl while shopping and learns he lives close by, getting a noncommital response to meeting up sometime. Sometime later, Lawrence attends his brother Adam's wedding and is surprised that Carl isn't there, as he was closer to Adam than to Lawrence. When Lawrence is being introduced to some of Adam's friends, he asks the name of a dark-haired man he's never seen before who then introduces himself as Carl. Confused, Lawrence asks Adam about the stranger and he reaffirms that it's Carl. Lawrence then decides to ask his stern, no-nonsense father the same question and he too says that the man is Carl. Getting scared, Lawrence starts to ask everyone he thinks would know Carl up to and including his own parents, and they all say the same thing. Lawrence thinks maybe he's having an episode of some kind due to stress and is just misremembering what Carl looks like, but he knows that's not true. Lawrence remembers that he has a box of photographs from his late grandmother stored in his attic and starts to go through them. All but two of them feature Not-Carl at various ages, and as Lawrence tries to make sense of them there is a knock at the door. Lawrence answers to find Not-Carl outside, who says that he noticed Lawrence leaving the wedding early and wanted to drop by since they live so close together. Not-Carl lets himself in and he and Lawrence sit silently in the living room, Lawrence too terrified to say anything. Lawrence notices that he can't properly focus on Not-Carl when looking at him. At the end of the afternoon, Not-Carl excuses himself and proposes they visit again soon. Later that night there is another, different knock at the door and Lawrence meets an old man who asks if he knew the person who left his house earlier. Lawrence laughs and says he doesn't despite all the photos, which excites the man. Walking inside the house, the man tells Lawrence to fetch the photos that hadn't changed to show Not-Carl. Lawrence does so and the man introduces himself as Adelard Dekker and is "an exorcist, of sorts". Dekker has Lawrence help him carry a large box from his van outside into the house. Lawrence starts to lift the box's lid and sees something made of dark wood, but Dekker shuts the box before he can get a good look and directs him to stay in his bedroom until further notice. Lawrence tells Dekker that he wants to help save Carl but is immediately shut down as Dekker curtly tells him that the real Carl is dead and staying in the bedroom is for Lawrence's own safety. Lawrence stays in his room through the night, morning and into the next afternoon, when he hears a knock at the door, the exact same knock at the exact same time when Not-Carl visited the day before. Lawrence hears the front door open but there is silence for an hour, at the end of which there is an "unnatural scream" with "nothing in it but the purest rage". Panicking, Lawrence runs out of the house and on the way he gets a glimpse of what's happening in the living room: Dekker moving his lips soundlessly while the Not-Them in it's true, gangly, multi-jointed form is wrapped in spiderwebs coming from a dark table with intricate carvings. Lawrence runs far away and doesn't come back until the next morning where he sees two men carrying the table's box out of his house and loading it into a different van.

Lawrence: My aunt and uncle have reported Carl missing. The police did come round and asked me if I knew anything but I told them nothing. I just said we weren't very close.

Post-Statement

Jonathan found Lawrence's statement in the folder labelled 9910602, which should have contained Dekker's statement according to Gertrude. Jonathan found the missing tapes with Sasha's real voice on them, hidden in her desk. Jonathan calls Tim and Martin into his office and tells them to take the next few days off since he's not feeling well but still needs to get some things done in the Archives. As Jonathan apologizes to them, Tim quickly drags Martin out and Jonathan tells them to not worry about telling Sasha to leave. Jonathan then gets an axe and goes into Artefact Storage to destroy the hypnotic table. Smashing the table to pieces, Jonathan finds it to be hollow. Michael suddenly appears, gleefully telling Jonathan that he has no time to escape and the hypnotic table was binding the Not-Them, not sustaining it. As the Not-Them approaches calling Jonathan's name, Michael produces a door and laughs hard.

Chronic Evidence Retention Syndrome: For unknown reasons, Not-Sasha kept the tapes containing the real Sasha's voice in her desk, which gives Jon the confirmation he needs about Not-Sasha's true nature.
Idiot Ball: Hoowee, where to begin? Jon destroys the fractal patterned table with an axe, thinking it's the source of the Not-Them. It's actually the thing holding them in. This comes directly on the heels of him listening to a statement discussing why this is a bad idea, from a predecessor who we've come to learn is much more well-versed in the supernatural than he is.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Jon's attempts to kill Not-Sasha ends up freeing it from its prison, making it much stronger.

79: Hide and Seek

Case #0170216-A. Original recording of manifestations and sightings at the Magnus Institute, London, 16th February 2017.

Jonathan's apology tipped Tim off that he was about to do something rash, and so resolves to stop him with Martin in tow. Tim insists to Martin that there are supernatural things happening at the Institute that stops any of them from quitting or getting fired. Searching for Jonathan, they soon encounter the Not-Them distorting in and out of its Not-Sasha form and its true form. They run and hide, watching the Not-Them descend through the trapdoor into the tunnels. Although Tim doesn't to go after it, Martin refuses to abandon Jonathan to the Not-Them's mercy and heads into the tunnels with Tim begrudingly following suit.

Having gone through Michael's door, Jonathan is now in the tunnels. He berates himself for thinking that the table was empowering the Not-Them somehow, as its spiderweb iconography clearly suggests otherwise. He then hears the Not-Them calling to him in the distance.

Tim and Martin are arguing their way through the tunnels before encountering Michael, who tells them that he's just there to watch the chaos unfold but decides to kill them since the tunnels don't afford them the same protection that the Institute does and he doesn't want them helping Jonathan. Tim and Martin run and end up walking through another of Michael's doors.

Jonathan has retreated deeper into the tunnels, and though he's found a pipe to defend himself he doesn't really think it'll do much good. He tells whoever's listening to the tape that this is his real voice in case the Not-Them chooses to replace him. Jonathan mourns that he cannot remember what the real Sasha looked like even after learning of the Not-Them's deceit. The Not-Them draws closer, telling Jonathan how it will "wear him" and that it's painful for people to be replaced by it.

Tim and Martin don't know where they have ended up after going through Michael's door.

As it stalks Jonathan, the Not-Them tells him its story of how no one would ever know it was there when it replaced someone, and when someone did notice they were scared, which it loved. After Adelard Dekker bound the Not-Them to the hypnotic table, it had Breekon and Hope ferry it around so it could still do its evil at a smaller range. Eventually it was taken to the Magnus Institute "to steal all its secrets" where it was disappointed to not be scaring anyone until Jonathan destroyed the table and set it free. The Not-Them ponders if killing and replacing Jonathan would make itself the Archivist, but decides it would be better to just kill him. Jonathan whispers an apology into the tape as the Not-Them finds him and prepares to kill when it suddenly screams and disappears. A man emerges from the darkness and tells Jonathan that they need to talk.

Barrier Maiden: The position of Head Archivist is revealed to be something of this, as Not-Sasha wonders aloud as she's about to kill Jon whether she'll inherit the position's powers if she steals his form. What those powers are are as of yet unknown.
Deus ex Machina: Jurgen Leitner's arrival, saving Jon from Not-Sasha and almost certain death.
It Amused Me: Michael muses that maybe it should kill Tim and Martin, not because it hates them or would enjoy hurting them, but because it thinks things will be more interesting if they don't help Jon. It just makes them get lost instead.
Evil Gloating: By Not-Sasha to Jon, before she's about to kill him.
"I'm going to wear you... It'll hurt. It hurt Sasha."
For the Evulz: Not-Sasha scares and kills people simply for enjoyment.
Jump Scare: Surprisingly the first one in the series proper, accompanied by a nice Scare Chord.

80: The Librarian

Case #0170216-B. Statement of Jurgen Leitner regarding his life and works. Recorded direct from subject 16th February 2017.

Pre-Statement

Jonathan brings Jurgen Leitner, the man who saved him from the Not-Them into his office. Leitner explains that the Not-Them isn't dead but trapped, and that the real Sasha is dead and not coming back. Jonathan asks how Leitner trapped the Not-Them and he takes out The Seven Lamps of Architecture, a book somehow published before it was written, which can entomb its reader and which Leitner found can have effects on architecture by Robert Smirke when certain passages are read in certain locations. Leitner controlled the tunnels when Jonathan was exploring and mapping them so as to keep him safe while deciding if he could be trusted. Leitner also explains the other book, A Disappearance, which erases anyone who reads it cover to cover, and reading a couple words renders them temporarily invisible which Leitner used to meet with Gertrude undetected by her "master". Throughout the extent of the tunnels, Leitner set up several safehouses that he hid out in for the twenty-three years since his library's destruction. These served as a refuge from the monsters and people hunting him down. Leitner collected the books because he thought he could contain and control them, labelling them with his name so that they would be easier to identify should they be lost. At this point Jonathan asks Leitner to tell his story from the beginning.

Story

Leitner always felt the need to make something of himself, and finds he has a talent for identifying valuable or important items and getting their owners to sell them. He first learns about the books from a man named Desmond Lorell who believed them to be spellbooks descended from Merlin's knowledge. Desmond was killed by the first of the books he found, The Stalwart Hunters' Almanac, which mutilated him when he read it. Leitner finds his purpose in tracking down more supernatural books, hiring staff to help study them and more importantly to be guinea pigs. Leitner soon learns about Robert Smirke's architecture and constructs a library using his principles to help store the books safely, as some of them don't take kindly to each other. He eventually amasses nine hundred and seventy-eight books and considers the library complete. A few years later in 1994, people start to come to the library asking to see the contents. Leitner sends them away, noticing certain tells that expose them as nonhuman. Eventually the library is attacked by a horde of creatures, getting in since all Leitner's defenses are focused inward at the books. Leitner watches the monsters slaughter his assistants, and only he escapes the carnage. Leitner goes into hiding so as to escape his hunters, mostly people seeking revenge for losing loved ones to the books.

Leitner meets Gertrude in 2011, shortly after she lost her last assistant. They work together, with Leitner suggesting some potentially helpful books for her to track down, those being The Seven Lamps of Architecture, A Disappearance and The Key of Solomon. The latter was suggested by Leitner as he thought the tunnels would make it possible to study it, though he was wrong and they had to destroy it. Leitner mentions that it "contained elements of several different powers", and when Jonathan inquires more Leitner explains that there are many dark entities that exist outside our reality, and the books and monsters are their forces. Michael, or the Distortion as its true name is, is an aspect of an entity called the Spiral which specializes in confusion. Jonathan asks Leitner about Gertrude's death, and he believes that Elias is responsible, likely because he learned that they were going to destroy the Archives. Elias changed the CCTV footage with power from the Eye, the aforementioned "master" of the Institute.

Post-Statement

Jonathan leaves to take it all in over a cigarette. While he's gone, Elias enters and talks with Leitner who pleads for the files he stole, saying that they contained Gertrude's research on the Stranger. Leitner mentioned that he didn't have time to tell Jonathan the truth about Gertrude, so Elias beats him to death with the pipe before leaving.

Tim and Martin reemerge in the Archives, having been stuck in Michael's passages for an unclear length of time, and had some encounters including with a woman. They go to Jonathan's office and find Leitner's battered corpse, which Tim thinks to be Jonathan's doing.

Foreshadowing : Leitner's frustration at how little Jon has actually figured out, and his noting that Jon's role as Archivist is simply to observe, not to actually connect the dots, ultimately foreshadows the endgame of the series; that Elias' plan & the Eye's ritual is ultimately doomed because it will lead to the death of all things via The End, and the Eye is incapable of piecing this together, or that all of this has been manipulated by the Web.
Magical Library: Leitner stored his collection of books in a house specifically designed to contain it safely. It turns out that the fatal flaw in its design was that it was built to keep anything from getting out, but had no defenses against anything getting in.
Sentient Cosmic Force: Leitner explains that there are effectively eternal beings of vast, dark power that exist "next" to our world that can affect our world through their will. All the monsters that have appeared, and all of Leitner's books, are essentially aspects of these entities projected into our reality.
Wham Episode: The Institute is revealed to belong to one of the dark forces of fear; specifically one known as "The Eye". Furthermore, Elias, a servitor of the Eye, is revealed to be the murderer of Gertrude and proceeds to murder Jurgen Leitner, forcing Jon to go on the run.

Recap / The Magnus Archives Season Two

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