"All of it is... individually reasonable... people fall in love without mind control making them do it, grief makes you forget things... but it's just kind of. Suspicious. --Evan's dead body also had the same expression that all of his family did, and that's suspicious. And all the graves were empty, and Evan's voice told Naomi to turn left..."

"From what you've said it definitely sounds like it has the, uh, horror movie aesthetic, yeah."

"I have a hunch that the Lukases are undead somehow. And hunches aren't exactly reliable, but."

Shrug. "We can add them to the list, see if any other statements come through about them?"

"Yeah. It's frustrating. --I was thinking about some of the other non-digitizable statements. You remember the one about Agnes?"

"Yeah. That one about the house on hilltop road, right? Statement of, uh, Ivo Lensik."

"Yeah. ...Uh. I have. A bias here. I don't trust universally beloved people who run halfway houses for troubled youth."

"Well. He did appear as a freaky... ghost... thing. I guess I don't know if trustworthy people do that? Maybe they do. But I feel like not trusting the weird ghost makes sense."

"If you're surrounding yourself with people who are weaker than you and who can't protest if you hurt them, and then everyone loves you so no one believes them... And we know from Sergeant Berry's statement how some deals with evil spirits work. Wilfred Owen made one with the Spirit of War, and he started to be able to write really good poetry like he wanted, and when the war ended he died. And Agnes... well, the other kids went away, so Fielding couldn't hurt them, and then he died, and he couldn't hurt anyone. He was missing a hand when he died. And when the tree was pulled up she hung herself, and a severed hand was tied to her by a chain. You can think of the tree and World War I as sort of... anchors, maybe? You get the thing you want, and you're alive as long as the anchor is there, but when it goes away you'll die, and in the meantime you'll be strange... I admit that a weak part of this argument is my assumption that good people don't exist, which I am assured they sometimes do."

"No, no, it makes sense. It's possible that Fielding is a good person, but it's also possible that he's not. ...Didn't Naomi call the gravestone she was holding an anchor, too? I mean. Could be a totally different thing, obviously--unless she also happened to mention making a deal with an evil spirit and you just, left that out of the notes--but just, your phrasing made me think of it."

"Social workers are not good people. --I didn't leave any deals with evil spirits out of the notes, it seems like it might be a different thing. Although it's unclear to me how explicit the deals usually are, and definitely the Lukases are cultists of something nasty."

"So, they're either cultists or zombies or both? Possibly with mind control powers? Poor Naomi."

"I mean, I think they're definitely cultists of something, there have been enough different cultists around the statements to make that certain. And Evan mentioned he didn't get along with his family because of their religion and was very cryptic about what the religion was."

Nod. "That makes sense, yeah."

"Another thing I was thinking about... so before Naomi came in I was rereading Saraki's statement and she mentions that Gerard Keay said 'For you, better beholding than the lightless flame.' And I knew that sounded familiar, so I went and looked through the other non-digitizables, and it was the very first non-digitizable I found. 'You can stare all you want, make your notes and your inquiries, but all your beholding will come to nothing.' And afterward Saraki mentions feeling watched, the way I feel watched in the Magnus Archives. I think 'the beholding' might be the name of the Watchful Thing."

"Huh. Should we... put that in our notes, then? Or we can continue conspicuously avoiding putting it in our notes, I guess. The Beholding. Well, it's certainly a dramatic name. --Does that mean that Gerard Keay might be associated with the watching thing, then? Given the eye tattoos, the painting he made, all of that."

"Yeah, that's a thought. The camera feed cut out for a second and was replaced for one frame with a closeup of a human eye. --Since the eye tattoos repelled the lightless flame, and the Rayners' symbol is a closed eye, the Beholding might be opposed to the lightless flame, and whatever the Rayners worship."

"Yeah, that's true. I hadn't thought of that, but--yeah. I wonder just how many things there are out there."

"Hopefully fewer than it seems from the monster manual. --The lightless flame seems... definitely bad... and the Beholding-associated people-- the Magnus Archives and Gerard Keay-- seem ambiguously benevolent, or at least not outright evil."

"Well. That's definitely better than it could be, then."

"...Makes me wonder if I should be honest with Elias. But really if he wanted me to be honest with him he should have been honest with me first."

Shrug. "Yeah, that makes sense as a policy. We'll just have to... wait and see, I guess? I dunno. And count our blessings that we're working for him and not, uh, who was the other burn patient--Chris, I think?--because I for one definitely prefer creeping unease to second-degree burns."

"First-degree burns can be fun."

Laugh. "Well then maybe you would like the Lightless Flame, I don't know enough about them to know if they would be satisfied with that."

They pay and go back home! Because it is a Day Off, instead of doing any other work Lev cuddles up on Martin's shoulder and starts to teach himself about special relativity.