"I did want to talk to his mother. Do we know where she is?"

"He didn't say, but it seems worth checking at his estate."

"It's true he's only temporarily allowed to leave with her. But I'm pretty sure you can change most legal rulings if you have good enough lawyers, though, can't you? But doing anything about it would probably require convincing Mrs. Winston-Rogers of its usefulness. Which I'm not actually terribly sure is a good idea? Given that they seem to take the - haunting, or whatever it is, with them wherever they go."

"I guess that's true, but I don't know that leaving them there is all that safe, either."

"I suppose we can see if anything similar is happening with Mr. Carruthers? Or is happening around his mother if she does ever take him out?"

"It certainly seems to be harming the other patients."

"Right! And what if it gets stronger the more... haunted people are in one place? And that doctor brings even more all in for more 'confrontation therapy'?"

"I guess that does sound bad. But we don't know that! It could just as easily be the place that all of those people are haunted for good, and that moving them will just make more haunted people. But yeah, we should definitely find out more."

"The idea of a contagious haunting is rather terrifying. Imagine if it spread over the whole world..."

"Oh, you can fix those things with good enough medicine. - spiritual medicine, not the - psychiatric kind. But I don't want to go taking drastic action without knowing what's going on."

"Even if it's not ghosts doing the haunting?"

"Oh, sure. If there were anything in the world you couldn't keep under control with the right medicine, we'd all have stopped existing a long time ago, right?"

"We are getting rather loose with our language. They're not hauntings, per se, are they, they're -- they're -- mouths-related incidents -- actually I don't want to call them that either, that's very silly--"

"I'm not sure what to call... stalking by unnatural beings... other than haunting."

"The question is what's doing the stalking, or if stalking is even the best way to describe it. I don't think I've ever heard of anything quite like it."

"I had thought the mouths wanted to eat the people they followed... but the other patient makes me less sure of that. He seemed to be... compelled to bite? Though I suppose it's possible that Mr. Henslowe was still the... target of the bite."

"It's very strange. I have never heard anything like it. Did Aarons tell you much about the ritual--" and they can compare each part, the monstrous descriptions and the ritual and the events leading up to it, on the way back to the hotel.

While everyone else was busy having asylum adventures Mordred was in the library! He found out the following facts:

-The first address, in the center of Savannah, is Joy Grove Sanitarium, a forty-year old mental institution in a huge antebellum hospital building. Head of the hospital, Dr. Lawrence Teake, is on the verge of retirement. His protégé, Dr. Jonathan Keaton, is the heir apparent, according to a recent newspaper clipping.

-The second address, thirteen miles from the center of Savannah, is the Henslowe family mansion and grounds. The Henslowe estate is on land that’s been in the Henslowe family since 1801, at least, on a stretch of ground that’s ordinarily a peninsula but sometimes an island, depending on rainfall. It’s called the Moss Island Peninsula. The estate is all that remains of a collection of farms and plantations that once operated in the Henslowe name. It is still home to Virginia Henslowe, who, at 89 years old, must be Douglas’s mother.

-Douglas Henslowe used to be an artist. There’s a lot of society gossip about him and some of his gallery openings. (The paintings are rather good.) The Henslowes haven’t appeared in society columns since 1923.

-There’s no code in the letters, it was just Walter Winston desperately grasping at straws.

That night, Anemone dreams:

She's in Joy Grove, in an exam room, when a nurse comes in wearing a surgical mask and carrying a syringe. The end of the syringe is not a needle but a groping proboscis ending in a tiny, toothless mouth. The nurse drops her surgical mask, revealing two mouths, one above the other, both smiling with teeth like a shark’s. She's suddenly aware that she's in a straightjacket and leg irons as the nurse comes for her with the hungry syringe.

She awakens to find a mosquito at work on her arm and tries to swat it. 

The investigators hire a taxi to take them to the mansion. At one point, they come to a road fork. One way, the pavement continues on south. The other way, the road turns to packed clay. At the fork, beneath a leaning, rusted street sign, a brown dog with mange lies sprawled in the heat, watching them move.
 
When they arrive, everything has the wet soil smell of a marsh, of rotting wood and mud. Giant palmetto bugs flit through the air, tap-tap-tapping against windshields and windows. Spanish moss dangles from the trees. Leaves and seeds blow through the air. The grounds are surrounded on three sides by a six-foot-high stone wall capped with wrought-iron spikes. At the front, a shut wrought-iron gate blocks the driveway. Along one wall, a gardener’s gate is rusted shut. In the back, the property sinks into swampland.
 
There is a gate with a bell.

Anemone rings the bell.

A hole in the gate slides open and a black man in his mid-forties looks at the investigators.

"Are you Carruthers? Mr. Henslowe said to give this to you." She hands him the note she was supposed to give to him.

"Yes, ma'am." He takes the note. "Right this way, sir, ma'am," he says.

Anemone notices that Carruthers does a slight but noticeable double-take at the color of her skin.

Carruthers escorts them to the Henslowe mansion. Standing proud amidst the greenery and mud, it is a classic plantation house with tall, shuttered windows and towering columns ringing porches and balconies. From a distance, the house is shining white, but up close it is streaked with mud and moss stains and takes on a greenish tint from the sullen light through the heavy leaves.