"We will. Thank you for your help."

"Should I be heading to LA?" He sounds like he wants to be heading to LA, instead of sitting in New York worrying.

" - I wouldn't recommend that? We do still have obligations in Savannah, as well, and it's still possible that she'll turn up shortly. I'll be sure to call you either way tomorrow morning, and you can make a decision then, if you'd like?"

"Okay. Thank you."

Anemone goes back downstairs to report.

"Lacie's brother believes it's possible that Lacie is still with her father. Mentioned something about the possibility of punishing her for disrespect, or for looking into matters she shouldn't. He urged us to find her but not to rush into anything, and said that Mr. Trammel employs security. He's concerned enough that he's considering flying to LA. I told him I'd call him back with more information tomorrow. Do we think we ought to go to the police? I don't know that it's been long enough yet that they'd take that seriously. I'm still tempted to go down to the house myself, but I don't want us to get in over our heads."

"We said we'd call back tomorrow with more information, right? Do we have any other ways of getting that information?"

"It's probably worth at least getting it officially recorded somewhere?"

"I don't think the police will care if someone went missing for a few hours. If she's not back by tomorrow afternoon..."

"I'm sort of hesitant to go to the local police purely on the basis that Lacie's father almost certainly has more pull with them than we do."

"That is also possible, yeah. We could have someone scout without telling him we're coming over. I'm not sure whether that's more or less risky. Magnificence could try, but he's never done anything this important before. Have you, Magnificence."

🤔

"Do we know who he actually is? As in, what he does, who he's connected to, why he would be relevant to our investigation, why he'd sorta-kidnap Lacie in the first place?"

"We do not know much of anything about who he is. Oswald suggested that he might be holding her in order to punish her for something, but he wasn't sure. I... suppose we could check the newspaper morgue?"

"Tomorrow morning."

And now they are going to finish reading the books they were reading. 

Cults of the Akumsite Empire was written as a thesis paper by Brill Davidsen in 1897 and published in a purely limited edition in that year. This copy has been recovered in some sort of fishy hide.

Daviden’s thesis is a remarkable work of scholarship, delving deep into the cult history of the Kingdom of Axum along the Red Sea coast during the 5th century BC, the resurgence of these cults during the Zagwe Dynasty of the 12th century, and even hinting darkly of evidence that the cults were still present (or at least their folk beliefs) well into the 19th century as the interior of Africa was opened to European eyes. There are suggestions that Italian colonists may have carried some of the Aksumite beliefs back to their homeland, possibly infecting Masonic lodges in Venice and Rome with their barbaric rites.

Davidsen also references the Revelations of Dagon, suggesting strange parallels between those apocryphal book of prophecies and lurid blasphemies and the Axumite beliefs he charts over the course of a millennia. At times it is unclear if he is suggesting that both the English text and the Axumite beliefs spring from a common source; or if he believes that the Axumite beliefs may have somehow traveled to Europe much earlier than the 19th century (possibly via Roman legionnaires) and found fertile soil in Celtic Britain. The last three dozen pages of thesis are given over to a detailed symbological analysis of the “Prisoner of Dagon” and the “Wide-Open Mouth”, equating the two figures on a deep level through complicated Jungian metaphors despite the gross differences of their disparate mythologies.

Fishing The River of Stars is a strange and curious text reputedly among those in the blasphemous library of Auguste Chapdelaine. Recovered during the Second Opium War and brought back to London in 1858, the origins of this anonymous work were lost with Chapdelaine’s life. (Chapdelaine, along with other Chinese Catholics from his circle of followers, was arrested and executed in Yaoshan, helping to precipitate France’s involvement in the war. Reputedly Chapdelaine was condemned for his missionary work, but darker rumors suggest that it was dark rites emerging from his study of forbidden Chinese texts which ultimately brought down the wrath of the local mandarin.)

Fishing the River of Stars is reputedly a first-hand account of the rise of the Northern Song Dynasty during the 10th and 11th centuries in China. Much of its bulk is taken up with routine and unsurprising bureaucratic “revelations”, but the choice passages which have given the book its particular notoriety are those revolving around the legendary engineer Zhang Sixun, who served Emperor Taizu of Song.

Zhang Sixun is said to have been served by a council of “thrice-mouthed advisors”, each of whom was said to “speak with three tongues” and to “balance the words of one hand against the other”. The strangely cryptic and disturbingly inhuman descriptions of these advisors are echoed eerily in a description of the inner (or secret) gardens of Emperor Taizu, where the author reputedly saw flocks of blue-green hummingbirds, their “feathers flecked with gold and with lipped mouths gaping upon their hovering backs”.

There are also suggestions that the ingenious armillary sphere of Zhang Sixun’s astronomical clock tower, which employed liquid mercury in its escapement mechanism, was only the “precursor” or “broken model” of the true clock tower which was “hidden by the Emperor”. This “true tower” was reputedly powered by “reddened mercury”.

In its final, black chapters Fishing the River of Stars reputedly supports the legends that claim Emperor Taizong killed his brother Taizu to inherit the throne. Here, however, it is intimated that the “Golden Shelf Promise” (the sealed document which validated Taizong’s claim to the throne) was filled with such horrid blasphemies that its “golden inks were placed in flame until they melted into screaming lead” and the scroll was replaced with a more palatable forgery.

The Rift of the Mouth, a thin, ebon-covered book, is a collection of thirteen meditative mantras. The character of these meditations, however, is severely disturbing to any civilized mind: They fixate upon imagery of depraved acts of violence, power, and control.

Each mantra is disparate (albeit varied) in its perverse obsession, but the common theme which joins the mantras together is that of the “Mouth” and the “Maw”. The Maw is the void from which both Truth and the turgid release of the flesh emanates. It is the gaping hole beyond the empty gulf which is the world of mortal perceptions.

The Mouth is characterized as being connected to the Maw. It is the path which cleaves its way through the barriers of the mind which lie between your voided gulf and that place beyond, releasing thereby the wisdom of the Maw. It is also the font from which such “honeyed knowledge” is spewed forth from the world.

Delving deeper into the imagery of the mantras, however, reveals another layer of truth: That there is a more direct path to the Maw. A rift. And that the “new-mooned Rift” will give “clear skies of truth” to those who find it.

The final mantra issues a chilling warning against the “name of the Maw”. 

For the name of the Maw is the Maw and the name of the Maw is its wisdom and the name of the Maw is its void and the name of the Maw is the gulf which swallows and the name of the Maw is that which destroys.

 The name (which is not given) is a shortcut by which the Maw of the Mouth can be regurgitated (or vomited) into this world; but such sudden and overwhelming truth would “sear one whose mind has not been glazed to the stars beyond one’s own”.

Ziggurats of the Pre-Helladic Period is a fascinatingly inchoate and bizarrely unorganized survey of its titular topic. Great and particular attention is given to Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavation of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, which was essentially contemporary to the composition of this text. Its dimensions (both real and hypothetically reconstructed) are given in painstaking detail and some sense of the structure of Alexander’s text begins to become apparent as one realizes that these dimensions are being equated through complex mathematical transformations to the dimensions of other ziggurats.

This, perhaps, also explains the sharp and sudden departures of the text from its topic: While drawing complex relationships between the ziggurats of Babylon, the ziqqurats of Akkadia, and the pre-zigguratical zaqaru of the Ubaidian period, Alexander will abruptly introduce discussions of monoliths and other structures from South and Central America and even from his native Hungary.

It then becomes clear that the dimensional diatribes – which at first seem a secondary characteristic of the text, wedged between lengthy narrative descriptions of each site – are actually of the primary and utmost important to the author: And in unwinding the strange cycles of his numbers, one realizes that he is making the bold claim that all of these disparate works of stone draw their ultimate inspiration from the preternatural dimensions of the “Black Stone” which the author ultimately claims “thrusts into the heart of every building constructed by man; thrusts into the very subconscious of our modern edifices of pride and hubris”.

Mordred gives a summary of the ziggurat book, including the fact that its writer is weirdly into black stone monoliths in places that have no relation to the ziggurats he claims to be writing about.

The Maw is connected to a separate thing called the Mouth, apparently! "It's 'the path which cleaves its way through the barriers of the mind which'-- okay, I'm not sure the descriptions are actually that helpful. There's definitely a lot of metaphor and mental stuff and horrible imagery."

Carrie is visibly panicked by Fishing the River of Stars, attempts to give a summary, is incoherent from anxiety, and gives up.

Wow, Anemone is reading that one next.

Poor Carrie.

In the morning, Carrie looks at the newspaper morgue and discovers that Samson Trammel was a cinematographer working with the producer Ramon Echavarria in the 1920s. He hasn’t worked since 1925 or thereabouts.

LOVELY.

She calls Oswald back

"Hello! It's Mary Silverstring again. We have discovered that your father worked with one of the primary people we're investigating, one of the men responsible for the series of murders that Lacie was investigating. She has not returned."