Lev is shaking and tracing a symbol on the ground over and over: the shape of a lidded eye.

"I'm sorry," very quietly.

"Well. Knew this would happen if I didn't stay at the hotel."

"I'm still sorry."

Lev looks up at him in bafflement. "You--" And then it occurs to him that disagreeing with Mordred about whether Mordred should apologize to him is maybe a bad idea.

"I brought you here and then fucked up at being quiet? And I could have not done that."

Lev's anxiety is replaced with increasing confusion about Mordred.

He keeps tracing the eye on the ground over and over again like a tic.

Arguably an improvement???

"What does the eye mean?"

"Oh. It's a warding symbol from the-- oh god, I used to know this-- Some people, anyway. Douglas and I used to draw them all over the asylum. Not just this one, all sorts of warding symbols. Because the Mouth Thing was watching us."

"Sense. Like this? Am I doing it right."

"Yeah. Like that. --Or. Because we believed the Mouth Thing was watching us."

The shape that Lev is making, now that Mordred is tracing it with his fingers, looks oddly familiar. He realizes that it is the shape on the stone that was in the box that had Henslowe's journal.

Huh.

"Seems like you had good reason to believe it."

"I mean. I hallucinated. I have psychosis."

"That doesn't mean everything you saw was a hallucination."

"I saw mouths everywhere. Hard to explain that otherwise."

"I -- think it is less likely that you and Henslowe hallucinated exactly the same thing despite not having had a chance to talk to each other about it in the interim, and that other patients were also hallucinating the same mouths you were, and that I am also hallucinating, than that something actually happened."

"Oh. You see them too?"

"Not everywhere, but I have seen them. And it's not exactly a mystery why something real would be following you more than me."

"Oh."

He traces the eye shape over and over.

Mordred traces it too.

Meanwhile--

"Hello, Mrs. Winston Rogers? This is Mary Anemone Silverstring, Zoe's friend. I'm calling to give you a report on what we've found. There's a lot to get through and I'm calling long-distance, so I'm going to go ahead and give you the summary as quickly as I can, is that all right?"

"Sounds excellent."

[paranoia voice] Does that sound like mrs winston rogers on the phone there?

It does. Okay.

"All right, here it is. We have a lot of reason to believe that what your father was doing ten years ago was attempting to combat a wide-ranging criminal organization. They may also have had some ties to various occult practices, but the important thing to realize is that it was a serious criminal enterprise with a long history of making people disappear - kidnappings, followed by murders. We're still determining what their endgame was, and the full scope of their activities. What we do know is that the crime ring has remained active, in a somewhat more limited form, to this very day. They've caught on to our investigation, and what's worse, they have one of our investigators captive inside their stronghold. It's Lacie. Now, I'm a sensible person, once I found out Lacie had been kidnapped, I figured we'd call the cops, but they have the cops in their pocket, bribed up to their ears. Nobody'll hear of going after them. Now, I thought it was time to check in with you, and let you know some of what we've discovered, and also time to ask whether you, being a person of means, have any idea how one goes about bring someone to justice when the cops won't touch them. Or if you have a lawyer who does."

"Unfortunately," Mrs. Winston-Rogers says, "it is often easier to buy injustice than to buy justice. Still, perhaps I can buy injustice in your favor. I do not make a habit of bribing cops of my own."

"Be wonderful if you could even the scales a bit, even if there is some injustice weighing down both sides. I do think I should tell you that we think there's a lot of reason to believe that Lacie is in real danger. The group's not willing to leave her there, not after what we've seen of these people's activities. If it isn't possible to get her out via official channels, we do have a backup, but it's risky, of course. I figure if we're forced to make use of it, we ought to leave Frank out of it and leave our current pile of evidence with him, to return to you in case anything particularly awful happens to us. Does that seem right?"