"Please, Mr. Markham. It is a dangerous play and it hurts those who watch it, it is not safe for it to be performed."

"Do you realize what you sound like? It's a play!" Terrence sighs. "Mr. Sano - in every civilization, there are powerful works. Works that speak to people, works that do something new, works with the ability to upend the status quo of society. And change is threatening to many people, to the fabric of every society. But without change, society stays the same, forever."

"Mr. Markham," Sano says. "Not all change is beneficial to society. The status quo is what keeps our children fed and our houses warm at night and the monsters in the dark at bay. I see your mind is made up, but please take some time to think about my offer. If there is anything you like, I am happy to arrange for it. And if you continue down this path, it will not end well for you."

"I... will think on it. Thank you, Mr. Sano."

"You're welcome. I hope you enjoyed the tea."

"...Have you even read it?"

"I have never read it and I pray to the gods I never will."

Terrence sighs, long-suffering. "You want to suppress it and you don't even know what's in it." He gets up to leave. "You seem like a smart man. This is an old story, Mr. Sano. --The tea was good."

When Terrence gets home afterwards, he starts editing his essay. He's determined to get this published where it'll be seen ASAP.

Meanwhile--

Sal was going to ask Terrence and Oscar if he can borrow the sigh three mysterious books in question, because he feels like doing at least a bit of the reading might actually be important, but if Inaaya would like to further discuss all the ridiculous things that have been happening he's also up for that.

Discussing the ridiculous things that have been happening sounds horrible but unfortunately necessary great.

...Maybe he can ask to borrow Terrence's books and then ask Inaaya for a vibe check on them.

British Gods is not a particularly rare book and Terrence can easily point Sal to a copy.

And Sal is 100% assuming that if he asks him to lend me The King in Yellow he will give it to Sal immediately.

Hell yeah. He asks Sal to treat it carefully, though.

He's not going to immediately READ them, obviously. He is going to skim the first twenty-five pages, and see what happens, and then pick a random paragraph from each and see what happens.

The King in Yellow is really boring and matches with what you recall of the play from having watched it.

British Gods is about Celtic, Roman, Sumerian and other gods believed to have been worshiped in southwest Britain from about 50 B.C. to 650 A.D.

He hands them off to Inaaya and says, "Do your psychic powers happen to extend to telling whether a book is, uh. Cursed. For lack of a better word."

"The short answer is that I don't know but it seems very likely. The slightly longer answer is that I get impressions of an object's history and properties and I would almost definitely be able to tell if it was cursed by any reasonable definition of cursed, but I am.... really not sure that I want to find out what would happen to me if I tried it.

"--context, I learned English when I was six when I used that particular power on an English-language newspaper I was left unsupervised around, but I was passed out for four days and it almost killed me."

"Is it possible to get... degrees of information, impressions without full knowledge, or anything like that? Or for, maybe, someone else to pull you out of it if you get stuck? --Actually, I guess I should check whether you've done this with other books at all, or if you've been avoiding them since you were six. Picking up on things, I mean. I know you read a lot."

"I learned my lesson about trying to absorb the contents of written information without actually reading it, but I can get things like, for instance, 'who owned this book.' It's also possible that now that I wouldn't be trying to cram a whole language in I'd be fine but Joan would be extremely annoyed if I risked it and turned out to be wrong and I do listen to her sometimes."

"Would you be willing to try picking something up either of these books? The one about British gods, for what it's worth, I'm reasonably certain isn't unusual except for the author's connections, it was simple enough to get a copy of it and there hasn't been at all the same fuss over ti."

All right. 

Inaaya touches the book and her face goes blank. She's still breathing, but otherwise she looks more like a corpse than like a person. It's nothing that couldn't be faked by a good actor, but the longer she goes without blinking the less it looks like a performance.

No one has read this book. It has spent a lot of time in libraries gathering dust while people picked up other volumes. One time someone grabbed it and pretended to be reading it when hiding their necking in the back stacks from a librarian.

There is nothing supernatural about it. It's just a book.

After a solid minute of this she startles back to life, blinks rapidly as she remembers where she is.

"It's just a book. Nobody's read it in a very long time, it's just been sitting on various library shelves."

"...Are you up for two of these in a row? I wasn't expecting you to look so, uh. Dead."