He lifts his eyebrows. "What do you know about cursed books, Miss Sinope?"

"The King in Yellow ate my friend and tried to eat me. Metaphorically. Der Wanderer didn't try to eat me but it hurt to touch."

Okay even Sal is getting tired of the doublespeak here. "We're here to talk to you about those books, Mr. Sano. It would be more convenient for you and us if you'd be forthcoming about your own involvement."

"...ah. Perhaps we should both lay our cards on the table?" His face is impassive as his secretary bandages him up.

"Sure. I'll go first. I have psychic powers that let me pick up impressions from objects I touch, which is how I know those books are cursed without having personally read them, and I visit the Dreamlands every night and can talk to cats-- cats have language and are people, incidentally. Recently I was hired to look into the Alexander Roby case to try and get him out of the asylum he's in but what I'm mostly doing is trying to figure out what keeps killing people so that maybe it can be stopped from doing that. There's details on that but I haven't gotten very far."

"Normally," Sano says, "I would-- enforce silence about such things magically, as I did with Mr. Latz, but as you can perhaps tell from these cuts I do not have any more ability to cast spells for today. So I would like to ask for your discretion."

"Sure."

"You have it."

"I'm not simply an antiques dealer. I work for the Japanese government securing occult artifacts and books. And-- beings which commit mysterious murders."

"I -- can't say I came prepared for this, but if we were to go through a list of people and objects involved in our own mysterious murders, would you be willing and able to provide information about them?" What the fuck. Is this actually going to be really easy.

"As much as I can. Unfortunately, I'm returning to Japan soon, so I cannot assist much."

"How soon?"

"Three days."

Oh that is soon.

"Okay. Um-- should I just go down the list--"

"Please."

"Shub-Niggurath, Chris Parker, Ben Best, DeVille, whistles carved from meteorites, some sort of creature that looks basically like," she has Jing Yi's drawing, "this, the town of Clare Melford, Carcosa, Lake Hali, the star Aldebaran, the play The King in Yellow, the book Der Wanderer, things that look like knife wounds but in circumstances where they can't have been-- Sal am I missing anything--"

"Alexander Roby, Valentine Donovan, going farther afield Nessa Clapper, Randolph Carter, William Way... the devil creature, if that's different from what Jing Yi's dreaming about... The sharp-faced man that killed William Way and threatened our friend Terrence. There might be two of them."

"Several of these I doubt I can help with, due to the absence of proper nouns. Chris Parker is interested in the occult but on the-- other end. Not preserving the world but seeking power for himself."

"We. Kind of figured given the murder."

"He is a dangerous man and I would recommend not crossing him."

".....is there anything you can tell us that's more specific than that?"

"We keep hearing that. Would more description help with the things we don't have names for or do you need unique identifiers to know what we we're talking about."

"He trades in a variety of-- cursed books. We have often competed for the same books. And he is very old, I think over a century. He knows a spell called Steal Life."

"Does it happen to mummify its targets? ...How old are you, Mr Sano?"

He laughs. "Thirty-two. It does mummify them, as a consequence of-- draining the life from them? And using it to make Chris Parker young again."