THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 พ.ค. 2020
- MAG137 - Case #9950307 - Wallis Turner
Statement regarding an incident at the North Point prisoner-of-war camp, then later the sunken ship “Nemesis” in late 1942.
The Magnus Archives finds a statement from the Pu Songling Research Institute from an unwilling soldier sent to the Pacific theatre who gets involved in an unusually musical prisoner break.
Content Notes: Wartime trauma, POW experiences, torture, extreme violence
Starring: Gertrude Robinson - Sue Sims; The Archivist - Jonathan Sims
Writer: Jonathan Sims
Director: Alexander J Newall
Producer: Lowri Ann Davies
Editors: Alexander J Newall, Elizabeth Moffatt, Brock Winstead
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I like the subtle detail that he calls him Gerry. ... *sniff*
that's not subtle at all
Jon's healthiest relationship is with a dead man he had a brief conversation with.
@@StrangeTheEditor probably because he doesn't have any personal history with him lol
Gertrude said that she cared about Gerry and she still bound him to the book :( Also: "It feels nice to hate something that can't hurt me" Jon deserves so much better
Its sad but I also like that about Gertrude's character. She never lets personal emotions distract her from what needs to be done
Amphitrite Mists why did she need to bind Gerry to the book though?
@@xxgirl101xx I always thought Gertrude bound Gerry to the book as a help and maybe guide her future successor to Jon. His purpose in the book is to give knowledge and clarify about the spooky things
@Reese David I get that but it still seems so... extreme? Like I get what she did to Michael and Jan because it was an End Of The World situation even if I find it distasteful (and even her blowing up the proto-archive found in Alexandria which was stated to have civilian casualties), but binding Gerry to the book and then leaving it behind in America just strikes me as so unnecessary.
Not saying that I don't understand why she did it, just that it's an interesting bit of characterization where she doesn't resort to extreme and unethical methods such as betrayal to deal with an immediate greater evil, but now defaults to them whenever the opportunity arises.
@@xxgirl101xx knowing that she had the eyes power to an extent, she might've known Gerry had cancer before he did and did it out of having no other choice? Like she wanted her successor to have access to her level of knowledge but the only other person that would know that much is slowly dying without him realizing it, she might've thought binding him was her only option to make sure Jon had her knowledge, she probably didn't think he'd "free" gerry either.
Idk that's just what I'm assuming here though
"it feels nice to hate something that can't hurt me" im calling it now, the final battle of season 5 will be against the archers
🤣 I can’t wait to reach that episode!
Maybe it's just me, but the thought of how the Lonely disrupts rituals is just hilarious.
Like, imagine you're doing your super important once-in-a-lifetime ritual and your main ritual thing just... doesn't show up.
Late but I love this idea
Wait how did the lonely disrupt the slaughter ritual?
@@nateds7326 it was just an assumption by Gertrude that it might have happened
@@saurabhsharma6939 off topic but im glad people are still listening to tma
@@SunnyCapricious Heck yeh! I started about a month ago after Tumblr kept reminding me of it's existence and hinting at it's amazingness. Came for the queer love, stayed for the horrorshow.
Also, didn't it get nominated or win an award? well earned methinks!
The piper really said “how do you do fellow kids”
Hello fellow soldiers. Let me do a musical Ollie on my Tubular Instrument! Watch as these corpses both whip AND nae nae, that’s Dab!
@@FreshSqueezedSlugs this physically pains me. I hate it. Good job.
This gave me a small chuckle
@@daughtersstormcrow553 the 16th entity The Cringe
@@agustinramos7500since the eye deals with fear of knowledge or being known the cringe would be a sub entity of the eye like an organ
"Get a cup off tea"
I see you Jon
It makes me really happy that Jon and Daisy are bonding
According to all known laws of maritime, there is no way the Nemesis should’ve been able to float. Its deck was too full of rust and holes to keep its big twisted metal hull from filling with water. The Nemesis, of course, floated anyway. Because spooky supernatural ships and the cosmic fear entities they’re aligned with don’t care what humans think is impossible.
This comment is pure art.
LMFAO, is this the second comment i've seen from you with a copypasta in the comments? continue ur work, good troll. its not much but its honest work
This is painful to read and yet it simultaneously feels like a holy revelation. How?
this is one of the best comments i've ever read
i need you to know that this made me laugh out loud, thank you! :D
I miss normal Sasha and kool-aid man Tim.
I know this was a year ago but MEEE TOOOO 😭😭
@@wahs789 holy crap didn't expect to see a comment from only 2 hours ago
@@wahs789for me it was like a few days to a week ago 😭😭😭 still hurts 😢
I feel like Gertrude theorizing about what made the ritual not work is really interesting for her character because it kind of shows how she doesn’t put much value on individual ppl. Like she thinks the ritual was stopped by bombs not occurring but perhaps it was just this statement giver being the only one who, even going through all the horrors of war, staying a passivist
Yeah i think that too
Like its not that hard he litteraly wasnt there for it
Of course she doesn't put value on people. She sacrificed multiple assistants to get what she wanted. She kills without much remorse. That's why Jon is afraid of becoming like her. She's too objective.
One who amid all the horrors, simply said no.
@@savingplayer1613 This quote goes hard
everytime a himbo appears in a statement, death is coming. its the law of the tma universe :''))))))))
Except that guy who walked away from the stranger, the plumber, can't remember his name
@@dragonwolf4274 true dude was just too nice to have any of that "scary clowns taking over the world" bs and I say more power to him!
Or the dude who walked for six hours in a spiral with his dog and then decided he had to go home bc his mom made dinner.
@@dragonwolf4274 Sebastian Skinner
Every time a himbo is in a TMA statement they will survive by doing the sensible thing in that situation
"the breadcrumbs I'm finding are... stale"
writing on this show sure is amazing
and, once again, my favorite type of a statement giver: I didn't want to so they couldn't make me attitude
The best attitud. It goes too the "It's not polite to [incert pretty logical thing to do but ya didn't], so I stay"
If an avatar is putting you in a ritual, simply say no. It is illegal to participate in a ritual without your consent.
When you already listened to them all but still like every episode to show your support
same
Same
Me too, even now.
Same. As I'm going through a second time, I've been making sure to hit that for any of them that I missed on my initial listen, ages ago.
I feel like anytime The Slaughter is mentioned, I get that "man behind the" meme stuck in my head. Not the whole song, not the phrase "man behind the slaughter." No, just "man behind the man behind the man behind the man behind the," just playing in a faint loop in the back of my mind.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one getting weird loops of song parts stuck in my head :0
That's what the song was
I keep thinking of that one meme with one person sitting in a chapel with another behind him and another behind her and then the sniper trained on all of them in the gallery
Honestly I do think purple guy would’ve made a decent slaughter avatar. What more senseless violence than killing 5 children?
This character really got to me. I really felt for him; this podcast always does the tragedy of war really well, but Wallis... genuinely never wanted to hurt anyone, and it made me so sad that he found himself a soldier. Honestly I have to wonder if that's what disrupted the ritual. The fact that they'd accidentally abducted a pacifist.
I think I like that theory the best. It's just so human? My man's morals weren't changed by the trauma of war, if anything cemented it, and that's why the world didn't end. It's so simple but sweet. TMA is a fable.
(Spoilers: we're going to ignore the fact that all fears somehow have to be included for it not to fail as well, but let me have this.)
I wondered that too, was surprised when Gertrude didn't mention it.
Looks like Wallis passed his Wisdom saving throw
Bite The Bullet - I see your a man of culture as well
He was lucky he had advantage as he never willingly/brutally killed another living person before.
My, playing mostly barbarians, would have not passed that so hard in most cases
Crown of Madness be wild like that
Oh man daisy getting jon into her favorite series is so wholesome. Finally, he has some human connections again.
...... oh no. something terrible is gonna happen to her and leave him even more alone than before, isn't it.
“Like my country ever fought for me?” Fucking mood. Drafts are inhumane and fucked up and need to be illegal!
Not that the military gives a damn about legality, obviously
You're absolutely right.
Ugh, most country's have fought for their people. We'd be overrun by bandits otherwise. This is elitist thinking that they were owed everyone else's efforts to create a safe world for them.
The Statement: horrific detail about the violence of the Slaughter
Gertrude: lmao skill issue. Should’ve gone to Hiroshima.
Went to recent comments to see what's up. Saw this. LMFAO gold
Every time Jon calls Gerard Gerry it waters my crops and clears my skin
god the things i would do to get a gertrude podcast
ikr uwu
Gerry makes me v emotional
he definitely deserved better !! i miss him sm :/ he's too powerful jonny sims had to nerf him or he'd have taken care of everything within 2 seasons :' one (1) angry goth owns my entire heart
same
very good to know they have one less ritual to worry about! flesh, slaughter, end, spiral, and hunt are all out, then. (am i forgetting any?) also, what the hell would watcher's crown even be like? intense staring? sitting in a circle and reading statements?
I was thinking somewhere more along the line of intense stalking but i like your idea better.
Staring contest. The weak get their eyes gouged out
Now I’m just thinking of Jon sitting on the floor and just reading tons of statements whilst everyone stares at him.
You know, Watchers Crown seems too obvious to be a Beholding ritual. What if it's the Web?
Spiders basically stalk their prey
How many times have you found a spider just perched on the wall staring at you with all of its eyes?
It seems totally like something the Web would do to name its ritual that just to mess with the Beholding
Everyone has to sit in a circle and talk about their feeling for all eternity
Jon:"the bread crumbs I keep finding are.."
Me: "Stale"
Jon: "Stale..."
Me: O-O
Jon keeps calling Gerry the way he asked. That's lovely
So THIS is what happens in the boys locker room, huh?
PFFFFFFTT
Yeah, there is a lot of music and swordfights
Is it just me or Wallis was important to rutual nit going of? The fact that even during world war II there were some people unling to give in to the slaughter? I dunno but the fact he didn't go killing seems important to me.
If it wasn't because of Gertrude listing others possibilities, I would 100% believed that he was the one responsible for making it fail, his unwilling to join the army, not giving into slaughter even after being torture under enemies imprisonment, not killing anyone during his time of service.
If the sunken sky was stopped by throwing a mutilated void touch body into its maw , what is to say that having a advocate of live *even animal* at the heart of the slaughter ritual wouldn't disturb the very essence of it.
ME TOO it was what I thought stopped the ritual like showing how humanity still has enough good & thoughtful ppl in it that will survive & help the world thrive 😍
"death ain't scary"
Terminus: 😠
I love the idea that The Slaughter disrupted the Unknowing, and since that every attempt at its own ritual (i assume they were quite a few giving the ammount of wars at the time) has been stopped by other fears purely out of spite
We love some of that eldrich horror banter
Kinda surprised the slaughter's ritual didnt take place during the cold war. When the fear of war was at it highest.
I think that is what Gertrude meant when "none of us can see the future"
The Slaughter was hoping for aomething to happen, ywt pulled the trigger too soon, and couldnt build up for the cold war
Slaughter isn't about the fear of war alone. It's mindless violence, brutality, killing upon killing. The cold war, by definition was cold - there wasn't enough to feed the slaughter.
I think that would have been the time that other things came to exist because of the fear of war, but it wasn't the Slaughter.
I think the Cold War may well have been an origin point for the Extinction, it was the first time in history humans were really faced with the fear of their possible complete annihilation
@@mimkyodar I kinda agree with you, however the cold war wasn't really "cold".
The Slaughter performs WORST ritual EVER, asked to LEAVE the main player entity circle.
Edit: after watching episode 143 i no longer stand by this statement
Anybody else's heart just so warmed whenever Jon calls him "Jerry"? It's just so sweet to hear him using the name he always wanted to be called by.
I think Wallis being a pacifist helped disrupt the ritual, the Slaughter never expected to pick up a pacifist during a war in a camp.
I still can't believe how few views these have, deserves way more
most people listen in other platforms :)
@@f_mva That's good to know,glad it's not just the few views on here
Yall ever set up a massive fireworks display, pull the trigger, then it doesn't go off until 3 days after the party is over? Behold, the Slaughter at its finest. Rather fitting that they were too eager and jumped the gun. Oh well, not even the Beholden can see into the future. Can't read what hasn't been written.
My man said "nope" and yeeted himself. Amazing to stop a hole ritual.
Gerry :( I miss him :(
Daisy and Jon becoming besties was unexpected but I really love that for both of them. I went from hating Daisy to her being one of my favorite characters. Her development is so good!
They were vibing 🎶
the hardest vibe check in history
That ending caught me off guard and I almost started crying
I can't be the only one who really thinks that Jon, The Archivist, might want to avoid Learning about the Ritual of Beholding.
The Avatar of knowledge gaining knowledge about a ritual for it's god just sounds like a risk you might want to avoid.
this is my first time listening, I finally caught up on all the episodes uploaded to youtube! I binged it all in like 2 weeks and I absolutely LOVE everything about this, the writing and voice acting and audio engineering are all absolutely fantastic! I find it interesting that, despite literally being the embodiment of our fears, so many of the Entities seem to use dance, something which is typically associated with human expressions of joy and happiness. It's particularly common with the Slaughter, which makes sense to me; after all, the Slaughter seems to thrive on amplifying human emotions and desires, pumping their veins with violence and hatred that's already there (which, it seems, is likely why it didn't affect Wallis here). And in states of heightened arousal, emotions can often get mixed and confused; and perhaps the Slaughter amplifies that jubilation as well, the desire to dance to music that so many naturally posess.
However, the other Fears are also shown to use dance at times-- in the last statement the Web did, and the Stranger's recent ritual was a big dance. The Hunt has also used dance and play before, which could be similarly an amplification of instinct. I just find these frequent connections to dance interesting, and what they reveal about some of the Fears that don't want the Extinction to win because of their reliance on such human expressions.
Why is Gertrude so fucking devious, it feels like she almost wants the rituals too happen, just to see what it’s like, just to learn.
"It feels nice to hate something that can't hurt me." Wait...shit, this explains some things about my own brain I didn't realize until now. Damn.
Idk but this episode of the slaughter kind of gave me "Man of Medan" vibes with the ghostly ship, music, dancing and killing.
Wait, was Gerry's dad mentioned in a statement before? Except for Gerry's, I mean. Something more... concrete, about who he was and all that
I don’t think so? Mary mentioned Eric in her statement, but briefly, and the name Eric Delano has been brought up in passing here and there, but I don’t think they ever said what his connection to Gerry was 100% specifically until his own statement in episode 154?
@@TheNitpickChick haha I got past that now and yeah ^^ I was just hoping I didn't miss anything and, well, I didn't
The name Eric was mentioned in one of Gertrude's tapes, at the end of the statement featuring Mary Keay
I think he was the one who took the statement for “The man who wasn’t there” and said he never remembered taking that statement and had to take the day off for bad headaches, but I could be wrong
OMFG NOT THE ARCHERS 💀. I can share in Jon’s hatred as I hear my mum listen to it all the time
Dance battle of the fears
SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING WITH THIS OR I'LL DO IT
@@cain3895 DO IT DO IT DO IT
Rip Clarisse she would’ve loved the Nemesis’s Crew
Hm. I wonder why you feel like your on a deadline to find out about the beholdings ritual.
THE RITUAL OF YOUR PATRON WHO YOU ARE NOW THE AVATAR OF
I FUCKING WONDER WHY JON
the first time getrude showed her power by knowing there were supposed to be an explosion and what stop it
21:24 “if they’d had just a BIT more patience, waited a few more years and sailed her into Nagasaki harbor instead..”
well my stomach dropped
With the existence of Worldstar, I'm not even surprised that people keep cheering whenever something violent and bloody happens
what is that voice in 12:55?
it's so feint and you need some headphones to listen to it behind gertrude's voice
hold on, didnt melanie say elias doesnt have a safe? but in here there is a safe? did elias go into prison because he want to?
[CLICK]
GERTRUDE
Case 9550307, Wallis Turner. Incident occurred at the North Point prisoner-of-war camp, then later the sunken ship Nemesis, in late 1942. Statement taken 3rd of July, 1955 at the Pu Songling Research Centre, Beijing. Committed to tape 9th of October, 2014. Gertrude Robinson recording.
GERTRUDE (STATEMENT)
I always knew what sort of a thing war was. Even when everything was going to hell, even when it just plain stopped making sense, and what I was seeing and hearing was obviously ghosts and monsters - even then it still didn’t surprise me. Not really.
I never wanted to join up, never cared about fighting for my country. I mean, what, like my country ever fought for me? No. No government ever gave a damn about me, and I didn’t feel like I had anything needed paying back on that front. Add to that, I was terrified. I’ll admit it, the thought of marching off to war set my whole body shaking, and I can still remember the nightmares I had when I got the notice.
I was half an inch from going conchie - going to prison and taking my lumps - but in the end it was my dad that pushed me into the uniform. And it wasn’t an argument or telling-off that did it, either. He just looked so damn proud when I told him. His son, the soldier. Don’t know if I’d ever seen him look at me like that before. And I just didn’t have the heart to break it. Me going conchie would kill him, so I had to learn to kill others.
And that’s the thing that really scared me, you know? I wasn’t scared of dying, not really. Everything dies in the end, and the chaplain says you end up with God. Who am I to say different? Even if it’s just sleep, just a quiet nothing forever, it’s not like you know enough to be bored, is it? No, death ain’t scary.
But killing, that’s scary. To look another living thing in the eyes and end it forever, strip away everything they could have been, could have done, or felt - nobody should ever have to do that. Sergeant once told me it’s no different from killing a chicken back home. But people aren’t chickens, and the idea that war strips us all down to just a body, that moves and kills, or falls and dies, makes me feel sick to my stomach.
I don’t like killing chickens, either. But none of my feelings mattered in the end. I got the uniform, the training, and the gun then ended up shipped off to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. I’ve got no desire to share the details of my service. They’re not memories I care to dwell on, and they’re certainly not why I’m here. Let’s just say that neither my noble comrades-in-arms nor the soldiers fighting for His Majesty the Emperor seemed to share my lofty ideals about the sanctity of life. Still, I got through a while without dying and even without killing anybody. That I know of, at least. I fired my gun plenty, I guess, and you don’t usually see where the bullet lands, do you?
I was captured after about six months and sent to the North Point prison camp in occupied Hong Kong. At the time it seemed like a relief, but then I hadn’t heard the stories about how the Japanese treated their POWs. I mean, these days after the Tokyo trial and everything, I, I guess everyone knows how bad it was. But I didn’t have a clue when we first surrendered.
The things people will do to their fellow man, just because someone with a shinier badge tells them to. And even then, our treatment was a picnic compared to the Chinese prisoners who came through North Point. But again, that’s not the point, and I have no interest in dwelling on the suffering. Plenty of others to tell those stories, if you want them.
I was in that place for four months - four months of hell. I know others who were in there a lot longer, and I sure don’t envy them. Though the way I got out wasn’t exactly ideal.
Leonard was the one who heard it first. He was the closest thing I had to a friend in that place: Leonard Holden, built like a barn, and about as complicated. He’d worked on a farm before signing up, and sometimes it seemed like that was about the limit of what he thought the world was. At least until the rest of the world caught up with him. Poor bastard.
We’d been captured at the same time, and the fact his head stuck out above the others meant it was easier for me to stick by him when we were all getting sorted. We pushed through those four months together, me watching him go from a hulking farm boy into a scrawny beanpole of a man. He never lost his smile, though. Not until he heard that music.
It was a cool winter night when it happened. It never got properly cold in North Point, not like back home, but you still ended shivering most of your nights away. There was the lightest of rains that night, when the Nemesis arrived.
We were trying to sleep, pushed into our cramped wooden huts, thin blankets pulled tight. At first, it was a drumbeat - distant, regular, sometimes broken by the rattling role of a snare drum. I could feel my pulse quicken, like it wanted to match the tempo, though I’ve no idea why.
I should have been confused - scared, maybe, and I guess I was, but I could also feel my fingers tap-tap-tapping away to the beat. Beside me, Leonard started to hum to himself, a tune I could almost half-remember hearing, just before the trumpet began to drift over the waters just a few yards beyond the walls.
I call it a trumpet because that’s the closest thing I can think to liken to that sound. But it sure wasn’t any trumpet they played on the parade ground. By this point we were all out of our beds and clustering around the dirt-caked windows looking out towards the water. I don’t know if any of us had any expectations of what was going to happen, but unless it was some Japanese military thing, I think we were all expecting to watch some… people… die. And we did, I guess. Just the way we thought.
There was a boat floating out there not 20 yards in the shoreline. It wasn’t like any Imperial ship I’d ever seen, but I didn’t think it belonged to our side, either. It was metal, but not like the warships I was used to. It was like an old tall ship, with tattered masts and rigging, but made entirely out of cold, black iron. I knew it was cold. It made me cold just to look at it. The whole thing shone in the moonlight, slick with water, as though it had been caught in a rainstorm, and I could see the name written in English on the prow, clear as anything: Nemesis.
It had been almost a full minute by now, and we’d still heard no response from the guards. No searchlights, no alarms, no angry shouting, none of the things that usually accompanied any sort of commotion. That should have been a good thing, right? But instead, I just felt this pit in my stomach, like I knew whatever was coming had to be really, really bad.
Just then, I saw figures moving towards the shore. Even in the dark, I could make out the uniforms of our captors, but they weren’t moving right. They were stepping slowly, walking to the rhythm of the drum, the swelling of the trumpet. In another life, another… reality, I’d almost have said they were dancing.
They kept going until they stood at the water’s edge. I counted dozens of them. It must have been every guard in the camp, or damn near it. They were still moving around each other, still shifting and stepping to the rhythm of that music, but now something was in their hands, glinting in the moonlight. Our captors held their blades tight, keeping them utterly still while their bodies moved and swayed. Then in a moment, the control broke, and they fell on each other suddenly, each crying out with unleashed ferocity.
One man severed his commander’s arm in a single swipe, before being run through the stomach by his former comrade. Two more plunged the points into each other’s eyes, pushing forward, driving them in until they both collapsed, propped up, intertwined. It only took a few seconds, and then they were all dead, and the dirt was slick with their blood, flowing down and into the water where the Nemesis floated.
When they were lying still, and the music stopped, the night was quiet again. That’s when I heard the sound that really chilled my blood: all my comrades, my fellow prisoners, cheered. And it wasn’t the cheer of those glad for freedom. It was the sound of bloodlust and cruelty.
Without any fear of the guards, we left our cramped dormitories and filed down towards the ship that all the others seemed to think was our salvation. They walked slowly, almost reverently, stepping over the bodies of our slain jailers. A few bent down, pulling long knives and bayonets from the corpses, not even bothering to wipe the trailing gore from them.
Small boats paddled over from the ship and started to ferry us over. The sailors wore old uniforms, a mess of different navies, different eras. Some I recognized from history books, others were a complete mystery to me. All of them had some telltale stain, or burn, or patch of missing cloth - something that made it clear that whoever was wearing the uniform was not the original owner.
It took several trips to transfer everybody to Nemesis, but in all that time, nobody spoke. It was surreal. My whole time as a prisoner had felt like a nightmare, but this… this felt like something else entirely.
They lined us all up on the deck, as if we were mustering for something, none of us dressed or uniformed, a few holding salvaged weapons, waiting to know what was expected of us. And the ship began to sail, out down towards the open ocean, wind and salt cutting through us as we went. My feet felt stuck to the deck, shivering, as we watched this weird mismatch of bloody sailors maneuver this thing that seemed like it belonged to the bottom of the sea. Looking around, I could see the metal was twisted and bent in places, and staring closer at the deck below, I began to notice rust and holes laced through it. There was absolutely no way that this vessel should have been floating.
After an hour, we completely lost sight of the land, and the only things beyond our ship were the rolling black waters and the hollow glow of a full moon. That was when the music started up again. We were so close now, every pulse of the drum shuddered through us.
And the trumpet notes cut through us. I could see now it was made of the same black iron as the ship, and embedded like shrapnel in the hand that held it, the lips that blew into it. Whatever spell had come over the others was gone in an instant, and I could feel the sudden terror flow out of them in a flood of unleashed fear. Some of them started to whimper. Others tried to ask questions of anyone they thought might be officers, but they were ignored, and the music just got louder.
Leonard was the first to dance. Well, I think of it as a dance, though I don’t know why. He reached over and grabbed another one of the former prisoners, a scrawny guy, I, I think his name was Milton. He gave a cry of anger that I could never have imagined coming from his gentle, smiling lips, even in the heat of battle. There was nothing Milton could do. Even malnourished as he was, it was easy for Leonard to snap his arm like a twig, twist his neck until his leg spasmed and his skull started to crack. Even when his victim was clearly dead, he kept beating it, tossing the corpse across the deck with as much ferocity as if it were the most hated man alive.
The bloody crew of the Nemesis watched, their eyes riveted, and their feet tapping to the music. Leonard’s rampage against the now-unrecognizable corpse of Milton only ended when another soldier, whose name I never knew, lept forward with that same cry of violence, and began to stab him wildly with a stolen bayonet. So it continued, hour upon hour of that night, as one-by-one the stolen prisoners succumbed to that music, their silent, frozen terror giving way in a moment to the eager desire to kill.
The crew, hungry for death in their stolen uniforms, at first cried out in joy with each new murder. Then, they cried out with expectation. And at last, with what sounded like concern, casting their eyes up into the empty sky as though waiting for something. As fewer and fewer of us remained, I could feel something like panic begin to spread through them, and I began to see the water line creeping higher and higher up the side of the ship, reaching eagerly to pull the Nemesis back down into its grave.
The whole time, I expected the music to reach me - to take me, to seize my heart with murderous purpose. But it never did. Even as the last of the other prisoners began to hack wildly at each other, and the waters started to flow over the sides and around my ankles, I never felt it.
Instead, I broke and ran, fleeing for one of the smaller boats that had ferried us from the shore. The crew did not stop me. They simply watched me with expressions of despair - the deepest disappointment I’ve ever seen.
The small craft was iron, like the larger vessel, and as the Nemesis sank finally beneath the waves again, I cut the remaining ropes and simply… floated away. I was terrified I’d be picked up by the Japanese, or die out there in the ocean, but as it was, I got lucky, and a few days later was picked up by an Allied ship. I told them my story, just like I’m telling you now. And what do you know? I got to sit out the rest of the war.
I often think about that night. But it’s not the blood I remember - not the black iron ship, or the look on Leonard Holden’s face as he pulled poor Milton apart. It’s the sadness on the faces of those who kidnapped us. Those who made us dance to their violence. I don’t think I’ll ever know what they expected to happen. But I think I’m very glad it didn’t.
GERTRUDE
Final comments.
Well, that’s quite a relief. Nearly 40 years I’d been wondering about the Slaughter’s ritual, keeping an eye out for anything that might be stirring. And it turns out I needn’t have been worried at all. The Risen War failed a few years before I was even born.
I should have known, I suppose. Few wars in my lifetime have reached anywhere near the heights of fear I suspect this ritual would need - though I did spend some time a while back looking over some details from the Cuban Missile Crisis to, heh, no avail. And all this time, the answer was just sitting in the archives of the Songling Center. Funny how that works, sometimes.
An interesting set of trappings for this one: the Opium War history of the Nemesis, uniforms linking - no doubt - to horrific crimes from every Imperial nation, all placed in the bloody heart of the Pacific Theatre. And Japanese POWs… something to do with attitudes towards surrender and atrocity in Japan at the time? The Senjinkun military code? Not my place to speculate, I suppose.
Still, the anticlimax is fascinating. I can only assume they were supposed to be bombed at the height of the ritual - maybe by Japanese aircraft, maybe Allied, maybe both. I wonder what stopped it. A Japanese radar filled with spiderwebs, a US destroyer finding itself suddenly alone in the open ocean? Heh. We’ll probably never know.
Heh, I suppose… Hah! If any of them survived the re-sinking of the Nemesis… God, they must have been kicking themselves in 1945! If they had just had a bit more patience, waited a few years, sailed her into Nagasaki Harbor instead… Still, none of us can tell the future, can we?
So, that’s nice. Another one to cross off the list. Doesn’t help with the Unknowing, though.
(sigh) Well, you still have Dekker’s back-up plan, of course, but it’s very risky. To be sure, I think the detonation would need to happen from within the Unknowing, while it was going on. Gerard may have a connection to the Eye, but I’m not convinced it would be enough. And I will admit I’ve grown… fond of the boy.
I wonder if I told him about Eric, whether he’d follow in his father’s footsteps… Still, it’s not like it kept Eric safe in the end.
Anyway, point is, you can probably discount the Slaughter. It had its chance.
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ARCHIVIST
So. Funny story. Turns out when Daisy broke the lock to get into Elias’s old office… well, she did a good enough job that it’s not obviously broken. So, it hasn’t been replaced yet.
So, I had a look around. Mostly as I remember, but there’s a box of tapes and statements in the corner. Obviously those Elias either didn’t feel he could trust me with yet, or maybe just the ones he was checking himself.
Ideally, I’d like to avoid tipping Peter off for as long as possible that I have access, but it turns out I don’t Know Elias’s safe combination. Not yet, anyway.
So I just took the first one that called to me, and it’s… it’s good, I suppose. Glad to know I don’t need to worry about a Slaughter ritual. Nice to get confirmation that whoever Eric was, he was Gerry’s father and, well, one assumes Mary Keay’s partner.
But nothing with any direction to it. Ever since I crawled out of that damn coffin I feel like I’ve been… adrift. Filling in blanks and diving into history, but only… The breadcrumbs I’m finding are stale. Old.
What the hell is the Watcher’s Crown? So far, the only mention of it I’ve had is from Gerry, and he didn’t seem to know much about what it actually meant. And he’s gone, now.
But if it is the grand ritual of Beholding then I - I mean, I need to know about it. Right? I feel like I’m on a deadline, like I’m running out of time, somehow. And I don’t even know where to go, what to look for, or… I’m just casting around blindly for more clues to just drop into my lap. Everyone else is running towards something or running away, and I… I don’t know what I’m doing.
I’m just tired. Think I might go lie down for a while. Get a cup of tea. Daisy’s got me listening to The Archers. I hate it. But it feels nice to hate something that can’t hurt me. I don’t know. That’s it, I, I guess.
End recording.
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Thank youuuu
They wrote 995 instead of 955 for the case # so I thought this was gonna be a 90's story! 😂
21:09 Gertrude noises tho
She was gonna kill Gerry. o-o
Gertrude and Gerry being the duo i didn't know i needed
What is this abomination known as … The Archers…
Wallis staying chill even though the slaughter is playing it's magic violence music: "idk guess I'm just built different"
SHES CALLED THE FLYING DUTCHMAN AND ITS RAGE THAT FILLS THOSE SAILS
Doesn't Melanie know the safe combination?
There's only so much you can do with the evils of war and man intertwined.
Missing “supplemental 🧐”
Was reminded of episode 49
The slaughter
Wait, I thought Melanie said in s2 that Elias didn't HAVE a safe?
@ the end you could say he feels /like a delivery man with no address/???
Pra que tanta preucupação
Não é pior que uma festa universitária
Start 1:33
TEA REMINDS HIM OF MARTIN 1000%
What if you brought about the apocolyspe, the watcher's crown. Then, as the archivist, you would gain all knowledge and become all knowing. And then you will even know how to stop the watcher's crown from happening.
does anyone else find it funny that the embodiment of war is canonically Scottish?
Probably an avatar. Its an old joke that, because British forces were accompanied by the Bagpipe playing Black Watch, people associated bagpipes with war, but it was actually the hideous music that frightened people.
(I'm kidding, I like bagpipes!)
How the hell can she tell the difference between slaughter rituals and Hunt rituals
They overlap a lot but the Hunt is focused on the chase and the Slaughter is focused on the kill, that's the best way to tell them apart
also, the presence of The Nemesis and The Piper point very directly to The Slaughter
I wish they'd explored the relationship between fear and rage a little more explicitly, that would've been interesting.
Psychology says rage is a reaction to being afraid of something.
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GERTRUDE
Case 9550307, Wallis Turner. Incident occurred at the North Point prisoner-of-war camp, then later the sunken ship Nemesis, in late 1942. Statement taken 3rd of July, 1955 at the Pu Songling Research Centre, Beijing. Committed to tape 9th of October, 2014. Gertrude Robinson recording.
GERTRUDE (STATEMENT)
I always knew what sort of a thing war was. Even when everything was going to hell, even when it just plain stopped making sense, and what I was seeing and hearing was obviously ghosts and monsters - even then it still didn’t surprise me. Not really.
I never wanted to join up, never cared about fighting for my country. I mean, what, like my country ever fought for me? No. No government ever gave a damn about me, and I didn’t feel like I had anything needed paying back on that front. Add to that, I was terrified. I’ll admit it, the thought of marching off to war set my whole body shaking, and I can still remember the nightmares I had when I got the notice.
I was half an inch from going conchie - going to prison and taking my lumps - but in the end it was my dad that pushed me into the uniform. And it wasn’t an argument or telling-off that did it, either. He just looked so damn proud when I told him. His son, the soldier. Don’t know if I’d ever seen him look at me like that before. And I just didn’t have the heart to break it. Me going conchie would kill him, so I had to learn to kill others.
And that’s the thing that really scared me, you know? I wasn’t scared of dying, not really. Everything dies in the end, and the chaplain says you end up with God. Who am I to say different? Even if it’s just sleep, just a quiet nothing forever, it’s not like you know enough to be bored, is it? No, death ain’t scary.
But killing, that’s scary. To look another living thing in the eyes and end it forever, strip away everything they could have been, could have done, or felt - nobody should ever have to do that. Sergeant once told me it’s no different from killing a chicken back home. But people aren’t chickens, and the idea that war strips us all down to just a body, that moves and kills, or falls and dies, makes me feel sick to my stomach.
I don’t like killing chickens, either. But none of my feelings mattered in the end. I got the uniform, the training, and the gun then ended up shipped off to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. I’ve got no desire to share the details of my service. They’re not memories I care to dwell on, and they’re certainly not why I’m here. Let’s just say that neither my noble comrades-in-arms nor the soldiers fighting for His Majesty the Emperor seemed to share my lofty ideals about the sanctity of life. Still, I got through a while without dying and even without killing anybody. That I know of, at least. I fired my gun plenty, I guess, and you don’t usually see where the bullet lands, do you?
I was captured after about six months and sent to the North Point prison camp in occupied Hong Kong. At the time it seemed like a relief, but then I hadn’t heard the stories about how the Japanese treated their POWs. I mean, these days after the Tokyo trial and everything, I, I guess everyone knows how bad it was. But I didn’t have a clue when we first surrendered.
The things people will do to their fellow man, just because someone with a shinier badge tells them to. And even then, our treatment was a picnic compared to the Chinese prisoners who came through North Point. But again, that’s not the point, and I have no interest in dwelling on the suffering. Plenty of others to tell those stories, if you want them.
I was in that place for four months - four months of hell. I know others who were in there a lot longer, and I sure don’t envy them. Though the way I got out wasn’t exactly ideal.
Leonard was the one who heard it first. He was the closest thing I had to a friend in that place: Leonard Holden, built like a barn, and about as complicated. He’d worked on a farm before signing up, and sometimes it seemed like that was about the limit of what he thought the world was. At least until the rest of the world caught up with him. Poor bastard.
We’d been captured at the same time, and the fact his head stuck out above the others meant it was easier for me to stick by him when we were all getting sorted. We pushed through those four months together, me watching him go from a hulking farm boy into a scrawny beanpole of a man. He never lost his smile, though. Not until he heard that music.
It was a cool winter night when it happened. It never got properly cold in North Point, not like back home, but you still ended shivering most of your nights away. There was the lightest of rains that night, when the Nemesis arrived.
We were trying to sleep, pushed into our cramped wooden huts, thin blankets pulled tight. At first, it was a drumbeat - distant, regular, sometimes broken by the rattling role of a snare drum. I could feel my pulse quicken, like it wanted to match the tempo, though I’ve no idea why.
I should have been confused - scared, maybe, and I guess I was, but I could also feel my fingers tap-tap-tapping away to the beat. Beside me, Leonard started to hum to himself, a tune I could almost half-remember hearing, just before the trumpet began to drift over the waters just a few yards beyond the walls.
I call it a trumpet because that’s the closest thing I can think to liken to that sound. But it sure wasn’t any trumpet they played on the parade ground. By this point we were all out of our beds and clustering around the dirt-caked windows looking out towards the water. I don’t know if any of us had any expectations of what was going to happen, but unless it was some Japanese military thing, I think we were all expecting to watch some… people… die. And we did, I guess. Just the way we thought.
There was a boat floating out there not 20 yards in the shoreline. It wasn’t like any Imperial ship I’d ever seen, but I didn’t think it belonged to our side, either. It was metal, but not like the warships I was used to. It was like an old tall ship, with tattered masts and rigging, but made entirely out of cold, black iron. I knew it was cold. It made me cold just to look at it. The whole thing shone in the moonlight, slick with water, as though it had been caught in a rainstorm, and I could see the name written in English on the prow, clear as anything: Nemesis.
It had been almost a full minute by now, and we’d still heard no response from the guards. No searchlights, no alarms, no angry shouting, none of the things that usually accompanied any sort of commotion. That should have been a good thing, right? But instead, I just felt this pit in my stomach, like I knew whatever was coming had to be really, really bad.
Just then, I saw figures moving towards the shore. Even in the dark, I could make out the uniforms of our captors, but they weren’t moving right. They were stepping slowly, walking to the rhythm of the drum, the swelling of the trumpet. In another life, another… reality, I’d almost have said they were dancing.
They kept going until they stood at the water’s edge. I counted dozens of them. It must have been every guard in the camp, or damn near it. They were still moving around each other, still shifting and stepping to the rhythm of that music, but now something was in their hands, glinting in the moonlight. Our captors held their blades tight, keeping them utterly still while their bodies moved and swayed. Then in a moment, the control broke, and they fell on each other suddenly, each crying out with unleashed ferocity.
One man severed his commander’s arm in a single swipe, before being run through the stomach by his former comrade. Two more plunged the points into each other’s eyes, pushing forward, driving them in until they both collapsed, propped up, intertwined. It only took a few seconds, and then they were all dead, and the dirt was slick with their blood, flowing down and into the water where the Nemesis floated.
When they were lying still, and the music stopped, the night was quiet again. That’s when I heard the sound that really chilled my blood: all my comrades, my fellow prisoners, cheered. And it wasn’t the cheer of those glad for freedom. It was the sound of bloodlust and cruelty.
Without any fear of the guards, we left our cramped dormitories and filed down towards the ship that all the others seemed to think was our salvation. They walked slowly, almost reverently, stepping over the bodies of our slain jailers. A few bent down, pulling long knives and bayonets from the corpses, not even bothering to wipe the trailing gore from them.
Small boats paddled over from the ship and started to ferry us over. The sailors wore old uniforms, a mess of different navies, different eras. Some I recognized from history books, others were a complete mystery to me. All of them had some telltale stain, or burn, or patch of missing cloth - something that made it clear that whoever was wearing the uniform was not the original owner.
It took several trips to transfer everybody to Nemesis, but in all that time, nobody spoke. It was surreal. My whole time as a prisoner had felt like a nightmare, but this… this felt like something else entirely.
They lined us all up on the deck, as if we were mustering for something, none of us dressed or uniformed, a few holding salvaged weapons, waiting to know what was expected of us. And the ship began to sail, out down towards the open ocean, wind and salt cutting through us as we went. My feet felt stuck to the deck, shivering, as we watched this weird mismatch of bloody sailors maneuver this thing that seemed like it belonged to the bottom of the sea. Looking around, I could see the metal was twisted and bent in places, and staring closer at the deck below, I began to notice rust and holes laced through it. There was absolutely no way that this vessel should have been floating.
After an hour, we completely lost sight of the land, and the only things beyond our ship were the rolling black waters and the hollow glow of a full moon. That was when the music started up again. We were so close now, every pulse of the drum shuddered through us.
And the trumpet notes cut through us. I could see now it was made of the same black iron as the ship, and embedded like shrapnel in the hand that held it, the lips that blew into it. Whatever spell had come over the others was gone in an instant, and I could feel the sudden terror flow out of them in a flood of unleashed fear. Some of them started to whimper. Others tried to ask questions of anyone they thought might be officers, but they were ignored, and the music just got louder.
Leonard was the first to dance. Well, I think of it as a dance, though I don’t know why. He reached over and grabbed another one of the former prisoners, a scrawny guy, I, I think his name was Milton. He gave a cry of anger that I could never have imagined coming from his gentle, smiling lips, even in the heat of battle. There was nothing Milton could do. Even malnourished as he was, it was easy for Leonard to snap his arm like a twig, twist his neck until his leg spasmed and his skull started to crack. Even when his victim was clearly dead, he kept beating it, tossing the corpse across the deck with as much ferocity as if it were the most hated man alive.
The bloody crew of the Nemesis watched, their eyes riveted, and their feet tapping to the music. Leonard’s rampage against the now-unrecognizable corpse of Milton only ended when another soldier, whose name I never knew, lept forward with that same cry of violence, and began to stab him wildly with a stolen bayonet. So it continued, hour upon hour of that night, as one-by-one the stolen prisoners succumbed to that music, their silent, frozen terror giving way in a moment to the eager desire to kill.
The crew, hungry for death in their stolen uniforms, at first cried out in joy with each new murder. Then, they cried out with expectation. And at last, with what sounded like concern, casting their eyes up into the empty sky as though waiting for something. As fewer and fewer of us remained, I could feel something like panic begin to spread through them, and I began to see the water line creeping higher and higher up the side of the ship, reaching eagerly to pull the Nemesis back down into its grave.
The whole time, I expected the music to reach me - to take me, to seize my heart with murderous purpose. But it never did. Even as the last of the other prisoners began to hack wildly at each other, and the waters started to flow over the sides and around my ankles, I never felt it.
Instead, I broke and ran, fleeing for one of the smaller boats that had ferried us from the shore. The crew did not stop me. They simply watched me with expressions of despair - the deepest disappointment I’ve ever seen.
The small craft was iron, like the larger vessel, and as the Nemesis sank finally beneath the waves again, I cut the remaining ropes and simply… floated away. I was terrified I’d be picked up by the Japanese, or die out there in the ocean, but as it was, I got lucky, and a few days later was picked up by an Allied ship. I told them my story, just like I’m telling you now. And what do you know? I got to sit out the rest of the war.
I often think about that night. But it’s not the blood I remember - not the black iron ship, or the look on Leonard Holden’s face as he pulled poor Milton apart. It’s the sadness on the faces of those who kidnapped us. Those who made us dance to their violence. I don’t think I’ll ever know what they expected to happen. But I think I’m very glad it didn’t.
GERTRUDE
Final comments.
Well, that’s quite a relief. Nearly 40 years I’d been wondering about the Slaughter’s ritual, keeping an eye out for anything that might be stirring. And it turns out I needn’t have been worried at all. The Risen War failed a few years before I was even born.
I should have known, I suppose. Few wars in my lifetime have reached anywhere near the heights of fear I suspect this ritual would need - though I did spend some time a while back looking over some details from the Cuban Missile Crisis to, heh, no avail. And all this time, the answer was just sitting in the archives of the Songling Center. Funny how that works, sometimes.
An interesting set of trappings for this one: the Opium War history of the Nemesis, uniforms linking - no doubt - to horrific crimes from every Imperial nation, all placed in the bloody heart of the Pacific Theatre. And Japanese POWs… something to do with attitudes towards surrender and atrocity in Japan at the time? The Senjinkun military code? Not my place to speculate, I suppose.
Still, the anticlimax is fascinating. I can only assume they were supposed to be bombed at the height of the ritual - maybe by Japanese aircraft, maybe Allied, maybe both. I wonder what stopped it. A Japanese radar filled with spiderwebs, a US destroyer finding itself suddenly alone in the open ocean? Heh. We’ll probably never know.
Heh, I suppose… Hah! If any of them survived the re-sinking of the Nemesis… God, they must have been kicking themselves in 1945! If they had just had a bit more patience, waited a few years, sailed her into Nagasaki Harbor instead… Still, none of us can tell the future, can we?
So, that’s nice. Another one to cross off the list. Doesn’t help with the Unknowing, though.
(sigh) Well, you still have Dekker’s back-up plan, of course, but it’s very risky. To be sure, I think the detonation would need to happen from within the Unknowing, while it was going on. Gerard may have a connection to the Eye, but I’m not convinced it would be enough. And I will admit I’ve grown… fond of the boy.
I wonder if I told him about Eric, whether he’d follow in his father’s footsteps… Still, it’s not like it kept Eric safe in the end.
Anyway, point is, you can probably discount the Slaughter. It had its chance.
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ARCHIVIST
So. Funny story. Turns out when Daisy broke the lock to get into Elias’s old office… well, she did a good enough job that it’s not obviously broken. So, it hasn’t been replaced yet.
So, I had a look around. Mostly as I remember, but there’s a box of tapes and statements in the corner. Obviously those Elias either didn’t feel he could trust me with yet, or maybe just the ones he was checking himself.
Ideally, I’d like to avoid tipping Peter off for as long as possible that I have access, but it turns out I don’t Know Elias’s safe combination. Not yet, anyway.
So I just took the first one that called to me, and it’s… it’s good, I suppose. Glad to know I don’t need to worry about a Slaughter ritual. Nice to get confirmation that whoever Eric was, he was Gerry’s father and, well, one assumes Mary Keay’s partner.
But nothing with any direction to it. Ever since I crawled out of that damn coffin I feel like I’ve been… adrift. Filling in blanks and diving into history, but only… The breadcrumbs I’m finding are stale. Old.
What the hell is the Watcher’s Crown? So far, the only mention of it I’ve had is from Gerry, and he didn’t seem to know much about what it actually meant. And he’s gone, now.
But if it is the grand ritual of Beholding then I - I mean, I need to know about it. Right? I feel like I’m on a deadline, like I’m running out of time, somehow. And I don’t even know where to go, what to look for, or… I’m just casting around blindly for more clues to just drop into my lap. Everyone else is running towards something or running away, and I… I don’t know what I’m doing.
I’m just tired. Think I might go lie down for a while. Get a cup of tea. Daisy’s got me listening to The Archers. I hate it. But it feels nice to hate something that can’t hurt me. I don’t know. That’s it, I, I guess.
End recording.
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GERTRUDE
Case 9550307, Wallis Turner. Incident occurred at the North Point prisoner-of-war camp, then later the sunken ship Nemesis, in late 1942. Statement taken 3rd of July, 1955 at the Pu Songling Research Centre, Beijing. Committed to tape 9th of October, 2014. Gertrude Robinson recording.
GERTRUDE (STATEMENT)
I always knew what sort of a thing war was. Even when everything was going to hell, even when it just plain stopped making sense, and what I was seeing and hearing was obviously ghosts and monsters - even then it still didn’t surprise me. Not really.
I never wanted to join up, never cared about fighting for my country. I mean, what, like my country ever fought for me? No. No government ever gave a damn about me, and I didn’t feel like I had anything needed paying back on that front. Add to that, I was terrified. I’ll admit it, the thought of marching off to war set my whole body shaking, and I can still remember the nightmares I had when I got the notice.
I was half an inch from going conchie - going to prison and taking my lumps - but in the end it was my dad that pushed me into the uniform. And it wasn’t an argument or telling-off that did it, either. He just looked so damn proud when I told him. His son, the soldier. Don’t know if I’d ever seen him look at me like that before. And I just didn’t have the heart to break it. Me going conchie would kill him, so I had to learn to kill others.
And that’s the thing that really scared me, you know? I wasn’t scared of dying, not really. Everything dies in the end, and the chaplain says you end up with God. Who am I to say different? Even if it’s just sleep, just a quiet nothing forever, it’s not like you know enough to be bored, is it? No, death ain’t scary.
But killing, that’s scary. To look another living thing in the eyes and end it forever, strip away everything they could have been, could have done, or felt - nobody should ever have to do that. Sergeant once told me it’s no different from killing a chicken back home. But people aren’t chickens, and the idea that war strips us all down to just a body, that moves and kills, or falls and dies, makes me feel sick to my stomach.
I don’t like killing chickens, either. But none of my feelings mattered in the end. I got the uniform, the training, and the gun then ended up shipped off to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. I’ve got no desire to share the details of my service. They’re not memories I care to dwell on, and they’re certainly not why I’m here. Let’s just say that neither my noble comrades-in-arms nor the soldiers fighting for His Majesty the Emperor seemed to share my lofty ideals about the sanctity of life. Still, I got through a while without dying and even without killing anybody. That I know of, at least. I fired my gun plenty, I guess, and you don’t usually see where the bullet lands, do you?
I was captured after about six months and sent to the North Point prison camp in occupied Hong Kong. At the time it seemed like a relief, but then I hadn’t heard the stories about how the Japanese treated their POWs. I mean, these days after the Tokyo trial and everything, I, I guess everyone knows how bad it was. But I didn’t have a clue when we first surrendered.
The things people will do to their fellow man, just because someone with a shinier badge tells them to. And even then, our treatment was a picnic compared to the Chinese prisoners who came through North Point. But again, that’s not the point, and I have no interest in dwelling on the suffering. Plenty of others to tell those stories, if you want them.
I was in that place for four months - four months of hell. I know others who were in there a lot longer, and I sure don’t envy them. Though the way I got out wasn’t exactly ideal.
Leonard was the one who heard it first. He was the closest thing I had to a friend in that place: Leonard Holden, built like a barn, and about as complicated. He’d worked on a farm before signing up, and sometimes it seemed like that was about the limit of what he thought the world was. At least until the rest of the world caught up with him. Poor bastard.
We’d been captured at the same time, and the fact his head stuck out above the others meant it was easier for me to stick by him when we were all getting sorted. We pushed through those four months together, me watching him go from a hulking farm boy into a scrawny beanpole of a man. He never lost his smile, though. Not until he heard that music.
It was a cool winter night when it happened. It never got properly cold in North Point, not like back home, but you still ended shivering most of your nights away. There was the lightest of rains that night, when the Nemesis arrived.
We were trying to sleep, pushed into our cramped wooden huts, thin blankets pulled tight. At first, it was a drumbeat - distant, regular, sometimes broken by the rattling role of a snare drum. I could feel my pulse quicken, like it wanted to match the tempo, though I’ve no idea why.
I should have been confused - scared, maybe, and I guess I was, but I could also feel my fingers tap-tap-tapping away to the beat. Beside me, Leonard started to hum to himself, a tune I could almost half-remember hearing, just before the trumpet began to drift over the waters just a few yards beyond the walls.
I call it a trumpet because that’s the closest thing I can think to liken to that sound. But it sure wasn’t any trumpet they played on the parade ground. By this point we were all out of our beds and clustering around the dirt-caked windows looking out towards the water. I don’t know if any of us had any expectations of what was going to happen, but unless it was some Japanese military thing, I think we were all expecting to watch some… people… die. And we did, I guess. Just the way we thought.
There was a boat floating out there not 20 yards in the shoreline. It wasn’t like any Imperial ship I’d ever seen, but I didn’t think it belonged to our side, either. It was metal, but not like the warships I was used to. It was like an old tall ship, with tattered masts and rigging, but made entirely out of cold, black iron. I knew it was cold. It made me cold just to look at it. The whole thing shone in the moonlight, slick with water, as though it had been caught in a rainstorm, and I could see the name written in English on the prow, clear as anything: Nemesis.
It had been almost a full minute by now, and we’d still heard no response from the guards. No searchlights, no alarms, no angry shouting, none of the things that usually accompanied any sort of commotion. That should have been a good thing, right? But instead, I just felt this pit in my stomach, like I knew whatever was coming had to be really, really bad.
Just then, I saw figures moving towards the shore. Even in the dark, I could make out the uniforms of our captors, but they weren’t moving right. They were stepping slowly, walking to the rhythm of the drum, the swelling of the trumpet. In another life, another… reality, I’d almost have said they were dancing.
They kept going until they stood at the water’s edge. I counted dozens of them. It must have been every guard in the camp, or damn near it. They were still moving around each other, still shifting and stepping to the rhythm of that music, but now something was in their hands, glinting in the moonlight. Our captors held their blades tight, keeping them utterly still while their bodies moved and swayed. Then in a moment, the control broke, and they fell on each other suddenly, each crying out with unleashed ferocity.
One man severed his commander’s arm in a single swipe, before being run through the stomach by his former comrade. Two more plunged the points into each other’s eyes, pushing forward, driving them in until they both collapsed, propped up, intertwined. It only took a few seconds, and then they were all dead, and the dirt was slick with their blood, flowing down and into the water where the Nemesis floated.
When they were lying still, and the music stopped, the night was quiet again. That’s when I heard the sound that really chilled my blood: all my comrades, my fellow prisoners, cheered. And it wasn’t the cheer of those glad for freedom. It was the sound of bloodlust and cruelty.
Without any fear of the guards, we left our cramped dormitories and filed down towards the ship that all the others seemed to think was our salvation. They walked slowly, almost reverently, stepping over the bodies of our slain jailers. A few bent down, pulling long knives and bayonets from the corpses, not even bothering to wipe the trailing gore from them.
Small boats paddled over from the ship and started to ferry us over. The sailors wore old uniforms, a mess of different navies, different eras. Some I recognized from history books, others were a complete mystery to me. All of them had some telltale stain, or burn, or patch of missing cloth - something that made it clear that whoever was wearing the uniform was not the original owner.
It took several trips to transfer everybody to Nemesis, but in all that time, nobody spoke. It was surreal. My whole time as a prisoner had felt like a nightmare, but this… this felt like something else entirely.
They lined us all up on the deck, as if we were mustering for something, none of us dressed or uniformed, a few holding salvaged weapons, waiting to know what was expected of us. And the ship began to sail, out down towards the open ocean, wind and salt cutting through us as we went. My feet felt stuck to the deck, shivering, as we watched this weird mismatch of bloody sailors maneuver this thing that seemed like it belonged to the bottom of the sea. Looking around, I could see the metal was twisted and bent in places, and staring closer at the deck below, I began to notice rust and holes laced through it. There was absolutely no way that this vessel should have been floating.
After an hour, we completely lost sight of the land, and the only things beyond our ship were the rolling black waters and the hollow glow of a full moon. That was when the music started up again. We were so close now, every pulse of the drum shuddered through us.
And the trumpet notes cut through us. I could see now it was made of the same black iron as the ship, and embedded like shrapnel in the hand that held it, the lips that blew into it. Whatever spell had come over the others was gone in an instant, and I could feel the sudden terror flow out of them in a flood of unleashed fear. Some of them started to whimper. Others tried to ask questions of anyone they thought might be officers, but they were ignored, and the music just got louder.
Leonard was the first to dance. Well, I think of it as a dance, though I don’t know why. He reached over and grabbed another one of the former prisoners, a scrawny guy, I, I think his name was Milton. He gave a cry of anger that I could never have imagined coming from his gentle, smiling lips, even in the heat of battle. There was nothing Milton could do. Even malnourished as he was, it was easy for Leonard to snap his arm like a twig, twist his neck until his leg spasmed and his skull started to crack. Even when his victim was clearly dead, he kept beating it, tossing the corpse across the deck with as much ferocity as if it were the most hated man alive.
The bloody crew of the Nemesis watched, their eyes riveted, and their feet tapping to the music. Leonard’s rampage against the now-unrecognizable corpse of Milton only ended when another soldier, whose name I never knew, lept forward with that same cry of violence, and began to stab him wildly with a stolen bayonet. So it continued, hour upon hour of that night, as one-by-one the stolen prisoners succumbed to that music, their silent, frozen terror giving way in a moment to the eager desire to kill.
The crew, hungry for death in their stolen uniforms, at first cried out in joy with each new murder. Then, they cried out with expectation. And at last, with what sounded like concern, casting their eyes up into the empty sky as though waiting for something. As fewer and fewer of us remained, I could feel something like panic begin to spread through them, and I began to see the water line creeping higher and higher up the side of the ship, reaching eagerly to pull the Nemesis back down into its grave.
The whole time, I expected the music to reach me - to take me, to seize my heart with murderous purpose. But it never did. Even as the last of the other prisoners began to hack wildly at each other, and the waters started to flow over the sides and around my ankles, I never felt it.
Instead, I broke and ran, fleeing for one of the smaller boats that had ferried us from the shore. The crew did not stop me. They simply watched me with expressions of despair - the deepest disappointment I’ve ever seen.
The small craft was iron, like the larger vessel, and as the Nemesis sank finally beneath the waves again, I cut the remaining ropes and simply… floated away. I was terrified I’d be picked up by the Japanese, or die out there in the ocean, but as it was, I got lucky, and a few days later was picked up by an Allied ship. I told them my story, just like I’m telling you now. And what do you know? I got to sit out the rest of the war.
I often think about that night. But it’s not the blood I remember - not the black iron ship, or the look on Leonard Holden’s face as he pulled poor Milton apart. It’s the sadness on the faces of those who kidnapped us. Those who made us dance to their violence. I don’t think I’ll ever know what they expected to happen. But I think I’m very glad it didn’t.
GERTRUDE
Final comments.
Well, that’s quite a relief. Nearly 40 years I’d been wondering about the Slaughter’s ritual, keeping an eye out for anything that might be stirring. And it turns out I needn’t have been worried at all. The Risen War failed a few years before I was even born.
I should have known, I suppose. Few wars in my lifetime have reached anywhere near the heights of fear I suspect this ritual would need - though I did spend some time a while back looking over some details from the Cuban Missile Crisis to, heh, no avail. And all this time, the answer was just sitting in the archives of the Songling Center. Funny how that works, sometimes.
An interesting set of trappings for this one: the Opium War history of the Nemesis, uniforms linking - no doubt - to horrific crimes from every Imperial nation, all placed in the bloody heart of the Pacific Theatre. And Japanese POWs… something to do with attitudes towards surrender and atrocity in Japan at the time? The Senjinkun military code? Not my place to speculate, I suppose.
Still, the anticlimax is fascinating. I can only assume they were supposed to be bombed at the height of the ritual - maybe by Japanese aircraft, maybe Allied, maybe both. I wonder what stopped it. A Japanese radar filled with spiderwebs, a US destroyer finding itself suddenly alone in the open ocean? Heh. We’ll probably never know.
Heh, I suppose… Hah! If any of them survived the re-sinking of the Nemesis… God, they must have been kicking themselves in 1945! If they had just had a bit more patience, waited a few years, sailed her into Nagasaki Harbor instead… Still, none of us can tell the future, can we?
So, that’s nice. Another one to cross off the list. Doesn’t help with the Unknowing, though.
(sigh) Well, you still have Dekker’s back-up plan, of course, but it’s very risky. To be sure, I think the detonation would need to happen from within the Unknowing, while it was going on. Gerard may have a connection to the Eye, but I’m not convinced it would be enough. And I will admit I’ve grown… fond of the boy.
I wonder if I told him about Eric, whether he’d follow in his father’s footsteps… Still, it’s not like it kept Eric safe in the end.
Anyway, point is, you can probably discount the Slaughter. It had its chance.
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ARCHIVIST
So. Funny story. Turns out when Daisy broke the lock to get into Elias’s old office… well, she did a good enough job that it’s not obviously broken. So, it hasn’t been replaced yet.
So, I had a look around. Mostly as I remember, but there’s a box of tapes and statements in the corner. Obviously those Elias either didn’t feel he could trust me with yet, or maybe just the ones he was checking himself.
Ideally, I’d like to avoid tipping Peter off for as long as possible that I have access, but it turns out I don’t Know Elias’s safe combination. Not yet, anyway.
So I just took the first one that called to me, and it’s… it’s good, I suppose. Glad to know I don’t need to worry about a Slaughter ritual. Nice to get confirmation that whoever Eric was, he was Gerry’s father and, well, one assumes Mary Keay’s partner.
But nothing with any direction to it. Ever since I crawled out of that damn coffin I feel like I’ve been… adrift. Filling in blanks and diving into history, but only… The breadcrumbs I’m finding are stale. Old.
What the hell is the Watcher’s Crown? So far, the only mention of it I’ve had is from Gerry, and he didn’t seem to know much about what it actually meant. And he’s gone, now.
But if it is the grand ritual of Beholding then I - I mean, I need to know about it. Right? I feel like I’m on a deadline, like I’m running out of time, somehow. And I don’t even know where to go, what to look for, or… I’m just casting around blindly for more clues to just drop into my lap. Everyone else is running towards something or running away, and I… I don’t know what I’m doing.
I’m just tired. Think I might go lie down for a while. Get a cup of tea. Daisy’s got me listening to The Archers. I hate it. But it feels nice to hate something that can’t hurt me. I don’t know. That’s it, I, I guess.
End recording.
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Thanks