Moving House

I'm in the process of moving the contents of this blog over to a website on Substack. New content, and old, will appear there over the course of the next few weeks. A few details may change, but the core will stay the same. 

Find me here from now on: Lost Media and Other Supernatural Concerns

Prismatica: Killer Queer Fiction

Report compiled by Tristan Marshall, Visual Media Investigator, Institute for the Study of Forbidden Media


To my superiors:
I apologize for the prolonged lack of communication. I came into contact with a new fragment of Passerine Birds of the Great Lakes (Vol. II) and thought it pertinent that I quarantine until I was positive that I was no longer transmuting. The fragment is in storage at my place of residence; please send an agent to collect it as soon as possible, it’s broken three filing cabinets as of writing.

Unfortunately, due to my contact with Passerine Birds, I had to immediately vacate my civilian employment. I have been squatting in a building that once belonged to the law offices of Peterson and Vanclad PC, Attorneys at Law in the scenic Mistake on the Lake-- Cleveland, Ohio. If I’m correct, then at least one member of the Institute’s Board should have raised eyebrows upon reading that name; Abraham Vanclad was a nightmare to Northern Ohio’s indie publishing scene from 1976 until his death in 2009, due to his litigation of smaller presses when they toed the line of public domain. While most of them were unscrupulous (no tears will be shed for No Vacancy Publishing’s demise, with their $50 submission fee and proto-MLM pay structure) his litigation means that over three dozen anthologies, comprising over 1,000 individual short stories, are now permanently out of print.

And, it seems, Mr. Vanclad kept trophies of sorts-- I don’t see why else the room that was formerly his office would have an aging copy of 1995’s On King Arthur’s Secret Service, an attempt to adapt Arthurian Lore into a James Bond-esque spy-fi setting, or 2048, an anthology that somehow had the blessing of George Orwell’s estate to tell stories of the world of 1984, IngSoc and Big Brother during the titular year. All of these have been documented, and I have done my best to preserve them (again, please send an agent to collect) but the crown jewel of the collection was a copy of Prismatica, the lost 2009 queer fiction anthology curated by Valeria Schrader.

Firstly: it’s braced. I’ve managed to confirm that much-- the paper is impossible for me to tear or cut, the cover is unaffected by mold or any other form of rot or aging. It’s a bona fide anomalous document containing seven pieces of short, queer fiction from the late 2000s.

I’ve inspected the volume fully-- it seems to have lost the ‘bite’ it had circa 2009, as it were. From what I’ve read, Prismatica was weaponized post-publication, being handed out at gun shows, Republican campaign rallies, and other conservative functions disguised as everything from The Turner Diaries to The Anarchist’s Cookbook; excerpts of it were even reportedly published in pamphlets meant to look like Chick Tracts, though they lacked any illustrations. The Institute was predominately straight prior to the mass proliferation of the internet; perhaps the fact that I haven’t been affected by a fully intact copy of Prismatica is due to my own complex relationship with gender.

Regardless, I have read all seven stories, and have summarized them below.


Lipstick Stain
By Julian Schipp

‘Lipstick Stain’ tells the story of a teenaged boy who, after wearing his mother’s lipstick out of curiosity, is forced to eat the rest of it. The effects on his body are horrific-- probably the most graphic description of aluminum poisoning I’ve seen outside of a murder mystery novel. His mother tries to bury his paralyzed body in the yard without realizing that he’s alive.

I had to be careful when reading this; Lipstick Stain was associated with at least a dozen cases of aluminum poisoning reported at the 2012 Republican National Convention; these were likely psychosomatic in nature, due to reading graphic descriptions of the symptoms. Precedent exists for plain text causing illness if the description is graphic enough; see the 1952 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Maladies or the Palmer, Kansas School District’s 2013 STD Education Pamphlets, among others.



Agent O
By Gregory Grimm

A spy thriller pastiche, comedic in nature; the twist is that the James Bond stand-in, ‘Agent O’, is gay, and nobody seems to get it, least of all the object of his affections, Agent Q. I don’t much care for spy fiction, so I don’t know how this stacks up in the genre, but much of the humor seems to come from the fact that it doesn’t occur to most people that LGBTQIA+ people… exist. There’s a line that mentions Agent O foiled ‘a plot wherein terrorists attempted to set off a bomb that would have rendered the citizens of San Francisco unable to be attracted to the opposite sex’. Grimm is listed as having been with ‘a man he considers his husband for fifteen years’ in his bio at the back of the collection; I don’t know if the humor simply isn’t landing with me or if it’s just bad writing.

The anomaly with this work is both active and annoying; every piece of music I hear sounds like it’s straight out of a bad spy film. My playlist says ‘Florence + The Machine’, but I’m hearing the theme to Operation Double 007, a 1967 Italian spy film starring Sean Connery’s brother.

Note: effect faded after approximately six hours.


The Queen in Yellow
By Nannette Simpson

“Over the course of the 20th century, the so-called Yellow Sign, a symbol both deviant and divine, became a common mark for the sexual pariahs of the world-- gay, trans, lesbian, all could come together beneath the Yellow King’s mark and be one.” Thus begins The Queen in Yellow, a tale which attempts to tell a new story from the world of Robert W. Chamber’s horror anthology The King in Yellow. ‘Carcosa’ is misspelled twice in the 5000-word work, and the plot tells the story of a trans woman getting the Yellow Sign tattooed on her right breast, and how it affects her.

There’s a strong theme of reclamation throughout the work, which makes sense; The Yellow Sign and various other hallmarks associated with Hastur were co-opted by Lovecraft for his Cthulhu mythos, and Lovecraft was every flavor of bigot available in the early 1900s. Enjoyable enough.

Again, I had to be careful with this one; copies of The Queen in Yellow distributed at the 2010 Louisville Gun Show resulted in ‘spontaneous changes in human mammaries’, per an Institute report at the time. While reportedly the effect is less pronounced in those who aren’t cis-hetero, I’d rather not risk the chance of me needing a mastectomy while I’m uninsured.

At this point, I started noticing that there were consistent elements in each of the works-- particular word choices and foibles that are hard for unskilled authors to conceal, or easy for a skilled author to accentuate for thematic purposes. For instance, the phrase ‘lemon-scented’ appears in each story, as does the description of a ‘sky so blue you could drown in it’, and both this and Lipstick Stain have a character extinguish a candle by pinching the wick. Schrader was the editor for this, so she may have inserted these phrases… but she could just has easily have written them all herself and published them under a variety of pseudonyms.


Guenevere’s Eyes
By June ‘Jojo’ Johannsen

A lesbian retelling of the tale of Guenevere and Lancelot-- Lancelot in this continuity is a young woman impersonating her older brother, who is a ‘layabout and a lout’. Apparently, the author thought alliteration was appealing to her audience, as it pervades the work. ‘Lancelot’ commissions the assassination of King Arthur so that she and Guenevere can be together.

Note: I’ve been informed that several early King Arthur stories were written in alliterative verse. Perhaps this was intended as a callback to those?

Language and references are both anachronistic; it’s one thing to mention Bedlam House in a vaguely medieval work, but at one point, a ‘village idiot’ croons out a verse from Sloppy Seconds’ immortal song, Why Don’t Lesbians Love Me?, in order to heckle Guenevere and Lancelot kissing in public. He even says ‘dude’.

Guenevere’s Eyes was, perhaps appropriately, reported to cause blindness among seven members of staff at a facility called Camp Bethlehem, a ‘pray the gay away’ conversion camp in Western Pennsylvania-- once again, this doesn’t seem to affect me, but I would caution any of the Institute’s more conservative members against reading it. Furthermore, this shares the ‘lemon-scented’ descriptor with the other works in the anthology, this time talking about some wine that Lancelot drinks.

Great Blue Sea
By Willa Tombstone

As far as I’m aware, the term ‘queerbaiting’ didn’t arise until the mid-2010s; however, the term ‘queer baiting practices’ comes up in this story in an odd context. It’s a cyberpunk future, and ‘fishermen’ are tasked with weeding LGBTQIA+ individuals out of the population by luring them into containment using what I can only describe as rainbow-coded dog whistles. Some of it reminds of Fahrenheit 451, specifically the later theatrical adaptation; it’s legal to be a homosexual as long as you don’t show homosexual behavior, just as it is legal to own books but you are disallowed from reading them. This is the situation our protagonist, a ‘homosexual man of fifty-two years married to a woman with whom he has had five children’, finds himself in.

It’s… grim, to say the least. Rather gruesome, as well. But this anomaly might be the most baffling of the bunch-- it wasn’t obvious to me at first, but after reading it and going to do some light errands, I found that people were asking what my pronouns were regularly-- I’m male-presenting, by and large; could this confound pronouns? Possibly more testing needed.

If I am correct, and Schrader did write all of these stories, or affect them in some way with her editing, then it’s clear that we have someone who has great skill with the art of writing. Five distinct anomalies across five separate works; it’s terrifying, and likely explains how Schrader was able to pull off what she did when she was active.

Schrader was part of a majority-female pro-queer militia calling themselves ‘The Society of Stonewall Scythians’; they were calling for LGBTQIA+ individuals to arm themselves long before it was in vogue to do so, and while it has never been proven, allegations linking the SSS to the 2006 ‘Fountain of Blood’ outside the Sistine Chapel have circulated for over a decade. Schrader herself may be a polymath, versed in both anomalous writing practices and anomalous sculpture.


Royale
By Colleen Pierce

Gay intrigue at a royal palace in the fictional European country of The Republic of Cote Rania. (At least I’m assuming it’s European-- they mention their ‘cousins in England’ at one point.) Surprisingly complex for a short story-- but complex doesn’t mean interesting. It revolves around a succession crisis after the crown prince announces that he will marry his male fiance, and… bearing in mind that I don’t know much about anime, this feels like the plot of a bad anime, one where every character has the same face and there are fewer frames of animation than a Synchro-Vox cartoon.

This story is unique in that its effects seem to be geared towards queer individuals; Cote Rania's flag is described as being 'hued with all the colors of the rainbow... a stain on vexillology, but a flag the people are proud of, and fiercely defend'. This might explain why, in 2018, the Patton Baptist Church in Patton, Nebraska was destroyed following its public burning of the Inclusive Pride Flag; anecdotally speaking, I nearly cursed out a woman for sneering at an agender pride pin I had on my shirt.

Prismatica
By Valeria Schrader


Prismatica is the titular work in the piece, and is less a short story and more of a manifesto by Schrader, beginning with an autobiographical segment. She explains how she was six years old when the Stonewall Riot happened, and that her father berated the television whenever he saw news about it; she reasoned that if these people were capable of making her father angry so easily, that she wanted to know more about them. When she came out as bisexual and trans-femme in 1984, her father attempted to ‘dispose of her’ (her words exactly), but she ‘fought him off with a copy of Juliet & Juliet by Mary Caddick’; Caddick was a queer author who died in 1987, and her work has largely been beneath notice. However, I managed to dig up a police report about the 1984 incident, which states that Willem Schrader, Valeria’s father, was found in a ‘crater’ in his front yard, with ‘several broken bones’. A manifestation of Schrader’s own abilities ,or does Juliet & Juliet have its own anomaly?

In any case, she continues with a screed:

“For centuries, the Christian Man has attempted to lock us in closets and let us suffocate. For centuries, the Christian Woman has pushed to lobotomize us in the name of defending her children. Levi’s tribe is dust, and its laws with it. We will not be beholden to the laws of a God of Hate-- we have a right to live, a right to love, and it will not be abridged by the fascism of the Christian Nation. I refuse to be beholden by any of your Stolen Commandments, and that includes the seventh-- I shalt kill in the name of my own defense, beginning with…”

And then the document goes on to list dozens of names. I’ve looked them up-- all of them were local to Northern Ohio, and all of them are affiliated with some form of homophobic group of some form, ranging from members of the Catholic Church to the law firm of Peterson and Vanclad, PC. Abraham Vanclad was hired by someone else named in the manifesto to sue Schrader and her publishing company for harassment and defamation of character, among other allegations.

Process servers attempting to serve Schrader with papers vanished twice, re-appearing in Nova Scotia weeks later. So, Vanclad took it upon himself to attempt to personally serve Schrader. The result was recorded in a statement to the Cleveland PD by a witness:

“I lived down the hall from her. She seemed nice enough; a little quiet, and clearly a dyke, but she didn’t seem harmful. So when I heard screaming coming from her apartment, I thought ‘oh my god, someone’s hurting her’. I called the police, but when I looked out into the hallway… it was the strangest thing. There was something standing out there, it looked like a sculpture, a man made out of paper, like pages from a book. It was soaking wet, too; it took me a while to realize it wasn’t water or ink. That man was a lawyer, you said? He was just trying to do his job. I hope you catch her.”

And they have yet to; Schrader has been on the run for over a decade at this point. Reportedly, she was sighted at the 2016 Akron Firearm and Hunting Expo, distributing pamphlets; the contents of these pamphlets are unknown, as the majority of them seemingly self-destructed following reading. Notably, Akron held its first Pride parade the following year.

# 

To my readers: thank you for sticking around, those of you who have. My employment situation varies between 'precarious' and 'non-existent' at the moment; while donations are not expected, I do have a Ko-Fi you can find in the sidebar, if you wish to donate. 

I'm behind on Institute work, but hopefully I can make up for lost time. I have a couple of items in the trunk, as it were, waiting to be published.

Be seeing you.

Sporadic Updates to Come

So, this is basically the situation as it stands.

The Head of the Institute, and several board members, were concerned upon seeing my vent post a week or two ago, and they decided a re-assignment would be best for me. I'm still going to be in the Midwest; unfortunately, we don't have bottomless resources to help an archivist and scribe like me move. 

As I write this, I'm getting ready to present my two week notice to my civilian job. That's already going to help a bunch with my state of affairs; I don't mean to sound elitist, but I'm overqualified for pretty much every job in this hick town I live in, and my degree makes my resume noxious to anyone looking to hire me within Hornbeck County. It's hard to believe that Superior is less than an hour's drive away from the literal parade of Blue Lives Matter flags I've seen every Fourth of July for the last four years.

My new assignment is going to be in Cleveland. I know Cleveland has a certain image to it (thank you, Mike Polk Jr.) but it's been an area of focus for a few reasons, and yes, one of those reasons is the fact that Bill Watterson seems to be completely impossible to photograph. He's like bigfoot or something. Plus there are marketing jobs all over Cuyahoga County that are looking for people with film degrees, so it shouldn't be too hard for me to find a job up there.

Only problem is that Cleveland is home to a more... athletically-focused branch of the Institute, shall we say. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the local anomalies there relate to the abysmal performance of the Cleveland Guardians (née Indians) and the Browns; at least one person claims to have captured a version of the 2016 World Series on their DVR where the Indians won instead of the Cubs. Someone in Chagrin Falls claimed to have captured a time loop occurring in a game between the Boston Celtics and the Miami Heat, but considering that is literally the premise of an SCP, I'll press X to doubt.

I don't care. I'll learn about knuckleballs and quarterbacks if it means I can get out of this shithole town. Goodbye, Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin and your freaky-ass plastic industry. 

But yeah, more sporadic updates. I have gotten a couple of reports I've been meaning to put up, so expect those every other week or so until I get myself situated.

Sunwalkers

Ms. di Corci from the Alescio Manuscripts case has returned to us with another write-up. This is something she pulled from the files of one of her ‘father’s’ colleagues, regarding a strange art exhibition in the middle of the 2000’s.


As an aside, I have to applaud Ms. di Corci for growing so diligent in her research already. New York, as you can imagine, is a hotspot for a lot of odd media activity; she’s already written up half a dozen cases since joining, but this is the one she’s most comfortable with presenting at the moment.


Before I let her take the metaphorical floor, I leave you with a quote:


“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” --Sir Terry Pratchett


1.

Here's the deal: it’s June 2005. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is hosting an exhibit by an up-and-coming sculptor from the Lower East Side known as Herman Binger. It was a series of stainless steel sculptures depicting melted or melting figures, called ‘Sunwalkers’, because Binger thought that this is what would happen if people walked on the sun-- he called it a ‘perverse transmutation’.


The sculptures looked neat, but nobody knew how they were made; they resembled cast steel, but (this is a quote from the NYT) ‘the combination of humanoid forms below and melted steel on top seems too complex for current artistic techniques’. Binger explained how he did it, and most people accepted his explanation; he took department store mannequins, dismembered them into poses, and dumped molten steel on them. Even from pictures, you can tel something is off about the display. Some of the sculptures had faces that seemed too detailed for a mannequin.


One weird thing is that each of the sculptures also had at least two holes somewhere on them; no larger than a few millimeters. Binger explained that it was his signature, and that if anyone else copied it, he knew that it was plagiarism.


They’ll believe anything in the world of art, it seems.


There was one piece, “Prostrated”, that had a kneeling figure with its mouth open, apparently praying. It was one of the most evocative pieces, in no small part due to the fact that it looked the most melted out of the whole exhibit. It made noise when wind blew through it, so they set up a fan, creating a sound somewhere between a whistle and a scream.


Critics ate it up; the New York Times called the display ‘haunting and evocative’, while the New Yorker called it a ‘must-see’ for anyone visiting the city at the time. MoMA extended the time it would be exhibiting the museum by two more months.


Binger, for his part, had some odd habits when it came to the exhibit; he wouldn’t let anyone else touch the pieces, and insisted on coming in three hours before the museum opened to polish them all by hand. He insisted that he not be disturbed while doing this, on pain of lawsuit against the museum and removal of his exhibits.


In July, Binger announced a new piece for the exhibition; this is unusual in any museum, moreso as the MoMA decided to allow him to display it. Called “Amalgam”, it was almost twenty feet tall, made up of bodies piled on top of each other, all coated in layers of steel, with a single screaming figure at the top.


Nobody was really sure what the exhibit was actually trying to say. Some thought it was a commentary on the horrors of war, with the melting forms being based on allegations of white phosphorus rounds being used in the First Battle of Fallujah. Others thought it was a take on just how badly 9/11 scarred the country, with the melted steel being an allegory for the ruin of the World Trade Center. Some thought it was a parody of statues around the city; Binger had lived in New York his whole life, so the thought was that this was his view of the statues around Manhattan.


If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far as part of this weird-ass project or community, it’s that the only thing worse than an art critic is a New York art critic.

2.

 
It took until August for people to notice the smell.


Nobody knew what it was, at first; maintenance at MoMA was called to look into the possibility that a rat or a pigeon had gotten into the ventilation shafts and died, but even that didn’t fix the putrid, stinking scent in the exhibition hall. Anyone who’s been to New York knows that the city has some… interesting smells, but most New Yorkers are used to clouds of gas from the sewers, not rotting flesh and filth. Well, okay, if you live by the Hudson, maybe you’re used to filth.


Eventually, Binger came in and removed one of his sculptures, called ‘Venus di Argent’; it was a take on Venus di Milo, complete with arms being removed, but she was bent in half like she was throwing up, and once-molten metal was coming out of her open mouth. The smell vanished over the course of a few days; Binger explained that a family of mice had gotten trapped in the podium the piece was being displayed on and died.


Again: people in the art world will believe anything.


Nobody knew what Binger was actually doing until a few days before the exhibit was supposed to end. A family visiting from Nebraska came to the MoMA with their six-year-old son. Bringing a six-year-old into a museum with expensive art is already a risk, especially one who’s angry at his Gameboy being taken away by his parents. So, when they got to the Sunwalkers exhibit, this kid started messing with the statues. Eventually-- and don’t ask me how, these were supposedly solid steel-- he ended up knocking over a piece called ‘Mother of Babylon’, a female figure with no legs, sitting on a pedestal. The steel on the face chipped off when it hit the ground.


Beneath that steel was human skin, and a human eye. At first, when the NYPD got there, they thought they were dealing with a corpse inside the statue, like Binger had been grave robbing or something, but that wouldn’t explain why the body was so-well preserved.


And then the eye turned to look at them, and the person inside started letting out a low, rasping moan-- the closest thing they could make to a scream.


3.

 
All fifteen pieces in the exhibit of them had at least one person inside them; Amalgam had at least ten by itself. Most of the people inside were dead, early works when Binger hadn't perfected his process, but only Venus di Argent had started to rot. Seven survivors were found among the sculptures, and several things about the exhibit began to make sense.


The signature holes left in the metal by Binger were just big enough to put in an IV tube and a catheter. That’s what he was really doing whenever he would ‘clean’ the exhibits by himself--keeping his statues alive with a liquid diet and removing their waste. One of the survivors was the subject in Prostration, and he actually had his mouth propped open so that Binger could force liquids down his throat.


But nobody could explain how they got in there. Pouring molten metal over a corpse makes some sense, god knows it’s probably a more humane way to display bodies than what those fucks who make art out of the corpses of political prisoners do. But pouring molten metal over a living human being, even one who’s drugged or restrained, will definitely kill them. The main explanation for it was the Leidenfrost effect, which is something involving why you can stick a wet hand into a pot of molten metal and not get burned (don’t try that at home) but I call all sorts of bullshit.


You can't just stick steel on top of someone and expect them to survive. The weight of the metal alone would crush bones and organs, assuming they weren't incinerated outright. Binger did something to these people to keep them alive.


I tracked down one of the survivors in Jersey City. She doesn't really remember being in the statue, which I guess is a blessing. All she knows is that she was invited home by Binger one night after a gallery showing of his, had some tea that he said was from "the old country", and next thing she knows, a team of surgeons and engineers are working to get her out of a steel sculpture.


At first, I didn't necessarily think there was something spooky or kooky going on here, beyond some people surviving being encased in steel for a few months. Not that it matters much, because we'll never know his "technique"; one of Binger's victims-- the woman who was in Venus di Argent, the only person who died while on exhibit-- was identified as the niece of an NYPD officer, whose gun "accidentally discharged" into Binger's brain stem when he was cuffed.


At first, I thought the only clue we might have is the tea, but even then, it might just have been drugged. Then I tried to find Binger's autopsy report, hoping to find something behind the miasma of bullshit the NYPD uses to cover their tracks-- but there just wasn't one, nor was there a paper trail indicating that one was absent.


Even for 2005, way back before police accountability was a hot topic, that was weird. But paperwork kept on referring to an incident report not included with the rest of the case file; one FOIL Act request and a bunch of stonewalling from the NYPD later, I had a redacted copy of it in my hands. The report read:


"On 9/25/2005, Assistant Medical Examiner ████████ █████ attempted to begin an autopsy on a subject who died following arrest in connection to Complaint 952930918. Subject's remains had been delivered to the City Mortuary two days prior and were in cold storage.


A.M.E. █████ attempted to begin the autopsy at approximately 5:20 P.M., after a period of thawing. Subject's remains were in a standard body bag, and despite A.M.E. █████ claiming that the profile of the subject's body could be seen while the body bag was closed and had the appropriate weight for a human body, upon opening the body bag, a mass shredded paper smelling heavily of ozone was found within, with no sign of the deceased subject.


The shredded paper appears to correspond to an obscure, currently out-of-print erotic novel originally published in 1978, titled 'Skin of Steel, Heart of Gold'; the similarities between the contents of the novel and the method in which the subject carried out their crimes has been noted.


A. M. E. █████ has been placed on paid administrative leave; as the subject has no known next-of-kin, and was the perpetrator in the deaths of at least seventeen people, the condition and location of his body are considered low priority. No follow-up is required."


I've tried tracking down Skin of Steel, Heart of Gold, but I haven't found anything other than a couple of pieces of superhero-related smut. Considering it's 45-year-old spank material that sounds incredibly niche, and the author died in '89, I'm not surprised. But I'm not sure how Binger could have been inspired by it; he was born in '78, and by the time he would have been old enough to enter a shop that sold that kind of thing, the book would have been out of print for a decade.


I'll keep looking for it, but that's firmly on the back burner. There's a lotta weird shit going on in the five boroughs, and I can't really focus on a serial killer who's been, metaphorically speaking, in the ground for almost twenty years.

I lost a friend.

I’ll be real. The reason I haven’t updated lately is because the arcade job went south. Not in the way you think-- nobody’s in jail, nobody’s dead. But I did lose a friend.


I was looking forward to talking to you all about how we broke into an abandoned resort, decimated thanks to COVID, to recover a cursed arcade cabinet. It’s actually a pretty fun game called Crime Stoppers, a light-gun game developed by the now-defunct Yumegemu Entertainment (they got bought out by Capcom in 2003 or 2004). But when you play it around loaded firearms, those firearms have a tendency to spontaneously discharge. Not a problem in Japan, but in America, where there are 1.2 guns for every person, it’s a big yikes. We’ve been going around and disabling them for years by ripping out the board that actually has the game’s programming on it and…


It doesn’t matter.


It just doesn’t fucking matter.


There are times when I really, really hate this fucking job. It’s not even my real job; god knows it pays pennies on the dollar. My job at the hospital isn’t much better, populated by miserable people who commit so many HIPAA violations on a daily basis that I’m surprised the hospital where I work hasn’t been wiped off of the earth by a wave of lawsuits-- a sue-nami, if you will.


Therapist says I deflect trauma with humor. Guess she’s right.


After the job was done… We went to an IHOP. It was the only place open late enough that we could get food. There were about half a dozen other people from the Institute there. One of them was a friend I’d known pretty much since getting into this business-- let’s call him David. It’s not his real name, do you think we’re stupid enough to use our real names here?


David and I were… I’m not sure ‘thicks as thieves’ would be the right term here. He used to be a really mean son of a bitch; I remember having to hold back Cecilcy (who’s AMAB and now identifies as trans-NB) from punching him because David used to be fairly transphobic.


I’m a misanthrope, and part of that is because I believe people can’t improve in terms of morality. In terms of skill, you can learn and get better at something, but actually improving as a person is basically impossible. People always take the easy way out, and it’s always easier to fall back on bad habits, to crawl back in the cave, to live in blissful ignorance.


David is probably the sole exception I’ve met. No offense meant to any other members of the Institute, but we do have a tendency to wallow. After being yelled at by dozens of people that his attitude wasn’t cool, on top of some personal tragedies that I won’t discuss for his sake, he’s one of the few people I know that has actually shown meaningful improvement over the course of his life.


The job was… it didn’t go smoothly. We were trying to contain the board by ripping it out of the machine, but I kind of smashed it in the process. Squirrel’s confident we can get it back together since the memory chip that actually contains the game was intact, but David broached a subject that many members of the Institute have questioned during our time.


“Why not just destroy it completely?”


At this point, Squirrel and their brother Matt conveniently had to make a phone call. And David and I got to talking. His reasoning was that shit like this was actively harmful, and served no purpose. A lot of the stuff we studied did; why talk about the Hemaphytes like they’re a valid art movement instead of a glorified bunch of serial killers? Why not burn every copy of Adventures in Alorane we find immediately?


I reasoned that we couldn’t realistically do that to every piece of media we find; beyond the whole bracing phenomenon, there’s all sorts of stuff that’s propagated online to the point where it would be impossible to mitigate or undo the harm. LiveLeak dying only helped so much, but the Garrison Footage has popped up on dozens of porn sites, and while we don’t think mind_the_gap$.mov is doing anything beyond giving people non-anomalous nightmares, it can’t exactly be scrubbed from the internet by a group of 200-odd people working on a budget of shoestrings and prayers.


Then he brought up an uncomfortable topic.


People in RPG circles have probably heard of Mr. Welch’s List, or as it is properly known, “(X) things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG”; the last known count was at around 2500. Copycats have popped up to the point where there’s a Tv Tropes page about them; there’s one dedicated to XCOM, one to the MCU, one dedicated to Shipgirls (I don’t know what that is and I don’t want to know)... basically if a fandom exists, assume someone has made a Welch list. (Or a Skippy’s List, apparently?)


He brought up a list that falls under our purview. “Things Mr. Drake Is Not Allowed to Do in [REDACTED]”. The redaction is there because I don’t want to call out the fandom associated with it. The Drake List is a fairly minor anomaly, all things considered; the person who wrote it somehow made it so that the entries on it are burned into your memory. Fairly harmless, all things considered.


But there was a secondary component we weren’t aware of until a couple of years ago. A second half of the list, as it were, one that the original person who wrote it would send to… to children. While it doesn’t have a name officially, we’ve termed it the “Things Mr. Drake Is Allowed To Do To You” list. It’s sickening, and I don’t want to talk about it; the man who wrote it is somehow still free, likely because he can coerce his victims to consent.


Inarguably, the world would be a better place without the list. We technically have the means to remove the first half of it from the internet, but it would be a logistical headache that would essentially be an all-hands-on-deck situation for the Institute, an expungement that would have to be approved by the Institute’s Board.


I’m for media preservation in general, no matter how harmful it is. I realize that’s not the best viewpoint to take when your job is literally to study media that can kill people, but in my eyes, it’s like studying diseases; we have to understand what’s causing it before we can make the vaccine.


It got heated after that. I barely remember what was said, but I remember it was stupid. I would like to think I told him that he was an idiot if he thought removing the public list would undo, or even mitigate, the harm that it did, but in all honesty, everything I said to him was a blur. I tried making a point about how, if we wanted to talk about harmful media, we should be destroying every copy of the Bible we find, and taking flamethrowers to Harry Potter.


I’m not very good at rhetoric. My friend Dora (not part of the Institute) says it’s a weakness of mine, and I’m hoping is a flaw in skill rather than a flaw in morals; if it isn’t, then I’m kinda fucked.


Eventually, I told him to go to hell and left. I didn’t drop below 50 until I got back into my hometown in Wisconsin.

#

Why the vent piece, you might ask? God knows why. This blog is my outlet, and I feel bad for not posting for a month. People have apparently been worried about me, so this is me just. Writing for the sake of it.


I’ve listened to music that’s gotten me hospitalized. I’ve had to help photograph paintings that have survived fires that destroyed families. I once had to read a book that told me, in excruciating fucking detail, what my fucking sociopathic redneck neighbor did to the cats he caught on his property.


This has made me feel worse than any of that. Because now, I realize he was right.


This list, this fucking list, is on the verge of being pulled down, but I can’t even express my support for it without looking like some kind of hypocrite. It’s not like it’ll accomplish that much; it’s been adapted into other forms by now (I think the monstrous son of a bitch was trying to sell individual entries on it on T-shirts for a while) and he’s still going to be able to exert control over people who read it.


David, on the off chance you read this: you were right. I’m sorry I wrecked everything over this. You know how to contact me if you don’t think I’m a complete asshole.

Change Your Number: 424-555-0177

Expect the write-up about the arcade cabinet next week; right now we’re in the process of re-assembling it, as it were. This came across my desk a bit earlier today.


If you’ve ever watched TV, you’ll know that pretty much every phone number in any given TV show includes the local block code “555”-- for instance, an episode of Law and Order: SVU might display a New York City phone number as 212-555-XXXX. ‘212’ is New York’s area code, but ‘555’ as a phone code is restricted in North America, and is basically only used for fictional works, so that actual phone numbers aren’t dialed. 867-5309/Jenny by Tommy Tutone caused issues by using a valid telephone number in its chorus, resulting in several people in the 1980s having to, ironically enough, change their number.

With that being said, here’s a question for you: why has the phone number “424-555-0177” been appearing in real-world advertisements since 1985? And what happens when you call it?


‘424’ is the area code for a large portion of Los Angeles. That much I can attest to, having blocked dozens of phone numbers from that area. The 424-555-0177 number is not registered to any Los Angeles business or home, but nonetheless has appeared several times over the years.


It first appeared as a toll number, 1-900-555-0177, in an advertisement for… let’s not sugarcoat it, for a phone sex hotline. It appeared on late night television commercials in the LA area, but sadly (or thankfully) there are no reports of what happened to people who called this number; however, in August 1985, when this number was used, there was reportedly a strong smell of ozone in residential districts of LA, even on smog-free days.


It next appears in an infomercial for the Magik Oven, by Magik Technologies, an oddly-named start-up from the early 90’s. It was one of the first convection ovens that was small and light enough for home usage; basically an early air fryer. They had the toll-free number 1-800-555-0177, but they never sold a single unit through their infomercial; the following is a transcript of a phone call attempted by a member of the Institute in 1992.



Caller: Hello? Is this the Magik Oven order service?


Operator: Thank you for calling the Algernon Board of Tourism, this is Laverne, how may I help you?


Caller: I’m… I want to order a Magik Oven.


Operator: I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number, ma’am.


Caller: No… this was the number on the infomercial, I swear.


Operator: This has been happening a lot, they put the wrong number in the damn commercial. Have you tried dialing 455 instead of 555?


Caller: I’ll try it, thank you.


Operator: You’re welcome. Happy False Saints Day, ma’am.


Caller: …you as well.


1-800-455-0177 did connect with the ordering service used for the Magik Oven, but sales were low due to this error. Magik Technologies eventually went out of business due to this blunder, as has been recounted on the product review and history podcast Disinfomercial.


(There’s a podcast for goddamn everything, isn’t there?)


The first instance of the 424 area code preceding the phone number was recorded in 1997, where it appeared on a commercial for the law firm of Schuyler, Baumer and Walker in Los Angeles. The law firm still exists there, so clearly the number didn’t affect their business too much. The number’s even been seen in the background of a couple of LA-based television shows.


Its most recent, and most troubling, manifestation occurred only three weeks ago.


Marc Koch was a YouTuber based out of Antwerp, Belgium, whose channel was, to be frank, predatory. It was a genre of channel that created content based on making phone calls to fictional characters and pretending to hold conversations with them; Marvel heroes and villains, Disney princesses, Freddy Fazbear, Fortnite characters, that kind of thing. Cheap and easy to produce, brings in ad money like gangbusters.


Koch’s body was found in his bathtub, sans left kidney; he had a rare blood type, so it was assumed the organ was harvested and he was left to die. However, this does not explain the footage that was found on his video camera.


In the footage, Koch sets up his camera and announces he is going to call the Madrigal family, from the Disney film Encanto. He holds up the phone to the screen, dialing the 424-555-0177 number, and calls. “Hello, is this--”


“Thank you for calling the Algernon Board of Tourism, Happy Windelsmith’s Day. How may I direct your call?”


Koch looks alarmed. “Uh, no, I have the wrong number. I’m trying to do this thing for a Youtube video where I call, uh…”


“Oh, I know exactly who you’re looking for! Just have to route you through the Ol Coman(?) exchange…”


“The what?”


The line dies, briefly, and then a woman’s voice talks to him from the other end. “Hola?”


“Uh… wrong number.” He tries hanging up, but the phone is unresponsive. He turns the camera to show the phone number, mouthing something that I’m told is essentially the German equivalent of ‘what the fuck?’


“No, Marc,” the woman says, “I think this is exactly the right number. You have a few things we need. What you need to do is--”


He manages to shut off the camera. When it’s turned back on, it’s on the floor next to him, and he’s piling something up by his feet. A pair of tweezers will enter the frame, deposit an object, and then go back up. After a while, the female voice says, “That’s enough.”


“I think I have one more--” Marc says, before there’s a sickening squelch. “And that was one of his arteries. God dammit.”


“Do they have those in their mouths?”


“They bleed so much so I just assumed--”


“You idiot. Extract, now.”


There’s a sound of falling viscera as Marc Koch’s body hits the floor, scattering the pile of teeth. “Oh come on!” a distorted voice says. “Took me five hours to do that. Fucking tax.”


Marc Koch’s only injury was the removed kidney; he was found with a fully intact set of teeth, but they did not match dental records taken antemortem.


Koch was the first confirmed death caused by the 555-0177 number in almost thirty years. Others had been suspected in the interim, but this was the closest we’ve gotten to video footage.


Do not call this number. If you’re lucky, you’re wasting minutes calling a fictional number. If not… at least leave a record for us.

The Black Rondeau

So, here's the deal. Tristan is bedridden with COVID right now, so I'm taking over this week. Hell of a way to spend the New Year.

 

I'm Squirrel, musician and audio engineer by day, person-shaped thing that looks into cursed audio by night. Let’s talk about the Black Rondeau.

In our line of work, when you want to research the weird shit we find, sometimes you have to create or perform it. Sometimes that means you have to emulate the Hemaphytes and paint with your own blood, or put on a production of Love's Labours Surrendered, or playing a game of Calliope (never again). In my case, it means trying to perform various pieces of cursed music. Some stuff isn't too bad; sure, Everdeath's discography will make everyone who listens to it have a nosebleed, but that's only a danger if you're on blood thinners. But there is something I will never play again.

The Black Rondeau is an incomplete piece for cello from 1748, and the first recorded performance of it was in 1749, but the most infamous performance took place in Cleveland in the 1970s; if you've ever read about the Severance Music Hall massacre, you now know the cause. 

The sheet music that we have for it is seven pages long and can be played in about seventeen minutes, but it was originally believed to have been thirteen pages and required approximately twenty-three minutes of playtime. The last six pages were destroyed after the original performance.

The piece is notable for requiring two people to play it, despite technically being listed as a soloist piece. One person mans the fingerboard to help generate the chords, while the other actually plays the notes on the strings. It’s a difficult piece to play, and getting it wrong can cause horrible consequences. Getting it right can do even worse things-- again, Severance. 

The 1749 performance was a private one, held in Leipzig. Approximately thirty people were in attendance, and the performance was done by twins, Hans and Alfons Koch. Otto Koch, their father, composed the piece. Hans and Alfons were both cellists in an orchestra at the time, and both of them bemoaned the ease of the pieces they had to play; their father is said to have written their Rondeau in an attempt to challenge them. We’ll get more into what happened during this performance in a little bit.

#

The performance I put on occurred in mid 2018. While I did the chords on the fingerboard, I had my brother, “Matt”, play the strings. It was an awkward set up, with me having to sit in his lap. We had an audience of ten people, seven from our community, and three willing participants from outside of it. We took all of the appropriate measures we could-- we left appeasements, we said prayers, we took showers to cleanse ourselves. But the whole time, I was afraid it might not have been enough.

One thing I have to stress about this: if you’re a student of classical music and manage to find a copy of The Black Rondeau and want to play it: don't. It's a test of endurance after you get through the last intact page, and can take anywhere from five minutes to six hours. You can not stop playing.

To play the Rondeau, the cello has to be tuned in a specific manner; the D string has to be slackened, which risks compromising the integrity of the instrument. By contrast, the A string has to be tightened to the point where, if you try to play pizzicato, you end up slicing your fingers open; this is completely intended.

The performance began with a standard canon progression. The sound it made was the musical equivalent of a train wreck-- it sounded utterly wretched, but it was completely enthralling. The three members of the audience from outside of the community tried covering their ears in some manner as we progressed through the first several bars. Matt was clearly uncomfortable playing his cello from high school in a manner that was potentially destructive to the instrument. But that discomfort was nothing compared to what came next.

At the start of the eighth bar of the piece, the playing instructions call for the person who’s manning the fingerboard to pluck the A string as hard as they can. Despite the thickness of the cello's strings, it drew blood. I gasped in pain, and those who weren’t in the community looked ill when they saw blood flowing down the fingerboard. But as it did, the tone of the music literally changed.

I felt like an entire symphony was grabbing onto the fingerboard beside me. Notes that could not have been played by one, two, or maybe even ten people resonated from the instrument, and the temperature plummeted. An invisible, slimy hand came up against my bleeding finger, and an invisible tongue licked my blood from between the strings. The good news was that we had begun playing it correctly: but without the final six pages, how it would go from there was up in the air.

#

In 1749, Hans and Alfons began their performance to an audience of thirty, including some celebrities among the Electorate of Saxony’s musical scene. Accounts of the time confirm a similar finger-slicing to what happened here, with Hans being the one to spill blood. The music that came from the cello after this was described as ‘sonorous and wild… like a murder of crows learning  how to sing an aria’. 

As Hans’s blood flowed down the neck of the cello and began pooling onto the floor, it reportedly flowed uphill from the small pit where they were performing, and up into the audience. It stopped at the front row, and one of the people in attendance there reported that it felt like the blood was somehow ‘looking at me… as if a million invisible eyes were judging my reaction to the piece’.

Others reported feeling claustrophobic in a room that was big enough to hold an audience of two-hundred. One man felt something sharp pressed against and eventually into his skull, right above the eyes, but no blood was produced. Eventually, one woman-- the wife of a nobleman-- stood and bolted for the door.

She found it locked from the outside. And as she panicked, trying to pull it open, the music intensified. 

#

The locked door was likely intended to contain whatever the hell the Black Rondeau summoned. Thankfully, times have changed, and now all that’s needed is a few powerful electromagnets to keep them from escaping.

These beings, what Alfons called ‘oneiroi’, had flooded the room. One of the non-Institute members stood and fled, screaming about how something was trying to strangle him. As he ran out, the electromagnet hummed, and I picked up the brief impression of something falling against the floor with a thump.

At the midpoint of the piece-- at the top of page six-- Matt was required to make his own sacrifice. He pulled away the cello’s bow as I plucked the strings during a brief interlude, and with a grunt of pain, yanked out a lock of his hair, jamming it it into the horse hair of the bow. He continued playing, and the oneiroi howled.

One of the other non-audience members, an older woman, looked around wildly; part of me wonders if she was looking for hidden cameras, like this was some kind of prank show. Our researchers just took notes, some discussing their experiences with each other. Once you experience an unsound or three first-hand, musical aberrations like this cease to really amaze.

Blood continued flowing from my finger, and as I turned the page, my heart sank; we were on the last one, but we had to keep playing to a point at which the oneiroi were satisfied so that they didn’t tear us apart. That happened before-- in 1749.

#

We'll call the man who felt the blade by his eyes Sebastian. After seeing two people faint from fear, he decided to put a stop to the performance, drawing a pistol and aiming it at the performers. “Cease!” he called. “Cease this devilish music at once, or I shall silence you forever!”

Hans and Alfons either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care. Another witness reported at least one of them crying, trying to pull his fingers away.

When Alfons moved to join his hair with the bow, Sebastian loaded and fired his pistol. The bullet hung in the air about three inches in front of the barrel, and was slowly flattened and molded by something. It reportedly glowed red-hot for a moment, before being rolled into a long, needle-like shape, and shoved into his eye.

Sebastian didn’t scream in pain-- he just stood, startled, as lead that was still practically molten metal penetrated his left eye and exited his right. His eyes became clouded by cataracts as he fell unconscious; he would not awaken for the rest of the performance.

That left everyone essentially glued to their seats until the song’s conclusion. Hans and Alfons kept playing like a gun hadn’t just gone off within ten feet of them.

#

We reached the end of Page 7. From there, we had to keep playing to satisfy the oneiroi. Both Matt and I are musicians, but we’d never actively hurt ourselves performing, and this was starting to take a toll. We had some sheet music that we’d managed to adapt for this set-up, something from Beethoven. We could only hope it would suffice. 

The cut on my finger had started to scab over, so I plucked it open again. There’s only one non-community member in the audience by this point, a young woman. She kept trying to look over the shoulders of Institute members to read their notes; one of them invited her into an empty seat, and they began discussing what was happening. We had a new convert, maybe someone to replace us in case shit went fully sideways. 

There was some discordant muttering from the oneiroi. They recognized that we weren’t playing the music that called them forth in the first place, and several of them growled. I kept playing as we transitioned to a more modern piece, something from the 1920s. This seemed to satisfy them.

We renewed the sacrifices every few bars. I had to cut open my finger on the same string, and Matt had to pull out more hair and jam it into the bow while I improvised pizzicato. I felt sick, but there was no applause still, so we couldn’t stop. This was the most difficult performance of a cursed piece I’d ever pulled off.

Twenty minutes turned into twenty-five. Thirty. Forty. I lost count. The group members are looking worried, and a few of them are debating how to safely put a stop to the performance. I just had to keep going until I passed out, or the oneiroi applauded.

#

Hans and Alfons failed to finish their performance.

After two more people collapsed from fright, with Sebastian barely breathing, someone in the audience took the initiative to storm the pit they were playing in. They were a Frenchman named Gernons, and they were directly responsible for the only death that night.

They strode up to the stage, and kicked Hans Koch in the sternum, driving them five feet away from the cello, and interrupting the performance. He began berating Hans in French; what he said is lost to time. But his kick drove Hans directly into a set of invisible arms. First, growling came from around Hans. Then, heat and music filled the room, tones that were both beautiful and incredibly angry.

The heat didn’t ignite Hans. It dried him out, ‘like a tomato’ as one account puts it. He shriveled into a leathery sack (no bones were reported as being seen) before an invisible knife began cutting off a piece of his skin from his back and forming it into a sheet. Blood was splattered onto the page, and musical notes formed on it.

Gernons took the music and fled the room, never to be seen again. All of the candles in the room flickered and died, before spontaneously re-igniting an unknown amount of time later; Alfons was curled up sobbing by the cello, which was completely shattered.

Another casualty resulted from that night; Sebastian, who was completely blind from the cataracts the oneiroi gave him, attempted to get surgery the next year. Said surgeon was a quack doctor, and Sebastian died from complications at age sixty-five.

You may have heard of him; his full name was Johann Sebastian Bach. 

#

Two hours turned into two and a half, then three. I couldn’t feel my fingers. My mouth was a desert. I cried as I tried to stand upright, until my knees buckled, and I fell over, exhausted, tears in my eyes. I once played the violin for six hours, but I didn't have to self-harm every other bar.

There was whispering all around me, and for several minutes, I was sure I was done for. Someone in the group tried to pick up an electromagnet to contain the oneiroi swarming around me, but it would have been a temporary measure; they’ll eventually find me, and I’ll just become another piece of sheet music.

However, Matt managed to finish the performance with a flourish, before he also collapsed. Our eyes met as he landed on the floor and then closed, as we waited for the worst. I muttered for people to evacuate the room, but nobody heard me.

Then, the room broke out into thunderous applause. It’s like I’m in a stadium with the acoustics of a concert hall. My ears rang after three minutes, and it took another five for me to realize that they’ve dispersed. 

That one woman from outside of the research group was a nursing student. After she treated us with some help from one of the Institute's medics, she asked the typical questions (“What the hell was that?” “Who are you people?” “Is anyone going to believe me about this?” “How can I help?”) and the questions are answered in turn (“Long story”, “Concerned parties”, “Probably not”, “You already are.”). We gave her our Telegram link, and we got her on the path to help figure out some of the more bizarre parts of the world of media.

I haven’t played cello since, and even playing guitar is harder, thanks to the scar on my thumb. Like I said, I’m an audio engineer; because of this performance, a lot of the music I make nowadays typically involves a lot of MIDIs in the melodies.

#

The piece of music made from Hans Koch’s skin is called the Bloody Minuet; a short piece, only one page, front and back. I’ve heard that performances of it have occurred as recently as 1995, but it’s fallen off of the face of the earth. Honestly, I’m not even sure if the Bloody Minuet is cursed, or if its just a novelty, with it being printed with human blood and skin. 

I'm one of the Institute's lead music experts, but I don't try to perform classical music anymore. The Black Rondeau was bad enough, but in 2020, I was subjected to one of the Posthumous Symphonies. I recoil at the sight of clarinets almost three years later.

Assuming Tristan's condition improves, he should be back next week. If not, we have plenty of other people who can do essays.