Item: MoonBase 2, bio-memo # 442/section 3.5 Captain Jack Tracker

The dead magician was Ivor Kant. Jerry recognized him from a book he’d recently read on the topic of the Enoch-Mesra tablets and the controversy surrounding their disappearance. Something Kant had said about errors in the transfiguration formula tipped Jerry off.

When Jerry told me this, I became quite concerned. It was bad enough having a dead magician hanging about, but Ivor Kant! It was said that he’d died while trafficking in the souls of children with lower caste demons from a vibrational plane described, by my sources at least, only as other. In some circles, the mortal crime of bringing harm to children was gravely compounded by the fact that Kant had perpetrated the crime with the aid of and, worse yet, for the profit of non-vibrational entities.

Fortunately for Kant, I don’t move in those circles. Fortunate for me, also, to have Kant’s formidable skill and experience at my disposal later, when the situation on Earth deteriorated and we found ourselves at the mercy of cruel fate and even crueler Venusian Brain Bats.

Kant’s efforts during the Brain Bat and other crises, it must be noted, heartened my long cherished belief that even the vilest and most wicked of men are capable of making amends and changing for the better, even after death!

Transcribed by Richard Cody, 2005

Item: San Francisco, CA, 2004

His wife was not what she seemed. After the incident on the bridge, he was sure of that. Now, the many strange occurrences he had so readily attributed to imagination these past four months came back to him in a rush of memory.

He had suspected nothing, really, until the night of the onion dip. The pictures of their honeymoon had been back from the one-hour lab a week or more at the time, he recalled. She was slicing onions in the kitchen when she cried out and sucked with a pained face on her left index finger.

Rushing to her side, he found her sucking the finger. He offered assistance and tender kisses, reaching for the offending digit so that he might see what was wrong and so affect a cure. But she refused, frowning around her injured finger, and ran to the restroom, slamming the door behind her!

He stared after her a moment before his eyes found the curious drops of green splattered upon the floor where she’d stood, and there on the cutting board just the way blood from a lacerated finger might look. But green!? Insanely, he recalled in a flash an old episode of Star Trek in which it is revealed that Mr. Spock’s blood is green. Even more insanely, he found himself wondering if he had married a Vulcan. Ripping a length of paper towel from the roll, he quickly wiped the thick green drops away; realizing only after he had tossed the crumpled towel into the trash, that he had cleaned the strange green splatters with such haste because he was afraid.

Of what, he was only just beginning to figure out when she emerged from the bathroom, the injured digit swathed in clean white bandage. “I cut my finger,” she said, indicating with a nod the serrated knife on the cutting board. She held the injured finger to her breast and appeared, he thought, peevish.

“Oh,” he said, trying not to look at the small green pearl of a drop he had missed with the paper towel.

“Let me finish that onion,” she said, moving into the kitchen and resuming her position at the cutting board. He moved aside and there had not been an easy moment between them since.

This morning on the bridge had taken them beyond deferred eyes and awkward silences. He shivered to think of that kiss, far too moist, and the loathsome touch of that thing in her mouth, glimpsed writhing a moment between her teeth and in the full light of day!

Transcribed by Richard Cody, 2005

Item: Earth 11a

June 14, 2025
Tlokli Expedition
Journal of Robert Wilkington, ASMU

The heat was terrible today and the fleas, blinded by thirst, bounced like tiny erratically fired cannon balls across the dusty caravansary main tent – pinging, zinging and ricocheting from various parts of our bodies, the canvas walls, the dogs, even the very page these words are written upon! Maddening, and needless to say, I am bitten and itching from head to toe.

One redeeming hour in the suffocating heat of mid-afternoon brought us into contact with a passing group of the rarely seen Nhit people. They are a nomadic tribe said to wander the vast and terrible desolation of the great Xeng-Ten valley rift in a perennial migration to and from certain sites where the strange black stones of the rift valley are laid upon the dusty ground in patterns of peculiar geometry.

This group consisted of two men and a woman of middle age, a girl child, and one small, indeterminate figure hunched inside a hood and cloak of some dark and rather pungent leathery material – what we later learned was said to be the hide of the fearsome Xeng-Ten Wild Man. We spoke to them for several minutes, mainly through a shared smattering of the nomad lingo known among the windy crags and bleak desert stretches of this region as “Tribe Talk”.

We queried them regarding their destination and they replied, as best we could make out, that they were going where the day would take them. They seemed friendly enough. But I was not the only one to be disturbed by the furtive gleam deep within the dark caves of their eyes, hidden beneath the heavy, sloping brow ridge present in all of the group with faces visible; most horribly perhaps in the child standing slump shouldered and still in the shadow of her mother. Likewise, each of them moved with a grotesque shuffle that can be described only as simian, long arms swinging from the shoulders as they hunched forward into their path.

Our brief exchange raised many questions, for us at least, and offered intriguing clues about the Nhit culture, not the least of which is the fact that, as we learned with amusement and amazement, they have no word for thwock.

Transcribed by Richard Cody, 2005

Item: One of the 12 Unknown Realms of Aether

They were made of light

and cast no shadow

nor did I in their presence

but I err to speak of myself

as separate from them

in their presence I became

infused by their light

it shone from my mouth

my eyes my flesh

stepped away from my bones

to reveal a skeleton

neither particle nor wave

Transcribed by Richard Cody, 2005

Item: Salem, Mass., 1992

The new owners of The Harmony House had most of the interior walls of the old building removed and replaced as part of a black mold remediation. During this process, a strange skeleton was found in one of the ground floor bedrooms. Disagreement arose immediately regarding the age and gender of the short, thick bones. More than a few credible experts, citing the strange narrow skull, maintained that the bones were not even human. Certainly the sloped and elongated angles of the skull, the swollen knobs of bone, terribly suggestive of horns, at either temple, only gave weight to their arguments.

But if these bones are not human, the majority opinion asked, what are they?



- Transcribed by Richard Cody, 2005 -