200 Phenomena in the City of Glasgow

About This Blog

This blog collects together “Glasgow’s Gideon Keys”, a number of weird areas, artefacts and
personalities in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. The origin of the Keys is unknown, their purpose can only
be speculated at, and their history is obscure, macabre, and often stained in blood.

The Keys

“There are seven words in every Gideon’s Bible – y’know, the ones they stuff in every hotel room – that
can’t be found in any other bible. If you repeat those seven words to yourself while grasping the
doorknob to your room, the door will open to any hotel room in the world. Of course, if you want to
control where you’re going, you’ll need to know the Gideon’s Key – one more inserted word, unique to
each copy, that acts as an index for each room.”

“The Gideon Keys” is the name given to a number of strange objects, locations, people, practises or
other phenomena that make up the occult history of particular regions of the world. The cities of
Calgary, Canada and Glasgow, Scotland, are two cities where acolytes (people with more than casual
knowledge of the Keys) have documented the Keys in that area to some extent (though they exist in
other cities, such as Atlanta and Lagos, if not in every major city in the world) . Calgary’s Gideon Keys –
often considered the first definitive collection of the phenomena – were shared by an individual dubbed
“calganon”, who found a notebook detailing 200 Keys in the city. In deference to this document, named
“200 phonomena in the city of Calgary”, the Gideon Keys of Glasgow are similarly numbered – though it
is unknown if there are only 200 Keys in Calgary, or if only a selection of the city’s numerous Keys was
compiled.

The Index

New Keys will be added irregularly. The Keys are not posted in strict numerical order, but an Index of the
Keys can be found here, which places the Keys in an appropriate sequence.
The Author

I’m a person living in Glasgow, and could liberally be described as an “acolyte” (or “seeker”, if we’re
using the Calgary terminology). I’ve taken the name “glasganon” in respect and reference to “calganon”,
the person who posted the Gideon Keys of Calgary, and I am making it my mission to document 200
phenomena in Glasgow that are related to the Gideon Keys and the city”s occult history. I have a Twitter
account, glasganon, where I make periodic updates about my research into Glasgow’s Gideon Keys.

Please note that I am not personally responsible for anyone breaking the law while exploring the Gideon
Keys: all individuals are to be held accountable and responsible for their own actions. I do not advise
anyone pursue investigation of the Gideon Keys unless they are prepared to take full accountability for
what they do.
001: The Hotel
The Hotel was only ever referred to as “The Hotel” – the reason for this is supposedly that it was the
most lavish, most important hotel in the entire city; however, it’s more likely because a cliqueish cabal
obsessed with the building wanted to give it special airs and reverence. What is true is that each
generation knew the hotel by a different name, as it was renamed and rebranded a handful of times
throughout its life – the supposed reason for that is another story entirely, an unsettling tale of rumours
and legend that drags together many of the eccentricities and anomalies of Glasgow’s bloody history
that people have long believed were just disparate, isolated incidents. That story is plagued by
misinformation and misinterpretation, so for just now, we will focus on The Hotel itself.

The Hotel lay in the heart of the city for over 150 years, and in its heyday, it was a very popular spot –
but time took its toll on the establishment, and in its final years, many felt it had lost most of its glamour
and sparkle. The rooms of the hotel were very reasonably priced considering its location – on one of the
biggest and busiest streets in the city, literally only a few feet from the entrance to the Glasgow
Underground subway system. Its rooms were modestly decorated, its facilities spartan and its food
servicable, and as a result, the hotel came to enjoy a large clientele for short-stay visits.

The Hotel had one particularly special group of repeat clients over its history – the Guides, a handful of
people who may be unkindly (but perhaps not unfairly) labelled a cult. The Guides were initially a
Christian temperance group formed in the late 1800s, who met inside the hotel every few weeks for
social gatherings and talks on the temperance movement – most of the material that documents their
existence comes from newspaper articles kept at the Mitchell Library and the University of Glasgow
Library, though some unsavory suggestions about the Guides’ practices is brought up in
correspondences between the staff of the hotel and the city council offices. Just before the turn of the
century, the group’s structure radically changed – many members stopped attending the gatherings
(with more than a few disappearing altogether), and a rigid hierarchy began to emerge, with one
woman, Anna Napier, as its defacto leader. The Guides had become far more than just a social group,
but exactly what it had become was not documented, as the group no longer welcomed outsiders and
did not advertise or report in the newspapers after 1892.
The Guides did, however, keep records of some of their activities – written inside a single Gideon Bible
that was kept inside a certain room of The Hotel. The Guides made some arrangement with the Hotel’s
proprietors in the last decade of the 1800s to the effect that only they were allowed to use that
particular room, and it is only due to the descendants of those proprietors that we even know of the
continued existence of the Guide’s and their altered Bible. Indeed, many former employees of The Hotel
mentioned that the room continued to see use up until recently, which suggests that the Guides exist in
some form still – it has been suggested that this contemporary group is anything from a Wiccan coven to
a new sect with religious tenets founded on the altered Bible itself. The room that the Guides
supposedly used seems to change depending on who is asked: there is little consensus.

The only information gleaned from the Bible comes from the reports of former employees of The Hotel,
who may have glanced at it while changing the room’s linens. These reports include mentions of the
Drowning Chapel; the Gorbal plague cart; the Galvanic Angel; the false saint; the river under the Bridge
of Sighs; the Lady Love Well; the High Street bone railway; the Panopticon Experiments; and the Milk of
Mary. Many of these particular phrases are corroborated amongst several different people’s accounts,
though what each of them actually are tends to vary wildly, leading to the conclusion that urban legends
and Chinese-whispers have long since atrophied any usable accounts of the full contents of the Guide’s
altered Bible.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to check the Bible for oneself. The Hotel is gone now; ripped down and
smashed to pieces as of June of this year, with new city-center residential developments and a shopping
center being built atop it: rumourmongers are quick to theorise that it is no coincidence that the Hotel
was demolished just as Glasgow’s strange phenomena were gaining more widespread attention. The
whereabouts of the Bible are unknown: even prior to the Hotel’s destruction, members of staff at the
Hotel were unable to definitively locate either the room the Guides used, nor the bible it supposedly
housed. Having checked every Gideon Bible inside the hotel, I can confirm not one contained any of the
Guides’ records.
002: The Panopticon
Built in 1857, the Britannia Panopticon Music Hall is one of Glasgow’s hidden treasures; it was largely
forgotten about since its closure in 1938 until it was brought back into public awareness in the late
1990s. Some of the building is off-limits and in poor condition due to its neglect over the decades, but
campaigns have been undertaken to help restore and revitalize the building, with the occasional film
show or market taking place under its high wooden eaves. The Panopticon has a rich history – and one
that is tangled in the swollen web of the living history of Glasgow’s Gideon Keys.

Over a century ago, the Panopticon hosted the finest entertainment in Glasgow due to its proprietor,
A.E Pickard, continually pushing the bar and finding the best variety of attractions for miles around. The
basement of the building held the “Noah’s Ark” – the zoo – where, under cramped and often dubiously
humane conditions, animals from all around the world could be gawked at by punters. Shows were
performed on the main floor – and this was the place where Stan Laurel of Laurel & Hardy made his
debut. There was a roof-top carnival, a waxworks museum, and even a freakshow that displayed “The
Bearded Lady”, “Leonine, the Lion-Headed Girl”, and “The Human Spider”.

According to some, A. E Pickard wanted to go a step further. In order to keep up with the demand of
entertainment in Glasgow – the first dedicated cinemas had begun to open in the early 1900s – Pickard
apparently began to look further afield for more bizarre and unique exhibits. He found one in the form
of Anna Napier and a small group of hitherto-unknown individuals known as the Guides, who hosted
what was known as “The World’s First Psychic Freakshow”. Not much is known about the show other
than it was a mild success, with the medium – who was referred to only as “The House of Matter” –
managed to “emit forth with abandon some lengths of pallid ‘ectoplasm’, being a soft bundle of fragile
white tissue”, and that the ectoplasm “formulated itself into all manner of bizarre and distressing
personages, such as ‘The Dormance’, ‘The Fleshy Choir‘, and awful, terrible figures referred to only as
‘They’, with which [Anna Napier] had a lengthy correspondence on various Physic matters, of the nature
of the city’s occluded History – much of which … was a spectacular fabrication.”

The entities Anna Napier released, however, did not leave. The only surviving eyewitness account of
“The World’s First Psychic Freakshow” reported that “the denouement was thrilling, as the host
assembled made a show of causing the House of Matter and his attendants to be seemingly devoured by
the ‘ectoplasm’, disappearing from the stage in a violent cacophony of abyssal sounds. Mrs. Napier
thanked those in attendance, assuring them that the House of Matter was in good health but recovering
from the difficult acrobatic procedure demanded of him to appear to vanish so, and guided the group
outside. Nonetheless a fearsome blemish marked the audience’s mood once they had moved out of the
building, with one hysteric woman shrieking absurdities such as seeing the flames of candles in the
Panopticon transforming into quivering piles of smoldering, ectoplasmic flesh, and a film of vibrating
skin seeping down across the windows of the room. The woman was shushed by her companion and
Anna Napier herself.”
Given that Anna Napier’s show only lasted one night – and that certain members of the Guides seemed
to go missing after this period – there may have been more truth to the woman’s claim than the
spectator realized.
005: The Mirror Trick
{A handwritten letter, with the lingering scent of perfume on it. — Ed}

Hello again sweetheart, how are you? I believe its nigh time you and Eilidh got a little more practise, by
yourselves this time. Here’s something that you can do without even leaving your home, and its fairly
safe, no inviting things in or exploring abandoned buildings like you seem to be intent on doing! It can be
harrowing though so make sure you have some liquor handy!

For this you’ll need a candle, a mirror (which you shouldn’t need to close), a dark room and somewhere
comfortable to sit. Position the seat about half a metre in front of the mirror and then place the candle
half a metre behind the seat so that when you turn off the lights and light the candle you should be able
to see yourself in the mirror but not the candle itself. Now just wait and just watch.

The eyes are the windows to the soul but sometimes they can be doors too. If you keep your stare and
don’t look away from the gaze of your mirror image you’ll see your own face begin to change. Its
important you keep looking if you want to seek the truth. Your reflection’s face will deform and become
something else. Bits of skin will change shape and its eyes might disappear completely into blackness.
Your own face with too many rows of teeth in a screaming mouth. Or maybe you’ll see something that
looks like your parents… but They aren’t. They are something else entirely. The thing you have to realise
is that whenever you look into a mirror, behind your reflection’s eyes something else is looking back at
you.

You have to understand They are looking through at us all the time. My friend Dolly who you met last
fortnight at the meeting says that we’ve evolved to see only our reflections because They would take
notice of people who spent too much time looking and hunt them down. Po Face thinks reflections are
like windows or doorways into the city’s dreams and They are its nightmares. I don’t know if I believe
either of them but the fact remains that They are there, They have always been there, and They will
always be there. Sometimes I think They will find us all and there will be no-one left who remembers
They exist.

Trust me honey I don’t want to scare you, I want you to be prepared for what must come. You can’t save
everyone, but you can save everything. By that I mean you can record all of your experiences, write
them down, share them with people, and hope that even if something happens to you, you can still have
something to help the next generation. That’s all the Chain is honey, a chain of association. A link from
one generation to the next. Some day you ought to make a new link in the chain by passing on what you
know on. Remind me to take you along to meet our friend Ms. Christchurch next time you’re at the
meeting okay?
As always if you can’t stay safe stay careful honey. Mwah! x

Lady K.
009: The Ephod
{The main body of an email, which had two photos attached: the photos have since been stitched into
one single image. — Ed.}

from Eilidh Kinnaird eilidh.kinnaird200@gmail.com

to me

date Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 8:59 PM

subject Lead about the Guides

mailed-by gmail.com

signed-by gmail.com

Important mainly because of the people in the conversation.

I’m sorry to hear about Dominic Shaw – I understand you were very close: I know it’s frustrating and
difficult having to fabricate events just so that the police don’t end up deciding that you’re a suspect.
You said you think the Guides are involved somehow, and while I had told you everything I knew about
them when we last met, one of my contacts recently clued me in to something interesting in Glasgow’s
history; I offer it to you now as a gesture of goodwill and as a new lead to explore. When my mum
passed away, my dad buried himself in his work, and it seemed to help him: I hope it helps you, too.
There are two pictures attached which gives the full text of the story, but, to sum it up – in the early
1900s, a man known as an “Onion Johnny” (people who made a living out of selling onions on a door-to-
door basis) delivered onions to a restaurant in the east end of Glasgow; one day, when the restaurant’s
cook cut into one of the onions, she found a ring inside, engraved with the word “ZEBA”. When the
Onion Johnny returned the next week, she showed him it – he screamed, grabbed the ring, threw it
down a drain and hurriedly left the city, weeping. The man was never seen again.

This story is obscure and rather dull – until you look at it in the wider context of the city and its
associated cabals. “ZEBA” – which supposedly means “Manslayer” – is the name of a Midianite King, the
Midianites being a tribe of people from Biblical times who worshipped “false gods”, such as Baal-Beirith
and Asherah. Zeba was slain by a man sent by God on a holy mission to avenge his people and bring an
end to the worship of idols. Now, I know who it is you think I mean, and I’m afraid it’s not Moses – the
answer is far more interesting.

His name was Gideon.

According to Judges 8:24, after completing his mission, Gideon took a number of relics and jewelry from
the Israelites and their foes, melted them down, and had an “Ephod” made out of them. The Ephod
(sometimes associated with a “Teraphim”) was an object that, alongside the “Urim and Thummim”, was
commonly used in some kind of divination practise that modern scholars still haven’t managed to
identify – I’m guessing they’re rings, like the ZEBA ring in the story. In an amusing twist, it turns out that
the Ephod Gideon created led his tribe back into idol worship after he died. God forever sends prophets
to abolish idolatry, only to have them facilitate idolatry all over again.

My purpose in telling you this is that if anyone knew where the ZEBA ring is now – or the Ephod, Urim
and Thummim associated with it -it would be one of those unhinged Key collectors that show up at
Relics on the solstice/equinox. Strike up a conversation with one of them and maybe you’ll find it – or
maybe they’ll throw you in the White Room. It’s dangerous, but danger surrounds the Keys like an aura
to keep people away from them – even people who don’t know the danger for what it is, like Dominic
Shaw.

And please, for the love of the dear green place, stop framing the Keys as mere stories. You’ve dug
yourself into a hole by telling people the shadows at the Borstal and Duke Street were fictional, and now
Dominic is dead, the police are investigating your “unusual microfiction”, and people think you forged
Dominic’s note. It took blood, sweat, tears – and a good bit more blood – to find out what little we know
of the Keys, and a lot of people are angry that you’re belittling the danger they’ve put themselves in by
documenting them with half-truths. You need to start either writing fiction or reporting fact – not half of
one and the other – or else the hole you’ve dug yourself into will be your grave. Consider that a threat if
it will spur you to action sooner.
010: The Face at the Window
{A short passage written on lined A4 paper in blue ballpoint pen. — Ed}

I didn’t even realise it was so widespread in Glasgow. I thought I was the only one it had happened to.
But if, like you say, other people have seen the same thing, I want them to know that they’re not the
only ones.

I was sitting in my living room at about four or five in the afternoon. It wasn’t dark, but there was
something in the air… I kept getting that shiver you get all over your arms and back when there’s
something weird on your mind, you know? Like when you’ve started to scare yourself into thinking that
a stranger’s in your house, or that you’re being watched. I thought it was just cabin fever from being in
the house all day. I got up from the couch, turned towards the kitchen, and caught sight of something at
the window.

Eyes looking in. That’s what I remember. A face up looking at me through my window. It looked like it
was screaming, but there was no sound. I could actually feel my heartbeat all over me like I was hearing
it. I felt my blood in every part of my body, and it hurt. It throbbed. A screaming face at the window,
dead, white eyes focused on mine. Its mouth agape, as though seeing something awful in my eyes. I feel
it screaming through my blood, burning up in my eyes and face.

Then it was gone. I don’t know how. I didn’t see it move. I started to have a panic attack, I wondered if
I’d blacked out and it got inside my house. In a way it was – I couldn’t move about the house without
thinking about it appearing somewhere else. My bedroom window at night, just as I go to close the
curtains. In the shadows of the cupboard. Staring through the hinge of the kitchen door. Through the
peephole of my front door. I freaked out, searched every bit of the house, but I never found it.

It doesn’t matter though – you only need to see it once, and it stays with you. I think I’ve seen it since. I
can’t tell anymore. As soon as I start to see something at the window, I see the white of the eyes, the
dark hole of the screaming mouth. I can’t stop seeing it, even when I close my eyes. It’s everywhere
without being anywhere.

I keep thinking about the face. I don’t even remember a body. I don’t remember what it looks like. I
keep thinking that I might see the face again in the street, the face of a passerby locking eyes with me
and starting that silent scream. Sometimes when I dream, I dream about waking up and seeing it in my
room. In the worst nightmares, it talks to me. It tells me it lives in my neighbour’s houses, it watches me
from their windows, and it starts to tell me things about them. It tells me things I couldn’t ever know.
Little secrets, little stories, little facts they wouldn’t tell anyone. And then they always turn out to be
right. What is that? What does that even mean?
What if there are more, and all my neighbours have seen it? What if we all know each other’s secrets,
but we’re too scared to say anything?

Tell everyone who’s seen it that I know what they’re going through. I can’t help. I can’t even help myself.
But I know.
012: The Accordion Song
Those who make regular visits to the city center will, at one time or another, come across the Accordion
Women – middle-aged or elderly women wrapped up, regardless of the weather, in conservative
clothing and busking with a large accordion either in Buchanan Street or Sauchiehall Street. Despite the
fact that they are recognisable figures to most of the city’s residents, very few people claim to know
anything about them: opinions vary from them being recent Polish immigrants to members of an age-
old network of families whose traditions are finding their way into the streets of Glasgow. Only a
handful of people know the truth.

There is one piece of music that the Accordion Women play that is of particular note, not because of its
musical worth (although certain maestros with an ear for ancient Slavic compositions would disagree)
but because of its unusual properties. The song is not very harmonious – most who hear it being played
simply attribute poor skill to the musician – but, like a particularly figurative poem, or a complex
painting, one must actually study the intricacies of the song for the melody to be appreciated. It only
sounds discordant if you don’t stop to listen – so, the next time you hear a particularly abrasive or
lackluster song being played by the Accordion Women, stop. Listen.

The song is intricate, dense, and cryptic; for all that it seems to be the same twenty seconds of a tune
played over and over, there are harmonic variations within each canon that suggest subtle skill on the
part of the musician. Each of the accordion’s breaths wavers and frays in distinctive ways that calls to
mind the breathlessness of a life-or-death chase, the sheer explosive agony of air bursting back and
forth between quaking lungs. Every note is like the manic pulse of a rapidly-beating heart on its way to a
final, shuddering end. It is normal, once the song is over, to feel out-of-breath, agitated, and the feeling
of something dim and distant tickling your engaged paranoia. Leave some money for the Accordion
Women, and do not be miserly – they have performed a great service to you, and should be
compensated for their sacrifice.

If you can memorise the complex song, with all its variations and flourishes, you are blessed. Whistling
or humming the song is said to repel a number of bizarre shadows that stalk those who stare into the
abyss of the world’s darker corners – the Accordion Women play this song in the busiest parts of
Glasgow in the hopes that at least some will find protection in its discordant notes.
014: The Catalogue
There’s an unusual catalogue being delivered throughout the city that’s very easy to miss – but with the
offers inside, it’s well worth a look.

The catalogue requires a subscription to be delivered, but without having actually seen a copy of the
book, it’s impossible to get the details required to make a subscription – the people who compile the
catalogue (listed only as “G & J Distribution”, apparently also the title of the catalogue) have arranged its
circulation such that only those “in the know” about the catalogue’s odd contents can pass the details
along to like-minded associates. However, the catalogue can sometimes be found on the doorsteps of
acolytes and people involved in the occult, “accidentally” left on subway trains in the morning, in the
magazine rack at a certain dentist’s office in the East End, or, very occasionally, at one of the desks in the
Mitchell Library. The details for subscription are found inside the front cover – they are not reproduced
here as per a previous agreement with G & J Distribution.

The catalogue is usually around fifty pages thick, printed in black and white on flimsy off-white paper,
with the occasional grainy, low-quality photograph, rather like a poorly-made version of the telephone
directory; most of its contents are described in a sparse, economic way that does not immediately make
obvious the true nature of what is on offer. However, for those of discerning or unusual tastes and
interests, the catalogue lists a smorgasbord of items and services in the city of Glasgow to peruse and
purchase. The catalogue has a section for furniture and personal effects of the deceased – disguised,
innocuously, as a “previously owned” section – where the lucky buyer may snatch themselves up a
genuinely-haunted mirror or cursed engagement ring. The “marketplace” occasionally lists dubious
bargains such as vials of Milk of Mary, bundles of hair clippings with names of acolytes attached,
videotapes of unnameable rites, bottles of ritually-prepared water and the rarely-seen Glascau Tarot.
The “personals” section contains a number of acolytes at various stages of cognizance looking for
companionship, collaboration or Keys (and, recently, listed an ad for people to assist in the “reclamation
of a certain book” which resulted in the first and only robbery ever successfully committed at the Hidden
Exhibition). The services page has a number of permanent advertisements by people and small
businesses (like a listing for the Voice of Other Glasgows radio station and a number of pirate television
stations) as well as the occasional listing of various unusual services, for example the Guided Tour of the
Gideon Keys of Glasgow, or the Search for Remains Foundation, which invariably are listed once before
never appearing again. Alongside every service or product in the catalogue is a set of numbers that you
can call to arrange orders and get additional information.

It is crucial that the acolyte only purchase or place something from the catalogue if they are in great
need – if you call to do business, they will ask for your home address, and irrespective of what address
you may give them, G & J Distribution will always, always know exactly where you live.
022: The Video File
The Department of Psychology at the University of
Glasgow has an interesting mpeg video file on
their server that was used up until 2009 as part of
a presentation to second-year psychology students
for two tutorials on cognitive bias and visual
perception.

The video was shot by a group of four fourth-year

students at the university, and was intended to
chronicle a five-day period in which they all lived
on the streets of Glasgow without provisions,
money or modern conveniences, as part of a thesis
on the Maslow hierarchy and how it corresponds
to psychogenic needs. The video has been cropped
and edited heavily – first by the students for their thesis, then by the module leaders for use in the
cognitive bias tutorials.

The video file – named “02.01.2005_parei_exped.mpeg” – opens with an introduction to Surinder,

Stacy, Rashima and Natalie, who give a brief outline of what they intend to study by sleeping on the
Glasgow streets for a week. The next ten minutes documents the group trying to find a place amongst
the twilit central streets in which to set up their sleeping bags as the sky begins to darken. Spirits are
high, but it’s obvious that much of the cheer and messing around is done to keep the feeling of the
January chill away – Surinder continually makes light of the camera attempting to use its facial-focus
technology to focus in on each of the group and failing. Once the group find an acceptable place – up a
side-street just off of Argyle Street, in between a tall apartment building and the entrance to a walled
yard filled half with rampant weeds and half with trash, broken glass, and gravel. The group keep the
tape running for ten more minutes, with Surinder manning the camera, as they lie in their sleeping bags
and discuss what they expect the next day will bring – the biting cold in the air easily felt in the quiver of
their voices – before they bunker down and try to sleep.

The tape’s next five minutes shows the group discussing how they slept – and in Rashima’s case, it was
badly; she reports waking several times through the night and thinking that she saw figures standing out
amongst the shadows of the tall weeds in the gravelled yard adjacent to the group’s “camp”.
The footage cuts to the evening, where three of the group are bunched together, talking about an
encounter with the police that must have happened off-camera, before Rashima’s voice cuts through
the air as she waves maniacally at the group from inside the yard. The camera cuts to the group’s feet as
they stand around an open, uncovered drain hole in the ground, around three feet wide, with a
rudimentary set of iron bars pushed into the wall to act as a functional ladder. Rashima insists she saw a
figure standing in the same location the night before. The group seem to entertain her story rather than
dismiss it instantly, and, as the camera continually flickers its focus while facing the impenetrable
darkness only a few feet down from the mouth of the open drain, the team agrees that everyone will
sleep in shifts in case there is someone nearby that may pose danger to the group. The camera pans
back to the area of the yard where the open drain sits as the group head back to their camp; for all that
those few seconds are shot with no focusing problems, there is still something stark and eerie about the
scene, almost as though there was something there that, when the viewer sees it, would immediately
“unlock” it.

Once again, the camera cuts to late night – it is difficult to see well due to the inadequate lighting from
nearby streets and from the camera’s continual auto-focusing. Stacy is sound asleep, Rashima is sitting
up in her sleeping bag, and Natalie is standing up next to the six-feet-high metal fence around the yard,
apparently shouting over towards a dark corner at the far side of the yard. “Isn’t that where the drain
is?” Surinder asks from behind the camera – no-one answers, but Rashima turns to face Surinder with an
expression of equal parts contempt and fear. The camera alternately focuses on Natalie and the corner
of the yard where Natalie has focused her attention.

The footage jumps to the next morning, with Surinder and Natalie looking at the hole again; Surinder
takes a bottle lying nearby and drops it into the hole to gauge its depth, but no sound answers his query.
Stacy soon joins the group, insisting that the footage is detracting from what they were there to
investigate, and that they are being unprofessional and unscientific in passively encouraging Rashima to
be frightened.

The final twenty minutes of the footage takes place at night; the entire group is awake and talking (or
bickering) animatedly. The camera pulls up as Surinder stands and takes it to the edge of the yard, then
jams his arm through a hole in the fence to get the camera as far in as possible. For three seconds, there
is silence that accompanies the shot of an indistinct, but vaguely humanoid figure in the shadows of the
yard – a muffled sound, like the crunch of gravel muffled by a cloth-shod foot, chokes the silence – and
the whole scene erupts: Rashima screams, Natalie shouts something to an unknown person, Stacy
begins to moan as if in pain, and Surinder yelps and drops the camera.
The last few seconds are footage of the camera spinning, hitting the ground, and staring out into
darkness. The frames immediately following the camera’s crash to the gravelled ground have been
slowed down either due to the damage or to postprocessing; the facial-focus flickers once, towards the
interminable blackness before it, and the sharp contours of a vaguely-human face emerge from the
shadows of the darkened yard. The camera catches only the pinprick eyes and ragged grin of the face
before it falls out of focus and turns off completely.
024: The New Build
There is a building in the city center that has been under construction for at least the past four decades.
It’s not hidden, it’s not disguised – it’s just taken for granted. However, no workers are ever seen on the
site, aside from those who visit the building once a fortnight to check for signs of vandalism. When
someone looks at the New Build and realises that work on it has never moved on, a set of interesting
properties of the New Build make themselves known.

Once such property is the absence of an interior. Trying to enter the half-constructed rooms or climbing
down into the structure reveals that, though it should be possible to get inside the half-a-dozen solid,
sheltered rooms, the acolyte will always be standing outside, no matter how they try to get in. Bizarrely,
thrown objects are immune to this rule – one could easily toss sensitive documents, old personal effects
or things that might be used as evidence in undesired police investigations into the unapproachable
rooms and be assured that it would not be discovered… more or less. It is simply impossible for living
creatures to enter the rooms; they either find the passage impossible, or find themselves in a different
building entirely.

This is down to the New Build’s second interesting property; by looking through the scaffolding of the
building at different angles, different buildings are quite clearly visible. This is not down to the building
being a mash-up of various architectural styles – although several are employed to disguise this bizarre
quirk. In fact, the geometry of the scaffolds actually allow for passage from the New Build to specific
other sets of scaffolding in construction sites around the city. There is no guarantee of safety, however –
running along the wooden planks on the second storey of the New Build may cause you to shift to the
seventh storey of an unfinished building in Queen’s Park – but this may prove vital if you need to make a
hasty retreat from the city center. These “spatial shortcuts” do not always remain constant, and can
switch even as someone is passing through them, leading to our third interesting property; the
inhabitants of the New Build.

The Inhabitants are those people unfortunate enough to have been crossing between the New Build and
another place when the shortcut they were on suddenly changed. Because of the unusual geometric
effects of such a change, most inhabitants simply resemble fleshy canvases spread across frames of
metal scaffolds, human forms punctured by bursts of broken brick and wood, heads bisecting corrugated
iron with steel-wire nerves. The Inhabitants reside in the unapproachable center of the New Build,
making themselves the custodians of all the unwanted objects that are tossed inside. They know our
deepest, darkest secrets, all the things we want to hide, and they collect them when they fall into the
New Build, stashing them away in some unseen room. Those that have secrets so dark they must be
hidden here must pray the Inhabitants are never released from the unapproachable room.
036: The Earthen Womb
On December 8th, 2011, Scotland was hit by strong winds that, thanks to the zeal of Scotland’s
population, was unofficially termed “Hurricane Bawbag.” Transport around the country halted,
businesses closed for the day, buildings were torn up and electrical power was disrupted. The storm also
uncovered a “room”, buried several feet under the surface of a garden in Anniesland, which the
garden’s owner never realised was ever there.

Despite having no entrances whatsoever, the room bore signs of recent habitation.

The room was an almost-perfect hemispherical shape, dug into the soil by unknown hands. The floor
was somewhat smoothed, and in several places, shapes reminescent of footprints can be seen – as well
as patches of earth darkened by the spilled blood of a housecat, whose remains were found near the
middle of the room, freshly-killed. On first glance,the room appears to have hundreds of tender roots
reaching in through the dirt wall – on closer inspection, these roots are seen to be small, fleshy tendrils.
The tendrils themselves seem stiff but flexible, and could be manipulated like a human finger. One
particular set of tendrils, however, lay slack and lifeless against the wall of the room – when they were
tugged at, a clod of earth collapsed out of the wall, revealing a dessicated crumple of withered flesh.
Comparisons were instantly drawn with a human placenta.

The owner of the property, before moving out and putting the house on the market, mentioned that her
garden always seemed to have more birds in it than the neighbours’ – and once saw a bird instantly
disappear before her eyes in the garden, but rationalised and dismissed it. She also actively prevented
her son playing in the garden, as he had told his mother on several occasions that someone in the
garden had grabbed him while he was playing; his mother came to believe there was a pedophile in the
neighbourhood.

The hidden room was filled in with soil after its owner decided to move house. In the two weeks that
followed the aftermath of the storm, many homeowners in the area reported that the grass and soil in
the gardens had been partially dug-up.
038: The Coins
{Found on a now-defunct forum — Ed.}

Edit 3-03-2011 by Eilidh Kinnaird

Look what I found on the MSE site – looks like these people are talking about Touch Pieces, a practise
that has long since died out. Only, these Touch Pieces look like they were crafted for James Stuart:
maybe the reason the tradition stopped is because every monarch after James didn’t have a legitimate
claim to the throne. James Stuart must have surviving descendants through the paternal line living in
Scotland in order to activate the coins – look for doctors, nurses and faith healers – if you get no results,
try something more conceptual, like psychiatrists, tree surgeons, care workers, addiction counselors, or
hospice workers. The coins need a monarch to function, and there’s a true king living somewhere in
Glasgow.

lauriestone 11-12-2009, 10:46 AM

Member

Joined: 09-03-2009

Posts: 439

Quote (by elderpark_perkyelder):

My mum’s from the east end of Glasgow too, and she said that her mum had a catch-all cure for the an
upset stomach. Just pour a glass of coke, then drop a penny into it. The penny turns it flat, and it’ll help
to settle your stomach acid. My mum had a special penny given to her by my grandmother that she used
for the cure, a wee copper one that was slightly bigger than a one pence coin, and had “III” and “VIII” on
one side, and the face of some king or prince on the other. I’ve tried it with normal pennies, but it
doesn’t seem to work half as well as that special coin my mum had. I’ve asked her if she still had it, but
she must of lost it before she moved to Govan.

oh, my parents had a coin just like that as well ! it had the same markings on it and i remember my dad
told em the face was an old scottish king :confused: 🙂

anyway if you need more tips, try adding baking soda to a glass of water, or making a cup of tea with
honey or chamomile ! good luck ! 🙂
040: The Radio Station
There is a special radio station transmitting in the Glasgow region that delivers unusual “weather”
reports. It is relatively unknown due to its limited coverage area (it’s difficult to pick up transmissions
north of the River Clyde – some have speculated that the station transmits from somewhere in Govan),
and the fact that either people unknowingly cite the wrong frequencies to tune into the station, or else
the frequencies change over time – most suggest the station transmits at 99.3MHz, but some have
claimed to have success picking up the station at 106.3 and 90.1 on certain broadcasts.

The radio station is manned by Gordon Hamilton, also known as “Gordo” or “The Voice of Other
Glasgows”: he’s an amiable, well-spoken and intelligent host, someone who you would appreciate
having a pint down the local with. He transmits at 2 a.m almost every morning – if he misses a
broadcast, a horrific and unsettling excuse is usually given the following morning. His show tends to last
between one and two hours, depending on how much material he has to cover. The show consists of a
“weather” report and news in and around Glasgow, and sometimes, during times of great strife or
unusual events in the city, Gordo allows listeners to call in on-air, providing a (presumably temporary or
disposable) phone number to call.

The “weather” report includes facts on mundane weather patterns, temperatures and the like
throughout Glasgow for the following few days – however, his report also includes a number of
phenomena not typically reported in weather updates. He gives information on where and when the
next Roar will be heard, umbric cover warnings for the days when the shadows of the city grow more
dark and abyssal, locations of potential “splinters” occuring throughout the city where hauntings may be
manifest, prominent dates or hours for cyclical monthly or yearly phenomena, the overall thanatotic
stress of the surrounding regions, estimated from how many have died in the city over the past few
days, and, on certain abysmal, rainy days, delivered between sobs, prayers, and pleas for people to find
a safe place to hide – he reports that They have made appearances within the city limits. The latter
reports tend to last only a few minutes before the broadcast disappears in a burst of static and the
station goes off-air for a number of days.

His news reports tend also to include matters that only a small number of Glasgow’s residents would be
interested in or made aware of; for example, his most recent broadcasts covered the robbery at the
Hidden Exhibition, warnings sent out to people named in police radio broadcasts as being persons of
interest in suspicious cases, the reappearance of the brass candle, and the evisceration of John-Paul
McGuigan, which went entirely unreported by the Strathclyde Police.
For all that Gordo’s broadcasts are almost daily, nobody seems to have identified exactly where The
Voice of Other Glasgows is transmitted from – hearsay claims that it is located in Govan, but there is
little to no reason as to why this is, other than the signal for the station being clearer south of the River
Clyde; nor has anyone come forward to claim that they’ve met Gordo. Some have suggested, in
accordance with the station’s name and Gordo’s nickname, that Gordo doesn’t live in Glasgow at all —
not in this version of Glasgow, anyway.
041: The Roar
{A transcript from a radio broadcast. — Ed.}

Gordon “Gordo” Hamilton: Alright then, we’ve got another caller on the line… This is, eh… this is Michael
Harris from Scotstoun. How you doing, Michael?

Michael Harris: I’m doing fine, Gordo, how’s yourself?

GH: Good, good – quiet night, no rain {laughing}.

MH: That’s good to hear.

GH: Eh, so, we’ve had people calling in to give us their, eh.. their stories, about the Roar last Saturday
night. What’ve you got for us then, Michael?

MH: Well, right… I was down in Govan that night round at my mates’ house after the Old Firm match.
Now, at the front of the house there’s a court that all the flats around about there use, and a bunch of
us were out letting off fireworks –

GH: Ah, you’re a Hoops fan then Mike?

MH: Aye, I am, yeah… So, we were letting off a tonne of fireworks out in the communal court for a good
ten minutes, and after they all went up, our ears were absolutely ringing. But then, just as it had gotten
quiet, there was this massive sound all around us – like something fucking huge just screaming in a
metal voice. I’ll tell you what, Gordo: I used to work in the shipbuilding industry, and one of the ships I
was working on once had a leak, and the whole thing went up.

GH: It exploded?
MH: Aye, it did, with me inside it even. I didn’t even really hear the explosion so much as feel it, because
it rocked the whole ship and threw me on my feet – but the sound of the metal supports straining under
the weight, groaning and grinding as whole chunks of the ship twisted and collapsed inwards like hungry
metal mouths trying to chew up everyone on board – I remember hearing that gnashing metal, and that
was exactly the noise of the sound we heard last Saturday – like something huge and metallic grinding
and twisting up in the sky.

GH: Christ, that sounds horrible. How did you and your mates react?

MH: Some of us had bleeding ears after hearing it, and my wife was having a fit, shouting and screaming
about rusted lungs. We calmed down after a bit, and most of us agreed that we probably had busted
eardrums from the match and the fireworks. So that settled us a little at the time – except the next day,
one of my mates who’d left early and wasn’t at the football match said he had heard something too, but
some of the neighbours heard the fireworks but didn’t hear the sound in the sky at all.

GH: That happens more often than you’d think, Mike. It’s like you can’t hear it when you’re indoors.

MH: What is it, Gordo?

GH: That’s just the thing, Mike – nobody knows. Every so often we get a phonecall here at the station
warning us about it, then you hear a roar somewhere up in the clouds, the wind speeds crank up, all
radios in a mile radius blare what can only be described as screams in static, a handful of people go
missing – and nobody can tell us what the fuck is going on.

MH: {Whispering} Jesus Christ.

GH: Thanks for your time, Mike. Stay safe out there.
043: The Missing Girl
There is an ongoing rescue mission to find a girl that nobody remembers, with sparse information as to
what she looks like, where she comes from, and who she is.

Legend has it that the first persistent record of the Missing Girl was found inside a Bible that had been
annotated with various miscellaneous references to the city of Glasgow – a Bible said to be held by the
Guides, a shadowy cabal tied into the living myth of Glasgow’s Gideon Keys. In that Bible, she was
named “St. Ella”: she would appear during the colder months in the Blacader Aisle of the Glasgow
Cathedral, praying to St. Mungo to stop monsters from taking her back at midnight. When the Cathedral
closed for the night, she would be forced to leave – and by twelve o’clock, all trace of her disappeared
from the city.

But people do not just disappear. Similarly, people do not just appear; St. Ella had to have been
someone before appearing in folklore. St. Ella has a number of relics that hint at her existence, spread
throughout the city, but only on certain days of the year, which are apparently impossible to tell. On
these days, in a certain dental practise in the East End, her name reappears on the patient database. Her
bus pass occasionally remanifests in the hands of the last person to hold it for just under 24 hours. A
calendar from 2002 gains a blue circle around January 24th. But these relics lose their ties with St. Ella as
soon as their allotted 24 hours are up – information on her is impermanent.

This is perhaps due to the strangest miracle associated with St. Ella: the fact that, unless the acolyte is
aware that she only remanifests on certain days, they will forget ever hearing about her, or ever
knowing her. Which means, for knowledge of St. Ella’s predicament to have manifested in the first place,
someone, somewhere in Glasgow, knows what happened to this little girl in the first place – and yet,
they remain silent.
045: The Waterlogged Coffin (or, The Unmarked Grave)
There is a strange tradition that was passed on in the pubs on Paisley Road West, specifically in the
Cardonald area. This tradition was only ever discussed in those wee hours of the morning, when the
shadows outside the hazy, rain-lashed windows seemed too dense and too dark to ever allow safe travel
back home, when half-lidded, drunken conversation began to drift towards the strange and the
supernatural. Supposedly, the tradition began in Buchanan’s bar earlier in the century, then passed on
to Howden’s Bar, then Parkway. It seems as though the tradition has died out – but the acolyte may be
able to resurrect it.

On the first rainy night after the new moon, in any of the aforementioned bars when the bar staff call for
last orders, the acolyte could order a “Waterlogged Coffin” (although in Howden’s Bar, it was referred to
as an “Unmarked Grave”). The bartender would then serve the acolyte a cocktail – a dirty-brown
mixture with a number of white lumps floating in it – and underneath the glass would be a scrap of
paper. The acolyte would drink the cocktail and leave, headed for the Craigton Cemetery just across the
street. The scrap of paper would indicate a grave, and this grave would have a particular significance on
that night.

Unfortunately, the bars on Paisley Road West have since closed down or discontinued serving
“Waterlogged Coffins”, so nowadays the acolyte must perform their own due diligence. On rainy nights,
one grave in the cemetery will be marked with a small glass bottle, sitting atop the headstone and
collecting rainwater: the grave will always be dedicated to a soldier who was killed in the First World
War – but their headstone will be completely blank – and it is not necessarily a different grave every
rainy night, though it is unheard of for the same grave to be indicated within the same three-hundred
and thirty-three days. The bottle of rainwater will be important later – do not empty it out.

Dig up the grave where the bottle is situated, and do your absolute utmost to ignore the objects that
may appear in the grave as you dig. Your paranoia is likely to increase as you dig, from hearing phantom
voices inamongst the torrent of rain and the froth of splashing water to the odd vibrations deep under
your feet, so even when you unearth a lost childhood toy with broken bones sticking out of it, even
when you dig up a familiar photograph of your younger self seemingly suffering from harlequin
ichthyosis, you must cast these aside. Only when your shovel hits the wood of the coffin six feet down
can you focus your attention.

Smash open the coffin’s lid – it is easier than trying to move enough dirt to open it – and stick your arm
into the hole. Your fingers will clasp around a cold, hard object, which, when you pull it out, will reveal
itself to be a small rusted metal box that rattles as you move it.
Inside the box is a selection of teeth, of various sizes and stages of decay, containing exactly eight
incisors, eight premolars, four canines, and twelve molars. If you wash these teeth using the water from
inside the bottle atop the grave, the teeth can be used as a method of divination to gain answers to any
question when they are thrown on the ground of the city of Glasgow. It is pivotal, however, to replace a
tooth as soon as it breaks – otherwise, the teeth will no longer read the future – they will only read you.
049: The Watchtower
Go to any subway station south of the River Clyde, and ask for a single to Merkland Street; you’ll likely
be told that Merkland Street has now become Partick, but reply “I like to keep one foot in the past, one
in the future.” They should make some motion to show they’ve understood you – if not, or they ask you
to repeat yourself, walk out of the station and rip the ticket up – it’s of no use to you.

If you manage to get the ticket, get on the Outer Circle line, and board the next train that arrives. Figure
how many stops you have to wait before getting to Partick – for example, it’s one from Govan, seven
from Bridge Street – and the second you sit down, close your eyes. Keep them tightly shut and count
down the stops, and when you get to Partick, stand up and walk through the doors with your eyes shut.
Open them once your feet touch the platform.

You’ll find yourself at the topmost point of the Watchtower: a colossal, concrete monolith that rises up
from a valley, with a view that spans miles. The wilderness around the Watchtower seems to indicate
the city’s current health: in almost all cases, the valley is as empty as it is dry and barren, but now and
again, new things appear. A black, charred horse-and-cart that rides through the blasted valley, leaving a
trail of dark soot and rot behind it. A sickening yellow shape that resembles an enormous cloud in the
sky, until it gets closer and you realise it’s a creature of impossible dimensions, roaring through the
deserted plains. A confluence of misshapen figures, congregating around the base of the Watchtower,
looking up at you with their blurred, thrashing faces as the rain of annunciation falls from the heavens.

It is important to take note of as much of the wilderness around the Watchtower as you can, as quickly
as you can – you will wake up inside the train you thought you had left as soon as it reaches Partick
again.
050: The Rippling Eyes
If you are walking through the western part of the city center on a day where it is raining, you may catch
sight of a figure standing in the center of a small alley, locked in between two tenement blocks. It’s hard
to see him in the rain, but the distinguishing traits are easy to make out – black suit, white shirt, no
umbrella. There is something wrong with his head: the murky, light-brown flesh seems to ripple and
quake with the rain, like the dark surface of a pool disturbed by splashes of water, throwing bizarre
shapes and stranger waves across his features that endlessly reflect his surroundings.

Stand at the threshold between the road you are on and the lane, and listen. The man will speak slowly,
in a series of distorted voices that fade in and out of one another, like several children shouting
underwater. The man speaks one verse of an unknown, unknowable poem that trembles and quivers in
your ears, like the crashing waves of a radio signal being transmitted through water. When he finishes,
he performs a small gesture – clasping his hands together like in prayer – before he trickles away,
disappearing from sight as rain lashes across in your eyes.

From that moment on, whenever you stare into the surface of any body of water, you will see the
reflection of another Glasgow, with perpetually twilit streets swept by rain from bruise-purple
thunderclouds, tenements dominating the murderous skyline with windows filled with flickering
candlelight. This city is our cosmic mirror image, and, as a reflection of us, our life, and our city, the
image of the other Glasgow can act as a barometer for the supernatural activity in Glasgow.

But when They fill the rainswept streets, staring out through the darkening water surface with their
pallid, empty eyes, wearing the faces of your mother and father, you must find shelter; you will find that
the water surfaces can be more than just windows – they can be doors to those who seek to come
through and take your transcendant eyes.
054: The Music Store
The HMV store on Buchanan Street is a great place to shop. It’s wide and spacious, chock-full of the
latest CD and DVD released, and even has a dedicated lounge at the top of the stairs for LAN gaming.

The only thing is, the store is far more spacious than people realise. There’s a number of rooms that still
exist inside the store, despite having been demolished. They’re difficult to detect unless you know what
you’re looking for: patches of sunlight and shadow that aren’t being cast by any of the windows in the
store. You see, even though these rooms don’t exist anymore, they still cast light in a similar way as they
did before: windows in these phantom rooms will be dimly visible just a few inches away from the glass
panes of the store, areas that should be brightly lit will instead be cloaked in shadow from a nonexistant
wall, and candlelight without any source reflects off of the television screens on the upper floor. The
effect is more detectable during the night, but of course, very few people are in or around the store
during the night.

Most disconcerting is when light in the real world seems to flicker as the room’s occupants move
around, temporarily casting shadows in the store.
061: The Lab
There is a building in Possilpark that often goes unnoticed by everyone who passes it by; it’s tucked
away at the end of a street of industrial buildings that continually pump clouds of chemical gases into
the air – which is fortunate for the people that work in the hidden-away building, as it helps mask the
odour of the things that they are producing through clandestine chemistry. If you have a particular need
for substances that are harder or more innovative than the heroin that is rife throughout Glasgow, you
need to visit the building at the end of the row on a Sunday, either between four and five in the
morning, or eleven and twelve at night. If you knock on the door and hand over a full bottle or packet of
any prescription medicine when requested, you’ll be led into the lab.

The lab is operated by three people. A woman named Rachel Marshall handles all the business
enquiries, and it is she that allows you into the lab when you arrive – she’s playful but assertive in asking
for your details, straight-talking but eloquent in describing her business, and powerful but relaxed in her
neatly-pressed blouse and skirt. If it’s your first time there, she’ll give you a brief tour around the large,
single room that she and her team work in. The low stone ceiling makes the place seem quite cramped,
but the use of partitions to cordon off certain areas does do wonders to give each section of the room its
own unique personality. Rachel provides introductions to the other two members of her team: Mark
Lawson, a man in his forties with an unusual taste in anabolics, and Harpreet Singh, a twenty-two year
old Religious Studies student. They do most of the cooking and manufacturing in their own corners of
the lab.

Mark – a bald man with bulky, unnatural muscles interwoven with ridges of veins – spends most of his
time at a desk cluttered with racks of hypodermic needles. If you are present during the morning, you
may find him gripping one of the filled needles in between quivering fingers, pressing it in only a few
inches of flesh above his nipple, and plunging a thin, milky liquid into his chest. Occasionally, lashes of
blood squirt across the floor of the dingy building – a failure to aspirate with the needle – but otherwise,
his experiments seem to progress quietly. At night, he is seen taking empty needles and drawing
another, darker liquid from his pectorals. If asked, he will explain that during his wife’s pregnancy and
his child’s birth, he experienced some of the biological and emotional processes that his wife was
undergoing – a medical anomaly known as Couvade syndrome – and he is attempting to metabolize a
formula in his own body that replicates the hormonal glow he experienced, using a strange milk taken
from an undying, unseeding plant locked away in a museum somewhere in the city.

Harpreet – a young woman in a lab-coat, with her hair tied back in a net – works at a number of small
tables with neatly organised equipment and paraphenalia lined up along the sides. She is most often
seen experimenting with an off-white powder – sometimes using the flame from a brass candle-shaped
object to heat it up inside a foil cradle. Apparently she is synthesizing a new form of heroin that allows
the user to see hidden pathways, roads that never existed, and imaginary anti-spaces in the mesh of city
streets.
After the tour and introductions, Rachel will take you to her office near the front of the lab, and ask
what it is you’re looking for. It is best to turn down the offers of meta-amphetamine, a drug that
accelerates and intensifies the effects of almost all other chemicals, or Code, an Oxycodene variant that
allows the user to see the messages written on the walls of the ancient city. No, the piece de resistance
of Rachel Marshall’s lab is “Gideon’s Key” – brittle brown crystals packaged inside pages from a Bible,
which, when ingested, will cause the user to experience a heavily altered state of consciousness that
they will summarily never remember – but when they awake, they will find themselves in the
approximate location of the most recent thing they wanted to find, provided it is still within the region
of Glasgow.

Rachel will never tell you the price of the drug, nor will she demand anything from you as she hands
over the neatly-folded square of Bible pages. In fact, she seems to suggest that the price is always paid
during the amnesiac trip after taking Gideon’s Key – what it is is anyone’s guess, but given that the lab
always seems to get a lot more equipment, stock and resources immediately after someone takes away
Gideon’s Key, it would seem that it’s what keeps Rachel Marshall in business.
063: The Water Tower
It is often suggested that the elemental attribution of the city of Glasgow is “Water”. Geomantic
practises that operate on the scale of the central belt of the country declare that, with its birth on the
Molendinar Burn and subsequent growth over the River Clyde, Glasgow, in the West, represents Water.
Airy Edinburgh, with its elevation and lofty castle atop the mountain lies in the East; Fiery Carluke with
its coal mines lies in the South; Scottish Geomancers bicker over whether North is represented by
Stirling (The Gateway to the Highlands), Aberdeen (The Granite City) or Falkirk (The Speckled Church).
Much of Glasgow’s mysteries seem to grow out of the water. Glasgow itself has yet more esoteric
associations which further develop its strange connection to water – its nine major water towers are
often said to be symbolic of the planets, and the tower at Cranhill represents watery Neptune, which in
astrological terms governs the mind, mystery, dreams, illusion, deception, the occult, isolation, and
visionary experiences – in a sense, it is the planet most strongly associated with acolytes.

The Cranhill water tower looks bizarre – when it is lit up at night by the eerie colours from the lamps
placed around it, the cuboidal tank with cylindrical legs suggest a colossal, cosmic fountain-temple,
spilling over with sacred water. For many, gazing upon it its otherworldy appearance sometimes dregs
up memories of something seen within their dreams, and they will readily attest to the feeling of some
deep secret locked away inside.

To unlock this mystery, the acolyte must go to the tower at night – an act itself fraught with danger,
since many unsavory types are attracted to the eerie allure of the tower – and fall asleep underneath it,
at the feet of one of the harpy-like wireframe sculptures that stand as guardians around it. The tower
acts as a kind of “sleep temple” common to Egyptian or Greek cultures, allowing the acolyte to gain
insight in their dreams – and certainly, once asleep, the acolyte will dream. It is important to keep in
mind that, should the dream become lucid at any point, the acolyte must “tell” their subconscious to
allow them to talk to “The Man in the Tower”.

The acolyte will cut through their dream and find themselves in a tight, constricted room of complete
and total darkness. Walking a few paces in any direction reveals metal walls, but no exits; the only other
sensations are the sound of great, heaving breaths from an unknown source, and the trickle of water. A
voice will penetrate the darkness, in between the heavy inhalations – somewhere in the room, beyond
sight and touch, is a person who introduces themselves as “The Man in the Tower”.

He will first ask if They are there – to which you must answer “No”. Declare yourself as “An acolyte that
seeks the truth”, and he will answer any questions you may have about the watery mysteries in the city,
including the Necropolis Lake, the Lady Love Well and the Rain of Annunciation. However, you only have
five minutes to ask your questions and have them answered; the room is slowly filling up with water,
and the acolyte must wake themselves from their dream before it completely fills – those acolytes with
little or no lucid dreaming experience go missing, the final impact of their lives nothing more than
another tangy taste in the drinking water of the city.
072: The Brass Candle
There is an object that seems to find its way into the collection of various shops around the West End of
Glasgow. The rhyme and reason as to where it appears is unknown.

This object is a brass ornament shaped like a candle that, when lit by the flame from a matchstick, casts
a light that allows the holder to see ghostly streets that never appeared on any of the city’s maps,
dilapidated corridors and rooms of dead buildings long since vanished, and primeval tunnels that lead
deep under the city. The holder of the brass candle can travel down these ancient places for as long as
the candle remains lit: if the candle is ever left in the dark, unlit, it disappears – and, at the next equinox
or solstice, will reappear in a shop somewhere in the West End.

Curiously, a number of people who buy the candle tend to go missing within a few weeks: perhaps
they’ve been negligent in keeping the brass candle lit while walking those ancient pathways.
077: The Manhunt House
The older children in Maryhill play a strange game in what is known to them as Manhunt House.
Typically, the game is reserved for those between thirteen and seventeen: the children do not often
allow adults to play – they may demand the adult buy them cigarettes or alcohol from the nearby
newsagents, but following through with their demands does not automatically mean that they will allow
you to accompany them. They are fickle and capricious. Nonetheless, the “lucky” acolyte may be
allowed to join in, on very rare occasions.

The game is kept sacred by the children, and when the game is threatened, the children’s “team spirit”
keeps it safe, no matter what the cost. In 2004, several children went missing, and when word got out
that the children were playing a “strange game” with certain adults in an abandoned house, a coalition
of the parents, media and police tried to smoke out the individuals responsible. To protect their game,
the children chose to martyr a number of their parents – those most vocal in defiance of the game –
corroborating false claims of child abuse and perverse photographs in order to have them locked away.
It’s impossible to say if the furore died down because the rest of the parents believed they had got the
culprits, or if they were cowed into submission and silence after seeing that those who spoke out against
the strange game – whatever it was – ended up getting life imprisonment. The secret game continues in
the uneasy, half-knowing silence.

The game takes place at 8 p.m in a particularly run-down, dilapidated two-up two-down flat connected
to a row of four other flats just like it – the eponymous Manhunt House. The front garden is sparse and
bare, occupied only by muddy stumps of ragged bushes, broken pottery and chunks of stone from the
decrepit stone path, half-sunk in the choking earth. The door to the property is always locked, save for
select nights of the year – usually in midsummer and midwinter – when a small, silver Yale key with an
old-fashioned military patch keyring is found in the front door. This allows a new game inside Manhunt
House to begin – the game starts the second that all of the players enter the house and the key is used
to lock the door from the inside. The brass clock sitting on the mantel beside the front door chimes at
eight o clock, then remains silent until midnight, which is when the game ends. Once the clock chimes
the eighth hour, every player runs away to various parts of the house, looking for hiding-places.
The aim of the game of Manhunt is simple – the Hunted hide, and the Hunters hunt. However, this is a
special version of Manhunt, and the House gives one more objective, as inside the house, there are
special photographs hidden away throughout the House, pictures of bizarre objects, locations and
events throughout the city of Glasgow – an album spread through the house of every Gideon Key in the
city. One particular photograph that seems to crop up often when acolytes play is an overexposed,
blurry image of several children, bunched together in an indistinct room, with eeriely smeared looks of
abject terror on their blanched-white faces, each of which is instantly recogisable as one of the children
in the house alongside the acolyte. The children collect the photos like trading cards, often completely
unaware as to what the photographs really represent. The Hunted are allowed to take any photographs
they find – the Hunters can only take photographs from the Hunted that they find. Acolytes, either
Hunters or Hunted, are encouraged to do their utmost to collect as many photographs of their own as
possible – the house conspires to keep photographs collected by the children out of the hands of
acolytes using many of its idiosyncratic eccentricities.

One particular eccentricity of the house tends to go undetected by newcomers until around five minutes
into the game, when the player has stumbled across the fourth kitchen, or realised that, having taken
three left turns down the main hallway, they should be back where they started, and not in the attic-
space above the bathroom. The house is impossibly large – but never in an obvious way. There are no
sweeping ballrooms or colossal staircases, no vaulted ceilings or elaborate lounges – every space in the
house is low, narrow, and cramped. The upper and lower corridors never seem excessively long – they
just have far too many branching corridors, far too many doors, far too many sets of stairs. And yet,
despite its cyclopean size, no two areas in the House are the same: as far as one can tell, there are no
two matching sets of wallpaper anywhere in the house, each floor is seperated from the others by a
differing amount of steps, and the architecture is of varying size and design – the only commonality are
the brass clocks, identical to the one near the front door, in every single room, which all count down the
hours til midnight. Many explain this away by claiming that the other flats in the street have had the
walls seperating them knocked down, resulting in one long collection of five different apartment blocks.
This goes some way to explaining the eccentricity, but does nothing to alleviate the odd sense of vertigo
suffered by players that look through the cracks in the boarded-up windows of the house and realise
they all look out onto different streets — even when looking through different cracks in the same
window.
Another eccentricity are the players themselves. Many variations of the playground game Manhunt have
the teams split into two: the Hunters and the Hunted. When a Hunter finds one of the Hunted, they
become a Hunter too – any Hunted left at midnight win the game. However, whenever acolytes play the
game, new Hunters begin to join in the game – as the clock counts down towards midnight, They begin
to manifest, and They do their very best to find the children, Hunter and Hunted alike. For whatever
reason, They leave acolytes alone inside the Manhunt House: the dull chattering and creaking of aged,
stretched limbs in nearby corridors, or the heady scent of allspice wafting through the damp, earthy
smell of decay that permeates Manhunt House, are the only indications that They are present – aside
from the screams of the children whom They have found, of course. And when acolytes are present, it
seems as though They step up their game just to impress – just to make sure the acolyte knows how
good they are at finding the children hiding themselves in the house that They built.

When acolytes play, the game usually ends with every clock in Manhunt House ringing simultaneously,
and you walking out of the house, alone, at midnight, after They have found all the children, to be met
only by the silent, accusatory looks of a handful of parents too scared to scream blame in your direction.
There is no consolation prize – no consolation at all – but you get to walk away with the photographs:
one of which is a permanent reminder of the souls that were lost to the house so you could emerge the
zero-sum victor.

Congratulations, you win!

082: The Eyelid Collection
Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum is considered one of the best museums in Scotland, not least of
which because of its varied and evocative exhibits. From rooms themed on natural history to Ancient
Egypt, and galleries featuring Dutch painters to the Glasgow Boys, there’s something for anyone to
enjoy inside – even acolytes.

Go to the café and order a bottle of water at the counter – do not take a bottle of water from the fridge,
as they have not been prepared or treated with the appropriate ritual. One of the staff will give you a
bottle from behind the counter, seemingly identical to those in the fridge, for £1.50. Take the bottle, and
go to a secluded part of the museum, such as a cubicle in the toilets, to prepare your solution.

Drink (or pour out) some of the liquid in the bottle, and then add allspice to the remainder – the more
allspice is used, the stronger the solution will become. Mix the allspice in, then apply the liquid to your
eyes. A fierce burning sensation will result, the intensity of which depends on how strong the solution is
– but as a result, whenever you close your eyes for the next hour or so, you will be able to see dim,
glowing auras behind your eyelids that seem to emanate from certain objects inside the museum. (As an
addendum: preparing a solution that is more than nine parts allspice to one part “water” from the café
will likely render you blind, but the ability to see auras will be permanent).

Tour the museum, and every so often, close your eyes and observe the colours that radiate behind your
eyelids, like emotionally-charged afterimages of the museum’s artifacts: objects that are infused with a
high degree of occult significance will seem to cause the colours behind your eyelids to twist and swirl in
iridescent whirpools. These artifacts should be studied and understood where possible. In many cases,
the reasons why these objects bear such intense energy is not understood – why do the sketches for
Dali’s “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” all glow with immaterial chromatics, yet the full painting itself
does not? Why do some of the rooms of the dollhouse-like art objects from the World War II exhibit
seem to resonate with the fell radiance? Why does the Spitfire in the museum seem to be dripping and
bleeding colour onto all the objects below?

Not all of the objects in the Kelvingrove Museum are simply static artifacts to be studied – some are
dynamic, and allow a certain “rapport” to build between yourself and the thing being observed. If you
would prefer not to invite the gaze of certain entities that would otherwise turn a blind eye to you, do
not open your eyes in front of the paintings that seem to drink and devour the colours behind your
eyelids – looking at their canvases through your stained eyes will result in something turning its own to
stare into yours.
088: The Glass Bones
Of the two divinatory systems closely linked to the city of Glasgow, the Glass Bones is the lesser known;
its association with “working-class magick” makes it seem uncivilised to those who prefer the much
more dangerous – and much more sought-after – Glascau Tarot. Nonetheless, to those acolytes who
would seek answers only the spirit of the city can give, the Glass Bones are an indispensable tool.

First, the acolyte must take a glass bottle of alcohol, and draw a perimeter around his turf with the
alcohol – if the acolyte runs out, they can continue using another bottle of the same drink. It is
important that the line of alcohol remain as unbroken as possible, and that the bottle is empty before
the next step is undertaken.

The acolyte must then break the bottle. It is said that the higher the bottle is thrown from – and it must
be thrown, not meekly dropped – the more of the city the bottle can “see”. This can be played to the
acolyte’s advantage – those who seek secrets throughout all the city may find it best to throw it from
the roof of a block of flats, but those who seek to become the New Provost or Royal for their street,
neighbourhood or burgh may opt to throw the bottle from a first or second storey window. The bottle
must hit a surface within the perimeter of the alcohol, but it does not matter if that surface is a street,
roof, or wall. When the bottle breaks, the ground inside the alcohol perimeter becomes sacred ground
to the acolyte.

The acolyte must then collect every piece of glass from the broken bottle, collect them together, and cut
each piece on their flesh, so that every shard can “drink” its owner – agony results, but results can only
come through agony. Finally, the acolyte must make themselves drunk on the same alcohol as the type
used in the rites; during the drunken haze which follows, the acolyte will be granted inspiration in vino
veritas, whereupon they will be able to accurately describe every single shard of glass as having a
different particular meaning, set of associations, zodiacal (or other) correspondences, and so on. It is
pivotal that the acolyte record these as best they can during their drunken state; afterwards, it will be
impossible to tell accurately which shard describes what.

The acolyte, after having performed these steps, has gained his own set of Glass Bones, a set of glass
shards which can be collected together and used in fortune-telling and divination like a set of rune
stones. When asked questions and thrown, the acolyte will be able to divine meaning in the Glass Bones
provided they are under the effects of the same alcohol as the type held in the bottle that made the
oracle.
A warning about the Glass Bones. The acolyte must avoid throwing them for divination under the
influence of another kind of alcohol – doing so results in the acolyte puking up a new set of ready-made
Glass Bones. Similarly, there is always one shard that goes unmarked by any acolyte – and any acolyte
that claims to have named theirs is lying. When this shard appears in a reading, the acolyte must
immediately cease reading, take the Bones, and find a safe place to hide: the unmarked Bone will cut
through the safe consensus reality that the acolyte so often takes for granted and rip a splinter through
their lifeline, inviting in sharp, cruel angels that herald the end of flesh, their voices echoing and
reverbating through dimensions impossible to acknowledge such that skin becomes water, water
becomes glass, and the acolyte is rent asunder, his life torn from reality so that he goes unremembered
and unmourned by all who knew him, except during certain melancholic drunken nights where the
alcohol calls up hazy, incongruent memories of splintered spirits.
091: The Night Bus Service
You’ve probably seen one of them if you’ve ever been in town late at night: a city bus with an electronic
sign declaring “Sorry, I’m not in service”, trundling restlessly by on the orange midnight roads. The bus is
almost completely dark, save for a single lamp in the driver’s cabin, like a glinting nightlight at the end of
a shadowy hallway, pulling your attention in towards it – and then you see them. The silhouette of a
person sitting in the back seat of the bus, completely shrouded in darkness. You will, as all people have
done, rationalise it away – just a trick of the light, or a person who was on the other side of the bus, or a
reflection in the window. You might even be right. But most times, you’d be wrong.

The N14 night bus is an enigma even to the people that use it for the unique travel route it offers. Bus
companies will insist that there is neither a 14 or N14 bus on their service, though occasionally out-of-
date leaflets can be found that indicate an N14 service makes a single stop – “Sta. Glasgow” – and only
has one service at precisely 00:04 at Buchanan Street Bus station from Stance 28. And so, to board, you
must go to the Buchanan Street Bus Station before 00:04, and wait at Stance 28. Provided there is at
least one person at the stance by 00:04, the bus will trundle into the station – an unassuming teal-and-
beige single-deck bus with dim lighting and no passengers.

The driver’s cabin is fairly well illuminated, but the driver herself, positioned as she is under the lamps, is
swathed in shadows. The only discernable features are her frame – indicating she is female – frizzy red
hair bunched around her head, and what seems to be a broad, cutting grin. The rest of the bus is badly
lit by comparison, and an assortment of what appears to be discarded rubbish litters the interior, from
the floor to the seats: but owing to the insufficient light on the passenger side of the bus, they are
indiscernable from the outside.

The doors of the bus will open, and the driver will beckon you in – she asks for no fare, but she will
incline her shadowed face to highlight her perpetual wry smile. It is customary to sit at the back of this
bus; in so doing, you will see that what looked like rubbish from outside the bus is actually melted pools
of wax, bundles of paper with bizarre drawings on them, circular metal disks with a dimple in the
middle, filled with ash, and a number of strange steel “pots” with openings carved into them in ornate
patterns. Custom again demands that you leave the objects where they lie, and take your seat
immediately. When you are seated, the bus door will close, the lights in the entire vehicle will turn off,
and the bus will pull out of the station.

For the first portion of the journey, the route is recognisable to most who are familiar with the city –
North Hanover Street, Bath Street, Renfield Street, West George Street, George Square – but after a few
minutes, a realisation will dawn on the mind of the passenger – the bus is going round in circles. And as
soon as this realisation is reached, the bus turns down an unfamiliar street, slows to a stop, and the
driver gets up.
Working her way from the front to the back of the bus, the driver – still cloaked in shadows – will set
down lit white candles on the seats of the bus, along the baggage shelves above the seats, and on the
floor of the carriage. She will place sticks of incense in the metal disks – incense holders – and will light
the incense inside the steel pots – incense braziers. She may throw you another grin as she sets the final
candle down on the seat beside you, before she returns to the front of the bus, and resumes the
journey.

On this final part of the bus journey, the passenger will not recognise any of the streets, though they will
all seem somewhat familiar – the architecture of buildings redolent of the apartments of the West End,
some tight sidestreets resembling the close, cramped lanes in the City Center, a view of water indicative
of proximity to the River Clyde. Occasionally, the outside world is not visible at all, owing to trick plays of
light from the candles, casting fractal colours onto the windows of the carriage, brightening them up like
incandescent stained-glass, or else, the wispy clouds of allspice-scented incense smoke blanketing the
windows completely as they wind through the carriage, creating a heady atmosphere that at once feels
somnolescent and suffocating. The hypnotic metronome of the carriage suspension groaning, the
reliable tilt of the bus as it turns left and right, and left, and right, and left, and right, takes you in and
takes you over. Slowly wading into a drift of sleep, you will feel your vision swim, your attention sink,
your thoughts disperse as though writ on water, and, upon closing your eyes –

– the bus will judder to a halt, pulling you out from the cusp of sleep, and the doors will clatter open.
With the smoke of burning incense filling the carriage, it is impossible to see the stop through the
windows, but invariably, when you step out of the bus, you will find yourself on an empty suburban
street, filled with buildings of various construction – all painfully familiar, like a recollection from a
recurrent nightmare – under thunderous orange-and-purple storm-clouds.

“This is Stained Glasgow“, the driver will say, in a voice that buzzes in the electric air, “and the bus will
be terminating here.”

The bus will depart, and until the next time you fall asleep, you may explore the warped streets of
Stained Glasgow, the archetypal memory, dream and reflection of past and present Glasgows. Without
guidance, however, the acolyte may well fall prey to those things that stand hidden in the spaces
darkened by the city’s Jungian shadows.
093: The Sacred Ground
There is a patch of disused land where a church once stood in the southside of Glasgow. The grand has
grown wild and untamed since the church was demolished, and due to its previous use as a holy site,
can now be used as sacred ground.

Note that this does not mean it provides any kind of sanctuary from some of the entities that thrive in
the darkness of the city – the creations of Shadow Farmers can set foot on the soil, the Silent Man can
pass through the iron gate, the Scavenger’s Daughter will still find you, and They will be able to follow
you there.

The real boon of the Sacred Ground is its use to practitioners – because the Gideon Keys of Glasgow
have been interwoven so tightly with Christian mythology, certain elements of each system come
together on the grounds of the former church. Mixing water with allspice on the grounds will create a
kind of “holy” water which, when applied to the eyelids, will allow acolytes to detect those things and
people who have heavy significance in the living mythology of Glasgow. A number of the mushrooms
growing amongst the weeds can be ingested to give hallucinogenic trips that reveal the fundamental
mycological reality that lies underneath our own. Rites held on the ground seem to have a much
stronger effect, perhaps due to the things that are buried beneath.

The acolyte must avoid the area on rainy nights; unknown figures sometimes congregate in the grass,
digging up cadavers from the soil, and it can be harrowing to see your own body being dragged up from
the dirt.
094: The Spiral Hall
{The main body of an email — Ed.}

Hey again. I hope you don’t mind me emailing you, but I need yours and Eilidh‘s help more than ever. I
know you might not want to get into something like this after what happened to Dominic, but I need you
to come round to Cumbernauld, and soon. There’s something not right here, and I need someone to
help me before the spiral hall manifests.

You know Cumbernauld’s dead at the best of times. The place reeks of depression and desperation, and
it’s starting to really get to me. The town was built in the 50s as a kind of residential overspill zone for
Glasgow, and since every aspect of it was planned by the government, it doesn’t have any kind of pulse.
When you stand on Buchanan Street , listening to the swarms of people chatting around you, sensing
the vibration of the traffic and the subway trains under your feet, and feeling the wind and rain lashing
and blasting through the alleyways and avenues, you can tell Glasgow’s alive, breathing and shouting
and screaming; in Cumbernauld, all you can hear is a death rattle. If there’s such thing as a “spirit of the
city”, ours was stillborn.

Dead things rot, Alexander, and there’s a rot that’s settled in the town center. You know how all the
residential areas are built around the Shopping Center, that massive eyesore? That’s basically
Cumbernauld’s version of Buchanan Street – the dead heart of the city. The whole thing looks like it was
built inside-out, the bones and bowels everted: all the things that are normally obscured and hidden
away from the public – like service areas, ugly brick facades and aged décor – are thrown right to the
forefront for everyone to see. The building itself doesn’t even look like a shopping center – it looks like
an angular, austere 70s municipal building, with the people around it consigned to despair.

You know how you get those shoppers who just seem to traipse and amble along, without ever seeming
like they’re really conscious of where they are or where they’re going? They’re not junkies – well, not
always – they’re like the walking dead. Well, I was in the shopping center one night – it was practically
empty – and I was walking down a long, straight corridor behind one of those people when they
suddenly stopped about two meters in front of me, and then she turned to her right, just staring over to
the wall – except the wall was completely gone.

Instead, there was what I can only describe as being a hallway spiral – it was like looking down a
stairwell that vertically grown from where the wall used to be into a colossal architectural ammonite, an
Escher corridor stretching and circling, endlessly orbiting and eventually terminating in some nauseating
singularity. I felt ill looking at it – and worse, I could feel something looking back at me from the other
end of that spiral. It was a rotten, festering wound in the dead body of the city, and it was infested with
something.
The person in front of me shuffled towards the corridor-spiral in that addled, slow way, and I never even
tried to stop them. God knows I thought about it, but I wanted to see what happened. I wanted to see
how the spiral worked, how someone could possibly navigate that thing – and she did it. She shuffled
over to the corridor, and within seconds, she was on it, turning down that impossible gyrating insanity,
being devoured by its incongruent geometry. I saw her just keep trundling along, her limbs beginning to
warp and twist, her neck elongating and her skin splaying out at odd angles all the way down the
hallway. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it – not until the last moment, when something rose from
the bottom of the corridor, announced by a far-off vibration – a maddened, hysterical scream of sheer
panicked delight, the sound of fragile sanity finally cracking and echoing over eternal, endless walls. The
sense of movement from the inevitable terminus of that hellish spiral was enough to throw me into a
sense of bile-inducing horror – I couldn’t bear to look at the thing that was coming screaming up from
the depths of that hallway, tearing its way up the spiral and violating the distorted, mangled frame of
that lost woman in a way I couldn’t even describe, before rushing up the hallway towards me. I had to
run, Alexander. Out of the hallway, out of the town center, and all the way back to my flat.

I’m sorry I dumped all this on you, but I’m fucking terrified. The hallway in my flat has started to twist -
the floor in my bedroom doesn’t match up with the hall anymore, and when I’m in there, I can hear
something from far away, screaming and laughing at me. Please help. Please, please help. I don’t know
what to do.

– Alan Strachan
100: The Contrary Line
The Contrary Line is an impossible railway line running under Glasgow. Each part of the line, each
“Contrary Station”, is not spatially connected to another. Instead, the Contrary Line is a purely
conceptual framework that allows travel between several different points throughout Glasgow (and its
alternates), a psychogeographical walkway that takes the acolyte to a place most in-tune with their
subconscious mind.

To ride the Contrary Line, the acolyte must first locate a Contrary Station. These are found all over the
city of Glasgow, but are difficult to find – acolytes that do find one often mark it as such using graffiti
that only another acolyte would recognise – usually a pictogram of another Gideon Key – near the
entranceway that allows access to the Contrary Line (a door, tunnel, ladder, hallway…). Indeed, many of
the locations described and documented in the Gideon Keys contain a Contrary Station nearby.

The acolyte must then lead themselves into a highly associative mental state. This can be achieved in
various different ways; many acolytes opt to meditate on the graffiti at prominent Contrary Stations, and
several Stations have graffiti created by acolytes for this explicit purpose – look for related motifs
arranged in a web-like pattern near an entrance into a dark or underground passage, and focus on
unlocking the elements that link them all together. Other acolytes choose to compose spontaneous,
nonsensical poetry in a stream-of-consciousness style, or carry books written in free association for that
purpose. The acolyte must then venture into the opening at a Contrary Station, all the while
contemplating inter-related symbols, ideas and themes that mesh together in various ways. Focusing
exclusively on one specific idea will prevent the Contrary Line taking effect – “sleight of mind” is a
requirement.

Using the acolyte’s generation of interwoven ideas, the Contrary Line will transport the acolyte to the
station most closely aligned with the topic that is linking together most of the acolyte’s thoughts, with a
vast majority of these stations existing partway or entirely in Stained Glasgow. Those who focus on
disease will travel to the Contrary Station at the Chapel of Our Lady of the Gory Bell. Those who focus on
escape will find themselves in Trenchton, halfway between the only known exits of Rutherglen Rig.
Those who focus on uncovering secrets will find themselves trapped in a dark, metal room with a slowly
rising water level and The Man in the Tower – and, though they may not realise before too late, they are
also deeply asleep.

Travelers beware: do not let your thoughts focus too heavily on death. This is almost unavoidable for
those new to exploring the darker spaces of Glasgow, who cannot help contemplating the danger they
may be in. Those whose minds resonate to strongly with death will be brought to the High Street Bone
Railway Station, and may witness atrocities that force them not only to accept their inevitable
termination, but welcome it – and rightly so. In the world above, there is no recuperation for a mind lost
to the Bone Railway Station.
101: The Tunnels
While it’s true that the public are somewhat clued-in to the existence of the tunnels beneath the streets
of Glasgow, most are unaware of any of the entrances to the network and the extent to which the
tunnel system spans the city. This is fortunate, as even fewer are aware of the things that stalk the
shadowy, claustrophobic depths of the underground tunnels.

One of the main tunnels runs from the crypts in Glasgow Cathedral all the way to Rutherglen in the
south-east: this tunnel has the nickname of the Rutherglen Rig. There are anecdotal stories of a piper
who ventured into this tunnel alongside his dog, all the while playing his bagpipes in order to allow his
associates above ground to trace the pathways of the tunnel: halfway through, the sound of his piping
disappeared completely. The piper’s associates ran to the other end of the tunnel and waited for him –
hours later, the only thing that emerged was the piper’s dog, shaking, squealing and shivering, with
every strand of fur torn from its flesh. Contemporary accounts of urban explorers corroborate one part
of this story – sometimes, people who enter the rig just don’t come out. Nonetheless, in an emergency,
the rig does provide an easy means of escape from the city center on rainy days when They are abroad.

There is another tunnel in Glasgow, accessible only from the now-defunct Glasgow Green railway
station. A hatch in the street nearby leads down through the roof of the building below, where one will
find oneself on precisely the platform required to ‘ride’ the Contrary Line – an impossible railway line
that includes the High Street Bone Railway among its stops, though no train ever runs on it – the only
traffic it sees travels by foot, acolytes and pilgrims looking for the stations in alternate Glasgows
glimpsed only in the throes of fever.

Another important tunnel lies somewhere underneath the centermost streets of Glasgow – in fact, this
particular tunnel has entered public consciousness, as many natives to the city will be aware of the
existence of a completely preserved Victorian street, with old shop-fronts still standing, having been
built over by one of the larger streets but kept intact. A cobblestone road is flanked by small pavements
of concrete, and the wooden veneers of a pharmacy, dentists, tobacconists and post office lie quiet and
undisturbed in their dusty sleep beneath the streets above. Varying accounts claim it lies beneath Hope
Street, Union Street, or Argyle Street. Slightly more savvy individuals place it under Glasgow Central
Station; the village of Grahamston once lay outside the city of Glasgow before it was demolished in
order to make way for the station, and the Grant Arms pub, only a few yards from the station itself, is a
still-standing relic of the village. These estimates are partially true: in fact, the tunnels one must traverse
to find the underground street lie under each of these locations. A postal network tunnel under Hope
Street is accessed through the heavy-load elevator in Glasgow Central Station near platforms 11-15. The
tunnels split under Union Street, and one tunnel leads down Argyle Street, connecting the sub-
basements of shops and department stores on the street above. By going down a waterlogged sub-
basement on the southern side of the tunnel, one can find the underground street.
The street is well-preserved, largely because each of the shops are still in use, run by eccentrics and
visited only by acolytes. Alas, we are here to speak only of the tunnels: the underground establishments
are another matter entirely.
102: The Borstal
When people witness or undergo traumatic events, it can damage a person’s psyche to such an extent
that the wound never quite goes away, cracking and bursting open afresh if it is probed and broken by a
triggering incident. It has long been suggested that places, too, can develop scars from disturbing
ordeals that may be torn and bleed freely once again with particular triggers – in other words, they
become haunted.

The alleged crimes undertaken at the Larchgrove borstal are severe: from the 1950s onwards, boys who
had committed criminal acts – and even some who had only been implicated in such – were sent to
“remand homes” like that at Larchgrove. From the testimony of those staying at the borstal, the
conditions were apparently nightmarish, and routine physical and sexual abuse were inflicted on the
boys by staff members and by other inmates. Many purportedly committed more serious crimes inside
the borstal’s walls in the hope of being transferred to an adult prison purely to escape the constant
threat of violence and violation inside the borstal.

The sheer volume of psychological and emotional trauma delivered at Larchgrove has resulted in a
“splinter” of the area’s psychogeography, a kind of recurring insanity that only requires certain triggers
to cause unnatural phenomena such as what people think of as “ghosts” to appear, much as a person
who had suffered some heinous event such as rape or torture may be shocked into emotional
breakdown by a trigger such as certain words, descriptions, people, or similar. Whenever blood is shed
at Larchgrove, the building may go mad. Ghosts of past events, skewed and exagerrated by the
emotional turmoil of scores of hormonal, adolescent young men, become distorted, degenerated, and
warped into horrific monsters of brutality and torture glimpsed in the mirrors, windows and flickering
lights of the borstal. Old hallways suffer schizoid breaks and splinter off into new, hellish spatial
dimensions occupied by entities measured in pain ladders. New gods of primal fear, fed by the inverted
faith of the suffering along the umbilical tension in the air, gestate behind the walls, thrashing in their
sleep before birth. Many acolytes of darker purpose supposedly used the borstal as a torture chamber
for their enemies after it was closed down, their only tool being the raw, weeping psychosis that the
building even now suffers from. With its reopening and repurposing, it has been made more difficult for
anyone to use the former borstal in such a way.

Positive gains can be made from even this profoundly negative phenomenon. Much as psychologists use
the abnormal psychology of particular people in case studies to illuminate the inner workings of the
human mind, so to can the savvy acolyte use the incidents at the former borstal to gain insight into how
physical locations “think”, or “live”. Much experimental work has already gone underway in the borstal
already: nowadays, the building is used as an employability center with an adjoining nursery, but there’s
said to be a certain room, kept locked to all but a core group of acolytes, wherein experiments are
performed with a black-handled knife to plumb the building’s deep mind and detail its darkest corners.
103: The Duke Shadows
{Scrawled on a piece of lined A4 paper, over a paragraph – which abruptly stops three sentences in –
written in pencil about the effects of the passing of some piece of legislation. –Ed}

Hey dude, don’t have long to write. You weren’t in and I don’t have your new number so I’m going to go
in alone. Weird conversation starter but – Steph once said how she couldn’t sleep during her period
because she kept having nightmares, and a lot of them were about “shadow people” in her flat – one
time she told me that even when she was awake she thought she could sometimes see someone looking
at her through the gap in the bathroom door when it was left open just slightly at night.

Now today I was studying in the library and I found this book about weird shit in Glasgow. One of the
stories talked about a house in Duke Street, where some guy’s kids were playing with a “black dog” that
they thought was weird because it never wagged its tail and it was impossible to touch it, and a
policeman later saw the same dog. The guy also had encounters with a shadow that was a human but
missing a hand, and his wife sleeptalked with a shadow at the end of her bed while she was having a
nightmare. It gave me the chills cause I thought of Steph. Apparently her flat stands on the grounds of
the old Duke Street Prison, too, and our tutor was talking about that place in Politics a while ago, how
there was some fucked up shit going on with the prisoners being severely abused and basically tortured.
It became a woman’s prison a while after Barlinnie was built, and then they closed it and knocked it
down.

I’m writing to you cause I remember you told me about those things you saw when you cut your hand in
that place in Easterhouse – you said they were like “Hiroshima shadows of the mind instead of the
body”. That was fucked up dude, haha. I’m heading round to Steph’s flat just now to see if I can bring
them out with blood. If anything happens I’ll let you know.

– Dom
105: The Crossroads Rite
Something happened on one of the crossroads at French Street. Constituent pieces of folklore mesh
together around that crossroads that map a gory and haunting history, but those in the know refuse to
comment upon it; how the specifics of the ritual came to light, such as the participants names, is
unknown; someone, somewhere must know the truth.

Visit the crossroads on Monday about an hour before sunrise with two other people. Each person must
stand on a different part of the crossroads; on the empty corner, place the entrails of a mammal – a
“canopic bag” gives the best results.

The ritual must be performed like a play, where each person has a different persona to adopt. One
person must at all times be addressed as (and consider themselves to be) Brian. Another is Margaret.
The last is Steven. Their surnames are not given here, but they are easy for acolytes to discover, as they
have since become bywords in the occult community in Glasgow. It is pivotal that “actors” make the
performance as realistic as possible, and they must never break character; otherwise, the ritual will fail,
bringing into being certain entities that otherwise remain bound to the crossroads.

‘Brian’ must turn to ‘Margaret’ and say “Margaret, you have to put her out of her misery.”

‘Margaret’ responds, “I never agreed to this.’

‘Steven’ must then say “I’ll bring her through“, and walk to the entrails, picking them up with his bare
hands, preferably while saying “Here we go, girl, let’s go see your mum“. He must then bring the entrails
to ‘Margaret’ and set them down at her feet.

‘Margaret’ must bend to the ground, and devour the entrails, whole. Nothing must remain. When she is
finished, ‘Steven’ and ‘Brian’ must pull her to her feet, and lead her down the street.

Once the ritual is complete, the person who played Margaret will be forever sterile or barren, and
cancerous cells will begin to grow in their brain; however, this tumour will slowly coalesce into
something like an organ – and this organ brings with it a series of bizarre “powers”, such as the ability to
cause spontaneous epileptic seizures in people purely by focusing on them.

Incidentally, there are people with the same first and second names as the three original members of
the ritual, who are said to be enjoying successful careers with a certain law enforcement body.
106: The Corpuscular Brick
In Shawlands, there was once a field known as the “Good Man’s Croft” to farmers and villagers; this field
was deliberately left to grow wild without having a crop planted in it, so that the “Good Man” – the Devil
– could use it to entertain his malevolent company and leave the crops on the other fields alone. Once
set aside, it could not be claimed again – if crops were sown, they would be blighted; if animals were put
to pasture, they would be stricken and die. It can be inferred that the Good Man’s Croft is now part of
Pollok Country Park south of the city.

There are a number of strange phenomena occuring in Pollok Country Park – all stemming from the
area’s notorious links to demons and black magick – but one particular phenomenon is of great interest
to many acolytes. In a part of the park where there is very little trees around, there is a medium-sized
mound, with a muddy earthen ring surrounding it where no grass ever grows. If one stands atop this
mound at midnight on a night where the rain is particularly heavy, and aims a pair of binoculars due
west, there may be a chance you will spot a figure stalking along the treeline. The figure is often very
difficult to make out, but many acolytes have described it as moving erratically, as though it makes its
way by twitching and spasming forward; its skin appears to be stretched across its skeletal frame, with
thick knots of bone throbbing from thin, fragile-looking bone shafts that look far too weak to withstand
its manic thrashes. The figure moves around the wooded areas, looking for something in between its
juddering spasms: eventually, it will stop at the base of a tree, dig down into the earth, and plant
something there, before covering it back up with soil.

Unfortunately, due to your elevated position atop the mound, it is more than likely that the figure will
see you – and once it does, it will freeze for only a few seconds as it fixates on you. You have only a few
seconds to run to the place it dug up – and it will be thrashing its way back towards it in order to prevent
you from seizing its treasure. The figure is fast, and the figure is precise – before you realise it is upon
you, square chunks will fall away from your still-gushing flesh as it guts you with strange bony tendrils
that shred, cut, pierce and carve.

If you manage to rip its treasure up from the soil before the frenzied creature reaches you, you will
discover that the treasure is a brick-like cuboid, made entirely of warm, fleshy, muscular corpuscles
inside a mesh of thin but durable bones, which quiver and shake in response to your touch. If you
transfuse blood from the sinewy brick, you will find yourself healthier and more energetic over time,
more alert, and more awake. However, there is always a chance you might have seized a “bad brick” –
and will suffer from anything from HIV to leukemia for the rest of your life. Many would suggest this is
no different to your chances when you first come into the world – and who would turn down the chance
of a better, healthier body?
110: The Bookstore
There is a hidden book store that can be found in every city on the continent. In Glasgow, it can be
found in a close on Dumbarton Road in Partick. Approach the door to the flat, and press the buzzers for
one ground floor flat, one first floor flat, and one second floor flat simultaneously. When a voice from
the buzzer asks who is there, tell them you were actually looking for access to the basement. A sharp
peal of electrical buzzing will indicate that the door is open, and you can then step through into a musty,
dimly-lit shop run by a woman named Judith Christchurch.

The shop specialises in the works penned by people driven mad by religious revelations, with documents
detailing impossible mythologies across the United Kingdom: the Eucharist of St. John Barleycorn, The
New Matter of Britain, the Underground Angels, and the vibrational frequencies of the Avebury
megalithic radios are described in painstaking detail amid frenzied, tangential prose. Judith sells these
documents for a reasonable price, and despite their varied comprehensibility, they each have something
that can be of use to acolytes. However, there are other services available at the book store.

Behind the counter, Christchurch keeps a series of glass cases filled with notebooks, journals,
sketchbooks and photo albums and the like. All have been prepared by acolytes and all describe the
atrocities and splendour that we who seek the truth delight in. Christchurch will let you have one of
these, for a price; you must prepare one of your own. If you don’t, you will find yourself unable to read
anything. The words will wash away before your eyes, rearranging themselves into images of bizarre
oceanic landscapes and vague anatomical structures.
111: The Drowning Chapel
St. Enoch’s Square, in the city center, is primarily known for the St. Enoch Center – one of the city’s
indoor malls – and St. Enoch subway station. Amongst historians, it is known for being the approximate
location of an old chapel dedicated to St. Thenew, the mother of the city’s patron saint, St. Mungo,
which housed ancient relics, and a well where offerings were made in petition to the heavens. There is
no chapel – or well – anywhere on St. Enoch’s Square.

In fact, the chapel is under St. Enoch’s Square, and is only accessible through the subway station by
walking south on the tracks – as such, it is advisable to wait until after 11:35pm, when the last train
terminates in Govan, to begin the walk to the drowning chapel.

The tunnel south of St. Enoch station is damp – the ground gets wetter as one walks along due to
rivulets and streams of water feeding in from the cracks in the sodden, moldy walls, so it is next to
impossible to get to the chapel without getting one’s feet wet. After ten minutes of walking south, the
seeker will notice a large, filth-stained crack in the wall, with light coming from within. On the other side
is a room, much taller than it is wide, half filled with mud, dirt and dust from the earth above. Inside the
muck are cracked stone pillars, decayed wooden panelling, meshes of metal poles and structures – the
last remnants of the St. Thenew chapel. Water continually cascades in from each of the walls, making
the whole room seem to shiver, quake and struggle. And, in the center of the room, lies the well,
illuminated by an orange luminescence coming from a hole in the ceiling above – straight metal bars on
the hole indicate that it is a drain in the street.

The well is filthy, and a number of objects lie inside and around it – many, most likely, from having been
dropped through the drain above. Curiously, no rubbish has come in through the drain – or if it has, it
has been cleaned away by persons unknown. All that remains are the strange offerings – dolls, all with
their left hands cut or ripped off. Photograhs of people, with holes stabbed through in a straight line
through the center of their bodies. Plastic bags, some with small bones poking out of holes inside them,
tied up with red elastic bands…

It is said that making a sacrifice inside the Drowning Chapel – in accordance with certain passages found
inside the Old Testament – allow the user to petition for divine vengeance against any mortal man who
has transgressed the ten commandments.
116: The Fungal Bloom
There is a house in Bearsden that lies condemned, but this is not immediately obvious from the outside.
It cannot be demolished as there would be too much disruption to the homes it is connected to, and the
door and windows of the house cannot be welded shut, because residents of the neighbourhood felt it
would cast a stigma over the area and petitioned for it to stay empty. Nowadays, people have all but
forgotten about the strange house, and it would be entirely unnotable were it not for the thing that was
responsible for it being condemned – the Fungus.

The house has become a home for a persistent, interminable mould that covers vast swathes of the
ceiling, walls and floors. The fungus is so prevalent that acolytes will not realise that none of the rooms
are carpeted – wherever you walk in the house, you are walking on a bed of mould, which releases small
clouds of dust-like spores as you tread atop it. The master bedroom on the upper floor is murky and
difficult to see in, due to the descent of millions of spores falling like snow from the ceiling – breathing in
this room invites respiratory problems that come accompanied with persistent, recurring visions of
people made out of mushrooms standing around you, watching you with absent faces.

The bathroom on the lower floor is the nexus of the bizarre infestation. From the plugholes of the sink
and bath, long, pallid fungal stalks rise up to a foot in height, crowned by pale yellow cone-like heads.
The shower head has stalks growing down from it, which curl up at the ends like hooks. The mirror over
the sink has shattered, with a wrinkled, tumour-like mushroom growth sprouting through the glass.The
toilet has become a throne for the fungal bloom; thick wreaths of white-and-beige flesh has burst out of
the broken cistern, leaking trails of amber pus into a greasy puddle around the stained white ceramic.
The u-bend has become a vase for a fungus so large it could easily be mistaken for a tree, its fleshy bark
white and tender, topped with the sickly yellow cone of the thinner stalks in the bath and sink.

Entering the bathroom causes a subtle change in the fungus – it almost seems to quiver at your
presence. The stalks sway from side to side, the fungal face in the mirror twists and flexes… and the
tree-like growth seems to shudder. Approach the growth in the toilet bowl, and grasp a limb or stalk
from the fungus – the flesh will tear off quite easily.

Chewing and swallowing the stalk will cause vivid hallucinations of an impossibly vast parallel reality
made of endless, juddering fungi, writhing and rubbing against each other in a mass mycological
breeding conclave. This is the fundamental reality under our own, and the fungi release spores that
cause us to hallucinate the world that we perceive every day; the stalk allows a brief glimpse into that
true world, grants us the chance to walk under the cyclopean caverns formed out of the bulbous skin of
megafungi, lets us see the forests of colossal mould trees lit up by the otherworldly blue-and-green light
of luminal rot. It is paramount that the acolyte does not become addicted to these altered states of
consciousness – although that world is filled with painful beauty and unfathomable wonder, it won’t
take long for someone to notice that you have awoken.
118: The Hairy Icon
In Govan, there are a set of docks that were
once used to house ships that were undergoing
repairs on the River Clyde. The docks have been
abandoned since 1988, and it shows – access is
possible to the site, but it is no longer regularly
maintained by council services. The water in the
three bays has become dirty and filled with
rubbish; the grass and weeds have pulled their
way up through cracks in the stonework to
overrun the ground.

The dock does see some activity by a group of acolytes, however; on the first Sunday of every month,
they gather in the burned out building at the far side of the dock – provided it isn’t raining – and
newcomers are welcome to visit and join in on their pet project.

From Clydebrae Street, the acolyte must climb through a damaged metal fence, and traipse along a path
well-worn by both the acolytes and the neds and chavs that occasionally invade the area. On the
Sundays that the acolytes meet, you may find them swimming in the dingy, rank water of the basins
where the ships used to undergo maintenance – their faces are turned down into the murky black water
and trying to make as little body movements as possible, lest they disturb the thing they’re looking for.
From the top of the basins, they look like floating corpses. Occasionally, one will rear up out of the
water, holding his hand up and displaying the prize to the rest of the group – a clump of hair, often with
a mouldy, bloated piece of rotted, white scalp flesh attached. The scalp pieces are tossed over to one
side of the basins, landing with a wet splat atop the stone, bleeding water.

One acolyte – Mark Wilson, a man in his thirties, usually dressed in neutral greys and greens and
sporting a haunted, anxious look – will take any newcomers to the partially burned-down building on the
docks, where, in one of the ruined rooms, The Hairy Icon awaits.

Stepping into the room alerts your every sense that

something is wrong. At the center of a room with
more open spaces than walls is a human-sized
object suspended by a metal framework of girders
and hooks in lieu of a roof. Upon first viewing, its
essence is impossible to tell – and as such, the conscious mind is assaulted and gripped by terror, unable
to categorise what it is seeing but failing to comprehend – but as Mark brings you closer, you can see
that it is a vaguely human shaped entity. There is a definite outline of a head – only, it seems to be
several heads, all clustered together into one huge mass covered by long streaks of dank, ragged hair
that reek of sewage and piss. Occasionally, the mass will judder as though gripped by a sudden shiver,
but different parts of the body will spasm at different times, resulting in a full-body contortion of horrific
angles that makes the entity sway dangerously from the creaking, roaring metalwork above it. The entity
is silent but for the sound of wreaths of dirty, spindly hair tracing up against itself, like whispers of
something hiding deep inside, and occasionally a bizarre crunch or squelch, as though possessed of
some digestive process.

Mark will explain that he and his team have been finding pieces of
scalp with human hair attached in the docks for two years, all from
the same person. Only, there’s too much for it to be one ordinary
person. And so, by examining each of the pieces of flesh, Mark has
begun to construct a patchwork reconstruction of the “inconnu de
la dock”; so far, the Hairy Icon has amass

ed four and a half mounds of hairy flesh, which Mark believes may
be faceless heads. Mark has also claimed that by the time the
second head was constructed, the Hairy Icon experienced limited
self-locomotion; by the fourth, he was able to communicate with it
in some fashion – although he never explains how. He hopes that by
the seventh head, the Hairy Icon may be able to be taught not to
devour the people that come too close to it, and that the bloody maw filled with human viscera and
tangled hair on its underside may shrivel up after lack of use. After that, he will petition to have the
Hairy Icon canonised – Saint Jennifer, after his late girlfriend and the Hairy Icon’s first known victim –
and establish a church right there, on the blasted grounds of the Govan docks.
120: The Flesh Chorus
In Ibrox, south-west of the center of the city, there is a small set of flats considered unfit for residence
by the local government – and even by homeless people in the area. Nonetheless, they visit the flat as
part of an “urban saint feast day”, to pay respect to the flesh chorus.

The crumbling brown stone flats are inaccessible from the front: the door lies hidden behind a panel of
solid steel, and every one of the windows of the building’s three storeys are similarly blocked. The flats
immediately to the left and right of the block stretch out to each end of the street, allowing no way
around – however, on Wednesdays, the rubbish bins for the flats adjacent to the condemned flat are
emptied, and the front and back doors are often left open – and this is the only way through. Walking
down through one of the adjacent flat’s closes and out through the back door leads to the back gardens
– scaling a wall allows the acolyte to access the back garden, and the back door, of the condemned flat.

Once inside the condemned block, the route to take is marked out on the walls of the tenement. Arrows
have been etched into the eroding stone, alongside a gallery of various bizarre images: chalk drawings of
the Virgin Mary, trapped inside her own halo; depictions of arms in weeping white paint; multiple motifs
of women holding accordions; and a particularly harrowing scrawl, drawn using some kind of waxy
substance, shows a tall figure in a coat, obscuring all its features save for square, blocky feet, standing at
the end of a narrow corridor – the letters “SHH” are scribbled all around it. The hallway’s imagery is
made more unsettling by the continual murmurs and groans of multiple pitches and timbres that seem
to emanate from somewhere upstairs

Following the arrows up a flight of stairs will bring the acolyte to an apartment that, despite its severe
dilapidation and the various moulds growing across the walls, is still apparently in use. In every room,
accompanied by a heavy scent of ozone and the dull buzz of electricity, there are lamps and desklights
plugged into multi-sockets in the walls, torches and candles clustered together in corners on the floor,
resulting in every room being unbearably bright – all except for one room, which has no illumination of
its own, and it is from here that the sound of murmuring that permeates the flat seems to emanate.
From the flickers of failing electrical lights and the guttering of days-old candles, the acolyte’s eye will be
drawn to a crack in the wall of this half-lit room, framed by curling, singed wallpaper and deteriorating
plaster. Visible inside the crack is the right-hand side of a bare torso and lower body of a human figure –
the head and legs are obscured behind the wall.
The body behind the wall will judder and be thrown into spasm as you approach, perhaps disturbing the
gentle and fragile play of light that it has become accustomed to. Unintelligible yelps and moans will
echo out from the crack in the wall, the scrape of skin-on-stone punctuating its murmurs and mutters.
The body will thrash more viciously the closer the acolyte gets, and, without timely intervention, blood
will seep down the chest of the figure. The only way to prevent the body’s thrashing is to approach with
an outstretched hand.

In so doing, the body will reduce its movement to a small tremble, and, with some difficulty, will pull its
arm free from the crack in the wall and open its hand, to reveal a number of bloody teeth.

Grab the arm by the wrist before it grabs you, and force it to drop the teeth – if they are crushed to a
fine powder, burnt, then snorted, they will allow you to “eat” pain, gaining sustenance from your own
suffering. Do not try to take the teeth from the hand directly – it will drop them, grab you by the wrist,
and pull you in to join the flesh chorus – victims dragged through the stone crack and squeezed into the
tight, constricted and clammy gap behind the walls, unable to stand, unable to sit, unable to lie down,
forced into painful positions of torturous interminability and continuously chanting in groans of
breathless, claustrophobic misery as they thrash against one another, unable to free themselves from
their prison.

The homeless men and women that attend to the flesh chorus on certain holy days attest that the
bravest of them will venture into the flesh chorus on that day to try to get to the end of the row of
quivering, groaning bodies, which terminates in an opening similar to the one they entered through – a
crack in the walls of Heaven.
122: The Saffron Room
Astral projection and remote viewing are two skills that are frequently denounced by many acolytes as
being anything from unscientific down to outright fake. These acolytes, however, tend to be the types to
extoll pet theories and discuss matters with which they have little to no first-hand knowledge. Studying
the Gideon Keys of Glasgow requires an open mind, and any method that provides some insight, some
understanding of the living mythology, should be regarded as useful. Besides, what with the rules
applied to the where, when and how of some of the Gideon Key rituals, we must guard against
“armchair acolytes” advising us to take up new sets of “laws” that do nothing but prevent exploration.

Astral projection is not unlike dreaming, especially lucid dreaming; the acolyte must lead themselves
into a state of relaxed focus, releasing their dependence of their mundane senses and trying to
experience the world around them using only their imagination, their “mind’s eye”, which is non-local
and can travel across rooms, streets, cities, countries, worlds, and dimensions. In the city of Glasgow,
there are many locations where employing this technique will allow the acolyte to venture into zones
that are halfway between reality and whatever other worlds they choose to acknowledge. One such
example is the Saffron Room.

While sitting outside, the acolyte must will themselves into an altered state of consciousness, to prepare
their ascent to the Saffron Room. It is rumoured that taking a hit of the “Gideon’s Key” drug, available
from a lab in Possilpark, will make the trip easier, as will meditating on the flame of a certain brass
candle that only appears in the city on the solstices and equinoxes.

Meditate on the colour saffron. Imagine a single point of pure, compressed colour that slowly undulates
up and down, and up, and down… watch as the point becomes a line, that twists into a staircase. Feel
the vertigo of the staircase that rises up and down, and up, and down, the mental motion-sickness that
grows as you peer down endless corridors, walls that stretch up to the upper atmosphere and down to
the ground, up, and down, and up, and down…

It will take a while, but the architecture of the Saffron Room will glow visibly in the darkness of your
mind’s eye, bringing with it a hazy, yellow-tinted image of the city of Glasgow beneath it. The Saffron
Room is actually a colossal, semi-transparent structure that spans the entire length of the city, visible
from any point in Glasgow, and connected to several of its buildings and streets – in particular, a row of
houses in Maryhill, the north of Buchanan Street, and a park in the south of the city. Depending on how
long you can bear to watch, and the time of year, you may even see a number of figures walking the
yellow halls, although They never seem to notice you.
It is usually just as you notice one of the Saffron Room’s inhabitants that a sense of nausea will infiltrate
your meditation, a wave of sick shuddering that grips your bowels and throat; perhaps, as the
scientificly-predisposed acolytes believe, your mind’s eye is incapable of fully realising the things you are
perceiving with it, your mind becoming overwhelmed by bizarre geometry that violates physical science,
laws of proportion that are so impossible for your brain to comprehend that it tries to prevent you
looking. Or perhaps, as the more religious acolytes believe, the Saffron Room is simply purging your
body of everything material so that you can ascend physically into the iridescent rooms of Heaven above
it. Most acolytes simply believe the most obvious answer – that it is a defense mechanism of the Saffron
Room’s inhabitants so that They can move about in their transcendent, sickening architecture; They
seem to enjoy walking the hallways of the Room that lead into people’s homes; it is impossible to tell
what They do while there, but there is always an aura of deep disequilibrium in those places that They
have visited, a threatening feeling of intense intrustion and deep violation that hints at something
approaching.
129: On Gloom Geometry
Have you heard of the Shadow Farmers?

There are places in the city where shadows fall in such a way that they create biomes for other kinds of
life. The feng-shui criss-cross of penumbras with slashes of light cutting perfectly across the network of
shadows allow strange things to take root, but complete darkness, or complete brightness, will prevent
their growth. Places that are exposed to the same level and orientation of light and dark are the best
breeding grounds – abandoned places that no longer suffer human interference.

Urban explorers tend to run into the work of the Shadow Farmers the most, though they do not always
recognise it when they see it. Human silhouettes that seem to stalk them throughout their expedition,
shadows that fall towards the light, the outline of a window where none are to be found… these are
often written off as “a trick of the light”, which, in a way, is exactly what they are.

The Shadow Farmers make new things out of the lack of light. “Shadow people” can easily be crafted
from the silhouette of a single human body, which fulfill the Shadow Farmer’s requests. The angles of a
building that suggest depth and perspective can form a hallway that allows access into people’s
darkened bedrooms at night through the shadows cast by lights outside their windows. The overlap of
mesh and scaffolding can create a cage to imprison their enemies. The motion of a slow, grinding fan can
create a method of execution for those same enemies.

Fortunately, we have an ally. The Shadow Farmers are said to be opposed by a group who have
discovered ways of permanently destroying things crafted through gloom geometry. Their methods
include the use of sunlight reflected in hexagonal patterns, six-sided prisms that split light into various
colour wavelengths that seem to expunge shadow when used alongside sounds that harmonise with
those wavelengths.

Unfortunately, it is a necessary consequence that those casting the strongest light will also create the
strongest shadows.
130: The Green Grimoire
Part magical artifact, part posturing art-school degree show project, the Green Grimoire is
simultaneously an inspired supernatural tome and a sickening insight into how anything, regardless of
taste and sensibility, can be drawn into the web of the occult. It is held in an underground art gallery,
but rarely sees the light of day due to its odd effects on the psyche.

The Green Grimoire is also known as the Folio and Das Garten, although the latter title is incorrect, both
grammatically and due to the fact that the title belongs to a different book entirely). It is a small booklet
of thirty pages of thick, hand-made paper, bound to a cover that feels smooth, like the rubbery texture
of fake plant leaves. On the first page is a name, “D. McDonald”, then “Glasgow School of Art”. Near the
bottom is a single word, “Folio”. The rest of the book is given to drawings made up of words, images of
ferns and trees made up from synonyms that branch out from one another in tangential leaves and
stems, all written in various shades and colours. The whole work appears to be an exercise in combining
stream-of-consciousness writing with pictorial typography.

In fact, the Green Grimoire combines memetics with magic. The pictures-of-words are made in such a
way that, when the reader consciously understands them, the seed of that picture takes root within
their mind. An image of a wispy, frail-looking tree comprised of synonyms for “fear”, “deception” and
“paranoia” will eventually grow inside the reader’s neural forests, with the end result of them feeling
constantly afraid and suspicious of the people around them. Dry, barren vistas made up of prickly
calligraphy and the word “thirst” can make the reader die from dehydration in an hour. A mushroom –
one of the few images in the book to be shaded in – is made up of opposites and antonyms. “Lies”
beside “truth”, “illusion” beside “reality”, “black” beside” white”; the mushroom provides fertile ground
for schizophrenia to take root. Nobody knows the real effects of the willow comprised of the word
“They”.

Not all of the meme-plants growing in the Green Grimoire are negative traits, though. Others include a
row of sunflowers made up of “happiness”, “confidence” and “bliss”; poppies grown from “dreams of
the future”, “clairvoyance” and “second sight”, and a tangle of weeds repeating one word, over and over
in sprawling, creeping handwriting – “eternal life”.
137: The Riddle Querent
There is an abandoned swimming pool in the south of Glasgow, which, due to the general disrepair of
the building it is housed in, lies open to the skies. The pool sits empty and unused during dry weather,
but on those nights where the rain seems to fall heavier than usual, the pool quickly fills up as rainfall
trickles in through the dilapidated roof.

It is during these nights that something takes up residence in the depths of the pool.

The only way to gain access to pool is through the roof. You must throw yourself into the black water
below you, allow yourself to fall with the rain. As the water rises up around you, you will quickly realise
that the water goes far, far deeper than you realise – and far further than is actually possible, judging
from the depth of the darkened pool during dry weather. To meet the querent of the pool, you must
swim down as far as you physically can. If you are confident in the answer you intend to give the
querent, then you should consider weighing yourself down with concrete.

When you swim down far enough that your breath begins to burn in your chest, when your lungs feel as
though they’re about to burst, you will hear a voice, quivering and vibrating out through the pool – this
is the unseen querent, who poses you a riddle.

“Within the hole you saw your whole environment contained,

Though nothing solid from within could ever be obtained.

This mirror manifested –

Appearing as a guest did –

Once the downpour started, and after it had rained.

Once the sun had crested,

no part of it remained.”

This far down, answering incorrectly or not at all means it will be impossible to resurface in time to take
another breath. However, if you answer the querent correctly, you will find yourself able to breathe
underwater for far longer than should be humanly possible.
139: The Necropolis Lake
In the east of Glasgow there is a grassy hill, covered in
graves, tombs, sepulchres, burial chambers, and
mausoleums – this is the Necropolis, the “City of the
Dead”, and it is here that so much of Glasgow’s bloody
history is interred – dead, or asleep. The acolyte that
seeks truth will eventually make a venture into the
Necropolis, to find that thing that sleeps in the soil
beneath.

Construction of the Necropolis began in 1831 by the Merchant’s House of Glasgow due to a high
demand for burial space within the city thanks to a rising population and thus its rise in death toll.
Before long, many prominent structures had arisen inside the extensive cemetery, such as monuments
to prominent members of society who had passed on, mausoleums for wealthy families, and ornate
statues of grieving angels. The Necropolis is accessed by walking across The Bridge of Sighs, which once
spanned the river that Glasgow was founded upon, now hidden away underground.

The Necropolis is quiet, like all graveyards, but its location on a hill, elevated above the heights of the
city, gives it an air of liminal seperation, a chill of isolation that is remarkably prevalent in the winter
months, when fog obscures the rest of the city from view such that the only buildings that can be seen
are those erected for the dead; the sounds of the city below fade away into the white shroud, and one
can hear what sounds like the breathless whispers of the city of the dead – this is, in fact, the rushing of
water deep beneath the soil of the cemetery, and it hints at one of the city’s best-kept secrets: a secret
that the acolyte that seeks the truth will find.

At the entrance to the Necropolis, immediately opposite the Bridge of Sighs, is a large stone facade, with
doors that were initially designed to act as entrances to a tunnel with vaults inside the hill the
Necropolis is built on, largely to prevent bodysnatchers from gaining access to the recently-buried;
however, the tunnel was not completed, as frequent flooding inside the vaults made it difficult to build a
safe, sanitary means of travelling through to the vaults. The doors of the facade were locked.
 There are other doors in the Necropolis, however,
that remain open. The extent of the construction in
the Necropolis was never fully documented or
discussed, and the most wealthy men in the
Merchant’s Guild, eager to build tombs that would
serve their families for generations (as well as keep
them safe from graverobbers), secretly dug deep
down into the living earth to build colossal vertical
vaults. These vaults can be accessed from certain
surface-level mausoleums dotted around the
graveyard: simply look for the monuments that bear
curious insignias that hint at hidden passages inside
their stone crypts. The Egyptian Vaults, for example,
are decorated with upside-down torches with the flames still lit, hinting at a shaft that stretches down
into the earth. Once inside (by working the lock of the mausoleum door, or climbing down through the
roof), find the entrance; in most cases, this is as simple as sliding off the stone atop a tomb and climbing
down into the vacant space below – in many cases, previous acolytes do not slide the stone lids back
across once inside, hence the many mausoleums with disturbed crypts.

The catacombs under the Necropolis are dank, damp, and intensely claustrophobic – the air feels heavy
and oppressive, and drawing breath is difficult in the deeper levels. The architecture of the vaults is
difficult to maneuver; some of the passageways are permanently flooded, some have collapsed inwards,
and some were never finished at all; it is said the merchants who built the catacombs felt they had
disturbed something deep down amidst the gloom. The catacombs are rarely silent – the rush of water
is never far off, as the river above the vaults (but below the streets) continually flows down through the
stone. The dim roar of distant, crumbling corridors occasionally punctuate even the dry corners of the
vaults; in the dark, it is easy to imagine these roars as laments of the anguished dead who line the walls
of the abyssal tombs.

The acolyte that seeks the truth must venture into the water of the catacombs – there is no other way
to access that secret that lies sleeping in the amniotic waters of the earth’s womb. Danger is
omnipresent – damp clothing and strong currents can drag the acolyte under the surface forever; the
roof or floors of passages may collapse and pin them down under rocks, soil or water; passages may
suddenly flood, or air pockets fill up and disappear entirely. Only a few times must the acolyte dive
below the surface of the water and swim down under a solid surface overhead, but these few airless
moments in an area already starved of air is harrowing. The reward, however, lies at the end of a long,
earthy tunnel with a strange, broken luminescence at the far end. The tunnel is littered with bloated,
fleshy masses – the remains of previous acolytes who, looking towards the end of the tunnel and being
gripped by fear, inadvertently took a breath of stale water – no air pockets exist in the tunnel. Only
when the acolyte clears the tunnel and rises to the surface of the underwater lake they have swam into
can they gasp for air. And gasp they inevitably will, for they will have been able to see that thing as they
swam down the tunnel towards it – that thing that had so terrified the previous, failed acolytes.
Deep in the lake, some way below the acolyte’s feet, is a colossal entity of indistinct amphibian
anatomy, sleeping with giant, stark-white eyes wide open and staring, interminably still – not even a
bubble arises from it. It is impossible to tell if it is alive, or merely some work of insurpassable
craftsmanship – the eyes are dimly luminescent, providing the only light in the underwater cavern, but
they barely illuminate the vast bulk of its body, which is visible only as a cyclopean murky shadow
hanging in the center of the lake. Swimming towards it through the tunnel – the fear that comes with
the sudden acknowledgement that the light at the far end is actually the gaze of something enormous
towards you – is nothing compared to the vulnerability you feel when treading water above it; moving
your arms or legs too quickly feels far too dangerous. The entity’s stare is gripping – even as small a
gesture as glancing away from it seems like too much of a movement to make, too vital a defense to
lower in front of its gigantic frame.

And the acolyte who has found the truth must now turn away from the staring monstrosity; dive deep
down in front of its unlit body, straight into the center of its unwavering sphere of vision, to swim back
through the tunnel of the dead to the catacombs above, the weight of its gaze now – and forever – on
the acolyte’s back.
141: The Phone Network
Electromagnetic fields are often used to explain away bizarre phenomena that the human mind
experiences – in particular, theory suggests that electromagnetic fields cause the feelings and
hallucinations that conspire to create a “ghost sighting”. The two are linked, but it’s the wrong way
around. The phone network is made up of electrical signals masquerading as sound, so it should not be
surprising that haunting phenomena occur on the phone lines as much as in decrepit castles and old
houses. For this reason, many acolytes refuse to carry mobile phones, or else keep them turned off for
extensive periods of time.

A number of people in the region of Glasgow have experienced the “screaming phone”. Instead of the
traditional ringing tone of their home telephones, the phones emit a high-pitched peal of electrical
screams that tear into the heads of anyone unfortunate enough to hear them; answering the phone will
immediately cease the screaming, but it is far preferable to let the phone ring unanswered by simply
waiting for the screams to end, or leaving the building altogether – the voice on the end of the line is
always your own, and the secrets it delivers may lead to your own destruction.

It is not uncommon for acolytes to receive texts, picture messages and voicemails from unknown
individuals that tease answers to the questions of Glasgow’s living mythology. Pictures of a missing girl.
A message detailing a severed hand with sticks of incense poking out through decaying flesh. A video of
reflected lights in the sky. A voicemail message spoken by vaguely familiar voice, pleading for you to
show mercy. A photo taken through a watery lens of paintings bleeding colour. It is pivotal that these
are ignored unless their source is known; the acolyte that seeks the Truth must seek the Truth itself, and
not false icons created in her name. Truth is the greatest temptress, and They know this well.
144: The Hidden Exhibition
On the grounds of the Glasgow Cathedral is a baronial brick
building: the St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art,
opened in 1993. The museum is dedicated to showcasing
works of art and artifacts dedicated to various world religions,
and its displays are a wonder to behold in any circumstances:
the huge bronze statue of Nataraja Shiva is as impressive as
the Zen Garden held within – indeed, the entire museum is
the embodiment of the oft-held of differing religions co-
existing peacefully, all with mutual respect, and it is free for
anyone to see from Monday to Saturday.

It is rumoured there is one exhibition in the museum,

however, that is off-limits to anyone not authorised by an
individual known as the Glascau Curator. To gain entry, you
must first locate what the Curator refers to as a “living relic”:
any object that has some kind of bizarre, occult property. If
you find one, ask an attendant at the Museum to let you speak
to the Gleschu Curator, and indicate that you have a relic that
they will be interested in. You will be taken to the top floor of
the museum and through a door marked “No Unauthorised
Entry”, into a small, stark-white room. The room has one
window, opposite the way you come in – though nothing can
be seen through it, as it seems an interminable, swirling white fog presses itself up against the glass –
and one door – the one you entered through. In the center, behind an elaborate oaken desk (painted
bleach-white) sits a person of indeterminate gender, dressed head-to-toe in a white robe not unlike a
burqa. The attendant will leave. The Curator will beckon. You will present the relic.

If the Glascau Curator is satisfied with the relic you have shown them, you will be allowed into the
Hidden Exhibition – at the cost of giving up the relic, which will become part of the Hidden Exhibition
itself. The Curator will indicate for you to go to the foggy window, and you will see that there is no
window at all – only an indeterminate space filled with dense whirlpools of white mist. Walking into the
space causes the fog to coalesce around you – but only for a few moments, as the clouds soon dispere
to reveal the room that hosts the Hidden Exhibition.
The room is small – only thirty by thirty feet, and is panelled in dark-brown wood, occasionally dotted by
ornate brass vents. It is completely windowless and lacks any definitive light-source – shadows seem to
lengthen, turn and contract independently of any stimulus. Incense burns away inside censers of
porcelain shaped like rampant vegetative growths, that stand from floor to ceiling in each of the four
corners of the room, creating a heady, smoky and reverent air. Along each wall, and in the center of the
room, are glass cases that contain various unusual items, with plaques that describe, in florid prose, the
history and abilities of each item. Behold the Hand of Mary-Anne, a small, bloody, withered hand – most
likely belonging to a child or young woman – wrapped in barbed wire, with fragments of crisp packets,
refuse sacks and polythene bags wreathed around it like a garland: it belonged to a girl martyred for her
far-from-immaculate conception. Tapping the end of the bony, stiff index finger onto a person suffering
from a virus or disease will cause the hand to incubate that virus or disease – touching the broken pinky
finger to another person will cause them to contract anything the hand is currently incubating. Observe
the Milk of Mary, a lush and verdant plant with ripe, fleshy fruits holding the breast-milk of the Virgin
Mary inside, which, when consumed, will burn away a person’s sin proportionate to the volume drank; a
single fruit, with a tablespoon full of silvery-white milk, can be taken from the plant per person per year.
Marvel at the Eternal Robin, a bird perched inside a cage of razor-sharp wires that fatally contract and
slice the Robin into pieces every hour on the hour: over the course of the following hour, each slice of
the bird’s quartered body flutters, flits and springs back together to reconstitute its physical form anew,
and as it does so, its croaking voice chirps the name of all the people in the city who will die that day.

There are at least fourteen objects in the Hidden Exhibition that describe, in their own visceral and
aberrant way, the living history of Glasgow’s occult underground – and by extension, the world. The
exhibition rotates its displays every thirty-three days, and the Glascau Curator forbids anyone from
removing objects from inside the Hidden Exhibition. Only once – albeit recently – has someone
successfully managed to steal an object from the Exhibition, and that object, a humble Gideon’s bible,
has yet to resurface.
150: The Parallel Puzzle
There is a large communications tower in the east of the city that is home to an enigma that has gone
unsolved for thirty years.

Although the tower seems ordinary from the ground, climbing up the ladder to the uppermost point of
the steel-and-wire construction will reveal a series of square-foot-sized concave mirrors haphazardly
tied down to metal struts and hidden away behind the huge television and satellite dishes at the apex of
the tower. There is some give in the ropes that tie them down, which allow them to be rotated to face
the city around them, or the sky above.

Each of the mirrors seems to reflect a slightly different reality. The one reached first – also the largest –
seems to reflect its surroundings accurately, but when angled towards the ground, it reveals a colossal,
gaping pit in the ground below you. There’s no trace of this chasm in the real world, but that doesn’t
mean it isn’t there – and it certainly won’t stop anything from climbing out of it.

The two mirrors above the hole-mirror are angled so that they only reflect the sky, or parts of each
other. Oddly, they only ever show the night sky, and always as though there was no air or light pollution
in the sky – however, the constellations that appear in the mirror are never visible in the sky. In fact,
they’ve never been seen on Earth.

The final mirror, placed at the tip of the tower, can swivel to point immediately above to the ground
below. It’s difficult to reach, as it requires stepping off of the secure metal struts of the tower and
climbing up the smooth face of a satellite dish, which can easily mean falling to your death with a
misplaced step or a mistimed jump. The last mirror is large enough for you to see all of yourself in it –
and invariably, whenever you look into it, you will see yourself at the pinnacle of all you could have
accomplished. This reflection looks like you would if you had strove to reach your potential, if you had
done your utmost to succeed and took every opportunity before you. This is a false blessing – there is
only so much pride you can share with this false reflection before you realise it will always be better
than you in your current state, and with that acknowledgement comes frustration and anger.

Perhaps that is why the mirror now lies broken – someone simply did not like what they saw. In their
anger, however, they have doomed us; in the 70s, before it was smashed, the light from the moon
would filter down through the comm tower and into the large pit that is only visible as a reflection. This
light would draw in all those things that hide in the shadowy parts of the city and force them down to
the deeper consciousness of the city, keeping us safe; now, the light is split and fragmented, and
acolytes have thus far been unable to realign the light from the mirrors without something from the pit
rising up to claim a new prize.
159: The Gatekeeper
In Malta Terrace, there is a statue made of bronze, hung
from the roof of a block of flats that is known as “The
Gatekeeper”: it is an androgynous robed figure with flowing
hair and one palm outstretched as if giving benediction,
that stares out at the Gorbals with vigilant eyes. Although a
recent installation, it is already a prominent focal point in
Glasgow’s living mythology.

In 2002, there were a number of thefts from the Hunterian

Museum – and one of the objects stolen was a small, sealed
jar. This was not reported to the public, as the object was
part of a collection not exhibited in the museum. The sealed jar has a dire connection, however, as it is
one of the artifacts held within the Gorbals Plague Cart, a monstrous contraption that supposedly lead
to an outbreak of plague in the city in 1900. The individual who stole the jar was intent on unleashing it
again in the Gorbals – only for his ritual to fail completely. He had not counted upon the Gatekeeper,
which bore the pain of the plague itself: the residents of the Gorbals marveled at a miracle in their very
own neighbourhood as they noticed that the statue had mysteriously acquired a stigmata-like wound in
its outstretched palm.

For as long as the Gatekeeper hovers above the streets, the Gorbals will be safe: in fact, the Gatekeeper
can prevent harm coming to any area that it resides in. The only reason that it hasn’t yet been stolen is
that Eilidh Kinnaird, a powerful acolyte, lives in one of the nearby flats, and uses it to safeguard her
apartment block.
163: The Disharmony Gospel
In the northeast of Glasgow, there is a factory that, while not abandoned, has certainly seen far better
days. Over the past few years, the staff have quartered, halved, halved again, and so on until only two
dozen workers occupy the building – which is rapidly shrinking, as the management has begun to close
off parts of the factory that will not see use again. Rusted iron grilles lock away empty brick-and-steel
corridors, huge metal doors are welded shut, entrances to shafts in the ground are bolted down.

There is one area in the factory has not been locked away, however, that holds a peculiar significance to
acolytes. To gain entry, the acolyte must enter the building after 9 p.m, when the workers leave and
only two area security officers remain on site. One of the exterior doors of the factory is marked with a
piece of red electrical tape – this door is not monitored by cameras, and the security officers check it
infrequently. The lock on the door has been partially broken, such that applying some force to the door
will cause it to swing open, revealing a corridor inside. Remember to close the door behind you – the
security staff already know something strange is happening inside the factory, but they can only remain
in ignorance for as long as acolytes are careful.

The corridors behind the door are loud – a colossal rumbling permeates every corner, accompanied by
staccatoes of steam being released from pressurised valves in some far-off room; it is impossible to hear
your own footsteps on the bare concrete floors. Dead rats tend to accumulate under the many electrical
boxes and wires that bulge from the walls, but whatever has ailed them is difficult to tell in the stark
orange light of the corridors, thrown by dim, flickering wall-lamps webbed with dust. The corridors are
labyrinthine, and it is easy to get lost – however, there are pieces of red electrical tape marking certain
paths at junctions throughout the hazy, blinking maze – take the corridors with red tape over ones
without every time.

The acolyte may see other humanoid figures making their way through the dusky corridors out of the
corner of their eyes; these are known as the “Gospel Wardens”, and it is imperative that the acolyte
never cross their paths – otherwise, all the lights blink out, and the Wardens use the cover of darkness
to do whatever it is they do to their captives. The lamps in the corridors immediately surrounding the
acolyte will give an indication as to how close the Gospel Wardens are – when a Warden is nearby and
out of sight, the lights in the corridors around it grow brighter, buzz louder, and seem to flicker in a
rhythmic breathing pattern. When the Warden passes, the lights dim again, and the acolyte can
continue moving.

The acolyte’s final step in their journey is a ladder fastened onto the wall of a dead end in the labyrinth,
leading up to a hole with unsettling red light occasionally spilling from it. The acolyte must ascend the
ladder, and they will find themselves standing in the central room – the Chapel of Disharmony.
The metal room is swathed in stark, bright-red light, its source impossible to define other than it coming
from outside the room itself. Red strobes of light pulse through gaps in the steel plates stacked and
welded together to make ersatz walls; wire meshes break up the light into tendrils slipping through
holes in the rusted ceiling; aged but functional extraction fans built into nondescript steel chop up the
beams of luminescence into bursts of red with their grinding, groaning blades, flooding the room with
the taste of dust and iron; red gushes out of the drilled holes in the steel floor, splashing over the walls,
the ceiling – everything. The light never remains still, alternately illuminating the room in its harrowing
bleed before throwing it back into darkness, all the while accompanied by the sound of the grating fan
and murmurs of vibrating metal from every wall, the ceiling and the floor. Even touching one of these
surfaces produces a tingling throughout your body, its humming and buzzing somehow weakening the
parts of your self beyond your flesh. Spending a few minutes in the room can induce dull aches and
pains throughout your body – especially noticable in teeth with fillings, or any metal joints inside you. A
few more, and the sickening vibration of the metal inside your flesh becomes nauseating. After a half-
hour, and the feeling of steel trying to rip itself out of you becomes intolerable.

Propped up against one wall, however, is the acolyte’s prize – the Disharmony Gospel, a stack of six-by-
five feet rusted iron plates, each embossed with raised letters that list all the things that the acolyte has
misremembered because it was just too strange, too bizarre, didn’t fit, or they didn’t want to deal with.
The mysterious words whispered to them from in the dark space under the bridge by the river before
they ran away in fright. The mental image of the bird with a human face that looked in their window at
night.. Their father’s secret twin that lived in the cupboard. The woman that was running down Main
Street one evening, before falling into her shadow and screaming all the way down, before the car
headlights destroyed the shadow-hole. Each event storms back into the acolyte’s memory like a
revelation, spurring them on to lift the huge, heavy plates so they can uncover the next metal page and
use the intermittent strobes of red light to read the next set of forgotten apocrypha from their lives. The
head made of soil they found in the garden which cried when their brother smashed it with a brick. The
time they lifted up a sewer cover and found a man inside, who smiled back at them before trying to grab
them. The view from the neighbours house into the nearby restaurant’s kitchen, holding rows and rows
of small bodies in huge basins of dull-grey water.

It is wise that the acolyte leave as soon as they have read their Gospel, if not sooner. The flashes of red
that illuminate the room occasionally cast light upon the holes in the walls, revealing oddly-
proportioned humanoid shapes, occasionally reflecting red light off of marred, black eyes that peer
through as they pace around. Though the Gospel Wardens seem to be unable to get through the gaps
between the steel plates that make up the walls, they have no trouble reaching the labyrinth of dimly-lit
corridors that seperates the room and the exit of the factory, and they make it their mission not to have
the acolyte escape with any knowledge gleaned from their Gospel.
197: The Silent Man
An entity has entered the annals of urban myth under a number of names and guises; in Glasgow, it is
given the name “Sandshoe Sammy”, a mocking title intended to discourage fear by laughing in the face
of it – the name comes from the fact that it can move without making a sound, as though its shoes
dampened the noise of its footsteps.

This entity is given other names. Another common appelation is “The Still Man”, in the sense that the
entity often brings with it a sense of foreboding stillness before it strikes, or that it makes very little
movement in those rare moments where it is seen by an eyewitness. Irrespective of how appropriate
this title is, it may be misapplied – German folklore refers to it as “Der Stillmann”, which can be
translated to “The Silent Man”, referring back to its method of remaining completely quiet when
stalking its victim.

The Silent Man usually appears as a man dressed in dark-coloured formal clothing, but for whatever
reason, appears hazy and indistinct when viewed with the naked eye; its facial features seem to blur into
one another when viewed closely. According to most eyewitnesses, the Silent Man simply stands and
stares – if it can be said to have eyes. The Silent Man will stalk its victims for any length of time before
ultimately disposing of them.

In areas where the Silent Man is seen, atrocities are inevitable; it is an omen of disaster. While
eyewitness accounts of its actual behaviour are lacking, it is obvious from the aftermath of its
appearances that it is capable of severely mutilating its victims. The most common artifact discovered
after an encounter with him are a number of “canopic bags” – fleshy containers that hold each of the
victim’s individual organs and body parts. The face bag tends to be left behind most often.
Emergence
It’s all lies.

That’s what you have to keep in mind when it comes to the “paranormal”, the “supernatural”, the
“occult”, whatever you want to frame it as. Everything you hear, everything you see – hell, even
everything I’ve said – it’s all half-truth. Para-normal. Beside the real.

Which isn’t to say the other half is a lie, necessarily. You know that old saying, about how if you were to
the point to the moon, a dog would only ever think to look towards your hand, never towards the sky?
The half-truth is the hand half-open, one digit extended (painkillers, little white moons, tucked inside
the other folded fingers).

When we watch a movie, we’re not constantly assessing whether or not what is happening on the
screen is “real” (whatever that means), whether it has actually happened (whatever that means), or who
is lying (whatever that means). If an artist draws a portrait of you, he’s not really trying to get you to
believe that you’re nothing more than graphite on paper (although…). When a friend delivers an
anecdote, we don’t demand evidence – but we also don’t believe that everything they’re saying is one-
hundred-percent true, either. (“YOU CAN’T MAKE AN OATH ON THIS BLACK BOOK.”)

A lie is the sugar on the bitter pill of truth; it makes it easier to get in your gullet. I’m all for taking
painkillers for the sickness reality’s given us. Don’t call it Lunacy.

All these half-truths are meant to get us to think. Metaphor, ‘pataphor, semaphore six times removed,
one thing pointing to another, pointing to another, pointing to a hand that’s pointing at the moon while
the other pats the Dog of Sickness. It’s not enough to read the writing on the wall – you have to move
your mind down to each and every individual letter, all the way up to the soaring heights of symbol.
(“TURN YOUR EYES FROM WINDOWS TO DOORS”).

It’s not a random accident, for example, that the only way to access a colossal, seemingly-infinite tower
standing in desolate plains can only be done by passing through a circular (seemingly-infinite) tunnel
(the negative space of a horizontal tower) under metres of rock. It’s also not a coincidence that the
acolyte has to press buttons labelled 1, 2 and 3 (three realities) at the same time (bringing them into
synchrony) then denying all three by mentioning the basement (sub-reality/the level of symbol and
metaphor/para-normal/beside the real) to get access to a woman who owns books (grimoires,
grammaries) that describe reality through magick (spells) and symbol (spelling). It’s also not insignificant
that these two locations are, in our level of reality, physically within sight of one another. They’re
connected. (“THE SPELLER DWELLS IN THE CELLAR”.)
This is not a random assortment of meaningless, arbitrary details and cosmic mis-takes: each part, each
Key, is connected to every other one in cryptic, but altogether concrete, ways. In a spider’s web, the
spaces between each strand of webbing are just as important to the overall structure of the web as the
strands themselves; what’s missing is just as important as what’s present. What am I missing?

I guess I’m missing myself. Or that I was missing.

It’s important to not only be good at crafting a lie, but to be just as good at crafting a half-truth. I’ve
spent almost three years pretending to be someone else, someone I created, just to give myself a place
to hide – but you know, you can only hide objects inside or behind other objects. Where do you hide a
mind? Inside and behind another mind. A mind that said “None of it’s real!” “It’s just something I wrote
for fun!” “It’s all an art project!”

Maybe you believed it, maybe you didn’t. Remember, it’s not about whether or not it was true, or if it
was a lie. It’s about the hand that’s pointing at the moon. In this case, it was a bit of sleight of hand.
Sleight of mind. (“THE WATER RESTING ON YOUR EYES PROTECTS FROM ALL THE FOULEST LIES“).

That’s why I went missing. I left Glasgow, travelled down south for a while – “it’s all gone south, really,” I
said to myself in Portsmouth. It wasn’t enough. Every city, every town, every village, every farmstead –
every congregation of people has its relics, its pilgrims, its acolytes, its bibles, its holy words, its
prophecies. Its secrets.

I tried the Appearance of Three Ladies in Brighton, only, it seems as though They’d always been there,
mistaken for phantom nuns (phantom, nones) at Apes. I watched as They made their eternal walk down
the Devil’s Dyke. I lost the Colder Capacitor in Tunbridge Wells when London’s Acolytes came down to
find me – appropriately enough, on September 18th – and I cried “Weal, weal, weal, weal,” all the way
home.

And now: I’m home.

Things have changed. Everything old is new again. And Glasgow’s Gideon Keys have grown older and
younger. Some survived, some have died, some will rise again. And I know I have to go back, to write
this all down – forge the next link in the Chain – before we forget that all of this, the Keys, the Held
Breath Conflicts, Eilidh, the Glascau Curator, Lady K, and Dominic, all of these things were real. Beside
the real. Para-normal.
And now:

“THE DAMSELFLY FLITS ON THE DOOR OF THE DEAD, WAITING FOR THE KEYS TO TURN IN THE LOCH.”
EMERGENCY
I’ve scheduled this post to be sent out at midnight on a Sunday, so that, if I’m not around to disable it, it
will send out this message. I’m also making a habit of updating this post every other week so that if
something happens to me, you will have as much information as I can give you.

The last date I edited this post was: 6th March 2012.

This post will be the longest by far, because something is going on in Glasgow. Something major has
changed, and we’re all feeling the fallout. Not just acolytes – the Keys are moving so close to the general
public that they’re bound to finally notice. A meteor passing across the sky. An image of Princess Diana
being caught on camera in a Glasgow church. You don’t need to know about Wormeswood and
Kempion, or the Secret Canonisation, to know that these things are tinged with the paranormal.

But they’re just the fallout of bigger events that the public never sees.

According to The Voice of Other Glasgows, the Glascau Curator has been killed, and everything from its
exhibition has been taken – all acolytes are being turned away. If the exhibits fall into the wrong hands,
we could have a new disease hitting the streets – made up of every disease that has come before.

People using the Glascau Tarot have reported seeing a new card show up in the “future” position of
spreads – “The Damselfly”. It seems to take the place of The Hermit, and some people are interpreting it
as an omen of “the birth of a new death” – a contact of mine claims it “sleeps in the amniotic lake,
steeped in placental dirt”. Other forms of divination report similar ideas.

A gang of Coerceomancers have gotten involved with football throughout the city, which has led to the
tumultuous period for Celtic (with their manager embroiled in bomb plots) and Rangers (going into
administration and numerous other business disasters). The gang has gone unnoticed due to the
relatively mundane, down-to-earth havoc they have wreaked – but it’s all really to weaken the power of
“The Church of Our Lady of the Old Firm”, a group of occultists who have been trying to give football the
same sanctified status as religion.

The Watchtower bleeds. Ankle-deep blood on the top, dripping down through the cracks of the
concrete. The plains around are empty.
And most damaging for me – I saw my own body pulled out of the Sacred Ground. I know it’s not a
concrete, inviolate portent of doom, but it’s unsettling enough to have given me some sense of
memento mori. I need to make sure I have everything in order. That’s what this was for.

Eilidh is missing. No-one at the consultancy has seen her since two Sundays ago. I keep getting messages
from her phone, but they’re not from her. I’ve had phonecalls too. I don’t answer them any more. They
sound like her, but they can’t be her. Eilidh would tell me where she was, what had happened: the voice
on the phone screams, and cries. I listened to the voice for fifteen straight minutes, and it never said a
word. Screaming and crying, for fifteen minutes, and it sounds like my best friend. My last friend.

Even Steph is gone.

I think she killed Dom. She’d been acting really weird since I took her to visit the Borstal and we opened
the splinter there. When we left, she told me she wanted help her find answers – I thought she meant
about Dom, since the things we experienced in the Bostal are so closely tied to the things that Dom was
investigating. I wanted answers too, so I took her to visit Ms. Marshall at the lab, and we took some of
Gideon’s Key: I woke up the next day in Steph’s apartment, and walked into the kitchen to find her at
the sink, with blood dripping down from the worktops and all over the floor. She was slicing away layers
of skin on her left ring finger, just cutting and cutting away without making any noise. She jumped when
she saw me, and her hand slipped, taking the full finger clean off. She didn’t scream, or shout, or
anything. She just breathed in. There was a noise like metal hitting the floor – I looked down, and saw
her finger, purple and blue from the blood being cut off by a ring that had the word “ZEBA” engraved on
the front.

I looked up. She was watching me the whole time, maybe trying to gauge if I had worked something out.
I hadn’t – but it didn’t stop her. Steph thrust the knife at my face without even blinking, and just set at
me. She jabbed the knife at me, but I managed to shove her away so that she slipped on the floor, and I
ran out of the flat.

I went back every few days, but she never answered the door. The lights were always out when I visited
in the evenings. Then, this Saturday, I saw a “To Let” notice on her flat’s window. She’s gone, and I don’t
know where.
I don’t know what to make of all this. I’ve tried using the Glass Bones, but they don’t work for me. I’m
writing down as much as I can now, but I don’t know how much time I have left. There’s still so much
I’ve need to tell people. The Scavenger’s Daughter, The False Saint, the Clock that Crawls, the Witch
Tree, the Ochre Room, the Doll Colony, the Centipede Mosaic… I haven’t finished my work yet.

Just in case, though, I’m taking what I’ve written so far and giving it to Judith at the book-store: 75
entries will be enough for Bible John’s black book. If anyone could find a way to weather any storm
that’s coming Glasgow’s way, it’d be that bastard.