The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 212 - The Axis Mundi

August 16, 2016·34 min·2 clips

Richard Strand admits he did not lead friends to Bobby Mames' body through psychic vision — he led them to every logical location he had mapped out, and they happened to find the body at one of them.

1. The Black Tapes Season 2, episode 212, titled The Axis Mundi, advances the season's core conspiracy as multiple investigative threads converge. 2. The episode is produced and mixed by Nick Silver, executive produced by Paul Bae and Terry Miles, and narrated by journalist Alex Regan. 3. The episode opens immediately after a cliffhanger in which Alex and Richard Strand were taken to a safe house by Cora Lee — Strand's missing wife — and two unnamed companions. 4. After Cora Lee's group departs, Strand reveals to Alex that Cora Lee told him she had been hired as a 'watcher' by a shadow organization led by a figure called the Advocate — tasked with monitoring his whereabouts and keeping him safe. 5. Cora Lee fell in love with Strand, began protecting him from both sides including from her own handlers, and was abducted when her organization discovered her defection; she had also been monitoring the podcast as it made her communications increasingly difficult. 6. Strand discloses that Cora Lee believes Thomas Warren is the Advocate, and that Warren's organization — working with the Order of the Cenefis — believes Strand's family carries a genetic key that, 'when the time is right, they could manipulate to achieve some ridiculous end.' 7. In a private conversation, Strand corrects the record on the Bobby Mames incident: he had spent weeks mapping possible body-disposal sites around his town, led his friends through every logical candidate location, and found the corpse at one stop on the route — by the stream he had dreamed about. 8. Strand describes the prevailing myth of his direct psychic guidance to Bobby Mames' body as 'a construction,' attributing it to a 16-year-old's 'flair for the dramatic' and the shock-altered memory of his friend Wayne Coates. 9. Strand confirms he no longer has the one million dollar reward he offered through the Strand Institute — he used his inheritance from Howard Strand to fund the Institute and pay employee Ruby over the years. 10. A meeting with Thomas Warren at a Seattle restaurant goes on record: Warren offers to finance the Strand Institute as a research grant, claims Dava Corporation is working on something 'altruistic,' and invites Strand to join their team. 11. Warren hands Strand one of Howard Strand's research journals, telling him that Howard had been working with Dava Corporation for seven years before being murdered — contradicting Strand's belief that his father died in an accident. 12. Nick connects a recurring theme: Simon Rees had referenced symphonies and choirs in earlier messages, and four anonymous sound files have been received over the course of the investigation — possibly corresponding to the four movements of a symphony. 13. The observation that composer Percival Black composed exclusively five-movement symphonies introduces the possibility that the files form his version of the Mysterium — with the Unsound potentially representing the fifth movement. 14. Alex contacts John Uvella, a guide to Yuraka Mesa, to check on two Anasazi totems believed to keep an interdimensional gateway sealed; Uvella reports both have been knocked over, one broken badly. 15. Nick finds a sketch of the totems from the early 1600s showing five totems originally at the site — the same number as movements in a Percival Black symphony, and one more than the four sound files received. 16. A reexamination of Anasazi cave paintings in Yuraka Mesa leads Alex to suggest the tall central figure in a circular formation of smaller figures is not being worshipped but is conducting an orchestra — with the smaller figures holding instruments, not weapons. 17. Nick realizes the hexadecimal numbers associated with the Axis Mundi do not decode to GPS coordinates for Mount Ararat — they decode to an IP address, specifically the IP address of the Pacific Northwest Stories studio. 18. Alex and Nick deduce that the podcast itself has been the Axis Mundi: by broadcasting the four sound files across episodes, they have been playing the movements of Percival Black's Mysterium symphony to listeners all season. 19. A closing voicemail from an unidentified source delivers the season's most ominous warning: those who have heard all five movements of the Mysterium in order will be 'followed by a darkness... when they look into the shadows, they'll see a little further,' and 'the world will be lost.' 20. Requires knowledge of prior season events to follow most threads; best suited for existing Black Tapes listeners engaged with the serialized mythology.

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