The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Songs and Signs

January 12, 2020·33 min·3 clips

A mystic believed tearing through reality's fabric requires playing an ancient song from Pythagoras.

The episode begins already fractured. Richard Strand returns one of eleven calls, gets folded into the machinery of the recording, and the show lets its own setup peek through before sliding back into dread. Alex is still shaken. The Oneida mansion sighting left her with too many Sebastian Torres lookalikes, and that unease follows every question after it. Then the trail turns archival. A professor walks her through Juris, whose writings place him somewhere between Russia, Bulgaria, study with monks, and a careful blank space. That missing place matters. Juris says he kept the monks' privacy, but the professor hears control in the silence. Ego belongs in the file. A man expecting his work to surface after death would know what followers might do with a named source. The word keeps changing shape. What Alex hears as an order with an F sound becomes Cenefis, then a person, then Cylon's rebellious student. The correction lands dry. Even the meaning slips, from the spiny one to something closer to spiny claw, maybe botanical, maybe bent by Juris himself. Music becomes a system. Juris says the Bulgarian monks practiced a heavy regimen of music theory and mathematics, tying discipline to belief without really explaining the knot. Then Alex's memory drops out. She hears the answer she called for, stays on the line, and cannot remember why she called at all. That is the real disturbance. The investigation is no longer only names, sects, and lost records. It is what the subject is doing to the investigator. The ending gives no clean explanation. A tape shows children spotting a creature, screaming, and dropping the camera, but Alex's recognition makes it worse. She has seen it before. The creature resembles one from an earlier dream, standing beside her bed, holding the head of a cat, with an intimacy she cannot file away as coincidence. The case closes sideways, leaving a scholarly footnote, a failed memory, and the sense that the signs may be reading Alex back.

As heard by us

A historical mystery darkens as children's footage begins to rhyme with a private nightmare.

Richard Strand's investigation starts with a dozen Sebastian Torres lookalikes on the lawn of the Oneida Community Mansion House, then narrows toward Juris and a trail through Russia, Bulgaria, Cylon, and unnamed monks.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a children's tape to turn from odd historical footnote into the narrator's old nightmare.

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