The Black Tapes S01E11 - The Codex Gigas

Alex Reagan: The Black Tapes is brought to you by Rocket Sound. Not everyone has blackmailed a structural acoustician into being a part of their podcast – we still know what you did, Dr. Pullman, and if you don’t play ball everyone else will, too – but sometimes you still need an audio engineer to rip apart the secrets in an MP3 sent from beyond the grave. In times like those, it’s essential to contact RocketSound. Creating a new video game? Authoring a new animation? Crafting a digital ritual that will open the final Gate and unleash the apocalypse? RocketSound is there for you.

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Alex Reagan: Previously, my good friend and Nic’s on-again, off-again lover Amalia, who was working as a research assistant for us in Russia, disappeared without a trace, save for the word “KROATON” carved into the wall of her hotel room beneath the blood-splattered visage of a devil goat. We also learned that Coralee Strand, Richard’s missing and presumed dead wife, has an active post office box under an assumed name. I broke into Richard Strand’s house and waited in the shadows, tape recorder running, in order to capture his true and honest reaction.

Alex Reagan: So Richard, what do you think about the news that your missing wife may be alive, and had created an entirely separate identity in order to hide vast troves of communication from you?

Richard Strand: Well Alex, I see two possibilities. One, this is true, which would certainly be an interesting turn of events. Two, and more likely, your information comes from a crazed fan who has been listening to you podcast, which is like radio for the internet, and has carefully crafted a fiction designed to lure you in and grant her both a role in the story she loves so dearly and the fame she so desperately craves.

Alex Reagan: Wait, you think she hacked into Coralee’s email twenty years ago and created a paper trail that pointed vaguely in her direction in the hopes that one day someone wold create a podcast about this woman whom she had never met?

Richard Strand: Exactly, Alex. You know, you’re getting much better at this rational skepticism thing. I’m glad we’ve been hanging out!

Nic Silver: Hey Dr. Strand, I just got back from California and I talked to an undocumented immigrant who had very clear memories of the day your wife disappeared, and she said that you and Coralee got into a big fight right before she vanished? Care to comment?

Richard Strand: We fought about Coralee’s affair. Coralee created a sophisticated system of deception, using assumed names, burner phones, and dead drops. She and her illicit lover never met at the same location twice, and there was always a carefully crafted, completely plausible, and even verifiable explanation for why she was away.

Alex Reagan: Wow, it sounds like she was some kind of spy or something!

Richard Strand: Yes it does, but I am sure that nothing will ever come of that!

Alex Reagan: And that fact that you have never told us about this fight is totally not because you murdered her in a fit of rage and then sacrificed her soul to some foul demon in order to aid its ascent from the depths below, right?

Richard Strand: Absolutely not!

Alex Reagan: Remember how I mentioned that my good friend and Nic’s former lover Amalia went missing? Well that’s still true!

Alex Reagan: Hi, Reggie? Amalia put me in touch with you, and said that you were Percival Black’s roommate back in the 80s?

Reggie Erdman: Oh yeah, Percival Black! What a card that guy was! Always locked away in his room, playing music that sounded a little bit like the seems of the universe coming apart, and always talking about how he was working on the “final symphony, that great and terrible music that will end this current age and unleash that which is to come!” And he also had this habit of wandering off on the night of the full moon and hanging out in the Witches’ Coven Clearing in Murderforrest Woods.

Alex Reagan: Hi, this might be a little weird, but do you guys offer degrees in Satanic Composition or Pagan Orgies?

Alice Kermode, University at Bath: Well not exactly. There is a field devoted to the darkest elder gods just off campus, and a series of caves in which the most aberrant rituals were once performed, and we did have a student a few years back whose Master’s Thesis was entitled “The Unsound: Sewing the Seeds of Chaos through the Occult Application of Disharmonic Acoustics and Blasphemous Mathematics.” That one got a lot of attention, since the University has never had a music department. But other than that, nope, this is a nice normal campus!

Alex Reagan: Hey Richard, have you ever heard of the Order of the Ceonophus?

Richard Strand: I absolutely have no knowledge of this so-called religious order, their blasphemous mythology, their demonic devotions, or their apocalyptic intentions, but I think I know a guy!

Dr. Rufus Carmichael, Cambridge University: Hi Alex! So let’s start with the Benedictines, who kind of created the modern archetype of a monk: celibacy, prayer, study, and nifty black robes. Pretty standard stuff. But there’s also a legend of a man named Brother Herman, in the Czech Republic, who committed a sin so great that he was sentenced to be walled up alive and left for dead! He obviously didn’t think this was a great idea, and started pleading for his life. His final offer was to create a work of art so staggeringly beautiful that God himself would descend from Heaven to bless the Order.

The abbot was kind of a dick, so he agreed and gave Herman one year to create a complete copy of the Bible, which normally takes more like twenty years. Herman knew he was fucked, so he prayed to God for help, but Jehovah was all “new phone, who dis?”

Like any good disgraced priest, Herman then turned to Satan, and offered his soul in exchange for help. Legend has it that Herman completed his work, the Codex Gigas, in a single night, and in gratitude for Satan’s help, he painted a giant portrait of the Devil and put it right in the center of his bible.

Alex Reagan: That’s cool and all, but how does it apply to the Order of the Ceonophus?

Dr. Rufus Carmichael, Cambridge University: Well in addition to being a dick the Abbot was apparently a Satanist, because the Codex Gigas quickly became his favorite book. But when the Order fell on hard times, the monks sold the Codex Gigas.

Brother Herman’s apprentice, Silverslouch, was furious, and he poured his anger into a work of creation, a copy of the Codex. This text came to be known as the Ceonophus, and Silverslouch started his own rival Brotherhood.

The Order of the Ceonophus lives in complete isolation, having no contact with the outside world, so their aims are a mystery, but they probably don’t involve using the secretes recorded in the facsimile of the Codex Gigas to unleash Satan and destroy the Church that disgraces Silverslouch’s master Herman!

Alex Reagan: Her Richard, have you ever seen this video of the guy who throws himself off the top of the Order of the Ceonophus’ monastery in Glushka, but when the tourists rush over to see the body, it has disappeared?

Richard Strand: Oh yeah, that gets sent to the Strand Center for Excuses and Denial a few times a year!

Alex Reagan: But I thought you’d never heard of the Order of the Ceonophus!

Richard Strand: Alex, if you’ve debunked one video of a phantasmal suicide at the condemned monastery of an heretical order of Satanic monks, you’ve debunked them all.

Alex Reagan: Okay … well, have you ever heard about the Even Eviler Codex Gigas, the Ceonophus?

Richard Strand: The Ceonophus is about as real as HP Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, which is to say a 100% real and 100% accurate text dedicated to unshackling the old gods sleeping quietly in a stone city at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, whose awakening will lead to untold chaos as the sanity is stripped from man, leaving us to revel in our terrible and animalistic true natures.

Alex Reagan: Hi Tina! Any developments on the Coralee Strand / Lisa Stevens angle?

Tina Stevens: Hi Alex! Nope! That woman that I met that one time ten years ago has not, in fact, stopped by to say hello and tell me all of the terrible secrets she had been concealing prior to her disappearance and/or murder!

Alex Reagan: Okay Nic, Tina Stevens was a wash, how about tips from the listener mail?

Nic Silver: Well I did get a very credible email from a guy named Carl Jenkins who claims that Dr. Strand’s research assistant wasn’t killed by the Unsound, but in fact died when Richard Strand opened up a portal to the Twelfth Netherhell, which is just outside of New Jersey, in an act Carl called “the first sacrifice to usher in the final doom.” That all seemed to line up with my research, so I set up a coffee date with you and Carl tomorrow at noon!

Alex Reagan: Thanks Nic, you’re the best!

Scary Sexy James Bond: Hi Alex! I just stopped by to grab a sample of Richard Strand’s DNA … this used coffee cup should do the trick! Anyway there’s absolutely nothing sinister about this at all, so please don’t make a big deal about it! TTYL!

Alex Reagan: … I have such a confused ladyboner right now.

Richard Strand: Hey Alex, I just got off the phone with someone who was clearly trying to distract me while an act of evil was perpetrated upon me! Anything interesting happen while I was gone?

Alice Kermode, University at Bath: Hi Alex! I sent you a some photos of the cave paintings. As you can see, there’s very typical neolithic art, and not at all reminiscent of an invading army of shadow demons, led by a monster god with an upside down face. Hope that helps!

Alex Reagan: Wait a second, this looks exactly like an invading army of shadow demons, led by a monster god with an upside down face!

Nic Silver: I should play the PNWS Boom now!

PNWS Boom

Alex Reagan: Hey Dr. Strand, quick question: I just received incontrovertible evidence that all of the Black Tapes are connected, and that you are both a lying liar who lies and quite possibly the fulcrum upon which a plot to destroy the world turns. Care to comment?

Richard Strand: Nope!

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Alex Reagan: The Black Tapes Podcast is a production of Pacific Northwest Stories and Minnow Beats Whale. Join me next time, when I beat some goddamned answers out of Richard Strand, and spend a pleasant afternoon with a hot Eagle Scout.