The following is the last piece of work done by a former colleague, Nathaniel Douglas. While he survived this incident, the same cannot be said of three police officers, four paramedics, and two doctors that attended to him in the aftermath. He retired in 2018, and currently lives in an assisted care facility due to the injuries he sustained during this case.

It's because of him that we adopted the Douglas Doctrine; essentially, it was made official Institute policy to not use dictation software because of what happened to him. The text reproduced below omits a large amount of potentially dangerous text generated by an anomaly.

When most people think of an occult bookstore, images are conjured of poorly-lit, decaying wooden buildings in back alleys, with an ancient-looking man behind the counter, poring over a volume of eldritch lore, hoping that he doesn’t realize you notice the sounds of screaming and chains rattling from under the floorboards. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

When I was in London recently, searching for my next project, I found myself drawn into a small storefront near the Leicester Square Underground station. It was called Watkins, and advertised itself as an ‘esoteric bookstore’. It’s quite famous; Aleister Crowley’s first biography mentions it, and the owner was friends with Madame Blavatsky, whose belief system of theosophy helped contribute to the ideology of the Nazi party.

Instead of finding volumes of quaint and curious lore, what I found inside were crystals, homeopathic remedies, and licensed Tarot decks. (They wanted almost £40 for a Beatles-themed Tarot deck with some of the ugliest art I have ever seen on the major arcana.) Still, my last report to the Institute was three months old, and I was desperate for some form of pay.

There was a ‘genuine’ copy of the Necronomicon going for £50 (over $60!) because it was a ‘rare edition’; I suppose being based off of a fictional book of dark magic does make it rare. Other books were similarly disappointing; a few volumes of werewolf and vampire lore, some sensationalized accounts of druidic rituals, ‘Most Haunted Places in Britain’, that sort of thing. I was about to give up entirely… when I saw it, in the basement of the bookstore.

It stood out because of how small it was; it was a paperback book, no more than maybe 200 pages. It had a faded pink spine, but it was surprisingly devoid of cracks and other wear associated with an aged book. I pulled it off the shelf, and found myself staring at the face of a barbarian prince, clearly modeled off of Fabio, as he positioned himself between a scantily-clad woman chained to some rocks and a black dragon with seven heads. Upon looking closer, I realized that… it wasn’t a dragon. It was a hand, with far too many fingers.

My breath hitched when I read the title: Adventures in Alorane, by Robert Nitrum. It looked like a generic sword-and-sorcery novel, but I knew it was far, far more than that. What I was holding was probably one of the most dangerous volumes of fiction in existence, and I don’t mean in terms of the story. People have killed for copies of this book, and died to destroy them. I brought it up to the cash register on the main level, and was met with an odd look; they looked through their system, and informed me that they didn’t stock the book, and there was no price sticker on it. All the same, they agreed to part with it for only £10.

I ran back into the Underground, and was jittery all the way back to the AirBnB I had rented near Victoria Station.

Adventures in Alorane was originally published in 1987 by what was essentially an author mill, trying to capitalize on the popularity of-- and controversy surrounding-- Dungeons & Dragons. The plot is nothing to write home about, and is essentially explained on the cover; a store-brand version of Conan the Barbarian has to rescue a fair maiden from the clutches of evil. That’s the key word here: clutches. Individuals who have been subjected to this volume have reported the sensation of being strangled, which is supported by ligature marks on the survivors.

The following has been written with the assistance of dictation software. Recording begins at 6:17 PM GMT on June 10th, 2018.

Table of Contents: Chapter 9 and 15 possess identical titles (“The Servants of M’laru”) and are identical in terms of page length.

Page 1: Odd-numbered pages are on the left-hand side of the book, and even-numbered pages are on the right. It’s disorienting, but not too troubling.

Content: cliche fantasy narration, talking about how the Land of Alorane has been under the rule of darkness for generations at this point, and how a prophesied hero is fated to free them.

Page 6: A line of dialog spoken by the evil sorcerer M’laru-- an incantation of some sort?--gives me a twitch in my left eye. Might be coincidental, but still worth noting. Also of note: page has a brown stain on it, too small and dark to reasonably be a coffee stain.

Content: M’laru scrying the protagonist of the novel.

Page 13: Completely blank. This lines up with other accounts of Adventures in Alorane. Every page that is a multiple of thirteen (twenty-six, thirty-nine, fifty-two, etc.) is blank, but the text accounts for this; the text on page 12 continues on Page 14. More dark stains on this page as well.

Content: On page 12, we’re introduced to the barbarian prince Hagal, and a prophecy, where he will ‘sever M’laru’s fingers’.

Page 29: Nose started bleeding. Stuffed a tissue up there, but may remove it at a later point to test Page 65. 

Content: Some characterization is given to Princess Essamine, the damsel du jour. Oddly, she’s described as being furred at several points; I triple-checked the cover, but it’s just a plain human on the front.

Page 37: Taking a break. Nosebleed is leading to a migraine. Not helping is an entire page of M’laru’s incantations. Photographs appear to show a mess of toner, spanning whole paragraphs. To my eyes, it looks as if dozens of letters have been superimposed over each other, producing a sort of nonsense script. When Adventures in Alorane was first discovered in 2005, it was originally thought to be a printer error; this isn’t the case. Our best guess is that the text is a language that the human mind was not built to properly comprehend. Trying to read it is like trying to read every page of the dictionary at the same time.

Page 42: I normally don’t imagine the voices of characters as I read them; I just perceive the words and imagine them read in a neutral voice, barring any mention of an accent. So why am I hearing M’laru’s voice as clearly as if he were next to me? Other audible phenomena-- snapping sounds, like twigs or popping joints. Likely the latter. Left hand (one flipping the pages) has a dark spot on it now, between the thumb and forefinger.

Content: M’laru converses with his master: P’ram’ya, the Hand of Darkness. P’ram’ya isn’t described, not fully, nor does it ‘speak’ in any script I can understand; same overlapping letters that M’laru uses for his magic.

Page 50: M’laru is seemingly narrating the novel in my head, speaking with clear derision of Hagal, and with some degree of perverse affection towards Essamine. 

Content: Hagal discovers he must sacrifice three of his fingers to be able to wield the magic sword Sumutr. (Misspelled at least twice as “Smutr”).

EDIT: He asked me a question: “Do you feel its embrace?”

Page 57: Fight between Hagal and a mirror vision of himself. It’s at this point that I realize I have forgotten to cover the mirror in my room prior to reading this; I look up and see a dark shape in the room with me, clad in a robe, one hand holding a long scepter. It asks: “Do you long for its embrace?”

I try to stand to cover the mirror, but my chair won’t move. Nor will my legs. I look down to see small hands the color of ice on a winter’s night holding me in place. The message is clear: finish the novel, or else.

Page 65: All of the blank pages before now have been blank as a misdirection. Page 65 is the only one with any unique properties, and it shows; there are dark stains all over the page. I produce a small knife, and cut my ring finger, just a little, so that blood drips onto the page.

What’s revealed are words in the overlapping script, but I can read these. I don’t know what would happen if I read them out loud, nor did I want to know. I tried tearing the page out of the book for separate preservation, and found myself screaming; a tear of equal size had opened on my left hand, between the first two knuckles. I could see flesh beneath. I looked in the mirror, and saw the figure grinning at me.

Content: irrelevant.

Page 71: Hand is bleeding too much. Hard to read. Dictation software still works. Feeling dizzy. Nauseous. I beg the figure to let me go; he says ‘Will you accept its embrace?’ I don’t know what it is; the Hand of Darkness? M’laru? The book is stuck to the table, I can’t shut it. The figure seems to be getting closer to the mirror with each turn of the page.

I have to stop reading. I can’t stop reading. I must. I shouldn’t. This was a mistake. Help me, please.

Page 77: Help.

Page 78: Help.

Page 79: Help.

Page 80: Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell.

Page 81: [Text Omitted per Douglas Doctrine]

[Error: No speech registered. Please try again.]

[Error: Software not calibrated for this language. Please try again.]

[Error: No usable words registered. Please try again.]

Mr. Douglas, this is a wellness check.

Mister Douglas?

Door's unlocked, that's odd. Mr. Douglas?

Jesus Christ! This is PC Martins, I need an ambulance at [address removed]. 

Yes, I think… he may be alive, but.

Oh. Oh God. What happened to his hand?

Do you feel its embrace?

[Text Omitted per Douglas Doctrine]

[Error: input volume exceeded. Please speak more quietly.]