The black door did not hide a cult.

That was Stacy’s first disappointment.

No robes. No candles. No chanting.

Instead, the Inner Flame Society had a library, a laboratory, several respectable scholars and a distressing quantity of filing cabinets.

**STACY:**
“I was promised occultism.”

**CAELWYN:**
“Were you?”

**STACY:**
“There was a black invitation.”

**CAELWYN:**
“Aye. Very misleading.”

A physician passed carrying photographic plates.

Two women were comparing automatic writing with a medieval manuscript.

An archaeologist sat beside an electrical engineer, arguing over something excavated near Nineveh.

Stacy stopped smiling.

**STACY:**
“They’re serious.”

**CAELWYN:**
“That’s usually when things become dangerous.”

Dr Arthur Pembroke appeared from between two shelves.

His tie was immaculate again.

**STACY:**
“Doctor.”

Pembroke regarded her suspiciously.

**PEMBROKE:**
“I trust last night’s boxing enthusiasm remains confidential.”

**CAELWYN:**
“Your reputation is safe.”

**PEMBROKE:**
“Thank you.”

**CAELWYN:**
“Your singing, less so.”

Pembroke sighed.

**PEMBROKE:**
“Come downstairs.”

—

The basement was enormous.

Maps of Britain, Egypt, India, Mesopotamia, West Africa and the Caribbean covered one wall.

Archaeological sites were marked beside monasteries, battlefields, private houses and places where mediums had reported unusual phenomena.

But another map dominated the room.

It showed no countries at all.

Stacy read the labels.

**STACY:**
“Dream. Apparition. Possession. Invocation…”

She moved closer.

**STACY:**
“The dead.”

Another section simply read:

**UNCLASSIFIED CONTACT**

**STACY:**
“What exactly are you mapping?”

Professor Edwin Harcourt looked up from the table.

He seemed more suited to the Royal Society than a secret occult organisation.

**HARCOURT:**
“The invisible.”

Stacy waited.

Harcourt did not smile.

**STACY:**
“You’re serious.”

**HARCOURT:**
“Entirely.”

She pointed towards several clusters of reports.

**STACY:**
“Ghosts?”

**HARCOURT:**
“Sometimes.”

**STACY:**
“Angels?”

**HARCOURT:**
“According to some witnesses.”

**STACY:**
“Demons?”

**HARCOURT:**
“According to others.”

Caelwyn was studying another section.

Ancient names had been carefully copied from excavated inscriptions.

Names belonging to beings once worshipped as gods.

**CAELWYN:**
“And those?”

Harcourt joined him.

**HARCOURT:**
“More difficult.”

**CAELWYN:**
“Gods?”

**HARCOURT:**
“That’s what the people who built their temples called them.”

**STACY:**
“And what do you call them?”

**HARCOURT:**
“We haven’t decided.”

Stacy raised an eyebrow.

**HARCOURT:**
“A name is not a specimen, Miss Stacy.”

He pointed towards the map.

**HARCOURT:**
“Ghost. Angel. Demon. God. Spirit. Humanity has accumulated thousands of names for the invisible.”

**STACY:**
“You think they’re all the same thing?”

**HARCOURT:**
“No.”

That answer changed the room.

**HARCOURT:**
“We used to.”

—

On another table lay three drawings.

One copied from an ancient Near Eastern fragment.

One from a seventeenth-century European manuscript.

The third had been produced eighteen months earlier by a Glasgow medium during automatic writing.

They were almost identical.

**STACY:**
“She’d seen the others?”

**HARCOURT:**
“Neither had been published.”

Caelwyn bent over the oldest drawing.

**CAELWYN:**
“Almost identical.”

**HARCOURT:**
“Yes.”

**CAELWYN:**
“No. Almost.”

He pointed to a ring of tiny marks surrounding the ancient version.

They were absent from the others.

**CAELWYN:**
“What happened to these?”

**HARCOURT:**
“Nothing happened to them. We omitted them from the reconstruction.”

**STACY:**
“Why?”

**HARCOURT:**
“Protective superstition. Probably decorative.”

Caelwyn looked at him.

**CAELWYN:**
“Aye.”

**HARCOURT:**
“You disagree?”

**CAELWYN:**
“I’ve seen markings like them before.”

**HARCOURT:**
“Where?”

**CAELWYN:**
“Old places. Doorways. Boundaries.”

Harcourt smiled politely.

**HARCOURT:**
“Exactly. Protective superstition.”

**CAELWYN:**
“That’s one name for it.”

Stacy knew that tone.

**STACY:**
“And the other?”

Caelwyn looked back at the missing marks.

**CAELWYN:**
“A lock.”

—

Harcourt led them to a collection of electrical instruments, photographic equipment and a wireless set modified beyond recognition.

**STACY:**
“You’re using all this to contact the dead?”

**HARCOURT:**
“To observe phenomena.”

**STACY:**
“That’s a very scientific way of avoiding my question.”

Harcourt laughed.

**HARCOURT:**
“Very well. Sometimes mediums claim to contact the dead. Sometimes people claim to encounter angels. Others report demons, ancestors or gods.”

He touched the edge of the great map.

**HARCOURT:**
“We stopped asking which religion was correct.”

**STACY:**
“And started asking?”

**HARCOURT:**
“What actually answers.”

Stacy glanced at Caelwyn.

He wasn’t smiling anymore.

**HARCOURT:**
“Superstition is merely observation without method.”

**CAELWYN:**
“Sometimes.”

**HARCOURT:**
“You disagree again?”

**CAELWYN:**
“Sometimes superstition is a warning without an explanation.”

Harcourt considered that.

**HARCOURT:**
“And sometimes it’s merely superstition.”

**CAELWYN:**
“Absolutely.”

He nodded towards the ancient diagram.

**CAELWYN:**
“Problem is knowing which before you remove it.”

A bell rang.

Once.

Conversation stopped.

One of the electrical needles moved.

Then again.

Stacy immediately approached the machine.

**STACY:**
“Electrical interference?”

**PEMBROKE:**
“Possibly.”

The needle moved a third time.

Three movements.

Equal intervals.

Harcourt’s eyes lit up.

**HARCOURT:**
“Record the time.”

Not fear.

Excitement.

Scientists reached for notebooks.

Someone checked atmospheric conditions.

Another examined the wiring.

And Stacy understood why this place frightened Caelwyn.

These people weren’t fools.

Their experiments worked.

Not reliably.

Not completely.

But considerably more often than they should.

Then Caelwyn noticed the black thread.

One end had slipped from its pin on the great wall map.

It fell slowly across the paper.

From:

**UNCLASSIFIED CONTACT**

to:

**LONDON**

**STACY:**
“Caelwyn?”

He stared at the map.

**CAELWYN:**
“They’ve mapped all the ways we might reach the other side.”

**STACY:**
“They’re trying to.”

**CAELWYN:**
“Aye.”

The needle moved once more.

Caelwyn looked towards the machine.

**CAELWYN:**
“I wonder if anyone’s mapping the ways it can reach us.”

The Victorian world had mapped oceans, continents and stars.

It had excavated forgotten cities, translated the names of ancient gods and begun probing the human mind.

Why should the invisible be exempt?

Perhaps that was the Inner Fire in its purest form.

Not lust.

Not violence.

Not intoxication.

Curiosity.

The inability to discover a closed door without eventually asking what lies behind it.

And perhaps the frightening part of the Victorian obsession with ghosts, angels, demons and forgotten gods was not that intelligent people went searching for them.

It was that, every so often,

something answered.

**What would frighten you more: discovering that the supernatural is real — or discovering that it can be studied?**

And if we start mapping the other side, when should we ask whether something over there has begun mapping us?

Walk into worlds that remember:
https://startplaying.games/gm/dunchan

Essays, worlds and the ideas behind Mythveil:
https://www.patreon.com/c/mythveilchronicles_bydunchanhuntergames