The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 111 - The Codex Gigas

September 29, 2015·44 min·4 clips

Dr. Strand admits he and Coralie had a screaming fight at a gas station just before she vanished.

The trail starts with an absence. A professor at the University of Bath tells Alex the school has never had a music department, which knocks out the simplest version of Percival Black's old identity. Reggie Erdmann was working from assumption. Black had moved to Bath in the early 80s, and his roommate seems to have accepted that he was a music student without knowing every department at the school. It is a small lie, but it changes the shape of Black's sudden departure, his nights away, and the cave the story keeps circling back to. Professor Kermode's photographs become the next hope. Alex wants a clue from them, but the evidence, as usual, arrives slower than the suspicion. So she turns to the monastic order. The Order of the Cenefis, described as an offshoot of the Benedictines, leaves almost no online trace, just as Amalia warned. Dr. Strand has never heard of it. Alex hears something in that, too. If Strand has no ready category for the order, the silence starts to feel less like obscurity and more like concealment. Strand stays practical. Which branch, where they came from, and where their chapters are supposed to be matter more to him than Alex's unease. The answers stay incomplete. Alex can name Mordovia, where Black is, and Bulgaria, but not enough history to make the order fully legible. Strand still has contacts. Within an hour, Dr. Rufus Carmichael calls, and the hidden trail suddenly has experts standing just outside the frame. The case tightens without getting louder. By the end, Alex has material she was never allowed to see and feelings she cannot yet sort into anger, betrayal, or confusion. The mystery gets wider.

As heard by us

A final episode that turns a paper trail into a deeper, stranger room.

The Black Tapes story goes further into monastic lore, false identities, and one especially evasive trail in Bath. Alex Regan follows Percival Black from a university rumor to the photograph that opens a new door, and the exchanges with Professor Kermode and Dr.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a season-one finale where interviews, photographs, and Dr. Strand widen the mystery instead of closing it.

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