Pre-Statement
Statement of Mary Keay regarding her first Leitner.
Case Number
0080307
Audio By
Author
Date of Statement
2008-07-03
Date of Event
1955
Date of Recording
2008-07-03
Locations
- Turner Street, Whitechapel, London
Meta Info
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MAG 63 - The End of the Tunnel
Guest Voice
Carrie Cohen as Mary Keay
Release Date
2017-04-27
Statement
Mary Keay remarks that Gertrude does not use her tape recorder very much anymore and that big changes are coming.
Mary met Jurgen Leitner in 1993, when he would come into her book shop and spent a long time investigating each book before leaving. In 1955, when she was nine, her father had committed suicide and her mother was working for The Magnus Institute and a factory on Grove Road. Mary lived with her mother in Whitechapel on Turner Street, where she would teach her daughter her ‘true studies’. Mary spent much of her youth hunting in charity shops for Artefacts which might whisper to her in special ways.
It was around this time that she gained her first Leitner book, in a time before his collection had really started. Dr. Margaret Tellison moved into a house opposite Mary’s and opened a small practice on Nelson Street. Immediately, Mary could tell that Dr. Tellison was touched by powers like the ones that watched over her family. A stream of patients would go into her practice, but ambulances would appear frequently to take some patients away.
One day Mary sneaked into Dr. Tellison’s practice. There she hid and watched an elderly man go in to see her. She managed to get in a few more times, before witnessing Dr. Tellison murder one of her female patients with a syringe of some liquid. She opened a safe with the combination 24-18-3-50 to reveal two books, one small, bound in leather and covered in animal bones; and the other large and misshapen.
Dr. Tellison removed the larger book from the safe and picked up a pen. After turning her patient over a table, she cut her top off and wrote on her back with a fountain pen. After 20 minutes she took a scalpel and removed the flesh from the corpse’s back and hung it on a wall to dry. Shortly afterwards she called someone and some men in an ambulance took the body away after being handed a large amount of cash.
Later, Dr. Tellison flicked through the larger book and read aloud from a page. Mary smelt the wet smell of dirt and saw an apparition of the previous older man. Dr. Tellison asked about his bank details and if he had hidden large sums of money. Mary disappointedly remarks that with all that power, Dr. Tellison was using it to make money. After she dismissed him, she fell asleep in her chair. Mary stepped out of her hiding place and, drawing the straight razor her father had used to commit suicide, slit Dr. Tellison’s throat. She took both books and left.
She spent a lot of her next years mastering the flesh-book, including learning Sanskrit. She claims to know all its secrets, except one, although she’s close to cracking that too. Gertrude remarks that this explains why Mary broke with the Institute. When asked, Mary says that the book comes from “[The End], of course”, but that she could not truly serve it as she found singular devotion too restrictive and that Gertrude could ask [Eric], “or what’s left of him”, for confirmation.
The other book was full of poems about dying animals written in Sanskrit, which drops bones, which Mary eventually sold to Leitner, but it returned to her after the fire.
Just before closing her statement, Mary handed Gertrude a page from the book, but refused to say who it was.
Supplemental
Jonathan suspects that Elias is withholding a lot of information. At the end of the recording he hears the floorboards creak and he discovers Gertrude’s hiding hole: where her laptop and a key are stored.
Continuity
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Mary Keay appeared first in MAG 4 - Page Turner.
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Related Entities:
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Related Books:
- The Catalogue of the Trapped Dead allows for people to be bound to the book to exist post death. Existing like this hurts according to Gerard Keay. It is also known as “the skin book.”
- Dead Mary had shown the other book of dead animal bones to Dominic Swain in MAG 4 - Page Turner.
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Related Beings:
- Mary Keay is close to cracking the book’s final secret; how to bind oneself to the book to become “beyond death.” She completes the ritual imperfectly in 2008. She becomes “powerful but erratic” and is able to “manifest almost at will,” punctuated by periods of fading away. When Mary manifests, she now appears as a shaven woman covered in Sanskrit tattoos and can interact with the physical world. She spends her time haunting her son and continuing her bookshop. Gertrude destroys her page after Gerard asks her for help.
- Gerard Keay was bound by Gertrude Robinson in the USA after he has died of brain cancer. Gertrude left him in police evidence for about a year before Trevor Herbert and Julia Montauk stole him and kept the book as a monster manual. Gerard expected his father to be in the book but he was too late, thinking he was wrong. John steals his page and destroys him back in the institute as requested by Gerard.
- Eric Delano was bound by Mary Keay, his wife. Mary had killed him and bound him to the page five years into their marriage. His page was given to Gertrude in this episode. Gertrude invokes the page and he gives his statement. Gertrude agrees that destroying his page is the best solution. He is not burned on tape therfore we only have Gertrude’s word as proof.
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Even though Eric, Mary and Gerard were all bound to the book, they were always destroyed or ripped out of the book before the next member of the family was added.
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Related Episodes:
- MAG 107 - Third Degree Trevor Herbert and Julia Montauk reveal to have the Catalogue of the Trapped Dead.
- MAG 111 - Family Business Statement of Gerard Keay while he is bound in the book.
- MAG 117 - Testament Gerard Keay’s page is burned by Johnathan Sims.
- MAG 154 - Bloody Mary Statement of Eric Delano while his page is in possession of Gertrude.