▫▪ Table of Contents ▪▫
⨕ Sandmen
The powerful people in that world were those people that were capable of reading the public mind and giving the public what it wants in those terms.
— Stuart Ewen, The Century of the Self
Dr. Frank Stanton
“Dr. Frank Stanton.”
© The Stanton Foundation
The former president of CBS (1946 to 1971) and its current vice-chairman. Along with the company’s founder William Paley, Dr. Stanton is responsible for growing CBS from an obscure regional radio operation into the so-called “Tiffany Network,” the gold standard for American television. Oddly, neither Paley nor Dr. Stanton like one another very much and never socialize outside of work. Paley once described Dr. Stanton as a “closed-off, cold man.”
Dr. Stanton’s long tenure at CBS has not been without controversy. During the “Red Scare” he required CBS employees to swear loyalty oaths to the United States. He also established an office for monitoring employee political activities and opinions, and blacklisted journalists and entertainers for their supposed leftist sympathies. This brought him into frequent conflict with Edward R. Murrow, one of television’s most lauded broadcasters.
Dr. Stanton is a doctor of psychology and ardent technocrat. For his Ph.D. thesis, he invented a method of monitoring radio audience size, a sort of forerunner to the Nielsen ratings system. He helped pioneer the advent of color television in the early 1950s and organized the first televised presidential debate in 1960. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower selected him to serve in the "E-10" group, a secret body of civilian appointees charged with maintaining continuity of government in the event of foreign invasion or national emergency.
Dr. Stanton is highly placed within SANDMAN and is charged, in a vague way, with overseeing Operation URIEL.
Major Stephen Wycliffe
One of SANDMAN’s general logistics staff. Serious, but affable enough. There are so many teams and programs now working in Granite Peak — the global response Mil-Ops personnel, the Mass Media team that Marshall in March ‘73, the sociometrics and pure esmology folks, the more esoteric researchers into Anunnaki and History B lore, the head-crackers like Dr. Gunn, internal security, and of course bleeding-edge programs like INDIGO – that certain managerial staff are needed to act as go-betweens (and not so incidentally eyes for SANDMAN Control to keep tabs on all this work and to look out for people inside SANDMAN deserving of promotion … or demotion or transfer). Wycliffe is one such staff person.
Dr. E. Mansfield Gunn
World War II veteran of the New Guinea campaign who kept American soldiers alive in some of the nastiest, most disease-ridden jungles in all of Australasia. Brought into CIA after the war, he was a bigwig in MK-ULTRA, mostly doing recruitment in research centers and universities, looking for developments in brain hacking and neurobiology.
Brusque and a bit arrogant, Dr. Gunn led the brain-hacking assisted interrogation of Sebastian Keiner at Granite Peak. Marshall finds his methods a little heavy-handed.
Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder
A pair of “women’s magazine” journalists who traveled behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1960s, allegedly to do psychic research. In reality they were working for the CIA to put together a book saying how far ahead the Eastern bloc was in psychic research. In even deeper reality, they were working for SANDMAN to act as both a spur to US military-intelligence psychic research and for their book — Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (Prentice-Hall, 1970) — to act as a useful honeypot for psi active individuals in the United States.
While their primary mission has been one of disinfo and confusing the informational battlefield, they did see some real examples of History B-touched psychic ability in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. They are as close as SANDMAN gets to field experts in psi research.
Sheila and Lynn brought Mitch to Mount Shasta in order to help assist him in cultivating his own psychic abilities. They seemed friendly and helpful enough.
Ambrose O'Connor
Roger’s handler at SANDMAN Mil-Ops. He started in OSS during World War II, and now operates under CIA cover. Something of a Wild Bill Donovan type but a bit jaded and, of course, burdened with the extra Manichean burden of knowing about History B.
John Merrick
A young but capable neurolinguist who works directly for Granite Peak and generally just goes by his surname. URIEL first encountered him at Altamont. Later, he was sent as a liaison with a kill team to the University of California, Berkeley, in order to capture or eliminate the Old Man. He acquitted himself admirably during both that operation and during URIEL’s subsequent efforts to contain the ontological event at the St. Francis Hotel.
Donna Montanari
The long-suffering administrative assistant to the Director of Granite Peak’s Records Department and one of Marshall’s assets. Intelligent, organized, and above all perceptive, Donna got her start as a stenographer in the OSS before being recruited into SANDMAN shortly after the end of the war in Europe. Since then, her advancement has been stymied by SANDMAN’s deep-seated misogyny and belief that a mere “typing pool girl” is not fit for higher position. This has instilled in Donna a touch of bitterness, which she takes out by enjoying the occasional glass of good Sonoma wine – Dr. Redgrave is kind enough to send her bottles of her favorite vintages – and through minor acts of institutional betrayal, such as providing Marshall with unauthorized access to the Department’s files.
The Dig Team at
Altamont
Professor Peters
Reality archaeologist. He is an elderly gentleman with a stooped posture and thinning gray hair. URIEL met him briefly when he was sent by Granite Peak to investigate the Altamont Object.
Dr. Quarles
Cultural anthropologist who operates on direct assignment from Granite Peak. He’s in his late 30s or early 40s, with a shock of red hair going white at the temples. He assisted Professor Peters at the Altamont dig.
Johann Xanten
A young, bespectacled West German and fledgling music producer. He fell in with Sebastian Keiner, who recruited him as a catspaw to assist in the irruption of the West Oakland Kusarikku at the Mansa block party concert. URIEL picked him up outside Dominoe Records. After an interrogation conducted by Sophie Edelstein, he was sent to Granite Peak for cultivation and possible recruitment.
Sophie Edelstein
Known sometimes as the Librarian, Sophie was assigned to the URIEL library in early 1971. She presents to the world a façade of being all-business: bookish, fastidious, with a solemn respect for the machinations of the Irruptors and of History B. She’s famed for her ability to find links and patterns of said History B in seemingly-unrelated pieces of media: newspapers, books, films, academic papers, intelligence reports, advertisements, even popular music. She is assumed to have come to SANDMAN and URIEL through her being an intelligence analyst.
She has an occasional unexpected playful side: very quick-witted with a wicked (and sometimes cruelly intellectually-snobbish) sense of humor about the people she doesn’t like at Livermore and SANDMAN. She's the kind of person who does cryptic crosswords and asks you for help with clues but really doesn't need the help at all and makes sure you know it, maybe a couple of days or a week down the line. While at URIEL, she rarely went into the field.
Following the events at the St. Francis Hotel, Sophie reported herself to Granite Peak as a possible security risk. The members of URIEL have since deduced that her true goal was to obtain a transfer to the highly mysterious Project THROWAWAY in hopes of locating Charley’s mother.
⨳ Bio // CLASSIFIED
Synopsis of Sophie Edelstein’s personnel records
compiled by Marshall Redgrave.
Sophie Edelstein was born in July 1944 in the Theresienstadt ghetto/concentration camp in Bohemia-Moravia in the Greater Reich. Theresienstadt was of course the “model ghetto” that the Nazis paraded before the Red Cross and other international monitoring organizations early in the war. By 1944, it was taking transfers from other concentration camps. Sophie's mother, whose identity is unknown, died during childbirth, and baby Sophie was raised by the community. Upon liberation, the baby was sent to a facility for war orphans in the Netherlands; raised in the orphanage until 1947, baby Sophie (named by the nuns of the orphanage) was adopted by a British Jewish family, the Edelsteins.
Despite this early trauma, Sophie excelled in school, finding herself particular adept at languages. She read Modern Languages with a second in Ancient Near Eastern studies at Girton College, Cambridge and was quickly snatched up by MI6. She was sent to various posts in Israel, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon (all deep-cover field assignments where she was resolutely not doing intelligence analysis) in the mid-to-late '60s. In the course of this work, she inevitably ran across History B (here the records are fairly fragmentary as they are still held and classified by SANDMAN personnel within MI6, but it’s clear from reports after this first encounter with History B her sanity and stability was shattered) and was brought back to Britain to work as an intelligence analyst, where she truly excelled.
Her interest in (some former supervisors in her fitness reports say “fascination with”) History B makes her an excellent, almost preternatural diviner of which phenomena, culturally and historically, are tainted by contact with History B. But nearly all her former bosses are unified in the belief that she is both too valuable and too, yes, attracted to History B to be sent into the field regularly.
⨔ OZYMANDIAS
Andrija Puharich
Physician, inventor, paranormal researcher and undercover Sandman who “collects” psychics, both real and fake, among them the charismatic Israeli showman Uri Geller. For the past many years he has worked to groom legitimate psychics so that they will better serve America’s agenda in the Cold War. Such individuals are rarely interested in something so mundane as geopolitics, however, so “you have to trick them into accepting a new belief structure sometimes.” As he put it:
Uri’s going to serve our purposes extremely well. He’s easily controlled, broadly loyal to the US and Israel, and the back-and-forth “is he or isn’t he the Real Deal” will get everyone looking the other way for years, decades. His fame and this book I’m writing will make him look like a space cadet to most reasonable sleepers in the West plus it’ll likely flush out a bunch of real believers in the Kings. Uri gets rich, we got memes out there to trap more butterflies and I continue to separate the wheat from the chaff, maybe even recruit a few of these folks to our side … everyone’s happy.
Lt. Col. Anthony Barnes Reinhardt
Former de facto commander of the Natural Guard, now operating under Langley cover, with a keen interest in supra-normal human performance and the military applications thereof. He shuffled the Natural Guard into SANDMAN, basically liquidated corporate-takeover-style, as the point person in a concerted effort between the Pentagon, CIA, and SANDMAN. His remit now is sort of an expert-without-portfolio in Weird enhancements of human physical performance. Big into hot tubbing, learning macrobiotics, and listening to Alan Watts lectures. Also part of the executive team in charge of the INDIGO Program — perhaps even the man in charge himself.
⨔ INDIGO
Dr. Haynes
First name unknown, Dr. Haynes was Charley's assigned caretaker at Granite Peak. She is a severe woman with a businesslike demeanor who seemed uncomfortable around her charge.
RAVEN
Charley's birthmother. A former archaeology student at UCLA, RAVEN’s real name is unknown at this time. SANDMAN recruited her following a minor ontological incident involving Anasazi remains. Thereafter, she drifted away from field archaeology (though she maintained the profession as a cover) and into real SANDMAN commando/undercover work. She disappeared for about four months in 1965 while infiltrating a roving group of UFO cultists that called themselves the "Solarans." When she reestablished contact with SANDMAN in October 1965, she was three months pregnant. Since giving birth to Charley, she has been assigned to THROWAWAY.
Charley and Mitch briefly — tantalizingly briefly — communed with RAVEN while dreaming during URIEL’s trip to Mount Shasta. She seemed highly confused by the interaction, and tormented by her past.
Dr. Ian Stevenson
Canadian-born American psychiatrist and director of the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Division of Perceptual Studies. He is best known for his research into childhood incidents of inexplicable past-life recall, which he contends is evidence supporting the existence of reincarnation. To date he has investigated approximately 3,000 cases of children expressing ideas, emotions, and memories of past lives. He assembled several of his most compelling case studies in his 1966 book, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.
Twenty Cases brought Dr. Stevenson to the attention of Project SANDMAN, which promptly recruited him to work on its nascent INDIGO Program. In that capacity, he served as Charley’s advisor with regards to her past-life recall. He is generally regarded as an earnest and well-intentioned researcher.
David Wolf
Catherine Davies
Elias Simon
The researcher and theoretician who helped develop ORACLE and who specialized in computer-assisted esmology and historical prediction. He was also, at one time, Sophie Edelstein’s lover. He was killed under mysterious circumstances during URIEL’s investigation of GRAIL TABLE.
An analyst and psychonaut who explored the simulated predictive future generated by ORACLE. She was found dead after URIEL thwarted Morgan le Fay’s irruption in the UK.
A computer programmer, systems modeler, data architect, and one of David and Catherine’s fellow researchers. He programmed the “people” in ORACLE’s simulated reality to have genuine beliefs, unwitting of the fact that the Red Kings had infected the program. Also killed at the conclusion of URIEL’s trip to the UK.
⨕ MOUNT SHASTA
⊼ BEHOLD THE DREAD MOUNT
Reverend Master Houn Jiyu-Kennett
British-born roshi and the first woman to be sanctioned by the Sōtō School to teach Zen Buddhism in the West. After the death of her master Kōho Keidō Chisan Zenji in 1967, Jiyu moved to the United States to do missionary work. In 1969, she founded the Zen Mission Society in San Francisco. In 1970, she established Shasta Abbey at Mount Shasta. Jiyu is a woman of incredible spiritual and psychic fortitude, though her physical health is failing fast.
Dr. Nola Van Valer
An elderly woman, wheelchair-bound, with white hair and bright blue eyes. During the Great Depression, she and her husband lived in San Jose, where he worked as a mechanic and she dabbled in Christian Science. As the story goes, she was one day visited by a strange man dressed in a long robe who taught her “many things.” In the wake of that visitation, she started journeying to Mount Shasta, sometimes alone, sometimes with companions. Some of these trips lasted a month or longer.
In 1963, Dr. Van Valer and a small contingent of friends and followers permanently relocated to Mount Shasta, where she founded the Radiant School of Seekers and Servers. This group eventually organized the “Friendly Letter Service,” an international esoterica correspondence ring. The formation of the Radiant School and the Friendly Letter Service were quietly encouraged by SANDMAN, which saw Dr. Van Valer’s work as a way to spread memes, influence the emerging occult underground, and monitor for dangerous ontological activities.
Dr. Van Valer met Mitch when he visited Mount Shasta with Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder. She immediately recognized him as a fellow Illuminated, a “Lord of Light,” and imparted a good deal of wisdom upon him about the so-called “Ascended Masters.” In a subsequent visit, she revealed to Mitch that there is an artifact of History B buried in her backyard.
⨕ I AM
Elizabeth Clare Prophet
Leader of the Summit Lighthouse, having inherited the organization following the death of her second husband Mark Prophet in February 1973. URIEL encountered her and twelve of her adherents while camping at Mount Shasta; there she proclaimed that her movement was scouting the location in advance of the coming of their messiah, whose arrival was prophesized to occur in two years. Prophet is inexplicably trained in NLP, though is apparently not a Sandman, and is also capable of channeling spirits in a manner similar to Roger.
Peter Mt. Shasta (né Kraus)
Illuminated drifter turned hiking guide turned apostle of the I AM movement. Mitch and Roger first met Pete at a Mexican restaurant outside Mount Shasta. Later, Pete got steady work with a local excursions concern, in which capacity he served as Mitch’s guide on his hike to the top of Mount Shasta, there to be enthralled by the Comte de Saint Germain. The encounter had a lasted impact on Pete: he subsequently fell in Pearl Dorris and her peculiar brand of Ascended Master theology, changed his name, and quit his job. Now he works part-time at a local health food store. Mitch refers to him as “Bigfoot Pete.”
⨕ URIEL
Like any good clandestine intelligence operation, URIEL makes liberal use of informants, contacts, sympathizers, and spies — not all of whom are witting participants in the war for History A.
see also:
Andrew Harris Krane
I mean, that’s the thing about Krane ... he bridges both sides of SF now. He was around in the square ‘50s writing about very strong silent men in big phallic chrome rocket ships, but then he wrote Arrest and a bunch of near-future books about how the mass media are kind of evil and the nascent hippies on college campuses started loving him. Present company included. And then he goes and writes the Atlantis Rising books and pisses both groups of fans off! He’s kind of like that. Truculent, you might say. Particular. Comes off an ass in interviews but is still somehow really compelling.
Science fiction author best known for his Atlantis Rising Trilogy, in which the fabled lost continent rises from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in 1968, ultimately sparking a magical cold war with the United States. He came to URIEL’s attention in the days leading up to Westercon, which was, in 1973, taking place at the St. Francis Hotel. URIEL surveilled him for a time and eventually determined him to be unknowingly Illuminated, able to impose his will upon reality in ways not yet determined. He has an amphetamine addiction.
After discovering Rich Talbot and Carl Fletcher’s plan to use Krane as a sort of demiurge to transport themselves to the Atlantis Rising universe, Jocasta, acting on orders from Marshall and Archie, abducted Krane from the St. Francis and brought him to Livermore for safe keeping. Later, Archie explained the state of things and the existence of History B to Krane in order to entice him into helping the team stop the temblor event at Westercon. In the end, Krane survived the events at the St. Francis, having witnessed the near-creation of an alternate reality by Mitch, and agreed to become a SANDMAN asset.
⨰ COINTELPRO File // Restricted Handling
Obtained by Jocasta Menos through her contacts at Army Intelligence.
Father was an engineer, mother homemaker. Younger sister April died three days after birth in 1933; otherwise subject KRANE was an only child. High school Berkeley HS, graduated 1947. 4-F draft classification ineligible for service due to not meeting physical standards on weight (extreme underweight) and nearsightedness. Attended San Francisco State for electrical engineering, did not graduate. Married 1952 to Bethany Kazantzakis, member of Socialist Workers Party. While subject KRANE worked odd jobs in Bay Area in early '50s (record and book stores mostly), accompanied wife to two SWP meetings. KRANE and Kazantzakis divorced 1955. KRANE kept under periodic spot surveillance until 1962 when FBI San Francisco field office discontinued surveillance due to subject's not being involved with further left-wing politics. During 1955-1962, office compiled profile of subject as addicted to pharmaceutical amphetamines (dexedrine). Married secretary Katherine Jones 1963, divorced 1965; has not remarried. Lives alone in Berkeley, Calif. Added to file since 1963 are records of his "political" novels (Arrest, 1963; The Master Operator, 1965; The Arm From The Screen, 1966) with dismissals of any truly subversive content within. File remains open; surveillance discontinued.
♅ Archie’s People
Ed Dooley and the Rev. Lester Kinsolving
The News Editor and Religion Editor (respectively) at the San Francisco Examiner. Both were cultivated as assets during URIEL’s investigation into the Transamerica bombing, the former by Marshall and the latter by Archie.
Jack Ogilvy
A veteran ad man and one of Archie's former colleagues. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
The Ransom Family
Archie’s family: his wife Melanie (née Gardner), and two children, Jane (17) and Eddie (14). The couple's third child, a son named Charlie, passed away tragically at the age of 10 in 1965. Though they appear happy enough, the family never really recovered from Charlie’s death. They live in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.
Melanie was Archie’s mission sweetheart. She keeps the home and has some suspicion about Archie’s “double life,” but rarely questions him about his work or whereabouts.
Jane is a tall and striking young woman. In 1973 she is a junior-going-on-senior in high school. She has blonde hair that she wears long and straight, befitting the fashion of the times. Her style is hippie-ish, but in a decidedly middle class way.
Eddie is a slightly awkward boy with dark hair and a bowl cut. He dresses like most boys his age: ringer tee-shirts, flared jeans, wears his Dodgers cap indoors (he’s still an LA fan and gets no lack of guff from the kids at school who all love the Giants). He is a freshman-going-on-sophomore in high school.
The Ransoms are Mormon. Since Charlie’s death, however, they have followed Archie’s lead and distanced themselves from the Church, rarely attending services and declining invitations to participate in community events.
Charley was informally adopted by the Ransoms shortly after her assignment to URIEL.
John Ritchie
A real estate broker, member of the San Francisco Planning Commission and Landmarks Board, and President of the California Historical Society. In his spare time, he is also the Noble Grand Humbug of the Yerba Buena Lodge of E Clampus Vitus. He knows Archie through the Bay Area Mormon grapevine, though Ritchie’s only been a Mormon since 1971, when he went to an event in Utah in 1969 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Golden Spike and became interested in converting afterwards.
∻ Charley's Ghosts
Harry Houdini
“Harry Houdini.” Photographer unknown. 1920.
behold, the greatest magician who ever lived
The Hungarian-born American magician, escape artist, and debunker, originally named Erik Weisz, later known as Ehrich Weiss, and then by the stage name Harry Houdini. In his time he was one of the most famous performers in the world, rivaled only by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Gloria Swanson. Arrogant, but undeniably brilliant, Houdini was casually affiliated with several of Project SANDMAN's predecessor organizations, including the Duncorne Foundation.
Houdini’s greatest trick was only revealed in 1973, when Marshall and Mitch discovered that he had orchestrated an elaborate ritual that dispersed his consciousness to various points across the globe at the time of his death on Halloween, 1926. He existed in this purgatorial state, half-conscious, half-dreaming, until he tricked Marshall and Mitch into releasing him during a séance. In so doing, he found himself trapped on a cassette tape smuggled into the séance by D. Scott Rogo.
Through a bit of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand on Marshall's part, the “Houdini tape” remained in URIEL’s possession after the events in Colorado. Mitch and Marshall presented the tape to Charley for study; she was able to transfer the contents – that is, Houdini's consciousness – to the computer chip lodged in her brain. Before Mitch destroyed that chip using his pyrokinesis, Charley transferred Houdini to a sophisticated data storage unit that she found at the Ransom residence.
⋠ Jocasta's Connections
Tom Padden and Monte Hall
A pair of special agents with the FBI. They work out of the San Francisco office and were assigned to the Frank DiGiuseppe case after he bombed the Transamerica Pyramid. Jocasta cultivated them as contacts during that investigation. They believe she works for Army Intelligence.
ζ Marshall's Followers
Everett Bumgardner
CIA officer and analyst. He served in Vietnam with Marshall in the 1960s; both were charter members of the Phoenix Program. Everett has found himself somewhat rudderless since the conclusion of the war. He has work to do, but none of it piques the interests he honed in Vietnam. Everett and Marshall fell out of contact soon after Marshall was recruited into SANDMAN. The two reestablished a connection following the news coverage of the Frank DiGiuseppe incident.
David Rocco
Marshall’s bagman and bodyguard. Born and raised in rural Oregon, he was drafted into the Army in 1966 and went on to serve two tours in Vietnam. Dave developed a heroin habit toward the end of his service; upon returning to the States, this turned into a full-blown addiction. By early ‘73, Dave was almost destitute, working whatever odd jobs he could find to support his drug and alcohol habits, and contemplating suicide. While listening to the radio one night, however, Dave happened to tune into Marshall's conversation with Frank DiGiuseppe. He decided the next day to seek out this strange guru.
With Marshall’s assistance, Dave has now largely cleaned himself up, found purpose, and treats his trauma with a variety of prescription medications.
Sunshine Parker
Marshall’s perky young secretary and assistant. He poached her from a receptionist gig at the Bellevue Hotel when he opened the Mission. A bit of a hippie, but quietly competent. She lives on site in a free one-bedroom with a sunset view, furnished for her by Doc Red.
The Special Ones
Three pairs of kids showed up at Marshall’s LA pied-à-terre, Karuna, during his trip to Hollywood for The Tonight Show: Ethan and Jane, Ethan’s younger brother Stanley and Ada, and Will and Debra. They were separating from their congregation of “Jesus Freaks” in Orange County, Costa Mesa Calvary, led by pastor Chuck Smith. The kids (specifically Ethan and Jane) flung accusations at the group’s leadership. The Jesus People movement has lost quite a bit of steam from its heyday in ‘71, and Marshall successfully (critically) brought the six kids into his orbit. They’re now living at the Mission where they form the core of Marshall’s “Special Ones,” performing odd jobs and assisting where needed in exchange for room, board, and pocket money.
During the spring and early summer of ‘73, the Special Ones added to their orbit four new members from Northern California. All four of the new recruits were 18 and older, and most of them are college dropouts who left after their first semester. One of them, who’s a little bit older at 20, was named Marianne – she left the group for parts unknown following the temblor at the St. Francis. The others were John, Thom, and Susan, all 18 or 19 and freshman dropouts.
Zeb
Former agent of the Anunnaki, sent to History A in the early 1920s while still seemingly a young man to mentor E.L. Moore and pave the way for the irruption of the West Oakland Kusarikku. He spent the next 50 years weaving himself into the Black community with the aim of fostering Moore’s musical abilities. Life in History A was not kind to him; unable to wholly adapt to the alien landscape of mid-century American life, he descended into alcohol abuse and quasi-homelessness. By the time he came to the attention of URIEL, Zeb was a frail old man, whimsical and strange, who spoke in cryptic phrases and fantasized about his life in History B.
On the eve of the Mansa block party, Marshall traveled to Granite Peak to interrogate Keiner again, concerned – based on one of Mitch’s Tarot readings – that URIEL had left some element of the Annunaki's plot uncovered. He found there that Granite Peak had tortured Keiner to the point of near ego collapse. With a bit of hypnotic prodding, Marshall was able to determine from Keiner’s suppressed memories that the Red Kings had long ago dispatched a deep cover agent to History A to assist in their efforts: Zebulon.
Mitch, Roger, and Jocasta abducted Zeb from Moore's home in Oakland on the eve of Mansa's album debut block party. Once at the Barn, Zeb played a song on his guitar for Charley – a catchy tune from History B that was wholly unfamiliar to the team. At Charley's prompting and with Mitch’s assistance, Zeb went on to play several more unrecognizable melodies which the team taped on a reel-to-reel recorder. Fearing that his colleagues were now infected with a memetic virus native to History B, Marshall hypnotized Mitch, Roger, and Jocasta into forgetting the tunes they heard, but left Charley “untouched,” believing her training as an Indigo Child would inure her to any harm associated with Zeb’s music.
After URIEL thwarted the irruption of the Kusarikku at the Mansa block party, the team delivered Zeb to the Mission. There, Marshall brainwashed him using the CCRME into believing that he had served in Europe during World War I, and that his memories of History A were merely delusions created by shell shock and years of drug and alcohol abuse. Now, Zeb works at the Mission as a gardener. He can still play a bit of guitar.
SCANATE
Russell Targ
Harold Puthoff
A physicist and parapsychologist. He got his start in the ‘60s working on laser technology and is a firm believer in psychic phenomenon. He’s also quite tall and lanky, and almost blind.
An engineer and parapsychologist. An affable sort, he is friendly with Price, who seems to have as much affection for him as he would a smart dog.
Patrick Price
Patrick H. Price (left) and Hal Puthoff (right).
Photo: Dr. Elmar Gruber. (1974).
A retired member of the Burbank Police Department. Jocasta's research into Price revealed that he still does business in both Northern and Southern California and is still in touch with the law enforcement community generally (speaks at dinners, visits Burbank regularly, etc.).
A series of local Burbank news clippings of Price’s appearances in local Southland newspapers, usually for a quirky story about his trademark “hunches” on cases that have led to high case clearance numbers, and his love of fly fishing, meditation, and “cloud busting,” i.e., weather control with the powers of his mind. You know, the kind of stories they’d do in LA in the late ‘60s about a “Zen police detective,” that kind of thing.
Price possesses legitimate psychic or remote viewing abilities, sparked to some degree by Jocasta’s LSD-fueled visitation of his younger self in 1961.
Ingo Swann
An artist and psychic, the so-called “father of remote viewing.” Mitch assesses his extrasensory abilities as legitimate and has observed that he has an indigo aura, similar to both Charley and Anna Turner.
John Atwood
A detective for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. Descended from generations of white Anglo-Saxon California planters, he is the first in his immediate family to eschew the “family farm” in order to pursue a white collar career in law enforcement. He is a serious man, well-regarded by his peers, and a staunch Nixon Republican.
Atwood doesn’t like Marshall. The two first met when Atwood was called to the Mission to investigate the death of a patient. The death – and Redgrave himself – struck Atwood as extremely suspicious. Subsequent investigation revealed that the death was truly accidental, and Redgrave was officially cleared of all suspicion after only a few weeks. But Atwood still believes Redgrave is “up to something” and he is determined to find out what that is.
⨀ Mitch's Circle
Ricky Jay
Magician, illusionist, and magic historian from Brooklyn, New York. Despite his young age, Ricky Jay has already baffled the experts with his sleight-of-hand; his proficiency with cards is almost unrivaled. In 1973, he's a recent transplant to the West Coast – a young, insouciant, chubby hippie kid with a kind of hard-edged ironic stage presence that he keeps up even when he's not performing.
Mitch and Marshall met Ricky Jay while attending the Carnival of Knowledge at the Stanley Hotel. He assisted them with their séance to summon Harry Houdini and later struck up a friendship with the equally odd Mitch.
Don Kirshner
Music industry bigwig behind some of the biggest pop hits of the 1960s. As the man who brought his powerful Brill Building team of composers and lyricists to bear on pre-fab groups like The Monkees and The Archies (and their associated TV series), he was in a position to wrangle some of L.A.’s premier studio musicians for his productions, including one young drifter with a guitar named Mitch Hort.
In 1973, Don is producing the new late-night ABC series for ABC In Concert featuring live — not lip-synched — musical performances from the ‘70s’ hottest artists.
Anna Turner
Bay Area radio producer who got her start as an administrative assistant with NCET, the National Center for Experimental Television. In 1973 she is working on the late-night political roundup at KPFA Radio.
Mitch and Marshall met Anna at the Stanley Hotel during the Carnival of Knowledge. There she participated in their impromptu séance to summon the dispersed consciousness of Harry Houdini. Later, Anna attended Westercon at the St. Francis Hotel, where the irruption of History B caused her to awaken her latent psi abilities. She’s been known to meet up with Mitch for pizza and beers on occasion.
Mary-Lynn Turner
Lounge singer at the San Jose Airport Hilton’s Skyline Bar. She stumbled into Mitch at a McDonald’s in Palo Alto; the two have struck up a romance. In her mid-20s, she relocated to California during the Summer of Love from a small town in Oklahoma. Currently she is undergoing testing for potential psychic abilities at the Stanford Research Institute (she has some).
∯ Roger's Community
Padre Juan-Ignacio
One of the associate priests at San Pedro Parish in the Mission District and Roger’s confessor. “Father 'Nacio,” as he is sometimes called, is on the younger side and concentrates his work mostly among the Spanish congregants. This means he is heavily involved with the Sisters of Mercy, helping run the parish school, but is low on the administrative rung, and so is often relieved to occasionally get to do “priest work.”
Padre Juan-Ignacio is a mystic. That’s why Roger can use him as a real confessor. Father ‘Nacio is still strictly on the Catholic side of the fence, so Roger has to code-switch strictly to that vocabulary around him. But he can talk of inspiration and visions and minor miracles, and ‘Nacio is fascinated. Under the Seal of the Confessional, Roger's told him he's an agent of the government — not a lie.
Pepe and Patrico
Mechanics at Pepe’s Auto Service, where Roger brings his 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle SS for the love and care it needs.
Yolanda
The proprietor of the Botanica Yoruba in the Mission District. She is slightly younger than Roger and his go-to source for the material components used in his sacred and not-so-sacred mystical practices. The loa Agent 00 attempted to put the moves on her during a late night screening of Live and Let Die. She didn’t take it well.
the ANUNNAKU
Finally, we may mention some relevant ideas of Sumerian mythology. The gods are characterized by a variety of forms, not all human. They are celestial in origin. In general, each is associated with a different star. In fact, in the earliest Sumerian pictographs, which preceded cuneiform writing, the symbols for god and for star are identical. The cosmos is conceived as a state governed by an apparently representative and democratic assembly of the gods, which made the great decisions on the fates of all beings. Within the assembly there was a smaller group of prominent deities called “The Seven Gods Who Determine Destinies.”
— Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe
Morgan le Fay
“She who is first among them is more skilled in the healing art, and also surpasses her sisters in beauty. Morgen is her name, and she has learned what useful properties all the herbs contain, so that she can cure the body ills. She knows, too, the art by which to change her shape, and to fly through the air, like Daedalus, on strange wings.”
— The Vita Merlini
The witch-queen Morgên y Dylwythen Deg, better known as Morgan le Fay, was briefly encountered by certain members of URIEL during their sojourn to Cumbria, England. The team managed to suppress her irruption at great cost; Archie later deployed a meme in hopes of further containing her influence. Among SANDMAN’s academics, she is presumed to be a šedu, one of the caste of slave-masters appointed by the Red Kings to oversee humanity.
Charley beheld Morgan in one of her nightmare-visions as looking like her “birth mom but nine feet tall, with great black iridescent raven's wings rising above her graceful bare shoulders.”
Immensely strong, capable of battering their way through a steel wall, the kusarikku can also rapidly heat objects or air in up to a two-yard radius by manipulating molecules with subvocalized intonations and focused mental energy.
Kenneth Hite
GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier
The West Oakland Kusarikku
The nickname given by URIEL to the god-bull whose retro-creation at the Mansa block party threatened to destabilize consensus reality. His existence was deduced by Jocasta after she followed what appeared to be a UFO resembling a “float-car” from the Mansa album cover into West Oakland, where her obsession with cryptic symbols (and a sudden attack of synesthetic hallucinations triggered by seeing the UFO) allowed to her to see a repeating set of symbols festooned throughout West Oakland: a bucket and a spade.
The Houdini Kusarikku
Mitch and Marshall encountered the “Houdini Kusarikku” at the Stanley Hotel while attending the Carnival of Knowledge. He (it? they?) claimed that Harry Houdini had somehow stolen one of the Anunnaki’s most secret and forbidden protocols – the ability to physically transpose himself through solid matter. Such power threatened the stability of both History A and History B, and was deemed so malign that his masters sent him to History A in the early twentieth century to destroy Houdini.
By the time the Houdini Kusarriku met Mitch and Marshall in 1973, he was a shell of his original self, weakened by decades of existence in History A and frustrated to confusion by his inability to fulfill his mission. In the end, he gravely wounded Marshall before he and Mitch were able to dispel him back to his own world-line.
Roscoe
We were always meant to be seven.
Seven we were. A nest of three at the roots of the tree, they were placed here to commit themselves to the spiral of fate, ultimately to protect the One Who Taught.
One to hide and keep safe the treasure, to protect the precious metals meant to summon the threads, the partnerships, the lost stories.
One to seduce, one always to seduce. The cattle are so easily led by one who gives them encouragement to rut. And in the sky, closer to our gods, our masters, two: one to spill blood, to present a burnt offering, to bring the pain and fire and glory.
And then … one more. One whose face I cannot countenance. One whose glory and brightness and light will make them ruler of this place. One whom your own Sandmen will place upon the last throne.
They … they you have not met yet. Nor will you, if you succeed in dragging this temple back across the precipice.
– Roscoe and Mitch, prophesying
“Roscoe” manifested during Westercon as the host of a 1920s-style “hot jazz party” at the St. Francis Hotel. Mitch had drinks with him while discussing the nature of the reality and the Red Kings’ plans; the two ultimately shared a prophecy while under the influence of the emerging temblor zone. Mitch, Jocasta, and Roger – operating as the loa Agent 00 – were able to destroy him in a hail of bullets and pyrokinesis.
The Steve Canyon Ékimmu
[The êkimmu] never takes physical form at all; it is a psychic projection that nests in a human mind. Project analysts believe the êkimmu may be a subroutine dreamed into existence by the sleeping Anunnakku and sent out to somehow influence events in our history.
Kenneth Hite
GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier
The ékimmu that attached itself to Steve Canyon Program pilot Frank DiGiuseppe while flying a mission in Laos. It stayed with him for the next few years until jumping bodies from Frank to his elderly father, Armando. URIEL discovered the ékimmu while it was inhabiting the senior DiGiuseppe. It is believed the irruptor completed its programming by “converting” Frank to the cause of History B by planning a series of terrorist actions, and so leapt to a host (Frank’s elderly father) which would not endanger the mission by being physically or mentally harmed by prolonged possession. The irruptor’s presence presumably accelerated the elder DiGiuseppe’s illness from lung cancer and also caused the old man neurological problems.
The ékimmu had some mastery of glyphs — Frank exhibited knowledge of SHEG and GU.SHUB, presumably learned while the ékimmu possessed him, and the ékimmu also used NAM.HILI while possessing Armando. The ékimmu was eventually “exorcised” by Archie and its host Armando died immediately following the irruptor's leaving his body.
Clodagh
An elderly washerwoman and lifelong resident of Dufton, England. She spoke with a broad Cumberland accent, nearly unintelligible to those members of URIEL who met her. At the height of the GRAIL TABLE crisis, the team discovered she was host to a kulullû, and had been for nigh-on 70 years. Jocasta and Archie killed the irruptor but in the process, Clodagh was badly and permanently disabled. Her long-term exposure to History B left her with memories of what happened around the River Eden before the temblor and the destruction of the original Long Meg.
The Old Man
A kulullû who claimed to have worked alongside and influenced Dr. Ernest Lawrence in the 1920s, and to have manipulated innumerable people and events into place – including the birth of Andrew Krane and Genevieve Abeille – in order to cause the temblor event at the St. Francis Hotel. Carl Fletcher described him as a man in his 70s, “kind, friendly, avuncular” and clad always in an “old-timey” lab assistant’s outfit (and sometimes in a lab coat). He was allegedly incapable of moving from a particular area in the basement of LeConte Hall.
The Old Man — the kulullû, that is — survived the Siege of LeConte Hall, though apparently sustained a great deal of physical injury in the process. He was last seen by Roger in the company of the Comte de Saint German atop the roof of the Hilton at the San Jose International Airport. At that time, he was wearing a SANGUSH glyph to give himself the appearance of a “five year-old boy wearing an old-fashioned suit,” bearing “multiple complex facial deformities,” among them severe burn scars. In his “natural” form, he had a “fleshy, bulbous head” and eyes that radiated “plenty and joy and peace.”
Frank DiGiuseppe
“Not all of humanity’s enemies come from outside History A. Plenty of people native to our history nonetheless seek alien rule, out of short-sightedness, bitterness, or desperation.”
Kenneth Hite
GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier
Franklin Roosevelt DiGiuseppe was an agent of the Red Kings originally possessed an êkimmu while serving as a clandestine pilot in Vietnam. After returning to the States, and under the influence of both drugs and his êkimmu host, Frank became obsessed with occult conspiracy theories. In early 1973, he attempted to trigger a temblor event by ritually sacrificing a busload of school children (he planned to bury them in a giant pit at Altamont). Eventually, URIEL was able to track Frank to a school bus depot in San Francisco, where he was run to ground by Roger and Mitch. Frank died when Mitch used his pyrokinetic powers to light him on fire.
∅ Counseling File // Confidential
Obtained by Marshall Redgrave
from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Born in Martinez, California, to Armando and Helena DiGuiseppe. Armando was commercial fisherman, Helena was a housewife. He had one sibling: a brother named Ronald, five years his junior. Due to his Italian ancestry, Frank's father was prohibited from operating fishing boats in California during World War II. Deprived of his fishing boat and livelihood, Frank's father moved his family inland to Modesto, where they lived for four years.
The DiGiuseppe family returned to Pittsburg, California, after the War. Frank attended Pittsburg High School and was a member of the Civil Air Patrol. He graduated from Pittsburg High School in 1958. After that, he became a bush pilot, working in the region of northern California and southern Oregon for a few years. Eventually, he got work flying for several regional airlines.
Frank enlisted in the Air Force in 1964 and graduated as a commissioned lieutenant. In late 1964, he was assigned to reconnaissance and search and rescue missions in Vietnam. In the summer of 1966, he was detached to the 56th Fighter Wing at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Navy Base on the Laotian border. Between 1966 and 1968, Frank served in the joint CIA-USAF Steve Canyon Program. In January 1968, he was honorably discharged, and returned to California.
Starting in 1970, Frank reported to the Veterans Administration complaining of headaches and other neurological problems. Upon an initial interview, it became clear he was dealing with psychological issues having to do with his tour of duty in Vietnam. Initial therapeutic sessions seemed to focus on his disappointment and bewilderment in returning stateside and the associated culture shock with the changes happening in the Bay Area. But upon return visits, it became clear that he was dealing with “gross stress reaction” (post-traumatic stress disorder in modern-day parlance).
As time went on, Frank’s visits to his VA counselors became more and more frequent, and the physical and neurological complaints seemed to deepen into acute paranoid schizophrenia. These included feelings of constant surveillance and fear of conspiracy at the highest levels of government. It was clear during each of these later visits he did not trust the authorities treating him but came all the same because he "needed to work." He reported losing jobs as a cabbie and, eventually after he was blackballed by every Bay Area taxi company, as an itinerant auto mechanic because of his outbursts. These frequent visits ended in prescriptions for anti-psychotics (most often Thorazine) and occasional short-to-medium stays in mental hospitals associated with the VA. He stopped going to the VA in April 1972.
Sebastian Keiner
You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I’m the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm. Yes, painting is a moral activity alright. Some people think [Arshile] Gorky was violent, or Bill [Willem] de Kooning, but there’s a latent violence in my art. Look again!
West German artist, agent of the Red Kings, and former deep cover asset affiliated with the Stasi. He came to the United States in the role of a visiting scholar at Berkeley, and his work – which included a room-sized box called Beth-El that acted as a sort of gateway to History B – was exhibited at the De Young Museum. He also collaborated with Mansa in creating artwork for two of their albums, including their most recent record, Ikenga.
Keiner possesses a degree of knowledge about History B and a modicum of talent in using the Anunnaki's various mind-control tools, the product of extensive indoctrination and training by the Stasi and the GZ. After he was apprehended by URIEL, he confessed to visiting an alternate world where he would commune with “angels.” After his interrogation, URIEL shipped Keiner to Granite Peak.
The Comte de St. Germain
Mitch calls the mysterious man he first met at the top of Mount Shasta the Comte de Saint Germain, after the infamous philosopher, artist, alchemist, aristocrat, and (alleged) immortal. To Mitch, he looked like a stumpy little man with bulging eyes and fishy lips, almost frog-like, clad in a weird mix of contemporary cold weather gear and actual furs. On his head he wore a golden crown with a broad area in front, bedecked with crystals and gems. Carved into the front of the crown was the KI.AG glyph – LOVE ME.
The Comte’s seems aligned with the Red Kings, though his exact motives are unclear. He is able to appear where he wants, seemingly at will, including in Mitch’s dreams — though he later said to Roger that it is easier for him to appear in high places, like the top of a mountain or even a building. In their dealings, the Comte has urged Mitch to help track down or locate Mitch’s doppelgänger, who has, apparently, abandoned his duties and absconded with some thing or things that the Red Kings consider valuable.
The Comte approached Roger for a parley atop the Hilton at the San Jose Airport while Roger was bugging Uri Geller’s suite. To Roger, he looked to stand about 5’6” and wore a sharp black suit with black shirt, dull black shoes, and dark sunglasses. His hair was closely-cropped to the skull and his face was squat and wide. The Comte told Roger to tell Mitch that the “upper world” had undergone a dramatic and unexpected transformation which “endangered” the deal he had with Mitch to find Mitch’s doppelgänger. "Causality,” he shouted to Roger across was the roof, “it is all twisted and your timeline is thus tremendously unstable! Things were supposed to go a certain way and now they are not!”
“I AM Master of my world. I AM the Victorious, Intelligence governing it. I send forth into my world this Mighty, Radiant, Intelligent Energy of God. I command It to create all Perfection — to draw to me the Opulence of God made visible in my hands and use. I AM no longer the Babe of Christ, but the Master Presence grown to Full Stature, and I speak and command with authority.”
– Guy Ballard, The I AM Discourses
Carl Fletcher and Rich Talbot
Graduate students at UC Berkeley assigned to the Space Sciences Laboratory. Both studied astrophysics, with Carl focusing on cosmology and Rich focusing on engineering. They were ardent fans of Andrew Krane’s Atlantis Rising novels, and were partially-witting dupes of a kulullû whom Carl referred to as the "Old Man." With the Old Man's tutelage and direction, they were able to trigger a reality temblor at the St. Francis Hotel during Westercon.
The event did not go well for them: Rich had his mind and soul obliterated attempting to escape the bounds of the subduction zone, rendering him something like a zombie. Carl was apprehended by Roger and Mitch. Subsequently interrogated by Marshall, he revealed all he knew about his plan and the Old Man before his mind snapped under the weight of too many contravening memetic loads. Still, he was able to escape URIEL’s bivouac suite while the team was distracted and absconded to the uppermost floors of the hotel. Again apprehended by Roger and Mitch, he was safely evacuated from the building after URIEL contained the temblor event.
Marshall arranged to stage Carl and Rich's suicide, hypnotizing Carl to lead a vacant-eyed Rich to the Golden Gate Bridge, there to plummet to their deaths. Using his contacts at the CIA, he had a “lover’s suicide” note placed at the pair's apartment in Berkeley, implicating them in a tawdry homosexual love affair.
Edward Louis "E.L." Moore
A Black experimental musician, composer, vocalist, and leader of Mansa, a 13-person psychedelic funk-soul band based out of Oakland. He is affiliated with the Black Panther Party, though less closely in 1973 than he was back in 1968-1969, during which time he was a protégé to Raymond Hewitt. COINTELPRO twice approached Moore in an attempt to cultivate him as a confidential informant. Both times they were rebuffed.
Moore began an informal collaboration with the German-born artist Sebastian Keiner in 1972; the latter designed the album art for Mansa’s third album, Mirrored Sky, as well as for Ikenga, their most recent album, which was released in March 1973. Whether through Keiner or some other source, Moore became dimly aware that History A is fungible, commenting in at least one interview that he considers “this history” to be “a lie.”
URIEL eventually learned that much of Moore's life had been engineered by a human agent of History B named Zeb who taught Moore how to play music and inspired him to think radically about alternatives to the stultifying kyriarchy of History A. Had that plan come to fruition, Moore’s Ikenga album debut block party would have led to violence between the attendees and the police. That violence would have acted as a blood-ritual irruption to reassert History B in the present timeline.
URIEL managed to neuter Moore through a combination of powerful memetics designed by Archie, psychological manipulation by Roger, esmological controls, the abduction and “re-education” of Zeb, and physical sabotage of the Mansa block party in Oakland. Moore is now on the rise to mainstream prominence, but mostly as a solo act. He is held largely in disdain by the Black community as a sellout. His magic seems to be gone.