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Fiction, maybe?

The "what if"
we keep on a separate shelf.

Everywhere else on this site the rule is the same: sources or it didn't happen. This is the one room where we suspend it on purpose. These are stories, occult-thrillers and ancient-astronaut tales built on the bones of real people, real places, and real books, with an invented conspiracy strung between them. The history is accurate; the cosmic horror is not. Each piece says exactly which is which.

For people who want it to be real and want it to be true, and these are clearly marked as fiction.

The series · 6 entries

The Thirteenth Codex

Invented reconstructions of the parts of the gnostic library that burned, rotted, or were never found.

Real manuscript, real hole, invented filling, every one of them labelled.

Open the codex →

The stories

A small stone church with a round-arched door under a heavy storm sky, a large iron anchor hanging on ropes out of the clouds beside it, a line of cloaked, hooded figures standing on the wet grass watching
Fiction, maybe?

The Office Against the Ships of the Air

A work of fiction built on a real silence. Medieval sources describe ships sailing on the clouds: Agobard of Lyon in 815, Irish annal-keepers in the 740s, Gervase of Tilbury around 1211, and a Norse king's mirror that puts an anchor in the church door at Clonmacnoise. Not one of them records what the priest was supposed to say. We wrote the rite that is missing, labelled every line of it as ours, and then explained why it would not have worked.
A person seen from behind at a desk in a dark room at night, lit only by two monitors showing scanned documents and rows of file thumbnails, a mug and a notebook on the desk, heavy rain streaking the window beyond
Fiction, maybe?

The Sixth Tranche

A work of fiction. The Pentagon has published five tranches of UAP files at war.gov/ufo, with dates and locations redacted to protect witnesses, and says more are coming. This story imagines the sixth, and the volunteer archivist who mirrors it at two in the morning and finds one file whose metadata does not agree with the others. No sixth tranche had been published when this was written. Everything about it below is invented.
A robed teacher seated in silhouette at a high stone window over ancient Alexandria at dusk, a vast stack of luminous layers rising into the sky above the city
Fiction, maybe?

Basilides, Exegetica, Book Thirteen

He wrote twenty-four books in Alexandria around the year 130. We have a page and a half, quoted by men who were refuting him. The most disturbing idea attributed to him is that ignorance is installed on purpose, as an act of mercy. This is the middle book, invented, arguing that case.
A woman in a pale robe and a man in an ancient tunic seated on opposite sides of a small fire at night on a stony hillside, the wood beneath it unburnt
Fiction, maybe?

The Book of Hypsiphrone

A named woman, a revelation in her own voice, a man with a name meaning bright-eyed, and fire. That is everything the manuscript preserves of Hypsiphrone: a few sentences off the end of a ruined codex. Nothing survives to contradict us, so we wrote her whole book.
A sealed earthenware jar at the foot of a limestone cliff in the Egyptian desert at dawn, a scatter of burnt fibre in the sand beside it
Fiction, maybe?

The Lost Leaves of Codex XIII

Codex XIII survives as eight leaves someone tore out and hid inside the cover of another book. They are numbered 35 to 50, which means thirty-four pages are simply gone. This is an invented reconstruction of what stood on them, and of a fourth descent the real text never got to make.
A glowing teal schematic of concentric circles ringed by standing gate markers, a serpent biting its own tail coiled at the centre
Fiction, maybe?

The Ophite Diagram: The Gate Passwords

A second-century sect drew a map of the levels above the world and wrote out what you say to the thing guarding each one. We only have it because a pagan critic described it in order to mock it, and a Christian critic quoted the mockery in order to answer it. Here is the document itself, invented.
A woman speaking with open hands to a semicircle of seated bearded men in a lamplit first-century upper room, one of them turned away in disbelief
Fiction, maybe?

The Six Lost Pages of Mary

The Gospel of Mary opens mid-sentence, because its first six pages are missing, and it drops out again in the middle of the soul's ascent, because four more are. An invented reconstruction of both gaps, written to dovetail into the surviving lines exactly where they resume.
A small robed figure at the foot of an immense stack of luminous rings receding upward into darkness, the highest rings dissolving into nothing
Fiction, maybe?

What Zostrianos Saw in the Gaps

The longest book in the Nag Hammadi library is also one of the most damaged, and the damage has a cruel pattern: the ladder of aeons survives, and the descriptions of what stands on each rung do not. We filled the holes and left the pattern intact.
A man of about six feet standing in the middle of a dark rural highway at night, arms folded, olive complexion, black hair combed straight back, wearing a smooth dark coat with no front opening, holding a wide fixed grin, a small domed object on the verge behind him
Fiction, maybe?

The Grinning Man

A speculative thriller, and a work of fiction. Every anchor is real: the two boys at the Turnpike fence in October 1966, Woodrow Derenberger's roadside encounter with a man who called himself Cold, the thirteen months of Mothman reports around the TNT area, John Keel's notebooks, and the forty-six people who went into the Ohio River when the Silver Bridge failed on 15 December 1967. The only invention is the other side of the conversation, and what the grin actually was.
Crowd of Portuguese villagers in shawls and caps kneeling and standing on rocky ground at Fatima on 13 October 1917, all of them staring upward at the sky
Fiction, maybe?

The Sun Dance

A speculative thriller, and a work of fiction. Every anchor is real: the six apparitions at the Cova da Iria in 1917, the three shepherd children, the anticlerical reporter who came to laugh and filed the strangest column of his career, the tens of thousands who stood in the rain on 13 October and watched the sun come loose, the secret written down in 1944 and kept sealed until 2000. The only invention is who was on the other end, and why it chose the shape it chose.
A lone man on a desert hilltop at dusk aiming a tall array of long metal pipes, a cloudbuster, toward a thin cigar-shaped light trailing black vapor across a bruised violet sky
Fiction, maybe?

The Spacegun

A speculative occult-thriller, and a work of fiction. Every anchor is real: Wilhelm Reich and his 'orgone' energy, the cloudbuster he aimed at the sky and renamed a 'spacegun,' the 1954-55 'OROP Desert Ea' expedition in Arizona where he believed he was fighting UFOs, the August 1956 court-ordered burning of his books, and his death in a federal prison in 1957. The only thing invented is the secret cause stringing them together, that the spacegun worked, and that what he touched in the sky was looking back.
A shiny oval craft glinting above a Himalayan caravan on a high cold plateau, a faint three-sphere emblem and an eye-topped pyramid burning in the clouds above the snow
Fiction, maybe?

The Shambhala Signal

A speculative occult-thriller. The painter, the expedition, the sky-object, the symbol, and the cabinet secretary are all real; the intelligence threading them together is not. In 1927 Nicholas Roerich's caravan watched a shiny oval cross the sky over Central Asia, one of the earliest documented UFO sightings. He was looking for Shambhala on the orders of a Himalayan 'Master,' and a few years later a U.S. cabinet secretary who called him 'Guru' helped put an eye and a pyramid on the dollar bill. This is a story about a sign being planted where everyone would carry it and no one would read it.
An Elizabethan scholar in a dark study gazing into a glowing obsidian scrying mirror, an angelic child-form taking shape in the glass, a grid of strange letters on the table
Fiction, maybe?

The Angelical Tongue

A speculative occult-thriller. The man, the diaries, the language, and the spy-code are real; the thing on the other end of the line is not. Queen Elizabeth's astrologer, mathematician, navigator, her first '007', spent seven years writing down a complete language dictated by 'angels,' letter by letter, backwards. This is a story about what happens when you speak it forwards.
A blue-white binary star over a moonlit African escarpment, a faint dark companion star beside it, amphibious robed figures rising from still water below
Fiction, maybe?

The Dark Companion

A speculative occult-thriller. The people, books, and star are real; the signal binding them is not. From a blind cliff-priest in Mali to Aleister Crowley's 'Silver Star,' to the magician who in 1955 named the dark twin of Sirius, to a novelist who thought the Dog Star called him on a July night in 1973, an 'ancient contact' tale about the one star no naked eye can see.
A tall, pale, almond-eyed figure half-formed from grey-green phosphorescent carvings on the wall of an underground gallery, a bent solar cross glowing in the stone
Fiction, maybe?

The Hyperborean Doctrine

A speculative occult-thriller. The names, places, and books are real; the conspiracy stringing them together is not. An 'ancient astronaut' tale that traces the 'Aryan master race' myth from Blavatsky's Himalayan revelation to the Antarctic ice, and asks what it would mean if the lie had a cosmic-horror origin.
A 1940s pulp magazine editor's desk piled with lurid sci-fi covers and stacks of reader letters, a welding coil glowing, cavern silhouettes and flying discs bleeding through the paper
Fiction, maybe?

The Influencing Machine

A speculative occult-thriller. The welder, the editor, the magazine, and the saucer flap are real; the broadcast under them is not. A factory worker heard voices through a welding coil; a cynical pulp editor printed them as fact; a quarter-million readers wrote back to confirm. Then, weeks after the all-Shaver issue, the flying saucers arrived. A story about the medium as the antenna.