S4/E4 | Evaluation

I write books that no one reads, about books that no one has read. My specialty is since Anselm of Canterbury and the ontological argument? You familiar um? And why would you be? Anselm was a Catholic theologian of the eleventh century, a thundering, black habited engineer of the Arcanetus of God. Before he was my research subject, Anselm was a homegrown obsession of my father's yes, Dad, It was

a bit of an amateur theologian himself. He spent so many hours pouring over Anselm, Augustine and that whole spectral faculty of god minded men from ages past. Of course, when I was a girl, I had about as much interest in all of that as I had in the design of seward rains. But I suppose death does have a way of rearranging one's engrossments. My father died when

I was in my first year at university. He was alone, alone on one of his meditations, as he called them, hiking the peak of a mountain in Scotland called khn Aran. It was a heart attack, or so they assumed. But would you guess this, He did make it to the top. They found him there in the cold rocks, in the fog, as high as the mountain goes. I always liked that felled by his ambition, but he did make it all

the way up. After he was gone, I found myself home for Christmas reading through the books and papers in his study. One story from a book on his desk that arrested my attention was about Saint Anselm's childhood. Apparently, as a young boy Anselm had met face to face with God himself, or so he said. The encounter took place on top of a mountain called Beccadinona, near his

home town of Aosta in Italy. After the young Anselmo climbed the cliffs and scrambled over the ice and rocks to the summit, he was found by a wandering angel and ushered into the secret mansion of the Lord, where they welcomed him with a meal the bread of God. Now when I read this, I couldn't help but wonder if Daddy's solitary mountaintop journeys were all in the vain hope that he would one day stumble into the garden of a secret manner and be welcomed inside by a

seraphic majordomo and taste the bread of God himself. After I uncovered this window into my father's obsession, I had to learn more about Anselm. It was in this that I first crossed paths with my life's work and Saint Anselm's most favorite invention, the ontological argument for the existence of God. Are you ready for me to prove it to you? The existence of God? Anselm says, if God exists. He is the great conceivable being. No being greater could

be imagined. Now, I ask, would the greatest conceivable being be greater if it existed only in your mind? Or if it existed both in your mind and in reality. Surely if the being were real, it would be greater than if it were only imaginary. Therefore, the imaginary one is not the greatest. The real one is. Therefore, by definition, the greatest conceivable being must and does exist, not just in here but out there. Ah, I take it, you're

not convinced. Some say the same form can be used to prove the existence of any silly thing, the most perfect island or the most perfect cup of laps and tea. But that first night, when I read the proof, I was flawed. It was late in the evening, and I was alone in his study, and everything was quiet except for the crackle of snow falling outside the window. I walked out into the night and let the snow fall on my face and melt on my skin. Every sensation

was rapturous. The air around me was bursting with the life force of the presence previously unknown. I knew there was a God. I had absolute proof, and that knowledge meant I would one day see my father again. I slept fitfully that night, dreaming about strange clouds that gathered round a mountain top. When I woke in the morning, I ran to my father's study and read the ontological

argument again. But something was wrong. The words were the same, but they lacked the force of certainty they had the night previous. To my horror, I was no longer persuaded. Instead of absolute proof, I was left with a humiliating sense of the hollowness of it all, like the whole thing had been a mere word game, some kind of clever trick of grammar. I couldn't say what was wrong with Anselm's argument, but it just didn't feel right at all. And that's where I stayed. For thirty years. I became

a scholar of Saint Anselm. I under a professorship at Oxford, married, had children, sent them off to university to foster their own obsessions. I wrote several books about Anselm, dozens of articles on the subject of the ontological argument, its modern proponents, and so on and so on, bloody blaody blah. But as many in my profession know, though they dare not

confess expertise has diminishing returns. In all all those years and through all that study, I never once again found what I was searching for that moment that night, where I knew in my bones the ontological argument was sound, and I knew he orri it was out there. This rather boring life of flapping dust jackets and compiling endnotes went on until one day, at an academic conference, I was approached by another professor, not of theology or medieval studies,

but of biochemistry. I'd just given a presentation on modern challenges on the ontological argument, and she met me afterwards to see if I would like to chat over a cup of tea. Her name was Professor Raymond. She was a dashing woman with long black hair and livid eyes, and her attention was dangerously exciting. I could hardly say no. Raymard led me to a secluded corner in the college's library.

Once we were snuggled away in our little den, to my astonishment, she narrated that she had one night long ago become absolutely convinced that the ontological argument had force, only to find upon waking the next morning that she was once again doubtful. But she had never been able to shake the memory of the Catharsis, the almost psychedelic arising to a second substance of life that came from

that one night when it seemed true. Since then, she had thought about the argument every day, but with a different sort of lens than I had. Raymond asked me, suppose that.

over smaller ones in a fight. But sweet aside the preferences of generous Homo sapiens and ask, from the perspective of, say, an atom of hydrogen, what are the qualities of the greatest conceivable being? Might bound cell be proving the existence of a different kind of being altogether? And if so, what are those qualities that are the greatest as conceivable by the universe, the true superlatives, if you will.

just an intellectual understanding, but an experience. To use the analogy of an alien life form from the burning, sulfurous planet, who could never understand the wetness of water, no matter how many papers it read on the chemical properties of H two O. The wetness must be seen with the eyes, and felt with the skin, and tasted with the tongue. And whom you've had the experience of a damp cloth wrung out and dripping on your toes, you don't understand

what water is. After all, didn't Anselm himself taste of the bread of God. This seemed true enough to me. I'd spent years trying to recreate the experience of that night in my father's study, and I didn't know anything that could conjure it again. Well, she did, Remard had in her laboratory happened to isolate a compound called seven methyl ionamine. This molecule was an enzymatic byproduct of a species of alpine lichen that grew on rocks above the

tree line in certain mountain ranges. It just so happened. She noticed that this molecule was similar in structure to a number of other molecules that are known as ensogens, those used in religious ceremonies to bring messages from the gods. She said that she had, on more than one occasion happened to ingest a significant amount of this compound, and she believed it had given her profound insights into the ontological argument and the being to which it pointed naturally.

I asked what these insights were. She said that they were difficult to put into words. She said, I would need to see for myself. I would need to wring the cloth to understand what it meant for water to be wet. So I took what she offered me. It was a white powder in a small plastic bag. She gave me a dosy'ch advisory said she'd be in touch. I mulled over it for a while. I'd never taken drugs of any sort, not even a puff of grass.

In my school years, I only drank wine at Christmas time, but I felt I owed it to myself, or perhaps to Daddy, to understand what Raymard was hinting at. It was a night my husband was away on some silly mission of his, collecting fossils in Devon or some such so I had the house to myself. I dipped candles. Isn't that humorous? Why did I like candles? It just seemed the thing to do. But I only had half

a dozen or so in the house. So there they were, my six candles, melting on the sofa table while I waited for the drug to take effect. I didn't know what to expect, and for a long time nothing happened. I rubbed my toes on the carpet and took deep breaths and waited to feel something. I confess after some time I grew rather bored. I began to wonder if the powder had lost its potency, or if Reymard had

been pulling some kind of prank. For a while, I became convinced this must be the case, and that I had just swallowed several grams of baby powder dissolved in a cup of tea. I was so embarrassed, What a stupid thing to even try. But then, while I was sitting there, feeling sorry for myself, I witnessed something quite strange in my border. I'd flicked on the television, which was showing a football match, but at some point, without

me noticing, everyone had stopped playing. No one was running or kicking, no line up for a penalty, and they weren't leaving the pitch either. They were just standing there, all of them, stock still on the green. The crowd in the stands had fallen silent, and one by one all of the players began looking up up into the sky at what. I had no idea. I suppose at the camera hovering over the pitch, because our eyes met. I was looking at them, and they were looking to me.

No one moved. For what seemed like ages, they gazed into my eyes. I said to myself, now that is rather odd. Then one of the football announcers answered me. He said, scarcely ever happens. And I said, what makes them do that? And the man at the microphone said, they're showing respect for the arrival of an important guest. I said, well, I suppose I'm flattered, and he said, I'm not talking about you. The hare stood up on the back of my neck. I felt jets of cold

water rushing over my bones. I swirled round to look behind me, but saw nothing except the blank wall. However, I knew there was someone in the house with me. I didn't know who it was. I said, I'm afraid, but the announcer wouldn't reply again. The football players all stood there, looking right at me, not smiling, saying nothing, just watching what I was going to do. Suddenly, they all raised their arms and pointed upward to the sky. Without warning, the telly switched off. Then all the lights

began to grow dim. The lamp bulbs faded to gray, and even the flames on my half dozen candles shrunk down to mruborn pinpricks of light. I stood and they all snuffed out completely. The only light left was what I could see up the staircase from the second story. It was as if the tide of darkness were rising

through the house. In that darkness, there were things. I could hear them, soft squeaks and shuffling on the wood of the floor, like little infants crawling towards me to play, But without laughter or even breath, I lunged for the staircase and climbed it into the safety of the light. But no sooner had I come into the upper hall than the lamps there began to fade as well. The dark flood was rising evermore, driving me up and up. I heard the crawling of the creatures. Now upon the stairs,

How could I go any higher? Then I looked to the ceiling and saw, yes, in the little crack around the door to the loft, there was a glow of yellow light. I snatched the chain, leave it down the door, and scurried off the ladder as fast as I could. The loft was lit with a single yellow light bulb. The shadows were throbbing, and there in the just within reach of the light, there it was the stack of things from Daddy's office. I tore open the boxes and

began paging moniately through the papers inside. These were not my father's books, which were now part of my own library, but his notes and his diaries. I blazed through the pages, searching for something that would make sense of it all. I said out loud, what is it you want to show me? And Then a voice, speaking from a darkened

corner of the loft whispered, what shood dear. At that moment, the tattered notebook in my hand fell open to a page where my father had made a long diary entry about plans for one of his meditations, a mountain hike at Ben Lower's. He noted his transportation, his packing list, the books he would take with him, et cetera, et cetera. But after his return from the mountain, the entry was only two words, written with such force his pen had cut through the page. It said most ancient. After this,

I have very little memory of that night. I know there was something else. The man in my house told me something important, but I couldn't recall beyond that, only faint sensations of fibers, like soft hair brushing against my skin and hearing a melody ah. When I woke the next morning, I was in a rather strange position, blank curled on the floor of my son's bedroom, with a vague sense of discomfort in my mouth and a taste

of salt on my tongue. When I went to wash up, I discovered the source of the taste in my mouth, which was an unexpected gap in the molars on the lower left side of my jaw. I searched around the house for the missing tooth to no avail, but no sense wailing about a lost tooth. Here and there. I was exhilarated about what had been revealed to me, the most Ancient. I tried to call Raymond on the telephone that very morning. Could it be that most Ancient was

one of her true superlatives? Had I and Daddy before me somehow discovered one of the objective properties of the greatest conceivable being. It's hard to express how true and how important this discovery felt. I was tingling all over, but alas Raymond's telephone rang and rang and rang without answers, so I couldn't share what I'd found. It was, I think the loneliest I had ever been ah, but I

was ravenous to learn more. A few nights later, I fabricated a story to feed my husband about an overnight trip to visit relatives on my side. Instead, I set out to have another meeting with the presents. This time, I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could, so I ignored Raymard's dosage instructions and took the rest of what she had given me. In one go, I had landed at the ruins of an abbey in the East Country, thinking this setting would aid in perceiving the

qualities of Anselm's God. Of course, I had to do a bit of fence jumping, since the grounds were closed to tourists after sunset, but I didn't think much of it. Little was left but a broken wall on the southern face and a row of stone archways, all of it now covered in moss so green it seemed to glow in the dark. I took the powder and waited, writing meanwhile in my journal, which I had brought along so

I could record my experience despite my previous encounter. It took long enough that I began to wonder, if you may laugh at me for this, But so be it. I wondered if it had ever done anything in the first place, and the source of my previous experience had been nothing but my own mind, perhaps in the effort of arriving at some form of madness. Oh but as I put all this down to paper, I began to hear voices singing a quiet melody that was unlike any

chance I'd ever heard before. I tried to sing along, and then I was somewhere else. Entirely the abbey was gone. I was floating up, as if clutching to a trail of steam rising in the sky. But I wasn't simply rising up. I was rising backwards, backwards in time. I saw the earth below my feet, with civilization retreating, every road fading to grass, and then grass fading to stone, and then stone to icy waters, and then icy waters to entrails of flame, a landscape of illimitable, writhing worms

made of molten rock. The earth glowed like a forge, and I was silent. And then he was there with me, the presence from the shadows in my loft, the one who would show me the way. I asked him, Are you going to welcome me into the mansion of God? The voice said, The sterile earth burned below us. I asked what we were looking at? He said rest. I gathered my wits and remembered why I had come. I

asked him of the ontological argument. I asked him what it was I had understood the night in my father's study that I could no longer see now, And damn it to hill as I tell it, I can't explain precisely what he said. He did whisper something to me from just behind my ears, so that I could feel his breadth through my hair, something so so not words, more like a melody, a melody that somehow in itself

carried a logic. And I knew. I knew in some sense it contained a hidden premise that made the ontological argument irrefuteable. I could almost put it into words. It was right behind the veil in the back of my mind. How I failed around for my notebook so I would be ready to write it down as soon as I worked it out. But then then below, as the earth opened its mouth a chasm of unimaginable heat and darkness,

I asked, Must I go in there? He whispered. A change came over me, the beginning of an unfolding of sensation into impossible dimensions of strangeness and understanding and pain, thought without meaning, sight without light. There was an infinite more, but I could not remember it. I came to the next morning with a policeman gruptly shaking me awake. Had slept in the grass at the crest of the hill,

somewhere beyond the abbey. I dealt with the policeman quickly as I could, and darted off to my car leave me. Through the pages of my journal, I'd left several indecipherable illustrations, along with scribbled notes from the part of the night I could not recall. One note said the terrible Angel the Majordomo. Another said the bread of God. It is of God, but it is not bread. And finally, at the end of my notes I had written with such force that my pen tore through the pages most secret.

Upon reading this, my heart raised, Could this be another of the true superlityis of the greatest conceivable being? It must be, Though it made less sense than the last. It was hard to reconcile the evangelical message of Christ with the idea that God's greatness could be a secret. But nevertheless I knew this insight had to be correct. I would make sense of it somehow next time I would understand. In this excitement, I knew immediately I had

to get more of the powder. I called and called for Professor Raymond dozens of times, but you never answered the telephone. Eventually, I became so desperate I booked a plane ticket and made my way to her university. After a bit of asking around, I came to the correct building. I found her office locked, with parcels overflowing her mailbox. So I went to the office next door, where I met a small, timid looking man, framed with a bald head and neatly trimmed beard. He was friendly at first,

asked if I needed help. I told him I was looking for Raymond. He said that she'd recently gone on sabbatical and he didn't know when she would be back. He asked who I was. I said I was a research partner, and that we were considering authoring a book chapter together. The little man frowned. My deception must have been rather obvious and really not good at lying. He asked what we were writing about, and in a panic for what to say, I blurted out a compound, A

compound called seven metal I ownamine. He stiffened, rose from his chair and took a step backward, as if suddenly afraid of me. He looked me up and down. His voice became very quiet. You're not one of them, he said, Did they send you? I asked who he meant? With evident terror, he whispered foss. I said I didn't know what he was talking about, but that I had been given to some of the compound by raymart and I needed more. Could he get it for me? He said no and told me to go away. I explained I

was desperate. I told him I would pay anything for it. He began shouting, shouting for me to leave his office and never come back. Not knowing what to do, I hid in a laboratory stall down the hall until later that night, when every one had left and the building was locked up. With a bit of a jimmy, I broke into Raymard's laboratory and began looking around. I ransacked the cupboards and the sample drawers and the file cabinets. Nothing.

There was no powder anywhere. But then something caught my attention. A large photograph lying in the heap among all the papers from the file cabinets, A photograph of a rock covered in splotches of gray, green, and yellow. I knelt and picked up the picture. It was a patch of lichen. The photo was dated from several years before, and it was labeled source of sample north face of khn Iron. I felt something grip inside my gut. I'd heard that

name before, long before. Khn Iron was the mountain of Daddy's last meditation, where they found him at the top. Without returning home, I booked another ticket and made my way to Aberdeen. There I rented a car. I was delirious, no telling how long I had gone without proper sleep. I drove up a long, lonely road through the Highland glen to the foot of cahn Aran. The peak of the mountain was ringed with gray fog when it came into view, and the rocks along the path were slick

from the morning's rain. I began to hike up the slope, clutching the photograph of the Lichen. I made my way up through the corner of the forest, then on a steep incline over a ridge like the spine of a great beast. I looked all around for the Lichen, venturing far off the hiking trail, turning over rocks and checking their undersides like a child collecting insects. And finally, at long last, I found it on the upturned face of

a huge flat boulder. The lichen was a papery mass of pale green and yellow substance that somehow looked almost delicious. I assure you it was not. It was poisonously bitter, with the texture of old rope. But I choked down as much as I could. I managed quite a bit. I waited and waited for what seemed like hours on end, but I felt nothing save for an increasingly vicious stirring of nausea. Eventually I had to be sick in the weeds beside the boulder. Had I lost my mind? I

didn't even know if it would work this way? Did Raymond have to do some sort of chemistry to isolate something within the lichen? Was I even sure I'd found the right organism? It was a miserable defeat. I sat on the boulder, ill and exhausted, and sulked in self pity as clouds gathered their gray bulk. Evermore overhead, the sun went down, and the shadow of the mountain swept over the valley to the east at a racing clip.

As I thought about it, I realized Daddy may well have looked out over the same gloomy view his last day on Earth. Did he sit on the same boulder and rest half way up the mountain? Was he surrounded by pale pink frogs just like these? Would he have noticed the way their skin looked like rare veal, leaking juices under the pressure of the carving fork. I tried to ask the rosy froglets if they had any memory

of him, but they were not especially talkative. Instead, they began to leave my side all at once, in a frenzy up the mountain slope. How strange, I thought it was almost as if they were fleeing in terror. So I turned back to look down at the valley, and I saw what it was, the water line of darkness. I had felt just the edges of it in my house a few nights before. Now I saw it complete in its awful majesty, stretching as far as an ocean

would have. A mist of moonless blackness rose from the valley and ascended the mountain side, And hidden in the darkness came the things creatures of a chilling primeval innocence, the silent Cambrian infants crawling on hands and knees. My mind was seized with flashes of what could happen if the little children overtook me. They did not laugh or shout that they would play. My heart contracted with terror. I scrambled from the boulder and ran as fast as

I could up the mountain path. Up above me were the silhouettes of several men, whose skin seemed to glitter with dull reflections in the gray light. When I came close, I saw they were man shaped things, made not a flesh, but of thousands of little metal objects, safety pins, batteries and fish hawks, all held together by a sort of animate magnetism. They were slow moving. They begged me for help in their rattling language, but I couldn't stop. I ran past and left them behind to be played with.

The path steepened, and I climbed with a ferocity of which I wouldn't have thought myself capable. I was driven now not only by the fear of what rose from below, but by a del larious ecstasy of what lay above. Stone shattered under my toes like globes of glass, and the soil gave off the aroma of bread crust. The boulders that lined the path bloomed with the sacred lichen in shapes of naked bodies, humming with pleasure, and splitting up masses of oysters and offal that fell at my

feet as I passed this. This was their way of showing respect. Meanwhile, all around black habitat. Monks stood guard underneath prisoners who were hoisted up to the sky upon Catherine wheels, my namesake, I thought. The men and women blashed on the wheels sang together. Yes, it was all starting to make sense. I understood that the prisoners on the wheels were not being punished. They were in the shines, machines for generating a kind of power, like the turbines

in a down. The monks standing guard under the wheels of torture all raised their arms when they saw me, all pointing in the same direction to the top, just over the last ridge of rock. As I climbed above, finally I felt him, the presence the Major DOMO. He was looming just behind me, breathing on my neck. But I knew it would be terribly bad manners to turn

and look. Without a word, he guided me through the fog until the jagged rocks of the peak gave way to a smooth, paved pathway of flagstones and mortar, surrounded by crisp green hedges on either side. It was a secret garden path leading me to a mansion with its windows bleeding yellow light. My voice trembling, I asked the Major d'ama, Will you ah take me inside? The Major d'omo whispered, perhaps, but not yet. I understood there was something I had to do first. I had to meet

some one. There was a lanky human shadow on the path just ahead. When I saw the figure, my heart leapt into my throat. I thought, Daddy. But as I ran to meet him, with tears gathering in my eyes, the shape that came into focus was all wrong. It was not my father. It was Raymard, standing athwart the path, wearing a cheshire cat grin. I asked her what she was doing here, and she leaned in to embrace me, whispering, Catherine,

I have the most wonderful news. I have been given a research grant by God Almighty, and you are to be my assistant. I was flummoxed to say the least. I said, but his house is right there. Can't I go inside and learn what he is like? Raymard said, you will, but you're not ready yet. First you must learn the secret, the oldest secret. She then stepped back and unbuttoned her glass, and her skin was not skin,

but a sort of plate thronged with legs. Hundreds thousands of dancing, undulating articulated legs like the underside of a horseshoe crab. A tear of blue blood leaped from the corner of her eye. She came in close to embrace me again. In horror, I tried my best to recoil, but now the major Domo stood behind to hold me in place. Raymond's breath smelled like copper. The legs wriggled and flexed, close enough to tickle my stomach. I screamed, no, no,

this is not what I wanted. Raymond leaned to my ear and said.

me to get some help? I told him not to bother, and I rose to go on my way, limping on a leg I had injured somehow in the night. But as I was walking away, he said, were you invited in? I stopped. I asked in where? He said, beyond the secret garden, into his house. I rushed back to the monk's side. What do you know about it? I asked. The monk smiled. He said, are you seeking to believe in order that you may understand? Or seeking to understand in order that you may believe? I felt a hopeless

despair come over me. I didn't know. In truth, I feared I'd lost track of what it was I was trying to prove and whom I was trying to prove it too. But I was in his presence, I said, nearly in his mansion, I see, said the monk, the greatest conceivable being, I said. He smiled placidly, as if to humor me, the god who called out to Abraham, I said. But then the monk's expression changed. He looked, amuteoos, oh him, you think down here on this bleak mountain

top with us. I didn't know what to make of that. The monk said to me, if there were two beings, both infinitely beyond your understanding, and both claimed to be the greatest? How would you tell them apart? I had no answer. I asked, will I ever understand what he is? The monk said, well, now, if you wish to be welcomed into his manner and taste of his bread, I suggest you make yourself a courteous house guest. I said,

how would one do that? He said, for one thing, when a courteous house guest comes to visit, she always brings a gift. I asked, well, what should she bring? I laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and said, what is most precious? Looking back, I realized the sheer hubris of my initial endeavor. Though I find myself in good company with the likes of Daddy and Saint Anselm himself, I know now that the mysteries of totality are too much for one mind alone, and with alacrity I settled

for just a glimpse. So I turned myself over to Doctor Raymard's care, in which I have been ever since. Ever said, what do you mean? Will call me a test case? An experiment in the long term effects of seven metal ie on mine on human consciousness? How can you big if you like but one of many and the labrat likes to have company in her cage.

Williams Supervising producers Trevor Young and Josh Thain. Producers Jesse Funk, Rima Ilkali, Noami Griffin, Chandler Mays, and Casby Bias. Script editing by Lauren Vogelbaum, Story consultants Ben Bowley and Matthew Riddle. Casting by Sunday Bowling CSA and Meg Mormon CSA. Production coordinator Wayna Calderon. Production assistants Jenna Johnson and Winona Low. Theme music by Rose Aserti with vocals by Anna Hummler, recorded at This Is Sound Design Studios in Burbank, California.

Engineered by Ross aeronaut special thanks to Romelia Osorio, Nathan Rule, Glen Nishida, and Rob Mosca. Thirteen Days of Halloween was created by Matt Frederick and Alexander Williams and is a production of iHeart Podcasts, Blumhouse Television, and Grim and Mild from Aaron Makey. Learn more about the show at Grimandmild dot com slash thirteen Days and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. Happy Halloween,