NIC: From Pacific Northwest Stories and Minnow Beats Whale, it’s Tanis. I’m Nic Silver. We’re telling the story of Tanis in order, every two weeks, so if you haven’t listened to the first six episodes, go back and start there. We’ll try not to get too far ahead by the time you get back.
NIC: Last week, we discovered that Vincent Pardow had allegedly hired Carl van Sant to take him to some secret place to perform or discover some kind of miracle cure. Pardow’s sister indicated that Vincent had referred to Carl, on at least one occasion, as a runner. Something else that happened last week, of course, was my meeting Morgan Miller and Sam Reynolds. We’re going to update that situation very soon, but first, I had a call scheduled with Meerkatnip.
NIC: I asked the person who picked up her phone to call the police, and I called them myself, as well. As you can imagine, knowing Meerkatnip, the phone was a burner, untraceable. They had me file a report, but they were just going through the motions. There was nothing for them to go on, aside from an email address that was obviously one of at least a hundred different alias accounts.
There was really nothing for me to go on, either. She was gone. We’ll get back to Meerkatnip and HaidaGurl soon, but first, an update on the Morgan Miller/Sam Reynolds situation. The way Miller sounded in that parking garage, I didn’t think there was any way I’d be hearing from them again, but Sam Reynolds had other ideas. He called the studio and asked to meet.
NIC: Sam Reynolds and Morgan Miller have been looking for Sam’s sister, Tara. And they’d arrived at the same place I did- Carl van Sant’s death. I wanted to explore connecting those two events further- Tara’s disappearance and Carl’s death, so I set up a follow up meeting to check in with Sam and Morgan. In the meantime, I discovered something very interesting about a strange cabin in the woods.
NIC: The first clear reference to Baba Yaga was in 1755. She’s referred to as a Slavic goddess. Unique, without a pantheon of her own. There are numerous stories and qualities attributed to Baba Yaga or The Forest Mother, but in all of these legendary tales, there are common through lines. She’s generally described as some kind of frightening witch living in a unique dwelling, which I’ll get to in a moment, and she’s often depicted working over a stove of some kind. Baba Yaga is referenced in “The Maiden Tsar” by Alexander Afanasyev. “Do you know, Baba Yaga, where lies the thrice tenth kingdom?” “No, I do not,” she replied.
Tales of Baba Yaga often involve musky smells, mysterious feathers, and birds behaving in very odd ways. In addition to these, one other element is almost always present- the place she lives. Baba Yaga’s hut. Baba Yaga’s hut is described as quite small and always located in a deeply wooded area. There is an additional point of interest, however. The Hut moves through the woods perched on two, giant fowl legs. Fowl meaning like chicken legs. I’ll upload some pictures to the notes section of our website.
So, what does Baba Yaga’s hut have to do with Tanis? Well, to find that out, we’re going to have to play a game. Dungeons and Dragons. The original Dungeon Master’s Guide was written by Gary Gygax in 1979. Along with editor Mike Carr, a few other TSR employees had a hand in helping Gygax craft some of the mythological details of that 232 page hardcover book. One of those employees was Peter Chenoweth.
Back then Chenoweth split his time between working as a commodities trader in Milwaukee and a writer at TSR. He was an expert in Slavic folktales and it was allegedly Chenoweth who suggested adding Baba Yaga to the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Just one year before moving to Milwaukee and joining TSR in Geneva, Wisconsin, Chenoweth lived in the Pacific Northwest in a small house on an acreage on Bainbridge Island, just west of Seattle. Here’s Chenoweth speaking to a college student in 1980 about Dungeons and Dragons and Baba Yaga’s hut.
NIC: Three weeks after that interview, Peter Chenoweth went home to Washington on vacation. While camping with his family in the woods, Chenoweth disappeared. Three months later, he showed up, back at home, dazed and confused, as if nothing had happened. Now, all of this was way before the internet, so there isn’t much information available, but the one report we were able to dig up indicated that Chenoweth believed less than an hour had passed since he’d last seen his family. Just over a week later, Peter Chenoweth hung himself in the family’s living room. His family believed that the drastic change in his personality was due to something that happened to him in the woods.
NIC: Still no word from Meerkatnip. I was worried, so I followed the only lead I could think of. She’d mentioned a friend at Tesla Nova Corporation, an ex-boyfriend maybe. She was pretty vague on that point. I didn’t have anything else, so I called and asked if someone there knew someone named MK. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get very far. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, I received a call from somebody from TeslaNova a few days later. They wanted to set up a meeting.
I asked them if it was about Meerkatnip, and they told me that they’d tracked down someone in their organization who matched the limited job description that Meerkatnip gave me of her…acquaintance. Apparently there was an employee there who had a female friend who went by the initials MK. I was surprised, I certainly wasn’t expecting that. So, I made an appointment. I was going in to meet someone at TeslaNova Corporation.
NIC: TeslaNova Corporation is located in a large, imposing, monolith of a building, very plain and rectangular. No company name, no sign on the outside. It kind of looks like that thing in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
NIC: So, yeah, Meerkatnip was back. I was happy she was okay, but somewhat concerned that she’d been following me. She led me back to my apartment, of course she knew the way. She told me what happened, why she hung up on me and fell off the grid. She said that someone had been following her and that when she tossed her phone and approached them, they took off. Right at that moment, she received a text from a friend of hers she had keeping an eye on her place, telling Meerkatnip that her home had been compromised.
She said it took her quite a while to get set up somewhere new, but her new place wasn’t going to be ready for another 24 hours, so until then, she was in my living room, on my sofa working on a laptop that looked like some kind of homemade prototype, definitely not something you could buy in any store. In retrospect, I probably would have been disappointed if it had been anything else.
NIC: Everything I was able to learn about Carl van Sant led me to believe that although it looks like he was taking Vincent Pardow for a ride as far as miraculous healing powers go, Carl van Sant was more deluded than devious. But there was just so much to unpack with all this stuff. It feels like the more layers I peel away, the deeper the mystery becomes. I left MK in my apartment and drove down to Portland, to the Lamp Post and Colonel Bookstore, to try and track down HaidaGurl.
NIC: It was a long shot, but it worked. There was one employee from around the time period I was looking in to whose list of staff purchases included the following books: Killing in the Rain, two Charles Forte biographies, Hubbard’s Dianetics, a collection of historical maps of the Pacific Northwest, Sex and Rockets- a book on Jack Parsons, and both the boys’ and girl scouts’ handbooks. That employee’s name was Veronika Pillman.
Aside from raiders patrolling the coast, the Haida had very little permanent presence in or around the Puget Sound area. They generally lived up north, around the archipelago of Haida Gwaii and southeastern Alaska. The Haida raiders who did make it farther south were allegedly fearsome warriors at sea. As an example, in 1856, an expedition in search of a route across Vancouver Island observed a large fleet of Haida canoes approaching and hid in the forest. The Haida, gliding through the water in canoes, each cut from a single western red cedar tree, were holding decapitated human heads. Later, the explorers came upon the charred remains of the village visited by the Haida.
There, they found the brutally murdered and mutilated bodies of the village’s inhabitants. There was only one survivor, an elderly woman, hiding terrified inside the stump of a western redcedar tree. I wondered if Veronika Pillman was familiar with this history, but more importantly, I wondered how I was going to find her. I couldn’t find any Veronika Pillman online in Portland. So, I went to the library and dug up the latest version of something we used to use all the time- the white pages of the phone book. It was a few years old, well, more than a few actually, but there was one Veronika Pillman listed. It was another long shot, but wasn’t everything at this point?
NIC: When I went back to my place, I found Meerkatnip sitting on the floor, pouring over scraps of paper, computer screens, and newspapers. This was getting serious.
NIC: Okay, so while I was working on MK’s payment, I did a little searching on my own. This Cult of Tanis seemed like something somebody should know about, but it turns out, it’s not. They really know how to keep the secret in secret society. Most of them…that is. I received a strange email from a Tanis listener who sent me a link to TeslaNova Corporation’s new website. Apparently, the company had avoided an online presence for a very long time and had only recently updated their domain with a kind of place holder site at teslanovacorp.com
NIC: The link wasn’t the strange part, however, the text of the message was. It read, “The Cult of Tanis in Marley from Singles on the Coast.” I’d never seen Singles on the Coast, but that’s because it never made it to air. It was an unproduced reality television show pilot from a company in Vancouver. One of our executive producers works in film and was able to get a copy of that unaired pilot episode. It’s a reality dating show and Marley was the third contestant voted off. I poured over her footage from the episode, which amounted to about four and a half minutes, I was about to give up when I heard this-
NIC: There are wondrous things, there are magical things, there are dangerous things. We get what we deserve. Is that the Cult of Tanis chanting in the background of that clip? I left a message with the owner of the property where the chanting was coming from, it was next to the location where they filmed that pilot. I’m still waiting for them to call me back.
NIC: So, what does it all mean? The short story, “Where is Tanis?” was repeating on some kind of strange numbers station. Tara Reynolds, Baba Yaga’s hut, the Servant Girl Annihilator, and the rest. What was the connection? Tanis is the connection. There has to be something I’m missing, some place I haven’t looked yet.
Sam and Morgan didn’t show up for our meeting and my bosses at Pacific Northwest Stories have been threatened with legal action from a numbered corporate entity if I continue to pursue my… current avenue of investigation, whatever that means. I’m probably not as worried about that as I should be, but I just can’t help but feel this exploration of Tanis is important somehow.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but at times it feels almost like coming out of hypnosis or something. I dunno. Next time more on the Cult of Tanis, I try and track down Veronika Pillman, plus, a strange town frozen in town reveals a dark secret. It’s Tanis, I’m Nic Silver. Due to the holidays, we’ll be back again in three weeks. Until then, keep looking.
Tanis is produced by Terry Miles. Produced, mixed, and edited by me, Nic Silver. Executive producers Terry Miles and Paul Bae. As always, listen to The Black Tapes Podcast at theblacktapespodcast.com
NIC: For legal and safety reasons, we've elected to change some names, and leave others out entirely. We don't do this very often, but we're unwilling to compromise people's safety for any reason.
Thanks again for listening to Tanis.
NIC: Last week, we discovered that Vincent Pardow had allegedly hired Carl van Sant to take him to some secret place to perform or discover some kind of miracle cure. Pardow’s sister indicated that Vincent had referred to Carl, on at least one occasion, as a runner. Something else that happened last week, of course, was my meeting Morgan Miller and Sam Reynolds. We’re going to update that situation very soon, but first, I had a call scheduled with Meerkatnip.
- MK: Hey.
- NIC: Hey, it’s Nic.
- MK: I can see that.
- NIC: (laughs) How can you see that? I’m calling from one of our intern’s-
- MK: They work for Pacific Northwest Stories, don’t they?
- NIC: Um, yes, but I’m not at Pacific Northwest Stories.
- MK: (sighs) Do you really wanna know how I know?
- NIC: Do I?
- MK: Probably not.
- NIC: Okay, well, you’re not going to-
- MK: I found something.
- NIC: What is it?
- MK: Someone who’s been posting to a variety of bulletin boards over the past few years, someone very interested in Xanu.
- NIC: Who?
- MK: HaidaGurl.
- NIC: Haida girl?
- MK: Haida G-U-R-L, it’s a username or codename or, most likely, both.
- NIC: Okay, so what’s-what’s special about Haidagurl?
- MK: See, I had the same question. I actually had to hack into Hanslope Park to find out.
- NIC: Hanslope Park?
- MK: You’ve never heard of Hanslope Park, have you?
- NIC: Um…no.
- MK: 15 miles of floor to ceiling shelving? Documents from 37 former British colonies? Cold War? Hong Kong? Nothing?
- NIC: Sorry, no.
- MK: (sighs in frustration) Well, okay. So, I slipped in and pulled out a number of files related to Xanu. That’s where I found this information on HaidaGurl. She’s Canadian, but she was hired by the British government in 2009 and then after some kind of top secret environmental operation went horribly wrong, she just vanished.
- NIC: She vanished?
- MK: Mm-hmm.
- NIC: Another ghost.
- MK: Another ghost. Well, almost.
- NIC: Almost? So you found something?
- MK: Mm-hmm. It’s old, but I managed to find a record of employment. Her real name’s been redacted everywhere, but she worked at a used bookstore in Portland a few years ago.
- NIC: At a used bookstore?
- MK: Yeah.
- NIC: But it’s probably not still open.
- MK: It’s Portland.
- NIC: Good- good point.
- MK: It’s open. It’s called The Lamp Post and Colonel.
- NIC: Really?!
- MK: You’ve never been to Portland, have you?
- NIC: I have, yes.
- MK: Okay.
- NIC: So do we know anything else about HaidaGurl?
- MK: Not really, but I’m guessing she’s Haida, but honestly, who knows?
- NIC: Right.
- MK: Yeah.
- NIC: So, okay, this secret, British environmental operation was taking place in the Pacific Northwest?
- MK: Mm-hmm. Washington. The same area that Tara Reynolds was working at.
- NIC: Well, that’s interesting.
- MK: Okay, well, let me know if you need anything else.
- NIC: Okay, well-
- MK: Hey! (indistinguishable yelling in background) –turn around!
- NIC: Hello? MK? Meerkatnip? Hello? Hello?
NIC: I asked the person who picked up her phone to call the police, and I called them myself, as well. As you can imagine, knowing Meerkatnip, the phone was a burner, untraceable. They had me file a report, but they were just going through the motions. There was nothing for them to go on, aside from an email address that was obviously one of at least a hundred different alias accounts.
There was really nothing for me to go on, either. She was gone. We’ll get back to Meerkatnip and HaidaGurl soon, but first, an update on the Morgan Miller/Sam Reynolds situation. The way Miller sounded in that parking garage, I didn’t think there was any way I’d be hearing from them again, but Sam Reynolds had other ideas. He called the studio and asked to meet.
- MILLER: I just want to state for the record that I’m against this and that you don’t have permission to record my voice.
- NIC: Okay, got it.
- MILLER: Okay.
- NIC: You’ll have to leave.
- MILLER: I’m not going anywhere.
- NIC: Then I’m afraid I’m going to have to record your voice.
- MILLER: Fine.
- SAM: C’mon, Morgan, he wants to help. We’re both after the same thing.
- MILLER: HE is after ratings and downloads.
- SAM: It doesn’t matter, we both want to find out what happened to my sister.
- NIC: Do you have any new information?
- SAM: Yeah. The Cult of Tanis.
- NIC: The Cult of Tanis? You mentioned that before.
- MILLER: It’s not an official name at all, but the description fits.
- NIC: And what does this have to do with Tara’s disappearance?
- MILLER: Carl van Sant was killed because he got greedy. It looks like he was trying to attract Tanis… enthusiasts looking for a runner who couldn’t afford to go through the proper channels.
- NIC: Proper channels? What do you mean?
- MILLER: Parzavala
- NIC: Okay, but what about Vincent Pardow?
- MILLER: Vincent was turned down by Parzavala. He couldn’t afford it.
- NIC: Couldn’t afford what?
- MILLER: Apparently, Parzavala’s been running some kind of executive success program for probably centuries under a variety of different names and descriptions. I’ve been looking into this stuff for a long time.
- NIC: You were the one posting under the name Tigernuts, weren’t you?
- MILLER: Guilty.
- NIC: So you think Vincent Pardow and Carl van Sant were trying to sign up for whatever they had going on at Parzavala? The executive, success program?
- MILLER: I think Carl had discovered something in those audio recordings and he believed he could find a way to Tanis. Carl believed that he had some kind of special ability.
- NIC: A runner.
- MILLER: Yes.
- NIC: So Vincent Pardow went looking for a less expensive alternative to Parzavala and found Carl van Sant?
- MILLER: Yes. Carl van Sant who claimed to be a runner which Vincent understood was exactly what he was looking for.
- NIC: Right. So you think somebody at Parzavala or whoever went after Carl?
- MILLER: Yes.
- NIC: Okay…um…but why now?
- MILLER: I have to believe they knew what he was up to, but because he had no genuine understanding of what he was looking for, they had him on a watch list rather than a kill list.
- NIC: That sounds…intense.
- MILLER: Yeah. It looks like they switched lists.
NIC: Sam Reynolds and Morgan Miller have been looking for Sam’s sister, Tara. And they’d arrived at the same place I did- Carl van Sant’s death. I wanted to explore connecting those two events further- Tara’s disappearance and Carl’s death, so I set up a follow up meeting to check in with Sam and Morgan. In the meantime, I discovered something very interesting about a strange cabin in the woods.
NIC: The first clear reference to Baba Yaga was in 1755. She’s referred to as a Slavic goddess. Unique, without a pantheon of her own. There are numerous stories and qualities attributed to Baba Yaga or The Forest Mother, but in all of these legendary tales, there are common through lines. She’s generally described as some kind of frightening witch living in a unique dwelling, which I’ll get to in a moment, and she’s often depicted working over a stove of some kind. Baba Yaga is referenced in “The Maiden Tsar” by Alexander Afanasyev. “Do you know, Baba Yaga, where lies the thrice tenth kingdom?” “No, I do not,” she replied.
Tales of Baba Yaga often involve musky smells, mysterious feathers, and birds behaving in very odd ways. In addition to these, one other element is almost always present- the place she lives. Baba Yaga’s hut. Baba Yaga’s hut is described as quite small and always located in a deeply wooded area. There is an additional point of interest, however. The Hut moves through the woods perched on two, giant fowl legs. Fowl meaning like chicken legs. I’ll upload some pictures to the notes section of our website.
So, what does Baba Yaga’s hut have to do with Tanis? Well, to find that out, we’re going to have to play a game. Dungeons and Dragons. The original Dungeon Master’s Guide was written by Gary Gygax in 1979. Along with editor Mike Carr, a few other TSR employees had a hand in helping Gygax craft some of the mythological details of that 232 page hardcover book. One of those employees was Peter Chenoweth.
Back then Chenoweth split his time between working as a commodities trader in Milwaukee and a writer at TSR. He was an expert in Slavic folktales and it was allegedly Chenoweth who suggested adding Baba Yaga to the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Just one year before moving to Milwaukee and joining TSR in Geneva, Wisconsin, Chenoweth lived in the Pacific Northwest in a small house on an acreage on Bainbridge Island, just west of Seattle. Here’s Chenoweth speaking to a college student in 1980 about Dungeons and Dragons and Baba Yaga’s hut.
- STUDENT: Everything included in the artifacts and relics section of the DM’s Guide was created specifically for the game, like Vecna, (unintelligible), but for some reason you chose to include one ancient, existing myth, and only one: Baba Yaga and her hut. Why is that?
- CHENOWETH: It was of interest.
- STUDENT: Okay, but something my friends and I can’t quite understand is the unique element you added to the myth- basically another dimension. Well, literally another dimension.
- CHENOWETH: I’m not sure I follow.
- STUDENT: You describe the hut as very small on the outside, and yet inside the hut is enormous with a garden, fountains of water and wine, 30 lavishly and richly furnished rooms on 3 floors…
- CHENOWETH: Gary added the stuff about being richly furnished and having 3 floors. My original suggestion was simply that the hut was much larger and dangerous on the inside than on the outside.
- STUDENT: So, what was the inspiration for this disparity in dimensions? Mr. Chenoweth?
- CHENOWETH: I’m sorry, I have to go.
NIC: Three weeks after that interview, Peter Chenoweth went home to Washington on vacation. While camping with his family in the woods, Chenoweth disappeared. Three months later, he showed up, back at home, dazed and confused, as if nothing had happened. Now, all of this was way before the internet, so there isn’t much information available, but the one report we were able to dig up indicated that Chenoweth believed less than an hour had passed since he’d last seen his family. Just over a week later, Peter Chenoweth hung himself in the family’s living room. His family believed that the drastic change in his personality was due to something that happened to him in the woods.
- ALEX: Day Three. We barely speak anymore. We didn’t travel far on the morning of day two. Maybe a couple of miles before we stopped and just….waited. But still, the woods were starting to take their toll. We ate in silence and set out again, following The Runner as she moved through the forest with mysterious purpose. We pushed, slowly, through the trees, a few steps behind.
- The Runner continued to tie dark red string she pulled from a large spool around certain trees. I assume to mark the way back, but I could never find logic in her choice of trees. As we set out this morning, The Zealot told me that he felt different, that a couple of days ago he was someone else. He was having second thoughts. I could tell he wanted me to reassure him that it was all in his head, that these were just trees, that this was just a forest. But I just nodded and kept moving.
- The wind had picked up and it had started to rain. The sound was constant now, a distant thrum and throb, a kind of constant, deep sigh. The sound had simply become part of the landscape. We stopped talking about it, but it was always there. The wet, water smell was constant as well, the feeling of breathing in something…alive. I looked back occasionally, and… this is going to sound crazy, but…sometimes I felt like I was looking at a completely different forest. I don’t know if it was fatigue, I still wasn’t sleeping at all, but early on day three, I saw a path I knew we hadn’t taken or seen in the exact spot we’d stood a few seconds earlier. At that point, I stopped looking back completely. This was right around the time The Novelist had her breakdown.
NIC: Still no word from Meerkatnip. I was worried, so I followed the only lead I could think of. She’d mentioned a friend at Tesla Nova Corporation, an ex-boyfriend maybe. She was pretty vague on that point. I didn’t have anything else, so I called and asked if someone there knew someone named MK. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get very far. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, I received a call from somebody from TeslaNova a few days later. They wanted to set up a meeting.
I asked them if it was about Meerkatnip, and they told me that they’d tracked down someone in their organization who matched the limited job description that Meerkatnip gave me of her…acquaintance. Apparently there was an employee there who had a female friend who went by the initials MK. I was surprised, I certainly wasn’t expecting that. So, I made an appointment. I was going in to meet someone at TeslaNova Corporation.
NIC: TeslaNova Corporation is located in a large, imposing, monolith of a building, very plain and rectangular. No company name, no sign on the outside. It kind of looks like that thing in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
- RECEPTIONIST: I’ll let them know that you’re here. Would you like coffee or water?
- NIC: No, thanks, I’m good.
- RECEPTIONIST: Okay.
- WOMAN: Get up and walk away.
- NIC: Excuse me?
- WOMAN: Follow me, right now.
- NIC: Uuummmm…
- WOMAN: Now!
- WOMAN: I can’t believe you were going to meet with them.
- NIC: Um…Meerkatnip? MK?
- MK: We have to keep moving.
- NIC: Well….
- MK: Are you coming or not?
- NIC: Well, where are we going?
- MK: Your place.
- NIC: My place?
- MK: Yep. Try and keep up.
NIC: So, yeah, Meerkatnip was back. I was happy she was okay, but somewhat concerned that she’d been following me. She led me back to my apartment, of course she knew the way. She told me what happened, why she hung up on me and fell off the grid. She said that someone had been following her and that when she tossed her phone and approached them, they took off. Right at that moment, she received a text from a friend of hers she had keeping an eye on her place, telling Meerkatnip that her home had been compromised.
She said it took her quite a while to get set up somewhere new, but her new place wasn’t going to be ready for another 24 hours, so until then, she was in my living room, on my sofa working on a laptop that looked like some kind of homemade prototype, definitely not something you could buy in any store. In retrospect, I probably would have been disappointed if it had been anything else.
- ALEX: So…what did you two talk about?
- NIC: Well, Alex, we talked about a lot of things. (Alex laughs) She’s pretty fascinating once you get past the acerbic exterior.
- ALEX: Okay…
- NIC: What? (Both laugh)
- ALEX: Nothing! (Both laugh again)
- NIC: Okay. Well, we spoke at length about Carl van Sant and Vincent Pardow.
- ALEX: Yeah, what’s- what’s the deal there? Carl…he was a runner? (laughs) Like what… Is that…is that possible?
- NIC: Well, presupposing that there’s actually something called a runner with some kind of special Tanis location skills, Carl van Sant certainly wasn’t one of them.
- ALEX: Okay, so he wasn’t a runner. He was- he was what? He was posing as one?
- NIC: Exactly.
- ALEX: Yeah, but for what? Money?
- NIC: Doesn’t look like it.
- ALEX: No?
- NIC: No. Carl was obsessed with finding Tanis, really obsessed. You should have seen how he was living in that basement. MK thinks Carl honestly believed he was a runner and that he was actually capable of helping Vincent Pardow get better.
- ALEX: Wow.
- NIC: Yeah.
- ALEX: What about that Reddit thing? The short story repeating over and over? That’s interesting.
- NIC: Yeah, extremely interesting. I haven’t been able to learn anything else about it. It feels like- all of this feels like it’s part of something larger. Maybe. I dunno. There are a lot of moving parts.
- ALEX: A few episodes ago, I asked you what you thought might be happening. Do you have any new theories or ideas?
- NIC: Uh…a lot of new theories and ideas! (Alex laughs) Nothing remotely close to solid, however.
- ALEX: Uh…best guess?
- NIC: Oh, man. Um, there are so many threads to follow with this thing. Okay, well, what if Tanis is some kind of… thing that moves around every 400 years or so, changing and influencing certain regions of earth at certain times?
- ALEX: That sounds like a decent guess based on the evidence so far.
- NIC: And what if now it’s here, in the Pacific Northwest? But we have no clue what we’re looking for? Like ants on the side of the freeway who have no idea what a freeway is.
- ALEX: Interesting theory. (both laugh)
- NIC: Thank you.
- ALEX: Anything else?
- NIC: Well, could Tanis be…I dunno, like an idea, maybe? (Hesitant noise)
- ALEX: Okay?
- NIC: Some kind of catchall label or way of thinking or talking about the darkness of the world. The pain of the suicidal, the frustration of the mentally ill, the rage of the serial killer?
- ALEX: Uh…wow. (both laugh)
- NIC: The-the dark side of humanity? I don’t know.
- ALEX: Wow.
- NIC: I don’t know. Like-
- ALEX: What about the…the positive aspects?
- NIC: Okay-
- ALEX: The eternal life? The fountain of youth?
- NIC: Yeah, right, well, I don’t know. What do you think?
- ALEX: I think you should…keep looking.
NIC: Everything I was able to learn about Carl van Sant led me to believe that although it looks like he was taking Vincent Pardow for a ride as far as miraculous healing powers go, Carl van Sant was more deluded than devious. But there was just so much to unpack with all this stuff. It feels like the more layers I peel away, the deeper the mystery becomes. I left MK in my apartment and drove down to Portland, to the Lamp Post and Colonel Bookstore, to try and track down HaidaGurl.
- (bells jingling, door opening)
- NIC: Excuse me?
- TONI: Toni.
- NIC: Toni, hi.
- TONI: What’s up?
- NIC: My name is Nic Silver, I work for a company called Pacific Northwest Stories, we make podcasts and radio- I’m the host of a podcast called Tanis.
- TONI: Really?
- NIC: Yeah.
- TONI: I love it! Especially the early, scarier episodes.
- NIC: Oh! Thanks!
- TONI: You’re really him? The host?
- NIC: I’m really him.
- TONI: What are you doing here?
- NIC: Well, I’m looking for someone who used to work here. A woman, probably Native American, maybe late 20’s, early 30’s?
- TONI: When did they work here?
- NIC: A long time ago, probably.
- TONI: I haven’t worked here that long…
- NIC: Okay, is there someone around who’s worked here a bit longer, maybe?
- TONI: They're all at the festival in Red Rock.
- NIC: Right. The festival.
- TONI: Yeah.
- NIC: That’s right.
- TONI: Shitty. Sorry.
- NIC: Okay…you get a staff discount on books, right?
- TONI: Yeah, it’s awesome. 70% off.
- NIC: Cool.
- TONI: Very cool.
- NIC: Do you happen to keep a list of the books that the staff purchase?
- TONI: Totally. Why?
- NIC: Is there, maybe, a way to find a list of the books that your female staff purchased over the past few years?
- TONI: Sure. Well, I can’t go by age or gender, but I can do it by name.
- NIC: Okay. Well, I’d appreciate any help.
- TONI: Is this really going to be on the Tanis podcast?
- NIC: Chances are.
- TONI: Awesome.
- NIC: Cool, um, so any luck with that list?
- TONI: It’s printing now.
- NIC: Cool, thanks.
- TONI: Yep.
- (paper printing)
NIC: It was a long shot, but it worked. There was one employee from around the time period I was looking in to whose list of staff purchases included the following books: Killing in the Rain, two Charles Forte biographies, Hubbard’s Dianetics, a collection of historical maps of the Pacific Northwest, Sex and Rockets- a book on Jack Parsons, and both the boys’ and girl scouts’ handbooks. That employee’s name was Veronika Pillman.
Aside from raiders patrolling the coast, the Haida had very little permanent presence in or around the Puget Sound area. They generally lived up north, around the archipelago of Haida Gwaii and southeastern Alaska. The Haida raiders who did make it farther south were allegedly fearsome warriors at sea. As an example, in 1856, an expedition in search of a route across Vancouver Island observed a large fleet of Haida canoes approaching and hid in the forest. The Haida, gliding through the water in canoes, each cut from a single western red cedar tree, were holding decapitated human heads. Later, the explorers came upon the charred remains of the village visited by the Haida.
There, they found the brutally murdered and mutilated bodies of the village’s inhabitants. There was only one survivor, an elderly woman, hiding terrified inside the stump of a western redcedar tree. I wondered if Veronika Pillman was familiar with this history, but more importantly, I wondered how I was going to find her. I couldn’t find any Veronika Pillman online in Portland. So, I went to the library and dug up the latest version of something we used to use all the time- the white pages of the phone book. It was a few years old, well, more than a few actually, but there was one Veronika Pillman listed. It was another long shot, but wasn’t everything at this point?
NIC: When I went back to my place, I found Meerkatnip sitting on the floor, pouring over scraps of paper, computer screens, and newspapers. This was getting serious.
- NIC: Hey.
- MK: Hey.
- (door closing)
- NIC: What’s up?
- MK: I found something.
- NIC: Okay. Something on HaidaGurl?
- MK: Parzavala.
- NIC: I thought there was nothing online at all.
- MK: There wasn’t. Isn’t. But I found something cached. Something so simple, I can’t believe it worked.
- NIC: Really? What did you do?
- MK: Kind of like what Weev did to hack AT&T. (pause) You have no idea who Weev is.
- NIC: I’m don’t, sorry.
- MK: You know on Reddit, they say I’m a better detective than you, that you should take the lead more?
- NIC: On Reddit?
- MK: Yeah, it’s kind of like all the angry, anonymous internet comments sections all rolled into one.
- NIC: (laughs) I know what Reddit is. But why are they talking about my detective skills?
- MK: (sighs in frustration) So, I found an unlinked page on TeslaNova’s website.
- NIC: Really? What page?
- MK: Right here.
- NIC: Parzavala.
- MK: Right.
- NIC: So, what is it?
- MK: As far as I can tell, it’s some kind of personality test.
- NIC: Really?
- MK: Mm-hmm. So Parzavala is connected to TeslaNova after all.
- NIC: Connected how?
- MK: Not my department.
- NIC: (scoffs) Um…well, it’s kind of your department now, right? A little?
- MK: Okay, look, you don’t know shit about much. (Nic laughing) But you’re not…terrible to look at, and Steely Dan aside, you have pretty good taste in music.
- NIC: (laughs) Okay, but-
- MK: But I’ve been hacked. Twice. By people who know what they’re doing, and I mean really, fucking know what they’re doing.
- NIC: Right…
- MK: So-
- NIC: So?
- MK: I’m just not sure that I wanna…(pause) So I’m not sure I wanna be the face of this Tanis thing, or whatever, you know?
- NIC: Fair enough, but you’re here on my floor, digging into this Tanis thing or whatever.
- MK: Yeah. I know. I know. You kinda pulled me in a little.
- NIC: Oh.
- MK: Yeah.
- NIC: Right.
- MK: But the main thing is-
- NIC: Yeah?
- MK: I kinda really need the money.
- NIC: Oh.
- MK: Speaking of which, my BitCoin purse was looking a little bit light this morning.
- NIC: Okay, I’ll take care of that.
- MK: Okay.
- NIC: Okay. (whispers) Okay.
NIC: Okay, so while I was working on MK’s payment, I did a little searching on my own. This Cult of Tanis seemed like something somebody should know about, but it turns out, it’s not. They really know how to keep the secret in secret society. Most of them…that is. I received a strange email from a Tanis listener who sent me a link to TeslaNova Corporation’s new website. Apparently, the company had avoided an online presence for a very long time and had only recently updated their domain with a kind of place holder site at teslanovacorp.com
NIC: The link wasn’t the strange part, however, the text of the message was. It read, “The Cult of Tanis in Marley from Singles on the Coast.” I’d never seen Singles on the Coast, but that’s because it never made it to air. It was an unproduced reality television show pilot from a company in Vancouver. One of our executive producers works in film and was able to get a copy of that unaired pilot episode. It’s a reality dating show and Marley was the third contestant voted off. I poured over her footage from the episode, which amounted to about four and a half minutes, I was about to give up when I heard this-
- MAN: I don’t think they can see us here.
- WOMAN: I love getting to know you like this. I think we should hang at home, you know? In the real world? (couple kissing and whispering)
- (chanting in background, tape rewinds and plays chanting again)
NIC: There are wondrous things, there are magical things, there are dangerous things. We get what we deserve. Is that the Cult of Tanis chanting in the background of that clip? I left a message with the owner of the property where the chanting was coming from, it was next to the location where they filmed that pilot. I’m still waiting for them to call me back.
NIC: So, what does it all mean? The short story, “Where is Tanis?” was repeating on some kind of strange numbers station. Tara Reynolds, Baba Yaga’s hut, the Servant Girl Annihilator, and the rest. What was the connection? Tanis is the connection. There has to be something I’m missing, some place I haven’t looked yet.
Sam and Morgan didn’t show up for our meeting and my bosses at Pacific Northwest Stories have been threatened with legal action from a numbered corporate entity if I continue to pursue my… current avenue of investigation, whatever that means. I’m probably not as worried about that as I should be, but I just can’t help but feel this exploration of Tanis is important somehow.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but at times it feels almost like coming out of hypnosis or something. I dunno. Next time more on the Cult of Tanis, I try and track down Veronika Pillman, plus, a strange town frozen in town reveals a dark secret. It’s Tanis, I’m Nic Silver. Due to the holidays, we’ll be back again in three weeks. Until then, keep looking.
Tanis is produced by Terry Miles. Produced, mixed, and edited by me, Nic Silver. Executive producers Terry Miles and Paul Bae. As always, listen to The Black Tapes Podcast at theblacktapespodcast.com
NIC: For legal and safety reasons, we've elected to change some names, and leave others out entirely. We don't do this very often, but we're unwilling to compromise people's safety for any reason.
Thanks again for listening to Tanis.