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If

0:55

you're just joining us, I strongly

0:57

recommend you go all the way back to the beginning of

0:59

the case of Charles Dexter Ward and

1:01

catch up from there.

1:03

A lot has happened. An

1:05

awful lot. What

1:08

follows is a discussion in the studio about

1:10

what we've learned so far. It's not

1:12

going to make a lot of sense to new arrivals.

1:16

If you're still here, welcome back.

1:18

Following

1:20

my encounters with Diane Netley and Victoria

1:22

Ness, and Kennedy and Marcus Byron's

1:25

unusual trip to the Blake House, we

1:27

thought now would be a good time to try to assimilate

1:30

what we've learned. Kennedy

1:32

and Marcus Byron had retrieved Robert Blake's

1:34

notebook, so we made some copies

1:37

and went away to read. A

1:39

few days later, we all reconvened in the studio,

1:42

the three of us, joined by Dr Eleanor

1:44

Peck. What you're going to hear

1:46

now is that discussion, which

1:49

gets

1:49

a little spirited in places.

1:54

I'm Matthew Hayward. And I'm Kennedy

1:56

Fisher. And this is

1:58

The Haunter of the Dark. Okay,

2:02

so, what do we think? Bollocks.

2:05

Actually, I was going to say interesting. Should we start

2:07

with like a biography, a potted history

2:09

of Robert Blake? Well, actually, could you do Edwin Lilybridge

2:11

first, because that seems like it sets up Blake. Right,

2:14

sure. Okay, so,

2:17

okay, you guys know I went to see Ermest Levesque about Lilybridge,

2:20

and now in the past few days, I've been filling in

2:22

some of the gaps on him. Okay,

2:25

so, Edwin Lilybridge was born in 1895 in Camden

2:27

Town. I couldn't find

2:29

much about his early life, and it's probably not relevant. He

2:32

goes off to fight in the First World War, and

2:34

he's in the same unit as Edward Lansdale, which

2:36

is how Comey attends the Melissine ritual. Now,

2:39

it's unclear exactly what this ritual was supposed to

2:41

achieve, but Blake's notebook has some hints,

2:43

because it refers, again, to this thing,

2:45

the Haunter of the Dark. And Victoria Ness

2:47

told Matt that they brought through some kind of entity,

2:50

the curse of the 20th century that Levesque was

2:52

talking about. I'm not sort of like that. No, right, does it

2:54

matter? It's about what they believe, isn't it? Or what we believe.

2:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And it's still not really clear what

2:58

this thing is. Well, Victoria Ness described

3:01

it as a mythical spirit

3:03

of ancient Albion. So that sounds like Bullock. Which

3:06

is what she said you'd say. It's the Suffolk thing.

3:08

I think it's what we heard in that house. The roaring.

3:11

Ness thinks he goes back to when Dunwich was a port,

3:14

and they brought the Necronomicon in through

3:16

there.

3:17

Some kind of a cult organization back then

3:19

conjured this thing or summoned it or whatever.

3:21

He got off the leash, trashed Dunwich, and

3:24

dropped half the place into the sea. They

3:26

then managed to secure the thing again, and they basically

3:28

trapped it. How? I don't know, with magic.

3:32

Like Ness said, this took us all by surprise.

3:35

These starry wisdom people weren't on our radar.

3:38

The working theory is that there must be some kind of

3:41

ritual object somewhere that controls

3:43

this entity and suffer. And this is what the Church

3:45

of Starry Wisdom are looking for. It's

3:48

as good a theory as any. What do they

3:49

want to do with it? Well, that's alluded to in the Blake Notebook,

3:51

isn't it? The spirit of old England is basically

3:53

a fascist totem. You control this

3:55

thing, you can cleanse the whole place. Cleanse?

3:59

Yeah. as sinister as it sounds.

4:00

So, sorry, to get back on track, Kennedy

4:03

was talking about Lilybridge being at Melazene. What

4:05

does that ritual have to do with an ancient spirit

4:07

in suffering? It could be about preparing the ground,

4:09

you know, like terraforming in science

4:11

fiction. Maybe if you're going

4:14

to let this thing out of its cage it needs to be entering

4:16

a conducive environment.

4:18

Death, destruction, misery.

4:20

The 20th century pretty much had that covered, right?

4:22

Yeah, but more than any other time in history? Well,

4:24

it's all been a bit shit, but when you look at

4:26

the scale, two world wars, atomic weapons,

4:30

it's

4:30

like someone turned history up to 11. So

4:32

that's what Melazene did. And Victorin

4:34

S. thinks that whatever came through during that ritual

4:36

was put into the body of a human being. But we don't

4:39

know who. No, we don't. Well, it's the spirit of a century,

4:41

so it needs to go into the body of someone who was born

4:43

on the first day of the century and died on the last.

4:46

Ooh, that sounds like... Bollocks, yes.

4:48

What happens to the entity when the host dies?

4:50

It goes into the next vessel, but you have to

4:52

wait. You can't put it into a newborn baby,

4:54

which is why Melazene didn't happen until 1914. The

4:58

vessel needs to be strong enough to accommodate

5:00

it.

5:00

So is this what Obed Marsh was trying to do in Pleasant

5:02

Green?

5:02

I thought that was supposed to be blood magic, a sacrifice.

5:05

Yeah, but that's just part of the process.

5:07

It's not the end result.

5:08

So who are they going to put it into? Melody Cartwright?

5:10

No, she was born in 1999. The

5:12

vessel doesn't have to be present. There was no

5:15

14-year-old running around the Battle of the Marne, was there?

5:17

One second. Wikipedia might be

5:20

our friend here.

5:21

Oh, wow. What? Wow,

5:24

OK, Wilberforce Ashton Heath empty. Oh, I thought

5:26

he might be coming up again. He's married to Leslie Tillingas,

5:28

and they have a daughter, Chloe, born on...

5:31

January 1st, 2000? Yep. Sounds

5:33

like she had a luckiest coat when the Pleasant Green

5:35

thing went sideways. So

5:36

is this what they think they can do with Blake's notebook? Get

5:38

this thing into Chloe Ashton Heath? Can we take a moment

5:40

to appreciate the idea that the next leader

5:43

of the government might actually believe

5:45

all

5:45

this stuff? We can, but can we also get back on track?

5:47

I'm acutely aware of how confusing all this can

5:50

get, and if we keep jumping around... Sure, yeah,

5:52

yeah, OK.

5:52

So back to Lily Bridge, who survives

5:54

Melazene and the rest of the war, and we

5:56

pick him up again in Paris in 1925. He's

5:59

in this...

5:59

taken by man Ray possibly

6:01

taken by man Ray you've

6:03

got Crowley and Picasso and the others and in

6:05

the back there you have Lilybridge talking to Obed

6:08

Marsh the Count Sandra Mann and the new info

6:10

is that the guy on the other side of Obed Marsh

6:12

is Ernest Gladwin our

6:13

fascist will before Sashton

6:15

Heath's grandfather right

6:17

so this is the guy that Lilybridge has the

6:19

falling out with and we know that Gladwin was

6:21

friends with Crowley and he was into all this stuff something

6:24

happened around that time which turned Lilybridge off

6:26

the whole group but Gladwin in particular

6:28

fascism will do that I think that's

6:31

it I think he didn't like where this is all

6:33

going so Lilybridge leaves

6:35

Paris and he comes back to

6:36

London he starts working for the London Evening News and

6:39

his big thing is the rise of the right

6:41

he wants to tell people about it he wants

6:43

to stop it from taking hold in England he was

6:45

ahead of his time but he's still also

6:48

into the weird shit too so

6:50

in 1935 Lilybridge goes up to Suffolk

6:52

to look into the murders of the Marston family and

6:54

that's how he meets Robert Blake right okay

6:57

so I can pick up here Blake is a

6:59

junior at the East Anglian Daily Times basically

7:01

an apprentice the Marston house was his

7:03

first big story and it seems like he was only covering

7:06

it because no one else was available either

7:08

way this is where he meets Lilybridge and

7:11

they must have hit it off because a year or so later

7:13

Blake moves to London and Lilybridge

7:15

gets him a job at the London Daily

7:18

News and becomes his mentor so this

7:20

is a formative time for Robert Blake he's under

7:22

Lilybridge's wing and he's learning all about the rise

7:24

of fascism so it's worth breaking off here to talk

7:26

about that because while I'm lukewarm on this curse

7:29

of the 20th century bullshit both Lilybridge

7:31

and latterly Blake seem to think that

7:33

there was some kind of dark shadow cast

7:36

over that period and that the fascist

7:38

movement was either driving it or symptomatic

7:40

of it so let's look at Ernest

7:43

Gladwin because he was very much the focus

7:45

of Blake's later writing and he seems to have been an elemental

7:48

force in the rise of the right. Gladwin's

7:50

association with all this goes back to 1922 he

7:52

was already an acolyte

7:55

of Aleister Crowley's and he was friends with this guy

7:57

Major General JFC Fuller Fuller

8:00

is interesting for a number of reasons.

8:03

In 1907 he published a book called The

8:05

Star in the West which was essentially a glowing

8:08

review of Crowley's poetry. Two

8:10

became friends and later that year

8:13

they founded an occult group, the AA,

8:15

together. Fuller later fell out with Crowley

8:17

following some inferences in the press that Crowley

8:20

was bisexual. Crowley himself was delighted

8:22

by those stories of course but Fuller

8:25

didn't want to be associated with what at the time was

8:27

considered sexual deviancy. Fuller

8:29

went on to have a pretty stellar military

8:32

career through the First World War and beyond and then

8:34

became a military theorist. It

8:37

was his ideas about battlefield tactics, specifically

8:40

a manual he authored

8:42

with the catchy title Provisional Instructions

8:44

for Tank and Armoured Car Training which

8:47

caught the attention of the Germans in the

8:49

1930s. Translations of Fuller's

8:51

work were developed and evolved

8:54

by Hitler's people to become the Blitzkrieg

8:57

and that's all good for Fuller because he's a rabid

9:00

anti-Semite and fascist by this point. Unapologetic

9:03

too. He died in Cornwall in 1966

9:06

having published a book just five years earlier still

9:09

banging the drum for Adolf Hitler as the saviour of the Western

9:11

world. So anyway, Gladwin

9:13

is a mate with Fuller and they come up through

9:15

the fascist movement together. In 1922

9:18

Gladwin joined an organisation called the Britons

9:20

which had been founded by a guy called Henry

9:23

Hamilton Bemish. The whole purpose

9:25

of that group was to disseminate anti-Semitic

9:27

propaganda. This was Gladwin's

9:29

introduction into the world of fascism and

9:32

he was going to live in that world for the rest of his

9:34

life. So we know

9:36

that Gladwin knows Alastair Crowley

9:39

possibly through Fuller. He also meets another

9:41

fascist around this time, a guy called Robert

9:43

Byron Drury Blakeney who would go

9:45

on to run an organisation called British

9:47

Fascists. The names of these groups

9:50

aren't too important because, well there are

9:52

a lot of them and it's all a bit Judean

9:54

People's Front. Blakeney though

9:56

is mates with an American woman called

9:59

Edith Star Miller.

13:47

influence

14:00

within the British establishment. In 1929 he helped

14:02

Arnold Leis on the Imperial Fascist

14:06

League. In 1933 Gladwin

14:08

joins Oswald Mosley's British Union

14:10

of Fishes. There he's hanging out with nusses

14:12

like William Joyce who became the Nazi

14:15

propagandist known as Lord Hawhaw

14:18

and Nora Elam the ex-fregette

14:20

who had become a fascist organizer which

14:23

is three years out from the Battle of Cable Street and it's

14:25

instructive to remember that the Metropolitan Police

14:28

and the establishment were on the fascist side for

14:30

that one so we can see how Gladwin and his friends

14:32

influence was working. So now

14:34

we get to 1935 which is a key year

14:36

for Robert Blake. It's the year

14:38

he met Lilybridge at the site of the Marston House murders.

14:41

Looking back on that event from the time Blake was writing

14:43

these notes he has become convinced

14:46

that the chain home radar testing at Orford

14:49

Nest somehow woke this beast, this

14:51

Haunter of the Dark, and caused it

14:54

to possess Mary Marston in some way. She

14:56

murdered her family and the beast fed

14:58

on the energy of that. Of course Lilybridge

15:01

was already into this stuff by then because he was investigating

15:03

Gladwin and his story wisdom people and

15:05

Gladwin is at this time corresponding with Heinrich

15:08

Himmler who also in 1935 founded

15:11

the Arnenebe which was an SS

15:13

think tank bringing together the Aryan ideals

15:15

of noble ancestry with the cult theology.

15:18

The Arnenebe and the Church of Story

15:20

Wisdom were basically twinned from here

15:22

on. This is also the year when

15:25

the Nordic League was formed with Gladwin

15:27

as a key member. This was a

15:29

Nazi sponsored organisation that sought

15:31

to coordinate all the various fascist groups in England.

15:35

The whole mission was to get the establishment and the government

15:37

wholeheartedly behind Hitler and expose

15:39

this supposed Jewish plot to take

15:42

over the world. Gladwin was a director

15:44

of the Nordic League along with Arnold Leis,

15:46

Archibald Moore Ramsey, JFC

15:49

Fuller, all the usual suspects. Anyway

15:52

Lilybridge met Blake in 1935 and brought him to London

15:56

and they start working to expose

15:58

all of these people without having any real

16:10

Ku

18:00

Klux Klan people that Edith Star Miller

18:02

and Elle Fry had been so enamored of before

18:04

the war. Debbie also embodies this

18:06

link between fascism

18:08

and the occult. Dior, meanwhile,

18:11

who was younger, became romantically

18:13

involved with Colin Jordan, who had been Arnold

18:16

Leis's protégé in the British Union of Fascists

18:18

and would go on to found the British National

18:20

Party, with John Tindale, who in turn

18:23

would go on to form the National Front

18:25

with A.K. Chesterton. Tindale,

18:27

by the way, was also shagging Dior when

18:29

she wasn't sexually abusing her own daughter and then

18:32

successfully persuading the poor girl to kill herself.

18:34

Jesus, this is the point, right? Because

18:38

you run the potted history and it's just a bunch of names

18:40

and organisations, but

18:42

even taking gladwin and starry

18:45

wisdom and any mention of the occult out,

18:47

you're left with a list of the most

18:50

reprehensible human beings who ever

18:52

walked the earth. These

18:54

people are monsters, anti-Semites,

18:57

white supremacists, the absolute

18:59

dregs of humanity, and

19:02

they're still there today in

19:04

spirit, if not in person. Wilberforce

19:07

Ashton Heath was a force behind the Brexit

19:10

vote. He's anti-immigration, obsessed

19:12

with stopping a handful of the world's most disadvantaged

19:15

people from finding a safe place to live because he

19:18

doesn't like the colour of their skin. These

19:20

people are scum and it's not

19:23

just that they're still part of the establishment today, they

19:26

are the establishment and

19:29

this is what Robert Blake was battling against. These

19:32

occult fascist families, the

19:34

Tillingals, the Gladwins, they've spent

19:36

the 20th century feeding their pet

19:38

beastie and now they're trying to breed a vessel

19:41

that will allow them to unleash the Haunter of the

19:43

Dark and purify their beloved Albion. Blake

19:46

couldn't stop them, not for want of trying, but

19:48

it nonetheless all went spectacularly

19:51

wrong for them in 2020 when you two bowled

19:54

into pleasant green and broke

19:57

everything. Yeah, yeah. So I think...

20:00

But that's the problem they're trying to solve now. Even

20:02

with the right human vessel, even if they could complete

20:05

the ritual that you guys screwed up for them in 2020, it

20:07

seems like there's something inside the Church of Starry Wisdom,

20:10

some kind of ritual artefact

20:12

that they think they need. And

20:15

I don't think they know where it is.

20:16

The artefact? The church.

20:18

I know it sounds unlikely, but Lily

20:20

Bridge thought he'd found it in 1941 and then he vanished.

20:25

Blake, in 1987, calls Diane Netley

20:27

and says he's found the missing piece. These

20:30

notebooks are all about him trying to

20:32

find that church, but he doesn't think it's physically

20:34

located anywhere. Blake has come to believe

20:37

that the church exists in some kind of liminal space.

20:39

A breach.

20:39

I was going to say. So maybe Blake thought

20:42

he'd found it and then someone or something scared

20:44

him to death during the storm of 1987, hours

20:46

after he spoke to Diane Netley.

20:48

But surely the members of the church know where it is? I

20:50

don't know.

20:51

They're all looking pretty hard for Blake's notebook.

20:54

Obed Marsh would have known, certainly.

20:55

But he's gone. Maybe

20:58

Matthew coming back was an accident,

21:00

if someone was trying to bring back Marsh and

21:02

hooked Matt instead. So it's gone. The

21:04

church. No one knows where it is. No

21:06

church. No ritual object.

21:08

Their whole plan over a century

21:10

in the making. And it's fallen apart. Well,

21:13

that's why they want this notebook. Because

21:15

the trail that Blake followed is

21:18

in here.

21:18

Well, we have the book now, so can we

21:21

follow the trail?

21:23

I suppose so. Maybe.

21:26

The question is, why

21:28

on earth would he want to?

21:46

Do you want to exist in

21:49

the real world? Audio

21:51

drama. It's not just TV

21:53

drama without the picture.

21:54

Where are you? They're

21:57

not free. They're supposed to come for me.

22:00

It's more like a novel, but with the added

22:02

texture and energy of sound.

22:05

In human eyes, a black

22:07

vortex at the centre

22:08

of them, swallowing everything it sees, pulling

22:11

me towards the precipice. BBC

22:13

Radio 4 presents Limelight, the

22:16

podcast for thrilling original

22:18

audio drama box set. Jolene,

22:20

we need to leave now. With

22:24

incredible new stories told

22:26

by a stellar cast of actors. I

22:29

loved you.

22:31

Subscribe to Limelight on

22:33

BBC Sound. So who shot

22:35

him?

22:37

I don't know.

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