The _Black Guide_, or _Moderor de Caliginis_, is a book featured in the story [[Mysterium Tremendum]] and in [[The Men from Porlock]]. A Russian pioneer who explored the [[Olympic Peninsula]] surrounding [[Mount Mystery]] ([[Washington State]]) around the 1840s wrote a different book that predates the _Black Guide_. Pages from the book ended up in the Black Guide: "A few o' them explorers fell on hard luck an' got kilt, or lost. Some tried to pioneer and disappeared, but onea 'em, a Russian, came back an' wrote hisself a book. An pieces o' that book wound up in another one, a kind o' field guide. Looks like a Farmer's Almanac, 'cept black with a broken circle on the cover." (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, p. 221) This Russian Pioneer is most likely Dr. [[Boris Kalamov]]. The _Black Guide_ was originally published in 1909 and features articles, essays, route directions, hand-drawn maps and illustrations. It also contains a listing of secret attractions, hidden places and persons "in the know" regarding matters esoteric and arcane. Its cover shows a _"broken, red ring"_, which is almost certainly the [[Ouroboros]] used to signify [[Old Leech]]. A seventh edition version of the book, released in 1986, falls into the hands of four men when they stumble upon it in a general goods store in Seattle, [[Washington State]]. The same copy formerly belonged to Rose, a woman who found the book (after a years long search) in 2007 at a gift shop in Ellensburg, Washington State. A few months later Rose traveled with three friends to a tomb on Mount Mystery in the Olympic Peninsula and goes off the grid. At the end of Mysterium Tremendum, she shows up and abducts or seduces one of the main characters to join her and (what we might safely assume to be) the [[Children of Old Leech]]. Notable places featured in the guide are a cave system in [[Yakima, WA]], a tomb or dolmen up a trail on Mount Mystery on the Olympic Peninsula, and undescribed regions in France, Spain, Portugal and South Africa. There's also a passage in the guide that documents [[Lake Crescent]] and the Lady of the Lake Murders that ook place there. The disappearance of the [[Slango Camp]] at the end of the events from The Men from Porlock also seems to be described in the guide: "I dredged up my research from the pages of the Black Guide [...] There was even a tale of the Slango logging camp that vanished during the 1920s. The spirits seized unwary men and dragged them into the depths and feasted upon them, or worse." The _Black Guide_ can perhaps be seen as Barron's version of H.P. Lovecraft's [Necronimicon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necronomicon). #Object #Occultation