MAG 62: First Edition

Statement of Mary Keay regarding her first Leitner.
==Statement==
Mary Keay remarks that Gertrude does not use her tape recorder very much anymore and that big changes are coming.
Mary met Jurgen Leitner in 1993, when he would come into her book shop and spent a long time investigating each book before leaving. In 1955, when she was nine, her father had committed suicide and her mother was working for the Magnus Institute and a factory on Grove Road. Mary lived with her mother in Whitechapel on Turner Street, where she would teach her daughter her 'true studies'. Mary spent much of her youth hunting in charity shops for artefacts which might whisper to her in special ways.
It was around this time that she gained her first Leitner book, in a time before his collection had really started. Dr. Margaret Tellison moved into a house opposite Mary's and opened a small practice on Nelson Street. Immediately, Mary could tell that Dr. Tellison was touched by powers like the ones that watched over her family. A stream of patients would go into her practice, but ambulances would appear frequently to take some patients away.
One day Mary sneaked into Dr. Tellison's practice. There she hid and watched an elderly man go in to see her. She managed to get in a few more times, before witnessing Dr. Tellison murder one of her female patients with a syringe of some liquid. She opened a safe with the combination 24-18-3-50 to reveal two books, one small, bound in leather and covered in animal bones; and the other large and misshapen.
Dr. Tellison removed the larger book from the safe and picked up a pen. After turning her patient over a table, she cut her top off and wrote on her back with a fountain pen. After 20 minutes she took a scalpel and removed the flesh from the corpse's back and hung it on a wall to dry. Shortly afterwards she called someone and some men in an ambulance took the body away after being handed a large amount of cash.
Later, Dr. Tellison flicked through the larger book and read aloud from a page. Mary smelt the wet smell of dirt and saw an apparition of the previous older man. Dr. Tellison asked about his bank details and if he had hidden large sums of money. Mary disappointedly remarks that with all that power, Dr. Tellison was using it to make money. After she dismissed him, she fell asleep in her chair. Mary stepped out of her hiding place and, drawing the straight razor her father had used to commit suicide, slit Dr. Tellison's throat. She took both books and left.
She spent a lot of her next years mastering the flesh-book, including learning Sanskrit. She claims to know all its secrets, except one, although she's close to cracking that too. Gertrude remarks that this explains why Mary broke with the Institute. When asked, Mary says that the book comes from "The End, of course", but that she could not truly serve it as she found singular devotion too restrictive and that Gertrude could ask Eric, "or what's left of him", for confirmation.
The other book was full of poems about dying animals written in Sanskrit, which drops bones, which Mary eventually sold to Leitner, but it returned to her after the fire.
Just before closing her statement, Mary handed Gertrude a page from the book, but refused to say who it was.
== Supplemental ==
Jonathan suspects that Elias is withholding a lot of information. At the end of the recording he hears the floorboards creak and he discovers Gertrude's hiding hole: where her laptop and a key are stored.
== Continuity ==
* Mary Keay appeared first in MAG 4: Page Turner.
* Related Entity: The End and The Eye
*Mary's book is also known as Catalogue of the Trapped Dead or "the skin book."
*The page Mary gave to Gertrude was of Mary's husband, Eric Delano. Mary had killed him and bound him to the page five years into their marriage. Gertrude invokes the page and he gives his statement in MAG 154: Bloody Mary.
*The book's final secret that Mary is close to cracking is that of how to bind herself to the book to become "beyond death." She completes the ritual imperfectly later in 2008. She becomes "powerful but erratic" and is able to "manifest almost at will," punctuated by periods of fading away. When Mary manifests, she now appears as a shaven woman covered in Sanskrit tattoos and can interact with the physical world.
*Dead Mary had shown the other book of dead animal poems to Dominic Swain in MAG 4: Page Turner. 
Category:Leitner
Category:Live Statements
Category:The Magnus Archives Episodes