Fantasy is Also Horror III: Who or What Keeps This Secret??

Good evening. The time is late and clouds shroud a moonless sky. The dark is deep and you know not what creatures lurk therein. Welcome to my blog.

In the third video of my Fantasy is Also Horror YouTube series, I cover the methods through which supernatural secrecy terrify and victimize the world around them. In most fantasy settings, especially urban or contemporary fantasy, people are generally unaware of the supernatural; that is, the supernatural or mystic qualities of their reality remain secret from them. The two ways these things remain secret are (1) they maintain their own secrecy, perhaps automatically, and (2) an outside party maintains secrecy. Both options are horrific, though perhaps the second is worse than the first…

SUPERNATURAL FORCES ERASE EVIDENCE OF THEIR OWN EXISTENCE

In some settings, supernatural forces erase the evidence of their own existence as they go. In the most abstracted forms, this might look like reality self-correcting for a magic spell; that is: a spell might create a new mountain, and everyone suddenly remembers that the mountain has always been there. This version of supernatural secrecy seems, to me, the most easily swallowed. If reality corrects itself to account for supernatural events, there would be little if any evidence to prove the existence of paranormal or supernatural activity. In short: the secret constantly keeps itself. This might mean that nobody in the world is even aware that the supernatural exists; it might also mean that only an infinitesimal percentage of the population knows. Either way, proving it will be difficult-at-best and more likely impossible. This is the fastest, easiest way to account for supernatural secrecy in a setting…but, then, how do you engage with the supernatural over the course of the story?

Most settings create a Diet Coke version of this: very little supernatural activity actually exists and very few people have the proper mental/psychological/cerebral faculties necessary to properly perceive the activity in the first place. This means that the majority of people can’t witness supernatural events and the majority mundane population probably doesn’t believe them possible. Still, if any percentage of sapient life can bear accurate witness to paranormal events, eventually it would happen, which brings us to our second point…

SOMETIMES SECRETS NEED TO BE KEPT

In the very rare event that someone witnesses paranormal/supernatural activity (or magic) and also somehow creates a record or accrues a large enough base of believers, the secret of supernatural existence may need to be kept by a third party. Often, the third party takes the form of a private or state-run organization, a secret society, a cult, etc; but there is usually some group or another that has taken the mantle of supernatural secrecy upon themselves, and who then act to maintain this secret.

If such an organization or loose grouping of individuals does not exist in a supernatural setting, there may need to be reasons why not. Over a long enough time period, someone has to handle the accrual of evidence or testimony, someone has to figure out a way to undermine reports or perhaps destroy physical materials. One could explain a degree of supernatural witnessing as inherently disbelieved into lore, legend, or myth; but especially in the modern world, evidence needs to be addressed, testimony undermined, and secrets kept. If there aren’t groups or individuals keeping the secret, parts of it would whisper out into the world, infecting small groups of believers or researchers, and perhaps spreading virally from there. Or not. Maybe it’s so rare that nobody has ever needed to warden it, maybe the events are so uncommon that no evidence ever needs to be covered up. If that’s the case, nobody needs to keep the secret; our mission is accomplished.

But in many settings, and perhaps realistically so, there are organizations, societies, or other groups or entities with a vested interest in keeping the secret a secret. And they may go to horrifying extremes to do so…with good reason.

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE SECRET STOPS BEING SECRET?

It’s important when dealing with supernatural secrecy that one answers the question…what happens if the secret gets out? If life more or less continues as normal, there’s not much reason to maintain a secret.

Frequently in fantasy media, supernatural secrecy exists to protect power structures or power hierarchies, but just as often it exists to protect the unmolested lives of people who are or have been in contact with supernatural entities. That is: if people found out that witches/vampires/werewolves/whatever were actually real, there’d be death camps built tout de suite. Human history may lead one to figure that as an understandable and realistic risk, what with our millennia of massacre, war, and violent destruction of anything perceived as remotely deviant. So there may be very good reasons for supernatural secrecy.

Alternatively, the maintenance of the secret may also serve solely the interests of powerful people. Either way, great actions will be undertaken to insure the secret remains secret.

NOT EVERYONE JUST ‘DISAPPEARS’

I dislike when secret-keeping societies/organizations resort to murder in fantasy settings. Not because murder doesn’t keep secrets (three can keep one if two are dead, after all), but because there are much less obvious and severe secret-keeping methods. If the go-to response to secret-keeping is murder, well, it won’t be for very long. Missing people and dead bodies attract notice, attention, and questions. Secrets hate questions. And so: probably murder isn’t the best strategy.

Character assassination is an old-fashioned go-to. It works. If a witness can be torn apart, discredited, disproven, or called into question, this will go a long way to discrediting their story, too. Any undermine of a witness’s reputation will help undermine the narrative they’re alleging, the evidence they’ve gathered. This is a great non-violent way to dismantle a person’s life, thereby protecting the secrecy of whatever they know.

Psychological terrorism also works. Organizations in real life have used tactics of psychological terrorism from generations; some might argue, for instance, that the FBI drove Hemingway to suicide. Can we prove it? No. But it could be argued. Similarly, any apparatus that incites paranoia, fear, pain, anxiety, etc. over a long enough period of time could drive a target to mental stress, trauma, mental illness, suicide…all of which could help protect the secrecy they threaten to topple.

If supernatural resources are available, magic spells, curses, hexes, etc. may also come into play. If the setting in question has extant magic, any organization or society might be able to use it to their advantage…including to induce silence or secrecy. This is also why it’s important for people writing in such settings to ask themselves what the ceiling of power might be for their supernatural forces.

NON-DISCLOSURE

Any organization with a vested interest in secrecy will have its agents, its employees, its leadership, its pawns. There may be different available classified intel available at every level. There may be, as in many secret societies, certain knowledge or ‘wisdom’ that those at the top possess that those at the bottom are forbidden from possessing. Etc. But even then, as with Aleister Crowley publishing Golden Dawn secrets, information leaks happen.

Information leaks may play a role in a story. They may be an ongoing facet of a setting. Even in vast networks of conspiracy and mysticism, leaks are liable to happen. That’s fine. If you’re developing a setting with secret-keepers, there’s a chance their methods are flawed. There’s a chance that leaks happen. Hopefully they just don’t happen enough to yank the curtain down from all the secrets beneath.

So, how do we handle non-disclosure? How would the society/Lovecraftian god/cult/corporation/state/etc involved with secret-keeping make sure that its own agents don’t become whistleblowers? Of course, insurance policies may vary. Family members, legal documents, or, again, magic. Magic has many terrifying uses, not the least of which might be serving as NDA. A person may find themselves suddenly mute when they open their mouth to talk about secrets. Misfortune may rapidly befall anyone who even utters a work-related secret. Who knows?

Sans magic, controlling intel within an organization becomes more complicated. Different scales must be balanced—how best to ensure an agent’s loyalty, how best to seek out and maintain related collateral, what steps to take in the event that a leak develops. For the sake of long-term secrecy, any entity with a vested interest in that secrecy should have protocol for these things. Otherwise, how long does the secret stay secret?

SECRETS, SECRETS HURT SOMEONE

Secrecy isn’t necessarily evil. I’ve mentioned before that settings where anyone could learn magic, or where anyone might discover it or know about it, could easily be tragic, terrifying, and traumatizing. So secrecy isn’t all bad. Especially considering humankind’s predilection toward violently uprooting that which makes us uncomfortable. We kill each other all the time for reasons seldom better than that…why would we treat witches or vampires any differently?

But keeping secrets means making difficult and frankly reprehensible choices. A secret whose reveal might end with death camps, mass lynchings, war, or geopolitical/economic instability might very well need keeping. And if the consequences were so grave, how far would someone go to keep it? Probably very far, indeed.

My point isn’t that secrecy is evil, it’s that maintaining that secrecy may require evil deeds. Likely, it will require evil deeds. When building a setting where magic is secret, especially a setting where groups, entities, or organizations purposely keep said secret, it’s important to figure out why they keep the secret…and how. It’s important to create layers. Not everyone in this secretive society might agree with the leadership. People may break protocol, they might blow whistles, they might make decisions for personal reasons instead of professional ones. Anything might happen. The point of this video (and blog) isn’t to illustrate the necessity of a secret-keeping group, but to illustrate the necessity of answering important world-building questions related to secrecy. If people don’t know about the supernatural, there need to be methods of secret-keeping in place.

What would you do? If thousands of lives depended on secrecy, how far would you go to protect those lives, that secret? If the only thing that depended on the secret was everything you have, how far, then?

Probably farther than you expect.