We can now move quickly through the rest of this post, making only the briefest observations about subsequent contributions to the string:

• The Trappist returns with a rhetorical flourish, contravening “the dark powers which lay behind the seemingly innocuous vacuity of the discussion.” Thus he interprets “disappearance” as a code word for its antonym, “emergence.” The Trappist then brings forth the manifesto, again clearly referring to Perriman’s book, asserting that it “had been the true focus of the triumvirate’s deliberations, and from which the Elderly Sage had sought to distract attention by the smoke-screen of misleading theological controversy.”

• Doyle, apparently irked, responds through a new character, the Viennese alienist, a thinly-veiled stand-in for Freud. Dismissing the Trappist’s reappearance as trivial and observing that “there is something vaguely disturbed about this fellow,” the Alienist launches into a story about a game he played as a child. This is a nearly word-for-word transcription of Freud’s Fort-Da Game from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Alienist uses this story as an explanation for the Trappist’s obsession with repeatedly disappearance from and reappearance at Sir Toby’s. There is reason to believe that Doyle was also using the Alienist to explore Wilkinson’s seeming compulsion to return, again and again, to Perriman’s discourse.

• Carr re-enters the thread, revealing that the Eastern Monk was actually a spy, and that he hadn’t disappeared through magic or maya, but through a trapdoor in the floor. Here Carr seems to ally with Wilkinson, turning the thread into an intrigue. Perhaps he had decided it was time for “shaking the Old Man off of some dangerous trail.” Perhaps he is referring not to the Old Man but to “the inoffensive but nonetheless offending Austrian” who, in Carr’s interlude, has irritated the Trappist.

• Wilkinson now has the Trappist and the Old Man slip through the trapdoor. We discover that the Westerner (Perriman) is the mastermind behind this latest disappearance. Here the conspiracy is rejoined by the Antipodean, the alter-ego of Paul Hartigan, another frequent contributor at OST. The Westerner decides that, in order to relaunch “The Project” the co-conspirators must leave Sir Toby’s and reconvene secretly at another inn. Clearly Wilkinson is breaking definitively with this post, this line of discussion, this distraction. By placing the Westerner at the center of the intrigue, the project, and the abandonment of Sir Toby’s, Wilkinson acknowledges that Perriman, even when absent, remains the focal point at OST.

• From this point on the Invisibility Cloak thread is continued by Doyle and Carr but without Wilkinson, who now establishes a parallel post focused explicitly on the Westerner’s Manifesto; i.e., Perriman’s “Project.”