My knowledge of the thing, and my first contact with Ilinx, began in the winter of 1986-7 with the death of my uncle Adin Fasrol , Professor Emeritus of Experimental Semiotics in Harvard University, Massachussetts.

As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to collect his belongings carried sparingly between continents. Much of the material found in his luggages, consisted in spread papers with annotations and drawings regarding the three tribes of the N'ma island.

The arrival of Fasrol, first in Java and then in the district of Krakatoa, is reported in his passport and the dock records. However, due to the ban of accessing Nma island, considered sacred ground by the Indonesian authorities, it appears that the professor persuaded some locals not attached anymore to old superstitions (and under a relatively large amount of money) to get him in the island and assist him during the expedition with supplies of food transported on the island during the night.

Other relevant notes report their arrive first in the Mu's area, the last tribe of N'ma to be defeated by the self-prophecy of N'ma's religion, and then in Tak's area, the first Nma people to disappear after the eruption of the Krakatoa. Following this path, Fassrol discovered the location of a certain 'katak temple', main objective of the expedition supposed to provide the key to understanding the language engraved in a particular Nma's artifact. Despite the fact that he didn't actually manage to translate the language, the temple awoken some sort of omen in the professor who writes in his last letter "What we are, we are, whether we be aware of it or not!"

I shall not dwell too much on these letters whose events are far more complex than my short description. My focus, instead, must be directed toward another artifact, a box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so, I seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the spiralic stone bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found?

The bas-relief, to whom professor refers in his papers as Ilinx, was a rough cone less than three inches thick and about five by six inches in area, containg a series of signs developing inside a spiral whose ending point matched with the top of the cone. According to Fassrol's papers, the cryptic object was an authentic repert of the Mu's tribe found in 1980 in a black market of Boston, and which he unsuccessfully tried to decipher on his own. His professional interest led him to consult various experts in semitic languages who, however, discarded the symbols on Ilinx as a non-language, a pre-artistic medium meant to symbolize language but without any stable meaning. Far from being satisfied by this explaination, Fassrol passed five years attempting to find the key to read the signs that in his belief were hiding a mystery bigger than what usual language could conceive. Eventually, his phanatism led him to undertake his journey to N'ma and to come back to the US without a solution to the enigma.

At that time I couldn't follow the case of my uncle with particular attention as I was completely assorbed with my job, however, year after year my interest was growing bigger and I started to reorganize all the events described in his papers in an attempt to decipher the meaning of the writings encraved on the spiral of Ilinx. It was at that time, in 1992 that I contacted professor Linda Trent, an old collegue of my uncle whose name I found multiple times in his papers.

Trent was oblivious to Fassrol's expedition to the N'ma island and profoundly shocked, she explained me that 20 years before they were close friends but a series of events that culminated with the foundation of the Miskatonic Virtual University, in the early 70s led to their complete separation.

She was particularly disturbed by the fact that despite his well-known opposition to Echidna Stillwell's methods, the professor was following exactly the trails left behind by Stillwell himself fifty years before, and that after that trails he started to chase the footprints of Cecil Curtis managing to trace back the original location of the Katak temple. The same temple where the legent of 'Mad Dog' Curtis blurs into total madness.

After a more detailed observation of the encraved stone, Linda's face contracted in an even more gloomy and thoughtful expression mumbling apparently disconnected words. Later she explained to me that in Stillwell account on Mu's folklore there is a story concerning a certain Tchattuk stealing something from Katak and that probably Fassrol belived that Ilinx was what Nma tribes called what-is-lost. Linda continued explaining how in N'ma animism the function of their cerimonies based on dream sorcery are ment to re-enact Tchattuk's stealing, with the belief that the splitting of the cosmical order of time produced a multi-temporal matrix, or templex, permitting the Old Ones to flow in different directions and not collapse in a single point, called by them, Teotwawki.

My meeting with professor Trent opened my eyes, indeed the object I came across in my uncles belonging was supposed to be the key of some sort of ancient belief whose secret he never managed to reveal. I'm still wondering on which extent all this story is true, however I can't forget how all the knowledge Trent passed me started to infect my consciousness leading all my being to think that for no reason I should have let this story evaporate and that in some sort of wired way I was already meant to follow my uncle's paths to the Katak temple and unravel what is hidden beyond the mystery of Ilinx.