Malachi Yarrow

Malachi Yarrow
Main aliases:	Patient Y
Species:	Human
Affiliated with:	British Secret Service
Place of origin:	Earth
First appearance:	Pre-narrative Briefings
Appearances:	PROSE: No Enemy But Despair PROSE: Subjective Interlock

Colonel Malachi Yarrow, codename Y, was the head of the section of the British Secret Service that dealt with Mal'akh in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (PROSE: Subjective Interlock)

In 2010, Jim Sheldrake wrote Imaginary Friends: The Hundred Year War: 1969, whose main character Spy-Master Malachi Yarrow parodied fictional spies of the 1960s. A character who had briefly appeared in the same volume of Imaginary Friends was brought into reality by Sheldrake the next year. (PROSE: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy)

In 2011, at the age of 54, Yarrow retired from the Secret Service and moved to the Peacock House on the Island of Jersey. His exposure to the House gradually eroded his sanity. (PROSE: Subjective Interlock) In 2015, Yarrow's book The Missing Hour Occupancy — Hauntings of the Channel Islands was published. (PROSE: Pre-narrative Briefing M, Subjective Interlock)

An MS found in a psychiatrist's abandoned office described a "Patient Y" who was in his mid-fifties and retired from "the mainland's" civil service. Patient Y believed was he was a hospital patient suffering PTSD after taking part in a War. Y claimed, among other things, that he was the last survivor of a work of fiction, stranded in a reality where everything — including Finn Foster — had slightly different names. Y also recalled exposing a large conspiracy by the Cult of the White Peacock, fighting praying mantis-amazons disguised in human skin suits, and failing to stop a species of underground "horrors" from inverting the universe so that all planets were "stifling bubbles of stagnant air pent without exit in light-years of solid rock". (PROSE: Pre-narrative Briefing P)

In 2017, Yarrow vanished while in the Peacock House. (PROSE: Subjective Interlock) An MI5 agent came to the Peacock House to investigate Yarrow's disappearance and had a direct encounter with the Enemy. He would later rave about having been part of an expedition to the Citadel of Despair, of which Yarrow was a part. The agent claimed that Yarrow was a solemn man who loved unusual insects, interested in Despair because of the Moth Of The Shroud. He remembered Yarrow being killed by the touch of an Electric Stick Insect. (PROSE: No Enemy But Despair)

Behind the scenes

• The City of the Black Moon, a Blind Atlas Cities entry written by The Book of the Enemy editor Simon Bucher-Jones in 2006, was attributed to a scroll called "The Yarrow of the White Peacock".