Speaker 1: Twelve Ghosts is a production of I Heeart three D
Speaker 1: audio and grimm and mild from Aaron Manky Headphones. Recommended
Speaker 1: Listener discretion advised. M Hello, I don't understand. I don't understand. Hello.
Speaker 1: Oh oh light light, Oh hello, light Hello. M hm
Speaker 1: huh h Hello. I was expecting you later. What I
Speaker 1: just what? I was expecting you hours from now? Oh,
Speaker 1: no matter, you must be freezing. Well, don't just stand
Speaker 1: there with your mouth wide open. You'll let the heat
Speaker 1: out of my mouth. Come in the start of the
Speaker 1: very longest night of the year, the dead center of midwinter.
Speaker 1: We cannot be any further from summer sunlight. Here desolate.
Speaker 1: It is from this vantage point the dream of June
Speaker 1: feels almost cruel, doesn't it. Even the wolves stay in
Speaker 1: on this night, respecting the heavy dark. And you know
Speaker 1: how they love a winter forest drink. Where am I
Speaker 1: in a place where drink is being offered? I've got
Speaker 1: mulled wine. It's very good for knocking off the chill. Yes, good,
Speaker 1: we'll hang your coat by the door. You won't be
Speaker 1: needing it. Where am I I was? I've been walking
Speaker 1: in the woods for what seems like forever. It's a
Speaker 1: very deep wood, and with no sun to mark the time.
Speaker 1: It's endless, isn't it. Sit? You have an answered my question.
Speaker 1: You're standing in front of a steaming cup of mulled
Speaker 1: wine at a large wooden table in an inn, in
Speaker 1: the deepest bit of a dark wood, in the middle
Speaker 1: of the longest night of the year. Sit please, And
Speaker 1: you are the owner of this establishment. Yes, but hold on?
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. How unusual? What it's strange? How time passes.
Speaker 1: I thought you came alone. I did well. It seems
Speaker 1: as though you were mistaken. Come in. You're right on time.
Speaker 1: M h I saw you a light. Yes, that is
Speaker 1: why I keep it on, so that weary travelers have
Speaker 1: something to move toward in the dark. Leave your coat
Speaker 1: at the door and come sit. I've got a drink
Speaker 1: to warm you. Are you all right? Yes? Good, you've
Speaker 1: both traveled so far. Tonight there will be rest for
Speaker 1: you now rest, yes, But before I send you off
Speaker 1: to bed, tell me where have you come from? Where?
Speaker 1: My name is lost to me now, as well as
Speaker 1: my life before that night and all that has occurred
Speaker 1: since until I found myself. No, no, not lost nor
Speaker 1: forgotten mind you, but devoured by what you may ask,
Speaker 1: by the dead thing inside me that much I am
Speaker 1: allowed to recall. The dead thing, the creature, the ghost
Speaker 1: that lives that resides within my skull. Whatever it is,
Speaker 1: it's ravenous, and the only thing it can eat is memory.
Speaker 1: I think it was human once. Who knows, maybe it
Speaker 1: was even like me, a simple, weary traveler who paused
Speaker 1: to converse with the wrong stranger on the wrong night.
Speaker 1: Now we are inseparable, and have been since since a moment. Please,
Speaker 1: what remains of my recollections are not easily gathered and
Speaker 1: demand a courage available only to me through the grace
Speaker 1: of the bottle. I don't know why it's allowed me
Speaker 1: to recall our meeting. I have the theory, though, I
Speaker 1: think perhaps that's where it's made its home, there in
Speaker 1: the last memory my mind can hold. From there it
Speaker 1: enters my other memories to wait, where was I the meeting? Yes? Yes,
Speaker 1: how the dead thing that eats memories and I became one.
Speaker 1: I was a nocturnal traveler, alone in the land, as
Speaker 1: far from where I came for as wherever this place.
Speaker 1: Maybe now young, or at least a much younger man
Speaker 1: than the one in my reflection and adrift in a
Speaker 1: strange city shuddered in the last hours before Christmas morning.
Speaker 1: I can still see a goblin moon peering over the
Speaker 1: darkened rooftops to illuminate the last patches of snow clinging
Speaker 1: to the corners of the street. I wandered that city,
Speaker 1: lost in search of a drink that I didn't need,
Speaker 1: and found only closed doors until I found him. Towards
Speaker 1: the last hour of night. I approached him vagrant, an
Speaker 1: old man, half lurched from the shadows of an alley way.
Speaker 1: From his hand dangled a bottle of wine that sparked
Speaker 1: with the promise of a sweet numb The old man
Speaker 1: mumbled to himself in a tongue that I couldn't really
Speaker 1: understand until I realized what I was hearing was a
Speaker 1: mick sture of languages, muttered all at once and to
Speaker 1: no one at all. I was almost upon him, and
Speaker 1: still he hadn't noticed my approach. The moonlight revealed a
Speaker 1: gaunt face twisted in concentration, as if conducting a great
Speaker 1: series of calculations whose some eluded his best efforts. None
Speaker 1: of them mattered. All that did was the bottle that
Speaker 1: dangled from his hand gently at a respectable distance, I
Speaker 1: intruded on his mumblings and informed him that for the
Speaker 1: remaining coins in my pocket, I would gladly purchase the
Speaker 1: last drops of wine from his bottle. Startled, the old
Speaker 1: man looked up and down the street furtively, as if
Speaker 1: we weren't the only two souls there in that hour
Speaker 1: before dawn. His eyes, previously lost in some private toil,
Speaker 1: now bulged with amused confusion. In my presence, I reached
Speaker 1: into my pocket, jangled a few coins in my palm,
Speaker 1: and gazed as keenly at his bottle as he at
Speaker 1: my face. The old man looked at the bottle as
Speaker 1: if only just then realizing what it was that I wanted,
Speaker 1: then with a grin of broken tombstones, and inquired how
Speaker 1: it was. I could see him. Thrown off by the question,
Speaker 1: I found myself bereft of an answer. The old man
Speaker 1: looked down at my feet and then back up at
Speaker 1: my eyes, shudered, dragging at the heels of your feet,
Speaker 1: does me you don't belong here? One? Where are you from?
Speaker 1: How did you get here? He took a swig off
Speaker 1: the bottle and then passed it to me, returning the
Speaker 1: coins to my pocket. I accepted the bottle. The wine
Speaker 1: tasted of iron and dust, but it was strong enough
Speaker 1: to loosen the tongue. After another pull on the bottle,
Speaker 1: I confessed I wasn't sure where here was anymore. I
Speaker 1: explained that I came across the sea in search of
Speaker 1: fortune or to escape my fate, one or the other,
Speaker 1: or maybe both. I've further explained how, after many long months,
Speaker 1: I finally received a letter from my one true love,
Speaker 1: a Christmas gift from home that arrived a day early,
Speaker 1: or so I thought. I learned that what my love
Speaker 1: and I had shared was no more than a bonfire
Speaker 1: in a blizzard. Bright, fierce and defiant, but ultimately doomed
Speaker 1: to be extinguished before the night is through. The old
Speaker 1: Man's bottle was almost empty, and I realized I had
Speaker 1: been crying. He seemed unconcerned to my state and simply
Speaker 1: asked if I wanted my love back. No, I replied
Speaker 1: with a sudden rage, not just at my love's betrayal,
Speaker 1: but the tears I shed for her. Before a stranger,
Speaker 1: I explained to the universe as well as the old man,
Speaker 1: that all I wanted was to forget my love had
Speaker 1: ever existed. All of it, the good and the bad.
Speaker 1: For without my love in my life, the good we
Speaker 1: shared was a pain unbearable to remember, while the bad
Speaker 1: we suffered and survived was simply a lesson loss to
Speaker 1: me now forever, I would forget it all if I could.
Speaker 1: And there was a long silence, just long enough for
Speaker 1: me to recant my words, before the old man cast
Speaker 1: a sad crack of his cemetery grin and reached out
Speaker 1: his hand. He said, take my hand, and all that
Speaker 1: haunts you shall be no more. Every wound, every loss,
Speaker 1: all of the injuries that even the bottle count reach,
Speaker 1: they will become my and no longer burden your time
Speaker 1: on this earth. Dried my eyes and laughed at the
Speaker 1: absurdity of it all. But the longer the old Man's
Speaker 1: hand hung there, the more eager I became to believe
Speaker 1: his offer. Why not, after all, what harm can there
Speaker 1: be in the casting of a simple wish? All of it,
Speaker 1: I demanded, realizing now how desperate I was for his
Speaker 1: words to be true, all of it. With that, I
Speaker 1: emptied the bottle in a single pool and took his hand.
Speaker 1: The grip was stronger than an expected. I felt his
Speaker 1: nails dated deep into the palm of my hand, and
Speaker 1: with a cry of pain, looked down to discover that
Speaker 1: blood had been drawn. Then the pain receded under a
Speaker 1: terrible numb. A strange chill ran up my hand, and
Speaker 1: I watched with mute horror as its flesh turned lou
Speaker 1: within his grasp. I pried my attention from the chill
Speaker 1: flowing into my body to plead with the old man
Speaker 1: to rescind my wish. But the old man was gone,
Speaker 1: and in his place stood a corpse. His corpse to
Speaker 1: be more accurate, hollow eyes and shriveled, rotted flesh pulled
Speaker 1: taut across the outline of a skull. I tried to scream,
Speaker 1: I tried to kick free, and tried to strike at
Speaker 1: the corpse with my other hand, but found myself frozen
Speaker 1: in raw terror. I watched helplessly as his rutted skin
Speaker 1: began to bubble, as lumps formed and moved beneath the
Speaker 1: surface of his face. As the jaw of the corpse
Speaker 1: unhinged itself like some great snake from the Amazon, there
Speaker 1: was a gurgling as it struggled to speak, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't words that were freeing itself from its jaw. The
Speaker 1: corpse began to vomit up, and a swarm of insects,
Speaker 1: not any kind I had ever seen, for they resembled beetles,
Speaker 1: only with tiny human faces painted on the front of
Speaker 1: their onyx carapaces and mandibles that clicked an alien communication
Speaker 1: with each other. They cascaded into thousands from the jaws
Speaker 1: of the old man's corpse, flowing down the neck, that shoulder,
Speaker 1: the arm that connected us now in this unholy union.
Speaker 1: The insects swarmed over my hand, scurried beneath the sleeve
Speaker 1: of my coat, and even through the numb of the skin,
Speaker 1: I felt them enveloped my body in their thousands. Then
Speaker 1: they began to burrow deep beneath the flesh, even through
Speaker 1: the numb of the corpse'script. The pain was not something
Speaker 1: you forget. Apparently. The last thing I saw was the
Speaker 1: old man's corpse disintegrate, flaking off into chunks of dust
Speaker 1: that drifted into the dying moonlight as the last of
Speaker 1: the human faced bugs drained from its screen. Then, mercifully
Speaker 1: I blacked out. I woke up in the alleyway, still alive.
Speaker 1: A Christmas miracle. It had all been a terrible dream
Speaker 1: brought on by the bottle. I staggered into the street.
Speaker 1: I was groggy, still unshore of my location, hungover as
Speaker 1: I was drunk, and then immediately recalled why I had
Speaker 1: been drinking so furiously the night before. The smile of
Speaker 1: my love's face flashed across my mind's eye. Instantly I
Speaker 1: found myself in a familiar bed. Maybe there's maybe mine.
Speaker 1: A lone candle illuminated the longing and exhilaration of my
Speaker 1: love's gaze upon my body. Rain pattered against the window
Speaker 1: and crackled across the roof. Enraptured, I was on the
Speaker 1: verge of whispering my love's name when everything rose. The
Speaker 1: light of the candle no longer flickered, the rains cadence
Speaker 1: had stilled itself, and my love was still as a painting,
Speaker 1: with neither a breath nor a blink revealed. Then, slowly
Speaker 1: a shadow formed and rose from behind my love, displayed
Speaker 1: naked across the bed. The shadow began to shimmer and
Speaker 1: melt away into the leering visage of the old man's corpse,
Speaker 1: the dead thing inside me. It ran a talented finger
Speaker 1: through my love's hair and studied me with empty sockets
Speaker 1: and a rich scrin of broken tombstones. It wanted me
Speaker 1: to know that it could see me. It wanted me
Speaker 1: to know that it took great satisfaction in my helplessness.
Speaker 1: It pressed its face against that of my loves. It
Speaker 1: whispered into their ear, and it sniffed along the curve
Speaker 1: of their neck with the rotted remains of its nose,
Speaker 1: before leaning back, with odding satisfaction, fixed its eyeless gaze
Speaker 1: upon me, and threw back its head as if to
Speaker 1: mock me in sinister delight. Only it wasn't laughter that
Speaker 1: erupted from the old man's corpse. Phantom swarm of human
Speaker 1: faced beetles burst through the jaws of the old man's
Speaker 1: corpse as it elongated unnaturally to provide them gateway into
Speaker 1: my memory. Crawling in their allegiance, they cascaded down the
Speaker 1: jaws of the old man's corpse and scattered themselves across
Speaker 1: my love. They spread across their skin, forming a chittering
Speaker 1: shadow over my lover, as their mandibles devoured every detail
Speaker 1: of what I could remember from my love's body. And
Speaker 1: still they swarmed from the muted scream of the old
Speaker 1: man's corps, spreading themselves relentlessly across the bed, the floor,
Speaker 1: the walls of my memory, until their swarming masses had
Speaker 1: obliterated all I could recall of that night into nothingness.
Speaker 1: It was then that I recognized the faces painted onto
Speaker 1: the beatles. It was that of my love, where the
Speaker 1: eyes locked and agony be pleading with me to do something, anything,
Speaker 1: But I was frozen, unable to escape out of memory
Speaker 1: into consciousness, nor shift to a different recollection. As the
Speaker 1: body of my love was devoured with their smiling eyes
Speaker 1: the last to go. I could feel everything we shared
Speaker 1: vanishing from the mind, the little jokes between us, a
Speaker 1: place where we met, the moments we shared, and then
Speaker 1: even their name. We're gone forever still the old man's
Speaker 1: corpse feasted with eyeless gaze still locked on mine. It
Speaker 1: wanted me to remember this moment for as long as
Speaker 1: I lived. It wanted me to know that this was
Speaker 1: going to happen to everything, every person, every moment I
Speaker 1: had experienced. It wanted me to know the horror, and
Speaker 1: it wanted me to know the perverse joy it would
Speaker 1: take in devouring my memories. It wanted me to know
Speaker 1: that every time I woke up, a scene like this
Speaker 1: would play again before being wiped away forever. Eventually there
Speaker 1: was nothing left of the memory save the dead thing
Speaker 1: inside me, the undulating tide of insects, and the candle light,
Speaker 1: until that was enveloped too, And then my sole remembrance
Speaker 1: comes to an end. After that, my story is no
Speaker 1: longer mine to tell. Written over the years, possibly the decades,
Speaker 1: and higher glyphs of scars and wounds, my body remembers
Speaker 1: more than I can. But chiefly what it remembers is
Speaker 1: that I need a drink to function. Mind you, That
Speaker 1: is not to say that there haven't been scraps of recurrence.
Speaker 1: I've been allowed to nibble on crumbs of memory that
Speaker 1: have fallen off the chin of the old man's corpse.
Speaker 1: A few moments from a prison here, a few seconds
Speaker 1: spent in a sanitarium. There, the face of a priest
Speaker 1: as they called upon our Savior to rescue my wretched
Speaker 1: soul from the phantom. Within a flash of lightning over
Speaker 1: a burning ship, a dead man in my feet, and
Speaker 1: lurch in my stomach at the bloody knife in my hand,
Speaker 1: brief sparks of a desperate life that I when I
Speaker 1: try to follow lead me back to the night when
Speaker 1: I met the dead thing inside me there in the
Speaker 1: land of hungry ghosts. So now I just traveled around
Speaker 1: in search of new experiences, new cities, new tales to
Speaker 1: feed the dead thing inside me, all the while biding
Speaker 1: my time for the right story to come along that
Speaker 1: will satiate its eternal hunger. A story or a memory,
Speaker 1: as if the two weren't the same, but a tale
Speaker 1: so terrible that its teller would do almost anything to
Speaker 1: forget it ever existed. Who knows. Perhaps in that moment
Speaker 1: they'll even reach their hand out to take mine, and
Speaker 1: the dead thing inside me will at last have found
Speaker 1: a new home. But then I forget myself. My God,
Speaker 1: are you tired? Marcus? Marcus? Yeah? Us Marcus, that was
Speaker 1: my name once it is again. Do you wish to rest? Yes?
Speaker 1: Take this key, Marcus. Up the stairs you will see
Speaker 1: a series of doors. Yours is the very first on
Speaker 1: the left. Inside is a bed. There you will find,
Speaker 1: for the first time in a very long time. I
Speaker 1: imagine a long dreamless slumber. Your hungry ghost will trouble
Speaker 1: you no more. That sounds nice. Please excuse me, you
Speaker 1: are excused to bed with you? Hm. And Flights of Angels,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Who are You? I'm the Innkeeper, now annabel
Speaker 1: Who are You? Twelve Ghosts starring Malcolm McDowell as the
Speaker 1: Innkeeper and Gina Rikiki as Annabelle. Episode one, The Land
Speaker 1: of Hungry Ghosts written by Rob Mosca with additional writing
Speaker 1: by Nicholas Takowski, editing by Chris Childs and Stephen Perez,
Speaker 1: featuring Robin Bloodworth as Marcus. Directed by Nicholas Takowski. Original
Speaker 1: score and sound design by Chris Child's. Executive producers Aaron Mankey,
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick, Alexander Williams and Nicholas Takowski. Supervising producer Josh Same.
Speaker 1: Producers Chris Child's and Stephen Perez. Casting by Sunday Bowling
Speaker 1: c s A and Meg Mormon c s A. Production
Speaker 1: coordinator Wayna Calderon. Recorded at Lantern Audio in Atlanta, Georgia,
Speaker 1: engineered by Chris Gardner, Aeros Sound and Recording in Ojai, California,
Speaker 1: engineered by Ken Arrows. Twelve Ghosts was created by Nicholas Takowski.
Speaker 1: Then is a production of I Heeart three D Audio
Speaker 1: and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Learn more about
Speaker 1: the show at grim and Mild dot com, and find
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my heart Radio by visiting the I
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.