Speaker 1: Thirteen days of Halloween is from grim and mild blumhouse
Speaker 1: and I heart free d audio headphones recommended. Listener discretion advised.
Speaker 1: How is your head still swimming? It comes in and out,
Speaker 1: M HMM. And the visions. Every few steps, the sun
Speaker 1: goes dark, as if I'm looking at the world from underwater.
Speaker 1: And shadows, they seem to move around me. Arch shadows,
Speaker 1: like clouds, like like mountains, are floating overhead. I can't
Speaker 1: almost make out shapes, but someone is telling me something.
Speaker 1: We're trying, you know, one of the side effects of
Speaker 1: the tincture that you were given by the pastor some
Speaker 1: call it hallucination. What do you call it? Just another
Speaker 1: way of seeing the world. There's more on heaven and
Speaker 1: earth and all I can almost where are you going?
Speaker 1: I can hear a voice, a voice, and what is
Speaker 1: its saying? I can't quite tell. It's or a smile. Names, names, what?
Speaker 1: What names? Flit silver, Horace Smith, Jorgan Benson, Jorgan Benson. Ah,
Speaker 1: I see what's happening. Sean Whaland Augus UNCUS, Caroline Burgesse
Speaker 1: it's it's the well, Oh, well, in front of you.
Speaker 1: Can't you see it? or Yes, H May I have
Speaker 1: a coin to throw in it. Take this, but be
Speaker 1: very careful what you wish for. It works. Throw it.
Speaker 1: Don't worry about a coin. You can throw a pebble
Speaker 1: or a stick or whatever you have in your pocket,
Speaker 1: anything really. People used to throw children down there. That's
Speaker 1: the same either way. They're watch like this. H can
Speaker 1: you hear it? M H spooky right. The sound and
Speaker 1: makes falling in is mm HMM. It's haunting. And I'll
Speaker 1: say it, you're not wrong. There aren't just coins at
Speaker 1: the bottom. I'm down there too. I'm not alone. Every
Speaker 1: year someone else moves in, you could say, whether they
Speaker 1: want to or not, and it's unfair. I was human,
Speaker 1: you know. I grew up in this town. I was
Speaker 1: down on my luck, a single mom, when being a
Speaker 1: single mom Madi an enemy of the moral crowd. Of course,
Speaker 1: this was a long, long time ago, but do you
Speaker 1: know what they say about small towns? One Century is
Speaker 1: the same as the next, and if you could travel
Speaker 1: back in time to when I was alive, you'd think
Speaker 1: it was the modern day. Nothing has changed, except maybe
Speaker 1: a few goats of paint. Still, this well would be there,
Speaker 1: whether a hundred years ago or a thousand and it works.
Speaker 1: You just need to be very careful what you wish
Speaker 1: for and how m take me, for example. I remember
Speaker 1: exactly how it happened. I was young, just finishing high school.
Speaker 1: My head falls books and stories and boredom and loneliness.
Speaker 1: I worked at the town store. I would walk over
Speaker 1: here at lunchtime when the weather was nice. I never
Speaker 1: threw anything in. It felt silly, you know, like leaving
Speaker 1: cookies out for Santa or hiding a tooth beneath a pillow.
Speaker 1: High School was almost over and it was time to
Speaker 1: put away childish things. But still, as I looked out
Speaker 1: at the endless empty days ahead, my thoughts would drift.
Speaker 1: I'd find myself lost, staring out the window of the
Speaker 1: store in the direction of this old well. What harm
Speaker 1: could it do? I thought to make a wish. It
Speaker 1: started as an errant thought, then the most inside of jokes,
Speaker 1: something I shared only with myself, until one day I
Speaker 1: stood right where you are now and looked down deep
Speaker 1: into the well. I made a wish. I've thought about
Speaker 1: this carefully. I wished, after days of deliberation, to never
Speaker 1: be alone. At first I thought nothing happened, just the
Speaker 1: blink of a coin against the stone. I looked around
Speaker 1: at the low gray sky. Raven stared at me as
Speaker 1: though it knew I was a fool in a dying
Speaker 1: core for being so naive. The very next day my
Speaker 1: men are traveling encyclopedia salesman. It's funny I forget his name.
Speaker 1: Even his face has faded, as if someone rubbed a
Speaker 1: wet finger across a charcoal drawing. He rolled through hopelessly
Speaker 1: lost on the back roads. When he stopped for supplies,
Speaker 1: his hand lingered on mine. When I gave him his change.
Speaker 1: I swear I could hear our heart gets bumping in
Speaker 1: perfect unrehearsed unison. There was an electricity to the air
Speaker 1: I wanted to drown in. His eyes, dark and deep
Speaker 1: as a well. The next thing you know we've stolen
Speaker 1: away to Hay loft. Even now I remember that sweet
Speaker 1: damn smell of the Hay decomposing gently beneath us, the
Speaker 1: gentle throb of rain pattering along the roof of the bar. Oh,
Speaker 1: I thought he was my ticket out. That's how it
Speaker 1: was when you were young. That's how it is when
Speaker 1: you're young. I remember hearing radio shows about far away places.
Speaker 1: Surely He'd take me right. After all, the well and
Speaker 1: I had a deal. But when this salesman traveled on,
Speaker 1: he did so in the dead old night. All I
Speaker 1: had left of him was a crumpled up re seat
Speaker 1: for lucky blue cigarettes and a ghost of drug store
Speaker 1: after shape. I wonder if you ever made it to
Speaker 1: the Pacific. I wonder how he died. But I've gotten
Speaker 1: my wish, just not the way. I don't. I was pregnant.
Speaker 1: I would never be alone again, but I was also ruined, unmarriageable,
Speaker 1: scraping by and living with my parents for months. I
Speaker 1: was the talk of the town, a Jezebel, a lowe woman.
Speaker 1: I know what they said. I can hear them now
Speaker 1: through time if I'd listen. They never tell you that.
Speaker 1: The religious and the PSYCHICS and all those other selling
Speaker 1: stories about the afterlife, they never tell you the dead
Speaker 1: here everything, each and every word the living said about them,
Speaker 1: each whisper of condemnation, each declaration of love, all of it.
Speaker 1: No wonder so many of us end up sticking around,
Speaker 1: and no wonder I ended up in the well. It's
Speaker 1: one person each year when the stars are right, but
Speaker 1: it's never the mayor or the members of what passes
Speaker 1: for high society and direbrook drifters, ruined women, orphans, out
Speaker 1: of towners, people like me, people like you. My disappearance
Speaker 1: was in the local paper. The Headline Read Tragic Death
Speaker 1: Marks End of harvest. It's a short article. Beneath the fold,
Speaker 1: news about the war took up most of the front page.
Speaker 1: That's funny. I can't remember which war. The last thing
Speaker 1: I can remember the real me is how, tied up
Speaker 1: and painted with all those weird symbols on my face,
Speaker 1: I asked if I could see my kid one last time.
Speaker 1: Then up and over I went, the sounds of everyone
Speaker 1: chanting as my head hit the pick of stones lighting
Speaker 1: the well. Then darkness. Why did they choose me? Did
Speaker 1: someone make a wish? Did I win some Arcane dark lottery?
Speaker 1: Either way, down I went, just like all the countless
Speaker 1: others before me. Then, after a time, I found myself here,
Speaker 1: bound to the well. I'm not always here, I'm somewhere
Speaker 1: else sometimes, but every so often a person like you
Speaker 1: happens along and I'm drawn out like water. Did you
Speaker 1: find it a pattern? Listen, silent, going good. Hold it.
Speaker 1: Philis Gon Tours against your hand and the fat of
Speaker 1: your bone. Now through it in trust me, it works.
Speaker 1: It is always worked. This wasn't always a will. Millions
Speaker 1: of years ago, old this valley was a long low plain.
Speaker 1: The Rock fell from the spy, drawing waterful deep beneath
Speaker 1: the earth. Some of the first animals stumbling onto the
Speaker 1: land found the evidence of its passage. The creater lined
Speaker 1: with Redns, dead things. They stood, crows or slithered right
Speaker 1: where we are now. They looked over the edge, down
Speaker 1: into the darkness and the Spring and they fell. Ages passed.
Speaker 1: The land grew over the spring like a scar forming
Speaker 1: the valley. When the first people arrived, they could feel this,
Speaker 1: a pulse, like an ordery below the flesh of the soil,
Speaker 1: flowing from somewhere deeper still. Your ancestors dub into this
Speaker 1: ground and called what they found God. You can't see
Speaker 1: it now, but there was a place here before, a temple,
Speaker 1: a church, you could say, but not the kind you'd recognize.
Speaker 1: If you close your eyes you can hear the wind
Speaker 1: through those ruins. Now the shame of a place alters.
Speaker 1: One comes after the well, the wind. This place. It
Speaker 1: is like you, it is like me. It is wearing
Speaker 1: a face not its own. We are wearing a face,
Speaker 1: the voice you hear us speaking through now. She died
Speaker 1: in this well, the face you see in your mind
Speaker 1: when you close your eyes and listen to the wind.
Speaker 1: That's her. We remember her name when the wind whispers
Speaker 1: it into her ears. Down there, you can remember everything.
Speaker 1: The well remembers the dark winters long before her own,
Speaker 1: when certain people of this town made a covenant with
Speaker 1: the well, the thing beneath it. A trade every so often,
Speaker 1: when the stars were right, a trade a little wish
Speaker 1: for a wish, a little sacrifice for a heart's greatest desire.
Speaker 1: We'd take no one, any one would miss, of course,
Speaker 1: a drifter or an orphan or a single mother. There
Speaker 1: were never any misimposters, never stories on the mainland news,
Speaker 1: not even an article in the local newspaper. It's funny
Speaker 1: how they forget those on the edges of their society.
Speaker 1: But we don't. We know the feeling of desire and
Speaker 1: all we require is someone to take care of what's
Speaker 1: stopping you. Why the hesitation when you're scared? Don't worry,
Speaker 1: our wishes don't count. We're already in here. We, the dead,
Speaker 1: can only make the same wish over and over again,
Speaker 1: but you, you can make a new one. You can
Speaker 1: set us free and say okay if it doesn't happen
Speaker 1: right away. That's the thing about wishes. There's no time limit.
Speaker 1: You wish, you wait, you walk, you move on further
Speaker 1: and further away from the version of you that made
Speaker 1: the wish. You Change, trade one piece of you for another,
Speaker 1: over and over again, until you have become something different,
Speaker 1: and you will wish when it arrives from the chasm
Speaker 1: of the distant past. That wish up close, it could
Speaker 1: feel a lot like a curse. You're not supposed to
Speaker 1: tell people what you wish for. That's one of the rules,
Speaker 1: but we've always thought that rule was for the living.
Speaker 1: Here coome closer. Would you like to know what we
Speaker 1: wish for? Weld all the faces you will meet, we
Speaker 1: wish for you. Over and over again, we have wished
Speaker 1: for you. You can free us, all of us Down't here.
Speaker 1: What are we? What are you freeing? You mean, never
Speaker 1: mind that there's no time. Listen. Can you hear them?
Speaker 1: The festival is upon us. The stars and the darkness
Speaker 1: between the stars aligned. They know you are here, they're coming.
Speaker 1: We can save you. Throw in your goin and say
Speaker 1: the words free us and we will have our cot
Speaker 1: it now. Don't turn us and you won't spend the turning.
Speaker 1: Come now, your face rip, now in the darkness. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's it now, that's enough. That's enough of that. What happened?
Speaker 1: I'll take that going back. Thank you. What happened? You
Speaker 1: met an unfriendly spirit, not one of the father, in
Speaker 1: the seas, adjacent to the father, but not of him.
Speaker 1: I could feel it's need. Well, it's need. Is None
Speaker 1: of our business, is it? Come? The doctor should be
Speaker 1: back by now. We can take a short cut back
Speaker 1: past the schoolyard. Okay, are you all right? Yes, just shaking. Well,
Speaker 1: my darling, step up a little. They're so much more ahead. Yeah, tomorrow,
Speaker 1: on thirteen days of Halloween, the schoolhouse eventually over the waves,
Speaker 1: I heard my name called. I awoke to the Gustav
Speaker 1: Twins Bursting into the classroom with hysterical bleed. They urged
Speaker 1: me from the desk and led me towards the playground,
Speaker 1: their identical smiles radiant, yet their faces flushed and still
Speaker 1: wet with tears. They wouldn't explain themselves, and I was
Speaker 1: still too discombobulated to protest. Once outside, I saw them
Speaker 1: the other children, all kneeling in a circle in the
Speaker 1: center of the kickball field and their body swayed to
Speaker 1: the tempo of their Chad. The grading to do exceedingly indeed,
Speaker 1: in the places the head reached, the gray angels wings
Speaker 1: are out there. The emotions, the Stutus, thirt days of Halloween,
Speaker 1: the wishing well starring Kathy and Jimmy, Bethany and Lynde
Speaker 1: and Claire Bronson, written by Ben Bolan with additional material
Speaker 1: by Nicholas Takowski. Sound Design and mixing by Miranda Hawkins,
Speaker 1: engineering by violent Ferton, DUBWAY STUDIOS NEW YORK. Casting by
Speaker 1: Jessica Losa. Created by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with
Speaker 1: executive producer Aaron Manky. A production of I heart radio,
Speaker 1: grim and mild and BLUMHOUSE television.