When The West Was WEIRD

Time for some fiction with Steve Stockton: When The West Was WEIRD

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:27):
The West was one, they say, with grit, gunpowder and
the iron wheel of pioneers. But the land was older
than any nation, and the silence of the prairies was
not always empty. In the vast sun scorched places between
boomtowns and lonely outposts, other forces were at play. Things
that slumbered beneath the salt plats stared from the coal

(00:51):
spaces between the stars, were bled from rocks that fell
from stranger skies. These are the tales the official histories
forgot to write. There are the whispers from the west
that was not just wild but weird. Here the greatest
threat is the bullet in the back, but a truth
that could unmake a man's mind. The sun was a hammer,

(01:28):
and the Arizona bad Lands with the anvil silas gripped
the reins of his dun mare, the leather hot and
slick with sweat. For three days he had been on
the trail of Kyote Jim, a two bit outlaw with
a five hundred dollars price on his head, enough for
months of whiskey and warm beds. The trail was easy
to follow. Jim was careless, leaving a wake of discarded tins,

(01:50):
and spoke to wildlife. But now the trail was leading somewhere.
Silas didn't like. The land itself was growing quiet. The
buzz of chacadas had traded in the air, once thick
with the scent of dust and chriss oat, now held
a sterile, metallic tang, like the air after a lightning strike.
The rocks, too had begun to take on a peculiar sheen,

(02:12):
a faint, sickly luster that wasn't a reflection of the sun.
Silas pulled his mare to a halt, drawing a canteen.
The water was hide enough to brew coffee with. He
scanned the horizon. The landscape was a jumble of scorched
maces and cracked earth. But ahead, nestled in a shallow basin,
something was wrong. It was a patch of wrongness in

(02:35):
a world of harsh rights, a faint, shimmering haze that
wasn't from the heat. He urged the mare forward, his
hand resting on the butt of his colt. The feeling
of unease solidified into a cold knot in his gut.
He found Coyote Jim's horse first. It was dead, its
high drawn tight over its skeleton, its eyes wide and white.

(02:59):
But it wasn't Thursta had killed it. The ground around
the carcass was covered in a fine, gray, brittle dust,
as if every drop of moisture had been violently leashed
from the soil, and the beast itself desiccated. The horse
looked like a forgotten relic, ancient and fragile. There were
no buzzards. One hundred yards further he found the source

(03:22):
of the strangeness. It was a crater, maybe thirty feet across,
and in its center lay a rock, But it was
like no rock Stiles had ever seen. It was a
misshapen lump of something that seemed to drink the sunlight,
and from it something bled. It was a color. He
had no name for it. It was not purple, nor

(03:43):
violet or crimson, but it was a living, shifting hue
that his mind recoiled from, a visual scream that boats
with a soft internal light, seeping into the crater floor
and staining the earth around it. This was the source
of the haze, the metallic smell, profound and unholy silence.
The landscape within the basin was a gallery of hors.

(04:06):
The cacti were no longer plants, but fleshy, tuborous things
that twisted into agonizing shapes, Their needles replaced with what
looked like fine glassy hairs. They seemed to writhe in
a slow, constant torment. A lizard scuttled passed, its scales
replaced by crystalline gross that caught the alien light and
fractured it into a dozen more impossible shades. Ain't it

(04:30):
a marble? The voice was a dry rasp, like stones
grinding together. Silas spun his colt cleared the holster in
a single fluid motion. An old man set on a
rock near the crater's edge, daunt weathered like a desert mummy.
He was dressed in the tattered rags of a prospector.
His eyes, however, were the worst part. They glowed with

(04:52):
a faint, reflected sheen of the color from the crater.
Names Jedediah Kane. The old man said, not flinching from
the pistol, and that there, that's my claim. I'm looking
for a man, Silas said, his voice tight. It was
by cowdy. Jem seen him. Jededdiah smiled, the ghastly cracking

(05:13):
of his sun split lips. Oh I seen him. He
came blundering in here, thirsty and shouting. He didn't appreciate
the gift. He gestured with a skeletal hand towards the crater.
He tried to chip a piece off the starstone, thought
it was some kind of jewel. The frostbster chuckled a dry,
rattling sound. The stone just shared a piece of itself

(05:34):
with him. He's part of the garden now, bertilizing the
new world. He pointed to a patch of ground near
the meteorite, where the color was particularly vibrant and the
soil seemed to churn with a slow, thick motion. There
was a lump under the soil that might have been
a boot silas felt a cold dread that had nothing
to do with the heat. You're insane, old man, insane.

(05:58):
Jededdiah's voice rose, taking out on a fanatical fervor. I
was blind, and now I see. I came here seeking gold,
the pool's metal, and I found the blood of creation.
It speaks to me. You see, shows me things whirls
for the sky is this color where the mountains walk
and the rivers singing in geometric patterns. He stood up,

(06:19):
his movements jerky and unnatural. He was unnervingly tall, as
if the color had stretched him. It's a gift, a
new genesis for a world that's run dry. The color
will drink the brown in the gray and make everything
new again, everything beautiful. Silas began to back away slowly.
The air was thick, hard to breathe. He could feel

(06:41):
the color on his skin, a tingling sensation, like an
army of ants. In the corner of his eye, the
landscape seemed to shift and bend, the horizon buckled. You
can't leave, Jedediah whispered, his voice suddenly in Silace's ear,
though he was still ten feet away. The sound seemed
to crawl directly into his skull. You've seen it. You

(07:03):
have to be a part of it. You have to
drink deep and let it wash you clean. Silas didn't think.
He fired the colt bucked in his hand, the explosion
deafening in the oppressive silence. The shot struck Jedidiah in
the chest, thrown him back a step. A dark stain
appeared on his shirt, but it wasn't red. It was

(07:23):
a deeper, more intense shade of the alien color. The
old man looked down at the wound with detached curiosity,
waste the lead son. There's no blood left in me,
just the light. He lunged. He was impossibly fast, his
hands hard as petrified wood, clamped onto Silas's gun arm.
The bounty hunter was strong, but Jedediah's strength was not

(07:46):
a musclin bone. It was a rigid, unyielding force. The
very ground seemed to pulse, and a nearby cactus screamed
a high, thin sound like tearing silk. Silas brought his
other fist around, smashing it into the prospector face. It
was like punching the stone wall. He felt bones in
his hand cracked. Jedediah's head snapped back, but his grip

(08:08):
didn't loosen. The color in his eyes blared. Desperate, Silas
kicked out, looking his boat behind Jedediah's leg and throwing
all his weight forward, They tumbled to the ground, rolled
towards the edge of the crater. Silas could feel the
heat from the meteorite, the palpable psychic pressure that made
his teeth ache and his thoughts spray. He saw flashes

(08:30):
of sprawling, non earthly cities under a black starpak sun.
He broke free, scrambling away on his hands and knees.
Jedediah got to his feet, laughing that dry, horrible laugh.
He wasn't looking at Silas anymore. He was looking at
the starstone, his arms outstretched as if to a lover.
It's time he croaked, the harvest begins. He stumbled toward

(08:55):
the meteorite, his wound leaking the impossible color under the
thirsty ground. As he reached the edge of the stone,
he laid a hand upon its surface. The effect was
instantaneous and absolute. The color flared, a silent detonation of
light that bleached the sky. Jedediah Cane screamed, but his
scream was not of pain. It was a sound of

(09:17):
ecstatic release. His body dissolved not into dust or ash,
but into pure color. He became a liquid stream of
the alien hue, flowing into the meteorite, which pulsed once,
a deep, resonant thrum that Silas felt in his marrow.
The ground shuddered. The color surged out from the crater,

(09:39):
no longer seeping but flooding. The gray dust around Cowdy
Jim's horse ignited into a carpet of shimmering alien moss.
The screaming cactie thrashed and writhed. Silas ran. He didn't
look back. He scrambled over the basin's edge, his lungs burning.
The horrifying images from the stone burned into his mind.

(10:00):
He found his mare, her eyes rolling in terror, and
huled himself into the saddle. He rode east as hard
as he could, away from the setting sun and the
spreading stain of wrongness that was consuming the bad lands
behind him. He rode for two days without stopping much,
a man possessed. When he finally stumbled into the dusty
outpost of Redemption, he was hollowed out, his eyes wild.

(10:24):
He tried to tell the sheriff, a fat man with
a sweat stained collar, just what he had seen. It
was a color, Silas stammered, his voice hoarse, a color
from somewhere else. It killed him. It's growing. The sheriff
just stared at him, then told him to get some

(10:46):
sleep and lay off the mescal. Silas gave up. He
never filed the claim for a cowdy Jim's bounty. He couldn't.
He left town that evening, riding without destination. As the
moon rose, he looked down at his own hands on
the reins. Under the nail of his forefinger, almost too
small to see, was a tiny, persistent speck, a speck

(11:10):
of color, A speck of a color he had no
name for a color that wouldn't wash off. And he knew,
with a certainty that chilled him to his very soul,
that he wasn't running from the color. He was just
carrying its seed to fallow ground. The dynamized roar was

(11:36):
the only higher power Cormick respected. It was a god
progress of shattered rock and brute force, and had paid
his wages. He stood on a precarious ledge, the wind
whipping dust into his beard, and watched a plume of
smoke and de bury billow from the mountain side below him.
An army of labors, desperate men from every corner of
the earth, cheered another few yards of the whisper's throat

(11:59):
had been calmed. Their employer, the man with the vision,
stood nearby, standing at the raw wound in the mountain
with eyes that burned with a feverish light. Jefferson Hale
was a railroad tycoon of singular terrifying ambition. While other
men laid track across flat plains, Hale decided to drive
his trans continental line straight through the jagged heart of

(12:22):
the Rockies, through a past the local ute tribe shunned.
They said it was a place where the world was thin,
where the wind carried voices that weren't the wind's own.
Hale called it a shortcut. Magnificent Cormick. Hale boomed over
the wind, his voice dripping with self congratulation. Every blast
is a hammer blow against the ignorance of geography. We

(12:43):
are not merely laying track, We're imposing the will of
mankind upon this savage landscape. Cormick just grunted and spat
a stream of tobacco juice. He was the foreman. His
job wasn't to believe in manifest destiny. It was to
manage the dynamite the men and the mounting list of problems.
And the problems were getting strange. It had started with

(13:05):
the disappearances. Men vanished, Not just drifters who took their
pay and ran, but Venturan workers who disappeared between shifts,
leaving their tools, their meager possessions, and sometimes a half
eaten meal behind. There was no sign of struggle, no
tracks leading away from the camp. They were simply gone.

(13:26):
Then came the tools they left behind. A pick axe
was found with his head bent into a perfect fluid spiral,
the iron looking more like pull taffy than ford steel.
A sledgehammer was discovered, twisted into a shape that seemed
to fold in on itself, a nod of metal that
hurt the eyes to look at. Kormick held it in
his hands, feeling a faint vibration from the object, a

(13:47):
hum that resonated deep in his bones. He had thrown
it into their crevass, and his heart pounding with a
nameless dread. The worst part, however, was the sound at night,
when the generators fell silent and the camp was lit
by flickering fires, it'd begin a low, rhythmic chanting that
seemed to emanate from the freshly blasted tunnels. It wasn't

(14:08):
a human sound. It was metallic and dissonant, a sequence
of clicks, scrapes, and grinding tones that fought a complex,
unnatural pattern. It made the men's teeth ache and their
tempers fray. Flights broke out over nothing. Men woke up
screaming from nightmares of shrinking metal and impossible sharp angles.
It's the mountain a grizzled irishman named O'Malley had whispered

(14:31):
to Kormick, his eyes wide with tear. It's singing, sir,
and I don't like the tune. O'Malley was gone. The
next morning, his bedroll was still warm. Cormick brought these
concerns to Hale, presenting a crowbar that had been bent
into the shape of a three dimensional figure eight. This
ain't natural, hail men are spoke, They're vanishing, and that

(14:57):
noise from the tunnels snatched the crowbar. His eyes gleaming, sabotage.
This is the Union Pacific trying to slow us down.
They hire thugs to scare men, to break our equipment.
He dismissed the channing as wind in the rocks, amplified
by superstition. He would not be delayed. The schedule was everything.

(15:20):
He doubled the wages for the blasting crews and ordered
them to work around the clock. A week later, a
ute elder appeared at the edge of the camp. He
was ancient, his face a road map of wrinkles, and
he leaned heavily on a staff. He spoke to Hale
in broken English, his voice rasping with urgency. You cut
the stone, the old man said, pointing a trembling finger

(15:41):
at the tunnel. But you do not see the veins.
You cut the skin between the worlds. He warned them
of a being that did not walk or fly, but
traveled on the straight line. He said, they were not
building a road, but calling its name with iron and fire.
Hale had laughed a harsh, ugly sound. He called the

(16:03):
elder and drunken savage, and had his personal gards run
him off, firing their pistols into the air. The old
man had simply turned and walked away. His shoulders slumped,
not in defeet, but in sorrow. The work continued. The
tunnel grew deeper, the chanting grew louder, more insistent, but
it was no longer just at night. The men could

(16:24):
hear it during the day, a subliminal hum beneath the
clang of hammers and the shouts of the foreman. They
were carving a channel, and something was resonating with their work.
The breaking point came when they were set to blasted
a final section of rock connecting the two main tunnels.
The men refused. The entire Chinese crew laid down their

(16:45):
tools in silent protest. The Irish were drunk and muteness.
Hale was incandescent with rage. Cowards, luddites. I will do
it myself, hebellowed, grabbing a bundle of dynamite sticks. I
will complete this passage of my own hands, and dragged
this continent, kicking and screaming, into the modern age. Hale, don't,

(17:06):
Kormick shouted, grabbing his arm. A sudden, terrible understanding had
dawned on him. He'd seen the strange metallic veins in
the rock, how they seemed to converge on this exact point.
He'd seen the drawings in Hale's office, the long, unbroken
line of the track stretching across the map, the straight line.
They hadn't just been digging randomly. They'd been following a

(17:28):
path that was already there, a path of least resistance.
They were completing a circuit. Hale shoved him away, his
mask of face of Zeltry. Get out of my way, Cormick.
History is made by men of action, not doubt. He
stalked into the tunnel, laid the charges himself, and lit
the long fuse. He strode back out, his chest puffed

(17:49):
with pride. As the workers scrambled for cover. The blast
was enormous. The mountain shuddered for a long, breathless moment.
There was only the ring in there and the patter
of falling rock. The silence that followed was absolute, profound.
The channing had stopped. A collective sigh of relief went

(18:10):
through the camp. Maybe it was over. Then a new
sound began. It wasn't the chanting. It was a low,
steady hum, a clean industrial thrum, that came from the
darkness of the now completed tunnel. A cold geometric light
began to pulst within, casting sharp edged shadows that seemed
to move their own volition. The men stumbled back. This

(18:34):
was not the warm, flickering light of a lantern or
a locomotive's headlamp. This was a dead light, cold and precise.
Something began to emerge from the tunnel mouth, moving along
the newly laid tracks. It was not a train. It
was a being, if such a word could apply. It
was a conglomeration of impossible geometry, a moving sculpture of

(18:56):
grinding metal plates, raising sharp angles and shimmering crystaline structures.
It had no front or back, no driver, no engine,
It simply was, and it moved with a terrible purpose.
The air around it warped, and the sound it made
was a distant chanting from the tunnels, now clarified into
a deafening, soul scraping shriek. It moved down the track,

(19:19):
a physical manifestation of a hostile the orum. The men
screamed and fled, scattering into the wilderness. Only Jefferson Hale
stood his ground, his face a mixture of ultimate terror
and ecstatic triumph. My god, he whispered, his voice filled
with a horrifying awe. It's beautiful manifest destiny. The entity

(19:43):
passed over, and Hil didn't scream. He wasn't torn apart
or crushed. He was simply erased. For a second, his
form seemed to flatten, to lose it to depth, and
then he was gone, avoid in reality a patch of
air that the ice slid off. The entity had not
killed him, It had corrected him, removed him from its equation.

(20:07):
Cormick ran. He ran until his lungs burned and his
legs gave out. The shrieking hymn of the thing on
the tracks chasing him. He found a handful of other
survivors huddled in a cave, their faces blank was shot
from the valley below. They could hear the sound. The
entity had cleared the pass and was now moving out
onto the Great Plains, following the endless iron road they

(20:29):
had so painstakingly built for it. Cormick never went back
to civilization. He became a ghost of the mountains, a
wild eyed man who would occasionally appeared isolated homesteads raving
about the railroad. He tried to warn them. He told
them they were laying down pathways, not for commerce, but
for things that travel on straight lines. He told them

(20:51):
of the train that wasn't the train, the one that
ran on the railroad to nowhere. But no one listened.
They just saw a madman, another casualty of the frontier.
And all the while, across the continent, the hammering continued.
The thousands of men laid down mile after mile of
straight iron track, extending a formal invitation into the heart

(21:13):
of their world. Silas rode into the town of Serenity
under a sky bruised with twilight. The name was a
cruel joke. Serenity was a festering sore on the height
of the territory. A place where men with no pass

(21:33):
and no futures came to drink, gamble, and bleed for silas.
It was just a place to collect the bounty and
wash the trail dust from his throat his face. A
road map of scars etched by knives and bad decisions
drew no more attention than a crack in the boardwalk.
Here everyone was scarred in one way or another. He

(21:54):
collected his money from a nervous sheriff who looked like
he had bought his badge from a mail or in
a catalog, then found his way to the town's largest saloon.
The air was thick with a smell of stale beer, sweat,
and desperation. He took a corner table, his back to
the wall, a habit that had kept him alive longer
than most in his profession. He ordered a whiskey and

(22:16):
let the noise of the saloon wash over him. A
familiar discordinate him. It was when he stepped outside hours later,
the whisky warm in his belly, then he first saw it.
He glanced up at the familiar tapestry of the night sky,
at the cold, distant diamonds of the constellations. But tonight
there was a new one. Tucked away near o'rion's belt

(22:38):
was a pinprick of light that didn't belong. It wasn't
the warm, twinkling light of a normal star. It was
a dead white point of cold fire, like a chip
of bone, lodged in the black, velvetist space. It seemed
to stare down at him, and only him. He blinked,
rubbing his eyes. A turk of the cheap rock, good whiskey,

(22:59):
he thought, But when he looked again, it was still there,
a silent celestial accusation. A faint, irrational chill crawled up
his spine, the feeling he hadn't had since he was
a boy afray the dark. He shook his head, dismissed
at his weariness, and retired to a cheap room for
the night. The next day, the star was forgotten, lost

(23:21):
in the harsh glare of the sun. But as dust
fell again, Silas felt a strange compulsion to look up,
and it was there, the Hangman's star, he found himself
calling it, and he started to notice things. He saw Cutter,
a gambler who had famously shot his own partner over
a poker, Han step out of the saloon, glance around furatively,

(23:43):
and then fix his gaze on that exact same spot
in the sky. A flicker of something fear recognition, cross
Cutter's face before he scurried back into the lamplight. Later,
he saw the saloon owner, a mountain of a man
named Thomas, who was rumored to build his business on
the bodies of his rivals, standing on his balcony, a

(24:05):
cigar clamped in his teeth, staring at the star with
a look of grim contemplation. Over the next few days,
the celestial paranoia began to fester. A silent, unspoken understanding
grew among a certain subset of Serenity's population. The back shooters,
the clam jumpers, the men with notches on their gun belts.

(24:25):
They all carried a new tension in their shoulders. They
all cast speriod of glances at the night sky. The
Hangman's Star was their secret, a shared burden they couldn't
speak of. It was a brand visible only of those
who'd earned it by spilling another's blood. Silas a man
who'd taken out more men than he could remember saw

(24:46):
it brighter than anyone. It was a constant weight on
his soul, a cold pressure in his mind, he found
himself counting the men he saw looking at the star.
There was at least a dozen in this one street town,
and he began to suspect, with a chilling certainty, that
the star's intensity was tied to them, It was feeding

(25:07):
on their presence. The first demise was quiet Cutter. The
gambler was found in an alley behind the saloon with
a knife in his back. The sheriff called her a
robber gone wrong, but silace knew better. That night, he
looked up at the Hangman's Star. It was still there,
cold and belovolent, but he could have sworn it was

(25:27):
infinitesimly dimmer. Its accusatory glare had lessened just a fraction.
And that's when the horrifying truth clicked into place. The
star wasn't just a brand, It was a judge, and
it had passed its sentence. The next day, two more
marked men were found to cease. A few between rival

(25:49):
freight owners had been simmering for months suddenly bowled over
into a bloody street gunfight. When the smoke cleared, both
men lay dead. That night, the star was not possibly fainter.
A terrifying thought entered Silas's mind. It wants us to
do this, It wants us to thin the herd. The

(26:10):
unspoken secret was now an open conspiracy. The marked men
of Serenity began to hunt each other. The town became
a killing field, adjudicated by a silent, cosmic entity. Alliances
were formed and broken in the span of an hour.
The sound of gunshots became as common as the creak
of the saloon doors. The unmarked citizens of Serenity barricaded

(26:33):
themselves in their homes, leaving the streets to the damned. Now,
silence was a predator by nature, but this was different.
This wasn't for money or survival. This was a celestial cull.
He found himself barricaded in his room, the Star's cold
life filtering through his window, a constant, maddening pressure. He

(26:55):
didn't want to be a part of it, but the
Star wouldn't let him go. It whispered in his mind,
showing him the faces of the other marked men, urging
him to be the hand that swung the scythe A
heavy boot kicked his door in. It was Thomas, the
saloon owner, a massive shotgun in his hands. His eyes
were wide with a zealous fire, reflecting the cold light

(27:17):
of the star evening. Silas Thomas boomed, his voice unnaturally cheerful.
It's a fine night for tidy enough, Ain't it this insane? Thomas?
Silas said, his own colt steady in his hand, insane.
I've never felt more say in my life, thorn Lap.
Don't you feel it the clarity? For years we've been

(27:40):
looking over our shoulders for the law, for revenge, but
we were always looking down. The real judgment was always
up there waiting. He gestured with his shotgun toward the window.
It's a gift, Silas, a chance to wipe the slate clean.
The last man standing gets to walk away free. No
one walks away from this, Silas said, his voice low.

(28:03):
Only one way to find out. A shotgun to roared,
blasting a hole in the wall where Silas's head had been.
A second before, Silas fired back, his bullet, catching Thomas
and the shoulder, staggering the big man. Thomas roared in
pain and fury, charging forward, swinging the shotgun like a club.
They clashed through the flimsy wall and out onto the balcony.

(28:25):
The whole town spread out below them. Stage for their
final act. They fought with a savage desperation, two killers
locked in a dance orchestrated by a distant, uncaring star.
Silas was faster, but Thomas was a brute. He grabbed Silas,
lifting him clean off his feet and slamming him against
the railing. It splintered, groaning in protests. Below, the street

(28:50):
was littered with bodies. The star's light was faint, now,
a pale ghost of its former self, but it still watched.
With a final desperate surge, Silas jammed the barrel of
his colt under Thomaster's chin and pulled the trigger. The
fight went out of the big man, and he collapsed,
a dead weight that crashed through the broken railing and

(29:10):
fell to the street below. Silence descended upon serenity, a profound,
echoing silence, broken only by the whisper of the wind. Silas,
battered and bleeding, pushed himself to his feet. He was alone.
He looked up. The Hangman's star was almost gone. It

(29:32):
was just a dying ember, a faint speck of dust
on the black canvas. But it wasn't completely extinguished. A tiny,
cold spark remained. He understood then Thomas was wrong. There
was no wipe in the Slate clan. The star would
never truly disappear as long as he silence still due breath.

(29:53):
It was his now, his alone to carry. He stumbled
down the stairs and out into the street, a lone
figure in a town of ghosts. He found his horse,
mounted up and rode out of serenity without so much
as a backward glance. He didn't know where he was going,
but it didn't matter. For the rest of his nights,

(30:13):
wherever he went, he would have company, a silent celestial warden,
a tiny pin prick of cold, dead light, reminding him
of what he was and what he had done. The
last man standing under the Hangman's star. The drafts had

(30:35):
scoured the world clean, leaving only dust and brittle faith.
For a year, Jacob Hayes had watched his homestead bake
and crack under a sky the color of bleached bone.
The creek had turned to a snake's skeleton of polished rocks,
and the old well, the one his father had dug,
had been nothing but a throat full of dust. For
six months, all that was left was his own stubbornness,

(30:58):
a force of nature almost as powerful as the sun.
His family felt the weight of that stubbornness. His wife,
Martha grew thinner and acquired her with each passing day,
her prayers becoming dry whispers. His son, Caleb, a practical
boy of sixteen, had a new hard set to his jaw,
his gaze constantly on the two remaining water barrels. And

(31:21):
then there was Elizabeth at ten. She was a quiet child,
lost in a world of her own, making a world
that seemed to be receding even further as the real
one withered around her. We will not be beaten by
this land, Jacob would declare, his voice of raw command
against the silence, and so they dug. Every day, from

(31:41):
sun up to sundown, Jacob and Caleb attacked the unforgiving earth,
chasing a new well, their shovels ringing a desperate rhythm. Then,
one sweltering afternoon, it happened. Caleb shovel struck something that
wasn't rock. It was a wet, sucking sound water. A
cry of pure, unadulterated joy tore from Caleb's throat. Jacob

(32:05):
scrambled down the ladder, his face cracking into a rare,
triumphant smile. They had done it. They had beaten the land.
Their joy lasted until they hauled up the first bugget.
The water was wrong. It wasn't a cloudy, muddy water
they expected. It was thick, almost viscus, and it clung
to the sides of the wooden bucket like oil. In

(32:26):
the dim light of the whale shaft, it seemed to
possess a faint internal luminescence, a sickly phosphorescent glow. When
Jacob dipped his hand into it, he recoiled. It was
unnaturally cold, a deep, penetrating cold that had no place
in the sun blasted earth. This is not God's water,
he said, his voice low and heavy with conviction. The

(32:47):
smile was gone, replaced by a grim mask of suspicion. Father,
it's water, Caleb pleaded, his throat raw with thurst and
hope we can boil it. No, Jacob comm out and,
in his authority absolute, we will not touch it. It's tainted,
a trick of the devil to test our faith. He

(33:08):
forbade them from drinking it. He would keep digging, he declared.
A few yards over through water, clean water was close.
But as he spoke, his eyes kept darting back to
the bucket of glowing liquid, as if it were a
coil serpent. That night, the nightmares began. It wasn't just
one person's bad dream, but to share it hard that

(33:30):
infected the whole family. They all saw the same thing,
sprawling weird cities of black, greasy stone, building in possible geometries.
The angles were all wrong, pushing the eye and sickening
the mind. Above it all hung a black, bloated sun,
and from every shadow things washed with unseen eyes. They
would wake up in a cold sweat, the architecture of

(33:53):
that dead city burned into their minds, the taste of
ozone and decay in their mouths. Elizabeth was the most
deeply affected. Martha found her one night, standing by the
new well, her head cocked as if listening to a
faint melody. The faint glow from the well water painted
eerie patterns on her face. She didn't seem scared, she

(34:13):
seemed attentive. Soon after she began to change, the girl
who was once merely quiet, became utterly silent. Then she
began to speak again, but the words were not English.
It was a flowing, siltibate language, full of soft clicks
and long drawn out vows there was a language that
sounded ancient and utterly alien. She spent her days in

(34:36):
the shade of the cabin, a stick in her hand,
drawn in the dust. Her drawings were not the simple
pictures of a child. They were complex, maddeningly intricate geometric patterns,
spirals that seemed to fold into themselves, triangles with shifting angles,
lines that implied dimensions that had no right to exist.
They were maps of the nightmare city. When Martha, her

(34:59):
heart ache with fear, knelt beside her and asked what
she was doing. Elizabeth looked up, her eyes clear and calm.
She pointed a small finger at the drawings, then at
the well, and whispered in her new alien tongue. Though
Martha could not understand the words, the meaning was terrifyingly clear.
The teacher below is showing me the true shape of things.

(35:22):
Then the dust storm was the final blow. It came
without warning, a rolling brown wall that swallowed the sky
and imprisoned them in the cabin for three days. The
wind howled, sand blasting their small home. The last of
the clean water was gone by the second day. Their
lips cracked, their throats burned, Jacob sat with his bible,
his face a stony mask of defiance. Caleb paled weak,

(35:45):
finally broke, we have to drink it. Father, He rasped,
his voice barely a whisper, will die. We will keep
our faith. Jacob counted, his voice hollow. We will not
drink from a poisoned well. Elizabeth is not dying. Caleb
shot back, his gaze falling on his sister. It was true.
While they withered, Elizabeth seemed untouched, her skin was clear,

(36:09):
her eyes bright. She sat in her corner, quietly, tracing
her impossible patterns on the floorboards, humming a strange atonal lullaby.
That night, Martha made her choice. Her husband's faith was
a rock, but it was a rock that would crush
the ball. Her daughter was a living proof that the
well offered something other than death. With Jacob boss in

(36:30):
a fitful, dehydrated sleep, she took the bucket and slipped
out into the dying storm. She returned with the glowing water,
its cold light filling the dark cabin. She knelt by Caleb, first,
offering him the dipper. He hesitated for only a second
before grabbing it and drinking greedily. Then she turned to
her husband, who was now awake, his eyes wide with horror.

(36:53):
A bomb nation, he breathed, scrambling away from her, as
if she were a leper. You have damned us. All
but Martha's eyes were on Caleb. As the boy drank,
a profound change came over him. His eyes, which had
been dull with thirst, widened with a sudden, terrifying comprehension.
He looked from the bucket to his sister's drawings on

(37:14):
the floor. He gasped, not in pain, but in revelation.
He pointed to a complex, interlocking series of lines. He
began to speak, and the same syllaban alien language that
had claimed his sister now flowed from his lips. Elizabeth
looked up and smiled. She crawled over to him, took
his hand, and together they began to correct a flaw

(37:36):
in one of the drawings. The teacher below had a
new student. Jacob was an island in his own home.
His family was lost to him, communing in a language
of madness, their minds intertwined with a thing that slept
in the cold, dark water beneath his land. He was
the last remnant of the world. He knew in a
house that had become an outpost for another. Martha offered

(37:59):
him the dipper one last time, her face impassive. He
stared at the glowing water, then at the faces of
his children, their eyes reflecting the impossible geometry they now
understood so well. He could feel the thirst clad at
his throat, a physical torment, but a greater, more terrifying
thirst seemed to emanate from the bucket, the thirst of

(38:21):
an ancient, patient intelligence that had waited in the dark
for a very, very long time. He had a choice,
dive thirst, clinging to his faith insanity, or drink deep
and surrender his mind. The sun was a white, hot

(38:42):
coin and a bleached blue sky. Jonas was a man
who understood the desert. He understood the shimmering heat haze
that played tricks on the eye, the profound thirsts that
could drive a man mad, and the crushing weight of
a silence so complete it felt like a physical presence.
He was a man of tangible things, of the heft

(39:02):
of his pistol and the solid warmth of his horse rock.
What he did not understand was the shadow that trailed him.
He first noticed it at noon. The sun was directly
overhead and His shadow should have been a tight, dark
puddle beneath him and his horse. Instead, it was elongated,
stretched out behind them, as if cast by a low

(39:24):
afternoon sun. He dismissed it as a trick of the heat,
a distortion caused by the shimmering air, But the feeling
of wrongness lingered. Now would the sun beginning its slow
westward descent. The feeling had curdled into a cold certainty.
His real shadow, the one that obeyed the laws of
God and light, stretched long and thin before him. But

(39:47):
there was another one, a second, darker patch of blackness
that clung to his heels. It was this second shadow
that was wrong. He pulled rock to a hawk, the
horse stamping nervously, sensing it rider's unease, Jonas watched the ground.
His true shadow stopped with him, a perfect still silhouette.

(40:08):
The other one, however, did not. It seemed to pool
for a moment. Then it slid, detaching from the heels
of his boots and flowing over the cracked earth like
a spill of black ink. It contorted, twisting into shape
that was not his, something vaguely serpentine, before reattaching itself
to him. Jonas's blood ran cold. He was a practical

(40:30):
bed He had faced bandits, wolves in the raw fury
of a prairie storm. He knew how to fight what
he could see in touch. This was something else entirely.
He drew his colt in a familiar way to small comfort,
and fired around into the dark patch on the ground.
The bullet kicked up a puff of dust, leaving a
small crater in the earth. The shadow was utterly unaffected.

(40:55):
It rippled almost lazily, as if in amusement. A primal fear,
the kind he hadn't felt since he was a child,
took hold. This thing was not a shadow. It was
a creature that wore the shape of a shadow, a
predator from a place with different rules. He spurred rock
into a gallop, his heart hammered against his ribs. He

(41:17):
didn't know what he was running from, but his instincts
screamed at him to flee. He wrisked a glance over
his shoulder. The thing kept pace, effortlessly, flowing along the
ground behind him, a silent, two dimensional pursuer. He came
to a small outcropping of rock, and an idea born
of desperation sparked in his mind. He leaped from his

(41:40):
horse's back and scrambled up the sunder in space of
the rock. He stood atop it, fully exposed to the
sun's rays, and looked down the shadow thing stopped at
the base of the rock. It could not seem to
leave the shadow cast by the rock itself. It slithered
back and forth along the line where light met dark,

(42:00):
a caged animal, its form shifting restlessly. He understood sunlight.
This thing was bound to the darkness. It could not
enter the direct, cleansing light of the sun. It was
safe for now, But this sanctuary was also a clock.
The sun was already touching the tops of the distant masis.

(42:21):
His safety was measured in the dwindling hours of daylight,
and so the race began. He stayed on the high ground,
moving from one sun lit patch to another, a desperate
game of celestial hopscotch. The landscape, once a wide open expanse,
transformed into a treacherous minefield. Every rock, every stunted thorny

(42:42):
bush cast a long dark shadow, a potential ambush point,
a hiding place through the thing that hunted him. His
pursuer grew bolder. It would detach from his own shadow
and dart across a patch of darkness to lie in
wait for him. He saw it slither into the shadow
of a top cigaro and had to veer the horse sharply,

(43:03):
which made it whiny interror. The thing was learning, It
was using the terrain against him. The psychological toll was immense.
His eyes, raw from the glare, darted everywhere at once.
He was no longer just a rider, but a navigator
of light and dark, his mind constantly calculating angles and

(43:23):
trajectories of the dying sun. The world was no longer
made of rock and sand, but of safety and peril,
light and death. As the sun sank lower, painting the
sky and hues of orange and blood red, the shadows stretched,
becoming vast oceans of darkness. The safe islands of light
grew smaller and farther apart. Jonas was forced to make

(43:46):
frantic dashes across shattered ground, his skin crawling with the
feeling of the thing flowing just inches behind him. He
could feel its presence, a palpable coldness, a drain on
the very air. He found himself off on a wide
flat mesa, a final raised platter of rock. There was
nowhere else to climb. The sun was a burning sliver

(44:08):
on the horizon. His own shadow stretched for one hundred yards,
a long dark road leading back to the way he came,
and at his heels the other shadow pulsed, waiting. He
stood his ground, his back to the set and sun,
facing the darkness that was about to inherit the world.
A horse, sins of the finalite of the moment, bolted,

(44:30):
galloping off into the twilight. Jonas was alone. The last
sliver of the sun disappeared. For heartbeat, there was nothing.
Then the shadow at his feet began to rise. It
was no longer a flat patch on the ground. It
peeled itself from the rock, gaining a horrifying, paper thin

(44:51):
third dimension. It rose like a sheet of black cloth
in the wind, Silent and absolute. It was taller than him,
a featureless, man shaped hole in reality. He fired his
colt emptying every chamber into the rising darkness. The bullets
passed through it without effect, their passage marked by nothing.

(45:12):
The thing advanced, its coldness, watching over him, stealing the
breath from his lungs. It didn't grab him, it didn't
tear at him. It simply flowed over him. He felt
a terrifying, crushing pressure from all sides, as if the
world were being flattened. The sounds of the desert, the wind,
the chirping of a lone cricket were instantly silenced, replaced

(45:36):
by profound and absolute void. His vision dissolved into pure,
featureless black. He tried to scream, but he had no breath.
He tried to struggle, but it was as if he
had no limbs. He was being erased, smoothed out, pulled
into a world of two dimensions. His last sensation was

(45:56):
being folded like a piece of paper into space. There
was infinitely thin and utterly empty. The moon rose, casting
a pale silver light over the empty mesa. There were
no footprints, no signs of a struggle. Rock. The horse
stood a mile away, trembling, staring at the spot where

(46:16):
his rider had been, But there was nothing there, nothing
but rock and sand and the vast, silent desert which
captain secrets well. Jonas was gone, a footnote and a
story no one would ever read, absorbed by the shadow
that walked on the dark side of the world. Now

(46:41):
Kane was a man who specialized and disappeared. He could
beld into a saloon crowd, vanish into a box canyon,
or simply fade into the vast, indifferent landscape of the west.
He was running from a name he no longer used
and a crime he could never forget. So when he
found in the canyon, it felt like a gift from Providence.

(47:03):
Talked away behind a screen of rock and juniper, the
entrance was nearly invisible, and nestled within it, bristined and
untouched by the harsh world. Outside was a town. The
sign read Haven's Rest. It was perfect, almost too perfect.
The clapboard buildings were freshly painted, the street was free

(47:24):
of mud manure, and flowers boomed in window boxes, their
colors vibrant against the dark wood. But the most perfect
thing about it was the silence. It was a deep,
profound silence, not of emptiness, but of stillness. He rode
down the main street, his horse hoof beats sounded like

(47:45):
cannon shots in the quiet. He saw people. A blacksmith
stood at his anvil, his hammer raised high, his muscles
tensed for a blow that never fell. The iron on
the anvil was cold and black. In the salute, A
girl with red hair was frozen in the act of
pouring a drink from an empty bottle into a clean glass.

(48:06):
Her smile was wide and welcoming, but her eyes were vacant.
A cold knot of unease tightened in Kane's stomach. He
dismounted and pushed open the door to the Sheriff's office.
The law man stood behind his desk, one hand resting
on a stack of wanted posters, his gaze fixed on
the far wall. He was breathed. A slow, shallow rising

(48:27):
followed his chest, but his eyes were like dusty windows
on an abandoned house. Sheriff Kane said, his voice rove.
There was no response. Kane waved a hand in front
of the man's face. Nothing. He was a statue of
flesh and bone. Caane backed out of the office, his
hand resting on the butt of his pistol. He started

(48:49):
to notice something else. A strange, pale, weblike growth clung
to the corners of the buildings and stretched between the
eaves like ghostly cobwebs. It wasn't no fun, as he recognized.
It was faintly luminous, seeming to punch with a soft
internal light, and he gave off a faint, sweet smell
like damp earth and honey. He saw it everywhere, now

(49:12):
wrapped over the sign of the general store, woven into
the spokes of a wagon wheel creeping up the side
of the church steeple. The town wasn't just silent, it
was infested. In the hotel, he found a room with
an open door. A woman sat on the bed, a
needling thread in her hand, poised a man to tear

(49:32):
in a child's dress. She was as still and as
empty as the rest. On the bedside table, however, was
a leather bound diary. It was open, and the last
entry was written in a frantic, spidery scrawl. Think smudged
as if by a trembling hand. It's in the air,
the spores. I thought the fungus was just a curiosity,

(49:54):
a strange new mold. But it's a parasite, not of
the body, but of the mind. I saw it happened
to Martha next door. She was humming a tune. Then
she just stopped. She stood in her garden for a
whole day, staring at a rose bush. The light in
her eyes went out. It doesn't kill you, It harvests you.

(50:15):
It eats your thoughts, your memories, your words. It takes
everything that makes you and leaves the shell behind. It
offers peace, a terrible empty piece. I can feel it now,
trying to get in. It whispers to me, promising to
take away the grief, the fear. It's so tempting to

(50:37):
just let go, to forget. God help me, I'm so
tired of remembering. The writing trailed off into a meetingless scribble.
Cane dropped the diary as if it were burning hot.
The sweet smell of the fungus suddenly seemed glorying, suffocating.
He realized, with a jold of pure terror, that he

(50:57):
had been breathing this aracence he arrived. He bolted from
the room, his heart pounding. The silence of the town
was no longer peaceful. It was predatory. He had to
get out, but as he ran towards the street, a
wave of dizziness washed over him. The edges of his
vision began to shimmer, and he could see the faint
web black patterns of the fungus overlaying everything like a

(51:20):
crack in a looking glass. A voice, soft and sweet
as honey, echoed in his mind. It wasn't a sound,
it was a thought that was not his own. Why
run it whispered, you are weary. We can feel it.
The miles you've traveled, the faces that haunt you, the
blood on your hands. Let it go. Rest, be at peace.

(51:45):
He stumbled, followed to one knee. The face of the
man he'd done away with, the man whose name he
was running from, rose in his memory, clear and sharp.
The fungus sensed his pain, his guilt, and it offered
him the one thing he craved more than anything, oblivion.
No more nightmares. The voice coued a siren song of serenity,

(52:07):
No more looking over your shoulder, just stillness, just silence.
Join the chorus, be one with Haven's rest. He looked
at the frozen figures around him, the blacksmith with his
hammer raised, the woman with her needle poised. Their faces
were so calm, so free. For a moment, he leaned

(52:28):
into the feeling, letting the sweet promise wash over him.
The weight of his past, the constant grinding fear he
could feel it began to lift. It would be so easy.
But as the memory of his crime began to fade,
something else rose in its place, not just the face
of his victim, but the reason, the memory of the

(52:50):
land Baron's cruelty, the injustice that had simmered for years,
the final explosive act of rage. It wasn't just a
memory of guilt. It was a memory of who he was.
That rage, that choice, that single violent act, had set
him on this path to race It would be to
race himself. The pain was the proof he was still alive.

(53:14):
No a raw act of defiance, he pushed himself to
his feet, shaking his head to clear the sweet fog.
My ghosts are my own. The voice and his head changed.
The sweet cooing tone vanished, replaced by a piercing, psychic
shriek of frustration. The peace of Haven's Rest shattered. The

(53:35):
blacksmith's hammer, which had been frozen for what might have
been years, came whistling down, smashing the cold anvil with
a deafening clag, the echo through the street. A saloon
girl hurled her bottle, not at a glass, but at
Kane's head. He duck and it shattered against the wall
behind him. The sheriff in his office drew his pistol
with a slow, mechanical scrape of metal on leather. The

(54:00):
people of Haven's Rest began to move, not with life,
but like marinitts, yanked by unseen stirrings. Their movements were jerky, unnatural,
their blank faces a horrifying contrast to their violent actions.
They were the funguses, antibodies, and caine was the infection.
They shambled towards him, a silent, placid mob. Kane drew

(54:22):
his coat, but he didn't fire. What was the point?
These people were already gone. He showed past a frozen
faced farmer who swung a pitchfork with clumsy forest and ran.
He knew he couldn't just fleae the canyon. The spores
were in the air, a part of this place. He
had to cut out the heart. The sweet smell was

(54:43):
the thickest at the center of town, near the public well.
He fought his way there, using his fists and the
butt of his pistol to knock the puppets aside. The
will was choked with the fungus. A huge pulsating mass
of the pale, weblike growth spilled over its stone sides,
a cancerous heart that fed the entire town. He spotted

(55:04):
the General's store. Its door was ajar, its owner standing
motionless just inside. Kane shoved the man's pliant body aside
and burst in. He found what he was looking for,
a can of kerosene and a box of matches. He
ran back to the well, the puppet townsfolk closing in

(55:24):
on him. He uncorked the can and drenched the pulsating mass.
The fungus seemed to recoil, the light within it, pulsing faster.
Kane struck a match. For a second, he hesitated. He
looked at the faces of the people surrounding him, lost
in their terrible peace. He was about to bring fire

(55:45):
and ruin to their quiet haven. But it was a
false haven, a beautiful lie. He chose the ugly truth.
He tossed the match. The kerosene ignited with a whoosh
that sent a wave of heat across the street. The
fungus streaked sound that was not a sound, a wave
of pure agony that slammed into Kane's mind and threw

(56:06):
him to the ground. The pale web black gross all
over town flared with a brilliant, sickly light, then turned
to black ash. The townspeople collapsed in heaps, their strings cut.
The fire roared, spreading from the well to the nearest building.
The dry, perfect wood of Haven's rest caught quickly, Kane

(56:27):
scrambled to his feet, his head ringing. He stumbled away
from the growing inferno, his lungs filled with smoke and
seent of spores. He found his horse, its eyes wide
with terror, and hauled himself into the saddle. He rode
out of the canyon, not looking back until he reached
the ridge below him. The hidden town of Haven's Rest

(56:48):
was a funeral pyre, sending a column of black smoke
into the clean desert sky. He had destroyed its peace,
burned away. It's forgetting. He was still Cane, a man
running from his past, a man haunted by his ghosts.
As he turned his horse and rode back into the vast,
indifferent west, he knew he was not a victim of

(57:10):
his memories. He was their keeper, and that was a
freedom no false Haven could ever offer. So the campfire
dies and the stories are told, but the shadows they
cast linger long after the last amber fades. The West
was a frontier not just of land, but of sanity.

(57:33):
It was a place where the veil between worlds was thin,
worn away by solitude and the endless saching sky. These
tales are more than ghost stories. For a lonely night,
their echoes of a fundamental truth, that humanity is a
brief and noisy visitor and a cosmos that is ancient, silent,
and utterly indifferent. Remember that the next time you find

(57:54):
yourself alone under a canopy of unfamiliar stars, the silence
may not be empty. It may simply be listening. I'm
Steve Stocktor,