The October Records - A Month-Long Halloween Nightmare (Episode 12) - "The Pattern"

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Silas maps every incident across Millbrook and discovers they form an ancient symbol—not random points but thirty teeth in a vast mouth about to open. The Pattern is actually a drain, designed to pull everything down into what's been waiting beneath Miller's Lake, growing stronger with each fifty-year feeding. Margaret's investigation of the town square fountain becomes a nightmare when another version of herself from 1974 emerges and pulls her down through impossible depths to reveal the truth: the Pattern is the living anatomy of something that existed before land rose from the waters. The Blackwood family aren't witnesses but antibodies, ensuring the feeding happens on schedule, because the alternative is the entire continent returning to primordial ocean. Margaret discovers the list of thirty names for 2025's sacrifice—and her name is number thirty. The horrifying choice becomes clear: thirty souls or seven billion, and every Blackwood before her who looked for another way has failed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Calaruga Shark Media. Welcome to Ghost Scary Stories and the
October Records, a month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode twelve, The.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Pattern, October twelfth, nineteen seventy four. Silas Crane. I've done it,
God help me. I've mapped it all, every incident, every death,
every disappearance, every point of horror these past eleven days.

(00:45):
I spread the town map across the library floor and
marked each location the Davidson House, the church, the hospital,
the Brennan basement, the Hendrix home, the radio station, the school,
the apartment building, and when I connected them, when I
drew lines between the points in the order they occurred.

(01:07):
Christ It's not random. It's never been random. The pattern
is a symbol, ancient, older than Millbrook, older than the
settlement that came before. I've seen it in one other place,
carved into the stone at the bottom of Miller's Lake,
photographed by a diver in nineteen fifty three who died
three days after surfacing. The symbol is a doorway number,

(01:32):
not a doorway. A drain, a vast drain centered on
the town square, spiraling outward, designed to pull everything down.
But here's what terrifies me. Most. The pattern isn't complete
with thirty points. Thirty points just opens it. To complete it,
to activate it requires something else. The symbol needs to

(01:55):
be fed, and I found the feeding schedule written in
the original town charter, hidden in legal language disguised as
property law. Every fiftieth year, the founding families shall contribute
their share to the municipal reservoir. We thought it meant money,
water rights, but reservoir is an old word from the French,

(02:19):
meaning to reserve, to keep, to store. We're not contributing
to the water supply. We're contributing to what's being reserved
beneath it, what's been waiting, what's been growing, fared every
fifty years, with thirty souls, growing stronger, growing hungrier, and now,

(02:40):
in nineteen seventy four, it's strong enough to stop hiding.
The pattern isn't marking victims. It's marking teeth, thirty teeth
in a mouth that's about to open.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
I need to tell you again why I'm still playing
these recordings, despite what they're doing to me, Despite the
scales beneath my skin, the water in my lungs, the
fact that I may already be dead. It's not just
the physical consequences of playing multiple records, the fracturing across time,
the simultaneous drowning in multiple octobers. It's what Silas understood

(03:25):
and documented. These recordings are a controlled release, like opening
a valve slowly instead of all at once. If I
played all thirty recordings today, the pattern would complete instantly,
the drain would open fully. Everyone in Millbrook would drown
in minutes instead of days. So I continue one per day,

(03:49):
letting the horror seep in slowly, giving people time to
what escape. There is no escape? Prepare? How do you
prepare to drown in your own home? To understand? That's why,
To understand what our ancestors did to us. After playing

(04:14):
today's recording, I did what Silas did. I spread a
map of Millbrook across the library floor, marked every incident
from the past eleven days, connected them in order. The
pattern was different from nineteen seventy four. Not the shape
that was identical, but the orientation it had rotated seven

(04:37):
point two degrees clockwise, a specific measurement deliberate I found.
My protractor did the calculation. If the pattern rotates seven
point two degrees every fifty years, then after exactly two
hundred and fifty years. Five cycles, it completes a full rotation,
returns to its original position. Twenty twenty five is year

(05:01):
two hundred and fifty one. The pattern has made its
full rotation and begun again. But this time it's not
just marking points, it's using them. I went to the
town square where the pattern centers. There's a memorial fountain there,
built in seventeen seventy five. I'd always thought it was decorative,

(05:24):
but looking at it now, knowing what I know, I
see it differently. It's not a fountain, it's a cap,
a seal holding something down. The water in the fountain
had turned black overnight. Dead fish floated on the surface,
fish that shouldn't exist in a fountain, deep seafish, with

(05:46):
too many eyes, with human teeth. I reached into the
water to remove one, and my hand touched something else,
a hand reaching up from below. The mountain is only
three feet deep. I pulled back and the hand followed,
attached to an arm that extended impossibly far down. Then

(06:09):
a shoulder, a head, a face, my face, but younger,
wearing clothes from the nineteen seventies. You're early the other,
Margaret said, standing now in the fountain, water streaming off her,
like she'd climbed up from somewhere much deeper. You're not
supposed to find the center until day fifteen. You're from

(06:32):
nineteen seventy four, she laughed, but water poured from her
mouth instead of sound. I'm from every year, eighteen twenty four,
eighteen seventy four, nineteen twenty four, nineteen seventy four. We're
all down there, all the Blackwood witnesses, documenting, recording, drowning,

(06:54):
over and over. She stepped out of the fountain. Where
her feet touched the ground, the concrete cracked, water seeped
up through the breaks. The pattern isn't a symbol, she said.
It's anatomy a mouth, yes, But more than that, it's
the nervous system of something vast, something that exists mostly

(07:17):
below the thirty points are where it touches our world,
where it feels, where it feeds. What is it? The
thing that was here before the land rose from the waters,
the thing that's been waiting for the land to sink
back down, the original owner of this place where just

(07:40):
squatters on its sleeping body, and every fifty years it
turns in its sleep, and when it turns. People fall
through the cracks, fall down into the spaces between its cells,
into the reservoir of souls it's been collecting. She reached
for me with prune fingers, skins sloughing off in wet sheets.

(08:04):
Want to see something horrible, something true. Before I could answer,
she grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward, not toward
the fountain, into it, threw it down. The fountain was
a throat three feet on the surface, infinite below. We
fell through black water, past layers of sediment that were

(08:27):
really layers of years nineteen seventy four, nineteen twenty four,
eighteen seventy four, eighteen twenty four, seventeen seventy four, at
the bottom, in the original lake that existed before Millbrook,
before humans, before anything that breathed air. I saw it,

(08:48):
the pattern carved in stone, the size of a city,
but not carved living. The lines were veins, the points
were organs, and at the center where the fountain would
be built centuries later, an i vast ancient opening it
saw me, and I understood every Blackwood had seen this,

(09:11):
had been brought here by their predecessor, had learned the truth.
We weren't witnesses We were antibodies the thing's immune system,
ensuring the pattern completed correctly, ensuring the feeding happened on schedule,
ensuring no one interfered with its fifty year feeding cycle.

(09:33):
Now you know the other, Margaret said, Now you'll do
what we all do. Play the recordings, mark the points,
feed the mouth, because the alternative. She showed me a
vision of what happens if the pattern breaks. If the
feeding fails, the entire continents sinking, returning to the primordial ocean.

(09:58):
Seven billion people drowning as the land itself liquefies, returns
to the sea. It came from thirty souls or seven billion,
She said, that's the choice. That's always been the choice.

(10:21):
I woke up beside the fountain, soaking wet, coughing up
black water, full of squirming things. The memorial plaque had changed.
Instead of commemorating the town founders, it now listed names,
thirty names the sacrifices for twenty twenty five. My name

(10:42):
was number thirty. When I returned to the library, I
found the map had changed itself. The pattern was complete now,
all thirty points marked, but they weren't locations anymore. They
were names. Thirty names from thirty families, and at the
same where the fountain would be two words in Silas's handwriting,

(11:06):
it rises Tomorrow, I'll play October thirteenth. Tomorrow, I'll learn
about the mine Tonight. I'm staring at the list of names,
twenty nine people who will die to save billions, and me,
the witness who ensures it happens properly unless I can

(11:27):
find another way. But every Blackwood before me looked for
another way, and every black Wood before me failed.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Caloroga Shark Media.
Some elements of AI may have been used in this
production that it was written, edit, mixed, and produced by
Real Live People Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott