It Plays in the Dark by Isaac Boissonneau

A very longggpastaaa!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I used to think that I was brave. In the summer,
I'd go out with the boys and take charge of
our little expeditions into the forests around our little town,
pretending that we were archaeologists, uncovering lost tombs and fighting
off mummies or mutant vampire bats. And by the time
I'd reached twelve, there wasn't a tree I hadn't climbed,

(00:22):
or a boy in school I hadn't ustled with. I'd
always come back with a scrape knee or skinned elbow,
with dirt and grass stains on my sneakers and burrs
stuck to the hems of my jeans, and my mom
and dad would just roll their eyes and smile because
I was just so precious. I'm pretty sure I was
the only girl in my class who didn't scream when

(00:44):
Ben Howlitz brought one of his dad's tarantula specimens in
for show and tell. I mean, the thing was dead
and behind glass. I was always first to take a
day or two. Couldn't stand the thought of someone thinking
that I was just some girl girl because I wouldn't
climb the water tower or walk through the graveyard at

(01:04):
midnight and touch the statue that was supposed to kill
you if you did. I didn't tell my parents about
those things unless I actually got hurt. I think I
had to go to the hospital like four times before
elementary school was finished. They were always pissed, but I
just bide my time until I could start up again.
I kept on like that, with fear and guilt in

(01:27):
my periphery, until the second year of middle school. We
were in Miss Newman's English class. It was July and
we were reading The Turn of the Screw, and about
halfway through we got bored and started talking about ghost stories.
Miss Newman talked about the Victorian tradition of reading a
ghost story on Christmas Eve. She asked us if we

(01:49):
know any ghost stories. Someone brought up Casper and we
all made fun of him for reading kids stuff. One
of the girls whose parents were laxer brought up some
rated movies she'd seen. Terry Listone brought up m R.
And James, because of course she did. And then Lee Howard's,
who was one of my closest friends, asked if we

(02:10):
know the story of the McKenna house. He says it
like he's winding up to give us all the juicy details,
eyes narrowed, his lips starting to quirk up into a
smirk because his dad patrols around there a lot, and
he thinks he can give us all nightmares. And Miss
Newman shuts him down. She didn't yell, she really had to.

(02:35):
She just snapped her head around, looked at him down
her bony beak of a nose, and said, no, we
will not be talking about that house in this classroom.
Do you understand? Lee did? Of course he did, and
he shut up. Most of us were scared of Miss Newman,
with her dark eyes, pointy nose, gray hair, and thin fingers.

(03:01):
She just had this classically stern, unlikable teacher air about her,
like the villain in a story about magic orphans fairy gardens.
And she lowed that house with a passion. She lived
close to it, actually, in one of three houses at
the bottom of the hill it sat on. We figured

(03:24):
she'd probably been there and seen it all go down.
I asked her once, right in front of everyone. I'd
never even considered the fact that someone would be furious
without raising their voice. But the way she said it's
all stories, now, get back to your seat, and the
way that she looked at me while she said it,

(03:44):
with her dark eyes punching holes through me, making me
feel like she was about to slap me. She scared me.
She was the only adult that I'd met who could
really make me feel small, stupid, and well childish, and

(04:06):
I hated her for it. I made her my nemesis
because the kid liked me had to have one, even
though I doubt she ever really gave me much of
a second thought outside of school. Still, I was fed
up with her attitude and I saw my chance to
have some fun. So after class had ended, I cornered
Lee and asked him, well, I told him actually that

(04:31):
we were going to go and check out the house.
His eyes lit up and he smiled this big, mischievous
smirk and he said, hell, yeah, I'm in Of course,
I dragged Grady into it too. Grady was my brother,
and our relationship was a mess. To put it lightly.

(04:55):
Back then, I was so full of fire, and he
he wasn't. He wasn't a risk taker like I was.
He was sort of an island, someone who sat on
the sidelines and read or built models or watched them
up at show. He didn't live like I did, and
back then I thought that meant that he didn't live period.

(05:18):
I was so obsessed with being strong and tough. To me,
he was just weak, So I bullied him. I told
myself that I was just toughening him up, getting a
rise out of him, getting him mad, getting him to
take risks. I knew better, I knew he was just
shy and sensitive, but I kept going so wonder he

(05:46):
didn't hate me. Maybe he did. I don't know. Sometimes
when it's late and I can't get to sleep, I
tell myself that he did and over until I get
too fed up to do anything that's sleep. So yeah,

(06:11):
I dragged him into it, cornered him after school, put
my arm around his shoulders, laid it on real thick
the whole thing. He actually put up a fight, which
was pretty surprising to me. He went on about how
despite what some people said, not many people actually knew
what had happened up there, so there could have been
traps or super old broken drug paraphernalia waiting to stick

(06:34):
us if we touched the wrong thing in the dark,
or druggy squatters, and who knew what they might do.
He even finished it off by saying, and if the
floor breaks and I break my leg, then you'll get
in so much trouble. Looking back, he was actually pretty convincing,
and I was way too fired up to let anyone
sway me. I just rushed ahead, told him to stuff

(06:57):
it or something like that we were going and that
it would be good for him, all that crap, and
he just he wilt it under me. I didn't care.
I wanted to stick it to Miss Newman and my

(07:17):
parents and every other well meaning adult and condescending teen
that had ever told me to stay away. And the
years of hearing the story had sort of desensitized me
in a way and also hyped me up to see
if the story was true anyone like this, give or take.

(07:40):
The McKenna's were a wealthy family from New York who
bought the land in nineteen seventy six, and by seventy
eight they had a house built and moved in. The
husband's name was Jared and the wife was Sandra. They
were both quiet, reserved people. Jared was short and fat

(08:01):
and rarely left his wife's side. Sandra was tall, sad eyed,
and her skin was the color of bread. Though they
were charitable, kind to anyone who met them on their
lonely evening walks by the lake, or when they worked
themselves up enough to go out to eat. But they
were fragile, not normal, especially Sandra, who kept showing up

(08:24):
at school plates and talent shows but couldn't ever stay
till the end before she had to leave in tears,
and who sometimes caught children by the arm and stared
at them with wet, dull eyes until they pulled themselves
away and ran. Acting like that, it's not surprised that
rumors started spreading. The adults whispered that she'd been in

(08:46):
and out of asylums her whole life, that she'd smothered
her baby during an episode of postpartum psychosis. The kids
told each other that she was a child snatcher, or
a witch looking for her next meal, or maybe even
a petiphy. While scooping out the choicest kid in town,
the lady my mom knew from church bumped into Jared

(09:07):
one evening walking from the town's antique store. He'd stumbled
and the thing he'd been carrying fell out of his hands.
My mom's friend, being a decent person, went to pick
it up and saw the cover of what was definitely
a book on the occult. She never told mom what
the cover picture was exactly. All she said was that

(09:28):
it was vulgar and utterly horrid. Eventually, as the rumors
grew and people started getting colder towards them, the mckennas
stopped leaving their house. Eventually, without any new incidents to
stoke the fire, the talk turned towards newer things to
be upset about, and the McKenna's sort of slipped into

(09:51):
ghost story by flashlight territory and that's where they stayed.
And then one blue gray night in July, when the
air was thick with gnats and the wind was cool,
the police got a call from Jared. He was in tears,

(10:12):
begging them to come quickly. Something's happened to my wife,
he said, it all went wrong. Everything's wrong. She's dying.
You have to help us, And so they do. Three
or four cop cars go squealing off into the night,
up the dirt road on the fringes of town and

(10:33):
to the McKenna's quaint little house. When they get there,
they can hear screaming and sobbing from inside the foyer,
and when they bust down the door, they find Jared
in the process of dragging his wife's body across the floor.
She's white, turning yellow from the blood loss. One leg

(10:53):
is hanging on by a nerve cluster, nearly torn off
at the thigh, and her belly and sup mauled. It
takes a proper autopsy for them to see that some
parts of her are missing. Of course, they arrest Jared.
The man's a babbling, drooling, screaming wreck who can only

(11:15):
say I'm sorry. Sandra, and the cops find the museum's
worth of occult stuff all throughout the place, so it's
not too much of a stretch to say that he
went and killed his wife as part of some dark ritual.
After everything, the house was left to rot. But some

(11:35):
people say that on clear, blue, quiet nights, when the
wind is cool and the gnats are flitting, you can
hear Sandra's ghost staggering to and fro inside, calling for
her husband to come join her. Obviously, there were elements
that kept changing. Sometimes her body is headless, other times

(11:59):
she'd be the one dragging him. The one that was
most common when I was growing up was that the
police found the two of them alive, wrapped in bloody
robes and standing over a baby or a kid that
they had just made a meal of. I's been a
long time going over what I can in the way
of evidence. I have a theory that I'm pretty sure of,
but I'm gonna leave it till the end. I want

(12:21):
to go over what happened to us before I lose
my nerve, and if I think I'm fine after then
I'll tell you. Back then, I heard about all those awful,
gruesome things, and although I did have nightmares, I still
felt this giddiness at the idea of going there, or

(12:41):
delving into the unknown like an old timey pulk hero.
What better place to test myself? Right? So we snuck
out at eleven because I thought it'd be cool to
explore the haunted house at midnight. We brought our backpack,
stuff full of horror comics and candy Halloween in July, flashlights,
and my little flip phone. The house was at the

(13:02):
opposite side of town, down a lonely little dirt drive
walled in by the woods. Grady had brought our dad's Kodak,
which was pretty much his anyway, and by the time
we'd gotten there, he'd taken about a dozen pictures. When
I asked him why. He sort of stuck his nose
in the air and said, because it looks pretty at

(13:22):
night and I want to enjoy it. I said something
swamy back to him, and then I pushed him. They
got up and shoved me, and then we were racing
the rest of the way so quick he always husband.
In the end, I had to trip him up as
he made it into the driveway of the house, and
then I twisted his arm behind his back until his

(13:45):
laughter stopped and the begging started. It was such a creep.
Probably smiled when I did it, and he's were quiet
for a bit. Afterwards. Lee called to say that he
was on his way, so that gave us some time
to look around the outside of the place. I've been
hearing stories about the place since I was little. Their

(14:06):
town was big, with forests on all sides and tall mountains,
nice blue lake, and there are dozens of weird places
you can still visit, the old rectory, the museum, the
biggest library in the county, the abandoned the wharf by
the lake, little stone circle near the hiking trail. But

(14:28):
those places were they were all charming, you know, quaint,
like an old Halloween die cut or a Ray Bradbury story,
Places that our parents approved of, places where tourists went,
places that had a history, that you could make family friendly,
that wouldn't taint our little child brains and turn us

(14:50):
into witches or drug dealers or whatever. The McKenna house
wasn't like that. The adults didn't like talking about it.
If I asked them, they'd just say it wasn't a
place for little girls to go playing. And if I
naged them enough, they'd get antsy or angry and they'd

(15:11):
tell me to go find some other place to horse
around at. Or sometimes they'd crouch down, look me dead
in the eye and say something like some very bad
things happen up there, okay, some very bad things, and
their serious voices as if we'd figure that out, and

(15:35):
they'd leave it at that, like saying that wouldn't make
me and every other board between and teen want to
go have a look. And people did go have a look,
but nobody ever went in, at least not farther than
the mudroom, which had a closed door at the other
end of it. And I don't think that counted, not

(15:57):
that I'd actually seen it outside of a few pigs
pictures after someone a few classes above me tried to
break a window. The place ended up being patrolled by
one of the policemen, usually one that looked suitably scary
to her kid, probably picked like that on purpose. Stuff
that got taken from the house was like a good
luck charm or a priceless museum piece. Toby Nash had

(16:21):
a boot that he'd taken for the mudroom, and he
treated that disgusting thing like a Picasso painting or something.
So with all that said, when I actually saw the place,
it had lived up to my expectations. It was a tall,
thin house, covered in narrow windows, almost like the kind

(16:43):
medieval soldiers would fire crossbows through. The top was all
green gables that were as straight and sharp as knife tips,
with a few old brick chimneys sticking out here and there.
There was an awning going around the whole place between
the first and the second floors, and everything except the

(17:06):
shutters and the roof were painted in this light blue,
like the kind of blue that you see in nurseries.
I remember the last rays of the sun bouncing off
the dark glass, and the cotton candy inferno of the
evening sky overhead, and thinking it looks like a fairy
tale house, and yeah it did, but it was more

(17:30):
like a fairy tale house a long time after the
Happily ever After, when the Prince and Princess had moved
away to bigger and better things and left their little
cottage behind to rot in the enchanted forest. Grady was
actually the one who got over At first. It was
the clicking of his camera that snapped me out of it.

(17:52):
I remember being glad he was too fixated on the
house to see the expression that had been on my face,
or even if it was for only a moment. We
followed this half wrecked stone pathway through a tangled mess
of a garden that led all the way up to
the little front porch, Grady snatching the polaroids that fell

(18:14):
from his camera all the while. There wasn't any graffiti,
but I could see a few places where some people
had dug out a chip of wood from the already
gouged up front porch. The door itself was really scratched
up too, but the knob still worked and it wasn't
locked or bolted. I said something like we should just

(18:39):
go in, maybe we can hide and scare Lee when
he comes by, and I didn't mean a word of it.
Grady gave me a look. He was really good at
mimicking our parents' facial expressions, but they never worked on me.
It was hard to take someone smaller and slighter than

(19:00):
you seriously, especially when you've seen them cry, when you've
made them cry. Still that time, I relented something, some
little need in my mind told me to not go
in without someone else with me. Lee was bigger than

(19:20):
Grady by a fair margin. He played a lot of sports,
and I knew that he'd bring up baseball, bat or
something with him, because he always did that whenever we
explored a new place. So we did some looking while
we waited. It ended up being only about five minutes,
but Grady got a bunch of shots of the actual house. Well.

(19:41):
I took a look at the garden. If you didn't
look at it, and I mean really look at it,
if you just let your brain file it away under
part of the house, then you wouldn't notice all the
little details, like the Doughey white clusters of fungus sprouting
up everywhere, even on the flowers, or how the roses

(20:03):
weren't roses because they were too tall and they had
big bloated bulbs that weren't the right kind of red
and their thorns were too long and black, or the
bird bath that was half sunken into the ground. It
all tangled with ivy, but you could still see that
there was a carving of a naked woman with a

(20:24):
hummingbird head holding the pincers of a giant scorpion with
a man's head. I bet Lee would have thought some
of that stuff was cool, and maybe it sounds cool
to you, But there in all that stillness, with the
humidity weighing everything down, in the shadows growing out from

(20:44):
the grass and the trees, it really wasn't. Eventually Lee
came panting and gasping up the trail. Grady asked him
if he was okay. I gave him crap for being late,
And then it was tough, and I didn't really wait
to open it. I just did. I knew that I'd

(21:06):
looked scared if I hesitated. I knew in some deeper
way that I'd just give up and walk away if
I let myself think about it too much. I had
to be the strong one, the personal ethos of a
tomboy tween. God help me. The door was heavy, and
it didn't make a sound when it swung in. The

(21:28):
air that came from inside was cold, dusty, and damp.
It was dark, but we'd brought some pretty powerful flashlights.
The door opened up into the mudroom, which wasn't much
to look at, just a bunch of crusty waiters and
old boots, one pair of which was missing a shoe
really a really moldy rug, and another door. I got

(21:53):
this overwhelming sinking feeling when I saw that door, this
understanding that we were about to go somewhere real for
lack of a better word, there hadn't been another place
in town that was off limits to us, and now
we were someplace that was actually forbidden to us, someplace

(22:14):
even the adults didn't go. We all knew, at least
at least I think we did, that we get in
more trouble than we'd ever been in. If we got caught,
or if anyone found out later, it should have been exhilarating.
But it made my stomach turn still. I made myself

(22:35):
take the first step. I brought a few things with me,
some wires, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a skeleton key
that my dad kept in his junk drawer. Obviously, none
of us knew how to pick a lock, but I
was ready to try something if I had to. But
there was no need because there was a key in
the lock, a little silver key with a big purple

(23:00):
tassel that was so grimy and dusty it looked like
some kind of mummified dead spider. Toby hadn't even mentioned
a key, none of the older kids did. I told
Lee and Grady about it, went on about what total
lying whimps the other people must have been. As I
reached out and I turned it, there was this deep,

(23:24):
resonant click that I could hear echoing out through the
walls and into the depths of the house. And the
thing popped open, like it was on springs or something,
and this rush of cold, musty air hit us, like
the house had let go of a breath it had
been holding in. I remember how we all gasped at

(23:45):
the sound. Lee whistled, or he tried to, and Grady
reached out to take my hand. Then he stopped, he
just hugged himself. I was glad he kept his hands
to himself because mine had gone wet and clammy. In
what felt like a second, we all went in single file.
The sounds of crickets, the wind in the trees gave

(24:06):
way to the creeks and groans of the house, and
what I thought was the scratching of mice in the walls.
The foyer looked like a smaller version of one of
those old plantation mansions, with thin white pillars, marble floors,
two doorways leading off to other wings, in a big,
tall staircase going up to the second floor. We argued

(24:27):
a bit over what to do. Lee wanted to go upstairs.
I wanted to find the nearest room so I could
snag something and leave. But Grady, in a moment of
bravery that totally caught me by surprise, said that it'd
be better if we went through all the rooms starting
from the bottom. We'd be legends, hometown heroes like Tom

(24:50):
Sawyer or something. We'd have pictures to prove it to.
The older kids stopped looking at us like we were babies,
and the kids our age would worship the ground we
walked on. He looked like he was falling into a
daydream while he laid it out for us. It made
sense a bullied kid might go pretty far to get
at least a little respite from everything, at least outside

(25:15):
of home. We went left first, the echoing marble gave
way to creaky, old wood, proper floors for a haunted house.
Right our flashlight beams pooled on the ground like a
little boat, you know, big dark sea, full of shadowy
little islands that could just barely make out. I hope

(25:38):
to find old blood, or a tape outline, maybe something,
but all I saw was dust and shadows. We ended
up in the living room first, and by my thinking
at the time, all my worries that the house was
going to leave us cold faded away. It was a
big room, but there was so much clutter there looked smaller.

(26:02):
There were a couple of chairs that had sheets on them,
in a ratty overstuffed couch that didn't a little fireplace
by the door at the far end of the room.
Stacks of paperbacks and newspapers, charts and folders, and babies,
not real ones, just figures, statues. But that didn't really

(26:22):
make me less creeped out. There were hundreds of them
sitting on the tops of the stacks, cluttering the coffee tables,
lines in front of the books on the bookshelf, boys
and girls of every race from every period, plastic dollar
store looking crap and antiques, realistic cartoony gave me a thrill.

(26:43):
Grady started taking pictures pretty much immediately. Lee went to
the stacks and they went to the bookshelves for a
few rows. It was all romance and stuff about color
theory and architecture, but it didn't take long for the
selection to change. It went from too sur with love

(27:05):
and the art of color to the expectant mother in
motherhood one on one. The last bookcase was empty. We
looked through the rest of the place, but there wasn't
anything else to interest us. I pocketed a baby figure

(27:25):
that I thought was the creepiest out of them, a
big headed, big lipped thing with glass eyes. Leese wiped
an old magazine without looking at it, and Grady Grady
took more pictures. Then we went for the door past
the fireplace. The hallway behind it was cramped full of
boxes and other things under yellowing sheets. The wallpaper was

(27:46):
torn all to hell, and there were holes punched in
the dry wall, with bits of stuff scattered around the floor.
There were two doors on either side, so I took
the left handed one and Lee took the right. Grady's
interest was four hors on the holes in the wall,
and he was taking pictures of the insides of them,
so he stayed behind. The room I'd chosen ended up

(28:09):
being completely empty, just my luck, so I waited a
few seconds because I didn't want to seem like I
picked a dud room, and then went over to see
if Lee had found anything. I'd taken like two steps
when I heard Grady gasp. I ran out and find
him with his back pressed against the wall, away from
where he'd been. His eyes were wide and the camera

(28:31):
was shaking in his hands. He was staring at the
largest hole in the wall, and I knew he must
have seen something before he'd even said it. He told
me that he'd seen what he thought were a bunch
of big, fat maggots writhing around a green ball, and
he even snapped a photo. The problem was his hands

(28:52):
had been shaking too much and the thing had fallen
into the hole. I humored him, shining my light inside
it even poked my head in a way. No maggots,
no green ball, no photo, just slick wood and a
few wisps of fiberglass. Admittedly, I didn't linger. I thought

(29:16):
that it was just a cramped little alcove between the joists,
but it was actually a lot bigger than that. I
could reach out my hand and only barely graze the
sheathed insides. It was like a thin, dark extra hallway
that had been walked over. The air in there was damp,
like the guts of the house had taken a bit

(29:36):
of every storm that had ever weathered and kept it in.
It was cold, too, way colder than the rest of
the house. But when my fingertips touched the sheathing, it
came away slimy, like I'd picked up a slug and
with a few extra splinters. After I'd taken my hand

(29:57):
out of there, I made sure to give Grady my
best unimpressed mod look. He wasn't the only one who
could do that, before I went to go check on Lee.
After that we went back to the foyer. I checked
the door on the right. There was the kitchen, and
the only interesting things we found in there were a
pan roast that was so old it had ossified, and

(30:18):
a cookbook with recipes to encourage male fertility, which made
Lee and I giggle like morons for a good minute.
From there, it was onto the second floor. The stairs
leading up groaned every few seconds. Grady asked us if
we could please go single file and go slowly. We did,
though I teased him a little about it. The upstairs

(30:40):
felt different when we got to it, kind of cold
but humid. The air there stuck to my lungs and
I broke out in a cold sweat before I knew it.
Poor Grady had to make a go for his inhaler
a min and inn and Lee started coughing like he consumption.

(31:01):
It's tank too. I've been an EMT for about five
years now, and in my opinion, there's two kinds of smells.
The gut churningly bad acute kinds like when a person
has a seizure and loses control of their bowels, and
the creeping chronic kind of smell like in a burn

(31:22):
ward or the ICU. Places that have a smell and
then an under smell, something that all the antiseptic and
industrial bleach can't totally wipe away. It's the kind of
smell that's what's the word. It insinuates itself, creeps up

(31:48):
on you and tickles your brain until you realize, until
you realize what it is, and then you can't stop
noticing it. That's what The whole upstairs of the McKenna
house smelled like, like something curdling, fermenting, it growing just
on the edge of notice. No wonder, we all started

(32:09):
feeling so sick. The actual layout of the upstairs was odd,
two long hallways on either side, and the left had
two rooms. The right looked like it had only one,
but I couldn't tell, so I decided we saved that
one for last. The first room we went in turned
out to be the bathroom. It looked like you'd imagine.

(32:30):
The second was the bedroom, shag carpeting that had gone
ratty with time, a big night stand covered in picture albums,
a few bottle of prescription antidepressants, a closet without a door,
and a king sized bed that had had all its
covers and sheets taken off. There was a big duvet
on one side, and on the wall right next to

(32:52):
it was this big gash in the dry wall that
was taller than me and nearly as wide. They went
over and started taking pictures, though he had to come
back after a minute because the smell was making him queasy.
Lee actually wanted to go in and see where it went.
But I told him he was too fat to fit,
and Grady butted in before we started to fist fight

(33:15):
in the Haunted house and told him that he saw
lots of rusty nails sticking out everywhere, which wasn't true.
I felt Lee's eyes burning into the back of my
neck or he moved on to the second room, but
I knew, I knew he wouldn't try anything until later,
if he did at all. I mean, he just took
my brother at his word, and he didn't usually do that,

(33:38):
so maybe he was just trying to sound macho and
waiting for us to I don't know, give him permission
to let it go, if that makes any sense. Normally,
if that kind of tension broke out between us, we'd
snipe back and forth and maybe get in a proper fight.
But we'd been marinating in the atmosphere of this damn

(33:58):
house for about a half an hour, and we kept
starting to talk and then second guessing ourselves before the
words came out. So we stood there in awkward silence
until Grady asked if we were going back. Obviously I
heard the words more than the actual worried tone and
took it for a jibe. So I scoffed and told

(34:18):
him that we had one more room left and then
maybe we could leave. We got halfway down the right
hall when Lee got his revenge by jostling me. I stumbled,
reaching out and put a hand on the wall to
steady myself. My palm hit a doorknob. It's hard to
describe the feeling that came over me when I actually

(34:40):
turned and looked where I put my hand. It was
like looking at a page in a book when you're
beyond tired. My vision got all splotchy, and I felt
this greasy feeling in my gut. I blinked and all
I could see was plaster and mold, and then I
blinked again, and there was a door, and then whatever

(35:05):
it was went away. My hand was on the knob,
and I could taste chalk in the air. Looking back
on it, it should have been obvious would have happened,
but I think I legitimately thought that it had been
a trick of a light or my mind being addled
from the awful stink in the dust. I bet you

(35:28):
anything that if I had actually looked before I tried
to open the door, Lee and Grady would have started
staring at me and the wall with slack jaws and
buggy eyes. It was locked, so I took out the
crowbar and I broke it open. The room turned out
to be the study, and it was quiet, not a

(35:53):
thing moving. There no rats in the walls, just the
creaking of the floors and the whistling of the wind outside.
That's how it seemed. At least. It was a big
room with pictures on every inch of wall by cheap
looking bookshelves filled the capacity, a gouged up and ransacked desk,

(36:15):
a few bins, a claw foot bathtub that wasn't hooked
up to anything and looked old enough to be in
a museum. And two statues, one short, one very tall,
both under sheets. I bet you that if we looked

(36:39):
at the floor, we'd have seen the marks in the
dust around the taller statue, or at least we'd have
noticed how that one wasn't fuzzy with cobwebs like the others. Instead,
we were distracted by everything else. At some point in time,
there had been a long holding table like the kind

(37:01):
that they have for bookfairs on the far wall, but
time and the weight of all the crap on it
had been too much for the cheap ass legs, so
he'd fallen on one side and dumped everything across the floor.
The pictures weren't good things for kids to be looking at,
not at all. A circle of men standing around a
smiling woman whose belly had bloomed like an orchid to

(37:24):
show the grinning baby inside. A very detailed female and
atomical chart that looked like it had been made in
Victorian times. A giant hermaphroditic thing with two heads. Things
like that. I think Grady was the only one of
us who wasn't creeped out by those things. He took

(37:47):
a picture of most of them, I think, then check
them out later yourself. Aside from them, there were periodic tables,
star charts, Norman Rockwell postcards, and sketches of children and
babies in sunny meadows or whatever the hell else. Photo
copies of old medieval tapestries, sons with people's faces. Felt

(38:08):
like finding that secret room in a serial killer's house.
With all the pictures and the newspapers, there were books too,
stuff like The Female Body Inside and Out, or from
Clay Life. Some of them were so old that they
were actually growing mold. Some of them were in Japanese

(38:28):
or German or some other language. Some of them didn't
even have titles or authors. It was Grady who figured
out what we were looking at. That wasn't much of
a reader, much less a fantasy reader. He looked around
for a few moments, brows furrowed, just like our mom
when she was editing her latest design. Before his eyes

(38:51):
widened and he said, in the same tone that he
had when we took him to see the whales at
Sea World, I think this is an alchemist's lab. I
had no idea what he was talking about, but I
pretended like I did anyway, so I didn't have to
hear him wind himself up into a rant. It didn't
matter to me, at least not at the time. He

(39:16):
went off snapping picture after picture until his satchel was
full and he had to hand it off to me.
I actually took them without messing with him. I mean,
the more proof we had, the less the other kids
could nasa us. Right. Lee was at the back of
the room looking at a weird lab setup that looked
like it was entirely made of glass. He was looking
at his reflection in the beakers and snickering to himself,

(39:37):
which meant that I had nothing else to do but
poke around a bit more. Eventually my eyes landed on
a little wooden chair that had two books stacked on
the seat, Pity as can be, one thick and water
stained one on top, only a step above being a
pamphlet the New Age of Insemination, or how the Great

(40:01):
Work may gift the baron and cell your seed in
follow ground. I didn't know what the word on the
first one meant, so my attention got snagged by the
other one, and before I'd even really thought about it,
I'd taken it. It was a thin book with this

(40:24):
really awful lithograph cover of a woman in pilgrim clothes
kneeling in a field full of baby's arms, all swaying
in the wind like stalks of grain. It was really
dog eared, full of bookmarks. It hid lots of writing
in it, red blue pan coming over every sentence, until

(40:46):
it looked like a weird three D I trick puzzle.
It's been years, but I've never been able to find
out anything about it, who published it, who wrote it.
It has virtually no online presence except for a few
people and a couple of forums that I had visited,
who have a copy or saw it somewhere. Bet you anything,

(41:08):
The other books in there are all like that too,
antiques that only alchemists, real practicing ones, not strip mall
spiritualists know about. Regardless, the place was too much for me.
I'd found my limits. I was done. I wanted to go,
and I said as much. And that's when Lee saw

(41:31):
his opening and pounced. He'd definitely been working up a
good head of steam since the bathroom, so he laid
into me. So I was chickening out before we'd gone
through the whole house. He finished it all off by saying,
I bet you're just gonna run crying to mommy and
run straight into a cop and get us all in trouble,
all because you were too chicken to go into a room.

(41:56):
You ever been so angry that you felt like your
skin was on fire, Like you wanted to cry and
scream and roar, but your mind couldn't decide on which one.
I stood there for what felt like a minute, literally
shaking with rage. I pushed the fear and uneasiness aside.

(42:17):
Made me feel like I'd just eaten all my Halloween
candy in one go. Lead to his credit, realized that
he'd gone too far and wisely started running. He got
out of the room and tried to go down the
hall to the stairs, but I cut him off, so
he ran back down the hall to the last room.
I caught up to him before he could get any further,
grabbed him by the hair and started laying into him. Wood,

(42:39):
groaning things crunching under our feet. And I didn't even
think to look where we were going until we tripped
and fallen. One second, I'm cutting through the air, the next,
I'm among brittle things, crunchy, brittle, cold things that break
under me and rip through my clothes and shred my skin.
Something goes through my arm while my hand goes straight

(43:01):
into something cold and mushy. I allowed this disgusting squawk
and push Lee away so I can get to my feet.
I braced myself on the floor and my other hand
hit something fuzzy and cold. And that's when I noticed
the smell, this horrible, sour, sweet smell that burrows into

(43:24):
my nose. I dropped my flashlight earlier, but Lee hadn't.
I didn't want to see. I already knew what I
was lying in hot summers spent near highways and culverts
and owning four mouths with black holes for stomachs had
acquainted me with the smell and the feel of roadkill.

(43:46):
The light came on before I could get up and
tell them to stop. They were everywhere, birds and mice,
cats mostly, though I saw a few dogs and maybe
an elk too, all rotting and melting into a knee
high swamp of mold and sewage. Basically, I saw the

(44:06):
flashlight being glinting on a dozen wide, dead black eyes,
the off white of teeth and fangs, the crayon drawings
on the wall, the gnawed up well used toys dotted about,
and all the filth like little islands, and then the
massive hole in the far wall that went from floor

(44:28):
to ceilings. The smell wouldn't let up. There was something
behind the rocks, something like petricorn flesh, raw meat. I
bent over to try and keep myself from throwing up.
When I did, I saw something lying on top of
the mess, stuck to it with biofilm. It was a polaroid,

(44:52):
a polaroid of an old wooden floor without any dust.
Some joyce, little wisps of fiberglass still sticking to them,
and a green ball gripped by five fat white fingers,

(45:13):
each ending in a black hook. That's what I understood.
I thought it would have been fun, our spooky little quest,
just something to do in a town that had started

(45:34):
to bore us. You don't really know that a horror
story is real until you're in the middle of one.
The feeling that came with that realization was awful. Obviously,
it felt like I had been walking across the road,
my feet firmly on stable ground, and then bam, I'd
stepped out into open air. I stood up, feeling like

(45:55):
the world was tilted on its side, hands sticky with green,
rotten fur and maggots. I turned to scream or call
out to tell Lee and Grady that we needed to
get out of there right now. And then down the
hall I heard my brother start to scream. It was
an awful sound, high pitched, throat splitting, helpless. He broke

(46:16):
in an arm once because I'd pushed him out of
a tree that I dared him to climb. I'd scared
him hundreds of times in October and out of it,
and I'd let my rough housing get out of control
more than once and he'd never made a sound even
a little like that. He'd went on and on. Something
fell with a crash that I heard him start to run,
then stop just as quickly, and then there wasn't anything,

(46:45):
no more screaming, no more crashing, just Lee's crying. In
my own heart beat, I knew we'd have to get
out of there. The hole in the wall was behind me.
I could feel it at my back weighting. I think
that's what got me to move, that kind of nebulous
image of something shooting out of the darkness and pulling

(47:07):
me down into the rot and then dragging me away.
There wasn't much real planning on my part. All I
knew was that I needed to get my brother and run.
I imagine taking the stairs three at a time, dragging
the boys by their arms, bursting to the front door,
running out into the night from whatever lumbering cool was
chasing us. I hauled Lee up and threw him onto
solid ground, and then I got out, feeling maggots dying

(47:30):
under my fingernails. We went to the door, threw it open,
and stepped out into the darkness. With only Lee's shaky
little pocket of light to see by. I heard Grady
before I saw him, and I I didn't have the
time to even finish thinking I don't want to see him.

(47:55):
Before he crawled out into the light. Every breath he
took was wet, and his hands were red. What it
had done to his face. God, I don't know how
he could have seen us or heard us. I can't

(48:17):
imagine how painful it must have been. He reached out
to me, my little brother, the person I bullied and
comforted and held as a baby and promised my parents
I would care for gagging on his own blood. And
I couldn't move, I couldn't scream. His hand fell. It

(48:40):
was like watching in slow motion, and that's it. I
noticed the things on his back, five or six of them,
maybe more. I was too shocked. They were too fast,
but I caught a glimpse of red and white skin,
lumpy heads with big wet mouth, fast little hands with long,

(49:03):
long fingers like dental tools. They all fell off Grady
when the light hit them. But I saw them scurrying
around him with the light didn't reach, brushing at his clothes,
tugging at his legs, making tiny, quiet, little suckling sounds.
Lee screamed, and maybe I did too. I can't remember.

(49:23):
I was just standing there, feeling like I was watching
everything happen to someone else. And then the light was gone.
Lee had turned around to run, which was stupid. They
weren't any other rooms. The only window there was was
boarded up. It didn't even matter. He hadn't even taken
two steps before something came out of the room that
we had just been in. She've never seen a monster,

(49:48):
a real one. It's been two decades that I still
haven't fully found a way to explain how seeing that
thing come swaying into the light from out of the
dark and has felt what it did to me. It
was brain searing. It was like being in free fall.

(50:08):
It was like seeing something impossible and knowing it wasn't.
It made my bladder give, my bowels burst. It made
me choke on bile, and the scream that still wouldn't come.
Imagine legs with no feet. Imagine red flesh on a
body like a honeycomb for vulture bees. Imagine a mother

(50:32):
spider with her body boiling, with her babies all jostling
each other, rippling, going still like lake water. Imagine a
big swollen her white head, all dusty and soft like
rotting bread. Though, imagine that somebody tried to sculpt a

(50:54):
baby's face onto it. Now, imagine it looking down at
you and cooing at you with a baby's happy little voice.
That's what it was, and it was worse than any

(51:14):
accident you could see, any sickness you could treat, or
wound you could suit her. Seeing it cost me so much,
my health for a good ten years, my sobriety for
nearly as long, my willingness to even be around children
for longer than absolutely necessary. None of my family knows,
so I bet plenty of the old timers in town too.

(51:37):
Aside from you, the only people I've actually told were
some friends at a college party when I was drunk
and high out of my mind, and Miss Newman. She
was the one who found me choking on my tears
and snots, stinking like dead things and waste. She had
been coming up the trail with the officer we'd snuck past.
She yelled something when she saw me and Lee racing down.

(52:00):
Then I heard I heard her gasp as we got closer,
and she could smell us and see us. For me,
there's nothing between hearing the baby's happy little voice coming
out of that that thing, and feeling the night wind
clawing at my cheeks. Missus Newman caught me when I fell.

(52:20):
She didn't shake me or yell at me. She just
she spoke to me, even though I couldn't hear anything.
All I hear all I could hear was my brother's dead.
My brother's dead, over and over on a loop. I
must have told him about Grady or Lee did. I
can't remember. I passed out pretty soon after my little

(52:42):
adventure was the talk of the town. I mean, I
must have told him about Grady or Lee did. I
can't remember. I passed out pretty soon after my little
adventure was the talk of the town. I made the

(53:05):
paper a few times, got talked to and yelled at
by the police and my parents. Lee's dad came by
and watched me for a while before he left, barely
talked to any of them. I spent a week in
the hospital and then the remainder of that summer sitting

(53:27):
in my bed doing nothing. I just sat in my
bed with my blankets wrapped around me, staring off at
my TV or wall, not seeing anything about what happened
that night. I barely moved sleeping until my body gave out,
or my parents made me take a sleeping pill. I

(53:52):
didn't talk either, but I did have my brother's satchel.
I'd forgotten that i'd taken it with me when I'd run,
but I had, and it wasn't long before someone found them.
I'm sure some people here have told you some stories
about me, but I'm also sure there aren't many who

(54:15):
think that it was me who killed Grady. And those
pictures are why I kept them, despite the smell and
what they show, and the fact that I can't even
look at the filing cabinet they're in without it all
coming back. I won't throw them out. They're Grady's pictures,

(54:42):
and I can't just throw them away just because they
make me feel bad. They stay there, but you can
take pictures of them, or I make copies of them
with the originals. The originals stay with me. They burned

(55:03):
the house down, It took people a few years to
actually do it. I remember one of my friends who's
a firefighter, told me the night they all went up
there ready to torch, it took them an hour to
actually do it because he and his friends were certain
down to their souls that the place wouldn't catch fire
if they tried. They ended up having to leave. Some

(55:27):
of them had fevers and headaches afterward. That's how it
went for six more nights across four months. It was
just before we were expected to get a huge snowfall
when a group of them just decided to get sloshed
and do it anyway. I'm told the place went up

(55:49):
like a grease fire, just kept burning even after the
last of the supports turned to ash. I go up
there sometimes during the day. There is just one big
black pit. I haven't seen anything grow there, and it's

(56:13):
been more than a decade before you ask. I can
see you gearing up to I don't know. I don't
know if those things are dead. I wanted to know
what I thought had happened to the McKenna's. I think

(56:40):
Sandra wanted children so bad that she and her husband
turned to alchemy to fight their problems, and those things
that I saw that night they were the result. Yeah,

(57:00):
I have some sympathy for her. She was clearly very
mentally ill, and the way she died was horrific. But
I mean she could have adopted, brought a kid into

(57:22):
their lives that way instead she and her husband. They
cost my brother his life. I'll never get the chance
to apologize for everything I did for leaving him behind.
He wouldn't have made it, but I should have done

(57:45):
more instead of stepping on him on the way out.
I hope he's okay wherever he is. Either kids is

(58:09):
me mister Creepypostam just wanted to tell you thank you
so much for watching Welcome into October for this year.
And if you like Tonight's story from Isaac Bossa now
please check out the link to his Etsy shop. Not
only is he a writer, but he also creates some
pretty incredible horror statues and creations, and if you're interested
in anything like that, please take a look. Also, I

(58:30):
want to give a huge thank you to everybody on
this list of patreons. Some of these amazing folks are
Diana kraus Asset System, Blake Rattler, Brandon Mendoza, Redda Crow,
how Tuna Chicago hit Man, Corey Kenschent Crusader, Jocobo, Dakota Best,
Daniel Poulsen, Don Taking Kaid Enchanted Buns. That's the Bean,
Haadie's nephew, Himbo, Jerry how I Am minute second Time Inger,
Girt Salstrom, Jay Curts, jat Is, Pat mcmog, Mister Marcus Splitz,
Psycho Melt Plant, Pis Red, Shadow Cat, Remember the Sun,
Salty Surprise, samarl In Seclude, Simbas, Bloody Mojo, Sky, Harber Smiley,

(58:53):
The Psychotic Sully Man, Tolly Sue, Team LAO seventy six,
The Demended Voice in your Head, The Chabez Brothers, The
Joker Brus, Tommy Walters, Vice, Roy Scorn, William Wellington, You're
bro Keegan Zubub and Shadow Gardens. A huge thank you
to you guys, everybody who shows up in the description
down below, and as always, folks, sweet dreams,