the Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio

A new series has launched! It has its own feed so as to not confuse the two series. Check it out on our website, somewhereohio.com, or search "Department of Variance" wherever you get your podcasts! Further episodes will only be posted to the Department of Variance channel. Hope you enjoy! Episode 1: New Employee Orientation. The Department of Variance, a clandestine government agency, experiences a crisis and the building goes into lockdown. Two employees–Jasmine Control and Scarlet Jaunt–are stuck on different floors as the emergency begins. The two must communicate and get to the bottom of the skyscraper however they can. (CWs: voice modulation, implied death, strong language) Check out our website or carrd for all the links you need! Join our Patreon for early access! CREDITS: Cast, in order of appearance: Jesse Syratt, Em Carlson, Emily Kellogg, Shaun Pellington, Justin Hatch, William A. Wellman, Tatiana Gefter, Saph the Something, Taylor Michaels, and special guest Shannon Strucci. Art by NerdVolKurisu Written, scored, edited, and narrated by Rat Grimes. Transcript available on our website!

It seems like the horrors of our dreams are most frightening to you... On the Eve of Halloween, a dozen storytellers sneak inside the abandoned Darklight Carnival grounds to share a chilling batch of stories in two varieties. This year they split up to uncover the fears that lurk within and horrors that walk among us. One group will head to the Ferris Wheel to tell tales of real-world terror. The other will venture into the Funhouse to spin yarns of the frightening spirit world. Which path will you embark on first? Nine II Midnight is a collaborative storytelling event between 12 podcasts: Hell Gate City Malevolent Nowhere, On Air Out of the Ashes Parkdale Haunt The Cellar Letters The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio The Night Post The Storage Papers The Town Whispers Wake of Corrosion WOE.BEGONE CREDITS & CONTENT WARNINGS CW: General horror, swearing throughout Produced by Harlan Guthrie Master edit by Harlan Guthrie 'Nine II Midnight' written by Harlan Guthrie. Performed by Harlan Guthrie, Dylan Griggs, Kevin Berrey, Shaun Pellington, Rae Lundberg, Vincent C. Davis, Jess Syratt, Alex Nursall, Rat Grimes, Jeremy Enfinger, Nathan Lunsford, Cole Weavers, and Jamie Petronis. Pick a path on October 30th at midnight, and keep your wits about you. 9️⃣🔪🔪🕛TRANSCRIPTS ARE AVAILABLE HERE CREDITS: WOE.BEGONE "The Almanac Building" was written, directed, performed, and scored by Dylan Griggs. CW: gore, animal death Website: www.woebegonepod.com _________________________ OUT OF THE ASHES "Train Ride" was written, directed, and performed by Vincent Comegys-Davis. CW: hospitals/medical issues, death, blood, gore Website: www.outoftheashespodcast.com _________________________ THE NIGHT POST "Dead Space" was written, performed, and produced by Rae Lundberg CW: animal peril, drowning Website: nightpostpod.com _________________________ NOWHERE, ON AIR "A Dream" was written, performed, and edited by Jesse Syratt (credits for SFX available in the transcript) CW: brief graphic description of body horror and sounds. Website: https://nowhereonair.carrd.co _________________________ HELL GATE CITY "Shadow of the Eliminator" was written and performed by Kevin Berrey with music by Cheska Navarro. CW: hallucinations/visions, bodily fluids Website: www.hellgatecity.com _________________________ THE STORAGE PAPERS "Silly Billy" was written, edited, and mixed by Nathan Lunsford. Performed by Jeremy Enfinger (as Jeremy) and Nathan Lunsford (as Billy). Music credits available in the transcript. CW: profanity, child injury, brief gore (SFX) Website: www.thestoragepapers.com

On the Eve of Halloween, 14 storytellers make their way to the Darklight Carnival to share horrific tales of mystery and murder… but not all is as it seems. This October 30th, the feed you're listening to now, along with all other participating shows, will post two episodes simultaneously for Nine II Midnight. One episode will feature tales that are based in reality with terrors that may be part of our waking life. The other episode will share the horror of the most esoteric and spiritual side of the dark and terrifying. NINE II MIDNIGHT is another collaborative storytelling event, and sequel to last year's episode. Both episodes are comprised of stories written and produced by the Nine II Midnight participants: Hell Gate City Malevolent Nowhere, On Air Out of the Ashes Parkdale Haunt The Cellar Letters The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio The Night Post The Storage Papers The Town Whispers Wake Of Corrosion WOE.BEGONE On October 30th, you get to choose which stories you want to enjoy first, then, make sure to listen to the other for the complete tale. See you then. The Prologue was written, produced & edited by Harlan Guthrie Guest starring Alexander Newall Series Art by Nathan Lunsford --------------------------------------- Content Warnings: Descriptions of Violent Death Starring: Harlan Guthrie Rat Grimes Jeremy Enfinger Nathan Lunsford Rae Lundberg Jess Syratt Shaun Pellington Kevin Berrey Dylan Griggs Vincent C. Davis Alex Nursall Emily Kellogg Jamie Petronis Cole Weavers

Wren has a chat and descends into the dark. Liz gathers allies for a revolt. Major thanks to the MVPs of this episode: Rae Lundberg as Shadow, Jess Syratt as Liz, and Nathan from the Storage Papers as the Director. (CWs, mild spoilers: fire, death, body horror, distorted voices and faces, static, dripping noises) Transcripts available at somewhereohio.com Apologies for the delay! TRANSCRIPT: *Fizzling Boss tones* *boss tones coagulate into a voice* BOSS: "Because I needed you alive long enough for us to talk." WREN, barely conscious: "wh-what? Where…" WREN: Drops of frigid water pelted my forehead, stirring me from the astral plane. Above me was a whitewashed ceiling, stone walls curving in a circle like a shackle. I wasn't restrained, however. I sat upright on crossed legs. Someone had been speaking just then, right? WREN: "Is someone there?" BOSS: "Ah, good, you are awake. I was a tad worried the furball out there hit you too hard." The curdled voice had to be coming from…somewhere, but it felt like it was all around me, under me, seeping into my hair and nails. The impact of the sheer cold of this place finally hit me as my head stopped spinning. I sat hunched for a moment before responding. WREN: "Boss? I-is that you? How did you–" BOSS: "I live in the wires, creep through static, remember? And your friend out there is about 50% wires, give or take. It'll be fine once its circuits or whatever they have reboot. But that thing isn't what I'm interested in. I brought you here to talk. So let's hop to it." WREN: "What do you want me to say? I'm sorry for leaving? For trying to help you?" BOSS: "Lucy. I want to talk about Lucy. See, Ever since our phone call, I've been…unsettled. Now that I've always been the boss, I have near unlimited knowledge of the DLO, of the things around me, but still no sign of Lucy. That bothers me." I warily stood up and looked around the frozen lighthouse. Long icicles hung from the ceiling–floor? whichever--dripping and freezing once more on the ground. The whole interior was covered in a thin icy sheen. No sign of Conw–er, the boss. I needed to find where this voice was coming from, but I needed time. I'd have to string him along for a bit and hope his confidence would play against him. WREN: "Okay, then. Let's talk Lucy. But first, there are some things I want to know. I've heard about some sort of machine salvaged from the lakebed. What is it?" BOSS: "Might as well indulge the little worker bees in a bit of honey while they can still taste it. Very well, Wren." As he spoke, I snuck around the perimeter of the dark tower, listening for any changes in directional sound. BOSS: "That machine is what made this place, made me real. It shepherded a new era for this state. Sure a few people lost a job or two, a few houses demolished, a few forests burned down, but it made way for industry, for growth. For potential. You shouldn't blame this engine for your troubles: it's people that run it. Without us, it's just a hunk of junk. But with our hand on the till, we can remake the world. You're stuck in the old ways, Wren. You're a dinosaur, flailing in the tar, and I am the good god above, shaking my head. Yes, this little engine can be dangerous, if you can't handle the power. Kenji couldn't. Look what happened to him. I could handle it, and here we are. Speaking of power, don't think I don't know about the little coup attempt you're plotting with some of my…former associates. It won't work. As soon as we're done here, I'm crushing your little salt and feeding her to the engine. Then it's back to business." I should have known he'd know. But just because he knew what was happening didn't mean he could stop it. If all went well on Liz's side, it would be many hundreds against one. Those are decent odds in my ledger. I just needed a bit more time. WREN: "So this 'lucid engine' really runs on human misery. It carved its way across the midwest, burning through the souls of workers, flattening towns, setting forests ablaze, bringing nightmares to life. But it's our touch that makes it glow, our will that drives its whips and chains. Is that right? A conduit for economic malice? You know you weren't always like this. I've heard your earlier memos. You were kind, artistic, even funny sometimes, I must grudgingly admit. I trusted you. I want to believe that person is still in you somewhere, trapped among the paperwork and oil. If it is, I intend to find that person, and bring them back. If it is not, I don't intend to show any mercy." BOSS: "You sure say a whole hell of a lot and say a whole lot of nothing, huh little bee?" I found no hints to the direction of his voice, but I did discover a narrow staircase winding down to the top of the lighthouse. BOSS: "I believe it's your turn now, Wren. Where is Lucy?" WREN: "I'll be honest with you: I don't know. I encountered her at a waffle house at the end of the world. But she didn't talk to me."BOSS: "Well…no, that can't be right. I was…No. No. NO. You're not going to play with my mind like he did. Said I wasn't real. You're talking to me right now! Real as real gets." WREN: "You sound unfocused, boss. Tell me this: what's your full name? How old are you? I'm Wren Crawford, nonbinary claims adjuster born November 1st, 1998 in Illinois. My favorite color is silver, I love driving at night with the windows down, and I hate pineapple. How about you? No easy answer? You think much too literally, Boss. Of course, 'real' can mean extant, physically in the world. But it has many other meanings, too. Genuine, authentic. You may be here, but you're not authentic. You are a fiction." I had inched my way to the stairs as I spoke. Before I could take the first step, he noticed where I was headed. BOSS: "Whoa, whoa whoa, hold on now, hoss. Sorry to disappoint you, but what you're looking for ain't down there. That's just the DLO's vault. All you're gonna find there are dusty old letters. You've shown a lot of grit to even get here, Wren, a good deal of stick-to-it-iveness. You're bright, hardworking, got a keen eye. You shouldn't waste your life scrounging around in the dark. I'm a compassionate leader, I recognize potential when I see it. So to make your trip worthwhile, I've got an offer for you. I could use someone else under my wing. A right hand, so to speak. Someone to watch over the warehouses and offices while I'm away on executive duties. You would have your own office–with a window!--your own assistants, access to all the documents you could want. You could escape the life of the worker bee. You could be the Supervisor, Wren. A damn good one. Wealthy, to boot." WREN: "In my time, I've come to find that wealth acts like a poison. The more concentrated it is in one host, the more dangerous it becomes. But dilute it among many and it's harmless, or as with a serpent's venom, a vital part of its own antivenom. It should be the sweet fruits picked from trees we planted ourselves. I don't want your poison apples." I stood at the precipice of a yawning mouth to hell. One more step and I could never go back. WREN: "Sorry, Boss, I'm no insect. I am a hawk." My foot hit the metal stair, and the world above went dark. *** LIZ: "Suuure, just round up some shadows and commit arson, Liz. This is a perfectly normal thing people say all the time, Liz. Well, no time like the present, I guess. Hey, uhhh, you at the desk! What's your name? *Harsh buzzing and static emanate from the shadow* LIZ: "All right, forget you then. Stapler dude, with the cool glasses. My guy, what are you up to?" *more unwelcoming noise* LIZ: "This isn't working. How was that other shadow able to talk to me?" SHADOW: "I'm not sure, how can you talk? You're a shadow, too." LIZ: "Christ, you're still here?" SHADOW, gently: "You needed someone to talk to." LIZ: *pause, sigh* "Sorry, I didn't mean that to sound so…" SHADOW: "Hostile?" LIZ: "Right. There's just a lot going on right now. I keep thinking I'll see her here somewhere. I can almost feel her nearby. But then I turn around and it's all gone, just a puff of smoke, sifting through my fingers like sand. I just want to be back at our apartment, building a little house in the sims together. Pretending that someday WE could own a house. I need to find her before we get out of here. IF we get out of here." SHADOW: "And I need to make sure that thing in the middle is taken down." LIZ: "Well we've both got something to do then. I wonder…Do you think that having purpose makes here us…tangible? SHADOW: "Makes about as much sense as anything else that's happened to me in the last 24 hours." LIZ: "Ever read any Sartre?" SHADOW: "No." LIZ: "Me neither. But if his stuff's anything like Groundhog Day, it's about how we're defined by what we do, not who we are. Making the choice to continue in the mouth of the void. We have goals, those goals give us meaning, that meaning gives us solidarity. Err, solidity. SHADOW: "Then all we have to do is remind these people there's more to the world than this office. Give them something else to live for." LIZ, speaking to the room: "All right, listen up, folks. You've been working, what, Eight? Nine hundred hours? With no break? Do you even know what you're doing, or why you're doing it? Look at me, I'm not glued to a desk, grumbling and sneering at everyone trying to be nice to me. I'm free! No boss to tell me what to do. Come on, you can't tell me you actually like your boss. What's more American than hating your boss? You in front, yeah I know you think he's a real pissbaby." SHADOW, whispering: "I hope you know where this is going, because we've got a lot of eyes on us." LIZ: "Good! I want them to see. There's got to be some part of you that knows this office is busted, this state is busted. Hell, this whole damn system's gone busto. You're all toiling away down here in the dark for someone that doesn't even know your name. Not to mention the giant column of flesh. That has to be an OSHA violation. And these folders on the floor–serious fire hazard. Do you even get sick leave?" SHADOW: "More are listening. Keep going!" LIZ: "Are we not meant to be free? To see the sun with our own eyes? To be entitled to the spoils of our own labor? Have you all become ants, mindless cogs to be spun, or does some sliver of you yet remain human? Can none of you work up the courage to hold on to that sliver of humanity? Lay down your tools and come with me. Then you'll find your answer. Maybe you can go home again. Maybe we'll meet on the other side. And maybe, just maybe, you'll get to kick the guy who did all this in the teeth. Shadows of the cave unite, you have nothing to lose but your chain letters!" *** WREN: "Wow, did you really come up with all that on the spot?" LIZ: "I may have been taking some poetic license with what happened near the end, but you get the gist." WREN: "Okay…then what happened?" *** LIZ: Many of the shadows dropped their papers and stamps, littering the floor with office trash, and stood on desks with me. Some shades remained hard at work. They buried their faces in their books. I don't think those shadows wanted to be helped. I think they were happy being pawns in the DLO's game. I only hope they'll find peace some day. I hopped down from the desk to be among the shadows. We gathered on one side of the massive file cabinet and started pushing. It didn't budge much at first, seeing as it was about 60 feet high. The tower of tissue noticed what we were doing, and sent some dark matter assassins our way. But more and more shades joined our cause, and the wall of drawers started to tip under our collective strength. It fell toward the tower in the center of the room. An enormous tongue shot out from the tower, halting the fall of the cabinets. I shouted for any stragglers to join up with us before it was too late. Then we did what you said to do. The friendly shadow I'd been talking to found a small space heater at one of the abandoned desks. She set it down next to the base of the giant leaning cabinet and switched the heater on. I opened a few of the lower drawers, which spilled their contents onto the floor beside the heater. A big pile of dry paper plus an unsupervised space heater…You can imagine what happened next. And you can imagine the smell, too, as the paper and flesh were licked by the flames. We stood in front of the burning tower for just a minute, outlined in the dark by a ring of righteous flame. And then with our shadowy friends, we left the way we came. Which is to say: through a series of unexpected and inexplicable moves and feelings that I can't recall. And then we were in the cold. *** WREN: I prowled down deep into the guts of the wretched lighthouse. Each footfall was imbued with growing dread. I descended into the darkness for some time, passing a grim scullery and fetid living quarters, until a dim light and faint roar made their presence known. As I continued, the light and sound grew stronger, and then came the smell: scorched oil and exhaust. Illusory hellfire overwhelmed my senses until at last my boots made contact with the lighthouse floor. The circular room was small, only just wide enough for a small walkway around the lamp in the center. There was a door across the way, so I started to work my way around the lens. But I quickly realized that in the center of this lighthouse was not a light. Instead, there was a horrific chunk of alien steel, like quicksilver in one corner and immovable iron cubes in another. It had pipes running up and down its sides, spouting haze into the tiny chamber. This is what had been making the dizzying light and sound. I felt a pit open in my stomach at the moment of recognition. I was terrified and thrilled in equal measure. I, much like Conway, had been unwittingly trailing this engine. This room felt more like a shrine than a beacon, a place of worship for a dead metal messiah. White fire burbled into the air, and the rattling hum of the engine grew as I approached. I was drawn to run my fingers along its cool surface, but I restrained myself, and recalled what had happened to the others who came in contact with the engine. I knew not where it came from and probably never would, so I looked at rather teleologically. I whispered to myself: "What does this thing DO? What is its purpose?" And I received an unexpected answer. BOSS: "It can make your dreams come to life." I crept around the edge of the machine to confirm my horrible suspicion. This is indeed where his voice had been coming from, but not in the way I expected. On the other side of this nightmare device was a face–Conway's face–stretched across its surface beyond the point of possibility. It spanned maybe three feet across, skin and metal fused and tangled, a simulacrum of a sick rubber mask pulled taut. The large eyes were dull and hazy, roving aimlessly. The distended mouth hung open, through which I could see the burning fire within. My autonomic nervous system kicked in, and unfortunately my fight and flight instincts often exert equal and opposite force, leaving me frozen in place. I couldn't move, and could barely make a noise. WREN: "C-conway…is that?" I whispered through my pale lips. The cloudy eyes rolled without clear direction, angrily searching for the source of my voice. The engine rumbled and spit embers, and then the mouth of the Conway mask moved slowly, with some effort. BOSS, stuttering and glitching: "Please, call me Boss. I'm your superior after all. Unless you're quitting now." WREN: "I already…quit. Boss, you…you're not…this isn't right. This isn't…you." BOSS: "Of course it's me. I am fire. I am steel. I am the Boss." WREN: "You weren't always like this. Do you remember playing in the woods? Studying art?" The voice using his face like a puppet grew harsher, more mechanical. BOSS: "Your conjecture interests me not, insect. I am the standard. I am the control. I am the Boss." WREN: "I don't know if you can hear me, but I'm not stopping now. I'm going into the vault, and I'm going to bring you back with me. The real you. Just keep…breathing, if that's a thing you still do. It's not over yet." I tore my eyes away from the shining abyss and passed through the door across from the engine. As it closed behind me, the sound and heat from the machine dissipated, and I was once again on my own in a dark, quiet cave. I could hear water drip from stalagmites onto the damp stone ground. My phone had just enough battery left to cast its light across the rock, revealing hundreds of boxes and bags, all stuffed to the brim with letters, packages, objects. A chef's knife, a game cartridge, cassettes unspooling their magnetic tape through dirty puddles. All things forgotten but not lost. I was finally in the Vault of the Dead Letter Office of Aisling, Ohio. *** CONWAY: "Yeah, good to meet you. *ow* Strong handshake you got there. So this is still my first week, what did he say I should do with the ones that uhh fit the criteria?" DIRECTOR: "The Boss says to make a note of it, send the memo to your supervisor, and place the letter or object in the shaft to the vault." CONWAY: "Right. Now pardon me if this sounds a little funny, but who is my supervisor? Where's this vault?" DIRECTOR: "At present, you don't need to know any of that. Just follow the steps exactly as prescribed." CONWAY: "Aw hell, you're the ones giving me health insurance, I'm not dumb enough to question that. So you got it, sir." DIRECTOR: "Good to hear. You know how to keep a secret, right? Because at this agency, we value our privacy. We don't need your average citizens finding out what we do. So this vault is where we send all evidence that we, and the things we handle, exist. You don't want to go in there. Could be dangerous. It's best that it's forgotten. You understand? CONWAY: "Not really, but I promise I won't go in there. Wherever 'there' is." DIRECTOR: "Oh and one more thing: you like baseball, Mr. Conway?" CONWAY: "Sure, well enough. And please, call me–" *STATIC* CREDITS Hey everybody, it's your host here with just a few brief announcements and shoutouts. So this is the penultimate episode. The next episode will be out soon and that will be the finale of the series, or at least the series as it exists now. I'm sure I'll make more at some point, but it's not going to be these characters, it's not going to be this story, it's going to be a whole different thing. So I hope you still enjoy it and I will certainly enjoy my break. I want to thank everybody who's listened so far, or left reviews or subscribed or shared the show. It really helps and it means the world to me. And without further, I'd love to give a shoutout to our lovely patrons: Carriers Alien Octopus, BertBert, Feather, Flo, and Jessica. Receiving Clerks Argent Lune, Elena, Ezra, Gadz, Jennifer, Kidcha, Spicy Nigel, Patricia, Paul, and Wheezy and Beaker.

Wren visits the town of their dreams. A man finds a doll that looks just like him. Featuring Jess Syratt of Nowhere, On Air as Liz. (CWs, some spoilers: alcohol, possible murder, body horror, derealization, dysphoria?, blood, insects) CONWAY: Sometimes a drop of water is all it takes for rust to form. A single grain of sand to gum up the gears. One thought to plant to the seed of doubt. Sometimes we don't want to think that thought, so it festers, mold in our minds. We wear masks, build whole cities–empires–just to obscure that one thought. It can drive some people to madness, others to enlightenment. What that thought is I'll leave up to you. I'm not here to give you answers. I'm here to tell you what happened. The facts, as I see them. Despite my power and wealth, something stung me. Ants crawling on my skin, salt in my wound. Defection among the ranks. And something else, too. A feeling that something wasn't right. That I wasn't right. That something had gone wrong somewhere along the line, but I couldn't remember what. You can't usually go back and fix the past, so what you've got left is thought, grains of sand, drops of water. Masks. What happens if the mask takes over, starts to be more real than the face underneath? And if you're a mask, who's wearing you? Was it too late for me to take it off? Was I really…me? Or was I just what I thought I should be? Was I in the cave, or in the tower? Wren, can you see my face? Or do you see the mask? *** The first thing I noticed was the fog. Wisps of light gray curling and drifting above the tall grass that framed the narrow road. It wasn't the fog itself that gave me pause, it was the movement. I hadn't seen anything outside of my control move at all these past 3 days. The yellow cones of the car's headlights illuminated a sign, bent and scored by weather and age: "WELCOME TO AISLING, THE TOWN OF YOUR DREAMS. POPULATION–" I couldn't read the rest: rust and time had swallowed the populace of this place. Though there was movement here, it was nearly silent and empty. No crickets, no birds, no rumbling engines or hushed voices. I suddenly felt very exposed in my car. I pulled off into the dewy grass and got out. I took the flashlight and jacket out of my emergency kit in the trunk and ventured into the haze. As I drew nearer, a cluster of short buildings emerged from the mist, and I could smell the lake on the air. Its gentle lapping barely pierced the foggy aura surrounding the town. The steady beam from my flashlight guided me as best it could, given the conditions. The second thing I noticed was the cold. The temperature dropped precipitously as I crept through the barren streets. I focused the flashlight between my heavy puffs of breath onto the nearby houses. Every home along this road was encased in hanging ice, sheets of gray vacuum sealed to the facades, dripping at the edges in a thousand angry fangs. The frozen tendrils hanging from every surface mimicked alien architecture: these were no longer houses, they were noneuclidean sculptures hauled from the deep itself, symbols of tentacled things unseen and unspoken dwelling miles below the surface. Spiraling, bubbling cathedrals dedicated to the worship of beings our species had forgotten, or chose not to remember. There is a difference. One in particular near the shore stood elevated on a dock, now smothered in sharp icicles. There it sat hunched before the lake like a withered king on a throne, now too thin for his hanging robes. All he can do is watch as his kingdom melts away. The third thing I noticed was whistling. As I explored the town further, I could make out a faint ethereal tune floating on the air. I followed it, and it grew in volume as I neared the lake. Out on the frozen piers stood a man in an orange vest, human alone amongst the jaws of ice, casting his line into what had to be frozen lake water. I shone my flashlight his direction, which made him pause. His shoulders tensed and the line went slack. He slowly turned to face me from across the sculpted pier. I couldn't see his face. Or maybe he didn't have a face. He waved at me, then pointed to my left. There in the frigid alien landscape was a warm glow. Incandescent light poured through windows thick with condensation. I heard voices carry across the dense atmosphere, quiet conversations, glasses clinking, laughing. I turned to thank this kind fisherman, but he was gone. Shivering and nose running, I hopped along toward the bar. Even if this was somehow a trap, at least I'd die warm. I could feel the heat and light radiating from the building. It stood out so sharply from the rest of the town. I pushed the door with my shoulder and it swung open. Instead of being greeted by central heating and stale beer, I was met with more ice. The door to this place must have been left open during whatever had affected the rest of the town. Ice hung from the ceiling, the bar, the rough stools. The walls were coated with translucent spears. The sole artifact spared from the ice was a black rotary phone, sitting in the center of the bar's counter. A sharp bell rang out from bar, through the town. I jumped, I'll admit it. I was startled. It rang again, and I turned the phone around to see how they managed to wire it up in this place. Of course, there were no wires. No phone line. Simply a disconnected phone ringing in a frozen town that shouldn't exist. Given the circumstances, I presumed the call was for me. *** WREN: "H-hello?"LF: "Weeelll, now you've stepped in it, huh?" WREN: "What do you mean? Who is this?" LF: "Just a fisherman angling for a bite. And what I mean is you've crossed over. Welcome to the unwaking world. I'm sure you've got questions, but I can only answer three, and it looks like you've used two. So I'd watch my words, if I were you." WREN: "I see. Well, instead of asking questions, I'll request that you tell me about this place." LF: "Clever work. Now this used to be a big lumber town. Imports and shipping. Real nice little place across the lake from canada. Town was run by an old robber baron's kid, scion of the Van Leer family. Had this funny notion there was something special about this lake and boy, was he right in all the wrong ways. WREN: "Maybe if you weren't arbitrarily governed by genie rules, I'd ask you more about this town's history and this Van Leer person."LF: "As well you might. Then sometime round 1918 was when it all went to hell. This Van Leer fella put together a team to dredge the lake. Lookin for a shipwreck from years back he said had some kind of vast wealth in it. The Oneiros. He even went in himself in his diving dress. I'll spare you the guessing as to whether he found that shipwreck. He did. And more. The crew dragged this massive crate from its grave in the muck and pulled it into the center of town. Took 4 men stout and true to get it open. Inside was a mass of iron, smooth in some parts and sharp in others, pipes and wheels gone wrong, like a steam engine built by a madman. Van Leer had found his treasure. It's said that the next night, he went out and tried to start this wicked machine. Wouldn't burn coal or wood, though. Needed something with more…vitality. So he fed its dark cravings with blood. The engine roared and huffed black smoke. This activity must have stirred something in the water, because soon a white maiden flanked by hideous beasts visited the town. Nobody's quite sure what came of Van Leer or the rest of the people here. Place has been frozen since. Or so the story goes. Now I'm not sure how much of that is true, but I have seen the drag marks. You can follow them if that sick engine is what you're looking for. WREN: "Oh, my." LF: "'Oh my' puts it mildly. Oh and Wren, I've got a warning: you're in danger. WREN: "Danger?" LF: "I'll pretend there wasn't a question mark at the end of that sentence. You're real, Wren, the only real thing here, and that puts you in a pickle. The last real person here was a man named Kenji, and I assume you heard what happened to him. WREN: "Oh, my…" LF: So that's why I had to call you. To let you know that he knows you're here, and his dark messengers are coming for you the second you step out of this bar. The frozen horrors of this town have started to thaw. Hope you can run, kid." WREN: "Oh…fuck." LF: "Now you're getting it. Well, I best be lettin ya go…"WREN: "Wait! I still have a question left. Where's Conway?" LF: "Which one?"WREN: "huh?" LF: "That Van Leer kid, name was Conway, too." WREN: "Two Conways." LF: "Sort of. Before you brave the cold again, let me tell you a story…" **** NARRATOR: Joe had always been a bit of an odd guy. A nice guy, but a little hard to live with. Real picky about certain stuff–liked to have stuff just so–had a hard time letting go of grudges, and usually felt that the people around him didn't really care for him. He had a small group of friends he'd known since college that he figured were accustomed to his predilections. They sure all had their own, as everyone does. But this didn't stop the thoughts from creeping in. The thought that maybe he didn't belong, that they'd rather he disappear. After living with friends for years, he decided it would be easier to live alone. Now moving is stressful, even under normal circumstances. For Joe, it was a nightmare. How to box everything so that it doesn't mix rooms, split functions, lose pieces. Trying to find someone to help lift furniture that won't resent you. Picking an apartment in the first place. Joe moved in most of his belongings, but found this apartment a bit smaller than his last. This meant some boxes had to go in the basement. Joe carried a stack of books in a laundry basket down the stairs, and nearly dropped it on his foot when he came across something he hadn't expected. Below his kitchen was a large crate, nearly as tall as the basement ceiling, with a scribbled note that read "do not open." Joe lasted about 3 weeks before he opened the crate. The best tool he had for the job was a screwdriver and he was too stubborn to get a crowbar, so it took him a while to pry the planks up, but eventually they splintered. The tiny bit of light leaking in from upstairs illuminated the interior, and made visible the shape of a man. Joe recoiled and dropped the screwdriver bouncing across the cement floor. He reeled backward and slammed into the stairs behind him. He sat with his hand over his mouth for a good minute, breath caught in his chest, staring at the body inside the box. There was no movement. Surely dead, after all this time in a sealed container, he thought. Should he call the cops? The FBI? The president? He leaned a bit closer and finally took a breath. No, can't be a corpse: he could only smell the freshly torn pine of the box and the usual basement mildew. Not a whiff of rot. He fished his phone out of his pocket and switched on the flashlight. Sitting inside the box was a life sized doll. A mannequin of sorts. Joe stalked over to the box and hesitantly turned the head toward him. Staring back at him in the stark light was a startlingly familiar face. Joe's face. His own damn face, in molded and painted plastic and silicone and whatever the hell else. He instinctively pushed the doll away. It landed naked and cold in the sawdust and packing. Not only did it have his face; it was his height, his build, his hair. This couldn't have been a coincidence. It was supposed to be him. He felt sick to his stomach, dizzy with questions flooding his mind. The most pressing of which wasn't who or how, but why. Why would someone make this? Why would someone leave this effigy here? His landlord had no idea what he was talking about, and didn't want to make the drive up from Cinci to look at a box. He sat with this doll for a time, both leaning against their respective walls, both silent. Then Joe piled the splintered planks up, trying to seal the doll–mannequin, whatever it was–back in its container. He at least managed to cover enough of it that he didn't have to see it from the stairs. Joe could hardly sleep that night, and his dreams were fitful and strange. He'd be sitting in a small, dark room, unable to escape. Then came a light, and the man who stole his face. Then he'd wake up. Day after day, the events in Joe's life only grew stranger. Joe felt a connection to this doll, a kinship, and an equal and opposite revulsion. He'd go down to check on it late at night when he couldn't sleep. There he'd find pieces of wood stacked in places he'd swear he hadn't left them. He'd hear footsteps in the dazed half-waking hours of the early morning. He'd find bags of chips that were lighter than he remembered. But he never saw it move. It was just a doll, after all. Joe's acquaintances found out about it (how long can you keep something this strange to yourself) and they were powerfully curious. Joe took them down, a few of his closest friends, to "meet" the doll, which he'd been calling Joseph. They were stunned at the similarity. Uncanny. So similar to Joe but not quite. And in his own house. They said it could easily be his twin if they didn't know better. Lots of playful joking and laughing. He laughed along too, for a time. The laughing stopped when he came home from work to find the doll standing in the corner of his kitchen, wearing one of his shirts. He called his friends in a flurry, asking around to see which of his them had pulled this awful prank. Not a soul would confess. A cruel trick, I'd say, to make someone think they're losing their mind. He returned the shirt to his closet. He was determined to keep this thing under cover, so this time covered the box with a tarp. He figured his friends probably didn't actually like him, were humoring him at events. That they were messing with him. It didn't occur to him that none of his friends had a spare key to get inside his place. Joe tried to carry on with his life, even put an ad online to get rid of the doll: FREE, LOCAL PICKUP ONLY. But there were no bites. By now, Joe's lack of sleep was getting to him, and he was getting irritable, antisocial. When his friends texted him, he was snippy. He avoided calls and meetups. He was trying to make dinner on a steamy midsummer night when he heard a thud downstairs. He hadn't checked on the doll in some time, and for a moment wondered if he had an intruder. He grabbed a shovel from the porch and crept down to the basement. In the cascading luminance from the open doorway, he saw the legs of the mannequin laying on the bare floor, covered in denim. A pair of his jeans. Joe was instantly furious, then that anger cooled to desperation. He begged his friends to stop whatever game they were playing. Said he didn't care who was doing it, didn't want a confession anymore, he only wanted it to stop. He'd leave them alone if they stopped. Still they claimed innocence. Summer had come and gone, and Joe's 30th birthday was fast approaching on the back of a biting winter, and while he wasn't looking forward to getting older, he did find himself excited to see friends for the first time in months. Derek had set up a whole party at his place. Drinks, music, cake, the works. Joe wanted everything to go right. He put on a nice shirt and pants, but when he reached for his favorite tie, he found the hanger empty. Ah, well, Joe thought, I'll skip the tie. Maybe a bit formal for a birthday party anyway. Surreal. That's what it was. Uncanny. Joe knocked on Derek's door, who gave him an apprehensive look as he opened it. Surreal. "Oh, hey Joe, uhh come on in," Derek warily led Joe into the living room. Mid-2000s indie music scored the scene of friends and couples drinking, talking, laughing. And on the couch among his friends, wearing his favorite tie and nothing else, was the doll. They were chatting as if nothing was out of place. The mannequin even had a little controller in its hand for playing kart racing games. Sitting next to it was a girl Joe had been talking to for a few weeks. He thought this issue had been settled. "What the hell is that thing doing here? I told you it wasn't funny anymore." Joe strained to keep his anger under control. "Whoa watch it, man" Joe stormed out of his own party. Derek looked around the room and issued an awkward shrug. Joe sped home, gunning it down highway lanes dotted with circles of orange vapor glow. He crunched up the frosty grass slope to his door, and locked himself inside. Derek tried to reach out, but Joe wasn't ready yet. This was a massive breach of trust. A few days passed and Joe realized that he'd probably overreacted. His friends were probably trying to get a rise out of him. And even if they did genuinely hate him, they were the only friends he had. He texted Derek. They planned to meet at the coffee shop down the block so he could apologize and catch up. Joe strolled down the crisp downtown streets toward the cafe. He stood on the corner across from the shop and took in thin air through his nose. Behind the cafe's foggy window, he saw Derek, sitting at a table already. He smiled and took a step forward.. That's when he saw that sitting across from Derek, in a striped shirt and slacks, was the doll. On the table in front of it was a full cup of coffee. It still wasn't moving, it was just a doll after all, but Joe could see Derek's lips moving. This was too much. This wasn't a joke anymore, this was hostile action. He could only be kicked so many times before he'd kick back. What were they thinking? Did they like the doll more than him? Why, because it wouldn't make snide remarks, wouldn't feel down, wouldn't drink your beer and forget to replace it? Joe needed rest badly. He had gotten some sleeping pills from his doctor at some point he couldn't remember, but hesitated to take them before. Not so this time. Joe swallowed the pill and went into the kitchen. He descended the basement stairs, holding the shovel from the porch. The tarp over the box was flipped up, and inside was the mannequin. Joe licked his dry lips and stepped lightly into the crate. He tapped the doll with the handle of the shovel. Nothing. He shouted at it. Nothing. It was just a doll, after all. Then his phone rang. It was Derek. DEREK: "Oh, uhh hey dude, I was wondering if…is Joe there?" Joe's face grew red. Embarrassment, anger, jealousy, fear, who can say which feeling specifically caused the break. He hung up and threw his phone across the concrete floor. Joe twisted the shovel's handle around in his sweaty palms, then lifted the shovel high. He brought the sharp edge down directly on the doll's head. At this point, the drug took hold, and as the doll fell to the side, Joe collapsed against the wall and plunged into a deep, woozy sleep. He hoisted the limp doll over his shoulder and dragged the heavy object upstairs. He wrapped it in an old area rug and stuffed it into his trunk. He drove on in the frosty moonless night, down country roads outside the city, heading to the pine forest nearby. He was quivering, quiet. He kept checking the rearview mirror to see if he was being followed. He passed a sheriff near the woods and a cold chill ran down his back. What if the sheriff pulled him over and checked the trunk? He was speeding a bit. But then again, he hadn't actually done anything wrong, right? It was just a doll, after all. He found a suitable spot and pulled off the road. Dripping rug and shovel in tow, he finally stepped into the woods. The ground was hard, digging even harder. He was sweating and coughing as he dug a hole for the doll. His twin. His reflection. He dug until he physically couldn't anymore, arms sore and lungs ablaze. By now the sun was starting to cast its pink rays through the snowy branches. High conifers bowed in the breeze, shaking loose a dust of fine white into the air, which caught the milky morning light and shimmered in sapphire. The hole was barely deep enough for a body now, and the ground was too hard to dig further. He rolled the thing into the cold grave, then slowly covered it with dark soil. It would be gone, finally, and he could live his life. His friends would be happy to see him again. No more jealousy, no more fear, no more worry. No longer burdened by the weight of his imposter. Everything was in its right place. He was free. Even if that sheriff spotted the tire tracks in the fresh snow, followed the footprints down into the frozen woods. If he uncovered the freshly churned earth, and what was decomposing within. If sirens blared, a line of cruisers shining in the neon sunrise. If they checked his car and found the stained rug, brought him in and asked him a thousand questions, about his past, his friends, the bandaged gash on his head, he would still be free. It was just a doll, after all. CLICK *** WREN: uhh, is someone still on the line? LIZ, apprehensive: "Hey, uh, Wren? What does Conway look like?" WREN, on the phone: "You know, I'm not sure I've ever heard him described. Hmm, dark hair, normal height I suppose, 28-36 years old?" LIZ: "Sooo…not a towering column of flesh?"WREN: "....no?" LIZ: "Got it. Well, that's what's here in the boardroom." WREN: "Board room??"LIZ: "It's like this…bureaucratic nightmare cave. Probably 10 stories high, walls lined with filing cabinets floor to ceiling. Stacks of papers and folders everywhere, with more of those shadow things flipping through them and stamping pages." WREN: "Oh…that sounds bad."LIZ: "And in the middle, surrounded by a bunch of empty chairs and desks, is this tower of skin and paperwork fused together. There are eyes and mouths all over it, just twisting, pulsing…like it's breathing. Like this thing is a person, or a tumor imitating a person. What should I do?" WREN: "It's always been a game of facades, hasn't it. Gather what shadows you can–you seem good at that–then leave. Whatever that is, it's not Conway anymore, if it ever was. On your way out, burn whatever remains." CLICK *** WREN: Immediately upon hanging up the phone, the town outside started to shift. I could hear water pooling under the gap under the bar's door. Sloshing and groaning, crunching, far-off wailing carrying on the wind outside. "None of this is real, I'm what's real," I whispered to myself a few times, standing right beside the door. Of course, merely because something isn't real doesn't mean it can't kill. It's happened before. I stretched my left leg, then the right, and hopped up and down a few times to get the blood flowing. I hoped I could run, too. The door flung open with more force than I'd intended. The slamming door reverberated throughout the town, once empty but not so anymore. The rows of anomalous buildings shook and rose. Unholy behemoths descended from their perches, writhing and dripping as they freed themselves from their stupor. The sound of the door alerted them to my presence. They slinked along the roads toward me, some still half encased in ice, dragging massive blocks of frozen terror in their wake. I couldn't go home now, even if I wanted to. I planted my feet and took off full speed toward the dock. Just my luck, only three steps in, I slipped and faceplanted into the stone below. My nose crunched and shards of ice dug into my skin, painting trails of red across my face and palms. I scrambled and clawed until I was on my feet. Hunched, bloodied, and soaking now, I came face to face with one of the awakened giants. Icicles still hung from its head, a wilted crown, its body bulky and strong. From the hole where it's mouth should be, a long whiplike tongue unfurled. It darted toward the drops of blood running down my cheek. I wiped away the flowing blood and snot with my sleeve and skittered to the side. I saw an alleyway behind the beast. Narrow, empty, just wide enough I might sneak through it. The creature turned as I moved around its horrible frame, and from its spine sprouted many more tongues. They lashed at me, a hundred tiny blades. The tongues tore at my shirt and left slashes across my arm. They sliced and curled, but the beast couldn't grab hold of me; the slush I was covered in kept me slippery. I darted down the alley. A look over my shoulder revealed the creature leaning on its back, now carried by dozens of pink slavering tongues. It tried to follow where I had gone, but the alley was too narrow. Stuck between the two buildings, It let out a gurgling howl, like a psalm for drowned god. I briefly smirked. Then it began tearing at the wood and brick around it, and the fleeting moment of triumph vanished. I kept moving, on and on the melting streets went, each rounded corner possibly harboring another death. The sky overhead was a crumpled sheet of tin, and the remaining houses seemed to lean inward around me, casting their spiky shadows over me as I ran. I managed to escape the center of town and found myself at the lakeshore, dread mariners following in my wake. There, through my panting sweat and blood and dried tears I saw the tracks in the ground. My eyes followed the deep lines in the earth to what I had been looking for. There, floating in the misty air, impossibly suspended upside down, was the Lighthouse. The tower issued a distorted bellow and the shore was shrouded with fog. I could hear wet tendrils slapping close behind me. I ran for the lighthouse. Its tip stood about 5 feet off the ground, the rotating lens nearly at my eye level. The beacon spun toward me as I approached, its dazzling light shining on me. I was instantly overcome with nausea. It was clear that whatever entity resided here didn't want me any closer. The light was a nameless god here, and these were its charnel angels. I dropped to my knees under its watch, as the intense gaze of this tower soaked into me. I felt the skin on my bloodied hands and face burn and peel away from the bone like an orange rind. Static filled my head, and my body disintegrated. But this was not my first rodeo, as they say. Unlike Conway, I've dealt with this static, with this withering glare, before. I took a deep breath and focused my thoughts. I imagined a radio, and on that projected radio was a dial. My spectral fingers reached out and turned the dial. I felt the astral station change and the static dissipate, replaced by the gentle plinking of piano keys. The fire on my flesh turned to tingling, and I realized my body had not actually been damaged, despite the pain. This was enough to get me standing upright again, but forward progress was still slow; the full focus of the burning lens was still on me. The light had a physical presence that continually repelled me with every step. I was losing energy, and the blasphemous vermin behind me were slithering ever closer. A long, mucous tentacle skated over the ice and reached for my ankle. The last thing I saw there in Aisling was a flash of brown fur. A blur of claws and hair leapt out of the haze and slammed into the malicious angel that had tried to grab at me. Talons ripped into a monstrous carapice. A pink light from the furry creature's forehead sent the horrid bug flying ino the frigid water. Why is something always swooping in at the last moment to save me? I'm not 12 anymore, I can legally drink now! I can handle myself. Well, maybe not in this situation, but usually I can. The furry creature turned its long neck my way, its face covered in synthetic brown hair, and I locked eyes with my one-time-nemesis, my friend, my deskmate, my savior. Its yellow beak parted and it spoke. "U-nye-way-loh-nee-way" My eyelids grew heavy, my head spun, and I fell to the ground, unconscious. "SLEEP."

Wren takes a road trip. A divorcee spots an odd insect. Conway tries to shake a rock out of his shoe. Featuring the voices of Nathan from Storage Papers (https://thestoragepapers.com), Jess Syratt from Nowhere, On Air (https://nowhereonairpodcast.weebly.com), and Rae Lundberg of The Night Post (https://nightpostpod.com/). (CWs, mild spoilers: LOTS of insects, body horror, fire, car braking sound) Transcript incoming, here's the rough script for now, which mostly follows the episode. "Now let's get to the weird stuff…" WREN: We humans generally like stability. Predictability. We like to figure out patterns and stick with them. I think that's why change can be so frightening for us. It throws the future--which once seemed so certain--into chaos. Anything could happen. We could be on the verge of destruction at any moment. But we could also be inches away from utopia. If you can learn to live with this change, this constantly revolting present, you just might make it out of the apocalypse with your sanity intact. Or so that's what I hoped. I had little else to count on. I tried to flow like water with the shifting tide. You can be the judge of how that all turned out. That's why you're here, right? Pockets of shadows remained in the cave, about a dozen or so people, seemingly oblivious to the life outside. They toiled under The Boss's directives, worked day and night for the Dead Letter Office. To what end, I couldn't really say. Seemingly just to perpetuate the office itself. If I could show them the way out, maybe they would help me take on the Boss. One shadow, Liz, was receptive to my offer. She still had some kick left in her diminished form. Her girlfriend, though, was blind to the world, just a single atom in the bureaucratic monolith. In Liz, I had someone on the inside. If she could go back and agitate from within the machine, we might stand a chance of turning a few more souls back to the light. It would be risky, though; if even one shade suspected outside forces were at work, they might alert the Boss. Even given all my experience with the paranormal and extranormal, I have no idea what would happen then. My gut feeling told me that facing the Boss prematurely would be...ill-advised. If I wanted to find more of these shadows, I'd need to search through the dead mail, find the stories that might have caught Conway's attention, and seek out their writers. The problem was that I had just walked out of my job, and I had a suspicion that if I showed back up unannounced, the Boss would take notice. Where, then, would I find these letters if not the office? I'd need to find the place that Conway kept all of the clues. I'd need to find Aisling. I'd need to find the vault. Would anything be left in the old vault, or had the Boss already figured out my plan and purged it? Only one way to find out. Yes, change can be terrifying. Yes, the future is in flux. But the scariest part is that the past can be made just as uncertain as the future. Memories fade, records burn, and witnesses pass on. Entire decades lost, cultures lost. Lessons unlearned. Mistakes repeated. If a place loses its history, how can its people know the present? Without a past, how can we make sense of the future? As a butterfly forgetting it was once a worm, who are we without who we were? Driving through the clogged artery highways of the state was a challenge, given that time appeared to be at a standstill for most of the world. If all the postcards and letters were to be believed, I was looking for a lakeside town. Somewhere along the Erie was a town full of shadows, a place haunted by its own history. And within that town was a lighthouse. This lighthouse was my metaphorical beacon. I kept the postcard printed with its image folded and tucked into my pocket. It was among the few items I took with me on this road trip: a cassette player with some of Conway's old tapes and a furry little friend also jostled around in a cardboard box on the passenger seat. I couldn't just leave the poor thing in the office after all we'd seen. The morning air was silent and stiff, only the sound of my rumbling engine accompanied the pink rays glancing off rows of glass and steel. I turned the stereo's knob, but the radio was entirely dead air. I loaded up one of the tapes to see if it would be of any help. The enormous hand still hung overhead like the executioner's ax. What was our crime, Conway? What did we let ourselves forget? *on tape* OLD INTRO MUSIC This is Conway, receiving clerk for the Dead Letter Office of Aisling, Ohio, processing the national dead mail backlog. The following audio recording will serve as an internal memo strictly for archival purposes and should be considered confidential. Need I remind anyone: public release of this or any confidential material from the DLO is a felony. Some names and places have been censored for the protection of the public. Dead letter 11919. An SD card found in a condemned building. The house caught fire in fall of 2011, but card was mysteriously undamaged. The fire department contacted one of our carriers, who brought it back to the office for investigation. The contents of the SD card are as follows. *off tape A month after my divorce I took up photography. Call it a midlife crisis if you want. I needed something to keep my mind occupied now that I was perpetually alone again, and a camera is a hell of a lot cheaper than a sports car. Photography's really for lonely hearts; you're by yourself, but surrounded by people. You watch them through the lens, feed on their fleeting touches. I threw myself into it fully without thinking too much, like I do with just about everything. Like I did with her. Three months after the divorce, I went to the butterfly house. To see things so wet and new enter the world, so hopeful, was healthier projecting my turmoil onto the world around me. The insects' colorful wings rendered through the lens like stained glass, and there was so much variety. I started shooting at the conservatory whenever I could, and gleaned a lot about butterflies in the process. Monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus, migrate long distances, from the great lakes to the gulf, then come back again when the weather warms up. How they remember the path back home, no one's quite sure. Almost romantic. On the other end of the spectrum, some moths only live for a week. Actias luna don't eat anything during their brief week of existence, because they can't: their mouths are vestigial. Instead, they rely on what they ate in their larval state to sustain them throughout their lives. They eat, change, mate, and die. Also kind of romantic. In a sense. Six months after the divorce is when I saw it. The reason for this video. I was kneeling in front of a coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, waiting for one of the little powdery things to alight on a petal. A kid running through the conservatory was scaring off most of my subjects, but I could be patient. What else did I have going on in my life? My friends were mostly married and mostly busy, my family...well, I'd rather not go there. So I waited. Crouched, holding the hefty camera, lens focused, my mind was sharp but my body was getting stiff. I was about to call the day a wash when something interesting came into view. A large butterfly landed on the purple flower. Its folded wings were pure ashy black, and it looked sharper than the objects around it. This one had a sort of presence, a portentous aura, as if the events of the world waited on every flap of its wing. In my time here, I'd never seen anything like it. It held my attention in a vice, like it wasn't a bug at all, but a treacherous cinder in a pile of dry leaves. Like it demanded a watchful eye, else the ember might be stirred by a breeze to glow again and burn and burn. I snapped a few photos of its dusky form. Then it turned, its back now facing the camera, and spread its wings. There smudged across its span were three bars of color: white over red over brown on black. Like three chalky rectangles floating in the void. The thing that worried me most about this creature was that it was somehow familiar, like somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind I had seen this before. But not on a butterfly, no, it had to be something else. Six years ago, we drove up to canada in a cheap rental car. We threaded a trail up and east, across the Erie border, into the marigold hills of pennsylvania, through the vineyards and thin eastern pines of new york, up across the border. We were spending a long weekend in Toronto, taking in the sights and sounds of a real city, a place where public transportation isn't just a pipe dream. We bought fresh pears from a bodega in and took the metro across the river. We walked through the financial district and saw a seagull pick at fries in a discarded styrofoam container. I say we. I can see the places in my mind, remember the sounds and smells, but she's not really there in my memory anymore. My mind erased her from the picture, but the empty space she occupied is still there. Like a citation to a book that doesn't exist, an overexposed blob on a film negative haunting every frame. This was our last trip together, not that we knew that at the time. We were both worn out, a wordless static swelling between us. Radios tuned to different stations. We were growing apart, but neither of us wanted to admit it. That would be too brave. Easier to let it wither away until it's a dry husk of what it once was. We had exhausted just about every other method of holding this thing together, so in a mocking reflection of our first date, we went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. We casually wound through the hallways going through the motions, pointing out something interesting here, gently nodding there. In a dark room near the end, among the abstract expressionists, was that pattern I had seen before. A Rothko, white and red something, on display. It shook me more than I had anticipated that day. Something about the frankness of it. There was no obfuscation, no dalliance. It just was. I knew then that we had to split, come what may. The camera fell from my eye as my arm went limp. This couldn't possibly be the same pattern I'd seen six years ago. I must have been remembering the painting wrong. Or maybe some sicko had meticulously painted its wings. A cruel obsession. But the nausea welling inside me told me that I was flailing for a rational explanation for the irrational. That to know the thing was to unknow all else. That I was throwing darts at the tide. Putting a leash on an acorn. Crying over spooled milk. I pulled myself from my stupor and shot a few pictures of its outstretched wings before it flew off. I showed the photos to the head of the butterfly house, almost just to reassure myself that I hadn't imagined it. He had no idea where it had come from or what it was, but he did see the pattern, too. He guessed it was a rare genetic mutation occurring in a more common variety of butterfly. He went with me to look for it, but we didn't find a trace of it in the conservatory. Once I got home, I searched for the painting. There it was, Mark Rothko's No.1, White and Red from 1962. It was identical to the pattern on the butterfly's wings.There had to be some kind of connection between the bug and the painting, but even after hours of research, I just wasn't seeing it. Eventually, like anything else, the novelty of that day wore off and I went back to my usual routines as if it had never happened. One afternoon weeks later I stepped out of the humid greenhouse into the glaring september sun. The courtyard was hot and white. Sweat was dripping down my forehead, rolling into my eyes and stinging my vision. I squinted against the salt and light, and in my periphery saw a bird eating its dinner under an oak tree. A blackbird, large iridescent green-black, a white streak dripping down one wing. I rubbed my eyes to clear the sweat. The bird had something sticking out of its mouth: its poor prey hadn't been completely devoured yet. Poking out of the black beak was a butterfly. It didn't look like one from the conservatory, though. I took out my camera and zoomed in on the bird. The wing dangling from its mouth had a stunning pattern. Swirling blues and whites, tangerine globes and black spires. Before I could even register what I was seeing, the bird took off into the thick air. That sickening deja vu hit me again, but this time I didn't need to look it up to know what it was. Eight years back on our trip to New York we explored the Museum of Modern Art. It was the first household-name-famous painting I'd seen in person. Not as big as I expected, but stunning nonetheless. Van Gogh. Starry Night. I ran through the conservatory and out the door, tracking the blackbird as best I could. Jogging with my camera and bag wasn't ideal. By the time the bird landed, I was red and puffing hard. The shining bird with the dripping wing had landed on a branch next to a shuttered house. The surrounding houses were also condemned, and this one seemed to be in the worst condition of the bunch. The white paint on the doorframe was peeling, revealing the wood grain underneath in stripes like the teeth of a great beast. The shutters were drooping eyelids, hanging crooked from their hinges. The windows were dusty and glazed over with cataract grime, those that weren't shattered anyway. It was falling apart, a relic leftover from a more prosperous time, but it had an austere dignity that so many ancient and forgotten things do. The tree next to the slouching old shack had crashed through the roof at one point. There the blackbird perched, inviting me into its home. The door creaked open with a push, and the smell of wet wood and rotting fabric flushed out and spread over the brown lawn. Vines and mold reached in equal measure up the splotchy walls. Sunlight falling in through the hole in the ceiling stepped lightly down the stairs and caught dust in its place. An offwhite couch sat mouldering in one corner of the den, a table with a broken leg had years ago spilled its contents onto the floor. Green tendrils wrapped around lamp cords and stretched across rooms. A gentle drip in the stained kitchen sink rang out through the silent house. And all across the ceiling through the house hung little crystalline pods. Hundreds of cocoons dangling from the stucco, from fan blades, from mounted pots and pans and light fixtures. A few butterflies were already emerging, casting aside their comfortable skin to face the new. These cocoons continued up the stairway and onto the ceiling of the second floor. I crept up the uneven stairs, testing each one with a press of my foot just in case the whole thing was about to collapse. More chrysalis dotted the ceilings here, and so too did the pudgy little bugs that make them, inching their way across the abandoned home. Some bright and colorful, some drab and fuzzy, the caterpillars had moved into this space that people no longer wanted. The hole in the ceiling up there had been worse than it looked from the outside. A section of the wall had been caved in as the tree grew through it. Its boughs outstretched along the broken wall as if cleaving it open, a large ovular hole in the trunk nearby slack like a hungry maw. Living branches and leaves intertwined with the dead lumber planks and leaden drywall. Caterpillars nibbled at the corners of the vibrant green foliage fanning out across what was once a bedroom, crawled up and down the bedposts and nightstand. I shudder to think what might have been festering under the mildewy comforter. The tiny creatures here covered nearly every interior surface after the mold and water damage had taken their parcels. A faint hum reverberated from somewhere within its walls. Now that I had taken in the place, I could start examining the insects themselves. The caterpillars were mostly typical: short, rotund, many brightly colored like little tubes of acrylic paint, but they were hardly exceptional. They went about their business with a casual disinterest in my presence in their reclaimed home. The butterflies, on the other hand, were illogical, inconceivable, exquisite. Every lepidoptera had painted wings. Gently fluttering clouds, each point engraved with some classic or another; a monet here, a frankenthaler there. My mind reeled at the implications that this suggested. Did we influence them somehow, affect them to grow with these patterns? Or were our artistic hands subtly moved by some unseen force to create these great works? That's what a lot of the ancients thought. Certain gods and muses could be literal in their influence. Divine inspiration. On the other hand, what if there was an outside force affecting us, but it wasn't helping us? What if it was indifferent to us, like the rest of the universe? Or actively malevolent? What if it wanted to reclaim the land from us, like the insects had taken this home? I knew that if I thought too much about the big questions of the universe I'd lose myself, forget I'm a person and feel that cosmic unreality in the pit of my stomach. It struck me as odd that other people could perceive me. Odd that I existed at all. I knew I should go home, but I couldn't leave for fear that it might vanish just as quickly as it had popped into my life. I briskly walked to the truckstop up the highway to grab snacks, drinks, and a travel blanket. I was going to stay and document what I saw for as long as I could. The insects in this house behaved quite differently from the ones outside. For one, they rarely traveled beyond the yard. The overgrown lawns dotted with wildflowers and tall grasses surrounding the place provided all that they needed. They also seemed to function as a unit, like a school of fish: when one moved, many moved in a cascading wave. The artwork on their backs spanned ages. I saw greek pottery imprinted on their wings, the birth of venus, carvaggio's light and shadow. Many of the works I recognized, some I didn't. Who knows how many photos I took of the butterfly with the Last Supper on its back. It must have been weeks that I slept on the dusty floor with a thin blanket and my camera bag as a pillow. The excitement and wonder kept me in place. I subsisted on empty gas station calories and sugary soda. The wrappers and empty bottles started radiating around me in a ritualistic circle as time wore on beyond my knowledge. My skin grew pale and oily, my hair matted, but I hardly noticed. I ate, observed, and very rarely slept. I was so enthralled I had hardly noticed the change. The recent hatchlings had been trending toward modern art: no longer DaVinci's and Gentileschi's, the butterflies flitted about with more post-industrial design on their wings, Mondrian's squares, Picasso's blue period. The hum within the house had grown as well, but I hardly took notice at the time. Then came the seismic shift. I was feeling weak, lightheaded and nearly delirious, when I saw a horse and rider mid-gait painted on an eggshell white body. No, not painted, I realized after some inspection. Photographed. Days passed and more butterflies emerged with film on their backs: images of war, recreation, winston churchill and che guavara. The hum was loud enough now that I couldn't ignore it. My head was pulsing and the noise was only exacerbating it. I needed to get out for a minute of fresh air. I walked the abandoned neighborhood, then beyond into the former arts district. The stars were crystals hanging in deep blue velvet overhead. The streets were empty and still. I crossed the old craft store and paused to look in the window. I felt an irresistible compulsion to paint. But I had no money left after abandoning my job for weeks. I tore a section of my greasy shirt and wrapped it around my fist. The window shattered more easily than I'd expected. I absconded back to my hideaway with tubes of oil paints, turpentine, brushes and rags, canvas. Wading through the trash filling up my own little cocoon, I began to paint. I started on the canvas, but soon found it confining. My paint spilled off the page and onto the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the trash. I couldn't say how long I painted. I never grew tired or hungry. I didn't need or want. I was in the flow. I simply was. The house was only so large, though. Two floors entirely covered in paint, dirty rags scattered about and turpentine dripping down the stairs, and yet I wasn't satisfied. I'd have to make something else my canvas. I started on my free hand, red and purple spots along my fingers, then green up my arm. Black along the torso, white stripes near ribs. I stripped off my remaining clothes that got in the way of my brush. Blue around my eyes, yellow bands across my head. Once I was entirely encased in paint, I felt my mind relax, deflating like air let out of a balloon. I grew aware of my surroundings again. The hum had grown so loud it was shaking the remaining furniture in the bedroom. I had been so preoccupied with the transformation of the creatures that I hadn't even noticed where they were actually coming from: caterpillars were pouring out of the hole in the encroaching tree. Swaths of crawling, squirming bugs spilled from the crooked mouth of bark and writhed in the dark room. On the wall opposite the tree, butterflies gathered. They stationed themselves in a square on the white paint. They flapped their wings and moved in unison. This patch of living color formed a pointilist image of her face. An image I had taken. My own photograph of my former wife. The insectoid screen undulated and shifted, forming new images in succession like a flipbook, each one displaying a moment from my past that I had captured. New York, Toronto, chopping vegetables, hiking through shale caves, the first snowfall of our last year together. I could feel the change curling inside me. Was I destined to take these photos, to mirror the natural patterns of the world? Or were these insects somehow directed to grow in accordance with my life? The swirling thoughts surged forth in waves of vertigo. My brain was swelling, pushing up against my skull. I smelled smoke from the stairway, acrid chemical flame and burning cloth. Flames of every color rose and licked at the blackened walls, dancing and fluttering. Thick smog was filling the room. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled to the only place that seemed safe, into the buzzing tree. I nestled down into the bark as far as I could, only the top of my head peering out through the opening. I felt my new brethren creeping and slinking in the darkness all around me. I set up my camera and recorded this testimony with the last of its battery. Oh my stomach is pulsing, moving, as if something is crawling inside. I can feel it bubbling up like gold from deep within. My back is splitting with wet folded wings. The photographs on their wings flip faster and faster until it's a moving image, a film, streaming through the striations of black smoke. I can't stifle my laughter as I see my life playing out before me on the living screen. Loud full body spasms. How else can you react to the absurdity of life laid bare so bluntly before you? If a caterpillar can become a butterfly, what might I look like after my metamorphosis? What glory might humanity ascend to in its next phase? I envy you, because if you're watching this, you know. We're ready to reclaim what you have taken. I am hatching. I am ascending on painted wings ablaze. But I am not in pain. I am beautiful. CONWAY ON TAPE: Well, I...I'm gonna need a minute. CLICK *** CONWAY: Nothing stays the same, no matter how hard we try. Something somewhere is always changing, like the water to vapor. Hell, even electrons are always moving around, can't quite pin 'em down. The changes inside are the hardest to spot, though. And you're usually the last one to notice you've changed. You're you, after all. As I slipped my influence into every corner of this state, I could barely recall most of my life, such as it was. Didn't miss my body all that much either, never really felt like I fit in it anyway. But for a moment, I felt a bit nostalgic for my old job. This nostalgia is a warning sign that something isn't what it once was, that some part of you is no longer there. I hadn't seen the cracks forming yet. I was still intoxicated with my new position. There was a rock in my metaphorical shoe, though. A lingering thought I just couldn't shake, even with all this. It started with the phone call from the fisherman. "You're not real." What the hell was that all about? Of course I'm real. "I think therefore" and all that. I'm the Boss. I've got buildings full of people who listen to me. Doesn't get much realer than that. But there was that itch somewhere in the vast and ever expanding recesses of my consciousness I couldn't quite scratch. I felt like I was forgetting something, or like I was about to remember something big. "How's Lucy?" *** Outro--interrupted *brakes screech* I fell asleep at the wheel and woke up at the bottom of an off-ramp. With no one else around and nothing to distract me, I dozed off. Just for a second. I'm not proud of it, but it's the truth. I caught myself quickly enough that I somehow managed to avoid smashing into any of the parked--well "parked"--cars on the highway. I was at a stop sign, and ahead of me was a one-lane country road. I couldn't see anyone in either direction for as far as my eyesight allowed. But below the stop sign was a bright green plaque, emblazoned with a path to what I'd been looking for: AISLING - FIVE MILES. Conway, here I come. *** LIZ: Is anyone here? *muffled response* LIZ: Hello? I know you're around somewhere. LIZ: Hey. Hey!...hmmm...hail and well met, shadow, I mean you no harm. *under her breath* "Hail and well met"? Jesus, what's wrong with me. SHADOW: *anxious* What was that? LIZ: I'm Liz, who the hell are you? SHADOW: *slowly, with effort* I...I don't know. It's hard to think. I'm...where am I? What am I? LIZ: I know, I totally felt the same. Just take a minute. Relax. I'm a friend. SHADOW: I can't feel my...anything. LIZ: Yup, that'll happen. Corporeality's kinda messed up here. So it goes. If you focus really hard, you might be able to keep yourself solid. See? SHADOW: I'm dreaming. This isn't real...I must still be asleep. LIZ: Sure, you sort of are. Anyway, what do you say we get out of here? See your friends again. SHADOW: But...wait, I remember something. I can't go yet. The Head Office. The Board Room. There's...there's something there. It's...oh god. The tower. We can't just leave it there. LIZ: Board Room? Can you show me? SHADOW: I think I can lead us there. But... LIZ, to WREN: Wren, this could be big. Could be a whole lot of shadows there for us to recruit. I'm going in. Good luck out there.

As we've previously established, forward and backward are not necessarily stable concepts. Conway makes a choice. Wren steels their nerves. A familiar face appears. This is the end. (CWs: food, brief allusion to bullying, mild apocalyptic imagery, death) Nathan of The Storage Papers as AGENT/DIRECTOR; Jess of Nowhere, On Air as Liz. Go listen to their shows! https://nowhereonairpodcast.weebly.com/ thestoragepapers.com Kiss Me Son of God originally by They Might Be Giants (John Flansburgh and John Linnell) Quotes from Jean Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies and John Stuart Mill. *Projector clicks, a dark smoky room filled with people* AGENT: That brings us to the falling hand incident from a few years back, dead case 0069. *sparse chuckles from audience members* AGENT: *exasperated* Jesus, I'm running a daycare here. Now those of you who were with the office at the time will already know all this. You new guys won't know anything about it. But that's why we're here, right? One of our field agents witnessed the whole thing, and gave their testimony during a thorough debriefing here in HQ. Pay attention to Wren's account. I'm only going over it once. *slide click* *INTRO MUSIC* WREN, on tape: Falling to earth from somewhere I chose not to think about was a left hand. AGENT, on tape: So what did you do? WREN: Well, I tried the one thing I hadn't done yet. One last shot before the end of the world. I called Conway. CONWAY: Hard to explain how I got into that lighthouse. Can barely remember it myself through the fog of exhaustion. I was so damn tired. But get in I did. And at the top--or was it bottom?--was a dark, steamy room. An office of sorts, filled with smoke pouring out from some sort of awful machine in the corner. The engine's shape was irregular, almost hard to look at, but it kept spewing its haze like humid breath. In the center of the office was a desk, set with--you guessed it--a phone, some stationary, a blank nameplate, a painting of an old lighthouse in a gold frame. I sat in the plush leather chair behind the desk. A highly welcome respite after the day I'd had. The woods, the mall, the deerhead priest, the lost fisherman. I needed a minute to put my feet up. I'd earned it. I leaned back and looked at the empty notepad. "Welcome to the Deerland Mall" was printed at the top of each page. I had the materials to send a letter to the DLO, but what to actually write? "Hey, I'm in a weird lighthouse somewhere, come get me?" I didn't see how that would work. Still, according to the fisherman, I had two paths in front of me: write home and go back to my life as it was, or answer the call and take the promotion. And then it rang. No, not the offwhite rotary phone in front of me, it was my cell phone. Didn't recognize the number. Probably somebody calling about my car's warranty or a $50 walmart gift card. But at that point I was willing to take that risk just to hear someone who didn't talk in metaphors again. CONWAY, on the phone: Hello? WREN, on the phone: Conway? Oh my god, is that you!? CONWAY: Yeah, this is Conway. Hard to make out what you're saying. Sorry, who is this? WREN: Oh wow, I don't know how I got through to you but listen: I'm coming to get you. CONWAY: I don't reckon that's the smartest idea. I don't even know wh-- WREN: I've followed your trail. I think I'm nearby now. But there's something going on. Something you're connected to. It's bad. Lucy told me where to find you. I think she's-- CONWAY: Now what is this about Lucy? You talked to her? Are you with the office? How...how is she? WREN: I just got a postcard from her. But listen, something's coming, and I don't think it's going to end well. I need you to come out of the cave now. I'll be at the entrance waiting to take your hand. CONWAY: Cave? THAT cave? I'm...wherever I am, I'm not in there. WREN: Where are you? This may be it, Conway. The end.CONWAY: I'm in a lighthouse. The fisherman in the place that looks just like a blockbuster said...well you know what, that doesn't make any sense saying out loud...I'm tired, you know? I don't want to keep going. I want to sit down for a minute. At this desk. I don't think that's selfish. WREN: Desk?CONWAY: Yeah there's like a whole swanky office here. Guy said I could be the boss if I wanted to. Kenji didn't have what it took, but I just might. I'm so damn tired of it all, you know? The grind. And there's some kind of machine. I think I've heard of it before. Somebody called it the lucid engine. If I'm the dreamer, that means… WREN: Conway I don't think I follow. Boss? Just come back, okay? We need you. CONWAY: Now you too, huh? Seems like everyone's got something for me to do. More work. I don't think I've got it in me. I need a break. WREN, over static: Conway, you're breaking up. Come back to me. I think you're responsible for-- CONWAY: Can't it wait 15 minutes?WREN: I can't hear you-- CONWAY: Look, I'm not sure what you expect of me, but I have a feeling you're gonna be disappointed, like everyone else. Like Lucy. Even myself...I shouldn't be reading mail in a damn office. What am I doing? I studied art, I did radio. Poorly, I might add, but I put in the time. Now my dad worked the same job for 40 years, bought a house, got a pension, and retired. I've got nothing to show for my labors but a pile of debts and a sore back. Feel like I'm owed something after all this or it's for nothing. Look, I want to go home, but home kind of blows. Just live to work, work to live...It ain't human. If I have a chance to get out of that hamster wheel...well, sometimes when an opportunity comes along, you have to snatch it. Take care of yourself, kid. See you on the other side. WREN: The line went dead. I had no idea what he meant, and it sounded like he wasn't too sure, either. I left my car parked in the grass. I managed to tear my focus away from the falling hand and ventured into the woods. I had plenty of time to myself to think as I stepped through the crackling branches and deep grass between the trees. Why was I even pursuing this? Was finding someone I've never met before worth losing my job over? What if he didn't want to be found? Wanted to disappear? Here I was trudging through the buggy forest looking for a cave. What was in the cave? No idea. Why was I looking for it? No idea. Still, I went on with my little task despite everything. Maybe it was the last thing left I felt I had any control over. Maybe I was just stubborn. Maybe I wanted someone to praise me. Well that's for my therapist to sort out now. I came upon a creek by a shale ridge. I hopped across on the smooth black stones breaking through the water. One, two, and slipped on the third. I fell into the creek. Not deep enough to be dangerous, but it didn't help my mood. I sat in the muck for a moment. The stream was clear and cool. Looking down at the rippling surface, dappled sunlight bounced along the contours of the tiny waves washing away from me. I watched the light dance on the water for a minute or a year, and then saw something reflected in the water. A break in the sheer stone beside me that I hadn't noticed before, or couldn't see before. A gaping wound in the rock. I slowly rose from the creek, water pouring out of the pockets and folds of my clothes. I kept my eyes on the reflection on the surface, and walked backward to where the cave should be. I saw myself in the water, glaring sun alight on the ripples, my back to the cave. Then I went in. AGENT, on tape: So far I'm not seeing how all this connects. WREN, on tape: I was only barely starting to then, as well. AGENT: All right, go on. What was in the cave? WREN: Clarity. *music swells, then abruptly cuts out* AGENT: Come on, really? WREN: Yes, really, but more than that too, if you'd let me finish without interruption. *Music continues* WREN: I was surrounded by damp dark stone. My footsteps echoed with such resonance that the cave had to be massive. After minutes of stumbling through pure black, a dot of light appeared in the distance ahead. It was as good a waypoint as any other I had. So I continued toward it. It may come as a shock to you, but I was a bit of a solitary child. No brothers or sisters. Parents kind, but busy. We rarely did anything as a family or even dined together, other than breakfast. Before they left for work and I went to school, we shared whatever bits of news we had, then parted ways. It may sound less than ideal, but I preferred it that way. I think I did. I'd spend the evenings looking up at the night sky, trying to tune in to astral signals I wasn't supposed to know about. Surrounded by the hypnotic drone of cicadas and the polyrhythm of cricketsong, I found joy. For a time. Flashbulb memories pulled forth by the cave. Ghostly afterimages and faroff scents. Birthdays, weekends, cardboard castles and polaroids. Enthusiastic child. A butterfly emerging from its chrysalis in a mason jar. Precocious. Singing, learning. Gentle. Someone playing soccer too rough, but only with me. Tackled, pinned, forfeit. Difference. The scratching of nails and humming of speakers. My first dance where I didn't dance at all. Perfume. Laughter. Clothes that didn't fit. Words that didn't fit. Burnt scrambled eggs. Dark poetry and bad movies. Static. Carving sacred names into bedframes. Horizontal lines. Flowers emerging then shrinking. Summers smeared like watercolor into fall. Dripping paint. A college dropout. Destined for menial labor. A gear dislodged from the system. Quiet. Only a matter of time. But the conjurers of tradition were wrong about me. I wasn't meant to turn wheels. It took some time to unlearn these thought patterns I'd been forced into by school, work, and law. To undo the oppression of orthodoxy. Time and effort. A lot of pain. Mill said it's better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. But look at the pig's face, watch it frolic and splash, and then look at the prisons built for us: cubicles, luxury apartments, retail warehouses, slums, mass graves. If this is what it is to be human...you tell me. At least I knew that as the curtain call approached, I was truly who I wanted to be. I was doing what I wanted to do. I wouldn't die dissatisfied in a cage. I would die smiling in the mud. Tiny points of starlight flicked into existence in the cave overhead, swirls of constellations and galaxy arms reaching. I heard crickets in the grass that was sprouting under my feet. The dot of light ahead grew into a blob, expanded in a luminescent rectangle a dozen feet over my head, then letters appeared. I smelled butter on the grill, cheap coffee. A beaming yellow sign in front of a yellow building. It was beacon for a wayward ship. Sitting alone at the end of the world, bathed in cosmic glow, was a waffle house. Of course it would be a waffle house. *** CONWAY: I'd have to be some kind of moron not to answer that call, wouldn't I? How could I just go back to my life knowing all this? Knowing what I passed up? That'd be like handing back the winning lottery ticket. Though I'd heard stories about what happens to some lottery winners. Of course I picked up the phone. There was no voice on the other end, only humming, crackling static. I felt electricity run from the receiver into my ear, down my shoulders and back, all through my limbs. A giddy bolt. I dropped the phone. Who knows if it hit the ground or disintegrated. I felt energy surge through my body. I was elated, unlimited. I suddenly knew that this is where I was supposed to be. I belonged to it, a missing limb returned. My step was light, like walking on water, to the engine. I felt it calling to me, singing in smoke, waiting for my charged touch. This would be my deliverance and my deliverer. Lucy, I...Lucy, I couldn't face you again. I wasn't ready yet. I had to let that part go. I had to let go all the things that bound me to who I was, sever all ties if I were to succeed. My finger made contact with the holy motor and my body was no more. *** WREN: Buzzing lights flicked overhead inside the diner. I scanned the place for any signs of life, but no results. I took a seat at one of the sticky booths and picked at the duct taped upholstery. I tried to peer outside but all was dark. I could only see my face reflected in the glass. I looked tired. Lonely. Someone was standing behind me in the reflection. A waitress at my table. I couldn't see her expression, but she silently held out a menu. "Oh, no thank you. I'm just resting for a moment." Her arm remained outstretched, menu aloft. "You're the only one here. It's late. I don't want to be an imposition." She didn't budge. "So be it. I'll have two eggs--over easy but not too runny--two pieces of toast on white, a double side of hashbrowns--smothered, covered, and capped with ketchup on the side--and a cup of coffee--black if it's fresh, a dash of milk if it's been out a while." As if I needed a menu. She nodded and withdrew toward the kitchen. I heard eggs hit the griddle, sizzling and squeaking, crisping just so on the edges. My mind left my body for a moment. I floated above the restaurant in the void. I saw a family of possums digging through a dumpster out back. I wondered if I should have gotten a waffle. The clatter of a plate in front of me brought me back. A little smiley face of ketchup on the hashbrowns looked up at me. Tell me, director, have you ever wept over breakfast? I have. There I sat, still wet from the creek and caked in mud, huge streams of tears running down my hot face as I dug into the greasy pile. Someone made this for me. Cared for me. Not in a familial or romantic sense, just in the way that people take care of other people. Nothing else in the world mattered beyond this plate, this place, for just a moment. It's the little pleasures that keep us going even in the shadow of apocalypse. A waffle house left standing after a hurricane. Clarity. The odd letter, the directives from above, the fuzzy call. The pieces fell into place. Conway wasn't coming back. The waitress returned from...somewhere to take my empty plate. I thanked her, but she didn't respond. Instead she turned to leave, which is when I realized that she was only using her right hand. I tried to ask for her name, but she was gone. A receipt left stuck to the table made the answer clear: "Your server today was: Lucy" accompanied by a smiling face. AGENT, on tape: Wait, Lucy's real? WREN, on tape: Real as you or I. AGENT: But what happened to her? Where is she? WHO is she? WREN: I'll get to it eventually. Promise. First there's the issue of the Boss. **** CONWAY: My physical form dissipated in streaks of light, as did any lingering doubts I might have had. My fingers reached out across the beach, bending over the land. My feet were tree roots, ancient and intractable. My heart caught fire and burned eternally underground. Never again did I need to worry about hunger, pain. Money. I'd have people for that. Speaking of… I became aware of all those under my domain. Offices like hives, honeycomb cubicles full of shadows. Warehouses of hollow shells sanded down to nothing throughout this great right-to work-state. Souls destroyed by the midwest burned in the lucid engine, now they were husks, but working husks. All at my command with a single impulse. And if I ever needed more workers, I could reach through the wires, touch some hearts, and set them aglow. I wouldn't abuse that power, I thought. I'd make a fine boss. Great, even. Pay's not bad for entry level work so they shouldn't complain. So what would my first order of business be now that I was the Boss, Wren? Well, it would behoove me to make sure someone like me doesn't find me and take over. I'd need a way to contain any traces of myself, this place, and its inhabitants. I'd need to prevent word from getting out to the public about...well, any of this. I would need people, not just my shadows here but real hands and feet employees, to do it. I'd need to form an organization, one dedicated to cataloging things out of place and setting them right. Or at least keeping the things that shouldn't exist hidden from public view. A web of people all over the country, a low-profile surveillance network, a vault. I'd form The Dead Letter Office of Aisling, Ohio. It all lined up. All those piled up cliches, the missing person, the mysterious town, the odd letters. Of course they were all a ruse designed to grab my interest and not let go. It'd been me the whole time. I built this place, on the backs of those I used to work with. To quote a great philosopher, if I may: "Perfect is the event which assumes its own mode of disappearance...Imagine a good resplendent with all the power of Evil: this is God...creating the world on a dare and calling on it to destroy itself..." Once I was gone, I needed to make sure no one went looking for me. I'd have to find some cog and keep them at my old desk to sort through the mess. A real beaurocrat. Tell them they're looking for clues. Keep them on a track. I'd need an intermediary to pass between me and the membrane of the real. Someone of the dream but outside it. It had to be Kenji. The second man, the son of god. My courrier, my herald. He brought me here--at my own behest I knew then--and he would keep me here. Now all I had to do was sit back and let my word be known. Kenji, take dictation: There's electricity in the margins on the page, an atom bomb's worth. In the space between the words, there's energy. The things we can't see are made of that energy. They travel through the wires and hide in stoplights. We can't see them because we're not meant to see them. They come out at night and ride on the electrons in the air. We are made of electrons. When the twilight is gone, and no songbirds are singing, God comes through the lines and sits in the streetlights. He waves but you can't see it (fades into The Boss voice) AGENT, on tape: He told you all that, huh? But he's gone. WREN, on tape: In a manner of speaking, yes. AGENT: Was he ever really there? WREN: In a manner of speaking, no. He was a mask. AGENT: What about you? WREN: I walked back through the darkness of the cave satiated, but determined. The stars disappeared, the grass receded, and the balmy woods returned. I wandered back to my car and looked up into the clear blue. The hand above had closed into a fist, and it hung motionless in the air, waiting like the cocked hammer of a pistol. The insects in the woods had gone quiet. A hawk was frozen mid-strike. Everything was still and silent. The missing second that only comes along once in a million years. If the world were a just place, it all would have ended there. The hand would have disappeared, the world would keep spinning, the birds would sing. But it's not, and it didn't. The only justice in the world is that which we make ourselves, by olive branch or blood. You must understand: this is the inevitable outcome when things are out of balance, when we submit to orthodoxy. When we try to drown out that strange frequency. When all is built on bad faith, entire structures in our brain designed to lie to ourselves. It all collapses eventually. It's fatal. Slow death. I tried calling Conway again, but he didn't answer. He made me care about him and then turned on me. Damn it all, I let myself get vulnerable. I couldn't be afraid to get my hands dirty this time. I wouldn't be the beetle, devoured by the hungry bird. I would be the wasp, stinging all the way down. I slammed the car door and sped off in a cloud of gravel and dust. It's fatal, but it is preventable, this collapse. There's a solution; we're not yet at the end of history. If I couldn't convince Conway--the Boss--to face what was coming nicely, I'd drag him out, kicking and screaming if necessary. I couldn't do it alone, but I could find others. We had the numbers, we could do it. For me, for Lucy, for everyone. By blood it is, Boss. I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage Called the blood of the exploited working class But they've overcome their shyness Now they're calling me Your Highness And a world screams, "Kiss me, Son of God" I destroyed a bond of friendship and respect Between the only people left who'd even look me in the eye Now I laugh and make a fortune Off the same ones that I tortured And a world screams, "Kiss me, Son of God" I look like Jesus, so they say But Mr. Jesus is very far away Now you're the only one here who can tell me if it's true That you love me and I love me I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage Called the blood of the exploited working class But they've overcome their shyness Now they're calling me Your Highness And a world screams, "Kiss me, Son of God" Yes the world screams, "Kiss me, Son of God" AGENT, in projector room: So we've covered that Conway was the founder and Boss of the DLO, Wren tried to track him down, and we were all about to die. Any questions so far? No? Good. Now let's get to the weird stuff. END LIZ, floating in the void: Where am I? All I remember is...fire...am I dead? If I'm dead, how come I'm still like...thinking. Suck it, Descartes. Damn. Does that mean I wrong about the whole god thing? WREN, from the shadows: Who might you be? LIZ: I'm Liz, who the hell are you? Wait...you're not… WREN: No! No, I'm Wren. I'm looking for collaborators. Shadows with some bite left. LIZ: Uhh... WREN: I understand this is all very confusing. But if you help me, I'll return the favor. LIZ: Just tell me this: how's Priya? Is she okay? WREN: Let me show you. LIZ: Oh god... WREN: I know who did this, and I'm coming for him. Are you in? REAL END OUT OF FICTION CREDITS: Hey everyone, it's your host here. Thank you for listening to the first two seasons of the show (assuming you didn't just skip to this episode, that would be a bad idea). Now I'll be taking a break from here on out to work on some season 3 ideas. I would like to thank my patrons, carriers Flo and Jessica, Receiving clerks Ezra, Elena, Jennifer, Patricia, Paul, Spicy Nigel, and Gadz. Thank you all for your support throughout season 2, and to everyone else sharing and supporting the show. If you'd like to get your name in the credits next season like these fine folk, sign up at Patreon.com/somewhereohio and select one of the tiers there. If you like the show, drop a rating or review on your podcast platform of choice. It's free, if you do a rating you don't even have to write anything and it helps the creators a lot (even though it seems like maybe it shouldn't). Until next time.

A man finds strangely familiar movies outside his door, someone pushes a rock up a hill, a dog chases its tail, and Wren takes things into their own hands. (CWs, minor spoilers: blood, death, brief mention of sex, some language, vomit, birds, dogs, derealization) TRANSCRIPT: WREN: The crowd at the Song Bird had vanished. The edges of the room faded into a misty gray. The woman I'd been talking to was gone. All that remained was the stage, awash in nightclub luminance. There was something standing on the stage. A kind of shapeless being. Its body was waving like a dead flag stirred by a subtle breeze. Harsh noise blared through the ashen bar. It seemed to be facing my direction despite its lack of features. I turned to run for the exit, but the door was no longer there: the back half of the dive bar now extended into an endless void. The jittering form reached out, and from its hand erupted streams of black ribbon. They curled around my feet with some force and bound my movement. I kicked and tore at them, but it was no use. They continued snaking up my legs. The shape on the stage bellowed again, a horn from the lighthouse of the damned, and the ribbons tugged hard at my feet, knocking me down and pulling me toward the thing. The strands were halfway up my torso, and quickly began restricting my arms as I clawed at the checkered linoleum floor. I was pulled halfway up the stage, wrapped nearly to my throat in tight black bands. The closer I got to the umbral figure, the harder it became to breathe. My chest tightened, and each breath felt like I was gulping down burning air. I felt a hot jolt run through my body. I wriggled furiously and knocked over the microphone stand. Feedback screeched through the ethereal room. Just as the ribbon was about to encroach on my lips and stifle my cries, something emerged from the gloom beyond the walls. It flew between the projector and lyrics splashed on the screen and for just an instant, it cast an avian silhouette against the wall: a huge feathered beast, wings flared and talons outstretched to strike. It slammed into the shadow on stage and tore through the strands confining me. No longer connected to my would-be abductor, they lost their mystic pull. I broke my arms free and tore through at the constraints around my feet. It wasn't until later--hunched over my stained coffee table with a mug of green tea, draped in a blanket and shaking--that I realized what had been wrapping me: magnetic ribbon, the kind used in video tapes. The giant raven stood on stage with its back to me, its foot on the slowly vanishing shadow monster. It struck me as odd that the thing had any form at all on which to step. But now was no time for wandering thoughts. I tried to call out, but my voice was hoarse and dry. The bird didn't move. WREN: "You saved me from...whatever that was. Can I repay your kind favor somehow?" The hulking corvid turned its head back to me. It had no beak, nor feathers on its face. Instead I saw pale skin, dark eyes, lips; upsettingly human. AVERY: "You already have," WREN: it replied in a voice that sounded uncannily like my own. And then the bar was back, and I was standing alone and disheveled in the middle of a vibrant dance floor. No bird, no shadow, no ribbon. Just me, alone among the crowd. I fled the bar and didn't look back. Though looking back now, I think I forgot to pay my tab. I should probably return soon and hope for a better experience. Now, let's take a look at the penultimate letter in Conway's backlog. It is addressed to a John Johnson at 123 Cool Street, Real City, Ohio. Right...seems like the only indication of where it came from is the stationary, labeled "Welcome to the Deerland Mall." I don't think I've heard of a Deerland, Ohio, nor its mall. Let's see what this letter has to offer. CONWAY: Let me tell you a story. An aspiring screenwriter and college dropout was working at an indie movie theater. Let's call him John. He worked the late shift, usually slow now that the old college town was starting to lose most of its college students. He used his free time in the projection room to work on his scripts. He had a friend, we'll say David, who said he was "in the biz," whatever that means. About once a week, David sent over some weird reel he'd gotten a hold of. Once the manager was off for the day and the crowds had all but gone home, John would set up the projector and screen whatever wild stuff David had found. Exploitation flicks, experimental genre stuff, early short films by famous directors. It wasn't always that exciting, though. Sometimes it was boring b-roll footage, or badly transferred home movies. Regardless, John would screen them and then he and David would talk about it the next day. One evening, deep into the greasy salty night, John nodded off while waiting for a delivery. It was only for a minute, but when he woke up, a film canister was there at the door to the projection room. John looked the canister over. No shipping package, no label, no markings, just a clean metal disc. John loaded it up as usual. As the flickering quicksilver poured through the empty theater onto the screen, John was struck by something. He knew the star of this one. Not like in the way you "know" a celebrity, he really knew her. He couldn't see her face right away but he knew it was her: an ex of his he hadn't talked to in years. She wasn't an actor, never showed an interest in it to his knowledge, but there she was. She was winding down the aisles of a brightly lit grocery store. She picked up a box of fruit loops and put it in her cart. Then she was outside shivering, looking up at the full winter moon through cloudy breath. The moon was a bowl of cereal she ate for breakfast, then click clack off to work along the rumbling subway tunnels, click clack keyboards and phone calls, the touch of fur under palm, and then the reel stopped. There was no dialogue, no real characters, no theme or meaning he could really get at. The backgrounds and settings were all vague, almost abstract. But it all seemed a little familiar to John. He felt a wave of deja vu wash over him, a memory tingling in some lost corner of his mind trying to get his attention. The next day, John called David and asked him where he got the film. David had no idea what John was talking about. He didn't send any reels that week. John told David to hold off with the movies for now, just to see if any more of these unsourced films showed up. And show up they did. *** Saturday night somewhere in Pittsburgh. Interior of John's apartment. He's fast asleep in bed. We can hear his snoring as we pass through the open window. Tight shot of John's face, then crossfade into the dream. John is on a plane, middle seat surrounded by faceless strangers murmuring incomprehensible dialogue. "Watermelon, peas and carrots, lorem ipsum." He looks around the flying tin and sucks in the stale air. The window shade is open, cloudless dawn or dusk or the dead of night shimmers out of view. The plane cruises through thick rivulets of puffy clouds. John is terribly thirsty. He tries to signal for a flight attendant but his arm won't rise. He tries to talk but his voice comes out in a soft hiss. He screams, but his expletive barely moves past his lips before silently crashing to the floor. Then John is sitting in the terminal in Germany with a return flight in a week. But he's forgotten to call off work. He tries to call his boss, but the line won't connect. Wide shot of John's bedroom, he bolts upright and looks out the window. A plane blinks in the sky over the city. Scene. *** Sunday night came around and John was at the theater as usual. He was scribbling away in the moleskine notebook as the projector streamed a vision of another world on the screen. The click and whirr of the machine was a nice distraction, a good way to occupy the nagging part of his brain that always pulled at his attention. Just as he had started writing some snappy dialogue, there was a clank outside the projection room. He peeked outside, and in front of the door was another blank canister, the deliverer nowhere to be seen. There was no one in the audience, so no one would mind a quick change of scenery, right? The projector buzzed and spun the new reel. Light filtered through the 35mm print, spitting its magnified contents across the room. When the first image appeared, John's breath caught in his chest. He felt the creeping itch of panic in his throat like rising seawater. There was a plane, a crowd of people, an open window, a thirsty patron, a terminal. Exactly like John's dream, or what he could remember of it. That's when he realized why the first mysterious film was so familiar: it was a dream he'd had a few weeks back. Fragments of half-forgotten sights and sounds flashed in a jumbled collage in his mind. "Holy shit, is that Emily?" David asked as the two sat in the audience for a private late night screening of the first mysterious film. "I had no idea she could act. This is pretty good!" John was less enthused. "Sorry. It's so short though. Is that it?" John said that had to be it because that's all that was in his dream. "This is literally unbelievable. Like I don't believe what you're saying. Wait a week, and if another comes in, call me right away. We'll watch it together and I'll see if you're just messing with me." John had fitful sleep the following week. He couldn't focus on his writing. He was getting irritable and paranoid. Someone had to be watching him, right? How else would they know this stuff? Were they reading his journal? John woke up that sunday groggy and distracted. He couldn't remember his dream clearly, something about a street maybe. But come nightfall, another canister showed up at the projectionist's door. John set the reel spinning and David watched. In the film, David was in the middle of Hamburg, Germany, or rather what a young white guy in America who's never been abroad might imagine Hamburg looks like. He was wandering through the streets and looking at the various buildings. He kept turning to the camera and saying something, but there was no sound. Then the screen went white. "What the hell was that?" David accused more than asked this time. "Were you spying on me or something? Where was that? I don't recognize it." John reiterated the theory about his dreams. David was pale now, the reality of what was going on finally sinking in. "This is sick. Bad sick. That means someone is watching this and putting it into to film. What if you have a messed up dream, or like a sex thing with somebody, or a nightmare. Are there other copies being sent to other theaters? I don't want people seeing this." It was all too much for John, too intimate, too unsettling. We can't control what we dream anymore than we can control our heartbeat or our appetites. It just is what it is. But what if what it is is really rotten? And what if someone else finds that rot at our core? These were John's thoughts as he looked over other jobs for the week. At least maybe if he got away from the theater, this would all stop. Made about as much sense as how it started. Why did David have to start bringing over bootleg reels anyway? He's the one who got John into this and Interior. Unknown time. John is standing in a stark white bathroom, the floor stained deep red in a growing pool. There's David, his throat slit open, painting streaks of crimson on the wall as he flails and grips at his wound. In John's hand is a straight razor, you know like the kind old barbers sharpened on that leather strip. Real Sweeney Todd stuff. David chokes and bubbles until his body slows and he slumps against the wall. John climbs in the shower behind him and closes the curtain. The blood rushing in his ears is the deafening sound of waves on the shore. He can still see the red smears through the plastic curtain in a smudged vignette, and the red on his hands drips into the tub. He sees a blur that used to be David in the corner. John's vision shakes as the blur that was David rises. Circles of pulsing light shoot through John as the blur that was David comes closer, one unfocused hand reaching, gripping the shower curtain. It pulls, the cheap pvc sheet ripped from its hooks, and falls over John's head. He tumbles backward against the shower wall. The blur that was David leans in, and John was back at work screening some real junk for an audience of two. Probably teens there to make out. He was drawing little ink circles in his notebook. He hadn't had any good ideas in weeks. All of his thoughts were occupied by his current...predicament. He draws the circle bigger and bigger, until it expands beyond the borders of his notebook and paints black lines in the air. The ink begins filling the room. It threatens to absorb him into its eternal center. He tries to run but his legs are John's notebook hitting the ground stirred him. The projector was spinning dry and the only patrons departed. He must have dozed off. He stuffed his notebook in his bag and moved to leave when he saw the canister outside the door: a round tin streaked with red. John's heart fell through the floor. Metaphorically speaking, that is. Good stories should have metaphors, right? The last real dream he could really remember was... There must be some kind of sickness in us, in humans. We know we shouldn't but...well, we just can't walk away, can we? This sickness, curiosity. A cruel prank by god, maybe. Or an evolutionary mechanism to get us to destroy ourselves. We stick our fingers in a dog's mouth then act surprised when we get bit. We can't turn our backs to the fire even as it melts our faces. We can't leave well enough alone, we can't just accept that some things aren't meant to be seen, to be known. Yeah, even when we do know, we just have to see for ourselves to be sure, don't we? Or maybe that's just me, and I'm..ah, what's the word… John watched the movie, of course. The razor, the blood, the shower, the blur that was David, all there, all realer than real on that massive screen. He ripped the film from the projector, jamming and tangling the whole thing up. He called David. Tried to anyway, but David didn't answer. He figured his friend had a late night or early night or whatever the hell kind of night it would take to make things okay. But John didn't know that David would never answer a call again. *** Interior, projection booth, midday. John is playing one of the summer's box office hits for a packed audience. He pops in the second reel and gets ready for the switch. When the old reel runs out and the new one starts, the screen glows with morbid celluloid. Razor, blood, shower, blur. John feels his body go cold from the inside out despite the heat. He sees every mistake he's ever made, every regret he has, pass before him, and before the audience. They watch as if nothing's changed. John stands up and creeps toward the small glass porthole in the booth. He looks out over the patrons. He can't quite make out any faces, but they're all watching his worst fears intently. Then the bloody short ends and John appears on screen, standing in the projection booth, peering out the tiny window. John's breaths are ragged, his mind racing through justifications for what's happening, but there's only one. He wipes the dripping sweat from his burning forehead and the John on the screen does too. He holds up his right hand and movie John follows. He trips backward, disoriented and sick to his core. John's back slams into the projector as he stumbles. It falls, the film seizing up in its mechanism, and then shuts down. The audience erupts in applause. John sits against the broken projector. His stomach's churning something fierce. He can feel it tickling the back of his throat again. From his mouth pours black tape, technicolor nightmare ribbon, in spools on the floor. He pulls and retches as the film exits his body. The audience cheers. Curtains. Scene. *** Now what was the lesson here? Was all that oddness just a dream? That would seem a bit cheap, wouldn't it? Or is John himself just a dream? Or, maybe, you're the dream, and John's the dreamer. Well, I'll leave it to you to figure out. Did I say a story? I lied: I've got three. See, three's a good round number. You know the myth of Sisyphus? Imagine you were cursed to push a boulder up a hill all day. When you get to the top, it rolls back down the hill and you have to start over again. Now repeat that forever. Imagine you had to grind away day after day, working yourself to dust for most of your waking hours. You had to toil and strain all your life for nothing. Just bearing the weight of that rock. The labors never cease. Camus imagined the absurdity of it all, figured sisyphus happy. I think based on experience, that's a load shit. Now imagine someone came along and told you they'd let you switch places with the rock. You could finally relax, you could finally be on top. You could let someone else carry that weight for a while. I mean, someone's gotta do it, right? Do you think Sisyphus would take that offer? Would you? All right, one more story. Last one, I promise. There's a dog all alone out in a field of broken corn stalks. He's supposed to be hunting. But he sees something move behind him out of the corner of his eye. He spins around to catch it, but it's gone. Then another flash of movement. He turns back and there's still nothing there. He's getting nervous now, his mouth hanging open, tongue lolling with each anxious pant. He stamps his feet into the dark earth and shakes. The movement comes back, but this time he waits. He'll surely get it this time if he's patient. His anticipation for the catch grows, his ears perk up. The thing behind him reveals itself. He spins in a tight circle and clamps down. Not quite as strong as the wolf, but there's enough of the primal, ancient grit in him to kill. But what's this? Whatever he's caught is attached to him, coming directly from his hind quarters. He pulls, and feels the tug on his own back. It's furry, and it smells familiar. He stands for a moment in that shattered field, tail in teeth. He's forgotten what his purpose is. He tries to think of something all the way back, some instinct that runs in the blood of those who hunted mammoths and survived glacial flow, the fear of every human huddled in caves, huts, cabins. This isn't what he's supposed to be doing. There's something else. But that thought is beyond him now. So he lets go his tail. Now he's really gonna do what he's told, what he's trained to do. Then the swish of something swaying behind him, a blur of gray or brown in his periphery, and it starts again. Don't go chasing your tail on a hunch or you'll end up getting hurt. Stick to what you're supposed to do. Some birds are just bigger than others, you know? Of course the big birds at the top of the feeder get their fill, but what they leave behind rains down on the sparrows and wrens below, and trickles down to even the lowest of birdkind. They all benefit if they stay in their places. Or so I've been told. So which are you gonna be? The dog or the wren? *** WREN: And with that, there's only one piece of mail left in Conway's inbox: the last letter on his to-do list the day he vanished. I suppose the backlog all recorded and archived, they'll be sending me back to my original office next week. Or maybe they'll keep me here a while to continue doing this. It's hard not to wonder what happened, though. So many loose ends. I'm fighting nearly every instinct I have to look deeper, but I've been explicitly instructed not to do so--some might say threatened. This has come to an inauspicious end, hasn't it? Let's see what this last letter has in store for us before we part. It looks like a postcard, a little worn and discolored. On the front is a white lighthouse. The script below indicates it's in Aisling, Ohio. And on the back is just one sentence. It reads: Little Songbird, That's not your tail moving behind you. Bite, and don't let go. -Lucy *off mic, shuffling, footsteps and a door closes* WREN, muffled: Hey, Martinez, when did this one come in? *unclear dialogue from a second person* WREN: Are you certain? *unclear dialogue* WREN: Who flagged it? *unclear dialogue* WREN: No, no! Don't get The Boss. This isn't work-related, it's...personal curiosity. *unclear dialogue* WREN: Actually could you let them know I'm done with Conway's pile here. And I think I'm going to take a vacation. Thank you! *sounds of sitting back at the desk* WREN: I'll find out what happened to you, Conway, directives be damned. Now where the hell is Aisling, Ohio? *out of fiction credits* Hey everyone, it's your host here. Just want to give a shoutout to all the lovely patrons that help make this show possible. So thank you to carriers Flo and Jessica, and to receiving clerks Gadz, Paul, Spicy Nigel, and Patricia and to everyone else sharing and supporting the show. If you'd like to support the show and get your name in the credits like these fine folk, head on over to patreon.com/somewhereohio and sign up for one of the tiers there. Thank you again, and happy belated birthday, Nigel!

A letter writer reminisces about his strange childhood pet. Conway explores the guts of an abandoned mall and finds someone he wasn't looking for. Wren gets chewed out for something they can't control. (CWs: body horror, brief mention of violence and death, alcohol, dead animal, whispering, some strong language) TRANSCRIPT: Hello, this is Wren, claims adjuster for the Dead Letter Office of *******, Ohio. The following audio recording will serve as evidence for Conway's case. Public release of this or any other evidence is strictly prohibited. Some names and facts have been censored for the protection of the office. As we've previously established, forward and backward are not necessarily stable concepts. So let's begin today by looking at the next letter in Conway's backlog, which may give me insight into what happened to him. Dead letter 14417, a long note written on several folded pieces of printer paper, sent by a Stephen ***** to his mother in late 2016. The letter reads as follows. NARRATOR STEPHEN: Hey mom. Did I ever have a pet growing up? I know dad never wanted one and then Dave was allergic. It's getting harder to remember if this actually happened or if it's a vivid dream that's stuck with me through the years. Before high school hit me like a semi truck, you'd let me bike up to the arcade at the Deerland Mall on the weekends. LOUDSPEAKER: "WELCOME TO THE DEERLAND MALL, YOU'LL GO BUCK WILD FOR THESE DEALS! Our store hours are: 9am to 7pm" *slowly fades out* NARRATOR: I remember the huge globe of stale gumballs loitering in the foyer. I'd chew on them even though I knew they were rock hard and would probably cut my gums up. Sorry about the quarters missing from your purse. Then I'd stop by the candy store and get a big bag of sweaty gummies that had been sitting in the foggy display case for god knows how long and a tall cherry coke from the concession stand. The light gun shooters and fighting game cabinets there were cool enough, but my favorite was the racing game. It had a whole mock driver's seat that moved side to side as you steered. It was also more expensive to play than the others, so I'm sorry about the missing dollar bills. Whatever change I had leftover after a few laps of hairpin turns went into the vending machine full of capsule toys. Since I couldn't get a dog, I was desperate for one of those new Tamagotchi toys. But where was I gonna get a whole twenty dollars? Coincidentally, the top prize advertised on the machine was a bright blue Tamagotchi. I was old enough to know there was probably only one in there, if any at all. I knew I'd probably end up spending more than twenty dollars trying to get it, yet here I was pouring money down the slot anyway instead of saving it up to buy one. On a particular lazy afternoon, the arcade was empty: not too uncommon for a summer weekday. I put two quarters in the slot on the capsule machine, twisted the tough old crank, and out dropped a peculiar toy. The capsule itself was identical to the others: a translucent plastic casing, a bubble with a colorful top that popped off. Almost like an acorn fallen from a petroleum tree. But what was inside the case gave me pause then, and still makes me uneasy today. I cracked it open under the flickering lights of the arcade. Inside wasn't a Tamagotchi, but rather an egg: bigger than a robin's egg but about the same color with a few white spots, and surprisingly heavy for a toy its size. What's a thirteen-year-old boy want with a plastic egg? Waste of 50 cents, I thought. I put it in its case and set it on top of the claw machine so I could go play a game about shooting aliens in area 51. I was winding down a blocky corridor when I heard something behind me. I had thought I was the only one in there. I froze, and a bead of prickly sweat rolled down my neck. I turned my head to the entrance of the arcade. Nobody there. I scanned the stained carpet for anything out of place. Spilled on the ground near the rusty change machine was the capsule I'd just won, split up as a cracked egg. The toy that was inside sat upright among the wreckage. I took a step closer, still gripping the orange gun tethered to the cabinet. The egg on the ground shook. A tiny wobble. I shut my eyes hard for a few seconds, inducing those familiar mental fireworks, then looked again. Another teeter. I pointed the light gun at it and fired. Kid logic would state that if this toy came to life, it could similarly be brought down by a toy gun. By then my connection to kid logic was hanging on by a single synapse, constantly threatening to disappear from my thought patterns forever, on the precipice of the bigger, darker realizations that the adult world foists upon the unsuspecting teen. Well, sometimes kid logic doesn't hold up to real world testing anyway. But now this blue egg had my interest: it was a curiosity, an oddity, and nothing sparks the young imagination quite like oddity. I picked it up gingerly and put it under my baseball cap. Under the blinding sun outside I hopped on my bike and rode home. Back at the house, I breezed past you and Dave without a word and stomped up the stairs. Looking at my prize in the familiar light of my room, it didn't seem to be moving at all. Once again in the mundane, away from the caffeine surges and sugar crashes and flashing numbers, it was just a plastic egg. Maybe it had actually moved, or maybe I just really hoped it would. I set it on my bedside table and forgot about it for the rest of the day. I woke up in the middle of the night to something scurrying around my room. I didn't see it at first. Too dark, too small, too quick. I only heard the chattering and scuffling. I stood up on the bed and surveyed my room. There was something moving in the pile of dirty laundry in the corner. I crept over to the clothes and peered into the moving sleeve of my sweater. Inside was a tiny, fleshy thing. No bigger than the palm of my hand, barely more than a tan blob with black eyes and a wide mouth. It had glommed onto a green army man I used to play with all the time, some years ago forgotten in the halting dust of my adolescent closet. It was gnawing on the soldier's helmet, content with its prey. I reached in to gently pull the toy away, but it was hanging on with thin, fingerless limbs. Under its round body were small nubs planted firmly to the floor. When I managed to wrestle the toy away, it let out an odd chirp, like a strained baby bird. The little guy was probably hungry. If it sounded like a bird and came from an egg like a bird, maybe it would eat like a bird. So I gathered some seeds and nuts from the pantry and scattered them in front of it. The thing poked around a bit with its probing mouth, but it didn't seem that interested. Then it hit me: momma birds chew up the food for them when they're young. I mashed a handful of peanuts around in my mouth and leaned over the blob to spit. I'll tell you it didn't go well. I tiptoed to the darkened kitchen for some paper towels to clean the thing off. When I returned to the pile of dirty laundry, the creature had found another favorite childhood possession: a blue gameboy game. I'd spent dozens of hours playing it to collect all the monsters, but I hadn't touched in a while. The creature had the corner of the plastic cartridge in its mouth. I figured it probably couldn't do much to damage the game, seeing as it didn't have any teeth, so I let it gum on for while. Big mistake. It closed its mouth around the cartridge, and I heard a muffled snap. It set down the game, the corner roughly broken off and missing. The creature swallowed the chunk and chittered with joy. Arcade bird eats arcade games. Made sense at the time. I brought it another game, a game I wouldn't mind losing. The tiny blob ignored it and wandered over to my binder full of baseball cards. It ducked its head under the cover and started nibbling on the corner of my Ken Griffey Jr rookie card. I rushed over and pulled it away. Never have I been more thankful for a thin plastic sleeve. So what did this thing want if not games? Well, after an hour or so of testing its palette, I had some promising results. My favorite gameboy game? Yes. My pillowcase? No. Baseball card? Yes. The small tv in my room? No. My lucky hat? Yes. I slowly put together over that early morning that this creature only wanted to eat things I had an attachment to. It could sense my emotional connection to certain objects, and sought those out. I let it finish the game cartridge it had started eating since it was functionally useless now anyway. It seemed satisfied, and passed out in the laundry basket. A few days went by. The creature wasn't just a blob anymore: it had a bigger torso, longer front limbs, and extended legs. It looked more animal now and less like a ball of skin. I started calling it Creech, short for creature. Real original, right? Hey, I was thirteen, cut me some slack. You remember the "imaginary friend" I would hang out with? That was Creech. We grew together for a time, though it much faster than me. It got taller, longer. Its head rounded out. Creech started standing mostly upright and used its fingerless arms to manipulate objects and simple tools. It would respond to my calls, and chatter back in a manner a parrot newly learning to speak might. As its body grew, so did its hunger. There were only so many old toys and games around my room that it would eat, and only a few left that I was willing to part with. I couldn't buy it food or sneak scraps from the kitchen, it wouldn't touch them. Lucky for us, late summer is garage sale season around here. So every muggy August morning, Creech and I hopped on my bike, the little guy barely concealed under my yellowing cap, and rode the neighborhoods searching for pieces of other people's pasts. Yeah, you guessed it: sorry for the missing 20s. A faded picture of a deceased husband. A ratty teddy bear from a relationship gone stale. Worn kid's shoes. These things seemed to have an aura, some weight to them that Creech could sense, and it pointed me to the most potent objects: dated comics, grimy games, scratched records, vessels for fond memories ready to be consumed again. We played together in the park, had pizza in the mall food court, won rigged games at the county fair. Creech was my secret pet, my friend. We spent the whole hot summer together, enjoying my last long days before high school started. While Creech consumed these bittersweet artifacts that boiling summer, it started looking distinctly more humanoid. It grew rudimentary fingers, long toes. Creech stayed pretty hairless, and its eyes still stared endlessly, round and black. Its long mouth hung open, and took up the lower half of its face, sans nose. It was cute, in the way a pug's cute. As the last days of August crawled sweatily on, Creech needed more to feed on, stronger emotions, objects loaded with more joy, or more pain. And it was almost up to my knee by then. I felt the scratching of a bad idea at the back of my mind. An echo deep within a cave, or a fuzzy radio signal you can almost make out if you tune it right. A violent movie you can nearly see through the garbled static of a channel you're not supposed to get. I looked at that screen for a moment, anxious but deeply curious. Could it feed on more than old toys and trinkets people used to love? Could it feed on a connection a little more...potent? Something a little more...living? But that signal was too garbled, too big for my mind at the time. As the season's credits started to roll, I reflected on my own past, on the people and things I used to care about so deeply. Why did I shove my stuffed animals in the closet? Why couldn't I feel the same way watching Power Rangers that I used to? Somewhere deep inside, I felt my first blustery wave of nostalgia. I was about to transition to high school, another unskippable cutscene, another click up the rollercoaster, leading to the inevitable drop into adulthood. Into game over. I wanted to get off, to stop for a minute and really take in what I had--what I was--before then, but I was already past the platform. No getting off now, no slowing down. When you're young, every moment is always ahead of you: the myriad loves, disappointments, triumphs, and failures are further up the track. It's not until something's behind you that you can anticipate how sweet it was, and how sweet it must stay. Or maybe that's how I see it now that I'm old, my perception of time stretching out and compressing. So many things I'll never get back. How sweet it all seems now. Mom, if I told you about Creech, I knew I'd be grounded, but I couldn't keep feeding it alone. I didn't see my teachers during summer break, and I thought the cops might kill it, or take it in for military study if I showed them. I couldn't keep hiding it and hoping no one would get suspicious of a 13 year old boy constantly rifling through antique shops. It wasn't fair to either of us. It was time to let go. So Creech happily climbed into my backpack that simmering day like any other, one leg at a time, hungry and eager. It barely fit in there by then, even curled up, and it was getting heavy to carry around. We peddled out of town for a while, way out past where the asphalt veins break down into gravel arteries that wind around brutalist cornstalk ribs. Into the limitless moony analog heartland. Past where Old Lady Carruthers fed the stray cats that howled at her window every morning. Where the Baldridge brothers--who grew up good christian boys like their small town bigshot daddy--beat a guy half to death on Cottonwood Road cause he looked a bit funny. They ended up at Case Western. Where the adults turned to stone and the kids either left or drank and drank until their guts fell out and they fossilized too, because what else is there to do when the horizon ahead of you is so damn flat. Where I'd learned how to swim when I was 6, had my first real crush at 12, crashed my car into a pole at 17, left for a better life at 24 and came back at 30. Out where Creech had no clue that after today, we wouldn't see each other again for 16 years. We crossed Holcomb road and slowed beside the gray picket trees. I figured it'd be safe out here, no predators and plenty of space to roam and get big. I opened the backpack and let Creech out in the tall grass. It looked at me, then around at the rising branches and leaves. It hadn't been this far out of town before, probably had no idea that trees got this tall or this plenty. I pointed into the still gloamy woods, streaks of bloody sunset banding across our faces. "Go on, bud. I can't take care of you anymore." Creech simply stared at me. It saw the tears welling in my eyes, but didn't know what they meant. "Go!" It winced, and said what was almost name, in the best way that its toothless mouth could. Sparse clouds painted contusions overhead in thick pink blocks. I wanted to stay here with it forever, to remember this for all time. I wanted to carve my initials into the support beam. But if I stayed much longer, I'd never leave, and we might get spotted. I pulled my hat low against the burning punctured yolk of sun dripping yellow across the field. I straddled my bike and sped off in a cloud of dusty stone, leaving Creech alone and unmoored in Holcomb Woods. Mom, I have to confess something. I'm not just writing to check up on you or jaw on endlessly about my childhood. See Creech came back today. I saw it out behind the Green's house, eyeing their precious terrier through the screen door. Then it saw me. Creech got big. Real big. It looks different from before, too. When it was treated well and eating our stuff, it started looking like us: human. But its eyes are harder, its posture more hunched and bestial. I had hoped that writing this out would imbue the letter with enough feeling to pack a real punch for it. But Creech isn't buying it. Creech wants something more. Now that I'm done, I'm actually having a hard time remembering what I wrote. Guess I wore myself out getting flowery near the end, huh. Seeing Creech brought up so many memories, but it's hard to think. What was I saying? Well anyway, I've got a last ditch, hail mary idea. Something that might have enough ambient nostalgia to sate it: the Deerland Mall. With its shuttered storefronts, empty theaters, and abandoned junk, there ought to be enough memory impressions and lingering ghosts of the past for it to stay full for years. Now it's hungry, mom. Real hungry. I don't think it'll hurt me, it remembers me. But I'm not sure it'll have the same courtesy for others. That reminds me... Wait. What was I thinking of? Keeps happening today. Brain zaps. I'm remembering something then Creech is there and it's gone. Ah, nevermind. All my love, Stephen WREN: While I can't intuit a direct line from the content of this letter to Conway's disappearance, I have to wonder if the theme of this story is relevant here. A thing once fondly recalled has been twisted and offered for consumption. Something dark within revealed. I believe I have some insight into Conway's headspace the day he left. He was remembering something. But memory can be treacherous. If you bring the wrong thing back from the past, you can alter your life forever. I suppose we'll keep this letter in our vault for the time be-- *old phone rings* WREN: Oh. *Wren answers the phone* WREN: H-hello? *Static on the other line* WREN: Is anyone there? *whispered* Conway? *phone hangs up* WREN: I guess it was a wrong number. CONWAY: I arrived at the dilapidated shopping center thirsty and weary. Lettering on the facade indicated that this was the Deerland Mall, though most of the letters in Deerland had been busted or stolen by wayward youth, leaving only "the D E A D Mall." The glass doors were rusty at the hinges, covered in reaching fingers of ivy. The signs plastered to the glass had been bleached almost white by the sun. About as good a natural "do not enter here" signal as it gets. The doors weren't locked but they did take a bit of doing to open. The place wasn't in much better shape on the inside either. Most of the lights overhead were burnt out. The foyer--or is it foy-ay?--was gently illuminated by some waning daylight peeking in through the glass ceiling. Something crackled over the speakers. *Mall greeting from earlier plays, but glitched out* CONWAY: A huge gumball machine sat in the center of the open area, still half full of candy. The treats had lost a lot of their luster, but to their credit they still looked edible. Lord knows what chemicals made that possible. In front of the machine was a coin operated carousel of shabby horses. The steed in front had an anguished look on its face, you know the kind of wild expression horses get sometimes, where their lips curl up in a grimace. It's gaze was aimed backward, desperately trying to look behind it. As if it was being...pursued. I poked my head around and looked at the other horses on the ride; all of them were similarly horrified by something behind them. But they went in a circle. So. Huh. A sign on the coin repository read: "Money changer in the game room." Below that someone had crudely written in sharpie "game changer in the money room." Okay, Banksy, calm down. Beyond this pale circle of light near the entrance, the abandoned corridors were pitch black besides an occasional flicker from whatever animating force remained in the few viable bulbs. I fished out my phone. No reception, but I could at least use its flashlight and maybe see where I was going. I pulled the map out of my back pocket and shone my phone's light on its faded surface. Down the central strut, past an arcade and a shuttered JC Penny was the mall security office. I hoped there'd be some tools there to get this briefcase off my wrist, and if nothing else it was a decent place to hole up for the night. I led with the LED light and crept down the dark, damp corridor. The tiles overhead were blackened in large circles with water damage and mold. No doubt loaded with enough asbestos to shred my lungs just by looking at 'em. You'll go buck wild for these deals, indeed. I walked by a play place on my left that blinked with dim light. "Come play in Bucky's World" the dingy sign said in three different fonts. A reeking odor from the place gut punched me and halted my breath. Fetid water stood covering the cheap linoleum flooring, and grime oozed up the legs of kid's chairs and slides. The stars and stripes dangled limply in the stillness of the scene. Salty choking stench spilled from the playroom as flies buzzed around a deer's head decomposing in the middle of the puddle. Come play. Being in this place called to mind my own, very different experiences of my local mall. Went almost every weekend to see movies with friends once I was old enough to drive. But unless you were looking for dated clothes or illegal firearms and shady sports memorabilia, there wasn't much there anymore. I can still remember the smell, though. The way voices echoed off the high ceilings. The scratchy fabric of the theater seats. The gaudy carpeting, somehow always sticky with something. My first kiss in the parking lot after a matinee. It was all flooding back at once, stronger than usual, one image, one scent connecting to another. Packs of japanese pokemon cards, uncomfortable slacks, greasy pepperoni pizza. These vivid memories here cracked open and rotting like a black tooth. And that's when I heard something moving in a vacant storefront. A weird slapping and squeaking, close to bare skin dragging on tile. I had hoped maybe it was an old couple on their usual morning mall walk, I guess barefoot, amazing what the mind will conceive to paper over reality. I turned the direction of the noise and shone the flashlight into the room. It was an old arcade. Most of the machines missing, leaving a brighter spot on the wall where they stood. A claw machine sat crumpled near the entrance. Through the cracked glass case, I could see a few mildew-covered plushes laying face-down like waterlogged corpses in a lake. The floor was littered with these empty plastic capsules. In the rear was a storage room. The door was hanging open. I pointed the light that way and saw a broken face. It was yellow, missing a rounded ear, with cracks up its face and under its black eyes. It was reaching into a jar of something. Was it...honey? This was a busted winnie the pooh ride that must have been shoved into storage before the mall closed. Something else was on the edge. A long fleshy hand gripping onto the plastic exterior. From inside the ride rose a thin, reedy thing. Half-human, with spindly limbs, a bulbous head. Its toothless mouth was dangling impossibly low. It stood probably twice my height, and stretched a leg over the rim. I didn't stay long enough to see the rest of it. A guttural screech echoed through the mall. It almost sounded like language, but I couldn't understand it. I turned tail and ran. Something boomed over the loudspeaker. MAN OVER THE LOUDSPEAKER: "When the twilight is gone, and no songbirds are singing, God comes through the lines and sits in the streetlights. He waves but you can't see it. Should we all be so lucky as to be touched by the waving man in the light." CONWAY: The fluorescent bulbs in the play place across the hall flashed. Now the deer head rose from the rancid pool, hanging skin and nylon flag draped like vestments across the bone, exposed teeth stark dealership white. In its wake were shadowy figments, jittering out of the bulbs overhead in bursts of sickening light. Their forms were sketchy, vibrating lines. One reached a palm my way and buzzed like a guitar plugged in wrong. Come play in Bucky's World. I could feel my chest aching as it drew closer, a lightning bolt salvation. Come play. I was sprinting now, holding tight to the damn empty briefcase as it flopped and bounced at my side with each step. I was heading straight for the security office. Are mall cops allowed to have guns? For the first time in my life I hoped they did. I wound down a narrow side path, avoiding the public restrooms and pay phone covered in stickers, the buzzing and wheezing following close behind. At the end was an office. I struggled with the sweaty doorknob for a minute, then slammed my shoulder into the door and stumbled into the room. Gone was the miasma of mildew and lucid nightmare. The gentle two-tone mint and white walls invited me in. The door shut behind me with a click, and the commotion outside ceased. The office was small and tidy. In the center was a wooden desk accompanied by a lacquered chair. A pristine rotary phone sat atop the table, warping the spacetime around and drawing menacing attention like a gravity well. A corkboard sat centered behind the desk, with a couple old flyers and a key ring pinned to it. I moved to the desk and slid open the side drawers. No guns, but I did find a lockpick and got to work on the cuffs. Not 5 minutes and they were off, and the briefcase dropped to the carpet. I rubbed my sore wrist and looked around the office again. That damn phone, inescapable, ringing in my head. A barn on fire on a moonless night. I kicked around a thought. Maybe if a phone got me into this, another could get me out. I picked up the sleek mint receiver and dialed the number I had called before, my old phone number, with a trembling hand. I waited and waited and listened. Nothing. Hm. Maybe in a better story it would have worked. What about my office number? Maybe someone was filling in for me today. I gave it a shot, but all I heard was some static. Then the line cut out. While this little office seemed relatively safe, I couldn't just hang out in here forever. Especially if those things were still outside. I pored over the old map again and planned out my best route to the exit from here. It was going to be a close one. I crept out through the door and toward the end of this narrow hallway. Didn't see any sign of the things that were pursuing me earlier. Of course that's always what they say right before they get got, huh. A screech rang out from the stinking guts of the gangrenous mall. More volleys of low droning from the other way, the dissonant warning bell of place already dead, that doesn't know it's dead yet. An air raid siren from a collapsed empire. I took off in the direction of my planned route. But you know what they say about god and plans. The sinewy flesh giant was already nearly on me by the time I crossed the peeling wildlife mural in the kid's food court. In a desperate attempt at distraction, I threw the old magazine I'd been navigating by into what used to be a pretzel store, if the tattered twisty signage was anything to go by. The creature suddenly turned and leapt over the high counter with its long limbs to gnaw on the coupons and photos inside. I still had yet to contend with the shaking shadows and the offal deerhead priest. I was puffing and winded. I rounded the last corner on my route and felt my stomach sink. Rather than a door out of there, I found a closed gate. They must have built an addition to the mall since that magazine came out. Nothing can ever just stay the same here, can it? Gotta always be growing, always making more, and more than more. Or maybe the mall did this itself, continued to slink and slither through the clogged arteries of the midwest even after everyone left. The hairs on my neck stood cornstalk straight and goosebumps sprouted across my arms. My chest tightened from the electric pull of the visions behind me. There was a sharp hot pain in my core, as if my heart was about to catch fire and burn hollow. A barn ablaze deep in the indigo dusk. The decaying godhead wreathed in stars stretched its exposed tendons as if to speak. *incomprehensible whispers* That's when the gate in front of me rose, with the clanking, grinding brash of machinery that's sat dormant too long. I was baptized by a deluge of corporate light. Blue and yellow franchise lettering plastered the walls, below which hung shelves lined with black tapes. A man sat behind a counter, surrounded by rows of rainbow candy boxes and expired popcorn on sale. A video store. He motioned for me with a fishing rod in hand. "Come on in, Conway, and come quick. I've got something that might interest you." WREN: Now that I'm done cataloguing my findings for the day, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the people who make all this possible. Thank you to our brave carrier Flo, and to our wonderful receiving clerks Jessica and Gadz. For the Dead Letter Office of ******* Ohio, this is claims adjuster Wren signing off. *click* *off mic* WREN: Oh, hi. I didn't see you come in. *static from The Boss* WREN: No, I'm done. *dissonant static* WREN: No, look, it's fine, the light's off. Hey, I got a call earlier that might-- *static* WREN: Did I do something wrong? I get the feeling that you-- *intense static* WREN: Right. Well if anything like that happens again, I'll--I'll report it to you right away. Okay. I'll just...keep reading the old mail then. *long static* WREN: See you then. WREN: Might as well not even have me here if this is all I'm allowed to do. How am I supposed to do my job if I just sit here and read all day and get yelled at for answering a phone? I could use a drink. Maybe I'll head to the Song B-- Oh shit. The mic's still h--. *CLICK*

A freighter on Lake Erie experiences heavy storms. A salvage goes wrong. Conway reminisces about his past, and has a revelation about his present. (CWs: death, dead animal, brief gore, blood, body horror, insects, alcohol, derealization, deep water) Lyrics to "Farewell Song" originally published by Dick Burnett TRANSCRIPT: CONWAY ON THE PHONE: Omens always come in threes. The dead rat on the porch should have been number one with a bullet. I put some water on the range for a pot of coffee yesterday morning. I was looking out the back window at the leftover frost glittering in the pink ribbons of early sunlight. I saw it lying there on the cement and couldn't let it just decay. I went out the back door and looked over the scene. Pretty big thing. Probably lived a nice long life eating from my garbage, all things said and done. It had a serious bite on its leg and its stomach was uh...well you know how sometimes your imagination is worse than anything you actually see? This wasn't one of those times. The kettle bubbled in the kitchen, letting off a trail of steam, and a fly buzzed around overhead. I fixed to move the poor deceased critter. Scooping it up with a shovel seemed awful undignified, though. I rummaged through the kitchen drawers and cabinets. I waffled between a paper bag and a shoe box. The kettle screeched and plumed on the stove behind me. I couldn't just dump the little guy in the trash, so I grabbed my garden trowel and made a small hole in the backyard. I laid the box in the grave, then covered its fur in soft earth. In time, it'll be earth itself once more, and plants will grow from its back that new rats eat. Needless to say, I'm out a pair of tongs and a shoebox now. Yeah, omens always come in threes, but not because of any natural or supernatural law. Humans are real good at pattern seeking, sometimes to our own detriment. It's just that it takes three strokes of bad luck for us to really pay attention; one bad thing--well, it is what it is. Two bad things? That's a coincidence. But three, and now you've a pattern. A chain of events. A story. By then, Kenji'd been missing two weeks, and the angel was still in storage. It'd been a hell of a month. A missing person, an small town, mysterious letters and unexplained occurrences. It all felt a little...familiar. Almost cliche. But I'd been doing this gig for 6 years now and I wasn't about to give up my healthcare over that. Besides they pay me to read, not to think. And so I did read, one last time, for the Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio. *New introduction music* CONWAY: This is Conway, receiving clerk for the Dead Letter Office of ******* Ohio, processing the national dead mail backlog. The following audio recording will serve as an internal memo strictly for archival purposes and should be considered confidential. Need I remind anyone: public release of this or any confidential material from the DLO is a felony. Some names and places have been censored for the protection of the public. Dead Letter 315, a weathered diary sent to the wife of a ship's engineer. It details the fate of a lost cargo ship called the Oneiros, slated to make a quick trip across Lake Erie in 1913. The entries that contain no pertinent information will be excised from the record. The remaining relevant passages read as follows. NARRATOR: Morning November 6, 1913. Embarking on a short voyage across the Erie, carrying a heavy load of cargo. Some twenty of us boarded the steamer Oneiros, a handsome ship, one of the finest freighters I've seen on the Great Lakes. Most aboard are able-bodied seamen, seasoned hands for the weather 'sides one of the young cargo loaders, a Patrick, or Phillipe I think. USDA weather bureau noted a brisk easterly front, spots of rain for the upper lakes, calmer waters south. Crew seems in fine spirits despite the chill, the 3000 some gross tonnes of cargo, presumably coal and timber, secured below deck. I'm to look after the engine and its various components. Captain Ludic's a little daffy, assertively old-fashioned. Barking orders like he's a pirate king and we're his swabbies. Could have stepped right from the pages of Treasure Island, beard and all but for his soot black buttoned coat and hat. Seems no quack, though, and certainly knows his way round the ship. He's very particular about his cargo, and ordered that none of us enter the cargo hold unless he gives us his explicit permission. Should be no longer than a day's trip, then two days more before I see you again. It's lonely out here, I can only imagine how dire it is stuck at home alone. I pray that upon my safe return, this log of my activities and thoughts of you more than makes for the time apart. And perhaps then we shall marry. I will be thinking of you fervently. Evening the 6th of November, 1913. I've settled into my berth for the night after we've supped. How I wish you could join me. Captain Ludic took his meal on the deck, and I saw fit to join him. Conversation wasn't exactly enlightening. We took our meat and bread quietly, until a cold drizzle started pattering his old cap. He looked out at the overcast horizon, then he fixed his glazed eyes on me. His hard roll fell from his lap and bobbled across the deck unevenly for a yard before toppling. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "The Witch of Autumn, she's coming for us, lad." NARRATOR: He spoke softly, and his crooked mouth hung open long after his last syllable. A bit of chicken hung from his scruff. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "The boys in the papers said t'would be calmer southward, but these old bones feel it coming. When my knuckles swell, when my teeth ache, and the heavens themselves break open, the winds carrying droplets of death, the witch will crest the white waves. She'll take us all if we're not vigilant. You mark my words, boy: beware the Witch of the White Squall, and those who would invite her with their careless yearnings. I fear there's one such man aboard now. You keep your heart hard and your eyes open, all 5 of 'em." NARRATOR: He was panting after this warning. His lone gold incisor glittering among the row of stained teeth as his shoulders rose and fell. Then he burst out in laughter, a wheezing squeal that cut through the wind. He slapped me hard on the back. I spit out my whiskey at the impact and forced a chuckle. Needless to say I won't be spending my dining hours with that walking stereotype again unless I'm yearning for a fairy tale. I figure myself lucky I'll only be in his company for a short time. I can now hear the cold rain impacting the deck above my wool-wrapped womb. And something below in the cargo hold, though I can't tell its origin or purpose. Creaking, maybe footsteps. Perhaps something's come loose and Patrick or Phillipe is checking on it. I'll try not to fret over it. Until I see you again in the flesh, Caroline, I will continue our rendezvous in my dreams. Morning 7th of November 1913. I took breakfast below deck with Phillipe. The rain's still coming down and the wind blows cold, but Phillipe thinks it should clear by afternoon, and by then we'll have gone ashore. Like a bad fever, he says. Just have to wait for the break. The boy's from Montreal, took the rail down, then rode the canal before hauling lumber across the lake. He seems affable and handy enough. He's as wary of the captain as I, and he had some troubling news about our cargo. He's been loading lumber for about 10 months now, certainly not a master of his trade, but he says something was off about our freight. The tonnage is accurate, but one crate in particular severely outweighed the rest. Given the volume of the thing, he's convinced it can't be lumber, or even coal. He asked me if I knew any more about our voyage: who's paying us, where the lumber's going, but I had little to tell him. I'm not one for accounting. He seems concerned that we may be harboring something dangerous, and the captain won't tell us. I'd be inclined to agree. Though I'm not entirely convinced Ludic even knows what's down there himself. Whatever the cargo, we should be seeing the beacon from the lighthouse cutting through the fog any moment now, and I'll just be glad to be off this ship and in your arms. I do grow so melancholy on these trips without you. Evening the 7th of November 1913. We lost Terrence this afternoon. The storm has shown no signs of abating, despite the predictions of the men in the papers. Terry'd gone up top the pilothouse to help the captain navigate, as its windows were awash with rain. The lake was growing angry, waves breaking high as 10 feet. The boat was churning in the drip, swaying to and fro, threatening to take on water. Terrence was calling down directions to the captain when a wave suddenly rose double the height of the others. The ship lurched, and poor Terrence--with naught to hold onto--he was launched backward, slamming his head into the pole behind him. The crew rushed to the pilothouse but another swing of the freighter tossed him overboard. We scoured the waters for some time, until Captain Ludic ended the efforts and sent us to bed like a disappointed father. Still no sign of land. We should have come ashore in Ohio by now, even at our slowed pace. At night, I imagine the two of us together once more, holding hands by the lake. It's only a drean, but...until then. Afternoon 8th of November 1913. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "I think we've got a rat problem aboard this vessel!" NARRATOR: The captain shouted over Neptune's angry bluster. He'd gathered the 19 of us that remained on the darkened deck in the freezing downpour. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "I know one of you's been below deck. Couple of the crates been pried open." NARRATOR: He had us standing side by side, and walked the line up and down, hunched and frantic, his breath visible in large puffs. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "Who among ye disobeyed yer captain's orders?" NARRATOR: He narrowed his bright eyes. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "Or so bereft were you of a woman's touch that you consorted with the witch? Ye accepted the company of the devil herself onto this freighter? Have ye no sense, lad? Must ye look death in her viscous eye and spit in it? Aye the witch draws near, and she'll scarce be satisfied with you, now she wants the whole crew, and all that we carry. Your base lust has pinned us all to Satan's dartboard." NARRATOR: He had me and Phillipe take our boots off. He inspected the soles. We were the newest members of his crew, and apparently the least worthy of his trust. Rainwater poured down the front of his cap and trickled off his nose. The engine chugged and the steamer groaned against the bracing waves. He threw my boots back at me, squarely impacting my chest. I stumbled backward on the slippery wood. He stood upright in front of Phillipe and drew a long blade. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "Aye, that's about the size of it. Yes we've got a rat problem aboard this vessel and I aim to remedy it. Do you know what's down there, lad? Do you have any idea what that is we're hauling?" NARRATOR: Phillipe was shaking, shivering. His dark hair was matted, wet and stuck flat to his skull. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "I'll not see it sink to the lake floor. Our cargo is more precious than any coin, or any of you scoundrels and lowlifes with your lascivious thoughts." NARRATOR: I propped myself up on my elbow, none too eager to draw Ludic's ire. CAPTAIN LUDIC: "White witch, take the boy! Let the thousand tongues of the deep rise and writhe! Let Neptune's breath whip the tide into knives, all cutting wind and choking froth. Come, come on your pelagic locusts, black as the moonless crusted tide. Take him to the sunless fathoms, entombed in barnacles. Stuff his mouth with algae and feed his eye jellies to the worms. Let your nautical insects drink his ichor and sup on his hair. Drag him down, drag him below the surf, where his soul will fester and rust among the reeds, forgotten in the scrap of a hundred ships, a thousand lives, hallowed out and timeless, unmoving as cold pitch. Take the boy who called to you and leave the Oneiros be." NARRATOR: Spittle dotted his beard. He panted for several tense moments as freezing rain pelted the ship. The engine burbled and the stack belched black fire into the twilight. Then the captain thrust the knife forward, straight into Phillipe's core. I shot upright and charged the captain, but three other crewmen held me back: the captain had a pistol at his side, revealed as his thick coat swung open. Ludic slid the blade upward, gutting the poor lad from neck to navel. He burst like a beached whale onto the deck. The captain roared for someone to tie brick to the corpse and toss it overboard, where it sank unceremoniously out of view. I dreamt of you last night. You came to visit me in the bunk. You leaned over me and gently pressed your sweet lips against mine. I felt a jolt through my system and woke up. I shall hardly sleep this evening, and I shall hardly feel a more forceful loneliness in all my days. Afternoon November 9 1913. Mutiny. Of course mutiny was on the lips of half the crewman on this cursed freighter, myself included. The cold rain gave way to thick globs of snow overnight, now stinging in the hurricane winds. The ship is barely remaining upright among the massive waves. Everyone's freezing, hungry, furious. I gathered a few similar-minded seamen and huddled below deck as we planned our next move. The captain has his pistol, but we have numbers on our side. And a few blunt instruments could certainly bash some sense into him if our pretty words can't. This is for Phillipe, for Terrence, and for our miserable woebegone souls. Morning November 10th 1913. I could scarcely see my hands in front of me, nor the plank of lumber I was wielding. I and four others approached the pilothouse, now almost entirely coated in frost and long, sharp icicles. I pounded on the door and demanded to see Ludic. No response. I wrapped the door several more times. Nothing. The men and I shouldered the door open, only to find the wheel jammed the pilothouse empty. We'd been left rudderless by a craven fool. Then the winds fell silent, the snow diminished. The waves began to sink back into the lake. Several of the men aboard took to the lifeboats. They liked their chances better in a vessel they could actually steer now that the storm was clearing. JONATHAN: "It's a sucker's hole." NARRATOR: One man, Jonathan, confided in me. JONATHAN: "Those buffoons are going to capsize and freeze out there as soon as the wind picks up again." NARRATOR: I looked around at the frozen steamer. Ice hung from every surface. A westerly wind blew over us. I went below deck to check on the engine. While in the dark of the hold, I heard sleet impact the deck once more. The wind began howling, and the storm proceeded at such a force I could imagine the boat cleaving in twain. Unless we find a way to maneuver or god forbid find any sign of the captain, I'm doubtful we'll make it to shore. I shall be thinking of you even as I draw my final breaths and pray you visit my nighttime musings again. Evening November 11th 1913. I can hardly believe what I'm about to write myself, Caroline, but to the best of my storm-battered and hungry mind, it's true: Captain Ludic was right! The witch came for the Oneiros. I awoke to the sounds of heavy footfalls on deck. My head was hot and I felt a deep chill. Someone was shouting. I shook my hazy head and rose from my berth, coughing. A scream rang out. I crept along the hallway and neared the ladder. A wet, slurping slither, dragging along the ground. I hesitantly peered above. There was a sight I shan't forget for the rest of my life, for as long as that may be. Some manner of creature was on deck, a massive wingless insect with long, segmented legs. It had a small, pointed head and enormous round body, like an monstrous tick. One of the men on board, Jonathan I think, had found a harpoon and launched it at the beast, but it couldn't penetrate the thing's thick hide. It turned the man's direction, and a long, thin tongue unspooled from its head. The pink tendril slithered and writhed on the deck with frightening speed, extending dozens of feet and ensnaring the man. This slimy appendage wrapped around the crewman, tearing his flesh and exposing deep red blood. The beast rushed him, seemingly drawn by the blood. He was screaming, but he couldn't move. The tongue coiled around him, cutting him badly at every point of contact, opening his skin like a rotten orange peel. The giant thing squirmed and lapped at the blood spilling from the poor crewman, whose cries became weaker, quieter now, blending with the fury of the storm until they ceased completely. It pulled Jonathan's head to its mouth and began feasting on the damp strands of his dark hair. From the other end of the steamer, another insectoid rose, its legs clattering over the metal and wood as it climbed onto the deck. It joined its kin, its whip-like tongue probing the air for others to feed on. That's when I saw the pile of bodies behind them, all shredded and drained of their essence, scalps bald and raw. The bloodbugs began patrolling the freighter for stragglers, and it seemed I was the only one left. I fled down the hallway, toward the cargo hold. Whatever the captain had said be damned. I hoped that the strong odor of the pine and coal would mask my own reek. I heard one of the things' legs trying the stairs. I frantically panned the room for somewhere to hide. I spotted a huge crate with a few planks pried off. I wormed my way through the opening and held my breath in the box. I heard the tongues slithering down hall in my wake. I clasped my hands and silently prayed to god with the fervor of a hundred choirs that I'd see you again once more. But my prayer was interrupted by a sound behind me. In the crate I could see a looming shape. *Crackling and rumbling noises, same as in the Lighthouse* A sort of metallic invention, like a massive steam engine. It was smooth, dark, containing strange protrusions and angles unlike anything I'd seen before. It was quietly humming, with an occasional clang or thump. There was something else, too. A fleshy hand reached out into the light filtering in through the missing slats. A hand robed in a dark wool coat. A neck stretched out behind it, attached to a crooked bearded head. It smiled, and a gold incisor flashed in the dim light. I could see that it was Ludic, or part of him anyway. His hands and neck were elongated and stretched beyond man's limitation. His flesh gray and malleable, like putty. My gaze followed his distended arm down to where his shoulder should be, but all I found was iron. He had somehow...melted into the engine, or soldered himself to it. Metal and flesh twisted and fused, stringy skin hanging between folds of steel. I think he tried to speak, but all that came forth was a buzz, an electrical chattering like a broken telegraph. I felt sick, and ran from the crate. I sprinted past the sleeping quarters and up toward the deck. I was hit full force with the blistering might of the storm as I went topside. My eyelashes froze, my nervous sweat crystalized. I could barely see the bloodbugs at the other end of the deck through the blizzard. My vision went completely white as I dropped to my knees, violently ill and nearly frozen solid. Then through the pale wall she stepped, the Autumn Witch, the Woman of the White Squall. She bade her pests retreat, and stood before me. Her skin was glistening, and she wore not a single scrap of clothing to defend against the chill. Her hair shimmered and waved as if she was underwater. Her feet never touch the ground. She brushed her hand against my cheek, and an icy jolt shivered down my back. I looked into her eyes and saw wild, radiant love. A love conjured by a lonely sailor, now requited. A fevered love so bold it would kill. She leaned down close, and I could smell the salt breeze on her breath. She pressed her blue lips to my forehead, and I blacked out. I woke up 12 hours later in the dark, soaking on my back in the falling rain, adrift in the infinite waters of Hades. Morning November 12, 1913. I awoke to a distant horn. I thought it at first a dream, a hopeful hallucination. Then the horn sounded again a second time. I sat upright, shivering and soaked through. I saw a beam of light cut through the rain: the lighthouse! I yelped, a sound as much of agony as celebration, and stood. I laughed, dry and bitter wheezing. The ship was drifting toward the shore after 6 long days in hell. I ran down to gather my things and wrap myself in something dry. Then I ducked into the pilothouse and stared out at the light. A smile dared cross my lips. I could make it after all. Then came a horrible rending, a piercing shriek of metal on rock. The ship lurched, and I tumbled forward in the cabin. I was so enthralled by the beacon of the lighthouse that I'd missed the sharp rocks in the shallows. Now she was sinking, taking on icy water. Metal groaned and beams bent and snapped. The stack chugged and spit wet smoke over the scene. The rear of the freighter began sinking. Among the rocks I saw a lifeboat, the very same from the Oneiros, filled with skeletons picked clean and bleached by the sun. I laughed again, a wailing peal like the whinny of Death's very steed. There may yet be time for rescue, but the frigid waters or the phlegm in my lungs will likely take me before the sailors do. And so I bid you adieu, Caroline. Just one more sob story for another sailor's widow. As trite as Ludic himself. If the intrepid rescuers do happen to find these scrawlings and wish to know my fate, I've gone to join the Captain. CONWAY: Records at the time indicate that several other ships went down in this storm, including several hundred crew, but the Oneiros and its men were never found. Given its contents and its age, the DLO has deemed this diary, DL-315, undeliverable. It will be stored safely in our vault. CONWAY ON THE PHONE: I've been thinking a lot about the past lately. Old friends, old regrets. I suppose it's my approaching middle age catching up onme. My time with the office has been uh...illuminating. All those wild things I saw as a kid? The things my parents sent me to see serious adults about? Well maybe some of them weren't so wild. You know how I started working here? I used to be in public radio, the local affiliate down in Cincy. I studied art when I was in college, but well, that didn't pan out like so many other things. I worked a bunch of odd jobs, making 6 dollars an hour slinging coffee or double that if I was willing to break my back. I eventually got lucky and I guess somebody liked my cadence. I'm sure it helped that the station was underfunded and I was willing to work late and cheap. One day about 6 years ago, two suspicious gentlemen in suits dropped by my little studio on my lunch break. They asked if I wanted a job with the post office. They sure as hell didn't look like mail carriers, looked like stone-cold feds to me. I politely declined, praying the cuffs didn't come out. They just handed me a card. I told them if I was ever out of a job, I'd give them a call. After they left, I looked over the card. No names, no phone number, just three letters: DLO. Next morning, I get a call. Boss says the studio caught fire last night after everybody left. Electrical malfunction. Whole place up in smoke. Not enough money to rebuild or move studios. Just gonna shut down the affiliate station. What a coincidence. I looked at the card again and thought of Lucy. Then I got a call. One more chance to reconsider the offer. Yeah, Lucy and I did almost everything together when we were kids. We were pretty much inseparable, at least until the cave incident. I haven't heard from her in a long, long time. I don't know why I haven't reached out. I guess I was afraid too much time got between us. That I wouldn't know what to say. We might even hate each other now. My memory from that time is a little fuzzy, too, just bits and pieces, blurry impressions. It's funny, I sometimes wonder if I made her up, y'know, like an imaginary friend. Those early memories feel about as real a dream most days. Like something that happened to someone else. Like scenes from a worn out VHS tape. But look at me, I'm rambling again. Back to the story. The teeth should have been the second omen. An unmarked box showed up at the office the same morning as the sailor's journal. I picked up the small parcel and shook it like a kid at Christmas, though my approach was rather more apprehensive. Lifting the folds revealed a jewelry box. I flipped the lid open with a creek of its rusty hinges. Underneath was a mirror long ago marred by the grit and grime of age. The plush interior of the box was covered in dark stains, and it smelled like a wet basement. Sitting in one of the compartments were about a dozen human teeth, dark and worn. One reflected light underneath the others: a crude golden incisor. CONWAY: Dead Letter 18316, an application for worker's comp from ******. The applicant's name has been redacted. Looks like he suffered a leg injury during a salvage job. Included with the application is a photo of the injury and testimony from the worker. His testimony reads as follows: WORKER: I hereby swear upon penalty of perjury that the following statement is true to the best of my knowledge. We were supposed to pull up some cargo from a ship that recently went down in the area. Apparently whatever was in there could leak, causing some serious trouble to the watershed. The algae's bad enough, we don't need some oil spill or toxic waste leak or you know anything like that. We were given permission by the state, and were funded by some tech startup to help clean up the lake. I boarded the boat around 6:50am. I got out to the marked location around 8. I put on my wetsuit, grabbed the hook, and hopped in. I swam down and found the boat we were looking for. I was about to check the cargo hold when something grabbed hold of me. Something bit my leg and pulled me really hard. Must have been some fish. Maybe even a shark. I've heard some bull sharks can live in fresh water for a while. I paddled and kicked, but my leg wouldn't break free. It dragged me some distance, and then let me go. I saw a different ship ahead of me underwater. Much older, covered in rust. I broke the surface and signaled for help. The boys pulled me aboard and the EMT got to work on my leg. Someone else went down to secure the cargo. I tried to tell them it was a different ship but I'm not sure I was making sense. I was in searing pain and losing a good deal of blood. I was looking up past the hanging cables and into the clear sky. Then the wires started moving, waving on their own and spiraling above me. I weakly lifted my hand to point, but the medic just placed it back down and told me to relax. The wires weaved and twisted into form: an angel. Not just like a lady with wings, it was all fingers and eyes and mouths. It told me I needed to find it. That it was in some museum somewhere south of here and needed to be freed. I know it sounds real loopy, but that's what I saw. Someone shouted that they got the cargo up, but it wasn't what we were looking for. I was close to passing out by then of course, so not sure what it was. Then I woke up in the emergency room with a bunch of stitches. CONWAY: Inspecting the photo here, it's a serious injury of the left calf. It's certainly no fish bite. I'm no biologist, but if I had to guess, I'd say the bite is primate in origin. Likely human. Multiple bites overall, very deep punctures and a few tears. I'm gonna send the photo and this box over to the boys in the lab. Maybe they can work out a match. In the meantime, I'll have the higher ups approve his application and send him a nice check, on the condition that he doesn't mention the incident again. We'll be keeping the application letter and associated paraphernalia in our vault. CONWAY ON PHONE: The Midwest is so big, it's sometimes hard to imagine there's anything outside of it. Like I see pictures of the ocean, and that might as well be a continent away at this point. You drive for hours and somehow you're still surrounded by cornfields and flat land. You take an old country route and pass the same intersecting road 3 times. It's like a magic trick. Every time I try to leave, something keeps me here. It's a curse, or maybe that's how I justify it to myself. Believing some paranormal interference is the reason I'm stuck in a rut makes it a little easier to swallow than the reality: the reality that there's a pit at the center of the state, a gravity well that pulls you in and keeps you here. The fire burning forever underground. You can fight it, but you'll always be pulled like the snap of a rubber band back home. There's like a vampiric presence here, a specter of collapsed industry and apathy, poverty and vast distance, that haunts the condemned buildings and provincial small towns of Ohio. There are good people here. Solid folk of all kinds. And there are stories to be told here. But who's listening? And who's allowed to talk? Anyway that's when the last postcard showed up. Just like the ones sent in by the Lost Fisherman from the nonexistent town. The name on the card read Lucy. What a coincidence. But the number beside the name's what shook me, gave me that tingling feeling in my brain that sometimes comes as a corollary to dread. Like twisted deja vu. It was my home phone number from when I was a kid. They disconnected that line ages ago. I thought about calling it, but the DLO was sending me out for one more field trip. A package too unwieldy, too fragile to be shipped out of the tiny post office that was storing it. Of course it was my job once again to drive out to some location and stick my snoot into whatever nonsense they'd cooked up. Of course it was 2 hours away. But I'm nothing if not dedicated to the job, so I tucked the postcard into my shirt pocket, took a swig of cold coffee, and got in the car. CONWAY ON TAPE: --down to a small post office, to check out a very large crate. Apparently it was a little too fragile and a little too um...unwieldy to ship out of that small post office given its resources. Now any time they send me out somewhere like this I'm a little suspicious, so let's find out what I'm about to get my nose in. *click* --the back room here, and it is a fairly large crate, I'll give them that. I've got a crowbar here, let's see if I can get this thing open. *Wood snaps* All right. *Conway coughs* Dear god, it's a body. Oh dear got that is a body. That...that's Kenji's body. That's Kenji. Oh my god. Oh god. And if I...His leg, oh my god. Well, that's those bite marks. Oof. Oh god Kenji, what did you get into. Okay. And he's holding something, he--Kenji's got a hold of a-an all white rotary phone. Old spin dial, you know you gotta twist the numbers around before you can input the number. Oh god Kenji. Based on the decomposition of the body, I would estimate he's been dead for quite some time, though the preservation is uh impressive. Perhaps the sea air or perhaps a mummification process was used on him. But god, lord if it don't stink. Now...gonna pick up that phone and dial this number. *click* CONWAY ON PHONE: Well anyway, that's when I called you. LOST FISHERMAN: "Jeez, that's all fascinating. You've had a quite a ride today. But do you mind if I ask you one thing? I want you to think real hard about this one, don't just blurt out an answer. What's your last name, Conway?" CONWAY: I uhh I don't see what uh...Now wait, now don't you do this. I know who you are, don't you do this. LOST FISHERMAN "I know it's rough, your mind wants to reject it, but I promise it's all gonna make sense. CONWAY: Oh, Ken and Lucy, very clever. You knew I'd tie it together eventually. Now don't you do this. Let me stay here. Let me-- LOST FISHERMAN: "You're not real, not yet anyway." CONWAY: Let me stay. LOST FISHERMAN: Now I want you to look at your cellular telephone. What time is it?" CONWAY: I can't…I can't make it-- *Dial tone* CRACKLING VOICE ON THE RADIO: If you make the margins big enough, you can see him in the dots and waves. He comes through the wires. He's a frequency, an atom bomb's worth of electricity. ANTONY: She said they're not real, they're just fictional characters. CONWAY: It all felt a little...familiar. Almost cliche. What happens in that missing second every million years? LOST FISHERMAN: We'll be waiting for you at the top of the lighthouse. *Overlapping voices say "this is Conway"* *Scratchy, old folk song, singing the following:* I am a man of constant sorrow, I've seen trouble all of my days; I'll bid farewell to Cincinnati, The place where I was born and raised. For six long years, I've been in trouble No pleasure here on this earth I've found, For in this world I'm born to ramble, I have no friends to help me now. Oh, fare ye well my native country, The place that I loved and loathed so well, Fo-- *record scratching, forest ambience, crickets chirping* Then I was somewhere else. A place I'd heard of but never been. Surrounded by fireflies underneath the canopy of red oak boughs. There was something in the trees ahead. Two glowing spots like headlights in foliage. They were moving, attached to something about a foot taller than me, coming my way through the dark. It strode on long, thin legs bending backwards, like a hulking stork. Powdery wings spread from its back and there was a...skunky smell on the air. And he had something to show me. *lighter flicks several times, drums kick in, jam begins* *forest ambience fading out*

The office receives a grisly letter from the early 20th century about an experimental composer. Conway muses about his past and present. (CWs: blood, body horror, knuckles cracking, death) Music: Purcell - Rondeau From Abdelazer Vivaldi - Concerto for Two Violins in A Minor Saint-Saëns - Danse macabre, Op. 40 TRANSCRIPT: CONWAY: This is Conway, receiving clerk for the Dead Letter Office of ***** Ohio, processing the national dead mail backlog. The following audio recording will serve as an internal memo strictly for archival purposes and should be considered confidential. Need I remind anyone: public release of this or any confidential material from the DLO is a felony. Some names and places have been censored for the protection of the public. Now this is an old one. I feel like if I'm not careful opening this, the whole thing's gonna tear. Dead Letter 312. A letter addressed to a Mr. Markos. I'm not entirely sure how it made it into our backlog, given it's about 100 years old, but there appears to be no address for this Mr. Markos. The letter reads as follows. EDGAR, NARRATOR: "Malicious. Obscene. Substandard. Most disagreeable and indigestible. The proverbial Dickensian crumb of cheese splattered on the stage by an ill-tempered mind, one assuredly perverted by rhythm and reason hitherto unknown to polite society. A complete aesthetic and moral failure for Monsieur Edgar, and a black spot on all contemporary English works. Perhaps Edgar should have retained his study of internal medicine, whereby he could make messes of the human form as he sees fit, sans audience." These "kind words" and more you levied at my first premiere in Paris one year ago, Monsieur Markos. Certainly your confidant Madame Stein has long ago heard the tale of my ballet's misfortune and ensured all the other aesthetes gathered in her gilded salon from Apollinaire to Matisse know my shame. I can imagine you poring over this text now, after my second premiere, in a frenzied allegro--perhaps accompanied by the horns of bobbies--seeking any news of your daughter's health, any drop of comfort for your troubled heart. Though my frame shudders with mirth at the mere thought, that revelation must come in due course, monsieur. First I should like to give you a thorough recounting of the creation of my latest, and final, piece. One evening the 25th of October, 1915. Deep in the trench of a gas-laden graveyard, a medic stood just outside the range of an artillery shell detonation. Three other medics within the radius were torn apart and died instantly, along with several soldiers a touch more slowly, leaving just this lone medic as the frantically bandaging witness. It was in these trenches that the medic saw the true barbarity of our race, the needless suffering we undergo and inflict for the benefit of our supposed betters. We, merely the chess pieces of our modern gods callously tossed off the board for a coin. He saw the very threshold of what man's body can endure, and what Herr Freud might call the collective psyche of a nation can withstand--or bury. You, Monsieur, championed this war in your paper of record and seem determined to bury its atrocities. At the time of my release from service, a friend apprised me of the goings-on at a salon in Zurich, of Mr. Hugo Ball and his associates at the Cabaret Voltaire. I was divinely inspired by their destruction and reconfiguration of the old modes into new ones, of the unseen grotesque discovered. The absurdity of our modern condition, in the twisted forms in a Braque, or a Duchamp, were not so dissimilar to the horrors of the Great War, to the bodies out of joint and out of space strewn across Europe. I spent the majority of my cached income to bring these radical new movements to the orchestra, to replicate the impossible bodies in dance, and to never let us forget what they have done to us, and what you and yours encouraged; the grinding of our bodies into dust in the gears of imperial war and industry. As for Stein and all: I hadn't the slightest interest in their approval in any case. However, since my premiere, your words had rattled around my mind like a sharp stone in my shoe. I thought I'd be rid of it only to be sorely reminded of its presence by a prick in the heel. I did not seek your approval, yet your critique soured me on my own work. I was driven to rework the piece entirely, to transmogrify it into a ballet that would test the very limits of the form itself. The fruits of this labor you were witness to this very night. I began the process many months ago. I would spend hours in my parlor with my mandolin, plucking out atonal melodies and discordant passages derived from sources both holy and profane. Dominant sevenths with no tonic, tritones without resolution. I found these enlightening, but not fully to my taste. There was a rhythmic certainty to even the most foul tonal combinations. My purpose then became to create rhythmic oddities. I tried playing in time with my metronome with the right hand and freely with the left, ensuring the notes were never fully in sync. This produced a most curious push and pull, a feeling of always being off balance and many missed notes. Yes, something akin to this might do well. Throughout the period of composition, I would snatch pieces of unrelated sound, the babbling of a river, the whistle of a shopkeep, and turn them into notes for my tone poem. The piece's vacillations and rhythmic intricacies would demand top-tier performers. I scoured the city for musicians who could perform my work. After numerous failures and a handful of misunderstandings, I hired two of the finest players in our county and filled the rest of the cast with novices. With my orchestra assembled and my score as completed as necessary, it then came time to select my ballerina. I met the prospective mademoiselle for tea one hazy morning. Her demeanor was most agreeable, and we got on fabulously. I had little money left, but my enthusiasm for the work convinced her to join our motley group. I found in her initial routines that she wasn't one of the many children of artistic figureheads given praise simply for a name, devoid of their progenitor's talent: quite the opposite, in fact. I found her skill astounding regardless of her parentage, and she held none of the contempt or pretense so often found in the offspring of great men. I gathered them all together the following day for our first rehearsal. The mademoiselle moved beautifully to the arhythmic flow, but the musicians left something to be desired. The performers all played off tempo and off-key, but not in the intended manner. I tried to reign in the chaos, but the novices grew frustrated with my demands, leading to a swath of musicians walking out of my studio. I was left with only a violinist and pianist. The capital was gone, so this would have to do. Oh, what accidents lady fortune brings us from time to time which illuminate the importance of a thing overlooked. With merely the two musicians and the mademoiselle--a truly sparse arrangement--the work came alive. The keys and strings battled and tangled, swaying in and out of time, leaving empty space in which the dancer could play her part. I watched her gyrations with keen interest, an interest I must admit grew beyond the professional. She was the fairest collaborator I had ever known. Not only could she aptly perform the steps I laid out, she absolutely understood them. The only apprehension she had was when I occasioned the rehearsals always to cease before the finale. Separately I worked with the players so that they may know their score, but never the mademoiselle. This, I told her, would shroud the final movements in mystery, even from the performers. Before we were ready to perform, however, it was inevitable that the finale be practiced. I took the mademoiselle through the steps slowly, half-tempo and half-intensity: I showed her the proper angles and bends, and she showed me her exquisite techniques. She found the choreography most unnatural and quite difficult even at such a speed, which I admit now is the intent, and I instructed that she not under any circumstances perform it at its full force before the premiere. To do so carelessly could be fatal: an imprecise leap, stumbled stretch, or ill-guided fold may land one in the grave rather than the headlines. Watching the Mademoiselle move recalled for me the impressive feats of which man's body is capable with the proper care and training. My medical studies gave me a superior mechanical knowledge of man's carriage, and I am also schooled in dance, yet her capabilities outstripped my own. As we practiced day by day, I was smitten first with her dance, then with the woman herself, though it was an affection that was largely kept hidden lest it destroy the very thing we on which we worked. I know not whether she felt the same, but it hardly matters; the yearning of a love unrequited is a literary gift all its own. After some weeks of rehearsal and revision, the piece was ready to be consumed by the public. We were given a small space in a local hall. We began sending out invitations. Yours, Monsieur Markos, I trust found you well. And whom else should you find advertised on the bill that evening but one of the finest dancers in our fair city, Mademoiselle Alice Markos? Is it not fitting that the daughter of the preeminent critic and writer of our time should perform in the next historic ballet? Now that you have been made privy of the history of this piece, Monsieur, I would like to briefly prognosticate its future. It is the very morning of the premiere as I am writing, and if you and the piping peelers would be so kind as to indulge my fantasy, I shall tell you how the performance no doubt went. You entered the concert hall, dressed in your black finery and hat, cane in hand. You sat near the rear of the theater, the better to disguise your presence from myself lest I mistake your appearance here for serious interest in my little farce. The house went quiet. Two performers hardly make an opera, you thought! Then the music began, a series of jerky, stilted lines, seemingly in constant struggle to be held together. Your daughter took to the stage next, dressed in naught but red bandages, a black cloth over her eyes. Her movements came quickly and suddenly, as if she herself wasn't aware of her next step. Murmurs arose from the audience, displeasure and confusion mingling. The mademoiselle's gestures were all raised knees, thrown elbows, more akin to the vicious maneuvers of illicit prize fighters than dance. Her arms swung side to side, twisting her torso, dark hair flailing in the light. She dropped to the stage floor curling and writhing her limbs violently as if on fire. Several patrons scoffed and rose to leave, others chuckled nervously or began booing. The dancer crawled across the open space, pulled by some malicious invisible presence. The music paused as the ballerina spun on knees and elbows, gesticulating outward with such force, the only remaining sound on stage being the scuffling and squeaking of bare flesh on the varnished wood. One arm flung outward toward stage-left as the pounding music swelled once more, then the body followed, jolting that direction and leaving the audience. By this point, the viewers were surely in a feverish excitement of various emotions. I can already hear the shouts and jeers, the pounding of fists on the seats, the gnashing of teeth and covering of eyes. If I may badly misquote the American Williams: Aircrafts slamming joyfully into the earth, youths throwing themselves into the streets to be run over wailing, "Someone has written a ballet!" But out stepped the dancer in all black, with a white mask obscuring every form and feature. The piano and violin crescendoed toward the finale. The dancer swayed back and forth, farther and farther, until they fell, collapsing faceward to the stage, unmoving. At this point I'm sure you leaned forward, straining to see if your daughter was ill or injured. Then the dancer's limbs began bending backward, twisting as if under the spell of Mephistopheles himself. Legs and arms folded and cracked like twigs underfoot. The spine stretched and curved. The dancer curled themselves into a knotted ball, then suddenly jerked their head. The dancer was very still, and the audience went quiet until dark red liquid began seeping through the mouth of the white mask, staining in its wake and dripping onto the floor. Blood pooled and dripped down the side of the stage. The audience erupted into a panicked mob, many running for the exits, the others climbing over the chairs to check on the dancer, and you paralyzed with fear, spirit sinking. Then the floor dropped beneath the dancer, the curtains closed, and the composer fled from backstage into the alley. It's quite impressive what can be done to the human body with the proper training. Yes, Monsieur Markos, the curtain calls for every one, even your precious daughter. The dance of death unites us all, from the nameless soldier to the illustrious writer, from the lowly Edgar to the mighty Cezanne, and tonight I have made this fatal ballet quite literal. Though it is not your daughter's day to die. No, Monsieur, I am no murderer: my beloved Mademoiselle is safe at my studio in my conductor's garb. Remember I am established in dance, myself, Monsieur, and rehearsed daily with your daughter. She taught me all I needed and more. For the final act of my final piece, I exchanged roles with the ballerina, so that the composer became the dancer vice versa. Make messes of the human form, indeed, monsieur. Now if you would open the door behind this note and check beneath the stage with the enclosed key. You may still find me barely clinging to life among the black kegs if you're fleet of foot. And bring those constables, I'm sure I'll have quite a bombshell waiting for you. Yours in the Danse Macabre, Monsieur Edgar CONWAY: Quite the grisly anecdote, if I say so. There's no address, and even if there was, I doubt any of the involved parties would still be around to receive it. Its contents have been archived regardless, and there's nothing in here that warrants storage in our vault, so...I guess I'll see if our local history museum has any interest in it. Heat. CONWAY: Atomic clocks are the most precise keepers of time that we've made so far. They measure the radiation given off by an electron in a cooled cesium atom as it changes energy levels. A second has passed when the device's oscillator measures 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation. Light. I was good friends with her growing up. We played together a lot, shared secrets. She lost her arm when she was 10. Now that's not just a figure of speech either. She actually lost it; no one knows where it went. We were out in the woods near Springfield climbing in trees, throwing rocks, and whatever else kids with busy parents did at that age. We found a cave, a small hollow spot in a wall of shale. She went in. I was worried about getting in trouble, so I waited outside anxiously. Decay. Eventually the oscillator's measurements will be a little bit off. One second every few million years, or something like that. You know, everything breaks down; entropy gets the best of us all. She came out without her left arm, no pain, no tears. Doctors were surely flummoxed. There's really nothing written in stone that says decay has to go that way, though. What happens in that missing second every million years? Hey, have you tried to shove a handful of cereal in your mouth but drop some, then look down in disbelief as the puffed circles form a pyramid on the ground instead of scattering everywhere? You ever make a little sandcastle in the sun only to watch the wind sweep it away, piece by piece, and make it into an even bigger sandcastle a few feet away? Well, I hadn't either, 'til then. 'Til she lost her arm. I've been with this office for 6 years, but it might as well be a lifetime. Sure, I'd seen some weird stuff before, that's why I got the job in the first place, but the sheer volume here can't be a coincidence. They got me sorting through old mail looking for god knows what. I've got criteria, I've got a list, but it all seems pretty arbitrary if you ask me. I mean like, "If the letter evokes sad memories of your childhood, it must not be delivered." Yeah, okay, sure. "If your nose itches while reading the letter, it may be delivered." I just don't get it sometimes. UNKNOWN VOICE ON PHONE: "Jeez that's neat and all, but what does it have to do with the statue, Conway?" CONWAY: I'm just trying to figure out what it all means. What it is. UNKONWN VOICE: "Uhh It's an angel, Conway." CONWAY: Well, yes, but...but why? Why Kenji? What's the symbolism? What do angels do? UNKNOWN VOICE: "I don't know, like guide you up to heaven? Aren't they the sort of like the go-betweens for god and us?" CONWAY: You know, you may be onto something. They're a connection, right? A bridge between the realms of heaven and earth. They hang around at the boundary between worlds, and they take you somewhere else. Somewhere different. But where, though? Where...where's Ken-- *DIAL TONE, followed by BUSY SIGNAL*

Conway receives a water-logged manuscript from a midwestern monster hunter of questionable character. (CWs: mild drug use--cannabis, fire,) TRANSCRIPTS: CONWAY: This is Conway, receiving clerk for the Dead Letter Office of ***** Ohio, processing the national dead mail backlog. The following audio recording will serve as an internal memo strictly for archival purposes and should be considered confidential. Need I remind anyone: public release of this or any confidential material from the DLO is a felony. Some names and places have been censored for the protection of the public. Dead Letter 10609, a manuscript for some kook's autobiography or memoir, sent to a less than reputable publishing company that shut its doors years back. It was flagged for inspection before it could be delivered due to some unknown fluid leaking from the package. Inside the package was the previously mention manuscript and a broken test tube. The most pertinent excerpts from what remains of the water-logged manuscript read as follows. NARRATOR: It started, as so many terrible things do, in rural Ohio. You drive out deep into the flat midwest farmland, past the intersection of McCutcheon and 199, down narrow roads covered in gravel and framed by a split sea of cornstalks. You take the turn onto Holcomb road, and one way or another you'll eventually hit Holcomb Woods--regardless of which way you're going. Holcomb road cuts a straight line through the foliage. You can see one end from the other, given clear enough conditions. Every kid in the area's heard of Holcomb woods. The legend varies from school to school, vivid details emerging when the tale's in the hands of a particularly clever storyteller, but some commonalities emerge: a vehicle, an accident, a tree, and some ghostly headlights. Some say it was a bus full of kids and a mad driver, others whisper of intoxicated teens. No matter the details, the story ends with a warning--or dare, depending on who is listening--drive down Holcomb road at night and you'll come upon the passage through the dense trees. Before you pass under the arced branches, you'll see a pair of headlights coming at you from the opposite direction. You can try to swerve out of the way, but they'll pass right through you, then disappear. Some say you can still see the driver's face in one of the trunks if the moon's angle is just right. Growing up, I wanted to work with animals. I was fascinated with animal behavior, with their taxonomies and eccentricities. I planned to go to the nearby state university after high school, study biology, zoology, whatever it took to get my dream job. That was until three friends and I took a trip down Holcomb road. It was the final day of our last summer break before graduation. We were bumping along the rough country roads in an old Buick, blaring the kind of music specifically designed to make our parents wince. We slowed down when we saw the woods ahead, the black void in the center of the trees inviting us in. Of course, we'd all heard the stories before, each of us with our own personal vision of the fateful event that we would passionately defend. We stopped at the very edge of the trees and shut off the engine. Mosquitos tapped at the windows in the humid air. The only sign of our presence that remained was the gentle clinking of empty beer bottles rattling around in the backseat. We sat and waited. Somebody cracked wise about a ghost driver needing a ghost license. We were haughty and skeptical in the headstrong way that only teenagers--so sure of their own immortality--can be. The driver was getting impatient, eager to return the rusty sedan to his parents before midnight and get inside in the central air. He reached for the keys, fixed to run the engine again, when two points of bright light emerged from the other end of the woods. We all went quiet, transfixed by the glow. The two points were close together, and smaller than headlights. They drew closer at a startling pace. The driver fumbled with the keys while the rest of us shouted at him to get it together. The keys hit the floor with a pathetic clink and we fell silent again. The lights were right in front of us now, standing about seven feet in the air. Each was about the size of a baseball, casting an eerie pall across our stunned faces. These lights were attached to something bigger: they looked like the eyes of some strange creature. The hulking beast stood on two thin legs, leading up to a wide body covered in dense fur. It took a step toward the driver-side window and tilted its oblong face. Two long feathery tendrils twitched atop its head. A hooked claw tapped at the door. I made eye contact with this thing from the passenger seat and felt a deep churn in my gut. Dread crept through my body. I could see every anxiety, every worst case scenario I'd ever imagined, play out in my head at once. The others burst into action simultaneously, all scrambling and reaching to find the keys under the seat. This entity seemed unsettled by our sudden movement and stepped back on its spindly legs. A huge pair of powdery wings spread out behind it. It flapped several times, then took off over the pale moonlit trees and disappeared. The driver snatched the keys from below the seat and we sped home. After what felt like a century of silence, somebody in the back made a joke about the fuzzy bird man, assuring ourselves that it was probably just an eagle or local crackpot in a costume. I didn't say anything the whole way. I was replaying the horrible visions in my head over and over. Classes would start next week, our last year of mandatory schooling before we all went our own ways in the adult world. That Wednesday, the high school caught fire, taking the lives of the driver, the two passengers in the backseat, and several other students and teachers. From that moment, my interest in zoology vanished, and I became deeply fascinated by cryptozoology. I've been all over this great state searching for signs of the paranormal and the cryptozoological. I've taken a dive in Lake Erie looking for Bessie, the South Bay monster. Didn't find much there apart from some sunken boats, a lot of trees, and a weird skeleton with a human skull and fish tail. I've journeyed into forests and nature preserves for sightings of the grassman, also known as the skunk ape or the woodland sasquatch. There are places here that are almost supernatural on their own. Small towns isolated in time, one-road-hamlets with ice cream stands across the street from stark white churches, 50s style diners and cash-only single pump stations. You'll meet some of the friendliest, most earnest folk in the world in these towns. You may think you've finally died and gone to heaven. I've also come to know that a lot of places here in Ohio are about as close to hell as we humans will see. Little pockets of distilled hate, of insular folk hostile to anyone or anything different, rotting from the inside. Places that drain your spirit and crater your faith in humankind. Pretty towns full of mundane demons who would rather bleed their kids to death in plain view than acknowledge the world outside. Horrific poverty and destitution wrought by business and encouraged by politics with no fix in sight. Of course this isn't isolated to any town or any state. It spreads and it festers across the midwest, through the rust belt, from coast to coast. With enough time on the road, you learn to keep mostly to yourself until you're sure which you're dealing with. It was at one of these previously noted ice cream stands on one of the aforementioned grassman journeys that I overheard a possible sighting. It was early August, hot as all get out. I was about 15 minutes out from the largest nature preserve in the state. Sitting on a bench under a big plastic cone, I was trying my damndest to keep my chocolate vanilla twist from dripping onto my hand. Church was just letting out across the road. According to the sign out front, next week was chili week. A small family in dated formalwear trotted over for a post-worship treat. The kids squealed and ran off with their cones. Their parents sat on a bench not far from me. The father said he had a friend who went hiking yesterday and came across a strange clearing. It seemed to be a campsite, but there was no camping gear, no sign of a fire. The clearing was surrounded by odd broken branches, tangled and tied into dangling arcane symbols like wicked Christmas ornaments. Then there were the weird indentations in the dirt. Throughout the site was a sour, skunky smell. He didn't give many clues as to where this site was, but given the description, I could narrow it down to a couple square miles of land. Besides, what other leads on the midwest bigfoot did I have? As any seasoned hunter knows, sasquatches, swamp apes, Ohio dog men, the Loveland Frog, and other paranormal phenomena are most active in the early morning. I loaded my camouflage, german-engineered tactical backpack full of the usual supplies: a 1978 Canon F1 with several lenses (which many experts attest is the best camera for capturing the paranormal), 6 rolls of monochromatic 35mm film, motion sensors, an EMF reader for when I'm feeling so inclined, a hiking pole adorned with bells, a compass, a first aid kit, and of course clean water and snacks. I set out on the trail just before dawn, camera in hand, looking for the possible hideout of the grassman. After several hours of pleasant hiking in the estimated area, my eye stopped on a small trail running from the main path. Of course this could just be any random trail, but In my years of searching, I've learned to discard logic and follow my instincts. And my instincts said this trail was it. I screwed on the telephoto lens to my camera and crept forward through the tall grass and gnarled roots of towering hickory trees. I could hear something ahead, and through the first sluggish rays of hazy daylight saw snapped and hanging branches. Gnarled bundles of thin twigs twisted and tied into complicated, unrecognizable shapes. A ring of trees ahead cordoned off a small clearing. I could hear faint rustling, and picked up a distinct skunky aroma wafting from the site. I gently set down my pole and backpack. I went prone in the grass, resting my forearms on the backpack to steady my camera, and looked through the viewfinder. I saw people. Several young people in tie-dye shirts and flared jeans, passing around a cigarette. I turned my gaze from the viewfinder to the site itself, but saw nothing. They weren't there. Back to the camera and there they were. I adjusted the aperture and snapped a photo. They must have heard the click and turned my way. I froze, and looked up from the camera. There they were, in the clearing, plain as day. One of the men held out an open hand in my direction. I slowly rose, my breaths short and quick. I started in their direction and breached the clearing. There were 5 of them, 3 girls and two guys. These people were completely silent, all in dated psychedelic clothing. Two of them were kissing on a log near the edge. The man before me had long hair bound by a headband and small round glasses, tinted a light shade of green. He wore a denim vest over a cream-colored turtleneck. A pendant dangled from his neck in the shape of a white butterfly. And his hand wasn't so empty after all: in it rested a small, hand rolled cigarette of some kind, the ends twisted shut. I reached for it. It was solid. I took it and put it in my pocket. The man smiled, and pointed north. I understood the meaning of his gesture implicitly. Whatever I was after, it wasn't here. No, instead of finding the midwest bigfoot, I found some teens making out and smoking grass. I thanked him, and he nodded quietly. I turned to leave the clearing, and when I looked back, they were gone again. I felt my pocket and yes, indeed, the illicit substance was still there. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. This was not the place I was looking for. The man pointed north. So that's where I would go. A vast swamp once covered much of northwest Ohio and parts of Indiana and Michigan, a shallow wetland carved eons ago by the slow retreat of glacial masses across the region. Thick patches of sycamores rose high over deep muck, flat marshes extended from Erie to the Maumee. Much of this swamp was drained in the 19th century to make room for cornfields and easier overland travel. Some segments of the swamp remain intact, however, and one such preserve was to be my next stakeout. I readied my usual gear and drove the old van north, through the featureless heart of the state, the land of a thousand antique shops and cheese barns. I only stopped occasionally under the harsh fluorescence of gas station limbo to refresh my caffeine supply or stock up on protein bars. As I drove down the side roads and country highways, the sun sank into the earth, the tall cornfields hiding its parting rays. I spotted a vacant motel with no name. I pulled into the lot and booked a room. Moths and flies drunkenly swayed around the bare fluorescent bulb outside, dancing and stumbling in their reverie. Once I settled in for the night, I figured what better place to smoke a mysterious joint than a derelict motel? I am a man of science (in some definitions), after all, and by this time it had been a few decades since my last indulgence. I put my lighter to the bent stick of dope and inhaled. The smoke was palatably cheap, skunky, stale, almost earthy, like it had been abandoned in a pair of bellbottoms for a century and was later uncovered and subsequently consumed by some groovy professors on an anthropological dig. Halfway through, I put it out. I felt pleasantly toasty for about 30 minutes before dozing off. Around midnight, the rotary phone rang on the bedside table. The old clanging felt nostalgic, but not in the good "remembering the smell of your favorite gum" kind of way. More like being reminded of the day your pet died, or how your dad reacted when he found your stash. Familiar dread, I'd call it. I reached my hand out through the bleary darkness for the white plastic receiver and hesitantly put it to my ear. I spoke, *Hello?* but my voice echoed back at me. I made a clicking noise with my tongue *click*, which once again came back through the line. I pressed down the hook to hang up, and the line went quiet. I lifted my hand, and through the earpiece I heard keys gently jingling on a chain, the stutter and rumble of an engine, the buzzing of assorted insects. I pressed the switchhook once more. Then I was sitting in my van with the engine idling, pulled off a gravel road and parked parallel to the boundary of some thick woodlands. The window was cracked to let in some of the humid vegetal air. I absentmindedly batted at the keys hanging from the ignition. Crickets played the hits in the tall grass ahead, while mosquitos vied for dominance over my arm. The receiver was still in my hand, tethered via coiled wire to cradle in the passenger's seat. I hung up the phone and peered into the dark. This was North. In my line of work, you can either just accept the strange things you see and hear as-is, just go with the lunatic flow of the universe, or drive yourself mad trying to explain it all. I had decided long ago to stick with the former. So I grabbed my bag from the back, shut off the engine, and stepped through the threshold into the Great Black Swamp. Now if you're not well-versed in wilderness exploration, it's easy to get lost in a place like this: the boughs of the tall sycamores obscure the stars, frequent marshes and flooded plains render tracks impossible. Even easier still to get lost if you're a little buzzed on a puff of ghost grass. Getting lost in the woods in an unfamiliar area at night is dangerous, reckless, and yet it's also the genesis of nearly every cryptozoological, supernatural, and scatalogical tale this side of the Rallys-Checkers divide. I hid my compass in my pocket for the return trip and set about getting lost. Every couple hundred yards or so, I would pluck a leaf from a tree and drop it, spinning and twirling, to the ground. Whichever way the tip of the leaf pointed was my new direction. This method requires patience and some trial-and-error, but produces results that are most unpredictable. So in this manner, I trudged through the thick muck and tangled undergrowth of the glacier's footprint. I mostly stayed on the drier land when I could: sasquatches surely don't like waist-deep swamp water full of leeches and who-knows-what-else anymore than the rest of us. The night was still and hot, and prevented any natural cooling. I wandered in random directions in a humid hazy odyssey. Clouds of mosquitoes buzzed at my damp ears and neck. Trees before me looked ominous and infinite, the swamp stretched under my feet to unknown horizons. The muck held onto my boots with every step and threatened to pull me deep into the black earth, as if the land itself was fighting my presence. I figured myself much like the early loggers and settlers in the area. I was unwelcome here, and the local flora and fauna were eager to let me know. It went on and on like this for hours, until I heard a bubbling to my right. Exhausted, drained of a not-insignificant quantity of blood, and still a little fried, I wondered at first if it was my imagination. This notion was quickly dispelled when a hanging bundle of twigs hit me in the forehead, just like the ones I'd seen before. Ahead, I spotted a patch of ripples. I waded into the turbid water toward the troubled bubbles. Rather than getting deeper with each step, the swamp around my feet receded, and the rippling spot ahead rose. Dark water rushed in toward the center as it peaked like a cresting wave. The swamp took shape, a towering obelisk of wet mud, clay, branches, and vines, resembling the twisted woodland decorations. Small alien spheres bubbled to the surface and roots reached out like the tentacles of some alien being. I extended my hiking stick to poke at one of the spheres. The mud lifted from its surface like a lid, and below was a yellow eye with a slit pupil. The other spheres opened, an assortment of different sinister eyes in all manner of shapes and colors. Frothy swamp water babbled from its center as it rasped, gurgled, and screeched a crustacean free jazz boogie. This was no skunk ape, no grassman or Loveland frog. It lurched toward me. I tried to turn and run, but I was stuck: the thick sludge and vegetation left under the water had trapped my boots for real this time. My ragged breaths came more erratically as I struggled to pull at the straps on my shoes, hoping to free them from the muddy midwest's toxic grip. I nearly got one free when my hand slipped from the wet strap and flew outward, brushing against one outstretched tendril of this creature. Thousands of words and ideas instantly rushed through my hand, into my head simultaneously, overlapping and combining into a soup of confused imagery: bread juice, cowboys holding hands underwater, The Great Gatsby but every page is alive and hostile. A wave of images zoomed out so far they're just dots in a complex pointillist wave. My mind was completely overwhelmed, endlessly repeating and synthesizing nonsense phrases and patterns. In a burst of colored light and dust--a negative image of the scene before me--I exploded and I died. Or so I thought, until I realized I had just been closing my eyes too hard. I rubbed at them with my sweaty fists and received another round of mental fireworks, then looked ahead again. The murky obelisk was still there, creeping toward me with malicious intent. But so was something else. Something familiar, standing on spindly legs, strange antenna atop its head, and powdery soft wings. Here it was again, some decades later. It flapped its wings at this muck monster and the abomination fell, the water returning and filling the land around my feet. The winged creature turned back to me, its wide glowing eyes locked unblinking with mine. It pointed with one of its clawed feet to my thigh. Oh god, I thought, this is it. Am I going to lose my leg? Gangrene, trench foot, gout? I yelped and stumbled, my boot coming loose from the wet earth, then fell backward into the swamp. I looked up into the twisted canopy and saw the gentle light of the moon peeking through the gaps in the branches. Then the eyes were above me again, and the clawed foot pointed at my leg once more. I felt at my thigh for any sign of injury or interest. That's when I felt it: the last half of my occult reefer cigarette. My fingers fished into my damp pocket and pulled out the crushed, half-smoked spectral spliff. I extended my open hand toward this fuzzy creature. One of its hooked feet bent upwards at an unnatural angle and took its prize, its token for sparing my life once more. Through all my journeys, it turns out the mothman was pretty groovy and just wanted to be smoked out and relax for once. By the time I made it back to the van, I was soaked in grimy water, bitten head to toe, and totally sober. I sat in the van for a long time in silence. I rubbed my oily, stubbly chin and thought for as long as I could tolerate. Then I picked up the receiver in the passenger's seat and dialed my mother's number. It ended, as so many surreal nightmares do, in rural Ohio. You drive out through the soy fields owned by one company full of patented seeds, past the poison miasma of suburbia and into the real deep country night, under the blistering stars and spires of rock and steel and into the Great Black Swamp, where there yet remains a sliver of the unknown. CONWAY: Tests run on the inciting liquid returned a rather mundane result: particles of dirt, vegetation, and microscopic lifeforms suspended in water. In other words, a simple water sample, likely from a swamp or marsh. As such, this letter, DL-10609, has been deemed undeliverable due to both contamination and an invalid address. The manuscript will be dried and subsequently stored in our vault. For the Dead Letter Office of *****, Ohio, this is Conway, signing off.

The Dead Letter Office receives a series of emails from a college student with recurring nightmares. Conway takes a trip to investigate a kitschy painting. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe if you like the show! (CWs: trypophobia, alcohol, finger damage, depictions of depression) TRANSCRIPT: CONWAY: This is Conway, receiving clerk for the Dead Letter Office of ***** Ohio, processing the national dead mail backlog. The following audio recording will serve as an internal memo strictly for archival purposes and should be considered confidential. Need I remind anyone: public release of this or any confidential material from the DLO is extremely felonious. Some names and places have been censored for the protection of the public. Dead letter 13905. A series of emails were sent to the Environmental Protection Agency of Ohio over the course of many months in 2015. There was some concern among the higher-ups at the agency that these emails may be more pertinent to our work at the DLO rather than the EPA. They were intercepted and forwarded to us, and have been subsequently opened and read. The emails read as follows: KARA, NARRATOR: Dear Rick, I'm a senior at um **** ***** State University. I've been dreaming about holes--dark caves, coves along the shore, deep black as far in as I can see. This may not seem relevant at first, but I promise it'll come up, keep reading. I dream about sinkholes opening in a busy city street; gaps in clusters of coral growing from a sunken boat; a bloody bullet-wound in my leg; a honeycomb. This isn't the first time I've dreamt about holes. There's something I find revolting and unsettling about their emptiness. Maybe it's ingrained in our lizard brains that holes are not good. Maybe that's why aliens in our movies and comics always have those giant, endlessly black eyes. I dream more dreams about holes. I dream about trying to fill an infinite pool with a small garden hose. I dream about empty pomegranates. Others are deeply upsetting: confused imagery, lotus pod faces, choking revulsion, claustrophobia. I haven't been sleeping well, and I can't seem to focus on my schoolwork at all. My grades are starting to slip and I'm not sure how to proceed. I haven't told anyone about the dreams yet. Talking about dreams to other people is pointless anyway; either they get it and nod along with you or they don't get it at all and just nod along out of courtesy. It's like having to explain why a joke is funny, it kills the whole prospect. After days of restless nights dreaming about holes, it's hard to not notice them just...everywhere. Pupils are just holes in your eyes. Don't look at close-up pictures of eyes. Empty spaces on bookshelves, open windows. Pores on peoples' faces yawn wide. Cavities burrow into teeth, worms dig through soil. Anyway, I was doing some much-needed vacuuming on a Sunday morning and had to move the rug in the middle of my room to sweep under it. I pulled at the fabric, then paused. Two of the wooden planks underneath seemed a little farther apart than they should be. I tried to remember what the floor looked like last time I vacuumed. It had been a while, but I don't think they were that far apart. After all of these dreams about empty spaces, I figured I was just imagining things. I put the rug back over the boards and continued cleaning. Over the next few weeks or so, I didn't really think about the space under the rug. I carried on with my dull work and repetitive life for a few weeks. That is, until a tube of chapstick fell off my coffee table and rolled strangely toward the center of the rug. Where it stopped, the slight weight of the tube made the rug sink. I hesitantly moved the table and reached out for the edge of the rug. The gap between the floorboards was definitely bigger this time. I started looking for answers online. Wood warping, leaky pipes, sinkholes, fracking quakes, ball lightning coming through electrical sockets; all manner of strange natural incidents can occur in your house, but none of this seemed to quite fit the symptoms. Anyway, now that the wordy preamble is out of the way, this is why I'm contacting you. I figure ODNR or the Ohio EPA should know something about this. It's probably fine right? I think it's just some kind of geological event or seismic oddity. My address and phone number are enclosed in case you think this sounds serious. Best, Kara KARA: Hello again Rick, Thanks for getting back to me. I don't hear any water, but it has grown. In fact, one morning I stumbled blearily downstairs and nearly fainted. The hole had widened, and seemingly swallowed my area rug and coffee table. The edges were perfectly smooth, as if something terribly sharp cut through the floorboards and into the earth. I froze in a panic on the stairs and spent what felt like most of the morning paralyzed, numb, staring at the hole from the dark steps. Where did it come from? Where did it lead? Should I call 911? Eventually I got brave enough to leave the stairs and go near it. I strained to see in from a few feet away, but it was no use. I smelled for rotten eggs like you suggested, but I don't think there's any gas leaks. I leaned in and listened. Nothing. As I inched closer, the urge to stick my hand in was strong, but my survival instincts proved stronger. I haven't told anyone else about this hole, either. Who would I call? My dad? The cops? What would I say? Now that I think about it, maybe I can take care of it myself. I've fixed a lock and caulked a shower before, so maybe it won't be too hard to replace some floorboards. Or maybe, if it's some freak geological occurrence, it'll just go away on its own, just as suddenly as it came. I'll just be extra careful not to drop anything for the time being, and I'll cover it up if anyone comes over. I'll plan around it. No big. Sorry to bother you. Thanks anyway, Kara KARA: At first it was a pain. I was stunned anew every morning that I came down from the bedroom to see chasm in the floor before me. My heart raced as I tip-toed around it, trying not to look down. Soon I'd forget about it for a few minutes when I was busy. I wouldn't notice it while I was watching entire seasons of show at once, or staring at the dishes that somehow keep piling up. But it always nagged at me, gnawing at some part of my brain, conscious or otherwise. I'd go out with friends, and they'd notice me staring into space. They'd ask what's wrong. Nothing, I'd say. And in a sense, it was true. Holes are just an absence, a lack. When I'd lay on the couch for days without moving, it was an absence, a lacking. It was nothing. I stopped going out with friends. I'd make and break little promises to myself that I would check my email and get back to you, that I'd talk to someone about it if it wasn't gone tomorrow. Then next week. Then if it was still around next year. Eventually I got accustomed to its size, its edges, to the point where I could just side-step it by muscle memory. Avoiding it became an unconscious routine like anything else. I didn't feel worried about it, and in fact didn't feel much at all anymore. If I drank and slept enough, it was nothing. I trudged through all this and by some miracle graduated. I got a new job and moved out of town. Yeah, I just left the hole there for the landlord to deal with. It's not like I was getting my deposit back anyway. The presence of the new city gave me a rush. There were new places to explore, new food to try. I was getting more rest, had more fulfilling work, better hobbies. Better relationships. My new partner moved in. But new things only stay new for so long, and bodies refuse to stay buried, so to speak. Just a small crack under the bed. Just a sliver at first. Probably shoddy flooring. I covered it with a storage tub and didn't tell my partner. Why should they get roped into worrying about a tiny crack in the wood? It's ridiculous. My partner later found it, of course, and wanted to call the landlord. I convinced them not to. Said I'd seen something like that before, and that it's fine if we just ignore it. The crack got bigger. Its presence festered. My partner was shaken from their sleep one morning when the bedframe slipped and fell halfway into the hole. They insisted that we call someone, but I fought back again. My partner got irritated, told me off. Said they were tired of the waiting, the excuses, the growing gulf between us. Then they went quiet, and confided that they had heard something scratching and whispering in the hole when I wasn't home. They thought it was their imagination running wild, paranoia, or just loneliness. But not anymore. They grabbed a flashlight out of the closet and tentatively peered over the edge of the silent void. They didn't say a word the rest of the night. My partner moved out less than a week later. I like to look into the hole for long stretches. I think about the scratching. I blankly drop in something just to see if it hits any sort of bottom. I want to climb in and see how far it goes. I want to see if I can survive a head-on confrontation with the dark. When I'm sitting in my living room absently staring at my phone, in the dead drunk grey of winter, I swear I can hear something. Faint whispers from the other room, drawing me in, tempting me to slide inside. Then I hear the chatter, the dragging, and the sound of bone grating on rock. I don't leave the bedroom. I have to keep an eye on the hole to make sure nothing falls in...or comes out. It fills everything with nothing. I can't move away, I can't blink. Sometimes I think I can see a hand reach up, not more than a shadow, fingers ragged and bloody. I shakily crawl to the edge on my hands and knees and peek in, my hair dangling just past the edge. I reach in up to my elbow, feeling for something, anything. I hear the scratching again. I hear the whispers and the clawing at the walls and I feel wet, clammy flesh brush up against my arm. I recoil and pull my arm back. I don't look into the hole for a long time. I only dream about holes. About voices, calling from inside. Telling me that it's not really that bad down there. It's not hot or cold, there's no noise, no pressure, no light. It's nothing. There are ways to get down, they assure me. I rely more and more on alchemical liquids and arcane herbs to drown them out, modern witchcraft to forget the nothing. But these also make me slow. Vulnerable. After a night of particularly heavy alchemy, I wake up stranded on the kitchen floor, unable to move or speak. I feel something pulling me by my ankle, and I can't turn my head to see it. It is pulling me toward the bedroom. My body lurches across the smooth linoleum with each tug. I feel the hardwood floor below me, then it vanishes, and the hand lets go. I feel myself falling for a long, long time. I come to in the abyss. I'm looking up at the ceiling of my bedroom from the bottom of a well. As if chained in the dark to the back of a sea cave straining to smell the ocean, it's so distant. I remember what it was like before, and I think I want to get back there. I reach out into the void and my hands find purchase on rough stone. I grip and claw my way up, drawing closer to the light even as my hands bleed and nails break. I approach the light and see someone, the silhouette of a woman my age haloed by humming incandescent light. Her hair hangs over the opening, her arm thrust into the black. This is my chance. I reach my hand out for hers, gasping for her to pull me get out. My chilly damp skin brushes her hand and she reels her arm back. Her silhouette disappears. I don't think I can get out alone. My phone is dying, but I'm ready to ask. I'm ready to accept it. Can you help me? CONWAY: Per the policies of the DLO, we have looked into the whereabouts of the sender. Emails were sent to her university address, but we received no responses. We contacted the school to see if they had any updates on their alumna, but they knew nothing of consequence. The aforementioned Rick, formerly with the EPA, declined to comment on the case. Thus the Dead Letter Office has verified that these emails, collectively called DL-13905, are undeliverable. A flash drive containing these emails will be stored in our vault, and our guys in IT are working to clear the caches or cookies or something out of the related devices. *brief music over the radio* CONWAY ON TAPE: All right, this entry's gonna be a little different. For some god-forsaken reason, they got me heading out to a warehouse up in ******** to check out some package they've got there may need archived. Now the government's not known for its...spending habits and this is no different. Instead of my usual setup or a lav mic, they've got me with an old cassette recorder and a used tape, so I apologize for the quality of this missive. Anyway, back to that package. Seems to be some kind of painting they found, the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis himself. The package handlers there found it torn open with no address and no return address, so they took the painting out and hung it up in their break room. Since then, a few of the handlers there swear they can hear his songs playing early in the morning, even if none of em turned on the radio. They only started hearing this after they hung up this Elvis painting. Some of the other employees have complained about the morning crew acting weird, getting defensive about it and saying odd things. Don't know why the hell they picked me, I'm not much of a Presley-head myself. *click* CONWAY ON TAPE: All right we're on 71 north, should be there before too long. Looks like we are about right on time to arrive at this warehouse. *click* Okay, we're here in the break room. The thing's about 4 feet high, 3 wide. Painted on black velvet, maybe with some kind of acrylic, not sure. Looks pretty new, must have been made recently or else stored well. I suppose it looks enough like the king. He's all in white, microphone clasped between his hands in front of his chest. Hair's dark, hanging a little bit wilted under the crown. Not his usual pompadour. Does have the sideburns, all right. He's looking up and into a light. There's a tear rolling down his cheek. Now below this painting, there's a small table. Seems like uh some kind of light--maybe plywood--covered in veneer. Situated on top of the table are a few candles. Looks almost like a votive. Small rug situated in front. Looks like...almost looks like a uh...well nevermind what it looks like, let's check the back of the frame here. All right, there is some text here, written in the same paint used to paint the Elvis. It reads as follows: "THE KING ISN'T DEAD, HE'S IN THIS PAINTING. HE WAS TIRED OF THE FAME AND WANTED OUT, SO HE FAKED HIS DEATH AND USED THE ELECTRICITY ON THE AIRWAVES TO TRANSFER HIS ENERGY INTO THE VELVET." Yeah, all right then. No names, no addresses. Well, suppose the only other thing to do here is listen and see if we hear any Elvis. *Hound Dog by Big Mama Thornton plays faintly in the background* CONWAY: Well I don't hear much of anything. Hey, Benny, was it? Yeah, do you hear it now? Any of y'all back there hear it? All right, well somebody hears something, but I'm not hearing any rock and or roll, so uh. Jeez...I don't know. I guess we'll take it to the DLO, have some people also give this painting a listen and review the tape later At least if I take it, we'll stop getting complaints from this particular office's management. Well, for this parcel, this is Conway, for the moment, signing off. *Distorted music on the radio* CONWAY: The tape has been reviewed, and we have assigned this parcel the code DO-06206. We have determined, given the lack of information and the findings on the tape, that this package is indeed undeliverable. It will be stored safely, and quietly, in our break room. For the Dead Letter Office of ******* Ohio, this is Conway, signing off.