Ep 55 - Never Alone

Never Alone — Far and Tall Tales • •

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Ghost Wax

GW: Season 2

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Ghost Wax

GW: Season 2

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Never Alone

Oct 27

Written by CBH Podcast

We hear lots of tiny strange little voices overlapping, they scramble up and fuzz out and then start to quiet.

Luca: I’ve almost got it… LOT coming through on the deeper levels, I’ll tune for it…

Ingram: This is so unfair.

Luca: ignoring him I’ve almost got it…

We hear the little noisy voices subside

Cid: Very good, all set and settled.

Ingram: I quit.

Cid: Whatever is the matter?

Ingram: Are you joking?

Cid: Well it is a bit on the gruesome side, I’ll admit but you’ve seen worse.

Ingram: Honestly, I’m not sure I have.

Cid: Come now, that rancid animate pile of bursting corpses from when an Eater’s Sliver pierced through in Shropshire was far worse than this… the smell alone.

Ingram: I suppose… but that was a long time ago… and this is somehow… sadder. Like… she’s all over the old linoleum…

Cid: thinks Linoleum IS possibly the saddest of the materials…

Adelaide: fascinated more than disgusted What happened to her?

Cid: that is what we shall endeavor to find out, though whatever it was has… certainly been thorough.

Adelaide: I don’t feel any… mean.

Ingram: What did she say?

Adelaide: Mean. I didn’t feel any mean-ness. Finding the words Sorry, what I intend to convey is, there’s no anger here .

Cid: If no anger why the… total obliteration, good question. Rather than theorizing, I think we should simply ask… what was her name again?

Luca: Emily Jacobs. Age thirty eight.

Cid: Yes. Which makes two unexplained deaths occurring within the same house within a six month period. Interesting…

Ingram: Interesting? Unexplained? You crazy? Tom Hilston was 91 years old.

Cid: And in perfect health, otherwise. Mr. Hilston was a consultant with the order. He was one of the only people left in the world who can read Aptueltherian Sakret. And now I may never find out how the Saga of Savagdi of Six Arms ends… He was nearly finished with the translation… to himself does he ever claim a seventh…

Ingram: Now I get why we’re here, you’re mad you’re going to miss your stories…

Cid: I wanted to ask after Hilston, but it was ages before we heard of it and honestly I couldn’t justify the time, but now? A second death? Something is afoot.

Ingram: Speaking of which… is this here her hand or a afoot?

Cid: That is… some… amount, of Emily Jacobs, aged 38. Her friends alerted the local authorities yesterday that they were not able to reach her, though we have not yet been able to obtain details from those reports. The house has been sealed since we were made aware of the case. You’ll note, again, significant decomposition. It seems one thing that Mr. Hilston and Ms. Jacobs had in common was that they lived alone and remained undiscovered for some time.

Luca: If you’re thinking Hilston was targeted for Order connections, why her?

Cid I’ve a theory or two, but we’ll soon know.

Adelaide: Why raise her and not him? If he’s the death you’re more suspicious of?

Cid: Fresher, closer… saves on having to dig up a grave… I mean it IS raining.

Ingram: So… expedience.

We start to hear sorcery

Cid: Yes now hush. slowly and with deliberate concentration. And watch. Adelaide, Ingram, pay close attention to the forms… I’ll go step by step… feel the resonance?… the intent… you see? Yes… a coaxing is the best way to start… see that loneliness… she can’t wait to speak… be a light on the shore though stormy seas… gentle but resolute… just calling her home.

Emily: How long?

Cid: Pardon?

Emily: How long before I was found?

Cid: Ah. These things can be difficult–

Emily: Just tell me. I’m already dead, what does it matter now? How long was I lying dead in my house before someone missed me? Before someone noticed I was gone?

Cid: Ten days.

Emily: Ten days. That…that’s not as bad as I thought it might be. Ok… you want to know what happened right?

Cid: I do. to the others and see that… we loop around the memory, connect our speech centers to hers… and open the door to the tale…

Emily: I’d never believed in ghosts, or spirits, or any of that shit. So when the house on Maple went up for sale, I didn’t think twice about the fact that someone had died there. Not a murder, nothing like that, just an old man who died quietly at home. I guess it took awhile for anyone to notice and by the time the police did a welfare check it was…pretty grisly. Enough to make the news. Enough that everyone knew the house. It was sad, sure. I felt bad for the guy. But it didn’t put me off making an offer on the house. Especially not for what they were asking. Way below the going rate in my neighborhood. My friends thought I was nuts. “Seriously? That’s all they want for it? Girl, it’s obviously haunted. They’re just trying to get rid of it!” I agreed, they were trying to get rid of it. But I figured the reason was way more mundane than ghosts. The sellers hadn’t even realized their…dad? Grandad? I’m not sure, I never spoke with them… was dead for weeks. It seemed like they probably weren’t very close. It didn’t surprise me that they were trying to offload the house and move on with their lives as quickly as possible. And it did need work. The real estate agent had assured me that the house had passed inspection, and I believed him. It was just old. Lived in. Like I said, I hadn’t known the previous occupant, only knew his name–Tom Hilston–from the papers, but he’d left his mark on the house. I wonder if we all do… leave marks on the places we are… probably. Tom left not just the signs of the life he’d had there–the tick marks of a growth-chart that hadn’t quite been scrubbed away, the faintest change in color in the hardwood floors where rugs had protected some areas from the sun, the shadows of brush marks on the walls from coats and coats of paint, puckered in spots where nail holes had clearly been patched over, where pictures had once hung –but the house itself, aging right along with the man who called it home. The sagging gutters and creaking joints and window glass fogged with age–all the things that should have screamed at me to run. I had no idea what I was doing with a house that needed that much rehab. It made me far more nervous than the fact that a man had died here, but they were also all the things that made me love it. It had so clearly been a home. Maybe it could be mine. My lease was up soon and I was just so tired of apartments, of spaces that never really felt like mine. I couldn’t ever bring myself to put that much effort into a space I knew I wouldn’t stay in, couldn’t hang pictures knowing I’d have to patch the holes in a year or three, couldn’t see the point of buying furniture that couldn’t be disassembled and shoved in the back of my SUV, couldn’t take another year of staring at some aggressively bland gray or white or beige wall. I guess I lied before. I do believe in ghosts, in a way. Or at least in hauntings. I just don’t think a person has to be dead to haunt a place. I don’t think we can help but leave a mark on the spaces we’re in. Maybe… Not just physically, but… God, I don’t know the word. I don’t know if there is a word. Psychically? Meta-physically? I just don’t think you can really be in a place without changing it. Without leaving a little bit of yourself behind. I mean… we do that literally. Skin cells and oil and residue from our breath… we are all over everywhere we’ve been. And if that’s true, then every apartment is infested with these ghosts of us. Ghosts of transience and discontent, of a dozen people, just like me, who never really called it home. So if those are my choices, to be haunted by a lifetime of being a home or a parade of loneliness, of impermanence… well, that’s an easy one. I just…I wasn’t where I thought I’d be. In life, I mean. Late-thirties, single, decent paying job, but nothing I was passionate about. A few friends, though I didn’t see them much now that they had kids. That was my fault, I think. At least partly. Sure, their schedules changed, they invited me to walks in the park or dinner over at their house instead of the club, suggested we meet up at 10:00 AM instead of 10 PM, but… but I’m the one who pulled back. I’m the one who said no. It sounds dumb, and, I don’t know, anti-feminist somehow. Like, of course you can have a meaningful life without a husband and kids or whatever. But I really, really wanted that. And sometimes it just hurt too much to be around people who had found it. But this, this house. It felt right. A chance to prove I was a real grown-up. To put down roots, literally - there was an overgrown garden out back that I was itching to clean up–and paint the walls any color I God. Damn. Wanted. Hell, maybe even go crazy and go with wallpaper. And maybe, if I had a home, a place that was really, truly mine… maybe the rest would fall into place. I had a real estate agent I’d worked with a few times. Never that seriously, but like I said, my job was pretty good. And it was just me, so not a lot of expenses. He was… surprised that I wanted the house, but didn’t ask too many questions. laughs a little I guess there weren’t very many offers. Even in this market, superstition wins. And it all worked out so perfectly. I ended up closing on the house with a month left on my lease, the perfect amount of overlap to move without rushing, but not having to deal with breaking the lease or finding a subletter. I don’t know, it just felt like it was right. Like things were coming together. I even got a little tipsy on a bottle of wine–out of a paper cup, I hadn’t quite unpacked–and updated my dating apps. I felt good. For the first time in a long time.

we hear a strange statticy gurgle I’d been in the house about a week when I started hearing noises from the basement. beat I guess…I guess they were noises? I can’t really describe them. They were like…you know when you’re sound asleep and then something wakes you up, but you don’t know what? Like there must have been a crash, or the smoke detector, or a car alarm outside, or maybe something internal, a hiccup or a stomach ache, but whatever it was has stopped by the time you fully come to consciousness and you’re just lying there, barely breathing, listening. But nothing’s there. And you’re not sure there ever was. Just a little empty space were something might have been. And it’s all too easy to fill that empty space up with… fear.

another gurgling The first time I… heard is still the best word… but that’s not right. Um, I was doing laundry. I mean, I was upstairs, in the kitchen, but the machine was running down in the basement. The machine was ancient, came with the house, and I was deeply skeptical, but not so skeptical that I wasn’t going to put off a major purchase for as long as I could. I… might have underestimated how much work needed to be done on the house. Nothing major, thank God, but all the little repairs were adding up and I was going to run that machine into the ground. I figured the washer had…I don’t know, flooded? Tipped over? This sloshy, heavy, expensive sound. Whatever it was, I was freaking out. Like, I couldn’t make myself open the door to go down to the basement, because I just knew whatever I found was going to cost me a fortune. So I stood there for I don’t know, two or three minutes. And I realized that wasn’t quite it. I wasn’t just worried about the cost. I was fucking terrified of going into the basement. Like a little kid. The thinking part of my brain was trying to rationalize this deep, primal fear that I’d never felt before. I didn’t know what I was afraid of and I didn’t want to think about it long enough to try to figure it out. Like, I don’t know, that less evolved lizard brain was screaming at me: “stay out of the dark.” But that was stupid. There was nothing in the basement. Almost literally. I didn’t have a lot of stuff–the benefit of moving apartments every couple of years, less chance for things to accumulate–so I wasn’t storing anything down there. It was just the washer and dryer and a few empty built-in shelves. In fairness, it was creepy. One of those half-finished spaces with the cement floor and brick walls. And dark, though that was my fault. Only the lightbulb right above the laundry was working; I went down there so rarely I hadn’t bothered to replace the others. “What does any of that matter”, the logical part of my brain argued. If the problem is the washer, you don’t need to go out of the light. I stood there for…I don’t know how long, awhile, just arguing with myself, trying to convince myself to go down the stairs, but the more I argued the more tension I felt. Like… why did I have to convince myself to do something so mundane? What was this invisible sickly pressure pushing back? Telling me to stay upstairs? I argued long enough that I heard the wash cycle stop. I hadn’t realized that I’d been straining to listen, trying to hear whatever had drawn my attention to the basement in the first place and the sudden silence was so jarring I jumped. Maybe it…wasn’t the washer? If the washer was still working enough to finish a cycle, what was that… sound? But that was it, no choice now, I told myself. You have to go look. This is your house, you’re an adult, whatever it was could be getting more expensive by the minute. Grow up. Go down. I forced myself down the stairs and found exactly what I should have expected. Nothing. Or, rather, nothing out of the ordinary. The washer had, by some miracle, lived to see another cycle, and the rest of the basement was as empty as ever. No water, no nothing. I moved the laundry to the dryer and, very deliberately, walked up the stairs. I almost felt proud of myself. Still, I replaced the lightbulbs that weekend and had a good look around the basement. I rationalized it again, of course: identifying the source of weird noises from the basement was simply a thing responsible, adult homeowners did. And, it was, but also…I hadn’t been able to shake the fear. It had faded from that icy, stomach churning terror that had frozen me to the top of the stairs, but it still clung to me. My neck itched from my hairs constantly standing on end. More than once I’d caught myself standing, stock still, listening. I didn’t find anything in the basement. Nothing catastrophically expensive to repair, no explanation for the strange noises, just some cobwebs and a bit of mold in the corners and behind the washing machine. I scrubbed them clean, made a mental note to get a dehumidifier before the summer hit, and tried to forget about it. I kept hearing things. Or rather, feeling like I heard things. Hearing things, but not. It was like, you know when someone blows a dog whistle and it’s too high for you to hear, but you can almost feel that something is happening? Or, when you go home from a concert, you can still feel the bass in your ears? That there’s some sort of current, or vibration that you just can’t quite consciously process, but that you somehow know is there? Then it got worse. The sensation of hearing started to be accompanied by another sensation. The feeling of someone there. I’d feel it. That inexplicable tingle at the back of your neck, base of your spine. Someone is right behind me. I’d turn around, fully expecting to see someone standing behind me and…nothing. Just me, alone in this stupid house that was ruining my life instead of fixing it. This nasty resentment towards the space started bubbling up in me. I started to look at it walls, its windows with a mix of dread and contempt. How dare this place expose how unreasonable, how childish I am? I can’t be alone in a house thats too big? I can’t handle even that? But even as these little burs of unhappiness started gathering around me… I noticed something else. I… started to have trouble leaving the house. That’s weird, isn’t it? If I was scared, shouldn’t I have wanted to be somewhere else? laughing slightly That’s what everyone always asks about haunted houses, right? Why didn’t they just leave? It wasn’t just the fact that I’d spent basically all my savings on the house. Even after I’d accepted that something was happening, something that I couldn’t explain…I couldn’t leave. Not for long. Quieter, testing for a reaction The house didn’t want me to. It took me a while to notice it, I’m not a thrilling adventurous person… I worked from home, often pretty long hours. Some weeks…*embarrassed* I guess I didn’t leave the house that much even before, either.

we hear strange voices and static rising It was just so easy to make excuses, you know? Work was busy–I’d just been assigned a new project, one with the promise of a promotion if I did well, and there was always something to be done to the house–the window above the kitchen sink was leaking and that damn mold had spread to the downstairs bathroom, and the air conditioner was making some very suspicious noises, and half the time seeing my friends just reminded me of everything that they had that I didn’t, but that was complicated, because of course I was happy for them and this house was supposed to fix everything but it was just making it fucking worse and I couldn’t tell anyone because they would say ‘I told you so’ because I’m the fucking dumbass who bought a fucking fixer-upper of a haunted house after fucking knowing that someone died there…*increasingly upset, crying* I actually started to look forward to those tingling non sounds… it started to feel familiar… but I could have left. I should have left. But I couldn’t. I stayed. I had to. I needed…

Takes a deep breath and recenters, strange sounds subside

Emily: I went to th e grocery store. I’d promised myself I was going to be better, was going to eat, like, actual food that I actually prepared. I guess I’d lost quite a bit of weight, hadn’t even noticed until I caught myself in the mirror. So I splurged, I even went to the fancy grocery store on the opposite side of town, as a treat. God, how fucking depressing. That the “nice” grocery store with its shitty little chain coffee shop was the highlight of my week. I didn’t know the store as well and it was taking me longer than usual, considering I normally run in, grabbed some cereal and frozen pizza, and called it good enough. I was in the produce section, picking out broccoli, trying to find the stir fry recipe I’d saved on my phone, and I just realized, out of nowhere, that it was the farthest I’d been from the house in weeks. My chest got so tight, like it was being squeezed shut, but from the inside, something was expanding within my lungs, pressing out and out and out until there was no more room for air. No space to breathe. I know what you’re thinking. Panic attack. Maybe agoraphobia, maybe good old generalized anxiety with a side of depression for fun. I thought so, too. Until I got home…. The whole way back to the house I could feel the pressure deflating, like whatever it was in my chest knew it was going home. And it was happy about it. I dropped the grocery bags on the floor and just stood there, my elbows braced on the counter, hands to my face like a makeshift paper bag to keep myself from breathing too deeply, too quickly, and hyperventilating again. I don’t really know how long I stood there. A while. I heard or…felt…those non-noises all around me again, but now it was like they were welcoming me home. What had been a disconcerting blank shiver was now a warm wave of invisible reassurance. I realized I’d missed them. I started putting the groceries away and my hands were smeared with black. How had I not realized? When had that happened? Was the broccoli rotten but I hadn’t noticed? Then a worse thought, was it me? Had it been there before? Did I drag this sticky black film all over the produce? Were the stares not just because of my freak out? Had they been staring already? I tried to wash it off, but every time I thought I’d got it all…I’d find more. Between my fingers. The back of my wrist. Under my nails. Not just under the free edge, but through the whole nail bed–streaks of black against the pink, like rutile suspended in quartz, beautiful… or I only thought beautiful for a moment, and right after this shock of horror. It was IN my fingers. I turned the water as hot as it would go and scrubbed at my hands with the dish brush until they were red and raw. When the skin at my knuckles split and bled the red that oozed from the wounds was tinged with black. I started coughing. My chest and throat kept spasming, these awful waves of pain coursing through me. I doubled over, hands on my knees, tears pouring from my eyes and snot streaming from my nose, just trying to stop for a moment, just long enough to catch my breath. I retched and, without thinking, put my hands up to my mouth and nearly gagged again. The mass of phlegm I’d finally expelled was awful, black and putrid. Sitting in my hands like a rotten organ.

we hear dozens of tiny alien voices

I stared at it in horror. Disgust. Incomprehension at what had just come out of me. And realized it wasn’t black. Not entirely. Thousands of flecks, pale white against the black gel, hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny dark… things. Little. Writhing. Things… round bodies with dozens of limbs like little whips flailing around suspended in the slime… I tried to make myself call for help. Even if it wasn’t real, if it was all some loneliness-induced hallucination, I needed help. But it was too late. My hands flailed around uselessly, shedding showers of small whispering… bugs? Molluscs? I don’t know. I was so tired. I’d been right the whole time. I’d never been alone. Now that they were out, now that they’d grown big enough, I could actually hear them… and… they were saying such nice things. As they writhed and swam and shuddered in the fluids leaking out of me onto the kitchen floor they showered me with praise. They were so happy I was here. They were so proud of me. I didn’t need to ever leave again. I had nothing to prove and no one to prove it to. So… I just sat on the floor and watched it happen. It was almost beautiful, the way the infection crawled beneath my skin, flowering in my veins, blooming across the delicate flesh on my inner arms and wrist. I knew it was doing the same deeper inside, out of sight, filling my heart and lungs and stomach with itself. My vision clouded over as the spores grew over the cornea, obscuring the light and I just…lay down. My head on the kitchen floor, I could see them up close. Their little whip arms shoveling the melt into small holes in the middle of round bodies, even as those holes muttered to me that I’d made them so proud and that I’d done so well. It was almost comforting I had always been afraid I’d die alone.

Cid: Luca?

Luca: I already called in the containment team.

Cid: We’ll need two. What was the name of that grocery store?

Luca: She didn’t say.

Cid: We will trace it and call you. Adelaide.

Adelaide: I’m ready.

Cid: Join us there, but first, Ingram, burn this whole house to the ground. True Flame. Everything.

there’s a sound of rushing and fire as Adelaide and Voncid depart

Ingram: And there they go.

Luca: Yeah…

Ingram: Luca?

Luca: What?

Ingram: I’m just realizing… that Hilston guy…

Luca: Yeah?

Ingram: He worked for the order… and he still sat here as a dead, forgotten, sad, dissolved pile of sad dead sick for six months before anyone thought to look for him, and it wasn’t even our guys. We all have that kind of thanks to look forward to?

long beat

Ingram: ok, well lets burn this house down.

click

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