Speaker 1: Calorougus Shark Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the October Records, a
month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode thirteen.
Speaker 3: The Mine m October thirteenth, nineteen seventy four, Silas Crane.
The Mitchell Mine has been sealed since nineteen forty seven.
Seventeen miners died in a collapse. Their bodies were never recovered,
But yesterday sounds started coming from inside, tapping rhythmic sos
in morse code, then voices calling names, current names, people
who weren't born when the mine collapsed. The rescue team
broke through the seal at dawn. The shaft was flooded,
has been for decades, thirty feet of black water, but
they could see lights down there, mining helmets still lit.
After twenty seven years. They sent down a camera. What
it showed seventeen figures standing at the bottom, standing under
thirty feet of water, still wearing their mining gear, but
their faces. Their faces had changed. The eyes had migrated,
clustered together on the forehead. The mouths had widened, split
at the corners, extending back to where ears should be.
Gills fluttered where their noses had been. They weren't drowning
victims any more. They were something adapted, something evolved. The
rescue team lowered a rope. One of the figures grabbed it.
Mitchell's grandfather, Thomas Mitchell, ninety seven years old. If he'd lived,
he climbed. When they pulled him up through the water's surface,
he began to scream, not from his mouth, from every pore.
His skin was screaming in the air. He began to dissolve.
His flesh ran like wax, but he spoke through his
liquefying throat. He spoke, We're not the only ones down here,
the others, the older ones. They're teaching us to dig.
Dig through the water, dig through the stone, dig to
where the pattern begins. We've almost reached it, the original
lake where it sleeps. Sixteen more days, sixteen more days,
and we break through. Then he melted completely, just a
puddle of organic matter, but still screaming. The puddle screamed
for three hours before it finally stopped.
Speaker 1: I continue these recordings despite knowing I'm already dead, despite
seeing my name on the list, despite the other margarets
I see in every reflection, all drowning at different speeds.
The compulsion to play only one record per days become physical.
This morning, my hand reached for the October fourteenth recording
while thirteen was still playing. The moment my fingers touched it,
my hand aged fifty years in seconds, wrinkled, spotted, then
young again, then skeletal, then flesh, cycling through states until
I jerked away. Time doesn't work right near these records.
They exist in all Octobers simultaneously. The Mitchell Mine. I
knew it would be different from the nineteen seventy four incident.
Everything this October has been worse, evolved, like fifty years
of marinating in darkness has made the horror richer. The
mine is no longer sealed, can't be sealed. Every barrier
they erect dissolves by morning. The town council gave up trying.
Now they just put warning signs, useless warnings. I arrived
at three pm. The entrance gaped like a throat. Water
lapped at the edges, but impossible water. It didn't flow out,
despite the downward slope. It stayed contained, like a vertical lake.
Marcus Mitchell was waiting the current Mitchell descendant. His eyes
were already clouded, but only the left one. The right
eye had migrated. It sat now on his temple, looking sideways,
always watching the mine. Grandfathers down there, he said, all
the grandfathers, all the miners, but also the new ones,
the ones who went looking. Thirty seven people in the
last two weeks. Thirty seven people are missing, not missing, transformed. Come,
I'll show you. He handed me a mining helmet with
a light. But when I put it on, the light
didn't shine forward. It shone inward, illuminating the inside of
my skull. I could see my own brain pulsing, with
something dark growing in the folds. We descended, not on
stairs or ladders. The water itself had formed steps, solid
water that held our weight. As we went deeper, I
heard them singing, hundreds of voices, singing in harmonies that
human throats couldn't produce. Twenty feet down we found the
first cluster, bodies fused together at the shoulders and hips,
creating a human centipede that breathed in unison through shared gills.
They were mining, their fused hands holding tools that shouldn't exist,
picks made of compressed water, hammers of crystallized breath. They're
digging to the original lake. Marcus explained, the one that
existed before geology, before physics, when this was all ocean
and something else made the rules deeper thirty feet fifty
The pressure should have killed us, but the water here
didn't follow pressure rules. It pressed in then pulled out,
like breathing. A child floated past. Emma Wilson, aged seven,
reported missing three days ago. But she wasn't floating. She
was swimming. Her arms had elongated, fingers webbed, her legs
had fused into a tail. She smiled at me with
three rows of teeth. We're becoming what we were always
meant to be, she sang, in a voice like whale song.
Before the land, before the air, when everything was deep
and dark and perfect. At ninety feet, impossibly deep for
a mine that had only gone down sixty we found
the breakthrough, a hole in the rock that opened onto
something vast, an underground ocean, but not water, something thicker,
something alive, the original lake, the thing that existed before Millbrook,
before Michigan, before the continent rose from primordial seas. It
wasn't a lake. It was an organ, a stomach, and
we were inside it. The missing thirty seven people were here,
but also hundreds more, thousands, everyone who'd ever gone missing
in Millbrook, everyone the pattern had claimed over centuries, all alive,
all changed, all wrong. They were building something, a structure
made of human bones, fused with something that might have
been coral, but pulsed like a heart. It rose from
the lake floor, spiraling up toward her, A tower, a beacon,
a feeding tube. Sixteen more days they chanted in unison,
Sixteen more days until the pattern completes. Then the feeding
tube opens, Then the stomach remembers how to digest. Then
Millbrook slides down the throat. Marcus turned to me, and
I saw his other eye had migrated now too. Both
sat on his temples, looking in opposite directions. Do you
want to see the worst part, he asked. Before I
could answer, he pushed me. I fell into the organ lake.
It wasn't liquid. It was flesh, living, flesh that thought
and remembered and hated. I was inside something's body, swimming
through its tissues, and in those tissues I saw the truth.
Every person who'd ever drowned in Millbrook was he not
their bodies, their consciousness absorbed into this thing, part of
its digestive system. They were stomach acid with human memories, enzymes,
with human fears, and they were happy. That's what broke me.
They were happy to be part of something larger, happy
to be useful, happy to digest their own families. When
the time came, I clawed my way out, gasping, wretching.
Marcus pulled me onto the solid water platform. But when
I looked at my hands, they were different. The skin
between my fingers had grown webbing, just a little, just
enough to swim better next time. The mine is the
thirteenth point, Marcus said, the deepest point where the pattern
touches the original inhabitant, where we learn what we really are,
food that's been seasoning itself for two hundred and fifty
one years. When I surfaced, when I finally climbed out
of that impossible mine, I found Deputy Harrison waiting. There's
been another disappearance, he said. Timothy Brennan, the seven year old.
His parents say he walked into his basement and never
came out, but they can hear him down there, laughing
and digging. The thirteenth point is marked the mind that
goes too deep, that reaches the thing that owns us.
All tomorrow, I'll play October fourteenth. Tomorrow, I'll learn why
my grandmother chose me for this tonight. I'm sitting in
the library, watching my hands, watching the webbing grow, feeling
my eyes loosening in their sockets, ready to migrate. We're
not drowned. We're evolving, returning to what we were before
we crawled onto land and forgot our purpose, forgot we
were meant to be eaten.
Speaker 2: Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Caloroga Shark Media.
Some elements of AI may have been used in this production,
but it was written, edited, mixed, and produced by Real
Live People Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott