Speaker 1: That's I don't know. Two am, I can't sleep again.
Maybe talking into this would help settle my brain. Everything
Graham and I've been digging into. It's rattling around like
loose screws, box whispers that waitress. I keep telling myself
it's just creepy stories and coincidence. But Christal, what are
you doing after the bed?
Speaker 2: Baby?
Speaker 1: If you don't have a mouse, this place better not
have mice. You're in the bed, then what's under the bed?
Is it a mouse? His voice was supposed to be clean.
Speaker 3: Dear Diary, Today, hid in the hallway closet darning the thunderstorm.
Then how I went out and I was sure the
shadows would get in if I breathed you loud. I
counted backwards from ten a hundred times. I don't think
it out of Medison, Dear Diary.
Speaker 4: Today was the funeral. I wore the blue.
Speaker 3: Dress with eachy color. The one man said I had
to wear just one more time. Everyone said I was
very brave, but I just kept staring.
Speaker 4: At the empty chair.
Speaker 3: Counting the threads. I thought if I reached a hundred
before the pastor said.
Speaker 4: Amen, he'd come back.
Speaker 1: Love Adison, that's mine. That's my diary. I haven't seen that.
Speaker 3: What's always waiting, the pages sharp with fear, the hungers
for the trembling hands, the dare to open the year.
Speaker 1: Stop this is impossible. We're out of here.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Whispers of the Wicked. I'm Graham Rowan.
Last time, we told you about the strange box that
showed up in our studio. No postmark, no return address,
no explanation, just black wrapping that wouldn't tear, scraps of ink,
blurred paper, and a thumb drive full of corrupted files.
We've been trying to treat this investigation like any other story,
chasing leads, collecting testimony, trying to stay objective. But sometimes
the story comes to you. Addison had an experience last night,
something personal, something she didn't want to talk about at first,
but I think it's an important part of the investigation. Addison,
you all right to talk about what happened?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm okay kind of. I stayed at a friend's place
last night. I'm in town at that short term rental
we talked about, But after what happened, I just I
couldn't stay there, not with that thing under the bed.
I went back this morning to get my recorder. It
was still on still recording. I thought maybe I'd captured it,
the voice, the pages, something, but when I played it back,
that's all. That's what it left me. There's my voice
and then the parts where it was speaking. Nothing. It
was there, Graham. It read my diary, things I haven't
seen since I was thirteen. Things I know I didn't
tell anyone, And now all I've.
Speaker 2: Got is that Addison. I believe you because something where
has been happening to me too. The day before yesterday,
I was rehearsing for the play I'm in Downtown. It's
a weird little one man show. I said yes too,
for reasons I don't remember anymore. And while I was
on stage rehearsing, I started to feel like I wasn't alone.
I mean, yes, there's a stage manager and production assistance,
but this was different. It wasn't stage fright either.
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 2: Feeling watched, but not in a way that you want
to as a performer. At first I thought it was
just nerves, but then the lights flickered backstage, just in
my periphery, in the wings, and something moved behind the
curtains there, not fast, slow, deliberate, like it wanted me
to see it, did you? Just its shadow, long thin,
too many elbows. And then I checked the thumb drive again,
you remember the one we found in the box. There
was suddenly a new file on it, a text document,
just a username and password. The file was named twl
upload info dot t xt. I used it. I don't
even know why, but it logged me into the podcast
distribution dashboard, the one for the Wicked library. And the
thing is I shouldn't have access, but it let me
upload episode one like it wanted us to.
Speaker 1: Why would it want that? And what is it?
Speaker 2: I don't know, but it didn't stop there. Last night
I got an email from me, sent from my own address,
no subject line, just a poem in the body, no punctuation,
a lower case. You open the door, and the door
opens you. Every mirror learns the shape of your fear.
Echo is not a name, it's a hunger.
Speaker 1: That's wrong. That's not just spam or prank.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I I tried to show my wife this morning.
The email was gone, no trace, not even in the
cent folder. All I have is this print out. Whatever
it is we're in the middle of. I think it
started when we opened that box, and now it's it's
not just following us, it's listening.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've got the box here again. I wrapped it
in trash back after last time. But look at it, Graham.
The outer layer it's not plastic. Looks like it feels
like it. But try tearing it.
Speaker 2: That's not normal. This isn't even plastic. It feels almost fibrous,
like muscle.
Speaker 1: It's cold, and it's always wet. I dried it off twice,
but the bottom just keeps seeping. I thought maybe it
was the rain from the night I found it, but
it's been three days it's still damp.
Speaker 2: Here's that key again, rusty little thing. I tried cleaning
it up. See right here, if you tilted in the light,
it has a number scratched in it, unit one three seven,
and the name of the self storage company here on
the tag lock and hollow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not a creepy name at all.
Speaker 2: And these scraps, these notes or poems. The girl was brave,
but the room was braver. It swallowed her before the
teeth came. Who writes like this?
Speaker 1: It's not just one author. There are different handwriting styles,
different kinds of paper. Some are burned on the edges,
some are chewed. This one's burnt around the edges, ashy,
yet somehow still damp. I found a book with screaming ink.
It bled each time I turned a page. The letters
ran like frightened things, and whispered secrets far to sage.
I burned at once. It didn't care. It only laughed
behind the flame. The ash it left behind grew eyes,
and each one softly spoke my name. The ash it
left behind grew eyes.
Speaker 2: This is the one that looks like it's been nod on.
It smells weird too, like copper. The one that fed
something chewed this poem left teeth in the rhyme, like
it fed on the meter and swallowed the time. The
words that remain are just marrow and spit. But still
they crawl backward. Still they won't quit. I wrote of
a man with no skin on his face. He wore
a white suit and carried a black lacquered case. He
said he was hired to harvest the sounds of screams
from the aisles where the quiet surrounds. I don't understand
why they're all damp.
Speaker 1: And this this thing, we plugged it in earlier, along
with the rest of the files. There are a dozen
MP threes on it, but they're all corrupted, just static
and some odd sounds breathing maybe, except the last one.
It's titled track thirteen. Like the others, it's just breathing
until the very end.
Speaker 2: I didn't play that one. What happens at the end?
Speaker 1: Something whispers to me about Well, here, I'll just play it.
Speaker 4: Oh, name a flower A bird? I dreamed a dream
in veilvet hues, the feacox strutting through the bruise. The
dusk had left across the sky. They sang your name
and would not lie. I counted roses as they mooned
in the middle of you. One for each fear you
locked and groomed, fears deep and true. A hundred medals
soft and red for every whisper in your head. A
girl once wept behind the glass, her middle name the
secret pass. She thought her pages lost and torn. But
roses know what fear has borne.
Speaker 1: Jesus Anyway, I traced the key. The number belongs to
a storage facility just off Route nineteen. I called them.
Unit one thirty seven exists, but it's been unregistered since
nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: That's twenty eight years.
Speaker 1: We're going this afternoon.
Speaker 2: I'll bring the recorder. Well, we'll talk about everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because whatever's happening, it started when we open that box.
Maybe it ends where it came from.
Speaker 2: Uh, let's take a break and when we come back,
we'll talk with one of the other voice actors that
worked on the Wicked Library and she'll share her odd.
Speaker 5: Experience introducing the pet Stone. Tired of the hassle of feeding, walking,
or cleaning up after traditional pets, the pet Stone is
here to bring simplicity, joy, and low maintenance companionship into
your life. Each stone is hand selected from only the
most emotionally balanced riverbeds, tumbled to perfection and housed in
a cozy, straw filled box. No barking, no biting, just
quiet understanding. Each stone comes with a stylish cardboard carrying case,
an official certificate of adoption, a thirty two page owners
manual including obedience training. Tis an emptiness you didn't notice
until the stone stared back. Yes, stared. You think it cannot,
but it does. At first, you'll chalk it up to imagination.
A shadow where none should fall, A faint humming like
winds through the bones of forgotten mountains. Then one night
your pet stone will not be where you left it.
You will tell yourself you must have moved it.
Speaker 6: You didn't.
Speaker 5: They all shift eventually, the manual warned you on page
twenty seven. But by then you were already too deeply bonded.
The dream lattices had begun, the whispering through the floor
boards had taken on the shape of your mother's voice,
your real mother, the one buried beneath the granite altar.
You remember her now, don't you. The pet stone doesn't
need food or water, only worship. Order yours today, But
don't look too long into its grooves. The geode sees,
the geode knows, and the earth is waking up. Just
listen to this testimonial from one of our satisfied customers.
Speaker 7: I'm Jane, and I never thought i'd be a that
stone person, But after just one week with my little guy, Jeff,
I can't imagine life without him. He doesn't eat, he
doesn't move, he doesn't blink, and yet every morning something's
a little different. The street outside my window bends at
angles I don't remember. My neighbor's eyes are smooth now,
no lids, just watching. Jeff likes it that way. Last
night my dog started speaking Latin. He told me the
clocks are wrong, not off wrong. Jeff said he could
fix it and eat it. I used to be afraid
of the doc, but Jeff showed me there's more truth
in it than light ever held. More teeth doo.
Speaker 8: Jeff, he said that stone, your reality will never be
the same because it won't be yours.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Whispers of the Wicked. We weren't expecting
this to become whatever it's becoming. We thought we were
digging into an old podcast graveyard. Instead, it's started digging back.
This next part caught us off guard. We had a
chat yesterday afternoon with someone we both know, a friend,
a fellow voice actor named Mary Murphy Right.
Speaker 1: She was one of the voice actors we emailed and
asked about her work on the show. She emailed us
back about an episode she worked on that never aired,
and we had a quick call with her.
Speaker 2: Hey, Mary, now you said you had a weird story
about the last thing you did for the Wicked Library.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's really weird. I recorded my part for Dan.
It was for this great character Rita. She was a
character in Enfield Detective Agency, a sequel to the Private Collector.
While I was recording it, I kept getting audio glitches.
I'd listened back to the file and sometimes I heard
someone breathing. Other times I'd listened to the same file
and it would be fine.
Speaker 1: The same files, Yeah.
Speaker 9: The same files. They would be fine. Then i'd go
back to level or clean up a flubbed line and
there would be whispering or breathing. Creeped me out. Anyway,
it never aired. And while I was cleaning up some
old files last week, right before you emailed me, actually
I was in that folder and all but one of
my raw and my edited audio files were gone, which
was weird because I know I didn't delete them. But
there was another file in there, one that I didn't
put there, and the file date June thirteenth, nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: What was the file?
Speaker 9: It was named read Me Text and it had stanzas
of a poem in it.
Speaker 1: Would you mind reading it?
Speaker 9: Okay? Laughter drowned in dust and ashes, voices stitched between
the tracks. Every tale a mouth that opens, every silence
bites you back. He wore the goatpin, pale and smiling,
carried keys of bone and flame spoke a tongue of
broken chapters. Nothing opened, only pain, paper, sings in burning fragments,
letters written in blood and thread, every word a scar
that lingers, every line of prayer to the dead.
Speaker 1: You're not the first person who said something like that.
Speaker 9: Well there's more. My phone rang this morning, no caller ID.
When I picked up, it was me, but not from now.
It was me in character. I was talking about things
that were happening in that episode, asking myself for help.
I had a conversation with a character.
Speaker 2: I played this Keepe's getting weirder.
Speaker 9: It really does. Whatever you two are doing, be careful.
Something odd is going on here. I have to run,
but if I find anything else, I'll send it over.
Speaker 2: So shortly after Addison and I ended the call, Mary
emailed us again and sent this file along. She said
it was buried in a backup folder, one she didn't
even know existed.
Speaker 1: She warned us, it's strange, but we figured we'd play
a portion of it here. So this is Mary reading
for the part of Rita from that unaired episode of
Enfield Detective Agency.
Speaker 9: Rita kinkaid, my husband Derek is missing, okay, and thank
you Frank for hearing me out. Why don't we go
to my place. I'll put a pot of coffee on
and I have some scones and we can talk where
it's warmer. My house is that one right over there?
I see you were looking at my husband's books. Oh. Yes,
he's been for a very long time before we ever met, and.
Speaker 1: We've been married forty years.
Speaker 9: He has a group of friends he meets with about
all that nothing to do with me, of course. I
just think of it like ELT's club or something. They
meet twice a month. I'm not sure where one of
his friend's houses maybe, but that's all I know about it.
I don't think any of them could be involved, do you, Frank?
Speaker 2: Okay, So that was Mary's recording and whatever else that was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks Mary, and sorry.
Speaker 2: We'll post a transcript of that clip for anyone who
wants to comb through it. If you hear something we didn't,
which God help us, is very possible, let us know.
Speaker 1: And yeah, we're aware how this all sounds. The box
shows up, poems, keys, emails from nowhere, whispers under the bed,
a voice actor haunted by a roll she barely remembers.
Speaker 2: It sounds fake, but it feels real.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if it is fake, someone went to a
lot of trouble to get under our skin.
Speaker 2: Mission accomplished.
Speaker 1: Anyway. We found the storage unit. As I mentioned earlier,
it's a place called Lock and Hollow, and yes, from
the images on Google street View, it looks exactly as
bad as it sounds.
Speaker 2: We're going later today. If you don't hear from us
after that.
Speaker 1: Check Unit one thirty seven. Bring snacks and sage, maybe
a priest.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time, assuming there
is a next time. Ha hah.
Speaker 6: Humans, ye dust fated.
Speaker 10: A sermon for the funeral of mankind.
Speaker 6: Humans, Ye dust fated.
Speaker 11: Lend me your ears, No, not your attention, your actual ears.
Hang them on the branches like fruits ripe for rotting.
We'll need them to hear what comes. I come not
to praise humanity. I come to bury it, but not
beneath earth, beneath memory, beneath the weight of its own myth.
Speaker 6: The evil that men do outlives them long after the
light behind their eyes has dimmed. Their deeds. Go are gnawing,
black toothed in the dark.
Speaker 10: The good it dies soft, it withers, It's quiet.
Speaker 6: Let it be with humanity. Then the brutal have spoken.
Speaker 11: They've told you humanity was ambitious, and so it was
ambitious enough to burn Eden for a glimpse of God,
would ambitious enough to crown itself with bones and call
it progress.
Speaker 6: The brutal are all honorable, of course.
Speaker 11: They sit on thrones of algorithms and ash their hands,
drip with the ink that writes history in reverse.
Speaker 6: But I loved humanity once.
Speaker 10: I wept with it, dreamed with it, slept beside it,
and listened as it whispered in its sleep the names
of stars it would never reach.
Speaker 11: And when the poor cried, humanity flinched, But only in dreams.
Ambitions should be made of sterner stuff, not mirrors, not
meet You say it turned away the crown, But I
saw it hesitate three times, each time, longer each time.
Speaker 6: The shadow behind it grew teeth.
Speaker 11: Was that ambition or was it the muse stirring in
the cradle of its mind? The brutals say it was ambition,
and sure they are honorable men. You all did love
humanity once, not without cause.
Speaker 6: What cause withholds your grief now?
Speaker 11: Is it the silence or the fact that the silence
is breathing.
Speaker 6: Oh judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and the
beasts they have evolved.
Speaker 11: Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin, there,
with humanity, but not skill.
Speaker 6: No, it writes in int that smells of rust, in
a
Speaker 11: Tongue no longer human, And every letter spells Remember