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