Speaker 1: Calarugu Shark Media. Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the
October Records, a month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode
twenty three, the first.
Speaker 2: Death October twenty third, nineteen seventy four, Silas Crane. Thomas
Brennan is ninety three years old. He died in nineteen
twenty four. He's very clear about this. Died October twenty third,
nineteen twenty four, at age forty two, drowned in his bedroom.
No water present, just drowned, but he got up the
next morning, went to work, lived another fifty years. He
called me tonight, said I needed to hear this, said
Margaret would need to know. Thomas died first in nineteen
twenty four, first death of that October, but death didn't take.
He remembers drowning, remembers his lungs filling, remembers his heart stopping,
then remembers it starting again, but beating wrong, backward, pulling
blood in instead of pushing it out. He's been dying
in reverse for fifty years, getting younger inside while his
outside ages. He says, by Halloween he'll be a baby again,
but a baby that remembers being old, a baby that
remembers dying. He wants me to come see him, says
he needs to show me something. Show me what happens
when you die, but don't stop when you rot, but
keep walking when you remember things that haven't happened yet.
He knows how I die, knows how everyone dies, because
he's already dead. We're all already dead. We just haven't
stopped moving yet.
Speaker 3: My scaled arm won't stop writing all night. It wrote names, deaths, dates.
By morning, my entire desk was covered in its prophecies.
According to my arm, I die in eight days, but
also I died yesterday and I died tomorrow, all simultaneously true.
Thomas Brennan lives in the same house where I heard
the first recording, where his grandson Timothy learned words from
his dead grandmother. Three generations of Brennan's, all touched by death,
all still walking around. I knocked the door opened before
my knuckles made contact. Thomas stood there, ninety three years old,
but his eyes were infant's eyes new, barely able to focus. Margaret,
he said, in a voice that came from his stomach,
not his throat. Sarah, Elizabeth, whoever you are today, come in,
come see what death looks like after fifty years of practice.
His house was wrong. Furniture on the ceiling, carpet on
the walls, windows in the floor, as if gravity had
forgotten which way to pull. It happens when you die,
but don't, he explained, walking on the wall while I
stood on the floor. Reality gets confused, doesn't know where
to put you. He led me to his bedroom. The
bed was there, but also not there. It existed in layers,
the bed from nineteen twenty four, from nineteen seventy four,
from twenty twenty five, all stacked in the same space.
This is where I died, he said. October twenty third,
nineteen twenty four. Three in the morning, my lungs forgot
how to process air, started processing water instead, water that
wasn't there. He lay down on the bed. All the
beds his body separated into age layers. Ninety three year
old Thomas on top, forty two year old Thomas in
the middle, newborn Thomas at the bottom. Want to see
how I died. Before I could answer, he was drowning,
actually drowning water that didn't exist, filling lungs. In nineteen
twenty four, I could see it happening fifty years ago
while watching it happen. Now, his chest stopped moving, his
eyes went flat. He was dead. Then his chest moved,
but wrong, inflating from the inside, his ribs spreading like wings.
His dead mouth opened and something crawled out another Thomas, smaller, younger,
made of water and memory. This is what it does.
The water, Thomas said, kills you, then wears you. But
you're still conscious inside, still aware, feeling yourself be worn
like a suit. The ninety three year old corpse sat
up the water. Thomas climbed back inside through the mouth.
The body reanimated. I've been dead for fifty years, Thomas said, standing.
His movement's puppet jerky. But it needs me to walk
around to father children, to grandfather Timothy, to complete the bloodline.
So I walk, I talk, I breathe unnecessarily. He grabbed
my scaled arm, where he touched the scales spread up
to my elbow. Now you're dying too, he said, have
been since you played the first recording. The death just
hasn't caught up to your whole body yet, but it will.
Look He pulled me to a mirror, but I wasn't reflected. Instead,
I saw Sarah Blackwood in seventeen seventy four, in labor, dying,
and inside her belly thirty babies. But they weren't babies.
They were us, all of us, the entire town of Millbrook, unborn,
waiting inside a dying woman. We're all her death, Thomas explained.
Every person in Millbrook is a piece of Sarah Blackwood's death.
When she died, her death shattered into thousands of pieces.
Each piece became a person. But we're not people. We're
fragments of a death that won't end. The mirror cracked
behind the glass water, behind the water, something moving, a hand,
then a face, My face so not. This face had
been underwater for centuries. The features were soft, melted, reformed
by pressure. Hello, death, it said to me, Ready to
remember what you are. The mirror exploded outward. Water rushed
into the room, real water, this time, cold, dark, full
of things that had been growing in the deep. Thomas
laughed as the water rose. This is the best part,
when the drowning stops being metaphorical. The water was at
my waist, my chest, my neck, But I wasn't afraid.
My scaled arm was happy it belonged in water. It
pulled me down under the surface. The room was different, bigger,
connected to other flooded rooms, other flooded houses, an entire
underwater neighborhoo. And there were people, hundreds of them, all
the Brennans who had ever lived, all underwater, all conscious,
all drowning perpetually, but unable to die because they were
already dead. Welcome to the real mill Brook, they gurgled
in unison, the one that exists below the surface, where
all the dead live, where you've always lived. I tried
to surface, but there was no surface, just more water,
layer after layer of drowned spaces than I saw him. Timothy,
seven year old Timothy, but not the current one. All
of them, every Timothy, from every generation. They were the
same child, the same dead child, being reborn over and over.
Grandmother taught me to breathe water. All the Timothy said,
want to learn. They opened their mouths. Inside instead of
throats were pools, deep pools that led down to something vast.
Just stop breathing air, they instructed, Start breathing water. It's easy.
You've been doing it since seventeen seventy four. My lungs
were burning. Had to breathe had to. I breathed water
rushed in, but it didn't hurt. It felt right, natural,
like coming home. I was drowning, I was breathing, I
was dying, I was living. I was Sarah Blackwood, murdered
in seventeen seventy four. I was Margaret Blackwood playing recordings
in twenty twenty five. I was everyone. I was no one.
Thomas pulled me up of the water, out of the truth,
back into the lie of air and life. Not yet,
he gasped himself, dripping, melting slightly. Eight more days, eight
more deaths. Then you can stop pretending to be alive.
I coughed at water, so much water, and in that
water swimming were tiny people, microscopic margarets, all drowning, all breathing,
all dying, all living. The first death never ends, Thomas said,
aging rapidly now, his ninety three years catching up. It
just spreads person to person, generation to generation, until everyone
is the first death, until everyone is Sarah Blackwood dying
in seventeen seventy four. He collapsed, turned to water, soaked
into the carpet, but his voice remained. Check your arm,
See what it wrote while you were underwater. My scaled
arm had written one word over and over covering all
the scales. Tomorrow, Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, Tomorrow, I'll play
October twenty fourth. Tomorrow I learn about the cover up.
Tonight I'm drying off, but I can't. The water won't leave.
It's inside me now and I can feel it, thinking, planning,
waiting for tomorrow when something happens, something my arm knows
but won't tell me, something that makes tomorrow the most
important day yet.
Speaker 1: Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaroga 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