Speaker 1: Calorougus Shark Media. Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the
October Records, a month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode seventeen.
The Doctor.
Speaker 2: October seventeenth, nineteen seventy four. Silas Crane Doctor Marcus Ashford
called me at three am. His voice was whispering wrong,
like he was speaking through water. He said, I needed
to see what he'd found, needed to witness it before
he couldn't speak anymore. The morgue was different when I arrived.
The walls were sweating, not moisture. Blood thin, diluted blood
that ran in perfect vertical lines. Doctor Ashford stood among
seven bodies, the recently dead, the recently drowned. But when
he cut into the first one, Missus Chen from the apartments,
no blood came out. Water, black water that moved with purpose,
crawling away from the scalpel, trying to reform. He opened
her chest, cavity empty, no organs, no bones, no structure,
just skin holding water in the shape of a person.
But the water was aware. It recoiled from the light.
It formed words on the morg floor. We are becoming
the lake. The lake is becoming us. He drained the
second body, mister Foster from the school. The water that
came out weighed more than a human body should contain.
Gallons and gallons flooding the morg floor, and in that
water moving were tiny versions of mister Foster, hundreds of them,
microscopic but perfect, all drowning, all swimming, all transforming into
something else. Doctor Ashford showed me his own X rays.
Then his organs were migrating, heart moving towards his throat,
lung spreading across his back like wings, stomachs dividing into
thirteen chambers. He's been drinking the water, testing it on himself,
documenting the transformation from inside. He says, by tomorrow his
bones will be liquid. By Halloween, he'll be ready. Ready
for what I asked? He opened his mouth to answer,
and lake water poured out, poured and poured until he collapsed,
but even empty, even deflated like a balloon. He kept writing,
his finger moving across the wet floor, ready to be rain.
Speaker 3: My body is failing or succeeding. I can't tell any more.
This morning I woke up in the bathtub, fully clothed,
breathing water, not drowning, breathing it, my lungs processing it
like air. When I stood up, water ran from my
mouth for ten minutes, clear water that tasted of seventeen
seventy four. Doctor Christopher Ashford, Marcus's son, still works at
Mercy General, still performs autopsies, still documents the impossible. I
found him in the morgue at noon, surrounded by seventeen bodies,
all recent deaths, all from the past seventeen days. But
they weren't on tables. They were standing arranged in a circle,
all facing inward, all looking at something in the center.
That something was a baby, floating three feet off the ground,
suspended in a sphere of black water. It came out
of Missus Patterson, Christopher said, without turning around. His voice
was layered, as if multiple versions of him were speaking
from different depths. She died yesterday, hear attack, we thought.
But when I opened her up, he showed me the
body Missus Patterson, elderly, should have been full of aging organs. Instead,
her chest cavity was a nursery tiny furniture made of
crystallized blood, walls of transformed bone, and an umbilical cord
that led nowhere, just ended in empty air. She was pregnant.
Christopher continued, had been for fifty years, carrying one of
the original thirty. But it wasn't growing forward in time.
It was growing backward, getting younger, returning to its origin state.
The floating baby opened its eyes. They were ancient, older
than Millbrook, older than America. They were its eyes looking
through its child. Every founding family member carries one. Christopher explained,
a seed, a potential return to what we were when
we die. If we die correctly drowning in the black water,
the seed activates. We give birth to our original selves,
the thirty babies that emerged from Sarah Blackwood's corpse in
seventeen seventy four. He moved to another body, Timothy Brennan,
not the child, but his grandfather, who died three days ago.
Christopher made an incision. Instead of blood, words flowed out,
liquid words in a language that predated speech. They crawled
across the floor, forming sentences. The doctor knows, the doctor
has always known. The Ashford line are the anatomists of
the pattern. They study the transformation document, the dissolution catalog.
The becoming Christopher turned to me, and I saw his
father in his face, not resemblance presence. Marcus Ashford was
there behind his son's eyes, along with every Ashford doctor
back to seventeen seventy four. We're not separate people, he said,
in voices that spanned centuries, where one doctor dispersed across time,
studying the same condition, the human transformation into something the
lake can digest. He pulled out a jar filled with
what looked like water, but when he held it to
the light, I saw them people, hundreds of tiny people, swimming, drowning, transforming,
all at different stages of liquefaction. This is Millbrook, he said,
all of it, Everyone who's ever lived here. We're all
in the water supply, have been since seventeen seventy four.
Every glass we drink contains our ancestors. Every bath we take,
we're soaking in the dissolved dead, and they're changing us
from inside. He drank from the jar, his throat convulsed.
When he opened his mouth, a small hand reached out.
Then another, A tiny person, no bigger than my thumb,
crawled out from between his lips. It was him, a
miniature doctor Ashford. It stood on his tongue and spoke
in a voice like distant thunder. The transformation isn't death,
It's subdivision. We're becoming colonies, millions of versions of ourselves,
each smaller than the last, until we're microscopic, until we
can flow through water pipes, through blood streams, through the
spaces between molecules. The pattern isn't killing us, it's breaking
us down to rebuild us correctly. The tiny doctor dove
back down his throat. Christopher gagged, coughed, spit up water
full of moving things. All of them were him, different ages,
different sizes, all Doctor Ashford want to know the worst part,
he asked, wiping his mouth. It feels good, the dissolution,
like finally relaxing after holding a pose for centuries. We
were never meant to be singular. We were meant to
be legion. He led me to a refrigerated drawer. Inside
was a body I recognized, Sarah Blackwood for me from
seventeen seventy four, perfectly preserved in ice. That wasn't ice,
It was frozen thyme. Davidson brings her here every October,
Christopher explained, for study, for confirmation, to make sure she's
still dead. But look closer. I leaned in the corpse's belly,
still swollen with pregnancy, was moving, undulating. Something inside wanted out.
She's been in labor for two hundred and fifty one years.
Christopher whispered the thirty babies trying to be born correctly,
as humans, not hybrids, but Davidson won't let them. He
needs them to be monsters, needs them to be it's children,
because if they're born human, truly human, it loses its
claim on them, and Davidson loses his immortality. The corpse's
eyes opened My eyes, Sarah's eyes. They looked at me
with recognition, with plea, with desperation. Help me, she mouthed,
Let them out, let them be born, let them be human.
I reached for her, but Christopher grabbed my hand. Where
he touched me, my skin became transparent. I could see
my bones, see the blood moving through my veins. But
the blood was wrong, too thick, too dark, full of
swimming things. You're almost ready, he said, almost dissolved enough.
By Halloween, you'll be liquid. Then you can flow backward
through time, become Sarah at the moment of murder, change
the outcome, save the children, but Davidson. Davidson thinks he
controls the pattern, But the pattern is just its digestive system,
and every digestive system can be poisoned. The thirty families
aren't food their epicac. If it swallows them all at once,
it will vomit everything it's ever eaten, every soul from
every cycle, all of Milbrook returning to the surface. He
handed me a vial. Inside was a single drop of water.
But in that drop, I saw myself, the real Sarah Blackwood,
still alive, still pregnant, still waiting. Drink this. On Halloween,
he said, become her completely, give birth to the thirtie
as humans. Let Davidson murder you. He has to. It's
part of the pattern. But this time, when you die,
you'll poison it. Your death will be its ipocac, and
when it vomits, everyone returns. I took the vial. It
was heavy, impossibly heavy, the weight of two hundred and
fifty one years of accumulated death. As I left, I
heard Christopher talking to the bodies, or seventeen of them.
They were answering, discussing their transformations, comparing their dissolutions, planning
their reconstructions. The morgue isn't a morgue anymore. It's a laboratory,
and we're all the experiment. Tomorrow I'll play October eighteenth tomorrow.
I'll learn about the priest tonight. I'm watching my skin
become more transparent. I can see my organs now, see
them moving, rearranging, preparing for something. In the mirror, I
don't see Margaret anymore. I see Sarah, still pregnant, still dying,
still being murdered, over and over. But this time she's
smiling because she knows something Davidson doesn't. The babies aren't
his to control. They never were.
Speaker 1: 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