Speaker 1: Calarogu, Shark Media, Hi, and Welcome to Ghost. This episode
is titled Phantasm.
Speaker 2: Ever since the fractures started appearing in the Sun Room's
southwestern foundation last spring, Walter Piken knew something wasn't quite
right within the hollowed inwards of his precious home. At first,
the hairline crevices spiderwebbing their way across the den's hardwood
oak floors seemed little more than the typical settling and
expansion murmurs of a nearly century old timber frame structure.
But as the vernal equinox slowly yielded to the sweltering
Appalachian summer, Walter couldn't ignore the steadily amplifying refrains of
strange scrapings and subterranean scritchings that seemed to echo up
from the den at all hours. More disturbingly, a sour,
loamy smell had started permeating the entire first floor, as
if the fragrant, well trodden mustiness of the home's storied
hardwood furnishings had begun putrefying from some inner miasma. When
Walter's oldest friends Marcus and Ray came over for the
monthly neighborhood Yuca game in late July. Both had to
stifle their revulsed grimaces behind cupped palms and hesitant cough flurries.
Everything okay down here, Walt Marcus finally ventured, gingerly, settling
into the overstuffed leather armchair that had been the retired
bricklayer's seat of choice for the past thirty some odd years.
The basement leaked like crazy over the winter or something.
Walter didn't reply at first, his roomy eyes narrowed as
if trying to discern where precisely the fetid organic tang
was originating from. It almost smelled like an animal had
crawled off somewhere to bloat and spoil in the dense humidity.
Could be anything with this money pit of a homestead,
he finally gruffed, leaning forward to start shuffling and bridging
the dog eared playing cards. This whole place is one rotten,
crooked beam away from caving in on my head at
any given minute. As the night wound on and the
Yuka rounds dissolved into clouds of pungent pipe smoke and reminiscence,
Walter made great efforts to steer all conversation away from
the increasingly rank, humid ambience. He knew Marcus and Ray
meant well, but there was no way a pair of
frivolous city boys could ever understand that character demanded of
an old home like this. The sounds, smells, all of
it was just part of the living, breathing ecosystem when
you inhabited a structure literally interwoven with the earth and
stones of the surrounding Allegheny forest and hills. But what
Walter didn't realize yet was that his faithful dens, daily
cicada chirrups, and acorn bombardments had been subtly usurped by
a far more sinister organism, something that fed, spawned, and
metabolized through methods far removed from terrestrial photosynthesis or seed dispersal. Indeed,
the great devouring had already begun deep within the oaken marrows,
lying just beneath where the old Mason had raised so
many raucous yuca games, music filled family Christmas mornings, and
contemplative solo evenings with worn leather bound tomes and a
glass of single malt. The changes started slowly enough, at
first a floorboard here and there, becoming slightly loose and listing,
almost imperceptible at ground level. But it didn't take long
before the first jagged edged breeches began cratering open at
various spots across the sunken dens once pristine plank work.
At first, Walter chocked it up to the usual throes
of aging home deterioration and set about jimmying loose nails
and slathering a POxy wood putty into the dry cracks,
as he always had. After all, what self respecting master
of a house wouldn't be prepared to battle endemic moisture infiltration,
root invasion, and vermin infestations over the long haul, all
part of the cycle if you chose to doggedly occupy
a manse like this one. What Walter couldn't have foreseen, however,
was the true scope of the malign ravening presence metastasizing
within the very foundation trenches and root cellars lying below,
nor the sheer primordial hunger that fueled its subterranean peregrinations.
It started as nothing more than a handful of indolent
incursions from wayward workers, mindlessly tunneling and devouring without sentience
or cohesive directive, but With each subsequent regurgitation cycle and
pheromone scattering, the feasting colonies rapidly swelled in number, their
expansive broods thrashing through the rotted oak, black capped snouts,
hungrily swarming over every inch of Walter's decimated den With
each writhing mandible riven salvo, more denizens of the home
well before their onslaughts reduced to chewy viscera leeched dollops
for the great devouring. It said that on the night
of Walter's final stand against their remorseless hunger, hundreds of
the gnarled, thorax bound invaders already thronged in the dens
desiccated corners, the old Mason only had the presence of
mind to let loose a single strangled shriek of terror,
a sound so primal and etched with mortal desperation that
it pierced every wasted kitanous carapace with the tines of
its reverberations. But even as his doe septuagenarian frame was
promptly drowned beneath an advancing, remorseless tsunami of clacking mandibles
and shuddering abdomens, Waltpiken's spirit remained defiantly, lucidly aware throughout
his entire gruesome deglutation. As his soft tissues were shredded
and voided into the countless serrated gullets. Walter's screaming consciousness
was severed from the physical husk, though not before registering
every last atomic spasm of ravaged agonies. It was only
later that night when the clattering, mandible, grinding, feeding frenzy
finally stated that an altogether different sort of haunting phenomenon
began to transpire throughout the basement corridors and first floor
lounging rooms of Walter's childhood home. An unsettling, low frequency
droning filled the rank, moisture saturated air, like the subsonic
ruminations of a partially lobotomised leviathan. Then the first of
many scuttling, irumpant percussions boomed, as if some behemoth buried
in the earth was flexing its exoskeletal plates, rending rock
and soil with the force of its birthing convulsions. For
the next several nights, anyone navigating within a quarter mile
radius of the peakan homestead swore they heard or felt
the unmistakable rumblings of earth being upturned, which percussive tectonic
blow preceded by a low, droning resonance. Geologists and oil
field dowsers deployed their most sensitive seismographic gear in attempts
to pinpoint the source of the other worldly tremors, but
failed to detect anything beyond the threshold of utterly inexplicable.
It wasn't until a sudden, violent upheaval ripped open the
topographic earth of Walter's wasted Den that the source of
the unsettling disturbances was revealed in its full abominable form.
What emerged was an insectoid amalgam of such distended, festering
mass that it seemed to occupy an entirely separate stratum
of the material universe. A towering kitin sheathed goliath with
thousands of articulated limb cases rippling and wriggling beneath a
hard shell carapace the size of a light aircraft. The
sheer bulk of its legionary thoraxes shuddered and throbbed with ceaseless,
chittering peristalsis, as miles of desiccated musculine undulated beneath from
its apex, knuckled an elephantine armoured cowl that could have
withstood the pressures of the Mariana trench, sweeping outward into
ridged armoured phalanges that spanned a dozen yards apiece and
culminated in razor tipped clusters of sickle scythe appendages. Yet
most harrowing of all were the hundreds of crevass mouths,
drooling streams of brackish icors and butchered carrion scraps from
their serrated grinding plates, each weeping from a different position
across the amalgam's vast swollen corpulence. As night watchers from
miles around converged on the pike and estate in a
trance of morbid fascination and terror, they bore witness to
a phantasmagoria of such perverse, multi dimensional horror that entire
clusters of spectators had to be physically restrained from clawing
their own eyes and ears away to escape the unraveling
of their perceptual psyches. For scattered throughout the pestilent roiling
mass were flashes of half congealed humanoid semblance writhing from
within the festering layers of sinew and cartilage, torso spasms
and flailing limbs, discernible in a contortion of perpetual flaying,
slowly compacting into a single cacophonous torso shape emerging from
the heart of the unearthly abomination. At this innermost nexus
of twitching, blasted remnants, a face emerged, a visage so
scoured with psychic desolation and anguish as to excoriate the
astral skein of every mortal who dared meet its hollow,
lidless stare of beseechment. It was the mutilated semblance of
Walter Piken, the once steadfast heart and spirit of the
old family homestead, now trapped in an eternity of roaring,
gelatinous torment at the ravenous nucleus of this world devouring behemoth.
As astrophysicists and theoretical men, meta biologists were hastily drafted
in by the National Guard to attempt comprehending this Eldrich
dimensional incursion. Walter's decapitated likeness rotated amidst the gnulled, pulsing
spines of sinew, like a splayed astronaut, wreathed in gore
crusted ship wreckage. One after another. The Old Masons gurgled
pleas of see me, see me, sliced through the oppressive
groans and insectal drones, as if calling out to any
lingering shred of empathy or conscience in the universe. Within days,
the US military initiated a series of targeted orbital gamma bombardments,
detonating dense radiation pulses directly into the anomaly in hopes
of quashing or destabilizing its fractal foothold. But all attempts
proved futile against the seething malign hunger catalyzing the colossal
creature's ceaseless metastasizing sprawl. Military payloads simply sloughed off the
corruscating bioluminescent plates in actinic discharges, seeming to nourish rather
than impede, the ravenous fiend's geometric birthing contortions. Only when
cern directed their remaining catalytic energies towards generating a microscopic
but hyper densely compacted field of total quantum negation, a
literal atomic exclusion zone for space time itself. Did the impossible. Finally,
begin to transpire. The singularity wavefront swept through the gargantuan
hive mind, with the thermonuclear finality of a universe biting
itself out of existence, banishing the obscene flesh growth from
every last encroachment into rational dimensionality in one incandescent etheric
wail of contracting force vectors. But as the final spasms
of rotten post biologic matter collapsed inward, one speck of
luminous psychic effluence seemed to achieve escape velocity, piercing the
containment boundary like a disembodied quasar. When all was silent
and the contaminated acres receded with electrified vitrification compounds, those
investigators who had borne first hand witness to the vile
incursions unmaking emerged from their spectral dampening shelters in panicked droves,
for in that final moment of entropic reversion, each felt
the imprint of Walter's screaming forgotten soul, achieve a singular
confluence with their own, an instant of awful reintegration into
the undying collective memory of humanity itself, to know themselves,
if only for a passing subjective eternity, as the ravenous,
unquenchable hunger that has eternally birthed and consumed every last
morsel of the Cosmos's grand divinity, a singular blight and
sacrilege scrawled across the very face of creation itself, the
grim primogen of all manifest being. Walter's endless screaming was
the universe's own infinite birth pangs of self immolation finally
made flesh and given voice, and every living thing was
now inextricably woven with those reverberations of ceaseless cyclic hunger
and curdled birthing, its stitches threaded through the quantum skein
to imprint upon the very ultrastructure of all that is, was,
and ever will be. Each time anyone now ventures too
near the perimeter of those ash seared acres where the
Piken House once stood, they cannot gave off a reflexive
existential shudder of dread, the creeping certainty that some macrocosmic
splinter of Walter's gnawing, forgotten essence achieved transcendental escape that day,
that it now roams ravenous and insatiate hungering to be
seen once more by the denizens of all possible worlds
before reintegrating its infinite, all consuming recursion.
Speaker 1: Ghost is a Calorogus Shark Media production, written and hosted
by Alexander Ian McIntyre, produced by Mark Francis. Executive producers
Mark Francis and John McDermott. This podcast may have been
created with the assistance of AI.
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