Speaker 1: Calorouga Shark Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Ghost Scary Stories and the October Records, a
month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode twenty six, The Binding.
Speaker 3: October twenty sixth, nineteen seventy four, Silas, Silas Crane. Something's wrong.
I don't remember recording this. I don't remember the town council.
They're attempting the binding ritual, iron circles, salt barriers, blood wards.
But I'm watching them and I've never seen them before.
They're strangers, but also familiar, like pupil a invented, like
characters in a story I'm telling. We're at town hall.
Mayor Davidson is here, but he looks unfinished, like a
sketch becoming real. The ritual they're using iron that doesn't
exist yet, salt from seas that haven't formed, blood from
veins that that who's listening to this?
Speaker 4: Who's making me say this?
Speaker 3: Margaret?
Speaker 4: If you're hearing this, stop The recordings aren't recordings, they're incantations.
You're not listening to history. You're creating it. Every word
I speak becomes true the moment you hear it. I
don't exist. I never existed until you played that first
record None of this happened until you made it happen.
Stop playing them, please, before you create something that can't
be uncreated.
Speaker 1: The record player sparked. Smoke rose from the vinyl, which
was melting, reforming, becoming something else. The grooves rearranged themselves
into words. You are the author of horrors. I pulled
the record off, but it was too late. Through my window,
I could see town Hall, see the ritual silas just
described happening now in twenty twenty five, the town council,
people I'd known my whole life were standing in iron
circles I'd just created by listening. No, that's impossible. I
ran to my filing cabinet, pulled out the newspapers from
October nineteen seventy four i'd been referencing. They were blank,
all of them, the text appearing as I looked at it,
describing the horrors I'd been listening to, creating retroactive history.
The phone rang, I answered Margaret mayor Davidson's voice, but shaking,
What have you done? I was in my office, normal day.
Then suddenly I remembered being something else, something you created.
I can feel myself becoming the thing from the recordings
my skin is turning to scales, because you heard it
that way. I looked out the window. The town was changing.
The apartment building was growing those impossible negative flows. The
hospital Morgue was filling with breathing corpses. The school bus
was driving its endless route. All of it happening now,
not in nineteen seventy four, because nineteen seventy four never happened,
not until I made it happen. A child's hand pressed
against my window. Lucy Henderson, the little girl whose mouth
had opened too wide. She was here, real hungry, Miss Blackwood,
she said through the glass, her voice muffled but clear.
You made us wrong, You made us hungry. Now we
have to eat our parents, because that's what you heard
behind her. More children, all twenty three from the school bus,
but also the wrong Margaret's, the convergence mass, the tree
body of Jacob Mitchell walking on its roots. Everything I'd
heard into existence. They weren't from the past, They were
from right now, freshly created and angry. The door exploded inward,
not broken, dissolved. The Davidson thing that had eaten my
arm stood there, but he was incomplete, half formed, one
side of his body still human the other side, the
million scale creature i'd described into being. You're not a witness,
he growled. You're a god, a broken, frightened god, speaking
nightmares into existence, and where your nightmares made flesh. My
transparent arm was changing. The tiny mill brooks inside were screaming.
I could hear them despite their sighs. They knew, they
all knew. Every recording you play adds another layer of horror.
Davidson explained, his form shifting, trying to become what I'd
heard him to be. Twenty five down, five to go.
But here's the thing. We don't want to exist. We're
abominations errors. We want you to stop. Then I'll stop.
I won't play any more. Too late, Clara Mitchell walked
through my wall, still impossibly pregnant with her reverse aging child.
You've created us, We're real now. The only way to
uncreate us is to complete the pattern all thirty recordings.
Let the horror become so complete it collapses under its
own weight, or said a new voice, my own voice
from behind me. I turned. It was the Sarah Blackwood
from the Fountain, the one who'd been pregnant for two
hundred and fifty one years. But she wasn't from the past,
she was newborn, just created. Or you could play the
recordings backward, unspeak us, unhear us, unmake us. The room
was fit with my creations, silas crane throats, still bleeding
from where the convergence had emerged. The inverted Father Williams,
the stretched Aaron Mitchell, Nurse Holloway with her missing eyes,
all of them fresh, all of them wrong, all of
them looking at me with desperate hope. Choose, they said,
in unison, complete the pattern and maybe destroy us all.
Or play the recordings backward and maybe save us all.
Or stop now and leave us half real forever. My
transparent arm reached for the stack of remaining recordings, five left,
but also twenty five already played, twenty five that could
be reversed. That's when I noticed something. The record player
had two settings I'd never seen before, create and uncreate.
It had always been there, I just hadn't looked. The
Davidson thing laughed, but it was sad. You're not Margaret Blackwood,
are you. You're something else, something that forgot what it was,
something that's been speaking worlds into existence without realizing it.
I looked at my reflection in the black final But
it wasn't my face. Looking back, it was nothing avoid
an absence where a face should be, because I wasn't
Margaret Blackwood. I was the space where Margaret Blackwood should be,
the missing thirty first family, the one that didn't exist
until it started playing recordings. I'm not real either, I whispered. No.
Davidson said, you're the realest thing here. You're the mouth
that speaks reality, and whatever you say next becomes true.
So choose carefully. The created horrors waited, the twenty three children,
the wrong margarets, the drowned nurses, the convergence mass, all
of them watching me, waiting for me to decide their fate. Outside,
the town was screaming. Real people were being eaten by
the children I'd created. Real buildings were growing roots and organs.
Real water was flooding from nowhere. Five recordings left, create
or uncreate, and somewhere in the static between settings, I
could hear my real voice, the one from before I
forgot what I was. It was saying something, a single word,
over and over. Choose, Choose, choose, choose, Choose tomorrow. I'll
play October twenty seventh or unplay October first, Tomorrow, I
save everyone or doom them all. Tonight I'm surrounded by
my creations, my mistakes, my horrors, and they're begging me
to either complete them or erase them. But not leave
them half real, not leave them suffering in between.
Speaker 2: Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaoga 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