Speaker 1: In the oldest section of the Oregon Cradle Bone Forest,
there stands no trail, no map, and no phone signals
strong enough to call for help.
Speaker 2: The locals. Those few old.
Speaker 1: Timers who haven't already packed up and left, tell campers
to avoid one place, the Burial Glades. There, among the
sunken earth and crooked stones, grows a mushroom unlike any other,
a pale, ghostly fungus that glows faintly like a firefly
trapped under skin. Some say it sprouts from the graves
of hunters who vanished in the eighteen hundreds. Others claim
it grows from the bodies of anyone. The forest refuses
to release. One truth, however, is always whispered. When eaten
beneath the blood moon. The vel captains the bar between
life and what waits hungrily beyond it, and once the
barriers lifted, nothing comes through alone. Tasha, des Rico and
Lani had spent years chasing the weirdest highs PMW could offer.
Speaker 2: They'd babe glacier grown weed.
Speaker 1: In Alaska, smoked hash from a stranger on a ferry,
and once shared a blunt they swore tasted like sea
water and gasoline. But none of that compared to the
shimmering mushroom des brought off a twitchy old woman at
the farmer's market. They're called zihillcaps, she croaked. Don't you
let them dissolve, otherwise they bite back.
Speaker 2: He brought them anyways.
Speaker 1: Two hours into cradle Bon Forest, the group found the
perfect sight, a ring of moss slick stone.
Speaker 2: Half buried in the earth.
Speaker 1: Bet druids sacrifice people here, Lanni joked, I bet they
hot boxed it first, Rico said. As the blood moon rose,
they passed the glowing caps around metallic cold, like licking
a wet battery in the winter.
Speaker 2: The trip hit fast, too fast.
Speaker 1: The trees inhaled, exhaled, the moon bled crimson into the clouds.
The forest hum with a pulse that wasn't wind or wildlife.
Tasha was the first to see the silhouettes, long thin
shadows slithering between trunks, dragging their limbs like broken puppets.
Then came the voices, a choir whisper sewn together with grief.
And then it got worse. A voice breathed into Lani's ear.
You left me, She turned no one, But then she
saw movement in the trees, figure stepping up from behind
roots and branches, bodies cracked, drowned, burned, frozen, every kind
of death imaginable, all smiling.
Speaker 2: DES's voice broke. That's that's my brother.
Speaker 1: Noah, he he looks water logged.
Speaker 2: Rico fell to his knees.
Speaker 1: Abuilita. But she wasn't the soft, warm woman he remembered.
Her skin sagged, mold covered, her rosary melted into her palm.
Tasha barely reacted. Her pupils were blown wide, her breath
misted like smoke. They're calling from below, she whispered. The
ground trembled, then split. Skeletal hands bursted from the soil,
snapping roots like bones. The dead pulled themselves up through
the earth, dragging braithed dirt and mushrooms with them. Dozens, hundreds,
and every single one.
Speaker 2: Knew their names.
Speaker 1: The four sprinted blindly through the forest, but cradle Bone was.
Speaker 2: No longer a place.
Speaker 1: It was a loop, a maid, a jaw closing around them.
Speaker 2: They ran north.
Speaker 1: They ended up back at the stone circle. They ran south,
back again. Time folded reality work. When they finally collapsed
in exhaustion, the circle wasn't empty anymore. A crowd of
dead stood waiting, layered, generations of horror, victims of the forest,
victims of ritual, victims of the bellcap. Their mouths opened
in unison, producing a sound like inhaling. A bomb hit backwards.
Speaker 2: Tasha stepped forward. They've shown me everything, she whispered.
Speaker 1: This spot, this is where the veil is thinnest.
Speaker 2: We opened it.
Speaker 1: Something burned into her abdomen, a glowing sigil made of
twisting fungal threads, a living tattoo. Dez tried to pull
her back. Tasha, you don't know what they want. I do,
she said, softly, to come home. The dead move with
terrifying speed. Rico was grabbed first, yanked down by four
sets of hands. His grandmother's corpse cradled him as more
dead tore out his neck and shoulders. Weeping as she fed,
Lani bolted but tripped into an unmarked grave.
Speaker 2: Shadowy body swarmed.
Speaker 1: Her, pulling her legs down into the dark. Her screams
cut off like someone hit mute. Des caught like a
wild animal, smashing skulls, breaking arms, lighting whatever he could
on fire.
Speaker 2: But the dead just kept coming, crawling.
Speaker 1: Out of graves of the trees, out of the darkness
between the heart beats Tasha, how Tasha wasn't Tasha anymore.
Her skin pulsed with veins of glowing fungus. Her eyes
were solid black, her hair withered like underwater kelp. Spores
leaked from her mouth like smoke. She knelt besides Dez
as he was pinned.
Speaker 2: Her voice.
Speaker 1: Now two voices layered her and something ancient underneath. You
brought life into its own grey place.
Speaker 2: She said, no when you become hurt like the feast.
As the final screen was swallowed by the forest. As
the dead consumed him, and then.
Speaker 1: Silence, the forest went still. Every corpse, fresh or ancient,
rotated slowly to face Tasha. She raised her hand and
they bowed. She wasn't their victim, She was their gateway.
The sidel on her stomach opened like a mouth, revealing
a swirling cavity of night and spores. From within it,
Something enormous shifted, something breathing, something waiting.
Speaker 2: Tasha smiled. The veil is open. Then slowly she.
Speaker 1: Turned her head directly towards the tree line, towards someone watching.
A faint gasp echoed there was a fifth person in
the forest, some one who had followed them, some one
who had been hiding recording everything on their phone.
Speaker 2: Tasha's smile widened.
Speaker 1: Come join the ritual, she whispered. The camera light blinked,
the hidden observer stumbled back.
Speaker 2: Brunches snapped with the dead turned, and the forest rushed
towards the unsea worst.
Speaker 1: The screen recording on the fallen phone kept going, even
after the screaming stop