Speaker 1: Calarugu Shark Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the October Records, a
month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode twenty The Hunter.
Speaker 3: Silas Crane, October twentieth, nineteen seventy four. I'm in the
woods with Jacob Mitchell. He's been hunting it for three days,
following the trails of black sap bleeding from trees, the
footprints that fill with boiling water. He thinks he's the predator.
He's wrong. We're being herded. It's letting us follow, leaving signs,
dead animals turned inside out but still breathing, Trees growing
downward into the earth, streams flowing uphill. Jacob has his
rifle useless. You can't shoot something that exists between the
spaces of things. Jesus Christ. It's right behind me. No,
it's inside the sound inside this recording. If you're listening
to this, check behind you, check right now. The hunter
isn't Jacob, It isn't me. It's you, Margaret. You've been
hunting yourself through time, and now here we go round
the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here
we go round the mulberry bush. So early in the morning.
This is the way we wash our face, wash our face,
wash our face. This is the way we wash our
face till nothing's left but mourning.
Speaker 1: I heard that singing after the record stopped in my office,
in my voice, from my mouth, but I wasn't singing.
Jacob Mitchell's grandson Erin is Millbrooks game warden. This morning
he called me, said he'd found something in the woods
I needed to see, said it explained everything about the pattern.
I met him at the forest edge at two pm.
He looked wrong, too tall, like someone had stretched him.
His joints had extra bends, been growing, he said, noticing
my stare. Every Mitchell does during their October. We get longer,
helps us reach reach what the things hiding in high places.
Come on. We walked into the woods, but the path
kept changing. I'd look at a tree, look away, look back,
different tree. The forest was rearranging itself around us. The woods, remember, Aaron, explained,
every October, they remember what they were before they were woods,
when this was all lake bottom, when trees were something else.
He led me to a clearing in the center was
Jacob Mitchell's body from nineteen seventy four, perfectly preserved, standing upright.
But he'd been transformed into something horrible. His body had
become a tree, not metaphorically. His legs had split into
roots that dug deep into the earth. His torso had
bark but translucent. I could see his organs still working inside,
pumping sap instead of blood. His arms were branches reaching
up thirty feet, fingers spreading into twigs, and from those
twigs hung things. Cocoons, dozens of them, each one the
size of a person. He's not dead, Aaron said. None
of the Mitchells who hunt it die. We become hunting blinds,
permanent fixtures in the forest, waiting for prey. One of
the cocoons started moving, splitting open. Something fell out, hit
the ground, wet and wrong. It was me another Margaret,
but this one had antlers growing from her skull, compound
eyes like an insect, hands that ended in hoofs. The
hunter becomes the hunted, becomes the hybrid, the other Margaret said,
in a voice like wind through leaves. Every time you investigate,
you leave a piece of yourself. It collects them, grows them,
makes new ewes. More cocoons opened, more Margarets, each one
wrong in different ways. One with her torso backward, one
with mouths where her eyes should be, one that was
just skin stretched over a framework of bones arranged in
impossible geometries. We're the hunting party, they said in unison.
Groan from your fear, your doubt, your investigation. Aaron's body
began to stretch more. His spine pushed through his back,
extending like a telescope. His neck elongated until his head
was twenty feet above me. The pattern isn't geography, he
said from up there. It's a hunting ground, thirty locations
where the prey is cornered and you, Sarah, you're both
hunter and hunted, chasing yourself through time. The Margaret things
circled me. Their movements were wrong, too fast, then too slow,
like film running at incorrect speeds. Want to know what
it really is, the antlered, Margaret asked. She reached into
her own chest, pulled out something wet and pulsing. It's
the space between predator and prey, the moment of the pounce,
the instant before teeth meet throat. It isn't a creature.
It's a relationship, and we're all part of it. She
squeezed the wet thing, blood sprayed out, but the blood
formed words in the air. You are hunting yourself. You
are eating yourself. You are digesting yourself, you are becoming yourself.
You are I ran, but the forest was amazed. Now
every direction led back to the clearing, to the tree
that was Jacob, to the cocoons, still birthing more wrong
versions of me. Then I heard it, the real horror.
Aaron wasn't behind me anymore. He was above me. His
stretched body had woven through the canner, his limbs threading
between branches. His face appeared upside down, hanging like a spider.
The Mitchells aren't hunters, he said, his mouth opening sideways.
Now we're the web, and you're already caught. I looked down.
Strands of something, hair, silk, intestines were wrapped around my ankles,
leading back to Jacob's tree body. I was being reeled
in the margaret things laughed. In six days, you'll hang
from these branches too, Another cocoon growing another yew for
two thousand seventy five's hunt. I pulled out the vile
Christopher had given me, threatened to drink it. They all
stopped froze. Even the forest held its breath. No, they whispered,
not yet, not here. That to happen at the fountain,
has to happen where everyone can see why the antlered
Margaret smiled with too many teeth. Because the hunt needs witnesses,
the eating needs watchers, the digestion needs documentation. You're not
just the meal, Sarah, You're the dinner theater. Aaron's stretched
face came close. His breath smelled of earth and rot.
Run home, little rabbit. Check your recordings, See how many
are left. Count down to your ending. The strands released me.
The forest path opened. I ran, hearing them laughing behind me,
hearing more cocoons opening, more wrong versions of me being born.
When I reached the library, I found them twenty more Margarets,
all waiting, all wrong, all hungry. We're going to watch
you play the remaining recordings. They said, what you understand,
what you choose, what you die, and then we're going
to eat you, every version, eating every other version, until
there's only one, the perfect Margaret, the final Sarah, one
of them, and Margaret made entirely of water, stepped forward Tomorrow.
You learn about the convergence when all the patterns meet,
when all the hunts end, when all the meals are served,
they're still here, surrounding me, watching me write this, breathing
in unison. The hunter's trail leads to only one place,
back to myself, and I'm running out of places to run. Tomorrow,
I'll play October twenty first. Tomorrow they all converge. Tonight,
I'm surrounded by my own hunting party, my own pack,
and we're all so hungry.
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