Speaker 1: Calorougu Shark Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Ghost Scary Stories and the October Records, a
month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode twenty eight, The Return.
Speaker 3: October October eighty eight, October October, Octobertober fifteen, fifteenth, nineteen,
nineteen seventy four, eighteen eighteen twenty four, nineteen nineteen twenty four, Mark, Margaret, Sarah,
the pattern. They're all here, the chill children, the drought, drowning,
scream screaming, It ririses October twenty eighth, nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 4: This is wrong.
Speaker 3: I can hear myself speaking other dates, other Octobers. The
recordings are playing themselves, all of them at once. The
library is full of me, five versions, all recording different truths,
and they're fighting, actually fighting. I just watched myself from
nineteen twenty four, strangled myself from eighteen seventy four. We're
all trying to be the real Stylus. The real October
Time is eating itself. Margaret, if you can hear this
through the others, know this. When all recordings play at once,
the entity doesn't need thirty anchors, It just needs one. You.
You are the thirty first recording. You always have been.
Speaker 1: The shattered record player was reassembling itself, the scattered vinyl
pieces crawling across the floor like insects, forming new configurations,
playing impossibly without the player real. Margaret stood in my doorway,
guns still aimed at where I should be, but I
was less than should be, a walking absence, a hole
in the shape of a person. The recordings they're playing
themselves now, all twenty seven at once. Can you hear them?
I could in my bones, in the space where my
bones should be, every October, speaking simultaneously. The children from
eighteen twenty four, older wrong, eating their grandchildren who hadn't
been born yet. The nurses from eighteen seventy four, their
eyes not just missing, but negative spaces that consumed light.
The Davidson House from nineteen twenty four, the entire structure
inside out, family members worn as wallpaper. The apartment building
from nineteen seventy four, infinite floors, both up and down,
residents falling forever. The horrors from now twenty twenty five,
freshly created and angry at being born wrong. They were
all manifesting, all at once, fighting each other for the
right to be real. Through my window, Downtown Millbrook was chaos.
Five versions of Main Street occupied the same space, buildings
from different decades, phasing in and out, the dead and
living unable to tell which was which. Lucy Henderson from
my created fiction was fighting Lucy Henderson from nineteen seventy four,
who was fighting Lucy Henderson from nineteen twenty four. Three
hungry children with impossible mouths, trying to eat each other.
We have to stop this work with me? Why would
you help me? I stole your life, your identity. You
didn't steal anything.
Speaker 2: I made you.
Speaker 1: When I was eight years old, I found those blank
records in the library basement, played pretend with them, made
up a scary story about October and patterns and drowning.
Gave the story a narrator, another Margaret, who would live
through the horror so I didn't have to. She pulled
out a child's drawing crayon on construction paper. It showed
the library the records and two margarets, one labeled me
and one labeled story me. You're my imaginary friend. But
I told your stories so many times, believed in you
so hard that you became real. And when you became real,
you needed a history, so you created one. The recordings,
the pattern everything, the Davidson Thing burst through the floor.
No multiple Davidson things. Five visions from five octobers, all
claiming to be the true horror. They fought, tore at
each other, their scales and newspaper and flesh, mixing into
something worse which all of you, none of you, You're
all stories. I told to make myself real. The room
was filling with temporal refugees, Silas Crane, all five versions
trying to record what was happening, but their words overlapping
into glossalalia. Clara Mitchell giving birth to Benjamin, backward and
forward simultaneously, the convergence mass from different decades, merging into
something that hurt to perceive real. Margaret grabbed my absent
hand where she touched I flickered into existence, almost solid. Listen,
eight year old me didn't just create you, She created
a way to stop you. The last three recordings I
remember now. I recorded them myself as a child. They're
not Silas's voice, They're mine, and they don't create horror.
They create endings. A child's voice echoed through the chaos,
not from the records, from the walls, from the air,
from memory.
Speaker 2: This is Margaret, the real Margaret a jate. How was it?
Speaker 1: First third, the voice was drowned out by screaming, real screaming.
The created horrors were eating the real town. The fictional
children had found real parents. The impossible buildings were crushing
actual homes. My fiction was murdering her reality. We need
those last three recordings, but they're not here. Eight year
old me hid them somewhere in the library, somewhere only
a child would hide something. The library where this all started,
where eight year old Margaret played with forces she didn't understand,
where I was born from imagination and terror. But the
library was now the center of the temporal storm. Five
versions of it existed at once eighteen twenty four's wooden structure,
eighteen seventy four stone replacement, nineteen twenty four's expansion, nineteen
seventy four's modern renovation, twenty twenty five's current form, all
occupying the same space, all equally real. Together, you know
the child's logic, I know the real layout. Together, we
can find them outside. Halloween was tomorrow or yesterday or
all days at once? Time wasn't working right. The pattern
wasn't completing. It was collapsing and in its collapse. Everything
was becoming true at once. The entity's voice from everywhere tweety.
Speaker 4: Plowing too were oriinated. Then one books of the thirty
bogocause all becomes none becomes run.
Speaker 1: We ran a real woman and an absence shaped like
a woman, running through streets that existed in five different centuries,
chased by our own creations, our own mistakes, our own
stories behind us. The horrors fought Davidson eighteen twenty four
consumed Davidson eighteen seventy four. The children from different decades
formed a hunger mass. The buildings began eating each other. Ahead,
the library flickered between states, and somewhere inside, hidden by
a frightened eight year old, were three recordings that could
end everything or make it infinitely worse. Tomorrow. If tomorrow existed,
I would play October twenty ninth, or unplay everything, or
become the final recording myself.
Speaker 2: Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaroga 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