Speaker 1: Calaruga Shark Media. Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the
October Records, a month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode nineteen.
The Teacher.
Speaker 2: October nineteenth, nineteen seventy four, Silas Crane. I'm in the
school hiding. Miss Williams has barricaded herself and her entire
third grade class in room one oh four. She says
something is coming for the children. She's right, I can
see them through the windows. Shadows that stand upright, wet
shadows that leave trails. They're shaped like people, but they
move wrong, joints bending backward, heads rotating too far, Fingers
that reach across the entire playground. Miss Williams has done
something to protect the students. She's christ. She's feeding them
pieces of herself, literally tearing off strips of her skin,
placing them on their tongues like communion wafers. The children
eat without question, without disgust, and where they swallow, their
throats glow a soft blue light, like bioluminescence. She's aging
as I watch, every piece she gives away takes years
from her. Her hair is white now, her hands are spotted, wrinkled.
But the children are changing too. Their eyes are becoming reflective,
like cats, like things that can see in the deep dark.
She knows I'm watching. Just looked directly at me through
the window, mouthed the words. The children were never the victims.
They were always the bait. The shadows are pressing against
the windows now. The glass is bending inward when it
breaks when they get in. No, the children are singing
that old song, ring around the rosy, but the words
are different, ring around the water, pockets full of daughters, fishes, fishes,
we all drown down. The shadows are retreating. They're afraid.
The children aren't prey, they're predators, and Miss Williams isn't
protecting them, She's preparing them for the hunt.
Speaker 3: The knife followed me home last night. I barricaded myself
in the library, but it scratched at the doors until dawn, patient, persistent,
writing my name in the wood with its point. This morning,
the scratches had formed words. Thirteen becomes twelve becomes none.
Miss Williams, the current one, teaches at Blackwood Elementary, same classroom,
room one oh four. When I arrived at three pm,
the school was in lockdown. No explanation. Sheriff Davidson, the
Mayor's nephew. But we all know better now. Standing at
the entrance schools closed, he said his eyes were black,
not pupil, not iris, just black. Incident with Miss Williams,
I could hear singing from inside children's voices, that same
wrong version of ring around the rosy. I went around back,
looked through the window of Room one oh four. Miss
Williams stood at the blackboard, but she was multiplying. Every
few seconds, another version of her stepped out of her body,
slightly younger each time. By the window I counted seven versions,
the oldest maybe sixty, the youngest perhaps twenty five, all
teaching simultaneously, their voices overlapping. Today's lesson is about food chains,
who eats whom in nature? But what if the food
chain is upside down? What if we're not at the top.
The children, twenty three of them, always twenty three, sat
perfectly still, but their mouths were wrong, too wide and
inside rows of teeth, not like a shark, like a
throat lined with molars all the way down. The youngest
Miss Williams noticed me, walked to the window. Her footsteps
left wet prints that sizzled on the floor. You shouldn't
be here, Sarah, she said through the glass. Not yet.
The children aren't ready ready for what. All seven versions
turned to look at me, to eat their parents. One
of the children, Lucy Henderson, stood up, opened her mouth
wider wider, until her head was mostly inside. I could
see her mother miniature screaming, being slowly dissolved by saliva
that glowed blue. We fed them the town, the oldest
Miss Williams explained, piece by piece. The parents think their
children are at school, but really the children are digesting them,
have been since October. Started. Another child, Marcus Patterson, burped
a wedding ring came up his father's. The pattern requires
thirty sacrifices, the middle aged Miss Williams said, but it
never specified thirty adults. Children are so much more efficient.
They digest faster, dream harder, believe better. The youngest Miss
Williams pressed her hand against the window, where she touched
the glass began to melt. Want to know a secret,
the real secret. There are no children in Millbrook, haven't
been for years. These things wearing children's faces there it's
teeth twenty three teeth still missing. Seven. She smiled, and
her face split, not metaphorically literally split down the middle,
revealing something underneath another face, older, ancient. I'm not miss Williams,
the thing said, I'm the first teacher, from seventeen seventy four,
from before the school, when teaching meant showing prey how
to be eaten properly. All seven versions began to merge
back together, but wrong, Arms coming out of mouths, legs
from eye sockets, a body trying to remember how to
be singular, but failing. The children stood up in unison,
walked to the windows, their faces pressed against the glass,
and I saw what they really were. Not children, not teeth,
stomachs twenty three, small stomachs that had learned to walk
and talk and pretend. Were so hungry, they said in unison,
So hungry for our families, for our bloodlines, for the thirty.
The windows exploded outward, not from pressure, the glass became liquid,
reaching for me with transparent tentacles. I ran, but the
children were already outside, already everywhere, moving through walls, through ground,
through air itself. Lucy Henderson caught my ankle. Her touch
burned through my shoe, into my skin. I felt myself
being pulled into her mouth, not physically, existentially, my memories
of childhood being swallowed, my years at school dissolving. You
taste like seventeen seventy four. She giggled, like original recipe.
I kicked free, but left something behind, A year, maybe two,
eaten gone. I'm younger now, can feel it, my body reverting.
Miss Williams. All of her stood in the doorway. Run Sarah,
Run home, Check on your family, Check on the blackwood children,
see what's been eating them from inside. I ran through
streets where every house had the same scene in the windows,
empty dinner tables, set for families that would never come
home because they were already being digested. When I reached
the library, I found seventeen children's drawing slipped under the door,
all showing the same thing, me at different ages, being
eaten by different things. But in the last drawing I
was eating two, eating the children, eating the town, eating myself.
A note was attached. Tomorrow we learn about the food
chain's bottom, where even it is prey. The twentieth point
isn't a place, it's a mouth. Twenty three small mouths,
waiting for seven more to complete the set. Tomorrow I'll
play October twentieth Tomorrow I'll learn about the hunter. Tonight,
I'm checking my body for bite marks, finding them everywhere,
tiny tooth marks that weren't there yesterday, as if I'm
being eaten, one nibble at a time. The children aren't
in school, They're in us, eating their way out.
Speaker 1: 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.