Speaker 1: Calarogu Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Romance Weekly and
Halloween Possession. This is episode five, Halloween Transmission. I had
to choose safety or him, the smart thing, or the
thing that made me feel like electricity was replacing my blood.
You already know what I chose, or I wouldn't be
telling you this story. It was Halloween night and Salem
was electric with more than just our merged electromagnetic field.
The streets throat with thousands of costumed bodies, all converging
on the common for the midnight festival finale. They had
no idea they were walking into the largest supernatural trap
ever constructed. Ethan stood behind me in our apartment, His apartment,
our apartment. The words didn't matter anymore, because everything was
ours now. His hands rested on my shoulders, and I
felt the touch from both sides, his palms on my skin,
my shoulders under his palms. Four days of this complete connection,
and it still made me dizzy. You're scared, he said,
not a question. He could feel my fear as clearly
as his own. Terrified, I turned to face him, and
our bodies moved in perfect synchronization, like a dance we'd
always known. The entity is out there, wounded, angry, and
it wants us dead. It wants us absorbed. He corrected
his thumb, tracing my jawline. The sensation rippled through both
of us. Dead would be merciful through our connection, I
felt what he wasn't saying. The entity had been reforming
all day, pulling its scattered pieces back together. We could
both sense it, a darkness gathering at the edges of Salem,
waiting for midnight, when the veil would be thinnest. We
could run, I said, though we both knew we wouldn't
leave Salem. Let someone else be the trap. There is
no one else. His forehead touched mine, and our shared
consciousness spiraled deeper. No one else has what we have.
What we had, a complete electromagnetic merger that had turned
us into something new. We'd spent four days learning to function,
how to be apart for short periods despite the discomfort,
how to shield each other from the most private thoughts,
how to not go insane from feeling everything. Twice. We'd
also spent four days fighting the inevitable. Every night lying
in bed, our bodies crying out for each other while
we held ourselves apart because we knew once we gave in,
once we fully consummated this connection, there would be no
going back. The merge would be complete on every level.
We'd never be able to pretend to be separate people again.
Mara Lily's voice from the living room, it's time to go.
My sister had recovered remarkably from her near dispersal, though
she now had a white streak in her blonde hair
where the end is had started to unravel her. Marcus
said it was permanent, a scar in her electromagnetic field
made visible five minutes. I called back. Ethan's hands slid
down to my waist. Are you ready for this? The trap?
Or what comes after? Both through our connection, I felt
his hunger. Four days of forced celibacy, when we could
feel each other's desire constantly, four days of knowing exactly
what the other wanted needed craved, Four days of resistance
that had only made the want sharper. After we trigger
the trap, I said, if we survive, when we survive,
when we survive, I agreed, We're going to come back here,
and I'm going to let you do every single thing
You've been thinking about for the past four days. His
grip tightened and I felt his control fracture. You can
feel all of those thoughts everyone, and I have some
of my own to add. He kissed me hard and desperate,
and the world exploded with sensation. But we'd learned control
these past days. We could kiss without losing ourselves completely.
We could touch without dissolving into pure energy most of
the time. If you two are done trying to burn
down the apartment with sexual tension, Lily called, we have
an ancient entity to kill. The walk to the common
was surreal. Salem on Halloween night was always intense, but
knowing what was coming made every costumed reveler look like
a potential threat. The entity could be in any of them,
or all of them. Marcus met us at the festival
entrance with a bag of equipment. The traps armed every booth,
every wire, every bulb is part of the circuit. At midnight,
when you two go to the center stage, we light
up like bait I finished. The entity comes for us,
The trap springs, and hopefully we don't get dispersed in
the process. I've made modifications, he said, not meeting our eyes,
grounding wires that should keep you anchored. Should that's reassuring
Lily muttered. The festival was in full swing, carnival games,
food stores, a band playing covers of monster ballads, normal
except for the electromagnetic readings. Marcus was tracking on his phone.
The whole common was one massive circuit waiting to be completed.
Half an hour until midnight. Ethan said, though I already
knew I could feel time through his awareness, now could
feel everything through him. We walked through the festival, and
I noticed how people unconsciously moved away from us. Our
merged field was too strong. Two other we made humans
nervous on a primal level. There, Lily pointed at the
cotton candy stand stood Rebecca Torres, all the thing wearing
her face. She was serving pink spun sugar to children,
smiling with empty eyes. It's taunting us, Ethan said. More
of them appeared as we watched Emma at the ring toss,
Sarah at the fortune teller's booth, All the women the
entity had taken over the years, puppeted by fragments of
the creature. We'd wounded but not killed. Ten minutes, Marcus said,
you should get in position. The center stage was a
raised platform decorated with pumpkins and corn stalks, very harvest festival,
very innocent. No one would guess it was the focal
point of an electromagnetic trap designed to destroy an entity
that fed on human consciousness. Ethan and I climbed the steps,
and I felt the circuit recognize us. The lights flickered,
just for a second. The entity felt it too. All
around the festival, the empty women turned toward us. Five minutes.
My heart was racing, or maybe it was Ethan's. Did
it matter anymore? We stood back to back on the stage,
watching the crowd, waiting whatever happens, he said, and I
felt the words resonate through our shared bones. I love you,
I know, I said, I can feel it. That must
be convenient, he said, with dark humor, never having to wonder.
I don't need to wonder about anything with you anymore.
Is that good or bad? Ask me in fifty years
you said that before I meant it. One minute to midnight,
the empty women were pushing through the crowd, now converging
on the stage. The humans couldn't see them properly, their
minds sliding off the wrongness, but they felt the threat.
The crowd was backing away, leaving us exposed. Thirty seconds.
I took Ethan's hand, and our merged field flared to life.
We were a beacon, now broadcasting our position to everything supernatural.
Within one hundred miles. Ten seconds, the empty women reached
the stage. Five. They smiled with stolen faces. Three two,
one midnight. The bells of Salem told, and the entity
struck not just through the empty women, but from everywhere
at once. It rose from the earth, fell from the sky,
emerged from the spaces between seconds. It had been hiding
in the crowd all along, dispersed through thousands of electromagnetic fields,
waiting now it converged on us with the hunger of
a starving god. The trap activated. The moment it touched
our merged field, every light in the festival exploded into brilliance.
The circuit came alive, channeling massive amounts of electromagnetic energy
through the common through us. I screamed, or Ethan did,
or we both did. The energy was tearing us apart
and rebuilding us a thousand times a second. I could
feel the entity trying to disperse us, to add our
consciousness to its collection, but the trap held it in place,
forcing it to maintain cohesion even as it tried to
feed hold on. Marcus shouted from somewhere far away. Sixty seconds,
sixty seconds, we'd lasted thirty in the haunted house and
nearly died. Sixty would kill us. But then I felt them,
the other women, the ones the entity had taken, Rebecca, Emma, Sarah,
dozens of others. They were still there, fragments of consciousness,
trapped in the entity's hunger, and they were fighting back
end this. Rebecca's voice whispered through the electromagnetic field. We're
ready to let go. They turned the entity's power against itself,
using their stolen energy to fuel the trap. It blazed brighter,
pulling electricity from every building in Salem. Street lights exploded,
car alarms shrieked. The entire city's power grid fed into
the trap. The entity tried to retreat, but we held
it Ethan and I opened our merged field, completely, becoming
a black hole of electromagnetic attraction that it couldn't escape.
We were bait, trap, and weapon, all at once. Thirty seconds,
I felt myself fragmenting despite the grounding wires. My consciousness
scattered across the electromagnetic spectrum, but everywhere I dispersed Ethan
was there, holding me together, maintaining the pattern of who
I was, who we were. Fifteen seconds, the entity made
one last desperate attempt. It offered us everything, immortality, power,
the ability to absorb consciousness like it did. We could
become gods of the electromagnetic spectrum. All we had to
do was let go of ourselves, let go of each other. Never,
we said in unison. The trap reached critical mass. The
entity screamed with a hundred stolen voices as it was
torn apart, its core consciousness shredded and scattered so thoroughly
that it could never reform. The empty women collapsed, finally free,
the trapped fragments of consciousness dispersed into peace. The lights
went out, all of them, every light in Salem, plunging
the city into darkness. In that darkness, Ethan and I
fell into each other. We were barely conscious, barely cohesive,
but we were alive, somehow impossibly alive. It's done, Marcus's voice,
accompanied by the beam of a flashlight. The entity is gone,
completely dispersed. The women I managed to ask free. They
can't be brought back. They've been gone too long, but
they're not trapped anymore. Lily's arms around me, around us.
You did it, You insane electromagnetically codependent idiots did it.
Emergency lights were coming on throughout the festival. People were
milling about, confused but unharmed. They'd remember this as the
year the Halloween Festival blew the power grid. A funny
story to tell, nothing supernatural about it. Ethan helped me
stand though we were both shaking. The merge had held,
but barely. We were raw, oversensitized, feeling everything twice as
intensely as before. Home, He asked home. Marcus drove us
back to the apartment, Lily fussing over us the whole way,
But all I could focus on was Ethan's hand in
mine and the promise of what came next. We'd survived.
The entity was gone. There was nothing left to resist.
The moment the apartment door closed behind us, four days
of suppressed desire crashed over us like a tide. Mara,
he breathed, and I felt my name resonate through his
entire being. I know, I said, I can feel it,
all of it. We came together like magnets, like gravity,
like inevitability. Our mouths met, and this time we didn't
hold back. The kiss was everything, physical sensation and electromagnetic connection,
his desire and mind amplifying each other in an endless
feedback loop. His hands were in my hair, on my waist, everywhere,
and I felt it all twice, his hands on me,
my body under his hands. When he lifted me onto
the kitchen counter, I felt his strength and my weight.
When I wrapped my legs around him, I felt the
pressure from both sides. Bed I gasped. We barely made it,
shedding clothes in a trail from kitchen to bedroom. Each
piece of fabric removed was a revelation felt twice. His
skin against mine created cascading waves of sensation that threatened
to overwhelm us both. When he touched me, really touched me,
I cried out from the intensity. I felt his fingers
on me, and through his perception, felt what I felt
like to him, Hot, wet, perfect. The dual sensation was
almost too much. Look at me, he said, and when
our eyes met, the connection deepened impossibly further. We moved together,
every touch, every kiss, every breath shared between us. When
he entered me, we both gasped, feeling it from both sides,
the push and the yield the fullness and the surrounding warmth.
It was overwhelming, invasive, the most intimate thing I'd ever experienced.
We found a rhythm, slow at first, learning how to
move as one consciousness in two bodies, But soon the
careful control shattered. Four days of want, the adrenaline of survival,
the complete trust of our merge, it all combined into
something primal and desperate. I felt his climax building with mine,
the sensations spiraling between us, amplifying with each pass. When
we came it was together, always together. Now the pleasure
doubled and reflected into something that whited out our entire consciousness.
We lay tangled afterward, our bodies still synchronizing, our breathing,
our heart beats. Through our connection. I felt his wonder,
his satisfaction, his love, all of it mixing with mine
until I couldn't separate the emotions anymore. So I said,
eventually that was yeah. Want to do it again? Give
me five minutes, he laughed, I'm still seeing stars. Literally,
your electromagnetic field is making aurora patterns on the ceiling.
I looked up. He was right. Our merged field was
painting lights across the room, beautiful and impossible. We're never
going to be normal, are we? I asked, we were
never normal to begin with. He pulled me closer and
I felt the comfort from both sides. Besides, normal is overrated.
My phone buzzed, Lily, did you two just blow the
power grid again? The lights went out for three blocks.
I showed Ethan the text and we both laughed. We're
going to have to get better control, I said, or
move somewhere with better infrastructure or that. We lay in
comfortable silence, our merged consciousness humming with contentment. The entity
was gone, Seleem was safe. We'd survived something that should
have destroyed us and came out stronger. Different, definitely changed
on a fundamental level, but stronger. Hey, Ethan said, suddenly,
what's your last name? I laughed so hard the lights flickered,
urged consciousness fought an ancient entity, just had electromagnetic sex
that literally blew the power grid, and you don't know
my last name. We've known each other two weeks, Chen Mara,
Chen Ethan Blackwood. He said formally, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too. We were quiet for a moment.
Then he said, in fifty years, when you decide if
this was worth it. Yeah, I hope the answer is yes.
I turned in his arms, looking at this man I
was permanently bound to, who knew my every thought and feeling,
who I could never leave or lie to or hide from.
This man who'd held me together when I was literally
coming apart, who loved me completely despite knowing all my flaws,
because he could feel them as his own. Ask me
again tomorrow, I said, not fifty years tomorrow, and the
day after that, and the day after that, every day
for fifty years through our connection. I felt his joy,
bright and warm as summer lightning. Deal he said, and
kissed me. The lights flickered again. We really were going
to need to work on that epilogue. One year later,
I'm recording this on Halloween night, one year after the
entity died. Ethan is beside me on the couch, not touching,
but present in my consciousness as always. We've learned to
function almost normally. Now. We can be apart for hours,
even different cities for a day or two, but we
always come back to each other. We have to. We're
two halves of one electromagnetic whole. Lilian Marcus got married
last month. The wedding was beauty, though they had to
have it outside Salem to avoid electromagnetic interference from all
of us together, my podcast, Vanished Voices has become the
number one supernatural investigation show in the country. Turns out,
having a genuine electromagnetic connection to the paranormal makes for
compelling content. Ethan and I investigate cases together now, following
electromagnetic signatures that only weaken sense. We've found three others
like us, people with the gift, the curse, whatever you
want to call it. We're teaching them control, helping them
understand what they are before something like the entity finds them.
Because there are other things out there, things that hunt consciousness,
that feed on connection. The Entity was just one of many,
but now we know how to fight them. Salem is
quiet tonight. The Halloween festival went off without a single
supernatural incident. The trap is still there, woven into the
city's infrastructure, ready if needed, but nothing has come hunting.
Maybe because word has spread in whatever realm these things
exist in, Salem is protected, Salem has guardians, or maybe
it's just a quiet year. Either way, I'm here, We're here, watching,
waiting together, always together, And you know what I wouldn't
have it any other way. Ask me again in forty
nine years