Latest / INSPIRE STORY / The Mystery of the Animals on My Farm That Kill Their Young

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The Mystery of the Animals on My Farm That Kill Their Young · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: We got merch that's right. For a limited amount of time.
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  Speaker 3: Welcome back to creep cast.
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  Speaker 4: Today.
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  Speaker 3: We are reading from the tails from the creeps subreddit
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  are subreddit. We have two lovely stories that we're reading today,
• 1:01
  the first one being Breathless and the second one being
• 1:04
  the Deer Pit.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: These stories that come recommended. We have a few authors
• 1:08
  who we've read stories before who have come to the
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  tales from the creep sub reddit and they have like
• 1:14
  given a ton of advice to writers and we've been
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  kind of in communication with them about what they ping
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  give some of the better stories that the community really likes,
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  one of them being Imperial invective friend of the show
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  who's recommended stories like this, And also these are ones
• 1:29
  a lot of the times, if you scroll through Tells
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  from the Creeps, a lot of stories will have people
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  saying like, oh, I hope the boys read this and
• 1:34
  stuff like that.
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  Speaker 1: So these are a couple of those.
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  Speaker 2: Tells from the Creeps is awesome because it's people who
• 1:39
  enjoy the show who you know, not to say they're
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  just submitting stories hoping they get read, but they get
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  to have a community of writers who can give them feedback.
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  You know, people enjoy reading scary stories, and every now
• 1:50
  and then a few of them do get read, and
• 1:51
  I think that's great. So I always like covering stuff
• 1:54
  from them. But our two authors today is the author
• 1:56
  from Breathless the Republic and the author of Deer Pitch It,
• 2:00
  Verdant Voidling. Both of them post a ton in our.
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  Speaker 1: Slash creep Cast and tell Us from the Creeps. So uh,
• 2:07
  they seem pretty into the pretty down with the community.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: Obviously they posted stories here. I'm excited to read about them.
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: I like the idea of reading some viewer stories. It's
• 2:16
  always been something that we've been talking about for a
• 2:18
  long time wanting to do on the channel. So now
• 2:20
  letting the back catalog build up a bit more. At first,
• 2:23
  when we were first doing first doing it, it was
• 2:25
  like we were like do we do we just actively start
• 2:28
  reading these right away, And it's been, in my opinion,
• 2:31
  a good way of letting things build up, letting an
• 2:33
  audience actually build up there versus people just rushing to
• 2:36
  dump something out there hoping that you.
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  Speaker 2: Know, I will say everything we've read. We have a
• 2:40
  very talented audience. Oh yeah, there have been some bangers.
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  Speaker 1: All all good eggs so far. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: The one we read recently about the Mermaid, Gosh, that
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  was good.
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  Speaker 3: That was a lovely one. I love that one much wonderful.
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  Speaker 1: The more the more I think about, the more I
• 2:53
  stuit on that one, the more I like it.
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  Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
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  Speaker 1: So we got that. We also have something else cool
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  for the audience.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, gives end up and show it off.
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  Speaker 3: Here. We have one of a new piece of merch.
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  You guys remember last time he's on the set, it's
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  the frog shirt show.
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  Speaker 4: We'll show up some graphics as well.
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  Speaker 3: The frog shirt. We also have Isaiah's dental photo.
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  Speaker 2: Shirt shirt of we've got a shirt that is the
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  photo of my lips.
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  Speaker 1: Because it was inevitable, it made it on to.
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  Speaker 3: Go ahead, here's gonna toss some one wouldn't stand back up.
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  I'll give us a nice rundown here while you stand
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  up and show it off. His beautiful his beautiful shirt
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  here with his dental record. You can show that off
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  to your family and friends. Looks very nice. And of
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  course we have the smile Dog shirt. Throws the smile
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  Dog go throw this one back. It's like we're at
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  a basketball game. And then the smile Dog shirt, which
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  used to be coming out pretty soon. I know people
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  have been asking for some merch. We got the nice
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  smile Dog shirt from my lovely drawing. Uh yeah, there
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  was gonna be a huge cock on it, but no
• 3:56
  people they've said that probably wouldn't that probably wouldn't fly.
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  Speaker 4: So more do you merch coming very soon?
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  Speaker 3: If not right now, link will be up or it
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  will be up soon, So be looking out for some
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  new merch coming up. Also, just want to take time
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  and say thank you to our audio listeners over on
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  Apple Podcasts and Spotify. All that jazz. Thank you for
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  giving us a nice rating there. It actually does help
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  quite a bit. And of course, last, but certainly not least,
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  is our patrons who get extra content in the side.
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  Speaker 1: We did a vlog, we did a punted house walks.
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  Speaker 4: On a house flog. We're gonna go.
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  Speaker 3: We're doing like a little movie chat about the Lee
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  Cronin's Mummy coming.
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  Speaker 1: A couple of author interviews coming.
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  Speaker 4: There's a couple often interviews.
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  Speaker 3: There's more stuff coming and also exclusive Patreon stories that
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  Speaker 4: It does help us out a lot.
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  Speaker 1: All right, Ready, ready, let's begin with breathless. I think
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  I lost them. Surely.
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  Speaker 2: I ran as fast as my muscles could grant me.
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  I crossed rivers, I trek through the mountains. I burned
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  my feet and hands on scalding hot sand. I ran
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  and ran so hard my breath became fiery and aching.
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  My eyes can only see so far, but that's good
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  enough for me. There's no way that they could cover
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  all of that distance.
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  Speaker 1: I'm certain of it.
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  Speaker 2: The hills have always offered refuge from the bitter, biting wind,
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  but I seek them with a different goal. I need
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  to rest on lush, soft grass under the only tree
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  for miles around. There are cuts up and down my legs,
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  some so deep I can see the stringy muscle underneath.
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  I take my long overdue seat by the lonesome tree trunk.
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  Sensation drains from my overworked limbs. More hot breath escapes
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  my lungs and scalds my tongue. Breathing was never this hard.
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  Don't know what to do.
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  Speaker 1: Usually, all it took to escape or quick burst before
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  the dust even settled be long gone. This was different.
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  Speaker 2: Started at the valley, when the herd was at its
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  most vulnerable. Long marches take their toll on even the
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  heartiest beast. That long away to drink of water kept
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  everyone moving near the helm of the herd. My steady
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  pace afforded me a more comfortable stride. It's always a
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  chore to live so far from the water's edge, but
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  the best yield of fodder grows further away. It should
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  have been like any other march. The wain had died
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  down sun wasn't as abusive. Our health was in order.
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  The shimmering ripples signaled to the herd and invited them
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  to dip their lips in clear cris sublime. That's when
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  it happened, that moment, our soft underbelly exposed an ear
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  blistering chant, booming out among calm waters. When it tipskewered,
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  the helm went down without so much as an exil.
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  What is with our viewers being mid century poets, so
• 6:46
  many of them will have this like in a good way.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, this is a compliment.
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  Speaker 2: We'll have this flowery language and like because I feel
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  like we read so many creepy pastas and like No
• 6:55
  Sleep stories and stuff where it's just like I'm a
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  guy who's scared, you know.
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  Speaker 1: It's like I'm just talking. I don't know what's going on.
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  Speaker 2: But then our audience will always be like long in
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  the time, long ago when land was.
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  Speaker 3: Free, and I don't know, I feel like there are
• 7:09
  a lot of it's they're trendy little show ponies, and
• 7:11
  I think I think that they know that it's gonna
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  get your Jimmy's all riled up, you know, you.
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  Speaker 2: Know, honestly, what I think it might be part of it.
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  We read so much No Sleep right. But the whole
• 7:21
  thing of No Sleep is it has to be someone
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  posting the story. There has to be a reason it's there,
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  so you can't be like, I'm reading this story and
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  I don't know if we're hearing like a herder or
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  if this is from the perspective of an animal.
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  Speaker 3: I keep thinking of this a perspective the animal.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, it sounds like like a buffalo or some animal,
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  like a gazelle or something. Yeah, I'm talking.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, uh post removed ox just can't use computers.
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  Speaker 1: A gazelle from the eighteen hundreds could never type like this. Yeah. So,
• 7:51
  but it creates more room.
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  Speaker 2: For creative writing when you don't have such tight restraints
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  on it. So I think that's the reason that we
• 8:00
  see the potential for such better language out of Tales
• 8:05
  from the Creeps than No Sleep, because there's not such
• 8:07
  a strict parameter that someone has to be posting to Reddit.
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  Speaker 3: I was just making an advert for our subreddit instead
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  of No Sleep. Yeah, so actually I was just actually
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  really cool.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: That's half the podcast at this point.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: I was chunking on No Sleep and then talking about
• 8:22
  why why are stuff some better?
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: Don't really believe that, but we're just we're making jokes.
• 8:26
  Speaker 4: I want to preface as a joke.
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  Speaker 1: But the number of times we've been like, mm band.
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  Speaker 3: It's a joke. I want to be I want to
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  have an audible record that it's a joke.
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  Speaker 2: Let's remember that whose story was it? One incredible story
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  we read?
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  Speaker 1: It was the one.
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  Speaker 4: Gosh, I feel like we're stuck in the basement.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: No that one. That one? Why did you bring that
• 8:47
  one up?
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  Speaker 3: Because it's bad?
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Oh well yeah, monster Hunter?
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: Huh yeah, well yes, I mean obviously that's all the
• 8:54
  on I'm thinking of. I'm thinking of the one about
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  the guy who his family was being turned into aliens
• 8:59
  or something like that. It ends with him in his
• 9:01
  room and he can hear them on the other side
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  of the door and he sees his dad's mouth, and
• 9:06
  that guy in the comments.
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  Speaker 1: Is like this. He posted that's right.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: He posted it to our creep cast before Tails from
• 9:12
  the Creeps and he said, thanks for all the support here.
• 9:14
  It got banned from No Sleep because not enough happened.
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  Speaker 3: We should ban it.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: It's like, what do you Yeah, we should have got
• 9:21
  rid of it.
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  Speaker 3: We should we should have moved the post. Where the
• 9:22
  what the fuck even happened.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: But I mean rules like that's insane, Like well, it's
• 9:26
  also it's I think it's all dependent on the mod
• 9:28
  Oh I'm sure, yeah, sure it is. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: But that being said, I think that's why we see
• 9:34
  such potential for writing ability here, because this is beautiful
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  so far the way it said. A rain of barbs
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  followed closely behind. Our young didn't stand a chance. All
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  at once, the once united herds scattered like a flock
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  of birds. We bolted in every direction, all of us,
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  the young, the old, disoriented, clean and fragments, we abandoned
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  the herd. My group was filled with many able bodied,
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  but there were inklings of heavy burden among our reign.
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  After a long sprint into the mountains, we rested on
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  soft pastures. The air became thick with gasps. It wasn't
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  that unusual, for we were covered well from the short bursts.
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  We became settled in and all fell asleep, all accept me.
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  I ruminated on the earlier events. Mouths full of pointed
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  teeth never fashion those kinds of tools. Small ones would swarm,
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  big ones would clamp down, Slender ones would ambush. These
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  things surrounded us and formed a kill circle. Quick succession.
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  They brought down their instruments and bashed in the unfortunate skulls.
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  Even though they sparked a new sensation and all of
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  us that day, I was certain we never see them again.
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  In the mountains, I was ready to fall asleep the
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  exhaustion of running. Finally catching up to me so close
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  my eyes snap sit waves through us. Those not quick
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  enough to get to their feet were dealt with. I
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  bolted with the others, but as I turned my head
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  there I saw with the horrible beings they stood on
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  top of felled elders. An icy pike pierced through me,
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  and the sensation became reinforced. That became our new norm.
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  I am not ashamed to admit I was the last
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  one left. I don't feel guilty for being the fastest,
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  the most endured, or the most agile. It's not my fault.
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  The others fell because we all had a chance. It's
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  not my fault that I never looked back, not responsible
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  for their failings. Every time they caught up to me,
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  I pushed my body to its limits. Still they closed
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  the distance, and I would try to create a gap between.
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  They never failed to trail close behind me. When I rested,
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  They kept moving. When I ate, they grew closer. When
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  I needed to heed the call of nature, they wouldn't
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  be far behind. Time and time again, I took advantage
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  of my exhaustion and stalked me intently. Every close call
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  left me scarred. Every near fatal encounter bled me of
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  my energy. Once they nearly caught me, my legs were shaking,
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  my eyes a blurry haze, and saliva.
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  Speaker 1: Was pouring out of my mouth. One of the monsters
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  brought a cold, sharp stone.
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  Speaker 2: To my throat. Scorned from my way out, it cost
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  me my shoulder. My trot became a hobble, and even
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  that grew into a limp. You must understand, I'm not
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  supposed to feel this way. I'm not supposed to keep
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  using my last resorts. I'm not supposed to feel my
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  heart pumped so hard that my whole chest grows in pain.
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  I'm not supposed to keep looking over my shoulder, worried
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  that something is ready to lunge out and in me.
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  I'm not supposed to feel anxiety. Yet I do so wrong,
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  no matter how hard I try, no matter how fast
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  I run, no matter how fierce my will to live became,
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  couldn't escape with slow death till now I'm sat by
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  a weathered and lonely tree atop a tall hill and smile,
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  and I felt relieved and fulfilled at my efforts. Can't
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  see them, no matter how hard has strained my eyes,
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  nothing free. The sky must have felt reprieve, for in
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  that moment I saw a gathering of black clouds and
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  the horizon I would finally fill their gentle touch and
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  their soothing rains.
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  Speaker 1: It lulled me to a well deserved sleep. Honey, so
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  clouds closed in on me could have sworn Their thunder
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  sounded like heavy footsteps.
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  Speaker 2: This is pretty good. It's just like an animal running
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  being hunted by people.
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  Speaker 3: It's kind of weird that you can kind of interpret
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  it in a you could interpret it in a way
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  that it's another human being or something if you wanted to.
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  I mean, I believe, I mean, you know, the trot
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  and all that kind of stuff is still it's you
• 13:39
  have a fun there's a fun way to decipher it
• 13:42
  that it could be human. But I mean, yeah, coming
• 13:44
  from the perspective of an animal with unrelentless humans hunting them,
• 13:48
  I mean, there was even lines of a being like
• 13:50
  riding the elders, which means it like horses or yeah,
• 13:53
  you know, so they were using other animals to hunt them.
• 13:56
  It's pretty fun. But I do like this idea that
• 13:58
  it's a little it's it's pretty open, but it's a
• 14:00
  fun Uh, it's a fun I guess the game of
• 14:05
  cat and mouse with humans and like just from the perspective.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Of the hunted animals, Yeah.
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: Which I think was pretty fun, but I think it's
• 14:13
  it's it's uh yeah, just nice.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: There's a description of like they're all the water and
• 14:18
  hole and then there's a cluster they don't know where
• 14:19
  to run everyone fragments out and stuff like that. How
• 14:22
  terrifying that would be from that perspective.
• 14:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, what year did you depict this? It depicted
• 14:28
  its kind of that.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: Well, well they talk about arrows, yeah, not so not
• 14:33
  rifle hunting.
• 14:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like bone arrow.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: So you go even further back, say it's like seventeen
• 14:38
  hundreds or something. Fifteen hundred would have fourteen hundreds. I
• 14:42
  don't think they were doing well. I mean they had
• 14:44
  the long bow back then.
• 14:45
  Speaker 4: Or thirteen hundreds.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: We just keep going.
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: If you're twelve.
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: Hundreds, it's like the crisis for eleven hundreds, one thousands,
• 15:00
  nine hundred eight one hundred.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: The thing about I'm never supposed to feel anxiety or
• 15:09
  like tear behind me. Maybe it's like a predatory animal
• 15:12
  of some kind, something that hunts others. Maybe it's something mighty.
• 15:15
  It's not like a bison. I think bison's a good
• 15:17
  one because it's like, what would they have to fear
• 15:19
  naturally other than man? Right, Maybe that's what mett by.
• 15:24
  I'm not supposed to feel fear. I'm not supposed to
• 15:25
  feel anxiety. Stuff like that.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: There's a lot with just the language that choose, There's
• 15:29
  a lot you could glean on just even the story
• 15:32
  from the perspective of an animal is just fun.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, fun approach. Yeah, very uh oh mother horse eyes,
• 15:41
  the cat segments.
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: I do think that the uh it is funny thinking
• 15:44
  that a bisons on like a mac typing the story
• 15:49
  took him along his time, has tiny glasses and he's
• 15:51
  like pushes it up.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Have you ever seen a bison before?
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they're huge, they're awesome.
• 15:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, they're very cute, they do.
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, I like them in their tiny eyes, very
• 16:05
  small eyes proportioned to have so big and yeah, they
• 16:08
  like to sit there and you like drive by them,
• 16:09
  and people people are always like whoa, They always just
• 16:12
  look at you.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: Like I remember I went to it was like this
• 16:16
  old reenactment camp and they had a bison there that
• 16:18
  had been like raised from a baby by people, so
• 16:21
  it was real friendly, and uh, the lady was trying
• 16:23
  to explain to us, like this is Tom the bison
• 16:25
  or whatever, and it comes up to her real slow,
• 16:28
  and it gets behind her and it just like that
• 16:31
  its head is her entire body size, right, uh, And
• 16:35
  it keeps pushing her, like trying to gently nuzzle her,
• 16:39
  but every time it does, it like knocks her on
• 16:40
  the ground. And then she's like he really likes to
• 16:43
  be pet and she'll pet on a little and the
• 16:44
  moment she stops, he's like moh and just topples her
• 16:47
  over again, just about like moving his head a little bit.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: So they're very sweet.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: If you had a bison moode, you name it.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: It's gonna start with a B.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: Right, So that's not true that one was named Tom.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: Well I was just kind of making up a name.
• 17:00
  But oh uh, Like I like Bobby, Bobby the Bison.
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: Bobby the Bison.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: What would you name a bison.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: With how bison's look? I named meat loaf. Oh, that's
• 17:18
  a cute name for ad bison.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: I like that.
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: Meat Loaf.
• 17:24
  Speaker 4: Thirteen hundred all.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Right, So that was our story tea again.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: The author of that story is named The Republic and
• 17:34
  they've posted a lot to like tell some of the creeps.
• 17:35
  To be sure check out more of the stuff Leven
• 17:37
  linked in the description.
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: You have to be kind of a fun angle that
• 17:39
  story too. It was the angle from the bird watching
• 17:42
  it all go down. Huh. Just potential hate Republic sequel
• 17:47
  bait that you can have the one for free. First
• 17:50
  first line, I'm a cardinal and I just witnessed something bad.
• 17:56
  Speaker 5: Sounds fatholic?
• 17:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, how much Father Mogahy touch a child?
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: It feels like have you seen them?
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: Does? I'm a cardinal?
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: Okay? Have you seen those?
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: Like those posts on Instagram or like in the comments
• 18:12
  where someone will say something and someone else pretends like
• 18:14
  they were there. That keeps going like a classic, Like
• 18:18
  a girl will post a hot pick of herself and
• 18:20
  someone will come and be like I just felt like.
• 18:23
  Someone will comment and say I just fell to my
• 18:25
  knees in Walmart and someone else will come and be like,
• 18:27
  I just watched the guy follow his knees in Walmart.
• 18:30
  Someone else will be like, I'm on the security camera,
• 18:32
  and someone yeah, they'll do that by someone. The other day,
• 18:35
  where these guys contractors were talking about like messed up
• 18:39
  stuff they did in people's houses, some girl posted was like,
• 18:42
  we hired a group of guys to uh redo our
• 18:45
  drywall and then a hole. Someone knocked a hole in
• 18:48
  the drywall and it was full of mculture cans like
• 18:52
  in the wall.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: And someone else.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: Replied it was like I did this house a while back,
• 18:55
  and we got hammered and we just threw the mculture
• 18:58
  cans into the wall.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: And soon else was like I were technic culture and
• 19:01
  I soul caught like it. They keep the joke going.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: You could do that with this where it's like from
• 19:05
  the Cardinal's perspective, from the horses perspective, from like another
• 19:10
  Bison's perspective, just watch the whole thing go down, just
• 19:13
  keep keeping.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: But on the third and installment, I would go Bison Cardinal,
• 19:18
  and then I would go, uh, I'd go little.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Boy, little boy, why why is that?
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: Because then you get the perspective of man but the
• 19:28
  innocence of man.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: Right, that's deep. Man, that's cool. And then God could
• 19:34
  be your fourth one. It's like God, watch it. What
• 19:37
  do you think God looks like man?
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: Man?
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Because the Bible says we're made in the image of God.
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: I want to think that God. I think he fibbed
• 19:46
  about that. I think that was a fib raight the
• 19:50
  deal I look like you. I think he looks like
• 19:53
  a fucking six storm cloud.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: I mean he's he's capable of it anything.
• 20:00
  Speaker 4: So when when when nothing but Spanish, that's okay.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: When Moses goes to Uh. When Moses goes to the Uh,
• 20:14
  the mountaintop, Uh, who's Moses. God speaks to him through UH,
• 20:20
  the the thunderstorm, through the lightning, and then Elijah when
• 20:23
  he goes to uh mount Horreb he has spoken to
• 20:28
  eventually through a still small voice, but says before there's
• 20:31
  like lightning and thunder and fire, so God can appears
• 20:33
  whatever he wants. The burning bush speaks for the burning.
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: Bush, barge. So did when Moses gathered up all his animals,
• 20:43
  And that's Noah. Moses didn't Moses did the ar Noah's ark.
• 20:50
  What did Moses do? Uh?
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: He was the one who led the israel Lights out
• 20:56
  of Egypt and then wandered through the desert.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: Ten Commandments that he did.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: The Ten Commandments m kind of a buzz kill. It's
• 21:04
  like Martin Luther hammering that those laws.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: You consider Martin Luther a buzzkill.
• 21:10
  Speaker 4: Kind of right or what I know he was. He
• 21:13
  was just like, actually, these rules.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: So I was thinking, Martin Luther king, I thought you
• 21:16
  were saying that, okay, was a buzzy.
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: His name is Martin Luther, right, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah,
• 21:22
  I had the end of the day, I was like,
• 21:23
  I feel like that is not correct.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: No, it's Martin Luthor.
• 21:25
  Speaker 4: She was sucked up.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: I suggested his name was Derek Luthor, and I'm like.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: There's no now not I Derek Luther don't agree with
• 21:34
  these rules? No, Martin Luther. Yeah. Ninety five THESS on
• 21:38
  the church store.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah you, And I was pissed off about that. Why
• 21:42
  can't you just make it one hundred ninety five? Really
• 21:46
  couldn't add five more in?
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: That's true?
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: Just tell I mean, how many is?
• 21:52
  Speaker 4: It looks like a hundred? You couldn't be more wrong.
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: It's ninety five.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: I haven't read all of them, but I'm I wonder
• 21:58
  what the last like ten are. It's like, how netpicky
• 22:01
  could he get? Let me see, this is a fun aside.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Greek Cast reviews of Martin Luther's ninety five pieces.
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: So it just kind of just in bold. It says
• 22:14
  sixty seven through sixty seven through ninety five. He says
• 22:19
  he attacks the partners who promote indulgences over the Gospel,
• 22:24
  arguing that money should be given to the poor rather
• 22:27
  than buying indulgences. Basically, it's him just being like, why
• 22:29
  the fuck, why do we have a gold door?
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Well, well, indulgences were specifically payments that you could make
• 22:36
  for prayers to get people out of purgatory and into heaven.
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: Oh the heaven bonds whatever.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah yeah, which was a big no no, and
• 22:44
  like bunch like historically a bunch of people freak out
• 22:47
  about that time. It's kind of during like, you know,
• 22:50
  some bad stuff going on in Europe and whatnot.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: What.
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: Like the let's see that was fifteen, it was fourteen,
• 22:58
  the red scare.
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: No, no, it happens with my wife over a month.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: Okay, so there was we can get back to the story.
• 23:08
  So not on the original schedule.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: But we wanted this episode to be a bit longer
• 23:12
  for you all, and we found an author we really
• 23:15
  liked from an episode about a radio that may or
• 23:19
  may not be up yet.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure when all of these were batch recording.
• 23:22
  We'll get posted.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: But this story is also about animals and we thought
• 23:26
  this was the perfect place to slot it in at
• 23:28
  so hopefully you like it. It's called the animals on
• 23:31
  my Farm always kill their newborns. This is one of
• 23:35
  two stories as far as I can see ever, posted
• 23:37
  by the Reddit user Gretelcat to our slash no Sleep,
• 23:41
  and the other story they did was phenomenal.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: No, it's really good. Yeah, we read, we saw the
• 23:45
  title act. We read that one on a previous day,
• 23:48
  and then we thought we should just put this in
• 23:50
  with the animal episode because.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: It's yeah, I mean, I mean, it's like they've had
• 23:53
  two stories. One was a banger. We're like, we should
• 23:56
  read the animal one, and then we were talking about
• 23:58
  this episode and it's like, oh, this could you another one?
• 24:00
  I know the perfect animal story that which is I mean, yeah, yeah,
• 24:04
  it adds intrigue and stuff like that. And if I again,
• 24:07
  I don't know if the radio one's up, yes or not,
• 24:08
  but we really liked it. I imagine you all would
• 24:10
  like it too, So I'm excited to see what else
• 24:12
  they have in story.
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, man, let's dive in.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: So another creep creeple, another creepy animal story. Animals on
• 24:19
  my farm always kill their newborns by gretelcat Link in
• 24:22
  the description of course, before I take my life tonight,
• 24:24
  I need to write down what brought me to this point.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, you know what.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: Was that some of the some of them got to
• 24:30
  build up, some of them just jump right in just
• 24:33
  for my own.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: Sanity, just as a catharsis.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: If I'm feeling brave, I'll post it on the Internet
• 24:39
  when I'm done. And if I do, if I'm actually
• 24:42
  talking to some human soul out there, know that I
• 24:45
  am an eternal piece as you read this. My favorite
• 24:48
  animal on my fiance's farm Sausage. She was an enormous
• 24:51
  hog who might have been intimidating if she wasn't so
• 24:54
  lovey dovey. Sausage acted like a dog whenever I came around,
• 24:57
  always wanted to be scratched behind the ears, made little
• 25:00
  grunts and snores if I wasn't giving her enough attention.
• 25:03
  In fact, she was the one who sold me on
• 25:06
  the whole farm thing. It was scary for me to
• 25:08
  move in with Anthony and his sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, pigs,
• 25:12
  donkey and cats. Before that, I had owned a total
• 25:16
  of two fish and a hermit crab.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: Do you guys have pigs?
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: No?
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: Have you? Have you? Have you ever been around pigs
• 25:24
  and stuff like that? Oh? Yeah, they're fun. They're like chill.
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: Okay, they're dicks.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: You don't like them.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: It's not I don't like them. They're just assholes. They're
• 25:30
  just messy dickheads. They can be very aggressive and dickhead
• 25:33
  of sham.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: You know, the whole thing.
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: But they're so smart and they're just like fucking rolling
• 25:36
  around the mud. They're just like screeching young pigs could
• 25:39
  be really mean.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: Have you ever you've heard the thing about like you
• 25:45
  can throw a dead body to pigs and they'll like
• 25:47
  clean it super fast, eat pieces of and so they
• 25:52
  can be mean. But I was in love with him
• 25:54
  and he was in love with me. Even in spite
• 25:56
  of all my anxieties and manias and foibles, I took
• 26:00
  a leap of faith moving on to his forty acre
• 26:02
  Midwest ranch a few months before the wedding. His father
• 26:05
  had raised him here but had passed away a year
• 26:07
  before we met. After only a few days, I stopped
• 26:11
  nagging him about selling the property and moving closer to
• 26:14
  a city. Just a few days. That's how long it
• 26:17
  took for Sweet Sausage to teach me the farm animals
• 26:20
  were not pets, but like judgmental of you. So I
• 26:23
  originally told Tony she was smart and affectionate. She was
• 26:27
  my friend. It didn't take long before I developed similar
• 26:30
  sentiments towards the rest of my new family. Sausage was
• 26:33
  pregnant when I moved in, and she was due to
• 26:35
  give birth just one week after Anthony and I returned
• 26:37
  from our honeymoon. Though I was on the verge of
• 26:39
  having a panic attack the whole time I was there
• 26:42
  from start to finish delivering all four pikelets, they seemed elsy,
• 26:45
  and I was overwhelmingly proud of myself. Following day, he
• 26:49
  brought over the two little boys who lived across the street.
• 26:52
  That was traditioned to name the newbies. The runt was
• 26:56
  not so creatively Chris and Peewee. For a few days,
• 27:00
  everything went well. The new picklets required a lot of care,
• 27:03
  but were super cute. Besides, I was confident that between sausages,
• 27:07
  nurturing disposition, and Tony's expertise, they could make up for
• 27:11
  whatever I messed up. The piglets were only a few
• 27:14
  days old when everything happened. After the chores were done
• 27:18
  for the day, Tony and I fell asleep, holding each
• 27:21
  other like the happy newly weds we were. I hadn't
• 27:24
  been out for long when a deafening squeal shattered my sleep.
• 27:27
  I spasmed away from Tony and whipped my head towards
• 27:30
  the window. I can't even describe the feeling that swelled
• 27:33
  in my chest at that noise. It was shrill, desperate, horrified.
• 27:39
  The two of us flew downstairs and across the field
• 27:41
  to the pickpin. By the time we had reached the
• 27:44
  front door, squill tapered off like a stereo being unplugged,
• 27:48
  with just the light of the moon to guide us.
• 27:50
  I didn't make out what was happening until we were
• 27:52
  a few steps from the pin. I'm in tears remembering
• 27:55
  this or pee wee. His little body was just destroyed.
• 28:01
  It looked like he had been banged against the wall repeatedly.
• 28:05
  His legs were dislocated, his body swelling with bruises, his
• 28:08
  tiny nose twitching as though it were the first step
• 28:11
  to being able to move again.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: But he would never move again.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: His glassy little eyes rolled towards us as we burst
• 28:18
  through the gate, and there was Sausage, calm as ever,
• 28:22
  looming over her newborn. Mechanically, almost gently, she gathered Pewee
• 28:28
  by a scruff and.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: Jerked back her head. No, Sausage, no, I shouted.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: I was about a lunge at her, but Tony grabbed
• 28:34
  my arm. I made a hysterical whimper as the pig
• 28:37
  slammed its snout into the ground with Peewee in her mouth.
• 28:40
  The ensuing crunching noise almost brought me to my knees.
• 28:43
  Tony whispered, it's over.
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: Wonder he's gone.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: He was right.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: Peewe was probably dead the instant he made contact with
• 28:50
  the dirt. I wasn't sure how many times Sausage had
• 28:53
  smashed him into the ground like this before we arrived,
• 28:56
  but I understood why Tony had held me back.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: Just then.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: It would have been responsible for mercy killing. Most humane
• 29:05
  thing was to let nature take its course, what the
• 29:07
  hell was natural about any of this? Have you ever
• 29:12
  have you ever witnessed like an animal just do something
• 29:14
  really messed up?
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: I mean, like one thing that was brutal was fucking
• 29:19
  I mean yeah, living on this farm and stuff, it's
• 29:22
  like coyotes and coyotes and possums killing all that. I
• 29:27
  mean my favorite favorite farm animals or donkeys and ducks.
• 29:30
  Speaker 4: I love them.
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: And yeah, we've had, like before, we had a lot
• 29:33
  of like fortified stuff. We've had to like reconfigure how
• 29:37
  just to approach, like how to keep the ducks super
• 29:39
  safe and stuff from the best you can. I mean,
• 29:43
  shit's gonna happen. But coyotes are ruthless. Many coyotes are
• 29:47
  fucking ruthless. Possums are ruthless, but it's mostly coyotes just
• 29:49
  will tear the shit up and you kind of come
• 29:51
  out and it's just a massacre and just kind of
• 29:53
  it sucks.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we uh, most of the people around home,
• 29:57
  like if they get a coyote, it's like all right.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: Ever one rang the guns like.
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I just uh, And I'm the worst with it.
• 30:05
  My wife is way way better. My wife and her
• 30:09
  boyfriend really handled.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: I just let you play this. I can't.
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: I have never ironically, I've never been good with like
• 30:17
  killing animal, Like even like my dad to take me
• 30:19
  on hunting trips all that shit.
• 30:21
  Speaker 4: I just can't do it.
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: I just even even when like it's it's just I
• 30:26
  just fucking can't. It's yeah, so it just it tears
• 30:29
  my fucking heart open.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: I remember one time this I remember being a kid.
• 30:33
  You know, when you're a kid and you see like
• 30:35
  your dad or like an adult do something, you're like, wow,
• 30:38
  that's he's cool. One of the first moments I had
• 30:41
  that with my dad is when I was five or
• 30:43
  six years old, we had found a kitten. We lived
• 30:46
  like middle of nowhere, Kentucky, way out in the woods.
• 30:49
  When I a little kitten showed up, uh and like
• 30:53
  we were.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: Like, oh, mom, can we keep it? Blah blah blah.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: And I think we named it Kitty because I was
• 30:58
  the oldest at five, so like my foreign two year
• 31:00
  old sisters were like, Kitty's perfect.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: So we would feed at milk.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: And we would like hand it little pieces of ham
• 31:07
  and stuff like that, and we had it two days.
• 31:11
  I was like, it's a cuse thing. Bla blah, blah,
• 31:13
  And we were outside with it one night and we
• 31:16
  were on the back porch and it was kind of
• 31:19
  nose in the morning. It was kind of like wobbling
• 31:21
  around looking and sniffed, and it went under the porch.
• 31:23
  We had a little wooden porch, and then we heard
• 31:25
  it scream and I was like, oh, what's that and
• 31:28
  my mom hurd us inside it. What happened is it
• 31:30
  got down there and a possum was down there and
• 31:32
  just shredded it, seemately killed it.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: And I remember being like so heartbroken about that, like.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: Oh, a little kitty like I just I still remember
• 31:40
  seeing the wood porch and seeing blood up the side
• 31:43
  of it, and my dad was like, never again. So
• 31:47
  that night he got a bunch of leftovers trash and
• 31:51
  he went out. We had this huge open backyard and
• 31:54
  he just laid leftovers all out in the yard. He
• 31:57
  got up on the second story of the house with
• 31:59
  a shotgun and he sat in that window and I
• 32:02
  remember laying down in bed that night and all night.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: Just boom, twenty minutes boom. Dad set up all night
• 32:10
  and just killed anything that came into the yard. The
• 32:13
  next day he had killed eleven possum garbage or raccoon
• 32:20
  garbage picking up stuff. Shut. But I remember I remember
• 32:25
  after that being like, wow, my dad really loves me.
• 32:31
  He just obliterated though. Dad's like, you'll never hurt kidding again.
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: But no.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: Animals do some weird stuff. I remember we were.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: A guy had asked us to come shoot prairie dog
• 32:45
  because they were like getting all of animals sick and
• 32:47
  destroying farmland. We had shot one, and then another prairie
• 32:52
  dog had come out of the hole and dragged it
• 32:54
  back down into the hole, and I was like, oh,
• 32:55
  that's kind of sad, you know, like their friends dye,
• 32:59
  so they dragged in Like that's heartbreaking.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: We walk up to the hole. Later they were eating it.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: The moment any of them.
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: Got hurt, the others were like, oh, it's like okay,
• 33:08
  well I don't feel bad anymore.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: Animals are stupid. Animals are fucking dumb. They're just hungry.
• 33:13
  They want to fucking they want to sleep. What's from
• 33:14
  much only want to do.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: Tony had tears in his eyes as he scooped up
• 33:17
  the three remaining picklets, who were cowering in a corner. Meanwhile,
• 33:21
  Sausage nudged the body of her front, and satisfied that
• 33:24
  he was thoroughly dead, he andered over to the slop tub.
• 33:28
  I watched Tony deposit the pikelets and the next pin
• 33:31
  over so that a swath of fence separated them from
• 33:33
  their mother. He told me to wait inside while he
• 33:36
  buried Peewee. I was all cried out by the time
• 33:39
  he came upstairs. He looked more enervated than I had
• 33:42
  ever seen him. Soaked and sweat and smudged with dirt.
• 33:46
  Tony set across from me on the bed. He didn't
• 33:49
  say anything for a long time. Finally he raised his
• 33:51
  brown eyes to mine and.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: Said, Anita, there's something I haven't told you.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: I can count on one hand the number of times
• 33:57
  I've heard him call me by my full name. Chill
• 33:59
  ran up my spine.
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: What this? What happened tonight is nothing new. All the
• 34:06
  animals in the farm kill the newborns one by one
• 34:09
  unless they are separated immediately. I don't know why. I mean, honestly,
• 34:14
  there's no explanation I've ever found for this behavior. It's
• 34:17
  just it is always happening on this farm.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: He looked away. I scared it closer.
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: How is that possible. I don't know. I'm sorry it's
• 34:27
  not a satisfying answer, but it's all I can tell you.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: But even saucy I asked, evoking the nickname i'd given
• 34:35
  my favorite farm animal.
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: All of them wanted to all of them. And I
• 34:39
  know you're wondering why I didn't separate the babies right away,
• 34:42
  and it's just because I was being selfish.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: Watched them clinch and unclenched his fist.
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: They didn't want to have it. I didn't want it
• 34:48
  to tell you this ever, and I guess I just
• 34:50
  hope that it had been in my head all along.
• 34:53
  You know, now the dad's gone and you and I
• 34:56
  are starting our life together. I just thought, rather than
• 34:59
  separating them like my family had been doing for years,
• 35:01
  should see what would happen. Maybe the curse had never
• 35:04
  existed in the first place, and I would never have
• 35:06
  been in this awful conversation with you. But look where
• 35:09
  that got us.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Tear fell onto the bed. I like that that's a
• 35:13
  very human thing.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: Where Like if your family's just been like, well, God,
• 35:16
  keep him separate, God keep him separate, and like you
• 35:18
  never saw it firsthand, your dad's gone, You're like, yeah,
• 35:21
  maybe not, and then it happens, You're like, Okay, well
• 35:23
  maybe maybe. So for the next several days, Tony wouldn't
• 35:27
  look me in the eye. You would think it was
• 35:29
  him out there torturing peewee that night. That's how ashamed
• 35:31
  he was. Seeing how profoundly this instance affected him just
• 35:35
  made me love him more. I've told him as much
• 35:37
  time and again. Since that day. He has never believed me.
• 35:41
  There's one that's a very sweet thing. There was one time.
• 35:43
  I know, I keep talking about animal stories be.
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: Kind of crazy too. If they have a kid and
• 35:46
  the mom just wants to kill them, that's where I
• 35:49
  feel it's I feel like it's going that way.
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: I think that's why I think that's what the tone
• 35:52
  and this is gonna be. And also at that point,
• 35:55
  what counts as not a kid anymore? How long does
• 35:57
  the mom have to be away from the kid? Was like,
• 36:02
  I remember one time we found mice in the garage
• 36:07
  and I had found a mother that was nursing a
• 36:08
  bunch of them and I saved it. And literally everyone
• 36:11
  I knew made fun of me, but Caylea thought it
• 36:13
  was very sweet.
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: God school.
• 36:19
  Speaker 5: You and then my dad boom, You'll never take kidding, Daddy.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: You're like rust into it.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: They went down to pet Go and that was the
• 36:54
  first in fantaside I witnessed on Anthony's family farm four
• 36:58
  years and several deaths of turin inspired since then. We
• 37:02
  tried to keep the animals separated, and obviously they need
• 37:04
  to reproduce to sustain the farm, but sometimes the killings
• 37:07
  happened before we even knew the mother was giving birth.
• 37:10
  I want to make a laundry list, because obviously these
• 37:13
  things aren't pleasant for me to relive. But one other
• 37:15
  episode that I constantly of nightmares about snoozers snoozers was.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: A barn cat.
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: It would appear curled up, napping and random places on
• 37:23
  the farm. Sometimes we wouldn't see her for days. Tony
• 37:27
  and I had been talking about she was getting big
• 37:29
  enough for us to assume she was pregnant, and we
• 37:31
  try to keep any on her. But you know, cats,
• 37:34
  she came and when is she pleased. We really started
• 37:36
  to get worried when we didn't see her for almost
• 37:38
  two weeks. That's when I was certain that she had
• 37:41
  given birth, and I feared for the lives of those
• 37:43
  helpless infant kittens.
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: What could we do.
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: I went on with my farm chores, having taken on
• 37:49
  more responsibility once Anthony got promoted. He was a quality
• 37:53
  assurance specialist for the USDA, and his new position many occasionally.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: Had to travel to conduct trainings.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: Mid morning was when I got around a change all
• 38:00
  the food and water. As I walked over to the
• 38:02
  goat's pin, I noticed Snoozers lounging on a.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: Pile of hay snoozers.
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: I chirped at once thrilled and terrified. She was noticeably thinner.
• 38:11
  I didn't see the kittens. Oddly, this made me feel
• 38:15
  much better. It would have put a maddening pressure on
• 38:18
  me to rescue them, and I would spend every second
• 38:20
  until Tony came home feeling like I had to protect
• 38:22
  them with my life. I just wasn't equipped to handle
• 38:25
  something like this on my own. Honestly, I was fine
• 38:28
  pretending she had never been pregnant at all. I slipped
• 38:31
  into the pin and knelt down to pet Snoozers. Clump
• 38:34
  of orange furs stretched and did a happy cat blink
• 38:37
  as I stroked her. At the insistence of the goats,
• 38:40
  I stood up and went to give them fresh water.
• 38:42
  Now the water was in a big black tin gallon
• 38:45
  tub in the corner of the pin. We changed it
• 38:48
  every few days. By day three, the water was murky
• 38:51
  with hay, dirt, food, and whatever other yuckiness the coats
• 38:54
  had on their mouths when they went to drink. Tiny
• 38:57
  as I am, I struggled to pick it up and
• 38:59
  pitch it.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: Over the fence.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: I heard the water splash onto the ground, followed by
• 39:03
  five or six distinct plopping noises. I was so shocked
• 39:08
  I dropped the tub. Lying on the ground in front
• 39:11
  of me were the shriveled, soaking, wet bodies of snoozers kittens.
• 39:16
  There were so little that their eyes had not even
• 39:18
  opened yet. Shakily got to my knees and stared with
• 39:22
  tearful eyes at the corpses. The most frightening part was
• 39:25
  the lack of injuries. They didn't even have the self
• 39:29
  awareness or strength to fight for their lives. All I
• 39:32
  could imagine was Snoozers staking her kittens in her mouth
• 39:34
  one by one and systematically holding them under water until
• 39:37
  they stopped moving. None of the food or water got
• 39:41
  switched until that evening. I spent the whole day in
• 39:44
  bed trying to get Tony on the phone he'd be
• 39:47
  home tomorrow afternoon. Until then, he suggested, put a towel
• 39:51
  over the kittens and he would take care of them
• 39:53
  when he returned. And I wish I could say the
• 39:55
  reason I'm writing now is because I am fearing for
• 39:57
  the life of another animal.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: God, it is so much worse than that.
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: Of course, Anthony and I had a discussion about this
• 40:04
  shortly after we found out I was pregnant.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: Uh, oh, what.
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: If it happens to me? What if I try to
• 40:10
  kill the baby?
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: Wanda, sweetheart, he said, running a hand through my hair.
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: I promise that's not going to happen. I was raised
• 40:18
  on this I was raised on this farm. Remember, our
• 40:20
  baby's going to be happy and healthy.
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: If you have to separate the humans, surely, to God,
• 40:25
  his parents would tell him that, right, you would think,
• 40:28
  but it's going to be a Tommy Taffy scenario where
• 40:31
  they don't mention.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: Them for years. Oh, shouldn't have done that.
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: Also, I had legitimately when they were talking about, like,
• 40:38
  I heard the PLoP stuff on the ground. I just
• 40:41
  picture your dad going over with the cats and just
• 40:42
  being like and dropping them into the bucket. Dad, my
• 40:51
  dad killed the animals to save my daddy killed them
• 40:54
  to save them, not hurt them.
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: There's more avenged, Well we got we got kittens after that,
• 41:01
  so that was like, if we get more, they're not
• 41:04
  gonna Yeah, they're not gonna be around to kill him again. No,
• 41:08
  my dad would never call animal, but that would never
• 41:10
  kill him, this animal.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: No, No, his evil laugh. Dad's a nice man, bobbing
• 41:23
  and the deal, picking h up with his mouth. O theyroed.
• 41:34
  I would do the exact same thing if my if
• 41:39
  my if my daughter had a little kiddy comes up,
• 41:43
  this if talking comes up and her little kiddy gets
• 41:45
  killed by a possum. I'm named in the woods.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: Everything I can kill, Yeah, immediately, anything in that woods
• 41:54
  is dying. Turkey the deer, another cat, doesn't.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: Matter, Hamster, I'm jade amming the property.
• 42:08
  Speaker 4: It's been excessive to head, thank you.
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess it's just vengeance.
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: I hate myself for being too scared to point out
• 42:23
  that he was raised solely by his father. His mother,
• 42:25
  as the story goes, died during childbirth. Sure, but as
• 42:31
  I look back now, I wonder if that's just what
• 42:33
  he was told so he wouldn't ask questions.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: No, tonight, I'm in the house by myself.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: I gave birth a week and a half ago, and
• 42:42
  all that time I have never been alone. Anthony, my parents,
• 42:47
  our families, our neighbors have been incredibly supportive, and with
• 42:51
  all the attention in company, it's been easy to ignore
• 42:54
  the thoughts. I am terrified to be having thoughts of
• 42:58
  killing my child. At first, I tried to tell myself
• 43:02
  that it was psychosomatic, that I had an effect cursed
• 43:06
  myself by believing this curse existed in the first place.
• 43:09
  Every night since JJ was born, I have lain awake
• 43:13
  reading about postpartum depression on my phone. I was dying
• 43:16
  to find something, anything, validating these feelings, and of course,
• 43:21
  if you search long enough on the internet, you can
• 43:23
  convince yourself of anything. But each time I put down
• 43:26
  that phone and looked at the little lump in the
• 43:29
  crib beside me, all I could think about was how
• 43:32
  much I wanted to kill it. I don't even understand why,
• 43:35
  and that's what's devouring me from the inside out is
• 43:38
  I can't even try to reason with myself. I haven't
• 43:40
  breathed the word of this to my husband. If he
• 43:43
  thought for a moment that leaving JJ alone with me
• 43:45
  was in danger in our child's life. He might do
• 43:47
  to me what I'm convinced his father did to his mother. Besides,
• 43:51
  I love this child. What's so maddening really is the
• 43:55
  genuine maternal attachment that I have to JJ. I love
• 43:58
  him so much I can't even put it into words.
• 44:00
  But I don't know how much longer I could fight
• 44:03
  this impulse. Even sleep doesn't give me a respite from
• 44:06
  this hell. The nightmares have gotten increasingly worse. The night
• 44:10
  before Tony left, I dreamed that the baby and I
• 44:12
  were hiding from a killer. I clutched him to my
• 44:15
  chest and ran through a dark cornfield, pausing only to
• 44:17
  catch my breath and hear the telltale rustle of the murderer.
• 44:21
  Finally I found my way out of the field. A
• 44:23
  small farmhouse was in sight. I ran as fast as
• 44:26
  I could to safety and locked the door. I sat
• 44:28
  on the sofa with JJ and my arms until I
• 44:30
  calmed down, and then I placed him on the table
• 44:32
  in front of me, took off his clothes and began
• 44:35
  peeling away his skin. He didn't make a sound, just
• 44:39
  stared at me with omniscient eyes, and I tore off
• 44:42
  a slice of skin I placed it in a neat
• 44:44
  pile on either side of him. One by one, I
• 44:47
  exposed his organs until all that was left of his
• 44:49
  skin was the patch between his eyeballs. We stared at
• 44:53
  each other until they rolled back into his head.
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: I woke up.
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: Then I darted to the bathroom and vomited before Tony
• 45:00
  Kid asked me what was wrong. I called through the
• 45:03
  door that I had food poisoning or something, and showered
• 45:05
  for an hour and a half until my heart rate
• 45:07
  slowed back to normal.
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: It's nighttime.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: I put JJ down after I finished dinner and went
• 45:13
  to watch some TV, trying to take my mind off
• 45:16
  the thoughts I was having. The last thing I remember
• 45:19
  is feeling like I was nodding off, not quite falling asleep.
• 45:23
  Just now, just twenty minutes ago, I woke.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: Up, came two.
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: I just suddenly realized that I was halfway upstairs with
• 45:33
  a kitchen knife in my hand. I screamed and flung
• 45:36
  it away from me and collapsed where I was into
• 45:38
  hysterical tears. I have no control over myself anymore. God,
• 45:43
  who am I? I can hear JJ crying. It's been
• 45:47
  at he's he's been at it for a while wailing
• 46:03
  from hunger. I haven't fed him sincerely this morning because
• 46:06
  I fear that if I try to feed him, I'll
• 46:08
  choke him to death before I could stop myself. Even
• 46:11
  if I did call Tony or my mother or a
• 46:13
  neighbor or the police, I know that the moment I
• 46:16
  put the phone down, I would killed JJ before anyone arrived.
• 46:20
  Writing out these truths, these thoughts is the only thing
• 46:23
  that has kept me from taking the life of my child.
• 46:26
  I am shaking so hard now. I know I don't
• 46:29
  have much time left before I can't take it anymore.
• 46:32
  And since the instant the first murderers saw it popped
• 46:35
  into my head, I have been using every mental faculty
• 46:37
  to figure out how to prevent this, and I did tonight.
• 46:42
  I figured out how to save JJ's life. I cannot
• 46:45
  risk another blackout like I just had on the stairs
• 46:48
  recording all this has been glorified procrastination, Anthony. I love you, JJ.
• 46:54
  I love you. Please never forget that, and I hope
• 46:57
  you can both move on and live long, happy lives.
• 47:01
  I just have one last request before I take my
• 47:04
  life tonight. Burn this farm to the ground.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: That was good. Those are really a good story. I
• 47:11
  enjoyed that. Yeah, that was brutal.
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: I liked that they didn't give you all the answers
• 47:15
  to I think that like having a I'm gonna keep
• 47:18
  this ope. I like I like that the keeping keeping
• 47:21
  it vague is kind of cool. But I do think
• 47:23
  it's I do like that it's uh it translates to
• 47:28
  the humans as well. It's just kind of fascinating.
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I like it.
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: It's a very I feel like, I feel like it's
• 47:34
  really Grandpa's fault because if he did kill his wife
• 47:40
  and he just did not tell his son about that
• 47:43
  this was going to happen, that's crazy.
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: Uh.
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: If it is a locational curse not a family curse,
• 47:48
  just go somewhere else.
• 47:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a weird thing where he probably did.
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: He probably did do it to uh help. Maybe maybe
• 47:57
  he thought that he wouldn't come back to the farm
• 47:59
  or something. I don't know why you wouldn't tell you.
• 48:02
  That is one thing you should definitely divol You should.
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: You should just Hey, if you have a kid here,
• 48:07
  your wife's gonna try to kill it until you kill her.
• 48:09
  Speaker 4: Just sorry, buddy, have fun out there, have.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: Fun, a good game out there. It's great though, yeah,
• 48:14
  I joined it. That was that was fun. Uh again,
• 48:17
  very well written. It was paid.
• 48:18
  Speaker 3: I hope that they write more two stories enough.
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this was like eight years ago, right, yeah, eight
• 48:25
  years ago.
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: So they wrote two stories eight and nine years ago
• 48:28
  and then not another story since, which is tragic, I think. So. Yeah,
• 48:33
  Gretel Cat, if you're out there somehow, I wishould write
• 48:35
  more of this. This also, for its fits perfectly in
• 48:38
  the middle of those stories, because the first story was
• 48:41
  a man attacking animal, second story man attacking man, right,
• 48:45
  and then the third story is man hunted by something
• 48:48
  some other creature. That's pretty cool. But I thought this
• 48:52
  was fantastic. We'll have Gretel Cat stuff linked in the description.
• 48:56
  But I think that was a perfect edition of this episode.
• 48:58
  And that was creepy and stuff about the dream with
• 49:01
  the baby that did get me a bit.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: That was a lot.
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: So why did I running all the way through the
• 49:05
  house or running through the cornfield to strip the kid's
• 49:09
  skin made it seem like the person that was chasing
• 49:12
  after was trying to stop her from.
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: The Yeah that's her husband, Like what yeah, exactly.
• 49:16
  Speaker 3: Stop it, baby, JJ, don't kill it.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, She's like, thank god, I got away from him.
• 49:23
  Now they killed the baby. On to the next story,
• 49:27
  On to the next story.
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: All right, well, Verdant Voiling wrote a story that a
• 49:31
  lot of people like, called the Deer Pit. Oh oh, and
• 49:33
  there's a tag on Isaiah says, creature features so perfect.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: Guys, can we get a.
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: Quick run of applause for creature features?
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: Oh, Caprice, son, that's your fifth one? Oh?
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: What's my fourth?
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah? All right? The Deer Pit by Verdant Voidling. I
• 50:12
  could still.
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: Remember how the steam pulse and steady rhythm from beneath
• 50:15
  the frozen leaves. When I was a kid, I had
• 50:19
  this place I would go to on the frozen mornings
• 50:21
  of winter, clearing that never seemed to suffer under the
• 50:24
  cruel frost of East Tennessee.
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: Oh baby.
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: The clearing was set deep in the woods, far enough
• 50:31
  away from civilization that the sound of rubber tearing across
• 50:34
  tarmac bled away and abject silence. Living so close to
• 50:38
  the interstate, even in a town as small as mine,
• 50:41
  left peaceful moments as a rare commodity. Everywhere I went,
• 50:45
  I could hear the distant ribbon of passing cars rumbling
• 50:48
  towards far off places. I treasured the clearing, the pristine
• 50:52
  silence there so stark, and then I felt that even
• 50:55
  a single breath might causet to burst. It had been
• 50:59
  a balm for my soul, and it's warmth the salve
• 51:02
  for my aching limbs after long days at school. Seventh
• 51:05
  grade was when the cracks began to show, all starting
• 51:08
  with the disappearance Heinrich Einswein. Heinrich had been an exchange
• 51:14
  student from Germany. Pudgy kid was swayed, blonde hair and
• 51:17
  eyes the color of emeralds.
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: I had a German exchange student in my school when
• 51:22
  I was younger.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: How were they?
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: He was in the grave below me, so I didn't
• 51:26
  know him too terribly well. But I do know that
• 51:27
  he took our German class at school and he corrected
• 51:29
  our teacher all the time, all the time.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: That had to be annoying.
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: I think she she fucking hated it.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Was he nice otherwise? Or was he just like
• 51:40
  a no at all?
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: He was like a he was like a really big kid.
• 51:43
  I think that they brought him in because he was
• 51:44
  like a like a big football player.
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: She came in, He's like say that kind of thing, and.
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks that kind of thing. Otherwise, I don't think
• 51:57
  I've ever met any other German person before my life.
• 52:00
  Speaker 4: Have you like a fluent German speaking but really you have.
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: I feel like I've known people from Germany, so, I mean,
• 52:07
  especially if we count online interactions.
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: Now I'm talking about in person.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that we had.
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: We had a friend of ours at the church we
• 52:13
  went to when I was younger who would have foreign
• 52:15
  exchange students coming in all the time. And one girl
• 52:19
  that they had visited a couple of times. Her name
• 52:21
  was i Ness. I believe Anness. She was from Germany.
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: Uh.
• 52:26
  Speaker 3: And I always feel like religious people from like Europe
• 52:28
  would have like a more radical approach.
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?
• 52:35
  Speaker 4: Just more old timy from the old country, you know.
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: More like conservative approach to mean religiously.
• 52:41
  Speaker 3: I don't know, I'm just being crazier.
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: Just because they're from Germany. It's not still old over there.
• 52:47
  If you go to Germany now, they have modern things.
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: It's not like, yeah, but I would say the tradition
• 52:52
  was stay over like you know, She's like, yeah, drink
• 52:54
  the blood.
• 52:55
  Speaker 4: It's not wine, it's fucking blood.
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, that's that's transubstantiation. A lot of Like Catholics.
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: Still believe that and stuff trans what transubstantiation, that's the
• 53:06
  belief that communion, wine and bread become physical blood and flesh.
• 53:12
  Speaker 3: So they actually do drink blood.
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: Well, they drink wine and bread, but the ideas like
• 53:16
  as it is consumed, it becomes a deal.
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: As it's digestic.
• 53:20
  Speaker 3: Is there any sec that actually drinks blood? Not that
• 53:23
  I know of that wouldn't.
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: I mean, maybe like there's some weird offshoot you're saying
• 53:27
  within Christianity.
• 53:28
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, what the whole or is it just Christianity?
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: Is it Catholics? I do the whole?
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: Well, same thing?
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: I mean, so, okay, so you had you have the
• 53:36
  church right after Jesus died, followed me, and then people
• 53:40
  have different interpretations if that's the Catholic Church. Orthodox, you know,
• 53:44
  they split in the Great Schism, became their own thing.
• 53:47
  And then you have Protestantism, which came after Martin Luther.
• 53:50
  But then Protestants will say that like, well, they're the
• 53:53
  actual remnant of the original Christian Church, and the Catholics
• 53:55
  will say they're the original, and the Orthodox will say
• 53:57
  they're the original. Several believes, but they all believe in
• 53:59
  Jesus Christ, and then they just have different tenets of
• 54:02
  like what worshiping him looks like, giving fires, priests and fathers,
• 54:06
  if it's just a pastor or whatever.
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: So that you found out there was a sect that
• 54:10
  was like, oh, instead of drinking witer, we're drinking blood.
• 54:11
  That people would be like, that's we I don't like.
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: That they're actually so there's historical precedents that that was
• 54:17
  used as part of the early criticisms against Christianity to
• 54:22
  kind of like propaganda against them, because they would be
• 54:24
  like Jesus when he gave the Last Supper, he said,
• 54:27
  this is my body, this is my blood. As often
• 54:29
  as you take do and remembrance of me as he
• 54:31
  passed the bread and the wine. So that's where like
• 54:34
  transubstantiation comes from. Like it's physically it physically becomes the
• 54:37
  flesh as you consume it. But Rome like Nero, when
• 54:43
  there was like, uh, they were trying to blame the
• 54:46
  Christians for the fires and stuff like that. Uh, this
• 54:49
  information would get passed around like yeah the Christians, Yeah,
• 54:53
  well the Romans executed the Christians.
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, because they were they're like a little fucking gutter dwellers.
• 55:00
  They were dude, can you imagine see the Christian day
• 55:03
  be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
• 55:05
  Speaker 4: Well, come down here, I want to tell you something.
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: Well, keep in mind this is also a fuck that
• 55:08
  this is in a polytheistic rome too, So this was
• 55:11
  in a realm where animal sacrifices were common and things
• 55:14
  like that were standardized thing, and then you had this
• 55:17
  group show up who believed aside from the polytheism, this
• 55:21
  one man who was executed by at the hand of
• 55:24
  the Roman state was God made manifest his man and
• 55:29
  then died and resurrected. So it was very different than
• 55:32
  the Roman idea of worshiping Mars and Saturn and Jupiter
• 55:35
  and stuff like that.
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: Always though those were sweet. I love the painting of
• 55:40
  Chronos eaten.
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 55:42
  Speaker 2: As opposed to that, the Christians were like this one
• 55:44
  person who was killed is you know.
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: Oh about all the planets? Do they have telescopes back then?
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: Yes? Really?
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they had planetary bodies. Yeah, holy shit, Well they
• 55:53
  didn't have telescopes. Galilea is the one who invented the telescope.
• 55:56
  They had star charts and they could map locations because
• 55:59
  that's how like, that's how they would sail and stuff
• 56:01
  like that.
• 56:02
  Speaker 3: I bet you Galleo was insufferable. You have backwards too.
• 56:07
  Speaker 6: They named the planets after the gods, not the gods
• 56:10
  after the planets.
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: Oh really yeah, okay, but could you see could you
• 56:16
  see that? Though? Galileo like trying to have a conversation
• 56:19
  with that motherfucker, Oh my God, showed compasses. He's like,
• 56:24
  what do you think of this? You're like, what can
• 56:26
  we are we gonna eat duck or I know where
• 56:28
  they bet them but some yuck.
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: You can still eat duck.
• 56:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm I'm just saying, like, probably more combat than
• 56:35
  I suppose.
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: Anyway.
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: My point is Rome would say things like the Christians
• 56:40
  eat blood and flesh like using that as the thing.
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, they talk about a no as in
• 56:47
  the gutters. No, I bet you down on the super stuff.
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: I bet you down on the sewers as motherfuckers sewers.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: What are you talking to about? They were in the sewers.
• 56:57
  They were not in the sewers.
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: But I will say that that's what they did because
• 57:00
  they're like they're being prosecutes.
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: You're like, what are you going to do? All over.
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: In the sewers and hiding the church was in the sewers.
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: Well, it is in people's houses, and so during the
• 57:09
  New Testament you can hear Paul writing to the churches,
• 57:12
  which are in people's houses.
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: That's why all the Romans are like, I keep hearing
• 57:16
  all these Bible verses under my floorboards.
• 57:22
  Speaker 4: You get it.
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: The amount of people who say online I'm not a
• 57:25
  real Christian because I hang out with you.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: Is alarming, because I hang on me.
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: Well, it's just like he sets on a podcast where
• 57:34
  like his co host just beats him about his religions.
• 57:37
  Speaker 3: I'm not beating you. I'm just I'm just saying the
• 57:39
  back of the day. There's are some there's some gutter fiends.
• 57:41
  Speaker 4: There's some.
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they were in hiding from the government for sure.
• 57:45
  For sure.
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: TNT Actually once again, that's probably that's why they did
• 57:48
  in the comics and put them in the gutters because
• 57:50
  Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, all that kind of stuff.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: I realized how you're talking about the Teenage Mutant.
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the Propa game about Christians eating the blood's
• 57:59
  been around for a long time.
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, as a spider against them.
• 58:02
  Speaker 4: I just didn't know.
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: I mean, I understand, I get I just didn't know
• 58:06
  because there's like there's sex of Christianity down in the
• 58:09
  South where they like they hold fucking snakes up and stuff.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: So those actually came in like the nineteen fifties. Actually
• 58:14
  you have that kind of.
• 58:15
  Speaker 4: Sure wherever it came from.
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: I'm just saying that if there was any sex, that
• 58:19
  would be like we drink blood and also we eat
• 58:20
  fucking skin. Yeah, because how brutal would it be? Would
• 58:24
  that be kind of fucking sweet? The pastor is like,
• 58:25
  all right, time for the deal, and he they bring
• 58:29
  up the robe, up the rope up his back, and
• 58:31
  everyone just goes up and they just off his back
• 58:34
  a little bit. You're like, whatever, you eat a that
• 58:37
  eat an apple with like a knife. You just imagine
• 58:41
  going to like some old motherfucker's back and he's just
• 58:43
  like take it.
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: It's pretty striky.
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well see that's that would be some horror game
• 58:49
  ship like that.
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: What was that?
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: What is that?
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: Fucking uh?
• 58:53
  Speaker 3: What's the out out last? The second one where it's
• 58:57
  like the creepy.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the pastor got that one there.
• 59:00
  Speaker 3: That would be where it's like drink my blood exactly
• 59:03
  like that kind of ship.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I would obviously this would be kind of thing
• 59:08
  to hear it.
• 59:08
  Speaker 6: But I would think that if there was people that
• 59:11
  were practicing like actual cannibalism.
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: And drinking blood, I guess it would pretty much probably
• 59:16
  be illegal.
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: Well, it'd probably be not in the United States. Oh.
• 59:21
  Speaker 3: Also, you know what if you have a pastor doing
• 59:23
  that too, it makes it seem like he probably thinks
• 59:24
  he's God. Yeah right, It's like the woman in Silent
• 59:28
  Hill movie.
• 59:28
  Speaker 4: I'll tell you what you can. You can tell how
• 59:31
  a church.
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: You can tell a church's quality by the fucking breader
• 59:34
  crackers they give you. When those motherfuckers give you those
• 59:36
  thin round crackers. Oh my god, I'm like, can you
• 59:38
  not go to this doore and get some fucking sour
• 59:39
  door some some sour dough, huh like they do They
• 59:45
  do the welch is grape whatever, and then they do
• 59:47
  the little the thing when they when they literally though
• 59:53
  they've done that for children.
• 59:54
  Speaker 6: Yeah, some of them that haven't gone through Canunia.
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: They can't have the wine.
• 59:58
  Speaker 4: But I will say, when they put those thin crackers
• 1:00:00
  your mouth in, Like.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: In all the churches I went to growing up, it's
• 1:00:04
  grape juice all around. That's what's probably. I was always
• 1:00:06
  in surreal against like drinking in any regard.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 6: So the that makes sense.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so it'll be it'll be great.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 6: Catholic and went to Catholic school and you did your
• 1:00:16
  second your first only union in second grade. I wouldn't
• 1:00:19
  then they mean they let you do the grape juice
• 1:00:21
  first and then at second grade immediately they were given
• 1:00:23
  these they were given us wine.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 3: I can say Catholic, I remember the one, the one
• 1:00:26
  that I went to. This Oneckers given us red kool aid.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: Went too.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 4: I mean that different.
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: But I will say but I was like it because
• 1:00:37
  I guess people complain that the welches tastes bad, so
• 1:00:40
  they switched it up to which I kind of. I
• 1:00:42
  always appreciated that taste.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 2: Early Christian writers such as Epiphanus and Salamus claimed that
• 1:00:47
  certain Gnostic sects, which isn't really Christian, but they used
• 1:00:50
  Christiany as a starting point, engaged in immoral rituals, including
• 1:00:54
  the consumption of human remnants.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: Interesting, I used, you just figured there's always there's gotta
• 1:01:00
  be one Gnostics. Would we wanted to do it? The
• 1:01:02
  Gnostics like believe like they believe Jesus was like a god.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: But there's several gods it's kind of like a pantheism
• 1:01:09
  attied to Christianity, and they've got some really wonky beliefs.
• 1:01:12
  The more down you go, so I could definitely see
• 1:01:15
  like some auto cannibalism thing coming out of You can.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 3: Kind of you kind of get a this is with
• 1:01:19
  anybody too, but you can kind of get some when
• 1:01:21
  people are getting too these church situations, you can get some.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 4: You kind of see who has.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: The kind of crazy beliefs When people kind of push
• 1:01:27
  it past whatever they want, they make what they want
• 1:01:29
  to believe. I met some people before, like the church
• 1:01:32
  systance when I was younger, like had like I was
• 1:01:35
  like he would thrive in a Puritan society, that kind
• 1:01:38
  of thing.
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just creepy, sure.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, like there's a I mean it's so varied,
• 1:01:44
  you know, because all that Christianity is at its core
• 1:01:47
  is the belief that Jesus Christ was died for our
• 1:01:50
  sins and was resurrected as the son of God.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: That is it.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: So any other belief that you have that adds on
• 1:01:56
  top of that comes later, is all still Christianity. The Uh,
• 1:02:00
  there's some people that are, in my opinion, are so
• 1:02:03
  heretical in what they do later that it kind of
• 1:02:05
  negates the title, but technically you don't.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 4: You would be a sweet book for us to read.
• 1:02:08
  I guess it's kind of horrid.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: It maybe because I said, Pierodon, we should see if
• 1:02:12
  we could read The Crucible.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 4: Read the Crucible. That's a fucking crazy Also, Dana day.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: Lewis and that just say it it's just your name,
• 1:02:20
  but it's my name.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 4: He does that whole line.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: It's great.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: Have you read that book? It's all about uh, it's
• 1:02:29
  all about a guy. I think his name is John
• 1:02:31
  Proctor or something, John procteror he fucks this like fourteen
• 1:02:34
  year old girl or something like that. I mean, it's
• 1:02:35
  like the fucking it's like period in times whatever. It's
• 1:02:39
  young chick whatever. And he's like, hey, so actually probably
• 1:02:41
  shouldn't do this anymore. You're kind of crazy. So then
• 1:02:43
  she says that she's a witch and she or she
• 1:02:45
  starts blaming other people, all the women in town for
• 1:02:47
  being witches, and it's like all like witch trial. It's
• 1:02:50
  very cool, it's very good. But yeah, Dana day Lewis
• 1:02:53
  is in this. It's probably in the theatres.
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: I always always thought it was a straight to TV movie.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 2: No, if Daniel da Lewis was then it had to
• 1:02:58
  be the theatrical Yet, I've heard the movie talked about before,
• 1:03:02
  so I imagine.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 4: Because I saw that one, that one came around there
• 1:03:04
  was the same time as the other one.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: Was it Scarlet Letter? Scarlet Letter?
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 4: Was that Gary Oldman and Demmy Moore.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: I haven't seen the film.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: That's Nathaniel.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: I'll tell you what that We watched that in school.
• 1:03:14
  Holy shit, boy, you know, like fucking crazy?
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 2: All right, Okay, seventh grade was when the cracks began
• 1:03:24
  to show. All started with the disappearance of Heinrich Einsim.
• 1:03:28
  Hein Rick had been in exchange, sent from Germany. Budgy
• 1:03:31
  kid with suayed blonde hair and has the color of emeralds.
• 1:03:35
  I had known him, but only just barely. He had
• 1:03:38
  been in town for a couple of weeks. In those
• 1:03:41
  two weeks, the shifty eyed kid with the messy hair
• 1:03:44
  had yet to make eye contact with me or anybody else.
• 1:03:47
  I could recognize it for what it was, an attempt
• 1:03:50
  to become invisible, shrink himself down so small that the starving,
• 1:03:54
  gluttonous egos of burgeoning adults.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: Might overlook him.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: The trouble was shrinking yourself away from ever scraps of
• 1:04:01
  your personhood remained visible or left entirely up to interpretation.
• 1:04:05
  The stories started almost immediately. The tightness of his lips
• 1:04:09
  and constant pale shade of his skin twisted by rumor
• 1:04:12
  into some latent sign of wrongdoing. Heinrich's uncle worked for
• 1:04:16
  the Department of Transportation, specifically in the removal of roadkill.
• 1:04:21
  Kids at school shout accusations at him, calling him bizarrely
• 1:04:24
  terrible names like rot mouth, streeting or None of us
• 1:04:29
  were overly surprised to hear that it had gone missing.
• 1:04:33
  Figured he'd probably just ran away. Search was exhaustive, with
• 1:04:37
  everybody coming through the wal mart in the center of
• 1:04:40
  town and broadening the surge from there until we had
• 1:04:43
  covered nearly six miles of woodland. I was surprised at
• 1:04:47
  the end of that day to find myself in the
• 1:04:49
  unusually warm clearing. The afternoon heat of summer shrank away
• 1:04:54
  as the sun sank in the west. The warm air
• 1:04:58
  rose from beneath the leaves, cressing every part of me,
• 1:05:01
  driving the cool evening winds for my bones. The only
• 1:05:05
  sign of him was a scrap of his scalp snagged
• 1:05:07
  on a tree branch behind his uncle's house. They eventually
• 1:05:11
  arrested the uncle, but I got the sense that nobody
• 1:05:14
  felt very good about it, as if it were something
• 1:05:16
  they did just so they could say that they had
• 1:05:18
  done something. I'm a little ashamed to say I had
• 1:05:22
  never really thought about him much after he disappeared. I
• 1:05:24
  moved on with my life as if nothing at all
• 1:05:26
  had happened, because from my perspective, nothing really had. Heimerich
• 1:05:31
  had kept himself as something distant, an oddity only to
• 1:05:34
  be observed. I never truly come to know him, and
• 1:05:38
  thus had never grown to feel any attachment. I was
• 1:05:41
  twenty three years old before I even remembered that he existed.
• 1:05:45
  Coming home from college to visit my folks, I found
• 1:05:48
  the same shrinking tables I had left behind. It seemed
• 1:05:51
  as if every year gave cause for one last chair,
• 1:05:54
  whether it be death, reviewed or simple logistical issues. It
• 1:06:00
  hurt in a way that sits just beneath the surface,
• 1:06:03
  an almost imperceptible constant agony of loss poisoning the air.
• 1:06:08
  When the typical heated political discussion arose, I excused myself
• 1:06:11
  from the situation, not due to a lack of interest,
• 1:06:14
  simply because I felt that whatever ideological victories might be
• 1:06:18
  scored wouldn't be worth the chance of another empty chair.
• 1:06:22
  The woods were as silent as a grave. As I
• 1:06:24
  drudged past fallen logs, a small family of deer wandered
• 1:06:28
  across my path. I remember wondering what life might be
• 1:06:31
  like through their eyes. Many people hold animals to be
• 1:06:34
  base creatures, devoid of real feeling, but I know that's
• 1:06:38
  not the case. At least for some several years prior
• 1:06:42
  when I left for college, I have been driving down
• 1:06:45
  country roads on my way to the new school. Excitement
• 1:06:49
  and possibility danced through my head, rhythmic joy of it all.
• 1:06:53
  Coming to a screeching halt head on the road, I
• 1:06:56
  could see a young fox laying near the median. There
• 1:07:00
  were no visible signs of injury, yet even so it
• 1:07:02
  was immediately obvious the kit was dead. His mother and
• 1:07:07
  siblings crowded around it, prodding gently with their noses, and
• 1:07:11
  I could hear through my open window the sounds of
• 1:07:13
  their gentle whining. It was as if I had found
• 1:07:16
  myself in the middle of some disastrously disheartening Disney movie.
• 1:07:20
  I don't know if the animals of vers feel all
• 1:07:23
  the same things as you or I, but I know
• 1:07:25
  without question.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: That they more just as we do.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: I followed the deer at a distance, all the while
• 1:07:30
  thinking of my own family and the family of foxes.
• 1:07:34
  I was so lost in my aimless, meandering grief that
• 1:07:38
  I didn't even notice when we entered the clearing. It
• 1:07:41
  was the same as it ever was. The images of
• 1:07:44
  the swaying trees heaving their heavy branches to and fro.
• 1:07:47
  The wind carried sweet, warm air to the tree line,
• 1:07:50
  where it seemed to wrap around every inch of me.
• 1:07:54
  Change in temperature said enough that I jumped in slight surprise.
• 1:07:58
  The blood of memory broke loose in my mind, threatening
• 1:08:01
  to carry me away with the torn of recollection, coming
• 1:08:05
  here to cry after Sadie rejected my invitation to the dance,
• 1:08:08
  bringing my first girlfriend, Heather, to experience the warmth of
• 1:08:12
  tranquility which marked this place. I was wrenched back from
• 1:08:16
  my trip down memory Lane by a sudden cacophony of
• 1:08:18
  panic deer calls. I couldn't have looked away for more
• 1:08:22
  than a couple of seconds. The deer had somehow disappeared
• 1:08:25
  from the clearing with the sound of their desperate cries,
• 1:08:28
  now oozing up from beneath the leaf lit or ground.
• 1:08:32
  I don't know if it was down to the state
• 1:08:34
  of my own family or just a streak of naive
• 1:08:36
  caring that prompted me to march out and investigate. The
• 1:08:40
  idea of deciding not to intervene never even occurred to me,
• 1:08:43
  just seemed obvious to me that I should help. Stopping
• 1:08:47
  across the ground, I became aware of a faint, groaning, clunk,
• 1:08:51
  like wet wood underweight. The deer quieted beneath the thumping
• 1:08:55
  of my heavy boots till there was no sound at
• 1:08:58
  all to the ground, clearing half decayed leaves and revealing
• 1:09:03
  a wooden surface much the same.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: I don't know what came over me.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: Maybe it was desperation to help the deer, or perhaps
• 1:09:11
  reckless abandon born of despair, maybe even something so simple
• 1:09:15
  as the call of the void. I jumped once, twice,
• 1:09:22
  and with the third the boards gave way. It was
• 1:09:26
  ever easy to tell how long you were falling. Each
• 1:09:28
  moment stretches out before you, your mind running uselessly at
• 1:09:31
  top speed to find some way of avoiding harm. I
• 1:09:34
  slammed against her terrain both bumpy and sharp, the great
• 1:09:37
  clatter resounding all around me. The smell hit me first,
• 1:09:41
  a thousand years of rot coated in a thick sheen
• 1:09:44
  of freshly baked bread. My eyes adjusted slowly to the
• 1:09:48
  dim light the hole where I had fallen through, acting
• 1:09:51
  it's the only window I was in a pit. Size
• 1:09:54
  of it was impossible to discern amid the crushing darkness,
• 1:09:58
  but the shape was easily surmised from the angle at
• 1:10:00
  which the walls were set. When finally I could see
• 1:10:03
  my fingers, I felt a rush of panicked horror boil
• 1:10:06
  throughout my beam. The ground here was comprised entirely of bone,
• 1:10:12
  scarted femurs and rib cages, intertwined until they reached a
• 1:10:15
  point of resembling stability. I stood slowly, moving with careful
• 1:10:20
  steps across the shifting floor. A rogue vertebrae set my
• 1:10:24
  feet flying out from under me, and I braced for
• 1:10:27
  the pain. As my face greened towards the jagged's surface.
• 1:10:31
  Instead of hard bone, I was met with the warmth
• 1:10:34
  of living tissue. Fresh wet blood coated my cheek. As
• 1:10:40
  I pulled away from the corpse of the father deer
• 1:10:43
  I had seen I scrambled against the wall, struggling to
• 1:10:47
  keep my footing as the bones slid effortlessly across each other.
• 1:10:51
  My knuckles crashed against abandoned skulls and hoofs as I
• 1:10:55
  slipped cartoonishly in the skinking darkness. I stared in raw
• 1:11:00
  untear as a tinkling rumble sounded from somewhere deep within
• 1:11:03
  the heap of rot, a harbinger of things unknown. Gliding
• 1:11:07
  through a sea of death, the ripple closed the space
• 1:11:10
  between us, sliding in seconds through fifteen feet of near
• 1:11:14
  solid bone matrices. So this is just like a literal
• 1:11:18
  deer pit, like a death pit of yeah, bit of
• 1:11:21
  death and blood and stuff come down here.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: Died into Kaid for a long time, and.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 3: This is a place that he's been before, that he's
• 1:11:27
  known this field, yes, but obviously he hasn't been Yeah, yeah,
• 1:11:32
  just boarded up for some reason.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: Somehow the deer got in there without there being an
• 1:11:35
  obvious opening. Stopped at my feet for a moment, all
• 1:11:38
  was still.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: Then a rattling.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: Shuffle began from below the surface. I listened as whatever
• 1:11:44
  it was grew closer, shivers of fear racking my body.
• 1:11:49
  I was shaking so violently that the bones had begun
• 1:11:51
  to displace themselves around me, leading me to sink slightly
• 1:11:54
  down into the pile. A rotted hand, all horrid blacks
• 1:11:59
  and greens, with gleim of stark white blow burst forth,
• 1:12:02
  and then another, slowly and exorably, the bean extracted itself
• 1:12:08
  from the tangled mass of putrid discarded flesh, decayane viscera
• 1:12:13
  lay draped across his exposed skull. All the meat above
• 1:12:16
  his upper lip had been eaten away. His ears pustuless
• 1:12:20
  craters rising with life as insects living with him fled
• 1:12:24
  from his ear canal. The blackness of his empty eye
• 1:12:27
  sockets suddenly parted at their midline, as if phantom eyelids
• 1:12:31
  had opened to reveal the bloodshot emerald eyes of Heinrich Einzim.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 3: That's cool, that's cool, almost popping out like a nat
• 1:12:39
  returned living dead tar man. Whatever. Yeah, I just imagine
• 1:12:42
  that's what he looks like, all droopy and stuff.
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: And rotting off of him.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: And uh, the empty eye suck, it's parted so as
• 1:12:50
  if phantom eye lids had opened, So it's like the skull.
• 1:12:53
  But then there's a supernatural tone where like the eyes
• 1:12:55
  of peer.
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 4: Well, I imagine it's like a deep set and then
• 1:12:58
  in the deep set it just.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: Like, oh you see the green open. Yeah. I think
• 1:13:02
  Tarman is a pretty good.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 3: It's usual I think of, yeah, like zombieesque kind of thing. Yeah,
• 1:13:08
  I will say at the moment, it sounds like a
• 1:13:09
  fucking reverse uh.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: The what's the the like water that makes you youth
• 1:13:18
  forever of the Fountain of Life.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 3: It's like that kind of thing, Fountain of Youth. It's
• 1:13:23
  like kind of like a reverse version of that. It
• 1:13:25
  seems like almost like things that are like born from
• 1:13:27
  death come out of it.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: What is that like? Is that like a Lazarus pit?
• 1:13:30
  What the is that called?
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: Well, the Lazarus Pit is like, well, it's from Batman,
• 1:13:34
  but it's dead. People are laid in it and resurrected.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 4: That's what I mean.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, only in the Lazarus pit they're made young.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 3: Also seems too, with the things boarded up so far,
• 1:13:44
  it almost seems like somebody was like, hey, don't go
• 1:13:47
  don't go over there, and don't go into the lazarus
• 1:13:49
  almost like a almost like a pet cemetery kind of meme.
• 1:13:52
  Yeah or whatever, like hey that like you know dead
• 1:13:55
  is bad like locals. If some whoever knows how long
• 1:13:59
  ago did that? Do you think Heinrich fell in or
• 1:14:02
  do you think he died in the forest and that
• 1:14:04
  it took him there?
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: Mmmm?
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 2: Well, there's that piece of they said, a piece of
• 1:14:08
  his scalp seeing outside of his uncle's house. Maybe his
• 1:14:10
  uncle found him dead and like, I know what can
• 1:14:14
  save him and knew about the pit.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: That or unless something fucking bludgeted him and dragged him back.
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, gotta.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 2: We don't know what the pit's for yet, if it's
• 1:14:21
  deserved something, or if it's just like a thing that happens, right,
• 1:14:25
  Heinrich finished, extruding his torso from within the pile, I
• 1:14:28
  wished desperately for my body to stop quaking. I wanted
• 1:14:32
  to disappear, to become as close to invisible as possible.
• 1:14:36
  That's a good line because it calls back to Heinrich
• 1:14:38
  and school wanting to be invisible. He turned his gaze
• 1:14:40
  to me, his skull rolling limply to the side as
• 1:14:43
  he fixed me with a single, blazing green eye. His
• 1:14:48
  voice was a wet rasp, as if he were speaking
• 1:14:50
  through a wasp nest soaked and viscera.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 3: I found someone from meath to booms huge shoot, see
• 1:15:00
  you hm.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 2: As he finished the sentence, he tried again to turn
• 1:15:03
  both eyes to me, leading his head to rotate around
• 1:15:06
  to the other side, his jaw hanging uselessly for weak
• 1:15:10
  dry tendons mummified by decay. His torso was a writhing
• 1:15:15
  mass of maggets, blot with botfly larva dotting his shoulders
• 1:15:19
  from end to end. His chest pulsed loudly with each
• 1:15:23
  ragged breath. It's the pungent air disturbed the insects nested
• 1:15:27
  in his lungs. Chittering sounds echoed through the chasm as
• 1:15:31
  Heinrich brought himself to loom over me, bowl odor of
• 1:15:35
  rot overpowering as he seeped decomposition across my chest.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 3: Come with me below the bones you ever.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: Here, lashed out with my boot, caving in a large
• 1:15:49
  section of his decrepit rib cage and setting swarms of
• 1:15:51
  insects to buzz through the closed space. I moved as
• 1:15:55
  quickly as I could create distance, but it was impossible
• 1:15:57
  to keep track of him and the endless buzzing star.
• 1:16:01
  I could feel a million legs crawling across my skin,
• 1:16:04
  and I had to swat uselessly at the air to
• 1:16:06
  keep them from my eyes. I wrenched as a fly
• 1:16:09
  crawled briefly into one of my nostrils, imparting the stench
• 1:16:11
  of rotic carried Heinrich let out a cry of terrible rage,
• 1:16:16
  causing another uproar of tiny wings within his chest. The
• 1:16:19
  way his agony.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 2: Warbled and wove itself through the wrathful echo of his
• 1:16:23
  kneeling well caused my head to thrumb with horrible pressure.
• 1:16:27
  I clapped my hands to my ears and scanned desperately
• 1:16:30
  for any possible way to get out. On the far side,
• 1:16:33
  near where I had fallen through, there was a ladder
• 1:16:36
  leading up to a small hatch. My clumsy panic feet
• 1:16:39
  betrayed me as I moved for the ladder, leaving me
• 1:16:42
  sprawled out on the shifting floor. From where I lay,
• 1:16:45
  feeling the infinite jagged edges of rot soaked bones poking
• 1:16:48
  against my chest, I could see Heinrich emerging again.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 3: You entered the pit. You belong You know you belonged
• 1:16:56
  to her. Now nothing of her SESI sky.
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 2: You go blow his voice, stretched wildly between rage and reverence,
• 1:17:06
  filtering through meters of desiccated bone, and echoing off the
• 1:17:09
  walls of the pit. He slid effortlessly through the bones,
• 1:17:12
  and I get to hear the shifting rattle behind me.
• 1:17:15
  As he reached the surface. He wabbled slightly, as if
• 1:17:19
  maintaining balance were a constant effort, his half devoured skull
• 1:17:23
  lolling uselessly from side to side as he swayed. I
• 1:17:27
  scrambled like an animal raking discarded femurs and abandoned four
• 1:17:30
  limbs back past my head as I crawled desperately toward
• 1:17:34
  the ladder, sharks scraping my face as he flew. He
• 1:17:38
  slammed down, splintering the tips of his fingers into tiny shards.
• 1:17:42
  He had fallen short, and then waste my chance. Wrenching
• 1:17:45
  myself upright, I ran for the exit. My heart dropped
• 1:17:49
  as the wet wood flexed beneath my weight. I made
• 1:17:52
  it up one rung and then another for searing pain
• 1:17:55
  tore through my leg from where he had fallen. Ireck
• 1:17:58
  had dragged himself across the room. A chain of deer
• 1:18:01
  thoraxes lay behind him, a sinuous rope of shadowy darkness,
• 1:18:05
  chaining them each to Heinrich's writhing form. He had dragged
• 1:18:08
  himself up and shoved his devastated fingers through my calf
• 1:18:11
  in behind my shin. I panic and tried to pull
• 1:18:14
  the leg away. The pain brought white hot oblivion bleeding
• 1:18:18
  into the edges of my vision as my head swam,
• 1:18:21
  the muscles binding my calf to my shin stretching themselves
• 1:18:24
  against Heinrich's fingers, threatening to sheer away completely. Hot yellow
• 1:18:29
  bile rolled from my throat As the pain threatened to
• 1:18:32
  drive me to unconsciousness, I was dragged back to reality
• 1:18:36
  by the feeling of a splinter slowly piercing my right thumb.
• 1:18:39
  The hand had fallen away from the ladder, dangling down
• 1:18:42
  behind me. There, beyond the tips of my fingers, I
• 1:18:45
  could see the gleam of terrible, hungry malice, suspended cloin
• 1:18:50
  bedded air. He used the fingers planted in my leg
• 1:18:53
  for support, sending waves of brutal agony tearing through me.
• 1:18:57
  He stretched and rised until he had position each of
• 1:19:00
  his jaws around my index, middle and ring fingers. He
• 1:19:05
  chomped down, cheering each finger at the knuckle. I sucked
• 1:19:09
  the fowl air into my lungs as he raised himself
• 1:19:11
  up for more and then there was a horrible tearing sound.
• 1:19:15
  The weight of his form had been too much for
• 1:19:17
  his desiccated tendons to hold. His wrist had come unbound
• 1:19:21
  from his arm. The sudden shift in weight was too
• 1:19:24
  much for his tentative sense of balance. He toppled to
• 1:19:26
  the ground, casting bone and visse across the room in
• 1:19:29
  a wide arc. As he fell, I cried in desperation
• 1:19:33
  as I willed my battered body to climb one wrung,
• 1:19:36
  two more, and I had reached the hatch. I felt
• 1:19:39
  the slam of Heinrich's remain in hand against rung after
• 1:19:42
  rung as I pushed the hatch once it was useless
• 1:19:46
  to flee.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 3: She will go for you. She must go down there,
• 1:19:50
  bloo the bones twice. I didn't want to go, not
• 1:19:55
  at first, but she assured me things. She will assure
• 1:19:59
  you as well.
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 2: Thrice clamped his jaws around the rubber of my boot.
• 1:20:04
  I yanked wildly, sending teeth careening from round the pit.
• 1:20:09
  As my shoulders slammed against the hatch, sunlight burst in,
• 1:20:13
  illuminating Heinrich's infested de cane form. Tumbling down into the pit.
• 1:20:18
  Scrambled out into the afternoon air. The sun against my
• 1:20:23
  skin gave me a feeling that the nightmare was over,
• 1:20:26
  even as disembodied fingers still wriggled in my calf. I
• 1:20:29
  carefully removed the hand fingers curling themselves in an attempt
• 1:20:33
  to hook into my flesh. As I pulled each one loose,
• 1:20:35
  stumbled across the clearing, collapsed against a fallen tree. So
• 1:20:39
  that was that entire segment was really cool. There's a
• 1:20:42
  giant pile of bones, and he still kept alive for
• 1:20:44
  some reason to serve whatever her is.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 4: How many years has passed this has happened since he's
• 1:20:48
  been missing.
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 3: Well, he was in middle school right now, twenty three, Yeah,
• 1:20:51
  so at least ten years more than yeah, ten years,
• 1:20:55
  ten years, i'd say.
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: So, it's been a decade and he's been down there
• 1:20:57
  to cane, but still alive.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 3: It seems like whatever this whoever her is, it seems
• 1:21:02
  like it's using her memory, or it's using our protagonist
• 1:21:06
  memory of Heinrich and this whole passing to manifest him again.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 2: Oh it could be at some point. Yeah, well, I
• 1:21:12
  mean his Heinrich's body did fall in there, Oh it did.
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 3: I'm just saying that, like I wonder how many victims
• 1:21:16
  there are, and it just seems like very convenient that
• 1:21:18
  it's like.
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, I know this kid, Yeah you know, yeah, that's true.
• 1:21:21
  I see what you're saying. I wonder if it just
• 1:21:23
  if people just come in this clearing and they're.
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: Pulled under you. Now, this actually seems like it.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 2: This works too, because there's a bunch of kind of
• 1:21:29
  like random fields you'll come across in the Tennessee Mountains,
• 1:21:33
  Like you come over the bow of a hill and
• 1:21:35
  it's like, hey, here's just a clear spot or that. Yeah,
• 1:21:38
  it's like or it was at one point, but now
• 1:21:40
  it just looks like grown up grass and flowers and
• 1:21:42
  for some reason, no trees grow there.
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, just fall down the pit.
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It makes you think.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 2: And it also like Appalachia's got a ton of sinkholes
• 1:21:50
  in it where the mountains are so old, there's random
• 1:21:52
  times where like holes will just Cavince's kind of this
• 1:21:55
  ties into that with like maybe one of those clearings
• 1:21:58
  is home to something like this. That's pretty cool. My
• 1:22:02
  eyes were heavy. The worms of the sun was richly intoxicating,
• 1:22:06
  grabbing me in its embrace and begging me to be still.
• 1:22:09
  I looked down on my leg my fingers. It was
• 1:22:12
  bleeding horribly, so I used my belt for a tourniq
• 1:22:14
  kit on my leg and did my best to keep
• 1:22:16
  my hand above my head. Clenched off the belt, suddenly
• 1:22:20
  becoming aware of a dragging thump and an incoherent, wrathful voice.
• 1:22:25
  Heinrich dragged himself from the pit and up endo the
• 1:22:28
  clearing the effort, causing him his ragged arms, which like
• 1:22:32
  flopping in piles of shredded rot, ripped away from his Torso.
• 1:22:36
  I also like how all the pieces of the body
• 1:22:38
  continue interacting after the detached from him. The remaining flesh
• 1:22:42
  of his face had been lost in the effort as well,
• 1:22:45
  leaving only his wild, furdin eyes to leer at me.
• 1:22:49
  He edged forward now by using his upper jaw to
• 1:22:51
  gain purchase in the earth. He was about seven feet
• 1:22:55
  away when a set of ribs snagged on the edge
• 1:22:57
  of the hole, causing the strain to overcome the bond
• 1:23:00
  of his vertebrae. His skull disconnected from his neck with
• 1:23:04
  a soft click, His eyes, experiencing a decade of decayed
• 1:23:08
  an instant it blistered and boiled away into a greasy,
• 1:23:12
  vaporous dust.
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: The chain of torsos with Heinrich at its end. Wriggled
• 1:23:17
  twice before backsliding into the pit. That's cool.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 3: It's like a.
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: Tentacle, almost like bones.
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 2: The motion, openly deliberate, drove icy despair into my heart.
• 1:23:29
  I began to crawl away, looking back only once when
• 1:23:32
  I heard the heaving, ragged breath of a dying animal,
• 1:23:36
  the slam of a bugging pod, drawing my eye back
• 1:23:39
  to the pit's edge. Flaws longer than my ring finger
• 1:23:43
  protruded from gangrenous fleshy stumps, round furry ears, just barely
• 1:23:50
  peeking over the edge, sound of wood splintering, the sight
• 1:23:54
  of that monstrous paw slipping off the edge where enough
• 1:23:57
  to set me sobbing as I dragged myself home. That's cool,
• 1:24:01
  it's like a living pit. That's like beckoning for him
• 1:24:04
  up there. A neighbor found me a few miles down
• 1:24:06
  the road. I was covered in bites and stings, some
• 1:24:09
  of them incurred in the pit, and others on the
• 1:24:11
  journey home. Dad was hysterical in the hospital, but Mom
• 1:24:15
  was there for me. She always had a way of
• 1:24:17
  setting herself aside when I needed her. Even as she
• 1:24:20
  caressed my bandage hand and petted my cheek. I could
• 1:24:23
  see in her eyes how badly she wanted to break
• 1:24:26
  down in tears, the mournful welling of her heart, prying
• 1:24:29
  desperately at the corners of her mouth. Eventually, when I
• 1:24:33
  was able to speak again, I told my story. You
• 1:24:36
  can guess how that went. Took a few weeks of
• 1:24:38
  begging before they'd even bothered to check the pit. When
• 1:24:42
  the sheriff finally made his way out there, he found
• 1:24:44
  Heinrich's battered skull sitting at the edge of a chasm.
• 1:24:48
  The empty pit stood thirty feet across and more than
• 1:24:51
  sixty feet deep. They had it back filled before I left.
• 1:24:55
  The hospital showed me pictures once the thing. I couldn't
• 1:25:00
  help but notice about those pictures, yeh, how infinite. The
• 1:25:03
  darkness seemed to grow so the hole banked off at
• 1:25:06
  the bottom couldn't help it shudder and thinking something massive
• 1:25:11
  had tunneled its way out of the deer pit. Sometimes
• 1:25:15
  they at nine, the rumbling of passing cars starts to
• 1:25:18
  sound familiar in a way that makes my heart sink. Oh, oh,
• 1:25:23
  that ending's awesome. It's like the giant This like a thing,
• 1:25:29
  like a pile of flesh, like the thing is tunneling
• 1:25:32
  under the mountain.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well it seems like something that's underneath it's I
• 1:25:36
  keep picturing like a almost like a giant worm or
• 1:25:39
  something like some kind of entity that's collecting bodies and
• 1:25:42
  like making itself larger.
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 4: That's kind of a picture whatever.
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: It's like, Oh, the Heinrich's body collapsed with then the
• 1:25:47
  rest of the thing fell through it. To me, it
• 1:25:49
  was like Heinrich's body fell off and then the worm
• 1:25:51
  kind of it went back in the uh.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: And knowing now that it'll be seen, it just goes
• 1:25:55
  somewhere else and goes to a different area.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 3: What do you think the connection was with the connection
• 1:25:59
  between people that are like Heinrich trying to be not
• 1:26:02
  to be seen. And then we have a similar thing
• 1:26:06
  with our protagonist here with his own family of like
• 1:26:10
  not wanting to intrude or impose on certain things because
• 1:26:12
  he doesn't want people to whisk away. He doesn't want
• 1:26:15
  people to go away, right, whether through death or through feuds.
• 1:26:21
  It seems something very similar there with so.
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 2: With that with the death thing, I think going back
• 1:26:27
  to pet cemetery, sometimes dead is better.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's like, well, I don't want to lose people.
• 1:26:32
  I don't want to that.
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 2: It's like, well, if you hold on too long, you
• 1:26:35
  know what would that look like? And then the deer
• 1:26:37
  pit's a physical manifestation of that where it's a it's
• 1:26:40
  a giant growth where nothing can die in it.
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 4: That's why I didn't know. It's like, yeah, no one's
• 1:26:46
  found that pit pit yet.
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 3: I wonder if, just like if it isn't coincidental that
• 1:26:49
  it's like, is there something that lulled him to it?
• 1:26:51
  Does it feed off people that are like it?
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 2: Kind of like that's a good point because he was
• 1:26:55
  talking about like how he thought about his family and
• 1:26:58
  then he thought of the foxes he saw. There's this
• 1:27:01
  continuing theme that he's like death is bad, Like he
• 1:27:03
  fears death or losing things. So he sees the deer
• 1:27:05
  and he follows them off, and it's almost like the
• 1:27:08
  deer at least symbolically lead him to the realization that
• 1:27:12
  maybe it's okay if things are dead. Maybe maybe it's
• 1:27:15
  okay if some things aren't around forever, because they if
• 1:27:17
  they are around forever, they just rot, right.
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 3: I'm trying to think of a different way of saying that,
• 1:27:21
  like almost like like the temporariness of life, and also
• 1:27:27
  just like the change of time or something. There's something there.
• 1:27:30
  I'd have to process it more, but I really the
• 1:27:33
  ending had a lot of fun to it. The gross
• 1:27:36
  kind of body horror visuals and stuff. I mean, I
• 1:27:38
  always eat up, but I do think like showing the
• 1:27:41
  entity at the very or revealing the entity at the
• 1:27:44
  very end, and then just having this idea that it's
• 1:27:46
  like kind of burrowing and digging and it almost seems
• 1:27:48
  like it's following him.
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 2: It was a great dripping of information because when we
• 1:27:51
  first see it, it's like, oh, there's bones down here,
• 1:27:53
  and then Heinrich comes out and it's like, oh, he's
• 1:27:57
  like a zombie. But then you see he's connected to
• 1:28:00
  everything and it's all one flesh, and it's like, oh,
• 1:28:02
  this is all one thing. And then the tentacle and
• 1:28:05
  the paw, and then to realize this isn't just a pit.
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: It moves.
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 2: And I love that last line because there's so many
• 1:28:11
  times you'll be hiking, like where my house is. I'll
• 1:28:13
  be hiking in the woods around my house, but the
• 1:28:14
  interset's nearby, so while you're hiking, you can still hear
• 1:28:17
  the Yeah, like the gentle on the asphalt. But then
• 1:28:23
  that idea that sometimes it's like it sounds similar, but
• 1:28:27
  that could be something else, something tunneling under. That's so
• 1:28:30
  that's such a cool note. It ends on a high note.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 3: It has a remnants of like kind of I guess
• 1:28:35
  what I was trying to say was like your past
• 1:28:37
  comes back to haunt you in a lot of weird ways.
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: I just the idea that it was like he felt
• 1:28:41
  guilty about Heinrich.
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the thing is too convenient to where it feels
• 1:28:45
  like to me it regurgitated him because he to allure
• 1:28:50
  in another body to the pit.
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he talks to the game like he was almost
• 1:28:53
  like he'd be embarrassed to be his friend because everyone
• 1:28:55
  else called him, oh.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: Oh what was that hold on that note? What rot mouth? Yeah? Yeah,
• 1:29:01
  they made fun of him because his.
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 2: Dad would clean up dead animals from the road, and
• 1:29:05
  then he becomes a part of this dead ENDM Wait
• 1:29:08
  was it his dad or his uncle who cleaned dead animals?
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 3: I think he said dad, Okay, is dad You're trying
• 1:29:15
  to say his uncle kill nor or something.
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: No, he didn't kill him.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: That if he died, he would know where to put
• 1:29:20
  the body that the body can live forever, because if
• 1:29:23
  he cleans up dead animals, maybe they just go into
• 1:29:26
  the pit, right, and maybe like there's some people in
• 1:29:29
  the mountains.
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: That's a that's a cool note. His clean up dead
• 1:29:33
  animals and he's in the dead animal.
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 3: This entity is also very indicative of Heinrich himself and art.
• 1:29:39
  I mean, like it's hiding in a pit. It's like
• 1:29:41
  not revealing, it doesn't want to reveal itself.
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's a girl at the base of it.
• 1:29:45
  That's a that's an interesting Yeah. No, I forgot that.
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 3: That was kind of very like quick.
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's just it's just what Heinrich says, So
• 1:29:52
  you can interpret that as kind of like they he
• 1:29:55
  refers to the entity as her whatever the court is,
• 1:29:58
  or maybe a woman started all this.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: Maybe this is some ancient being that's been in the
• 1:30:02
  mountains for century.
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 2: Or the first cause, Yeah, a woman was cursed with
• 1:30:06
  something and then other bodies piled on tour and cheese
• 1:30:08
  at the core of it. It gives you enough that
• 1:30:11
  you can tell there's purpose to it, but there's room
• 1:30:13
  to speculate on what stuff means. And those are those
• 1:30:15
  are always my favorite, Like the thing right. Those are
• 1:30:17
  my favorite movie Monsters where you see enough that you're like,
• 1:30:20
  there's clearly a design here, but then it's like, but
• 1:30:24
  what does this mean?
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: What would that mean?
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 2: And you get to like wonder in your head with
• 1:30:28
  details and stuff. To me, that's like where the best
• 1:30:30
  horror is, where you can tell there's a blueprint, but
• 1:30:32
  we don't get a look right at it.
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it always seems to be the most effective.
• 1:30:36
  I think one of the people also come out. I
• 1:30:37
  will say that I have a huge respect for people
• 1:30:39
  who have an idea of what something is and they
• 1:30:42
  present it to be judged. I think sometimes I feel
• 1:30:45
  like people hide behind the ambiguity factor.
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 2: They can't a lot they can, but I will say
• 1:30:49
  it's like this, Yeah, I think it serves the story. Also,
• 1:30:53
  I don't need I don't want there to be a
• 1:30:55
  part where he's like I looked it up online and
• 1:30:56
  I found out about a woman in the seventeen hundreds.
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: Just hearing her and just seeing like the flesh growth
• 1:31:03
  that tunnels. That's enough for me that I'm.
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 4: The animal motifs And both of these stories were a
• 1:31:08
  lot of fun.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 3: I like that we got the pov of the of
• 1:31:10
  the animal and almost both of them of like a
• 1:31:13
  literal animal and then like this creature presenting itself to
• 1:31:16
  another person.
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 2: With the first story, because I do think it was
• 1:31:19
  an animal being hunted by people. Yeah, I like the
• 1:31:22
  idea there that it's like an animal afraid of people,
• 1:31:25
  and then it's like people afraid of an amalgamation of animals,
• 1:31:28
  like something great, Like we're hunted by something greater, we
• 1:31:31
  just may.
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: Not realize it yet. That's a really cool, like furtherance idea.
• 1:31:35
  I think two home runs from the two home runs
• 1:31:38
  as always, Hey, I tell you what, the guys who
• 1:31:40
  watched the show, the guys and gals who watched the show,
• 1:31:43
  they they can put a story together.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 4: I will say the uh, just speaking to the tales
• 1:31:48
  and the cruise as well.
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 3: I just if you're ever interested in writing a story
• 1:31:51
  and you actually want feedback.
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 4: On both of the stories there were, there.
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 3: Were a lot of there a ton of people in
• 1:31:56
  the replies giving are actually engaging with the stories. I
• 1:31:58
  think that if you're ever int in writing, even if
• 1:32:00
  it's something that's just like you don't even want to
• 1:32:02
  be read, I think it's just an idea of if
• 1:32:04
  you're trying to get into storytelling or if you're just
• 1:32:06
  trying to get into writing. I think it's a great
• 1:32:07
  opportunity because there is just such a fun little fan
• 1:32:10
  base there, and I hope that it keeps growing. But guys,
• 1:32:12
  that's our episode today. Thank you so much for watching
• 1:32:14
  on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Give us a nice reading there,
• 1:32:17
  And thank you to our beautiful patrons for supporting the channel.
• 1:32:20
  We do appreciate you, and until next time, we will
• 1:32:22
  see you in the next one. Stay creeped.