CreepCast - The Red Tower | Creep Cast

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

The boys read legendary author Thomas Ligotti's work, marking it as the first non-creepy pasta book on the channel. This episode covers three short stories from the author that showcase his wide range of style. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is the cold habitual, and it is the froy of the mountains blue. The frowice at its summit. Coors Light, t'envee in a fraud. Celebrate in a fashion responsible, you have to have the age legal for consuming the alcohol.

Woo! Stop! Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket. To my new movie, The Naked Gun. Liam Nissan. Buy your tickets now. I get a free Tilly Dog.

Chili Dog, not included. The Naked God. Tickets on sale now. August 1st. Welcome back to Creepcast. Today we are diving out of the internet and we're diving into literature, I should say. Not that we don't read literature on this show. We do. There's classics.

There's beautiful pieces of art. But today we are actually going into, I believe, our very first. non creepy pasta published book that we actually got approval to read and i'm super stoked we're moving up in the world we're having like actual people in the real world be like hey you could read this if you want yeah next thing you know next thing you know buddy we're going to be the one taking advantage of young writers see i'm going to be i'm going to be the one yeah i'm going to be the one to go up to people and be like don't you want your book to be read on this show every store you've ever written two hundred dollars how's that sound i need i'm going to read you entire

works for $7. Thank you. But the PR, the publicity, the exposure. But the exposure, my friend, the exposure. Exposure. Think of the exposure. No, uh, they're going to be rich. This is, uh, Thomas Logody.

I have been recommended his stories by so many different people. That's why I'm really excited. I have buddies who are like storyboard, uh, artists. I have people who are writers. I have people who are musicians. And like, I've had so many people. recommend Thomas Logody. And today we're going to be starting off with his one of his very prominent short story

horror short story writer. We're starting off with the Red Tower, but we're also doing a collection. We're going to be reading from his collection of short stories from the songs of the songs of a dead dreamer and grim scribe, which is a penguin publishing book of stories. So it's going to be a nice day of cozy short stories and getting to read some. very some classics dare i say also we got new merge look at this i'm wearing i'm wearing the new eat me like a bug shirt boys look at that got tiny wines got amazing it's amazing shirt look at this ooh clean it feels amazing which one are you wearing isaiah i'm wearing the my better half shirt

which uh features me as a jeff goldblum esk scientist from the fly uh with Hunter being the tumorous gross that comes out of my nipple, just like in real life. That's true. Creepcasts down the sleeves. And it is super comfortable, super high quality print. And we also have a couple of other items. Don't we do? We have shorts. Beautiful

gym shorts. We've got shorts. Or it's the spring, going to be into the summer where you got to get your legs out. You know, it's the guns of the legs. That's what they say. So guns of the legs. So you do that. And it pairs beautifully with our crew neck

a sweater, a creep cast, ghoul sweater. It's a nice little ghost little. You know, I have to say I'm a dude that the fits together diabolical, unbelievable. Mm-hmm. They go crazy hard. I will also say that if you have our previous merge drop of the, uh, our heads hanging the shrunken heads,

you have to buy the shorts because the designs go perfectly together. It looks like you got a whole track suit on. It's beautiful. They're very, very nice. I just want to also say that these shirts are I don't know are they oversized this time put a thing up are they oversized there's a lot of weird we heard your feedback people are being like I didn't realize it was so big all this kind of shit this is the standard sizing we're putting up a graphic here this is the sizing do with that what you will that way you can't complain don't complain to me don't complain to me when you're like hey it's well you can complain to hunter that's fine you complain to Isaiah this time I think

hunter no no I'm not going to well actually you can't complain because I don't look at it I'll never know it's just me over here i hide everything i don't even know if people are watching my videos i can't i don't know all i know is go to this link right here or click the link in the description of the comments you probably have some shit there click it if you want to get some merch if not i don't you know it is what it is all right do you have enough you might have enough shirts i don't know if you don't there's some options that's all i got to say boom also and if you do if you do have enough shirts you still are obligated to buy this because we said so yes creepcast dot store check it out we got new stuff up now dude it's going to be beautiful we already sent thomas legoti his stuff he swagged out

also just want to say for people who are listening on audio right now we appreciate you be sure to give us a nice uh five star rating or thumbs up all that kind of stuff it does help us out and if you're watching this on youtube consider checking us out on spotify and apple podcast and it helps us a lot so check it out we appreciate you thank you so much guys and let's get into some red tower dude let's get legote me up let's get let's get how do you how do you make that a nice you know like because people say you know i'm creeping my cast all that stuff i creep my cat how would you do that with legody i'm licking my goadie just to me just just just immediately i also hate up child like that was i'm licking my goate i'm not not licking i'm licking i know i'm licking my gody or i'm licking

my Odie. I'm licking my Odie. I'm licking my Odie. I'm licking my Odie. We're about a lig or Odie. By the lig my. I'm about a lig my Odie. About a leg that Odie. Spread me open and all over the place. Spread me open and a lig my Odie. You always, you always somehow, regardless of what the conversation is, you come back to spreading or split me open. Split me open. Split me up until you see my Odie. That's your classic move. It's all I know. It's all I know. Spread. Spread. smear, scrape. She smear my, she smear my lig until I get my Odie.

Oh, no, that's, we like that. She creeping my cast till I, my cast till I lig my Odie. Fuzz. Yeah, that's good. I like that. See, now it's going. She creeped my cast till I od.

So after we've already besmirch this man's name, we should, we should be, now we're primed to be won over by his beautiful story. Which, like I said, we'll get into it right now. The first story of today, snuggle on up, dear. Listener, viewer, the first story is called the Red Tower. Let us begin.

The ruined factory stood three stories high in an otherwise featureless landscape. Although somewhat imposing on its own terms, it occupied only the most unobtrusive place within the gray emptiness of its surroundings, its presence serving as a mere accent upon a desolate horizon. No road led to the factory, nor were there any traces of one that might have been. have led to it at some point in the distant past. If there had ever been such a road, it would have been rendered useless as soon as it arrived at one of the four red brick sides of the factory, even in the days when the facility was

in full operation. The reason for this was simple. No doors had been built into the factory. No loading docks or entranceways allowed penetration of the outer walls of the structure, which was solid brick on all four sides without even a single window below the level of the second floor. The phenomenon of a large factory so closed off from the outside world was a point of extreme fascination to me.

It was almost with regret that I ultimately learned about the factory subterranean access. But, of course, that revelation in its turn also became a source for my truly degenerate sense of amazement, my decayed fascination. My decayed fascination got me chubbed up a little bit, I'll be honest. The decayed fascination. Yeah, that was sick. Is that what you have, a decayed fascination? I have a decayed fascination.

I'm also picturing this like a, my mind immediately went to a, like, oh, like fucking industrial revolution, like those old, like, you know, like late 1800s, like fucking cloudy ass sky. Fog fog or smoke filled sky. You know, like no, no signs of life, basically.

Dirt. Like just dry. Hellish landscape. Very, very empty. Very. Yeah. just like a subtle, a little subtle breeze. Dancing along.

The factory had long been in ruins. It's innumerable bricks worn and crumbling. Its many windows shattered. Each of the three enormous stories that stood above the ground level was vacant of all but dust and silence. The machinery, which densely occupied the three floors of the factory as well as considerable space beneath it, is said to have evaporated.

I repeat, evaporated. Soon after the factory. decreased operation, leaving behind only a few spectral outlines of deep vats and tanks, twisting tubes and funnels, harshly grinding gears and levers, giant belts and wheels that could be most clearly seen at twilight. And later, not at all. According to these strictly hallucinatory accounts, the whole of the red tower, as the factory was known, had always been subject to fadings at certain times. This phenomenon in the delirious or dying words of several witnesses was due to a profound hostility between the noisy and melodrous

operations of the factory and the desolate purity of the landscape surrounding it. The conflict occasionally resulting in temporary erasures or fadings of the former by the latter. Despite their ostensibly mad or credulous origins, these testimonies, it seemed to me, deserved more than a cursory hearing. The legendary conflict between the factory and the grayish territory surrounding it, may very well have been a fabrication of individuals who were lost in the advanced stages of either physical or psychic deterioration. Nonetheless, it was my theory, and remained so, that the Red Tower was not always the peculiar color for which it ultimately earned its fame. Thus, the encrimsoning of the factory was a betrayal of breaking off, for it is my postulation that this ancient structure was in long-forgotten days the same pale hue as the world which encompassed it.

Furthermore, with an insight born of dispassion to the point of total despair, I envision that the Red Tower was never solely devoted to the lowly functions of an ordinary factory. Beneath the three soaring stories of the Red Tower were two, possibly three other levels. The one immediately below the first floor of the factory was the nexus of a unique distribution system for the goods which were manufactured on all three of the floors above. first subterranean level in many ways resembled and functioned in the manner of an old-fashioned underground mine. Elevator compartments enclosed by a heavy wire mesh, twisted and corroded, descended far below the surface into an expansive chamber which had been crudely dug out of the rocky

earth and was haphazardly perpetuated by a dense structure of supports, a criss-crossing network of posts and pillars, beams, and rafters that included a variety of materials. Wood, metal, concrete, bone, and a fine sinewy webbing that was fibrous and quite firm. From the central chamber radiated a system of tunnels that honeycomb the land beneath the gray and desolate country surrounding the Red Tower. Through these tunnels, the goods manufactured by the factory would be carried, sometimes literally by hand, but more often by means of small wagons and carts, reaching near and far into the most obscure and unlikely delivery points. The trade that was originally produced by the Red Tower was in some sense remarkable, but not at first of an extraordinary or especially ambitious nature.

These were a gruesome array of goods that could perhaps best be described as novelty items. In the beginning there was a chaotic quality to the objects and constructions produced by the machinery at the Red Tower, a randomness that yielded formless things of no consistent shape or size or apparent design. occasionally there might appear a peculiar ashen lump that betrayed some semblance of a face or clawing fingers or perhaps an assemblage that looked like a casket with tiny irregular wheels but for the most part the early production seemed relatively innocuous after a time however things began to fall into place as they always do rejecting a harmless and uninteresting disorder never an enduring state of affairs and taking on the more usual plans and purposes of a viciously intent creation.

So it was that the Red Tower put into production its new, more terrible, and perplexing line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest far heavier, and loggots whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black, reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stage of disease, and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch.

There's a fake, disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight and insistently grew back should one attempt to clip them. No, I just said, what the fuck? That's just such a weird thing. A disembodded hand. It's like every time you clip it, it just like keeps growing its nails. The fingernails keep getting longer.

It's almost like, I'm thinking of like a, almost like a Ramshorn or something. You know what I mean? Like curling and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But imagine like actually seeing a thumb, like actually imagine seeing like a thumbnail like push out.

Like I almost see it like not. The nail isn't growing from the tip. It's like just like, pushing out from underneath the skin of the thumb, like your finger, you know? So it's just like, yeah, impossibly just kind of like oozing out of the, out of the thumb. Or I say thumb just because I'm looking at my thumb. I just mean their fingers. I just, it's just kind of a, just kind of a gross insight.

It's so weird to it's like, it's such a, sorry to interrupt. I was just going to say it's, it's such a weird, uh, kind of gross to think about kind of like yucky visual that were being delivered here when everything else has been so like kind of elegant with like even like lockets. you know it's like this this impossibly black like you're almost looking to space whenever you open up these lockets so it's just it just kind of threw me off guard a bit when I first read that it's like they represent some kind like problems with like you with people and stuff like that because it's like it's a dull structure that he says at one point was probably white and it's grown red over time like a disease has corrupted it and then from the minds underneath it will produce like a locket but instead of a loved one inside it's an abyss or it will produce

he said like a physiological structures but they have evidence of disease around them like you know organs that are rotted and deteriorated it's like it's uh corrupted people or corrupted flesh is being birthed numerous natural objects mostly bulbous gourds were designed to produce a long deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as harding globs of lava into whose rough in igneous forms were set a pair of roomy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. There was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk that left a most intracable stain, greasy and green.

on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed and ultimately replaced by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual's death roll. Wow, that's sick. That's so cool.

I like to imagine that it's like an actual person's like final breaths. like oh dude totally but you know it's it's kind of cool to think about it's like every time you do it though it's a different part like almost like it's a different one yeah yeah yeah be funny yeah you're like you're like oh my god the next one's just like

the sucking sound whenever you're like what open it open it again oh weird and the next what the hell is this music I'm going to need a couple minutes alone with the music box, I think. Yeah, you just, someone's in a closet.

They're like, open it and shun it really quick, like, no, no, no. Yeah, finally, there you are. Flipping through all the dine people. There's my favorite ghost. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch and a gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects. while the circling hands were reptilian tongues, slender and pink.

But these examples hardly began to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused upon for a certain length of time, compose themselves into fleeting, phantasmagoric scenes of a kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain. God, that's so, it's so sick. That the carpets, like, you see things.

Well, yeah. They're like morph in front of me. He's also saying that the patterns are so complex that it, to me, I read that as like you will go insane. Yeah, the incomprehensible carpet. As it was revealed to me, and as I have already revealed to you, the means of distributing the novelty goods fabricated at the red tower was a system of tunnels located on the first level, not the second or possibly third, but had been excavated below the three-story

factory building itself. It seems that these subterranean levels were not necessarily foundation of the original plan of the factory, but were in fact a perverse and unlikely development that might have occurred only as the structure known as the Red Tower underwent, over time, its own mutation from some prior state until it finally became a lowly site for manufacturing. This mutation apparently demanded the excavating, whether from above or below, I cannot say, of a system of tunnels as a means for distributing the non-rengths of tunnels as a means for distributing the novelty goods, which, for a time, the factory produced.

As the unique inventions of the Red Tower achieved their final forms, they seemed to be assigned specific locations to which they were destined to be delivered, either by hand or by small wagons or carts pulled over sometimes great distances through the system of underground tunnels. Where they might ultimately pop up was anybody's guess. It might be in the back of a dark closet, buried under a pile of undistinguished junk, where some item of the highest and most extreme novelty would lie for quite some time before it was encountered by sheer accident or misfortune. Conversely, the same invention, or an entirely different one, might be placed on the night

table beside someone's bed for near immediate discovery. Any delivery point was possible, none was out of reach of the Red Tower. There has even been testimony, either intensely hysterical or semi-conscious, of items from the factory being uncovered within the shelter of a living body or one not long deceased. I know that such an achievement was within the factory's powers, given its later production history. But my own degenerate imagination is most fully captured by the thought of how many of those monstrous novelty goods produced at the Red Tower have been scrupulously and devoutly delivered

solely by the way of those endless underground tunnels, daringly remote places they would never be found nor ever could be. Truly, the Red Tower worked in mysterious ways. Just as a system of distribution tunnels had been created by the factory when it developed into a manufacturer of novelty goods, an expansion of the system was required as an entirely new phase of production gradually evolved. Inside the wire mesh elevator compartment that provided access between the upper region of the factory and the underground tunnels, there was now a special lever installed, which, when pulled back or possibly pushed forward, I do not know such details, enabled one to descend to a second subterranean level. This laterally excavated area

was much smaller, far more intimate than the one directly above it. As could be observed, the instant the elevator compartment came to a stop and a full view of things was attained. The scene which now confronted the uncertain minds of witnesses was in many ways like that of a secluded graveyard, surrounded by a rather crooked fence of widely spaced pickets held together by rusty wire. The headstones inside the fence all closely pressed against one another and were quite common, though somewhat antiquated in their design. However, there were no names or dates inscribed on those monuments, nothing at all, in fact, the exception of some rudimentary and abstract ornamentation. This could be verified only when the subterranean graveyard was closely approached,

for the lighting at this level was dim and unorthodox, provided exclusively by the glowing stone walls and closing the area. These walls seemed to have been covered with phosphorescent paint which bathed the graveyard in a cloudy, grayish haze. For the longest time, how long I cannot say, my morbid reveries were focused on this murky vision of a graveyard beneath the factory, a subterranean graveyard surrounded by a cricket picket fence and suffused by the highly defective illumination given off by phosphorescent paint applied to stone walls.

For the moment, I must emphasize the vision itself, without any consideration paid to the utilitarian purposes of this place. That is, the function it served in relation to the factory above it. The truth is that at some point, all of the factory's functions were driven underground to this graveyard level. long before the complete evaporation of machinery in the red tower, something happened to require the shutdown of all operations in the three floors of the factory which were above ground level. The reasons for this action are deeply obscure, a matter of contemplation only when a state of hopeless and devouring curiosity has reached its height, when the burning light of speculation becomes so intense that it threatens to incinerate everything on which it shines. To my own mind, it seems entirely valid to reiterate. at this juncture the long-standing tensions that existed between the Red Tower, which I believe was not always stigmatized by such a hue and such a title, and the grayish landscape of utter

desolation that surrounded the structure on all sides, looming around and above it for quite incalculable distances. But below the ground level of the factory was another matter. It was here that its operation at some point retreated. It was here, specifically at this graveyard level. that they continued. Clearly, the Red Tower had committed some violation or offense, its clamoring activities and unorthodox products, perhaps its very existence, constituting an affront to the changeless quietude of the world around it. My personal judgment, there had been a betrayal involved, a treacherous breaking of a bond. I can certainly picture a time before the existence of the factory.

Before any of its features blemished the featureless country that extended so great, and so desolate on every side. Dreaming upon the grayish desolation of that landscape, I also find it quite easy to imagine that there might have occurred a lapse in the monumental tedium, a spontaneous and inexplicable impulse to deviate from a dreary perfection, perhaps even an unconquerable desire

to risk a move toward attempting defectiveness. As a concession to this impulse or desire out of nowhere, as a minimal surrender, a creation took place and a structure took place and a structure took form where there had been nothing of its kind before. I picture it, at its inception, as a barely discernible eruption in the landscape, a mere sketch on an edifice,

possibly translucent when making its first appearance, a gray density rising in the darkness, embossed upon it a most tasteful and harmonious design. But such structures or creations have their own desires, their own destinies to fulfill, their own mysteries and mechanisms which they must follow at whatever risk. From gray and desolate and utterly featureless landscape, a dull edifice had been produced,

a pale, possibly translucent tower, which, over time, began to develop into a factory, into issue, as if in the spirit of the most grotesque belligerents, a line of quite morbid, quite wonderfully disgusting novelty goods. In an expression of defiance, at some point, point, it reddened was an enigmatic passion for betrayal and perversity. On the surface, the Red Tower might have seemed a splendid compliment to the grayish desolation of its surroundings, a unique, picturesque composition that served to define the glorious essence

of each of them. But in fact, there existed between them a profound and ineffable hostility. An attempt was made to reclaim the Red Tower, or at least draw it back towards the formless origin of its being. I'm referring, of course, to that show of force which resulted in the evaporation of the factory's dense arsenal of machinery. Each of the three stories of the Red Tower have been cleaned out, purged of its offending means of manufacturing novelty items, and the part of the factory that rose above the ground was left to fall into ruins. Had the machinery in the Red Tower not been evaporated, I believe that the subterranean graveyard or something very much like it, but nonetheless have come into existence at some point or the other.

This was the direction in which the factory had been moving, a fact suggested by some of its later models of novelty items. Machines were becoming obsolete, as the diseased mania of the Red Tower intensified and evolved into more experimental, even visionary projects. I have previously reported that the headstones in the factory's subterranean graveyard were absent of any names of the interred and were without dates of birth and death. This truth has been confirmed by numerous accounts rendered in borderline gibberish. The reason for the blank headstones is entirely evident as one gazes upon them standing crooked and closely packed together and the phosphorescent haze given off by the stone walls covered with luminous paint. None of these graves, in point of fact, could be said to have anyone buried in them whose names and dates of birth and death would require inscription on the headstones. These were not what might be called burying graves.

This is to say that these were in no sense graves for burying the dead. Quite the contrary. These were graves of a highly experimental design from which the newest productions of the Red Tower were to be born. From its beginnings as a manufacture of novelty items of an extravagant nature, the factory had now gone into business of creating what came to be known as hyperorganisms. These new productions were also of a fundamentally extreme nature,

representing an even greater divergence on the part of the red tower from the bland and gray desolation in the midst of which it stood. As implied by their designation as hyperorganisms, slant of goods displayed the most essential qualities of their organic nature, which meant, of course, that they were wildly conflicted to their two basic features. On the one hand, they manifested an intense vitality in all aspects of their form and function. On the other hand, simultaneously, they manifested an ineluctible element of decay in these same areas. To state this matter in the most lucid terms, each of these hyperorganisms, even as they scintillated with an obscene degree of vital impulses,

also, and at the same time, had degeneracy and death written deeply upon them. In accord with the tradition of dumbstruck insanity, it seems the less said about these offerings of the birthing graves or any similar creation, the better. That's so cool. The bottom is filled with graves. And they birth out as these organisms that are, um, they jerk and they move with vitality, but they have a degeneracy and death really deeply upon them. I'm just, I'm processing stuff too.

I'm getting, I'm just getting hit by these things. It's so far. I mean, I was going to kind of say this towards the end, but I was going to say, it just just feels like such a almost somebody articulating beautifully, their like nightmare or their dream. Like a guy, like almost like a guy who works at an Amazon factory having a fucking nightmare about his work and it like manifesting and, you know, just like being like it was the most, it was the most detailed dream I've ever had. It's just, I don't know. in. It's fine. This is just, it's beautiful. No, I mean, there's no getting around. It's fucking beautiful. This episode is sponsored by ORA.

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integration on top of that. I've been using Turtle Beach since I was 14, 13 years old and got my first Xbox 360. So from the Stealth 700 headset to any game and accessory you can what, head to the link in the description at Turtlebeach.com and use code Creepcast to get 10% off your entire order. That is right, not only this incredible headset, but anything else you want from Turtle Beach to get the ultimate immersive gaming experience, head to turtlebeach.com and use code crepecast to get 10% off your order today. Support the show and tell them that we sent you, and thank you so much to Turtle Beach for sponsoring the show. We are now, back to the episode. I myself have been almost entirely restricted to a state of seething speculation concerning

the luscious particularities of all hyperorganic phenomena produced in the subterranean graveyard of the Red Tower. Although we may reasonably assume that such creations, were not to be called beautiful, we cannot know for ourselves the mysteries and mechanisms of, for instance, how these creations have moved throughout the hazy luminescence of that underground world. What creakier spasmic gestures they might have been capable of executing, if any, what sounds they might have made or the organs used for making them, how they might have appeared when awkwardly emerging from the deep shadows or squatting against those nameless headstones. What trembling stages of mutation they almost certainly would have undergone

following the generation of their larva upon the barren earth of the graveyard. But their bodies might have produced or emitted the way of fluids and secretions. How they might have responded to the mutilation of their forms for reasons of an experimental or entirely savage nature. Often I picture to myself what frantically Klein efforts these creations probably made to deliver themselves from that confining environment which their malformed or non-existent brains cannot begin to understand. They cannot have comprehended any more than can I for what purpose they were bred from those graves, those incubators of hyperorganisms, minute factories of flesh that existed wholly within and far below the greater factory of the Red Tower. It was no surprise, of course,

that the production of hyperorganisms was not allowed to continue for very long before he second wave of destruction was visited upon the factory. This time it was not merely the fading and ultimate evaporation of machinery that took place. This time it was something far more brutal. Once again, forces of ruination were directed at the factory, specifically the subterranean graveyard located at its second underground level. Its three-story structure that stood above ground having already been rendered and echoing ruin. Information on what remained of the graveyard and of its cleverly blasphemous works is available to my own awareness only in the form of shuddering and badly garbled whispers of mayhem and devastation and wholesale sundering of the most unspeakable sort. These same sources also seem to regard this incident as the culmination, if not the conclusion, of the long-standing hostilities between the Red Tower and the grayish halo of desolation that hovered around it on all sides.

Such a shattering episode would appear to have terminated the career of the Red Tower. Nevertheless, there are indications that, appearances to the contrary, the factory continues to be active despite its status as a silent ruin. After all, the evaporation of the machinery, which turned out countless novelty items in the three-story red brick factory proper, and the ensuing obsolescence of its sophisticated system of tunnels at the first underground level did not prevent the factory from pursuing its business by other and more devious means. The work at the second underground level, the graveyard level, went very well for a time.

Following the vicious decimation of those ingenious and fertile graves, along with the merchandise they produced, it may have seemed that the manufacturing history of the Red Tower have been brought to a close. There are indications that believe the three-story above the ground factory below the first and the second underground levels, there exists a third level of subterranean activity. perhaps it is only a desire for symmetry,

a hunger for compositional balance in things that has led to a series of the most vaporous rumors anent this third underground level. In order to provide a kind of complementary proportion to the three stories of the factory that rise into the gray and featureless landscape above ground, at this third level, these rumors maintain the factory schedule of production

is being carried out in some new and strange manner, representing its most ambitious venture in the output of putrid creations, ultimately consummating its tradition of degeneracy, reaching toward a perfection of defect and disorder, according to every polluted and foggy rumor concerned with the issue. Perhaps it seems that I have said too much about the Red Tower, and perhaps it has sounded far too strange. Do not think that I am unaware of such things, but as I have noted throughout this document, I am only repeating what I've heard. I myself

have never seen the Red Tower. No one ever has. Possibly no one ever will. Yet, wherever I go, people are talking about it. In one way or another, they are talking about the nightmarish novelty items, or about the mysterious and revolting hyperorganisms, as well as babbling

endlessly about the subterranean systems of tunnels in the secluded graveyard whose headstones display no names and no dates designating either birth or death. everything they are saying is about the red tower in one way or another and about nothing else but the red tower we are all talking and thinking about the red tower in our own degenerate way i've only recorded what everyone is saying though they may not know they are saying it and sometimes they have seen that they may not know they have seen it

but still they are always talking one deranged way or another about the red tower I hear them talk of it every day of my life. Unless, of course, they began to speak about gray and desolate landscape, that hazy void in which the red tower, the great and industrious red tower, is so precariously nestled. Then the voices grow quiet until I can barely hear them as they attempt to communicate with me

in choking scraps of post-nightmare trauma. Now is just such a time when I'm astrain to hear the voices. I wait for them to reveal to me the new vintestrian, of the Red Tower as it proceeds into even more corrupt phases of production, including the creations being turned out by the shadowy workshop of its third subterranean level. I must keep still and listen for the voices. Must remain quiet for a terrifying moment. And I will hear the news of the factory starting up its operation once more.

Then I will be able to speak again of the Red Tower. And that's the end of the Red Tower. And that's the end. God. Good fucking Lord. So I, well, I'll save my analysis for a second. How do you feel? I feel like I just gave birth.

I feel like I feel like I feel like I just came out of like what felt like a dream that was seven years long or something. But it felt like you lived, lived every second of it. It's just so beautifully woven together. There's so many different ways, I feel like you can look at this. I mean, my gut reaction of my college level, you know, giga-chat brain thinking of me going to a liberal art school is me thinking that this is, it almost feels like commentary on like a capitalistic kind of like a, just like a capitalistic run of like, I don't know, like just fucking mankind doing that kind of stuff. Even the way, the deal of like no one's ever seen the Red Tower and no one ever will. It's almost just like in a way, God, this sounds so cringy. I'm sorry.

It's just like it feels like that idea. of like wanting to get ahead like you know i'm like an american dream kind of thing you know you speak about it you want it you pursue it through even like the way that like the uh organisms and stuff it all feels like little just like cogs in the machine of people working at a place that is like churning out absolute fucking garbage for people that people are you know consuming they are uh interacting with like in a way they don't even want you know but they're still buying it like it to me it feels like a fucking red tower to me feels like an amazon nightmare is what it sounds like it sounds like people getting trinkets and shit you don't need but you have

it and being like forced into it even the idea of like we don't know how they do it like the tunnel is like fucking prime delivery and all that kind of stuff it just feels like you know they even have stuff too where it's like they're delivered inside of them it's just kind of uh i don't know it just it makes me think there's this place in kansas city called the um the um the east bottoms or west bottoms yeah one of those one of those direction bottoms but it used to be a place where that's where like the industrial part of kansas city used to be and then it got this huge flood came and it fucked up the whole town so they had to move the city up on this hill and there's all these empty giant industrial uh buildings down in this area with just like

broken out windows and you know they're just like shells and it kind of makes you think of like i mean this is back in like the 20s or something when this happened so it's like it just it gave me that vibe of like being down there you know and i love the continuous nature of like something a translucent almost phallic thing coming out of the ground that would like would just existed in the gray until it like ornated itself with a reddish shoe and like you know it would be a thing that you'd like oh fuck that's standing out but it's like it's almost like it wants you to see how like fucking evil and disgusting it is you know like this factory with no doors or it's just kind it's just so uncanny i'm rambling but yeah there's just

have a lot to say i guess i think uh so to me reading it uh and this shows the different uh this shows like um how different um kind of preconceived ideas can affect your understanding of a story to me i felt like i was reading the creation story uh because you have like a gray landscape that is subtle and it's like for seemingly no reason at all no one knows why the gray landscape invented the red tower. And for me, the red tower seemed to be like an analogy of Satan because that's kind of a question that gets asked in like religious circles a lot. If God is all knowing and God understands free will and see the future, then why would God make Lucifer? But it's like perhaps, I like the way that was phrased where it was like perhaps

to rebel against itself or perhaps to give some spirit to the land or whatever. The tower was invented. And at first the tower was beautiful, a match to land, but then the red grew over it. And it began to invent trinkets and it began to invent beautiful things. And a lot of extra biblical beliefs, Lucifer was, yeah, yeah, like, and a lot of extra biblical beliefs, Lucifer was a musician. He would make music. He would make beautiful things just like the factory did. But then the factory began to be corrupted. It brought red over itself. And then there was a first desolation of it, of mankind being kicked out of the garden, the tools being taken away. But then after the factory began to make these hyper organisms

which could be seen as the Nephilim or it could be seen as demons entering the world or humanity itself there was a greater desolation which sounds like the flood and then it's like it seems abandoned but I know it still makes things. None of us have seen the red tower but we all talk about it

like the afterlife, the devil, God yeah and like the subterranean and like the three floors above being representative of God but the three floors beneath being representative of the devil and the three phases of humanity and he's like I believe now that the third level is still working, which is like the age of existence we're in now. Just like that's what I got reading out of it.

But I feel like depending on where you come to the story with, you could take it so many different ways. Well, what's the thing is like, I think, I mean, I really enjoy your lens of how you see the story. Because I feel like I just kept getting hooked on the, the actual idea of like the industrial nature of it and like the production. And like, because my whole thing too, and I'm glad that they don't ever, like,

they never really tell you what the these things are who they're for because it doesn't really matter but to me I just kept thinking about like these nonsensical horrifying things and it's like the idea of like why would someone even want to make these and all that stuff and then like really the solidification of the uh the nameless graves underneath they're just fucking headstones painted is so um it's so cool it's so cool yeah it's just so haunting it's just the idea of like these people work it's just like another thing of like you work at this job and then when you die you're just like you're just another nameless like grave in this like this operation this horrible operation of stuff and like the uh that life amounts to uh a head like a head

stone and you don't even get to have a name is just so uh just chilling you know and i love the I loved all the dislike man I just anytime that they went into the specific I mean because the entire time like Logote here he's just like does not it. you know, not to go love craftian, but like really descriptive, extremely descriptive of these like very abstract ideas that he's throwing at you. But then there's even some that are a little more simple, like the music box that just is like people's like death rattles or I love the, I love the time piece that has the lizard tongues and the insects.

Like that's just such a, I like the idea, the same, the antithetical nature of having graves that birth people, right? Life coming out of death. Rebirth and all that day. Yeah, there's so many interesting visual elements. I love the idea of tunnels that can deliver the novelties anywhere. They'll appear on your bedside or there's some out there that will never be found because they can't be found.

Yeah, they're like they're almost hidden. Like they're purposely hidden for someone to find, which also makes it seem like cursed like relics or something. In a way, that does fit your biblical kind of analysis of the story of like, temptations, hiding anywhere, like little things, like just, especially the, uh, the, the idea of being like born in you or like delivered inside of you. It's a part of you. I think it's just things that you're born with it. It brought disease and pestilence into the world. It makes people worse, the formless. And also, uh, in like, I know in some Gnostic beliefs, but in like the book

of Enoch and stuff like that, there's a lot of mention, again, outside of the Bible of like the angels that fell with Lucifer introduced humanity to witchcraft and to gunpowder and to music and all these different inventions like these toys effectively they gave humanity to distract them from God and that's kind of the vibe I got from the tower like these temptations they're passing out to people I feel it felt very like religious to me there's even the line where uh where is that it's talking about it doesn't understand why the tower created what it did or it doesn't understand understand why the tower operates how it does

and it says truly the red tower worked in mysterious ways, which of course is the line everyone says about God, right? You know, God works in mysterious ways. Yeah, very very religious heavy line there for sure. Yeah, I don't know. Just the entire time

I was just thinking of greed like like like yeah, just extreme production for the sake of production production for the sake of like benefiting oneself and in this case we don't know who these people are like really there's there's not even anybody running it the tower itself is its own entity producing these things or whatever and it just feels like it's like a reward based system too like the tower is being successful and how it does

it even whenever it has that moment where uh the dust settles after the people have like basically destroyed it it's still able to produce and keep going into subterranean levels and it's just finding this way. It just felt like uncompromising greed is how I kept. It's just like the thing that kind of kept hitting me in the face. I was like, oh my God. Like it was just suffocating, uh, you know, and like just the idea of like these like gears grinding and you know, like all these like these like being down. I used to be in this so in that west bottoms or east bottoms area. I used to have a art studio down there. And the, the building was in a old string factory, which is just weird to think that there was a string factory, but the thing is just so dusty, even now.

And it's been, like, renovated and stuff. But it would still, it still has like all the brick and mortar type stuff, you know. And, uh, it's just so dusty. And the idea of like giant machines and like, just things meant to actually, like, mass produce things and all that stuff is just so loud. The idea of like grinding old cast iron like metal and all that stuff being in here, it really gives the red tower like it's weird because at first it feels so quiet but then there's times when I'm like when it talks about like you know the the fucking organisms or like the great like all these things where it's like all these people are working yeah you might not realize it but it's in full production it also just feels like unbearably loud like the screeching of metal and that stuff and that kind of juxtaposition between like this barren landscape where all you hear is like wind whistling versus inside being like fucking the clashing of metal, the grating of steel, all that stuff, it's just so, uh, it's, it's like nauseating

to think about it. It's like almost like you fucks with your equilibrium even to think about it. So, which I, I just really, I just think it's so cool, man. Such a, like, delicately, delicately written story. So much imagination of just how, of how someone would, I, just the amount of imagination to beautifully, like, weave these ideas together in this, like, extremely abstract, odd, you know, surrealist nightmare. It's just, it's just cool. Yeah, it says Legati has a compilation from 1997 called The Nightmare Factory. So what we just read might be the entirety of like the nightmare factory, like the only story about the factory within the anthology book, but he might have other stuff about it.

But as this stands on its own, I feel it was, it's like you said, it's very dreamlike. Nightmare Factory is a good word for it. It's like a vision someone has. almost it does feel that's why it makes me feel like it's a fucking nightmare of a factory worker that sort of makes me think of like like legitimately i'm just like it makes you think of like one guy who's like that's the hell they show up to every day you know it's kind of the things too like all the things that uh at least for me it's just like you buy all the shit every day all that stuff you never think about where it comes from or you know whatever else and it's just that little that fleeting thought of like out there there's just people putting these things together

so I don't know. It's, it's a, I, I, um, I like this a lot. I feel like, uh, you, I know that you don't like, uh, SCP stuff that much, but wait, bear with me here. I think there are two SCP stories that have to be directly based off of this. Um, one of them is a no one proposal called the factory, which is about a giant factory that's unexplainable and makes these weird items and several of the items it makes are other CPs. Um, and that one's kind of like surface level. the themes of it but there's this one I think it's called the House of the Worm

and back when we were talking about SCPs I tried to remember what the name of it was because it was it's my favorite SCP story I think I've ever read it's one of the only ones that the themes of it and like the writing actually stuck with me but I couldn't remember the name. That's called the House of the Worm and it's about this

he's a preacher or he's a businessman or something that has a vision of the end time so he gathers everyone into his biggest state in England and boards up the walls and windows and begins to prophesy about the end of the world and he goes insane

and starts to dig these tunnels underneath the building and he creates like every time someone dies he like uses these tools to build them back into like these zomified creatures and the ending of its very borderlands

or final prayer if you remember that movie I know you're a fan of that one but it's one of my favorite SCPs but the language of him going insane and talking about the subterranean levels remind me of this. This story, even though I'm not familiar with Legati before what we just read, I feel like he has influenced a ton of stuff I am familiar with, which is cool. It's like reading about your grandfather.

Yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean. That was good. I really, obviously, I love that story. This is sick. It's so sick. And I think that like, I'm,

I want to keep reading on to another one. the uh so like i said we were taking from the book song of a dead dreamer and grim scribe and the next one here if you want to open it up to uh to masquerade of a dead sword a tragedy there's that's such a it is yeah uh when the world uncovers of dark disguise embrace the darkness with adverted eyes all right well you're ready for this one yes give us chapter one's title how the fuck do you say that highly ill fallioles rescue fallio yeah but say here we go no doubt the confusions of carnival night

were in some measure to blame for many unforeseen incidents every violation of routine order was being committed by kerosene oh like a carousel oh I've never I guess you can use that word in different ways committed by kerosene masses

their high register songs of celebration harmonizing with a low droning pedal point which seemed to be sustained by the night itself having declared their town an enemy of what does that work all right all right legote let's fucking reeled in

for us civil then Sarah having to clear their town enemy of quite quicence quicence quicence I would think that means quietness yeah if I had to declare the town an enemy of being quiet

there you go being quiet there you go the people of Saldori had taken to the streets there they conspired against solitude and to accompany Japanese gyrations of squealing abandon, sabotaged monotony.

Even the Duke, a cautious man, and one not normally given to those extravaganzas perpetrated by his counterparts in Linesse or Darnsela, was now holding a lavish masquerade, if only as a strategic concession to his subjects. Of all the inhabitants of the three towns, those under the rule of the Duke of Saldori, occasionally to the Duke's dismay, were the most loving of amusement. In every quarter of their usually sedate principality, frolicing merrymakers combed the night for a new paradise, and were as likely to find it in a blood match, as in a bewitching countenance.

All seemed anxious, even frantic to follow blindly the entire spectrum of diversion, to dawdle about the lines between pain and pleasure, to obscure their vision of both past and future. so three well-drunk and hog-faced men seated in a roistrous hostelry might well be excused for not recognizing falliol whose colors were always red and black this man who had just entered the thickish gloom of that drinking house was garbed in a craze of colors none of them construed to a pointed effect one might have described this outfit as a motley gone man Indeed, what lay beneath this fool's patchwork were the familiar blacks and reds that no other of the three towns, neither those who were dandies nor those who were sword whores, nor even those who, like Falliol himself, were both, would have dared to duplicate. But now these notorious colors were buried under a rainbow of rags which were tied about the man's arms, legs, and every other part of his person, seeming to hold him together like torn strips, applied to the storm-fractured joist of a sagging roof.

Before he had closed the door of that cave-like room behind him, the giraffe rushing in from the street made his frayed livery come alive like a mass of tattered flags flapping in a calamitous wind. But even he had not been cast as a

tattered demelian. Tattered demel demiline, whatever. There was still so much else about Faliol that was unlike his former self. His sword, a startling length of blade, bobbed about, unbuckled at his left side, his dagger, whose sheath bore a mirror of polished metal, which now seemed a relic of more dandified days, was strung loosely behind his left shoulder, ready to fall at any moment.

And his hair was trimmed monkishly close to the scalp, leaving little reminder of a gloriously here suit era. But possibly the greatest alteration, the greatest problem and mystery of Faliole's travesty of his own image, was the presence on his face of a pair of spectacles. And given that these spectacles were darkly tinged as though fashioned from some murky substance, the eyes behind them were obscured. Still, there remained any number of signs by which a discerning scrutiny could have identified the celebrated Falliol. For as he moved, court a seat adjacent to the alcove, where the booming voice trio was escond, he strode with a scornful, somehow involuntary assuredness, of which no reversals of fate could

completely unburden him. And his boots, though their fine black leather had gone gray with the dust of roads at Azelius Equestrian, such as Falliol, never have trod, still jangled with a few of those once innumerable silver links from which dangled small, a gate-eyed medallions, one's identical to the onyx-eyed ambulance, which in other days hung from a silver chain around his lean throat. Now, however, no medallion ornamented Falliol's chest, and since he had lost or renounced the inkish eye of onyx, he had acquired two eyes of shadowed glass. Each lens of the spectacles reflected, like twin moons, the glow of the lantern above the place where Falliol seated himself. As if unaware that he was not settled in some

cloistered cell of lubrication, he removed from somewhere within his shredded clothes a small book having the words, Psalms of the Silent, described upon its soft-worn cover. The cover of the book was black, while the characters of its title were the red of autumn leaves. Falliol? A scholar? Someone whispered in the crowded depths of the room, while another added, And a scholar of his own grief, so I've heard. Balliol unfixed the tiny silver clasp and opened the book somewhere towards its middle,

where a thin strip of velvet marked his place. And if there had been a miniature mirror bound in place of the book's left-hand leaf, Balliol could have seen three thuggish men gazing mutely, not to say thoughtfully, in his direction. Moreover, if there had been a second mirror set at the same angle on the book's right-hand leaf, he could also have noticed a fourth pair of eyes spying on him from the other side, of the hostelries and grimed window panes. But there were only stern-looking letters written, to be precise,

hand-written, Faliol's own hand, upon the opposing leaves of the book. Thus, Faliol could not have seen either of the parties who, for reasons separate or similar, were observing him. All he saw were two pale pages elegantly dappled by somber verses. Then a shadow passed across these pages. and another and another. The three men were now standing

evenly spaced before Falliol. Though he continued to read as if they were not present. He read until the lantern above was extinguished and stump of tallow snuffed out by the middle man's grossly knuckled stumps of flesh. Clasping his book closed,

Falio replaced it with the rags around his heart set perfectly still. Oh, sorry. Clasping his book closed, Faliole replaced it within the rags of rags around his heart and sat perfectly still. The three men seemed to watch in a trance of uggsome hilarity at the slowly and solemnly executed sequence of actions.

The face of the window panes merely pressed closer to witness what, in its view, was a soundless scene. Some words of insult appeared to be aimed at the man in rags by the three men standing before him. The first of them splashed some ale upon the speckled personage, as did the second man. from his enormous tankard. Then Morel, this time, Expectorated, was received by the victim as to third man's contribution to what became a series of petty torments.

Faliol remained silent, as motionless as possible, thereby expressing an attitude of mind and body, which seemed only to provoke further the carnival-mad souls of the three Saldorians. As the moments passed, Ben waxed more cruel and their torments more inventive. finally it jostled a bloody mouth falliol out of his seat jesus to just beating the hell

out of this guy good lord no exactly dude you should be cool you write books idiot used to be fucking cool but you're kind of gay now dude let's beat this guy on this is this is actually what happens every time i'm around hunter yeah i'll just be over to the side like i'll be reading something and he'll just be like what's this guy about it just comes over and starts kicking me dude nice fucking book, needle dick, and I slap you in the face. Bam! What the fuck? And I do, shut up, man.

Nice glasses. Idiot. Hunter's always like, hey, the chiefs are on. You want to watch the game? And I'm like, oh, you and your sports ball. I'll be in the study. There's nothing. There's nothing.

Nothing in this world. I hate more than people saying sports ball. It is like the cringiest fucking thing. Anybody who's like, I don't know. much about sports ball. It's just like I can't comprehend that. I shut the fuck up with your stupid glass. I'm going to

smack in the face. I'm going to say, I'm going to dust those teeth out of your mouth. Pop. Pop, pop. Pop. Well, as you, as you study your games, I will smirk and be in my library. Well, I think I'll retreat back to my study

so I can read. I'm like, you know what, dude? Fine. I'm like, next time, don't come out with all these fucking rainbow tathered. So what is he? So they're like, so usually they're saying my boy, my boy, fiole, feuliole, my boy, falliole. My boy, falliole. Usually he's just got red and black trim on. That's what it sounded like they're saying.

Now he shows up. Yeah. haphazardly has a bunch of like random colors and shit. It sounds like it's just like wrapped around him. It's like not even like an outfit. It's just like a weird. I imagine it's like, uh, because he says he's an equest. So he's a horse rider.

So I imagine it's like one of those shoals they would wear, you know, that would like go down to their arms and cover them. It was like a windbreaker sort of looking thing. Oh. People wear it when they were horse riding. I'm picturing this. But it's like a bunch of colors. Yeah. It's like very eccentric and weird.

And he pulls out his tiny book and they're just like, what the fuck is up with you, dude? You're tiny book. What is this? Let's beat that guy out. Everyone is like pissed drunk. Everyone's just pissed drunk and they're like, dude, I thought you were cool. You wanted to drink. You can get pussy with us.

But apparently you're just wanting to read your gay book. he's like, okay, well, he's just thought that they could have me. I thought that I could just sit here and enjoy my book. And they're just like, I'm going to beat you up, dude. I think our, I think our boys getting done dirty is what I'm saying. Yeah, I think, I think it's not going to go great for him. Just a moment. Two of them pinioned him against the planks of the wall,

while the trio's Holking third member snatched his spectacles. A pair of blue eyes were suddenly revealed. Firmly clenched themselves closed and reopened as if bursting out of black depths and into the light. Feliol dropped to his knees and his mouth stretched wide to let out a strangled scream, a scream of a mute under torture. Very soon his features relaxed

while his ragged chest began pumping up and down with an even rhythm. He rose to his feet. How would you think his scream sounded? Is he actually mute or is that just saying like he's punched and he can't make noise stretched wide out like yeah the scream of a mute under torture so it seems like he kind of got his uh wind knocked out of him but he's screaming in pain yeah how would you how would that go for you really like that what is it like when you get

hit in the stomach what is it i think it cut out oh yeah that's that's probably right one more time nice again for the yeah you if i can do it again I like to think he's like to think he does He's like Ah Ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha

I think we're supposed to like Falio I like him He's my boy I know I know people like you Hunter Wouldn't understand the mind Of an intellectual Well I understand the mind

That was with a true sense of intellect Dexterity You wouldn't understand The minimum required effort it takes there's a life seen so much more fun now

it should that you put in the minimum required are you glad I brought up this story while we're reading my boy failure fall only my boy fall only

is not going to get David King pill dude you said it it's over you summoned him the one who had taken fellio's spectacles had turned away

and his clumsy fingers were fiddling with delicate silver stems, fumbling with two shadowy lenses that were more precious than he knew. Thus amused and diverted, he was not, he did not perceive that Falliol had drawn his dagger from its shoulder sheath and was cutting away at his companions with stealth and savagery. God! He's going crazy. Good Lord!

He's fucking, he's like, he's shaking all of the other people. My boy, Falliope, he'd be taken out a little butterfly knife and just stabbing everybody around him. to be fair they did they punched them first it's self-defense yeah yeah yeah yeah they definitely deserved to be stabbed to death in a bar for being drunk and messing with the guy who was riding in the corner where he started to shout to his loudish comrades as they ran ripped and bloody from the host hostlery then he turned about face to feel falliol sword against his greasy leather doublet he saw he must have seen that the blade was unclean but very sharp, and he must have felt it scraped playfully against the chain-mail vest

concealed beneath his doublet sorry cover. Soon, Valiol was lowering his blade until it reached the spot where the vest protection no longer protected. Now put them on that you might see. Instructed the giant, who held what appeared in his hands to be tiny toy spectacles. Put them on. He repeated in the tone of the time. voice of one who was dead to all

appeasement or mercy. The giant, his lip-licking tongue visibly parched, obeyed the command. Upon doing so, his body went rigid and became as a fastened to the floor on which it stood. Everyone in the room leaned closer to see the giant

and dark spectacles, and so did the well-groom face at the hostelary window. Most of the men laughed drunkenly and anonymously, but a few remain silent. If they did not infect, become silent at this sight. And a scholar of the wildest folly, too.

Someone whispered. Feliol himself grinned like a demon, his eyes widening at his work. After a few moments, he returned his sword to its sheath, and even so, the giant held his transfixed position. Folliol put away his dagger, and the giant did not budge a hair. Trapped within himself,

he stood with paralyzed arms, hanging beside his enormous flanks. The giant's face was extraordinarily pale, squizzled cheeks like two mounds of snow that had been sown with ashes. Above them, circles of glass gleamed like two black suns. All laughter had ceased by now, and many turned away from the unwanted spectacle.

The giant's meaty lips were the only part of him that moved, though very slowly, very much in the manner of a dying fish gasping in the dry air. having seen through Falliol's spectacles, the giant was not dying in his body, only his mind was a corpse. This, the wildest folly, whispered the same voice. Gently, almost contritedly, Fowliol removed the spectacles from the face of the dumbstruck idol, and he waited until he was outside the hostelry for replacing them on his own. Good sir. called a voice from the shadows of the street.

Valiol paused, but only as if considering the atmosphere of the night and not necessarily in response to a stranger who had accosted him. Please allow me to identify myself with the same Strildon. I assume my messenger spoke with you last evening, Linus. How generous have you to come to Saldori to meet with me? Well, then here is my coach. So that we need not talk in all the confusion of conversation. night. And when the coach began moving down streets on the circumference of the festivities,

this finally happened a gentleman, though he was just barely more than a youth, continued to speak to a silent Falliol. I was informed you had arrived in Saldori not long before this very moment and have been waiting for a discrete interval in which to approach you. Of course, you were aware of my presence. He said, pausing to scan Falliol's expressionless face. How unfortunate that you were forced to reveal who you are back in the stye of a drinking, in the stye of a drinking house. But I suppose you couldn't allow yourself to undergo much more of that treatment merely for the sake of an nominee. Anomidy, a nomadie. No harm done, I'm sure. And I'm sure.

Follyol replied in a monotone. That three very sad men would disagree with you. The young man laughed briefly at what he understood to be a witticism. In any event. Their kind will have their throats wrapped in the red cord soon or later. The Duke is quite severe when it comes to lawlessness of others, which brings me to what I require of you tonight. Presuming we need not bargain over the terms my messenger proposed to you and Linesse.

Very well. Said Streldon, though obviously he had been prepared to hackle over the matter. But he left no pause, which might have filled with the second thoughts of this hired source. who looked and acted more like one of the clockwork automaton's which performed their mechanical routines high above the town square of Saldori. Thus, with a slow turn of his head and a set movement of his hand, Valiol received the jeweled pouch containing one-half his payment.

Streldon promised that the other portion would follow upon the accomplishment of their night's work, as he now portrayed its reasons and aims. It seemed there was a young woman of a noble and wealthy family, a princess, an all but title whom Shreldin loved and who loved him in return accepting his proposal of marriage

and cleaving to his vision of their future as to who would be one but there was another who was called Wing my boy wing does that be right

Ving or wing it's Italian let's call him wing wing wing yeah it'd be wing who was called wing though Streldon referred to him

thereafter as the sorcerer Estrelden explained the situation, the sorcerer had appropriated the young woman for himself. This unnatural feat was achieved, Streldon hated to say, not only through the powerful offices of the Duke of Saldori himself, but also with the willing compliance of the young woman's father. Both men, according to Streldon, have been persuaded in this affair because the sorcerer had promised to supply them by means of alchemical transmutations of base metals into gold and silver with an unending source of riches to finance their wars and other undertakings of ambition. Without bothering to embellish the point, Streldon declared that he and his beloved, in their present state of separation, were two of the most wretched beings in the world and desperate for assistance in their struggle to be reunited. And that carnival night would be the last opportunity for Falliol to untangle them from the controlling strings of the sorcerer and his compatriots. Do I have your attention, sir? Faliol vouchsafed his understanding of the matter by repeating to its last detail, Strull Dunn's account of his plight.

Well, I'm glad to know that your wits are stern order. However, how of distracted you may seem, I've heard certain rumors you understand. in any event tonight the sorcerer is attending the duke's masquerade at the palace she will be with him help me steal her back so we may both escape

from Saldori and I will fill the empty part of that pouch dude this guy sucks this guy this is the thing with this guy that we're seeing here he's taking time

from a boy Follyole here right but it's just because he has bad dick game he's like she found some guy with better dick game and more money and I'm pissed and it's uh it's uh

Magic. He's a sorcery. Yeah, that's why she likes me. Yeah, she's like that that dig game is magic daddy. What she says to him. He's like, please value. Get, stop this. He's a witch. He has magic powers. Yeah, the guy's just like, yeah, I have a steady job. And I was like, I'm from. He's like, he's like a Nepo baby. He's mad that is his girl chose a guy, a nepo baby that has a better dick game. That's, that's what this is. And he's a, he's an alchemist. So he's like, yeah, I'm really good at like metal work and stuff. that. I'm like, yeah. He's like, no, I'm actually like super awesome. And she's like just totally. She doesn't realize how, you know, fucking lucky she is that like I still want her because like I'm such a catch. But please make her love me again. I will say I didn't really realize this until Legati started describing, uh, people in his stories. Because like in the red tower is just kind of a like exposition. Uh, but with the dialogue and people, this feels incredibly poe. Oh, dude, yeah. It's Edgar up.

At first I was like, this feels like a cask of a Montalado. Yeah, yeah, cask about me. Or the, what's the other one? The description of the party. Fall of the House of Usher. Oh, I thought that was the Red Death or whatever. I don't know. Yeah, it's Follow the House of Usher.

Oh, oh, oh, yeah. No, no, no, you're right. The Red, wait. No, yeah, Fall of the House of Usher is the one with the different colored rooms. Yeah. Mask of the Red Death is, um, what's the one where he chops up someone and puts them in the floor? That's the tail tail, heart. That was so funny, dude.

It's such a funny one. It's still beating. I love a guy. I love a guy just like getting so upset about looking at like an old person. He's just like, I have to fucking kill you. I have to kill them. I have to dismember them to put them in the floor. They're dead and under my floorboards.

Thank God. And he's just like, that's son of, I, that he's still fucking making a ruckus. Fuck. I like, you know what, though? I'm getting into the vibe here of the nice Shakespearean little pussy tail, dude. that's what this is that's what this is a little insult tail he's like he has no idea what she really wants trust me i wanted to point out that you were correct i was wrong mask of the red death is the party okay follow the house of usher is another one anyways back to insult uh shakespeare and

po thing here belliol asked if streldon had possessed the foresight to have brought along a pair of costumes to enable their entrance to the masquerade streldon somewhat vainly produced from the shadows of the coach two such costumes, one that was appropriate to a night of the old days and the other that of a court gesture of the same period. Falliol reached out for the wildly patterned costume with the cheering mask. But I am afraid that I intended the costume for myself. The other is more suited to allow your sword. No sword will be needed. Faliol assured his nervous companion, this will be fitting. added, holding the hook-nosed fool's face opposite his own.

They were now traveling in the direction of the palace, and Saldori's carnival began to thicken about the wheels of Streldon's coach. Gazing upon the nocturnal confusion, Balliol's eyes were as dark and swirled with shadows as the ravey night itself. So that's end of chapter one. I think this is a three-chapter story. So the, um, so what I have here,

which correct me if I'm wrong, this is about my boy. fally old and a guy who's coming up and being like i hear you're basically an assassin is it's kind of how i see it right and i hear you do good well he says that uh his uh lege already spoke to him the night prior so this has already been kind of set up or yeah fally old was probably going to that bar to meet up with him so he's like are you ready to do the job yeah so he's going out there he's just like hey we're here to do the thing i need i need you to kill this fucking sorcerer he's cringe.

He's a dead game's too good. He's got too much money. That way the girl will come back to me. Here's what I want to know from you. Do you think Fally-old, does he have magical abilities? Because it kind of seems like it. I think the spectacles do. It's just the spectacles.

I would think so, yes. Because he is, you put them on that guy's face and the guy freaked out. And he seems kind of like a quiet individual. He is, okay, so the story said in the beginning, like, Fally-old was coming around here. but the most noticeable thing are his new spectacles. So Fallyol was a known guy

who people around the community not only his spectacles but then also his outfit and the coat and also that he like is pulling out this uh the Psalms book which makes me think because he was he was wearing them too

wasn't he? The spectacles? The spectacles yes. Because when he put it on the other guy the big fat fuck whatever and that guy had basically like gotten all stiffed up and he couldn't even move.

He went canatonic. So I'm wondering why Fallyol is able to wear them and like still function and do his thing and he's become like red-pilled or whatever. Doesn't it kind of seem like it? He's like, let me pull out my book doing a party. You know what are you guys doing?

I'm going to educate myself. I'm so bored of these things. I can't not associate that voice with the David King thing. So immediately took me out of the story. Thank you for that. It's over. The story's over.

terrible. That's what intellectual people do. They just say their own name out loud. Yeah. Oh, fallio. Damn David King. It's his eye fellio.

There's really not a, you know, like, and it's kind of deserve the guy's ass kick now to go to a place where everyone's all drunk and having a good time. They're just like, you show up to the middle of the room, yawn and then take out a book and start reading.

Just like, fuck you, dude. You'll need me. I'll be in my study. I didn't even realize I was even here. What was I even mean? You know, I'm just participating in my reading. I'm in the Oprah Book Club, which is very exclusive. Oh, here.

Chapter 2 is the story of the spectacles. The story of the spectacles. Which means who was right? I was alright. No, no, I was if you don't. I'm the one who was asking about it. You could. I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that it's don't say whatever you're going to say. It's not true.

Whatever is not going to say. Okay. I'm not going to say that it's a bear trap moment, but it kind of is. It's not. It's not. You know what? You just say the bear trap thing to get me worked up. That's all it's for. That's the only reason. So I'm not going to do it. Baby, baby, baby. Listen.

Jealousy doesn't look good. on you all right chapter two the story of the spectacles his eyes fixed and clouded as a blind man's the mage sat before a small circular table upon which a single wax taper burned in a silver stick illuminated by that modest flame the surface of the table was inlaid with esoteric symbols a constellation of designs which reduced essential forces of existence to a few rather picturesque patterns but the mage was not occupied with ease. He was simply attending to someone who was raving in the shadow of a secret chamber. The hour was late and the night was without a moon. The narrow window behind the beardless,

pallid face of the mage was a solid sheet of blackness that seemed to absorb the candlelight. Every so often, someone would move before this window, his hands running through his thick, dark hair as he spoke, were tried to speak. Occasionally, he would move toward the candle flame and a glimpse could be caught of his bold attire in blacks and reds. His shining blue eyes, his fevered face. Calmly, the mage will listen to the man's wild speech. Not if I have become mad, but of what my madness consists is knowledge I seek from you. And please understand that I have no hopes, only a searing curiosity to riddle the corpse of my dead soul. As for the assertion that I have always been engaged in deeds, which one might deem mad, I would be abhorred. I would be

obliged to answer, yes, countless deeds. Countless mad games of flesh and steel, having confessed that, I would also avow that these were sanctioned provocations of chaos, known in some form to the body of the world, and even blessed by it, if the truth be spoken, but I have provoked another thing, a new madness which arrives from a world that is on the wrong side of light, a madness that is unsanctioned. the seal of our natural selves. It is a forbidden madness, a saboteur from outside the body of known

laws. As you know, I have been the subject of its devastation. First off, what the fuck are you even talking about, dude? So he's going to this mage who, like, in his place as esoteric symbols and stuff like that. And there's also a mage so we can assume it's like known

I get what's going on. He's saying he's, I understand. He's basically like, I found out what 4chan is. I'm like red pilled now. and I feel, you know, the darkness in me is growing. You're going to try to ruin this story for me. I'm not, I'm just saying, does it not sound like that? Where he's just like, he's like, yes, and I go to many odd boards. And I feel like I've become a bit of a monster myself.

That's not at all what he's saying. That's not all what he's saying. He's going mad. He is going mad because he is witnessing the, he's seeing the, the esoteric, the unspeakable. Like, he's peering behind the veil and it's making him lose his mind. and he's trying to get help from the mage he's trying to understand what's happening sure since the madness began working it's ruined upon me i have become an adept of every horror which can be thought of sensed or dreamed without purpose without constraint and without end

i have crept through dense forest not of trees but of tall pikes planted in the earth and upon each of them a crudely formed head has been fixed These heads all wear faces, which would forever blind the one who saw them anywhere but in a dream. And they follow my movements, not only with earthly eyes, but the shadows rolling in empty sockets. Sometimes, they'd speak as I pass through their uncanny ranks, telling me things I cannot bear to hear. Nor can I shut out their words, and I listen until I've learned the horrors of each brutal head. And the voices from their lacerated mouth so clear. so precise to my ears

that every word is a bright flash in my dreaming brain a brilliant new coin minted for treasure house of hell at the end of the mad dream these heads endeavor endeavor to laugh creating a blasphemous babble which echoes throughout the terrible forest

and when I awaken the night continues to reverberate with fading laughter what do you think so he keeps having these dreams he can't explain these heads speaking to him saying things he doesn't want to hear or would drive him mad and the faces themselves are just extinguishable it's like he's being haunted by some presence

I think what's going to happen is the mage is going to give him the spectacles to allow him to maybe see them while awake or to like understand things around him that's what that's where I think this is going yet why should I speak of waking from these dreams for to awaken as I once understood this miracle means to reclaim a world of laws which for a time were lost to rise into the light of the world as one falls into the darkness of a dream. But for me, there's no sense

of breaking through the envelope of sleep. It seems that I remain a captive of these dreams, these visions. For when one leaves off, another begins like a succession of connected rooms, which will never lead to freedom. And for all I can know, I am even now inhabitant of these rooms and at any moment I beg forgiveness wise man you may transform into a demon and begin to disembow weeping children god damn dude what the fuck

you can transform into a demon and begin to disembow weeping children before my eyes and smear their intros upon the floor so that in them you may read my future a future without escape in those heads and for what comes after so it's kind of cool actually what he's saying

here too is he's saying like he's basically forever in a nightmare even when he's not asleep. I see them while I'm away. I mean, he's like, he's like, he basically is in these, like, mad visions where he, like, imagine having to perpetually forever be in a nightmare. He's like, regardless of I'm sleeping or not, it's the same. Like, I'm in a constant hell. Yeah, like, like, I, I don't mean this against you, but looking at you right now at any moment, you can become a demon and rip a child apart. Yeah, you know, the shake, I, I can't trust anything. The Shakespearean guy, she's like, good Lord. He's like, I know, I'm sorry. I hate to even put

There's just a mage over there, just like, he's like gently pushing the kid back under the chair, like, okay. He's a giant, he's a giant pipe. He's just like, dear God, my man, get yourself together, for fuck sakes. He's like a very Sigmund Freud type looking guy, like the big glasses and the pipe. For there is a citadel in which I'm a prisoner in which holds within a type of school, a school of torture. The major's like, p. Good God. Ceremonial stranglers

Their poems grove by the red cord Stock the corridors of this place Or lie snoring in its shadows Dreaming of perfect throats Me too And somewhere the master carnifex The Supreme Inquisitor Wait as I'm taken from cell

And dragged across stone floors Until I'm finally presented to the fiend With witless rolling eyes Then my arms and my legs everything is shackled and I'm screaming to die while the torture of the question enough

said the mage without raising his voice yes enough and so I have said numberless times but there's no end there is no hope and this endless hopeless torment incites me

with a desire to turn its power on others. What a dick. He's like, I kind of want to just do this to other people. And even to dream of turning it on all. To see my world drown in oceans of agony is the only vision which now brings me any relief

from my madness, from a madness which is not of this world. Though neither is it of any other world. Thank you for picking that voice out of every option. This is now the mage's voice. Said the mage in the same quiet voice. But I have also had visions of butchering the angels. Replied the madman as if to argue the irreparable nature of his mania.

You have envisioned precisely what you've been able to me. All right, hold on. Hold on. That's a really good one. I like that voice. you have envisioned precisely what you have been made to envision and nothing that has risen from your own your own true being but how could you have known this what is the nature of what you've seen this is the most disinterested this office job voice this enema of the old of the oldest philosophers of an alchemist to deceive and depose as the soul of another world and not as a soul

of a world as we know there's only one world and one soul of that world which appears in forms of beauty or bravery or it's according to how many anima moondy would turn you what the fuck is an anima moondy i think it means like essence spirit i'm pretty sure your soul And no ordinary devising may turn you away from what it wills. This is the power that had made you what you are now. And would unmake you for its own design. It has played with you as it would a puppet. Then I will make myself its destruction.

You cannot. you can i hate you you cannot your very wish to destroy it is not yours but that but uh of shit you're very wish to destroy it is not yours but that of the thing itself you are not who you are you are only what it would have you are only what it would have what what you are only what it would have you be you speak as if you're like I was serious you speak as if

you as if you speak as if it were a god of deceit and illusion you speak as if it were a god of deceit and illusion, sir. There's no other true way to speak

in it. But no further words now. It sounds like the Mage had a script in his pocket He kept glancing down at To read Thank you for tanking that it does No dude, it's cool

He's like I'm A mage that sounds like that Yeah, it's a mage Just pretty much sounds like this It's kind of a magey voice So No, it's not that's that's a dwight shrewd voice well i'm more of uh i've seen so many things that the world

bores me right because that's where this is leading to right he's going to get this thing and he's so tortured all the time that he has no emotion left so anything that's why he's that's also why fololi why he fucking he's all you know mutant red pilled now and you know giga chad so um Annamamundi is the soul of the world as described in ancient Greek text and Roman philosophy that shows up a lot in like hermeticism, stoicism, and noesticism. So it's like old world thinking of like

the spirit of the earth itself. So the mage here is saying that you are being touched by the nature of the spirit of the earth and it is making you into what it wants you to be. That's why you're seeing these terrible things because it has something in store for you. And then pretty much fully, he's like,

he's like, you know, the only thing that fucking stops this headache that I'm in is just wishing other people had to endure this too. Which I guarantee is what the Anna Mahmundi's doing to him. It wants him to become the kind of person that wants to inflict this on others. Yeah, it's like a never, like a vessel.

Never ending cycle. Yeah. Yeah, it's making him into the villain, so to speak. he then instructed the madman to seat himself at the table of arcane designs and to wait there with eyes calmly closed and for what remained of the moonless night the mage worked in another part of his dwelling returning to the wretched dreamer just before dawn one of his hands was the product of his labors a pair of strangely darkened spectacles as if they had shadows sealed within them these he fitted to the madman's face do not yet open your eyes my unhappy friend but heed my words i know visions you i know the visions you have known for they are among the visions that all were born to know there are eyes within

our eyes and when others open all become confusion meaning of my long life consists of the endeavor to seize and settle these visions until my natural eyes themselves have altered in accordance with my purpose now for what reason i cannot say anima moondi has revealed itself to you in its most essential aspect that of chaos at feast having seen the face behind all its others your life can never again be as you've known it. All the pleasures of the past are now defiled. All your hopes violated beyond hope. There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them.

Your world is presently black with the scars of madness. You must make it black or still in order to find any solace. You have seen both. too much and not enough. Though the shadow-foged lenses of these spectacles, you will be blinded so that you may see with greater sight. Through their darkly clouded glass, Annamam Moondi will diffuse it into nothing.

Through their darkly clouded glass, Anima Moondi will diffuse into nothing that's before you. What would murderers? or another man's mind will bring your peace henceforth all things will be in your eyes

a distant play of shadows that will fretfully strive to engage you ghost that clamber to pass themselves actualities

mass that desperately flint about to conceal the stillness of the void behind them henceforth I say all things will be reduced in your eyes to their unconsequential essence.

All that once shine for you, the steel, the stars, the eyes of another, will lose its luster and take its place among the other shadows. All will be doled in the power of your vision, which will give you the ability to see the greatest power, the only power is to care for nothing please know that this is the only means by which I may help you you have been made ready to receive the salvation

by your very torments though we cannot overthrow the hole the animal moondy has on the others of this earth we must still try as we can for as long as the soul of the world as it's we will grieve all in whom we will we will grieve all in whom it lives but it will not live in you

on the condition you obey one simple rule you must never be without these spectacles or your furies will return to you there now you may open your eyes those lines were so cool and they've forever been ruined I can't even go back and look at them right now because it's just going to Anamomondi is going to just be in my head. Yeah, you got to watch out for Animamundi. I can't wait for what LaGotti's publishing company says

does after this because it's not going to be. We are. You can leave that episode off, but we keep getting emails about Anna Moondy. So we would just say, Thomas was thrilled with the reading and he found particularly interesting how he read

Annamo Mundi like that so many times and that's all he's been saying. It's actually driven him mad. He's perpetually in a state of shock. So on the bright side, videos doing really well. Book is selling well.

On the downside, he has agreed to never write ever again. Not even once. Animal Moondie. Gosh. Okay. So basically, like, these glasses will peer into the realm of the unseen, but for you who's already gone mad, it will dull everything. It will. Yeah. Well, that's to allow you to process your thoughts. Well, that's the thing. It's giving him a visual representation to be able to see horrible shit, because that's the only thing that gives him any peace. So he's able to exist in the world, even though he's still seeing horrible shit, it's like numbing his senses. So that's also why whenever he put the spectacles on the big fat fuck earlier, that's why the guy was like, oh. Oh, because he sees horrible. He sees how horrible it is.

Folly all sat very still for some time, and he's of heart within him as he gazed through the spectacles. At first, he did not notice that one of the mage's own eyes was closed, covered by a sagging eyelid. And at last he saw this and perceived the sacrifice, he said, And how may I serve you, wise man? Beyond the window at the back of the two figures, something seemed to be a watch.

Neither man took note of the image, which was so obscure as to be nearly invisible. Some would call it a face, yet its features were translucent such that not even the sharpest eye could read them clearly. Nor could any eye outside that room where Falliola and the mage set quietly conversing

suffered to behold such a vision. End of chapter two, we go into chapter three. Oh! Chapter three, labeled, very respectively Annamo Moondy

I really hope like some super hippie-dippy people who like are into like earth cleansing and spiritualism like send you angry emails and comments that are like dude that's my God don't talk about it that one anima moondy is what I say

that's what I would respond with anime I like this I like the vibe though I like the time jump thing and getting a fun backstory. We get to see what Fololi has been up to. And the idea, too, of, like, man made, like a mage making spectacles that basically shows you hell.

And it's like fighting fire with fire. It's just, it's a fun fantasy. It's like it gives you, I mean, we're getting into some fantasy shit now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, we kind of touched on a little bit with the red,

uh, the red factory or the red tower, uh, but, uh, this is certainly in the realm of it. It feels very, very, like I said, Poe, like a way a lot of his supernatural. It started in very Shakespearean Poe territory, but even this last bit, at least just, I mean, obviously it's a mage, but I was just being like, just the idea of getting a, like an artifact to wear. It's, I don't know, it just, it has a very, uh, adventurous feel to it, you know? What, what would you call a story hunter that is about esoteric things that cannot be understood and peer into the unknown that humanity's not capable of?

Easy peasy. I got you. Annamamundi. Okay. All right. Chapter 3. While the revelers in the streets of Saldori remedied their discontents by throwing off the everyday face of orthodoxy, those attending the masquerade at the Duke's Palace found their deliverance by dawning other faces, other bodies, and perhaps other souls. The anonymity of that night, no unmasking was expected to be held,

enabled a multitude of sins against taste, from the most subtle to the most grotesque. skin discretions. The society of the court had transformed itself into a race of gods or monsters, competing at once with the brightest and highest of stars and the strangest of the world's lower creatures. Many would undoubtedly spend the succeeding days or weeks in darkened rooms behind closed doors so that the effects their disguises had wrought on their bodies might be known to none. For a few rare spirits, this by necessity would be their last appearance in the eyes of the court before a final seclusion. All were quite clearly arrayed as if something unparalleled and possibly conclusive was to incur that

night. Musicians played in several of the palace's most sumptuous and shimmering halls, glittering glasses were filled by fountains of unnaturally colored wine, and maskers swarmed about like living gargoyles freed from the cathedral stone. All, or nearly all, were straining for some unheard-of antic, suffering the pleasures of expectancy. But, as the hours passed, hopes dissolved. The Duke, in essence, a simple man, even a dull one, took no initiative to unloose the abundant possibilities of the masquerade, and, as if instinctively aware of these perilous directions,

he restrained the efforts of others to pursue them and thereby digress in a wayward manner from the night's steadily unwinding course. No petitioning could sway him. He allowed several odd witticisms to pass unacknowledged, and he fiend that certain dubious suggestions and proposals were obtruse to his mind. Unnourished by any source within the Duke's character, every attempt at innovation curled at its colorful edges and died. The initial strangeness of the mass gathering went stale. Voices began to sound as though they were transacting business of some tedious sort and even

the sight of a jester, albeit one with darkness within the eyes of his mask, offer no special merriment to this sullen assembly. Accompanying the jester, who made no lively movements, was a knight out of armor dressed in radiant blues and golds. The crusaders cross emblazoned upon his chest and over his

face a white silk mask of blandly noble expression. The odd duo progressed from room to room of the palace as if they were negotiating a thick wood in search of something or someone. The knight was manifestly nervous, his hand too obvious. His hand too

obviously ready to go for the sword at his side, his head patrolling with skittish alertness the bizarre world around him. The jester, on the other hand, was altogether composed and methodical. With excellent reason, he knew, as the knight did not, that their purpose was not a difficult one, as they would enjoy the complicity of the wing himself, whom the knight had called the sorcerer, but whom the gesture knew to be the wise man, mage, and disguise. Oh! the person that the wing so the wing the person that his contractor wants him to kill is the mage

yeah wow okay with this advantage fally old might easily assist the knight in escaping sildori not that such heroics were any longer of concern to falliol who was merely serving the mage

in a machination to break the duke the alchemical transformation that the ruler desired would indeed take place, though not precisely as promised. What reserves of wealth the Duke and his sorceress conspirator possessed would tonight undergo, per the plan of the mage, a reverse alchemy that would leave them poppers, and then his work would be done in Saldori, such as he could accomplish what he set out to do.

The knight and the gesture now paused at the arch interest to the last and most intimate of the masquerade's many rooms. Pulling at the knight's golden sleeve, the gesture angled his pointed, sneering muzzle towards a costume pair in the far corner. The indicated figures were apparelled as monarchs of the old days, king and queen in ancient robes and stoles and minning horned crowns. How can you be so sure they're the ones? Whispered the knight to the buffoon and decide. Approach and take her hand, you'll be sure. But say nothing until you've led yourselves back through these rooms and to freedom.

but the king might well be the sorcerer in disguise. He could have us both executed. Dozer tell you. Though I cannot tell you all, you will see me greet the king and caper. You will see me greet the king and caper about his jester. Believe me when I say that he is no sorcerer. Only one that does what he can in the world against powers that he can never be.

That can ever be undone. He has been working on your cause even before you knew its troubles. Trust me that all will be well. I do trust you. the night as he fervently stuffed a jeweled pouch twice the size of the first into the belt of the gesture. Follyol cared nothing for the copious reward. The two characters separated emerged with the murmuring crowd. The gesture arrived first at their destination. From a distance he seemed to speak a few words into the king's ear and then suddenly leaped back to play the fool

before him, hopping about wildly. The night bowed before the queen and then without ostentation led her away to other rooms, though her mask covered the expression beneath it. The manner in which she placed her hand upon the knights appeared to reveal her knowledge of his identity. After they had gone, the gesture ceased his antics and stood close to the statue like king. I shall watch the duke's men around us. Who may have been watching you, wise man? And I shall see that our two little babes find their way through the forest. Blied the mock monarch, who abruptly strode off. But that was not part of your design, thought Falliol. Neither was the king's roguess

roguish voice, that of the solemn mage. Oh. The dark eyes of the gesture's mask followed the movements of the imposter until he became lost in the throng. Falliol had just started in pursuit when a strange commotion in another part of the palace adduced much talk on all sides.

It seemed that something unheard of had finally occurred, though it did not gladden any of those who had hoped for a unique happening on that carnival night. The disturbance originated in the system most of the labyrinth of capacious rooms composing the arena of the masquerade. To the surrounding, as well as the more peripheral rooms, including the one in which

Falliol was now caught by the crushing crowd, their first traveled what sounded like cries of amusement. These quickly transformed, however, into ambiguous outburst of surprise unto the edge of shock. Finally, the uproar took on the character of intense horror. All voices and alarm and confusion, tidings passed rapidly, though less and less reliably. From mouth to mouth, room to room, something terrible had happened, something which had begun or was initially perceived as a fabulous hoax. No one knew exactly how it was possible, but there suddenly appeared an outlandish spectacle in the midst of the most congested rooms of that night's affair. The matter of the event was that two participants in the mask, without being spied by those around them, had donned costumes which

went far beyond the most grotesque scene beforehand at the palace gathering. Among some persons, words circulated about semblances most closely akin to giant leeches or worms, for they did not walk upright but rised along the floor as if absent of bones. Sick. Others heard that these prodigies of disguise possess countless tiny legs and thus more properly resembled centipedes of some type. still others averred that what was now in their company were not masqueraders but things in human and nature having many tall and claws reptilian tails serpent faces and an overall composition of fantastical beasts which could not be dissembled by man nor woman but whatever may have constituted the true substance and form of these beings at some stage they affected the crowd with a panic past all reckoning and however subsequent actions were construed true to transpire, the consequence was that these bizarre intruders were hacked and torn and trampled

owing to an unreasoning revulsion for their aspect or many aspects. Tragically, once the massacre was accomplished, it was not the slaughtered remains of two uncanny monsters that the masqueraders, their mask removed, looked down upon. Instead, it was two of their own, a knight and queen of the old days. whose blood was spreading across the ornate designs of the palace floor. Their bodies, which they had feared, would be lastingly parted, now all but indistinguishable from each other. Throwing off his jester's face,

Falliol worked himself near enough to the scene to view the horror with his own shaded eyes. A tragedy, yes, but no such that would return Falliol to his furies. For the image he saw immediately took its place among the seamless and unending flow of hellish idola, which constituted Annamamundi, and which, in his vision, was a monotonous tapestry of the terrible ceaselessly unfurling itself in the faintest shades of gray. Thus, the appalling tableau was neither more nor less sinister in his sight than any other

which the world might show him. Look again for, for a hell out, for the old. Said a voice at his back, as a forceful boot propelled. him toward the carnage. But why was everything painted with such brilliance now? When a moment ago it was also insipid. Why did every piece of mutilated flesh pulse with color? And why was Fallio wholly benumbed by these red smeared forms in their unhappy fate?

He had been charged to save them, and he could do nothing. His thoughts were now careening wildly through crimson corridors within him, madly seeking solutions but failing at every turn into blind corners and flailing and vain against something immovable, impossible. He pressed his hands over his face, hoping to blind himself to the scene, but everything remained invisibly there before his eyes. Everything, save his spectacles. Now the Duke's voice broke the brief lull of the dazed and incredulous assembly. The enraged sovereign shouted orders, demanded answers.

How justified had proved his misgivings concerning the masquerade. he had long known that something of this nature might occur and he had done what he could to prevent its coming to pass on the spot he outlawed all future occasions of this kind and called for arrest and interrogations the torture of the question to be liberally implemented exodus was instantaneous the palace became a chaos fleeing freaks

falliol called a voice that sounded too clear within all the confusion to have its origin outside his own mind I have what you're looking for They're with me now Right here my hand Not lost forever When Valiol turned around

He saw the mass king standing some distance away unmolested by the frantic mob The king was holding out his spectacles As if they were the dangling head of a conquered foe Fighting his way toward the unknown persecutor Falliol would chase him down and reclaims sanity But not before he had barbariously Dispatch the fiend

yet he could not catch up to this figure which led him through all the rooms where the masquerade once flourished and then deeper into the palace at the end of a long silent corridor the gaudy flapping train of a royal robe disappeared through a doorway Folliol followed the shape

and at last entered a dim chamber with a single window for which stood the mummer that taunted him spectacles were still held by the velvet fingers of a tightly gloved hand Watching as the dark lens is flashed in the candlelight, Pelliole's eyes burned as much with questions as with madness.

Where is the mage? The mage is no more. Then tell me who you are before I send you to hell. You know who I am. But say I'm a sorcerer if that is well with you. And you killed the mage as you did the others? The others. How could you not heard the rattling...

How could you not heard that rattling pantomime? all the swords and swift feet. Did you not hear these, did you not hear that there was a pair of Leviathan leeches or something in that way, menacing the guest? True, I had a hand in the illusion. My hand contained no gouging blade. A shambles you saw it with your own eyes. In their fate you say your own future.

Even a sorcerer may be killed. Agreed. Though I think not by your hand. Who are you to have destroyed the mage? In fact, he destroyed himself, a heroic act, I'm sure. And he did it before my own eyes, as if in spite. As for myself, I confess that I'm disappointed to be so far beneath a recognition. We have met previously.

Please remember. But it was many years past, and I suppose you became forgetful as well as dim-sighted once you put those glasses over your eyes. You see, why the mage had to be stopped, he ruined you as a madman, as my madman. But you might recall that you've had another career before the madness took over you, did you not? Bubba, brave, falliol, do you not remember how you were made as such? Do you not wish to remember that you were falliol, the dandy? The dandy.

Before we met on the road that day. It was I In my role as a charm seller Who outfitted you with the onyx-eyed amulet Which you once wore around your neck It was the babble Which made you skillful mercenary Which made you the skillful mercenary

You once were And that you loved to be And how everyone else loved you that way To see a weakling become A man of strength And of steel As a stuff of public comment Of legend

And of And of diversion in general. And how much more do they love to witness the reverse of this process to see the mighty laid low, the Lord of the Sword made mad? This was the little drama I had planned. He was supposed to be my madman, Balliol. Not the impertable fool of that magician. He was supposed to be a real lost soul of torments in red and black, not a pathetic monk chanting in silent psalms and pale breaths. Do you not understand? It was wing who ruined you, who undid all my schemes for tragic and colorful history.

Because of him, I was forced to change my plans, which are many, which are many and touched the lives of all. Yes, it was your mage, who had wrestled his soul from me and believed he could do the same deed for you. Blame him for the slaughter of those innocents and for what, uh, and what for you're about to, Blame him for the slaughter of those innocents And for the... Ah, God! Blame him for the slaughter of those innocents And for what you are about to suffer.

You may know my ways. We are not strangers. No demon, or we are not. You are indeed the foul thing the wise man described to me. All the dark powers which we cannot understand, but only hate. Poor, fallow. How wrong you are to contend

that the one who stands before you is hated. What are of the few enemies I may have? Do you hear those rhapsodic voices in the streets below? They are not filled with hate. Even when I excruciate them, they make excuses for me. They could not possibly hold a greater love for what gives them all they have. However little it may sometimes come to. But I would never go so far that they would turn against their own perpetuity.

Only as they live do I live on. And the exceptional destinies of heroes and magicians. kings and queens saints and martyrs they have special roles to perform in my scheme from the highest to the lowest they are my children and through their eyes i see my own glory you see but your own foulness no the foulness is yours alone to lay eyes on my dear felial for those enamored of these contunence, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance, continuance. For these enamored of their continuance, no fallas exist. You have worn these spectacles too long, and to my disappointment, still see too much. You have seen me as others have not. If that pleases you, for that, you must come to an end. This is a privileged doom for those such as yourself. a type of consolation you have said enough to be sure my time is precious and yet i have not said what i came here to say or rather to ask you know the question did not deny a falliol

the one you dreamed in those mad dreams had sent you the torture of question you dreaded to hear asked and the dreaded more to have answered demon what is the face of the soul of the world No, it's not a face. It's only, yes, there is a face, Fallio, and you will see it. Said the mask figure as it peeled away its mask. But why have you hidden your eyes that way, Fallio? And why have you fallen to your knees? Do you not appreciate the vision I have shown you?

Could you have ever imagined that your existence would lead you into the presence of such a sight? Your spectacles cannot save you now. There are only so much glinting glass. Hark to my grinding them underfoot. Upon the cool marble of the floor, Norma Spatcos Fallial. And I think, too, nor more fallial. Can you understand what I'm telling you now, Jester? Well, what have you say? Nothing?

How black your madness must be to make you so rude. How black! But see, even if you will not, how I have provided these escorts to show you the way back to the carnival, which is where a buffoon. belongs. And be sure that you make my legions of admirers laugh or I'll punish you. Yes, I can still punish you, Fallio. A living man can always be punished. So remember to be good. I will be watching. And I am always watching. Farewell, then, a fool.

A glazen eyed guard on either side of him. Faliole was dragged from the Duke's palace and given to the crowd which still rioted in the streets of Saldori. And the crowd embraced the mad gesture, voiced in his jingling form upon their shoulders, shaking him like a toy as they carried him along. In his scheme to strangle silence forever, Saldori's unruly populace bellowed a robust refrain to Faliol's sickly moans. Into an onyx black knight, his eyes gazed and his mind vanished. There must have been some moment, however brief, in which Faliol regained his old enlightenment, and which allowed him to accomplish such a crucial triumphant action. Was it solely by his own sleeping strength, fleetingly aroused, that he attained his greatest prized?

If not, then what power could have enabled his trembling hands to reach so deeply into those haggard sockets, and with the gesture, brave and sure, dig out the awful seeds of his suffering? However it was done, the deed was done well, where as valliole perished, his face was flushed with a crimson glory. The crowd fell silent, and a new kind of confused. spread among them. Those heads, which were always watching, when it was found they were bearing through the streets of Saldori,

was only Faliol's victorious corpse. And that is the end. Interesting. Okay. So effectively, Faliol was driven bad by this mage who cursed him to see these dark things so that he could have control over him. So then Faliol goes to another mage

to try to get a, cure for it. That's where the glasses come from. So then he goes to the palace that this I forget the guy's name. The dude, the lover boy who wanted to have his princess back.

He hires him to take him on this job to get his girl back. And then as a mockery, the original mage puts a curse over the crowd to see the two of them as these giant centipede worm things. And they dismember them, tear them to pieces. And then he

admonishes Falliol for trying to get away from him and says you'll be mad forever and as Falio is being carried away by the crowd in a moment of clarity he digs out his own eyes and dies then says in the crowd fell silent a new kind of confusion spread among them

those heads which were always watching so the heads that Falliol was having visions of whispering and speaking to him on pikes were the heads of the people who would carry his corpse through the streets one day. But then Falio was able to he kind of you know It says his victorious corpse.

I think he was able to escape the visions by dying. Yeah, yeah. He's out of the main, through death, he has escaped the mage, the one that's done this to him or the sorcerer. That was really cool. I enjoyed that. Yeah, it's good. I'm stupid.

I can't read well. You're not stupid. Let alone, but here's the thing, too. I do prefer the, um, I think I prefer the red tower over this one. just because, I mean, I guess I don't mind the Shakespeare kind of. It's very Shakespeare.

It's very Shakespeare. It's, I don't really know if I just fuck with the vibe as much, you know? Like, I love Cass for Montalado, and I like that, but this idea of, uh, I mean, I don't know. I guess I did like I had to, it's weird. It feels like with his work, it's very, uh, there's a lot to digest. There's a lot to mull over on. I feel like that these would be fun like rereads, you know, it's just like a short stories, like come back to them.

how do they how do they rear its head on different occasions um because it's it's so beautifully written and it's done in this way that's very fun i mean even an idea about like a story like on the on paper it sounds fucking kind of lame of like yeah a guy is is sees visions of hell so he gets sunglasses made by a mage to help to help to help make it but it turns out really cool i mean like it's it's done in a way that's really fun and just the idea i always like those kind of angles and stories where someone is just like perpetually in a nightmare. Someone's like just kind of

perpetually seeing hell and there's no way to get around it. So it's even like it's infiltrating the real physical world too. It's cool. All right. For the final story we'll read today, we have the Christmas Eve's of Antalise. Are you ready,

Hunter? Yes. Yes. We pronounced her name with the distinct Z sound. Remember, Jack, remember. The way some people slur Mrs. into Mrs. It was at her home in Gross Point that she insisted our family, both in wealthy and its unwealthy sides, celebrate each Christmas in a style that excluded the traditional, the old fashion, the antique. Actually, Aunt Elise constituted the wealthy side of the family all on her

own. Her husband had died many years before, leaving his wife a prosperous real estate business and no children. Not surprisingly, Antilles undertook the management of the firm with admirable success, perpetuating our airless uncle's family name on four-sale signs planted on front lawns in three states. But what was uncle's first name? A young nephew or niece sometimes wondered, or it was more than once put by one of his children. Where's Uncle Ease? To which the rest of us answered in unison. He's had his ease. A response we learned from none other than our widowed aunt herself. Aunt Elise was without husband or offspring of her own, true enough.

But she left all the ferment of big families, and every holiday season she possessed as much in blood relations as she did in her tangible and intangible assets and investments. Nevertheless, she was not the conspicuously consuming type of rich bitch. Her house was something of an Elizabethan countryman, in style while remaining modest, even relatively miniature in its mass. It fit very nicely, when it existed, into a claustrophobic cluster of trees on some corner acreage a few steps from Lakeshore Drive, profiling rather than facing the lake itself.

A rather dull exterior of soot-gray stone somewhat camouflaged the old place in its woodland hideaway until one caught sight of its diamond-pane windows and realized that a house, in fact, existed where before there seemed to be only shadowed vacancy. Around Christmas time, the many faceted windows of my aunt's residence took on a candy glaze in the pink, blue, green, and other colored light strung about their perimeters. More often in the old days, remember them, Jack.

A thick December fog rolled off the not-yet-frozen lake and those kaleidoscopic windows would throw their spectrums into the softening haze. This, to my child senses, was the image and atmosphere defining the winter holiday, a serene congregation of colors that, for a time, turned our everyday world into one where mysteries abounded. This was a celebration. This was the festival. Why did we leave it all behind us? Leave it outside. Every Christmas Eve of my childhood, so I was guided up the winding front walk towards my aunt's house, a parent's hand in each of mine,

I always stopped short, pulling mom and dad back like a couple of runaway horses and for a brief, futile moment, refused to go inside. After the first Christmas Eve, I can recall, chronologically my fifth, I knew what happened inside the house, and year after year there was little change either in the substance or surface details of the program. For those from large families, this scene is a little too familiar to bother describing, perhaps even lifelong orphans are jaded to it.

Still, there are others for whom depictions of unusual uncles, lovable grandparents, and a common run of cousins will always be fresh and dear. Those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feel of their paper flesh. I tell you, they share this temper with my aunt Elise, and her spirit is in them. For the duration of these Christmas assemblies, my aunt always occupied the main room of her house. house. This room I never saw except as a fantasy of ornamentation, a hallucinatorium in holiday dress. Right now, I can only hope to portray a few of its highlights. First, of all Holly,

both fresh and artificial, hung down from wherever it was possible to hang. The frames of paintings, the stained wood shelves of a thousand goo gauze, even the velvety embossed pattern of the wallpaper itself intertwining with its swirls and flourishes if memory serves. And from the fixtures above, including a chandelier delicately sugared with tiny Italian lights, down came gardens of mistletoe. The huge fireplace blazed with a festive inferno, and before its cinder-spitting hearth was a protective screen, at either end of which stood a pair of thick brass posts. It slipped over the crown of each post was a sock puppet Santa, its middens outstretched and readiness to give someone a tiny angular hug. I like, I love how this is being set up as like a horror story of just having to go to your family's house for Christmas.

Yeah, like, oh no. It's like going to your grandma's house for Christmas. It's like, I don't know, it's like, it's a thing of not that you don't want to do it, but it's just this, I don't know, entering your grandma's home is just such a weird vibe. Like this is your aunt's house. It's just like decorated. Like it's almost like horror decorations, but it's just like this like uncanny, you know, like sock puppet Santa's on weird. You know, it's just like, it's setting up this very chilly, weird environment. I don't know.

I'm always creeped out by, I think, I think Christmas decorations can be kind of creepy, honestly. They certainly can. Do you have a kind of explicit trauma with your family you'd like to talk about with your grandmother or anything? No, no, no. None of that. It's more so just like, I don't know, like Santa visuals and stuff, especially like older ones, just kind of uncanny, weird, like just like a bunch of smiling. that's that there is there is a strangeness to it all of

I'm not going to say that it's like oh my I'm scared I'm just saying it there's a level of uncanniness to excessive Christmas decorations that give off of kind of just just a creepy vibe yeah I feel you I see where you're coming from with that definitely not you know the bright like the bright colors

and stuff I guess it's just more so the unnatural just kind of like ever cheery vibe of it can be kind of unsettling I think it's because it's so like in my mind when I think about going to my grandmother's house at Christmas. It's like the house. It's the same decorations. It's the same group of people.

It's almost like that place is a pocket and time. Nothing ever like changes. It's just like people get older, but it's like the same. It's the same thing. Also too, I think like it's the same. Elderly people just smell and it's like a fucking when you step into a,

when you were going to make it a redeem. Well, when you step into your grandma's house, I mean, you might not feel the same, but it's like going to like your grandparents house It just has this distinct smell. It's like old.

So you go in there. My grandfather, when he was alive, he would always, like during Christmas and Thanksgiving, he would sit on the porch and carve with cedar all the time. So anytime you would step in, there'd be like the super strong smell of cedar that I still associate. Yeah. And that just had that will always be a thing in your head that you associate now with that moment in time. And to that itself, it's like even just kind of uncanny and odd, you know, it can be warm and welcoming at times. but there's also just like a thing of like it's kind of like uh my my grandfather passed away it's

like when i go into my grandma's house i feel like i can still there's like that smell that reminds me of them so in a weird way it's like you just you have a sense that the person's still there you know and there's just something odd about that yeah no that makes sense because like to this day i'll smell cedar we're all like uh see someone whittling with it and i think my grandfather's been dead what 14 years now 15 years and it's like it's like oh he'd like that but it's yeah it's it's um whatever the opposite of nostalgia is you know like like sure there's a nicety to it in the corner of the main room the ones beside the front window a plump evergreen was somewhere hidden beneath every imaginable type of dangling roping or blinking decoration

as well as being dolled up with silly bows and pestle shades satiny bows lovingly tied by human hands. The same hands also did their work on the presence beneath the tree. And year after year, these seemed like everything else in the room to be in exactly the same place, as if the gifts of last Christmas had never been opened, quickening in me the nightmare's sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape. Somehow I'm still possessed by the same feeling of entrapment. My own present was always at the back of the hoard of packages, almost against the wall behind the tree. It was tied up with a pale purple ribbon and covered with pale blue wrapping paper upon which little bears and infant sleeping gowns dreamed of more pale blue presents which, instead of more bears, a little boy streaming upon them. I spent much of a given Christmas Eve sitting near this gift of mine, mostly to find refuge from the others rather than to wonder at what was inside.

It was always something in the way of underwear, nightwear, or socks, never the nameless marvel. which I fervently hope to receive from my obscenely well-hilled aunt. Nobody seemed to mind that I sat on the other side of the room from where most of them congregated to talk or sing carols to the music of an ancient organ, which Aunt Elise played with her back to her audience and to me. Sleep in heaven, heaven, leaves. That was very good.

She said, without turning around. As usual, the sound of her voice led you to expect that at any moment she would clear her throat of some sticky stuff, which was clinging to its insides. Instead, she switched off the electric organ, after which gestures some of the gathering, dismissed, left for other parts of the house. We didn't hear all Jack sitting with us. She said, turning to look across the room where I was seated in a large chair beside a fogged window. On that occasion, I was about 20 or 21, home from school for Christmas. I had drunk quite a bit of Anneliese's holiday punch and felt like answering. Who cares if you didn't hear old Jack singing?

You old bat? Hell yeah. Okay, but instead I simply stared her way. Okay. I was going to be like, that's wild. Drunkenly taking in her visage for the family scrapbook of my memory. Tight-haired head, like combed wires, calm eyes of someone in an old portrait, someone long gone.

high cheek bows highly colored less rosely than like a rash and the prominent choppers of a horse charging out of nowhere in a dream yeah that's rough he's like shut up your old horse mouth good lord i know worry about my future ability to remember these features even though i had vowed this would be the last christmas eve i would view them so i could afford to be tranquil in the face of anales's taunts that evening In any case, further confrontation between the two of us was aborted when some of the children began clamoring for one of their aunt's stories. And this time, a true story, Auntie.

One that really happened. All right. She answered, adding that. Maybe old Jack would like to come over and sit with us? Too old for that. Thank you. Besides, I can hear you just fine from... Well, let me think a moment.

There are, sir. Many, many, many who. Here's one of them. This happened before any of you were born. A few winters after I moved into this neighborhood with your uncle. I don't know if you've ever noticed, but a little way it's down the street, there's an empty lot where there should be, used to be, a house. You can see it from the window over there.

She said, pointing to the window beside my chair. Let my eyes follow her finger out that window. Through the fog, witnessed the empty lot of her story. There it once stood. A beautiful old house much bigger than this one. In that house lived a very old man who never went out and who never invited anyone to visit him. At least, no one I ever noticed.

And after the old man died, what do you think happened to the house? It disappeared? Answered some of the children, jumping the gun. In a way, I said, suppose it did disappear. Actually, what happened was that some men came and tore the house down brick by brick.

I think the old man who lived there must have been very mean to what that to happen to his house after he died. How do you know he wanted it? I interjected, trying to spoil her assumption. Why is he such a jerk? Dude, because he's drunk, bro. He's going through his

fields. I guess, I guess. I guess. What other sensible explanation is there? Anywho, I think that the old man just couldn't stand the thought of anyone else living in the house and being happy there. Because surely he wasn't, but maybe, just maybe. He had his house torn down for another reason. Said Antalise, drawing out these last words to suspenseful effect. The children sitting cross-legged before her now listened with a newly, intentness, while the crackling log seemed to start up a little more noisily in the fireplace.

Maybe. I destroying his house? Making it disappear? The old man thought he was taking it with him into the other world. People who have lived alone for a very long time often think and do very strange things. She emphasized, though I'm not sure no one except me. Thought to apply this final statement to the storyteller herself. Tell everything, Jack.

She went on. Now, what would lead a person to such conclusions about the old man? You may wonder, does something strange happen with him in his house after both of them were gone? Well, the answer is yes. Something did happen. And I'm going to tell you just what it was. One night, a foggy winter's night like this one, oh, my little children, someone came walking down this exact street and paused at the property line of the house of the old man who was now dead. This someone was a young man who many people had seen wandering around here off and on for some years.

I myself, I tell you, once confronted him and asked him. He asked him what business he had with us and with our homes, because that's what he seemed most interested in. Anywho, this young man called himself an antiquarian. And he said he was very interested in old things, particularly old houses. And he had very particular interest in the house of that strange old man. A number of times he asked him if he could look around inside. But the old man always refused.

Most of the time, the house was dark, as though no one was home, even if someone always was. So you can imagine the young man's beloved when, on one winter's night, what he saw was not a dark house, where it seemed no one was inside. But a place all lit up with bright Christmas lights shining through the fog. Could this be the old man's house? Decorated so nice and cheerful with these lights? Yes, it could There was an old man himself standing at the window With a rather frightened look on his face

So one more time The young man thought he would try his luck And maybe get to see the inside of that old house He rang the doorbell And the front door slowly opened inside The old man didn't say anything But merely step back So that his collar could come in

Finally the young Antiquarian would be able to study the inside of this house to his heart's content. And along the way, in the narrow halls and long abandoned rooms, the old man stood silently beside his guest, smiling all the time. I can't imagine how you would know this part of the true story. Ants Elise knows. Asserted one of my little cousins just to shut me up. and when my aunt cast a glance at me

seemed for a moment that she really did know then she continued her story After the young man had looked all around the house both men sat down in deep comfortable chairs on the front parlor and talked a while but it wasn't too long before the smile on the old man's face

that quiet little smile began to bother his visitor in a peculiar way at last the young man man claimed he had to go, glancing down at his watch he had drawn from his pocket. And when he looked up again, the old man was gone. Naturally, this startled the young man, who jumped up from his chair and nervously checked the nearby rooms and hallways for his host, calling, sir, sir, because he never found

out the old man's name. And though he could have been in any number of different places, the owner of the owner of The house didn't seem to be anywhere that the young man investigated, so the antiquarian finally decided just to leave without saying goodbye, or thank you, or anything like that. But he didn't get as far as the door when he stopped dead in his tracks because of what he saw through the front window. There seemed to be no street anymore. No street lamps or sidewalks, not even houses, besides the one he was in. Of course. There was only the fog in some horrible, tattered shapes wandering aimlessly within it.

The young man could hear them crying. What was this place? And where had the old house taken him? He didn't know what to do except stare out the window. And when he saw the face reflected in the window, he thought for a second that the old man had returned and was standing behind him again, smiling his quiet smile. But then the young man realized that this was now his own face,

and like those terrible, ragged creatures lost in the fog, he too began to cry. And after that night, no one around here ever saw that young man again. Well, did you like that story, children? I just want to say that is fucked. That is so fucked. My grandfather used to do that all the time. He would tell stories.

They were always like, it's like the skin taker roam through the woods and like, blah, blah, blah. It was always like something. Right. And I was just that they're like, wow, can I have another one?

And I'd act real brave. And then I'd go home and like cry in my bed. That's awesome. Thanks that story. Yeah, literally. And then I'd come back and be like, that did scare me at all. I want another one.

And I like couldn't sleep for, but yeah like the whole time you were telling that story like I I was imagining like again Thanksgiving Christmas setting

listening to my grandfather tell tales and stuff like that that faint cackling of the or cracking of the fire going on and just just fucking warm like the warmness it's so you can feel the cold

from the window but inside it's so warm you can also tell that the you can tell the drunk dude's getting kind of freaked out yeah yeah he got quiet he was like it seems seems like she knows

And it wasn't just like a typical like And then the man ran away the end It was like the house took him to a different place A place where everyone that's a funny part though About that I think is that he's sitting there And he's like yeah you wouldn't even be able to know that And she's like oh but I do And he's like

And then he shut up for the rest of story You listen I felt tired More tired than I'd ever been in my life I barely had the will or the strength To push myself out of the chair And to which I'd sunken down so deep How slowly I trudged past faces that seemed far off in the distance.

Where was I going? Was I in want of another drink? Did I desire another dainty from the table spread with Christmas treats? What was it that was calling me away from that room? No time seemed to have passed, but when I came to myself, I was walking down a foggy street. Fog formed impenetrable white walls around me, narrow corridors leading nowhere, and rooms without windows. I didn't walk very far before realizing I could go no farther. As it happened, though, I did finally see something.

What I saw was a cluster of Christmas lights, colors beaming against the fog. But what could they have signified they should be so horrible to me? Why did this peaceful vision of hazy wonder, which transported the imagination of my childhood self, now strike me with such terror? these were not the colors I had loved this could not be the house yet it was for there at the window stood its owner

sight of her thin smiling face for some reason was not right then I remembered Antilles was long dead and her house at the instruction of her will had been dismantled brick by brick Uncle Jack wake up urged young voices at close range

though technically being an only child, I was not their uncle. More accurately, I was just an elder member of the family who had nodded off in his chair. It was Christmas Eve, and I had a little too much to drink. We're going to sing Carols, Uncle Jack, said the voices, and they

went away. I went away to retrieve my overcoat from the bedroom where it lay buried in a communal grave under innumerable other overcoats. Everyone else was singing songs to the strumming of guitars. I like their metallic timber because it was in no way

reminiscent of the rich, rotting vibrations of the church organ annalese played on Christmas Eve's long past. Forgoing all rituals of departure, I slipped quietly out the back door in the kitchen. I left that Christmas Eve get together as if I had an appointment to keep, one of long-standing whose import I never knew or had forgotten. So many things I can remember from years gone by, and easily enough because I have led such an uneventful and solitary existence, but I could not remember what happened next that evening. My mind was not at its best, and the dream I had earlier must have carried over it

one I had when I went to sleep at home, though I do not recall doing that either. The one thing I do remember, as if it happened while I was still awake and not dreaming, standing before the door of a house that no longer existed, a door that opened in a slow, weighty sweep. Then a hand reached out and laid itself upon me. What horror I felt as I saw that great gaping smoke,

and hear the words. Merry Christmas, old Jack! Oh, how good it was to see the old boy when he came to me at last. He had grown old, never grew up. Finally, I had him, him and his every thought. All the pretty pictures of his mind, those weeping demons, souls forever lost, came out of the fog, and took away his body. He was one of them now.

But I have kept the best part, all his beautiful memories, all those lovely times we had, the children, the presence, the colors of those nights. Anywho, they're mine now. Tell us of those years, old Jack, the years I have now taken from you, the years I can play with as I wish, like a child with his toys. Oh, how nice, how nice and lovely to be settled in a world where it's always dead with darkness and always alive with lights, and where it will always, forever after, be Christmas. Eve. And that is the Antalese Christmas story. The end. That was a fun one. That was a fun one. And I also want to say, um, that was my bear trap by the way. Because what did I say earlier? I said it's like

those Christmas Eve like you're going to a portal to a place where it's always there. It's the same room, the same faces. And that is literally what this story was about. So you know what, Hunter? Bear trap on my half on my behalf. I'll give you all, I'll bargain you a rat trap. but not a bear trap I'll give you I'll give you a rat I'm not going to upgrade it from rat to beaver beaver beaver beaver you're a bear

do you know how big a beaver is compared to a bear ironclad my bear traps are listen here's the thing here's the thing here's the thing I this is just you what's crazy I feel like this has been three different kinds of writing

yes completely is that it's been like different eras of writing. Yeah. It's like old English, like, or not old, old new English and then like,

kind of like, you know, the 50s industrial sort of, like the, the first story was very, um, like Orwellian almost and how it was described sometimes. It felt very poetic is what is that.

Yeah. Then the, then the second story that is literally a Greek tragedy. And then this one here is like a contemporary just like, campfire horror story. You know, I mean, and what I love to is,

I was kind of, I was like, eh, you know, are we going to read the Christmas one? It was insane how like cozy. And I love that just the dark turn of an idea of like an elder telling a story. And then it's like slowly just revealing itself more and more to be this completely fuck story that she's just like trying to traumatize these kids with. And then now it kind of seems that in a way she basically has him or has these like memories. It's like it almost seems like the memories of it are forever trapped inside this perpetual Christmas Eve day. it's like part of her is it's like when they do those memories it creates another her

it creates like a uh a distant her and the entire story it's her trying to get him to write this down because there's those little notes that appear that say tell them jack tell them everything so it's like after she died and the house was dismantled she took the house with her now her house is some other place beyond the void so when it comes her family members time to die she brings them back to the house like our character jack thought he was a little boy than thought he was 22 and it turns out he's an old band that died in a chair and when it comes his time to die she brings his memories to the house to be with her forever in the place that it's always christmas eve it's like a purgatory a pocket dimension that's created

by these memories being so strong by the creation of them like the memories himself became a place do you think the that was i like that was i like that was the crying the crying blobs that are outside you think those are like just people upon the like just people outside of the veil that are crying over the loss of the loved one, do you think? It might be. I also think it is the rest of them. Because she says at the end, she says, how's that phrase?

Hold on. She says, those weeping demons, souls forever lost, came out of the fog and took away his body. He's one of them now, but I have kept the best part, all of his beautiful memories, all those lovely times we had.

So it's like the parts that don't want to be at Christmas, the parts that aren't, at Christmas Eve and her memories forever. Those are the others. The other part of him is cast out to the void, the fog around the house. But his best parts, his memory is the part that Aunt Elise wants to keep.

They're in the house now. Do you think the idea of the story that she was telling to, was that old Jack and young Jack? I think that is her giving an analogy for exactly what's happening, but she replaces herself with the old man. She's like, there's an old man who lived over there. And when he died,

the house was taken apart. And then the boy who went to visit him became a part of the house forever. And then at the end, Jack says, I forgot Annalise is dead. And she took her house apart. And then at the end, he goes to be in the house with her forever. So I think she was just describing herself. Yeah. Yeah, because I like, uh, there's a bunch of little subtle Easter eggs and hints to, like,

I like at the beginning when he's like, yeah, I'm drinking knowing that this is going to be the last time I fucking do the shit. He's like, he's like, he's all pissed off. You know, he's like a younger guy, 21. He's just one to, he's like kind of getting drunk. And he's like, well, God, I'm bored. I fucking hate coming to these things. And it's also like if the entire story is her making him write it down, then he's already

stuck in the house as he's writing these. So the little hatreds he has, even at a young age, he was like when I was five, something kept me out of the house. I would pull my parents back like reins on a horse. Maybe I like the lights, but for some reason I never wanted to go inside. And it's because he is a compilation of, it is however long he lived, 80 years. It is 80 days at that house all compressed into one moment. So something about even the childhood part of him doesn't want to go into the house.

And that's why all the moments in the house happen back to back. Because he goes one day from the other. He's always in that house. And it's like his brain understands that. And something's off putting about it. But he can't say what until the end when he realizes what's happened. The Christmas aesthetic here is really fun too. Just the idea of the super foggy purgatory feel of like you're in this dream

like area basically you can't see the things around you you're in a physical space but you can't see beyond that veil but then also how christmas lights would bounce off the the cloud of the fog you know i think is just uh just such a fun visual and too it's just like we were saying earlier that idea that it's like everyone looks forward to christmas it's like a holiday it's like a day off or like it's a way to it's also a way to rejoin your family which is kind of an interesting way to use this as like a family member welcome you into the afterlife it's like of course it would be like a holiday party where that's like the one time a year when you go and visit your family it's a weird combination between horror and uh like hopefulness you know where it's like

oh you're with your family forever but still half of you is ripped apart to be in the fog forever crying with the others it's like it's very good with the bad kind of i like this one a lot that was a lot of fun it is and i like the little blurb at the end after she says married christmas old jack and she kind of goes into her it's it's basically from her voice now just the uh it's it's very uh it's just kind of just very chilling and haunting like just such a weird cold way to end that story just super odd it's like she's an entity well yeah i mean even her just saying even her just saying those weeping demons souls forever loss came out of the fog and took away his body just it's just yeah yeah just kind of fucking chilling this is a

this was a great venture outside of our normal creepy pasta the R-slash-no-sleep stuff that is usually a bit more, you know, campy internet-focused, more, you know, more contemporary storytelling, like having something that feels, these all were just for like different sections of just different styles of writing that I just, you know, I mean, here's the thing too. I don't read a lot too, you know, so there could be authors who do this shit also, but I wonder how normal it is for people to have this kind of,

I don't know, fucking lexicon of work in that way. you know i mean he did the the incredibly well written i appreciate how he can adapt so many different styles into the story he's telling i really liked lecotta i never read it before before this and i really enjoyed it well dude on it so i think it's cool even on amazon or wherever you want to go like barns noble and stuff i'm telling you that thomas legaia the songs of a dead dreamer and grim scribe it's like it's not a thick book it's so it's like what i like about these uh authors that do uh short stories is it's just so easy to pick it up and just be like i just want to read a little something or just get totally lost in it.

So I think we should throw links to those two in the description. I think that'd be cool. Yeah, definitely. And it's all, it's all, I think people certainly be interested. It's all, uh, I think a lot of his work is up on, um, Amazon and stuff. And I'm sure he has, you know, any place you can buy books. But I would just say the ones that we were reading from the day. That's the songs of the, of a dead dreamer and grim scribe.

So be sure and check it out. It's a, man, what a fun read. Yeah. That was cool. That was awesome. I really enjoyed that. I hope that you guys in the audience enjoyed. I hope you support LaGotti's work because that was really cool. And yeah, that was just a ton of fun. I would like to read and see more from this guy in the future. I mean, obviously, he has a big body of work. I would like to see more from us regarding him in the future. Yeah, I want to just dive more into it for sure, even if it's just on myself personally. But also, guys, like we said at the beginning of the episode, new merch is out now.

please click a link to the description or down below and get yourself some new clothing so you can cover that gross body of yours. You can get you can get me as Jeff Goldblum. Oh, there it is. This is Jeff Goldblum from the fly. I also appreciate I didn't notice this until I was looking at earlier, but the Hawaiian shirt I'm wearing on the shirt is an actual Hawaiian shirt I have and wearing videos. That's right. Like that's insanely well detailed. It's a great shirt.

It's a great shirt. Great shirt. And Hunter looks like a two and then just like he just like he has some really. That's just how I am in real life. The, uh, and for everybody who was listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, we appreciate you. Consider supporting us on those in the future as well, guys. And we will see you all in the next one. Bye-bye.

See you all in the next one. Try not to get trapped in Grandma's time prison cube thing. Bye. I don't know. He said. Sh. Fy-ch-chie-ch-ch... ...their.

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