The Red Tower | Creep Cast

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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-Creepypasta 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.

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 story you've ever written, $200.

How's that sound?

I'm going to read your entire works for $7.

Thank you.

But the PR, the publicity.

But the exposure, my friend, the exposure.

Think of the exposure.

No, they're going to be rich.

This is Thomas Lugodi.

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

artists.

I have people who are writers.

I have people who are musicians.

And I've had so many people recommend Thomas Lugode.

And today we're going to be starting off with 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

dead, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, 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 merch.

Look at this.

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 features me as a Jeff Goldblum-esque scientist from the fly, with Hunter being the tumorous growth that comes out of my nipple, just like in real life.

Creep casts down the sleeves, and it is super comfortable, super high-quality print.

And we also have a couple of other items, don't we?

We do.

We have shorts.

Beautiful gym shorts.

We've got shorts.

It's the spring, going to go 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 sweater.

A creep cast ghoul sweater.

It's a nice little ghost little, you know.

I have to say, I'm a dude, the fits together, diabolical, unbelievable.

They go crazy hard.

I will also say that if you have our previous merch drop of of

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 of, are they oversized?

There was a lot of weird, we heard your feedback.

People were 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 what I'm saying.

You complain to Isaiah this time.

I think Hunter.

No, 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 or 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 shirts?

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.store.

Check it out.

We got new stuff up now, dude.

It's going to be beautiful.

We already sent Thomas Lugodi 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 it 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 get legodee me up let's get legote how do you how do you make that

a nice you know like people because people say you know i'm creeping my cast all that stuff i creep my cast how would you do that with legodee i'm licking my goatee

just immediately just just immediately i also hate how childlike that was i'm licking my goatee i'm not licking.

I'm licking.

I know.

I'm licking my goatee.

I'm licking my Odie.

I'm licking my Odi.

I'm licking my Odie.

I'm licking my Odie.

I'm licking my Odie.

We're about to lig our Odie.

I'm about to lick my Odie.

I'm about to lick that Odie all over the place.

Hey, spread me open and lick my Odie.

You always somehow, regardless of what the conversation is, you come back to spreading or

split me open.

Split me open until you see my Odie.

That's your classic move.

It's all I know.

Spread.

Spread, smear, scrape.

She smears my lig until I get my OD.

Oh, that's good.

We like that.

She creeped in my cast till I.

Creep my cast till I lig my Odie.

Fuzz.

Yeah, it's going to be.

See, now it's going.

She creeped my cast till I got a crazy.

So after we've already bespirged this man's name,

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 or 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 No road led to the factory, nor were there any traces of one that might 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.

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 signs of life, basically.

Dirt, like, just dry,

uh, hellish landscape.

Very very empty very

yeah just like a subtle little subtle breeze

dancing along

the factory had long been in ruins its 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 ceased 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 remains 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 envisioned 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.

This 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 honeycombed 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 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 lockets 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 was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight and incessantly grew back should one attempt to clip them.

No, I just said, What the fuck?

That's just such a weird thing.

A disembodied 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 ram's horn 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

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, too.

It's like...

Sorry to interrupt.

I was just going to say, it's such a weird,

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.

And, you know, it's like this, this impossibly black, like you're almost looking into 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

problems with

people and stuff like that.

Because

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

physiological structures, but they have evidence of disease around them, like you know, organs that are rotted and deteriorated.

It's like it's corrupted people or corrupted flesh is being burst.

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 hardened globs of lava and two whose rough

igneous 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 intraceable 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, an emulation of a dying individual's death.

Wow, that's sick.

That's so cool.

I like to imagine that it's like

an actual person's like final breaths.

Oh, dude, totally.

But you know, it's crazy.

It's kind of cool to think about it.

It's like every time you do it, though, it's a different person.

Like, almost like a bunch of people.

It's a different one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Be funny.

Yeah.

You're like, here's your, you just hear,

like, oh, you're like, oh, my God.

The next one's just like,

this is the sucking sound.

You're like, what?

Open it, open it, open it again.

Oh!

You're like, oh, weird.

What the hell is this music box?

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 shut it really quick.

Like, no, no, no.

Finally, there you are.

Flipping through all the dying 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 begin 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

sick.

That the carpets, like you see, things

like morphs.

Yeah, I mean, they're morph.

I mean, 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, that 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 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 where 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, with 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 enclosing the area.

These walls seemed to have been covered with phosphorescent paint, which bathed the graveyard in a cloudy, greyish 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 crooked 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 greyish 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.

In 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 gray 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 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 a 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 and to issue, as if in the spirit of the most grotesque belligerence, a line of quite morbid, quite wonderfully disgusting novelty goods.

In an expression of defiance, at some point, it reddened with an enigmatic passion for betrayal and perversity.

On the surface, the Red Tower might have seemed a splendid complement 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 origin of its being.

I am 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 had 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, would 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 in 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 manufacturer 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, this line of goods displayed the most essential qualities of their organic nature, which meant, of course, that they were wildly conflicted into 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 ineluctable 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 dumb-struck 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.

They birth out as these organisms that are

they jerk and they move with vitality, but they have degeneracy and death really deeply upon them.

No, I'm just

processing stuff too.

I'm just getting hit by these things.

It's so far, I was going to kind of say this towards the end, but I was going to say, it just feels like such a

almost somebody articulating beautifully their like nightmare 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 it just like being like it was the most

it was the most detailed dream I've ever had

it it's just uh

I don't know man it's this is it's just

it's beautiful I mean there's no getting around it's fucking beautiful this episode is sponsored by aura bank of America recently announced a data breach.

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Now let's get back to reading that episode.

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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 hyper-organic 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 creaky or 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 larvae upon the barren earth of the graveyard.

What their bodies might have produced or emitted in 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 client efforts these creations probably made to deliver themselves from that confining environment which their malformed or non-existent brains could not begin to understand.

They could not 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 a 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 an 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 had been brought to a close.

There are indications that believe 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's 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 have heard i myself have never seen the red tower no one ever has and 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 hyper-organisms 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 have only recorded what everyone is saying, though they may not know they are saying it, and sometimes they have seen, though they may not know they have seen it.

But still, they are always talking, in one deranged way or another, about the Red Tower.

I hear them talk of it every day of my life.

Unless, of course, they begin to speak about gray and desolate landscape, that hazy void in which the Red Tower, 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 must strain to hear the voices.

I wait for them to reveal to me the new ventures 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.

I 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?

How'd you feel?

I feel like I just gave birth.

I feel like I just came out of

what felt like a dream that was seven years long or something, where it felt like you 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 Chad brain thinking of me going to a liberal arts school is me thinking that this is, it almost feels like commentary on like a capitalistic kind of like,

just like, I guess it's 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, 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 idea of wanting to get ahead.

Like,

you know, I mean, 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 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

interacting with in, 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 tunnels, like fucking prime delivery and all that kind of stuff.

It just feels like, you know, and they even have stuff too, where it's like, they're delivered inside of them.

It's just kind of,

I don't know.

It just, it makes me think there's this place in Kansas City called the

East 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

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 what just existed in the gray until it like ornated itself with a reddish hue.

And like, you know, it would be a thing that you'd be like, oh, fuck, it'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 anything.

It's just kind of, it's just so uncanny.

I'm rambling, but yeah, I just have a lot to say, I guess.

I think, um, so to me,

reading it, uh, and this shows the different, uh, this shows like, um, how different

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 to be like an analogy of Satan, uh, 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 can see the future, then why would God make Lucifer?

Um,

but it's like, perhaps, I like the way that was phrased where it was like, perhaps to uh rebel against itself, or perhaps to give some spirit to the land or whatever, um, the tower was invented.

And at first, the tower was beautiful and matched the 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

almost,

yeah, yeah, like uh, 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, uh, 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 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 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 what's the thing is like i think i mean i i really enjoy your

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 what 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 why would someone even want to make these and all that stuff.

And then, like, really, the solidification of the

nameless graves underneath.

They're just fucking headstones painted is so

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 uh head like a headstone 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 dis like man i just anytime that they went into the specific i mean because the entire time like legodi 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 like 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 timepiece that has the lizard tongues and the insects like that's just such a i like the idea

like the symbol the antithetical nature of having graves that birth people right life coming out of

the death state yeah there's 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.

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 relics or something.

And 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

idea of them 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 brought disease and pestilence into the world.

It makes people worse, the formless.

And also, 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.

It felt very like religious to me.

There's even the line where,

where is that?

It's talking about it doesn't understand why the tower created what it did.

Or it doesn't

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, uh, 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

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 in how it does it.

Even whenever it has that moment where

the dust settles after the people have 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.

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.

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 building was in an 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 was 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

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

fucking organisms or like the ground, like all these things where it's like, oh, 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

it's like nauseating to think about it.

It's like almost like it fucks with your equilibrium, even to think about it.

So, which I

just really, I just think it's so cool, man.

Such a like,

delicately written story so much imagination of just how

of how someone would i 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 he has a it says uh legati has a compilation from 1997 called the nightmare factory uh 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 had almost.

It does feel.

That's why it makes me feel like it's a fucking nightmare of a factory worker.

That's what it makes me think of.

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,

at least for me, it's just like you buy all this 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, uh.

I like this a lot.

I feel like you, I know that you don't like SCP stuff that much, but bear with me here.

I think there are two SCP stories that have to be directly based off of this.

One of them is an 01 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 SCPs.

And that would 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 big estate 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 the every time someone dies, he like uses these tools to build them back into like these zombified creatures.

And the ending of it's very Borderlands or Final Prayer, if you're

in 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 Legatti 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.

Aw, man.

That was good.

That was, I really, obviously, I love that.

This is sick.

It's so sick.

And I think that, like, I'm, I want to keep reading on to another one.

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

Masquerade of a Dead Sword, a tragedy.

That's such a good idea.

It is.

When the world uncovers some dark disguise, embrace the darkness with adverted eyes.

Give us chapter one's title.

How the fuck do you say that?

Faliol.

Faliol's rescue.

Faliol.

Yeah, I would 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 quiet what does that word all right Ligodi let's fucking reel it in for a simple

having declared their town an enemy of quite quasense quiescence quiescence I would think that means quietness yeah if I had to get having declared the town an enemy of being quiet there you go being quiet.

There you go.

The people of Soldori had taken to the streets.

There they conspired against solitude and, to accompany 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 Liness or Darnzella, 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 Soldori, occasionally to the Duke's dismay, were the most loving of amusement.

In every quarter of their usually sedate principality, frolicking 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 roisterous

hostelry might well be excused for not recognizing Faliol,

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 mad.

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 hurriedly applied to the storm-fractured joist of a sagging roof.

Before he had closed the door of that cave-like room behind him, the draught 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 demelion,

tattered

demolion, whatever.

There was still so much else about Falliol 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 dantified 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 hearsuit era.

But possibly, the greatest alteration, the greatest problem and mystery of Faliol'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 Faliol.

For as he moved toward a seat adjacent to the alcove, where the booming-voiced trio was asconned, 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 grey with the dust of roads that a zealous equestrian such as Faliol would never have trod, still jangled with a few of those once innumerable silver links from which dangled small, agate-eyed medallions, once identical to the Onyx-eyed ambulet, which in other days hung from a silver chain around his lean throat.

Now, however, no medallion ornamented Faliol'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 Faliol 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 inscribed upon its soft, worn cover.

The cover of the book was black, while the characters of its title were the red of autumn leaves.

Faliol, 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.

Faliol 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 hostelry's engrimed window panes.

But there were only stern looking letters written, to be precise, handwritten, in 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 Faliol,

though he continued to read as if they were not present.

He read until the lantern above was extinguished, its stump of tallow snuffed out by the middleman's grossly knuckled stumps of flesh.

Clasping his book closed, Faliol replaced it with the rags around his heart and sat perfectly still.

Oh sorry.

Clasping his book closed, Faliol replaced it within the rags around his heart and sat perfectly still.

The three men seemed to watch in a trance of ugsome hilarity at this slowly and solemnly executed sequence of actions.

The face at 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 bespeckled personage, as did the second man from his enormous tankard.

Then more ale, this time expectorated, was received by the victim as the 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 Soldorians.

As the moments passed, men waxed more cruel and their torments more inventive.

Finally, they jostled a bloody-mouthed falliole out of his seat.

Jesus.

Just beating the hell out of this guy.

Good lord.

No.

Exactly.

Dude, you should be cool.

You write books, idiot.

You used to be fucking cool, but you're kind of gay now, dude.

Let's beat this guy up.

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?

And he just comes over and starts kicking me.

I'm like, dude, nice fucking book needle dick.

And I slap you in the face.

Bam.

You're like, what the fuck and i do shut up man nice glasses

idiot

hunter's always like hey the chiefs are on you want to 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 in my library 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 don't i can't can't comprehend that.

Like, shut the fuck up with your stupid glass.

I'm gonna smack you in the face.

So I say, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna dust those teeth out of your mouth.

Pop!

Pop!

Pop!

Pop!

Well,

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

So usually they're saying my boy.

My boy Fiol.

Fioli.

Falliol.

My boy Falliol.

Usually he's just got red and black trim on.

That's what it sounded like they're saying.

Now he shows up

haphazardly, has a bunch of like random colors and shit.

It sounds like it's just wrapped around him.

It's like not even like an outfit.

It's just like a weird.

I imagine it's like, because he says he's an equestrian, 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're a horse rider.

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?

Your tiny book.

What is this?

Let's beat that guy.

Also, everyone is like pissed drunk.

Everyone's just pissed drunk.

And they're like, dude, I thought you were cool and you wanted to drink.

You can get pussy with us, but apparently you're just wanting to read your gay book.

He's like, I came.

I just thought that I could have my,

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 boy's getting done dirty is what I'm saying.

Yeah, 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 hulking third member snatched his spectacles.

A pair of blue eyes were suddenly revealed.

They firmly clinched themselves closed, reopened as if bursting out out of black depths and into the light felliol dropped to his knees and his mouth stretched wide to let out a strangled scream 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, outstretched, like, yeah, the scream of a mute under torture.

So it seems like he kind of got his wind knocked out of him, but he's screaming in pain.

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're fucking doing it again.

I like to think he's like, I like to think he does,

he's like, ah,

ah, ah, ah, ah.

Ah!

I think we're supposed to like Falliol.

I like him.

He's my boy.

I know people like you, Hunter, wouldn't understand the mind of an intellectual.

Well, understand about

the truth as if it elected the dexterity.

You wouldn't understand the minimum required effort it takes.

Doesn't life seem 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 this?

My boy Faliol Faloli.

My boy Faloli is not going to get David King pilled, dude.

Shit, you said it.

It's over.

You summoned him.

The one who had taken Faliol'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 savage.

Good God.

Going crazy.

Good lord.

He's fucking, he's like, he's shaking all of the other people.

My boy Falliol

taking out a little butterfly knife and just stabbing everybody around him.

To be fair, they did.

They punched him first.

It's self-defense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they definitely deserve to be stabbed to to death in a bar for being drunk and messing with the guy who's riding in the corner.

Where?

He started to shout to his loudish comrades as they ran ripped and bloody from the

hostelry.

Then he turned about face to feel Faliol's 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 scrape playfully against the chainmail vest concealed beneath his doublet's 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 toneless 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 if fastened to the floor on which it stood.

Everyone in the room leaned closer to see the giant in dark spectacles, and so did the well-groomed face at the hostelry window.

Most of the men laughed, drunkenly and anonymously, but a few remained silent, if they did not, in fact, become silent at this sight.

And a scholar of the wildest folly, too,

someone whispered.

Falliol 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.

Faliol 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, its grizzled cheeks like two mounds of snow that had been sewn 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, and very much in the manner of a dying fish gasping in the dry air.

And 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, Falliol removed the spectacles from the face of the dumb-struck idol, and he waited until he was outside the hostelry before replacing them on his own.

Good sir,

called a voice from the shadows of the street.

Falliol paused, but only as if considering the atmosphere of the night, and not necessarily in response to a stranger who had accosted him.

And when the coach began moving down streets on the circumference of the festivities, this finely habited gentleman, though he was just barely more than a youth, continued to speak to a silent Faliol.

I was informed you had arrived in Saldori not long before this very moment, and have been waiting for a discreet interval in which to approach you.

Of course, you were aware of my presence,

he said, pausing to scan Faliol's expressionless face.

How unfortunate that you were forced to reveal who you are back in this in the sty of a s drinking in the sty of a drinking house.

But I suppose you couldn't allow yourself to undergo much more of that treatment merely for the sake of anomedy anomity anomedy.

No harm done, I'm sure.

And I'm sure, Faliol 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 sooner 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 sword, who looked and acted more like one of the clockwork automatons which performed their mechanical routines high above the town square of Sildori.

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.

Shreldon 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 in all but title, whom Shreldon loved and who loved him in return, accepting his proposal of marriage and cleaving to his vision of their future as two who would be one.

But there was another who was called Wing.

My boy Wing.

Does that be right?

Wing?

Let's call him Wing.

Wing.

Wing.

Yeah, it'd be Wing.

Who was called Wing, though Shreldon referred to him thereafter as the Sorcerer.

As Shreldon explained the situation, the sorcerer had appropriated the young woman for himself.

This unnatural feat was achieved, Shreldon hated to say, not only through the powerful offices of the Duke of Soldori himself, but also with the willing compliance of the young woman's father.

Both men, according to Shreldon, 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, Shreldon 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 Faliol 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 Streldon's account of his plight.

Well, I'm glad to know that your wits are still in order.

However, however distracted you may seem, I have 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 Fallyol here, right?

And 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

magic.

He's a sorcerer.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's why she left it.

She's like, that dick game is magic, daddy.

What she says to him, he's like, please, Fabio,

just stop this.

He's a witch.

He has magic.

Yeah, the guy's just like, yeah, I have a steady job.

And I was like, I'm from.

He's like a Nepo baby.

He's mad that his girl chose a guy, a Nepo baby, that has better dick game.

That's what this is.

And he's an alchemist.

So he's like, yeah, I'm really good at metal work and stuff like that.

I'm like, okay.

He's like, no, I'm actually super awesome.

And she's like, just doesn't realize how 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 Ligatti started describing people in his stories because in the Red Tower is just kind of an exposition.

But with the dialogue and people, this feels incredibly po.

Oh, dude, yeah.

And it's Edgar Opo.

Well, at first, I was like, this feels like a cask of a Montelado.

Yeah, yeah, Cask of Up.

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 Fall of the House of Usher, though.

Oh,

yeah, 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

what's the one where he chops up someone and puts them in the floor?

That's the telltale.

That one's so funny, dude.

That's such a funny one.

It's still beating.

I love a guy.

I love a guy who's.

I'm just like getting so upset about looking at an old person.

He's just like, I have to fucking kill him.

You have to kill them.

I have to just.

All right.

They're dead and under my floorboards.

Thank God.

And then he's just like, that's son.

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 pussytail, dude.

That's what this is.

Okay.

Little incel 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 one.

Fall of the House of Usher is another one.

Anyways, back to incel

Shakespearean Poe thing here.

Belliol asked if Shreldon had possessed the foresight to have brought along a pair of costumes to enable their entrance to the masquerade.

Shreldon, somewhat vainly, produced from the shadows of the coach two such costumes: one that was appropriate to a knight of the old days, and the other that of a court gesture of the same period.

Faliol 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.

he added, holding the hook-nosed fool's face opposite his own.

They were now traveling in the direction of the palace, and Soldori's carnival began to thicken about the wheels of Streldun's coach.

Gazing upon the nocturnal confusion, Faliol's eyes were as dark and swirled with shadows as the raving night itself.

So that's the 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 Faliol

and a guy who's coming up and being like, I hear you're basically an assassin.

It's kind of how I see it.

Right.

And I hear you do good work.

Yeah, well, he says that his liege already spoke to him the night prior.

So this has already been kind of set up.

Oh, yeah.

Falliol 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 you to kill this fucking sorcerer.

He's cringe.

His 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 Faliol, 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,

he 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, Faliol was coming around here but the most noticeable thing are his new spectacles so faliol was a known guy well not only not only his 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?

Yeah.

Because when he put it on the other guy, the big fat fuck, whatever.

And that guy had basically gotten all stiffed up and he couldn't even move.

He went cantotonic.

So I'm wondering why Faliol is able to wear them and still function and do his thing.

And he's become red-pilled or whatever.

Doesn't it kind of seem like he's like, man, let me pull off my book doing a party.

You know what 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.

Story's over.

Terrible.

Faliol.

Yeah,

that's what intellectual people do.

They just say their own name out there.

Damn David King.

It's his eye Falliol.

There's really not a more, you know, like, and they kind of, it's kind of deserved that the guy's ass kicked now to go to a place where everyone's all drunk and having a good time.

They're just like, ooh.

Like, you show up to the middle of the room, yawn, and then take out a book and start reading.

Just like, fuck you.

If you need me, I'll be in my study.

I didn't even realize I was even here.

What does that even mean?

You know, I'm just

participating in my readings, but my culture.

I'm in the Oprah Book Club, which is very exclusive.

Oh, here.

Chapter two is the.

The story of the spectacles.

The

story of the spectacles.

What's new?

Which means who was right?

I was right.

No, no, I was.

If you don't, I'm the one who was asking about it.

That's not what I'm saying.

You could.

I'm not going to say that.

I'm not going to say that it's happened.

Don't say whatever you're going to say.

It's not true.

Whatever you guys say is it's not true.

Whatever you guys say to everyone.

Okay.

I'm not going to say that it's a bear trap moment, but it kind of is.

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 2.

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 these.

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 or 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 listened 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 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 and without the seal of our natural selves.

It is a forbidden madness, madness, a saboteur from outside the body of known laws.

As you know, I have been the subject of its devastation.

Hey, first off, what the fuck are you even talking about, dude?

So he's going to this mage who, like, in his place, has esoteric symbols and stuff like that.

And there's also a mage, so we can assume that.

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 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 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 its ruin 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 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 mouths.

So clear, so precise to my ears, that every word is a bright flash in my dreaming brain.

A brilliant new coin meanted 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.

Hmm.

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 would drive him mad, and the faces themselves are distinguishable.

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 disembowel weeping children.

children god damn dude what the fuck you can transform into a demon and begin to disembowel weeping children before my eyes and smear the intros upon the floor so that in them you may read my future a future without escape and 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 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 if I'm sleeping or not, it's the same.

Like I'm in a constant hell.

Yeah, like

I've I don't mean this against you, but looking at you right now, at any moment, you could become a demon and rip a child apart.

Yeah, you know, the Shakespeare.

I can't trust anything.

The Shakespearean guy's just like, good lord.

He's like, I know, I'm sorry.

I hate to even put up.

He's just a mage over there.

Just like he's like gently pushing the kid back under the chair.

He has a giant pipe.

He's just like, dear God, my man.

Get yourself together.

For fuck's 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, and which holds within a type of school.

A school of torture.

The major's like,

good God.

Ceremonial stranglers, their poems grooved by the red cord, stalk the corridors of this place or lie snoring in its shadows, dreaming of perfect throats.

Me too.

As somewhere, the Master Carnifex, the Supreme Inquisitor, waits as I am taken from cell and dragged across stone floors.

Until I am finally presented to the fiend with

witless, rolling eyes.

Then my arms and my legs, everything is shackled, and I am screaming to die.

Well, the torture of the que- well, the torture of the question.

Enough,

said the mage without raising his voice.

Yes, enough.

And so, I have said numberless times,

but there is no end.

There is no hope.

And this endless, hopeless torment incites me with a desire to turn its power on others.

Now, 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.

That would have been very awesome.

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 make.

All right, hold on, hold on, hold on.

That's a really good one.

I like that voice.

You have envisioned precisely what you've been made to envision, and nothing that has risen from your own

true being.

But how could you have known this?

What is this nature of what you've seen?

This is the most disinterested

job, boys.

This enema

moony of the oldest philosophers of an alchemist to deceive and to pose as the soul of another world

and not as the 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 animamundi would turn you

what the is an animamundi

i think it means like essence spirit i'm pretty sure your soul

and no and no ordinary

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 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 cannot.

I hate you.

You cannot.

Your very wish to destroy it is not yours, but that, but uh, of shit.

Your 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?

You are only what it would have you be.

You speak as if you're.

Like, I was serious, guys.

You speak 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.

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 entire scene.

No, dude, it's cool.

He's like, I'm

sounds like that.

Yeah, it's a mage who pretty much sounds like this.

It's kind of a magey voice.

No, it's not.

That's a Dwight Shroot voice.

Well,

I'm more of a.

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 Faloli, why he fucking, he's all, you know, mutant, red-pilled now and, you know, giga-chad.

So, um,

and Anima Mundi is the soul of the world, uh, as described in ancient Greek text and Roman philosophy that shows up a lot in like Hermeticism, Stoicism, and Gnosticism.

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 this 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 Filoli, he's like,

Philil, 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 Animal Moon is doing to him.

It wants him to become the kind of person that wants to inflict this on others.

Yeah, it's like a

vessel.

Never-ending cycle.

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.

The 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,

Animamundi 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-fog lenses of these spectacles, you will be blinded so that you may see with greater sight.

Through their darkly clouded glass, Animamundi will diffuse it into nothing.

Through their darkly clouded glass, Animamundi will diffuse into nothingness before you.

What would murder 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.

Ghosts that clamor to pass themselves as actualities, masks that desperately flit 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 shined 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 dulled 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 torment.

Though we cannot overthrow the hold that Animamundi has on the others of this earth,

we must still try as we can.

For as long as the soul of the world has its way,

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 gonna.

Anima Monday is gonna just be in my head

thank you

yeah you gotta watch out for

animamundi

i can't i can't wait for what legati's publishing company says to us after this because it's not gonna be

like

we all don't know

we can leave that episode off but we keep getting emails about animamundi so we wanted to just say uh thomas was thrilled with the reading and he found particularly interesting how he read Animamundi 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 uh video is doing really well book is selling well on the downside uh he has agreed to never write ever again not even once animundi

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

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.

Falyol sat very still for some time, an ease 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.

When at last he saw this and perceived the sacrificed, 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 will 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 Faliol and the mage sat quietly conversing suffer to behold such a vision.

End of chapter two.

We go into chapter three.

Oh!

Chapter 3.

Labeled, very respectively,

Animamundi.

I really hope like some super hippy-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 way.

Animamundi is what I say.

That's what I would respond with.

Animamondi.

I like this.

I like the vibe, though.

I like the

time jump thing and getting a fun backstory.

We got to see what Filoli 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 fight, 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 people

are.

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 mean, like, just the idea of getting

an artifact to wear.

I don't know.

It just has a very adventurous feel to it, you know.

What would you call a story hunter that is about esoteric things that cannot be understood and peer into the unknown that humanity is not capable of?

Easy peasy, I got you.

And I'm a moonie.

Okay, all right.

Chapter 3.

While the revelers in the streets of Soldori remedied their discontents by throwing off the everyday face of orthodoxy, those attending the masquerade at the Duke's palace found their deliverance by donning 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 indiscretions.

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 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 feigned 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, offered 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 crusader's 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 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 in disguise.

Oh!

The person that the wing that so the wing, the person that

his contractor wants him to kill is the mage?

Yeah.

Wow, okay.

With this advantage, Feliol might easily assist assist the knight in escaping Soldori.

Not that such heroics were any longer of concern to Faliol, 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 paupers.

And then his work would be done in Soldori, such as he could accomplish what he set out to do.

The knight and the gesture now paused at the arch entrance to the last and most intimate of the masquerade's many rooms.

Pulling at the knight's golden sleeve, the jester angled his pointed, sneering muzzle towards a costume pair in the far corner.

The indicated figures were appareled as monarchs of the old days, king and queen in ancient robes and stolls and many horned crowns.

How can you be so sure they're the ones?

Whispered the knight to the buffoon at his side.

You will see me greet the king and caper about his gesture.

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 never 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, said the knight, as he fervently stuffed a jeweled pouch twice the size of the first into the belt of the gesture.

Though Faliol cared nothing for the copious reward.

The two characters separated and 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 knight 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,

replied the mock monarch, who abruptly strode off.

But that was not part of your design, thought Faliol.

Neither was the king's roguish voice that of the solemn mage.

Oh

the dark eyes of the jester's mask followed the movements of the imposter until he became lost in the throng.

Faliol 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 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 centermost 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, there first traveled what sounded like cries of amusement.

These quickly transformed, however, into ambiguous outbursts of surprise onto the edge of shock.

Finally, the uproar took on the character of intense horror.

All voices in 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 seen 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, yeah,

others heard that these prodigies of disguise possessed countless tiny legs and thus more properly resembled centipedes of some type.

Still, others avered that what was now in their company were not masqueraders, but things inhuman nature, having many talon 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 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, were now all but indistinguishable from each other.

Throwing off his gesture's face, Faliol 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 Faliol to his furies.

For the image he saw immediately took its place among the seamless and unending flow of hellish Edola, which constituted animamundi, and which, in his vision, was a monotonous tapestry of the terrible ceaselessly unfurling itself in the faintest shades of grey.

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

Faliol

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 all so insipid, why did every piece of mutilated flesh pulse with color?

And why was Falliel wholly benumbed by these red-smeared forms and 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 in 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 of fleeing freaks.

Faliol!

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 Faliol turned around, he saw the masked 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, Faliol would chase him down and reclaim sanity, but not before he had barbariously dispatched the fiend.

Yet he could not catch up to this figure, which led him through all the rooms where the masquerade once flourished, 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.

Valiol followed the shape and at last entered a dim chamber with a single window, before which stood the mummer that taunted him.

The spectacles were still held by the velvet fingers of a tightly gloved hand.

Watching as the dark lenses flashed in the candlelight, Valiol's eyes burned as much with questions as 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 have not heard the rattling?

How could you have 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 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 am disappointed to be so far beneath your 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?

Baba Brefalol

Faliol.

Do you not remember how you were made as such?

Do you not wish to remember that you were Faliol 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 bauble which made you skillful mercenary,

which made you the skillful mercenary you once were

and that you love to be.

And how everyone else loved you that way.

To see a weakling become become a man of strength and of steel is a stuff of public comment, of legend, 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.

You were supposed to be my madman, Velio.

Not the imperturbable fool of that magician.

You were 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 and what for you are about to...

Blame him for the slaughter of those innocents and for the

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 Faliol.

How wrong you are to contend that the one who stands before you is hated.

What 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, in the exceptional destinies of heroes and magicians, of 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 Felio.

For those enamored of these contu continuinance, continuance, continuance, continuin, continuinance, continuance, continuance,

continuance.

For these enamored of their continuance, no foulness exist.

You have worn these spectacles too long.

And to my disappointment, still see too much.

You have seen me as others have have not, if that pleases you, if 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.

Do not deny it, Falio.

The one you dreamed in those mad dreams I 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, Faliol, and you will see it!

Said the masked figure as it peeled away its mask.

But why have you hidden your eyes that way, Valiol?

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.

They are only so much glinting glass.

Hark to my grinding them underfoot upon the cool marble of the floor.

No more spectacles, Faliol.

And I think, too, no more Faliol.

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 will punish you.

Yes, I can still punish you, Faliol.

A living man can always be punished.

So remember to be good.

I will be watching, and I am always watching.

Farewell, then.

Fool.

A glazen-eyed guard on either side of him, Faliol was dragged from the Duke's palace and given to the crowd which still rioted in the streets of Soldori.

And the crowd embraced the mad gesture, hoisting his jingling form upon their shoulders, shaking him like a toy as they carried him along.

In its scheme to strangle silence forever, Soldori'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 and triumphant action.

Was it solely by his own sleeping strength fleetingly aroused that he attained his greatest prize?

If not, then what power could have enabled his trembling hands to reach so deeply into those haggard sockets and with a gesture brave and sure dig out the awful seeds of his suffering?

However, it was done, the deed was done well, for as Faliol perished, his face was flushed with a crimson glory.

The crowd fell silent, and a new kind of confusion spread among them.

Those heads, which were always watching, when it was found that they were bearing through the streets of Soldori, 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.

And 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.

Yeah.

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 Falliol is being carried away by the crowd, in a moment of clarity, he digs out his own eyes and dies.

Then it says, and 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 Falliel 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 he's out of the mate 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 let alone.

But here's the thing, too.

I do prefer the,

i i think i prefer the red tower over this one just because i mean i guess i don't mind the shakespearean kind of

it's very

it's very shakespeare it's just it's i don't really know if i just fuck with the vibe as much you know like i love cast with montalatto uh and i like that but this idea of uh i mean i don't know i i i guess i did like i i had to it's 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 story, it's like come back to them.

How do they, how do they rear its head on different occasions?

Um,

because 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 sees visions of hell, so he gets sunglasses made by a mage

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.

Um,

it's cool.

All right.

For the final story we'll read today, we have the Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise.

Are you ready, Hunter?

Yes.

Yes.

We pronounced her name with a 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-fashioned, 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, Aunt Elise undertook the management of the firm with admirable success, perpetuating our heirless 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 Elise?

To which the rest of us answered in unison, He's at 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 loved 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 country manor 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-paned 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 lights 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's 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 the celebration.

This was the festival.

Why did we leave it all behind us, leave it outside?

Every Christmas Eve of my childhood, as 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 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.

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 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.

And slipped over the crown of each post was a sock puppet Santa, its middens outstretched in readiness to give someone a tiny angular hug.

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.

I don't know.

It's like going to your grandma's house for Christmas.

It's like, I don't know.

It's like, it's that 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, 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.

It's just like, it's setting up this very chilly, weird environment.

I don't know.

I, I'm always creeped out by, I think, I think Christmas decorations can be kind of creepy, honestly.

Alpha on a shelf.

I 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 nothing.

There is a strangeness to that.

I'm not going to say that it's like, oh my God, I'm scared.

I'm just saying there's a level of uncanniness to excessive Christmas decorations that give off a kind of 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 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 in 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

redeeming.

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

It's like old.

So you there.

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 this super strong smell of cedar that I still associate.

Yeah, and that just 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 when 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 just something odd about that

yeah no that makes sense because like to this day i'll smell cedar or i'll like uh see someone whittling with it i think of my grandfather who'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 i 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 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 in infant sleeping gowns dreamed of more pale blue presents which, instead of more bears, had little boys 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 hoped to receive from my obscenely well-heeled 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.

Sleeping happiness.

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 gesture some of the gathering, dismissed, left for other parts of the house.

We didn't hear old Jack singing 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 Annalise'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 cheekbones highly colored less rosalie than like a rash and the prominent choppers of a horse charging out of nowhere in a dream

yeah that's rough he is he's like shut up you old horse mouth good lord

i had no 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 Annalise'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.

Alright!

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 so many, many.

Anywho,

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 even, I don't know if you've ever noticed, but a little ways 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 i let my eyes follow her finger out that window and 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 the house?

It disappeared,

answered some of the children, jumping the gun.

In a way, I 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 one that

must have been very mean to want 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, this is just because he's drunk, bro.

He's going through his fields.

I guess, I guess, all right.

Continue.

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 Aunt Elise, drawing out these last words to suspenseful effect the children sitting crisp 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 this 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.

Did 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, here off and on for some years.

I myself, I tell you, once confronted him and 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 a 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 bewilderment 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 frittened 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 stepped 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.

Aunt Elise knows,

asserted one of my little cousins, just to shut me up.

And when my aunt cast a glance at me, it 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 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 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.

It was only the fog and 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 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 roamed through the woods and like, blah, blah, blah.

It was always like something interesting.

And I was just, 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 for that story.

Yeah, literally.

And then I'd come back and be like, that didn't scare me at all.

I want another one.

And I like couldn't sleep for weeks.

But yeah, I got that.

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 this fucking warmness.

The warmness.

It's so, you can feel the cold from the window, but inside it's so warm.

You could also tell that the, you could tell the drunk dude's getting kind of freaked out.

Yeah, yeah.

He got quiet.

He was like, it seems, it 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 was.

That's the 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.

He's like, oh.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

And then he shut up for the rest of the 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 into 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 that they should be so horrible to me?

Why did this peaceful vision of hazy wonder, which had 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.

The sight of her thin, smiling face, for some reason, was not right.

Then I remembered.

Aunt Elise 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 Carol's Uncle Jack,

said the voices.

Then they went away.

I went away too, retrieving 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 liked their metallic timber because it was in no way reminiscent of the rich, rotting vibrations of the church organ Annalise played on Christmas Eves 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 cannot 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 smile 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, but 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 presents, the colors of those nights.

Anywho, they're mine now.

Tell us of those years, old Jack.

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 Auntaly's Christmas story.

The end.

That was a fun one.

That was a fun one.

And I also want to say, that was my bear trap, by the way.

Because what did I say earlier?

I said, it's like those Christmas Eves, 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, I'll, I'll bargain you a rat trap, but not a bear trap.

I'll give you, I'll give a rat beaver.

I'm not going to do upgrades.

Beaver from rat to beaver.

Beaver, beaver.

A bear?

Do you know how big a beaver is?

Do you understand how

ironclad my bear traps are?

Listen, here's the thing.

Here's the thing.

Here's the thing.

This is just.

You know what's crazy?

I feel like this has been three different kinds of writing.

Yes, completely.

It's been like different eras of writing.

It's like old English, like, or not old English, old, new English, and then, like, kind of like, you know, the 50s industrial sort of, like, the first story was very

like Orwellian almost in how it was described.

It's all very poetic.

Yeah, very poetic.

Then the second story is literally a Greek tragedy.

And then this one here is like a contemporary, just like campfire horror story.

You know, I mean, it's, and what I love too is I was kind of, I was like, and 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 fucked 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.

It's like

part of her is, it's like when they do those memories, it creates another her.

It creates like 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 and thought he was 22.

And it turns out he's an old man 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.

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 do you think the cry that was, I like that.

Do you think the crying,

the crying blobs that are outside, do 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 memories, 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, too, 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, Aunt Elise 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.

Okay.

Yeah, because I like

there's a bunch of little subtle Easter eggs and hints too.

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 this shit.

He's like, He's all pissed off.

You know, he's like a younger guy, 21.

He's just wanting to, he's like kind of getting drunk.

He's like, Oh, 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 liked the lights, but for some reason, I never wanted to go inside.

And it's because he is a compilation of memory.

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's, 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 it's you're in this dream-like area of 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

cloud of the fog, you know, I think is 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.

It's also a way to rejoin your family, which is kind of an interesting way to use this as like a family member welcoming 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 like hopefulness, you know, where it's like, oh, you're 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, Merry Christmas, old Jack, and she kind of goes into her, it's basically from her voice now.

Just the,

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 lost, came out of the fog and took away his body.

It's just, it's just, yeah,

just kind of fucking chilling.

This was a great venture outside of our normal creepypasta, 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 uh just different styles of writing that i just you know i mean here's the thing too i don't read a lot too because you know so there's there could be authors who do this also but i wonder how normal it is for people to have this kind of i don't know lexicon of work

in that way you know i mean he the the the incredibly well written i appreciate how he can adapt so many different styles into the story he's telling i really liked legati i'd never read it before before this and i really enjoyed it well dude so I think it's cool.

Even on Amazon or wherever you want to go, like Barnes and Noble and stuff, I'm telling you, the Thomas Legatti, The Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grim Scribe.

It's like, it's not a thick book.

What I like about these authors that do 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.

I think we should

throw links to those two in the description.

I think that'd be cool.

Yeah, definitely.

I think people will certainly be interested.

It's It's all, uh, I think a lot of his work is up on

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 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 it.

I hope you support Legati'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 in the description or down below

and get yourself some new clothing so you can cover that gross body of yours.

You can get me as Jeff Goldman.

Oh, there it is.

This is Jeff Goldman from the fly.

I also appreciate it.

I didn't notice this until I was looking at it earlier, but the Hawaiian shirt I'm wearing on the shirt is an actual Hawaiian shirt I have and wear in video.

That's right.

Like, that's insanely well detailed.

It's a great shirt, great quality, great shirt, great art.

And what it is.

And Hunter looks like a tomb.

And then just like he, just like he is in real life.

Just how I am in real life.

And for everybody who is 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.