The Gentleman From Hell |S1| Ep. 10

Rusty Quill presents

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That's all there is?

Looks like everything else is garbled.

I'm assuming the tape's damaged or something.

What the hell did we just listen to?

It sounded like some kind of ritual.

A seance, perhaps?

The tape might have been used to pick up EVP, like what we encountered during my walkabout.

You sure this tape gave you the same vibe as the tape from the elevator?

You said yourself this one wasn't meant for us.

Maybe these people aren't really associated with all this.

Cults and cabals usually seek out weird locations to practice their beliefs.

They could have come here and contacted the same kind of weird shit we have.

The vibe, as you're so fond of calling it, was most certainly similar.

It's hard to describe to the uninitiated, but they both possess the same kind of

signature, for lack of a better word.

Assuming all this shit is connected, how do we square it?

We got a bunch of paranormal stuff, and now we got this.

Some group of people doing weird-ass rituals and kidnapping people.

Seems to me the Bureau is onto something about all that cult business.

What else could it be?

I'd say that's a damn fine assumption.

Which means we could be in far more danger than we suspected.

Maybe we should bring the Bureau in.

It's still an open case, after all.

Problem is, we don't really have anything except this tape and some hunches.

Everything else is just a scary story for the campfire.

We've got a whole stash of media they missed.

And we aren't exactly nobodies.

Our word might still carry some weight.

Sure, they might put a couple guys on it, but whoever they send ain't gonna do any more than we are.

Plus, so far, most of the clues in Ben's stash only make kind of sense when you put them together with the paranormal stuff, and you know how that'll go over.

For Christ's sake, Phil broke out many cases for us, and we still get bashed for bringing her in.

Nah, I think we got a ways to go before we can think about blowing the whistle.

Just gotta work the case, like we've always done.

If there is some kind of cult afoot, then we'll need a lot more than salt to keep it at bay.

This isn't like the Soda family.

We knew where they were.

So far, we've got at minimum two people, maybe three.

If that voice at the end of the tape turns out not to be,

you know, a ghost.

We'll have to make adjustments, no doubt.

But right now, we should head back.

I want to keep going to Ben's Dash.

Gotta be something in there that ties all this together.

I might join you.

It's not like I'm going to sleep anytime soon.

Glad we packed all that coffee.

Looks like we're in for a long night.

Phil,

you up here?

In here, dearie.

There you are.

I thought you might have crashed out somewhere.

Not at all.

I decided to take advantage of the fact we're staying in a mansion where better to read than this delightful little sitting room

one of the few niceties we've got what's that you're reading the sunflower's moon it's a collection of essays by other psychics their experiences with what we call the light not the sort of thing a soulless atheist like you would appreciate

i suppose not

But I did go through a sort of spiritualistic paranormal phase way back in college.

Truly.

Well Well then, have a seat and spin some yarn.

I'm eager to hear all about this wonderfully open-minded young man.

To be honest, I think I got into it as an escape from Catholicism.

My parents weren't exactly Jesus Krispies, but they took me to church, sent me to Catholic school, all that jazz.

So you found the beliefs utterly ridiculous and sought out better ones?

Was that it?

No,

I actually didn't mind a lot of it.

In fact, I

really liked thinking about angels and heaven and all that.

Nah, it was hell that did me, and

once it was explained to me that if I wasn't careful I could wind up there, I couldn't stop worrying about it.

I'm not sure I follow.

How does the paranormal alleviate a fear in hell?

Because it contradicts the idea of hell.

You know, out of dimensions and aliens.

I really like the whole alien hypothesis thing.

And which one is that?

That humans were created by extra-dimensional beings, and religion was just a way for aliens to manipulate us.

Oh, yes, that one.

I suppose it does take the pressure off of fear of hell, if not create a fear of aliens.

Nah, aliens were just one of an infinity of other beings and states of being.

You die, and bang, zoom, you're in the fifth dimension, just raring to be born again.

Not a bad deal as far as afterlives go.

And then?

Then, philosophy, chemistry, physics.

And so the music died.

Yep.

Until now, I guess.

I can't say that I'm not similarly rattled, but I am comforted by my other experiences.

Joy, relief, reunion, all the things I've touched and been touched by since I started using my gift.

The light is stronger than the darkness, my dear boy.

You'll do well to remember that.

Then I take it you don't find Ben's theory on the paranormal very compelling?

That it's all just some hidden physics?

No, not at all.

Theory is one thing,

real lived experience is another.

I've no doubts about what I've experienced, and it wasn't the cold touch of an unfeeling universe, hidden or otherwise.

But speaking of Ben, there is something I found interesting in this journal of his.

It was precisely his dowel ruminations that had me looking for some light reading.

Ah, yes, here we are.

Listen to this.

I would have thought my nightmares at an end, given my new accommodations, but that seems not to be the case.

Every night they seem to get worse, and every night I spring awake.

Every night.

And every night I spring awake.

I can only assume the culprit is my encounter from the other night, that strange man.

And that's not all.

There was an oddness to everything leading up to that moment, a disjunction of night and normalcy.

These thoughts,

feelings, have only grown, especially at night.

It's as if something other than the darkness falls when the hour grows late.

Of course, this has always been the case.

When the mind suffers from a lack of visible stimulus, it does tend to manufacture its own.

Its macabre predisposition to cobble spectres from shadows.

And yet, this seems altogether different.

More of a wanton malice.

And then there's the fog.

It's always present whenever I awaken.

Always deep in the night, enfolding the city like a sea of gossamer webbing, webbing, waving gently in the wind.

Accordingly, I've had no want to return to my night driving.

The only positive to emerge from my interrupted sleep is the additional time I've been able to devote to my writing, which has certainly swerved into some different lanes.

all thanks to my father's notated copies of several of the Wither diaries.

Wither was no stranger to the idea of the supernatural as a process, going even further than my own speculations, assigning it a mechanistic quality.

He spells it out as much in the following passage.

The universe, at its core, functions as an intricate, unfeeling apparatus.

Every event, every action, is the result of mechanical processes governed by unyielding laws of physics and logic.

It stands to reason that any supplementary realms, those obscured from our standard perception, operate under the same mechanistic principles.

The notions of a heaven and hell, often shrouded in mystical interpretations, are better understood as systematic repositories for souls, filtered and allocated according to specific parameters.

These so-called afterlife destinations are not realms of ethereal contemplation or even spiritual transcendence.

Instead, they serve as the final stages in a grand sorting mechanism.

Souls are weighed, not in the moralistic sense, but evaluated based on criteria embedded within the fabric of this cosmic machine.

The allocation to heaven or hell is merely the outcome of an algorithmic process, devoid of emotion or subjective judgment.

While Withers often seeks to deconstruct or rationalize formal religious thought, particularly Christianity, I find that his ideas are equally applicable to the supernatural in general.

Why shouldn't the paranormal be articulated through logic?

Even if it's of a kind we rarely encounter?

And when we do, when its functions intersect with our realm of reality, we idolize these phenomena, set them beyond our understanding, and declare them unknowable.

Indeed, some form of system seems to operate even in the most abstract occult practices, as rituals, incantations, and formulas are invariably employed to produce specific effects.

Could it be that we are merely primitives reimagining the dials and switches of some cosmic mechanism, cloaking our ignorance with a veneer of imagination, until we are prepared to recognize the truth?

I'm reminded of my most recent nightmare.

I'm lying in bed when I hear the elevator down the hall open its doors,

followed by hideous laughter and the sound of many naked feet padding toward my open door.

It's Ben's phrase.

The disjunction of night and normalcy.

It's exactly what I've been feeling lately.

Like there's a point, mostly at night, when the curtains around cold sparrow apart and something else, something terrible, grows nearer.

How would Ben be able to detect that?

You think he might have a little of what you've got?

You make it sound as if he and I might share the same clinical condition, but you may be onto something.

I suppose it is possible he had some form of clairvoyance.

It would certainly make sense of some of his encounters, but then we really don't know if the things he's mentioned are truly supernatural occurrences.

Like you said, now's not the time to make assumptions.

By the sound of it, the elevator was on the fritz even when Ben was here.

Now we have to wonder if it really was faulty, or

you know.

Hey, where'd everybody go?

We're up here on the second floor.

Little sitting room.

What's up?

I think I found something.

Where did you come across this tape?

It was in the stack Leon made.

The one over there in some kind of chronological order.

Yeah, listen to this.

The fog's an old friend of Cold Sparrow.

Happily, there's even a painting of it somewhere hereabouts.

Shows a whole city covered in the stuff.

It's just been so routine this last week or so.

We sit in a bit of a valley, I think.

Fogs just love lowlands.

Yes, that does make sense, I suppose.

Um, on a side note, are there wolves in this part of the country?

I suppose there could be, but you don't usually see them until you get further north near the Adirondacks.

Why ask that?

Last night, I was out on the balcony having a drink, just a little nightcap before trying to get back to sleep.

And I thought I saw,

well,

a wolf, or something similarly built.

To be quite honest, it

looked a good deal larger than what I imagine a wolf to be.

Well, we got more than a few coyotes around here.

You ought to hear them after they land themselves a deer.

Oh, my, do they make an unholy racket.

And then there's corrid dogs.

I've seen a couple that could give a dog a run for its money.

Even been a few bears here and about.

Seems like every few years someone sees one, but

I ain't heard of no wolves.

Well, it was dark, and, as usual, the fog was considerably dense.

So I suppose whatever it was could have been more than a bit distorted to my eyes.

Okay, here's the last part.

As has become customary, I've been awakened by another nightmare.

This one, merely the sound of the strangest laughter.

Something half man, man, half beast.

This is old.

The door to my balcony is ajar.

What is all this?

There's um marks, perhaps even animal prints, all over the balcony.

It's hard to tell what they are, what they could be.

Even with the balcony light on, they're hard to make out.

If they are animal prints, then they're much too large for any creature that could get all the way up here.

I can't see any marks below the terrace that might suggest something scaled the wall.

But then with all this fog...

What the hell is that?

I've...

I've just heard something below, in the fog.

An animal of some kind.

I've just got him dressed, and I'm headed downstairs to see if I can see anything out the lower windows.

Rupert, I'm glad you're still awake.

That, um...

Animal is outside, just below the balcony.

I want to see if I can get a better look at it.

Let me fetch a light and my pop gun, and we'll head out back and see about it.

That's an excellent idea.

I'll meet you by the back door.

I'm looking out for doors that lead into the backyard, but I can't see a thing.

All that bloody fog.

Here's a light for you, Ben.

Now, let's get these back floodlights on.

All right.

Let's see what we got.

Based on the sounds it made I I'm certain it must be some sort of canine

Well this here's a desert eagle to put a hole the size of your head in whatever might come at us Well, I don't want to kill it just discover what it is Never hurts to be prepared very true

That's your balcony right up there.

So whereabouts did you hear?

Must have been close.

I heard it growling after all.

Perhaps over there by that stand of trees.

I ain't seeing anything then.

Don't seem to be any tracks hereabouts neither.

And that is some damp ground.

Good for catcher prints if there was any.

Is there, by any chance, any other way up to my balcony?

You mean from the outside?

Yes.

Not that I'm aware of.

The Ben, I don't mean the sound.

Well, are you sure you weren't dreaming?

You said you've been having nightmares and such.

I'm absolutely certain.

I heard the sounds as clearly as I hear your voice.

Haven't used it in a spell, but if it'll make you more comfortable, I could turn on the security system.

I think that would be a fantastic idea.

Thank you, Rupert.

I looked up hyenas in some of Ben's books.

Fuckers can live up to 40 years in captivity.

Now, I ain't saying it's a normal hyena, but now that we got some material leads, I want to know all there is to know about the fuckers.

And they are connected with witchcraft.

Check this out.

In medieval Europe, hyenas were portrayed in bestiaries as deceitful deceitful and unclean creatures that haunted graveyards, exhuming and consuming the bodies of the recently deceased.

These animals were also believed to possess other abilities, such as changing their appearance, and get this:

mimicking human speech to deceive the unwary.

Ah, it seems our doubting Thomas has taken quite the turn.

And for the better, I might add.

And what's this over here?

It's a map of the city I found all rolled up in one of the storage boxes.

See this?

It's the city cemetery, and it's pretty damn close to the mansion.

And based on what you read, you think that's where the creature's hiding?

I applaud your enthusiasm, Mason, but such a being isn't likely restricted to any particular place.

As the entry you read indicates, such notions are a bit

You said it yourself.

This thing ain't all powerful.

It's got limitations.

At the very least, it lines up with the stuff we've experienced.

I bet Ben would be on board.

He thinks the supernatural works like some kind of mysterious machine.

Whatever the case, we should all get some sleep.

I know I'm nearly dead on my feet.

I'm still wired.

I'm gonna go through more tapes and whatnot.

See if I can extend the timeline of recordings.

I'll probably concut afterward.

You have fun with that.

I'm in the hay.

But once we're all fresh as daisies again, we need to get her up.

Cause afterward,

we're hitting the graveyard.

The Gentleman from Hell is a Maltopia production.

Today's episode was written by Mark Anzalone and performed by Steven Zivik, Sam Stark, Aubrey Akers, and Mark Anzalone.

Sound editing was completed by Stephen Anzalone, and script editing was conducted by Walker Kornfeld.

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