Feed Drop - Burned by a Paper Sun

Rusty Quill presents.

Good evening, gentlemen and gentle ladies of hell.

First and foremost, thank you for tuning in.

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Ready to explore the deeper circles of horror?

Join us at www.patreon.com forward slash Meltopia And embrace the darkness.

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Greetings, gentlemen and gentle ladies from hell.

Today, we'd like to introduce you to one of our new shows, an anthology horror series called Burned by a Paper Sun.

After the great darkness of 1999, shadows tore free from their casters, and the night began to walk.

Humanity, broken, trembling, and half mad, clings to the last scraps of light as cosmic horrors whisper their soul-shattering truths.

Across the wastelands of of a ruined world, relics of nightmare linger.

A tower of teeth piercing a bruised sky, forests forever trapped in autumn, murmuring in their sleep, and stars that no longer burn, but stare, hungry, wicked, and waiting.

This is the post-noctom world, where nightmares survive sleep, and madness runs like rivers.

Explore this new horror anthology series wherever you listen to podcasts, and enter the darkness.

Maybe it's the seven steps to get the heading up to be kind of missing.

When William awoke from his year-long amnesia, he found himself standing in a metal room.

He was dressed in a butcher's apron.

Its construction a cobjob of stitched together human leathers.

The large room, perfectly square and stained with stiff piles of spoiling human remains, appeared nothing less than an abattoir.

William gasped at the human wreckage, his memory little more than a web of vanishing echoes.

Yet he had a faint realization.

He had done terrible, horrible things.

A glance into the room's darkened corners revealed strange machines, their sharp edges and mechanical arms stained a dark, stale red.

His fingers twitched with the residuum of practiced and obscene dexterity that still lingered in their memory.

They itched for the legions of knobs and levers scattered across the encrusted devices.

He stared dumbly at the dripping meat hook in his right hand.

Almost as much blood as metal.

The iron tool fell to the floor with a wet thud.

Ceiling lights reflected off it dully from the recesses in the rusted ceiling.

The illumination felt dirty, a glowing aerosol of urine.

With a few strong tugs, the door to the room peeled open, cracking a black, flaking line of congealed gore that coated the separation between door and jam.

Darkness mixed with flecks of light floated into into view, a bile of illumination and shadow flooding the throat of an endless hallway.

He waded into the shadows with a confidence born of habit.

William had walked it many times in the service of unknown, likely wicked impulses.

A familiar rhythm became the sound of his footfalls.

His eyes prepared to seize upon some impending sight.

A light in the dark.

A beacon.

A tiny red light bubbled up from the swirling gloom.

At first, it seemed animated, flitting about the shadows, determined to stay out of reach.

As William's eyes adjusted to the pocket of untried darkness at the end of the hall, he could make out an elevator door.

The light was its call button, fixed into the framework of its corroded steel.

When he made to push the glowing device in the hopes of summoning a way out, a memory broke free from forgetfulness.

A smile of perpetual starkness, white curving teeth like an indifferent wall of porcelain, unreflective eyes black as amnesia.

Something altogether unpleasant lurked behind the door.

William took the stairs.

As he ascended the steel staircase under the glare of conscience and blood-caked lights, he heard the elevator doors open.

The sound of old machinery straining to perform its prescribed and never-ending chore echoing through the building.

A terrible voice filled with all manner of elapsed debauchery came at William from the lower darkness.

Going

down.

Williams sprang awake from his usual nightmare, no less composed for the practice.

He'd been seeing a therapist for it since he first woke in the metal room over two years ago.

He was one of the lucky few who could afford counseling after the great darkness of 1999.

Most of the world had to settle for alcohol and religion, with an ever-growing number opting for suicide.

Every man, woman, and child on the planet, those who had the misfortune of living through it, had suffered from some form of post-stress syndrome or malady.

While no one could clearly remember what horrible things they'd done or had been done to them,

everyone suffered the nocturnal echoes of the worst event to ever befall humanity.

William, a grain captain of industry, fancied himself a true rationalist, always preferring the science of things.

As such, he took no stock in the belief that the entire world had been driven crazy by some kind of supernatural event.

Even if, given the actual facts, the scientific justification seemed wholly inadequate.

The official line of reasoning concerned a strange, heretofore unknown cycle of the sun, emitting mind-altering electromagnetic waves, which in turn disrupted the sober functioning of the brain.

In short, it was the star wheeling overhead what drove the world mad.

If nothing else, it was a tidy understanding of things.

Yet it brought no relief for the unfathomable things man had done in the absence of his mind and did nothing to spare him the aftershocks of those deeds when contemplated in sleep.

And yet, science persisted, every bit the punch-drunk fighter unwilling to quit after the towel's been thrown.

The relics of the Great Darkness were everywhere, generally due to the lack of funds for their proper disposal.

Not to mention, some structures were the size of small mountains, having been raised by the lunatic ambitions of entire cities, while others persisted as religious symbols, co-opted by the new mystery sects and cults that grew up in the wake of the darkness.

A collective, desperate scrabbling for meaning in the madness.

The building housing the office of Williams' therapist sat situated directly across from a towering bronze bull.

Hundreds of feet high, hollow, and once chock full of countless charred remains.

A giant version of the ancient Grecian torture device, the brazen bull.

But scaled to the size of prehistoric Eidobons.

It seemed that the Maddened had a penchant for architecture upon the grandest, if bloodiest of stages.

Every Tuesday at precisely noon, William parked beneath the shadow of the giant brass bull.

Coffee in hand, prepared for a lengthy and ridiculously expensive head shrinking.

The therapy sessions, however, were going nowhere.

William's nightmares persisted, scaling the tallest wall of pharmaceutical dream suppressant and tunneling beneath the best-laid hypnotic suggestions.

But But most concerning was that in every dream, William came closer and closer to pushing the glowing button, coming face to face with whatever lurked in the hellish elevator.

And yet, William wasn't entirely in the dark, so to speak, with regards to the identity of his hidden tormentor.

For Great Darkness folklore had given the creature a name,

the Elevator Man.

Practically all of the stories of the red-clad lift operator originate within the madness-manufactured city of Tartarus, an unearthly metropolis of hanging black skyscrapers suspended from the ceiling of a vast underground cavern, projecting down into a pit of undiscovered depth.

The pit itself, an infamous set piece from the Great Darkness, is accordingly referred to as the Hellhole.

Ranging from the spurious to the remotely credible, various witnesses to the elevator man had been spotted collecting particular persons, all of whom had awakened into the blackened innards of the aforementioned hanging city, into his red-hot elevator bound for hell.

Going

down!

Or so the stories claim.

What made the specter of the elevator man so looming for William regarded the specific and infamous location where he awoke from the darkness.

The hell scraper.

The largest building thrust into the blackness of of the Hellhole.

The actual bottom of the Hell Scraper, or the Hellhole for that matter, has never been determined.

William's therapist, a secretly superstitious man and unofficial adherent to supernatural explanations for the Great Darkness, exuded the sincerity and rich skepticism of a man born to the nuclear age and confronted his patient's anxiety with detached aplomb, deftly navigating the elevator man legend with prescriptive recourse to unresolved childhood stress and radiation-induced hysteria.

And yet, all the while, the hoary doctor of psychology could only pity the man marked by the devil.

Even if it meant lying in earnest, everyone needed to scratch out a living in the ashes of the darkness, shrinks included.

Tuesday after Tuesday, the shrink deflected the grim reality of his patient's fate, burying the man's fears beneath piles of clinical jargon, prescription medications, and breathing exercises.

Nothing worked, of course, but it kept the coins rolling in and his doomed patient reasonably sedate.

A trick that generally carried the day when nothing else would was the analogizing of recurrent symbols to a patient's day-to-day life, and then tying everything together into a neat little metaphor.

With William, the trick was a success, transforming most of his sessions into an hour-long meditation on the nature and meaning of his work.

It was, in the main, determined that the repetitive and bloody business of William's dark awakening had become the symbol for his sense of purposelessness, unconsciously appointing the task of underscoring his disdain for his career.

Thus, the nightmare was a metaphor concerning his sense of action without purpose.

The mindless swinging of a hook into dead meat for no apparent reason.

In no time, the idea formed the basis of a windy dissertation concerning the essence of William's life, which he was only too happy to indulge.

Doomed men, he believed, should be given their way.

Over the course of many sessions, various other symbols and themes were discovered, each shedding revelatory light upon William's many unresolved subconscious conflicts.

One of the most important symbols came when William described his high-yield salary as mere repayment for feeding devils.

His work as a stock market analyst was just a way to keep the monsters happy.

And so the phrase, feeding the damned, became conversational shorthand for William's professional life and his recently uncovered resentment of it.

William sat at a cafe just next to Coffin Park, a post-darkness recreational space made from giant empty caskets that once piled into the sky.

Wondering about his strange dream, he discovered a moment of clarity, a space more often encountered while showering or just waking up.

Contained within the naked revelation that had been waiting for him at the bottom of a year-long pile of rationalizations, both purchased and homemade.

How had he elbowed aside all the tales of the elevator man?

the missing persons alleged to have been taken back to hell, and the police warnings of a maniac abducting and possibly killing anyone who'd found found themselves in the city of Tartarus.

Of course, his therapist had answers for all of it, and the meds to back them up.

But at the moment, next to a park better suited for the dead, the truth was laid bare.

He would be called upon

and taken.

It was upon the eve of the third anniversary of man's darkest hour when William dreamed of pushing the call button, triggering an awful departure from the dower routines of his recurrent nightmare.

After the button summoned the elevator, he watched as a new lighted fixture emerged from the darkness, a glowing dial indicating the current position of the incoming elevator.

The floor numbers were indistinct, red and blistering, giving off heat as they denoted the elevator's approach.

William broke into a mad dash at the pretentious ringing of the car's arrival, making for the stairwell at the other end of the darkness.

The words spoken by the elevator man were no longer assembled into a question, rather arranged into into a statement of fact, if not a command.

William erupted from sleep, screaming and clutching the air.

Unfortunately, he hadn't escaped from the nightmare.

He felt the rumble of an approaching elevator car in his bones.

Heard the straining gears and winding lengths of cable clanking and wheezing between the slats of his closet door.

A glowing button appeared where the handle should have been.

The lights of an open lift car began to shine past the wooden labs.

At last, the lone tinny note of an arriving elevator.

William was already running for the stairs, screaming.

From behind, he heard the elevator doors open and an all-too-familiar voice now raised in obvious irritation.

Going

down

After nearly falling down the flight of stairs, William raced for the the front door, snatching up his car keys along the way.

He reached out to open the front door, but only a glowing red button stood out from the wood.

And above the door frame, a rusted floor indicator dial, its red-hot hand indicating the car's current elevation.

Steam hissed into the room through the spaces around the door.

Gears growled from underground.

The determined, if antiquated machinery approached.

William understood the going theme well enough not to try another door, and instead exited his residence by smashing a chair through his dining room windows.

Once seated within the relative safety of his vehicle, he sped into the darkness, straining his eyes for an isolated red light, his ears pricking for the sounds of droning motors and turning gears.

He placed a number of frantic phone calls to his psychologist, trying to remain composed through each breathless message so as not to warrant confinement to a mental hospital.

An altogether different species of post-darkness hell.

The aging head shrinker received and reviewed every message, but only after letting each settle harmlessly into voicemail.

His hands shook at the awful implications of the horrible truth that fueled his decidedly non-Euclidean faith.

While hoping his well-paying client a painless death, he realized with a primal certainty, hope had no place after the darkness.

Whatever became caught in the headlights as it crossed the road, causing William to swerve out of control, he would never know.

The car flew from the embankment like a missile, corkscrewing from its uneven launch pad of humped moss and tumorous pavement.

He cranked the wheel uselessly, tires spinning like black moons of the cold, open air.

He didn't feel the impact.

When the world regained focus, William was strapped to a hospital gurney, rolling through narrow hallways, hospital noises everywhere.

In the limbo between waking and sleeping, he remembered the heft of a meat hook and a monstrous smile upon his soiled face.

The sound of a jagged hook tearing through meat and bones screamed.

Taking of lives for food.

Feeding the damned their gruel of human agony.

Pain within and without, day after day after day, preparing the meal cart for hell.

Served with some bitters made from lives poorly lived.

William toiled in hell's endless galley.

As often as possible, an overflowing cart disappeared into the depths at the push of the blowing button.

The blurry hospital corridor moved in and out of his vision, but William's ears picked up the sound of automatic doors.

Going

down.

The words were civil, polite.

Yes,

chimed a nurse's voice, just barely audible above the din of a frantic heart monitor.

And William knew

it was time to feed the damned.

Burned by a Paper Sun is a Maltopia production.

Today's episode was written by Mark Anslone and performed by Aubrey Akers.

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

Be sure to rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

And follow us on Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Meltopia.

If you want unique art and animations of Meltopia's stories, visit our YouTube page or click on the link in the show notes.

And for more exclusive content, such as additional lore, stories, and art, be sure to check out our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash Meltopia.

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