Collection

The self-styled curator of a museum of horrors finally attains the masterpiece for which he has long yearned, but does not find quite the fulfillment that he expects from completing his collection.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of objectification of and violence against women, and true crime fetishization. Listener discretion is advised.***

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

America has a long history of violence, and perhaps equally long is its people’s sordid love affair with that violence. When we hear a tale of grisly, ghastly murder, many of us feel, alongside the appropriate revulsion and outrage, a certain thrill of dreadful fascination. And it is no coincidence that while the names of those who commit atrocity are often widely and long remembered, the worthier names of their undeserving victims are left to languish in obscurity and fall into oblivion.

Humanity possesses as much capacity for cruelty as it does for kindness, and that is perhaps inevitable. Perhaps it is also inevitable that such cruelty will always exert a morbid pull on our imaginations. But we should be wary that we do not follow that sirenic song too readily, for it can lead into the very darkest of pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode 12: Collection.

(Sounds of starling flock)

NARRATOR

Adrian stands before the mirror, coaxing his hair and lush sideburns into the perfect configuration. Tonight is the night that the man arrives from distant Seattle, the man with the name that Adrian cannot seem to retain no matter how many times he consults his handwritten notes, and which he half suspects is false.

Adrian has anticipated this moment for so long, and he needs it to be perfect. The thought of setting his eyes upon the item, not a mere photo or a reproduction, but the original itself, makes his stomach flutter and his fingers feel unsteady.

Once more, Adrian mentally calculates the time it will take the man to drive from Denver, about a hundred miles distant. At this time of year, both the roads and the weather can be very treacherous: blizzards sweeping down from the Arctic or west from the mountains without warning, black ice and deceptively deep drifts settling over the narrow highways and the wash boarded dirt roads, which may not see maintenance for days afterward.

But the man had sounded very confident, over the phone, in his ability to reach the House at the appointed time.

He’d better, Adrian thinks, a streak of dark temper coursing through his mind for a moment. Of course, he would never say it aloud. He is far too genteel, and far too unassuming, to express such a thought, let alone to follow through on the implicit threat should his expectations be contravened. But he has so longed for the hideous, magnificent painting since he first learned of its existence, his yearning not merely abstract, but a physical, palpable appetite. He longs to bathe his eyes in the lurid reds, the perfect black and white, the grim earth and flesh tones; to run his fingertips, ever so delicately, over the canvas and rough pigments, soaking in their feel as much as he may through the thin gloves that will protect the aging, fragile piece from the destructive oils of human skin.

So ensconced is he in these anticipatory ruminations, that as he gazes into the mirror, he ceases to see his reflection, sees instead Fred Gaussey’s masterwork as clearly as though it were already before him. He sees, in exquisite detail, the contorted, agonized faces of Gaussey’s thirteen victims, the deep brown shadows of the stark relief being the pigments which allegedly consisted mostly of the blood from his victims, the somber blacks said to be derived from their charred bones.

And, that vision seeming to swim behind the glass of the mirror, Adrian goes still, eyes wide and mouth slack, exhaling with a protracted, uneven sigh that is almost a groan of mingled torment and ecstasy. Could he see the reflection that actually looks back at him, he might notice that the expression upon his face resembles that upon the features of the outraged women in the killer’s self-described opus and tribute.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

The man from Washington drives expertly, despite the snow and ice. He smiles, thinking of the hefty sum of cash that awaits him at the end of this bitter night’s sojourn, thinking of all the troubles it will erase from his life and of the doors it might open, or reopen.

His eyes flit up once again to the rearview mirror, a glance both involuntary and futile. The painting rests in the trunk, protected by a large hard case and many loose layers of soft padding, and finally by the loose brown wrapping. It is, perhaps, the most valuable single item that the man has ever possessed or even handled, and his only concern is that it arrives at the House of the Holy Profane intact.

Not for the first time, the man wonders why Adrian Carholt chose such a lonely and desolate place for his morbid attraction. It is within reasonable driving distance from Denver, but still too far to draw many casual visitors – one would have to actively plan to visit the reliquary of sordid grotesquerie, to choose it over all the nearer, more varied entertainments and distractions of the sprawling capital city.

The man’s eyes periodically scan the mirrors, the road ahead, alert for any sign of local police or state troopers. Though to his knowledge he is not definitively breaking any laws, the question of who can lay the most valid legal claim to the painting is a little too far from settled for his comfort. It was sold at auction to a private buyer before the claims that it contained materials from the victim’s bodies could be investigated, either a gross oversight or a minor act of corruption that helped to end an Oregonian police chief’s career two decades ago. The painting has changed hands twice since, always for high sums and always very privately, and as far as the man knows there has been very little effort in the meantime by law enforcement to recover it, since the case is long since resolved. Where the matter of valid ownership now rests, the man neither knows nor cares, but he would rather avoid broaching the matter with any legal authorities altogether, if he can.

A waning crescent moon peaks out from behind the thin winter clouds, revealing a little of the land through which the highway winds, arid flatlands of snow-laden prairie grass. Again the man wonders what draw such a desolate, lonely landscape could have for someone born to the greenery and the cultural wealth of the East Coast, who had been raised in New Hampshire, attended Dartmouth, and who had inherited no small amount of wealth from his family’s respected banking establishment, which operated across four states in New England. The man from Washington has, of course, done his own thorough research on the buyer, perhaps even more meticulously than necessary. But there always comes that point where further research can cast no more light into the dark mysteries of a person’s soul, where the mind can only stare blankly into those benighted depths and wonder what lurks within, unseen and unguessable.

If he were of a more sensitive cast, the man might be troubled by such uncertainties. But he has been well-hardened, first by the stern eyes and fists of his ex-Marine father, by a youth of drinking and schoolyard fighting and back alley cruelty, then by a few years of his own in the military, and finally by the decidedly more lucrative work he had undertaken in Iraq as a security contractor. In the years since returning to the States, he has wandered from one city to the next, taking on private work on his own terms and at his own pace. He had thought that this change would leave him fulfilled, make him feel at last like his own master, but instead he has felt listless, bored by the tedious mundanities of American civilian life.

The man hopes that, with the payment for Gaussey’s repellent art, he can pay off the odd debts he has accumulated, perhaps even have enough left to lubricate his reinstallation into that vast engine that turns blood, ash, and tears into money, the corporatized military world which he both hates and desperately misses.

Out of the darkness and the snow looms a wooden sign, apparently homemade, that marks the turn for Carholt’s House of the Holy Profane. Slowing responsibly, he turns onto the ice-slicked gravel road, drives carefully up the low hill to where the tottering, two-story house sits. It looks older than most houses in this part of the country, perhaps the house of a wealthy ranch owner from around the turn of the century.

The man who comes to greet him seems also to be from another era, dressed in a fine paisley suit of black and dark purple, his overly styled sideburns and his longish wings haircut looking like they belong in a Civil War-era photograph. Adrian’s manner is unctuous, his speech seeming calculated to convey culture and intellect without true possession of either.

Carholt reminds the man of certain upper management officers he hated during his contracting days abroad, men who thought themselves better than he because their fathers could afford to buy their way into fine universities, could gild their paths into the highest levels of corporate ascension.

The man gratifies himself with the knowledge that he could easily kill the obsequious, soft-bodied collector before Carholt even realized he was in danger, and this thought is enough for the man to maintain his outward calm.

Carholt invites the seller into his House, and the man accepts the invitation, carefully opens the trunk and removes the painting, bringing it into the house with a grasp both firm and gentle.

As they walk up the narrow path toward the house, Carholt asks him how his drive was, if he ran into any inclement weather on the road. Laconically, the seller replies that it was fine, then, in a perfunctory gesture of easing the tension, he asks why Carholt chose such a distant placement for his museum. Carholt chuckles softly, an unpleasant sound, and says that he wanted to be as close to the middle of the country as he could, for both spiritual and practical reasons, and that the loneliness of the countryside was a better setting for his collection and display than the bustling confusion of an urban area. The seller has already lost interest at this point, but Carholt adds, in an odd tone, that the house had drawn him. It had belonged, he points out, to the once-mighty Carston Cattle Company that at its height stretched across three states, and that something about the house’s lonely decrepitude, together with the similarity between the names Carholt and Carston, had aligned in his mind to make him realize it was the perfect place for his amalgamation.

The way he says the word amalgamation vexes the seller and disorders his thoughts, and once they are inside the tottering old house he begins at once to remove the forbidden painting from its many layers of protection.

Adrian’s eyes light up as the package is slowly unwrapped, and this sight stirs once more feelings of disgusted contempt in the seller. He tries not to think of the nine-millimeter SIG P229 concealed under his suit jacket, of the KA-BAR combat knife strapped to his lower leg, hidden from the untrained eye but readily accessible.

After a few long moments of staring, seemingly without breathing, at the unmasked painting, Carholt asks if payment by check is acceptable, as though they had not already discussed this over the phone. The man says it is, and with a slight flourish, Adrian produces an envelope from within his purple paisley dress jacket and proffers it. The man takes it, peers inside, nods in satisfaction as he stows it in his pocket. They shake hands, but now the seller does not bother to hide his disdain for his customer, tells him softly to enjoy the painting, emphasizing the words in just such a way to make it clear that it is meant insultingly.

Adrian Carholt, however, does not seem to notice. He has already dismissed the man from his mind, is already anticipating finally touching the painting which he believes contains not only biological components, but the very souls of the murdered innocents it depicts.

The seller is almost at the door when Carholt begins to speak again, his voice quavering, brittle.

He says that the painting has called to him, that the tortured and sanctified souls within it sing to him as they never have for anyone else. He says that they belong here, in this house of their spiritual kindred, where the terrible meets the sublime. And he says that they will find salvation here, that they will join all the other spirits and become more than they could ever have been, otherwise.

They all sing to me, Adrian continues. They all sing, and yearn, and slowly converge to become something greater, something divine.

The seller stares at Adrian for a long moment. For the first time, a slight chill has burrowed into the back of the man’s neck, a physical realization that there is something aberrant, something perhaps dangerous, in his presence. It is a feeling that the man is not accustomed to outside of the warzone, something that he never expected to feel again in civilian life.

For a few seconds, the man from Washington tries to think of a meaningful reply. Then, he opens the door and retreats into the night, into his car and down the road, leaving that awful house behind him forever and hoping that he will never think of it again once he has deposited the substantial check that rests within his pocket.

The wind gusts coldly against his windshield, shrilling sharply, and he tries to push away his uncharacteristic fancy that it sounds like a chorus of pain-drenched screams.

(Sounds of wind gusting)

(Long pause)

NARRATOR

For a full week now, the painting has hung from its appointed place of pride, over the unused fireplace in the massive living room which houses his most impressive pieces, and yet Adrian cannot help but return to it at least once every hour, cannot refrain from brushing his gloved fingers over its sealed surface, from studying intently every detail of the brushstrokes and the inspired use of color. If, indeed, the browns are truly derived from blood, Gaussey was a genius, anticipating that it would only darken with time as the dried blood denatured, and would make the shadows on the faces seem that much deeper, render ever more hellish the contortions of terror and suffering around the mouths and the eyes of the young women.

As he turns away, telling himself that he must stop pawing the painting or risk damaging it, his gaze sweeps over the other assorted items in the room. Some hang from the walls, others rest in protective glass cases or upon enclosed shelves. Each is related, in some way or another, to an awful murder. Some are over a century old, their inevitable decay slowed in this sterile environment, whereas others pertain to especially horrid crimes of the last two decades. Most were obtained legally, a few by more questionable means, but Carholt is eminently proud of them all.

There is the exquisitely preserved handkerchief said to be left behind at a murder in 1894 by the Denver Strangler, who was never caught. Beside it are handwritten notes allegedly penned by Ziporyn himself, while he was preparing his thoroughly questionable biography of Richard Speck, as well as a switchblade that the seller swore had belonged to the killer himself. And on the other side rests the half-century old parking brake from a salesman’s Buick which proved to be the end of Charles Starkweather’s Plains state spree. Across the room, ensconced in glass, lie a set of clothes worn by Charles Manson, alongside painstakingly faithful reproductions of the Zodiac Killer’s letters to the police—one of which, to Adrian’s eternal delight, is actually the original, swapped with the copy due to clerical error. There is a lamp of Ed Gein’s, the pigskin lampshade as close to the human one which had once graced it as legally possible. And throughout the house rest similar items, gruesome and mundane, ugly and beautiful and plain, some with certain pedigrees and some with unverifiable and even doubtful connections – but all linked in some way to the worst and most repulsive of human potentiality, and all of them lovingly, obsessively curated and tended.

And, cataloguing them all mentally, Adrian thinks as he has thought so many times over the years, that they all belong to him, thoroughly, completely. Only he could ever love them and care for them as they deserve, only he could ever truly understand and appreciate them. For within each item is embedded a part of the deed itself, and the deed is the manifestation of the soul. So both the killers and their victims reside, in part, in his house, where they are held in awe and respect, where they are sanctified through their torment and their brutality, where they have transcended mortality and carnality.

But Adrian treasures none of them so highly as the Gaussey painting. In it, horror and the holy are most perfectly married. Fred Gaussey, Carholt believes, understood more than any other of Adrian’s beloved killers what he was and what he did, understood the workings of both the worlds, seen and unseen. He was the only one to ever fully merge art with murder.

So, happier and fuller than he has ever felt, Adrian goes into the little room with the desk and bookshelves which he calls his study, pours himself a glass of inexpensive brandy, and sips it contentedly. The soft, golden light of his green banker’s desk lamp flows gently over his hands, making him think of a merry fireplace. A warm feeling settles into his toes and his fingers, a pleasant sleepiness fogs his mind, and soon he dozes off in his chair.

He dreams of his ex-wife, Selene, whose last private words for him were a rebuke that he loved his morbid memorabilia more than he had ever loved her – and that they aroused him more too. She said there was something very wrong with him, that perhaps the only thing that separated him from the killers and sadists that so fascinated him was only a kind of physical cowardice, a timidity about exposing himself to actual danger, but that he was otherwise as every bit as twisted and damaged as they were.

But in the dream, the conversation does not end there, with her turning and walking out of the house, down the steps toward her sister’s waiting car. Instead, something unfurls around her face, many vaguely hooked and jointed appendages like a spider’s or a crab’s legs emerging from her cheeks, temples, and scalp. And the face at their center changes too, becomes something just on the wrong side of human, the mouth and eyes changing proportions and arrangement subtly but definitely.

And her awful jaws stretch open, cavernously wide, the arthropodic limbs reaching out to drag him into the vast, rotten darkness that has erupted from Selene’s face.

Adrian wakes, feeling a tight ache in his chest and back and wondering if he is suffering a cardiac event. His vision swims and he feels like he cannot catch his breath, but after a few minutes the episode subsides, and the dimly lit room takes shape once more around him. The solidity of his chair, of his desk, helps to steady him somewhat, and he stands stiffly, downs the remnants of the unfinished glass of brandy before him.

Then there is a sound from outside the office, downstairs. It sounds like a gust of wind, from a door or window suddenly opened and closed, and once more Carholt’s chest begins to ache. He opens a desk drawer and retrieves the little .38 Special Smith and Wesson Centennial revolver which he always keeps loaded within, opens the five-shot cylinder to double-check that it is fully loaded, closes it once more. Creeping carefully out into the hallway, he fumbles for the light switch on the wall, floods the house with light.

There is no sign of any movement, no hint that anything was disturbed. Very cautiously, Carholt descends the stairs, one step at a time, eyes probing every corner, doorway, and shadow for the slightest possibility of threat. He finds the front door locked, methodically lights and explores the rest of the downstairs and finds all the windows firmly latched, with no trace of any intrusion.

It’s only when he’s finished checking the large room and is about to return to his office, laughing at himself and his overactive imagination in relief, that he sees something that freezes him in his tracks. He blinks repeatedly, exaggeratedly, sure that it is a trick of his sleep-dulled eyes, but the Gaussey painting is definitely changed.

The women, whose gazes have always been directed upward and to the left, on some vaguely heavenward, off-canvas focal point, are now turned toward a new object that hovers in the upper corner of the frame that had once housed only deep black shadow.

Adrian shakes his head, telling himself that this cannot be, slowly approaches the painting and peers at it, not daring to move his face any closer than a foot from the canvas surface. The woman are definitely painted differently, the angles of their features and the arrangement of their bodies altered to look at the strange bluish orb that hovers above them, like a cold sun.

The dark temper flashes through him once more, and his fingers tighten unconsciously on the revolver grip. He thinks of the man from Washington, who had seemed so cold, so distant, so disdainful. And a suspicion rasps in his skull, soft and deadly as shifting sand, that the man must have cheated him somehow, or is perhaps playing some elaborate and unconscionable prank on him.

And, with his life’s ambition within his grasp, Carholt muses about how he might locate the man, extract the truth from him, perhaps exact bloody vengeance if he has in fact been thwarted and mocked.

But then his anger recedes, and he remembers how hard the man had looked, all sharp edges and emotionless staccato, and knows that any such plan is destined to fail. For a moment, despair robs him of all his vigor, and he feels ready to collapse upon the floor. He closes his eyes, trying to summon inner strength, and when he opens them again, the painting is exactly as it should be, the women as they were, the globe of pale blue flame vanished into the impenetrable, oily dark that had preceded it.

He stares at the canvas for a long time, in disbelief, and continues to study it closely for almost ten minutes before assuring himself that it is unchanged, pristine. Trying to convince himself that it was only the illusion of a mind still half asleep, he turns off the lights, returns the revolver to its accustomed place, and goes to bed. But he tosses and turns in his sheets, under an old-fashioned quilt, thinking once more about his theories upon the soul and of how they can infuse themselves into the fabric of the world. And he wonders, for the first time, if perhaps there might be some danger for him in collecting such things, in gathering them under one roof where they might communicate, feed off one another, perhaps even coalesce into something new and stranger.

Sleep does not come until well after midnight, and his dreams are very troubled, full of flights in dark places from things which are only half-seen and half-remembered when he wakes in the grey, cold light of the winter dawn.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

Four times that day, Adrian tries to call the man from Seattle, but the digits scrawled on his notepad now only summon a pre-recorded and apologetic voice message that the number is no longer in service. Adrian cannot say whether this annoys him or relieves him, because he has no idea what he might say to the man anyway, knows that he would not be able to bring himself to ask any of the questions swirling in his mind for fear of being derided by the seller who had seemed to ooze cold calculation and lethal intention.

So Adrian instead dials a number he has not used for three years now, not since a late July night after over-indulging in brandy and being overcome with a feeling of loneliness in the house peopled mostly by the aggrieved dead and the forever damned, both of whom have always maintained unbreakable silence.

Adrian calls Selene.

She answers, surprising him a little. When she speaks, her words are not impolite, but come out in clipped, rapid bursts, posing hard questions and offering few answers in return. She asks him why he is calling her, what good can possibly come of reopening old wounds, why Adrian cannot simply leave her in peace and let their lives complete their gentle separation.

Adrian evades the questions, and tells her that he misses her, that he has changed. He then begins to tell her that something strange is happening, something unseen and inexplicable is falling over the expansive house they once shared, but before he can get into any details, she cuts him off.

She says that he hasn’t changed at all, that everything has always been all about him and his own gratification, that if she let him, he would use her up until she was as empty and sad as the relics of torture and death he insists on collecting. Then she demands firmly that he never call her again, and hangs up.

For a while afterward, Adrian sits at his desk, toying with the idea of leaving the house for a few days and indulging himself in the comforts of Denver, in fine restaurants and hotels and entertainment. There is nothing to keep him in the sprawling house that is both his home and his business – there have never been large numbers of visitors, and there are fewer still this time of year, when such travel is least appealing. If not for his inheritance, he would likely have to sell and find more lucrative work, but the remnants of his familial wealth, even after the divorce, are enough to fund his fantasies and still live comfortably.

Yet, when he tries to remind himself of this, to convince himself that the drive to the city would not be too long or too difficult, if he takes it carefully, a pale mist seems to rise in his mind that obscures the possibility of actually leaving the House of the Holy Profane. He feels like something has encircled him, is slowly tightening its grip and cutting off all hope of escape.

So he spends the rest of the afternoon in his study, the door firmly locked from within and the loaded revolver resting within easy reach on the desktop, drinking and poring over volumes from which he cannot seem to really glean any words.

He has lost all track of time when he hears the voices downstairs.

They are faint at first, on the very edge of hearing, so that even when he initially notices them, he believes them to be an imagining, or perhaps the eternal prairie wind. But as they swell, mingling in a chorus that is both enthralling and horrid, his hands and feet feel suddenly cold and numb, even as his heart pounds unsteadily in his chest.

No, he whispers, and opens his mouth to repeat the word in a shout, to dispel the haunting, awful, beautiful music, but his voice and his courage wither to nothing in his chest, and he sits quivering behind his desk, waiting for the silence to return.

But the voices sing on, voicing their pain and their hatred, the sadistic cruelty of the murderers melding hideously with the fear and resentment of the murdered into something new, something beyond the realm of the human.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

For a full day, Adrian shelters in his study, not daring once to venture forth. Cotton-mouthed and hollow-bellied, he relieves his aching bladder at first into his emptied brandy decanter, and when that is full, through the room’s sole window that looks westward over a spreading expanse of pale snow and yellow grass.

All the while, the inhuman voices maintain their ceaseless threnody, which seems to reverberate now throughout the house and even in Adrian’s very bones, to have saturated every bit of matter in sight.

Adrian cannot tell if the feeling of intense malaise that ripples through his body is the product of dehydration, hunger, and stress, or the spiritual assault upon him. And sometimes, as he sits listlessly praying for some miraculous salvation from the unnamable threat, a far darker thought comes to him: that the song is not a simple attack, but an actual invasion of his body and mind, and that it has already progressed too far, beyond a point of no return.

So, by evening, he has resolved to sally forth from the study, gun in hand, and make a run down the stairs and out of the house for his neglected maroon Buick Regal. The thought terrifies him, but the prospect of remaining in the house, now humming with discarnate malevolence, fills him with a dread still more abject.

And so, as the sun sinks under the western horizon, he unlocks the door and runs out into the hall. Though he had last left the house awash in light, every bulb blazing, it now lies dark before him, the unlit space seeming impossibly stretched.

The heat has gone out, too, and the air is freezing cold, prickles his lungs when he inhales. The thought of bursting plumbing flashes across his mind and is quickly dismissed as trivial.

Groping at the walls and the polished wooden banisters, he feels his way to and down the stairs, each step feeling like that dilated moment before a precipitous, blind fall. Yet he makes his way, slowly and painstakingly, down the steps and toward the door. The malign lament does not grow any louder as he moves, seems to emanate from all directions at once.

But once he has left the bottom of the stairs and moved a few paces into the lightless foyer, the music suddenly reaches a crescendo, and then falls just as suddenly into silence. Adrian stands as though frozen, straining his ears for any other sound, as disturbed by the sudden change as he had been by the ceaseless choir.

Something blooms in the dark, a pale blue orb blazing abruptly into being like St. Elmo’s fire. It hovers, motionless and static, at about head level between Adrian and the front door.

And, looking at the blue glow, Adrian thinks of all he has read about ghostly lore, remembers a belief that flourished long before anyone had ever spoken of cold spots, or EMF readings, or electronic voice phenomena, that the presence of a wandering spirit would be heralded by a candle’s flame suddenly turning blue. In the very instant that he thinks of this, the orb grows larger and brighter, giving off yet more of that cold light that somehow exposes Adrian starkly to any possible observer whilst also revealing very little to him of his surroundings, offering neither knowledge nor comfort, only denuding both his body and his soul.

As though in the very worst of his childhood nightmares, Adrian stands rooted to the spot, unable to shift his legs to run. And as he gazes at the light, a shape seems to slowly form around it, vague and shadowy at first, then becoming more solid. It is roughly human, but at least ten feet tall, and with far too many grasping arms. Each of the many hands is disfigured by long talons, useless for anything other than seizing and rending. And within the amorphous mass of the great torso, numerous hungry, fanged mouths move, lit from within by that unnatural blue light and pouring forth that sweet, unbearable music in different voices. There appears to be no head atop the torso, only more waving, tangled arms.

The thing takes a single, ponderous step toward Adrian, and the spell is broken by a surge of animal fear. Screaming, he unloads all five shots of his .38 into the impossible amalgam. Each of the bullets brings a momentary blaze of blue flame pouring out of the surrounding dark energy, but leaves no other trace in the writhing hulk.

Dropping the now useless weapon, Adrian turns and runs up the stairs, back toward his study. He falls once, painfully spraining his right wrist and jamming his knees, but he flings himself up and back into flight. Reaching the study, he slams shut the door and locks it, drags over his chair and props it tightly under the knob.

Mind racing for any other avenue of escape, he backs away from the door and waits for any sound of pursuit, expecting to hear a terrible blow upon the old, polished wood. But instead, there comes only silence, not even that damnable song rising to meet his ears.

He turns to inspect the window, trying to imagine a way he might slip out of it without falling and injuring himself further. But as he looks out, he realizes that, in the now full night, there is a faint light spilling over the grass and snow despite the moonless sky. And from the way it falls, and even more from its hue, he realizes that it must be issuing from the weathered boards of the old house itself.

And, against the backdrop of the pale snow, he sees the wriggling of many shadowy arms, of less identifiable limbs and tendrils, which protrude from the outer walls and grope blindly for something, anything, to seize and to devour.

When he feels many cold, undulating fingers wrap around his feet and pull him down toward the floor, toward the gaping blue space that is opening now there, he cannot even utter a whisper before it swallows him, before he melds with that unearthly, unending cacophony of the wicked, the scorned, and the wronged.

(Mournful, dark choral music)

 
(Short pause)

NARRATOR

The indirect glow of the midmorning sun suffuses the room when Adrian wakes, lying faceup upon the study floor. Rising, he does not find any of the stiffness in his body that he expects. He feels awash in novel power and awareness, feels like every weakness has been expunged from his flesh and his soul. Most of all, the hard knot of fear and doubt which has always rested somewhere between his stomach and his spine is wholly gone now.

The antiquated rotary phone on his desk chimes loudly, and he has picked up and brought it to his ear before it can ring a second time. It is Selene. She apologizes for being so harsh, so abrupt, when he called her earlier. It had been a very bad day, she explains, and he had called her at the worst possible moment. From her tone, Adrian can tell that she feels guilty, ashamed.

Smiling to himself, he says that it’s alright, that he understands completely. As he speaks he picks up the letter opener on his desk, hefts it, tests the point.

Selene’s relief is palpable when she speaks again, and there is something else as well, something Adrian has not heard for a long time: she sounds pleased, even approving, when she says that he sounds different, allows that perhaps he has changed after all. With only a moment of hesitation, she asks if he thinks they might meet up sometime, catch up, maybe act like adults for once. She follows this with a light, self-deprecating chuckle.

Adrian’s smile widens, and he replies that that would be very nice.

As they say their goodbyes, Adrian feels more alive than he has ever felt before. And he thinks with wonder and excitement of all the marvelous tools, neatly assorted and lying ready at his disposal downstairs, all the beautiful ruin they may inflict upon delicate feminine flesh, as ripe and alluring as blank canvas.

(Doomful music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and musical arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]