The Land of Hungry Ghosts

out of my mouth. Come in the start of the very longest night of the year, the dead center of midwinter. We cannot be any further from summer sunlight. Here desolate. It is from this vantage point the dream of June feels almost cruel, doesn't it. Even the wolves stay in on this night, respecting the heavy dark. And you know how they love a winter forest drink. Where am I in a place where drink is being offered? I've got mulled wine. It's very good for knocking off the chill. Yes, good,

we'll hang your coat by the door. You won't be needing it. Where am I I was? I've been walking in the woods for what seems like forever. It's a very deep wood, and with no sun to mark the time. It's endless, isn't it. Sit? You have an answered my question. You're standing in front of a steaming cup of mulled wine at a large wooden table in an inn, in the deepest bit of a dark wood, in the middle of the longest night of the year. Sit please, And

you are the owner of this establishment. Yes, but hold on? Mm hmm. How unusual? What it's strange? How time passes. I thought you came alone. I did well. It seems as though you were mistaken. Come in. You're right on time. M h I saw you a light. Yes, that is why I keep it on, so that weary travelers have something to move toward in the dark. Leave your coat at the door and come sit. I've got a drink to warm you. Are you all right? Yes? Good, you've

both traveled so far. Tonight there will be rest for you now rest, yes, But before I send you off to bed, tell me where have you come from? Where? My name is lost to me now, as well as my life before that night and all that has occurred since until I found myself. No, no, not lost nor forgotten mind you, but devoured by what you may ask, by the dead thing inside me that much I am allowed to recall. The dead thing, the creature, the ghost

that lives that resides within my skull. Whatever it is, it's ravenous, and the only thing it can eat is memory. I think it was human once. Who knows, maybe it was even like me, a simple, weary traveler who paused to converse with the wrong stranger on the wrong night. Now we are inseparable, and have been since since a moment. Please, what remains of my recollections are not easily gathered and demand a courage available only to me through the grace

of the bottle. I don't know why it's allowed me to recall our meeting. I have the theory, though, I think perhaps that's where it's made its home, there in the last memory my mind can hold. From there it enters my other memories to wait, where was I the meeting? Yes? Yes, how the dead thing that eats memories and I became one. I was a nocturnal traveler, alone in the land, as far from where I came for as wherever this place.

Maybe now young, or at least a much younger man than the one in my reflection and adrift in a strange city shuddered in the last hours before Christmas morning. I can still see a goblin moon peering over the darkened rooftops to illuminate the last patches of snow clinging to the corners of the street. I wandered that city, lost in search of a drink that I didn't need, and found only closed doors until I found him. Towards

the last hour of night. I approached him vagrant, an old man, half lurched from the shadows of an alley way. From his hand dangled a bottle of wine that sparked with the promise of a sweet numb The old man mumbled to himself in a tongue that I couldn't really understand until I realized what I was hearing was a mick sture of languages, muttered all at once and to no one at all. I was almost upon him, and

still he hadn't noticed my approach. The moonlight revealed a gaunt face twisted in concentration, as if conducting a great series of calculations whose some eluded his best efforts. None of them mattered. All that did was the bottle that dangled from his hand gently at a respectable distance, I intruded on his mumblings and informed him that for the remaining coins in my pocket, I would gladly purchase the

last drops of wine from his bottle. Startled, the old man looked up and down the street furtively, as if we weren't the only two souls there in that hour before dawn. His eyes, previously lost in some private toil, now bulged with amused confusion. In my presence, I reached into my pocket, jangled a few coins in my palm, and gazed as keenly at his bottle as he at

my face. The old man looked at the bottle as if only just then realizing what it was that I wanted, then with a grin of broken tombstones, and inquired how it was. I could see him. Thrown off by the question, I found myself bereft of an answer. The old man looked down at my feet and then back up at my eyes, shudered, dragging at the heels of your feet, does me you don't belong here? One? Where are you from?

How did you get here? He took a swig off the bottle and then passed it to me, returning the coins to my pocket. I accepted the bottle. The wine tasted of iron and dust, but it was strong enough to loosen the tongue. After another pull on the bottle, I confessed I wasn't sure where here was anymore. I explained that I came across the sea in search of fortune or to escape my fate, one or the other,

or maybe both. I've further explained how, after many long months, I finally received a letter from my one true love, a Christmas gift from home that arrived a day early, or so I thought. I learned that what my love and I had shared was no more than a bonfire in a blizzard. Bright, fierce and defiant, but ultimately doomed to be extinguished before the night is through. The old Man's bottle was almost empty, and I realized I had been crying. He seemed unconcerned to my state and simply

asked if I wanted my love back. No, I replied with a sudden rage, not just at my love's betrayal, but the tears I shed for her. Before a stranger, I explained to the universe as well as the old man, that all I wanted was to forget my love had ever existed. All of it, the good and the bad. For without my love in my life, the good we shared was a pain unbearable to remember, while the bad we suffered and survived was simply a lesson loss to me now forever, I would forget it all if I could.

And there was a long silence, just long enough for me to recant my words, before the old man cast a sad crack of his cemetery grin and reached out his hand. He said, take my hand, and all that haunts you shall be no more. Every wound, every loss, all of the injuries that even the bottle count reach, they will become my and no longer burden your time on this earth. Dried my eyes and laughed at the

absurdity of it all. But the longer the old Man's hand hung there, the more eager I became to believe his offer. Why not, after all, what harm can there be in the casting of a simple wish? All of it, I demanded, realizing now how desperate I was for his words to be true, all of it. With that, I emptied the bottle in a single pool and took his hand. The grip was stronger than an expected. I felt his nails dated deep into the palm of my hand, and with a cry of pain, looked down to discover that

blood had been drawn. Then the pain receded under a terrible numb. A strange chill ran up my hand, and I watched with mute horror as its flesh turned lou within his grasp. I pried my attention from the chill flowing into my body to plead with the old man to rescind my wish. But the old man was gone, and in his place stood a corpse. His corpse to be more accurate, hollow eyes and shriveled, rotted flesh pulled

taut across the outline of a skull. I tried to scream, I tried to kick free, and tried to strike at the corpse with my other hand, but found myself frozen in raw terror. I watched helplessly as his rutted skin began to bubble, as lumps formed and moved beneath the surface of his face. As the jaw of the corpse unhinged itself like some great snake from the Amazon, there was a gurgling as it struggled to speak, but it

wasn't words that were freeing itself from its jaw. The corpse began to vomit up, and a swarm of insects, not any kind I had ever seen, for they resembled beetles, only with tiny human faces painted on the front of their onyx carapaces and mandibles that clicked an alien communication with each other. They cascaded into thousands from the jaws of the old man's corpse, flowing down the neck, that shoulder, the arm that connected us now in this unholy union.

The insects swarmed over my hand, scurried beneath the sleeve of my coat, and even through the numb of the skin, I felt them enveloped my body in their thousands. Then they began to burrow deep beneath the flesh, even through the numb of the corpse'script. The pain was not something you forget. Apparently. The last thing I saw was the old man's corpse disintegrate, flaking off into chunks of dust that drifted into the dying moonlight as the last of

the human faced bugs drained from its screen. Then, mercifully I blacked out. I woke up in the alleyway, still alive. A Christmas miracle. It had all been a terrible dream brought on by the bottle. I staggered into the street. I was groggy, still unshore of my location, hungover as I was drunk, and then immediately recalled why I had been drinking so furiously the night before. The smile of my love's face flashed across my mind's eye. Instantly I

found myself in a familiar bed. Maybe there's maybe mine. A lone candle illuminated the longing and exhilaration of my love's gaze upon my body. Rain pattered against the window and crackled across the roof. Enraptured, I was on the verge of whispering my love's name when everything rose. The light of the candle no longer flickered, the rains cadence had stilled itself, and my love was still as a painting,

with neither a breath nor a blink revealed. Then, slowly a shadow formed and rose from behind my love, displayed naked across the bed. The shadow began to shimmer and melt away into the leering visage of the old man's corpse, the dead thing inside me. It ran a talented finger through my love's hair and studied me with empty sockets and a rich scrin of broken tombstones. It wanted me to know that it could see me. It wanted me to know that it took great satisfaction in my helplessness.

It pressed its face against that of my loves. It whispered into their ear, and it sniffed along the curve of their neck with the rotted remains of its nose, before leaning back, with odding satisfaction, fixed its eyeless gaze upon me, and threw back its head as if to mock me in sinister delight. Only it wasn't laughter that

erupted from the old man's corpse. Phantom swarm of human faced beetles burst through the jaws of the old man's corpse as it elongated unnaturally to provide them gateway into my memory. Crawling in their allegiance, they cascaded down the jaws of the old man's corpse and scattered themselves across my love. They spread across their skin, forming a chittering shadow over my lover, as their mandibles devoured every detail

of what I could remember from my love's body. And still they swarmed from the muted scream of the old man's corps, spreading themselves relentlessly across the bed, the floor, the walls of my memory, until their swarming masses had obliterated all I could recall of that night into nothingness. It was then that I recognized the faces painted onto

the beatles. It was that of my love, where the eyes locked and agony be pleading with me to do something, anything, But I was frozen, unable to escape out of memory into consciousness, nor shift to a different recollection. As the body of my love was devoured with their smiling eyes the last to go. I could feel everything we shared vanishing from the mind, the little jokes between us, a place where we met, the moments we shared, and then even their name. We're gone forever still the old man's

corpse feasted with eyeless gaze still locked on mine. It wanted me to remember this moment for as long as I lived. It wanted me to know that this was going to happen to everything, every person, every moment I had experienced. It wanted me to know the horror, and it wanted me to know the perverse joy it would take in devouring my memories. It wanted me to know that every time I woke up, a scene like this

would play again before being wiped away forever. Eventually there was nothing left of the memory save the dead thing inside me, the undulating tide of insects, and the candle light, until that was enveloped too, And then my sole remembrance comes to an end. After that, my story is no longer mine to tell. Written over the years, possibly the decades, and higher glyphs of scars and wounds, my body remembers more than I can. But chiefly what it remembers is

that I need a drink to function. Mind you, That is not to say that there haven't been scraps of recurrence. I've been allowed to nibble on crumbs of memory that have fallen off the chin of the old man's corpse. A few moments from a prison here, a few seconds spent in a sanitarium. There, the face of a priest as they called upon our Savior to rescue my wretched

soul from the phantom. Within a flash of lightning over a burning ship, a dead man in my feet, and lurch in my stomach at the bloody knife in my hand, brief sparks of a desperate life that I when I try to follow lead me back to the night when I met the dead thing inside me there in the land of hungry ghosts. So now I just traveled around in search of new experiences, new cities, new tales to feed the dead thing inside me, all the while biding my time for the right story to come along that

will satiate its eternal hunger. A story or a memory, as if the two weren't the same, but a tale so terrible that its teller would do almost anything to forget it ever existed. Who knows. Perhaps in that moment they'll even reach their hand out to take mine, and the dead thing inside me will at last have found a new home. But then I forget myself. My God, are you tired? Marcus? Marcus? Yeah? Us Marcus, that was my name once it is again. Do you wish to rest? Yes?

Take this key, Marcus. Up the stairs you will see a series of doors. Yours is the very first on the left. Inside is a bed. There you will find, for the first time in a very long time. I imagine a long dreamless slumber. Your hungry ghost will trouble you no more. That sounds nice. Please excuse me, you are excused to bed with you? Hm. And Flights of Angels, et cetera. Who are You? I'm the Innkeeper, now annabel Who are You? Twelve Ghosts starring Malcolm McDowell as the

Innkeeper and Gina Rikiki as Annabelle. Episode one, The Land of Hungry Ghosts written by Rob Mosca with additional writing by Nicholas Takowski, editing by Chris Childs and Stephen Perez, featuring Robin Bloodworth as Marcus. Directed by Nicholas Takowski. Original score and sound design by Chris Child's. Executive producers Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alexander Williams and Nicholas Takowski. Supervising producer Josh Same.

Producers Chris Child's and Stephen Perez. Casting by Sunday Bowling c s A and Meg Mormon c s A. Production coordinator Wayna Calderon. Recorded at Lantern Audio in Atlanta, Georgia, engineered by Chris Gardner, Aeros Sound and Recording in Ojai, California, engineered by Ken Arrows. Twelve Ghosts was created by Nicholas Takowski. Then is a production of I Heeart three D Audio

and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Learn more about the show at grim and Mild dot com, and find more podcasts from my heart Radio by visiting the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.