S2/E8 | The Wishing Well

We're trying, you know, one of the side effects of the tincture that you were given by the pastor some call it hallucination. What do you call it? Just another way of seeing the world. There's more on heaven and earth and all I can almost where are you going? I can hear a voice, a voice, and what is its saying? I can't quite tell. It's or a smile. Names, names, what? What names? Flit silver, Horace Smith, Jorgan Benson, Jorgan Benson. Ah,

I see what's happening. Sean Whaland Augus UNCUS, Caroline Burgesse it's it's the well, Oh, well, in front of you. Can't you see it? or Yes, H May I have a coin to throw in it. Take this, but be very careful what you wish for. It works. Throw it. Don't worry about a coin. You can throw a pebble or a stick or whatever you have in your pocket, anything really. People used to throw children down there. That's the same either way. They're watch like this. H can

you hear it? M H spooky right. The sound and makes falling in is mm HMM. It's haunting. And I'll say it, you're not wrong. There aren't just coins at the bottom. I'm down there too. I'm not alone. Every year someone else moves in, you could say, whether they want to or not, and it's unfair. I was human, you know. I grew up in this town. I was down on my luck, a single mom, when being a single mom Madi an enemy of the moral crowd. Of course, this was a long, long time ago, but do you

know what they say about small towns? One Century is the same as the next, and if you could travel back in time to when I was alive, you'd think it was the modern day. Nothing has changed, except maybe a few goats of paint. Still, this well would be there, whether a hundred years ago or a thousand and it works. You just need to be very careful what you wish for and how m take me, for example. I remember exactly how it happened. I was young, just finishing high school.

My head falls books and stories and boredom and loneliness. I worked at the town store. I would walk over here at lunchtime when the weather was nice. I never threw anything in. It felt silly, you know, like leaving cookies out for Santa or hiding a tooth beneath a pillow. High School was almost over and it was time to put away childish things. But still, as I looked out at the endless empty days ahead, my thoughts would drift. I'd find myself lost, staring out the window of the

store in the direction of this old well. What harm could it do? I thought to make a wish. It started as an errant thought, then the most inside of jokes, something I shared only with myself, until one day I stood right where you are now and looked down deep into the well. I made a wish. I've thought about this carefully. I wished, after days of deliberation, to never be alone. At first I thought nothing happened, just the blink of a coin against the stone. I looked around

at the low gray sky. Raven stared at me as though it knew I was a fool in a dying core for being so naive. The very next day my men are traveling encyclopedia salesman. It's funny I forget his name. Even his face has faded, as if someone rubbed a wet finger across a charcoal drawing. He rolled through hopelessly lost on the back roads. When he stopped for supplies, his hand lingered on mine. When I gave him his change. I swear I could hear our heart gets bumping in

perfect unrehearsed unison. There was an electricity to the air I wanted to drown in. His eyes, dark and deep as a well. The next thing you know we've stolen away to Hay loft. Even now I remember that sweet damn smell of the Hay decomposing gently beneath us, the gentle throb of rain pattering along the roof of the bar. Oh, I thought he was my ticket out. That's how it was when you were young. That's how it is when you're young. I remember hearing radio shows about far away places.

Surely He'd take me right. After all, the well and I had a deal. But when this salesman traveled on, he did so in the dead old night. All I had left of him was a crumpled up re seat for lucky blue cigarettes and a ghost of drug store after shape. I wonder if you ever made it to the Pacific. I wonder how he died. But I've gotten my wish, just not the way. I don't. I was pregnant. I would never be alone again, but I was also ruined, unmarriageable,

scraping by and living with my parents for months. I was the talk of the town, a Jezebel, a lowe woman. I know what they said. I can hear them now through time if I'd listen. They never tell you that. The religious and the PSYCHICS and all those other selling stories about the afterlife, they never tell you the dead here everything, each and every word the living said about them, each whisper of condemnation, each declaration of love, all of it. No wonder so many of us end up sticking around,

and no wonder I ended up in the well. It's one person each year when the stars are right, but it's never the mayor or the members of what passes for high society and direbrook drifters, ruined women, orphans, out of towners, people like me, people like you. My disappearance was in the local paper. The Headline Read Tragic Death Marks End of harvest. It's a short article. Beneath the fold, news about the war took up most of the front page.

That's funny. I can't remember which war. The last thing I can remember the real me is how, tied up and painted with all those weird symbols on my face, I asked if I could see my kid one last time. Then up and over I went, the sounds of everyone chanting as my head hit the pick of stones lighting the well. Then darkness. Why did they choose me? Did someone make a wish? Did I win some Arcane dark lottery? Either way, down I went, just like all the countless

others before me. Then, after a time, I found myself here, bound to the well. I'm not always here, I'm somewhere else sometimes, but every so often a person like you happens along and I'm drawn out like water. Did you find it a pattern? Listen, silent, going good. Hold it. Philis Gon Tours against your hand and the fat of your bone. Now through it in trust me, it works. It is always worked. This wasn't always a will. Millions of years ago, old this valley was a long low plain.

The Rock fell from the spy, drawing waterful deep beneath the earth. Some of the first animals stumbling onto the land found the evidence of its passage. The creater lined with Redns, dead things. They stood, crows or slithered right where we are now. They looked over the edge, down into the darkness and the Spring and they fell. Ages passed. The land grew over the spring like a scar forming

the valley. When the first people arrived, they could feel this, a pulse, like an ordery below the flesh of the soil, flowing from somewhere deeper still. Your ancestors dub into this ground and called what they found God. You can't see it now, but there was a place here before, a temple, a church, you could say, but not the kind you'd recognize. If you close your eyes you can hear the wind through those ruins. Now the shame of a place alters. One comes after the well, the wind. This place. It

is like you, it is like me. It is wearing a face not its own. We are wearing a face, the voice you hear us speaking through now. She died in this well, the face you see in your mind when you close your eyes and listen to the wind. That's her. We remember her name when the wind whispers it into her ears. Down there, you can remember everything. The well remembers the dark winters long before her own, when certain people of this town made a covenant with

the well, the thing beneath it. A trade every so often, when the stars were right, a trade a little wish for a wish, a little sacrifice for a heart's greatest desire. We'd take no one, any one would miss, of course, a drifter or an orphan or a single mother. There were never any misimposters, never stories on the mainland news, not even an article in the local newspaper. It's funny how they forget those on the edges of their society.

But we don't. We know the feeling of desire and all we require is someone to take care of what's stopping you. Why the hesitation when you're scared? Don't worry, our wishes don't count. We're already in here. We, the dead, can only make the same wish over and over again, but you, you can make a new one. You can set us free and say okay if it doesn't happen right away. That's the thing about wishes. There's no time limit.

You wish, you wait, you walk, you move on further and further away from the version of you that made the wish. You Change, trade one piece of you for another, over and over again, until you have become something different, and you will wish when it arrives from the chasm of the distant past. That wish up close, it could feel a lot like a curse. You're not supposed to tell people what you wish for. That's one of the rules, but we've always thought that rule was for the living.

Here coome closer. Would you like to know what we wish for? Weld all the faces you will meet, we wish for you. Over and over again, we have wished for you. You can free us, all of us Down't here. What are we? What are you freeing? You mean, never mind that there's no time. Listen. Can you hear them? The festival is upon us. The stars and the darkness between the stars aligned. They know you are here, they're coming.

We can save you. Throw in your goin and say the words free us and we will have our cot it now. Don't turn us and you won't spend the turning. Come now, your face rip, now in the darkness. Yes, that's it now, that's enough. That's enough of that. What happened? I'll take that going back. Thank you. What happened? You met an unfriendly spirit, not one of the father, in the seas, adjacent to the father, but not of him. I could feel it's need. Well, it's need. Is None

of our business, is it? Come? The doctor should be back by now. We can take a short cut back past the schoolyard. Okay, are you all right? Yes, just shaking. Well, my darling, step up a little. They're so much more ahead. Yeah, tomorrow, on thirteen days of Halloween, the schoolhouse eventually over the waves, I heard my name called. I awoke to the Gustav

Twins Bursting into the classroom with hysterical bleed. They urged me from the desk and led me towards the playground, their identical smiles radiant, yet their faces flushed and still wet with tears. They wouldn't explain themselves, and I was still too discombobulated to protest. Once outside, I saw them the other children, all kneeling in a circle in the center of the kickball field and their body swayed to

the tempo of their Chad. The grading to do exceedingly indeed, in the places the head reached, the gray angels wings are out there. The emotions, the Stutus, thirt days of Halloween, the wishing well starring Kathy and Jimmy, Bethany and Lynde and Claire Bronson, written by Ben Bolan with additional material by Nicholas Takowski. Sound Design and mixing by Miranda Hawkins, engineering by violent Ferton, DUBWAY STUDIOS NEW YORK. Casting by

Jessica Losa. Created by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with executive producer Aaron Manky. A production of I heart radio, grim and mild and BLUMHOUSE television.