BONUS: Nine to Midnight

10/29/21 • 95 min

2 Listeners

the Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio

On the eve of Halloween, nine storytellers make their way to an abandoned asylum to share their terrifying truths about the darkness that exists around them. As the tales unfold, each more visceral than the last, the nine may just discover that it is not the waking world to fear, but the horrors that lay within.

Nine to Midnight is a collaborative storytelling event between nine podcasts:

Malevolent (https://www.malevolent.ca)

WOE.BEGONE (https://www.woebegonepod.com)

Wake of Corrosion (https://wakeofcorrosion.carrd.co)

The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio (https://www.somewhereohio.com)

The Cellar Letters (https://www.thecellarletters.com)

The Storage Papers (https://www.thestoragepapers.com)

The Town Whispers (https://www.thetownwhispers.com)

Nowhere, On Air (https://nowhereonairpodcast.weebly.com)

Hell Gate City Companion (https://www.hellgatecity.com)

CREDITS & CONTENT WARNINGS

CW: General horror, swearing throughout

Produced by Harlan Guthrie

Master edit by Harlan Guthrie

'Nine to Midnight' written by Harlan Guthrie.

Performed by Harlan Guthrie, Dylan Griggs, Shaun Pellington, Rat Grimes, Jamie Petronis, Jeremy Enfinger, Nathan Lunsford, Cole Weavers, Jess Syratt, and Kevin Berrey.

8:05 | 'Rare Book' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Harlan Guthrie of Malevolent.

16:50 | 'The Knocking' written, performed, edited, mixed, and music composed & performed by Dylan Griggs of WOE.BEGONE.

27:05 | 'The Broken Man' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Shaun Pellington of Wake of Corrosion.

CW: Violence, injury

35:30 | 'The Pool' written, performed, edited, mixed, and music composed & performed by Rat Grimes of The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio.

CW: Death, drowning

44:42 | 'The 1 to 5 Minute Man' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Jamie Petronis of The Cellar Letters.

52:24 | 'Ridgefield Manor' written, edited, and mixed by Nathan Lunsford.

Performed by Jeremy Enfinger and Nathan Lunsford of The Storage Papers.

Additional sounds from Zapsplat (https://www.zapsplat.com).

CW: Discussion of murder and suicide

1:02:45 | 'Public Access' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Cole Weavers of The Town Whispers.

1:12:34 | 'The Shortcut' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Jess Syratt of Nowhere, On Air.

1:22:14 | 'Peepers Creepers' written, produced, performed, edited, and mixed by Kevin Berrey, Screaming Panda LLC of Hell Gate City Companion.

Music composed by Cheska Navarro (https://www.cheskanavarro.com).

Sounds from Zapsplat (https://www.zapsplat.com).

Additional sounds and effects licensed under CC BY 3.0: https://freesound.org/people/Garuda1982/sounds/570378/ by Garuda1982 https://freesound.org/people/cbakos/sounds/50646/ by cbakos https://freesound.org/people/trip_sound/sounds/190470/ by trip_sound https://freesound.org/people/Omar%20Alvarado/sounds/251538/ by Omar Alvarado

https://freesound.org/people/SLCBagpiper/sounds/337743/ by SLCBagpiper https://freesound.org/people/GM180259/sounds/491997/ by GM180259

Nine to Midnight is a collaborative storytelling event between nine podcasts:

Malevolent (https://www.malevolent.ca)

WOE.BEGONE (https://www.woebegonepod.com)

Wake of Corrosion (https://wakeofcorrosion.carrd.co)

The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio (https://www.somewhereohio.com)

The Cellar Letters (https://www.thecellarletters.com)

The Storage Papers (https://www.thestoragepapers.com)

The Town Whispers (https://www.thetownwhispers.com)

Nowhere, On Air (https://nowhereonairpodcast.weebly.com)

Hell Gate City Companion (https://www.hellgatecity.com)

CREDITS & CONTENT WARNINGS

CW: General horror, swearing throughout

Produced by Harlan Guthrie

Master edit by Harlan Guthrie

'Nine to Midnight' written by Harlan Guthrie.

Performed by Harlan Guthrie, Dylan Griggs, Shaun Pellington, Rat Grimes, Jamie Petronis, Jeremy Enfinger, Nathan Lunsford, Cole Weavers, Jess Syratt, and Kevin Berrey.

8:05 | 'Rare Book' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Harlan Guthrie of Malevolent.

16:50 | 'The Knocking' written, performed, edited, mixed, and music composed & performed by Dylan Griggs of WOE.BEGONE.

27:05 | 'The Broken Man' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Shaun Pellington of Wake of Corrosion.

CW: Violence, injury

35:30 | 'The Pool' written, performed, edited, mixed, and music composed & performed by Rat Grimes of The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio.

CW: Death, drowning

44:42 | 'The 1 to 5 Minute Man' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Jamie Petronis of The Cellar Letters.

52:24 | 'Ridgefield Manor' written, edited, and mixed by Nathan Lunsford.

Performed by Jeremy Enfinger and Nathan Lunsford of The Storage Papers.

Additional sounds from Zapsplat (https://www.zapsplat.com).

CW: Discussion of murder and suicide

1:02:45 | 'Public Access' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Cole Weavers of The Town Whispers.

1:12:34 | 'The Shortcut' written, performed, edited, and mixed by Jess Syratt of Nowhere, On Air.

1:22:14 | 'Peepers Creepers' written, produced, performed, edited, and mixed by Kevin Berrey, Screaming Panda LLC of Hell Gate City Companion.

Music composed by Cheska Navarro (https://www.cheskanavarro.com).

Sounds from Zapsplat (https://www.zapsplat.com).

https://freesound.org/people/SLCBagpiper/sounds/337743/ by SLCBagpiper https://freesound.org/people/GM180259/sounds/491997/ by GM180259

Previous Episode

DLO 15: KISS ME SON OF GOD

As we’ve previously established, forward and backward are not necessarily stable concepts.

Conway makes a choice. Wren steels their nerves. A familiar face appears. This is the end.

(CWs: food, brief allusion to bullying, mild apocalyptic imagery, death)

Nathan of The Storage Papers as AGENT/DIRECTOR; Jess of Nowhere, On Air as Liz. Go listen to their shows!

https://nowhereonairpodcast.weebly.com/

thestoragepapers.com

Kiss Me Son of God originally by They Might Be Giants (John Flansburgh and John Linnell)

Quotes from Jean Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies and John Stuart Mill.

*Projector clicks, a dark smoky room filled with people*

AGENT: That brings us to the falling hand incident from a few years back, dead case 0069.

*sparse chuckles from audience members*

AGENT: *exasperated* Jesus, I’m running a daycare here. Now those of you who were with the office at the time will already know all this. You new guys won’t know anything about it. But that’s why we’re here, right? One of our field agents witnessed the whole thing, and gave their testimony during a thorough debriefing here in HQ. Pay attention to Wren’s account. I’m only going over it once.

*slide click*

*INTRO MUSIC*

WREN, on tape: Falling to earth from somewhere I chose not to think about was a left hand.

AGENT, on tape: So what did you do?

WREN: Well, I tried the one thing I hadn’t done yet. One last shot before the end of the world. I called Conway.

CONWAY: Hard to explain how I got into that lighthouse. Can barely remember it myself through the fog of exhaustion. I was so damn tired. But get in I did. And at the top--or was it bottom?--was a dark, steamy room. An office of sorts, filled with smoke pouring out from some sort of awful machine in the corner. The engine’s shape was irregular, almost hard to look at, but it kept spewing its haze like humid breath. In the center of the office was a desk, set with--you guessed it--a phone, some stationary, a blank nameplate, a painting of an old lighthouse in a gold frame. I sat in the plush leather chair behind the desk. A highly welcome respite after the day I’d had. The woods, the mall, the deerhead priest, the lost fisherman. I needed a minute to put my feet up. I’d earned it.

I leaned back and looked at the empty notepad. “Welcome to the Deerland Mall” was printed at the top of each page. I had the materials to send a letter to the DLO, but what to actually write? “Hey, I’m in a weird lighthouse somewhere, come get me?” I didn’t see how that would work. Still, according to the fisherman, I had two paths in front of me: write home and go back to my life as it was, or answer the call and take the promotion.

And then it rang. No, not the offwhite rotary phone in front of me, it was my cell phone. Didn’t recognize the number. Probably somebody calling about my car’s warranty or a $50 walmart gift card. But at that point I was willing to take that risk just to hear someone who didn’t talk in metaphors again.

CONWAY, on the phone: Hello?

WREN, on the phone: Conway? Oh my god, is that you!?

CONWAY: Yeah, this is Conway. Hard to make out what you’re saying. Sorry, who is this?

WREN: Oh wow, I don’t know how I got through to you but listen: I’m coming to get you.

CONWAY: I don’t reckon that’s the smartest idea. I don’t even know wh--

WREN: I’ve followed your trail. I think I’m nearby now. But there’s something going on. Something you’re connected to. It’s bad. Lucy told me where to find you. I think she’s--

CONWAY: Now what is this about Lucy? You talked to her? Are you with the office? How...how is she?

WREN: I just got a postcard from her. But listen, something’s coming, and I don’t think it’s going to end well. I need you to come out of the cave now. I’ll be at the entrance waiting to take your hand.

CONWAY: Cave? THAT cave? I’m...wherever I am, I’m not in there.

WREN: Where are you? This may be it, Conway. The end.CONWAY: I’m in a lighthouse. The fisherman in the place that looks just like a blockbuster said...well you know what, that doesn’t make any sense saying out loud...I’m tired, you know? I don’t want to keep going. I want to sit down for a minute. At this desk. I don’t think that’s selfish.

WREN: Desk?CONWAY: Yeah there’s like a whole swanky office here. Guy said I could be the boss if I wanted to. Kenji didn’t have what it took, but I just might. I’m so damn tired of it all, you know? The grind. And there’s some kind of machine. I think I’ve heard of it before. Somebody called it the lucid engine. If I’m the dreamer, that means...

WREN: Conway I don’t think I follow. Boss? Just come back, okay? We need you.

CONWAY...

Next Episode

DLO 16: METAMORPHOSIS

Wren takes a road trip. A divorcee spots an odd insect. Conway tries to shake a rock out of his shoe.

Featuring the voices of Nathan from Storage Papers (https://thestoragepapers.com), Jess Syratt from Nowhere, On Air (https://nowhereonairpodcast.weebly.com), and Rae Lundberg of The Night Post (https://nightpostpod.com/).

(CWs, mild spoilers: LOTS of insects, body horror, fire, car braking sound)

Transcript incoming, here's the rough script for now, which mostly follows the episode.

“Now let’s get to the weird stuff...”

WREN: We humans generally like stability. Predictability. We like to figure out patterns and stick with them. I think that’s why change can be so frightening for us. It throws the future--which once seemed so certain--into chaos. Anything could happen. We could be on the verge of destruction at any moment. But we could also be inches away from utopia. If you can learn to live with this change, this constantly revolting present, you just might make it out of the apocalypse with your sanity intact.

Or so that’s what I hoped. I had little else to count on. I tried to flow like water with the shifting tide. You can be the judge of how that all turned out. That’s why you’re here, right?

Pockets of shadows remained in the cave, about a dozen or so people, seemingly oblivious to the life outside. They toiled under The Boss’s directives, worked day and night for the Dead Letter Office. To what end, I couldn’t really say. Seemingly just to perpetuate the office itself. If I could show them the way out, maybe they would help me take on the Boss. One shadow, Liz, was receptive to my offer. She still had some kick left in her diminished form. Her girlfriend, though, was blind to the world, just a single atom in the bureaucratic monolith.

In Liz, I had someone on the inside. If she could go back and agitate from within the machine, we might stand a chance of turning a few more souls back to the light. It would be risky, though; if even one shade suspected outside forces were at work, they might alert the Boss. Even given all my experience with the paranormal and extranormal, I have no idea what would happen then. My gut feeling told me that facing the Boss prematurely would be...ill-advised.

If I wanted to find more of these shadows, I’d need to search through the dead mail, find the stories that might have caught Conway’s attention, and seek out their writers. The problem was that I had just walked out of my job, and I had a suspicion that if I showed back up unannounced, the Boss would take notice. Where, then, would I find these letters if not the office?

I’d need to find the place that Conway kept all of the clues. I’d need to find Aisling. I’d need to find the vault. Would anything be left in the old vault, or had the Boss already figured out my plan and purged it? Only one way to find out.

Yes, change can be terrifying. Yes, the future is in flux. But the scariest part is that the past can be made just as uncertain as the future. Memories fade, records burn, and witnesses pass on. Entire decades lost, cultures lost. Lessons unlearned. Mistakes repeated. If a place loses its history, how can its people know the present? Without a past, how can we make sense of the future? As a butterfly forgetting it was once a worm, who are we without who we were?

Driving through the clogged artery highways of the state was a challenge, given that time appeared to be at a standstill for most of the world.

If all the postcards and letters were to be believed, I was looking for a lakeside town. Somewhere along the Erie was a town full of shadows, a place haunted by its own history. And within that town was a lighthouse. This lighthouse was my metaphorical beacon. I kept the postcard printed with its image folded and tucked into my pocket. It was among the few items I took with me on this road trip: a cassette player with some of Conway’s old tapes and a furry little friend also jostled around in a cardboard box on the passenger seat. I couldn’t just leave the poor thing in the office after all we’d seen.

The morning air was silent and stiff, only the sound of my rumbling engine accompanied the pink rays glancing off rows of glass and steel. I turned the stereo’s knob, but the radio was entirely dead air. I loaded up one of the tapes to see if it would be of any help.

The enormous hand still hung overhead like the executioner’s ax. What was our crime, Conway? What did we let ourselves forget?

*on tape* OLD INTRO MUSIC

This is Conway, receiving clerk for the Dead Letter Office of Aisling, Ohio, processing the national dead mail backlog....