the Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio

the Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio

A series of weird horror podcasts set in the midwest. The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio is a horror-comedy fiction podcast set within one of the last remaining Dead Letter Offices in the country. Join Conway, Wren, and the rest as they archive strange, spooky, surreal pieces of lost mail. A solo project by a nonbinary creator inspired by Kentucky Route Zero, Twin Peaks, Edgar Allen Poe, and more. Each episode features 2 short stories connected in some way, either narratively or thematically. What begins as an anthology evolves into...something else. Content warnings are posted in the show notes, along with transcripts. Written, performed, and scored by Rat Grimes (they/he) Art by Nerdvolkurisu

  1. DLO 16: METAMORPHOSIS

    EPISODE 1

    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. The following audio recording will serve as an internal memo strictly for archival purposes and should be considered confidential. Need I remind anyone: public release of this or any confidential material from the DLO is a felony. Some names and places have been censored for the protection of the public. Dead letter 11919. An SD card found in a condemned building. The house caught fire in fall of 2011, but card was mysteriously undamaged. The fire department contacted one of our carriers, who brought it back to the office for investigation. The contents of the SD card are as follows. *off tape A month after my divorce I took up photography. Call it a midlife crisis if you want. I needed something to keep my mind occupied now that I was perpetually alone again, and a camera is a hell of a lot cheaper than a sports car. Photography’s really for lonely hearts; you’re by yourself, but surrounded by people. You watch them through the lens, feed on their fleeting touches. I threw myself into it fully without thinking too much, like I do with just about everything. Like I did with her. Three months after the divorce, I went to the butterfly house. To see things so wet and new enter the world, so hopeful, was healthier projecting my turmoil onto the world around me. The insects’ colorful wings rendered through the lens like stained glass, and there was so much variety. I started shooting at the conservatory whenever I could, and gleaned a lot about butterflies in the process. Monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus, migrate long distances, from the great lakes to the gulf, then come back again when the weather warms up. How they remember the path back home, no one’s quite sure. Almost romantic. On the other end of the spectrum, some moths only live for a week. Actias luna don’t eat anything during their brief week of existence, because they can’t: their mouths are vestigial. Instead, they rely on what they ate in their larval state to sustain them throughout their lives. They eat, change, mate, and die. Also kind of romantic. In a sense. Six months after the divorce is when I saw it. The reason for this video. I was kneeling in front of a coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, waiting for one of the little powdery things to alight on a petal. A kid running through the conservatory was scaring off most of my subjects, but I could be patient. What else did I have going on in my life? My friends were mostly married and mostly busy, my family...well, I’d rather not go there. So I waited. Crouched, holding the hefty camera, lens focused, my mind was sharp but my body was getting stiff. I was about to call the day a wash when something interesting came into view. A large butterfly landed on the purple flower. Its folded wings were pure ashy black, and it looked sharper than the objects around it. This one had a sort of presence, a portentous aura, as if the events of the world waited on every flap of its wing. In my time here, I’d never seen anything like it. It held my attention in a vice, like it wasn’t a bug at all, but a treacherous cinder in a pile of dry leaves. Like it demanded a watchful eye, else the ember might be stirred by a breeze to glow again and burn and burn. I snapped a few photos of its dusky form. Then it turned, its back now facing the camera, and spread its wings. There smudged across its span were three bars of color: white over red over brown on black. Like three chalky rectangles floating in the void. The thing that worried me most about this creature was that it was somehow familiar, like somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind I had seen this before. But not on a butterfly, no, it had to be something else. Six years ago, we drove up to canada in a cheap rental car. We threaded a trail up and east, across the Erie border, into the marigold hills of pennsylvania, through the vineyards and thin eastern pines of new york, up across the border. We were spending a long weekend in Toronto, taking in the sights and sounds of a real city, a place where public transportation isn’t just a pipe dream. We bought fresh pears from a bodega in and took the metro across the river. We walked through the financial district and saw a seagull pick at fries in a discarded styrofoam container. I say we. I can see the places in my mind, remember the sounds and smells, but she’s not really there in my memory anymore. My mind erased her from the picture, but the empty space she occupied is still there. Like a citation to a book that doesn’t exist, an overexposed blob on a film negative haunting every frame. This was our last trip together, not that we knew that at the time. We were both worn out, a wordless static swelling between us. Radios tuned to different stations. We were growing apart, but neither of us wanted to admit it. That would be too brave. Easier to let it wither away until it’s a dry husk of what it once was. We had exhausted just about every other method of holding this thing together, so in a mocking reflection of our first date, we went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. We casually wound through the hallways going through the motions, pointing out something interesting here, gently nodding there. In a dark room near the end, among the abstract expressionists, was that pattern I had seen before.

    32 min
  2. DLO 17: MIMIC

    EPISODE 2

    DLO 17: MIMIC

    Wren visits the town of their dreams. A man finds a doll that looks just like him. Featuring Jess Syratt of Nowhere, On Air as Liz. (CWs, some spoilers: alcohol, possible murder, body horror, derealization, dysphoria?, blood, insects) CONWAY: Sometimes a drop of water is all it takes for rust to form. A single grain of sand to gum up the gears. One thought to plant to the seed of doubt.   Sometimes we don’t want to think that thought, so it festers, mold in our minds. We wear masks, build whole cities–empires–just to obscure that one thought. It can drive some people to madness, others to enlightenment.    What that thought is I’ll leave up to you. I’m not here to give you answers. I’m here to tell you what happened. The facts, as I see them.   Despite my power and wealth, something stung me. Ants crawling on my skin, salt in my wound. Defection among the ranks. And something else, too. A feeling that something wasn’t right. That I wasn’t right. That something had gone wrong somewhere along the line, but I couldn't remember what.   You can’t usually go back and fix the past, so what you’ve got left is thought, grains of sand, drops of water. Masks. What happens if the mask takes over, starts to be more real than the face underneath? And if you’re a mask, who’s wearing you?   Was it too late for me to take it off? Was I really…me? Or was I just what I thought I should be? Was I in the cave, or in the tower? Wren, can you see my face? Or do you see the mask?    ***   The first thing I noticed was the fog. Wisps of light gray curling and drifting above the tall grass that framed the narrow road. It wasn’t the fog itself that gave me pause, it was the movement. I hadn’t seen anything outside of my control move at all these past 3 days.   The yellow cones of the car’s headlights illuminated a sign, bent and scored by weather and age: “WELCOME TO AISLING, THE TOWN OF YOUR DREAMS. POPULATION–” I couldn’t read the rest: rust and time had swallowed the populace of this place.   Though there was movement here, it was nearly silent and empty. No crickets, no birds, no rumbling engines or hushed voices. I suddenly felt very exposed in my car. I pulled off into the dewy grass and got out. I took the flashlight and jacket out of my emergency kit in the trunk and ventured into the haze.   As I drew nearer, a cluster of short buildings emerged from the mist, and I could smell the lake on the air. Its gentle lapping barely pierced the foggy aura surrounding the town. The steady beam from my flashlight guided me as best it could, given the conditions.    The second thing I noticed was the cold. The temperature dropped precipitously as I crept through the barren streets. I focused the flashlight between my heavy puffs of breath onto the nearby houses. Every home along this road was encased in hanging ice, sheets of gray vacuum sealed to the facades, dripping at the edges in a thousand angry fangs. The frozen tendrils hanging from every surface mimicked alien architecture: these were no longer houses, they were noneuclidean sculptures hauled from the deep itself, symbols of tentacled things unseen and unspoken dwelling miles below the surface. Spiraling, bubbling cathedrals dedicated to the worship of beings our species had forgotten, or chose not to remember. There is a difference. One in particular near the shore stood elevated on a dock, now smothered in sharp icicles. There it sat hunched before the lake like a withered king on a throne, now too thin for his hanging robes. All he can do is watch as his kingdom melts away.   The third thing I noticed was whistling. As I explored the town further, I could make out a faint ethereal tune floating on the air. I followed it, and it grew in volume as I neared the lake. Out on the frozen piers stood a man in an orange vest, human alone amongst the jaws of ice, casting his line into what had to be frozen lake water.    I shone my flashlight his direction, which made him pause. His shoulders tensed and the line went slack. He slowly turned to face me from across the sculpted pier.    I couldn’t see his face. Or maybe he didn’t have a face. He waved at me, then pointed to my left. There in the frigid alien landscape was a warm glow. Incandescent light poured through windows thick with condensation. I heard voices carry across the dense atmosphere, quiet conversations, glasses clinking, laughing. I turned to thank this kind fisherman, but he was gone.   Shivering and nose running, I hopped along toward the bar. Even if this was somehow a trap, at least I’d die warm. I could feel the heat and light radiating from the building. It stood out so sharply from the rest of the town. I pushed the door with my shoulder and it swung open.   Instead of being greeted by central heating and stale beer, I was met with more ice. The door to this place must have been left open during whatever had affected the rest of the town. Ice hung from the ceiling, the bar, the rough stools. The walls were coated with translucent spears. The sole artifact spared from the ice was a black rotary phone, sitting in the center of the bar’s counter.   A sharp bell rang out from bar, through the town. I jumped, I’ll admit it. I was startled. It rang again, and I turned the phone around to see how they managed to wire it up in this place. Of course, there were no wires. No phone line. Simply a disconnected phone ringing in a frozen town that shouldn’t exist. Given the circumstances, I presumed the call was for me.    ***   WREN: “H-hello?” LF: “Weeelll, now you’ve stepped in it, huh?” WREN: “What do you mean? Who is this?” LF: “Just a fisherman angling for a bite. And what I mean is you’ve crossed over. Welcome to the unwaking world. I’m sure you’ve got questions, but I can only answer three, and it looks like you’ve used two. So I’d watch my words, if I were you.” WREN: “I see. Well, instead of asking questions, I’ll request that you tell me about this place.” LF: “Clever work. Now this used to be a big lumber town. Imports and shipping. Real nice little place across the lake from canada. Town was run by an old robber baron’s kid, scion of the Van Leer family. Had this funny notion there was something special about this lake and boy, was he right in all the wrong ways. WREN: “Maybe if you weren’t arbitrarily governed by genie rules, I’d ask you  more about this town’s history and this Van Leer person.” LF: “As well you might. Then sometime round 1918 was when it all went to hell. This Van Leer fella put together a team to dredge the lake. Lookin for a shipwreck from years back he said had some kind of vast wealth in it. The Oneiros. He even went in himself in his diving dress. I’ll spare you the guessing as to whether he found that shipwreck. He did. And more.    The crew dragged this massive crate from its grave in the muck and pulled it into the center of town. Took 4 men stout and true to get it open. Inside was a mass of iron, smooth in some parts and sharp in others, pipes and wheels gone wrong, like a steam engine built by a madman. Van Leer had found his treasure. It’s said that the next night, he went out and tried to start this wicked machine. Wouldn’t burn coal or wood, though. Needed something with more…vitality. So he fed its dark cravings with blood.   The engine roared and huffed black smoke. This activity must have stirred something in the water, because soon a white maiden flanked by hideous beasts visited the town. Nobody’s quite sure what came of Van Leer or the rest of the people here. Place has been frozen since. Or so the story goes.    Now I’m not sure how much of that is true, but I have seen the drag marks. You can follow them if that sick engine is what you’re looking for.  WREN: “Oh, my.” LF: “‘Oh my’ puts it mildly. Oh and Wren, I’ve got a warning: you’re in danger. WREN: “Danger?” LF: “I’ll pretend there wasn’t a question mark at the end of that sentence. You’re real, Wren, the only real thing here, and that puts you in a pickle. The last real person here was a man named Kenji, and I assume you heard what happened to him. WREN: “Oh, my…” LF: So that’s why I had to call you. To let you know that he knows you’re here, and his dark messengers are coming for you the second you step out of this bar. The frozen horrors of this town have started to thaw. Hope you can run, kid.” WREN: “Oh…fuck.” LF: “Now you’re getting it. Well, I best be lettin ya go…” WREN: “Wait! I still have a question left. Where’s Conway?” LF: “Which one?” WREN: “huh?” LF: “That Van Leer kid, name was Conway, too.” WREN: “Two Conways.” LF: “Sort of. Before you brave the cold again, let me tell you a story…”   ****   NARRATOR: Joe had always been a bit of an odd guy. A nice guy, but a little hard to live with. Real picky about certain stuff–liked to have stuff just so–had a hard time letting go of grudges, and usually felt that the people around him didn’t really care for him. He had a small group of friends he’d known since college that he figured were accustomed to his predilections. They sure all had their own, as everyone does. But this didn’t stop the thoughts from creeping in. The thought that maybe he didn’t belong, that they’d rather he disappear.   After living with friends for years, he decided it would be easier to live alone. Now moving is stressful, even under normal circumstances. For Joe, it was a nightmare. How to box everything so that it doesn’t mix rooms, split functions, lose pieces. Trying to find someone to help lift furniture that won’t resent you. Picking an apartment in the first place.    Joe moved in most of his belongings, but found this apartment a bit smaller than his last. This m

    32 min
  3. EPISODE 3

    DLO 18: HONEYBEE

    Wren has a chat and descends into the dark. Liz gathers allies for a revolt. Major thanks to the MVPs of this episode: Rae Lundberg as Shadow, Jess Syratt as Liz, and Nathan from the Storage Papers as the Director. (CWs, mild spoilers: fire, death, body horror, distorted voices and faces, static, dripping noises) Transcripts available at somewhereohio.com Apologies for the delay! TRANSCRIPT: *Fizzling Boss tones* *boss tones coagulate into a voice* BOSS: “Because I needed you alive long enough for us to talk.” WREN, barely conscious: “wh-what? Where…” WREN: Drops of frigid water pelted my forehead, stirring me from the astral plane. Above me was a whitewashed ceiling, stone walls curving in a circle like a shackle. I wasn’t restrained, however. I sat upright on crossed legs. Someone had been speaking just then, right? WREN: “Is someone there?” BOSS: “Ah, good, you are awake. I was a tad worried the furball out there hit you too hard.” The curdled voice had to be coming from…somewhere, but it felt like it was all around me, under me, seeping into my hair and nails. The impact of the sheer cold of this place finally hit me as my head stopped spinning. I sat hunched for a moment before responding. WREN: “Boss? I-is that you? How did you–” BOSS: “I live in the wires, creep through static, remember? And your friend out there is about 50% wires, give or take. It’ll be fine once its circuits or whatever they have reboot. But that thing isn’t what I’m interested in. I brought you here to talk. So let’s hop to it.” WREN: “What do you want me to say? I’m sorry for leaving? For trying to help you?” BOSS: “Lucy. I want to talk about Lucy. See, Ever since our phone call, I’ve been…unsettled. Now that I’ve always been the boss, I have near unlimited knowledge of the DLO, of the things around me, but still no sign of Lucy. That bothers me.” I warily stood up and looked around the frozen lighthouse. Long icicles hung from the ceiling–floor? whichever--dripping and freezing once more on the ground. The whole interior was covered in a thin icy sheen. No sign of Conw–er, the boss. I needed to find where this voice was coming from, but I needed time. I’d have to string him along for a bit and hope his confidence would play against him. WREN: “Okay, then. Let’s talk Lucy. But first, there are some things I want to know. I’ve heard about some sort of machine salvaged from the lakebed. What is it?” BOSS: “Might as well indulge the little worker bees in a bit of honey while they can still taste it. Very well, Wren.” As he spoke, I snuck around the perimeter of the dark tower, listening for any changes in directional sound.  BOSS: “That machine is what made this place, made me real. It shepherded a new era for this state. Sure a few people lost a job or two, a few houses demolished, a few forests burned down, but it made way for industry, for growth. For potential. You shouldn’t blame this engine for your troubles: it’s people that run it. Without us, it’s just a hunk of junk. But with our hand on the till, we can remake the world. You’re stuck in the old ways, Wren. You’re a dinosaur, flailing in the tar, and I am the good god above, shaking my head.  Yes, this little engine can be dangerous, if you can’t handle the power. Kenji couldn’t. Look what happened to him. I could handle it, and here we are. Speaking of power, don’t think I don’t know about the little coup attempt you’re plotting with some of my…former associates. It won’t work. As soon as we’re done here, I’m crushing your little salt and feeding her to the engine. Then it’s back to business.” I should have known he’d know. But just because he knew what was happening didn’t mean he could stop it. If all went well on Liz’s side, it would be many hundreds against one. Those are decent odds in my ledger. I just needed a bit more time. WREN: “So this ‘lucid engine’ really runs on human misery. It carved its way across the midwest, burning through the souls of workers, flattening towns, setting forests ablaze, bringing nightmares to life. But it’s our touch that makes it glow, our will that drives its whips and chains. Is that right? A conduit for economic malice?  You know you weren’t always like this. I’ve heard your earlier memos. You were kind, artistic, even funny sometimes, I must grudgingly admit. I trusted you.  I want to believe that person is still in you somewhere, trapped among the paperwork and oil. If it is, I intend to find that person, and bring them back. If it is not, I don’t intend to show any mercy.” BOSS: “You sure say a whole hell of a lot and say a whole lot of nothing, huh little bee?” I found no hints to the direction of his voice, but I did discover a narrow staircase winding down to the top of the lighthouse.  BOSS: “I believe it’s your turn now, Wren. Where is Lucy?” WREN: “I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know. I encountered her at a waffle house at the end of the world. But she didn’t talk to me.” BOSS: “Well…no, that can’t be right. I was…No. No. NO. You’re not going to play with my mind like he did. Said I wasn’t real. You’re talking to me right now! Real as real gets.” WREN: “You sound unfocused, boss. Tell me this: what’s your full name? How old are you? I’m Wren Crawford, nonbinary claims adjuster born November 1st, 1998 in Illinois. My favorite color is silver, I love driving at night with the windows down, and I hate pineapple. How about you? No easy answer? You think much too literally, Boss. Of course, ‘real’ can mean extant, physically in the world. But it has many other meanings, too. Genuine, authentic. You may be here, but you’re not authentic. You are a fiction.” I had inched my way to the stairs as I spoke. Before I could take the first step, he noticed where I was headed.  BOSS: “Whoa, whoa whoa, hold on now, hoss. Sorry to disappoint you, but what you’re looking for ain’t down there. That’s just the DLO’s vault. All you’re gonna find there are dusty old letters. You’ve shown a lot of grit to even get here, Wren, a good deal of stick-to-it-iveness. You’re bright, hardworking, got a keen eye. You shouldn’t waste your life scrounging around in the dark. I’m a compassionate leader, I recognize potential when I see it. So to make your trip worthwhile, I’ve got an offer for you. I could use someone else under my wing. A right hand, so to speak. Someone to watch over the warehouses and offices while I’m away on executive duties. You would have your own office–with a window!--your own assistants, access to all the documents you could want. You could escape the life of the worker bee. You could be the Supervisor, Wren. A damn good one. Wealthy, to boot.” WREN: “In my time, I’ve come to find that wealth acts like a poison. The more concentrated it is in one host, the more dangerous it becomes. But dilute it among many and it’s harmless, or as with a serpent’s venom, a vital part of its own antivenom. It should be the sweet fruits picked from trees we planted ourselves. I don’t want your poison apples.” I stood at the precipice of a yawning mouth to hell. One more step and I could never go back.  WREN: “Sorry, Boss, I’m no insect. I am a hawk.” My foot hit the metal stair, and the world above went dark.  *** LIZ: “Suuure, just round up some shadows and commit arson, Liz. This is a perfectly normal thing people say all the time, Liz. Well, no time like the present, I guess. Hey, uhhh, you at the desk! What’s your name? *Harsh buzzing and static emanate from the shadow* LIZ: “All right, forget you then. Stapler dude, with the cool glasses. My guy, what are you up to?”  *more unwelcoming noise* LIZ: “This isn’t working. How was that other shadow able to talk to me?” SHADOW: “I’m not sure, how can you talk? You’re a shadow, too.” LIZ: “Christ, you’re still here?”  SHADOW, gently: “You needed someone to talk to.” LIZ: *pause, sigh* “Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound so…” SHADOW: “Hostile?” LIZ: “Right. There’s just a lot going on right now. I keep thinking I’ll see her here somewhere. I can almost feel her nearby. But then I turn around and it’s all gone, just a puff of smoke, sifting through my fingers like sand.  I just want to be back at our apartment, building a little house in the sims together. Pretending that someday WE could own a house. I need to find her before we get out of here. IF we get out of here.” SHADOW: “And I need to make sure that thing in the middle is taken down.” LIZ: “Well we’ve both got something to do then. I wonder…Do you think that having purpose makes here us…tangible? SHADOW: “Makes about as much sense as anything else that’s happened to me in the last 24 hours.” LIZ: “Ever read any Sartre?” SHADOW: “No.” LIZ: “Me neither. But if his stuff’s anything like Groundhog Day, it’s about how we’re defined by what we do, not who we are. Making the choice to continue in the mouth of the void. We have goals, those goals give us meaning, that meaning gives us solidarity. Err, solidity. SHADOW: “Then all we have to do is remind these people there’s more to the world than this office. Give them something else to live for.” LIZ, speaking to the room: “All right, listen up, folks. You’ve been working, what, Eight? Nine hundred hours? With no break? Do you even know what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it? Look at me, I’m not glued to a desk, grumbling and sneering at everyone trying to be nice to me. I’m free! No boss to tell me what to do. Come on, you can’t tell me you actually like your boss. What’s more American than hating your boss? You in front, yeah I know you think he’s a real pissbaby.”  SHADOW, whispe

    23 min
  4. DLO 19: WE'RE STILL HERE

    EPISODE 4

    DLO 19: WE'RE STILL HERE

    Forward and backward are not stable concepts. The curtains close, a mask is shattered, but we're still here. Wren helps a lost soul and meets some familiar ones. Thank you all so much for listening, and special thanks to guests Jess Syratt of Nowhere, On Air and Shannon Strucci of Critical Bits and more. (CWs, spoilers: bullying, derealization, implied dysphoria, brief fire and engine sounds, alcohol, smoking)     *audience shuffling and chatting, dies down* LOST FISHERMAN: “Good evening, dear audience. Tonight we present to you the final act in a series of strange events. The detective this evening will be played by Wren once more, with the receiving clerk reprising the role of the vanished. I will be your chorus. When you see me again, it will all be over. When I return, you will not be ready, but it must end as all things do. Until then, please enjoy the show. “A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me” WREN: The vault wasn’t so much an actual vault, but–as you’ve no doubt surmised–a cave. Like the cave I had encountered before, where Lucy served me breakfast. Where I cried over eggs and toast. Maybe just a different part of the same cave, even. All around me, stacked and scattered throughout the yawning caverns was dead mail: letters, packages, objects covered in grime and dust. The light from my phone only revealed a harsh circle in front of me, leaving much of the vault in total darkness. I felt things stirring in that darkness whenever I turned away. They gathered behind me, at my sides, spiraled gaseous tendrils around my ears. But they dissipated any time I faced them. I flipped through folders and sifted through cabinets and baskets full of decomposing paper. I found many strange stories among the mundane cruft. Some stories I had heard before, some I had not. These pieces had little in common: from different parts of the country, different times, different people. Many followed a similar thread, though. Something under the office’s purview, my purview, appeared in each: a moth here, an alien worm there. Just little hints of the ineffable, the sublime radioactive backdrop that most people tune out. This damp hall was where my furry friend would have ended up, had I not saved them from that fate. I panned the pulp silt for gold, trying to find any clue I could sink my teeth into. I went further and farther back, in time and in space. The older files were kept ever deeper in the cave. I was in the middle of reading a peculiar letter regarding an ill-tempered neighbor when my boot struck a vein. Masonry. Not the deep brown rock surrounding me, but a gray slab shaped by human hands. Around the base of the stone was a shallow puddle. I looked up and there I saw an angel. An angel in gray, its features blurred and worn by time, its form smudged with black. Had the angel been there the whole time, or had it just appeared a moment ago? I leaned closer and inspected its surface. All across this sculpture–from the top of its head to the base–were dark fingerprints. I gently slid the letter I was carrying through one of the tacky prints. The black substance followed, sticking to the paper. Simply looking was going to get me nowhere. What use is a detective that only uses one sense, anyway? I held the tacky substance close to my nose and inhaled. Fire, smoke, machinery. This thing was covered in scorched oil. The angel’s hands were clasped to its chest, and I could tell there was something within. I recalled a story I had heard about a sculpture of similar kind. About a disappearance and a hanging thread. I had to know what was held in its hands. As if already planting its roots in my mind, the angel’s stone fingers unfolded, and there it proffered an egg, no bigger than a chicken’s. I dared not touch the angel, this seraph bathed in the blood of the ancient earth. I took a step back and shuddered. At this rejection, many fish fell around the angel, all dead and frozen, slapping hard against the cave floor. Then, from the deepest recesses of my consciousness, there came a sound: steel wire hanging high above a field of corn. The lines shivered in the breeze and sang like clockwork sparrows. Metallic spring sprung forth in a curl of light and noise. An electrical pylon, its arms spread wide, so wide it held the whole state to its chest. Transmissions from everywhere and nowhere collected in the still air inside its ribs. It blew a whispered kiss through the heavy bent stalks, through iced cities and rolling foothills. It blew a kiss as loud as the trumpets of revelation, and spoke in a hundred tongues of electric rapture: “The next time you see me, you will be dead. And when I come, you will not be ready…” All of my training, all of my will and wit was for naught in the face of it. And in my mind were two diverging paths, two images in a cracked mirror. One was the face of god, of satan, of bosses and kings, of whips and chains, of a thousand bodies clawing and tearing their way to the top of a pyramid of their own kind. I saw the end of history, a prison of gold bars. I saw an ant on fire under a magnifying glass, carrying this flame back to its colony. In the other I saw a face I thought I had seen before, strong hands held and strong hearts holding fast against the unceasing tide. But this second image was hazy, uncertain. No way to tell what was to come, but at least something was to come. I was not prepared to face this pyramid of corpses on my own. I had yet to contend with a force of this magnitude before, and have yet to still again. So I ran. I ran blindly, avoiding every rocky spire and pitfall as if possessed. I ran until my lungs burned cold and my throat was a sandpaper bellow. I may have run for all time, the ant ever fleeing the flame, were it not for a flickering glow oozing from a bend in the path ahead. I slowed my jog and warily closer to the light. Beyond the turn I came to its source: a small television set, hissing with static, resting atop a vcr. Nearby were stacks of tapes. I heard no chase being given behind me, so I closed my eyes hard and just let myself breathe. Once my chest ceased its convulsions, I picked up one of the tapes at my side. There were no official markings or symbols: not mass produced media, these were home movies. And along the spine of each was a different date, but the same name: Lucy. *** Sound of vcr Some collage of sounds here *** The video I saw on the screen was odd, clearly taken on a camcorder, but its point of view didn’t make any sense, and seemed to shift scenes at will. There were birthdays, static, soccer games, color bars, a lakeshore, hissing, a hundred domestic scenes. Then the video slowed and focused on a single point: a specific space and precise time. And here there was a lone child, 10, maybe 12. She sat alone in her room, the low sun filtering golden through the falling leaves outside. A breeze snuck in through the cracked window and stirred the cotton balls on her bed. She held one hand out in front of her, a tiny brush in her other. Once the dark blue paint had been applied to her nails, she rested her hand on the sill to dry. Static She was in the woods, laughing and kicking at sticks and stones. She was alone, but content. She climbed a wide oak, chipping a bit of her fresh polish on the rugged bark. From the low branch she stood and surveyed her quiet kingdom. Not far from her perch, she saw the cave. She had heard stories about it from others at school, rumors of danger in this cave. She heard that people had gotten lost there, or lost parts of themselves. That there was something within that would eat you alive. She heard these rumors, but didn’t fully believe them. Usually she stayed clear anyway. Just in case. This day, however, she was old enough to know better but still young enough to feel invincible. So she went in. *** This child snuck into the shale chasm and strained to see in the dark. She took a few steps forward and stopped, startled by the echoing of her own footsteps. She could hear her breathing on the air growing shorter, heavier as the cave whispered it back to her. This wasn’t enough to deter our brave little explorer, however. She gripped the strap of her backpack tight to her shoulder and trudged inward, farther away from the circle of daylight that dared stick show its face in the cave. Before long, she heard different sounds ahead. Anonymous low voices, clinking and hissing. She thought about turning back, but wasn’t sure which way back was. The voices and clanking grew louder, and a flicker of light drew her attention. She saw fire spark to life. Glowing embers floated in the dark like tiny red eyes. These eyes, these sounds, she thought, must belong to a great beast with many heads and many eyes, glass knives for fingers, blowing fire in the deep. She stepped on a loose rock during her ingress, the movement of which clicked and clacked down the stone corridor. She froze, and a great circle of light struck her. The beast had her in its horrible sight. She strained to see through the awful beam. She held her hand over her eyes and tried to speak, to apologize to the great creature, to say she was sorry for disturbing its home. But peals of laughter interrupted her. More beams of light flickered in front of her, and she saw that the many heads of this beast were actually attached to tall, lanky bodies–human bodies–leaning awkwardly against the shale in baggy shirts and shorts. The lights weren’t the dread traces of a monstrous eye, but simple flashlights. And the floating embers weren’t red eyes, but lit cigarettes, the kind her uncle smelled like. There were four of them in all: teens who snuck into the cave for a little underage drinking. Though teenagers could be just as fearsome as some beasts, she had learned. She lowered her hands as the laughing died down. One teen boy pointed his ashy smoke at her hands, snor

    37 min
4.9
out of 5
57 Ratings

About

A series of weird horror podcasts set in the midwest. The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio is a horror-comedy fiction podcast set within one of the last remaining Dead Letter Offices in the country. Join Conway, Wren, and the rest as they archive strange, spooky, surreal pieces of lost mail. A solo project by a nonbinary creator inspired by Kentucky Route Zero, Twin Peaks, Edgar Allen Poe, and more. Each episode features 2 short stories connected in some way, either narratively or thematically. What begins as an anthology evolves into...something else. Content warnings are posted in the show notes, along with transcripts. Written, performed, and scored by Rat Grimes (they/he) Art by Nerdvolkurisu

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