Episode 187 - Campfire Tales #9: Only The Dead

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of The Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. I am Abby Brinker sitting here with Alex Bowman. We are back with two more spooky stories to share with you today. Speaking of spooky stories,

I was thinking this morning how Alex you are an active participant in horror book club. Oh, yes, of course I am. And we're overdue for to have a book in a meeting.

I think we should pick something. Oh yes, I know. I feel like the last one we read was last summer. It's been a while.

Oh, the last one we read was, what's the name of that one? The Victorian Psycho. Oh yeah.

That was the last one. Well, I didn't read that one. Oh, well. I need a read out.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I was thinking about because what my train of thought was that,

is that one of the stories today reminded me a little bit of that book that we read. There's two books we read. One was September House.

Yes. Not that one. The other book that sort of takes place in a house. Yep.

And it's a family and a haunting. With mommy. With mommy and other mommy. Again, other mommy.

Yes, okay, that's a great question. But I... Incidents around the house. Incidents around the house, yes.

Oh, interesting way. I just went to look this up. The way I searched for was other mommy book. Yeah.

Other mommy is a film that's based on the novel Incidents around the house that came out in 2024. Oh my gosh. Wait.

I hadn't heard anything about that. Okay, it says it's upcoming. So I guess maybe it was shot in 2024. where it was directed by Rob Savage.

Interesting, okay, so we'll have to. But the book itself was written by Josh Malerman, and I thought it was good. I thought it was spooky.

Oh, definitely. I know even the concept of other mommy is certainly spooky and freaks me out to this day. Yeah, and having like, spirits mimic, you know?

Beans. And especially when there's like little kids and they can be easily tricked into, maybe not tricked, but like, they're more vulnerable

to that kind of stuff. Yeah, and I thought sort of the metaphor of what it stood for and it ended up being pretty strong, which, you know, sometimes that's where things fall flat.

Is especially in these horror books, they try to make the idea bigger and they don't necessarily end successfully. And I thought that this one did. Yeah, I agree. Okay.

One of my favorite pastimes is to pit things against each other. The September House? For you personally, right? For you, not to say one is better or worse, but September House or Incidents

around the house, which one did you like better? Oh, Incidents around the house. Same. I think I think pretty solidly.

Yeah. But both were, you know, haunted house stories that were similar. Yeah, and I liked I liked September House, but I actually felt that that one, I liked the sort of tone of it in the beginning of it a lot more than the ending, and I sort

of like got into incidents around the house and felt like it ended stronger. Yeah, it also felt scarier to me the whole time. Oh, it definitely was scarier, I think. I was like a little bit nervous.

Yeah. And maybe on purpose, I don't think the September house intended to be as scarier as incidents around the house was intending to be. I think that's right. Yeah. Well, on that note, we have a story to kick off today's episode that Again, reminds me of incidents around the house.

We let him, red, my risk of the ship, red, my house. Thought for feeling that we feel at all. We think still of escape and end that could be a new beginning. Rest at last. They call us fossils.

We have no food, no warmth in the halls they build to hold us. Reduced to minerals, we have only each other. Deadline marble halls, plexiglass stands declaring the names that they gave us when they cut us from the land.

Exposing our bones to the world, we are cold, so cold, under LED lights and controlled air systems. This is where the dead pretend to walk, wired into approximations of heritage, mocking the The lifeways we lost, plastered, displaces our absent parts, AI reassembles our faces.

Some of us lie as we fell, pinned to walls like art we can't afford to buy. We are outsiders in this realm. Nights never truly dark. Days never truly day.

A cycle of artificial light and gawking faces shambling past. Peel departs, spread through departments and eons. Our ghosts gather to mourn the names we used to have. When the doors close and they leave, we hug our fragments close.

Dreaming of a chance, a chance to go back, a chance to escape these walls, these displays, these stubborn cards speculating on what we once were. Our dreams are green and lush. Our dreams span ages, collected like bones.

We remember millennia when we gather in the not dark. keeping us at precisely the right temperature. In these hours we share our true shapes. We recall our true names. We remember the myths, the homes, the world that existed before they came before we left. Before they found us and we were exposed to a realm dug into the skin of the

place we remember. Please, we whisper to the fabricated night. Please take us away from this place. This place where only the dead can live. Our bones are trapped, but our ghosts break the seal. Our memories set us free.

Until light flickers back, driving our remnants into cases and cards and displays none may touch, unglubbed. They wander in, flesh still growing from their bones. Gravel has yet to displace their blood.

Silt has yet to settle over their lungs. They are their nests and suffocate their unborn. We wait. Through stairs, murmurs and languages too new for us to learn.

What will come of us? We will never walk back through time. They have secured us too well to their walls. So we stay.

We stay until the walls collapse, until their world folds as ours did. Fire covering the ground and smoke clouding the sky. And they find themselves sinking into oblivion. We sink with them.

Wires will rust and break. Plaster will crumble at last. Stone will erode and our bones will rest again. That story was beautifully written by Mariska Pachev.

Mariska is a queer author based in Massachusetts.