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Speaker 1: Twelve Ghosts is a production of I Heeart three D audio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Banky Headphones Recommended. Listener discretion advised. I learnt upon a coppice gate when frost was specter gray and the winter's dragged may desolate the weakening eye of day. The tangle bind stems scored the sky like strings of broken lyres, and all mankind that haunted. NI had sought the household fires. Mm hmm. But the night is long and a bill, and there is more than enough time. The truth will out. But no matter at the moment, there will be time. There are many hours yet in this long night. How is the wine? It's good. I thought by my second cup i'd feel groggy, But I think I'm more clear headed than I've been in years. It's a special vintage. I quite like it. H good, right on time. Cheer, my lad, have we met? Absolutely not? Come in m ah. Of course you chose to stand beneath the mizzletoe, a lovely little plant. It is the tradition of kissing beneath it. Hearkens all the way back to Saturnalia and has been carried on ever since. But my lad, mistletoe is a parasite and quite poisonous. What does that say about love? Probably nothing? Sit John, meet Annabelle. Hello, hello, old friends. Already is this cup for me? Yes? Lad, drink it. Something tells me you haven't had a drink in quite some time. It's been some time. We're telling stories here jar to pass the time, to unburden ourselves. Oh, perhaps you carry a burden? Draw? Perhaps tell us that everything right from the start. The family estate sprawled across the northern end of the harbor, grand and Austeer. If you looked closely from the shore, you would see a small pinprick of bright red on a third story balcony, a figure in a billowing robe, standing and clutching her letter. The envelope proclaimed my name and her precise penmanship. It began with no salutation, Jaire Beaumont, she wrote, I will be plain. I am not fulfilled by you, nor have I ever been. I have made my wishes known, despite what your family and my father have decided for me. Your touch leaves me cold. I care not if my children become senators. I don't care for children at all. Did you know this even? Did you know of the scar on my hip I've had since I was just a girl. Did you in fact know anything of me? It does not matter. I hope you find happiness, for you are deeply, deeply unhappy. I will find my own happiness elsewhere I am leaving. You will not find me, not yours nor anyone's. Amara shock gave way to hurt, which, in my heart leaves the door open to a bitter anger. I have found anger to be a fantastic barrier against the snares of introspection. How dare she? How dare she leave me? A Beaumont? And the way she spoke as though she pitied me, pitied me. I refused to leave the house. Afterward. It felt safer. I didn't have to meet society's eyes as a shunned bachelor. I didn't have to face whatever Amara may have said to her parents, to her ridiculous little friends. I hated her friends. I didn't care much for her impoverished family either. How could someone with no means, no real prospects reject me? This was unprecedented. She'd come back, and when she did, I'd make sure she knew her place. I spent most of my time in those days in my grandfather's study. I never cared for the man, But within this sprawling estate, the stuffy side room is the one that felt most like home. The large windows opposite the desk allowed only a little son into the room, covered as they were by tangled vines that rose up from the terrace. The rightmost windows sported a splintering crack, not unlike the legs of some erratic spider. I made a note to chastise the ground keeper for their neglect. I sat at his old mahogany desk and idly rummaged through each drawer. Perhaps there was something I could use. I'm sure I could find an unresolved debt of Amara's father, an outstanding loan from the sole bank on the island, for example, Uncle Jensen was on the executive board. After all, there had to be something in there that would take her wretched family down a peg to show her that she's not better than me. No one is. There were tax forms, bank notes, and myriad other items. Underneath a leather binder filled with receipts from god knows where was a small bounds journal with grandfather's name on the inside cover. Curiosity took me, and I peered inside. Most of it bordered on indecipherable, written in his terse shorthand and punctuated with nonsensical abbreviations, no doubt a habit picked up from his time in the military. It went back decades. He wrote of the construction of the house, expenses incurred, and then seemed to whine slowly into madness. Speaking of voices in the hallway of presence, he was drawn to I only needed to find business expenses, perhaps an error, and calculations that I could use to my advantage against a Mars family. This strange diary would give me no answers. The very last word I read before throwing it back in the drawer would come to haunt me off nail. I promptly forgot about it. Over the following week, I degenerated in my misery. I sent the servants away and remained for days behind a locked door upstairs, scrounging crusts and crumbs off plates for meals long discarded. I was becoming more animal than man, my bitterness the only tether left to my humanity. Finally, it was the hunger that drove me out of my rooms and down the stairs. It was then that I encountered him. As I moved down a back hallway toward the kitchen, I caught something in my periphery. The mirror antique, tarnished and filthy. The reflection that had cast back at me was not my own. The sunken man in the mirror had tan skin and the dim eyes of a storm at sunset. His hair was closely cropped, a fashion from a different time. His eyes burned with anger that I recognized inherently in the moment. I was not surprised nor frightened. I was intrigued. I was fascinated. He looked back at me, not with pity nor malice. He looked at me with longing in his stare. I felt suddenly exposed, naked. Without thought. I drew my arms about myself in some strange manner, trying to protect my modesty, And yet I was encompassed by his stare. There was a burning in my chest, like a thunderclap. After months of absolute silence, something about this haggard, starving ghost was stirring something in me, a shock of life, of heat. The mirror shimmered as if in answer, and he moved, his fingertips pressed against the glass and then impossibly pushed through, slowly, softly toward me. His wrists slid out of the mirror, and then his forearm, his right hand came to rest against my right cheek, worn and thin, coated with mangy stubble. Through my beard, I could feel the ice dagger touch of his finger tips. He was cold, so cold, and yet I didn't miss company. I didn't miss the talk of tiny people. I missed touch, connection, the figure and the reflection spoke find. His voice was a low hiss, a slight outburst of air from a rusty pipe. It rattled me to my core. I was drawn further in His hand was just an idea, his outstretched arm a mere suggestion of a thing. I moved toward him, and then, as if by its own accord, his name dropped from my lips, Neil, as if compelled by the devil himself. I pressed my lips against the mirror, and he met me there. As his lips touched mine, I felt my blood chill thickening in my veins, goose bumps rose on my neck, and my face lost what color it had left in it. Che He whispered in that strange guttural voice, and then like a flash, he was gone, and with him the strange fire in my heart. It left a hollow in my chest that I felt suddenly was in desperate need of filling. Find me. He was here, he needed me. From then on I would search the house for a Neil, obsessively, as if it were a sort of madness. He was fickle and eluded me, frequently, appearing mostly when the evenings were dark, or when a storm made its way over the expanse of the gulf. Those nights I would find him in mirrors and the cellar or attic, cold and alone, and I would come to him there full of warmth, full of giving. I was of use again, I was needed magnanimously. I gave of my heat, and each time auth Neil glowed a little more brightly, and still the insistent plea fine. And then one morning it occurred to me he wasn't simply asking for a visit. Somewhere in this house his mortal remains resided find me. He was asking for my help. I immediately felt foolish. Of course, he was asking for help, the unquiet, dead haunt with a purpose. And what's more, I knew exactly how to find him, and so, for the first time in weeks, I made my way to my grandfather's study. This time I read his strange diary with purpose. In it, he wrote of the construction of the house. I rifled through the facts and figures, coming finally to where I'd seen the name first. There off Neil. He'd been a builder on the house, Young and unknown to many of the other workers. He was accused by a fellow of and here I quote heinous crimes. Instead of taking him to the local constabulary, the men sealed him beneath the basement floor. Included in my grandfather's notes was an incredibly helpful sketch of the layout of the house, with x is marked all over and increasingly erratic notes about tile patterns, floor braces, the color of the mud below the house, and over and over off Nil. Over the course of the coming days, I poured over the same notes and began to retrace his steps throughout the house. It was on the third day, rummaging through the old wine cellar, that I felt a sudden, desperate pull toward the far corner, as if excited fingers had reached into my heart and gently tugged there. In the floor a trap door with a trembling breath. I reached down, grabbed the old brass ring, and pulled. I found him there in a simple hole, not big enough to stretch out. He was curled up, not much more than rags and bone, a small shimmer coated with mildew. I climbed down into the hole and reached out a hand to his corpse. I shivered even as I touched him. Upon contact, I became enveloped in a shimmering mist on the ground, my clothes pulled aside, and my breath visible in the air. The corpse seemed more visible in that fog, animating with a creak of dry bones and turning toward me, the face somehow plumping, growing fuller, alive, more vibrant than sunrise. My breath caught in my throat as that strange desire overtook me. How long had it been, I thought, since I was last embraced, since I'd made love, since I last saw the sun. I looked into his eyes and recognized my own, hungry, insatiable. He pulled me down, wrapping me in an icy and race. The air escaped my lungs, and I felt a sharp pang inside my chest, as if shards of crystals were forming in my lungs. I thought to inhale, and off Neil clutched tighter, his finger bones digging deep grooves in my back, his bare teeth dragging across my throat. I could feel the heat and me leaving, leeching out and being replaced with a terrible chill. As off Neil's corpse grew ever more lifelike, taking on flesh that grew ruddy with its quickening, and all the while his eyes seemed to dominate and take and take and take, with no regard of who or what stood opposite him. I knew that looked well, and I was afraid. I felt frozen shackles on each of my wrists as they slammed into the ground. Above my head. Hathnil swelled larger, now bigger than me, now encompassing me, and I felt lost within him. As worn and mount nourished as I had been at the beginning of our passion, I had been larger than Aneil by far. Now he dwarfed me there on the floor, absorbing every last bit of my strength. And then my body no longer responded to my will. It's stilled cold and dead on the floor. Aneil was gone, and I stood tall over my mortal remains, dead on the stone floor. His eyes had shined with love, hadn't they. He'd wanted the same thing I did right, warmth, acceptance. But I'd been fooled. Time was lost to me. Who could tell how it passed? A moment could be a year, a month, mere seconds, and all the while I searched restless in that space behind the mirrors, in that inverted house that was now my domain. The decrepit shambles of the mansion I neglected was magnified and distorted. I saw as autnil once saw a world of tatters, and the hunger for warmth was all consuming. In this manner, decade slipped away, winters and springs all muddied together. And then one particularly frigid evening, the door to the house opened and she arrived. Her hair was wavy and dark, her complaint action of warm deep bronze. Despite the snow flakes that hid in the curls of her hair, she had an inner light. It flicked a trace of a distant memory that I could not place. The beautiful stranger took no care to remove her shoes, or even knock the snow from them, And why would she? Who would she insult? She passed through the halls of the manner, and I felt suddenly that I had my vessel for escape. She was flesh, she was blood and warmth, and I could sense in her. She was low, disheveled and crooked, driven from a warmer place out into the world. She viewed this house as a new start. She needed hope. I could smell it. I had hope. I had hope with the sweet promise of nothing behind it. And I knew that if I guided her gently offered up myself, she may very well give me a trade as off Neil had traded with me. I could keep her here, I could make her stay. I could drain away every bit of human emotion and replace it with the malice and spite that I felt she would take my place. It would be so easy. I could be free. And so as she passed the mirror in the hallway, I made myself known. When she first saw me in the mirror, her eyes gleamed, first with that surprise that a too sudden image had been thrown back at her, and then with the sort of glee. Yes, those, I said, take for me this heart. I reached out toward her, and just as I had all those years ago, she leaned into the mirror. My hand touched her face, so smooth, so warm. I had been so cold for so very long. But there was something more. I could feel her life force, the steady strum of her heart, could feel the sense memory of a mother's embrace, a sprint across the summer field, the first flush of new love, and the horrible, gutting emptiness of its loss. I understood the whole of her, and I wanted it and its entirety. But what had I to offer in return? Live I do not know why I said it, or where the word came from her eyes. Her beautiful brown eyes grew wide, and I quickly withdrew my hand into the mirror. She did not flinch, she did not run. I had decided, and those walls and those reflections I would remain. I would refuse to pass this herd on. Perhaps one day the laughter of a family, rosy cheeked and in love would bless the halls of that forgotten home once more, and perhaps I could find some gladness, some joy in the lives that I dare not siphon off. I watched her sleep that night, peacefully, hopefully. I watched as the morning sun lit her face, bleary eyed and alone. She got her bearings and stepped on unsteady feet into the main foyer and looked around with fresh eyes. She was home and had the whole of her life ahead of her. I would stay beside her, a silent watchman, as she hurtled forward. I would not hurt her. I knew finally, at last, what it meant to love. But they can't be true, I assure you, my dear, No words spoken at this table is false. But John, my lad, how do you feel? I feel warm? Good? Would you like to retire for the evening? Yes? Yes, I think I would like that. M hmm. This key is quite ornate, pure silver, very unusual. It befits your station, I think, hm. Take it. Thank you, it's nothing. Your door is up. The stairs is third on the left. Do rest well, my friend. I believe this is the warmest place I've ever been. It couldn't be true. What's that, dear? He couldn't have I couldn't have what, dear? Are we dead? Well? Yes, Annabelle, I thought that was quite Obvious. Twelve Ghosts starring Malcolm McDowell as the Innkeeper and Gina Rikiki as Annabelle. Episode three, The Mirror written by Steven Williams with additional writing by Nicholas Takowski. Editing by Chris Childs and Stephen Perez, featuring Nicolas Takowski as Jare. Directed by Nicholas Takowski. Original score and sound design by Chris Childs. Executive producers Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alexander Williams and Nicholas Takowski. Supervising producer Josh Staine. 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 Eros. Twelve Ghosts was created by Nicolas Takowski. That is a production of iHeart three D Audio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. 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. H
Speaker 1: Twelve Ghosts is a production of I Heeart three D audio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Banky Headphones Recommended. Listener discretion advised. I learnt upon a coppice gate when frost was specter gray and the winter's dragged may desolate the weakening eye of day. The tangle bind stems scored the sky like strings of broken lyres, and all mankind that haunted. NI had sought the household fires. Mm hmm. But the night is long and a bill, and there is more than enough time. The truth will out. But no matter at the moment, there will be time. There are many hours yet in this long night. How is the wine? It's good. I thought by my second cup i'd feel groggy, But I think I'm more clear headed than I've been in years. It's a special vintage. I quite like it. H good, right on time. Cheer, my lad, have we met? Absolutely not? Come in m ah. Of course you chose to stand beneath the mizzletoe, a lovely little plant. It is the tradition of kissing beneath it. Hearkens all the way back to Saturnalia and has been carried on ever since. But my lad, mistletoe is a parasite and quite poisonous. What does that say about love? Probably nothing? Sit John, meet Annabelle. Hello, hello, old friends. Already is this cup for me? Yes? Lad, drink it. Something tells me you haven't had a drink in quite some time. It's been some time. We're telling stories here jar to pass the time, to unburden ourselves. Oh, perhaps you carry a burden? Draw? Perhaps tell us that everything right from the start. The family estate sprawled across the northern end of the harbor, grand and Austeer. If you looked closely from the shore, you would see a small pinprick of bright red on a third story balcony, a figure in a billowing robe, standing and clutching her letter. The envelope proclaimed my name and her precise penmanship. It began with no salutation, Jaire Beaumont, she wrote, I will be plain. I am not fulfilled by you, nor have I ever been. I have made my wishes known, despite what your family and my father have decided for me. Your touch leaves me cold. I care not if my children become senators. I don't care for children at all. Did you know this even? Did you know of the scar on my hip I've had since I was just a girl. Did you in fact know anything of me? It does not matter. I hope you find happiness, for you are deeply, deeply unhappy. I will find my own happiness elsewhere I am leaving. You will not find me, not yours nor anyone's. Amara shock gave way to hurt, which, in my heart leaves the door open to a bitter anger. I have found anger to be a fantastic barrier against the snares of introspection. How dare she? How dare she leave me? A Beaumont? And the way she spoke as though she pitied me, pitied me. I refused to leave the house. Afterward. It felt safer. I didn't have to meet society's eyes as a shunned bachelor. I didn't have to face whatever Amara may have said to her parents, to her ridiculous little friends. I hated her friends. I didn't care much for her impoverished family either. How could someone with no means, no real prospects reject me? This was unprecedented. She'd come back, and when she did, I'd make sure she knew her place. I spent most of my time in those days in my grandfather's study. I never cared for the man, But within this sprawling estate, the stuffy side room is the one that felt most like home. The large windows opposite the desk allowed only a little son into the room, covered as they were by tangled vines that rose up from the terrace. The rightmost windows sported a splintering crack, not unlike the legs of some erratic spider. I made a note to chastise the ground keeper for their neglect. I sat at his old mahogany desk and idly rummaged through each drawer. Perhaps there was something I could use. I'm sure I could find an unresolved debt of Amara's father, an outstanding loan from the sole bank on the island, for example, Uncle Jensen was on the executive board. After all, there had to be something in there that would take her wretched family down a peg to show her that she's not better than me. No one is. There were tax forms, bank notes, and myriad other items. Underneath a leather binder filled with receipts from god knows where was a small bounds journal with grandfather's name on the inside cover. Curiosity took me, and I peered inside. Most of it bordered on indecipherable, written in his terse shorthand and punctuated with nonsensical abbreviations, no doubt a habit picked up from his time in the military. It went back decades. He wrote of the construction of the house, expenses incurred, and then seemed to whine slowly into madness. Speaking of voices in the hallway of presence, he was drawn to I only needed to find business expenses, perhaps an error, and calculations that I could use to my advantage against a Mars family. This strange diary would give me no answers. The very last word I read before throwing it back in the drawer would come to haunt me off nail. I promptly forgot about it. Over the following week, I degenerated in my misery. I sent the servants away and remained for days behind a locked door upstairs, scrounging crusts and crumbs off plates for meals long discarded. I was becoming more animal than man, my bitterness the only tether left to my humanity. Finally, it was the hunger that drove me out of my rooms and down the stairs. It was then that I encountered him. As I moved down a back hallway toward the kitchen, I caught something in my periphery. The mirror antique, tarnished and filthy. The reflection that had cast back at me was not my own. The sunken man in the mirror had tan skin and the dim eyes of a storm at sunset. His hair was closely cropped, a fashion from a different time. His eyes burned with anger that I recognized inherently in the moment. I was not surprised nor frightened. I was intrigued. I was fascinated. He looked back at me, not with pity nor malice. He looked at me with longing in his stare. I felt suddenly exposed, naked. Without thought. I drew my arms about myself in some strange manner, trying to protect my modesty, And yet I was encompassed by his stare. There was a burning in my chest, like a thunderclap. After months of absolute silence, something about this haggard, starving ghost was stirring something in me, a shock of life, of heat. The mirror shimmered as if in answer, and he moved, his fingertips pressed against the glass and then impossibly pushed through, slowly, softly toward me. His wrists slid out of the mirror, and then his forearm, his right hand came to rest against my right cheek, worn and thin, coated with mangy stubble. Through my beard, I could feel the ice dagger touch of his finger tips. He was cold, so cold, and yet I didn't miss company. I didn't miss the talk of tiny people. I missed touch, connection, the figure and the reflection spoke find. His voice was a low hiss, a slight outburst of air from a rusty pipe. It rattled me to my core. I was drawn further in His hand was just an idea, his outstretched arm a mere suggestion of a thing. I moved toward him, and then, as if by its own accord, his name dropped from my lips, Neil, as if compelled by the devil himself. I pressed my lips against the mirror, and he met me there. As his lips touched mine, I felt my blood chill thickening in my veins, goose bumps rose on my neck, and my face lost what color it had left in it. Che He whispered in that strange guttural voice, and then like a flash, he was gone, and with him the strange fire in my heart. It left a hollow in my chest that I felt suddenly was in desperate need of filling. Find me. He was here, he needed me. From then on I would search the house for a Neil, obsessively, as if it were a sort of madness. He was fickle and eluded me, frequently, appearing mostly when the evenings were dark, or when a storm made its way over the expanse of the gulf. Those nights I would find him in mirrors and the cellar or attic, cold and alone, and I would come to him there full of warmth, full of giving. I was of use again, I was needed magnanimously. I gave of my heat, and each time auth Neil glowed a little more brightly, and still the insistent plea fine. And then one morning it occurred to me he wasn't simply asking for a visit. Somewhere in this house his mortal remains resided find me. He was asking for my help. I immediately felt foolish. Of course, he was asking for help, the unquiet, dead haunt with a purpose. And what's more, I knew exactly how to find him, and so, for the first time in weeks, I made my way to my grandfather's study. This time I read his strange diary with purpose. In it, he wrote of the construction of the house. I rifled through the facts and figures, coming finally to where I'd seen the name first. There off Neil. He'd been a builder on the house, Young and unknown to many of the other workers. He was accused by a fellow of and here I quote heinous crimes. Instead of taking him to the local constabulary, the men sealed him beneath the basement floor. Included in my grandfather's notes was an incredibly helpful sketch of the layout of the house, with x is marked all over and increasingly erratic notes about tile patterns, floor braces, the color of the mud below the house, and over and over off Nil. Over the course of the coming days, I poured over the same notes and began to retrace his steps throughout the house. It was on the third day, rummaging through the old wine cellar, that I felt a sudden, desperate pull toward the far corner, as if excited fingers had reached into my heart and gently tugged there. In the floor a trap door with a trembling breath. I reached down, grabbed the old brass ring, and pulled. I found him there in a simple hole, not big enough to stretch out. He was curled up, not much more than rags and bone, a small shimmer coated with mildew. I climbed down into the hole and reached out a hand to his corpse. I shivered even as I touched him. Upon contact, I became enveloped in a shimmering mist on the ground, my clothes pulled aside, and my breath visible in the air. The corpse seemed more visible in that fog, animating with a creak of dry bones and turning toward me, the face somehow plumping, growing fuller, alive, more vibrant than sunrise. My breath caught in my throat as that strange desire overtook me. How long had it been, I thought, since I was last embraced, since I'd made love, since I last saw the sun. I looked into his eyes and recognized my own, hungry, insatiable. He pulled me down, wrapping me in an icy and race. The air escaped my lungs, and I felt a sharp pang inside my chest, as if shards of crystals were forming in my lungs. I thought to inhale, and off Neil clutched tighter, his finger bones digging deep grooves in my back, his bare teeth dragging across my throat. I could feel the heat and me leaving, leeching out and being replaced with a terrible chill. As off Neil's corpse grew ever more lifelike, taking on flesh that grew ruddy with its quickening, and all the while his eyes seemed to dominate and take and take and take, with no regard of who or what stood opposite him. I knew that looked well, and I was afraid. I felt frozen shackles on each of my wrists as they slammed into the ground. Above my head. Hathnil swelled larger, now bigger than me, now encompassing me, and I felt lost within him. As worn and mount nourished as I had been at the beginning of our passion, I had been larger than Aneil by far. Now he dwarfed me there on the floor, absorbing every last bit of my strength. And then my body no longer responded to my will. It's stilled cold and dead on the floor. Aneil was gone, and I stood tall over my mortal remains, dead on the stone floor. His eyes had shined with love, hadn't they. He'd wanted the same thing I did right, warmth, acceptance. But I'd been fooled. Time was lost to me. Who could tell how it passed? A moment could be a year, a month, mere seconds, and all the while I searched restless in that space behind the mirrors, in that inverted house that was now my domain. The decrepit shambles of the mansion I neglected was magnified and distorted. I saw as autnil once saw a world of tatters, and the hunger for warmth was all consuming. In this manner, decade slipped away, winters and springs all muddied together. And then one particularly frigid evening, the door to the house opened and she arrived. Her hair was wavy and dark, her complaint action of warm deep bronze. Despite the snow flakes that hid in the curls of her hair, she had an inner light. It flicked a trace of a distant memory that I could not place. The beautiful stranger took no care to remove her shoes, or even knock the snow from them, And why would she? Who would she insult? She passed through the halls of the manner, and I felt suddenly that I had my vessel for escape. She was flesh, she was blood and warmth, and I could sense in her. She was low, disheveled and crooked, driven from a warmer place out into the world. She viewed this house as a new start. She needed hope. I could smell it. I had hope. I had hope with the sweet promise of nothing behind it. And I knew that if I guided her gently offered up myself, she may very well give me a trade as off Neil had traded with me. I could keep her here, I could make her stay. I could drain away every bit of human emotion and replace it with the malice and spite that I felt she would take my place. It would be so easy. I could be free. And so as she passed the mirror in the hallway, I made myself known. When she first saw me in the mirror, her eyes gleamed, first with that surprise that a too sudden image had been thrown back at her, and then with the sort of glee. Yes, those, I said, take for me this heart. I reached out toward her, and just as I had all those years ago, she leaned into the mirror. My hand touched her face, so smooth, so warm. I had been so cold for so very long. But there was something more. I could feel her life force, the steady strum of her heart, could feel the sense memory of a mother's embrace, a sprint across the summer field, the first flush of new love, and the horrible, gutting emptiness of its loss. I understood the whole of her, and I wanted it and its entirety. But what had I to offer in return? Live I do not know why I said it, or where the word came from her eyes. Her beautiful brown eyes grew wide, and I quickly withdrew my hand into the mirror. She did not flinch, she did not run. I had decided, and those walls and those reflections I would remain. I would refuse to pass this herd on. Perhaps one day the laughter of a family, rosy cheeked and in love would bless the halls of that forgotten home once more, and perhaps I could find some gladness, some joy in the lives that I dare not siphon off. I watched her sleep that night, peacefully, hopefully. I watched as the morning sun lit her face, bleary eyed and alone. She got her bearings and stepped on unsteady feet into the main foyer and looked around with fresh eyes. She was home and had the whole of her life ahead of her. I would stay beside her, a silent watchman, as she hurtled forward. I would not hurt her. I knew finally, at last, what it meant to love. But they can't be true, I assure you, my dear, No words spoken at this table is false. But John, my lad, how do you feel? I feel warm? Good? Would you like to retire for the evening? Yes? Yes, I think I would like that. M hmm. This key is quite ornate, pure silver, very unusual. It befits your station, I think, hm. Take it. Thank you, it's nothing. Your door is up. The stairs is third on the left. Do rest well, my friend. I believe this is the warmest place I've ever been. It couldn't be true. What's that, dear? He couldn't have I couldn't have what, dear? Are we dead? Well? Yes, Annabelle, I thought that was quite Obvious. Twelve Ghosts starring Malcolm McDowell as the Innkeeper and Gina Rikiki as Annabelle. Episode three, The Mirror written by Steven Williams with additional writing by Nicholas Takowski. Editing by Chris Childs and Stephen Perez, featuring Nicolas Takowski as Jare. Directed by Nicholas Takowski. Original score and sound design by Chris Childs. Executive producers Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alexander Williams and Nicholas Takowski. Supervising producer Josh Staine. 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 Eros. Twelve Ghosts was created by Nicolas Takowski. That is a production of iHeart three D Audio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. 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. H
