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Leanne: Wasting Company Time presents Tell No Tales, Episode One: Not For Long

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[SFX: Recording Begins]

Leo:

Testing, I guess? Wow. That sounds professional. Not even sure why I’m whispering. I know the office is empty. I made sure of it. Oh, here’s an idea. What if I…

[SFX: Typing, then mouse click. Classical music begins playing]

Amazing. This way? Not even the empty office can hear me talk to myself. Okay. Let’s try this again.Audio diary of Leo Quinn, assistant to Frank Williamson, director of Better Place. Hopefully soon to be ex-assistant. I’m sure you’ve heard of us. Better Place Ghost Removal, moving them onto a better place so that your home can be a better place too. Ugh. You can’t go anywhere without hearing or seeing an ad. They’re on the tube, they’re at the start of every other podcast I listen to. I don’t think there’s been a single day in the last seven years of me working here that I haven’t had that god awful jingle stuck in my head. Catchy jingles are, I suppose, how you become the world leader in ghost removal. Not for long though. Not if my plan works. Because the thing is, I mean, we hunt them, right? The ghosts. We remove them from their homes, from our homes, because they’re inconvenient. Because we don’t like the icy feeling of being watched, or I don’t know, sometimes they throw knives or whatever, but isn’t it their home too? Shouldn’t we at least be asking consent or something? I know they’re dead, but, well, they’re still human, so don’t they still have human rights?So to help figure it out, I’ve been working on something. Something really, really cool. Riley keeps telling me that I have a tendency to go off on one a bit when I talk about one of my projects. But. Hey, if these notes are just for my own reference, then screw it. Let’s go off on one. At a basic level. It’s kind of like a digital audio recorder with a built-in EMF detector. If all goes well, it should be able to pick up the voices of ghosts. I know it all sounds a bit “who you gonna call?” But I seriously think I’m getting somewhere. It’s super high quality, see? Like unbelievably sensitive, to the point where on its own, the mic would be picking up ridiculous amounts of background noise and feedback. But if I gather enough EMF data, I should be able to train it to tune directly into the ghost’s voice, and nothing else. But that’s proving to be something of an issue. To train the recorder to recognize a ghost’s voice. I need to gather a ton of data on how the EMF reacts when ghosts are actually speaking, except… pretty much everything a ghost does creates readings on an EMF meter. So it’s hard to tell which EMF spikes correlate to verbalizations without being able to hear them speak, you know? I assume. I’ve never actually been out in the field. That’s the dispatcher’s job. I’m just an admin assistant, but I’m not going to let that stop me. I have my own EMF meter, and I have a best friend who works in the research department, so I can go find some ghosts on my own.I mean, I have to. This feels too important not to. When I get this recorder working, I’ll be able to gather firsthand statements of our… victims. Woah, victims, I don’t think I’ve ever called them that out loud before, but that’s kind of what they are, isn’t it? Because I mean, most of the time they’re not even hurting anyone.If I can gather statements from the spirits directly, then I can prove that. I can use it to stop what we do. I mean, it’s not like they can help it. They didn’t ask to stay behind, and they certainly didn’t ask for us to send them away. I’m not even certain that we do send them away. Not in the way that we advertise at least. I don’t know where we send them, actually, the dispatchers capture the spirits, but then they get sent to the warehouse. It’s heavily implied that they get destroyed, but nobody’s quite sure how. Trade secrets, I suppose. Makes it easier to buy out the competition. All we need to know is that the satisfied customer is willing to pay a lot to have us de-haunt their house. Which, you know, when profit is your main motivator, your intentions can’t possibly be anything but noble, right? So all the more reason to try and gather statements. Get some concrete evidence that Better Place is doing something wrong. And since I can’t start doing that until the recorder is up and running, I have a plan. I may have been pilfering old case files from time to time trying to find some that might be helpful for gathering EMF data.I’ve been waiting weeks for an empty office. And today Frank’s out all day conducting interviews for new dispatchers. So…

[SFX: Drawer opens, paper is lifted out]

case BL#1923, category two, case status: unresolved, reported by Jennifer Lyons via email. Initial report: “to whom it may concern. There’s a ghost living in my house. I think she hates me. I’m pretty certain. She’s a she, anyway, I’ve done some research. A woman died in this house. It doesn’t surprise me really. It’s an old two bedroom in Walthamstow, really old building I think. Statistically, the odds of someone having died here are high I’m sure. But this woman’s death was… let’s just say fairly violent and leave it at that. The article I found said her name was Caitlyn Brooks and she was murdered by her own aunt 12 years ago. I asked the landlord and he said all the previous tenants since then have left as soon as their one year minimum contract was up. So he lowered the rent. I’d like to stay. It’s really the only way I can afford to keep living in London, and even then, money’s tight, but the longer I stay, the more insistent she becomes. It started off small, slammed doors and flickering lights I could blame on drafts and faulty fuses. But there’s been more since. I found a bloodstain on the rug a few months ago, it didn’t come out. It didn’t even fade in the wash, not even a little bit. If anything, it grew. So I bought a new rug. The bloodstain has appeared on that one too. Last week I came home from work and my living room was just covered in maggots. They were everywhere. I had to stay with a friend while the place got fumigated and the landlord won’t pay for it because he thinks it’s down to my own negligence. I heard your ad on the radio and I need your help.”She ends by giving us her address. Customer services sent her a reply with a quote for potential removal of the ghost, and she didn’t get back to us for another month. In that time, the research department had already started digging into the murder of Caitlyn Brooks. It wasn’t the most violent attack I’ve heard of, but it was… it was pretty grim. Yeah. Caitlin had moved in with her elderly aunt to look after her, but the old woman had just snapped, I guess, stabbed her four times in the chest after Caitlyn had fallen asleep in the armchair in the living room. Then just walked out. Caitlin was left to rot and wasn’t found until her aunt had been spotted several weeks later. The research team is always pretty thorough. There are photos here from the crime scene but… Oh God. Okay. Nope. Choosing not to look at those for the time being.Jennifer, though, got back to us to say she couldn’t afford the quoted cost of removal and that was that. The case was dropped, categorized as unresolved, and no dispatchers were ever sent out. A little digging of my own shows that the house has been unoccupied since Jennifer moved out three years ago. So I’m going to break in. I mean, if the one thing standing between me and bringing down this company is a lack of data, then not going out and collecting that data would make me a coward. And I’m not a coward. Am I?No, no, no, I’m not. I’m going to go there tonight after work. Wish me luck!

[SFX: Recording Ends]

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[Ambience: Sounds of traffic]

Leo:

(Breathing heavily) I am not a coward. I am not. A coward… Christ, that was scary though. I’m okay. I’m fine. I’m out. Okay. Nope. Scientific notes. Just laying out the events. I broke into the house in Walthamstow. It was surprisingly easy. Just jimmied open a ground floor window from the back. If anybody saw me, nobody did anything about it. London am I right? Okay. So I got into the ground floor and, well, it was already pretty creepy.

[Ambience: traffic sounds fade out, spooky music fades in]

The rustling of what was probably a rat scurrying away at my entrance, the dust hanging in long thick strands from the cobwebs, and that something in the air. Beyond the musty stillness and the smell of lingering damp, that something that so many of our customers described feeling as the first sign of a presence, a kind of static feeling whispering over your skin, like fingertips brushing just a hair’s breadth from touching you.The room was almost empty of furniture, except for that bloodstained rug. And maybe it was the darkness that seemed to swell as my eyes adjusted, but it, it seemed to grow to pool out as I watched it. “Caitlyn?” I called out. “Caitlyn Brooks?” The only answer was a wriggling heap of maggots that seem to pour from the dark stain in the rug.I fumbled with the EMF detector, scrambling out the way of the swarming mass of maggots as it buzzed alive with lights. “Caitlyn, I’m not here to disturb you,” I tried to say with confidence, but in the name of scientific honesty, it was just a bit… um, wobbly. “I’ll leave you soon, but I’m here to listen. Say your piece.” The EMF meter fell still for a moment, and then it lit up in a way I’ve never seen before. Rising and falling in this rhythmic pulsing way. The cadence of her speech, as it grew and built to a shout, the lights holding strong and steady. I wish I could have heard what she was saying. I stood that way, just listening, for a long time until a different sound shook me out with my reverie. An awful sound, a low wet crawling whisper. She was still speaking. I think, as I looked over back towards the rug where the maggots had spilled out. The EMF meter, still shone with her words as I watched the pool of maggots writhe and climb over each other and the buzzing of it continued even as I realized, in horror, that the maggots were forming a shape. A clear and distinct shape of a person. But wrong, so wrong, shifting and pulsating with the erratic movements of the individual insects. And I tried not to be afraid. I did. I really tried. This might be a deeply unpleasant way of showing it, but it was just a spirit of a voiceless woman trying to be heard, trying to be seen. I just wish I hadn’t had to see the way the maggots parted as one in what I could only guess was the approximation of a mouth, or, a kind of gaping hole where the mouth should have been on this caricature of a person.And when it opened, I only had a second to register the change in the EMF meter. The lights swelled and tapered, like they’d been doing all along, until all of a sudden the whole thing lit up strong and bright and solid. And I heard, as if from inside my very skull, a screeching. The maggots was screaming. The person, that shape of a person that they formed, they were screaming.I couldn’t hear Caitlyn. Nobody heard her screams, not when she died and not any day since. So she showed me her pain through her manifestations. She showed me what her screaming would have sounded like if I could hear her. I hunched over, I nearly dropped the EMF meter as I clutched at my head. Every part of me wanted to run. Every instinct flooded me with adrenaline and roared at me to leave. Whatever she’d been saying, she was done. She was finished talking, but I was worried she might never be finished screaming. But as I stumbled back towards the open window, pushing past the figure, feeling the maggots spill over my shoes and my hands and my hair, feeling the bile rise in my throat, at their touch, I felt, I felt guilty. A sense of… I mean, I was the first person to listen to her in years, the first person to call her by name, to acknowledge her. and here I was running as soon as things got scary. I came to a stop with one foot already on the ledge of the open window, frozen on my way out, “Caitlyn!” I cried out eyes, clamped shut against the pain of the screeching in my head. “Caitlyn, you’re hurting me, please stop.”And… and she did. The screaming stopped, an echoing ringing in my head filling the sudden quiet as the figure, still reforming from when I’d pushed past it, closed the gap where his mouth had been. And I swear, I saw its head tilt, just slightly, in curiosity. “I hear you. I do,” I told her. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry you’ve been stuck here like this. I want to help. And you telling me your story has helped me get it started, okay? It won’t be like this forever. Let me go, let me leave. And I will come back. I will come back and I’ll record your story for others to hear. And I swear someday I’ll find a way to help spirits like you. Help you move on or, or help you to carry on with something as close to a life as possible, whichever you choose, but it will be your choice, okay?” And I watched, holding my breath, as the figure gave one short nod. Then collapsed, the maggots dissolving back into the rug.I’d like to say, I left calmly then, but I didn’t, I… didn’t. I fell back out of the window and ran, just ran into the darkness until the sound of my blood pounding in my ears drowned out the ringing still echoing around in my head.

[Ambience: Spooky music fades out, traffic sounds fade in]

So that’s how I’m here at a Walthamstow bus stop. Waiting for the night bus, talking into my phone. But it’s okay. It’s okay. I’m okay. And I definitely got something. The readings from the EMF meter are saved locally, and if I can get enough readings like this stored into a database, it’ll help me build the recorder. I’ve got more to work with, now. I will get this thing built. And when I do, I will take this company- Ugh. Ugh, is that…? Oh my god a maggot, fu-

[SFX: Mic fumbling, recording ends]

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Leanne:

Episode One of Tell No Tales, Not For Long, was written and performed by Leanne Egan.If you enjoyed this episode, the best way to support the show is to spread the word. Leaving us a rating and review in your listening app of choice is a huge help, or you can follow us on Twitter or Tumblr @tellnotalespodLinks and information about transcripts can be found in the show notes.Tell No Tales is distributed by Wasting Company Time Productions, under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share-alike 4.0 international license. Thank you for listening, and remember: the dead don’t bite.

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