S15E22 - "Erasure" - Horror Hill

Erik Peabody (0:02)

Chilling Tales for Dark Nights.

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Good evening, listeners, and welcome back to Horror Hill. I'm the face smiling at you through the funeral mourners, Erik Peabody. Tonight concludes our five-week study of the short fiction of Micah Edwards. And I must say, friends, I've had a great time covering his stories. I've actually narrated a previous collection of Micah's work, A Talent for Destruction, and it's been a real treat to get to spend so much time with him again. I hope that you feel the same. And, as long promised, I've got an announcement to make. Once we finish tonight's episode, we will have covered every tale in his collection, The Minutes of the Intermittent Meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, or rather, almost every tale. These five stories, The Judge, The Pitiful Orphan, The Bone Merchant, The Black Fog, and Tonight's Tale, The Whispering Man, are all connected by a secret sixth story, featuring a terribly normal man named Arthur, and his unexpected and unwanted conscription into said society. But rest assured, dear listeners, you won't be left out of all the fun. The audio version of this entire collection is going to be released shortly, with full narration by yours truly. Keep your eyes open for the minutes of the intermittent meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, available soon, and I'll be sure to mention it on the show here when it finally goes live. But for now, we still have the Whispering Man to contend with.

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And now, from author Micah Edwards, I give you, The Whispering Man.

Conrad's father only had one eye. He wore a leather eye patch to cover the empty left socket. And as a young boy, Conrad would whisper to his friends that his father had been a pirate before settling down in suburbia. There was no apparent physical damage to the area. The eyelids opened and closed as normal, though they hung a little loosely. There was no scarring, no evidence of trauma. But where there should have been an eye, there was just a smooth, round hole.

Whenever Conrad or his younger brother Huey would ask what had happened, they always got the same story. It was the Whispering Man, their father would say, looking serious. I heard him in my room at night, after I was supposed to be asleep. He doesn't like to be seen. I thought I could take a peek, but when I opened one eye a crack, he was the one who took something instead.

At this point in the story, he would always open his eyelids wide, letting the hollow socket gape. Conrad would scream and laugh, never sure which was the correct reaction. You're going to give the boys nightmares, Danny, his mother would say. Not if they keep their eyes shut.

At bedtimes, Huey and Conrad would dare each other to open their eyes in the night. Each would swear that they were going to, bragging that they were unafraid of the whispering man. Once the lights went out though, Conrad kept his eyes tightly shut.

He asked his uncle Bernard one time if he had ever seen the whispering man growing up. Uncle Bernie just laughed. Is Danny still telling that ridiculous story? He was born without that eye. Conrad's father overheard. You only think that because I wasn't the only one the whispering man took something from. He stole your memories just the same as he plucked out my eye, left you with nothing but a clean smooth hole. At least I know what I lost. You lost your marbles is what you lost, Bernie retorted. He turned back to Conrad. Middle of the night, one night, he started screaming. Your grandparents came running in to find him clutching his face, going, My eye, my eye. Grandpa just about had a heart attack thinking Danny had lost his other eye and was totally blind now. Once he realized that his 12 year old was hollering about losing an eye he'd never had, he smacked him so hard that your dad's other eye just about did pop out.