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Published on:

11th Nov 2025

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Transcript
Speaker A:

Messenger of fear they are pay By Michael Grant My eyes opened.

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I was on my back.

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A mist pressed close all around me, so close that it was more like a blanket than a fog.

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The mist was the color of yellow teeth, and it moved without a breath of breeze, moved as if it had a will.

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The mist swirled, the mist swirled slowly, senselessly, and it touched me.

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I don't mean that it was merely near to more and therefore inevitably touched me.

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I mean that it touched me.

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I felt my face like a blind bursting night.

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It crept up the sleeves of my sweater and down like and down the neckline.

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I found its insinuating way.

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I found its insinuating way under rough denim and sipped almost like a liquid along bare skin.

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Fingerless, it touched me.

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Eyeless, it gazed at me, it heard the beating of my heart and swept in and out of my mouth with each quick and shallow breath.

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The mist spoke to me, worldless, soundless, and yet so that I understood, and it said, shiver.

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I shivered and goosebumps rose on the insides of my arms and on my belly, and the mist laughed as silently as it had commanded me.

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I called out.

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I called out, mom.

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But the mist would have none of that.

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I took my word, stopped it, flattened it, made a mockery of it and echoed it back to me.

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I felt something prickling and tickling the side of my face and turned my head to see that I was lying in grass of such a color that it could never have known spring.

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It was the great rain of bread, mold the color of decayed life I could own.

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I could see only the nearest tox, those pressed closest to my face.

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How had I come to be here?

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And where was here?

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I searched my memory, but it was a box of old photos printed on aged cold paper.

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Here a face, there a place not quite real, too faded, too fractured, too far away to be real.

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Pictures, snatches of conversation, distorted sounds and sensory echoes, the soft scraping of paper, pages turned by an unknown hand, liquid forth from a bottle, the strike of a match, the smell of sulfur.

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I had the thought that then.

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I had the thought then that I was dead.

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It was not a certainty to me, but an uneasy possibility, a doubt, a guess whose truth I was not willing to test.

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Why were my memories so far out of reach?

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I had a life, didn't I?

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What was a person?

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What was a girl?

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I had a name, of course I had a name.

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Nara.

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Yet even that, seemingly, yet even that seemed unsteady to me.

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A fact, perhaps, but a shaky fact.

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The word Nara did not carry with it some snot of emotion who was a flat thing without debt or shape.

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Just a word, Mara.

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Was that me?

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Let it be me.

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Let it be me.

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Because I needed a name.

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I needed something definite to hold on to.

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I raised my hand to my face.

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I watched the fingers appear, swirling through the unnatural.

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I raised a hand to my face.

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I watched the fingers appear, swirling through that unnatural mist.

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I touched my face and felt fears.

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I touched my face and felt tears.

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I clawed my face and felt both finger and cheek felt.

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And therefore I lived.

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I lived.

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Then, as if discouraged by my discovery, the mist began to clear.

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It withdrew from me, sliding away from my flesh like a wave retreating into the sea.

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I wanted to stand up.

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I did not want to lie there any longer in the dead gray grass.

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I wanted to stand and see.

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And then one ran far from this ascending land.

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Run, run, far from this unsettling nightmare.

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Running would awaken me, and all of it, all of my memory, all that I was, would become flooding back.

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It must.

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I was shaking so badly that the simple act of standing erect became a challenge.

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My limbs did not want to cooperate with each other.

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Then I made a mess of it, rising first onto hands and knees and then stumbling, nearly falling, before finally rising to my full, unimposing hall.

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I was in an open place.

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It was dark, darker than it had been in the mists and most starlight still less moonlight shone down from above.

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It was not complete darkness.

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Patterns of gray and black and black on black steel emerged as I looked around me.

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There was a building.

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It had been there the last time I looked.

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No light escaped that building.

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Nothing about that building called to me to approach, except for the fact that it was the only object in sight.

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I moved one foot and a nitre.

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That fact, the fact that I could put one foot in front of another let me take a deep breath, a less agitated breath.

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To move was to live was a mom.

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To move was to choose a path, and that meant I still had move.

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To move was to choose a path, and that meant I still had some volition, some control, I felt.

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And I knew.

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Hadn't there been some blossom in class about the definition of life?

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And hadn't it been that sensational movement, something else?

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Had there been a class, a school?

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Of course.

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No doubt.

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So why couldn't I see it in my mind?

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Why, when I asked myself that question, was the only image like a stock photo, photo filled with unfamiliar, filled with unfamiliar, too bright, too pretty faces?

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Was I dead?

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Never mind, Mara, I told myself, trying to accept that name.

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As the truth.

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Never mind, Mara.

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You can feel and you can move.

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You can choose, Mara.

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I could go in a different direction.

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I could choose not to talk to that building, that outline of black against black, that shadow within shadow.

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My feet made sounds like sandpaper as they brushed in the breather glass.

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My feet made sounds like sandpaper as they brushed, as they brushed the brittle grass.

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The structure was taller than a house, narrow and long.

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There was a suggestion of high windows ending in pointed arches and a suggest and a suggestion and and a suggestion to suggestion suggestion two of a strong, heavily timbered door and above that door atop the building a suggestion two of a strong and a suggestion two of a strong, heavily timbered door.

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And above that door atop the building a sort of tower, a steeple.

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It was a church.

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That knowledge should have reassured me, but instead it drove a spike of cold terror into my belly.

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For I knew one thing.

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This church was no place for comfort and peace.

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There was a solemn, silent hostility to this structure.

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It was not calling me into God's presence, it was warning me to go away.

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Yet at the same time I could now feel the door drawing me to had a strange gravity, a force perhaps unknown to science, that pulled me toward it not by magnetism but by acting on night fear, turning my fear into a Botox.

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I had to know what was inside that church.

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I had to know, though I feared the no man.

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