Narrator 1: It doesn’t occur to
any of these people that the moon is about to fall out of the sky. Narrator 2: And let’s be
honest here: why WOULD it? They’re distracted. There’s a LOT going on. And moons, obviously, don’t
usually do anything so dramatic. Narrator 3: The pandemonium
we’re seeing in the streets right now is totally unrelated. Word of the big sale got out,
hmm, thirty minutes ago... and everyone in town is jockeying to
get inside the post office and cash in. This riot is ready to strike it rich. Narrator 1: Except for the
opalescent man, who already has. Narrator 2: In all the mayhem, no
one’s even noticing the guy in jagged, glassy armor dragging a body out
of a side-street door, blood fresh and dripping from his spiked fist. Narrator 3: No one sees
his panic or determination. No one notices... except the woman fighting her
way against the current of the mob, leading a girl with her. SHE sees it, stops, and IMMEDIATELY makes
an escape in the opposite direction, pulling the protesting girl with her. Narrator 2: The armored man looks
up from the body at his feet. He ALMOST sees her go. Narrator 1: He WOULD have seen her... if he, the woman, the opalescent
man, and everyone else hadn’t just then looked straight up into the sky,
terrified by the sound a moon makes... when it FALLS. [Main theme] There’s nothing this
far out in the desert. Nothing... except for one small cabin of sorts. It’s a sort of odd,
handmade patchwork hovel. Home to just one person. Narrator 2: The person who
lives here doesn’t really care about design or coziness. She cares about utility and function. Currently she is trapped in her
cabin by a horrible monster. Narrator 3: More on that in a moment. She’s not alone in the cabin; her
dog companion is here as well. Narrator 2: The dog’s
name isn’t ‘Companion.’ Narrator 3: No, it’s ‘Landlord’. Narrator 1: The dog’s name is Landlord. You heard that right. Narrator 2: Now that
we’re clear on that point! Narrator 3: He’s sort of a hound. Sort of sitting there on his
cushion, under the table. He lets out a little, “Bllughh” Narrator 2: He’s really old. He’s kind of tired of
this shit, to be honest. Lark [that’s the woman’s name],
she’s a kind of rangey, leathery, hawk-eyed Clint Eastwood-type. If Clint Eastwood had
dreadlocks and was a woman. So, Lark is putting a
blindfold on Landlord. It’s not the first time this has
happened, and he puts up with it with this kind of resigned tiredness. Narrator 3: It’s a safety precaution! It’s in his best interests. Narrator 1: He’s been used as bait,
he’s been used as a guard dog. He’s even been used from time to
time, though rarely, as a friend. Lark doesn’t really have many friends. She would laugh at you if you
suggested that Landlord was her friend. Landlord is her dog. He’s not even HER dog; he’s *A* dog, he
lives in the hut, she lives in the hut. They’re both here now, in
the dark, both in danger. Narrator 2: And there’s
a blinding outside. Narrator 3: Off in the distance, in the
strange darkness that has TEXTURE to it, outside the window, there’s a creature:
a large grey [possibly?] beast, lumbering slowly across the plain beyond her house. Narrator 2: It has vaguely
the form of a horse? Or maybe a really large dog like a
great dane or something, but with strange gripping claws on the ends
of its legs, not hooves or paws. And its skin hangs
loosely off of its bones. It really seems rather emaciated,
but it has this abundance of loose, pebbly, DISGUSTING skin, like elephant
skin hanging off of a dying horse. It’s gross, and its HEAD... its head is even worse. Narrator 3: Up a long, sinuous neck that
reaches up to peer above the desert is a blooming morning-glory-like mantle. A hooded frill. Flashes of light emit from tiny
little barbs that emerge, that jut out from the center of this. Narrator 1: The lights spackle the
desert terrain, projecting into the dark, reflecting off of metal edges, sheet-metal
contours on Lark’s shed-shack-house-hut. Narrator 3: ‘It’s on the wrong
side of the house,’ she thinks. ‘Shit.’ Narrator 1: She has a lantern
in one hand: a hooded lantern with a trigger-activated lever. She’s rigged it up herself. It has a tiny little spring attached. She can pop this hood open and shut. She is currently crouched down, back
to the wall, underneath one of the very few windows that she has in her hut. She is inside, waiting
for the right moment. Realizing that the blinding is in the
wrong place, carefully keeping her eyes shut to prevent any reflection... extends an arm, raises the
lantern, clicks the lantern open and shut—creating a flash,
attracting the blinding’s attention. Narrator 2: The blinding seems to have
become fixated on the glass of the window pane on this side of her house: the window
that she is currently crouching under. She should have prepared for
that, of course, but, well, this is the situation now and she’s
going to have to deal with it. Narrator 1: She reaches out,
giving Landlord a reassuring pat. Reassuring him. She’s fine. She doesn’t care. She’s done this before. Narrator 3: In fact, she’s SO practiced
at having hunted this particular variety of beast, she has prepared a lavish
banquet for it… in the front yard. A cow carcass, lying
there, awaiting her prey. Narrator 1: A “cow” is a good word for it. It may not be a cow in
the strictest sense. It is SIMILAR to a cow. It has things in common with a cow. Narrator 3: Eyes, principally, being
the most important in this case. Narrator 2: The eyes are… dead. But wide open. Still staring. And most importantly of all,
still glassy and reflective. Narrator 1: She has attempted to make it
extra-visible by carving its eyelids off. Narrator 2: If only the
blinding could SEE them! Narrator 3: Anyway, back to the case
of getting it around to the other side of the house: Lark, casting her
eyes about the interior of her cabin, sees the small table that Landlord
is currently crouched beneath. The few belongings that she has
meticulously gathered over the course of her years here [small survival
materials, and so on], and identifies a shelf of some drying glassware hanging
outside of the window on her front stoop. Narrator 1: The blinding’s lights
— sort of a visual echolocation [‘Photolocation’ maybe is the right term? Maybe we’ll get lucky and that will
be the right term] — its lights are beaming through the window just
above her head, reflecting around in the interior of her cabin. It is pacing closer and closer through
the darkness across the desert, zeroing in on her position… and NOW is her chance. Its lights are through the window. It is looking INSIDE of her cabin,
and she flashes her lantern across the space — not out the window — across the
space at the glassware, which glows. Narrator 2: The blinding
moves with … BLINDING speed. Narrator 3: She instantly feels a
change in the blinding’s anatomy: its musculature going rigid. There’s a sort of a small tremor that
passes in the intervening space between the blinding and her house, and as
its footpads come ever closer and begins to skirt ‘round the cabin, she
knows that her efforts have paid off. Narrator 1: She also knows
that she’s running out of time. The darkness inside her hut… let’s
make this very clear: the darkness is outside because it’s dark. The darkness is also INSIDE, and
we don’t mean that in the sense that it is dark in both places. We mean that LITERALLY the
darkness is INSIDE of her hut. The darkness in this desert.... is not like any darkness
you’ve ever known. It’s more of a FOG. It is a physical presence. It is DARK MATTER hanging in the
air, and this dark presence — this fog — is starting to retreat. It is soon to be DAY, and the
moment it IS, the blinding is gone. She will have lost it. So there’s no time to waste. She is on the move across the
hut, heading to the front door. Narrator 2: She slips through it silently. She’s moving with precision but speed. There’s not a moment to lose. She’s pulling something out of her pocket. It’s a glove. A RED glove. There’s only one like it, anywhere. Narrator 3: The blinding’s
horrible lithe form towers over the corpse of the cow in the yard. Its large mantle-frill currently open. The glowing pneumatocysts of its
internal sensory organs extended. A light flashes from the tip of
one and—reflecting off of the glassy eye of the cow—that same
pneumatocyst plunges in through the open ocular orbit of the beast. Narrator 2: Mmmm! There’s nothing quite like the
sound of a blinding’s barbs plunging into a dead creature’s eyeballs. Narrator 3: Or not necessarily even dead. Narrator 1: Unfortunately,
usually NOT dead. Narrator 2: Lark is still
approaching the blinding from behind. Walking up to it, calm as
you please, pulling on this red glove onto her left hand. It’s a strange glove. Definitely hand-made. Hand-stitched seams running along it. The blinding eats very quickly. The cow is already starting to look a
bit dried-out, a bit desiccated, and the blinding’s frill is wide open. Since Lark is behind it, she can
see through the translucent flesh. The blue-white glimmers
of its bio-luminescence. Narrator 3: Flashing with PLEASURE. Narrator 2: She reaches the
creature’s flank, reaches out, and strokes it, as casually as if
she were to give her dog a pat. Narrator 3: Instantly, she can
feel the skin of the creature attempt to seize up under her hand. Normally, a blinding, if confronted
with violence, will react... its skin hardening into a
carapace-like armor, protecting itself. This causes the creature to not be worth
quite as much once it has been processed. Narrator 2: It also makes it
near-impossible to take down by more conventional means, in case you were
wondering why Lark simply didn’t charge up to it with a shotgun, which would
be her normal way of doing things. Narrator 1: No, she hunts
them with her glove. Touching them gently... and putting them to sleep. Narrator 2: Already, the
blinding’s muscles are contracting. It retracts its barbs from its
meal and attempts to turn its head around to attack, but its reflexes
are becoming sluggish already. Narrator 1: Her red glove is still
firmly in contact with its haunch. The muscles around that point of contact
begin to seizure and tremor gently. Narrator 2: The creature’s
back legs buckle underneath it. She continues to walk forward, stroking
her gloved hand up the blinding’s flank. The front legs fall. Narrator 3: The glowing tips of the
barbs are flashing in a sort of chaotic, disorderly pattern, slowly dimming. Narrator 2: And they begin to
wink out one by one, going dull. Narrator 1: Within minutes,
the blinding is dead. And Lark, wasting no time, cuts it open. Narrator 2: She’s mostly
interested in the skin. The meat of a blinding
is no good to anyone. It’s disgusting. Narrator 1: It’s good to a few people,
but she doesn’t care about those people. Narrator 2: No, it’s the SKIN with its
remarkable transforming and protective qualities that is particularly valuable. But only if it is freshly skinned
from a recently dead blinding. Narrator 1: Landlord comes wandering out
of the door of the house, having somehow extricated himself from his blindfold. That’s bad. If he’d done that earlier, that
might have been a severe problem. Lark’s heart does a tiny somersault. Not that… no. She doesn’t care about the dog. It’s... whatever. [She does. She actually DOES. She has a very slightly soft heart. She would never tell you any of this,
which is why we are telling you.] Landlord, coming forward, is delighted
to find a pile of blinding viscera and begins snuffling in it joyously. Narrator 2: He is one of the
things to which a blinding’s meat is not totally disgusting. Lark wrinkles her nose at the
sight and continues with her work. Narrator 1: As Lark works busily
with her knife, the grey darkness of the night thins slightly, going
hazy, and then abruptly is gone. Instant, brilliant daylight. Narrator 3: This dawn
is like arriving in Oz. Red rocks. Green succulents. A bright, vibrant desert. A vast curtain of obsidian fog
slides back, exposing the landscape. Narrator 1: A sheer wall of darkness,
retracting laterally, spanning from land to sky, horizon to horizon, like an
opaque ocean of ink draining sideways, translating smoothly, its face phasing
through plants, rocks, Lark’s cabin. Through Lark. Narrator 2: There it goes. The NIGHT. On the move. Gliding silently away. Narrator 1: Lark doesn’t even notice;
she’s busy carving up a monster. Narrator 3: This happens every day. Narrator 2: She’s not the sort to
appreciate Unrise and Unset everyday. From the outside of the darkness,
it has a definite reflective edge. You can’t see through it. It’s like obsidian. Utterly impenetrable, gliding away from
her over this incredible landscape dotted with enormous succulent plants [the size
of trees] and huge redstone formations. Narrator 1: Tiny desert
critters—lizards—slither away. A couple of odd birds. A few mirrorhawks, concerned by the
sudden bright light, escaping back into the darkness that they prefer. Narrator 2: There is no sun. The SKY itself is the source of
luminance: a bright, pure, dazzling white. Narrator 3: The curtain of darkness
stretching away across the landscape suddenly passes over a tremendous hill. A glorious summit. Narrator 2: This huge red hill—a
mountain, almost—dominates the horizon. Narrator 3: And a rough path
trails off from Lark’s cabin, connecting with a distant road. A road snaking toward the hill. Narrator 2: She’s already loading
up the blinding’s carcass onto her… vehicle, we’ll call it for now. Narrator 1: It’s a sort of motorcycle. Narrator 2: A SORT-of motorcycle. Narrator 1: Sort of a MONO-cycle:
it has one large wheel. It has a small sidecar. She’s throwing the grim heap
of blinding flesh into the sidecar, a gruesome passenger. Gesturing, she attempts to send
Landlord back inside, he doesn’t notice. He doesn’t care, so she doesn’t care
either, and—firing up her cycle—wheels it out from an awning attached to her hut. She wheels off, cruising
down the main road. Her destination: the craggy mountain
in the distance peppered by buildings. There’s a town there. That’s where she will sell the skin. And on high, above the mountain,
above Lark on her cycle, there hovers—oppressively—THE MOON. Thank you for listening. New episodes of Midst are available every Wednesday on midst.co, on your preferred podcast
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