#weirdfiction

✧ Piece together the shards.

✦ Not every story wishes to be found.

Navigate the shards... https://www.endless-chronicles.com/shards

**This contains spoilers, so if you are currently listening to the show and wish to remain in the dark, maybe avert your gaze and attention entirely.** I’m currently casting a voice actor for an upcoming episode of my indie horror audio drama, Jack, It’s Me.

The episode is titled “Tape Found In Room 6” — a standalone found tape installment connected to the larger story of Cedar Bend.

ROLE: Frederick Frederick is the morning chef at Junco Diner. Dry, practical, sarcastic, tired, and deeply unimpressed by the town's nonsense… until Room 6 starts making that difficult.

Looking for an adult masculine voice, ideally 30s–50s sounding. Any North American accent welcome.

When Luc was born, nobody suspected anything.

7.4 pounds. 50 centimeters. 1:05 PM.

He spent a quiet childhood in the suburbs. Moving to the city never crossed his mind. At school, he blended in without effort.

When the other children hit puberty, Luc stayed behind for a while longer. He remained the baby faced kid. In that position, it was hard not to make jokes about everyone else’s acne covered faces. Luc made them too.

But words can return like a boomerang.

It started with flakes of skin peeling from his face. Moisturizers only seemed to make it worse. Soon it wasn’t just his face anymore. Dry patches spread across his entire body.

Luc’s words had come back.

At least the others were growing taller. Luc stayed small. The phase where he was both the shortest and the most childish looking dragged on endlessly.

Then one evening, his mother noticed something else.

"You're eating like crazy again," she said during dinner.

"But you’re not gaining weight. And you’re still not growing."

Luc stared down at his fish stick for a moment. Direct. That’s how he liked people.

For days, he had also developed a strange cough. His mother asked again if he had started smoking. Offended, Luc stomped upstairs with his plate.

After finishing the fish sticks, he slipped into his usual food coma earlier than normal.

Curled up on the bed, he stared at the empty plate while dull headaches slowly spread through his body. Before he could react, exhaustion dragged him under.

Drooling, he fell asleep.

From midday until the next morning.

His mother had just prepared breakfast when she entered his room.

The tray fell from her hands.

Luc looked bigger beneath the blanket.

Beside the bed lay an empty shell.

Small. Baby faced.

Luc looked at his mother.

His eyes were brighter than yesterday.

Slowly, she pulled the blanket away.

He had actually grown. The dry patches were gone.

"My boy."

Once the first shock faded, Luc slowly sat up.

Had that really happened?

Why was there an old, smaller Luc beside the bed?

He thought about a friend’s tarantula.

During the conversation, he suddenly realized he hadn’t blinked once.

Since the shedding, his blinking had become controlled. Intentional.

His hunger had normalized too.

The doctors found no explanation. Everyone involved was forced into silence. Luc was hidden away for several weeks so the changes wouldn’t look too obvious at school. Only a few teachers were informed.

Aside from the brighter eyes and the strange blinking, Luc seemed physically healthier than before.

But the uncertainty remained.

His first day back at school approached.

Since the shedding, Luc had even started helping his mother around the house willingly.

During dinner one evening, an unusual number of cars could be heard outside.

Then came the knock at the door.

His mother looked through the peephole and froze.

Reporters.

Cameramen.

Microphones.

So many people that the porch looked ready to collapse beneath them.

She leaned against the door.

"Luc. Someone talked. I knew this would happen."

Luc blinked for the first time in almost an hour.

Then he thought for a moment.

"You know what, Mom? Let them in. I feel good."

After a short hesitation, she opened the door.

The reporters immediately pushed past her and stopped only when they reached Luc.

"Come right in," his mother joked weakly.

Nobody listened.

Questions flew through the room. Luc raised a hand and calmly placed a washed cup onto the shelf.

"Relax. One at a time."

The room quieted slightly.

"My name is Luc. And I was born normal."

He gestured for his mother to return to the kitchen.

"I still don’t know what I am. But I think we’ll figure it out together."

Then he looked directly into one of the cameras.

"One thing for everyone: I live with my mother and I’m not dangerous. I’ve simply gone through a different form of puberty. The public will be informed once we understand what this means medically. Until then, I ask for a normal life."

Throughout the entire statement, Luc never blinked once.

The first reporters ran away.

"No. No."

Luc tried to calm the others.

Then he took a deep breath.

"OUT! MY MOTHER WANTS TO COME BACK IN! EVERYONE OUT!"

His voice deepened as he shouted.

Everything had been recorded.

For the next nine years, Luc and his mother lived almost like fugitives. Each year Luc became more famous. Eventually there was nowhere left where people wouldn’t recognize him.

Occasionally, they allowed reporters to visit.

Luc started enjoying half-truths.

"I'm growing fins."

04/23/1952

"I'm growing legs."

09/21/1957

"I'm growing scales."

07/17/1959

"I don’t blink anymore."

03/30/1962

Eventually they reached a country on the other side of the world.

Luc could feel the next shedding approaching.

His mother could see it too.

Luc decided the transformation should happen in public.

The attention had grown too large to avoid.

The military secured the area for miles.

People were allowed to see him only on the calculated date.

06/14/1963.

Luc stepped onto the stage and waved to the enormous crowd. Many spectators could only observe him through binoculars.

Voices spread through the audience.

"Webbed hands!"

"Wings!"

"Huge eyes!"

"He must be ten feet tall!"

Then Luc stretched his arms toward the sky.

And collapsed.

The military prepared itself.

Whatever emerged from the shedding would be contained.

Then everything happened faster than expected.

Luc slipped out of his old skin in one single motion.

No insect remained behind.

No monster.

Just a naked man in his mid-thirties.

"My boy," his mother said as she embraced him.

The crowd fell silent.

The military began pulling back.

Scattered voices echoed through the binoculars.

"That’s a man."

The first spectators began leaving.

The Road Below

A Subterraneans Story

Cassidy Watcher arrived in Burbank on a day when the heat felt tired, as if even the sun couldn’t be bothered anymore. He stood on the pavement staring at the tiny bungalow he’d just inherited — a chipped, sun-faded thing from the 1940s, now dwarfed on every side by towering new mansions. Glass walls, infinity pools, hedges trimmed into silent green fortresses.

None of these houses had been here when the bungalow was built. They looked like they belonged to another century entirely.

Cassidy, disgraced ex-detective, now pretending to be a real estate researcher, pushed open the gate and felt a strange vibration in the ground. Not movement — more like recognition.

Inside, the bungalow smelled of old dust and abandoned citrus. On the kitchen table lay the keys, the paperwork, and a brass key unlike the others. Heavy. Tarnished. Etched with a single word:

SUBSTATION.

He found the door behind the house — a metal hatch half-wrapped in ivy, nearly invisible unless you knew where to look. The brass key fit perfectly.

The hinges groaned as though woken.

Cold air drifted upward, smelling of concrete, stone, and something older.

The stairs led down to a tunnel lined in poured cement, cracked and marked with faint symbols he didn’t recognize. The walls were damp. The silence felt padded, deliberate. The further he walked, the clearer it became that the tunnels extended under the new mansions surrounding his bungalow.

And then he saw the footprint.

Bare. Fresh. Wide.

Someone had been down here very recently.

“You really shouldn’t be exploring,” a voice said behind him, smooth as poured whiskey.

Cassidy spun. A man stood in the tunnel wearing a tailored suit that looked wrong in the dim light — too clean, too sharp, as if the dust refused to touch him.

“I’m Cosmo Gent,” he said. “I imagine you’ve heard of me.”

Everyone had. Cosmo Gent — the mystery tycoon who had somehow acquired half the prime property from Beverly Hills to Malibu in only a few years. He’d become a legend, a ghost with a portfolio.

“Didn’t expect to find you underground,” Cassidy said.

Cosmo smiled. “This is where the foundations are.”

Two figures stepped out of the darkness behind Cosmo — neighbours Cassidy had passed earlier, though something about them now seemed different. Noah Deitrich from the hilltop glass house. Reiko Columbia from the place with no visible driveway. Their eyes reflected the tunnel light in a way that didn’t look entirely human.

“These tunnels… they’re not on any map,” Cassidy said quietly.

“No,” Cosmo agreed. “They belong to the original planners. Visionaries. They understood that a city must be built on more than land. It must be built on intention.”

“Why are they under my house?”

Cosmo stepped closer, and for a moment Cassidy thought he saw the tunnel walls pulse behind him. “Because you’ve inherited a doorway,” he said. “One the city forgot. One the founders never intended to leave unattended.”

Cosmo’s smile softened, almost pitying.

“You’ve already stepped across the threshold, Cassidy. That’s all that matters.”

Cassidy backed away, heart hammering. He turned and ran, following the echo of his own breath until he burst back into daylight, gasping. The hatch slammed shut behind him.

That night, as he tried to sleep in the bungalow, he heard tapping beneath the floorboards. Slow. Methodical.

Four taps. A pause. Two taps. Then a long, dragging scrape, as though fingers were moving across the underside of the house.

Cassidy knelt and pressed his ear to the floor.

The tapping stopped.

Then a whisper rose from the soil — soft, patient, impossibly close:

It made me sad because a force had left us, whose bread and butter it was to investigate - and keep alive like a crackling electrical connection, the human moments that bind us, while on the surface, deranged characters would plot or seethe and innocent, tragic or even “off-beat” types would fall in love, commit murder and generally play out elements of wholesome Americana.

There was no “us vs them” in the world of Lynch, there was just “Lynchian,” an umbrella term that unified universal beings under an unknowable but potent…something. Some kind of presence that was either manmade or primordial or a mixture of both and in most ways that answer didn’t matter because a teenager was dead and the community was hurting.

He felt like a bright shining beacon in a storm of normal norms. His presence alone was a comfort, like the idea that him just being alive meant that others gravitating toward the weird, thoughtful life could use him as a strong example of why this is a fulfilling path to take, and find similar travelers along the way.

When I was in middle school I listened to a punk rock album recorded live where the singer references having a bad haircut like “Eraserhead” which I had never heard of or seen. But I did see the cover in the video store and knew that if a punk rock singer was referencing it live on a recorded album that it must be cool or interesting at least. The Simpsons would send me on this type of journey multiple times throughout life.

I liked David Lynch’s relationship with creativity, how he seemed to tap into a pulsing, pre-existing force like placing his hand in a clear stream to catch a passing fish. He seemed to do this from the perspective of an everyman without ever believing once that to be an everyman was the goal. It was an archetype to step out of I think.

I equated his relationship with Americana to be a lot like Pee Wee Herman’s and John Waters, two of my other favorites. That normalcy was deranged on its own. No tweaking necessary. The grinning neighbor’s white smile where teeth might crack or shoot out was the strangest thing.

Oddball kitsch could be a comfort.

I was in awe of what Lynch did. As a thinker I was naturally curious about understanding “it” - like an exercise, but similar to the otherworldly presence of the Beyond in Twin Peaks, I never ever wanted it fully named. That wasn’t the point. The reaching was the point or the traveling or the phantoms.

The point was the Being, the relationships or the living. Or the dying - a process all its own that brought out humanity like instinctual figures called to an ancient ritual. Makes me think of the Log Lady’s last scene where she has a final conversation with Deputy Hawk and he knows her well and cares about her as Margaret Lanterman and she speaks urgently to him and it all feels lonely and intimate.

I suppose I identified with David Lynch. I was a Boy Scout. I was raised Mormon, had Mormon ancestry that I could trace all the way back to Brigham Young himself (though admittedly it was through his very first “pre-Mormon” wife Miriam Works. Who in a strange turn of fate right this very moment, I just learned for the first time she and I shared the very same birthday. I’m not sure if this is “Lynchian,” but it is strange.

I identified with David Lynch, because he always seemed to be putting Americana into focus from an earnest standpoint, and in looking at it so earnestly, he revealed the strangeness and a strangeness inherent in life itself, probably.

He championed a weirdness in me that was an unnameable force fighting against the rubric of my attempted but doomed traditional upbringing that my family always fell short of not through vice but doubt or apathy.

When it was time to go on my cinephile journey the Lynch filmography was there with a whole big groaning factory space all to his namesake. And discovering his movies were bread crumbs to a bigger community of fellow weirdos who were not weird but actually more normal than the normies. What did these words even mean actually?

There were traditional tales of masculinity and melodramatic love triangles mixed with ancient nameless evils. I mostly liked how comedic he could be while being thrilling and grotesque like when Bobby Peru blows his own head off, or how Lynch let things just be odd without scapegoating a character. After all, “This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.”

He was an instrument that harnessed the ethereal like music and allowed me to be a type of device capable of receiving it.

I favored his atmospheric droning. I will internally refer to it as “industrial Lynch drone.” It is a version of room tone that feels proactive. It feels like a presence. It is soothing to me. I guess it’s Lynchian. I will miss knowing that his heart is beating out there. He is an idea now, but he was an idea then too.

Root & Ember staff report ejecting a wild fae (again) for attempted glitter theft. The fae claims innocence. The floor sparkles anyway.