Feed Drop | Burned by a Paper Sun (Maeltopia content)

0:00Greetings, ladies and gentlemen from Hell. Mark here with a quick request for your feedback. We're fast approaching the end of part one of the season of the gentleman from Hell. And before launching part two, we'll be posting one or two creator chat episodes about the series. So what we'd really like from you is all your burning questions about the show. The writing process, the production methods, character development, and well, whatever else you'd like to know. We'll also be releasing video versions of those episodes on our Patreon's free tier. Where we've also now added our show's transcripts. So please take a moment and leave your questions here in the comments. And as always, thank you very much for listening. Thanks for watching.

1:59Thank you. Thanks for watching.

2:59It didn't make sense. And possible was a word that Greg used cautiously, especially post-darkness. It had become sort of a dirty word. For many, it was a provocation, a direct challenge to evil, no different than chanting bloody Mary three times in a mirror or refusing to hold your breath while passing a cemetery. But there were a few other words he could use to describe what he was looking at. It was too solid, too extant to be an artifact of shutter speed or image noise from bad ISO settings. Even if it wasn't, it would show up only in one or maybe a few of the photographs.

4:00But it was in every single picture, always in the same location, always possessing the same features. And yet if you were to go outside right now, he would look out and see a normal New York skyline. Greg stepped back from the developing bends. 15 alternate realities floated in little trapped ponds in front of him. Several more hung from closed pens, dangling like forbidden fruit. He plucked one from a line. There was a vagueness to the mysterious building in the photograph, a sort of dusky aura that blurred its finer details. It was a skyscraper, to be sure, but its exact characteristics, its architectural pedigree was lost beneath the haze. This was no surprise. The supernatural wasn't known for being photogenic. Its size was less ambiguous, looming above the rest of the high rises, its tops scraping the clouds above.

5:04Like Greg, its neighbors regarded it with caution, shrinking away from it. He pictured the windowed eyes of the other building, winsing, trying to shut out as much of its presence as possible. He wished he could do the same, but his eyes couldn't escape it. He kept trying to reconfigure it, look at it in such a way that it became merely a coincidental alignment of other objects, like the shape of a dog found in the clouds. But every attempt failed. He knew it would. If the darkness had taught humanity anything, it was that the universe wasn't beholden to our expectations. Greg hung the photograph back up and continued to develop the remaining images. When it was finished, he placed the developed pictures into a binder and shoved it into his battered green jansport.

6:04And then he stopped. Of part of him felt off about bringing the photos home. He contemplated leaving them behind, confining them to their red lit womb. It wasn't an irrational compulsion, after all. There was a reason reality had shunned the ghostly building, banished it to the outskirts. He worried taking them could taint the world, like the tower would break free from its laminate prison and gain caporeal footing somehow. Become just another patch of darkness in an ever-dimming world. He pushed the thought out of his head. Greg shouldered his bag and flipped the switch next to the exit, surrendering the room back to blackness. Outside the sun was sticking low over Manhattan, painting the skyline and blood and rust.

7:09He headed west from a studio on J Street, the industrial blocks of Dumbo gradually giving way to the manicured paths of Brooklyn Bridge Park. It was a beautiful scene. One that could fetch him some quick cash. Good city sunsets were a sure sell on his line of work. There was always someone looking to put it on their wall, painted cheeses and added to cross it. It was usually a snuff about such things, but rent was coming up and his bank account was empty. He had been unyielding visionaries needed a place to live. He thought, with a right smile. He walked past the carousel pavilion. It's painted horses frozen mid-gallop behind glass, until he reached the waterfront promenade. Stone steps led down to the river's edge, where photographers often gathered at the shower. Today he had the spot mostly to himself, say for a few joggers and an elderly couple sharing a bench. Adjusting the settings of his cannon as he went, Greg stopped at the railing, separating the park's paved path from the east river.

8:11Across the water, Manhattan's towers caught the dying light like monoliths of gold and glass. The Brooklyn Bridge stretched to his right, its gothic arches framing the scene. Viewing life behind the camera was like accessing the settings of the world, where he could modify its details with a few turns of a dial. Tune its vibrancy with a click and hue its edges with a simple press of the button. He imagined it was like seeing through the eyes of God, changing the world however you please. Within seconds, Greg snapped off a flurry of photos. The red shimmer of the water, the way the light caught the bridge's cables, all these subjects. But just as he was about to finish, I'll be known as something. Blow his area of focus teased something out of place, something strange, frowning he readjusted his camera. A gasp escaped his lips. On the surface of the water, Rippled Manhattan's familiar skyline, one world trade, the Chrysler building, the Empire State,

9:15and between two of the mirrored buildings loomed like a ghostly apparition. The sky scraper he'd captured earlier. Greg lowered his camera and peered across the river at the actual skyline. Nothing. Only the city he'd called home for years. He glanced back at the water to find the ghostly building curiously but appropriately absent. Puzzled, he returned the camera to his eyes and looked again at the city's watery reflection. The phantom structure practically smiled at him, rebelling against reason and the reality it was predicated upon. A song of blood rushed through his ears, replacing the rumble of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge above. His hands shook as he switched back and forth between his camera lens and his own eyes, the world cycling between real and unreal, sane and insane. He was starting to wonder which was which. Greg's finger trembled as he snapped a picture of the city's alternate reflection.

10:16Somewhere within the little rooms of his camera, he knew the ghostly building wandered, haunting thousands of ones and zeros, compelling them to rebuild it. A familiar thought entered his head. He wondered if he should throw his camera in the river, but banding it to the depths, the phantom building could live at the bottom of the sea, entombed in a metal and binary code coffin. Anyway, it wouldn't do it. The entry of his fears were outweighed by intrigue. A large part of him couldn't wait to get home and exercise the image from his camera, study it in detail and revel its mystery. He was shaking with excitement more than fear. That's why the photos in his bag weren't left to drown in their developing bins. Why his hand carefully placed his digital camera back into his bag? The spectral thing had captured him as much as he had captured it. Before he knew it, the sun Greg had come to photograph was gone. The night followed, erasing the world around him.

11:16The street lamps offered him a path, however, creating a dim and yellowed line from the travel. He followed it, silently passing rows of parked cars and cramped buildings. The monotony of his walk caused his mind drift, to wander beyond the circumscribed route in front of him and into the shunned blackness of his periphery. It made him wonder if there was truly anything beyond the lit world, or if this space is simply shut off when no one was looking, or what terrifyingly yet, or occupied by other things. Perhaps that's what he had captured earlier. And other, that it overstayed its welcome, like those ghosts that only show up in photographs, or the hairy monsters that appear in blurry out of focus videos.

12:18The York Street F station was completely empty. The platform of fitting backdrop for the constant swell of darkness that tailed him home. He never minded the company before. He enjoyed it. There was a calm to its emptiness, an illusion that the rest of the world had fallen away. But now he was weary of his companion, skeptical of its motives. He wondered what it would hold, wondered if he were to snap its picture if it might reveal more than it let on.

13:21The York Street F station was completely empty. Greg emerged at Fourth Street Ninth, where Brooklyn shadows swam gritty and raw. Before long, his building loomed before him. A sagging pre-war walk-up, braced by rusty fire escapes, wedged between a 24-hour laundromat and a check-catching place. Every step of the four flights to his one-bedroom objected to his passage, ignoring the suffocating, cooking smells and the muffled shots of domestic bliss. He unlocked his door, swept inside, and threw the dead bolt in chain with a sigh.

14:45The door was locked. He wasted no time in printing the pictures from his digital camera and comparing them to his film shots. They were identical. As far as the skyscraper in question was concerned, they even showed the same blurriness. As if the part of the photograph containing the ghostly structure was always slightly out of focus. Scrutinizing the photos further, you could see that some of the blurriness was due to a clouding mire surrounding the building. Small black particulates that hovered around it, obscuring its details. The structure itself was black, and Greg wondered if they might not be pieces of the thing itself, flaking off, building, shedding its skin.

15:46He poured over the photographs for hours, extracting as much as they were willing to confess. As far as he could tell, the architecture was fately gothic, but also contained more contemporary postmodern elements. For instance, while many skyscrapers had spires, this one was more ornate. One more likely seen on a 15th-century church than a Manhattan high-rise, and while the body of the building shared the minimalist fashion of its close neighbors, there were gothic nuances peppered in, like archivalts, towers, and even rose windows. Greg imagined it would be a fantastic subject for a photo shoot, if it were a real place. After exhausting all of his options with the photos, he moved over to his computer, which sat atop a cheap particle board desk bestuned with empty soda cans, fast food bags, and scribbled-on post-it notes. He sat down and swiped some of the debris from his workplace, donating it to a half-full waste basket below, and started typing into the search bar on his screen.

16:46At first, nothing came up. Search was like unknown building, in-why, or New York Ghost Building, just brought up websites listing supposedly haunted places in the city. It wasn't entirely typed, invisible skyscraper, that's something caught his eye. Scrolling down the screen, he saw a web page called The Night Scraper. He wouldn't have even noticed it if it weren't for the thumbnail accompanying it. An image of a midnight-shaded building identical to the one in his photos. He immediately clicked the link. He was brought to a relatively sparse web page, one that lacked the hot key flair of other sites of its kind. The text lacked its usual decorative font, and there was no cheesy music to greet his arrival, no tacky graphics. Instead, there was just a plain black title and a heading underneath that red have you seen The Night Scraper? He was grateful for the site's planned appearance, as it made him feel less crazy, less self-conscious about scouring the internet for phantoms and bogeyman buildings. Reading the page's description,

17:47he quickly realized why the phantom building didn't show up in his previous searches. It wasn't specific to New York. It was elusive, popping up in random cities for only short periods of time, never being seen with a naked eye, but always indirectly, like through a photo or a video recording. As for the nature of the thing, it was purely speculative. Some believed it was from a parallel universe, transiently phasing in and out between our world and another, while others linked it to the great darkness of 1999, theorizing it was part of some broken kind of physics. None of the explanations sounded particularly convincing now. Part of that was on account of there being no real science behind the claims. Just a bunch of tossed-around buzzwords and some overused sci-fi plots. The other problem was the existence of the tower itself, and it tempted to assign causality to something so absurd must itself by virtue of its product B absurd. That such was the nature of the paranormal, you suppose. You would have to take what you could get. Clicking on a link called Reports. Greg Pored over sightings of the so-called Night Scraper.

18:49And were hundreds of them. For almost two decades, the ghostly building appeared all over the world. Chicago, Athens, Bangladesh, Tokyo, always in a large city. But as he continued to read through the accounts, he noticed a peculiar consistency among the stories. Any attempt to get close to the building resulted in it appearing somewhere else in the city, as if it was a voiding contact. People tried reaching it in all sorts of different ways. Walking, driving, taking public transportation. One wealthy individual even claimed that he had flown his personal plane towards the thing. But in each instance, the Night Scraper refused visitation, always putting distance between it and its perspective guess. It appeared that the ethereal skyscraper, like so many of its supernatural brethren, was shire than it let on. Another pot of coffee got Greg through a couple more accounts, but sleep eventually overcame obsession and dragged him to the bedroom.

19:51Like the rest of his apartment, it was a mess. It was an apt metaphor for his life, scattered, aimless, abandoned. Besides the road of life's most essential applications, eating, sleeping, working. Greg lacked anything resembling a life. Rather, he simply existed. Occasionally, a warm body would find its way into his bed, but it would just as quickly find its way out, leaving the other half of his mattress to resume its customary coldness. He didn't have many friends, either, besides from a few people that he would see at art shows and galleries. But their conversations together were always superficial. Nearly lexical masks he dawned to convince others that they were talking to a human being. His aspirations were equally unformed. While he had certainly always wanted to pursue a career in photography, there was no lofty goal of becoming wealthy or famous as a result. In fact, he was surprisingly content with his borderline indigents. Photography was the only thing that mattered to him. It was a lone jewel, standing on a pedestal in the middle of an empty house.

20:54Greg trudged over to his heavily-pillowed full-size and collapsed, falling asleep within seconds. It wasn't too long, however, before he woke up again. He wasn't sure how much time had passed since he fell asleep, but the blinds were still dark without even a hint of light trying to slip through their slats, so he assumed it wasn't too long. He didn't mind, though. His throat was dry, and he was in desperate need of a drink. He dragged himself from the soft mess of his bed, walked over to the door, and opened it. Greg froze. And friend of him was a hallway, but not his hallway. His hallway was a straight and narrow path, himdened by cracked drywall and some of his favorite photographs.

21:54Lips stick on a pig, he'd always thought. At the corridor in front of him was meandering. Winding. The walls were drab. Gray. Bedecked with a strange, spiraling, stencil work that danced across their face. Column centuries punctuated the snaking foyer, standing guard at each side of the many doors lining the hall. An antique chandelier drooped from the ceiling, painting the area in melancholy light, distilling shadows to play in its awful glow. Before Greg knew it, he was walking. His bare feet slapping softly against the cold marble floor. The silence of the place was thick, tangible like a swamp he had to wade through. His silhouette seemed to deeper here, too. A man shaped a biss that swallowed the details of everything it crossed. It was as if the passive physics of the world had suddenly turned feral. Ravenous. But those considerations fell away almost immediately when he arrived at the first entrance in the hallway.

22:58The thing in front of Greg bore all the elements of a door. It had a knob, was made from the proper materials, even had an apartment number on its head panel. But the feeling in his stomach told him it wasn't. The thing seemed to breathe. Its surface heaving, ever so slightly like a pair of lungs. He could even hear the oaks dying, as each breath tested the limits of its wooden entry's strength. He was afraid. But his interest was peaked. His hand wrapped around the faux knob, twisted it, and then cautiously opened the thing that looked like a door. What Greg saw was not immediately explainable. It was an enclosure, to be sure, and its geometry roughly correlated to the concept of a room.

24:03But that's where the similarities ended. Where one would traditionally find a ceiling, floor, and walls. There was an expanse of gray and white tissue. Its surface was a chaos of lines, thousands of convolutions wandering like nomads across a drab wet landscape. Part of it would occasionally glow, flash, imparting the space with an evanescent kind of lighting. When he examined the stuff more closely, laying a hand on its moist face, he became fairly certain it was brain matter. He couldn't be sure, of course, but the material was definitely organic, and shared an uncanny resemblance to the human brain he once photographed for an esteemed science magazine. In the center of the room, strapped to what looked like a rusting dental chair, was a naked man.

25:05He was lanky, balding, and unremarkable, and every way. The man's demeanor was no less bland, as his face was a blank page empty of expression. But where the man himself lacked an intrigue, his circumstance did not. Coming out from the man's right temple was a confusion of electrical wires, a tangling of red, yellow, and white cables that stretched out into a large TV. On it was a grainy video, a first person tour of a darkened house. The person filming simply roamed from room to room, wandering like some wispy phantom through a quaint middle-class home. Greg watched the videographer slowly travel through the house, moonlight seeping through its windows, and inviting the black doppelgames of couches, chairs, and other objects to play across the walls. It was only when a camera focused on a nearby staircase that Greg noticed some photographs.

26:06The frame memories were staggered, and all of them contained the same smiling family, a woman, two girls, and a man. While the woman and two girls were strangers to him, Greg immediately recognized the man. He was sitting at least six feet from him, strapped to a corroded and uncomfortable-looking chair. A sudden noise drew Greg's attention to the back of the room. Three loader shapes came into view. Just visible via the faint glow of the television screen and the shattering synapses sparking across the ceiling and walls. The intermittent light caused the figures to flash in and out of existence, strobe lighting three squatting individuals wrapped in street jackets. It was crowned with a mop of greasy hair, which dangled and not-so-wrote, mulch-ewis landscape of smiles turning into frowns, turning into screams. Like the man in the center of the room, they had wires spilling out of their heads. In fact, all three of them were connected. Each one's wires traveling into their neighbor's skull, backwards and forwards, creating a deranged kind of circuit.

27:11However, the madman on the far right had a separate set of cables tumbling from his temple, which spilled out somewhere into the dark. Greg traced their faint outline until to his surprise they ended in the grasp of a large pale hand. The man holding the wires was tall and unusually gaunt and a ruined straight jacket hung from his frame like a cape, allowing his limbs a freedom his compatriots lacked. His eyes were merely peepholes into the insane world that surely spun behind them. Greg tried to make out his face, but it was difficult to discern. Blurry, almost. It was as if his possessed madness couldn't accommodate the stability of solid features, melting them into a fluid, barely perceptible chaos. Carrying the bundle of cables, the free but straight jacket and stranger skulked to the front of the room and loomed over the individual in the chair.

28:15He fit a long brass jack onto the terminus of the wires and then with little to no grace jammed it through the chair-bound man's left temple. The trapped man barely flinched. The lunatic jostled the wires a bit, apparently testing their purchase. Once satisfied, he turned his attention to the TV screen in front of the room, not knowing what else to do. Greg joined him. The videographer, who was one and the same with the gentleman in the chair, now walked up a carpeted flight of stairs. At first there was no change in the tone of the video. It was just as uneventful as it previously was. But where the audio used to be nothing but a static-y den occasionally disrupted by the moans of an aging house, other noises began to introduce themselves. The man's breath was a bit of a shock.

29:17They were subtle at first, fleeting, uttered words that hid somewhere between the borders of the imaginary and real. But as the man reached the second level, a swarm of voices emerged. They were volatile and rampant, crowding the psychic space. The man's breath became heavy, trying not to choke on the last shrieks and whispers that polluted the air. The words, and pleads, became more and more sharp until at last they converged upon a single lethal point. Greg watched the man grab a pair of scissors from a nearby bathroom and then loom over the bedside of his sleeping wife. Greg closed his eyes. Over the next few minutes, a ballad of shrieks, flees and tearing flesh haunted the otherwise sedate home.

30:21Tears pushed beyond Greg's closed eyelids when a few minutes later, he heard the screams of two little girls. When silence finally reclaimed the home, he mustered the courage to look at the screen again, where he could see the man, drenched in blood, staring at himself in the mirror. The scissors lay easily dangled from his fingers, almost dropping to the floor and his skin's pale as a V2, like the rest of his now deceased family. I'd been drained of blood, but perhaps the most strange about the video was that it was still running despite there being no evidence of the camera's presence. Both the murderer's hands were to a science, one barely holding onto the instrument of his family's demise, the other empty and shaking. It was as if the granted view was simply the vantage of the man's own eyes, not the lens of the camera.

31:26The video feed cut and the screen became snowy noise. The whales of the murdered family still echoed in Greg's head, and they were beginning to scribble outside the lines of his memory. He tried to focus on something else. Greg turned towards the seated killer, and then his mad caretaker, the latter dug into his jacket and pulled out some tubing in an empty vile. With an almost frenetic grace, he removed the electrical cables from the restrained man's skull and quickly replaced it with one end of the plastic tubing. The man was carefully holding below it, the man in the chair, for his part, didn't flinch. Once the ampoule was filled, the insane man corked it, re-plugged the rainbow of cords back into the subject's head and then walked to the nearby table. There he placed the vile into a small packing box and wrapped it with the care of a Christmas gift. When he was finished, he walked the parcel to the back of the room, where a line of pneumatic tubes,

32:32snaked up the walls, and placed it in one labeled distribution. Back in the day, the man was very busy. The man was very busy, and the man was very busy, and he was very busy, and he was very busy. The pneumatic tube snaked up the walls, and placed it in one labeled distribution. The package shot up and was gone within seconds, a brief rush of air the only thing marking its exit. Feeling that, whatever strange task he had just observed was finished, Greg left the room. He continued down the labyrinthine halls, passing door after door as he went. Wondering what bizarre thing might lie beyond, was every apartment the same, or did each contain its own species of macabre theater. His imagination furnished the rooms with all sorts of deranged spectacle, each containing living tabloes of things both weird and wonderful.

33:36They would make great set pieces for a photo shoot, he thought. Nightmares, that could be framed and hung in a gallery somewhere. In the distance, Greg noticed the faint clent of sunlight. He was sneaking in through a window. He hurried through the zigzagging corridor, eager to see if the world he knew was still there. When he arrived, a ready haze loomed outside. It was thick, murky. Like a pond tainted by the runoff of an old factory, its water red from rust and heavy metals. He could make out tall shapes in the distance, but the small reduced everything to shadowy roshecks. Then, as if sensing Greg's frustration, the crimson mists suddenly retreated. In a sense, the view was nothing special. The city was as it always had been. The same steel giants loomed over the same city blocks, the same pillars of smoke bloomed like ash and flowers from the same factory towers. And the same specs of humanity rambled about the same concrete terrain.

34:39Always well. Except one thing. A couple of blocks in front of them, he could see a familiar building. It's crumbling brick edifice, and 24 hour neon sign blinking a manic Morse code was unmistakable. He could even make out the broken patio chair on Mr. Cohen's fire escape. It was Greg's apartment building. He was sure of it. Suddenly Greg was back in his flat, staring out one of his living room windows. He noticed his camera and his hand hanging to his side. He knew what he was supposed to do, but he didn't know whether he should. He'd been invited to a secret place. The dingy smoke filled back rooms of reality. But the burden of such a membership was unknowable. Peeking behind the veil may reveal nothing but another banal layer of the world. Adams within atoms within atoms.

35:40Alternatively, he may discover that hidden behind everything is an engineered wickedness. Worrying and toiling its way to some terrible end. There was simply no way to know. Despite the risks, Greg shakily brought the camera to his face and looked through the aperture. A couple hundred yards out, overshadowing its more solid neighbors, was the night scraper. His finger trembled when he pushed the shutter button. The building was closer than the previous two times he'd seen it. Much closer. He could now see in detail the cyclone of Ashley debris that tore around its body. Making it look like a giant bee hive surrounded by swarms of loyal tenants. The finer details of the building were more visible too. As he could see the asymmetries of postmodernism blend seamlessly into the untamed flourish of gothic architecture. Creating a strange chimera he'd never seen. But more than anything, he realized that the structure's new proximity might provide the perfect vantage of his apartment building.

36:43Or perhaps at the right altitude, even supply a clear view of the cracked patio chair living on Miss Akone's fire escape. Burned by a paper sun is a meltopia production. Today's episode was written by Stephen Anzlone. Envoiced by Gina Smith. Sound editing was completed by Stephen Anzlone. And script editing was conducted by Walker Cornfeld. Be sure to rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. And follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at meltopia. And for more exclusive content such as additional lore, stories, and art, be sure to check out our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash meltopia. And for more information on our website, visit www.patreon.com