Transcript
A (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? Welcome to Scary Stories and Rain. Before we begin, I just want to remind you that there is now one week left to get your name in the pot to win a Nintendo Switch 2 bundle. If you want to be eligible to win, join my podcast. For $2.99 a month, you get rid of all of the ads, which is really great for sleeping and relaxing. And I might be contacting you to ask where to send your new Nintendo Switch 2 bundle. Also, I do want to say that I'm going to be announcing the winner on the first and I'm also going to be dropping a photo on my Instagram account showing the proof that I have the console, the shipping information that I actually did send it, and by the way, I just got my hands on a PlayStation 5 and I'm going to be giving that away next. So if you want to automatically enter to win the Nintendo Switch 2 bundle, go ahead and subscribe. Get rid of all of the ads and listen to every episode completely interruption free and you'll be automatically entered to win the PlayStation. I'm going to start doing giveaways every single month. And again, I just want to say thank you for being here.
B (1:06)
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A (1:34)
Packing@Blinds.Com it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com the only thing we treat better than Windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply. When people ask me at parties, I tell them I work in HR for an accounting firm or that my corner office has some bland nonsense title like Managing Consultant congealed to this glass and black lettering. They stop asking questions pretty quickly when you pull out your card and cover their whole tab. Curiosity peaks a little again, but soon gets washed over with inebriation. They wake up in the morning, and if their wife or lover asks them what it is I do, they just say something and like, administration, I think, and that's it. Plainness can hide all sorts of eccentricity. Can you think of anything plainer than the American Hops Museum? Even its boxy white form, sitting squat in the town of Yakima, Washington, yields little to hold your attention. The whole building is dedicated to the no doubt fascinating history of the cultivation of hops in the American Northwest. Can you tell your strigs from your bracts, from your bractioles? Eager to learn about how the rich volcanic soil of the Yakima Valley has made it to the ideal environment for hop growing? Yeah, one mention of the hop museum in the back of your dad's sweltering summer road trip RV and you'll be screaming to see the largest ball of twine in the Cascadia region. But plainness hides strangeness. Secrets are contained in the things that your eyes pass and glaze over. Just down the hall from the statue of Charles Capenter, the first to promote commercials of the hop growing east of the Cascades, lies a vending machine. It has Coke and Pepsi and everything you expect, with the only oddity that might catch someone's eye being as the machine had clearly not been replaced since the 70s, as Pepsi still bears its cold, chunky logo. But if you grab the machine at the back in just the right spot and pull, it'll swing back from the wall as light as a feather, and behind it you'll find a featureless wooden door. If you were to go to all this trouble, you'd be the only person to see my handiwork, besides the clients it's made for. If you looked at the blueprints for the American Hops Museum, should you be for some reason so inclined, you would notice that laws of physics remaining intact. The door ought to lead you to a spot in the parking lot, but if you went ahead and opened the door, you would in fact find a luxury hotel room. Or so I've been told. The furnishing of these impossible spaces is usually not part of your contract. I make the space between spaces, the rooms that should not be, and you figure out the Craigslist couch or BDSM equipment as you see fit. This is the work of a crypto architect. We often regard the founder of our field as Sarah Winchester. Her face adorns the first poorly mimeographed page of the Excellence in Cryptography correspondence courses that introduces one to the field. If you have heard of the legendary Winchester Mystery House. You probably know her story, or at least you think you do. Supposedly, she was haunted by the ghosts of all those killed by her husband's eponymous firearms. That she spent years pouring her fortune into a nonsensical house to appease or escape them. Doors that open to brick walls, stairs that go nowhere, rooms no bigger than a few inches wide. The whole labyrinth had become a tidy little tourist attraction. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. See, Mrs. Winchester lived at the time when folks scoffed at the thought of a woman becoming an architect. Hell, in some of the big firms you'll still get a couple of derisive snorts if they see someone with two X chromosomes mucking around with floor plans and blueprints. So Sarah, discovering something within herself, pioneered our art of making rooms that should not be contemporary. Reports will indicate that the Winchester home remained, to all casual observers, the small farmhouse that Sarah had initially purchased. A far cry from the four stories, 40 bedrooms, 17 chimneyed monstrosity that is now a modern attraction. So why now does the building seem to reside in documented and bizarre physical shape, attested to by tens of thousands of tourists? Well, one thing that keeps crypto constructs safe is precisely their impossibility. The ordinary mind, unconditioned to encounter such illogical spaces, will often crack under the pressure and instinctively flee the room while blocking any memory of it having existed. This would be what we might think of as. As a best case scenario. A more troublesome contingency is what we in the business call a fly trap. The intruder becomes convinced that the simultaneous feelings of strangeness and familiarity engendered by our spaces make them the only safe place left in a mad outside world. So your wealthy senator client brings his smoke show young mistress to the secret room on floor eight and a half of the 60 story downtown hotel and finds not an amorous love nest, but the emaciated corpse of some poor refugee from sanity. It kills the mood and leads to a hell of a customer service complaint. But on rare occasions that crypto constructs are passed through by thousands, like the tourist trap that is the Winchester Mystery House. The psychic weight of so many minds poison puzzling over the same space will eventually massage it into something real and physical. But once you're skilled and smart enough to avoid pitfalls, it ain't a bad little industry. Raunchy secret liaisons of the wealthy and powerful tend to be my stock in trade. The family values state senator that likes to take his boy toys in the room behind the vending machine in the hopps Museum just got me a nice new beachfront property. Secrecy will always be at a premium, and secrecy paid off my student loans for my naive, abortive attempt to break into the architectural world of the more usual variety. What can I say? I have unusual skill in high demand and I've always dreamed of making kill a guy and get away with community service money. And then one day opportunity came knocking. I got an email from a friend of mine in the industry saying he had just gotten off this incredible job. Easy, shouldn't take more than a few hours, and it was guaranteed big money. So of course I jumped at the opportunity because I'm nothing if not hungry for a quick buck. He told me he would send them my resume and information and someone should be in touch shortly. A few days later I got a text from an unknown Egyptian Embassy, Los Angeles. Tell them that you're with the Department of HSEC. Bathroom cubicles. Second from right in upstairs office. 8ft high, 3ft wide, length is up to you. Bare concrete single bowl. $3 million to complete in 24 hours. I gave my aforementioned acquaintance a quick call to make sure this all sounded right and he enthusiastically confirmed that everything sounded in order. He sounded a little stunned at the fact I had been offered a sum twice what he had received for the job, but his voice also contained a note of excitement. In our tight knit little industry, any notes of cutthroat competition were dulled by the feeling that we were all pioneers in some strange new art form. The fact that none of us were exactly starving artists helped some. The journey from my home in the Puget Sound area to LA was a fairly uneventful one. Only a sense of paranoia that thrummed in the back of my mind made me occasionally pick out inconspicuous looking people I suspected of glancing at me a little bit too long, my friend had suggested, and all evidence seemed to indicate that this was a secretive government job of some kind. Maybe I had just been watching too many 70s spy thrillers, but I kept looking over my shoulder until I got to the embassy. The building was quiet and as I walked in I suddenly wondered what it was exactly an embassy did from day to day, having never been inside one crazy hand to hand combat like in the Bourne movies. As far as I knew, it could very well be the case, but the drab bureaucratic building was about to see at least a little bit of excitement today, I thought as I strode up to the counter with my briefcase and neatly pressed suit. I gave my name and the sweet looking old lady at the desk blinked in the befuddlement before I added homeland Security and she beamed, gesturing me to a set of stairs behind her desk. I found my way to upstairs bathroom without a problem and feigned a little stage fright at the urinal before the rotund Arab man occupying my workspace had left. As I entered the cubicle, I gagged and muttered some derogatory a comment about his diet. I held my breath as I fumbled around the back of the cistern, calming my mind and envisioning a door opening in the white tiled wall in front of me. Eventually my grasping found the imperfection that would act as a key. A tiny chip in the back of this cistern. I pressed my finger, squeezing the flesh into the tiny space and turned it counterclockwise three times, visualizing a key turning in a door. Just like that, I was stumbling back as the toilet slid towards me, taking five feet of wall with it and leaving a gap to slip behind. All in all, forming the little room took two to three hours. The minute dimensions and bare features made it easy enough, and it only took a little massaging and concentrating to get done. But the light bulb was the real trouble. As previously mentioned, I usually tend to leave furnishing to the client themselves, and as for more complex systems like wiring and plumbing, those were definitely a no go. Without specialist knowledge, making U bends and earth lines out of sheer thought forms tended to go drastically wrong. I sent a message to my client's number informing them the space was prepared, but lighting would have to be done by someone else. I received a terse reply, get it done. At a loss, I reached out to a contact of mine in la. I kept tradesmen that I knew that could keep their mouth shut on hand in a few major cities for just this eventuality. After some confusion at the front desk, I brought my wire bearing savior into the cubicle and squeezed my eyes tight height twisting at the chip in the back of the cistern as the wall slid backlight spilled the color of jaundice onto the tiling. I crouched into the room in confusion. There was now a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling of the concrete den, but it was its companion, casting shivering shadows on the walls that made my heart rise to my throat. A pair of manacles stood suspended by chains from the roof, embedded in the concrete. It appeared the furnishing had already begun. As the electrician began to fire questions my way, my phone buzzed. I glanced at it in the dark and the light bounced off the shaking chains. Asset compromised. Our professional relationship is terminated. Consequences to follow I caught the last plane back to Seattle just as soon as I could, drinking three or four Jack and Cokes to calm my nerves. I should have been angry about the broken contract, but the only emotion my fiery gut could summon was pure animal fear. I tried every way I knew how to contact the acquaintance that had put me onto this job in the first place, but all I could get was his voicemail. Eventually, even that was gone, replaced by a dead click and and eventually one of those robot voice out of service notifications. I haven't left my house in a week or so. At night I dream of that little room behind the cubicle in the embassy. A shadowy figure hangs there and I can see his heartbeat through his chest. I pace the floor of my apartment, desperately begging it to expand. I feel like I can't breathe in here. I tried my front door today and it wouldn't budge in the slightest, as though something were blocking. I damn near broke my shoulder ramming the damn thing, but it would not budge despite the fact that it was clearly unlocked. Mind racing, I decided instead to pull, yanking at the silvery handle with all my might, cold sweat down my back. Eventually, the top of the door separated enough from its frame that I was able to yank at it with my fingernails, peeling it back ever so slightly, like I was peeking into a box of Tupperware. Beyond it, I saw a slab of dense concrete wall. My windows will be the next to go. Crypto architecture is a truly amazing industry. To change and conjure spaces, all you need is a defined, unbroken string of thought. Your mind can get lost in a trance, building and reshaping things unconsciously as its forefront is otherwise occupied. You can hypnotize yourself with a racing series of thoughts like a good tale, unaware of your world shifting imperceptibly around you. By the way, when was the last time you pulled your eyes away from the screen? Does something seem off about the familiar place that you're huddled up in right now? Plainness can hide all sorts of strangeness. You might want to try your nearest doorway.