S10E07 - "The Polyglot Problem" - Drew Blood

Hey friends, it's me again. You know what's really easy to do and even easier to forget? Help me out and hit that like button if you're listening on YouTube. If you're listening somewhere else, what the hell? Pop in and give me a thumb. Say hi while you're at it. Helps me a ton with that damn algorithm. And besides, it's always nice to see you there. Alright then, let's hop on that crazy train. All aboard! Oh, shit. Hey there, friend. Good to have you here on Lucky Friday the 13th. I know people tend to believe the opposite, but you know what I say. They're just glass-half-empty kinds of folks. Me? I say any day that isn't snowing in Texas is a pretty damn nice day. Nothing scary about it. Hey, Chester? Well, that's pretty spooky and all, buddy, but that's the Michael Myers mask. Friday the 13th is the other one, you know? The hockey one? Oh, didn't mean to embarrass him. Well, shit. I'll cut that out in post. Anyway, come on in, friend. Mmm. Hey, check out simplyscarypodcast.com. For as little as $7.99 a month, you get the entire catalog ad-free and available to download or stream. Oh, and if you want to make today feel extra lucky for Chester and I, feel free to pop in at patreon.com forward slash drewblood and sign up there too if you want. Alright, smoke them if you've got them and drink those glasses to the bottom, y'all. Cause old Drewblood's got a tell to tell. And tonight, we welcome author Ambrose Ipsen by way of our friends at Valox Books. In this one, we join a talented linguist who's discovered an ancient language that's supposed to be able to raise the dead. So, without further delay, from author Ambrose Ipsen, I give you the polyglot problem. We need to go. Ethel's voice rang in my ears as I held the corpse close. Skin once warm now grew clammy, and its former ruddiness had given way to a shocking white since death had tightened its grip. The limbs, Wyatt's limbs, were no longer responsive, and the joints were beginning to tighten up as though caked in ice. His heart hadn't stirred in a long while. I'd known it the instant I laid eyes on him in the gutter. Even so, I cradled him in my arms and racked my brain for some way to turn the tide. We need to go. Leave him be, Henry, continued Ethel. She regarded the two of us, slumbering wide in ice, played across the filthy cobblestones of the alley with utter disgust. There's nothing you can do for him. We need to go before someone thinks we had something to do with it, she warned. We did have something to do with it. My gaze rose from the cadaver's dead eyes and were briefly locked with hers. The shudder that passed through her bird-like frame did not escape my notice. He took a walk off that rooftop precisely because he trusted in me. He believed in me, Ethel. Since our arrival, I studiously avoided contact with the pool of red that had gathered on the damp stones and which seeped into the gaps between them. The slick trail, whose fountainhead was the crater in the back of Wyatt's skull. I have to help him! I have to try! Whatever. You do what you want, she snapped. I'm getting out of here. Still, she didn't budge. It was almost as though her curiosity was too great for her to make good on her threat. Ethel didn't believe in me. Unlike Wyatt, she had never seen, heard me work my magic. But she wanted to believe, and the wish kept her rooted to the spot. Cover your ears, I commanded. What? Why? Cover your ears, I repeated. I don't want you to hear this. Not yet. Not until I'm certain I have it right. You're not sure if you can bring him back? You're not sure if you can get it right? Taking a deep breath, I leaned down and began whispering in the dead man's ear. I kept my voice low, delivered each delicate syllable with such stringent enunciation that my throat began to ache. and as the black words left my lips in that alley, I couldn't help remembering. It's said that prior to age nine, children more easily absorbed foreign languages. From personal experience, I'd say that's true enough. I grew up in a bilingual household, dividing my conversations between Spanish and English. English and Spanish both had been learned through something like cosmoses. and I've often wondered what it might have been like had I been exposed to other languages during this formative period. It wasn't until my 11th year that I was introduced to my third language. That tongue, German, was mastered within several months of intense study. The next, Portuguese, was attained with still greater speed on account of its linguistic closeness to my beloved Spanish. By the time I entered high school and began seriously studying Japanese, I could have comfortably enjoyed the title of polyglot. But I didn't stop there. Kanji lessons soon gave way to an interest in Chinese, which I pursued beyond high school and into university. My acquaintance with Arabic began in the spring of my sophomore year when I befriended a handful of exchange students from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Before long, I was enjoying meals of capsa in their homes and getting on like the Shah. I picked up a smattering of French, Italian, and Latin along the way, any of which might have been pursued to the point of total fluency, if not for the thing I encountered early in grad school. Upon completing my undergrad, I was the school's most decorated student in the way of language study, and even most of my professors held me in awe. The ease with which I consumed and mastered new languages was something that most linguists could only dream of and I was encouraged, with not a little financial aid to sweeten the deal, to pursue a doctorate in applied linguistics so that I might leave a tremendous mark on the field, dwarfing even Pinker and Chomsky. It was on my path to do precisely that that I first met Raul Esquito, a linguist and polyglot of serious renown. I had sought him out while choosing a new university, and it wasn't long before the boatload of recommendation letters from my old professors earned me a place at his side. I joined him in his researches into the so-called dead languages of the Proto-Indo-European lineage. Professor Esquito was a stern and exacting character. the stereotypical severe academic, but in him I found the spark of true genius. Like me, new languages flowed into him as freely as water, and within a short while of our introduction, I dare say the celebrated professor and I hit it off. Whereas many of the other grad students working beneath him were mere careerists looking for grant money with which to fund researches into their pet theories, Mosquito and I shared a love for language itself, and long were the nights we spent over coffee speaking with one another in more languages than one might hear at an international airport terminal. A few months into my grad school career, I wound up gaining the professor's confidence, and it was then that he shared with me his ultimate aim, a thing he had been working towards since his own time in grad school. It was his intention to dig deep into the past and to resurrect the languages of the Proto-Indo-European peoples, languages which had not been spoken in many thousands of years, but whose far-reaching bowels entangled almost every modern tongue. To do such a thing was no small task. In fact, though predecessors of ours had long pined to decode such ancient tongues, most had surrendered without having made the least progress towards a meaningful summary. We were seeking to understand languages with no living speakers, and which had risen at such a time when writing was nigh unheard of. As such, there weren't any ancient texts we could puzzle over. A few experts over the years had referenced certain inscriptions in stone found throughout the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, but these had never furnished anything like real leads, except perhaps for one. Some years prior, a burial site had been uncovered on the Pontic Caspian Steppe in Moldova by archaeologists. On account of governmental interference and other bureaucratic headaches, their findings were some time in being published. While the discovery of an ancient burial site had initially been met with some excitement, by the time the team's write-ups began turning up in journals, the vast majority of academics had set their sights elsewhere, but not Professor Esquito. Delving deeply into the details of the dig, and corresponding with certain of its leaders over the course of weeks, the professor had become aware of certain etchings in clay which had been found there, but which had not been included in the final reports. On account of the region and the suspected age of the ruins, Esquito believed that this might be a long-awaited physical trace of a proto-Indo-European language, or one of its near-descendants. The professor wasn't long in making plans to visit the site. A flight to Moldova for him and his assistants would be costly, however, and at the time the area was still being closely managed by local authorities, which meant endless red tape. Ah, but when it came to greasing palms and parting donors from their grant money, none were more skilled than Professor Esquito, and within a month of back and forth, he had more or less cemented a plan to visit the dig in person the following spring. As both a cost-saving measure and the bulwark against intrusions by less qualified minds, Mosquito made the decision to travel with only a single assistant. After many months of the fruitful cooperation already discussed, I was very pleased to be offered that role, and in the spring, prepared to set out on a trip that would change my life forever. Dreams of book deals, of lengthy television interviews, and moneyed professorships at top schools filled my head in the days leading up to our departure Now unless one is unduly invested in the goings at my alma mater or else a keen disciple of linguistics, the sudden disappearance of Professor Raul Esquito that spring is unlikely to have registered. In my personal circles, though, I can say only that his vanishment led to a tidal wave of attention, which was, at least partially, responsible for my exit from academia shortly thereafter. I would go on to give, after that long night, an account of Esquito's last known movements. Whether questioned by authorities foreign or domestic, my story never changed. This is not to say, however, that I told the truth. For, you see, there were certain things about that trip that I could not tell. There were things about it that would have not been believed, frankly. Somehow, there are times when I don't believe the truth of the whole affair myself, and yet I played an instrumental role in the odd horrors that took place that night on the moonlit steppe. The dig site was quite remote, and at the time of our arrival was manned only by a small handful of semi-local workers whose English was rudimentary. After a long drive via SUV across the steppe, we were welcomed at the edge of a vast pit where excavators had tunneled out large segments of the landscape. This great space, supposed to have been part of an ancient burial ground more than 8,000 years old, was accessible only by ladder. That is, one had to carefully descend one of three steel ladders to reach the dusty stone floor below. Having secured access to the site for a number of days, Esquito and I were assisted by the men on site in lowering our things down into the pit. We had brought a good deal of food and water, tents, simple bedding, and other necessities in tightly bound packs, and at once began touring the ruins in search of the inscriptions the archaeologists had spoken of. These, it turned out, were in the deepest and least accessible portion of the site. There existed on the eastern fringe something of a burrow lined only with a rickety wooden ladder. To climb down into it was to find oneself far beneath the world in a cavernous chamber, some twenty feet in width and length, but with low ceilings. Sure enough, numbers of fragile clay tablets had been heaped there by a long dead hand, bearing the inscrutable markings of a bygone age and tongue. I remember how we marveled at them, how we ran our fingers over the ancient marks with shudders of excitement. I remember, too, their alienage, for the markings didn't resemble any writing system then known to us. At least, not initially. To put the matter bluntly, this deep chamber was all we had come to see, and after our arrival, we scarcely left it. Hunched and working by lamplight, the two of us carefully arranged the brittle old tablets and began a really thorough survey of them. We took our mules amongst them, slept just outside the hole that led down to them, and subjected them to intense scrutiny. We were not long, perhaps only a day and a half, in drawing parallels between this mystery tongue and newer, more familiar languages. It was Ischido who had the first eureka moment. By studying the arrangement of the marks and finding patterns in their sequencing, he inferred correctly the presence of a sort of primordial punctuation scattered about each tablet. Later, while studying one specimen in particular, I happened upon a set of marks that tugged at the threat of memory, and together we established their kinship to Markins in another ancient script, this one already having been translated by some of our contemporaries. With this, we were off to the races. The deciphering of a language by this method is very much a process of trial and error, and without recourse to a native speaker, one can never be completely certain of things like proper pronunciation. Nevertheless, we worked tirelessly from morning till night, connecting certain dots and finding in this forgotten language many hidden similarities to other ancient tongues. By day four, we were well and truly convinced that we had stumbled upon something far greater than a Proto-Indo-European language. This, we began to excitedly believe, could be something of a mother tongue to all extant languages. One night, before we settled in the bed, still buzzing with the thrill of discovery, Esquito put it this way. Think of it, Henry. We may have just discovered the language of the garden. I shared in his enthusiasm at the time, and even now I have no doubts that the tongue we poured over was indeed ancient. It was, in fact, something sinister. Something that had probably been better off forgotten. The disappearance to which I have alluded took place early one evening as our work was winding down, and the step was treated to a light rain. By this time, Professor Esquito and I had begun working out a fragmented grammar, and had even begun parsing declensions. At every turn, this ancient language was showing signs of life. Our notes were voluminous, and already my mentor had been making plans to entreat both the local authorities and our benefactors out west for more time at the site. He thought our work easily the most important of his career, and theorized that when we were through, our efforts would prove as influential and well-known as the Rosetta Stone. As I have said, the site was maintained by Moldovan men vetted by the local authorities. These men were given to lengthy lapses in their surveillance. Given that the dig site was so remote, they wagered rightly that it would be of little interest to outsiders, and that its distance from civilization alone was enough to keep it protected. While they should have been keeping a close eye on things and assisting the professor and I with our doings, the men often stole away to the nearest village to drink away their shifts with dark-haired women, an arrangement which suited Esquido and I just fine, for it saved us the trouble of trying to communicate with them in our admittedly fragmented Romanian. The two of us were quite alone on the site then, when the incident occurred. Seeking after a morsel of food to fuel him during the final leg of our night's researches, he left me in the lower chamber and began ascending the ladder to the main floor where our supplies were stored. He made it only a few rungs up the thing when with the sickening crunch, the worm-eating wood gave way and he came crashing back down into the subterranean chamber, where he landed on his head and went immediately still. I answered the commotion with amusement at first, believing he had dropped something or merely lost his footing on the crummy old ladder. But as I moved to the mouth of the pit and found him sprawled across the floor with eyes bulging and mouth agape, I understood that he had sustained truly traumatic injuries and sought to tend to him at once. Alas, my skill in medicine is not nearly so great as my skill in language, and at any rate, there are few remedies for a broken neck. Professor Isquito died in something of a freak accident that evening, and I now found myself alone with him in the deepest reaches of the dig site. You may well imagine my upset and terror, and I went on to make a terrible racket from the bottom of the pit. I tried to salvage the old ladder, to claw my way back to the surface but to little effect. Even on the best of days, the thing had never been especially sturdy. What's more, despite the awful cries I threw into the air to the point of utter hoarseness, no one ever came to my aid. Our local handlers had absconded to this or that watering hole, as was their custom, and in doing so had sentenced me to spend a night underground with my dead professor. A few hours passed, and night fell upon me with the hardness of iron. Hunger and thirst might have nipped ceaselessly at my heels if not for the fright and revulsion I felt at my predicament. Instead, I felt them only intermittently. We had been in the habit of camping within the dig site, some ten or fifteen feet down, and even from there, with the shadows of the settlement's ancient walls upon us, I had found the nights quite dark. in the little chasm that led into the chamber packed with tablets however i learned the true meaning of darkness and if not from my lamp and the professor's would have thought myself blind I did what I could with Esquito's body, arranged it carefully, and tried to show some reverence. But when shock and horror gave way to numbness in the smallest hours, I retreated back into the cavern a little ways toward the lamps and sought to distract myself. I had nothing much to busy myself with but the work at hand, of course, and so it was then, slowly, I resumed the effort that Esquito and I had been so absorbed in just hours before. With the late professor's notes in my own close at hand, I continued to pore over the clay tablets, drawing still more parallels between their markings and those of other extinct languages. At first, I did it only to keep myself calm, to give my mind something healthy to fixate on in the face of a mortal fright. I admit, however, with no little embarrassment, that I soon became so enchanted with my work that I occasionally forgot that my professor's body lay in repose nearby. The hours fell away and the creatures of the steppe sang their nocturnal songs. I plugged away at my translations with almost maniacal gusto, and from down below my voice joined the nightly chorus. Tenuously, fitfully, I gave voice to words older than any known empire. The tablet that I made most progress on, and which subsequently most intrigued me, seemed to have something to do with ancient burial rites, or care of the dead, a most appropriate topic considering my circumstances. I tugged at every word, filled pages with conjectures about single characters, and got into the habit of fastidiously copying the original text in my field notebook. As far as I could tell, this particular tablet was a kind of religious fright, and having made considerable strides over the preceding days, I tried my hand at phonetics. Line by line stumbling many times I thought my way through the tablet contents aloud As one can imagine with each subsequent pass while liberally referencing both my notes and the professor I improved I imagined myself the newest in a long line of eons dead high priests pronouncing an unmentionable rite in a shadowed temple surrounded only by flickering candlelight Again and again I spoke the words, tightening my approach gradually, until I was reasonably sure that my delivery was authentic. I had in this selection a real triumph, a key which would make the contents of the other tablets intelligible to me, and which would allow me to resurrect the long-dead tongue. The success I'd had would surely go on to fill many gaps in other language families as well, would put to rest many doubts plaguing not only Proto-Indo-European languages, but tongues as disparate as Coptic and Etruscan. Though Esquito was dead, his labors would live on, and he would become, in short order, a household name. So engrossed was I in my labors that I did not at once notice the sudden burst of movement from the other end of the cavern. It was only when I paced slowly toward the exit, my eyes sore from hours of uninterrupted reading by the harsh lamplight, that I discovered my mentor sitting upright on the floor, his back resting against the fragments of the shattered ladder. I had not left him in that position. Of that I was sure. Neither had his face been twisted in an infernal smirk when last I'd laid eyes on him. Yet there he was, grinning toothily from ear to bluish ear. P-P-Professor? I remember crying out, though nothing in his expression or bearing any longer called Raul Esquido to mind. The body, the general outline, was his, but in that dim hovel. I couldn't get away from the feeling that something else dwelt in the space he used to occupy. With another staggered step, the lamp at my side, I discovered that the odd angle of his head, turned harshly leftward to a degree more befitting than Al's, was the result of a clearly fractured neck. The jumble of vertebral wreckage jutted almost through his skin, and the whole swollen mass palpitated with his every wheezy breath, as though on the verge of violent rupture. The professor did not respond. Instead, somehow, he gained his feet. The movement was remarkably eerily fluid for one who should have been, at the very least, paralyzed from the neck down. His gaze roamed upward, strained in search of the night sky, and when he found it, Eskido did a thing which I can only recount with a queasy stomach and a shudder. that can in no retelling be denied. Hands outstretched, he muttered something to me in a low, distant voice, and in a tongue, I might add, which I did not immediately recognize. From there, grasping at the smooth walls of the vertical passage with his palms and fingers, he scurried animal-like up its length, pitting stubborn feet, elbows, whatever was necessary to facilitate his climb. and what should have been an almost impossible feat, even in perfect health, is Skeeto fought his way up the burrow and went crawling out into the dig site proper. I heard him pace away from the mouth of the aperture, heard what I thought was the tread of feet upon the nearest steel ladder, and then I heard nothing more. I called out to him for aid despite my fear, but my calls brought no reply. Raul had freed himself from the underground passage and had subsequently stalked off across the steppe in the dead of night. The professor's whereabouts ever since have been a subject of much conjecture. I personally have no idea where he's gone in the years since that fateful night. For a time, I was even less sure how it was that he had moved in the first place. It wasn't until later, when I'd had a little space from the incident and an opportunity to think, that I recalled the few words he'd spoken to me prior to making his exit, and I suddenly understood. Mosquito had spoken to me in the tongue of the cavern, the one that we'd been working so hard to translate, and subsequent study on my part has convinced me that they were words of thanks. thanks, that is, for having resurrected him. I realized in the hours after the ghoulish escape that the whole thing had been my doing. By sitting in that dark chasm, repeating the ancient text again and again, I had unwittingly performed the ride of an ancient sect with only the dead man present to hear. Mosquito's dead limbs had stirred in answer to my speech. His heart had begun pumping on account of my fevered recitations. Without realizing it, I had tapped into a malefic power, the likes of which modern men have only dreamed of. This black ancient tongue was no mere antecedent to contemporary languages. It was a thing possessed of real power. Power over life and death, it seemed to me. I was not rescued from the pit until early the next afternoon. Slumbering in the hovel, I awoke to the curious shouts of our Moldovan hosts and was hastily assisted. With my things in tow, I climbed out of the pit and helped myself to all the food and drink I could stand, struggling all the while to tell them that the professor had gone in the night. It would not be until the first of many official inquiries by regional authorities that I would be really pressed for answers, and to these suited men I gave more or less the same version of events. Late in the night, Professor Esquito had unexpectedly left the dig site. I had tried to follow, but the latter had been left in ruin after his ascent. I did not know where he had gone, I insisted, and hadn't the foggiest about his plans. All this was true enough, and interested parties both in Moldova and Stateside could tell plainly that I had been blindsided by Esquito's departure. I was cleared ultimately of all suspicions, and the professor's vanishment was laterally considered to be related to stress, mental illness, or something similarly banal. Only I knew the truth. Only I knew that the man had been clinically dead for some hours, and that he had been returned to life on account of my infernal babbling in that shadowed hole in the ground. Had I not spoken things that should have not been spoken, the matter might have come to a simpler resolution. It is a wonder that my belongings were not searched more thoroughly, for had they been inspected clinically, the presence of Esquito's personal jottings and the painstaking copies of the original Claiborne texts on my person might have raised a few eyebrows. Funnily, my handwritten reproductions of the tablet inscriptions are now effectively the originals. For in the hours before my rescue, when I realized what it was I had done through my utterances, I ground the originals into powder so that none might ever reference them. The destruction of these precious and remarkable artifacts would not be mourned. As previously stated, the archaeologists who had discovered the site had failed to mention the tablets in their article, making it so that only a handful of men on the planet were aware of their existence. In the event that their destruction did come to light, well, I figured it would be a very simple matter to pin the blame on the site's easy-going Moldovan caretakers, whose lapses into revelry had left the place unprotected from would-be vandals on many occasions. I wish I could say that my acquaintance with the dread script ended there. In fact, only my affiliations with academia wound to a close after that ill-fated trip. I dropped out of grad school within days of returning to the U.S. and instead turned to a life of independent study. With what little money I had sopped away, along with contributions from friends and family, I cobbled together something of a gap year while trying to decide what to do next. The detailed notes on the black script and the careful reproductions I had made of the tablets were always close at hand no matter where I traveled or what I got up to, and more often than not, I found myself delving ever deeper into the language. It was no longer my goal to enlighten, however. I no longer cared for Esquito's vision, had completely turned my back on the field of linguistics. Instead, I sought to leverage the evil tongue, to somehow use it as a means of self-enrichment. There is money to be made in necromancy. To raise the dead, to give hope to the hopeless, is to count immense riches. Who might pay a greater price for a dead son than a grieving mother? Would not a devoted widower give anything to see his dear wife again? Through careful study of the forbidden tongue, I planned to sharpen my skill and monetize it. It is true that my resurrection of Professor Esquito had not gone well, but neither had the course been planned. I wagered that a greater command of the language paired with sheer force of will could result in a more wholesome and lucrative vivification of the dead. Of course, this was a degraded and filthy course. I never had any illusions about the ethics of such a thing. Playing with the dead, conjuring up imitations of the living. It was all a sordid business. Propelled by demonic curiosity and bald want, I threw myself into it nevertheless. Eight months after dropping out of grad school, I moved across the country to a rural area. It was there that I made my first necromantic attempt in earnest, and in secret. Volunteering at a small care home dealing with the terminally ill, I kept my ear to the ground and waited for news of passing residents. There were many who had been deposited there by distant and uncaring family, and my pleas to sit with them in their final hours were confused for goodness by all who heard them. Instead, like a vulture awaiting the choice's pickings, I sat at the bedside of a dying octogenarian and listened for his final breath. When the last gasp had passed his shaken lips, my own instantly began to wag with the guttural tones of the pit None were more astonished than I when old Mr Parker 87 years old bed and suffering from incurable cancer suddenly rose up from his bed and attacked his nurses after my shift was through. The local news was briefly swamped by the story, which told of the man's sudden physical vigor, mental collapse, and savage treatment of staff. My little experiment happened to prolong the man's life by a few more months and resulted in a young nurse getting one of her eyes brutally gouged and her nose broken. Like the last time with Professor Esquito, something had gone wrong. The man had returned to life, yes, but he had come back different. The light had gone from him and darkness had nestled into the open spaces. Why this had occurred, why darkness and violence appeared to be the inheritance of all those resurrected by the ancient Rhyme, was a mystery to me. But I was committed to my work. The kinks would be ironed out eventually, I told myself. The next body I experimented on was that of a young woman, a drug addict. I had long since moved on to a big city and had been watching the area's junkies with a certain covetousness. One night, word went round that a pretty young thing had been duped with fentanyl-laced goods, and her corpse's presence in the back room of a club was going to make a real headache for the proprietor. A few club-goers gawked in curiosity. A few went on to dial authorities. By the time the ambulance rolled up, however, the girl was long gone, and I with her. With music thudding in the other room, I'd locked the door and knelt beside her cooling corpse, which had been left propped against the bench. With great care, I leaned in and whispered the words I had long committed to memory into her ears. Every line of dialogue went punching into her eardrum, and it wasn't long before the rest of her body responded to the rhythm. She jerked awake as though she had been Narcaned and flew at once from the bench. With a terrible scream, she ripped at her bottle-blind hair and made for the nearest exit door. I followed at her heels, waiting for the shock of resurrection to cease. It did seemingly after five or ten minutes, when we found ourselves hovering alone near a shuttered convenience store and bathed in the neon lights of nearby storefronts. There, twitching and slumped, she turned and fixed me with crystal clear eyes. How are you feeling? I asked, extending a hand. She didn't take it. She didn't move toward me at all, her gaze narrowing. What's your name? I chanced. Hugh Genie, came the reply in a cold and distant voice. She clutched at herself a little, chest rising and falling as she fought to savor a breath. And who... who are you? My name's Henry, I explained, slipping both hands into my pocket so as to put her at ease. I heard you were in trouble and I wanted to help you. At this, the woman shuddered. Her expression, previously unsteady with dreamy unease, hardened into something animalistic. Her clear eyes became clouded by hatred, and her delicate features were quickly wrenched in service of telegraph in the same. The words that flowed from her lips shortly thereafter cannot be reproduced here, not simply on account of their filthiness and combativeness, but because they were uttered in the black tongue. Cast in brilliant neon and seething with an otherworldly anger, the creature before me bristled with the promise of violence. I confessed that I fled before she could make good on her threat, and after a few more nights of constantly looking over my shoulder for the mess of my own creation, I quietly moved on to another city on the opposite coast. Dozens Over the years there had been dozens of attempts at resurrection. Each time I had succeeded in bringing the subjects back to life, though it was only life of a kind. I had never once succeeded in returning a person back to their natural state. Somewhere along the line, somewhere between death and new life, something integral was lost and something infernal moved in. This happened to a greater or lesser degree without exception. and each time my subject would either escape from me and vanish into the wide world or else I would be forced to run. And now, with Wyatt's body clutched to my bosom, I wondered if this time would be any different, if ever it could be different. After my litany of failures, I had decided to seek outside help. The formation of a society, a cult, would allow me to share my work with others, and also to refine it through their talents and insights. Wyatt had been among the first members of this bold new group, and had seen my abilities firsthand. Ethel, a newcomer, had been drawn in by rumors but very much remained a skeptic. Now, kneeling in the alley, I had a choice to make. Wyatt had wished to help me with my research. If something were to happen to me, you could bring me back, Henry, he had opined. It'd be cool to experience that. Perished the thought, I said with a chuckle, not knowing at the time what he had planned. We'll find other bodies, other subjects. I tell you, I'm very close to perfecting this. I'm nearly fluent in the old tongue, and once I've harnessed it correctly, I'll begin passing it on to you and the others. But imagine... Wyatt had pressed on just nights before. What if there was a shortcut? What if, you know, I died and you brought me back? So far, you've only really worked on strangers. I remember that guy in Des Moines. He wasn't that communicative or friendly even before he died. But you and me, we're friends. We get along. We understand each other. I could explain to you what it feels like. I could explain to you my impressions and all the things that- No, Wyatt. Let's stick to the plan, shall we? He hadn't obeyed my orders. Trusting that he was doing me a tremendous service and that I would be able to resurrect him intact where I had failed in dozens of others, he had plunged to his death from several stories up. I gazed up at Ethel, clearing my throat. Cover your ears, I commanded. What? She asked, combing a lock of dark hair from her eyes. Why? Cover your ears, I insisted. I don't want you to hear this. Not yet. Not until I'm certain I have it right. You're not sure if you can bring him back? You're not sure if you can get it right? I glanced down at Wyatt's face, strangely serene. I knew that what I was doing was wrong, that my meddling with life and death would leave me damned. By now, the devils were preparing a place for me in the infinite furnace, or tending coals with my name on them. It seemed a crime to disturb Wyatt's sleep. He could enjoy this peace forever, could slumber for eternity without ever having to know the pain and confusion I had subjected so many other innocents to in my pursuit of knowledge and gain. But as I leaned down and began whispering into his ear, I told myself that this time might be different. This time, maybe, I would get it right. And that was The Polyglot Problem by Ambrose Ipsen. A good reminder that dead languages got that way for a reason. So, watch your mouth. A little about the author. Once upon a time, a young Ambrose Ipsen discovered a collection of ghost stories on his father's bookshelf, and was never the same again. Heh, I found some books in my father's closet one time. I was never the same either, buddy. Anyway, apart from horror fiction, he enjoys coffee brewed strong. Ambrose has written nearly 50 novels and short story collections, so if you like what you've heard, there's plenty more where that came from. This story is from his book From the Heart, 13 Tales of Terror, which is available on VALOX Books and on Audible.com. Hey, thanks, Ambrose. And do old Drew Blood a favor, would you? Subscribe to his podcast wherever you do your listening and leave him a five-star review and a kind word, even if you're listening on YouTube. He needs soldiers on all fronts to win this battle, and he appreciates it. 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If selected, you'll get the full treatment, 10 Bananas. Well, I guess this is where we part ways, at least till next week. So grab a drink for the road, friend. And don't you worry about me this Friday the 13th. It can't touch the luck of the Irish. You, though? Well, may the wind be at your back, and may the road rise up to meet you. Hey, here's a big shout-out to another group of my patrons. Brian Brillo. What's up, buddy? Hey, Adita. Mindbender, I can't forget you. Let's see, Mark from Earth. Hey, buddy. There's Franklin, Crazy Tim Finley, Mary Brady, Ross Scott, Cassie Hall, Drake Walsh. And let's see, let me pick another. Hey, Claire Brown. And a great big thank you to all my patrons. I love you all. So until next time, friends, go fuck yourselves. Good night, y'all. Oh.