HER HORRORWEEN - The Three Deaths of the Blue Moon Ripper

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_06] You're gonna think I'm crazy. You assume I don't already? Last night, right after I listened to that record.

[00:00:06] [SPEAKER_02] And now, a thrilling science fiction adventure, The Chronicles of Astromos.

[00:00:11] [SPEAKER_06] I didn't just black out or fall asleep. It was like I was pulled into some other world.

[00:00:16] [SPEAKER_02] What the heck?

[00:00:19] [SPEAKER_04] Martin? Well, hot dog! I knew you'd be back!

[00:00:22] [SPEAKER_05] No, no, no, no, no, no, no! Another world? The world of the record. It was this big space opera with cheesy heroes and villains and stuff. They're trying to save the galaxy.

[00:00:33] [SPEAKER_04] You hear that? We have a mission!

[00:00:35] [SPEAKER_05] Chill, Martin. Chill. This is a dream. This is all a dream.

[00:00:38] [SPEAKER_04] I do not wish to interrupt your chill. Please, I need to save my people.

[00:00:42] [SPEAKER_05] What I need is to figure out what happened to me.

[00:00:45] [SPEAKER_00] The Chronicles of Astromos, starring Darren Criss, Maya Hawke, Alfred Molina, and Kate Mulgrew. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:00:54] [SPEAKER_04] I don't wanna die! You think I do?

[00:00:56] [SPEAKER_07] Listen up, thrillers. A quick note. Tonight's devious audio delight contains adult content and language. Please see the content warnings in the show notes.

[00:01:26] [SPEAKER_03] Something's different about number four. She smells spooky. I climb inside her broken window. Fever in my veins and moonlight on my back. And find her wide asleep in bed. Eyes open but far away. Obsidian pupils collecting moondust.

[00:01:48] [SPEAKER_03] Instead of bubblegum innocence and pop star pinups, number four's midnight bedroom haunts of ancient mud and cobwebs. And something scratches inside the grimy walls. She doesn't flinch as I lean over her in my piggy mask and shackles. Doesn't scream like the others. As rising consciousness shifts her dusty gaze my way.

[00:02:18] [SPEAKER_03] So damn lovely up close. This mystic creature of silken nightgown and bare shoulders. Inked skin and silver piercings. She accelerates my fever. I push back against the rising hackles of spine and the splitting of skin. Lunar toxins boiling my veins. I brandish the shackles.

[00:02:46] [SPEAKER_03] They won't contain my beast. They'll keep number four in place for it. But as I capture her wrists, this one doesn't thrash or beg to death gods. She watches me. Paralyzed by a tranquil, terrible awe. Redolent of formaldehyde and grave roses. As if she's a corpse already. And now she smiles.

[00:03:15] [SPEAKER_03] The unexpected thrill of it shoves me back a step into the burning full lunar light. Breeze in that smile. Eerie and dauntless. My moon-drunk heartbeat rages faster. Blood like quickfire, difficult to control. My skin overheats now with sweat and bulge. Flesh prickling, blistering, aching to crack open and expose the feral menace inside.

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_03] But something crunches beneath my bare feet. Slimy, papery membranes.

[00:03:53] [SPEAKER_02] Cocoons?

[00:03:56] [SPEAKER_03] The fever cools a degree. All around, shadows spasm in the high cobwebs. Squirmy bugs snagged in spider silk. Are those...? I blink, my moon-lathed vision sharp and disbelieving. More oozing chrysalises encrust the walls like tiny, vacant death shrouds. And Number Four's tattoos.

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_03] They twitch and rise. Inky bruises crawl along her bare shoulders. Wormy with spider-bent legs and dusty black wings. Fucking butterflies, I hate butterflies. A scratching inside the walls grows louder. Number Four's lips ripple and tiny, insectile legs poke through like hatchlings.

[00:04:53] [SPEAKER_09] Shall we begin?

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_03] She hisses inside my skull. And an eerie bile of deja vu sticks up inside me. My words. Words I've spoken three times before. Shall we begin? Her smile unhinges and eyes glitter inside her throat, multifaceted savage, cursed. They explode from her mouth. A furious, fluttering black mist.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_03] Chaotic wings swarm my pity mask and squeeze inside, infesting me. Velvet bodies invade my mouth, wiggle up my nostrils, ears, the hollows of my eyes, filling me, smothering my fever, blacking out my moonlight. Fucking butterflies. I thrash and beat at my head, choking on spotted wings, gasping for moonlight, gasping for transformation. Where has the fever gone?

[00:05:50] [SPEAKER_03] I claw at myself, clawing, clawing before the eggflies have their slippery way with me. I transform, I do, bones cracking. But I can't feel the moonlight. My deep-throated snarl becomes a trio of screaming voices. Then darkness beats wing and drags me under.

[00:06:22] [SPEAKER_03] Number one. The virgin with the dandelion hair. I wake atop someone else's moonlit bed, choking. My voice rasps, hideously effeminate. And something parasitic squirms inside my airpipe. Foreign. Slick. I curl fetal beneath perfumed bedsheets, hacking it up, birthing it from the parting chrysalis of my lips.

[00:06:52] [SPEAKER_03] A wet spasm of wings. A butterfly. Fully formed. It flits a spiral across the room and settles on floral wallpaper. Black wings with pale blue spots like glowing moons. I glare, refusing to tremble. The fuck is this?

[00:07:20] [SPEAKER_03] They call me the Blue Moon Ripper. Not because I do my savage work beneath the full moon, though I do. And not because I rip my girls apart without leaving a trace of myself. No fingerprints. No human DNA. But because something does remain. Every time. The first, I barely noticed. The second, I dismissed the coincidence.

[00:07:49] [SPEAKER_03] But the third time. Detectives christened me a serial killer. And named me after the blue moon butterflies found in every victim's bedroom. They think the butterflies are my calling card. But they're not mine. Half groggy and cool of vain, I stagger off the ruffled mattress.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_03] The butterfly sticks to the wall. Just above a perfume bottle vanity. Wings pulsing a slow heartbeat. I tighten a fist. Eager to pound the wretched egg fly into a velvet paste. Except my limbs feel noodle-weak and languid. In this bedroom's teen-bop posters and bubblegum frill are distracting and familiar.

[00:08:43] [SPEAKER_03] A glimpse a dewy face in the vanity's mirror and freeze like the predator I am. Amber freckles, golden halo puff of dandelion hair. Willowy and supple for the plucking. My muscles tense and stiffen. Hunter scenting prey. I know this girl. Not her name, but her number. Number one.

[00:09:13] [SPEAKER_03] This is her bedroom. Her layer of pink lip gloss and stuffed animals and wistful teen romance novels. Last time I was here, everything was dripping. And this one was home alone for the weekend. Wrists so thin, they nearly slipped the shackles. Soft-footing the doe, I shadow closer. And so does my girl in the mirror.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_03] Relax, sweetheart, I'm just passing by, I say. But the mirror girl mouths the words. And my voice isn't mine. I touch my throat. And my smooth, beardless chin. So does my reflection. An obscene thrill prickles through me. Because I'm wearing this girl. A wolf possessing maiden flesh. A hell?

[00:10:15] [SPEAKER_03] Somewhere in the house, glass breaks. Footsteps haunt the hallway, floorboards moaning outside the bedroom door. A wolf. Instantly, a musky dire terror pumps through this body I wear. The primal pulse beat of woodland prey and hunted girls. Moonlight blazes through the window, radiant and dominant and overbright, offering up no shadows to hide in. No time to close the curtains. The bedroom door moans inward and a man steps inside.

[00:10:47] [SPEAKER_03] Naked and breathing hard, fevered muscles twitching, shoulders bulging, gloriously obscene. He wears only a greasy rubber piggy mask, yellow-eyed beneath. Can that be me? It's like having double vision. Hyper real, yet eerily transcendent. I stand in awe of myself. And I remember this moment.

[00:11:15] [SPEAKER_03] How surprised I was to find the girl with the dandelion hair already awake and posing in front of her vanity. Her mangled gasp of terror. A sound that now escapes me. Reality becomes a mirror, dizzy and inverse, existentially backwards. Fear tastes like dusty wings in my mouth. The man in the piggy mask produces a set of shackles.

[00:11:41] [SPEAKER_03] He locks one cuff around himself, then tosses me the open end. A familiar metallic clatter. I catch it in delicate, weafish hands and perform for myself an eerie, obedient favor. Hands trembling against this body's adrenaline instincts, I snap the cuff around my pale, freckled wrist, like a perverse umbilical cord, merging two souls together.

[00:12:10] [SPEAKER_03] The man in the piggy mask steps into the moonlight, closing in, dwarfing me. Shall we begin? I've never watched myself transform before. Only felt the exquisite agony from the inside out. The crackling and straining of bones against the skin. The peeling away of tendons and flesh. The savage, wetting of fangs. This outsider perspective is a gift. To wear virgin eyes.

[00:12:40] [SPEAKER_03] To witness my own divinity. Then the beast before me snarls, scenting the vulnerable, freckled flesh I wear. Gruesome terror eclipses my awe. Black-winged and swift as death. Another involuntary blood rush of mortal panic. Our conjoined chains tremble, and the monster he's become lunges. A beast of rabid, gleeful hunger. Of flesh-stained, misshapen nightmares. Our rapture should be transcendent.

[00:13:14] [SPEAKER_03] But there's nothing exquisite about this agony. Number 2. A Slut With The Swollen Eyes When I wake this second time, I come up ravaged. Invasive fangs and saliva still sinking through me. Still defiling me. Still cutting soul-deep scars even as I wear new flesh. I clutch at my throat.

[00:13:45] [SPEAKER_03] Gagging on silent screams that transform into wings. A butterfly squirms free of me. Slick and unfurling. Its silhouette teases the oily dark. These new eyes I wear come crusty and sore. And I can still feel the foggy weight of tears inside my lungs. The room has changed. Still not my own, though familiar.

[00:14:16] [SPEAKER_03] Brown, austere, checkout times on the door. Blackout drapes. Probably a bible in the drawer for all the good it's worth. A table lamp casts sallow light over a nightstand and two fallen bottles. One of pills and one of booze. This one. This pathetic, wasted body I now wear. Wept and sniveled and self-loathed herself into a blackout sleep. Don't know what woke me.

[00:14:47] [SPEAKER_03] Maybe the beast standing at the foot of the bed. I can just make out the outline of the man's piggy mask. My mask. And the intimate naked cut of flank and shoulder. I remember this night, too. I kept the drapes drawn against the parking lot, even though I craved the rush of moonlight.

[00:15:12] [SPEAKER_03] Something about number two and the cheap scent of her bar-slut grief fed the fever as I waited in muddy darkness, slowly and fully transforming. By the time she woke, already shackled, the simple whites of her eyes ignited a ravenous fury. Now, instinct whimpers inside my throat. Fight or flight.

[00:15:39] [SPEAKER_03] I can still feel the teeth savaging through me. Still feel the horrors from the last girl. Writhing. Shaming. Staining. I want to claw the memory from my mind. Chains rattle around my ankle. And the beast's musky, feral cravings stink up the night. I make the mistake of glancing up, of meeting the yellow eyes beneath the piggy mask with the whites of my own.

[00:16:10] [SPEAKER_03] Shall we begin? Wait, you idiot. I'm you. The beast pounces, crushing me beneath a greasy blur of twisted flesh and slavering urges. I lash out and resist, a frenzy of desperation before the return of bone-ripping agony. I try to form words to alert myself to myself, to quell the beast. But only screams escape me. These futile limbs I've been cursed to possess.

[00:16:40] [SPEAKER_03] This whimpering female puppet. This moon-crossed body tears apart like soggy tissue paper. Such inevitable savagery. Such a tragic, sinking, black-winged escape. Fighting, flailing, nothing is enough. All I can do is scream and gasp and gurgle. Until all I can do... Is die.

[00:17:11] [SPEAKER_03] Number three. The hag with the smeared lipstick. Waking, I jerk upright in an antique bed. Ringing a heavy dinner bell of chains. My wrists thrust backward, already locked to number three's headboard. A third chain encircles my ankles and snakes off the bed. I know to look for danger in the inky corner by the window,

[00:17:39] [SPEAKER_03] even before my age-blurry eyes adjust to the shadow-edged moonlight. Messed-up head ghosts and deep-cut scars and an obscene, festering helplessness nest inside me. My mouth panics open, frantic to cough up butterfly wings and frail pleas. Fucking hell, I can't endure myself again.

[00:18:05] I know you're there.

[00:18:07] [SPEAKER_03] I cry out in a wheezing, dusty voice. Deja vu hammering inside this hag's old splinter-bone chest. A damn butterfly haunts the air, unseen, unchallenged. I first saw number three in the market. A crooked smear of her lipstick. The way it bled into the crow cracks around her mouth.

[00:18:35] [SPEAKER_03] Waxy red gore staining her dentures. This one clung to a beauty that had fled years ago. Yet I could still smell the glory inside her. Doesn't matter how old a girl gets. Inside, they all possess the same lovely meat. That's why I shadowed number three home to her lonesome cabin and marked her for the full moon. Now the piggy mask tilts its head.

[00:19:04] [SPEAKER_03] Raw menace creaking forward from corner shadows. Dousing flesh in nourishing moonlight. Shall we begin? No, wait, wait, I know you, I am you. And from my inner bile I speak sour words. The long ago name of the wretched little man who hides inside the beast. The name I try to forget. How the fuck?

[00:19:33] [SPEAKER_03] The piggy mask looms closer. Bare muscles bulging. Shackle chains ringing. I remember thinking I heard the old bat grong.

[00:19:44] [SPEAKER_08] I know what you want with this one.

[00:19:48] [SPEAKER_03] I stroke this body's wrinkled throat and fragile ribcage, shackles straining like this raspy, haggard voice.

[00:19:57] [SPEAKER_08] She reminds you of mother. Mother. She reminds you of all the girls who sense something off about you. All the girls you could never have. Not unless you chain yourself to them.

[00:20:16] [SPEAKER_03] Shut your whore bitch mouth! The piggy mask growls. And holy fucking hell, he's right. I sound like one of them. A virgin. A whore. An old hag. All these scars, they're warping me. It's not enough to prove myself to myself. The creature I just described could be any lone monster drunk on moonshine.

[00:20:45] [SPEAKER_03] My beast tromps closer through the slanted lunar light. Vertebra popping into a feral arch. Muscles bulging and rippling against fever-greased skin. A jagged shape of his darkness pours over the ceiling, then the wall, curling over the bag of wrinkled flesh that holds me hostage.

[00:21:12] [SPEAKER_08] The first time the fever touched you. The first time you transformed in the moonlight. You were young, home alone in the farm with the family hog.

[00:21:24] [SPEAKER_02] I said shut up!

[00:21:26] [SPEAKER_03] The beast explodes outward, flesh flying. Number three's agony is worse than the others. The beast draws this one out, takes his brutal time, adding to antique pains. Hoary, arthritic body, brittle heartbeat, tattered womanhood. This uppity hag that endured much, witnessed, much. Bones and organs and vital core

[00:21:54] [SPEAKER_03] cocooned in a lifetime of scars. I scream from within myself as they all spill open. Hideous, hideous, hideous. No man, no stalker, no beast should ever be forced to see inside a woman, to bear her insult like this, to suffer the obscenity of her pain. Never, never, never, never, never, this curse. Wings eclipse the moonlight. I try to warn myself one final, rasping, bloody breath.

[00:22:24] [SPEAKER_03] The blue moon will get out. A reeking, glistening mouth snaps forward and gnaws my tongue from my flapping chasm, jarring my dentures sideways, silencing me as evermore horrors imprint evermore scars. I stare into the perfectly malformed humanity behind those yellow eyes. And there's no escaping myself. Even death offers no mercy.

[00:22:55] [SPEAKER_03] Number four, the bitch with the butterfly tattoos. I wake without a bed, standing regal and upright before a cobwebbed mirror, smiling into my reflection. Obsidian eyes, a goddess of inked skin and silver piercings. I exist within her, a mind paralyzed inside this endless moon-stained hellscape.

[00:23:23] [SPEAKER_03] I cannot bend this one's flesh to my will, cannot look away, because I'm not the only one who watches, not the one who pulls the strings. Moonglow glazes the mirror and the bitch smiles and smiles.

[00:23:42] [SPEAKER_09] Hello.

[00:23:44] [SPEAKER_03] She hisses, echoing through my head.

[00:23:46] [SPEAKER_09] I speak now to the little man inside the big bad devil.

[00:23:53] [SPEAKER_03] In the blurred periphery of her vision, her bare throat and stoic shoulders twitch with that inky lacework of butterfly tattoos. Velvet wings rise and fall, matching the quicksilver rhythm of a breath I cannot control. Spidery legs tickle across her collarbone, and others emerge from the silken neckline of her nightgown, evermore wings soft with glowing moons,

[00:24:22] [SPEAKER_03] swarming together, becoming legion.

[00:24:28] [SPEAKER_09] Those girls will never feel their deaths.

[00:24:31] [SPEAKER_02] The bitch hisses.

[00:24:32] [SPEAKER_09] They will never feel the senseless pain you inflicted. But you will. Over and over.

[00:24:41] [SPEAKER_03] All around, dusty wings scratch a growing tempest inside the walls. The crude altar cuts into her bare feet. I feel them, papery and slimy, freshly hatched chrysalises spiraling outward to bind the moonlight.

[00:25:00] [SPEAKER_09] Over and over. You'll suffer your own carnage until you learn.

[00:25:06] [SPEAKER_03] Now she drifts from the mirror, taking me with her. Inky butterflies alight the air as she crawls into her bed. Atop the mattress, she lies supine. I feel her smile unhinge as three butterflies swirl downward, creeping inside, feasting on nectar inside her throat. As the three eggflies gorge on sweet promises of revenge,

[00:25:34] [SPEAKER_03] the bitch with the butterfly tattoos becomes a theater corpse, a perfectly motionless creature of raw, feral allure. A spider weaving a web and baiting her trap. I cannot move her, not a limb, not a finger, not a heartbeat, even as I squirm and howl and rage inside the shell of her. How dare she cage the beast?

[00:26:01] [SPEAKER_02] I am a savage. The moonlight is mine. Those girls were mine. I am the blue moon ripper, for fuck's sake. I am the beast divine.

[00:26:12] [SPEAKER_09] You will see what it is to be divine.

[00:26:18] [SPEAKER_03] The words echo through me, unbidden, as number four focuses her wide-open gaze on the twitching, cocoon-shrouded ceiling, obsidian eyes collecting moon dust. Waiting. Nearby, a window breaks. Heavy footsteps approach the bed. A piggy mask leans over me, and shackles rattle around my wrists.

[00:26:47] [SPEAKER_03] I scream silently inside, and eggflies scrape my teeth. Looking up at myself, into those relentless yellow eyes, I feel my blue moon curse ready to hatch again, around and around, in this endless, glittering swirl of death. And I wonder if I will ever learn. The bitch smiles.

[00:27:12] [SPEAKER_09] Shall we begin?

[00:27:21] [SPEAKER_01] The Three Deaths of the Blue Moon Ripper, written by Amanda Cecilia Lang, performed by Galen Murphy-Hoffman, with Sherry Wachard as number three, Erica Dawson as number four. You've been listening to Ominous Thrill, Her Horrorween. It's created, produced, directed, and sound designed by myself, Jeff Schmidt. If this is your first Ominous Thrill episode, please look back in the feed, to find other stories you might enjoy. There's plenty of devious audio delights, to choose from.

[00:27:51] [SPEAKER_01] The best way to help support, making more Ominous Thrill, is to subscribe to the ad-free feed, The Red Room, on Patreon and Apple Podcasts. Find links in the show notes, it's greatly appreciated. Next best is to share this story, with everyone you think might enjoy it. Help spread the word, use the share icon, in your listening app of choice. And the easiest way, is to leave a five-star rating, and a positive review. It doesn't do much for the algorithms, but it helps other listeners decide, if they'll listen.

[00:28:21] [SPEAKER_01] Thank you. This has been Ominous Thrill, Her Horween, and until next time, thrill you later.

[00:28:34] [SPEAKER_09] The Fable and Folly Network, where fiction producers flourish.