Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Chronicles of Ashwrath

Three people died in Ashwrath on the twenty-third of October. Four on the twenty-fourth. One on the twenty-fifth, which felt — God forgive him — like a respite.

On the twenty-sixth, John Pike opens the chronicle and finds something that is not an account of the sickness. The chronicle calls it the appetite. It has been in the wood the way cold is in winter ground. The sickness has been feeding it. And now it is full.

A folk horror audio drama set in a medieval English village during the Black Death of 1348. One voice. One candle. A chronicle that knows more than it should.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Ashrath's Chronicles
01:11 The Concept of the Appetite
02:25 The Sickness as a Seasonal Force
03:25 The Oldest Threat: The Appetite
04:32 Introducing the Key Characters
07:33 The Night of the Walking Entity
09:01 The Shape and Presence of the Entity
09:28 The Impact of the Walking Sickness

England, 1348. The Black Death is in the village. Something else is too.

John Pike, priest of Ashwrath, reads from a chronicle that knows more than he does — a record of a village dying of one sickness while another moves quietly through its lanes, leaving cold where warmth should be, silence where there should be sound, a mark in the mud with corners too sharp for any sole he knows.

Two girls are still missing. A wisewoman waits in her leaning house for what she has known was coming. A careful constable keeps a list he has not yet finished.

And in the iron case on Pike's desk, the seventh volume waits.

Three nights avoiding the chronicle. Three nights sitting in the corner of a dark vestry, waiting for something to resolve itself.

Tonight the priest opens the iron case. There is a passage he has never read before — sitting between two he knows by heart, as though it was always there and he simply wasn't ready to find it.

It concerns Edith Crow.

It is the 14th of October, 1348, and Ashwrath is holding its market because to stop would be to say the word nobody is saying. They come to the stalls in the cold morning and stand a little further apart than they used to and hold their vinegar rags like small, damp prayers, and they buy and sell and pretend that buying and selling still means what it meant before.

Two girls went to the tree line before the market bell. Agnes in her mother's green shawl, Ruth with the basket, walking with the quick serious purpose of children who have been given a task and mean to finish it. They did not come back. The ground remembers nothing of them.

Somewhere beneath the chapel, by one candle in a locked room, the priest reads. The chronicle is on his desk. It was not the same book yesterday that it is tonight. It will not be the same book tomorrow that it is now.

He reads because someone must witness it. He is that someone. It is the only thing he has left that he is sure of.