I'm doing a little survey to find out more about ALE listeners. There are just four tiny questions. It will only take a minute or two, and will help me a LOT! Please check it out. Thanks, Cooper
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Season 2 Episode 2Thank you for downloading this episode.
👉The story begins at 01:52 and the tiny lessons begin at 17:58
👉You can find the transcript after the Credits!
👉Visit our website to download the Podcast User's Manual and find out more! https://alittleenglish.com/
A Little English is written, produced, recorded, edited, mixed, mastered and scored by Edward Cooper Howland.
All stories are either in the public domain, or written by me.
Copyright 2024 Edward Cooper Howland
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, this is Cooper. I’m playing around with some of the options in my podcast host and one thing that I can do is add little messages to ALL the episodes. So. Yesterday we reached a thousand downloads. That’s totally crazy to me. Amazing. I just want to say, thank you! Let’s get on to the story.
Hi. My name is Cooper, and this is…A Little English. Every episode, I read a short story. After the story, there are three tiny lessons.
Today we are going to continue with The Hanging Stranger. Again, this story is definitely NOT for children. And if you thought it was weird before….hang on. At the end of the last part, Ed Loyce was on the run. He had seen a dead guy hanging from a lamppost, but he was the only one who was worried about it. Everyone else thought that was….just fine. He ended up in a police car, but he didn’t recognize the cops. So he ran away. Are you ready for more scares? Here we go!
He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.
And to his right—the police station.
He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.
Them?
Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.
And—something else.
Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.
He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.
Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.
Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.
He was seeing—them.
For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.
They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some...
