The Welcome to another edition of Nightmarefews and Peepers.

I'm Dan Cummins, and I'll be sharing the continuation of another original short story of the fictional horror variety.

Thanks for all the feedback regarding how I should never, ever apologize for a story

taking longer to finish than I originally thought it would.

I appreciate it.

Recording this in the final chapter on the same day, and I now feel like someday, when I have

time to work on books, I very well might revisit this story.

Flesh it out further.

Not sure I'm ready to say goodbye to this little world.

But for our purposes here, it does wrap up, I think, pretty satisfactorily in the next release.

And now, before we jump back in, a quick recap of the story so far.

Ned Watkins, a man in his early 40s, originally from just south of Seattle,

has returned to the Seattle area to bring the old Hermetic Healing Institute across the sound from Seattle in Olala back to life as the liminal lodge, a high-end occult-themed resort of sorts.

Nearly a century earlier, a woman named Dr. Mildred Blackwell had carried out strange experiments here based on crossing over and exploring life after death. Her experiments involve starvation,

shedding one's shell to loosen one's hold on this life and make a type of astral projection

more attainable. And enough for patients died for the area around her institute to become known locally as Death Mountain.

Ned, lost in his grief over losing the love of his life, a woman named Courtney many years earlier,

found out about the former institute after becoming obsessed with the occult due to his intense longing to reconnect with Courtney's spirit

and his belief that he'll be able to do just that at the

old institute by following the ghost of Dr. Blackwell's guidance and notes from her old

experiments have truly left him a shell of his former self. He has starved himself and become

dangerously thin due to his obsession with crossing over, so much so that his sister Ellen and his mother Janet

...