This place is a mess.

It's a mess.

It feels like we're knee-deep in candy wrappers and there are guts splattered everywhere. Most of it is just pumpkin guts, but around here you're never quite sure.

Hi folks, Cummings here.

And I know you've joined us hoping to hear more delicious horror stories this week, but

truth be told, the team and I are kind of burned out.

Once Halloween wraps up, we're usually not in very good shape for a week or so.

And this year, in the four days leading up to and including Halloween,

we released over five hours of stories for you.

More than two hours of stories for our wonderful free listeners.

Our sleepless sanctuary friends got almost two more hours of horror stories and those beautiful

people in the sanctuary tier got almost an hour and a half of delightfully dark tales from

L. P. Hernandez in the October premium bonus episode.

Phew, let's face it, that is a lot of horror for you.

And so we're going to take this week off. Well, almost off, as it were,

because we do have one short story to share with you.

But our producers, our voice actors, our Maestro,

and your old decrepit host could all use a bit of downtime.

We hope you'll understand, and rest assured we'll be back next week with season 20,

episode 6, ready to go.

Now, you may have noticed that I didn't mention the writers in the list of people needing a break. Writers are a rather unique lot.

They do all their hard work well before episodes even come out. By the time they put down

...