Midnight Air — Episode One
Opening Scene
The room is dim.
A fake fireplace glows in front of the desk, its flickering light casting long shadows across the floor. The flames aren’t real, but they dance like they are—soft, orange, hypnotic. Brian sits behind the mic, facing the glow, like a man telling ghost stories around a campfire.
The walls are lined with shelves—records, tapes, notebooks with curling edges. The air smells of dust and old vinyl. Outside, the firs press close to the building, and the wind moves like it’s listening.
Brian doesn’t speak yet.
He leans forward, elbows on the desk, eyes locked on the fire. For a moment, it’s like he’s somewhere else—lost in the glow, remembering something he hasn’t said out loud in years.
Then the red light clicks on.
The mic crackles.
And Brian begins.
“Some stories don’t come from books. They come from mouths—half-drunk, half-remembered, and told just once before the teller disappears. Tonight’s tale is one of those. A confession, soaked in moss and memory. And if you’re still awake… you might want to keep the lights on.”
Scene 2: The Inciting Incident
A quiet, weathered bar in a small Oregon town. Rain outside. A fireplace glows inside.
It was the kind of night that made the town feel like a memory.
Rain clung to the windows, not falling but lingering—like it didn’t want to leave. Inside the bar, the fireplace glowed low, casting flickering shadows across the floor. A few regulars sat in silence, their drinks untouched, their eyes half-lost in the flame.
The bartender moved slowly, wiping down the counter with the kind of rhythm that comes from years of repetition. He didn’t expect anyone new. Not tonight.
Then the door opened.
No bell. Just the creak of old hinges and a gust of damp air. The man who stepped in didn’t speak. He didn’t look around. He walked straight to the fireplace and stood there, dripping.
His coat was torn. His boots left muddy prints that looked weeks old. And he was covered in moss.
Not just damp from the woods—draped in it. Thick, green, clinging to his sleeves, his collar, even the side of his face. It looked grown, not gathered. Like he’d been sleeping beneath the forest floor.
The bartender froze.
He’d seen moss like that once before. Years ago. In the woods. On something that shouldn’t have been moving.
The man turned slowly and sat at the far end of the bar. He didn’t order a drink. He didn’t speak. He just stared into the fire, like it was telling him something only he could hear.
The bartender watched him for a long time.
Then, finally, he asked, “You lost?”
The man didn’t answer.
Instead, he said, “I need to tell you something.”
His voice was low. Rough. Like it had been buried with him.
The bartender felt the room shift. The regulars didn’t move, but something in the air did—like the fire had leaned in to listen.
And the man began to speak.
Scene 3 Confession
The drifter’s voice was small in the bar, rough as if it had been dragged up through roots.
“I saw it first when the fog took the road,” he said. “A stag all white, like it was carved from bone and moonlight. It stepped out slow, and I followed. Thought it would lead me to shelter. Thought it would lead me home. That’s when the moss found me.”
At the word moss the bartender’s hand stilled on the rag. Something in the cadence, in the way the man folded the word into the room, tugged at a thread in her memory. The jukebox hummed. The fake fire glowed. Rain tapped the glass like punctuation.
She hadn’t thought of that night in years—the night she was eight, when the logging trucks still rolled through town and her father came home smelling of diesel and pine. She had run off into the trees after a dare, chasing a flash of white that looked like a toy stag lit by a streetlamp. She remembered the antlers, impossible and bright, and the way the forest seemed to bend around it. She remembered the sound that wasn’t a sound: a hollow knocking, like a knuckle on old wood.
And then she remembered what came after. Not fully, at first—only flashes: her small hands pressed to her ears; the bite of cold on the back of her neck; a smell like earth and old rain; and her father’s voice calling her name from the edge of the trees, the way the world sighed when she ran back to him. She had told herself she’d imagined the stag. Everyone did. People told children things to keep them close. But now, listening to the drifter, memory fleshed out into detail, and the bar felt too small for the truth.
Legend of the White Stag
Locals called it the White Stag—never a real name, just a label stitched from gossip and fear. It appeared on the edges of town, usually in late autumn when the fog began to sit heavy on the river and the logging paths grew slick. The stag moved like a thing that knew every animal’s habit and every human’s weakness. It did not flee hunters. It did not graze. It walked, and when it looked at you, you felt a door in your chest swing open.
Old timers said the stag was a signpost. Follow it and you were led to a choice the forest had made for you. Some said the stag tested you. Some said it lured what the forest wanted to keep. Children dared one another to follow its ghostly flanks, and most turned back before the trees swallowed them whole.
The Moss Man Origins
If the White Stag was the lure, the Moss Man was the harvest.
The stories placed his birth in peat and regret. Centuries ago, when the first clearings were cut and the first bones buried without blessing, the forest answered with a thing grown from what humans left behind—secrets pressed into soil, oaths broken and never mended, names whispered over graves that no one tended. Moss gathered over those places until it learned to move.
He wore the forest the way a man wears a coat: patches of green and soil stitched with brittle root and the pale flash of bone. He did not speak in words so much as in the memories that clung to him. To meet him was to feel the weight of things you had done and the things you had left unspoken. People who encountered him came back altered: quieter, smaller, with a tenderness in their gait like someone who had been forgiven or someone who had been claimed.
Signs and Rituals
Over generations the town collected small defenses and cruel bargains. Farmers hung iron scraps near their doors; fishermen kept a ring of salt under thresholds; old women baked ash into biscuits and left a piece at the woods’ edge. No one knew which of these, if any, truly helped. They were gestures, not guarantees.
There were other practices, darker and older. If you found the stag and survived, you were told to spit three times, to never step on the first root you see, to cover your left eye with your palm before you look back. If you followed the stag deeper—you had to take something of value to the forest and leave it by the moss-grown stones, a trade to keep your name. The town’s records, the ones that lived in the old sheriff’s office and smelled of mildew, kept a list of returnees: footprints that led nowhere, boots filled with peat, and once—a child’s jacket folded into a ring of green.
Consequences and the Barter
The most whispered part of the legend was the bargain itself. The Moss Man did not eat flesh. He collected confidences and debts. He wanted stories tucked away, the lies and the truths everyone hoped would rot in silence. In exchange the forest spared a life or made a wound forget itself. That’s how the drifter framed it—an exchange made on a fog-thin night, a choice to barter another’s secret for his own survival.
“You gave it a name,” the bartender said now, voice small. “You said its name back then.” The drifter’s eyes were wet in the firelight. He nodded, but the name was not for anyone else to hear.
The bar stilled, as if the room itself were taking a breath it could not release. Outside, the rain increased, a heavier drum to whatever was being unearthed. The fake fire popped and hissed like something settling into place.
The drifter leaned closer and whispered, not for show but because the confession required closeness. “If you see the stag and then the moss,” he said, “don’t follow the light. Don’t bring it anything you won’t miss. And if it asks you to speak—speak nothing you aren’t ready to lose.”
The bartender felt the old knot in her chest loosen and tighten at once. Memory, legend, and the present braided together. The confession had begun to do what confessions always do: unmoor the past and let it drift into the room.
Scene 4: The Bargain
The bar held its breath like a lung at the bottom of a well. The drifter’s words sank into the room and settled—heavy, damp, inevitable. Outside the rain thickened into a steady, patient percussion; inside the fake flame painted everyone sepia and thin. The regulars pretended not to listen, but their faces had shifted toward the far end of the counter as if gravity itself had a preference.
The bartender wiped her hands on the rag but didn’t speak. Memory uncoiled in her like a rope pulling her backward: the flash of white antlers between trunks, the taste of iron on her tongue when she ran, the way something cold had touched her shoulder and left a dampness that smelled like earth. She should have been eight forever, small and forgiven. The confession made that impossible.
“Why tell me?” she asked finally, voice quieter than the rain. “Why tell anyone at all?”
The drifter looked at her like he’d been rehearsing the answer for years.
“Because I can’t carry it any longer,” he said. “Because it knows names now, and I’d rather it keep one less.” He pressed his palms to the bar. Moss flaked from his cuffs like old green snow; it left a smear that the bartender could see even in the firelight. “I made a trade once,” he went on. “I left something of mine in the ring and I thought that would be enough. It wasn’t. It never is. I need you to finish what I started.”
Her mouth moved around the next questions—who, what, where—but the drifter cut her off with a gesture. “There’s a stone ring up by the ridge, behind the fallen granite. You know it. Everyone does, if you’ve ever been stupid enough to keep walking after the stag.” He named the landmark in a way that turned her chest cold. It was the place she’d been told never to go. It was the place she hadn’t been able to get out of her head for twenty years.
“You want me to go out there,” she said. The sentence felt flat and ridiculous under the fake flame. She had a life that involved bottles and tabs and small, careful lies. She had bills. She had a father who still believed children didn’t get swallowed by woods. “I’m not about to walk into whatever you bargained with.”
“You don’t have to go alone,” the drifter said. “You don’t have to take what I left. You have to make a choice.” His eyes were hollows lit by the fire—old and pleading. “You speak its name and watch what it keeps. You put something down it asks for. Or you tell it nothing and hope it forgets you. I can’t promise it won’t come for any of us regardless, but—” He stopped. The bar hummed around the silence like a second, slower current.
At the edge of the room, the jukebox hiccupped and died; the last needle of the record stuttered to a halt. For the first time that night, an honest sound cut the air: the faint scrape of something large moving against the side of the building. Not a branch. Not wood. A deliberate, slow scraping like antler on stone.
The bartender swallowed. Her hands were steady in a way she didn’t feel. A small, involuntary memory rose up then—her mother at the sink, folding a cloth into quarters, whispering a string of meaningless prayers while tucking a silver locket under a loose floorboard. She had stolen a moment then and dropped the locket into the dirt at the trail’s mouth later that night; she hadn’t known why she did it, only that she had to. She had always told herself the locket was a foolish superstition. The drifter’s confession made superstition look like an inventory of debts.
“Tell me the name,” she said before she knew she would. Saying anything was a kind of anchor. The drifter’s mouth moved like a man remembering a candle’s arrangement of shadows and he mouthed the name under the flame—soft, private, and terrible. The syllables hung in the air and the fake fire flickered as if in response.
The scrape at the siding stopped. For a long moment there was only the rain and the sound of every heart in the room matching it. Then, slow and absurdly deliberate, something tapped once on the windowpane—three sharp, dry raps that sounded almost like knuckles.
Outside, between the dark trunks, a white shape paused and looked in.
Scene 5: The Aftermath
The bar feels too quiet.
The drifter’s stool sits empty, a smear of moss trailing behind it like a damp echo. The fake fireplace’s glow has lost its warmth. The regulars shift uncomfortably, drinks in hand, as if afraid to swallow. The bartender stands at the counter, fingers brushing the green flecks on the wood—each flake a fragment of a story she can’t unhear.
Outside, the rain has eased to a whisper. She steps to the window and peels back the curtain just enough to see the forest’s edge. There, between two fir trunks, the White Stag stands, its coat glowing pale against the dark. It meets her gaze for a heartbeat—antlers arching like beckoning branches—and then vanishes into the mist.
She turns back to the bar. The jukebox hums back to life on its own, a warped tune that sounds half–remembered. The fake fire flickers, and she thinks she sees shapes in the shadows—faces, hands, something waiting.
Without a word, she gathers her coat and keys. At the door, she pauses, touches the silver locket under her collar (still safe beneath her shirt), and presses her palm to the moss stain on the bar.
Then she walks out.
Scene 6: Closing Sequence
Sound: The studio door clicks shut. Brian’s footsteps echo on the wood floor as he crosses to the fake fireplace. He lets the glow wash over his face for a moment, fingertip tracing the edge of a silver locket hidden beneath his shirt.
He places the locket on the desk, slides the cassette recorder’s tape door closed, and flicks the red “ON AIR” light. His chair creaks as he settles in, hands brushing the mic’s base.
Brian clears his throat, the room hushed in anticipation.
“Some confessions don’t end with relief. They end with echoes—footprints on forest paths that lead us back to the debts we thought we buried. Tonight’s confession began in a bar drenched by rain and moss, a trade made under the glow of a ghostly stag and a devilish forest spirit. Remember this: if you ever glimpse something white in the fog, don’t chase the light. And if you feel the moss creeping into your life, keep a token close—and your secrets closer.”
He leans forward, lifts the locket, and lets it catch the fire’s flicker one last time before tucking it away.
Sound: A soft rap at the studio window—three deliberate knocks. Brian’s eyes narrow as he leans toward the glass, breath fogging the pane.
He exhales slowly, turns back to the mic, and offers one last whisper:
“Stay awake. Stay vigilant. Midnight Air will find you.”
The red light dims. Static swells. Then silence.
