You’ve found the world’s premier horror fiction podcast. Pseudopod brings you the best short horror in audio form, to take with you anywhere.

WARNING: This is a podcast of horror fiction. The stories presented here are intended to disturb you. They are likely to contain death, graphic violence, explicit sex (including sexual violence), hate crimes, blasphemy, or other themes and images that hook deep into your psyche. We do not provide ratings or content warnings for specific stories. We assume by your listening that you wish to be disturbed for your entertainment. If there are any themes that you cannot deal with in fiction, that are too strongly personal to you, please do not listen.

Pseudopod is for mature audiences only. Hardly any story on Pseudopod is suitable for children. We mean this very seriously.

By Barrie Darke

Read by Ben Phillips

It occurred to me later that week that maybe, just perhaps, it was happening to the other family men in the office, that they were also noticing these things about their families –- Thomas Malone, only in his early 20s but with two young boys, looked harried a lot of the time, and I thought about taking him out for a drink after work one day. But how do you go about broaching that subject? How many drinks would you need in you to mention you thought your family had been…? And what would happen to you if you got back looks that moved from the merely quizzical to the horribly worried? The whole idea of it happening elsewhere to other people was still hazy at that point anyway, so I thought I’d better let him come to me. I was an approachable boss, after all.

At home, it was how I imagine living in a haunted house must be. You moved in dread of every little awry sign, trying to convince yourself that the gaps between them were widening rather than shortening, accelerating. And that if the signs were there, then they really weren’t growing any more significant, they really weren’t becoming bone-rattlingly critical.

 

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By Simon Strantzas

Read by Nerraux

It reminds me of the place Jackson and I lived in during our final year of university. The corridors are filled with the partial light of forty-watt bulbs, and the walls look soiled and gummy — the odour of cooking meat and bleach sweating from them. Only three straight corridors, one on top of the other, each end marked by a staircase: the building feels decidedly utilitarian. Unlike our old apartment, however, there’s no telling how long Jackson will be here for.

“I feel like I’ve been robbed by myself,” he says, surveying the scattered boxes. “She only took the things I cared most about. Gilbert, she even took my cat. My cat!” He shakes his head. “All she left me was this.” His trembling hands unwrap a framed photograph of Janet and himself in Africa on the trip they had planned over a year to take together. In it, Jackson is adjusting a safari hat too large for him, trying to keep it from falling over his eyes. Janet has her brown cheek pressed up against his, focused on something beyond the photographer. Both are smiling. “I know I should throw this away,” he says. “But I can’t. Why can’t I throw it away?” I shift boxes around, wondering how I’m suddenly supposed to know the answer.

 

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By Maura McHugh

Read by Cheyenne Wright

Floating above the earth, Kulin checked the boundary around the graveyard. To his relief the hungry ghosts were contained, but the binding charms showed signs of deterioration. He cloaked his lifeforce so the dead would ignore his presence; a chill settled over his heart. He could not maintain the illusion for long.

The Tamga stood in the middle of the cemetery. Its skinny arms stretched upwards, and its black hair flared out. Kulin shrank into himself, and concealed his life’s pulse.

 

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By Tina Connolly

Read by Cayenne Chris Conroy

Getting infected makes your brain rewriteable. Surviving makes you able to rewrite. Not everyone gets it; most natives are immune and even many tourists are. One half percent is a low enough number that tourists flock in by the thousands, through the major port city and down south to the waters. The adults that get it are in a coma within 24 hours.

By the time Szo saw his mother, he’d turned nineteen minds for Hawk. He remembers the first one particularly, like you remember a first girl or first trick. But he remembers all the others, too. “Don’t know why you would,” says Jonny. “I don’t remember all the men.” But Szo does, and he clings to each one, proof that somehow he is not like Jonny, not like Hawk, not like himself. This is all temporary and therefore changeable, rewriteable.

 

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By Mike Allen

Read by Ben Phillips

What finally saved him at the not-so-tender age of fourteen was a book about lucid dreams he found at the community college library. He followed the recommended exercise out of desperation, repeating until he fell asleep: “I will know when I am dreaming. I will remember what I dream.”

Just as his first encounters with the morbid plunged him into nightmare, his first attempt at lucid dreaming introduced him to unlimited power. He again found himself in the City of Mazes, pursued by a crowd pulled on fleshy strings. You are all inside my head, he thought, and knew they were. He commanded, Stop, and they did, collapsing to the ground as their severed strings thrashed like loose hoses.

 

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A writhing pile of flash fiction stories combined, against all reason, into one congealed mass.

The Desert

By Tom Leveen
Read by Jaron Cohen

“They haven’t moved since . . .” Dom started to say, then cut himself off. I knew how the sentence finished. Since Trish and Jack had made a run for their car parked beyond the driveway, that’s what he was going to say. Since the spiders had swarmed them.

Benefits

By John Robinson
Read by Freeman Goodyear

The real person will never know that a copy of them just committed adultery in another part of town because, well, we can grow you from a piece of hair. A bit of skin. Fingernail clipping. Done. Person goes home, clone gets reduced to composite atoms, spouse is none the wiser — everybody’s happy!

Bird in a Wrought Iron Cage

By John Alfred Taylor
Read by the Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine crew

He opened up the musty buffalo-hide trunk with its green-stained brass fittings and pulled out the cage inside. For a second, I thought it held a huge brown spider, until I saw the fingernails like broken roots. Then it crawled to the corner of the cage and picked up a pen.

Theme music as usual: “Bloodletting on the Kiss” by Anders Manga
Additional music in this episode: “Ihaveseenthis” by Hopeful Machines

 

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By R.J. Hobbs

Read by Ben Phillips

It was a Tuesday night when the Primakov received an emergency transmission on the ICT radio from The Bakapor, a distressed fishing vessel from Petropavlovsk. The captain translated the Russian slowly, word by word, with a phrasebook. The night was completely calm, and the ocean lapped up against the hull with gentle rhythmic intensity. The Bakapor had lost fuel after a storm, and required additional petrol if the sailors were ever to see their wives and mothers again. The Primakov wouldn’t even have to change direction to give them assistance.

 

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By Lavie Tidhar

Read by Elan Ressel, voice actor for hire through Voices.com

It was just before the referendum, when white people voted on giving black people the right to vote. The skies were clear, the African sun was hot on my young face, and the wild scent of earth, of renewal, was in everything. All the Stop signs had F.W. sprayed on them. Stop F.W. Stop De Klerk.

I watched the Boer Nation on TV. Eugène, big and red-faced, a barrel of beer full of righteous White-Christian indignation. Eugène and his boys. I watched the bombs flower over Johannesburg in brilliant reds and yellows, fire and blood. Eugène and his boys valiantly rode to battle with pipe-bombs and guns, and I watched it on television. I felt like I was locked up, bound within the confines of the house, the garden, the walls, the barbed wire.



A quick primer on Afrikaans slang:

bankie - a bank coin bag, or bag of similar size, in which marijuana is sold (i.e., a dimebag)
dagga - marijuana (pronounced Dacha — the gg is the sound in Spanish J or hebrew Chet)
lekker - good, excellent
moer - to beat brutally
moffie - homosexual (slur)
jol - fun, good time
kaffir - a black south African (slur)
voetsek - go away; get lost; fuck off
tokoloshe - spectre/gremlin (orig. Zulu mythology)

Edit: Listener André Vermaak wrote in regarding the above slurs to emphasize that they are possibly more offensive than any used in American slang.

 

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By Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt

Read by Jaron Cohen

I thought about the brittle old letters in my briefcase, which included (among genial advice on writing and cranky complaints about publishers) a few passages of deep loathing about “the niggers and immigrants who fester and shamble in the slums of our fallen cities.” Ah, Lovecraft. I always wondered how my great-grandfather’s letters back to him might have read. I doubted if old Cavanaugh Payne ever told his idol that he was a “miscegenator” himself. Three generations later, I was fresh out of white skin privilege myself, but I had enough of Cavanaugh’s legacy to clear all my debts, assuming I could ever find the isolated country house where this collector lived.

The hand-drawn map Fremgen had mailed me was crude, and obviously not to scale, so it was a little like following a treasure map made by a pirate with a spatial perception disorder.

 

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