Drabblecast

Transmissions From Beyond

The Classic Tales

Frequency of Fear

October Country Radio

Scott Sigler

and Cast Macabre, who made a nice timely promo and everything:

Donate / Buy Stuff

We rely on donations to pay our authors, as well as to cover the cost of bandwidth and other overhead. Our goal is to increase sponsorships until the day we no longer need to ask for these, but until that glorious day your choices are:

Donate Monthly

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Tell the world!

If you enjoy our show, please recommend us to other fans of audio fiction. You are our PR department! Blog about us. Link to or redistribute our sexy 1-minute promo mp3. Or, link to one of our banners:

Paid Sponsorships

If you want to advertise to an audience of several thousand horror fans, one of the best possible ways to do it is to sponsor programming on Pseudopod. If you like, you can even advertise locally, targeting limited geographical areas using Wizzard Media’s targeted ad insertion technology. For example, in October of 2008, people who downloaded our show in southern California got to hear about Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios.

For current rates and more information, email ben@escapeartists.net.

Spread the pod’s foul seed via BitTorrent!

Our fans create, update, and seed torrents of past episodes, which we greatly appreciate since we currently lack suitable time and resources to handle this ourselves. There is one torrent that I know of on MiniNova. Please seed it if you can so it can spawn and be happy. Let me know (editor@pseudopod.org) if you create an updated one, and I will endeavor to link to it as well.

Volunteer to narrate

Do you know someone with an iron stomach and a talent for bringing to life what’s on the page, who can create high-quality voice recordings as digital audio files and upload them to a specified location by a specified deadline? We can always use more volunteer narrators to add variety to our sound. In particular at the moment, we’d like to do more justice to stories taking place in Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world. An interested potential narrator should drop a line to editor@pseudopod.org with a link to a dramatic reading of anything you like that involves dialogue between multiple characters in it somewhere.

Read by Ben Phillips

But less than a year later, when Lord Galen returned home from a hunting trip, he discovered four of his guards torn limb-from-limb, his bedroom window broken in from the outside, monstrous claw marks on the second floor balcony and, of his beloved, no trace. Most disturbing of all was what he beheld graven into the wall above her bed: a monstrous blue sigil in the form of a six-lobed eye. No earthly implement could have rendered the perfectly aligned delineations of that unmentionable shape; nor could any earthly ink have provided its hateful color which glimmered balefully even in total darkness.

Terrible was Lord Galen’s grief, but even more terrible was the thing which grew by degrees within him: his wrath.

Read by Tina Connolly

A high fence of weathered wood ran along the right side, partitioning the beach for the people in the hotel. The fence ran for a distance even into the water before giving up hope of division. Harriet heard happy shouts and laughter from the other side. It was a gleaming white hotel with balconies on the back; she could see the top floors rising over the fence, much better than the ramshackle crammed-in house with rusty showerheads and sand in the mattresses. Same water, she thought, squelching her envy, they get the same beach we do.

But this was a sad little beach. Grady surged like a live wire, pulling away and eager to be in the grey-green water, but she held on and stepped with distaste around broken beer-bottles and chunks of styrofoam. The horizon was infinite and curved but the air stank of fish.

My Body Your Banquet

By C.S.E. Cooney
Read by Jacquie Duckworth

The man next door was interested in eating human flesh. He said as much, last time I took the trash out to the alley.

Sight Unseen

By R. Scott Shanks, Jr.
Read by Rachel Swirsky

“Wherever you touch yourself, you will feel my hands touching you.” Sylvie reached for her aching head and felt a man’s rough hand twined in her hair, gently but firmly pushing her face into her graying sheets.

The Lot

By C.M. Harris
Read by Eve

It’s The Call of The Hydrae. It’s started.

The winners of our flash fiction contest will still be produced, either in October or sooner. Voting in our final poll closes July 22, so you can go there for some free online fiction! Vote for your favorites. (Free registration is required to see the candidates and vote. No, we’re not going to spam you — it’s a legal kludge so they remain technically unpublished.)

Enjoy the rest of July — we’ll post them as soon as we can.

• Ben Phillips, chief editor

Read by Ben Phillips

Turning into the long driveway, I noticed three tall figures standing shoulder to shoulder on the porch. That, I wasn’t expecting. This was meant to be a one-on-one affair with no spectators. Alarm bells rang in my head, but there was no way I could turn tail for the hills. I had to see things through, no matter how bad they got — especially after the phone call.

I’d recognized the voice immediately and knew I had no choice. There’d been too much killing over the years and if I could prevent any further bloodshed, then I would do my best. It was the least I could do, considering the amount of blood on my hands.

Read by Alasdair Stuart

Sit down with the usual gut warp strength black coffee - only thing that’s going to keep my eyes open all night really- and settle down to watch. I can’t help smiling at it all, all those individual juddering images spread out in front of me, like an artificial compact eye watching the city. A hundred small screens surrounding the single, higher resolution monitor, all for me. So much information fed right back to me in my warm, dark skull of a control room.

I can’t help but enjoy it. Too much to pour over. So many minute human dramas played out over the night shift as though just for me, all of them oblivious. All so used now to the all seeing eye, that ever present observer above that hums and tracks them, benevolent and protective. Never look up, never acknowledge, but I don’t mind. It’s more interesting when they forget they’re being watched.

Oil of Dog

By Ambrose Bierce

Read by Ben Phillips

One evening while passing my father’s oil factory with the body of a foundling from my mother’s studio I saw a constable who seemed to be closely watching my movements. Young as I was, I had learned that a constable’s acts, of whatever apparent character, are prompted by the most reprehensible motives, and I avoided him by dodging into the oilery by a side door which happened to stand ajar. I locked it at once and was alone with my dead.

The Horror of the Heights

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The thirty-thousand-foot level has been reached time after time with no discomfort beyond cold and asthma. What does this prove? A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them.

Read by Graeme Dunlop

John walked into the small kitchen. About to pitch the hot tea across the room, he took a slow breath, tipped the drink down the sink and delicately placed the mug at the side. Hands covering his eyes, he leaned back against the table.

He’d be the one left to make it.

Read by Paul S. Jenkins, author of The Plitone Revisionist

We were in our places, Olivia at the door and I in the wicker basket. The windows were concealed with heavy curtains to keep out the afternoon sun, but oil lamps pushed back the gloom.

The basket that hid me was a cubit square. Within it, I sat naked on a thin cotton mat, waiting for my cue.

Read by Elan Ressel, voice actor for hire

Closing music: “Mourning of the Storm” by The Secret Life

On my brother’s computer, a video file shows an American fighter plane pinpointing a group of men in Iraq.

I have no faces and no names to put to the men. The black smoke must have contained the atoms of their flesh, their bones (though bones are hardy), vaporized sweat, burnt eyebrows and pubic hair and nose hair (unless they used a trimmer, as I do), in short, the atoms of their being. Later, I think, one could find, lying in the street, a tooth or two, the end of a finger that had somehow survived, fragments of bone, a legless shoe. These men are nothing to me. They are pixels on a screen, a peer-shared digital file uploaded from sources unknown, provenance suspect, whose only note of authenticity is that young pilot’s voice when the smoke rises and he says, quietly – ‘Dude.’

What We Want

Pseudopod is a genre magazine in audio form. We’re looking for horror: dark, weird fiction. We run the spectrum from grim realism or crime drama, to magic-realism, to blatantly supernatural dark fantasy. We publish highly literary stories reminiscent of Poe or Lovecraft as well as vulgar shock-value pulp fiction. We don’t split hairs about genre definitions, and we do not observe any taboos about what kind of content can appear in our stories. Originality demands that you’re better off avoiding vampires, zombies, and other recognizable horror tropes unless you have put a very unique spin on them. What matters most is that the stories are dark and compelling.

Since we’re an audio magazine, our audience can’t skim past the boring parts, so stories with beautiful language at the expense of plot don’t translate well. We’re looking for fiction with strong pacing, well-defined characters, engaging dialogue, and clear action. It can be beautiful too, if you’ve got all those other bases covered.

Dark humor is just fine, and we run it on occasion; but we are more interested in tragedy than comedy, and comedy is better received the more sick and morbid it is. Above all, we want stories that make us think, that stick with us, that make us catch ourselves checking the locks a second time before bed.

More tips here.

Holiday-themed stories (regardless of which holiday) are ideally submitted 4-5 months prior to the holiday in question. The same guideline applies if you have a book coming out soon and want to publish a short story with us to coincide with its release, and we’re always happy to delay publishing if the resulting timing is better for author promotion. (Although for a sure bet, you can always just grease our palms with a sponsorship two months beforehand — contact amanda@escapeartists.net.)

Length

We’re primarily interested in two lengths of fiction, which we’ve somewhat arbitrarily dubbed “short fiction” and “flash fiction”.

Short Fiction: This is the heart of our weekly podcast. We want short stories between about 2,000 and 6,000 words; we are quite hesitant to produce stories any longer than that, although we may occasionally consider exceptional stories as long as 7,500 words. Anything longer than that will not be considered at all. (You are almost certainly better off cutting it down to 6,000 or less, even if it has been published previously at a greater length. The longer a story is, the more brilliant it needs to be to sustain audience interest in audio, and Pseudopod stories in particular tend to be no longer than 5,000 words as a rule.) We currently pay $100 for short fiction at this length.

Flash Fiction: We sometimes podcast short five-to-ten minute “bonus” pieces between our weekly main episodes. For this we’re looking at fiction under 1,500 words, with a sweet spot between 500 and 1000 words. Yes, that’s really really short. That’s the point. Our flash pieces are frequently quirkier and more experimental than our weekly features. We pay $20 for flash fiction.

If you have a story between 1,500 and 2,000 words, we’ll make a judgment call, based on whether we think the story would work better as a featured story or a bonus. But most of the time we’ll buy it as flash fiction.

“Reprints”

We do not discriminate between previously published and unpublished works. We’re an audio market, and we buy nonexclusive rights, so it doesn’t hurt us if a story has previously appeared in another market. In fact, we encourage new authors to send their work to other markets first, and then send it to us for audio rights after the story has appeared. You’re welcome to give us first dibs on anything you like, but consider: if your story’s good enough for us to buy it, it’s probably good enough to sell to another market first. Why not try that, and get two audiences and two checks?

If the text of the work is currently available online for free, that’s great! Let us know in your cover letter so we can link to it in the web post if we publish your story.

Multiple and Simultaneous Submissions

We do not accept multiple submissions. Please, one story at a time! Unless you’re specifically told otherwise, this is the rule at every fiction market.

We do consider simultaneous submissions (a story sent to us as well as one or more other markets at the same time), but we appreciate being advised that the story is under consideration elsewhere. In the event it is accepted by us as well as the other market(s), you’ll just need to let the editor know in response to your acceptance letter what other market(s) are slated to publish it and when. That gives us the chance to mention the fact in the intro to the story. We will also try to delay publication so as not to “scoop” the other market(s) before the publication date over there, but it will be up to you to communicate with the other market(s) to find out whether they insist on this or not. Unless you tell us so, we will consider delaying publication to be optional on our part. (In our experience, since we use audio format most other markets don’t seem to care one way or the other, and even appreciate it if we go live with it around the same time or sooner because it acts as publicity for them. But you never know, and should always check. For our part, though, we have no strong preference either way.)

The only exception to this is simultaneous submission of a single story to multiple Escape Artists podcasts (Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Pseudopod), which we ask that you avoid. When submitting to one Escape Artists podcast, please wait to hear back about it before submitting the same story to another.

How We Want It

Example:

From: Edgar Allen Poe
Date: Dec 13, 1889
Subject: Submission: The Pit and the Pendulum
To: submit@pseudopod.org

Dear Pseudopod:

I would like to submit my horror story "The Pit and the Pendulum" for
your podcast.  My work has appeared in numerous online and print venues
including _The Norton Anthology of Literature_, the Project Gutenberg
Web site (http://www.gutenberg.org), and _The Simpsons Halloween
Special_.   This particular work is in the public domain since it was first
published over a century ago, and all rights are available.  It has 
previously been adapted into a shockingly strange movie by Roger 
Corman.  Thank you for your time and consideration.


Edgar Poe
poeman@gmail.com


6200 Words
The Pit and the Pendulum
By Edgar Allen Poe

I was sick -- sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at
length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses
were leaving me. The sentence -- the dread sentence of death -- was the
last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the
sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy
indeterminate hum.  It conveyed to my soul the idea of _revolution_ --
perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel.
This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more.  [. . .]

We accept stories in plain text pasted into the body of an email, sent to the address submit@pseudopod.org. We don’t want Word files, PDF files, scanned images of a book, or sound files of you reading the story. Messages with any such attachments will probably get bounced. We will accept messages that are HTML formatted, but if you know how to turn it off, we greatly prefer plain text. Send it from the email address to which you want us to send correspondence to you!

Please be sure to include the word “submission” AND the title of the story in the Subject: line of the message. Most of our workflow involves bouncing your email message from one folder to another, and we use the email subject to identify the story. A subject like “story submission” doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.

In the body of the message, we want:

1. Your name. (Your real name. The story can have a different byline, and we’ll credit that byline in public, but we need to know who’s legally offering us this story and to whom the check should be written.)
2. A cover statement briefly giving us your publication credits (your top five or six publications at most), and in particular telling us whether this story has been published before or adapted into audio. If there’s anything we need to know about available rights, tell us that too. If the full text of the story is available online, that’s great — let us know what the URL is so we can link to it.
3. The word count of the story, rounded to the nearest hundred words. Don’t go nuts over which word count method to use, or whether to round up or down. We pay flat rate; we really don’t care. We just want a ballpark.
4. The title of the story.
5. The story’s byline.
6. The text of the story. Use single spacing, with blank lines between paragraphs and _underscores_ or *asterisks* (or whatever) for emphasis.

Once again, that address is submit@pseudopod.org. Any stories sent to any other address will be trashed, most likely without a response.

(The rest of these guidelines are basically just legalese.)

By sending us your story you understand and agree that:

• You are the original creator of the work submitted to us;
• You are the copyright holder of the work;
• You are not prohibited by any prior agreement from the transfer of non-exclusive electronic and audio rights to the work;
• All information in the contact and cover sections of your email is accurate and truthful;
• You accept sole responsibility for any false statements or encumbrances upon rights not disclosed to us.

If we buy your story we’ll send you a contract, and you’ll be bound to all of the above.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering whether you have audio rights to your stories: unless you’re doing work-for-hire for a game company, all reputable speculative fiction magazines of which we’re aware acquire serial print rights, often with non-exclusive electronic or anthology options. Some online markets may insist on electronic exclusivity for a certain period of time, and if so, you can’t publish it with us until after that period ends. However, we know of no regular short fiction market that contracts for exclusive audio rights. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen; always check your contracts.

What We Do With It

Once you’ve sent us your story, we will review it and respond to you via email in about two months. If it takes longer than that, please query.

If we decide we’d like it for our podcast, we’ll send you a contract as a PDF file in email. You will sign it and send it back to us either via email (after scanning it), fax, or postal mail. Then we’ll pay you via check or PayPal, whichever you indicated on the last page of the contract, and we’ll start producing.

During the production process we may contact you with questions about the story, its background, or pronunciations. We hope and expect that you’ll be available to help us, as a good performance makes all of us look good. Unfortunately, as everything we do is on a somewhat fluid schedule, we usually can’t give you an accurate timetable of when your story will appear in the podcast.

What the World Does With It

The audio files Pseudopod produces are released under a Creative Commons license. Specifically, we use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 license. Briefly, this means that the entire world has permission to distribute the podcast for free, provided they give credit for it, don’t try to make money off of it, and don’t change it in any way. Transcribing it, extracting portions from it beyond fair use, and mashing it up are all prohibited. This license applies only to our audio performance of your work, for which we’ve contracted and paid you. It does not apply to your story itself; you retain your copyright and all rights to any other use of the story.

We’ve had some questions about this from the writing community, so we’d like to make our reasoning clear. We know that Creative Commons licensing is scary to many writers, and it’s certainly a radical break from traditional rights that expire after a period of time. Our take is this: when we create a podcast, we are putting an MP3 file on the Web. That MP3 file is going to get downloaded and copied onto thousands of hard drives, CDs, iPods, and other portable devices across the world. That’s the point. We want people to listen to it. But once you’ve done that, you can’t take that file back. There is no way to delete the file everywhere it exists. There are some highly fallible ways to lock things down, but DRM sucks, and even if we believed in it it’s too complicated for us to implement.

So from a purely practical perspective, we can’t make our content expire. And we can’t stop people from copying our files, nor should we. Given that reality, why not give our listeners the full legal right to do what’s totally natural for an audio file (copy it, share it with people, and listen to it whenever they want), but make equally clear to them what they can’t do (share the story outside the podcast, or alter it in any way at all)? That’s our reason for the Creative Commons license. We’re not trying to plant a philosophical flag in the ground here; we’re just trying to reflect reality.

We hope you’ll agree with our reasons and choose to share your story with us. If you don’t, then we’re deeply sorry, but we feel it’s better that you know this now, before you make the decision to submit.

Any questions?

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, or criticism (but not stories) send them to our staff at editor@pseudopod.org. We’ll do our best to get back to you within a few days.

Thanks very much for your time, and we look forward to reading — and hopefully speaking — what you’ve got!

Read by Jesse Livingston

“Find yourself a nurse,” he remembered his mother saying as they prepared for her act. “They always have jobs and they like to take care of men.” It was good advice but even Sharon’s patience had an end. Danny thought he had almost reached it. He borrowed the three hundred from her. Told her he was done gambling.

Poker wasn’t gambling. When you gambled you might lose. Danny knew all about losing. He was down twelve grand to Rod Renshaw due to a string of sporting misjudgments that climaxed when the Steelers had the bad grace to win the Super Bowl but lose the point spread. That was gambling.

Read by Philippa Ballantine

All the signs of life are here, but this neighborhood has long been dead. They’re the only family left, and even they’ve fallen apart, like rotting meat from the suburban bone. She walks down the driveway, her low pumps clacking against the blacktop. As she steps into the street, her heart races; and now she catches the faint whine, a sonorous metallic song calling out in reply. After all these lonely years, it’s returned.

“But I have changed. Can’t you hear?” Megan presses her hand against her heart. “It’s like it’s inside me now, like I’m the engine, too.”

Kelly runs a long tongue over wet lips. “She’s already taken — it’s what you made her for, right?”

Read by Dave Thompson of PodCastle

Jim grinned. “If we cut his legs off, how far do you think he can crawl before he dies?”

“I don’t know.”

Read by Christiana Ellis

“It scares me,” she said finally.

“To keep us fed and dressed,” she muttered.

Read by Erik Luke of Extruding America

There is a cathedral in the middle of Radejast. It addresses the approaching pilgrim as a fist of granite and slate and limestone, lifting black iron bells and arches and gargoyles to touch the dangled teat of the soot-cloud that ever hangs low over the land. Within: a forest of stone pillars, some carved with the likenesses of Radejast’s saints, some simply chiseled with the mark of its venerable religion — all surrounding the dome, so high and wide that when emerging from the pillars I stumbled beneath it, madly fearful that gravity might suddenly reverse, fling me from the floor, and smash me against the curved mosaics above the whispering gallery.

The Good News Happening Congregation’s hall was larger than Radejast’s cathedral by half again: a great circular space beneath a peaked roof, lit from high, clear windows on every side. Behind the pulpit stood a crucifix with a painted sculpture of Jesus Christ bound to it, bright lines of blood trickling down his slender limbs, from the crown of thorns he wore. Altogether, it was half-again taller than any similar icon in Radejast.

Read by Ian Stuart, voice actor for hire

The place was different but the story was the same. The Japs had won at the expense of the British. They’d been particularly ruthless on this occasion. Besides the bullet-riddled and grenade-ravaged corpses, he recognized the hallmarks of ritual decapitation and disembowelment. The battle over, they’d set about the wounded with their samurai swords.

The soldiers had been dead some time. Twelve to fourteen hours, by Clelland’s estimates. The blazing sun had had a chance to cook the flesh. What should have been pink had blanched and turned beige. Instead of just the usual stench of shit and rotting flesh, a human barbecue was in progress.

Read by Kris Johnson

Trixie’s dead claws scrabbled faintly against the wooden stairs. The hairs on my arm came alive. It was clear Robbie hadn’t heard a thing.

Robbie hesitated, and I realized what a potentially stupid question that had been.

Read by Claudia Smith

He was tall and quiet, and thinner even than Gretel. Cigarette burn scars covered one cheek, and he was blind in his left eye from an especially bad night with his father. Gretel thought he was beautiful.

You’re beautiful, he told her later that night, after her stepmother had driven away and Brykerwoods orderlies had taken Gretel’s leather jacket and the contents of her pockets… but not the lipstick tube they hadn’t found in her bra. After she’d found him, like an uncharted territory, or an undiscovered planet, sitting on the dirty white linoleum next to a vacant chair in an empty TV room without a television. After she’d had handed him one hit of acid and placed the other under her tongue. You’re beautiful.

I’m not, she said. My front teeth jut like fallen tombstones. My nose is the size of a bus and my hair is like strips of rotting bacon and my eyes are small and brown as rabbit turds. You must be tripping.

And he said, I am, but that’s not why I like you.

Read by Ian Stuart, voice actor for hire!

Monday morning came, and Jim wondered at the fact that no other cars followed or preceded him into the garage. And yet, as his car swirled down the ramps, he noticed that almost every parking space was filled.

Level 11.

Read by Donna Lynch of Ego Likeness
“Breedless” out on Metropolis Records Apr 13, 2010 — order one now

The voice jarred her again.

If there was a god, he’d abandoned her months ago.

Read by Eric Luke

The boss is coming. She graciously gives me time to collect myself. We’re in some kind of a lounge; everything is upholstered with vertical stripes and there are flaming torches on the walls. The boss is not big on context, sometimes. I don’t hold it against her, she’s a busy lady.

I had a regular job not too long ago but I did something I shouldn’t have and lost it. She fired me, but never got upset. She’s never all that surprised when people do things they shouldn’t.

Read by Ben Phillips

I clear a space toward the back of my sorting table, by the auto parts bin. It’s as far back as I can reach and enough other crap is piled there that the bottle will probably go unnoticed.

Two years. That’s how long I’ve been here. They caught me a couple weeks after the war started. Damn it happened fast. They just appeared, everywhere, all across the world. One day the price of oil and some brush war were the big news; the next day, the world broke and they invaded what was left. Maorg, Hoods and a half-dozen other kinds appeared out of nowhere, hitting every continent at once.

Read by Jacquie Duckworth

I set my feet and reached for the next rung of the ladder. The wind snatched at my clothes, whipping my bomber jacket against my thighs, and then pulling it outwards in a billow, tugging me sideways towards the scary drop.

I’d snared the rats with generous dollops of peanut butter in long rectangular, live-catch traps. Their fur was sleek and glossy. They were greedy, bright-eyed pests, always wanting more than they needed. Never satisfied.

Read by Cayenne Chris Conroy of the Teknikal Diffikulties podcast

Her teachers never asked her to remove the headphones. What was the point? The girl earned a 100% on every quiz and exam, and when they called on her, Lynnette spat the answer back like a rifle ejecting a shell.

And Lynette was tall. She towered past six feet by the time she reached eighth grade. And her long black hair that she rarely brushed only made her seem taller when it fell down over her wide shoulders; she was heavy-set, truly big-boned, more muscle than fat. And she put that muscle to use during the “Lynette Incidents,” as they came to be called.

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.

Read by Mike Bennett

The wind bit into his skin like daggers into flesh. The cold was like no other he had felt, and he knew it was only going to get worse, day by day. Never mind the night; even people such as himself had to find shelter by night or end up a victim of his own trade by dawn. Gregorie’s eyes panned out across the vast, empty, bleak Russian landscape. It reminded him of looking out to sea from the docks at Cherbourg, with its long piers and obstacle strewn harbor to keep His enemies at bay. The steppes of Russia, much like the waters outside the port city.

A groan redirected Gregorie’s thoughts. He looked at the makeshift path the Grand Army had carved through the snow. While Russia might be near-featureless, His army was leaving behind plenty of markers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Read by Ian Stuart, voice actor for hire through voices.com

A
DESCRIPTION
OF THE ADMIRABLE
TABLE OF LOGA-
RITHMES:
WITH A DECLARATION OF
The Most Plentifvl, Easy,
And Speedy Vse thereof in both kindes
of Trigonometrie, as also in all
Mathematicall calculations.

He shuffled through the other papers in the box. All writings by or about the man: extravagantly illustrated occult texts; religious revelations; serious biographies. At the bottom, wedged beneath a thick medical textbook with an MRI scan of the brain on the cover, Tom caught sight of several off-white stones. Their smooth, heart-shaped surfaces gleamed in the torchlight.

Read by Kris Johnson

I shrugged my shoulders and leveled the .44 cap-and-ball at its plaintive face. The squirrel thanked me, got up on its hind paws, put the metal in its mouth, and suckled on the long barrel like a caged guinea pig taking water from a bottle.

We are meat, mad meat. Nothing more.