While “Charlie Harmer’s Day Off” is appearing for the first time in Pseudopod, there are other stories featuring the character: “Charlie Harmer Looks Back” also appeared on Pseudopod and “Charlie Harmer’s Last Request” appeared in the BOOK OF DEAD THINGS anthology from Twilight Tales, which is available on Amazon and other fine booksellers.

BRENDAN DETZNER lives, works, and writes in Chicago, where he frequently shows his face at several local reading series, and also runs his own, Bad Grammar Theater, which takes place the second Friday of every month as part of the Chicago Arts District 2nd Friday event. He also has a often-monthly podcast also called Bad Grammar and a short story collection called SCARE RESOURCES available for sale. You can keep track of what he’s up to by liking “Brendan Detzner (author)” on Facebook and checking out his web page at Brendan Detzner.

Your reader this week - Eric Luke - has a horror audiobook, INTERFERENCE, available for free on iTunes. “It’s an audiobook… about an audiobook. That kills. Just click PLAY.”

“A ghost is a dead person with a job. When you’re alive, you split your time. You work, you sleep. When you’re dead, the line gets blurrier. You switch between one and the other quickly, or do both at once. You lose track of time a lot.

She explains. I’m working for Gary now. Not just me. Lots of us.”

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“The Curse Of The Mummy” is making its debut on PSEUDOPOD.

ANDRE HARDEN is a freelance screenwriter. He has several scripts in development, one of which is in casting, but its up in the air and there are no details he can share at this time.
His thriller script, NUMB, won the 2011 Praxis Screenwriting Award. He is working on a fantasy novel, more short stories and several other screenplays. He Blogs at Andre Harden.com

Your reader this week - Emily Smith - Works as a physician in the Central Valley of California which helps pay for her fiction addiction and keeps her cats and dogs in kibble. She’s previously narrated two works for PodCastle - “El Regalo” by Peter S. Beagle and “Sugar Skulls” by Samantha Henderson. Her piece “Escape” won the Pseudopod Flash Contest II.” She would like to acknowledge the efforts of the good folks at Escape Artists, especially the hard working volunteers helping with the Flash Contests..

“She’d driven out of town a thousand times. Sometimes east, sometimes west, always alone. Anywhere was better than here. She tried to keep it real for the most part: a safety deposit on an apartment, a total make over, a new job; waitressing or maybe something else. Maybe a photographer. Maybe a dog walker. Maybe a nanny for rich people. Those were real jobs in some places. Sometimes she couldn’t keep it real at all: She’d flown to Paris and shared a taxi with a man who wanted her and who turned out to have millions. Fantasy, like real life, had a way of spiraling out of control.”

PLEASE HELP PSEUDOPOD AND ANSWER A VERY SHORT DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEY AT THIS LINK. IT WILL HELP US IMMEASURABLY! and thank you!

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“Gig Marks” was first published in LUCHA GORE: SCARES FROM THE SQUARED CIRCLE (Cruentus Libri Press - Kevin G. Bufton, ed.). Links to order the anthology can be found here. “I wrote it specifically for submission to that anthology, and it has not been reprinted since its original publication. If, when you think of professional wrestling, it brings to mind imagery of the WWE playing to packed arenas on television, replete with all the glitz and showmanship of a rock concert, set those thoughts aside. Wrestling’s independent scene is a different animal entirely, taking place in school gyms, armories, and VFW halls, These are the proving grounds for those who break their bodies and spill their sweat and blood for a shot at their dreams and little else. All too often, that opportunity never arrives, but that doesn’t stop the desperate belief that one day it might…”

ED FERRARA is a former television & sitcom writer/producer, whose credits include USA Network’s WEIRD SCIENCE and Walt Disney Television’s HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS: THE TV SHOW. He is perhaps best known for his work in the world of professional wrestling—as a storyline writer, he was one of the primary architects of the WWF’s “Attitude Era,” as well as having worked in similar capacities for both WCW and TNA. He teaches at Full Sail University in the Creative Writing for Entertainment BFA program. He is currently finishing his first novel, a YA/horror/adventure, and attending the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program for Popular Fiction. (Twitter: @TheEdFerrara)

Your reader this week - Patrick “The Voice” Bazille - is a Voice Over Talent and a new and fresh sound in the voice over industry. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Patrick has voiced everything from PSA’s, major product brand commercials, movie trailers, and documentaries. With a deep, commanding voice often referred to as “The Voice of God” Patrick demands attention. You can visit him at his website.

“The second I hear the sick pop of Carlos’ skull hitting the wooden gymnasium floor, I know the Kid is somewhere in the stands.

As the EMTs strap Carlos into a neckbrace, onto a backboard, I can’t help stealing a quick glimpse at the bleachers. I scan around for the Kid, just to satisfy my morbid curiosity. I don’t see him. Doesn’t matter, though—I can feel him. Somewhere close.”

PLEASE HELP PSEUDOPOD AND ANSWER A VERY SHORT DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEY AT THIS LINK. IT WILL HELP US IMMEASURABLY! and thank you!

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“Willow Tests Well” was first published in the anthology PSYCHOS: SERIAL KILLERS, DEPRAVED MADMEN, AND THE CRIMINALLY INSANE, edited by John Skipp, which was published in September 2012.

NICK MAMATAS is the author of several novels, including BULLETTIME and the forthcoming noir novel LOVE IS THE LAW. Recent short stories have appeared in the anthologies BLACK WINGS II, FUTURE LOVECRAFT, and FUNGI, and the new UK-based magazine the “Imperial Youth Review”. He is also published by Wildside Press - whose website is here. Check them out!

Your reader this week - Julie Hoverson - plies her audio trade as the main creative force behind award winning audio drama anthology series 19 NOCTURNE BOULEVARD. (In particular, check out their interesting dramatization of Lovecraft’s THE DUNWICH HORROR!)

“Tenth birthday: greeting cards from the CIA and NSA. Willow had scored ridiculously well on the Race to the Top tests, and even discovered the instructions for and answered the questions in the secret test integrated into the exam. Questions like

d. possession is nine-tenths of the law”

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WALTER DE LA MARE OM, CH (1873-1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. He worked in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil for eighteen years while struggling to bring up a family, but nevertheless found enough time to write, and, in 1908, through the efforts of Sir Henry Newbolt he received a Civil List pension which enabled him to concentrate on writing. His post-war COLLECTED STORIES FOR CHILDREN won the 1947 Carnegie Medal for British children’s books. He is probably best remembered for his works for children and for his poem “The Listeners”. He also wrote some subtle psychological horror stories, amongst them “Seaton’s Aunt” and “Out of the Deep”. Gary William Crawford has described de la Mare’s supernatural fiction for adults as being “among the finest to appear in the first half of this century” and several writers, including Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell, have cited de la Mare’s fiction as inspirational. .

Your reader this week - Paul Jenkins - has narrated for Escape Pod, Pseudopod and PodCastle a number of times (and was honored to be asked to read the story for the very first episode of PodCastle). His science fiction podcast novel THE PLITONE REVISIONIST is available for free at Podiobooks.com. His skeptical blog is Notes from an Evil Burnee and his skeptical podcast is Skepticule Extra (aka “The Three Pauls Podcast”).

“It is very seldom that one encounters what would appear to be sheer unadulterated evil in a human face; an evil, I mean, active, deliberate, deadly, dangerous. Folly, heedlessness, vanity, pride, craft, meanness, stupidity - yes. But even Iagos in this world are few, and devilry is as rare as witchcraft.

What was wrong with him?”

“The Ninth Skeleton” was first published in a 1928 issue of the Weird Tales. Most recently, the story was republished in THE END OF THE STORY: VOLUME ONE OF THE COLLECTED FANTASIES OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH - the first of six definitive volumes of Smith’s collected work published by Night Shade Books of San Francisco, from which this episode’s approved text was taken (and thanks to both Night Shade and the Smith Estate). To purchase this or other volumes of Smith, please visit them at the link: Night Shade Books - and tell them Pseudopod sent ya!

The iconic horror and fantasy fiction pulp magazine, Weird Tales, in its time published many if not all of the top writers in these genres, but according to critics, three stand out and have clearly endured: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and CLARK ASHTON SMITH (1893-1961). Put simply, Smith is a master of fantasy prose. Noted author and editor, Richard Lupoff, says of Smith, “Every glittering image demands our time and attention.” Listening to the story, one might do well to keep in mind that Smith primarily considered himself a poet, which perhaps explains his ability to mesmerize his audiences with language, not just plot. Smith was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories and was born January 13, 1893 in Long Valley, California, of English and Yankee parentage. He spent most of his life in the small town of Auburn, California, living in a small cabin built by his parents. His formal education was limited: he suffered from psychological disorders including a fear of crowds and was home schooled. But he was an insatiable reader and his education began with the reading of ROBINSON CRUSOE, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson and Madame d’Aulnoy, THE ARABIAN NIGHTS and (at the age of 13) the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Smith professed to hate the provinciality of the small town of Auburn but rarely left it until he married late in life. In his later youth, Smith made the acquaintance of the San Francisco poet George Sterling through a member of the local Auburn Monday Night Club, where he read several of his poems with considerable success. He became Sterling’s protégé and Sterling helped him to publish his first volume of poems, THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS (1912). Smith received international acclaim for the collection and was received very favorably by American critics, one of whom named Smith “the Keats of the Pacific”. Smith briefly moved among the circle that included Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, but his early fame soon faded away. In 1920 Smith composed a celebrated long poem in blank verse, “The Hashish Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil” which was published in EBONY AND CRYSTAL (1922). This was followed by a fan letter from H. P. Lovecraft, which was the beginning of 15 years of friendship and correspondence. Smith was poor for most of his life and often did hard manual jobs such as fruit picking and woodcutting in order to support himself and his parents. He was an able cook and made many kinds of wine. He also did well digging, typing and journalism, as well as contributing a column to The Auburn Journal and sometimes worked as its night editor. At the beginning of the Depression in 1929, with his aged parents’ health weakening, Smith resumed fiction writing and turned out more than a hundred short stories, nearly all of which can be classed as weird horror or science fiction. Like Lovecraft, he drew upon the nightmares that had plagued him during youthful spells of sickness. At age 61, he married Carol Jones Dorman. In August 1961 he quietly died in his sleep, aged 68.

Clark Ashton-Smith’s work is comprehensively discussed on the informative podcast The Double Shadows and the lovingly detailed website The Eldritch Dark. Please check them both out - you wont regret it.

Your reader this week - Corson Bremer - is an American living in France. He began acting professionally, as well as working as an on-air presenter in radio, while still in college in the States studying theater and technical communication. In his varied career he has been an actor, Technical Director and Set Designer for the theater; a commercial copywriter, Program Director, and producer for radio; a grant writer for non-profit organizations; and a technical writer writing user documentation for hardware and software for companies like Bull, Alcatel-Lucent, HP, and Thomson Reuters. After moving to France in 1990, and with the multimedia boom on the Internet, he combined his acting and narration skills with his technical writing experience to create voice-overs for e-learning and web videos. His big break in voice-over came when he was cast to perform characters in 2 video games for Ubisoft Paris. He set up his professional home studio and has worked internationally as a professional voice artist in commercials, video games, machinima, technical narration, audio guides, and corporate web videos since 2002. Other than “The Ninth Skeleton”, Corson’s most recent major project was voicing 5 different characters for Spiders Games’ new video game for XBox Live, PSN and PC, MARS: WAR LOGS scheduled for release in Spring 2013. Corson’s website can be found here.

“It was beneath the immaculate blue of a morning in April that I set out to keep my appointment with Guenevere. We had agreed to meet on Boulder Ridge, at a spot well known to both of us, a small and circular field surrounded with pines and full of large stones, midway between her parents’ home at Newcastle and my cabin on the north-eastern extremity of the Ridge, near Auburn.”

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“Last Waltz in Texas” by Bryce Albertson

This story originally appeared in Necrotic Tissue #10 and was reprinted in THE BEST OF NECROTIC TISSUE.

BRYCE ALBERSON is a writer from Fort Smith, Arkansas whose work has appeared in The Brooklyner, THE BEST OF NECROTIC TISSUE, MALPRACTICE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF BEDSIDE TERROR, On The Premises, and other places. His screenplay, PAPER EMPIRES, won first Place in the 2012 Las Vegas Film Festival’s screenplay contest. He was a guest judge for issue #17 of On the Premises and his story, “Like the Title Goes Here and Stuff”, will be featured in that issue, which should come out sometime near the end of July.

Read by Jacquie Duckworth, who grew up sneaking out of her room in the wee hours of the night to watch Twilight Zone and Night Gallery (my kind of girl - ed.). She is an actress in the San Francisco Bay Area performing everything from Shakespeare to sketch comedy and is proud to have been featured as the “Bondi Neighbor Woman” in a television episode of Discovery ID Channel’s I ALMOST GOT AWAY WITH IT!

“Hey there, cowboy. Have a seat.”

“Sterile” by Christopher Tepedino

“Sterile” has not been published previously. Pseudopod is the first publication to pick it up.

CHRISTOPHER TEPEDINO is a speculative fiction writer currently living in Champaign, IL, just south of Chicago. His other works have been published in Fusion Fragment, SNM Horror Magazine, 69 Flavors of Paranoia, and Arable. He is hard at work on a western zombie apocalypse novel that involves the pursuit of a mythical gun that may save mankind.

Read by John “Man Of Many Voices” Bell - why haven’t you gone and listened to BELL’S IN THE BATFRY, yet? Are you MAD?!?

“‘A shiny quarter. It’s on the pale green floor outside room 133, bright and sparkly, and Reynolds Parker stoops to pick it up. He’s a short, hunchbacked man, with missing teeth and a left eye that rolls in its socket without purpose. He has a mop in one hand; the tendrils hang toward the floor, splotched in dark red. He clutches the mop, sure to not let it fall — it’s his, after all — and hesitantly folds the shiny quarter in his palm. His hand shakes as he turns the quarter over, examining the eagle on the back, wings spread, perched on a branch of olives above the block letters E PLURIBUS UNUM, and then the decapitated George Washington head, a letter halo LIBERTY poised above his balding skull. It’s silver all around, not a speck of red blemishing its smooth surface, and Reynolds tucks it into the front pocket of his pants. Such items did not go in his apron; those pockets are for messiness. This quarter is clean.”

“Meat” by David Steffen

“Meat” has not been previously published.

DAVID STEFFEN writes video processing algorithms for traffic control systems by day. He lives with his wife and three dogs in Minnesota. His fiction has been published in Daily Science Fiction, Bull Spec, AE, and twice previously on Pseudopod, among others. He has been a dedicated listener to all the Escape Artists podcasts for years, and you can find him on the forum as “Unblinking”. David co-edits the non-fiction zine Diabolical Plots, focusing on interviews, reviews, and other topics of interest to speculative fiction fans. Also check the site for a full bibliography.

Your reader, Josh Roseman, has been published in Asimov’s and on Escape Pod, among other places, and his reviews appear regularly at Escapepod.org (he’s on the forums as Listener). His most recent fiction sale was “Secret Santa”, which appeared on THE DUNESTEEF last December, and he is currently seeking a publisher for his new superhero novel. He’s in the midst of a Buffy re-watch on his blog, Listener. His main website is Josh Roseman; his twitter is @listener42; and you can follow him on Google Plus or like him on Facebook.

“Try as I might, I fail Master. Keep the house clean and keep red meat in the fridge, he said. These are menial tasks, yet I fail.”

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This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com; they offer Pseudopod listeners a free audiobook download of their choice from Audible’s selection of over 100,000 titles.

“Red Rubber Gloves” was originally read by your editor in the late 1970s (when he was a small lad) in a collection called TALES OF UNEASE edited by John Burke and published in 1966. The book was a tie in to a soon-forgotten, and now seemingly lost, regional television anthology horror show of the same name that ran on London Weekend Television.

CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE (1923-2012) was one of the greatest British experimental novelists (the novel, BETWEEN (1968) is written entirely without using the verb “to be”), as well as a critic and a leading interpreter of Modernism. She was born in Geneva, Switzerland. During World War II she worked at Bletchley Park as a WAAF in Intelligence, later completing her university degree. She then worked for a time in London as a literary journalist and scholar. Because she often used alternative narrative devices (including unorthodox chronology and unusual typography) to create alternative realities, her work is sometimes classified as science fiction, though much of it is beyond category. As with much postmodern fiction, her writing — organized around an unspoken compact between the author, who is unspooling the text, and the reader, who is watching it unspool — is about the act of writing itself. As her New York Times obituary said “Ms. Brooke-Rose was a linguistic escape artist. In book after book she dons self-imposed syntactic shackles, and in book after book she gleefully slips them.”

Your reader this week - Kim Lakin-Smith - writes dark fantasy and science fiction short stories that have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Interzone, Celebration, Myth-Understandings, Further Conflicts, Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories By Women, and others, with ‘Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married’ shortlisted for the BSFA short story award 2009. She is the author of the gothic fantasy Tourniquet; Tales from the Renegade City, the YA novella Queen Rat, and Cyber Circus which was shortlisted for both the 2012 BSFA Best Novel award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

Her short story ‘Beyond Hope’ features in Solaris Rising 2, which is launched at this year’s Eastercon. Later in the year, her crossover YA novel Autodrome will be published by Snowbooks. Autodrome is part Speed Racer, part Death Race - on the same day that 15 year old Zar Punkstar qualifies as Pro Leaguer, he finds his inventor father murdered. His opposition are polished Pro Leaguers, hired thugs, and parts pirates. But who to trust in a world of competitors?

Visit Kim at her website

“In the kitchen window of the right-hand house the panel of two squares over two over two over two is open to reveal a· black rectangle and the beginning of the gleaming sink. Inside the sink is a red plastic bowl and on the window-sill are the red rubber gloves, now at rest.

In the morning the sunlight slants on all the windows, reflecting gold in some of the black squares but not in others, making each rectangular window, with its eight squares across and four squares down, look like half a chessboard gone berserk in order to confuse the queen and both her knights.

In the black rectangle of the open kitchen window the sunlight gleams on the stainless steel double sink unit, just beyond the cream-painted frame. Above the gleaming sink the red rubber gloves move swiftly, rise from the silver greyness lifting a yellow mass, plunging it into greyness, lifting it again, twisting its tail, shifting it to the right-hand. sink, moving back left, vanishing into greyness, rising and moving swiftly, in and out, together and apart.

On closer scrutiny I can see that in the left-hand house the wooden frames of the thirty-two black squares, eight by four in each of the rectangular windows, are painted white. It is only the right-hand house which has cream-painted windows. They all looked the same behind the trees against the strong September sun that faces me on my high balcony. The left-hand house seems quite devoid of life. Possibly the two rectangular windows, one above the other in the square end of the inverted U, are not the windows of the bathroom and kitchen at all in the left-hand house. It is difficult to see them through the apple-tree, and of course through the goldening elm in the garden at the back of my block. In the right-hand house, however, the lower room is definitely the kitchen, in the black rectangle of which the red rubber gloves move swiftly apart, shake hands, vanish into greyness, lift up a foam-white mass, vanish and reappear, move to the right, move back, lunge into greyness, rise and move swiftly right. Beyond the red rubber gloves is a pale grey shape, then blackness.”

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“The Suicide Witch” originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction, July 2012 and can be read here. She says “I wrote this story for the Codex Halloween contest. Codex is an online group of professional writers, and every year we trade “seeds” to spark new stories. My seed for this story was to write about a mortician who glues hair for special events. Clearly I have some funny ideas about how morticians live.”

VYLAR KAFTAN has published about 40 short stories in places such as Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld. She’s the founder of a new literary-themed science fiction convention in the San Francisco Bay Area called FOGcon, which happens in March (click link under the name). She was nominated for a Nebula in 2011 and blogs at here. Her novella which will be out in Asimov’s in the February issue - it’s an alternate history in which the Incan Empire survives into the 19th century, and bargains with America for a smallpox vaccine.

Your reader this week - Rikki LaCoste - is the creator and co-host of the metaphysical and esoterically flavoured podcast, Kakophonos Internet Radio available for free from iTunes. At this time, Kakophonos is undergoing a further incarnation, so if you visit www.kakophonos.com or search iTunes and cannot find it, check back again in a couple of weeks. His odd, informative, and provocative show often collapses into the silly and the absurd whenever it begins to get a little too serious. Rikki is a writer of strange articles on occult subjects, is a musician and the creator of Panthea, the co-creator of a cartoon strip about Aleister Crowley, a Hermetic Philosopher, a Ceremonial Magician, a summoner of daemons, and teaches piano to happy little children. He currently lives just East of Toronto in a dubious little house that emits strange sounds and eldrich odours all hours of the night..

“The suicide witch crushes glass in her leather gloves. Shards crumble like crackers over soup, filling her metal bucket. The witch’s fingers squeak together in the damp cellar air. Glitter escapes over the worktable’s edge, like white stars vanishing in the low torchlight. A peasant girl lies dead on a funeral board, her dress nailed to the wood in thirteen places.

The witch’s name is Yim, but none call her that. She lives under the noble house of Jiang in the province of Kung-lao, in a cellar with puddles like rice paddies. In the summer, fat flies buzz around her face until she swats them down. In the winter, her knees ache, and she coughs in the dampness as if she were an old hag. But Yim’s ragged hair is black without silver, and her face shows no lines. She can still see in the dark.”

AS PER AL’S OUTRO NOTES - COME EXPERIENCE THE ZOMBLOGALYPSE!

ZOMBLOGALYPSE

ZOMBLOGALYPSE: THE MOVIE!

“What It’s Come To” is first appearing here!

WOLF HARTMAN is twenty-two years old and lives in Orange County with his boyfriend, Matt. He is a student at Chapman University studying philosophy and English. This is his first short story. If you like what you’re hearing, be sure to become a fan of him on Facebook at WOLF HARTMAN

Your reader this week - Zhames Tremarco -has a band called Cyranoid you really should check out - HERE.

“The gas station climbs out of the dark.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Hey. Excuse me.’”

“Bunraku” was originally published in BETE NOIRE MAGAZINE #8

DAVID X. WIGGIN spent the earliest years of his childhood in Japan and was lucky enough to see a bunraku show live. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his very much flesh-and-blood wife. His fiction has appeared in STEAMPUNK MAGAZINE, STEAMPOD, THEAKER’S QUARTERLY FICTION and ALT HIST MAGAZINE.

Your reader this week - John Chu - has had short fiction published in markets including BOSTON REVIEW, ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION and TOR.COM. He blogs HERE.

“’They make her look like just another beautiful young woman,’ the old man said, ‘but really she’s more beautiful than any woman could be. I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to expect a drawing to capture what even photograph couldn’t. She’s at her most beautiful when she’s moving. When she’s still, it’s like admiring an unbent bow or an unsheathed sword.’

Now Shizuo recognized the old man as Kinoko’s puppeteer. The thought of this shriveled crab with his claw in her back, pulling strings and turning knobs, filled him with loathing. He wanted any reminder of that ugly truth out of his sight. He kept his eyes on the poster. The old man went on.

‘I noticed you in the crowd. You caught my attention immediately- your eyes did. I saw real love in them for Kinoko. I’ve always said that the truest proof of her perfection would be if someone fell in love with her. I’ve seen all sorts of eyes in the audience. Lustful, admiring, jealous, curious… but your eyes were the first I ever saw with love.

Shizuo still could not bring himself to look at the puppeteer but he nodded.”

ALGERNON HENRY BLACKWOOD, CBE (1869–1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. He was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. He was born in Shooter’s Hill, Kent, England and, after schooling in Europe, Blackwood’s father sent him to Canada in 1887 on business. From Canada, Blackwood moved to New York City, which was a less agreeable experience. He said of New York: “I seemed covered with sore and tender places into which New York rubbed salt and acid every hour of the day.” He was surrounded by criminals and other undesirables, and his roommate stole much of his money. He was sick and in poverty most of the time, and he was framed for arson. His jobs in New York included reporter for the Evening Sun and the New York Times. Blackwood returned to England in 1899. During the ensuing years, he traveled throughout Europe. His travels included a trip on the Danube River and camping on an island near Bratislava, which he used as a setting for possibly his most famous story, “The Willows”, praised by H.P. Lovecraft and others. In 1900 he joined the secret occult society the Order Of The Golden Dawn. It wasn’t until 1906, when Blackwood was in his late 30s, that he had his first major publication, which was a collection entitled THE EMPTY HOUSE AND OTHER GHOST STORIES. Two years later, his fame was assured with his stories of John Silence, a psychic investigator, and he spent the rest of his life writing, traveling extensively (he acted as an undercover agent for British military intelligence in World War I). In 1934, at 65 years of age, Blackwood started a new career by reading ghost stories on BBC radio, which enjoyed immense popularity. Two years later, he started appearing regularly on television. He retired in 1940 to Kent and continued preparing radio productions. He was made a Commander in the Order of the British Empire in 1949. After a life in which he received a modest income from his writing, Algernon Blackwood died in 1951.

You have two readers this week!

“Entrance And Exit” was read for you by David Rees-Thomas, the co-editor of Waylines Magazine, which can be found here. Issue 2 just came out March 1st! Check it out!

“The Terror Of The Twins” was read for you by Simon Meddings, who is a writer and director at Martian Creative, a company creating audio books, plays, podcasts and scripts for televison. Click the link under their name for a listen! Simon ALSO also runs the Waffle On Podcast with his friend Mark all about classic television shows and films from around the world. Available on itunes, Stitcher radio and direct at Podbean.

“These three — the old physicist, the girl, and the young Anglican parson who was engaged to her — stood by the window of the country house. The blinds were not yet drawn. They could see the dark clump of pines in the field, with crests silhouetted against the pale wintry sky of the February afternoon. Snow, freshly fallen, lay upon lawn and hill. A big moon was already lighting up.

‘As though Nature,’ the physicist went on, half to himself, ‘here and there concealed vacuums, gaps, holes in space (his mind was always speculative; more than speculative, some said), through which a man might drop into invisibility — a new direction, in fact, at right angles to the three known ones — higher space, as Bolyai, Gauss, and Hinton might call it; and what you, with your mystical turn’ — looking toward the young priest — ‘might consider a spiritual change of condition, into a region where space and time do not exist, and where all dimensions are possible — because they are one.””

“That the man’s hopes had built upon a son to inherit his name and estates — a single son, that is — was to be expected; but no one could have foreseen the depth and bitterness of his disappointment, the cold, implacable fury, when there arrived instead — twins. For, though the elder legally must inherit, that other ran him so deadly close. A daughter would have been a more reasonable defeat. But twins — ! To miss his dream by so feeble a device — !

‘At twenty-one,’ Edward, the elder, would remark sometimes, unhappily, ‘we shall know more.’ ‘Too much,’ Ernest would reply, with a rush of unreasoning terror the thought never failed to evoke — in him. ‘Things father said always happened — in life.’ And they paled perceptibly. For the hatred, thus compressed into a veritable bomb of psychic energy, had found at the last a singular expression in the cry of the father’s distraught mind.”

“Wings” was previously published nowhere else (though not for lack of trying)

NATHANIEL LEE recently turned 31. He’s got an English degree and thus considers himself basically unemployable if he ever loses his current (unrelated) position. His son, Archimedes Lee (a.k.a. Archie) is 13 months old, and Nathaniel can’t get any work done around the house. But at least he’s not someone’s flying monkey.

He still runs MIRRORSHARDS, which is now on an erratic “whenever he gets the chance” schedule because: baby. The MIRRORSHARDS book still exists at Amazon, too. His self-described sappy little story “The Alchemist’s Children” is in Alex Shvartsman’s extremely entertaining UNIDENTIFIED FUNNY OBJECTS anthology.

John Bell - is your reader this week. John is the president and CEO of John Bell Creative, LLC, and is available to write, produce, and/or voice anything from radio commercials to audio dramas to you-name-it. You can contact him at jbellvoice@gmail.com. For family-friendly fun, listen to BELL’S IN THE BATFRY, a comedy podcast available on iTunes and/or at the link under the name.

“Fresh wails assault my ears as I leave the cell and haul the rusty door shut. The lock clicks. I wonder briefly if anyone still has the key. Well, the witch can sort it out if she wants to. I’m too tired to care.

I see the witch, standing two cells down. She seems hesitant. ‘It’s very… damp,’ she remarks.

‘Yes,’ says the witch. ‘We have Dorothy. Bring me her little dog, too.’”

“The Trinket” was first published by Morrigan Books in the anthology THE PHANTOM QUEEN AWAKES in 2010

P.G. BELL was born and raised less than a mile from the old Roman fortress of Caerleon in south Wales, a site that served as inspiration for much of this story. He now lives in Cardiff with his wife Anna and son Aurelien, where he is currently putting the finishing touches to his first novel. He’s an editor at Impossible Podcasts, where he’s in charge of the ‘Stories in Print’ thread, exploring all manner of sci-fi, fantasy and horror literature.

John Trevillian - is your reader this week. John is an award-winning British author of the dystopian A-Men trilogy - The A-Men, The A-Men Return and Forever A-Men start with a classic mix of Mad Max and The Matrix – and this is a future with it’s fair share of urban undead and nightmarish storylines. It also contains a pitch for a movie called Nighties of the Living Dead… so there’s much here for the modern horror reader! Available in print, audiobook and ebook formats, the first novel is also downloadable as a free dramatized podcast. Trevillian’s work is informed as much by the roles of magazine editor, technology writer and IT journalist as his training in the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and Native American shamanism. Check out his blog.

He’s also founder of the Talliston House & Gardens project – basically the transformation of an ordinary house into thirteen unique rooms from different times and places in history. Medieval Watchtower living room? Check. Cambodia bamboo treehouse attic? Check. Art Nouveau Scottish haunted bedroom? Check! Take a look for yourself at Talliston House & Gardens.

“They burned Gederus in the yard outside the barracks. Dawn had brought the first break in rain for ten days and the men, still cold and filthy from the construction work, cast anxious glances at the black weight of cloud that threatened to stamp out and drown the struggling flames. Those closest to the pyre stole a guilty pleasure from its warmth.

All except Rufinius, who stood to attention at the head of the bonfire, his nostrils thick with the smell of pitch and roasting meat.

He nodded to the priests, who stepped forward and began reciting the prayers for the dead. Rufinius did not listen. Instead, he narrowed his eyes against the smoke and surveyed the army standing ready around him. A full century of men, their plate armor dull and glassy in the pale sunlight, the auxiliary soldiers and craftsmen standing in a looser huddle farther out. Surrounding them all, the fledgling stronghold of Glevum rose black and skeletal from the churned clay of the earth.”

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com; they offer Pseudopod listeners a free audiobook download of their choice from Audible’s selection of over 100,000 titles.

This story previously appeared on Hunter’s blog at FORGOTTEN MANUSCRIPTS.

Hunter James Martin comes from Scotland. He blogs at I sell exotic children to celebrities. That is all!

Your reader this week is Rich C. Girardi. A writer, producer, and puppeteer, check Lady Jane’s Lair on YouTube.

“The moment I laid eyes on the new start I knew he wasn’t going to last. Half of it was the look on his eyes, the other half was the look on everyone else’s eyes when they watched him. A lot of people don’t make it in this line of work. Not many minds can cope with being planted deep into the ground for so long. The average new start does five days a week, while the average worker does seven. I have been doing entire weeks for longer than I remember, devoid of fresh air and sunlight. It has been a long time since I have seen my reflection, but I imagine I am not a pretty sight.

The atmosphere doesn’t help things either, the horrid gloom we work within. Even in my apathy I can taste it: the darkness that nestles within the oily depths of the shadows, the dull throb that resonates through the caverns, and the dreadful machine, always rumbling like an empty stomach. The heat too, emitted from its insides, made worse after twelve hours of working in the same suit collecting sweat and oil and dirt and sometimes piss. Then wearing it again the next day. Then for another year.

My suit smells terrible. Everyone’s does. The tough leather is falling apart and there is a tear behind my left shoulder. But we are used to it. Used to recycled uniforms and moribund tools. Used to safety equipment that is a hazard in itself. Used to the smell of ancient piss and shit. Hardly even notice it really. Only made aware of it when a new start comes down the cargo elevator twitching his nose and pretending the reek doesn’t bother them. They all do that, then they either get used to it or lose their job. Back up the cargo elevator, or worse.’”

TED KOSMATKA set his sights early on being a writer. This mostly involved having all his writing rejected, pursuing a biology degree, dropping out before graduation, and becoming a steel worker like his father and grandfather. Then the mill went bankrupt. After that he worked various lab jobs where friendships were born and fire departments were called. (And where, incidentally, he learned the fine point of distinction between fire-resistant and fire-proof) Eventually, Ted finished college and worked in a research lab with electron microscopes. Then came the final logical step: ditching all that to write video games at Valve. Ted’s fiction has been widely reprinted and nominated for both the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon awards. His first novel, THE GAMES, was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best genre books of 2012 and is currently available on Amazon. His second novel, PROPHET OF BONES will be released in bookstores on April 2.

Peter Piazza - is your reader this week. Pete narrates stories for sites including StarshipSofa and Tales of Old (as well as Pseudopod, of course).

“Around him, ladies fanned themselves in the heat, dressed in their Sunday finest. At the front of the church, the minister began. He was an older gentleman, narrow and angular as the church itself. Somewhere up ahead, among the sea of blue hair and balding pates sat his cousin Jason—along with Jason’s wife, her grandparents, and other assorted relation, both close and distant, all here for the special occasion.

His daughter was good for the first minutes of the minister’s sermon. Then it began: she slid down his knee to the floor.”

Pete Milan - is your reader this week. Pete writes, and produces audio drama for Pendant Audio, and can also be heard in audio dramas from Gypsy Audio, the Colonial Radio Theater On The Air, and Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater. He has also performed free audiobooks for Librivox. You can visit him at twitter.com/PeteMilan..

“The crate, as best I can tell, hangs high above some sprawling dock, some bustling seaport. The smells are pretty unmistakable, but it’s the sounds that do the most telling. Gulls talk, water babbles. A lot of ships come and go. I can hear their massive hulls cutting the waves. I hear their horns, which sound somber and gloomy in the distance, then earsplittingly awake and angry when close. Foggy, lumbering mastodons, I imagine. Things crawling up out of the mist and out of history itself.

When I imagine the sea, the world outside the box, I always picture it dark. I don’t mean that to suggest I’m being fatalistic. I don’t brood because I don’t have time to. I’m far too busy in here, you see. If I started brooding now, I’d tumble down into it, and it would be a forever-slope that I couldn’t climb back up from. I see it as dark because that’s just how it naturally feels through the cracks.”

“I Am The Box, The Box Is Me” uses these creaking and harbors sounds from Freesound.

“treehouse” by mystiscool

“tie the boat” by laurent

“creaking silver birch” by ERH

“dock ramp” by epolk

“tree creak” by department64

“HarborToulon” by DifferentSoundScapes

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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.

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.

“There was one Professor George Manson, a teacher of anthropology, whose company my mother would least have advised. He was an espoused atheist, well-known for his existentialist and humanist rhetoric. My mother, a devout Catholic, would have called him the devil himself, but she would have been wrong. I have met the devil, and George was at best a close cousin.

He smiled, stood and retrieved a book from his shelf. ‘Have a look at this,’ he said as he sat down.”

“”I have to throw on some clothes. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

She was going to find him. He’d been only a few minutes, probably less than a mile, from home. She would be here any time. “

The website of A.C. WISE can be found by clicking the link under her name in the by line above. She also co-edits the Journal of Unlikely Entomology.

Your reader this week is Ben Phillips - and enjoy his reading of this story because that’s gonna be all you hear for a while from him…

“A floating city, a sinking city, a drowned city; there isn’t much difference, really.

I stand on a pier, eyes shaded against the water’s glare. It’s 2015, by the smell - diesel and cooked meat, early enough that such things still exist. It might as well be 2017, or 3051. But this year is where my client is, so I wait, sweating inside a black, leather jacket, watching slick weeds stir below lapping waves.”

“Maybe I’m not human, maybe I never was. I’m pretty sure humans never feel like I do when I drink gasoline, that sweet intoxication, so pregnant with possibility and power. It’s like the power of the sun, and of a great tree that drew in sunlight to grow, and of an ancient beast that ate of the tree and died, that sank into the earth and was worked on by millions of years until it turned to oil. It’s like all those kinds of power, concentrated step by step, and the toil of the drillers and refineries and pump mechanics too. Gasoline is everything. Gasoline is the elixir of modern civilization and I’m one with it when I drink. All the clouds of exhaust and all the labor of machines and their men, I’m all within it.

Then I drop off and I have to crawl out, I’m man-bodied again, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt with fake-pearl snaps. My fingers are crusted with rust and black under the nails but I run them through my hair anyway. It’s long hair, unkempt and black. I never get it cut, never trim my beard, but they stay the same.”

William Meikle is a Scottish writer with fifteen novels published in the genre press and over 250 short story credits in thirteen countries. His work appears in many professional magazines and anthologies and he has recent short story sales to Nature Futures, Penumbra and Daily Science Fiction among others. He now lives in a remote corner of Newfoundland with icebergs, whales and bald eagles for company. In the winters he gets warm vicariously through the lives of others in cyberspace, so please check him out at William Meikle.com. His Dark Regions Press collection DARK MELODIES (2012) is available now in hardcover and paperback - check it out here.

Your reader this week - Christiana Ellis - was last heard here reading PSEUDOPOD 268: Let There Be Darkness.

“Betty woke with a start, heart pounding so loud in her ears that it took several seconds to realize a different sound had brought her so rudely awake; someone was playing the piano in the dining room beneath her.

‘What else could it be?’”

“The first thing I was unhappy about was the dark. I do not like the dark very very much. It is not the worst thing in the world but it is also not the best thing in the world, either. When I was very smaller I used to wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and be scared when I woke up, because it was so dark. I would go to bed with my light on, the one light that turns round and round, on the drawers by the side of my bed. It has animals on it and it turns around and it makes shapes and patterns on the ceiling and it is pretty and my mummy’s friend Jeanette gave it to me. It is not very too bright but it is bright enough and you can see what is what. But then it started that when I woke up in the middle of the night, the light would not be on any more and it would be completely dark instead and it would make me sad. I didn’t understand this but one night when I’d woken up and cried a lot my mummy told me that she came in every night and turned off the light every night after I was asleep, so it didn’t wake me up. But I said that wasn’t any good, because if I did wake up in the night and the light wasn’t on, then I might be scared, and cry. She said it seemed that I was waking every night, and the she and daddy had worked out that it might be the light that kept me awake, and after a while I was awake I’d get up and go into their room and see what was up with them, which meant she got no sleep any night ever and it was driving her completely nuts.

My light was not on and I was cold.”

“But he was a tall, sinewy figure. He wore a cape or short mantle, a cocked hat, and a pair of jack-boots, such as held their ground in some primitive corners of England almost to the close of the last century.

The tall stranger entered uninvited.”

No Further by Matthew Acheson

This piece was previously published in “Underground Voices” magazine and is one of two stories available to date from Mr. Acheson’s WHISPERS FROM THE NORTH saga, a series of linked short stories that sets the backdrop for his currently in progress fantasy novel.

Matthew Acheson lives in Orono, Maine. He earned his Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Ancient History from the University of Southern Maine, and has worked as an engineer in the telecommunications industry for over a decade. His fiction has appeared in Raygun Revival, Spinetingler, Digital Dragon, Morpheus Tales, and others. On some cold winter nights you’ll find him by the fireplace, entertaining his fourteen nieces and nephews with strange tales of supernatural horror and the fantastic. His website, Cryptic House, is linked under his byline above.

Read by Ian Stuart, who has something special in store for you in a few weeks!

“Their arrival was a terrible sight. The light from the full moon cast a strange, eerie glow upon the host of pale corpse things and their shrieking masters which stretched across the vale for miles in every direction. They swept the valley like a flood that left only ash, carrion and pestilence in its wake.”

The Conchie by J. Chant

Pseudopod is the story’s first publication.

Jayne Chant resides in a tiny town in Cambridgeshire with her husband, daughter and malevolent cat. Her first experience of the unmatchable thrill of a good ghost story was as a small child listening to her mother read Victorian ghost stories by candlelight..

Read by Kim Lakin-Smith, whose dark fantasy and science fiction short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Interzone, Celebration, Myth-Understandings, Further Conflicts, PANDEMONIUM: STORIES OF THE APOCALYPSE, THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF GHOST STORIES BY WOMEN (”‘Field of the Dead”), and others, with “Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married” shortlisted for the BSFA short story award 2009. She is the author of the gothic fantasy Tourniquet; Tales from the Renegade City, the YA novella QUEEN RAT, and CYBER CIRCUS which was shortlisted for both the 2012 BSFA Best Novel award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Published on the 1st of December by Snow Books will be RESURRECTION ENGINES, an anthology of steampunk short stories inspired by classic novels from the Victorian period, containing her short story, “The Island of Peter Pandora” (a mashup of Peter Pan and The Island of Doctor Moreau), which has also been picked up for Best Fantasy 2013 from Proxima Books. She is currently working on an urban fantasy YA novel and a dark fantasy novel for adults.

“‘But last night I could not sleep. That unending thunder – I shut my eyes and all I could see were flames. It hurt to breath. It was Thomas I worried for. Then very late, after the clock struck three, Peter appeared and my heart leapt. He sat on the Ottoman at the foot of the bed, his back to me, his arm stretched along the bedstead.

‘It was a nightmare, nothing more,’ said Elizabeth, pulling her hand away.”

Bitter Tea & Braided Hair by Henry Lu

This story was first published on Fiction365 on May 4th, 2012.

Henry Lu learned English in a pre-podcast era, by listening to Voice of America when he was a teenager in Communist China. He also paints. You can look at his paintings on RedBubble under the name of “ArtPal”

Read by Tracey Yuen, who is involved in education and considers listening to podcasts a big factor in getting himself to “read” fiction and dabbles in photography, videography editing, page layout and narration.

“Incense smoke rises from the monastery into the low-hanging clouds of the same ominous shade, portending a quick-fire summer storm.

He pays close attention to the braided hairs of Tibetan maidens, determined to follow his Chinese father’s footstep in marrying one of them someday.”

This is its first appearance anywhere. This story will be one of four dark fantasy/crime-noir tales featured in the e-book A LONG WALK DOWN A DARK ALLEY, to be published on Smashwords.com and Amazon.com (and others) in late 2012.

J. D. Brink has been in the Navy a long time, first as an enlisted intelligence collector and later as a nurse corps officer, with a few years as a wandering civilian in between. His adventures have taken him around the Pacific on a warship, living all over the States and in Japan for a couple years, and had him deployed to an Army hospital in the deserts of Kuwait. Today he and his family live in south Texas (almost as hot as Kuwait) where he serves as a corps school instructor. What little bit of his life the Navy doesn’t own he leases from his family; fortunately, they let him write. He has two blogs: BRINK’S CHAOS THEORY can be found at the link under his by line above, and also check out FUGITIVES OF PURGATORY.

Your reader this week is W. Ralph Walters, whose FREQUENCY OF FEAR website hasn’t been updated in a while but still has treasures to be plundered. He read the extremely popular “What Makes You Tick” in Pseudopod 228: Flash On The Borderlands VII - Tableaux & Displays.

“The pecking order in the car is standard: George drives, the boss rides shotgun, and Shovel and Byrd ride in the back. The valet brings the Caddie around and everyone starts to climb in, but August takes Byrd’s seat and tells him to sit in the front. There’s a moment of confusion at this sudden change in protocol, but they’re soon on their way. Byrd runs the music too loud to talk, which is fine; the boss isn’t in the habit of explaining himself anyway and no one wants to ask. About halfway back to the house, August grabs Shovel’s idle hand and gives it a squeeze, kind of a you’re my main man gesture. Shovel, as expressionless as ever, just gives the boss a single nod. Once they’re back at the house, he finds out why.

‘I don’t trust them anymore,’ August tells him. They’re in the master bedroom, which is about as big as Shovel’s whole damn apartment. George and Byrd are downstairs, checking out the car and getting everyone something to eat, respectively, as instructed. August is standing in the middle of his closet holding up various neckties in the mirror. ‘You’re the only one I can trust with her. Shovel the Unfeeling, the human instrument, a man with no emotion, no fear, no regret. Your reputation made your career, and mine. You’re solid as a rock. But those other two…’ He decides on a cobalt blue tie, silk. ‘Good with my eyes, eh?’ he says, knowing he’ll get no reply. ‘Those other two, they might get jealous. Can’t have that. That’s why I need it to be just you and me from now on. You’ll manage the other crews but keep them at a distance. You, me, and her, from now on.’

That famous icy glare returns with cold fire behind it. August’s finger rises an inch from Shovel’s flat nose. ‘Don’t you back talk me. You get your ass downstairs and do your fucking job. Get rid of them, before they get rid of me. And I don’t want them coming back for me later, you hear? Get rid of them.‘”

“Beside them, a young man—a boy really—was having disks of black metal implanted in the skin of his forearms. Zeljko looked on, his mind spinning with a strange mixture of fear, revulsion and excitement. The excitement moved toward arousal, and he was suddenly self-conscious. He turned away, and walked back into the main area of the club.

‘I don’t know why he looks so unhappy,’ the woman said as she gazed at the figures contorted features. ‘Eventually, we’ll all be like that. Everything a mix, no difference between flesh and metal, no distinction between the workers and the machines they operate.’”

“There was a splash where there shouldn’t have been. Reed was shoving handfuls of dirty clothes into the washing machine when he stopped to listen closely. The sound seemed to have come from beneath the small wooden plank in the corner –- the one that covered the entrance to the crawlspace under the house. The splash had sounded distinctly like a weighty object –- a hand, maybe — slapping the surface of a body of water.

The entrance was barely large enough to allow an average-sized adult to slip down into the dirt-floored space beneath the house. Reed had watched the hefty home inspector squeeze through the hole a few months earlier before he and his wife, Maisy, bought the house. Once the inspector pushed through the narrow opening, Reed saw that there was a bit more room for someone to, literally, crawl under the first floor. While watching the older man slide into the dark space, Reed’s mouth had gone dry and he suddenly had difficulty swallowing.”

“OL’ DAGON DARK

He doesn’t see the shopkeeper sitting just behind the curtain, doesn’t see the man slide into a crouch, back against the wall, and bury his face in his hands.”

“’So they don’t mind that I’m just a lowly fisherman.’

Terrence only ever found the dead ones.”

“Mr. P sat at the table, his sagging head leaning against one gloved hand. It was tilted slightly to the side and he was waving the free fingers of his other hand in the air.

Fascinated, I longed to watch as he carved it, to see how it was done, but it was such an intimate act, so very personal, and I couldn’t bear to intrude upon it. As the knife penetrated the rind and into the tender inner flesh, I turned and left the house and returned to the field where I belonged.’

“The Last Reel” originally appeared in Supernatural Tales #10, in 2006 and was reprinted in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR #18 (2007).

Lynda E. Rucker’s fiction has appeared in such places as Black Static, THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR, and THE YEAR’S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR, among others, and is forthcoming in Postscripts. When not writing, she works as a composition instructor, writing tutor, and copy editor. She was born and raised in the South, has lived on three continents and both coasts, and currently calls Athens, Georgia home. Check out her blog at the link under her byline!

Your reader this week, Mark E. Phair, is an engineer and a storyteller. Find him online at MarkEPhair.com, Logibate.com, and @MarkEPhair on Twitter.

“Working in a kitchen had left her inured to minor cuts and burns. ‘Let’s see what’s in the box.’

‘I don’t know how she got hold of these. It’s all pictures of me.’ “

Tres Crow lives in Atlanta with the two people he loves most in the world. He’s been published in decomP, Emprise Review, Full of Crow, The Foundling Review, as well as the website Metalsucks.net. Check out his blog, Dog Eat Crow World, at the link under his name above.

Read by Malcolm Charles

I grab him by his shirt and yank him to his feet. He is so thin, a bird, just like his mother, and the reek of liquor from his pores and breath stings in my nostrils. I shake him.

“John…” starts my wife, dropping the shovels, but I wave her away.

“Stop your whining. It’s your fault we’re out here. If you weren’t such a goddamn idiot,” I yell at him and I shake him and I stamp my feet.

Magnitude Seven by David Glen Larson

This story was originally published in Niteblade, December 2011.

After leaving the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, David worked as a screenwriter and television writer for several years before writing his first short story, which recently appeared in Daily Science Fiction. He has also published speculative poems in magazines like Niteblade, Ideomancer, and the British Fantasy Society Journal (formerly Dark Horizons).

Read by Patrick Bazille. Patrick “The Voice” Bazille is a new and fresh sound in the voice over industry. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Patrick has voiced everything from PSA’s to major product brand commercials and movie trailers to documentaries. With a deep, commanding voice often referred to as “The Voice of God” Patrick demands attention.

Levoy found a road at the bottom of the stairs, and followed it to a city of blue and white tents. There were strange people all around him: dog people, pig people, tin-can people, people with legs made of tires and arms of twisted steel, and rat people too. All of them had no eyes.

There were also children making masks from scraps of wood and other broken things for tourists that would never come here. The children had no eyes.

One of them called out his name. It was Marta, a friend from the school Magnitude Seven destroyed. Marta had no eyes.

Always Grinning by Nathaniel Lee

Nathaniel is a writer living in North Carolina with his wife, child, and obligatory cats. He puts words in order, and sometimes people give him money for them.  His work, including a full bibliography, can be found at his daily writing blog, Mirrorshards (see the link under his name above) where he publishes a 100-word story most days.  HIs short story “Gastrohpidia” is currently available at Ideomancer.  The Mirrorshards book, “Splinters of Silver and Glass” has 100 of his drabbles, one flash fiction story (”The Lady of Tilmarine”) and one full-length short story (”Old Growth.”)

Read by Rikki LaCoste. Rikki is the creator and co-host of the metaphysical and esoterically flavoured podcast, Kakophonos Internet Radio available for free from iTunes.  His odd, informative, and provocative show often collapses into the silly and the absurd whenever it begins to get a little too serious.  Rikki is a writer of strange articles on occult subjects, a musician (involved in the projects Panthea and Wychwood Children), the creator of a cartoon strip about Aleister Crowley, a Hermetic Philosopher, a Ceremonial Magician, a summoner of daemons, and teaches piano to happy little children.  He currently lives in Toronto, alone, and in a basement that is dubiously avoided because of the strange sounds and eldrich odours that regularly waft from it.

With an audible thump, a man threw himself at the glass, arms splayed. Jay jumped before his conscious mind caught up with his reactions. Some asshole office-clown playing a prank.  But there was something wrong with the man’s head.  Jay peered up at the window as he resumed walking, then stopped dead barely ten feet away from the building. The man wasn’t moving, hadn’t thrown himself at all.  He was dead.  He had to be, couldn’t still be alive.  Could he?  Jay saw bones jutting from one limp leg, saw the bruises and black smears of blood across the man’s pudgy, gray-haired face.

“Singing by the Fire” is original to Pseudopod, though an earlier version was briefly available on the author’s website as a piece of free fiction. This story is directly inspired a decade of recurring snake nightmares and by a masterful little poem by North Carolina poet Robert Morgan, called “Mountain Bride” -but that near-decade of snake dreams underpins it like venom. He has recently had the story accepted for publication in the print anthology Hunting Ghosts, forthcoming from Black Oak Media (see link).

Jamieson Ridenhour is the author of the comedy werewolf murder-mystery Barking Mad (Typecast 2011) and creator of the short horror films Cornerboys and The House Of The Yaga. He used to live in a log cabin in the mountains of North Carolina, though one with electricity. He now lives in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Your reader this week is the Nathan Lowell, who you may know from Escape Pod #357: Connoisseurs of the Eccentric.

“‘I don’t know that I’d call it a ghost story,” Whithers said, looking at the reflected firelight caught in his brandy glass. “I don’t think I really believe in ghosts. It’s been twenty-five years, now.’ He fell silent again, studying his drink.

We stayed silent, not wanting to break Whithers’ train of thought for fear he would reconsider. The candles and fireplace combined with the lightning outside to create a weird shifting of shadows across Whithers’ face as he continued.”

Erich William Bergmeier is a freelance writer and translator. His work has appeared in M-Brane SF and A cappella Zoo. This story was originally published in Basement Stories, Issue #1, in the summer of 2010.

Your reader this week is Bob Eccles whom you’ve heard before both here and over at PodCastle. Bob has a collection of his own short horror stories out called Tiny Terrors. It’s available in the Kindle Store at Amazon.com.

The strangers arrived after dark. Raymond could hear them behind the cabin, the twigs cracking under their feet. He went to the bed and grabbed his shotgun and stood with his back to the wall. Quietly, he chambered a round.

“Who’s that?” he called out.

“Just people looking for a place to sleep,” a man replied.

Clara opened the heavy oak door and looked out through the screen. She saw them standing there in the half light; a husband and wife and their little girl. She looked at Raymond with pleading eyes, but he shook his head. Clara thought of their own children, how much she hoped that someone would open their door to them.

“Come in,” she said. “You must be freezing.”

The three strangers came up on the deck and skulked in through the door. They were thin and pale, and in the harsh light of the kerosene lamp the lines on their faces were as deep as dried up river beds. Clara motioned for them to sit down at the table while Raymond stood rigid in the corner with the handle of the shotgun pressed into his armpit. The man’s eyes moved around the room as he took stock of the empty shelves and the dishes stacked beside the sink. Clara had just finished putting the last of their food in the cellar before the family arrived and Raymond was thankful for that. It meant there would be no trouble.

“The Step” was originally published in 1925 and later collected in MORE SPOOK STORIES (1930)

Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and member of a distinguished and eccentric family. After attending Marlborough and King’s College, Cambridge where he studied classics and archaeology, he worked at the British School of Archaeology in Athens. One of our greatest humorists, he achieved great success at an early age with his first novel, DODO (1893). He was a prolific author writing over a hundred books: serious novels, ghost stories, plays and biographies. But he is best remembered for his MAPP & LUCIA comedies written between 1920 and 1939 and other comic novels such as PAYING GUESTS and MRS. AMES. He became mayor of Rye, the Sussex town that provided the model for his fictional Tilling, from 1934 to 1937.

Benson was also known as a writer of (mainly grisly, though occasionally humorous) ghost stories, which frequently appear in collections. Not as scholarly as M.R. James, Benson captures life in a rapidly modernizing Edwardian age, but one still prey to spirits and monsters. H. P. Lovecraft spoke highly of Benson’s works in his SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE most notably of his story “The Man Who Went Too Far.” A critical essay on Benson’s ghost stories appears in S.T. Joshi’s book THE EVOLUTION OF THE WEIRD TALE (2004).

Your reader this week is the Frank Key who was last heard here reading Pseudopod 261: Widdershins. You really should give his community radio show Hooting Yard On The Air a listen!

“”Nice night, let’s walk,” said John. “Nothing like a walk when there’s liquid on board. Clears the brain for you and I must have a final powwow tonight, if you’re off to-morrow. There are some bits of things still to go through.”

They walked on, and again, clearer than before, John heard what was inaudible to the other. He told himself, as he often did now, that it was an echo. But it was odd that the echo only repeated the footfalls of one of them. As he recognized this, he felt for the first time, when he was fully awake, some sudden chill of fear. It was as if a cold hand closed for a moment on his heart, just pressing it softly, almost tenderly. But they were now close to his own gate, and presently it clanged behind them.”

(medical note -Bleeding nose, not too bad. Bleeding ears, bad. Bleeding eyes, very bad indeed!)

….ENJOY?

A Short History of Pseudopod: Episodes 201 to 300

(see you soon at a Senate Subcommittee hearing on Internet delinquency and the corruption of the web’s morals!)

“White As A Bedroom Door” is original to Pseudopod.

Nathaniel Lee is a writer living in North Carolina with his wife, child, and obligatory cats. He puts words in order, and sometimes people give him money for them. His work, including a full bibliography, can be found at his daily writing blog, Mirrorshards (see link under his byline above) where he publishes a 100-word story every day. “Gastrohpidia” is currently available at Ideomancer. The Mirrorshards book, SPLINTERS OF SILVER AND GLASS has 100 of his drabbles, one flash fiction story (”The Lady of Tilmarine”) and one full-length short story (”Old Growth.”) It’s at Amazon (Kindle only, I’m afraid) here.

Your reader this week is the David Moore, who runs a gaming podcast called THE GAME MASTER SHOW, about sharpening your GM skills.

“The story she tells most often is not about any one person. In the story, Amber is a little girl, maybe five years old. She is sitting on her bed, in a darkened bedroom. The covers are thin, sometimes damp where she wet them. She smells sour sweat and urine, old cigarette smoke, spilled alcohol. The smells of home, as she thinks of them. They are almost comforting.

What isn’t comforting is the door.”