Sponsored by CONTAGIOUS, by Scott Sigler.

I sit at the table and work on my bonsai scar. I press the silver head of the meat tenderizer into my left thigh, stippling the skin. I do not feel pain; I scarcely feel the pressure. My nerves are dead, there on my left thigh, where I grow my scar. Matches, hot needles, knives, and time. I tend my scar, I do not control it. Skin and muscle are unpredictable– this is not like painting a picture, carving a piece of wood. The flesh knows its own logic, the bruises come strangely, the healing proceeds unevenly. I collaborate with my flesh.

Read by JC Hutchins

Stosh wore his sneakers as he walked along the incoming tide, let cool water ooze over his toes. It was awkward, squishing along in the wet sand, but he didn’t want to risk stepping on a broken seashell or a needle. His shoes were already filthy, not much left for the water to ruin.

He swept his eyes over the beach, scanned among piles of trash for Liddy. Instead he spotted a skinny figure running his way.

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Ben Phillips

Desdemona used to trace the stars with her finger, connecting the dots, naming her own constellations.

Desdemona.

Desdemona — who gave me thirty-one birthdays when I had none. Desdemona — who laughed and made snow angels on rooftops because the snow there was cleanest, the closest to Heaven. Desdemona — who made an angel of snow and blood in the dirty street on the day I lost her.

Too far.

Read by Ralph Walters

The first thing they did when they took a trip like this was pick new names. This time they were Michael and Jennifer. The house was empty when they got there; it was beautiful, the summer home of very wealthy people. The interior was an open shell, rugs on a stone panel floor with a kitchen in back and an open-sided spiral staircase that led up to a balcony bedroom and another set of stairs in back that led to a kitchen. The house was surrounded by grass, which was surrounded by woods, which were surrounded by a wooden fence. They took their clothes off as soon as they got inside. Jennifer threw hers in the corner; Michael left a trail, starting with his shirt at the front door and ending with his underwear at the kitchen. “Jesus, I’m hungry…” He stopped suddenly and looked at her sheepishly, like a dog that knows it’s done something wrong. “No, I didn’t mean…” Jennifer shook her head. “I know you didn’t. Don’t worry.” She hoisted herself up onto the counter, put her hand on his shoulder, and tilted her head to the side. He spit on her neck. His saliva was bright green; it hissed like oil in a frying pan, and a second later there was a swollen red mark on her neck. He nibbled on it gently, and her skin tore and split like tissue paper. She closed her eyes as he pressed his mouth against the wound. They stayed at the house for about two weeks.

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

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.

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. The longer the story is, the more brilliant it needs to be to sustain audience interest. 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.

Multiple and Simultaneous Submissions

We accept simultaneous submissions (sending a story to us and to one or more other markets at the same time), but appreciate being advised that the story is under consideration elsewhere. Please do not send multiple submissions (sending more than one story at a time to us) unless you have been told that it is acceptable for you to do so.

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, 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.

Please link to:  http://www.poemuseum.org/
Byline pronounced:  "ED-ger AL-in POE" -- last name rhymes with "hoe"


Edgar Poe
203 N. Amity St.
Baltimore, MD  21223
poeman@gmail.com
Skype: Da_R4ven

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 at which you want us to correspond with you!

Please be sure to include the title of the story on 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. How to pronounce your byline. (Optional, but if you don’t include this we reserve the right to completely screw it up.)
3. Your mailing address. (Optional, but if you don’t give it to us you’ll have to be paid by PayPal — in case you consider that a bad thing.)
4. A cover statement briefly giving us your publication credits, 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. (Note: When we say “briefly,” we mean only your top five or six publications at most.)
5. A URL for us to link from your name in the web posting (Optional. If you don’t provide one, we just won’t link your name or necessarily know what web address you want us to underscore for you in the spoken author introduction.)
6. 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.
7. The title of the story.
8. The story’s byline.
9. 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.

No Multiple Submissions: Please, one story at a time! Unless you’re specifically told otherwise, this is the rule at every fiction market.

(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 Ben Phillips

The young men in Bangkok sometimes called him Grandpa or Uncle as he clutched their lithe oiled bodies. His fingers grasped a bit too tight, his nails dug into their skin and drew beads of blood. Sometimes he’d choke them, but never enough to kill them. He had to be careful. He was gaining a reputation among them, and a reputation was something he had to stay away from. But it was hard not to let the old feelings overcome him, the memories flooding into his mind of how it once felt to watch a life quickly fade behind the suffocating film of a plastic bag.

Samnang startled. He clutched frantically at his shirt pocket. The piece of paper was still there.

Read by Heather Welliver

“You are lucky; I have already imparted that to you. It is the life inside you that is suffering.”

“Madam,” Kazungu said, as he put the car into first gear, “you should show Mganga respect. He is a very wise man.”

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Ben Phillips

Blood matting her blonde hair, blood on her face, blood covering so much of her it takes a moment to see she is naked. The dream gives me an eternity to see her. Eyes wide open and shining, shining. And she grins. That grin has never stopped haunting me. In the dream, I know what she’s done in the bedroom. And I’ve never seen her happier, more exulted.

“Hey, baby…” she says, and in the calm and affectionate tone of her words, the horror of the dream reaches an unbearable level.

Full text available here

Read by Elie Hirschman

As she leaves for work, my wife kisses me goodbye. It is love in the machine, passion stripped away on the assembly-line known as the workweek. Her car pulls out of the driveway, leaving me with more than an hour to kill before I have to go to work.

I empty a little plastic bag of capsules and gelcaps into my palm. These are all the vitamins a man my age should be taking. I wash them down with a glass of calcium-enriched orange juice, and then it’s time to shower. While lathering up, masturbation gets considered and rejected, the pleasure I would receive is found to be too fleeting to affect my mood. After rinsing and drying off, I pause to look at my face in the bathroom mirror. Seeing is believing — I look older than I am.

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who offers you a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Ben Phillips

Some places you visit in dreams again and again. Some places visit you. Fourteen and it found me.

When I was near, so close that I could almost touch it, the ground shook and the brass doors at the tower’s base flung open like the wings of an iron dragon and I stared into the guts of the machine.

Read by Ian Stuart

“I’m Mr. Sinclair.” The smiling old man introduced himself. “Not too early, am I?”

“Of course, I can always come back another time,” said the old man. He frowned and scratched his chin. “That would be rather inconvenient, though. I’ve come all the way from Oxford. Traffic was an absolute nightmare.”

Happy Halloween!

Read by The Word Whore

Sound design and score by Lee M. Bartow (featuring music by love is nothing. and Navicon Torture Technologies). Recorded and constructed at Leechnest Breeding Facilities Summer-Autumn 2008.


The house off Weathervane Street came old, but not haunted.

Isabelle made it haunted, and so she still lives in the house.


This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Alasdair Stuart

Okay.

I first discovered the existence of the human soul while examining the x-ray of a broken clavicle of an ugly boy named Peter Demetrios. Peter, who was the kind of kid I think of as a fly-torturing, spaghettio-bellied, dirty-fingernailed, nose-picking little crap of a little boy, had landed on a trampoline wrong and sustained a multiply displaced comminuted fracture of the collar bone.

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Damaris Mannering

“It’s going on three weeks, now.”

Nancy was surprised. “Oh.”

Read by Ben Phillips

A tiny slit in the yellow protective suit killed her.

She won’t see it. You never see the one that gets you.

She charged toward Ridley. The coiled air hose straightened behind her. Her gloved hands laid flat against the glass. She mouthed something. It looked like, “Please.”

Read by Richard Dansky

At first, there was only numb horror.

_I want to die._

Read by David Moore

Sauber wasn’t crazy. He’d planned on never hitting the same place twice. He even kept a check-list — near the toilet, in case it needed to be destroyed in a hurry. But two hundred and nine days crawled past before he’d bagged every store in Berkeley and Oakland, so it seemed impossible that anyone would remember him at Greenwald’s, his favorite. His first.

Of course he’d already studied it carefully. Thirty-six exposures, regular 35mm film. Jennifer Crisp. The address, written in delicate cursive, was just two blocks from here.

Read by K.J. Johnson

“So after he killed her he cut out the clitoris.”

“I’ll try to keep the press out of it, Jane - I really will.”



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Mur Lafferty

Days and weeks pass without another special lesson. We’ve had plenty of time to waste. Our first term grades are good and we lose ourselves in the responsibilities of senior year; of college recommendations and applications and social requirements.

There is a collage of clips and images, nothing in focus for more than a second or two, of car accidents. The kind of stuff some of us saw in driver’s ed. The images of crushed and limbless and decapitated bodies are intercut with scenes from funerals, and there are red-eyed family members, the ones who never saw any of it coming, wailing and crying and breaking apart.

We pay our authors, but we will always be 100% free. We are supported through listener donations, so if you like what you hear, please consider donating via our PayPal button!

Pseudopod is produced and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Our editor is Ben Phillips, and you can contact him at editor @ pseudopod.org. Our host is Alasdair Stuart, who can be reached at alasdair @ pseudopod.org. Pseudopod is a production of Escape Artists, Inc. Be sure to check out our other podcasts, Escape Pod for the best in science fiction, and PodCastle for the best in fantasy.

Read by Rick Stringer

Daniel lingered in his cramped office at the University of Minnesota long after the other professors in the Math department called it a day. He was still there when all the lights under all the doors winked out and the parking lot outside his window was a bleak, snow-draped emptiness. He was at his desk when old Cal Thomas from Geography shuffled past, taking his incessant coughing with him. He stayed until the equations on shifted lattices turned to squirrelly nonsense, lines and squiggles on ruled pages, until finally he felt the thing creep into his thoughts, that black starfish wrapping its prickly limbs around whatever memories he chose to dwell upon, making his ears ring and his eyes water.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Ben Phillips

A cold, black, liquescent fear laps at the edges of my heart as I approach the first gate in the long Caliph’s Maze of Airport Security. Some darker force is trying to sway me unobtrusively away, to make me renege my retainer’s oath, cut my losses and run headlong to South America with the dwindling remains of my bank account.

Should I die on my quest, a first-class seat in Paradise awaits me. In my time, I have lived through every hell Shaitan could possibly devise right here on Earth, moving behind newspaper headlines which even Al-Jazeera fears to run. Enquiring minds want to know, but some truths are better left to the darkness at the center of the universe, to be drowned out by the skirlings of the blind piper and his retinue of idiot flute-players..

1. You can come to our Web site and click on any MP3 files you see there, and listen to them. Dirt simple, and you’ve probably already got all the tools you need. You just have to remember to keep coming back.

2. You can subscribe to our RSS feed with a piece of software called a podcatcher. This is a little more complicated to set up, but easier once you’ve got it working.

A podcatcher is an RSS client that checks all your subscribed feeds on a regular basis (usually daily), and if it finds a new entry with a file enclosure, downloads it onto your system automatically. Most of them will also copy the file to iTunes (to sync with your iPod) or otherwise transfer the files to your MP3 player if you ask them. In essence, the podcatcher does your remembering and your file-clicking for you.

There are a lot of programs out there that handle podcasts, and more all the time. There’s a directory at iPodder.org if you want to try all of them. We don’t endorse any particular podcatcher, and we are not in the business of reviewing them. However, if you’re in a hurry, here are some of the most popular ones:

• iTunes: Apple’s music software has podcast support built in. It’s available for Windows and Mac, and it’s free. And you don’t need an iPod (TM) — you can copy the mp3s to any player after it downloads them.

• iPodder Lemon: Available for Win/Mac/Linux, and it’s free.

• iPodderX: Mac only. Free to try, $15 to own.

• Doppler: Windows only. Free.

• FeedDemon: Windows only. $30. A general news aggregator that handles podcasts as a side feature.

• jPodder: Win/Mac/Linux/etc. (Java based). Free.

Again, these are not necessarily the best clients out there (for any given definition of “best”); these are simply a few that we’ve heard mentioned frequently.

Read by Ralph Walters

“Excuse me,” said the old man by the door. He was hidden from view behind the bookshelves, and though Gerald had seen him come in, he couldn’t see who he was talking to. “Does the presence of this chapter make it the true first edition or the second state? I can never remember, you see, whether ‘Fathers’ is the missing chapter or the correct one.”

Mr. Mendoza seemed to have a low opinion of his customers. After a week of being left in charge of the shop, however — Mr. Mendoza having left for an unspecified length of time on what he called, in his strangely accented English, a “trade trip” — Gerald began to wonder.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by KJ Johnson

Blood gathered in pools around the body as the afternoon sun gave it a sickly glimmer. I remember thinking how much the dark liquid really seemed to belong on the pavement. Like oil, transmission fluid or lizard-green coolant, the blood was at home on the asphalt.

It’s amazing the things you notice when events force you to grown up in the span of a moment. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story really starts two hours earlier, with Gina.

Full text available here

Read by Ben Phillips

Music by Harmaline

Home? it asks, clothed in black feathers and flesh. A winged messenger come to carry me home.

They killed me I suppose. That pair of walking pools of hate. What else could have happened? I suppose I’d cry, if I could. If my tear ducts weren’t ash mixed with the glue remains of my eyes.

Read by Ben Phillips

When had the idea first possessed her? Victoria peered about the dim one-car garage and squatted to look under the counter along the wall. Pushed behind the containers of old paint, the new bag of concrete stared ominously back at her. Ben had hidden it like one would an Easter egg from a child. Did he think she was such a dolt she wouldn’t notice? She came out here regularly to do laundry.

Ben had not said anything about a project requiring concrete. Neither had his hunting buddy Jack. They always worked together. But there had been nary a word about fixing a fence post or repairing the walk. She dragged the bag from its hiding spot, proud of her strong, lithe body, even if Ben’s eyes constantly swiveled toward cleavage. She forced herself to read the directions. She glanced around the garage for a water container and decided she would have to use something from the house—the thermos, maybe, or the plastic pitcher, but she didn’t want to return to the kitchen any sooner than necessary.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

• Let the writing be guided by a strong sense of who the (hopefully somewhat interesting) protagonist is, even if zero time is spent developing any other characters.

• Keep any speculative (”what if?”) element simple, or take it out altogether. If the zombies are fast and smart, and the disease angle never becomes important to the story, then it could almost certainly be improved by making them regular old human attackers instead. No reason you can’t still have all the violence and horror you want, and the end result will be a lot more believable and hit closer to home. The great news about Pseudopod is that we do run stories grounded entirely in realism, so you don’t need a speculative element to sell to us. And as the age-old spec fic writing advice goes, if the speculative element can be removed without substantially affecting the story, then it should be.

• Preferably, tell the story using standard past tense, third person, active voice. Neither second person (the letter or monologue to an inert “you” represented only when the speaker refers to “you”) nor present tense exposition are fast routes to more innovative writing, but they are some of the easiest ways to unintentionally annoy an editor at least a tiny bit.

Nothing is taboo on Pseudopod. Send us your splatterpunk and your erotic horror. We love sex and violence — just bear in mind that I have a frail suspension of disbelief, so characters must say and do rational (not to say always ethical) things unless there’s a reason why not.
With that in mind, go nuts. Have fun with it — you know, in the Addams Family sense of the word — and we will too.

As for what not to do, I theorize that good writers focus more on positive examples than negative ones; but having said that, if your internal critic is just not loud enough for you and you want a shopping list of what to stay away from, Strange Horizons has already compiled a list of overdone horror plots.

I, too, have seen all of these quite often. In fact, I have little to add except to say that it is still possible to sell a story that matches any one of those patterns — it’s just that actually attempting to do so may be best considered an advanced exercise left to seasoned fictionists. If your entire plot and resolution can be summarized in a simple sentence like one of these at all, it probably wouldn’t hurt to complicate it.

• Ben Phillips

By B.J. West

Read by Leann Mabry

“How long’s it been?”

“I’m scared he won’t come.”

Read by KJ Johnson

The first time Wilson saw them was when he opened the medicine cabinet one groggy morning in search of aspirin and his toothbrush. Between the familiar can of shaving cream and the plastic tumbler that held his toothbrush, lying on his crushed and twisted tube of toothpaste as if it were a luxurious pillow, were two tiny people. They were no bigger than his thumb, and a little pinker, lounging in a tangle of spindly limbs. One of them lifted its head from the toothpaste and he slammed the door shut.

This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by BJ Harrison

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.



This week’s episode sponsored by Audible.com, who has extended their generous offer of a free audiobook download of your choice from their selection of over 40,000 titles.

Read by Cheyenne Wright

A painful kick to my shin woke me. Squinting against the harsh fluorescents in the office, I bleared up to see Kim holding out my hat and coat.

“Hang on,” I said, but she didn’t. Grabbing my camera bag and checking my battery supply, I took off after her.

Read by Phil Rossi

He checked the slip of paper in his pocket yet again. Kayla: 555-6213. She had drawn a smiley face encircled by small hearts after the last digit. She was young, a few weeks past her twenty-first birthday if she had been honest with him, and chances were it would not develop into anything serious, but she seemed nice and Shaun was a hopeless sucker for a nice girl. Maybe it was the alcohol applying a rosy tint to his immediate memories of her. Then again, maybe he genuinely was enamored with her, and she with him. Hell, she must have seen something she liked in him; she had even bought him few drinks. A small gesture, but he had been out before with girls who were undoubtedly interested in him but hadn’t bothered to pay for their own drinks, much less buy him one. So maybe…