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PseudoPod 998: The Story-Stealer’s Night


The Story-Stealer’s Night

by Madhu Campbell


Story-teller, Story-screamer

Tell your tales into this night.

 

The words of the poem rush into Durga’s foggy mind with unbidden clarity. She waits quietly at her school gate on the edge of the beach as the fishing boats make their way to shore at sunset.

Three girls join Durga at the gate, all still in their brand-new school uniforms, but with blankets and flashlights instead of book bags. They are not as quiet as Durga; their audible whispers and nervous laughter push against the silence of their school and the beach. A few teachers watch, expressionless, from high-up windows, but none bother to stop the girls from venturing out after dark.

Durga has done this once before, but the memory flows through her mind like sand through a sieve. And yet she knows where to go, where to stop, which rock to skip over. She knows how to lead the rite of passage every new student, teacher and novitiate at St. Anne’s Convent School for Girls must go through—spend a night on the beach telling stories.

The girls reach a low area on the beach and lay out their blankets to sit as best as they can in their starchy uniforms. A gold ring glints in the moonlight on Durga’s left hand.

“Jewelry is not allowed in our school,” says Rani, in her most pretentious voice, tucking her short hair behind her ear to reveal her own piercing with a small, silver hoop in place.

“The only ‘jewelry’ we’re allowed is the rosary,” says Mary, clutching the plastic cross on her plastic rosary, missing the smirk on Rani’s face.

Durga runs a finger over the cool gold ring on her left ring finger. She didn’t have it on when she took a leave from school three months ago to attend the family funeral. The fog in her mind lifts ever so slightly as she turns the ring around her finger. She starts to feel her surroundings—the wet sand under her thin blanket, her itchy socks, the cold sharp knife tucked away in her blazer pocket. When she reaches for the knife, the fog envelopes her mind again, chilling her curiosity.

“Let’s start!” says Vinuta, wrapping her thick, colorful blanket around her shoulders, shivering as a salty breeze blows across the beach. “I have a great story—”

“I bet it’s the most boring story ever,” says Rani.

Your face is the most boring story ever,” says Vinuta, scowling. She’s only been at the school for six weeks and is eager to make friends. But her roommates don’t make it easy for her. Compared to Rani’s incessant teasing and Mary’s annoying piety, she finds Durga’s aloofness almost aspirational.

“Please recite the poem,” says Durga, with a quiet authority, barely a whisper over the crashing waves.

 

Story-teller, Story-screamer

Tell your tales into this night.

Story-stealer, Story-eater

Have a feast before it’s light.

 

After they all recite the poem—Rani giggling at every other word—Durga straightens her back and asks, “What story do you have to offer?”

Vinuta lowers her own voice to mimic Durga’s authority and begins,

“A long time ago, in a faraway fishing village, a brutal storm raged for three days and three nights. Waves as high as mountains crashed into the village and washed away the low-lying huts. But thanks to the village leader’s foresight, all the people and their livestock survived. All except for one little boy, the leader’s son.

“When the storm subsided, the villagers went looking for the boy. They searched the wreckage on the beach and the sea. But the boy had disappeared. The leader, overcome with despair, wanted to walk into the sea to die with his son.

“But when he saw how the villagers rallied around him and supported him even though they had lost their homes and farms, he realized he had to live for them. He had a responsibility to his people and, as a good leader, he embraced it. Together, they rebuilt the village and grew stronger after the disaster.”

Vinuta bows and looks to the other girls for applause.

“That’s all?” snaps Rani. “I thought this would be the first fun thing to happen at this school and it’s a complete dud!”

“That’s not all!” lies Vinuta, struggling to draw out more story from her mind. “There’s more— ouch!” She yelps, jolting Rani and Mary.

“What happened?” asks Mary in an anxious whisper, gripping her cross.

Vinuta slaps the back of her neck. “Something bit me.”

“It’s just mosquitos. Don’t mind them,” says Durga. “Please continue your story.”

There are no mosquitos on this beach.

The breeze carries a melancholy moan and the sand around Vinuta vibrates in diffuse swirls. Durga fiddles with her gold ring, turning it around, and feeling its cold surface against her finger. A small dose of clarity against her mind’s dull susurrous.

“Anyway,” says Vinuta, rubbing her neck as she tries to ignore the prickling pain, “several weeks after the storm, a fishing boat caught something huge writhing in a tangle of grey tentacles. When they tried to haul it up, the tentacles slipped back into the sea, leaving behind a little boy curled in on himself. The leader’s son!”

As she speaks, Vinuta sees it in her mind. The little boy’s wet face shining in the harsh sunlight—her little brother’s peaceful face just before his cancer got worse.

“The boy lived! Ecstatic, the leader announced the biggest feast the village had ever seen. Everyone celebrated. Everyone, except the little boy.

“The boy didn’t open his mouth once, not to eat or talk. He hadn’t eaten anything for days. Weeks, if you counted his time lost at sea. The celebrations turned to grief. The villagers knew they would mourn him again soon.”

Vinuta swallows a sob bubbling up her throat as the father in the story merges with memories of her own father crying quietly as he heard her brother’s prognosis. It had been the last time Vinuta had seen him before she was sent away to St. Anne’s Convent.

“The leader spent every waking moment with his dying boy, talking, singing, trying to make him eat, but the boy sat wordless, staring at the mud walls of their hut, eyes glassy like the fish on his untouched plate. One day, the father started a story, something about gods and demons his mother told him a long time ago. That was the first time the boy’s eyes focused. He even smiled when the father acted out a fight between gods. The father continued telling stories, and that was all that the boy needed. The boy seemed to survive only on stories, and the father ignored his daughter, the villagers, and even his own needs to tell fantastical tales to his son.

“The villagers gathered around the hut each night after dinner to listen to his increasingly wild stories before going to bed. They didn’t question how the boy survived because, ever since the stories began, they were blessed with an abundance of fish. They didn’t need to go out to sea anymore, the fish swam into their nets right at the beach, as though entranced, and even their fruit and vegetable gardens thrived.

“Only the daughter saw how her father shrank and withered, but she was powerless to stop him.

“One morning, the stories stopped. When the villagers checked, they found the boy sitting alone by the back wall. Dust motes danced around him like flies in the daylight streaming through the small window. The father was gone!”

Vinuta shivers in her blanket as the low moan of a lonely deep-sea creature swallows the edge of her thoughts.

Yet, she can’t stop the story.

“In only a few hours, even before the villagers could find the father, the boy turned sallow. The leader’s daughter, no older than fourteen herself, stepped up to tell the boy stories. She knew the boy from the day he was born, had watched him grow up, even cared for him when their mother died, and their father was numb with grief. But when she saw his sunken, empty eyes, she knew it wasn’t her brother. She knew their father would never leave him. The boy, or whatever had returned from the sea, had wrung out their father until there was nothing left but dust.

“The boy turned his glassy eyes on his sister. She opened her mouth to scream, but the words of a story flowed out instead. As her story continued, the ground beneath her vibrated, shaking her down to her bones. From the corner of her eyes, she saw opalescent tentacles extrude from cracks in the mud floor.

“When the vibrations reached her fingertips, her thin gold ring that she always wore on her left hand resonated with it. She clasped her hands to not lose the ring, her mother’s and her family’s only heirloom. Slowly, painfully, she stopped shaking. But her ring still thrummed, protecting her—she realized—from the trembling ground just as she tried to protect it.

“Frightened and confused, she survived her first night as the storyteller. Then another night, and another. Years passed. She continued to tell stories to the dead-eyed boy with her mother’s ring to protect her.”

Vinuta yawns a long, spine-stretching yawn that gradually morphs in a wail. The little boy in the story no longer looks like her brother; the storyteller girl no longer looks like Vinuta. They both wear the same face—

Durga’s cold, impassive eyes are the last thing Vinuta sees before she collapses to her side. The moaning in her mind stops with a pop as she falls asleep.

A spindly silver limb, longer than a human arm, juts out from behind Vinuta.

Rani jumps— “What’s that?”

Durga tugs on Vinuta’s colorful blanket so that it completely covers her crumpled form, and the limb disappears.

“I didn’t see anything,” whispers Mary. “Did you…?” she turns to Durga.

“Since Rani’s distracted, can you share your story next?” Durga asks Mary, still fiddling with her gold ring.

Mary swallows and grips her cross tight. She has a story ready—a sweet fable with a message of devotion at its core.

“A long time ago,” she starts, her voice shaking, “three missionary sisters traveled across India, to lead… the hungry and poor… to the path of God—”

“Something’s moving!” screams Rani and jumps off her blanket and onto Mary’s.

Durga places her palms on Rani’s blanket and feels a gentle pulse under it. No large movement yet. “Just the sand shifting,” she says.

Rani’s face burns in the cold, salty breeze and she crawls back to her own blanket, facing away from the other girls.

“Please continue,” says Durga to Mary, ignoring Rani.

“Yes… okay, so, the missionary sisters traveled down the coast, but they faced many challenges,” says Mary, gripping the cold cross in her hand. “One day, a monsoon storm washed away their path, stranding them over a hill. But the Lord answered their prayers! A friendly shepherd gave them shelter from the storm—ow!” Mary screams as she realizes something has punctured the skin at the nape of her neck.

“What is it?” whispers Rani.

“Just… just mosquitos, I guess?” says Mary, rubbing her neck. Durga merely nods.

“The shepherd,” Mary continues, “though the shepherd lived in a modest house with only three sheep, he… he… was blessed with abundance? When asked about his prosperity, he told them the story of his hometown… one filled with miracles, like… fish swimming into the nets at shore. He promised to take them there the next day.”

This is not the story Mary meant to share, but the words flow like sweet, sacramental wine.

“When the missionary sisters reached the town, they were amazed that the stories were true—fish did surrender to the fishermen’s nets at the shore, and the villagers harvested a bounty of fruits and vegetables from their gardens every day. A vibrant market thrived on the beach, drawing in crowds from neighboring towns and villages.

“The sisters were led through the large streets with tall, colorful houses and into the older part of town with narrow, winding streets. The buildings wilted, and eventually crumbled into an ancient palm grove. A small mud hut stood in the grove, out of place and time, hidden away from the prosperity like a dirty secret preserved in amber.”

Mary realizes, then, that she knows the hut from a worn-out photo at her aunt’s house—a sepia-toned image of her grandfather in a loincloth, her grandmother in a tight sari with her sagging breasts visible through the thin fabric, their dozen children in tattered clothing, a cloud of flies crowning their heads, smiling with an inscrutable joy. And the small mud hut stood behind them, out of sight and mind of the high-rise buildings sprouting nearby.

“Every night, a small crowd ventured to the palm grove and listened to an old woman tell stories to a little boy in the hut, certain that this tradition brought good fortune to their town.

“The missionary sisters, while curious, didn’t care for the ignorant belief in folk deities. They established their own convent near the prosperous side of town to lead people in the true path of the Lord. Over the years, thanks to the patronage of the wealthy town, their convent grew to rival even the ones in Europe. But they couldn’t quell the superstitions about the storyteller.

“Several years later, a brave young novitiate at the convent, sure that she could guide the locals away from their superstitions, marched into the hut. It was empty. No furniture, no storyteller, no sign of anyone living there.

“She almost didn’t see the little boy with lifeless eyes, wearing only a loincloth, shrinking in the shadow.”

It occurs to Mary that the young novitiate looks like her eldest sister—a pious, god-fearing woman whose devotion convinced her family to convert to Catholicism.

“The kind novitiate took the boy back to the convent. She bathed him and gave him clean clothes and fresh food. But the boy didn’t eat or utter a single word. His eyes focused beyond her, beyond the convent walls. The sandy beach and roaring waves called to him.

“The town was in an uproar that night, and hundreds marched to the convent to bring the boy back. And the first to knock on the convent door was the old storyteller woman, reappearing with a gold ring on her left hand.”

In Mary’s mind, the old woman looks like her own sepia-toned grandmother, and the little boy is all skin and bones like the children in the photograph. Her thoughts fill with the buzz of flies, now swarming around a dropped chalice in an empty church, the sickly-sweet wine spilling over her thoughts.

“The old woman pleaded with the novitiate to return the boy to the hut, blathering about her sacred duty to tell him stories, how she had ignored her own family for the greater good. But the novitiate refused—there was no excuse to treat a child poorly.

“As a desperate final attempt, the old woman asked to tell stories to the boy right there in the convent. The novitiate agreed, and so all through the night, in a small antechamber, she told stories that the crowd gathered outside could not hear.

“The next day, the old woman left without her ring but with the same vacant stare as the boy. And she walked into the welcoming waves of the sea.”

Mary sways to the strange rhythms of her own story, eyes closed, words slurring—

“And the boy? He was nowhere to be found. Only the storyteller’s gold ring remained in the antechamber.

“And so ended the prosperity of the town. No fish came to their shore. The fruits and vegetables rotted quicker and quicker. Their animals died from strange diseases. The townsfolk, proud descendants of fishermen, no longer knew how to build boats, and couldn’t even imagine going out to sea. Many gathered on the beach at night to tell stories to the missing boy, a desperate attempt to regain the favor of their lost deity. But they always returned without their spark for life, merely puppets emptied of their thoughts, emotions, and dreams.”

“The sisters and cloistered nuns at the convent joined the townsfolk on the beach, attempting to share the word of God instead of the vulgar storytelling ritual. But they emerged from it in a similar trance.”

“Stop. Talking. Now,” hisses Rani.

But Mary doesn’t hear her over the incessant drone emanating from the shifting sand.

“Praise the Lord! The misfortune on the town was a blessing for the nuns! It unburdened their minds of worldly thought, replacing it with the low hum of a Gregorian chant. There was no room for anything but prayers and surrendering oneself to God. Even as the town withered away, their numbers grew; more and more local women joined the convent with a clear heart ready to welcome God.

“As the decades passed, the young novitiate became the Mother Superior, her mind devoid of all sin. The storyteller’s gold ring gathered dust in her vault as just another piece of jewelry.”

Mary yawns again as the comforting, somber face of her eldest sister as the Mother Superior turns into…

… Durga’s unnerving, too-wide smile is the last thing Mary sees before the overwhelming thrum of a thousand flies plunges her into sleep.

Rani and Durga are the only ones still awake.

Rani screams and jumps just as Durga grabs her forearm. She bites Durga’s vice-like hand, yanking her arm free, and runs across the beach, away from the school, away from her unconscious roommates, away from Durga. Unlike Mary and Vinuta, Rani won’t go down without a fight.

But no one can fight the beach.

Rani doesn’t get far before she trips over a rock and falls, face-first, onto the coarse sand as it ripples around her, forming patterns of curves and intersecting flourishes. She tries to scuttle away from the pattern when the moonlight disappears and throws her into darkness. She spins around, fearing the monster that she now understands fed on Mary and Vinuta.

Durga looms over her.

“Please tell the story,” says Durga, eyes red with tears. “I’m so close…”

Rani frantically searches the beach, breathing hard, desperate to find someone, anyone, who can help. But it’s all just sand and sea, silvery and gray in the moonlight. Words begin to gush out of her like waves—

“Many decades later, only the convent remained. Other villagers and fishermen settled around it, and quickly learned not to loiter on the beach, not to invite the curse. The stories of the strange village and the storyteller with the gold ring lingered, changed, and spread far and wide, to eventually reach the ears of an adventurous pair of thieves.”

The story comes easy to Rani once she starts. Each time she is left behind in a new boarding school while her parents travel for work, she imagines them as a couple of thieves on dangerous adventures and shares these stories with anyone who listens. Meanwhile, she has her own adventures, ones that get her expelled from school and force her parents to come back to spend a few precious days with her.

A slimy tentacle creeps up Rani’s back, but she can’t move a muscle. A dreadful marine whistle plays in her head when the unseen creature drills into her neck with a numbing pain.

“But this gold ring is special. It belonged to the thieves’ ancestors, and they were willing to do anything to get it back. The couple hatched a careful plan. Their daughter, just old enough to join the convent school, was their inside girl for the job.

“Every night, the girl’s parents waited beyond the beach, wary of the legend even though they claimed they didn’t believe it. As they watched the convent for a sign, the beach watched them, and waited.”

Rani shuts her eyes and hopes with all her heart her parents are waiting for her near the school. Their smiling faces come closer, followed by the deafening sound of uncountable tentacles slithering over her every thought.

“The daughter searched the convent for weeks, in between dull classes and pretend praying. She finally found the ring in the Mother Superior’s office and pocketed it. Alone in her cold dorm room that night, she whistled out her window and got a whistle in response—her parents were still out there! While the school slept, she packed her bag, tucked the ring in a hidden pocket inside, and stepped out to meet the beach.”

Rani sees the daughter—sees herself sneaking out, getting into a car with her parents, and driving away, all three whooping and laughing after a successful adventure. She wants to tell that story. Instead, she says—

“The beach had also tucked away its hunger in the folds of its wavy sands and greeted her with a gentle breeze. Over the years, it had learned to control the rapacious appetite that left its prey as nothing more than dust. A skilled connoisseur now, it could draw out the best, most delicious parts of its prey and savor each indulgent morsel. But after several, patient, weeks—”

Rani purses her lips, suppressing a yawn as the slither closes in on her consciousness.

Durga gasps and grabs Rani’s hands. “Don’t stop,” she pleads. “It’s not enough!”

Rani’s mind is deep in her story. Yet she keeps her mouth shut, swallowing the fishy, bilious words in her throat.

A pair of scaly legs ending in pincers extend from Rani’s back. One clamps down on her shoulder as the other pries open her mouth, and coats her tongue with a fetid slime. The story continues, but it’s not hers.

“The daughter saw her parents in the distance, nothing more than shadows walking quietly on the beach. She ran towards them, as fast as the sand allowed. But no matter the distance she covered, they were still far away, still approaching at their own ambling pace.

“She heard a whistle and spun around to face the ashen waves. Her mother kneeled at the water’s edge, hands reaching towards her, broken, gasping whistles calling her. The daughter turned around to find the shadows still pursuing. She ran towards her mother, legs as stiff as dock poles. Shadowy claws emerged from the chalky sand and snapped against her ankles. She held her bag with the hidden ring tight against her chest; it purred, vibrating gently.

“Whistles sounded from behind, and a pair of hands turned her around and shook her. Her father’s worried face emerged from the darkness, calling her name. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked, again and again. She told him about her mother and the shadows, but he couldn’t hear her. ‘Mama’s waiting by the car,’ he said, and wrapped two arms around her, gently guiding her away from the beach, taking her bag with his third.

Too many arms.

“She didn’t let her bag go, held on to its soothing vibrations with all her strength. But her father pushed her to the ground with a violent roar. The bag flew out of her hands. She screamed for her parents, for the nuns, for her classmates. She screamed and screamed. But the only hand that reached for her was the pair of sharp pincers grabbing her, pulling her down into the sand.”

A head-splitting rattle of claws covers all thought and emotion in Rani’s mind as the face of the girl sinking into the beach, her own face, morphs into…

… Durga pulls the knife from her pocket as Rani falls into a deep sleep in the ebb and flow of wet sand.

The thin, steel blade thrums in Durga’s hand, resonating with her ring. She doesn’t know when or why she stole the knife. But she knows its purpose now—to help her reclaim what she lost. She wants her stories, her hopes, her dreams and nightmares back. She wants all the stories the Story-stealer took from its victims. She wants to feel alive again.

Durga rolls Rani off to the side, leaving the creature visible in the spiral sand pattern, only possible when it’s satiated after a scrumptious meal.

The Story-stealer knows Durga is there—the last surviving descendant of the original storyteller, wearing the gold ring once again. It tormented her with a twisted version of her family’s legacy, unwillingly siphoned from her schoolmates. Now, it lies exposed, contently rubbing together pairs of insectoid legs, digesting its feast. Its many scaly limbs and tentacles of different colors—pincers on some, claws on others—rhythmically reach out and dissolve into its gelatinous mass, frothing nightmares from all the stories, dreams and hopes it has stolen. When its segmented gray body oozes and twists, its victim’s faces—Mary, Rani and Vinuta’s faces, along with a thousand others—writhe under its skin. Multitudes of chitinous shells vibrate and create swirling ripples in the sand that resonate with Durga’s ring.

The last time Durga saw the Story-stealer, she lost everything: her stories, her imagination, her ability to feel her past, to hope and plan and anticipate her future. She lived in the sharp, painful present for two years until she found the gold ring. But in those two years, the creature devoured her parents, her brothers and sisters, her friends. Whether they were lost to sea or in their own minds made no difference. She couldn’t mourn them. How could she? The creature leaves nothing behind.

But she can avenge them now.

Durga raises the knife over her head and brings it down with a war cry. The knife pierces through tough gray skin, into a ghostly unseeing eye, releasing beads of acrid, opalescent liquid. The creature hisses but doesn’t move. Durga hacks and slashes with all her strength. The shimmering blood soaks her uniform, sprays in her mouth. Bitter, rotten dreams rise up her throat to meet the putrid, briny blood. The hiss grows louder, the chittering shell vibrates stronger, and the ring thrums hard enough to cut through her finger.

And then it all stops.

The creature, Durga, the sand, the air—nothing moves.

A gentle foamy wave washes her feet and recedes.

She feels no triumph, only a bone-deep exhaustion; she can fall asleep in the slimy blood pooling around her.

Just as she lowers her knife, the creature rises above her, its innards splayed open. The hiss is incessant, loud, screaming from within her head. She stabs the creature every chance she gets, letting it bleed over her and drench her in its shiny blood. Its outer shell expands, splits into countless sections, and the pieces descend in a clamor around her, isolating her from the world. Her knife looks small and useless as she tries to stab the chitinous barrier. The hiss echoes inside the shell, drowning out her screams. A grey proboscis extends, blooms, and latches onto her face, swallowing her head.

Durga can’t scream as the carapace wraps around her, cocooning her. She can’t scream as the opal blood liquifies her body and rearranges her muscles and bones. She can’t scream as the creature gives her everything she wants—all the stories it has consumed for centuries, starting with the little boy from the fishing village. It is the most exquisite agony, and she slurps it all up.

And yet, she craves more—more joy, more terror, more love, more pain. She sinks into the warm sands, fated to scuttle beneath the surface to find the next storyteller.


When the sun rises tomorrow, and the fishermen pull their boats to the water, quiet and without stories, they might see three schoolgirls in wrinkled uniforms climbing back to the convent with no memories of the previous night. A ripple might appear around the feet of one fisherman. He should know better than to stop, but the allure of a gold ring glinting in the sand will draw him in, giving him a seed of a story to tell his children.

But will he remember how the poem ends?

 

Story-stealer, Story-eater

Have a feast before it’s light.

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PseudoPod 997: Flash on the Borderlands LXXV: Together is Our Favorite Place to Be


Our family doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful.


The Wind Beneath

By Alex Ebenstein


There’s a gale when dawn illuminates our world. The morning light arrives as though leached from my son’s eyes, his gaze cast skyward, forever in search of hope, his dreams. He’s gone.

There’s little else to mark the passage of time now, everything’s wind and survival…and heartbreak. When the world turned, we had no choice but to reckon with loss. To choke on it with every gust. We made it damn near ten years after, him and I, and that’s that. I don’t know what time I have left, but it feels like too much now.

It’s not all bad, this incessant wind that yanks at my clothes as I sit grieving. An old neighbor, distant a mile or so as we are nowadays, was an engineer. Before. A good one, apparently, able to retrofit leftover technology, made harnessing wind for energy a breeze. So we’ve got that at least, an efficient windmill and perpetual electricity. Well, I have that. The neighbor hanged himself years ago, and today my boy is dead.

The wind isn’t the problem. The problem is everything else. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 996: The Suitable Surroundings and The Resurrection of Chilton Hills

Show Notes

Ben Phillips’s music ? Painful Reminder


The Suitable Surroundings

By Ambrose Bierce


THE NIGHT

ONE midsummer night a farmer’s boy living about ten miles from the city of Cincinnati was following a bridle path through a dense and dark forest. He had lost himself while searching for some missing cows, and near midnight was a long way from home, in a part of the country with which he was unfamiliar. But he was a stout-hearted lad, and knowing his general direction from his home, he plunged into the forest without hesitation, guided by the stars. Coming into the bridle path, and observing that it ran in the right direction, he followed it.

The night was clear, but in the woods it was exceedingly dark. It was more by the sense of touch than by that of sight that the lad kept the path. He could not, indeed, very easily go astray; the undergrowth on both sides was so thick as to be almost impenetrable. He had gone into the forest a mile or more when he was surprised to see a feeble gleam of light shining through the foliage skirting the path on his left. The sight of it startled him and set his heart beating audibly.

“The old Breede house is somewhere about here,” he said to himself. “This must be the other end of the path which we reach it by from our side. Ugh! what should a light be doing there?” (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 995: Data Ghost


Data Ghost

by Martha Wells


When the station stats popped up on the screen, the Interface said, Anomalous. Deni batted at their ear and muttered, “No, no, quit it.”

In the second cockpit seat, Winnie threw them a look. “What?” At Deni’s shrug, her brows stayed up, skeptical. “Use your words, Tulip.”

“It’s the Interface.” Deni thumped their head against the seat back, thinking about the urge to dig the thing out of their brain with a spoon. Sometimes that shut it up. They waved a hand at their head and made their voice low and deep and ominous. “‘Anomalous.’ It’s still mad because we filled out that intake form wrong at Ring Transit.”

The Interface hissed quietly, Anomalous.

“Uh, folks,” Nehian said, his voice crackling over the comm from tertiary control. “It’s not mad about the form. Look at the station.”

Flicking through the incoming scans with a frown, Winnie said, “This is weird. Where is everybody?”

Deni looked. Okay, that was . . . not right. Though they refused to say it was anomalous. The station was silent: no outgoing signals detected, no beacons, no transmissions. “It’s offline completely?” they asked. There were a lot of things that could do that, and none were good. Like a disease outbreak, or a massive malfunction, or an attack that had taken down the life support systems. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 994: The Bride


The Bride

by Shaenon K. Garrity


As you drive south, the heat rushes up to greet you like your name is in the guestbook and it has your room prepared. A wet, eager heat, scarlet and citrus, the heat of orange crayons melting under a windshield, a heat that already feels like a sunburn. She’s at the center, and you might as well know you’ll never reach her. But here you are, still driving.

You have to drive because the railroad was never finished, but here is the miraculous road. The Overseas Highway! Route 1 unrolling off the Florida panhandle and over the ocean, baffling the eye, a fairy-tale magic carpet poured from American concrete. Another marvel of the twentieth century! You can drive from island to sparkling island as easily as you drove to the grocer back home. Waves undulate under your tires and the heat presses in.

The highway is safe, safe as it is modern. It hasn’t suffered serious damage since the hurricane of ’35. She remembers the hurricane. It was in the third year of her marriage, or was it the fifth? She’s never sure whether to count from the year she became a corpse or the year the Doctor’s treatments finally injected her with life. It’s all in the past, anyway. Now the marriage is over and she prefers to take long walks, smell the flowers, focus on the present.

You can see her footprints in the concrete, here and there. And you can see places along the unfinished skeleton of the overseas railroad where the steel is warped and melted. You don’t see those things, you’re driving too quickly and mopping your brow with a handkerchief, but you could.

These are islands of modern pleasures. You’ve read all about them. Exotic fruits, imported coffee and cigars, beetle-bright automobiles. You can get a cocktail that glows like a neon sign and sleep in a stainless-steel motel. Or, if modernity isn’t your idea of a good time, you can sip rum on the porch of a clapboard house while feral chickens scratch in the yard. The Doctor always liked the modern side of the island. New things, young things. Science! He was, himself, the opposite of modern, with his high-collared suits and shy manners and Old World accent so thick Americans thought it couldn’t be real. He sounded like a character from a monster movie, maybe the mad scientist, maybe the hunchback. He believed in ghosts and destiny, but he also believed in radium.

His voice was the first sound she heard. She has memories from before that moment, but they belong, she’s always felt, to a different person. Before the Doctor, her body belonged to a girl who had dark hair and dark eyes, read pulp romances, married the first boy who asked and was not entirely surprised when he vanished and turned up months later in Miami with a new girl, had a sweet tooth for pastelitos and arroz con leche. After that girl died, newspapers reported that she’d been known as a local beauty, but no one had told her that while she was alive. Her only evidence of being beautiful was that old men were always finding excuses to touch her. To kiss her, if they thought she’d giggle and let them do it.

But that girl wasn’t her, and memories from that time weren’t her memories. She was a new person, but the Doctor treated her as the old person, the beauty who died young of a beautifying disease, simply because the body was the same. Roughly the same. The Doctor had jammed things into it, radium and coat hangers and injections of yellow fluid, and stuck the flesh together with wax. He’d replaced the dark eyes with green glass ones, maybe because the brown eyes had rotted away, maybe because he preferred green. She couldn’t see through them, but she had other senses. X-ray vision! She could see by her own glow. And her wax-and-cotton ears were useless, but she awoke to his voice.

You are with me, dear wife, he was saying. He was reading from a book of fairy tales. The king came down himself and opened the door, and there he found both strong and well, and rejoiced with them that now all sorrow was over.

Alive! She’s alive! Electricity and radium at work for YOU.

Do you want to know the rest? If you end it here, it’s not such a bad story. You could stay on this island where you’ve stopped for gas, dispensed by a white-suited attendant from pumps as smart as Zippo lighters. When you sit at that table under the hibiscus trees and drink sweetened coffee in the Cuban style, just the way you read about in a magazine (Life or Look, you can’t remember) before choosing the Florida Keys for your two weeks’ paid vacation, you could take in the view without thoughts of her seeping into your unconscious. You could look for iguanas, which are common on this island, are becoming pests, in fact. She’s walked the beach here many times to watch the iguanas. If you look you can see places where the sand has fused to glass.

More and more, lately, the iguanas avoid her. But she can still enjoy the hibiscus.

You don’t have to hear the rest. But the story will keep going. At some point it started telling itself, maybe because she couldn’t tell it. Now it never stops, like a long-playing record long forgotten. Turn, turn, turn, flip, turn, turn turn, each rotation digging the grooves a little deeper. You could turn back. These words haven’t even radiated into your conscious mind yet. But look, you’re back in the car, you’ve slammed the door on the island of hibiscus and iguanas, and when you get back on the road you continue south.

Along the way, some of your questions may be answered. Answer: no, the Doctor was not really a doctor. He was a nurse. Or decided to be a nurse. He decided he could operate radiation and X-ray equipment, and the hospital management believed his assurances that he could do these things and hired him. Maybe it was the accent.

That was how he met the dead girl, before she was dead. When the doctors failed to stop the advance of consumption, the Doctor talked her family into trying his own experimental methods. Electromagnetic baths. Radium infusions. Throat sprays with real gold flakes. The dead girl understood she was to feel grateful and flattered. Grateful because the Doctor was doing so much for her, flattered because he did it out of appreciation for her beauty.

The Doctor fell in love with the dead girl at first sight. He believed she had been promised to him in a dream. He told his bride this many times, deep in the night, in their honeymoon suite. She never said anything. Though sometimes he asked, playfully, Why so quiet, darling?, he didn’t seem to mind that she never talked, or even notice, much.

Answer: yes, they did all the things you suspect at night, and several things only the Doctor could imagine. On the first night, she tried to stop him. When she pushed him away, her right arm tore off at the elbow with a damp sound. Her left arm snapped below the shoulder and dangled sickly. It looked like it was bleeding, but it was just dye smearing on wax. It hurt, but not the way a human would hurt. After that she stopped struggling. Afterwards, he sewed and soldered the arms and patted the wax back into shape. He cooed and praised her. It was his perfect wedding night, just as he’d imagined it, and the parts that weren’t exactly as he imagined, he chose not to remember.

They spent their honeymoon in an airplane. At least, the Doctor said it was an airplane. He was building it from scrap metal down on the beach. It didn’t fly, but it was much an airplane as the Doctor was a doctor. In the warm darkness he pinned her down and told her, lovingly, his plan to get it working so they could fly to his island in the South Seas. Meanwhile, the airplane would serve as his laboratory and their honeymoon suite. A honeymoon that would last forever, the Doctor liked to say.

It didn’t last forever, but it did last a few years. Then the airplane got too hot inside for the Doctor to bear and the walls were slimy with algae, so he let her into the cabin he was building on the beach. It didn’t take long for her to miss the airplane. It was stuffy and monotonous, but at least she had time alone. She went back whenever she could get away from him. She sat in the rusted cabin of the airplane that went nowhere and listened to chickens scratch and bicker while she read books. She liked the Doctor’s book of Grimm’s fairy tales. She didn’t need light to read.

The airplane never flew, of course. And there was no island.

Which is not to say the Doctor never took her out. Not this doting newlywed! When he felt daring, he’d hang a silk veil over her face and they’d go out for an evening walk. In dim light, she didn’t attract too much attention. They’d walk along a beach or a boardwalk holding hands. Once they went to a restaurant, but the Doctor hurried her out when people started to mutter. It was the smell. A cotton dress and mounds of wax couldn’t cover it up.

Once, only once, they went to a movie. The Doctor liked the technology of cameras and projections but found most films uncouth. The ones in the old country had been romantic and mysterious, not like the crass product out of Hollywood. This one was special, though. A bone-chiller adapted from the towering classic of horror! Her bones, wired together, were impervious to chill, but she was eager to see it anyway.

The Doctor talked through the movie, as she should have guessed he’d do. Very accurate, he nodded at the grave-robbing scene. These movie-making men, they have done their research. Then later, No! No, this is all wrong! In the great novel, the creature is intelligent, he speaks with eloquence! He is not this dull thing that can only grunt! Agitated, the Doctor glared at his companion, who never even grunted. She watched him without turning her head. She didn’t need eyes to see him. Then she returned her attention to the movie, which was very good. She understood she was supposed to find the creature frightening, just as the dead girl had understood she was supposed to find those lip-licking old men flattering. The dead girl had tried to feel the ways she was expected to feel, but this new woman could only feel her own emotions.

You see, he is lonely, the Doctor was saying. The genius who made him, he has rejected and abandoned him. He wishes for love. He chuckled. You will say, but this is a horror story, a schauergeschichte. But in the great horror there is also great romance. From the dark of the theater, several voices hissed at him to pipe down. He pulled her closer. You will never be lonely, my dear.

Eventually, he locked the airplane and told her to stay in the cabin, and the honeymoon was truly over. He filled a closet with dresses for her and started work on what he said was an organ, for playing beautiful and scientifically beneficial music. Slowly, the house grew hotter.

Here is another island. Blinding white sands and a strong smell of fish. This island is so small you can turn in a circle and see it all. You could take your shoes off, walk on white sand, let the water kiss your feet. But it’s so hot. Your feet would burn. You’d like a cool drink. Why did you get that coffee instead of one of the rum-and-fruit drinks you saw in the magazine? Why do they drink coffee here at all? But it’s getting harder to resist the electromagnetic pull on your mind. So you get back in your sweltering car and keep driving south, deep down into the heat.

The story gets jumbled, the way radio transmissions do down here. Listen:

Whenever her skin peeled off, the Doctor replaced it with silk. Luxurious! He ran fascinated hands over her. She thought of the worms that ate her old skin and the worms that spun her new skin and imagined herself as part of some eternal metamorphic cycle. Devoured and spun, devoured and spun. The Doctor couldn’t always find silk in matching colors, or couldn’t afford it, or maybe, after a while, he stopped caring. By the time the last of her old skin sloughed away, she was a patchwork girl in tangerines and pinks.

The Doctor made a wig for her, a skimpy thing like a moth-eaten fur hat. He told her it was made from her own hair. He meant it was made from the hair of the dead girl. Sometimes she wore it, but she preferred a head scarf or a wide-brimmed hat. It was a common source of arguments, the Doctor forcing the sad little cap of hair on her head, her pulling it off.

Sometimes the Doctor hit her. It happened if she tried to leave or didn’t come when called or did something dangerous, something that frightened him. It was always for her own good. It didn’t hurt, at least not in the way it would hurt a human being, and he soon learned to do it in a way that wouldn’t cause any damage he would, later, have to repair. Afterwards, in the night, he was theatrically sorry.

The Doctor continued his experiments to preserve and perfect her. He cleaned mold and slime from her body and picked out the maggots. He shut her in his liquid plasma incubator, a device never clearly explained. She was made to sit for hours while he played his organ, which was as much a musical instrument as the airplane had been an airplane, to apply the cosmic laws of vibration to her physiognomy. He clamped wires to car batteries and slid them under her silk skin. He smuggled from the hospital precious syringes of radium. He cackled to see her glow with health.

These treatments did make her stronger. And then, slowly, stronger still.

On three occasions the Doctor became angry enough to remove her head and put it in a closet. This upset her more deeply than he could imagine, although it had little physical effect on her. She could see and hear and think and even walk around without her head attached. But it was humiliating.

The Doctor loved to give her ladylike things. He bought her silky clothes, even if they weren’t always real silk. He bought her costume jewelry and handkerchiefs. He presented her with flowers. Of course he gave her perfume. She always needed lots of perfume.

The Doctor wired his house with electric lights. She could turn them on and off without touching them. Sometimes she did it without meaning to. It was the electromagnetism in her veins, the Doctor said. Usually he found her trick delightful, but sometimes it frightened him and he snapped at her to use her hands like a proper wife.

One evening, when they were out walking, some teenagers threw bottles at her. They knocked off the ugly little wig. Then they hit her head. Her neck snapped and her head rolled back between her shoulder blades. Someone screamed. The gang dispersed into the darkness. The Doctor led her home, though she could see perfectly well, and wrenched her head back into position. As he covered the damage in beeswax and balsam, he vowed revenge. Maybe in another story he would have followed through, but by the morning he seemed to have forgotten the whole thing. That was when she started hating the wig.

During the hurricane of ’35, while the Doctor nailed boards over the windows, she slipped out the door and walked through the rain. The only sound was the howl of the wind, which she found soothing in its meaninglessness. Lightning struck her twice. Wax melted down her face like tears and one of her eyes fell out. It was the happiest night of her marriage.

She could see while her head was shut in a closet. She could see while her body was shut in the Doctor’s house. Eventually she could see all the way across the island. She read the names of boats and thought about how far they could go.

She was very warm. She was always getting warmer.

It’s getting warmer now.

If this were one of the fairy tales in the Doctor’s book, it would end in revenge. Are you following the story in the hope it’ll end that way? She might set fire to the Doctor’s house, or make him dance in red-hot shoes, or send him to sea in a boat pierced with holes. She might escape and kill everyone he loved, like the creature in the movie. But the only one he loved was her.

And this is a true story. So he got away with it.

One night, as she lay in bed, one of the Doctor’s hands cupping a lumpy wax breast, she simply got up and left. Her body, a hand-me-down to begin with, stayed behind. She rose as a crackling silhouette in X-rays and electricity and radioisotopes, loosely girl-shaped, and walked through the wall. She thought the Doctor would wake up and believe she was dead; maybe he would even try to revive the corpse a second time. But he didn’t. He went on cuddling and petting and murmuring to her, and doing all the other things you suspect, as if she’d never been anything but a wax doll.

You’re still driving. You passed through the previous island, with its enticing cabanas and men selling shrimp from the backs of wood-slatted trucks, as if you didn’t see it. So you’re not satisfied. You’ve been pulled in. You need to know what happened next.

If it makes you feel better, the police came eventually. The dead woman’s family, long bothered by signs of desecration around her grave, finally had her coffin dug up and proven empty, and later still managed to convince the authorities to look up that overly solicitous hospital technician with the movie-monster accent. But don’t feel too much better, because he wasn’t punished.

On the contrary, the press adored him. A love story beyond the grave! This kindly if daft old gentleman, pining for a woman frozen at the peak of her exotic beauty, employing all his talents toward preserving her for worship. Not Karloff as the Monster, this story, but Karloff as the Mummy, eternally devoted. Romantic! The Doctor became, for a few news cycles, a local hero. The empty body was put on display for the curious. Thousands trooped past it, marveling at the little corpse sealed in wax that a man had so loved.

And the law decided, discreetly, that no one had really been harmed, that the happiness of a well-liked white man in the medical profession was more important than the horror and loss of a family of immigrant nobodies, and it was better if no news got out of the less romantic details in the coroner’s report. So everyone lived happily ever after, for the usual calculation of “everyone.”

The Doctor went home to his wife. Yes, he had a wife all along. And she took him back.

You’re still driving. You’re very far south now. Almost as far as you can go down the astonishing oceantop road. Can’t you stop and cool off?

No? All right. The story can keep going. Keep any true story going long enough, and it ends in death. She won’t die, but everyone else will.

The Doctor didn’t stay with his wife long. Even in the Florida heat, he felt cold all the time. He shivered and wept over his lost island love. His storybook romance. His flame.

One night, drawn by electromagnetic forces beyond his understanding, he staggered up and down the streets in his pajamas. The air was heavy with citrus and plumeria and X-rays. And there she was, flaring into sight like a struck match. The bride.

He stumbled after her. His wife was relieved when she woke to find him gone, though for the rest of his life, whenever she received word of his continued existence, she sent money.

The Doctor searched from island to island. Sometimes he stayed in one place long enough to settle down, find an apartment, buy a few plates and a can opener. Then he’d see her flickering between the coconut trees. Or he’d hear her voice or feel that electromagnetic pull. The same pull you feel now. And he’d be off again, limping.

The pull is much stronger now than it was back then. It grows like the heat and the radiation. Do you feel the radiation yet? She keeps growing hotter, her attraction keeps increasing. It seems to violate the laws of physics, but it doesn’t. It’s just that someone keeps coming along to put energy into the system.

Almost to the end now.

The Doctor never reached her. None of you ever reach her. No one will ever touch her again. She exists as the eye of a singularity. Only the constant motion of the energies rotating around her keeps her from collapsing into herself, taking the islands and perhaps the rest of the Earth with her. But you ordinary human beings are safe, aside from some radiation damage, as long as you don’t pass her event horizon. Once you get too close, according to the principles of modern science, there’s no escape.

The Doctor lay dead on the floor of his last apartment for three weeks before his body was found. His wife paid for his burial. No one mourned him or loved him or tried to bring his corpse to life. He was lucky. The only unlucky thing was that he died within her event horizon. Long after his body has rotted away, some part of him will still be marching south, getting hotter and hotter, never reaching her as time halves itself into infinity. The last atom of him that exists will burn with longing.

Almost to the end now.

As for her, she is content. She has quiet and freedom and sea turtles drifting in glass-green water. Someday the energies around her will be too strong for animals to tolerate; already they edge away as she walks the beaches. When that happens, she will learn to be happy studying the plants, which don’t mind her except that sometimes her presence makes them grow a little crooked. She would like you to know she feels sorry for you, now that you’ve passed her event horizon. But she would also like you to remember that you chose to keep following the story she doesn’t tell, that she did not ask for your obsession or the Doctor’s or anyone’s. The dead girl bowed her head and giggled and accepted kisses, but she is not the dead girl. If you kissed her, your lips would melt like wax.

The miraculous road evaporates. Your gas tank runs dry. You get out and start walking. Over the long grass the sun is setting, turning the sky into a whirl of silks. It keeps setting for a long, long time.

Almost to the end.

There will never be an end, you know. You may collapse from heatstroke or radiation poisoning, your body may be found or it may not, but something of you will keep chasing her long after the sun has turned to iron. That will be educational for you, perhaps.

She really does feel sorry that you took an interest in this story, but only a little. It’s not a subject that concerns her much.

You’re still walking. The sun has been setting for hours, maybe days. Your heart aches. You feel like you’re almost there.

Almost.

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PseudoPod 993: Home, Laced in Web


Home, Laced in Web

By Cameron Schoettle


I follow behind Butcher. A lot of nights spent imagining what I’d say to him. But there’s not been much talk on the road. Pretty used to silence anyway. Don’t hate it. Leaves room for possibilities, for what could happen when the right moment comes. Already know he’s lied though. Could hear the pause in the words my friend when he spoke of the patient in question. Didn’t elaborate. I didn’t press. Sets me off a little, though try not to show it. Don’t want him thinking I still love him, seeing as I don’t.

The cart rattles as he tugs it along. Kind of him to take it, though there are few I would leave my equipment in the care of. A cleaver dangles from his belt. His seven-foot frame kindly shading my eyes from the smoke-red sun—his antlers standing another two feet above that. Considered not coming. Bet he never doubted he could get me. And here I am, in step. The trees around us getting taller. The fog thicker as we head north.

We’ll be in Deep Wells soon. What once was home. A place where people know my name whether I want them to or not. Where I’m alone and unwelcome. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 992: Chattering Spines

Show Notes

From the author: Oh Spines. I wrote this while at a writing conference called Superstars Writing Seminars back in February of 2022 after attending a session run by Kevin Ikenberry. I forget the details of the class (and my notes are AWOL), but I came out of it obsessing over the idea of finding the most emotional beat of a story and crafting the rest from that singular moment.

I think the elevator doors had just closed when the idea that became this story lodged itself in my brain. Two hours later, sobbing, I finished the story in my hotel room. This version has had only minor edits for clarity from that initial draft.

And I still cry every time I read it.


The Secret of NIMH

War of the Worlds

Signs

UK pensioner, student arrested for backing Palestine Action

FBI sending 120 agents into DC streets as Trump targets carjacking and crime in capital

Scout group ‘racially abused’ after being mistaken for migrants

 


Chattering Spines

By Mike Wyant Jr


My neighbors smile when they burn.

The flames melt the flesh from their bones, revealing the full six inches of sharp spines that brought them here. I swear they sigh in relief.

Hell, I would, not that I’ll say that out loud.

No screaming, though. Never that. Just the crackling silence of flames and the perpetual hiss-pop of melting fat and burst organs. That stopped being a surprise a long time ago.

Now, this is just my last shift at the burn pit for the day. (Continue Reading…)

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PseudoPod 991: The Hermit Crab God

Show Notes

Notes from the author: I recently spoke with a nature photographer who was very passionate about hermit crabs, and he made me want to not give up. I suppose just because horror is often hopeless doesn’t mean I have to be. Maybe horror can just be a way to get the nihilism out of our system.


The Hermit Crab God

by ego_bot


“Behold the truth of this world, Koji, my friend,” said Masa. Pretending sophistication. “We live in a world made by humans, for humans. Don’t need a college degree to figure that out.”

Koji puffed on his cigarette. He was trying to enjoy the sunset in silence, but his friend kept going on about the trash strewn across the beach. As if anyone actually gave a shit about that.

“My dad drove me up to this beach all the time when I was little,” Koji said.

Masa took a sip from his plastic bottle of green tea. “Is that right?”

“We came up here to catch fish for my aquarium—snails, clams, whatever. Anyway, the place was pristine back then. I swear. No trash.”

“A lot’s changed since then.” Masa gestured his green tea bottle towards the ocean. “All those countries. All those corporations, those boats out there—these days they’ve got plastic to spare. How nice of the currents to deliver it all to our lovely beaches.”

Koji took a long drag of his cigarette, let the smoke mix with his thoughts. “We must be idiots to want to be biologists.” He exhaled. “All the coral on this island will be white as snow before we graduate, and nothing you and I do will make a damn difference, ever.”

“That’s the spirit. Rest easy knowing humans will get what’s coming to us. Nature will make sure of it, yeah? And either way”—Masa took another swig of his tea, then held the bottle out—“the sun will rise again in the morning. Hey, want a sip?”

Koji accepted the plastic without thinking. It was weightless—empty. He shot a glare at his grinning excuse for a friend who had just handed him trash. (Continue Reading…)