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Toby

By Brittany Groves

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It’s a long walk from Founders Cemetery, but I am old, dying, and don’t mind the wait.

The trick-or-treaters are out already, unusually boisterous this year, yet I barely hear them. I sit on my back porch in my creaky rocking chair, waiting and watching the empty, grassy borders of my property.

Any moment now. I feel it.

Beside me, the jack-o’-lantern’s flickering flames dance upon the grass like a picture show, and I gaze at the photograph in my wrinkled hand.

Olan Mills, October 31, 1953: Toby the Laughing Clown, 6yrs. The last picture ever taken of my son, well before my neighbor, Mr. Keeley, drove blackout drunk on a night known for streets filled with roaming children.

I choke back decades of tears. I try to remember my boy how he was that morning. How excited he was to go to the portrait studio. How he pranced around and played peek-a-boo with his ruffled, pointy hat.

What a goofy, gap-toothed grin he had.

A plague of grackles descend from the sky with raspy squawks, dusk on their wings, and settle in the dead trees that border the corn fields. The sun finally falls below the horizon, its fading rays lost to sudden, ominous darkness.

Halloween night has come.

The grackles cease their jagged cries and perch upon the branches, deathly still. My hair stands on end, and I’ve goosebumps all over, even after all these Halloweens.

A breeze kicks up, and with it the sweet, cloying scent of decay.

I spy a dark shape at the edge of the property, hear the rustle of stilted movement through sun-dried corn stalks.

He is here.

I stand, knees popping, and with a frail, quivering hand, I beckon—hopefully for the last time. I am old, dying, and now I am tired of waiting.

He shuffles across the lawn, dingy clown mask askew on his mottled, peeling brow. Clumps of soil and patches of limp blonde hair bunch about the straps hanging around his ears. The stained clown costume, its satiny sheen and once bright buttons, rot on his shriveled frame.

I grasp his cold, dry hand with a forced smile and hand him his faded candy bucket; a pumpkin bought at the A&P, its plastic grown brittle and cracked with time.

“Toby,” I say, though I know he cannot hear me. “Don’t forget to say trick-or-treat.”

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The 2024 Halloween Parade

by Alasdair Stuart

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For years, the Parade has travelled through the centre of town. It’s been the same route every time, the comfort of routine playing the bass note for the Parade’s complex symphony of unease. It’s the tune you all hum. You grab a churro, you grab a seat, you don’t look too hard at the people around you as you have a lovely time, then leave.

The year the Parade starts at the docks.

You arrive early, newness and uncertainty building the cortisol wave you ride through town and towards the water. It’s…nice actually. You’ve never been to the docks before but there’s the comforting plink and creak of boat riggings, fish and chip shops, and hey! The churro guy! Because horror may be eternal, but so are snacks.

You walk down a line of beached boats. The Orca, the Antonia Graza, the Sacramentum. Someone’s called their boat the Nostromo and you’re still chuckling about it when there’s the woosh of a fire arrow and the CRUMP of ignition and a Viking longship begins to burn on the docks.

It looks like someone has murdered a wooden dragon. Massive curved hull, full sails and dragon heads at bow and stern. The boat’s shape is defined against the night sky by its destruction. It’s being written into certain abstraction as you watch. It’s horrific. It’s beautiful.

The Controller, silhouetted against the burning boat. Their precise form shifting and towering as the flames rise.

‘Fire. This year we start with fire. All it destroys, all it enables.’

She walks forward and past the crowd; behind her the longship slides into the water. In perfect synchronisation as the boat hits the ocean, a colossal winged shape flies directly towards you. The crowd gasps and screams, the immense bird caws once in return and then banks away down the road. You notice it does so directly above the Controller, keeping perfect middle distance between her and the intense, worried young woman who follows it. She’s dressed in light amour, riding a chariot, and her eyes never leave the bird’s shadow.

There are other shapes out in the smoke of the burning boat. Colossal bipedal forms that move through the ocean with ease. A horde of blinking eyes. A second, larger winged creature. Not a bird this time. Something vast and old and just the start of a flock and you’re distantly aware you can’t quite look away from it or want to as it hurtles towards you and –

The robot is unexpected. The robot with motorbike wheels driven by a very small old man, aided by a crew of young assistants whose every move speaks to their competency, terror, and exhaustion. The robot is janky, rickety, held together by the

unshakeable determination of its creators. You can’t for the life of you take it seriously. And that’s the point. And you’re so glad for it.

And you aren’t alone. A man, longer hair, beard with more grey than the last time you saw him walks behind the robot in the unconscious rear guard position that anyone who’s ever worked in a protective or emergency service falls into. He looks so tired, and as you look you realize he has a prosthetic arm. As he goes past you follow his gaze to a woman with a katana, both in the same ill-fitting uniform. She is furious, focused. They’re either going to tear each other apart or tear everything between them apart. But until then they’re finding solace in each other’s presence.

The car that follows them is what someone would call old but you call ‘classic’. It’s a ‘70s sedan. Not quite an Oldsmobile but the sort of long, wide vehicle that could cover America in ten bonnet lengths. It looks like it has too, caked in dust and with the roof covered in supplies. A tent, clothes, a water purifier and, you notice, a radio dish. The woman in the driver’s seat is talking into a radio and there’s something a little off about her. She’s looking around but she doesn’t seem to see anyone… Following her is Sir and Apprentice. Sir is every authority figure you’ve ever known, distilled: tall and thin and precise and broad and powerful and shabby and furious and amiable. He’s the idea of superiority, and Apprentice is the idea of the student. Enthusiastic, slovenly, darting, plodding. The pair of them forming and reforming in response to each audience member’s gaze. The constant they rotate is their trolley of artefacts. Well, that and their voices…

But you become distracted by the search party cutting through the fog. Is it fog? Smoke from the fire? When did it go so cold? These trained rescue professionals – rangers in high vis gear walking with the off-hand confidence of people who work outside for a living. One of them though… The fog seems densest around her, and as you look you see figures moving through it. Around her. Whispering to her. You hope she finds who she’s looking for, before she starts listening to them.

‘Excuse me.’

There’s a punk standing next to you. Crouching actually. ‘Punk’ not in a pejorative sense either; this person has the determinedly cheery demeanour of counter-culture and they smell… amazing? They have a satchel full of greens and dirt under their fingernails and you are instantly reassured not just by them but by the fact they trusted you enough to speak. Because they have the same caution you do, have had for years now, under the charm.

‘Oh I’m sorry-’ you start.

They point to your leg, to the plant under it. ‘Wild garlic. Need it for lasagne.’ ‘Oh that’s COOL!’ you help them dig it out and they nod in thanks. ‘Come by, it’s going to be DELICIOUS.’

You’re still smiling at the thought of tasting wild garlic when you spot a commotion on the other side of the audience. A young woman, a scarf partially covering her face, stands up suddenly and stumbles down into the Parade. There’s some minor commotion but just as this looks like it’s going to cause a disruption, the Controller

touches her arm and guides her into place. The young woman walks slowly down the road, eyes down, trying not to attract attention and doing so anyway.

Behind her, a young man in an immaculate suit he has clearly slept in, and a painfully thin woman with a cat on a leash walk down the road the same way someone walks into a storm. Terrified, eyes darting, heads on swivels. They’re looking for something, wincing at every sound. But for now at least they’re safe.

The young miners aren’t so lucky. Two of them are badly injured, four more bear ligature marks around their necks and they’re all panicking, all frantically looking around them. Aside from one. He’s just as aware as his colleagues, just as worried, but he moves with the same calm as the sea behind the parade. He’s not going to stop until he needs to. Until he has to. You watch him lock eyes with one of the other miners and something passes between them. He looks so sad. The young woman that resembles him at his side looks so guilty. They keep running.

The two dads, deep in conversation, that walk behind the miners in their faded corporate sweatshirts seem … off. One is scanning the crowd in the way that’s familiar to you – looking for threats, looking for his children. The other is talking animatedly, charmingly. He’s engaged and friendly and right there and he wants you

to see no one and nothing BUT how engaged and friendly and right there he is. One of these men is exhausted. One of these men is furious. Both of them are dangerous.

An older woman in a full biohazard suit with a gun walks by next. It’s a stark image, the coy nature of so many threats here at the Parade replaced by the brutal truth of mortality, infection and death. The Controller walks with her arm in arm, smiling and waving like a pageant queen.

The weather shifts again. Thunder clouds start to roil in a way that should only happen in movies. You look up, rebelling against the atmospheric pressure squeezing your temples and see, just for a second, a colossal oblong shape hovering in the sky. You gasp. To your left someone laughs. To your right someone sobs. They sound exactly the same.

Lightning flashes, your vision fill with white and –

‘Water. This year we end with water. All it feeds. All it contains. All we know and all we choose not to know.’ The Controller, smiling and walking in the center of the parade route, her arms wide as she chuckles like an indulgent tyrant.

‘A wise man once described the ocean as largely containing fish, trash, and horrible mystery. I choose to view it as the home of… potential. And this year we embrace that potential.’

A boat, a trawler with the dimensions of a plucky animated protagonist, is wheeled across the Parade route. A man stands at the helm and he does not look away from the choppy, dark water ahead. You’re not sure he can. You’re less sure he wants to .

The Controller applauds as the boat nears the slipway and encourages us to stand and do the same. The Captain doesn’t move, doesn’t look anywhere but where he’s going. Out into the storm. Out into the fog.

The boat crests the slipway, slides down and a ragged cheer sends it on its way. Lightning strikes the horizon. An iceberg. Lightning strikes again. An oil rig. A third time and there is a moment, just a moment where you see motion under the surface. Then the ocean rises and the fog descends and the boat has gone and the Parade is over, accompanied by the distant rumbles of thunder.

The Controller bows, accepts the applause her presence demands, and then walks towards the slipway. You choose not to watch her leave. Instead you seek for the punk in the crowd and spot them at the centre of a tight knot of people. Some pick up trash left behind by other parade goers, others sift through the detritus and the docks for something useful, making something new out of what was left behind. It’s dinner time. And your friends are making lasagne.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 946

October 31st 2024

Toby by Brittany Groves

The 2024 Halloween Parade by Alasdair Stuart

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

Happy Halloween everyone! Welcome to our favourite time of the year and to our usual festive double bill. Join us after the episode for this year’s Halloween Parade. But first, this week’s story comes to us from Brittany Groves. Brittany Groves is an Occupational Health Registered Nurse and part-time aspiring writer, when the mood strikes. She lives in Texas with her two unruly children, a devastatingly handsome husband, and a dog that adores them all. Recently, her works have been published in Dark Matter Magazine and Lovecraftiana, both of which feature stories from her favourite genres, horror and science fiction.

Your narrator this week is Siobhan Gallichan. Siobhan Gallichan, a voice artist and premier William Hartnell voice actor, is one of those people who actually loves Marmite. Listen to Siobhan’s podcast at The Flashing Blade or watch the show on YouTube.

So get ready for tricks and treats, because we have stories for you and you know, deep down,t hey’re true

We bring our ghosts with us. I’ve found three species so far. The first is the loudest, the intrusive voices from long dead arguments and hurts that demand to be re-litigated and delight in costing you processing cycles and sleep by working out where you went wrong. Not what to do about it, just the mistakes, endlessly. I’ve met those many, many times. They’re tinnitus, it sometimes seems, screaming in our ears but only audible when we focus in or worse, when we don’t have that focus.

The second species is related to them. It whispers about the awful things that could be coming. The possibilities of tragedy, connected to that first species by a chain of false, inverted causality. If we can just remember what went wrong last time, if we can just brace for impact next time, then we can wn and emerge perfect and unscathed. Aside from the exhaustion. Aside from the headaches. Aside from what you miss by thinking about the worst-case scenario. Aside from the joy you lose as you let your worst thoughts turn the volume up on your other worst thoughts.

The third species is the hardest because while those first two deal with the intangible siren call of what we should have done and what we might have to do, the third deals with what has happened and what we do next. These are the actual ghosts. People we’ve lost, places we can no longer go, jobs we no longer have and wish we did.

The weeks immediately before and after my mother’s death were horrific. But once we’d had the funeral, I found myself…calm. Happy. Light-hearted. Some of that was the rubber band correction of the six gruelling weeks of hospice care. Some of it was just…happiness. A piece of music played at her funeral surfaced in the most delightfully incongruous place a few days later. I saw her at the

WorldCon Hugo reception. A small, neat woman with close cut grey hair, smiling and bobbing her shoulders, just like Mum always did. I wasn’t shocked, or startled. I wasn’t disappointed when I saw her again a few minutes later and saw it wasn’t her. It felt…nice. Reassuring. But it also felt weird. I became genuinely, sincerely worried I was grieving wrong. So much so I asked my therapist about it. The answer I got was intensely comforting and unequivocal.

There is no way to grieve wrong.

I loved my mum. She loved me. When she died there was no unfinished business, no sense of things unresolved and that’s a blessing I’ve become more grateful for as it’s come more into focus over the last few weeks.

I won’t judge the protagonist here. I can’t. Because there’s no way to grieve wrong. Some people need to keep the wound open, need to keep feeling the pain so they can function. Like a great joke you here six times, you’ll laugh a little less every time but the warm, calm spread of your emotional response will never leave you. That grief loses its capital letter. To use my favorite quote, eventually it becomes the second thing you think about when you wake up. You sit with your grief because you never stop loving the people you’ve lost, or the life you’re no longer part of. But you just sit with them as the days continue and that’s a comfort I choose to believe the protagonist here embraces. Their little boy, always their little boy. Not grieving wrong. Just grieving. We bring our ghosts with us. Because that way they’re never quite gone. The hardest kind of ghost, but the kindest too.

Thanks to Britany, Siobhan and Chelsea. Brilliantly done.

Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

Next week we have Will They Disappear by Cynthia Gómez, with narration by the wonderful Julia Rios, hosting by the wonderful Eleanor R Wood and audio production by the wonderful Chelsea. We’ll see you then. And finally, PseudoPod wants you to remember this, from Andrew Garfield and Elmo:

” “It’s kind of a lovely thing to feel, in a way, because it means you really loved somebody when you miss them.”

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe. And if you’re joining us for the parade, keep listening.

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Our second story this week is from, me. Alasdair Stuart is a professional enthusiast, pop culture analyst, writer, and award-winning voice actor. He’s the co-publisher for the Escape Artists Foundation and hosts their weekly horror fiction podcast, PseudoPod. A multiple Hugo Award and BFA finalist, Alasdair writes the weekly pop culture newsletter, The Full Lid.

Visit www.alasdairstuart.com to find all the places he writes, streams, and posts photos of his cat Twiglet.

This is our annual Halloween Parade. For new listeners, this is my yearly, somewhat narrative celebration of all the horror media that meant something to me in the last 12 months. Play along, and in a few days we’ll put the annotated version up so you can see how well you did.

So grab some churros, it’s parade time.