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PseudoPod 341: Immortal L.A.

PseudoPod 341: Immortal L.A. is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:55 — 33.0MB)

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Show Notes

“Immortal L.A.” was written for Pseudopod. “Because I’m a big fan. A really big fan. I was recently in a taxi driving through the Romanian country side. I asked the cab driver if he believed in vampires and he said in thickly accented broken English ‘of course, dictators, criminals, liars… these are the vampires. We see the news and we see the vampires. Vampires are not legends, vampires and legends don’t make vampires, if you look around you’ll see them. If you watch the news you’ll see them.'”

Immortal L.A.

by Eric Czuleger

I ran a hand along my softening stomach. Tomorrow I start my diet. I thought. I removed my mouth from my hand. Two neat holes. No blood.

I went to the bathroom. Before I opened the door I tried to convince myself to chew a piece of gum instead. Saliva roused in my mouth and convinced me otherwise. I placed my head on the door with a gentle thunk, and thought, Am I hungry? Then, no I’m just depressed. I opened the door to the bathroom. The girl was lying in the bathtub where I left her.

A stream of blood ran down her neck and out of her thin wrists, it formed a shallow pool at the bottom of the tub. Her legs were like pale sticks. Her platform shoes with nine inch spikes were thrown in the corner, I have to throw out that pile, it’s just getting bigger. Her eyes lazily rotated in their orbits toward me. Even below her thick red lipstick, her lips seemed blue. Her hair was cut into a short blonde bob and while I had my mouth around her neck I could pretend for a bit. Pretend she was someone else that I wanted to drain the life of.

I stood in the doorway feeling self-conscious. I didn’t think she would be awake still, and I was already coming back for a fourth helping. It was like that moment when I still ate food, where you wanted to take the last slice of pizza but no one does through mutual shame. In spite of the fact that, if left to your own devices, you would have devoured the pizza entirely. It was like that. This time the pizza was watching me. And judging me.

‘Are you going to kill me?’ She croaked, as if she were asking the time. She’d lost so much blood she was punch drunk.

‘Yes,’ I said guiltily. Conscious of my gut.

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PseudoPod 340: Neighbourhood Watch

“Neighbourhood Watch” originally appeared in an Australian magazine, Aphelion, in 1986, and was reprinted in Karl Edward Wagner’s THE YEAR’S BEST HORROR STORIES XVI in 1988. The story is available to read at here

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:09 — 37.3MB)

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Neighbourhood Watch

by Greg Egan

Only at night, says the contract. After eleven, to be precise. Decent people are not out after eleven, and decent people should not have to witness what I do.

Andrews is seventeen, and bored. Andrew, I understand. This suburb is a hole, you have my deepest sympathies. What do they expect you to do around here? On a warm night like this a young man can grow restless. I know; your dreams, too, shaped me slightly (my principal creators did not expect that). You need adventure. So keep your eyes open, Andrew, there are opportunities everywhere.

The sign on the chemist’s window says no money, no drugs, but you are no fool. The back window’s frame is rotting, the nails are loose, it falls apart in your hands. Like cake. Must be your lucky night, tonight.

The cash drawer’s empty (oh shit!) and you can forget about that safe, but a big, glass candy jar of valium beats a handful of Swiss health bars, doesn’t it? There are kids dumb enough to pay for those, down at the primary school.

Only those who break the law, says the contract. A list of statutes is provided, to be precise. Parking offences, breaking the speed limit and cheating on income tax are not included; decent people are only human, after all. Breaking and entering is there, though, and stealing, well, that dates right back to the old stone tablets.

No loophole, Andrew. No argument.

Andrew has a flick knife, and a death’s head tattoo. He’s great in a fight, our Andrew. Knows some karate, once did a little boxing, he has no reason to be afraid. He walks around like he owns the night. Especially when there’s nobody around.

So what’s that on the wind? Sounds like someone breathing, someone close by. Very even, slow, steady, powerful. Where is the bastard? You can see in all directions, but there’s no one in sight. What, then? Do you think it’s in your head? That doesn’t seem likely.

Andrew stands still for a moment. He wants to figure this out for himself, but I can’t help giving him hints, so the lace of his left sand-shoe comes undone. He puts down the jar and crouches to retie it.

The ground, it seems, is breathing.

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PseudoPod 339: The End-Of-The-World Pool

“The End-Of-The-World Pool” was first published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show #12, May 2009. Ray Bradbury’s SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES was a direct influence on this story.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:25 — 27.2MB)

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The End-Of-The-World Pool

by Scott M. Roberts

The pool was as warm as sweat. Evan kicked away from the surface, algae shifting and bumping against his bare legs. Even with his mouth squeezed tight, he could taste the foulness of the water, like it had seeped through his ears to touch the back of his throat.

Down!

There’d been no squares edging the poolside, advertising the depth. It could be ten feet, twelve feet, a thousand feet deep. Evan couldn’t sense the bottom or the surface. All around him, floaties and foulness and warm water, like piss. He was swimming through a toilet, that’s what, and maybe he’d gotten in the bend without realizing it, and what if someone flushed?

Evan opened his eyes. Light blurred above him, at the end of the angle of his skinny body. And below him, more water, darker and deeper. He stretched his arms, kicked his legs, and pushed on. Pushed in, he thought, through slick, sweaty water.

The water grew cooler the deeper he swam. He kept his eyes open, despite how they burned. The light above dwindled, and then was gone, and the water didn’t end. That wasn’t right — where the pool was dark and deep, that was where the bottom had to be. Covered by a layer of muck, maybe; maybe inches of decaying leaves blown into the pool during the winter. But water and quiet surrounded him instead.

Quiet. He couldn’t hear Dad and Uncle Hector banging on the deck. He couldn’t even hear the bubbles when he let some air out of his lungs. Evan swiped at the water, edging deeper. His fingers touched sand. Sand. At the bottom of a pool.

Something touched him back.

PseudoPod 338: Beware The Jabberwock, My Son

“Beware The Jabberwock, My Son” was first published *way back* in 1991 in a tiny little photocopied horror zine out of Seattle called FEAR BOOK. The print run was 150. It was the author’s first attempt at trying to write horror for a living, and the results paid so little ($15) that he stayed away from genre fiction for the next twenty years. But now we have podcasts and the world looks much brighter! If anyone remembers actually reading this story in print from back then, the author would like you to contact him. This is what Facebook is for.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:27 — 16.9MB)

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Beware The Jabberwock, My Son

by Dixon Chance

Richard stayed frozen. This is nonsense, he thought. Am I afraid of a funny noise? Of nonsense? He formed a determined smile and decided to recite Humpty-Dumpty’s poem to himself. Maybe that would help him relax, fighting nonsense with nonsense. “_I sent a message to the fish/ I told them, ‘This is what I wish—’_” he said softly.

He had nerved himself up enough to go two steps when he heard the next sound. It was like a lady’s fan—one made of cellophane—being opened. Or a breeze being…folded?

The sound (_whiffle_) came again, and this time it definitely came from the mirror. Definitely. He could imagine its long, snaky neck pouring out of the mirror frame, those two pale unblinking eyes peering around his bedroom as it flew

(_whiffle_)

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Pseudopod 337: At The End Of The Passage

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:53 — 40.5MB)

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by Rudyard Kipling

“At The End Of The Passage” (1902) was originally published in the August 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine. The description of the country suggests the desert of Upper Rajputana, north of Jodhpur which Kipling visited as a correspondent. It is available online to read here

(JOSEPH) RUDYARD KIPLING (1865–1936) was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He was born in Bombay, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling is best known for his works of fiction, including THE JUNGLE BOOK (which includes “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”), JUST SO STORIES (1902), KIM (1901) and many short stories, including “The Man Who Would Be King” and his poems, including “Mandalay”, “Gunga Din”, and “If—”. He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story, his children’s books are enduring classics of children’s literature and his best works are said to exhibit “a versatile and luminous narrative gift”. Kipling’s ghostly tales evince a powerful interest in the psychological, and their subtlety and indirection can be very impressive.

Your reader this week – Alasdair Stuart – needs no introduction – so click the link in his name and go read his blog instead!

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“The sky is lead and our faces are red / And the gates of Hell are opened and riven / And the winds of Hell are loosened and driven, And the dust flies up in the face of Heaven / And the clouds come down in a fiery sheet / Heavy to raise and hard to be borne / And the soul of man is turned from his meat / Turned from the trifles for which he has striven / Sick in his body, and heavy-hearted / And his soul flies up like the dust in the sheet / Breaks from his flesh and is gone and departed / As the blasts they blow on the cholera-horn”

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

SURVEY

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PseudoPod 336: The Abyss

“The Abyss” (1902) was published as a response to “The Kreutzer Sonata” (Leo Tolstoy’s fictional argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence). This story caused great commotion because of its candid and audacious treatment of sex.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:03 — 33.1MB)

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The Abyss

by Leonid Andreyev

‘Look, the sun has set!’ she exclaimed with grieved astonishment.

‘Yes, it has set,’ he responded with a new sadness.

The light was gone, the shadows died, everything became pale, dumb, lifeless. At that point of the horizon where earlier the glowing sun had blazed, there now, in silence, crept dark masses of cloud, which step by step consumed the light blue spaces. The clouds gathered, jostled one another, slowly and reticently changed the contours of awakened monsters; they advanced, driven, as it were, against their will by some terrible, implacable force. Tearing itself away from the rest, one tiny luminous cloud drifted on alone, a frail fugitive.

Zinotchka’s cheeks grew pale, her lips turned red; the pupils of her eyes imperceptibly broadened, darkening the eyes. She whispered:

‘I feel frightened. It is so quiet here. Have we lost our way?’

Nemovetsky knitted his heavy eyebrows and made a searching survey of the place. Now that the sun was gone and the approaching night was breathing with fresh air, it seemed cold and uninviting. To all sides the gray field spread, with its scant grass, clay gullies, hillocks and holes. There were many of these holes; some were deep and sheer, others were small and overgrown with slippery grass; the silent dusk of night had already crept into them; and because there was evidence here of men’s labors, the place appeared even more desolate. Here and there, like the coagulations of cold lilac mist, loomed groves and thickets and, as it were, hearkened to what the abandoned holes might have to say to them.

Nemovetsky crushed the heavy, uneasy feeling of perturbation which had arisen in him and said:

‘No, we have not lost our way. I know the road. First to the left, then through that tiny wood. Are you afraid?’

She bravely smiled and answered:

‘No. Not now. But we ought to be home soon and have some tea.’

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PseudoPod 335: Charlie Harmer’s Day Off

PseudoPod 335: Charlie Harmer’s Day Off is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:40 — 24.6MB)

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Show Notes

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

Charlie Harmer’s Day Off

by Brendan Detzner

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

There are similarities. I still have a boss. I don’t know much about her, I have no clear memory of ever meeting her for the first time. She has long brown hair.

A few days after my conversation with Darius, the boss calls a staff meeting. We meet in the Orange Room. The gang’s all here. Neil from the laundromat. The bloody torso. The asshole with no skin that no one takes seriously. (The torso is literal, the asshole is figurative.) The little girl who never talks. Others. Somehow the table is as long as it needs to be to fit everyone and no longer.

The brunette is the last to arrive. She looks tired. She never looks tired. She glances to her side before she says anything. She’s nervous. That’s not right either.

The skinless asshole is sitting in the privileged place to her right.

He’s wearing a tuxedo, his white collar stained by the blood and pus dripping down from his face. His name’s Gary. He’s got three names like all the bullshit serial killers have three names.

‘We’re going to make some changes,’ the boss says, and she sounds guilty.

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

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PseudoPod 334: The Curse Of The Mummy

PseudoPod 334: The Curse Of The Mummy is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:03 — 18.7MB)

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The Curse Of The Mummy

by Andre Harden

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