PseudoPod 515: The Magician’s Apprentice
The Magician’s Apprentice
by Tamsyn Muir
When she was thirteen, Mr. Hollis told her: “There’s never more than two, Cherry. The magician and the magician’s apprentice.”
PseudoPod 514B: Halloween Parade 2016
Show Notes
Halloween Parade music is “Depraved are Lurking” by Terrortron (a side project of Anders Manga). Download Terrortron on Bandcamp.
The 2016 Halloween Parade
by Alasdair Stuart
Parade time again.
It’s a little darker this year.
The nights, drawing, a little further than they have before. There’s still a crowd. Still a big one, but there’s a little more tension to them than usual. The laughs are louder, more brittle, and the music a little bit angrier.
This is a celebration still.
But it’s also a refuge.
And, maybe that’s why the clowns are so unsettling.
You see the thing about the clowns is… not that they’re at the front of the parade. It’s that they’re all around us. They step out of the woods. Step out of the crowd. Walk silently into formation to form the first float.
They’re all immaculate. They’re all clean. They are all unsmiling. None of them are carrying weapons…
But we know that all of them could.
We know that all of them want to.
That’s maybe why the kid with the goggles is such a relief – there’s not much to him: three feet maybe 80 pounds soaking wet but the goggles and the light spilling out from behind them that’s … strong, powerful, reassuring even.
He walks next to his dad who’s clearly terrified and clearly not moving from his side. Behind them a shorter thicker set man walks backwards, eyes on the other floats, on the crowd, on anything that could threaten the kid and the lights behind his eyes.
Lights that illuminate an advert.
A huge honest to god advert on a float that drives past, and as it goes by you hear groans from your fellow audience members: It’s come to this, adverts in the Halloween parade. But then you hear those groans… fade as people, as you take a look at just what is being advertised: A high-rise building.
An impossibly futuristic and yet somehow horrifically out of date high-rise building.
There are things… spread on the out…things that you choose not to look at. Especially as there’s a very tall very elfin man who is shirtless, on the float, waving to you as he barbecues something. You realise as the smell reaches you, you do not want to know what that is.
The car comes next. And as ever, the two brothers are in the front. In the back. The blonde man with a trench coat tries a few different versions of his face on precise features shifting as he turns and waves. Sitting next to him as a woman in sweatpants and the white top eyes wide laptop on her knees focusing. You realise not on the noise around her but the movement.
When she gets closer, he realised she’s deaf. And she is more aware, more awake than anyone else you’ve seen in this parade so far.
Except, perhaps, for the man in the smiling mask, walking carefully in the cars blind spot.
He looks at us.
Mimes: shh.
And you can tell he’s smiling.
But even he doesn’t quite see the young man with the odd gate and the hospital gown behind him or the scientist, the one in full decontamination gear, carrying an assault rifle.
The one who only seems visible from certain angles.
You’re still trying to figure out what’s going on when you realise it’s time for a little light music or a little heavy music, whichever works.
The band are loud, raucous, and know all the classics and run at them with all the enthusiasm of an over caffeinated puppy. They even hit a few.
They know them so well that they sprint through the ones that they do hit, moving so fast we can’t quite see the wounds …every band member has.
The maimed right hand of the lead guitarist,
The holes in the back of another’s shirt.
Behind them a group of very large, very angry, very tattooed men walk surrounding a small polite looking grandfather figure. They are all staring at the band. None of them are smiling.
Unlike the folks surrounding the full size wedding cake float that’s next in line and the floats stuffed with food that they’re handing out to parade goers – and I’m not just talking any food here. I’m talking primo, full-on, badass, gourmet food that’s got its fingers dirty, knows all the words to every Faith No More song, as well as how to both order and prepare steak tartare.
You see one chef, icing war paint on her cheeks throwing cupcakes out to the crowd.
Nearby you see a short intense looking man in a Billy Jack t-shirt next to a tall black woman, a human speed blur and the largest man you have EVER seen. All of whom are holding a shirtless Irish gentleman up, and arguing about knife fights. The Irish gentleman is yelling at the blonde man in the car further down the parade. Something about how he owes him 50 quid.
You catch a cupcake by the way. It tastes great.
And behind the food come the spiders.
Nothing you can see, just a whisper of silk on air on skin. Shadows moving like water. The Impossible clack of an impossible amount of mandibles.
The scent of meat.
An FBI agent – you can tell by how bad his suit is – and an academic walk back to back down the road.
The shadows surround them.
The shadows don’t pounce. Not yet.
You are distracted, thankfully, by an argument.
Two men, both huge, both muscled, both immaculately dressed and both wearing luchador masks or having a blazing row. The row appears to be the about best way to interrogate the terrified men dangling from one each of their meaty fists. There’s also something about bacon wrapped hot dogs but…you figure that’s on them.
The man walking behind them is alone. At first. He casts a very long, very large shadow. He is dressed like an old fashioned PI: hands in pockets, head down low, 30 seconds from opening a conversation with the phrase “It was raining in the city by the bay” But he’s glowering. He’s glowering at a spot right in front of him.
There’s something in that look, something other than rage, loneliness, horror.
Something that drives him.
You find yourself looking at the same spot and that’s why you don’t notice the pair of children when they step out of his shadow. They walk hand in hand and they’re careful not to make eye contact or getting close to the man. They’re not together. But they are… and you don’t want anything to do with anyone stupid enough to try and get between them.
The zombies arrive next. Only two of them this year, flanked by a man whose bearing says police officer and another taller man who’s bearing says ‘born this way’ who is holding a cup of tea in a fine china cup.
You can see his hands are shaking a bit, until the woman next to him steadies them.
Behind her: The second zombie float arrives. A legion of White haired, oilskins, men and women smiling and waving… and not a single one of them without dreadful churning feral hunger in their eyes.
And at last, the director, always immaculate, always precisely dressed and always invisible until she’s right in front of you. She strides down the centre of the road. Heels clacking, shoulders back. You watch her leave.
Make sure she does, and as the parade turns the corner: She turns and faces you all.
You didn’t see her put the clown nose on…or the makeup.
She bows, turns again and follows her collections of monsters and ghosts, horrors and victims, stories and myths off to the next town.
They have a lot of ground to cover.
Happy Halloween everyone form everyone here at PseudoPod Towers.
For Mortal Things Unsung
Pseudopod is putting together the first anthology to be released by Escape Artists. This is an integral part of our first Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for our narrators. For Mortal Things Unsung is inspired by the poem “Sympathetic Horror” translated from the French of Charles Pierre Baudelaire by Clark Ashton Smith.
Athirst for mortal things unsung
In shadowy realms of lone surmise
Or translated a different way, “We have a story for you, and we promise . . . it’s true.” (Continue Reading…)
PseudoPod 514: The Show
Show Notes
This story was also reprinted this month as part of Nightmare’s special issue People of Colo(u)r DESTROY Horror! Read along with the story over at their site. Listen to two more stories from this issue over on the Nightmare podcast feed, and add it to your podcatcher while you’re at it!
The Show
by Priya Sharma
The camera crew struggled with the twisting, narrow stairs. Their kit was portable, Steadicams being all the rage. They were lucky that the nature of their work did not require more light. Shadows added atmosphere. Dark corners added depth. It was cold down in the cellar. It turned their breath to mist, which gathered in the stark white pools shed by the bare bulbs overhead.
Martha smiled. It was sublime. Television gold.
PseudoPod 513: Flash on The Borderlands XXXIV: Interstices
Show Notes
All three of these stories are runners up from the PSEUDOPOD flash fiction contest
They walk serene / in spaces between
Zipper
by Murf Freedmont
Narrated by Spencer DiSparti
“Zipper was written entirely on my smart phone (in the middle of the night…in bed…when I could not sleep). I intended it to be a writing prompt for a story to be finished later, but when I counted the words the next morning I decided to submit it to the Pseudopod contest without significant changes. Since it fared much better than my other submission, perhaps I should limit all my writing to my phone … but I hate touch screens so much.”
Have you ever tried to open a sleeping bag zipper silently?
Subcutaneous
by Nicholas Conley
narrated by Rock Manor
I like the way that skin feels.
The Void
by Thomas Vicinanzo
narrated by Laurice White
“The most terrifying thing is a life devoid of intrinsic meaning, and a universe which does not and cannot understand us.”
I tripped on a little ridge where the turf was bunched up like a carpet. It was early morning and the park was empty, so I pulled at the grass, and it came up, revealing soil blacker than fresh asphalt. Then I saw it wasn’t soil but black empty space.
PseudoPod 512: Boys
Show Notes
“I’ve always struggled with titles, so when submitting work to my creative writing group I had taken to giving my stories temporary headings derived from Latin terms for animals: Ursa (Bear), Haedus (Young Goat), Porcus (Pig). This eventually incurred the wrath of my peers who found it completely pretentious and overblown. Hell hath no fury like writers patronized. Out of sheer stubbornness, I was all set to continue with this practice when submitting my next story, an early draft of this story. “Bos” I was intending on titling it, from the Latin term for cow. So I put the word “Bos” at the top of the document and as soon as it was there I struggled to take my eyes off it. All my other Latin titles felt like placeholders, but this felt right – or very nearly right. It was only after an hour or staring that I finally put the vital ‘y’ between the ‘o’ and the ‘s’, giving myself “Boys”. After I got the title right, everything else with the story fell into place in subsequent drafts, thematically, narratively. In naming it I’d realized something: it wasn’t the cow, the bos, that gave the story its horror. It was the boys; the foul, abhorrent and distressingly relatable boys.”
Boys
by Damien Laughlin
It was Ethan’s thirteenth birthday and he had invited me to a sleepover, along with friends from his new school. We were making our way through the forest by his home when he signaled for me to slow down. We allowed the other boys to pull ahead. That’s when he grabbed my arm and uttered a warning in my ear: I wasn’t going to like what he was taking us to see at the river bay.
The Eighth Day Brotherhood is a new novel by Alice M. Phillips that should be of interest to PseudoPod listeners. If you want a novel with the milieu of The Stress of Her Regard but tighter pacing, look no further. Couple this with the sensibility of Fincher’s Se7en and you have a tense and relentless thriller. Alice’s love for the tenebrous portions of the Decadent period glows through Paris while the Eiffel Tower rises on the bank of the Seine and as the city prepares of the Exposition Universelle. It manifests with an abiding love for the period supported by an incredible depth of research. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book from Black Rose Writing.
The Eighth Day Brotherhood by Alice M. Phillips — Black Rose Writing
One August morning, in Paris, 1888, the sunrise reveals the embellished corpse of a young man suspended between the columns of the Panthéon, resembling a grotesque Icarus and marking the first in a macabre series of murders linked to Paris monuments. In the Latin Quarter, occult scholar Rémy Sauvage is informed of his lover’s gruesome death and embarks upon his own investigation to avenge him by apprehending the cult known as the Eighth Day Brotherhood. At a nearby sanitarium, aspiring artist Claude Fournel becomes enamored with a mesmerist’s beautiful patient, Irish immigrant Margaret Finnegan. Resolved to steal her away from the asylum and obtain her for his muse, Claude only finds them both entwined in the Brotherhood’s apocalyptic plot combining magic, mythology, and murder.
PseudoPod 511: Flash on The Borderlands XXXIII: Corpus
Show Notes
“Hand Off” by S. Siporin is a Pseudopod Original. “We all have parts of ourselves we are unhappy with; the trick is to accept them as part of who you are”
“Hide” was first published in Black Static Issue 43 by TTA Press in November 2014.
“Think of the Bones” is a PseudoPod Original. It is about struggling with body image, and whether the story’s resolution is comforting or unsettling is up to the listener. Recommended additional reading is “The Skeleton” by Ray Bradbury, which is included in the October Country collection.
The suffering of strangers, the agony of friends. There is a secret song at the center of the world, and its sound is like razors through flesh.
Hand Off
by S. Siporin
She was wealthy; you could tell by the thick brown fur of her coat, by the elaborate, streaked hair that made her look ten years younger than she really was. Three slender fingers on her left hand gleamed smooth and ivory; they were heavy with silver and gold rings, mementoes of failed marriages. Her right hand was bare of decoration; it hung flaccid by her side, brushing against the soft fur like a sallow slab of flesh. She tried to hide it under her coat. It was defective, shriveled, half paralyzed.
Without warning, it twitched, the fingers diddling as if playing an invisible piano, as if restless, discontent. The line between her eyes deepened, darkened as if someone had drawn on her face with magic marker. Not again, she thought. Not here. Her left hand pressed its palm flat against her forehead; she felt the ache of an incipient migraine.
Hide
by Annie Neugebauer
When I met Cecilia I’d only been dead for twenty years and she’d only been alive for about as many. She was all golden-brown skin and mahogany eyes and legs that stretched longer than the last week of summer, and I was cold – so cold.
I stood several yards away in the shade watching her with her friends. We were at an outdoor concert where a local band did a shitty job of playing good songs. Cecilia sat on the grass with those legs sprawled easily in front of her, catching the sun, leaned back and propped on her elbows. She wore a big white floppy hat that should have seemed silly and out of place but instead looked perfect.
Think of the Bones
by Gary Emmette Chandler
When the bones first began to grow, David had watched them with something like lust. Each night, in his small apartment, he would sit at the edge of his bed and watch the bones shift, gradually taking form. It started with the feet: that multitude of delicate, tiny bones, slowly knitting themselves together.
It was a secret he kept for himself — a routine that kept the days in motion, swinging about in silence, with hope.
I’m here to turn up the volume. To press the stinking face of humanity into the dark blood of its own secret heart.
PseudoPod 510: Falling Under, Through the Dark
Falling Under, Through the Dark
by Damien Angelica Walters
Kara’s sitting at her desk when she falls. There’s no time for panic; it happens too fast. One moment she’s working; the next, she’s in the water. Gravity and the force of the fall plunge her into the depths and everything blurs. She wants to yell but her body needs to conserve oxygen and won’t allow it. Natural buoyancy kicks in and she bobs to the surface, eyes still burning from the chlorine.
Now her heart starts to race and she breathes in huge gulps of air, her mind already fumbling for statistics. Facts. Every day an average of ten people die from drowning, and of those, two are children fourteen and younger.