Cuernavaca

PseudoPod 504: Cuernavaca

Show Notes

“I’d like the audience to ask themselves what ‘belief’ means to them, and whether they think the things we believe in can protect us from a world that doesn’t seem to believe in much at all.”


Luis’ audio producer is the impeccable Branan Edgans (whom you last heard reading on Pseudopod in The Influence Of Thomas Glittio. Dan Powell is a podcast producer, audio engineer and sound designer. He is one half of Dead Signals, the production team between found-footage horror podcast Archive 81 and their more recent sci-fi adventure story, The Deep Vault. He can be tweeted @stereophobe.

And we would also like to thank Chris and Rob at BrickShop Audio in Industry City, Brooklyn for the recording help!


Cuernavaca

by John Mile Deisinger


Morelos state, as you know, is the crucible of the People’s Revolution. This was where the Grito de Dolores found its most fervent listeners. This was the homeland of Zapata, who I rode with and followed. You should have seen the landlord’s faces when we asked them for the taxes. When we burned their fields of sugar cane, so that the campesinos could plow them fresh and plant corn and peppers. They squealed like pigs in hot grease. How they threatened us, with their army, with their policemen, with their money, with their God. And all of this is to say nothing of the ones whose houses we burned.

But excuse me. My point is, I know the land well. The mountains that separate the city from the Distrito to the north. The patchwork fields, the lakes and small forests, where the peasants trap snakes for meat and smoke little green cigars. You are a peninsulare, of course, yes? You would have been lost, camarada. Your Spanish might serve you well in Monterrey or Madrid, but you’d be lost in the cornfields. The tongue of conquered peoples lives there still, it’s more Nahua than nacionale down there.

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PseudoPod 503: The Horror from the Mound

Show Notes

Anson’s audio producer is the impeccable Branan Edgans (whom you last heard reading on Pseudopod in The Influence Of Thomas Glittio. Dan Powell is a podcast producer, audio engineer and sound designer. He is one half of Dead Signals, the production team between found-footage horror podcast Archive 81 and their more recent sci-fi adventure story, The Deep Vault. He can be tweeted @stereophobe.

And we would also like to thank Chris and Rob at BrickShop Audio in Industry City, Brooklyn for the recording help!


The Horror from the Mound

by Robert E. Howard


Steve Brill did not believe in ghosts or demons. Juan Lopez did. But neither the caution of the one nor the sturdy skepticism of the other was shield against the horror that fell upon them — the horror forgotten by men for more than three hundred years — a screaming fear monstrously resurrected from the black lost ages.

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PseudoPod 502: The Trauma Box


The Trauma Box

by D. Morgan Ballmer


Most everyone in Fairview knows of the Trauma Box. None agree on its origins. Some claim the box was brought in by bootleggers during Prohibition as a place to stash illicit booze. Others claim it was used by the FBI to interrogate suspected communists back in ’50s. The Reverend, should you bump into him, will whisper of a family whose sole heir was a malformed child. The deranged boy was supposedly chained inside the box until his untimely death some eighteen years later (or ‘six-six-six years later’ as the Reverend puts it).

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PseudoPod 501: Flash on The Borderlands XXXII: Punishments

Show Notes

“Rat King” and “Dead Alive Imagine” are PseudoPod originals.

“The Cages”  originally appeared in PERSONAL DEMONS in 1998.


Devils speak of the ways in which she’ll manifest

Angels bleed from the tainted touch of my caress


Rat King

by Lia Swope Mitchell

narrated by Rish Outfield


Listen. This is just a free consultation. We’re just two men in a bar, you and I. Respectably dressed with respectable drinks, talking business, like everyone else. But I can see it on your face, written underneath your eyes. I can smell it. Underneath the bourbon, underneath the cigarettes and lies. Something’s in there, crawling around inside. You’ve got a secret. And you want to do business, I can tell.


Dead Alive Imagine

by David Murphy

narrated by Siobhan Gallichan


Incisions are made within the clinical white surrounds of the operating lab; incisions in space and time in the operating theatre itself – and incisions into the flesh of the patient. These cuts and alterations take place in a lab so pristine that ceiling, walls and floor blend in a haze that fuses dimensions of distance, height and depth; a shining cleanliness so all-pervasive that light and surface intermingle, making it difficult to distinguish what is vertical from what is horizontal. Concentration and precision are of vital importance in this facility. All tables are smooth, all medical equipment sharp. Follow the instruction manual carefully. Do not – repeat: do not – attempt any ancillary procedures beyond those outlined in this manual.


The Cages

by Christopher Fowler

narrated by Jon Grilz


‘Look,’ said Albert, ‘they’re beating up Mrs Tremayne.’

‘She’s not done anything wrong, has she?’ asked Dr Figgis. ‘No. Perhaps that’s why they’re beating her up.’

‘Doesn’t follow, does it? God, she’s making a lot of noise.’ He shouted through the bars. ‘Hey, keep it down!’

‘This thing’s hard on my arse.’ Albert fidgeted on the rungs. After a few hours they cut into your buttocks and forced you to change position. At least, that was the effect they had on Albert. He noticed that many of the others never seemed to move at all.

NASA aurora image from April 10, 2015, Delta Junction, Alaska

PseudoPod 500: A Bit Of The Dark World


A Bit Of The Dark World

by Fritz Leiber


… and then one of the last rays of the sun must have struck a mirror-surface in the summit-crag, perhaps an outcropping of quartz, for it struck back at me like a golden rapier, making me blink, and then for an instant the beam was glitteringly black and I thought I saw (though nothing as clearly as I’d seen the black all-knowing spider-centipede on the pinnacle) a black shape — black with the queer churning blackness you see only at night with your eyes dosed. The shape coiled rapidly down the crag, into the cavern gullies and around the rocks and finally and utterly into the undergrowth above the fold and disappeared.

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PseudoPod 499: The Tooth Fairy

Show Notes

“I hope the story works on its own without needing to know too much. But I’ve always been fascinated by the fascination that people have with serial killers, and how our perception is affected by both the fiction and the mythologizing of fact. To say much more would of course be to give away some of the story. It’s also an unusual piece for me in that its one of very few stories I’ve written set in the US. I’ve always wanted to write more US based fiction as that is mostly what I read, although I’m known for writing about Scotland and, more generally, the city of Dundee. It was refreshing to be able to write about a subject matter and location that was new to me, and the enthusiasm of Pseudopod for the story has been a great reward for taking that risk.”


The Tooth Fairy

by Russel McLean


The package, when it arrives, is innocuous. Plain envelope. Bubble wrap. A little box inside. Black cardboard. Red ribbon.

Could be anything.

Anything at all.

It comes standard delivery. Anything else would provoke suspicion. Signing for packages, someone, somewhere has to say what’s inside.

How would you explain the contents of that black box?

I sit it, for a while, on the black onyx stone of the kitchen worktop. I look at it. I anticipate opening the box. Think of Schrodinger’s Cat.

Dead?

Alive?

Present?

Gone?

I won’t know. Until I open the box.

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PseudoPod 498: The Only Ending We Have


The Only Ending We Have

by Kim Newman


The windshield wipers squeaked … like shrilling fiddles, scraped nerves, the ring of an unanswered phone. Another reason to trade in her ‘57 Ford Custom. For 1960, she’d like something with fins. Not that she could afford next year’s showroom model.

Unless Hitch coughed up the ransom.

For the thing it was all about. The mcguffin.

The thing the audience doesn’t care about, but the characters do.

‘Good eeeev-ning,’ Hitch said, every goddamn morning … like in his TV show with that nursery/graveyard tune burbling in the background. ‘Funeral March of the Marionettes’. Dump-da- dumpity-dump- da-dump…