EA Metacast, December 2014
What’s in store for Escape Artists — and for you — in 2015? Listen and find out!
PseudoPod 418: Shadow Transit
Shadow Transit
by Ferrett Steinmetz
Michelle wasn’t sure how to tell if her daughter was going insane, because kids weren’t stable. She remembered how Lizzie would boldly greet her favorite aunt one day and then hide behind Michelle’s legs the next. Lizzie slept through the night for years without a nightlight, and then suddenly developed a terror of the dark. That was just how kids were; their personalities fluid, like water, ever-changing.
PseudoPod Christmas 2014 Bonus Flash: Tradition
Show Notes
“It was at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia that I founded a member group for sci fi, fantasy and horror writers to meet and support each other. It’s a fantastic group and they helped motivate me to write, edit and submit this piece. Winter holidays are usually such a happy time, I wanted to try and do something seasonal that was a lot darker. I’ve always liked the pagan tradition of bringing in evergreens to give nature spirits a place to live during the cold weather and this story really came out of that idea- manifesting the rituals into something a lot more sinister and corporeal. I find the loss of control and fear that comes with this setting quite unsettling”
Tradition
by L.M. Ball
It always starts when the leaves change colour. At first they’re yellow, then golden before fading to a russet brown. I like the red ones the best, even though you could say they are the most obvious sign of what’s to come. They give you a rake and they tell you to make piles of the leaves. Your parents I mean, not the leaves. Though that wouldn’t be all that strange, considering. Sometimes when they aren’t watching we play in them, making big piles and knocking them over. It should be fun and it is, when you can forget that winter’s coming.
I think they started it all off, with the weird traditions, cutting down trees and bringing them indoors. Decorating everything in red and green, something about berries. Didn’t they notice that blood’s red too? Mamma says she remembers a time when winter was exciting, decorating a tree with glitter and ornaments to make it pretty. We don’t decorate our tree. Before, people believed that bringing foliage indoors was to provide a home for nature spirits, now that’s its purpose. I guess if you believe in something strongly enough, you can make it manifest. When the ornaments started to fall off by themselves and shatter on the floor, when it happened more than once, people started to notice. That’s what Mamma says. She said it was hard not to feel nervous that something else was going on when your entire tree had thrown off its decorations like an unwanted layer of skin.
PseudoPod 417: The Blistering
The Blistering
by Johnnie Alward
‘Try to imagine the human brain as being analogous to the ocean.’
Sam Dillinger snapped his fingers and an enormous map of the world unfurled itself above him.
‘Like the ocean, the human brain is tangible in its theory and physicality. We can touch it, understand its general uses, even map its surface topographically – the Atlantic here, the Pacific there; cognitive processing in this corner, emotional reckoning in that. We’ve studied them – lived with them – since time immemorial, but we still have so much to learn. Man may have stripmined the mountains and scorched the green earth, but he still hasn’t conquered the depths.’
He snapped his fingers again and the map reconfigured itself into a large glass pane. Paul watched as folded in on itself like crystal origami until it had become the Epsilion Prism, a corporate emblem as fiercely lionized as the golden arches or Newton’s apple.
‘Here at Epsilion, we pride ourselves in possessing the most finely detailed cognitive maps that the world has ever seen. In fifteen short years, we’ve gone from a small, speech therapy start-up on 40th street to one of the largest and most relentlessly innovative companies ever founded on American soil. We’ve helped thousands of our clients to access long-forgotten memories, undo crippling mental illnesses, and learn new languages and mathematical skillsets in the space of a few scant minutes. And still, we’ve barely begun to skim the surface of a vast and unknowable space.’
He paused and stared into the crowd – 300-odd painters, writers and musicians who hung on his every syllable.
‘That is, until now.’
PseudoPod 416: Punksnotdead
Show Notes
“It makes me uncomfortable to share this story. It was supposed to be one thing and it took a dark turn on me. It was inspired by the nightly walks my best friend and I take by the ocean. We’ve been taking the same walks for years. The coastline never changes but we do. I guess that scares me. That a minute ago we were twelve, a second ago we were twenty, and the coastline never changes.”
Punksnotdead
by Eric Czuleger
“Punk is Dead. He has twenty-four hours Left.”
PseudoPod 415: Night’s Foul Bird
Show Notes
“I’m obviously a fan of the aesthetics of early horror films, and this story was all about that, especially the portrayal of vampire lore in early films, especially silent films, though saying that in the opening might be giving the game away a bit. It’s also one of a pair of stories I wrote back-to-back dealing with early portrayals of vampires in media–its companion is a very short piece called “The White Prince” that’s in Steve Berman’s anthology of incubi stories Handsome Devil out now from Prime books, which deals more with early vampire novels and specifically Dracula, instead of film.”
Night’s Foul Bird
by Orrin Grey
Last week, a man moved into the building. He lives in the same rooms as us but on the fourth floor rather than the sixth. On the floor between is a plump-cheeked lady whose two sons both died in the War. I call her the “Widow Flowers,” because she is always drying flowers in the kitchen above her sink. She gives them out to everyone as gifts at every relevant occasion. I wonder if she loves them because they’re beautiful but already dead, unchanging, like a photograph, but Mother says I mustn’t ask people such questions.
The new man is strange, pallid and sunken, and his head seems to taper from top to bottom, as though his chin is forming like a stalactite from his face. His eyes are very pale and he has an odd way of staring at you as if he’s actually looking at whatever’s just behind you, instead. Mother says that he’s sweet and that I mustn’t judge. That many of the young men who came back from the War came back just like him. I don’t think he seems young, but Mother says that he’s not much older than me. She blames the War for that, too.
He says his name is ‘Milton,’ but in my mind, I’m already calling him “Mr. Chaney,” because there’s something about him that reminds me of Lon Chaney’s faux-vampire in London After Midnight, which I loved up ‘til the end. Maybe it’s his long coat, which he wears always draped over his shoulders, his arms not through the sleeves. Maybe it’s his shadow, which seems to cling too close to him, to hunch at his back when he stands near walls, as though it’s whispering secrets in his ears.
Mother says that I’m sensitive, but that I should keep it to myself, and that I mustn’t judge people until they’ve given me a reason to, as it says in the Bible. I don’t think that is what it says in the Bible, but I don’t contradict her.
PseudoPod 414: The Photographer’s Tale
The Photographer’s Tale
by Daniel Mills
‘Shall we proceed?’ asked Arthur.
‘Of course,’ said Lowell, nodding. He had already prepared the collodion mixture and adjusted the lens. All that remained was to open the shutter. Taking up the flash box, he slipped his head under the cover and placed his eye against the viewfinder.
The powder vanished from Mrs. Whateley’s brow. In its place he noted the swelling of an under-skin bruise. As Lowell watched, horrified, the colors deepened and spread, leaching through flesh and tissue to collect in a series of purple bruises down the woman’s neck, creating the imprint of a man’s hand around her throat.
Lowell’s stomach clenched. The air left his lungs, and he gasped for breath that would not come. She looked up at him then — perhaps only to wonder what was taking so long — and in her eyes he saw a silent suffering, such as he had once glimpsed in the eyes of another, and all at once, he understood everything.
Whateley had come to him seeking concealment. Like many clients, he wanted an image of false happiness, another mask for the violence and cruelty they both strove to hide — he with his airs and false benevolence and she with her daubs and powders. Mrs. Whateley gazed back at Lowell through the viewfinder, her eyes bloodshot, sightless.
He swallowed. ‘I’m—sorry,’ he said and withdrew from the hood. He stepped backward from the camera. ‘But I cannot go through with it.’
Artemis Rising
Between now and December 20, 2014, Pseudopod is accepting submissions of woman-authored horror fiction for ARTEMIS RISING, a month of audio fiction celebrating women in genre fiction, airing in February 2015. (Continue Reading…)