by Jon Padgett

“Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown” is a Pseudopod original. “As an adult human being, I’m an odd misfit, but I was truly a ghoulish child—small and rail thin with a large, square face capable of making the most hideous expressions (usually only for my own amusement in the bathroom mirror). I’m sure my dark humor and morbid bent are due in no small measure to an older brother who delighted in telling me scary stories almost every night of my early childhood. My brother pathologically despised me when we were kids and actively (and creatively) fed my fears and doubts when he wasn’t physically causing me discomfort or pain. My earliest memories are filled with his threats, creepy lies and bizarre, improvised stories. Many years later, they still haunt my imagination, and I wrote “Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown” with these childhood memories in mind.”

JON PADGETT lives in New Orleans with his spouse, their daughter, and two cats. Padgett has work out or forthcoming in Pseudopod, The Lovecraft eZine and Xnoybis. Padgett’s chapbook, THE INFUSORIUM, was released in spring of 2015, and his first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, is forthcoming from Dunhams Manor Press, Autumn 2016. Also later in 2016, Padgett–along with a team of editors and the artistic wizardry of Dave Felton–will be releasing the first issue of Vastarien: a source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti and the authors who influenced and are influenced by him.

Your narrator – Paul Cram – is a scrappy actor who’s character in movies always seems to be the one that dies. His latest role in at Anniversary as him awake at night seeing things that no one wants to admit are happening. While Paul still considers his voice to be somewhat new to the world of audio books, he has a few full-length novels under his belt, including the love story Flirting With Death set against the beauty of Lake Michigan & the Zombie Apocalypse. When not acting, Paul can be found out in the woods of Minnesota, arguing pop-culture with his little brother. Check out Paul’s website at PaulCramActor.

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I was seven years old the first time my brother tried to kill me.