PseudoPod

• Author : Ira Brooker
• Narrator : Elie Hirschman
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
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PseudoPod 621: Voices is a PseudoPod original.

“This story showed up nearly fully formed in a dream one night. I probably should have been freaked out by it, but instead I woke up thinking, ‘Ooh, I better get that written down!'”

Voices

by Ira Brooker

It was just after sundown when we heard the first voice, a faraway voice, whispery, wheezy, barely distinguishable from the howl of the wind that bore it. “Lessss… innnnn…” was what I heard. Not quite words but near enough that I ran to Mother on the other side of the room.

“Mother, did you-” I began. She silenced me with a raised index finger.

“Yes, I heard it,” she said. Her face was cautious, a look that was not quite fear but concern that soon it would be time for fear. Tomas huddled close to the hem of her skirt, happily pushing a stone around the barnwood floor. “Hush now and listen,” Mother said.

I kneeled beside Mother and we listened. The wind was strong, stronger than I had heard yet this season, screeching across the prairie in a fury that told us snow was imminent. We listened hard, trying to ignore Tomas’s occasional babbles and squeals. After a few moments the voice came again, clearer this time, closer, but still that eerie whisper. “Let… usss… innnnn…”

“There is someone out there!” I gasped. “Mother, someone is out in that wind!” I leapt to my feet and strode toward the door. Mother’s hand shot out and gripped me by the wrist, squeezing tightly enough that I winced.

“Nein!” she hissed. “Do not open the door!”

“But someone is out there!” I said. “They may freeze to death on a night like this!”

“Nein!” she said again, this time with a ferocity I had never heard from her. Her eyes stared straight ahead, burning into the thick wooden door as though she could see through to the other side. The look on her face sent a chill rolling from my scalp to the pit of my stomach.

“Let us in!” The call came again, this time sounding as though the speaker was just outside the door. “We are cold! Have mercy, as a Christian!” The voice was hoarse, croaking, just as could be expected from anyone traveling through a tempest such as this. I turned my pleading face toward Mother. She sat stern and resolute in her wooden rocker. Tomas had heard the voices now and looked up at us querulously. Mother’s lips were drawn tight, her nostrils flared as she stared and listened. A faint tap-tap-tap began at the door.

“Mother, what is wrong? Who is at the door?” I asked.

“Vampyr,” she whispered. “They have come for the sick.”

We were a week into the harvest when Father fell ill. It was a good year for wheat. It had been a pleasure to watch the heads shimmering fat and golden as the sun rose over the plain. Father and Peter and I were in the field every morning when the first light fell, Father handling the scythe while Peter collected the grain and I guided the mule. This was the first year I was allowed to help in the harvest, as I was now eight years old and finally strong enough to keep the mule in line. The work was hard and I ended every day so exhausted that I fell asleep as soon as I finished my supper, but I was elated to be of use and to spend the day sweating with Father and Peter rather than helping Mother with the washing and baking and keeping Tomas out of trouble.

I had never seen Father happier. I had heard he and Mother talking at night, speaking softly in a mix of German and the halting English Father insisted they use around us children, she lamenting ever having left Germany and he assuring her that these 10 acres of Minnesota prairie land would be our fortune yet. They had come over the ocean from the Kempen district, in the West, Father bringing a small purse of savings from his own family’s wheat farm and Mother bringing nothing but the scanty dowry her parents had pulled together. They had planned to push as far as Nebraska but Mother’s pregnancy with Peter was difficult and so they broke off their travel here on this Minnesota ridge, amidst a small settlement of other Germans who pitched in and helped Father build a sturdy log house before the winter settled in. It was no mansion, just two rooms with a table and chairs, a fireplace, a bed and palettes for each child. The hickory rocker had been Father’s gift to Mother the previous Christmas. I knew the story of the house very well because Father never tired of telling it on windy nights such as this.

When Father took sick he tried to make us believe it was only a passing cold. He stayed in the field all day, swinging the blade and pausing frequently to cough and blow his nose into handfuls of chaff. He carried on like that for two days until he finally collapsed on the morning of the third. Peter and I helped him to his feet and guided him back to the house. Mother put him to bed while Peter rode for the doctor, who arrived that evening with a bottle of vile-smelling medicine. Three days later Peter was on a palette beside Father, both of them sweating and tossing and catching fitful bouts of sleep. Mother and I tried our best to comfort them while taking turns harvesting what wheat we could and tending to Tomas. Two or three times a neighbor stopped by to help in the field, but when a week had passed and Father and Peter showed no improvement, the neighbors stopped coming for fear that the sickness would spread. Now the wheat lay rotting in the field and the cold had come upon us.

The tapping at the door became louder, faster. Mother rose from her chair, stepping over Tomas as he began to whimper. I knelt beside him and stroked his smooth, golden hair. “Let us in,” the voice croaked again, not quite menacing but calm and insistent. “We are cold and we are hungry.”

Mother walked to the door, turning to me and raising a finger to her lips. She stood before the door with her mouth slightly open, as if searching for the words that would make everything right. “We have no room for visitors and the baby is sleeping,” she finally said. “You may rest in the shed so long as you are on your way before morning.” I could hear a tremor in her voice but only just slightly.

There was silence in the room, broken only by the wet sound of Tomas sucking on his knuckles. Mother and I looked at each other, neither daring to breathe. The fireplace cast a meager glow across the room. Then the hissing voices erupted anew. “Let usss in! We must come in the house. The shed will never do!” The words seemed to come from several voices yet they all spoke as one. “We are cooooold. Let us innnnn.”

“Demons!” Mother snapped. “You shall not enter this house!” Her voice was suddenly savage, rasping with an intensity far beyond her usual soft-spoken, almost timid diction. She turned toward me with her eyes aflame. “Fetch your father’s rifle!”

I swallowed hard and ran to the bedroom. Tomas toddled past me, his chubby hand reaching for the hem of Mother’s dress. Even though I was not yet allowed to take the rifle out hunting myself, I knew just where it was kept. The house was small and spare enough that we all knew where to find anything that was put to regular use. Even in my terror, I still hesitated a fraction of a moment before opening the heavy wooden door and stepping into the bedroom. Every time I laid eyes on Father and Peter lying there in their misery my insides swelled with an awful dread. I edged my way through the darkened room, the dull stink of their sweaty bodies and sour breath filling my nostrils. The tapping at the door kept growing louder. I fumbled in the shadows beside Father’s bed, trying not to glance in his direction, until my fingers found the cold metal of the rifle barrel propped in the corner. I lifted it carefully, cradling the heavy wooden stock against my shoulder as I scooped up the box of shells. I turned to hurry back toward Mother. The voices were hissing again, their tone piercing deeper than the howl of the wind. “Let us in. We must come in. We smell your sickness. We hunger for it.”

I stopped cold in my tracks. Suddenly I felt a slimy hand grasping at my arm. I shrieked out loud, my legs nearly giving out underneath me. I looked down to see Father’s hand tugging at my sleeve. “Are they come?” he wheezed. “Are they come for me?” I forced myself to gaze into his face, his cheekbones sunken, his rusty blonde beard thick and matted with spittle, his steel-blue eyes almost glowing up at me out of the darkness.

“No, father,” I said, laying the back of my hand against his sallow cheek. “No one is come. There is a coyote bothering the hens, that is all.” My knees wobbled pitifully as I slid out of the bedroom.

Mother was moving from the door to either window and back again, checking and re-checking that all were fastened securely. Father had built each window with thick, wooden shutters as a defense against windy nights such as these. The door was even thicker, four inches of hard pine with a bulky metal bolt sealing it shut. I told myself that if a prairie wind couldn’t penetrate these walls, neither could whoever was out there.

“Mother, who are they? What do they want?” I whispered, handing her the rifle. She held Tomas tucked in the crook of her left arm, him staring at the door, his lower lip trembling.

“We smell your sickness!” the voices howled. “We hunger for it! Let us in!” After each outburst they went silent for a long moment, save for the steady tapping at the door. Their quiet was somehow even worse than their shrieking.

Mother passed Tomas to me and began loading bullets into the rifle with shaking fingers. “Vampyr,” she said softly. “They feed on the sick. I thought they would not follow us to America.” She looked at me and for a moment I thought she would break down crying. She took a deep breath to regain her composure.

“Back home there was a rich family. They had a large farm overlooking the valley where we lived. I was friends with their little boy, Rolf. Almost every day after I had finished my chores he would come down the hill to my house or I would walk up to his and we would play. One day I reached his door and his nurse came out and told me that Rolf was very sick and would not be able to play for several days. I was sad but I went home and played by myself. Three days later I went back up the hill and was told that Rolf was still sick. I was bored with my games at home and so I explored the woods behind Rolf’s house until it was nearly dark. As I walked down into the valley in the dusk I saw three people making their way up the path. Something about their movements made me very frightened. I left the path and hid in the tall grass alongside the ditch. Soon I saw they were dressed all in black, with hoods pulled up over their heads. The closer they came, the colder the air around me seemed to grow. They moved so strangely, lurching more than walking. My legs wanted very badly to run away but my mind would not allow me to move. As they drew even to me, the one nearest me turned its head in my direction. Its face seemed to glow beneath the hood, white and dead-looking like the belly of a fish. It was like a man’s face but also like an animal’s. A lizard. A bat. An insect. Something horrible. It smiled and I knew it saw me in the grass. Then it spoke to me, with the voice of the things you hear outside tonight. ‘Not today, child. But we shall see you again.’ They continued on up the hill and I leaped out of the grass and ran for my house. I sobbed in my mother’s lap and she tried to comfort me but I knew she was frightened too. Later that evening Rolf’s father came to our door. He was weeping and his shirt was stained with vomit. He said the Vampyr had come. They had tricked the nurse into opening a side door and Rolf was dead. No one had seen them come or go but all had heard the voices. ‘They smelled his sickness! They smelled his sickness and they have fed on my son!’ he shouted. I had never seen a man cry before. It frightened me even more than knowing that my friend was dead. I think of his wailing face always.”

Mother had finished loading the rifle. Tomas had begun crying in my arms some time during her story but I had not noticed it until now. “What… what can we do?” I asked.

She hoisted the gun onto her shoulder and stared at the door. She shook her head somberly. “My mother told me that they cannot enter a place unless someone opens a door to them. She said that they cannot walk in the sunlight. I cannot say if she was correct. Perhaps they will go away if we keep the doors closed until morning. For now, Tomas is hungry. I will watch the door while you feed him.” The fear was gone from her face now that her story was told, replaced by something cold and unrecognizable.

I nodded and walked to the pantry, bouncing Tomas against my chest and murmuring to him. Outside the tapping at the door ceased suddenly, only to be replaced by a dreadful grating sound, as though claws were being pulled along the walls of the house. “Let us iiiiiin,” the voices hissed again. I shuddered as I poured a small bowl of meal, setting Tomas down on the floor as I lifted the kettle from over the fireplace and stirred hot water into the bowl. In the bedroom Father and Peter rolled and rustled. Suddenly Father’s voice called out, “They are come for me! Keep them away!” Peter began to moan, a low, pained whine that pierced my ears nearly as painfully as the voices outside.

Mother rushed past me, still toting the rifle. “Feed the baby!” she barked. “I will care for them.” I pushed a spoonful of the hot meal toward Tomas, who gobbled it eagerly. I could hear Mother speaking to Father and Peter in the low, soothing tone she had been using to calm their fever-terrors for days now. The scraping of claws against the wood kept on, like racoons fighting their way into a silo. I continued feeding Tomas, trying my hardest to think of anything else.

Then I heard the voices again, closer this time, almost as if they were whispering into my ear.  “Chiiiild…” I whipped my head around but found no one there. “Child. Please help us. The woman is confused. Her memories are blurred by time and fear and superstition. We have come to help you. We smell the sickness within. We can eat it away. We can make your sick well again. We need only your permission. Let us in. Let us in.”

I sat quietly, not daring to respond. Tomas whimpered and I mechanically scooped another spoonful at him. I had no reason to believe the voices. I had no reason to doubt Mother. And yet, something in their words rang true. Had we not been praying every morning and every night for the Lord to send us a miracle? Did not Jesus teach that he might come to our door as a downtrodden beggar? Was it unthinkable that angels might appear in the form of demons as a test of faith?

Mother stepped back into the room with a heavy sigh. Father and Peter still groaned and jabbered in the bedroom. The clawing at the walls grew louder, the voices seeming to come from all sides. “Let us in. Let us in. Let us iiiiiiinnnn.” Tomas knocked the spoon from my hand and began wailing. My head pounded as though something inside was trying to kick its way out. Mother scooped Tomas up and whispered in his ear, cradling his head against her left shoulder with the rifle barrel tucked against her right. His cries did not abate. The cacophony in the house was overwhelming. “I- I- I need to use the outhouse,” I gasped.

Mother’s face spun toward me. “Nein! You will not leave this house tonight. If you must, there is the bucket in the bedroom.” The skittering scrapes of the claws had made its way to the roof now. “Woman,” the voices hissed. “Let us help you. Let us heal your sick. We want only the sickness. We will do no harm.”

I stood up and staggered toward the bedroom, my eyes still fixed on mother. She jabbed toward the ceiling with the rifle, even though she must have known no one could see the gesture. “I have buried two children already!” she snapped. “I will not give up another!” I winced at her words. Mother never spoke of my dead sisters, the two babies born between myself and Tomas. I had no memory of the first one, who had died after two weeks when I was still a baby myself. The other, named Ava, I recalled only faintly, although I was never certain if I was really remembering her or confusing her infancy with Tomas’s. She had been a little over a year old when she went to sleep in the afternoon and simply never woke up. Father had dug small graves for both girls behind the house. I had seen Mother lingering by the plot on many mornings.

In the bedroom I groped for the wooden bucket, the smell of it only slightly more rank than the smell of sickness hovering in the air. I was relieved to find it empty. Father rolled slowly back and forth in the bed, still murmuring, “They are come. They are come.” I had no reply for him. The clatter of feet and hands ran all across the house. I thought the things must be scaling the building like spiders. I knelt in the dark and squatted over the bucket without a thought toward my modesty. There had been no secrets in this house for a long time. I clasped my hands over my ears as I emptied my bowels and tried to think of anything but what was happening around me.

I placed the lid back on the bucket when I was finished and began stumbling my way back to the front room. As I passed Peter’s palette, I felt a sudden swell of pity. I knelt down beside him and placed a hand on his sweaty shoulder. “Don’t worry, Peter,” I whispered. “They will go away when the morning comes.”

Peter stirred in the dark. I could not see his face but I knew he was looking up at me. “Please, do not make them go away,” he groaned. His words sounded as though they were being dragged across a bed of rocks on their way out of his mouth. “They can help. They have been speaking to me. They can take away the sickness. They can make the pain go away. Let them in! You must let them in!” His voice rose to something close to a shout, his hands grasping air. I recoiled and fell back against the wall. Father sat up in bed and began to wail. “They will have us! We cannot keep them out!”

I had not cried yet despite the horrors of the evening but now I began. The tears burned down my cheeks like hot rain, my sobs mingling with the cries of Father and Peter. The voices pierced through the wood and mortar of the walls. “Let us help your sick! Give us the sickness!” Suddenly Mother’s frame filled the doorway, a black silhouette against the feeble firelight. She gripped the rifle in both hands. I wiped away my tears with the back of my hand, trying to appear strong for her sake. She did not speak, the only one of us capable of silence. She made a slight, slow motion and for a moment she appeared to be leveling the rifle. She turned toward father, then toward Peter, and finally toward me. I sat perfectly still, my back against the hard wood, eyeing Mother’s slight figure as it tapered down into the rifle barrel. For several long seconds neither of us moved. Father and Peter’s moaning faded into the background, though I was still very aware of the sound of claws scrabbling along the walls. Finally Mother took a step into the room, lowering the gun as she entered. “See to Tomas,” she said softly.

I rose carefully and rushed past Mother, not daring to look her in the face. Tomas was lying on his stomach on a woven blanket, rocking back and forth the way he usually did just before falling asleep. I knelt beside him and stroked his back. I knew I would not be sleeping this night but I was glad that one of us could find some peace.

“Child!” the voices shrilled again, penetrating my head with splitting force. “Time grows short! Your sick need aid. Let us in. Let us fill our bellies and ease the suffering. Let us in. Let us in. Let. Us. Innnnnnn.”

“But… but Mother…” I murmured.

“The woman does not understand! She is blinded by fear and superstition. You alone can help your sick. Let us in!” And now the voices rose in pitch, their words becoming a wild, howling chant of “LET US IN LET US IN LET US IN LET US IN LET US IN LET US IN LET US IN” until I knew I could bear no more. I took my hand from Tomas’s back and stood, moving shakily toward the door, my eyes fixed on the thick metal bolt holding it closed against the wind. I saw my hand reaching out as though it belonged to someone else. Behind me I heard Mother enter the room and gasp. “Nein!” she shouted. “You must not!” I did not reply nor even turn my head. The voices swirled into an unintelligible frenzy of sound as my hand fell upon the bolt and all went black.

The post PseudoPod 621: Voices appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : R.K. Duncan
• Narrator : Spencer Disparti
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Jefferson Dupree
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 620: Farewell Concert at the World’s End is a PseudoPod original.

“Worlds End state park is a real, quite pretty, place in Sullivan County Pennsylvania, where I have often had the privilege to stay in a friend’s cabin. I never really thought of how creepy the name was until I began writing this story, but it fit too well to ignore once I thought of it.

I usually do ignore Halloween these days, at least in terms of the candy and costumes celebration, but I’m always attracted to the idea of a liminal space, a time when living and dead, seen and unseen draw closer together, and things cross over that cannot at other times.”

Farewell Concert at the World’s End by R. K. Duncan

On October 30th, 1968, Luther killed a pair of wannabes a little way behind a roadhouse in southern Virginia. He’d smelled the power on them while they played with a pickup band for tips from truckers taking a late lunch. A scent like sage and engine grease cut through the rockabilly trash and the tortured picking that chased chords from chart-toppers that never should have been attempted on that battered, out of tune guitar. They hadn’t looked like much, the pair of thickset men with matching dirty-blonde mustaches and weathered jeans, but the scent was unmistakable for an Enthusiast like Luther. He’d thought of stepping up to play himself, hooking them that way, but his guitar was out in the lot, in the last car he’d stolen, and he had sudden flashes of the last time he’d played without it, the booing laughs and the bottles when he stayed and tried to save the set.

Instead he’d invited them to go someplace more private and really jam. They’d hesitated. That should have been his first clue they didn’t have enough spark to be worthwhile, damn it, but he’d been impatient. He’d used the last of his come-hither charm to make them follow. He’d felt the twist of hair go dry and brittle in his hand inside his pocket as it sighed out the last snatches of a scream caught in the crowd the first night the Beatles played Ed Sullivan.

With a lure like that, they’d been happy to come and talk. They were Carl and Ben Murphy, brothers who drove a tow-truck sometimes and played when they could, and who was he, and what did he do in music? Why, he almost looked like a record producer in his nice black shirt and hat and shiny shoes. Was he a record producer?

He’d told them not quite; he was Luther Angel, and he was always looking for talent. By then they’d been far enough back into the woods for him to pull his knife and open up Ben’s throat. Carl had been quick enough on the uptake to rush him, but Luther had played this tune so many times that he knew the beat pat. Carl ran straight onto the knife, and Luther held the big man close while he shook through the last dozen heartbeats.

Now he was rummaging around in Ben’s throat, and he could barely feel a tingle of the talent he’d been looking for. What the hell? They’d just been playing, and he’d felt the spark. It should have been close to the surface, but they had less juice than some audience members he’d caught after a real Enthusiast played. He licked his finger: nothing but a ghost of musty sage under the blood. It wasn’t even worth taking teeth for the bridge of his guitar.

Luther gulped a hard lump of frustration back down along with the taste of blood and tried to look on the bright side. He might not get what he was looking for, but the afternoon wouldn’t be a dead loss. He needed a new car anyway. The rusty Buick he’d picked up in Tennessee was on its last legs. He hummed a tune as he started looking for their wallets and keys. There was the spark again! He felt power, but this time it vibrated his finger and smelled of his own sweat. There was something here, something on them.

He tore Carl’s jacket digging for it, following the buzzing feeling in his fingertips until he grabbed it. A torn-out page from a AAA atlas. Scrawled across one side it read

            John Crowhurst, October 31,

            Worlds End

The other side was a roadmap for Sullivan county, Pennsylvania, with a star scratched hard enough to tear the paper over Worlds End state park. The page pricked with power. It felt wide in his hand, expanding to fill the distance between his feet and the place it called him to.

John Crowhurst must be real power, to put that kind of call into a secondhand invitation to his concert. Pennsylvania wasn’t too far. Luther had time to make it, and that would be worth hearing, and taking something away from afterward. Maybe Crowhurst would have enough juice for Luther to finish his guitar.

First he had to put the Murphys to bed. He found the keys to the orange pickup they’d parked at the roadhouse and collected thirty-seven dollars from their wallets, then he opened his own case, to take care of the bodies.

Luther’s guitar had come from the hands of Mississippi John Hurt as the old bluesman died at home, helped over the edge by the best Luther could play back then. He’d washed the strings in the old man’s blood, but the bastard had lived too long to leave much of his power behind. Screwed to the bridge were teeth from the four real Enthusiasts Luther had managed to harvest, and he picked with the fingernails of wannabes like Ben and Carl. John Hurt’s strings cut his fingers if he tried them without a pick. The guitar already made him good enough to play among Enthusiasts and not get called out for souring the tune, no matter how little talent he’d been born with. A little more work, and Luther’s guitar would get a whole stadium on their feet, and they’d scream and stamp their feet loud enough to drown out every memory of jeers from when he was just some tin-eared hack. Luther might have been worse than these idiot Murphy boys once, but he’d done something about it, damn it. Just two or three more real players, or one master, and Luther’s ticket would be punched. He’d have it all, money and fame, and enough power to make the ones who hadn’t had to fight for it think he was one of them.

He already had more than enough juice to play the Murphy boys down underground, dark as a dungeon. A miner’s song put them past where police dogs would sniff, and a quick riff had Luther’s clothes clean and crisp again. It was easy to begin with, cleaning blood off black. He whistled on his way back the roadhouse.

He put his guitar on the seat beside him in the orange pickup and started driving north.

He spent the rest of the day fighting Beltway traffic, squeezing the wheel ‘til his knuckles were white as he crawled around D.C. in rush hour. He finally gave up and slept in the car in a pull-off north of Baltimore. He’d have all of tomorrow, until whenever the concert started, to make it to Worlds End. The guitar muttered inside its case, nibbling the edges of his dreams. Sometimes he thought he could hear Hurt complaining, but that was nonsense. He’d shoved more than enough power into the guitar by now to quiet the old man down. It was probably that fiddler from Cloud County getting comfortable. He’d only screwed that tooth on a couple months back.

Luther woke up cold and kept driving. He was past Philadelphia and heading north along the turnpike before the sun burned off the cloud and things started warming up. The roads seemed sleepier today for some reason, or maybe that was just him. It had been too long since he heard a real Enthusiast play. He needed to make the concert and wake up.

The mountains grew ahead of him, and then all around like huge frozen waves of green reaching for a flat blue sky. When he turned into the mountains proper, he was feeling lonely. The trees pressed close as they climbed up sharp slopes on either side of the road. When he slid through a small town, the doors and the faces were closed up; the jack-o-lanterns and colored paper did not suggest a welcome for Luther Angel, and the looks he got seemed almost baffled that a stranger would be driving these roads in the middle of the day, when decent people should be working.

He got lost quick on the switch-backing mountain roads, and the Murphy brothers hadn’t thought to keep any maps of Pennsylvania in their car beyond the torn page advertising the concert. The trees pressed in, and it was easy to imagine the world ending on the other side of each steep saddle in the hills. He had to take the road ahead on faith as he nursed the pickup over each crest. The hills smelled clean, but not the inside smell of purified, dead air. The mountain breeze was full of the scent of leaves and the crisp solidness of autumn taking hold. It was getting late before he caught the power, sweet smoke and hot spice and the bitter crust of well-charred meat.

He followed that coil of scent down into Worlds End, in a valley between the up-reared mountains, from the green pines into the fire of fallen leaves lower down. There was a cool breeze off the creek as he pulled into a graveled lot, and he could smell an entirely ordinary char. Some of the crowd had barbecues set up. Luther’s mouth watered a bit. There’d been so little juice in the Murphy boys that he was almost hungry again already. He’d sort that out tonight. The sun was going down fast, but there was a splash of gold coming through the bare trees, and it caught a slapped-together stage at one end of the lot, and the noose hanging from a tree branch over it.

Hell, he’d thought he was too far north for that kind of décor. He didn’t see any white hoods, at least. Those people were unsettling.

The crowd looked local. Their clothes and the cars they’d parked were worn down the way city people never let theirs get. The faces were the same way, weathered to the point of admitting that time passed and didn’t leave them behind, just one more embarrassment Luther was going to sidestep, once his guitar was done. Luther joined the edges of the crowd, enough to show he was part of this, but he didn’t mingle, and no one invited him to. No one offered him an extra hot dog. That was fine. He wasn’t calling anyone to him, so no one bothered to cross the shell of silence an Enthusiast looking for privacy sweat out without thinking. Luther’s air of unsettlement wasn’t quite like players who had it in their blood, but it was good enough. He was a little worried by the size of the crowd. There weren’t too many of them, not for a real power. Maybe Crowhurst wasn’t all Luther had thought.

He peered at the band, sitting on the edge of the stage tuning up. There were hints of it there, sparks of real Enthusiasm. It wasn’t long before John Crowhurst stepped up on the stage. He had a black feather in his hatband, and a banjo strap round his neck. His eyes were smiling and his salt and pepper beard didn’t hide the deep lines at the edges of his mouth. His band was a young pale man with a mandolin and a weathered woman with her red hair tied up in a black cloth. John Crowhurst started talking, and Luther tasted the music in his voice. There was the smoke and the spice he’d been chasing.

“Well now, I know this place isn’t the easiest for everyone to find, even when you get one of our invitations, so thanks for comin’ out, all of you, especially first timers. Those of you who come every year, you know why and what it costs. It’s good to see you back to roll the dice again.” He looked round at the mountains catching fire in last bit of sunset. “Isn’t the name of this place grim? People say it looks like the end of the earth, the way the mountains all come together here. Me, I think it looks like the beginning of something, but I say this looks like the beginning of the show. Keep those toes tapping.”

Then they were off, Crowhurst’s banjo keeping rhythm under the wail of that high fiddle, and the music was more than good enough to keep Luther from trying to work out what that strange introduction had meant. Crowhurst had a big voice, and he let it out wide as his outspread arms until it echoed back off the hills. Luther was pretty sure Crowhurst was the only magic in the band, but he was pulling the others up with him, and they were damn good, even if they weren’t Enthusiasts. They played a little Johnny Cash, but mostly it was old-time music, what they were calling bluegrass now. They played Shady Grove and got the whole audience tapping, just a caller away from a line dance. They played Omie Wise and half a dozen more good murder ballads, and Luther felt black fingers curling down inside his gut and teasing a smile up into his teeth. Those were always his favorite songs.

Damn and hellfire, Crowhurst was good. Luther could feel himself floating on the magic, filling up with it just listening, and he’d heard a few masters in his time. The rest of the crowd wouldn’t have noticed if a five-alarm fire and every siren in the county were going off ten feet away, not while that band was playing.

Even Luther was having trouble keeping track of time. He couldn’t stop his feet from tapping with all the rest. If Crowhurst was wise to Luther’s game, he could put a charm on him to keep the knife out of his hands, keep the light out of his eyes if he looked murder at the banjo-player, but Crowhurst didn’t know shit. Luther could creep up later and cut him open just like all the rest. He’d have it then for sure. There was enough power there that Luther’s guitar would be good for a fight with any Enthusiast who took issue with his methods, enough to bring a crowd a hundred times this size whenever he stepped on stage and keep them cheering. Luther was here, just had to last through the set and take what he needed and he’d be ready for the bigtime.

All of a sudden it was a break, and the night had closed in cold.

There were a couple of fires burning now. When had those gotten set up? Luther stepped in a little closer, almost close enough to touch his neighbors. He’d been at edge, but the space behind him felt full now. He looked behind, and there was a some kind of Halloween crazy there, in a big mask that looked like a stag. There was a whole line of them hemming in the crowd, birds and dogs and deer and catamounts. They looked like they belonged in a Courir de Mardi Gras, not a Halloween show this far north. No one else was looking at them, and then Crowhurst strummed again, and neither was Luther. He was staring at the stage, and the noose was hanging low, almost level with the fiddler’s head, and the circle inside it was shining gold, just like it had at sunset.

The band played more of the same for a little while, and then they stopped.

“It’s time to remember the dead,” said Crowhurst.

The band stopped playing and they sang together. They sang dirges: Lonesome Valley, and I am Death, and something strange and old that must have been from before English was English. The whole crowd was singing with them, and everyone but Luther seemed to know the words.

“And now it’s time to play them back again.”

Crowhurst started on that banjo, and the band joined him. The tune might have been When the Saints to begin with, but in a moment it jammed alive, too fast and urgent to have a name. Luther felt the heat of it blister on his lips, and something started pulling itself through the golden circle of the rope. Luther was losing it. It had been so long since he’d heard real magic up close it was getting him high. That had to be it. Even as good as the playing was, the rest of the audience would have said something if they could see the Murphy boys pulling themselves out through the noose.

No one shifted while the Murphy boys walked through them to stand in front of Luther, Ben with his big second mouth, Carl with a black hole where his heart belonged. The rest of the crowd were in their own worlds, staring at nothing in front of their own faces, laughing and crying and whispering nonsense Luther didn’t have time for. The Murphy boys looked mad, but they just stood there, staring at him.

The rest came after: the boy from Tennessee with his broken fiddle and his perfect teeth; the woman from Kentucky who had smelled what he was after and run a mile into the field before he played her down and broke her legs with sharp chord. Mississippi John Hurt came last, with a broken strap where his guitar should hang, and he pointed the finger at Luther. Like he was supposed to say he was sorry. Now they were all pointing, and the rest of the crowd turned around to look at him.

Luther ran. No time to figure what kind of charm Crowhurst had played, or how much of this was real. He’d drifted farther toward the stage than he thought. Now he was fighting through the crowd, and they pushed him back toward the front. He dropped his shoulder and drove, kicked shins when he had space.

He made it three steps out the back of the audience and plowed right into the big man in the stag’s head. It was so tall Luther’s face was only halfway up its chest, and it smelled more like a deer than a man. Luther tried to whistle it out of his way, and it slapped him across the mouth. Why in the hell had he left his guitar in the truck? The deer man grabbed him, and turned him round to face the dead, and the whole crowd, pointing and staring at him. He tried to fight, but the thing was solid as a brick wall holding him, and the sudden silence drank the strength out of him. He was crashing from the concert high, and the world was going distant and dim. Someone ran out of the circle and he heard glass smash. They came back with his case and tore it open and dead ones ran over to it and tore their teeth off of the bridge, and licked their blood off the strings. John Hurt took it back and looked down at it with his big sad eyes, and then he broke it over his knee. All Luther’s work. He’d been close to something real, close to hunting down enough to give himself some real magic. He tasted that edge of char he’d smelled when he drove in, filling his mouth with bitterness.

The whole crowd cheered, and the deer man called a dog-headed one over, and they lifted Luther up on their shoulders and carried him through the crowd, up to the stage. He was in front of the audience, and they were all cheering and smiling. He was the star. It was just what he’d been killing for all these years.

What a goddamn nightmare.

He kicked and scratched, trying to go for the eyeholes in the mask, but he might as well have been fighting taxidermy. He remembered his knife and drove it down into the dog’s head, but nothing came out except a spray of dust. Luther screamed and couldn’t stop himself. All the fight he had left was pulling out his throat like a magician’s endless scarf.

“And now it’s time to thank them for coming back to help us out,” said John Crowhurst. “And a big thank you to Luther Angel, for coming all the way from Virgina to make our little party easier this year. I know y’all appreciate it when someone new comes to pay the toll on their first visit. Congratulations on carrying the heaviest weight of anyone here, Luther.”

Crowhurst slipped the noose around Luther’s neck, and then he picked up his banjo, while John Hurt and the Murphy boys and all the rest dragged on the rope and hanged Luther up high over the stage. He finally stopped screaming, and his legs were kicking without his say-so. John Hurt and the Murphy boys and all the rest were up against the stage, clapping with everyone.

He heard three notes of a sweet encore before everything went black and quiet.

The post PseudoPod 620: Farewell Concert at the World’s End appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : Ian Stuart and Alasdair Stuart
• Narrators : Ian Stuart and Alasdair Stuart
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

“The Ghost Guide’s Tale” first appeared in Quantum Theory for Cats which is available in both print and audio.

The Ghost Guide’s Tale by Ian Stuart

Outside the Minster, every eventide, You’ll see him wait- the smiling Ghostly Guide. Top hat on head, dressed in Victorian fashion, He’ll tell you stories full of gore and passion. “For just three pounds I’ll chill your blood,” he cries. And people pay him, though they know he lies. At half past seven by the Minster clock He’ll gather them to him, like a dog his flock And fleece them.Then when all have paid him money, He’ll charm them with a voice as sweet as honey. Dead Romans,phantoms, corpses limp and gory Drag bloodstained footprints through each shocking story. From Minster on to Bedern and the Shambles He’ll lead his nightly paranormal rambles. Then, at the end, he’ll finish with a joke- A jolly, cheerful, normal sort of bloke.

But take him to the pub and buy him ale- A pint or three- he’ll tell a different tale. “Twas late last year if I remember right- A windy, drizzling, miserable night In late December. Misty drifts of rain Shrouded the city from Walmgate to Lop Lane. I had a party booking- thirty one Retired teachers from South Hillingdon, All dressed in anoraks and sturdy shoes. “Come on !” I said, “There is no time to lose.” “Just wait a moment more- there is no hurry,” Their leader said, “We’re still one short- where’s Murray ?”

Chubby and pert, a dapper little chap, Round as a Christmas pudding, woollen cap Upon his head, came trotting up and smiled. “Sorry I”m late.It was a pint of mild Detained me at the pub.I feel so foolish. I’m dying to hear of ghosts and all things ghoulish. Please start at once.” And so the tour began.

Along the Minster’s length to College Green We trudged.I pointed out the ghastly scene Where once a man, weighed down with murderous knowledge, Paced up and down inside St William’s College. And then to Bedern where the children haunt, Lurking in shadows, wild-eyed ,pale and gaunt.

For every storyteller it makes sense To keep a sharp eye on your audience. To check if they are listening or no. So as I talked my glance flicked to and fro. I looked at Murray; terror numbed my mind- He stood wide-eyed and smiling but behind Him stood another, shadowy and dim. His robes were all of black,his face was grim And corpse-pale, but his eyes were black as coals. I knew that he was Death, who steals mens’ souls. I looked round at the others, wond’ring why No-one saw the horror, only I And then I knew- their faces blank and blind Saw nothing of the ghoul that stood behind them. Spreading wide the folds of his black cloak He wrapped them round the jolly little bloke, Who fell down to the ground and gasped for breath, Twitched and lay still, for he had found his death.

The tour broke up; there was no more to say. An ambulance arrived to take away his mortal remnants.Someone phoned his wife. “He was so happy ! Always full of life !” The leader said,”He wanted to find out Within this hour what phantoms were about. And now he knows.Our souls are full of sorrow. Just thirty of us will return tomorrow.”

For ten long years I’ve walked the alleyways Where echoes of the past seek to amaze and frighten the unwary.But that night Destroyed my courage and unnerved me quite. And now when I go out upon a tour I keep on looking round me to make sure There’s no-one at my shoulder. Yet I know When my time comes to leave the world and go into the unknown, there’ll be no ghost With ash-white face and graveyard breath to tap me on the shoulder. He I fear the most Is plump, and smiles , and wears a woollen cap.

The post PseudoPod 619: The Ghost Guide’s Tale & The Halloween Parade appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : James Whitcomb Riley and Orrin Grey 
• Narrators : Phil Lunt and Leeman Kessler
• Hosts : Alasdair Stuart and Karen Bovenmyer
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

“Goblins” was first published in order to add an original story to the deluxe hardcover edition of my first collection NEVER BET THE DEVIL, which was release last year (2017) by Strix Publishing.

“Little Orphant Annie” is an 1885 poem written by James Whitcomb Riley and published by the Bowen-Merrill Company. First titled “The Elf Child”, the name was changed by Riley to “Little Orphant Allie” at its third printing; however, a typecasting error during printing renamed the poem to its current form.

Goblins: “I don’t remember why my friend Reyna and I ended up having a discussion about a creepy undertaker pickling kids and turning them into goblins, but we did, and the idea was so perfect that I knew immediately that it had to turn into a story someday. So she deserves at least some of the credit for this one.”

Little Orphant Annie by James Whitcomb Riley Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay, An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away, An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep, An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep; An’ all us other childern, when the supper things is done, We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about, An’ the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you Ef you Don’t Watch Out! Onc’t they was a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,-- So when he went to bed at night, away up stairs, His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl, An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wasn’t there at all! An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press, An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’wheres, I guess; But all they ever found was thist his pants an’ roundabout-- An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out! An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin, An’ make fun of ever’one, an’ all her blood an’ kin; An’ onc’t, when they was “company," an’ ole folks was there, She mocked ‘em an’ shocked ‘em, an’ said she didn’t care! An’ thist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide, They was two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side, An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowed what she’s about! An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out! An’ little Orphant Annie says when the blaze is blue, An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo! An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray, An’ the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away,-- You better mind yer parents, an’ yer teachers fond an’ dear, An’ churish them ‘at loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear, An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about, Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out! Goblins by Orrin Grey

The undertaker lived with his wife in a long, low house in the farthest corner of the cemetery, built of dark brown stone that looked perpetually damp and covered almost completely with trumpet vines and creeping ivy. It had been the town’s mortuary once, before the mortuary facilities moved into a larger and more modern building a few blocks down the street.

The undertaker’s house was only one story tall, but it was built over a basement that stuck up a bit from the ground—the kind with a hopper window filmed over with dust—so that to get to the front door you went up three stone steps, bordered by a black wrought-iron railing. There was a detached garage made of the same damp stone where the undertaker parked the hearse. Whenever there was a funeral, you could sit in Ryan’s bay window and watch the long black car pull slowly out of the graveyard and onto the street.

Ryan lived with his mom in a house by the cemetery, with nothing between his bedroom window and all those dead people but the first floor of the house, the front yard, the street, and a low, moss-covered stone wall. Ryan’s mom worked at the hospital and she was gone a lot, so Ryan’s house was our favorite place to hang out. We’d ride our bikes over there and leave them in a big pile of wheels and chrome on the front lawn while we played tag or touch football or had imaginary shootouts and sword fights among the graves. When Ryan’s mom worked the night shift, we’d rent a bunch of scary movies—anything we could get from the video section of the Golden Apple Grocery down the street that was likely to feature moldy corpses crawling up out of loamy earth—and stay up all night watching them in Ryan’s living room, with the big bay window that faced the graveyard. The cemetery was our playground, but the undertaker’s house was the one corner of it where even we never dared to go.

The undertaker didn’t work at the big white mortuary building down the street, wasn’t even really an undertaker anymore, but the new owners kept him on staff, maybe because they felt sorry for him, or maybe for some other reason. As kids, none of us ever questioned the why of it. His job was to drive the hearse for the funerals, and he looked after the graveyard the rest of the time. In an old ghost story he would have been a sexton, but by our time the grave digging was done by backhoes, and a grounds crew from the city came out every other week to mow the grass with wide red riding lawnmowers.

The undertaker was an anachronism, a relic from another era, and he terrified us. Though the graveyard sent a little shiver of fear up our spines, especially at night, it was always a pleasing terror, the kind we got from watching a scary movie. The undertaker was something else. The fear he carried was the sick dread of the principal’s office, of bad news or waking up from a nightmare.

He was tall and bony, the kind of figure that’s described as “all knees and elbows,” always dressed for a funeral in a natty black suit. He looked like the Tall Man from Phantasm, or like Uncle Creepy from the old black-and-white horror comics that Cody had inherited from his older brother.

His wife was smaller, but equally wizened, like one of those shrunken apple heads that Vincent Price used to sell in the backs of comic books. Prime witch material, in other words. We saw her less often than her husband, but she occasionally came outside to do chores, and Matt said that he once saw her at the Golden Apple, buying canned corn like a regular person.

Though the undertaker would chase us away from the graveyard if he happened to catch us inside crypts or climbing on tombstones, we really had very little actual cause to be scared of either of them, but we were. Petrified. And we weren’t alone, even the high school kids sometimes talked about how “creepy” they were, and Matt’s older sister used to tell us all stories about them, how they stole kids like us and cooked them up for dinner. Whenever she did I would remember the flyers for missing children that decorated a board inside the front doors of the Golden Apple Grocery.

More than either the undertaker or his wife, though, we were afraid of the house, tucked away in the deepest corner of the graveyard. Everyone knew that, back when the house had still been a mortuary, the old embalming room had been in the basement. That was the room that was the center of our dread, and so also the room that held the most fascination for us all. Sometimes we would dare each other to run from the cover of the nearest gravestone to peer in through the window and try to catch a glimpse of whatever the room housed now. The stories that we returned with varied wildly, and the fact was that none of us was ever able to see much. The window was covered over with grime on the inside, and the basement was always dark.

While Cody once said that there was still an embalming table there in the center of the room, a sheeted form resting upon it, none of the rest of us ever saw any such thing. The only detail we could agree upon was that the walls were lined with wooden shelves, where glass jars held murky liquid with indefinite shapes floating inside. Of course, the most likely conclusion was that the undertaker or his wife had turned the basement over to canning, but as kids that’s not what we saw. I can say from experience that my own grandmother’s canning cellar—from which we ate bread and butter pickles and raspberry preserves—was filled with pickled punks and deformed embryos, jarred space aliens and mandrake roots as far as I was concerned. So of course the undertaker’s basement had to be populated by all that times ten.

Once school started back up, we were able to play in the graveyard and have video nights at Ryan’s less often, but we’d still ride our bikes over after school pretty much every day. As fun as the graveyard had been during the summer, it was even better as the leaves began to turn, and it didn’t take long for conversation to shift to what we were going to do for Halloween.

We all loved Halloween, but were mired in that awkward in-between age where we felt like we were too old for trick-or-treating, but were still too young for much of anything else. We had talked about staying in and renting movies, but that seemed too much like something we already did every day. Cody’s dad was taking us all out to the haunted houses in the city on the weekend before Halloween, but on the night itself we had nothing planned, until Ryan hit upon the idea of breaking into the undertaker’s house.

On Halloween night we didn’t dress up, just zipped our oldest coats on over our street clothes, though we told our parents that we were going out trick-or-treating, and painted our faces to help sell the illusion. Ryan’s was a skull, Cody’s some kind of dripping zombie. Matt’s face all red, with black circles around his eyes, while I painted myself green. A gillman, maybe, or an orc.

We left Ryan’s house before his mom had left for work, walking along the road for a few blocks, in case she was watching us out the front window, before we doubled back and jumped the stone wall into the cemetery. After that it was dodging from one headstone to the other, pretending there was someone out there to see us, or that they could see us in the dark if there were.

It was a cold night, and damp. The moon was big and orange and full, looking appropriately like a grinning pumpkin in the October sky, and just enough thin trailing clouds scudded in front of it to keep up the atmosphere.

The undertaker’s house was dark, save for a dim porch light that glowed like a gaslamp above the front steps. We had no way of knowing if the undertaker and his wife were home, though we also pretty much never saw them leave, and Cody snuck over to look through a crack in the garage door and said that the hearse was there, beetle-black in the darkness.

Because it had been Ryan’s idea, he was also automatically volunteered to go first, and as the rest of us took cover behind one of those big family tombstones, he crept toward the house, keeping low, his arms practically dragging the ground. And still he seemed too big out there, too visible. The rest of us huddled where we were and shushed one another, giggling nervously and trying to keep quiet, squinting at the house to somehow see more in the dark.

We saw Ryan reach the window and fiddle with the latch for a while, saw it hinge open and him slide through. He had a flashlight in his pocket, and we saw the thin beam of it flick on in the murky basement.

There was a whispered debate about moving closer, which culminated in Matt getting pushed out from behind the headstone, and all of us gradually following his lead to inch out into the open space between the graves and the house. We had nearly crossed the graveled drive that led to the garage when Cody cursed under his breath and pointed.

The flashlight beam beyond the window was tilted up and at an angle, and it looked like maybe Ryan was going up the stairs, or at least looking up them. At the same time, a wedge of orange light had appeared in the upper part of the window. A door opening on the basement from the inside of the house.

The three of us froze, caught between rushing forward to help our friend—or at least see what was going to become of him—and running away as fast as we could. There was a sound from the basement—it could have been Ryan, I suppose, but it didn’t sound human. It sounded like the shriek of a hunting bird, like how an owl must sound to a field mouse. The wedge of orange light disappeared from the top of the stairs, and Ryan’s flashlight dropped from his fingers, struck the steps once, and went out.

The basement window went dark like someone switching off a television, and that broke the spell that had frozen us in place. I’d love to say that we rushed to the window, that we shouted Ryan’s name, but what we actually did was run as fast as we could in different directions, all of them away from the undertaker’s house.

I was probably halfway back to my own house—my bike forgotten in its tangle on Ryan’s front lawn—when it happened. I was running down the middle of the street, the sidewalks too dark and shadowed, with too many lurking bushes and looming trees for my liking. Just as I passed into the glow of a streetlamp—brighter here than out by Ryan’s, the lights now a fluorescent blue rather than sodium orange—a black cat ran across my path. It came up from one of the storm drains and crossed the street in a dark streak, stopping right in the middle of the road and looking at me with bright, gold coin eyes for a moment before disappearing into the shadows on the far side.

It was enough to stop me in my pell-mell flight, and that was enough to make me think, as I really hadn’t since Ryan’s flashlight beam had been extinguished. Standing in the middle of the road, panting from the exertion of having run blocks and blocks through the chill night, I realized that I had to go back.

Had I managed to make it all the way home before I had this revelation, I would probably have called the police, or at the very least told my parents what happened. Had I been in my own brightly lit living room, or the safety of my bed, I would have made a wiser decision. But right then, on Halloween night in the middle of the street, I knew that I had to go back and check on my friend. I didn’t know what had happened to him, couldn’t guess. Grisly scenes spun like a macabre carousel through my mind, too quick to grasp any one of them for very long.

Even then, I knew that the most likely scenario wasn’t any of the ones I was imagining. The undertaker wasn’t a ghoul, his wife wasn’t a witch. They were just a poor old couple who had been left behind by time, and Ryan was probably in trouble, sitting on a ratty old couch while Mrs. Undertaker called his mother at the hospital. But even then, even if that was all that had happened, I knew that I still had to go back. I couldn’t abandon him, not completely. The shame of having done so even temporarily was acid in my stomach, and I knew that if I went on home I would never be able to look him in the eyes again, assuming he still had eyes to look in.

I wasn’t able to run back. My flight up ’til then had been pure adrenaline dumped into my system, and now that I had broken my stride inertia had settled in. My lungs were working like a bellows trying to get enough air, and my heart was pounding so hard that I was afraid it could be heard outside my body. I don’t know how long it took me to walk back, but when I reached the entrance to the graveyard I stood under the streetlight for longer than I’d care to admit, working up the nerve to walk down the gravel drive to the undertaker’s house.

When I got to that low stone dwelling, it was completely dark. Even the orangey porch light had been extinguished, and the night seemed darker than it had earlier, the moon veiled behind thicker clouds. I had a flashlight in my coat pocket, a cheap plastic one that had beaten itself against my side with every step when I ran. I pushed the button as I crept up to the window, and the beam that sputtered forth seemed woefully inadequate against the dusty darkness inside the basement.

The hopper window was still open where Ryan had crept inside, and I was able to slip in just as he had. There was a smell coming from out of the open window, like what I always imagined embalming rooms smelled like. Directly below the window as an old stove that I could step down onto, and beyond it I could see stacked trunks and the dangling pull-string of a light bulb and then my flashlight beam glanced off the rounded glass of the jars on the shelves.

Of Ryan there was no immediate sign. Overcome by curiosity, I temporarily forgot the purpose of my mission, and crept closer to the jars along the wall. There were dozens of them, all of them larger than the jars I was used to seeing in my grandmother’s cellar, big enough to hold a football or a watermelon. Some were empty, and the beam of my flashlight passed through them, while others were full of some dark, cloudy liquid thick with particles, suspending something large and gnarled, like a grotesque root vegetable.

The things in the jars had an oddly familiar shape, and I strained to identify them. Too gnarled and twisted to be fetal animals of any kind, too dark to be potatoes or carrots or any other plant with which I was familiar. And then I saw the face. Pop-eyes squinted closed in the murky liquid, pointed ears, needle teeth. I knew what I was seeing. Goblins. Row upon row of pickled goblins.

I stumbled backward, and my shoulder collided with the shelves. I felt my foot strike against something, and the beam of Ryan’s flashlight came back on where it lay on the concrete floor, rolling back and forth, throwing a circle of light on the space under the stairs. The tank there was like a mason jar itself, but easily twice the size of the ones on the shelves. Floating in it was a larger version of the homunculi behind me.

No, not a larger version, just one that hadn’t yet finished its process. One that was still pickling.

But that wasn’t what finally prompted the strangled noise from my throat, the sound that was half-terror and half-denial, the sound that brought hurried footsteps on the floorboards above. It wasn’t the sight of the creature in the vat, it was the recognition of it. The skull-painted features had already begun to shrink and darken, but it was still dressed in its street clothes, and I immediately recognized Ryan’s red sneakers.

Before I could do anything—try to smash open the vat, climb out the window and run screaming into the night, whatever it is I would have done—the door at the top of the stairs came open. There stood the undertaker, holding a kerosene lantern, and behind him his wife, peering beneath his upheld arm, their eyes glittering blackly down at me. I tried to move away, and my foot came down on Ryan’s flashlight. It went out from under me, and I sprawled backward, striking against one of the big wooden shelves.

The first of the jars to pitch off the shelf exploded on the floor next to me with a sound like a gunshot. The thing inside let out a sound half-croak and half-yawn as it began to move, to unfold, to stretch out limbs held too long in confinement. But one jar wasn’t all that was coming. The shelf was already beginning to fall, and I was crawling away as the whole thing came down, and the shelf next to it. The room was filled with the sound of breaking glass and the stench of strange liquid.

That’s the last thing I remember clearly. I don’t know what caused the undertaker to drop the lantern. Was it surprise? Was it concern for the destruction of the creatures? Did he rush down to try to save them, or to capture me? I don’t know. All I know is that when the lamp struck the liquid on the floor, it ignited. I heard the whoosh of the flames, and the screeching of the goblins, but I was already running again, turning my back once more on my friend, and on all the other things in the jars that had once been children like me.

This time I ran up the stairs, dodging around the grasping limbs of the undertaker and his wife in some sort of panic fugue. I don’t even know how I did it. I don’t remember the inside of their house, except as a stuttering sequence of old furniture and cobwebbed corners, all of it dark and covered in a layer of dust. By the time my thoughts cleared I was already outside, somewhere far out in the headstones, and behind me the night was lit up with the flames that were consuming the undertaker’s house.

It burned to the ground that night, left nothing behind but scorched stone walls in the shape of a building. When I got home my parents were still out, and I sat in the living room with all the lights on until the phone rang and I knew that it was Matt or Cody’s mom calling. We told all our parents, and then the police, about Ryan, about what we’d seen that night, though I left out the part about going back, about what happened in the basement. They sifted through the charred wreckage, but no remains were found. Not of any kids, and not of the undertaker or his wife, though the long black hearse was still parked in the garage.

I grew up. I moved away, got married, had a child of my own, and tried not to think about what I had seen that night. When we bought a house in another town, I went to the grocery store and the post office first and stared at the boards where they posted the photos of missing kids, and I tried to remember if the ones in my home town had held more than their fair share. Mostly, I succeeded in putting it out of my mind, but then, the other day, an old couple moved in down the block from us, into a house I’d somehow never noticed before, screened by thick bushes. The moving van unloaded box after clinking box of big glass jars, carrying them down through the outside doors to the basement. For canning, my wife says, and she’s probably right. But my daughter is terrified of the old couple, crosses the street when she walks past their house, and next week is Halloween.

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• Author : Maxwell Price
• Narrator : Paul Cram
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 617: The Culvert is a PseudoPod original.

The Culvert by Maxwell Price

Jamie had been visiting the thing that lived in the culvert for about three weeks now. He spent more time with it than he ever had with anyone his own age, or even anyone outside of immediate family members. Jaime was a curious child, but not particularly social. Friendships existed in the abstract. The companionship of even a strange culvert-dwelling thing was not easily cast aside.

In the last few years, Jamie had developed a fascination with the idea of a world underground. He had checked out a book on cave systems and spelunking from the school library, and had managed to sneak it home and keep it all summer. There were no vast caverns underneath suburbia, but there were storm drains, manhole covers, and culverts: all things that, in some limited way, seemed to suggest the possibility of life far below. These places were common enough around his neighborhood, and he longed to climb down in and curl up inside of them. Half inside, half outside; he would contemplate life and listen to the distant, muffled sound of the world as it rang through the pipes. Having lived all his life in a dull, perfectly coiffed suburban landscape, his restless instincts for exploring had turned inwards. Now he found himself squeezing his way into the cracks and seams that ran through the everyday. He had discovered this particular culvert (or rather, what was inside it) one day while riding his bike. It ran underneath a little one-lane country road that sat on the very edge of the world, or so it seemed to Jamie, who wasn’t allowed to go any farther than a few miles away from home. It was a plain concrete culvert, very narrow, running out either side into a ditch stuffed with leaves and pine needles.

He wasn’t quite sure what the thing looked like, for it was loathe to come out into full daylight. It had a voice that croaked like an old woman’s, and eyes that glittered in the darkness like a cat’s. Once or twice Jamie caught a glimpse of a small, wizened hand, darting out whenever Jamie brought it little things to eat, swiped from his mother’s kitchen. Mostly, Jamie came to sit and listen. It talked about a lot of things that Jamie didn’t really understand, but he was always trying to wrap his mind around them, concentrating more intensely than he ever had at school.

It had once lived in a great cave, but it had left the caves behind to be closer to the world of man. It had lived under grand old stone bridges that had rose over fresh water, back when the towns and roads had first sprung up. But now the only bridges around were bleak structures that soared indifferently over the freeway; white blasted things that would leave the creature stark naked and exposed. The water in the river had slowed to a trickle of sludge that was scarcely any better than sewage, and though the thing was not a creature of the daylight, it couldn’t breathe and drink in poison. And so eventually it became stuck in a culvert barely large enough for an eleven-year-old boy to crawl in, sipping the rainwater from leaves whenever it stormed. They were both trapped, the creature and the boy, with the open road and the wild countryside laying just out of the reach. The rising sun or a roaming policeman were always laying in wait for them, ready to scuttle the journey.

Today Jamie was even more careful than usual. The school year had started a week ago, and he had a good grasp now on how the school year would go for a boy who was seen crawling in and out of holes in the ground. He left his bike behind a big black walnut tree that stood a short walk from the road. He pulled the hood on his sweatshirt tight around his head and face, so tight that the whistling wind was now drowned out by the sound of his own crisp, sharp breathing. Just a short walk to the culvert, and already he was drawing himself up, making a hiding place of his own body. He was learning a lot about hiding, recently, but he was also discovering the thrill of keeping secrets. These were the things they had in common.

Leaves crunched as Jamie ducked into the shallow gully next to the road, slinging his backpack off his shoulder and setting it down beside him. He peered into the cold mouth of the culvert.

“Hey.”

Darkness, and the whipping sound of the wind.

“Hey. You there?”

There was a sound somewhere between a yawn and a sigh, echoing lightly off the concrete. Then a stirring of leaves, and what sounded like the clicking of nails.

“Jamie. I am here. Yes, I am always here, you know,” said the thing, clearing its throat as it spoke. “You’ve been away.” It had the tone of an elderly grandparent, chiding the grandson who never visits.

“I have to go to school in the day now. Told you.” Defensive. Still acting as if all his classmates are watching.

“Aah, yes. You’re right. I had forgotten” Resignation. But, also, a mocking edge. No schoolwork down here.

“Sorry. You know I’d rather be out here than over there.” Defenses lowering. “They make me.”

Another yawn, and a raspy laugh, like rough stones scraping.

“I brought you something,” said Jamie, removing a plastic baggie containing a raw steak from his backpack. He scrunched his nose as he opened the bag.

“I left it out in the back yard for a few days, like you said. I had to hide it up in the tree-house so my neighbor’s dog wouldn’t get it.”

A sharp-nailed hand darted out to snatch up the rancid treat, and then there was a scuffling sound as the thing scooted back away from the sunlight to feed. David sat at the mouth of the culvert and leaned his head back. He traced a crack with his finger as he listened to the sound of the thing sucking on the soft, rotten meat.

The questions began, as always.

“So how old are you?”

“Older than this town and your family’s name, older than anyone you’ll ever know.” The voice had music in it, though the notes were strange and bent, and the meter lopsided.

“You say that every time,” said Jamie. “I mean, really, how old? Like, when were you born?”

“Let’s see,” said the thing, swallowing a thick hunk of spoiled meat, “when the smallest, smoothest pebble in the world was a great mountain range, I was already looking back on centuries. A time before time as you know it.”

Jamie sighed. This was usually how it went. A lot of stuff that Jamie didn’t understand, and the thing seemed to know he didn’t understand, and he felt like it was laughing at him again. An eerie whistle began to curl out of the ground, and Jamie frowned. Sometimes it whistled, and that usually led to singing, or something like singing. And Jamie didn’t like that. The thing’s strange, reedy songs were in some awful language that hadn’t ever taken up residence in human ears before, and they made Jamie uncomfortable. The last time the thing had started singing and trilling like that, Jamie had started feeling dizzy, like he had hung upside down from a tree branch for too long. He tried to keep the conversation going.

“Are you a troll?”

“A troll?” There was the sound of spitting, of a thick wad of phlegm hitting the inside of the culvert.

“Well, I was just thinking, you know, that I had never really asked you if you were a troll or not. It just just seemed like, you kinda live in the ground…”

“Trolls,” came the measured response, “are enormous things, very squat, and very stupid. Or rather, they were, back when they still roamed about. Now they have vanished completely, though not as long ago as you might think.”

“Huh.”

“No, I am not a troll, nor a dwarf, a brownie or a changeling. What I am, you see, is a-”

The thing made a sound that sounded like a cough and a raspberry, if it were possible to do both at the same time while also sucking in air. It made Jamie’s stomach turn a little just the hear it spoken aloud.

“Are there any more of you still around?”

“Oh, well,” said the thing, “no way to know, for sure. Could be. Once, I had more brothers than there were leaves in the forests. The sun was not so hot then, nor so bright. There was a beautiful world of ash and cold, and we were born from that ash, and lived freely on the surface. But, the sun wouldn’t stay away, and we took to our hiding places. I suppose there could be one of us under every rock, but we’d not know it. Some of my brothers could hide so well, I might’n even recognize them. Why, its been so long since I’ve seen even my own reflection…”

The voice trailed off. Jamie felt a numbness creeping up his leg, and shifted his weight.

“The tricks. Tell me,” it said, shaking off a bit of melancholy in its voice, “how have the tricks gone?”

“Ok, I guess,” answered Jaime. In all honesty, the tricks that the thing had taught him had gone exactly as described, but something about the methods and rituals made him feel off, like the thing was purposefully trying to embarrass him.

Like when he started to complain about his big sister, and how she was acting like such a b-word now that she had started high school. Jaime just wanted her to shut it, sometimes, and leave him alone when he locked the door to his room. In response, the thing in the culvert had instructed him in just the right words to say, how to pronounce each burr and glottal stop. But first he had to steal a pair of his sister’s panties (though the thing had called them “under-garments,” in a way that assured him that the thing had not been out of its hole in a long, long time), the ones with the weird dark stains that had started showing up in the laundry lately. He had to say the words over them, scatter a bit of ash over them (mom’s ashtray came in handy), and then bury them in the back yard. Under a full moon. After that, big sister had gone a little quiet and timid. She seemed to pass by Jaime without saying a word, like she wasn’t really even seeing him anymore. Maybe even like she was scared of him.

After that he had regretted laying the trick on his sister like that. But he was afraid what he might have to do to un-trick her, so he had just let it slide for a while. Lately though, the glassy eyes and the silent treatment had started to get to Jaime. It was a sketchy thing to do, even to a high-schooler.

“So, can you like, take back a trick?” he asked. “Y’know, make them back like they were before?”

“Oh, oh! Of course you can, my boy. Very simple. The tricks only work so long as they stay secret, so just tell one of your school-mates what you’ve done, spare no detail, and it will break the trick’s hold.” The thing breathed out a dry little laugh.

Jeez. It was worse than he thought. Just the idea of having to admit to rooting through your sister’s underwear drawer made Jaime feel doubly-ashamed, and more than a little tricked himself. But it was good to know, he guessed. Still, here was just more of same: a bunch of junk that messed with his head, left him feeling like a stupid kid. What kind of magic was this? Jaime decided that it was time to get down to the heart of things.

“So I started thinking, like, why can’t you live inside a tree? I mean, like a hollow tree. It’s dark enough.”

The dismissive laugh fluttered around the hard surface of the culvert.  “And become prey for the owls and other flighty things. Oh, no no. Mine is the kind that needs to be closest to the earth, or the water. To the blood, and the heartbeat.” This didn’t make much sense to Jaime either, but he pressed on.

“Look, I’ve been thinking. Maybe I can help you.” As he talked, he could hear the thing start on the piece of steak again. Frustration was starting to creep into Jamie’s voice. “I can take my bike. We can find a place out there,” he said, gesturing to the road that winded out into the sticks. “Find a real bridge, over a big river. We could stay there for a while. Maybe keep moving. If you go with me, it’ll be faster than you could ever move on your own. And in return, you could show me how to, y’know, hide and stuff.”

The sound that was almost certainly marrow being slurped from bone stopped in consideration.

“You want to know how to hide?” The music had suddenly gone out of the thing’s voice.

“You want to live under the ground? Hide from the sun, and from all other men?” There was no more music in the thing’s voice, but it sounded like there might be a smile.

“Come closer, then. Closer, boy.” It was too easy.

“Ok,” said Jamie, halfway in the pipe. “I can’t see you very well. Could you hold out your hand?”

The hand with long, jagged nails shot out of the pitch and grabbed Jamie’s forearm, and it began to pull with all the strength in its wiry body. Surprising, alarming strength. But Jamie’s other hand had already reached into his backpack. He had brought the big knife today, stolen from his mother’s kitchen set, the very sharpest he could find. It cut the thin flesh of the thing’s hand down to the bone, and it recoiled, making a most awful sound. Again, the knife flashed and made contact. Jamie was halfway in the pipe now, his eyes adjusting quickly. The thing lashed out with fang and claw, but the boy was larger and quicker, and well-fed, and the thing was old and weak with shock. The blade sunk deep in-between its ribs once, then twice, and it snarled hideously, making foul cries that sounded shrill and metallic in the enclosed space.

But all its rage could do no good, and the knife plunged in with a terrible rhythm, drawing thin blood that didn’t spurt so much as drain pitifully from the thing’s body. Jaime struck out and found a papery lung, then the chewy gristle of a windpipe, and finally the only sounds that could be heard in the culvert were a sour gurgle and the crisp, sharp breaths of a winded boy.

Outside, it began to rain.

Jamie washed the knife off in the trickle of water that was beginning to run through the pipe. He thought he would have to ditch the sweatshirt, maybe, but there was only a little blood on it – barely more than what rose from the scraped knee he now sported. He would pile some big rocks around the body in the culvert – he already had a few nice ones in his backpack – and he would let the water do its work for a little while. He had hidden lots of things in the culverts and drain pipes around town; squirrels, rabbits, even a few stray cats. He would have to be more careful, though. Because nobody batted an eye if a stray or a piece of roadkill happens to wash out in the rain, but this thing…Jamie hoped that it would stay secret, though, until the water and the bugs picked the thing’s skull clean. It would be the gem of his collection, which was getting larger by the day. Maybe too large for the tree house to hold anymore. Because who knows what else Jamie might find, in another culvert, or under a bridge, or maybe running through the park across town. With the thrill running through him like this, he felt like he was ready for anything that might find its way to his collection. But whatever he found, he had to keep it secret. Hidden.

Jamie was good at hiding.

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